Glory

by Gillian Wigmore

  Invisible Publishing

  Halifax & Picton

  Text copyright © Gillian Wigmore, 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any method, without the prior written consent of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or, in the case of photocopying in Canada, a licence from Access Copyright.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Wigmore, Gillian, 1976-, author

  Glory / Gillian Wigmore.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-926743-98-1 (softcover) | ISBN 978-1-988784-01-4 (EPUB)

  I. Title.

  PS8645.I34G56 2017 C813’.6 C2017-905385-X

  C2017-905386-8

  Edited by Leigh Nash

  Cover and interior design by Megan Fildes | Typeset in Laurentian

  With thanks to type designer Rod McDonald

  Invisible Publishing | Halifax & Picton

  www.invisiblepublishing.com

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

  For the Stones of Stone’s Bay,

  past, present, and future.

  And for the Water Girls—Elly,

  Fabienne, Laisha, and Jenni.

  “Each valley where a cabin has been built has its lore kept alive by the unceasing movement of human lips and tongues. And out of that, like smoke from a smudge—and perhaps no more defined—rises sometimes the figure of a man; not of the real man, perhaps…”

  – Howard O’Hagan, Tay John

  “He doesn’t know

  you can’t catch

  the glory on a hook

  and hold on to it.

  That when you

  fish for the glory

  you catch the

  darkness too.”

  – Sheila Watson, The Double Hook

  CHORUS

  Danny Chance, point at Chance Bay

  We crossed the Lion’s Gate Bridge at daybreak, no traffic, climbing up and out of Vancouver, away from the city, the lower mainland, the only life we’d known so far. We turned a corner and headed north.

  We followed the Fraser, kept it on our left flank. It was deep and heavy, flowing back toward the delta and the sea. We left the fields of Chilliwack behind us, and the rough mountains all around spat waterfalls and loomed, impossibly green. We craned our necks looking out the windows. Hope, then the Fraser Canyon, Boston Bar, China Bar, the subterranean seconds when the road was enclosed in concrete tunnels—we hurtled through the sides of mountains.

  I sped on the flats, then we watched the traffic flow around us, the Toyota lagging on the long, winding uphills. I thought of our stuff in storage back in the city—how I’d have to hire a U-Haul and do the whole trip again sometime, but I couldn’t really imagine a time beyond the interior of the car, the music, Renee humming along when she wasn’t crying, the baby jabbering or laughing in the back. I cut the corners on the curves when no one was coming. The Fraser flowed fast and messy below. We stopped at the Devil’s Kitchen and watched the rapids.

  Renee fell asleep once we left the wet coast behind and the scenery turned dry and the hillside silvered with sage. I snuck glances at her as I drove as fast as I could to make it true that we were leaving. I rolled down the window a crack so I could feel it was real.

  We passed Spuzzum, Lytton, Boston Bar, the river pacing us below. Shuttered fruit stands on one side and crumbling cliffs on the other. I marked off time against the power poles, drank water from a bottle nestled between my legs. She woke up outside Cache Creek and we ate takeout hamburgers near the Bonaparte River, me leaning on the car, her sitting sidesaddle in the driver’s seat. She nursed Thomas as she ate. I told a stupid joke and she laughed at me. I wanted to catch her smile and keep it.

  We barrelled through the Interior Plains. She took photos from the car window of black-crusted rocks, red bluffs, and ignored me. The wind got cold and I shut the window. She piled our coats in her lap and watched the sky: raptors on the updrafts, cumulonimbus piling up in the east. We’d been driving for six hours when we hit 100 Mile House.

  “A hundred miles from where?” She had her sunglasses on. I couldn’t see if she was joking. The largest cross-country skis in the world, a bird sanctuary, a Tim Horton’s, and the highway. We were out the other side and halfway to Williams Lake before we realized it.

  I stopped at a pullout near Quesnel for a break. Semi trucks and a camper van with a German flag sticker shared the parking space. I got out to read the Moment in History sign that described the wagon trains and the men who’d defied death on their way to the goldfields. I sat on a cement berm and tried to picture the wagons and donkeys, the men creeping along a dirt road cut into a cliffside, rapids below them, all for the promise of gold.

  I looked over at Renee’s hair pressed up against the passenger window. The couple in the camper van clambered over their seats into the depths behind them. A trucker lit a smoke and sauntered over.

  “Where ya headed?”

  “North.”

  He smoked for a second. “North where? There’s a lot of it up there.”

  “Fort St. James.”

  He shook his head. “Now why in hell would you go there? Family?”

  “Sort of.” I shrugged.

  He coughed. Spat. Took another drag on his cigarette. “Don’t envy you. That place is the goddamn back of beyond.” He stooped to peer into the car at Renee sleeping with her mouth open. “That yer wife and kid?”

  I nodded. It was a still-new truth. He ground out his cigarette, hiked his pants up, waved at me, and lumbered off.

  I watched the clouds swallow the sun before it could set behind the hills. There was nothing on the coast for us. I would make us a home in Fort St. James. My granddad’s cabin and the bay on the lake waited for us. I had a job at the mill. I looked at Renee again and felt that zing of hope in my stomach. We were starting something, going north. I felt crazy and hopeful, both.

  Renee and the baby slept as I drove. The light disappeared and night came up. I played the Be Good Tanyas quiet on the stereo and watched the eyes of deer in the ditch catch the light of our headlights—quick flares in the dark. When Renee woke up, I pulled over and she took the wheel.

  PART ONE

  All You Want Is More

  RENEE

  I felt the ice underneath me melt and seep into my jeans, my coat, even into my hair. I lay on the driveway, my face wet with tears and snot, having just had the first tantrum of my adult life. There was no other word for it.

  Thomas cooed in the stroller watching the sky, as I did—the cold, clear April blue—ready for our walk now that I’d freed the stroller wheels. The earth had frozen again overnight, encasing the lower parts of the wheels in solid mud. I’d struggled to free it, sweating through my shirt, swearing and shaking the stroller back and forth until I’d finally lost it and tackled the stroller like a full-sized human opponent. I’d fallen on the handle with all my weight, almost standing Thomas upright in his five-point harness, before the wheels broke loose.

  I sat up and wiped my face, pushed my literally dirty blond hair behind my ears, and got up. I was almost glad I had no friends to see me now, or for whom I’d make this funny later in the retelling. I wouldn’t tell Danny, that’s for sure. There’d been too many moments near-breaking for me—the winter had been so awful, so lonely and unforgiving. I just had to hold it together and spring would come for real—it had to. I didn’t know what I’d do if it didn’t.

  It was late morning by the time I finally followed the driveway through the woods to the road, damp and a little shaky. Tiny frost bridges criss-crossed the p
uddles. Patches of snow lay in clumps on the road edge and in hollows on the forest floor—dirty white scabs littered with branches and cones. Thomas watched the swallows feint and swoop, and laughed. He seemed to especially love birds, and I tried to care about that—I’d even gone so far as to start building him a mobile for above his crib. I’d cut crow shapes out of felt and weighed them with nickels, but it sat, with my half-finished knitting projects and an abandoned puzzle, on the table we never dined at in our cabin that didn’t feel like home.

  I squinted in the bright spring sun, marching past the dried thistles and dead grass in the ditch. I saw views through the naked trees I hadn’t seen in September, before the snow had fallen and hidden everything—rusted tricycles tangled up with barbed wire in one backyard, a picnic table with an axe head stuck into its charred top in another. I didn’t let it mean anything, I just kept going.

  I passed the Dream Beaver Pub an hour after I left the cabin. It wasn’t open—dark windows watched me balefully, and a large chain wrapped around the door handles was fixed with an oversized lock. I’d never been in. I’d hardly been anywhere. The winter had been a blur of snowstorms rattling our single-pane windows and colic-induced howling—both mine and the baby’s.

  Now, Thomas seemed to be growing out of his howling, while I was mired. Stoic Danny worked his twelve-hour shifts at the mill and scooped the baby up as soon as he walked in the door. I would go into the bedroom then, lie on his grandparents’ bed, and stare at the stacks of books lining the bedroom walls. I hadn’t replaced Danny’s granddad’s Louis L’Amours on the bookshelves, and my books sat in short towers of New Canadian Library and orange Penguin paperbacks on the floor, spines out, waiting for me to be myself again and pick one up for a reread. I hadn’t read a book since Thomas was born, eight months and a lifetime ago.

  If I managed a walk a day, I was proud. If I only made it as far as the couch, I tried not to fault myself. If it snowed, as it had for October, November, and December through to April, I let myself off the hook. But when the day broke only relatively grey, no snow, no rain, I told myself to get out and walk. Today I was planning to go as far as the graveyard, then turn around and get home while Thomas was still asleep in the stroller. I had just passed the pub when I heard a car door slam.

  “Fucksake.” A woman’s voice. “Come on, Crystal!”

  Another door slammed. Two women stood locked in a glare across the hood of an old yellow car. One wore a short white sundress, tight on her hips. Her hair was long, dark, and tangled, and she flipped it over one shoulder, out of her way. The other woman was taller, in jeans and a flannel shirt, a baseball cap over straight black hair. She stood stiff and unmoved by the other woman’s shouting. I realized I was staring, and started walking again.

  “Hey,” the same voice yelled.

  I kept going down the road.

  “I said hey! You, with the stroller. Come and settle something for us!”

  I considered ignoring her, but I hadn’t talked to another human outside my family in so long. I couldn’t help it—I started toward them, curious about what would come next.

  The woman with the curly hair beckoned me closer. “I need your help.”

  The other woman kept her face turned toward the stand of birch between the pub and the lake. She was slope-shouldered, like she’d been through this before.

  I glanced at Thomas, asleep in the stroller. He had that all-out, mid-nap look about him, where thunder could crack and he wouldn’t even sigh. I adjusted his blanket, then steered the stroller through the dirt parking lot, toward them.

  “Good, okay,” the woman in the dress said. “I’m Glory. This is my cousin. Going to say hi, Crystal?” She waited, but Crystal said nothing. “Don’t worry about her. She’s a sourpuss.” Crystal didn’t flinch. “So, what you’re going to do is tell her she’s wrong.”

  “About what?”

  Glory hauled the car door open and pushed the seat forward, straining into the back seat to pull out a guitar. It lay uncased on the vinyl.

  As soon as Crystal saw the guitar, she started walking down toward the lake.

  “Forget about her.” Glory cradled the guitar. There was a stippling of nicks under the strings, like cat’s paws on the lake when the wind came up. I had no idea what I would hear, but I was eager for it, more excited than I’d been in months. She adjusted the leather strap and thumbed the strings to see if it was in tune. The notes rang out clear from low to high, and the hairs stood up all over my body.

  “I wrote this song, but Crystal doesn’t think it’s any good. You listen and you can tell her how great it is.”

  The wind stirred the dust in the parking lot, and it stuck to my skin where my sweat had cooled. Crows wheeled above us. Glory played her guitar and sang like no one else I’d ever heard. Her voice was the colour of ashes of roses, smoky and low, gentle and unforgiving at the same time. I felt cold, my breath shallow in my chest. It might have been the wind and the crows, or the birch and their stiff branches revealing the cold lake behind them. It might have been that I’d talked to all of four people in the months since we’d moved to Fort St. James. But whatever it was, I felt like I would never be the same again.

  “What do you think?” Glory asked, when she’d finished. She set her guitar against the car and brought both hands up to gather her hair into a bun while she waited for me to answer.

  I shook my head. I couldn’t talk, for fear of crying. I couldn’t say anything, so I looked down toward the birches, where Crystal sat throwing rocks at a log.

  “Well?”

  The tears brimmed and spilled over.

  “That good, hey? That’s right. I told you so!” She shouted down at Crystal. Then, to me: “I’m glad you liked it.”

  I laughed and wiped my eyes with the backs of my hands. My hair, thin and wispy, not long enough to put in a bun, blew around and stuck to my wet face.

  She pushed her sunglasses onto the top of her head and smiled. “That’s a damn good response to a song. I love making people cry.” She shook her head. “It’s not too often someone gets a free concert, mind you, but I guess I asked you to listen, didn’t I?”

  She opened the door and laid her guitar on the back seat. She grabbed a pouch of tobacco from the well of the emergency brake on her way out, then walked around to the back of the car and hopped up to sit on the trunk. She patted the metal beside her.

  I collected myself and parked Thomas in the car’s shade.

  “So, who’re you?” she asked, busy rolling the loose tobacco into a slim white torpedo. “Where’d you come from?” She glanced sideways at me, then offered me the new-made cigarette. I took it, and she quickly rolled herself another.

  “I’m Renee. I live down the bay.” I hopped up on the trunk to sit beside her, and bent to the flame she offered from her lighter. I inhaled and coughed.

  She laughed. “Don’t smoke?”

  I coughed again. “I do, just not much.”

  “Where round the bay? You mean Chance Bay?”

  I cleared my throat and nodded. She whistled.

  “Fancy. You must smoke tailor-mades.”

  We were quiet for a while. I tried to be cool, to still my shaking hands, to sit there like nothing momentous was happening. She smoked hungrily, then hopped down off the car, tossed her butt into the dirt, and ground it out with her flip-flop. “Crystal!” she shouted.

  I got off the trunk, too, and dropped my half-smoked cigarette on the ground. I stood on it so she wouldn’t notice I hadn’t finished. Everything looked super-etched, like a 1950s postcard of spring in the north: the pub, Crystal coming toward us with the white trunks of the birch trees glowing behind her, her legs unnaturally long in the morning light.

  Crystal seemed to consider saying something to her cousin, but turned to me instead. “I don’t know what she told you, but I’d be careful if I was you.” Her voice was low and her eyes the same dark brown as Glory’s. “She don’t always tell the truth, and if she does, you can�
�t tell the difference anyway.”

  “Christ, Crystal, you’ve hardly ever spoken so much, or so eloquently.”

  Crystal ignored her. “I’ll tell you this, whoever you are: bees look soft to touch but they sting like sons of bitches.” She opened the passenger door, got in, and slammed it behind her.

  Thomas woke at the sound and cried out.

  “Dammit, Crystal, now you done gone and waked the baby!” Glory shouted. To me, she said, “She stole those words from a song I wrote. She doesn’t mean it.” Glory winked, then turned to get into the car.

  “Wait.” I didn’t want the moment to be over. There was something about Glory, something vivid and alive, and I needed it. “When can I hear you sing again?”

  “Tonight. We sing here most Friday nights.” She gestured to the pub. “Otherwise I’m over on Southside.”

  I picked Thomas up out of the stroller. His hair was stuck in sweaty curls. He shivered in the wind and cuddled his head into the crook of my neck. Glory watched us.

  “Where are you going, anyway? There’s nothing out this way except the graveyard and the train tracks.” She eyed me. “You’re not running away, are you?”

  “No, I’m not running away.”

  “Now, that is a bald lie, missy. Every single one of us is running away, just at different speeds. Me, for instance, I’ll be gone by this time next year. Gone, gone, gone.”

  She was interrupted by the car horn. Crystal sat back in her seat and glared out the windshield. Thomas howled in my ear.

  “That girl is so touchy!” Glory grinned. Her short dress flapped around her thighs and she pulled her sunglasses on. “If you want to hear us play, you’d better do it soon.” She climbed into the car.

  She backed the yellow car up so the tires spun and spit gravel. I hugged Thomas close and turned my back to the grit in the air. Glory screeched to a stop just before the road and shouted back, “The highway’s that way!” and honked her horn. I could see her bare arm waving as she drove off.