“The police called. They said they’re sending out search and rescue.”
“They’re at the pub! They’re just at the pub. Or the Cab. Check there!”
“I came from the pub—they’re not there.”
She pushed past me and ran toward the lake. Todd stood with a stupid look; Renee knew nothing about this place, these people, what mattered—neither of them moved. I tore after her.
There was just light enough to see the white crests on the water and the dark blob of Glory against the water. She was already coming back up toward me.
“How’d you get here,” she yelled. “You got a truck?”
I had her figured, so I bodychecked her and pinned her down. She fought me, sobbing and scratching.
“Let me go! We’ve gotta get them! We’ll get a boat!”
“We can’t go out in a storm, you know that.” I held her tight.
“What are we going to do?”
“I’m going to keep you safe, like Mac said.”
Glory bucked under me. “Mac didn’t say that. He doesn’t care about me.”
“He does, too,” I said.
“Shut up, Crystal. You’re a traitor and a bitch.” She squirmed to get out from under me, but I held on. She went slack all of a sudden, the fight leaking out of her. Her arms snaked around me and I hugged her back. The night fell around us like a song we’d written when we were drunk and high, full of stars and wind, less about something than the feeling of something. I couldn’t feel my own heartbeat for the pounding of hers. It wasn’t the first time I’d held her like a scared little sister, but it felt like the most important time.
“Is it true they’re out there?” she asked. “They were fishing?”
“Yeah. Tiny’s wife called.”
“Were you at Mac’s?”
I nodded into her shoulder.
“I wish you wouldn’t go there.”
“I can’t help it.”
“How is she?” She meant Juniper.
“Big. It was her answered the phone.”
“Of course it was. She’s grown-up.”
“Yeah, for ten.”
“I hate this town.”
“I know you do.”
“Don’t leave me.”
“You know I won’t.” Don’t leave me, I thought.
The wind threw down cottonwood catkins at us and bits of branch and leaves. Glory sat up and I let her. I lay where I was and watched her sway. She was drunk. Her eyes darted around and her hair moved like a horse’s mane in the wind. She watched the lake. She said, “I can’t even remember Alfred, you know that? I can’t call up his face. I can’t remember anything we ever did together. I hate myself for that. I think, how can I love Anton like I do and I can’t even remember his twin. My own brother.”
“It happened a long time ago. You were just a kid.” I didn’t touch her because I knew not to. If I touched her, she would leave. If I stayed quiet, she’d keep talking. She picked up a cottonwood fluff and started flaking it apart. But I couldn’t not talk. “Alfred was smaller than Anton, right?” I hardly remembered him.
“Smaller, but just a little bit. He had lighter hair. Anton could pick him up and chuck him around. They used to wrestle.”
“I remember that,” I said. And I could, a little. Something about a lawn and two big boys on it, grown men on the porch cooking burgers. A summer night. “I don’t remember why he was on the lake, though.”
“He wasn’t supposed to be,” she said. “He snuck out onto Chuck Dodd’s boat one time when they were having a party. He was younger than everyone else, but they let him go along. They went out to the diving rocks past Sowchea to go cliff jumping. Alfred jumped from way high up and when he hit the water he lost his bearings. Fuck. I hate that. I hate the picture in my head of him swimming toward the bottom. I can just see it. It’s so quiet and blue and he’s thrashing to get there faster, except he’s swimming down instead of to the surface.”
“I remember the service at the Friendship Centre.”
“I hate that place,” she said. She threw the cotton at the wind but it blew away from us, back toward the trees. She looked like a mermaid—her jeans could have been a tail, her white skin and long hair, her face wet with tears.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here. All the beer is gone. We can’t help them, so let’s get drunk.” It was awful, but just like her: mean, so she wasn’t vulnerable; crass and foul-mouthed, so it didn’t show she was hurt.
I hauled her up the bank, onto the boardwalk, and she grabbed on so tight it was hard to walk. Todd sauntered over, and Glory dropped me and reached for him. Also typical. I tried not to care. We started back toward the service entrance and the truck, pushed on by the wind. I felt a tug at my shirt. It was Renee. I reached back for her hand, gave it a squeeze, and pulled her along. I could do that, at least.
CHORUS
Allan James, historic fort caretaker,
campfire, Paarens Beach
No one sings folk songs about the Siberia of the fur trade, Fort St. James. Maybe around the fire, men sang songs of old Caledonia and conjured memories over the flames, but when the winter closed in there was no place for song. They ate dried salmon day and night, the wind blew, and still there were chores: water to haul, tools to repair, company business to attend to, and at night, no women to offer them comfort. There was no family to draw near.
The Hudson’s Bay Company sent men here to the far west to prove themselves loyal, or to sort themselves out; Fort St. James was the end of the known world, and its inhospitable climate did the work of punishment and man-making all at once. They came back east chagrined, stalwart, or stark raving mad. Trading furs out west, at the mercy of the Carrier people, who kept them in salmon and taught them to live on the shore of a lake that would as soon flay them as feed them. This made something of them—not men, not workers loyal to the cause—it humbled them, it made them kneel. And a kneeling man is either subservient or spent. It’s hard to tell which at a glance.
Three times the Fort burned down. Three times the men were out of doors in the middle of winter. Did they curse the blaze Simon Fraser scraped into a tree with his axe in the middle of the wilderness in 1806? Samuel MacGuire shot an eagle out of the sky on Christmas day. Once the Carrier were gone for a full year, no word from them, and then they were back. By then, two parties had set out to find game. Only one returned.
The men made the Carrier move their village. They built a church with little houses around it, like a mother hen and her chicks. That burned down, too, once or twice. There must have been years without fire. The records are incomplete. Imagine the northern lights like green flames in the sky, reaching down the to earth, then withdrawing.
They caught salmon and dried salmon and kept it in the fish cache the Carrier helped them build. They built a stockade, but took it down once they realized their dependence on their nomadic neighbours. They bore the brunt of the weather that built up the length of the lake and wracked whatever shelter they constructed on its shore. They died and were replaced. They traded fur, packaged fur, sent out fur on mule trains, and waited for the ice to go out in the spring. They built a schooner to get them out to Babine Portage and to bring the goods back in. They developed the Carrier’s dependence on their goods: hard tack, flour, nails, and booze. There was an awful cost for the booze. Boots, hobnails, squat stoves, and blankets, coloured stripes on them like blood streaked on snow.
They left behind buildings with dovetailed corners, stairways that creaked in the shifts of weather, walls chinked with manure and straw. They papered the Men’s House with advertisements for women’s corsets. They waited all winter for mail. They built boardwalks to keep themselves out of the mud and shit in the spring. They fixed gutters to the fur warehouse. They shot bears creeping round the fish cache, and missed, or not. The shot is still embedded in the corner post. See? They built post-on-sill, they lived as well as they could, and they ate the dogs one New Year’s when they ran out of salmon. Did
they sing? There’s no record of that. There are no surviving folk songs from the Siberia of the fur trade.
PART THREE
A Story They Tell at the Bar
DANNY
The knock on the door scared the shit out of me. Thomas, too—he started crying. I picked him up and went to answer it. I knew it wouldn’t be Renee, she wouldn’t knock, but even so, my heart hammered in my throat. I flung open the door, angry that just the thought of her could make me so weak.
Bud stood in the porchlight with his hair plastered over his forehead, hunched up against the wind. I must’ve looked surprised, because he laughed at me. “Hey, Dan. Mind if I come in?”
“No! No, of course not. Come in.” I got out of his way. I put Thomas in his high chair and strapped him in so I could take Bud’s coat. “Wild night to be out.”
He headed straight for the wood stove once he got his boots off. He rubbed his hands together, nodding, but I could see that something was off. “Nice place, Dan. Cozy.”
I put the kettle on, opting for hot toddies instead of beer, choosing for Bud because I could see he was still deciding how to tell me why he was here. My heart thudded. I couldn’t think of another reason for him to be here except for Renee. But if something had happened to her, the cops would have been here, too. So Bud wasn’t here about Renee. He didn’t know she’d left and he didn’t know where she was and he wasn’t a messenger from her. I knew all that. I tried to calm myself, getting out mugs and rum and cinnamon, but I was sweating.
“You going to tell me why you’re here, Bud?”
“Jeez, Dan, I’m sorry. I was just over at Mac Stuart’s. You know him? He’s just down the bay there, past the Swannells’. There’s a real bad thing going on tonight. His boys are out in this.” He included the lake, the weather, the night, in his nod at the window. “I want to help, but there’s nothing to do. I don’t have my truck, so I couldn’t go, but I couldn’t stay at Mac’s, either. The Swannells are over there, now, and the police are on their way.”
I looked out the window and shook my head. What was there to say? “I’m sorry, Bud. That’s terrible.” Thomas was squawking, so I picked up his stacking toy and put it on the tray. I touched his soft hair. “What did you say about your truck? Who took it?”
Bud blushed. “Crystal.” He swallowed, looked away. “She went to find Glory Stuart, to let her know about her brothers.”
The name made me seethe. I went back to the kettle, poured rum into the mugs, and added hot water, lemon juice, a cinnamon stick, clenching my teeth, replaying the fight with Renee in my head.
“Dan? You okay?” Bud had come up beside me. He took one of the mugs.
“Renee left. I mean, I kicked her out. She said she was leaving, and she said she was going with Glory, so I don’t know. There can’t be two Glorys, right? Maybe they’re already gone.”
Bud put his hand on my arm, just above my elbow, and squeezed. It was a strange, manly gesture, and it almost broke me. I took a breath. Bud went to sit at the table near the high chair. Thomas offered him the red plastic doughnut he’d been whacking on his tray and Bud took it.
He didn’t ask any more, but I told him about Renee, about the winter we’d spent in silence, and about the previous night, when she hadn’t come home. I had to stop a couple times, to really breathe so I wouldn’t lose it, but Bud understood. He traded colourful doughnuts with Thomas and sipped his drink. When I was done, he set his doughnut down and shook his head.
“That’s hard, Dan. I don’t know anything harder than trying to keep things together when one of you’s bent on leaving.”
I shook my head. “Mac Stuart’s facing something harder. I haven’t got it so bad as all that.” I stood up. “You want another?”
“Nah. Listen, Dan. I don’t know what we can do, but I think we should try and do something. Crystal’s gone to find Glory, and I know how that’s going to go.” He rolled his eyes. “But whatever goes on with them, I think they’ll end up at the pub. And I think I should be there. Would you be willing to give me a ride? I know it’s a lot to ask.” He looked at Thomas, who was trying not to fall asleep on his toys.
“Sure, Bud. I’ll do that. Maybe I can get the Swannells to watch Thomas. He’s just going to go to sleep. They can keep an eye on him while they’re staying with Mac.”
“I’d appreciate your help, and I know Mac would, too. You haven’t met, have you?”
“Maybe, when I was a kid. I don’t remember a lot from back then.”
We got Thomas bundled up, packed up the playpen, and headed out on foot to Stuart’s. I thought it would be easier to walk over than to drive all the way out to the road and then double back down the driveway in the car, but the wind was worse than I thought. We walked the path Renee had beaten between the houses. In the clearing near the Swannells’ carport, the wind was so fierce, it howled through the trees and tore at our clothes. I had Thomas tucked inside a blanket and held him tight to me. His toque was down over his eyes. He didn’t like it and fussed. I paused in the lee of the Swannells’ porch to fix it.
Bud came up beside me. “Stuart’s is just over there.” He pointed at the next house down the bay. It was hidden behind a stand of trees, but I could see lights blazing from every window. I looked at the path between the houses and I felt like I’d been here before. I must have, since I remembered rambling all over the bay when I was a kid, but I had a feeling about this path. A memory tugged at me.
Bud led the way, hauling the playpen, and I followed, Thomas complaining in my ear. I was sure I knew this place, and when we pushed through the trees and into the driveway, I knew I was right. I’d been here before, and it had been a night like this.
I was thirteen the last time my dad had brought us up here from Vancouver. My brother was ten. He was after something, my dad—we only came back when he was broke or on the run. I remember he was drunk, shouting at my granddad. Jimmy was asleep, but I couldn’t stand it. I put on my coat and took off out the back door. I remember feeling like I couldn’t breathe if I faced the water, where the wind ripped the air right out of my mouth. I found a path through the trees and followed it, first to the Swannells’—I knew them, they were neighbours—but then I carried on past their house, down another path, to another little, grey, hip-roofed house in the trees.
I thought it was abandoned. No lights were on. I went around the back, away from the wind, and stepped up onto the veranda. There was a chair at either end, and I slumped in the near one. A girl’s voice startled me.
“You don’t wait for an invitation, do you?”
I jumped, but didn’t run. More curious than embarrassed, I wanted to know who she was. I didn’t think there were other kids on the bay. She was smoking, and she told me her parents were asleep inside. She didn’t know who I was or what my problem was, but she saw I had one, and instead of sending me packing, she said, “Come on,” and led me back to my granddad’s property.
I remember she wore a mackinaw jacket, man-sized, and gumboots—she was bundled up, and I wished I was, too. She offered me her toque, even went so far as to pull it off her head and hold it out to me, but I wouldn’t take it. Her long, curly black hair blew around in the wind. She was exactly my height. We were standing behind a bush and I was close enough to kiss her.
“This way.” She had a flashlight. She led me over the point, past the gazebo my granddad had built that had been falling down since my grandmother died. She crouched, and we made our way down a steep rock face on a ledge just wide enough for us to walk single file. The water was close, splashing up the cliff at us, but she didn’t hesitate. She reached back for my hand and pulled me into a cave in the rock just big enough for two.
“You didn’t know this was here, did you?” She tucked us both in so we were facing out at the lake. The waves swallowed the lights of the far shore, then spat them out again. We looked out at the water, and she said, “Sometimes I come here to cry. It’s private. I bet we’re the only two who know about this plac
e, now. I think someone else used to use it, once upon a time. I found ashes from a little fire the first time I came here.” She looked at my face. She used her sleeve to wipe the water from my cheeks. “Now, what are you crying about tonight?”
“I’m not crying. That’s rain.”
“It’s windy, but it isn’t raining.”
I didn’t know what to say. I was sweating but still cold, nervous to be so close to this beautiful, strange girl.
“Look,” she said. “It’s not your fault, whatever it is. Everyone’s dad’s an alcoholic. Everyone’s uncle touched them where they shouldn’t. Everyone’s mom left and everyone’s sister’s a whore or a lunatic. Everyone’s sorry they didn’t do something, or that they did. Everyone’s lonely and sad and cries sometimes.” She turned my face to hers and touched her forehead to mine. “It’s okay. We’re gonna grow up and it’s gonna be better. That’s what happens in books.”
She looked in my eyes and I couldn’t tell anything from hers except that she was kind—I couldn’t see what colour they were, or how old she was, but I didn’t want to cry anymore. I didn’t even want to kiss her, though I should have—we were alone and I was thirteen. We sat in that cave for an hour, watching the storm blow down the lake, until I fell asleep. And when I woke up, she was gone.
Bud was up on the veranda, knocking on the door of the hip-roofed house. The same chairs flanked the doorway. I looked for the curly-haired girl in the shadows. Of course, she wasn’t there. Then the door opened and light spilled out, framing a tiny imp. She grabbed Bud by the hand and pulled him inside. I walked up the stairs with Thomas and gratefully came out of the cold.
CHORUS
Todd MacDonald, over beer at the Cambie
Why Glory? Because she had tits and tattoos. When she got suspended from school, she didn’t give a shit; she had black-rimmed eyes that scared boys, and power over kids that would shame the Pied Piper. I wanted to know how she did it. I watched her all through Grade 9, Grade 10—her boredom, her disdain for our teachers—I learned all I could, watching her, but I needed to get closer to know more.
Glory Page 13
