Glory

by Gillian Wigmore

  The sounds of the bar disappeared. I heard Crystal inhale. I heard her fingers squeak on the fret board, the shuffle of her shoe on the floor. I could almost hear her heartbeat.

  She strummed awhile before she started in on the last part.

  The water rises late in the spring,

  branches rattle in the cottonwood like bones,

  and you still hear her voice,

  still you hear her voice when the wind moans.

  She’s just a story they tell at the bar

  and you wonder where she goes between the songs,

  but she’s just some small-town whore and you’ve heard

  stories

  she’s just some small-town girl, and she’s gone.

  On the recording, Crystal paused. I looked out the windshield of the truck at the black spruce poking out of the bog at the back of the parking lot. I took a deep breath and shook my head because I still couldn’t believe it—that she’s mine. She sleeps next to me at night and wakes next to me in the morning. She holds my hand when we walk to town. She buys us groceries and gets me a beer from the fridge if I ask for it. I run her baths and hold her when she cries. I get to be the one she comes to when she can’t take it that Glory’s gone, that she doesn’t know if Glory will come back. When she gets a postcard from fucking Whitehorse with nothing but a lipstick kiss on it, I’m the one that gets her back on track again.

  When she’s happy, she comes to me with why don’t we and can’t you and my answer is always, always yes. She’s come so far since the spring—she’s not so skinny, and she’s writing songs. I seen the drifts of papers piled up on her banjo on the coffee table. I watched the wind tip the treetops back and forth, the leaves starting to let go. I counted my blessings and they were so many.

  Back on the CD, Crystal took a breath and held her hand against the guitar’s strings to stop their ringing. She started plucking individual notes and went through the melody one last time.

  Dead silence in the bar. I pictured the last notes disappearing into the dusty fur of the animals mounted on the pub’s walls.

  Crystal sniffed, “Thank you. Thanks for listening.” I smiled to hear the frog in my sweetheart’s throat. I remembered walking up to her after she played that night and telling her she was great, but I don’t think she heard me. She had a faraway look in her eyes. So I gave her a hug and a kiss and took her home.

  The recording was over. Static filled the cab. It was a shitty CD—Paul’s no expert—but the song rang in my head. I didn’t know all the words, but the melody echoed long after the CD ended. I stared at the cover: a date in black letters, a blurry face and a flash of teeth, a woman’s soft cheek against a mess of dark curly hair. It still made me shiver to think of her. She could’ve kept Crystal for her own. Hell, she could have kept Juniper, too, and Renee Chance, all of us. She had this whole place in her hands until she let us go. Chose herself. But it’s a good thing she did. For me. For Crystal, too, I hope.

  I flipped the CD case over in my hand to look at the spine. One word in black pen: Glory. Not like anyone would ever forget it.

  JUNIPER

  Papa says I read too much Little House on the Prairie and he might be right (he’s usually right), but he doesn’t notice that it’s On the Banks of Plum Creek I love—still Laura and Mary and Ma and Pa and baby Carrie but a house in a creek bank! Then a new house with pine boards! Sometimes when the lake is wild I wake up because I hear the roof creaking and I read those books to make the night go away. I taught myself that. I read the bad right out of the night and I’m not scared anymore. Not of the lake, not of anything.

  Papa also says that I’m baking too much and he’s getting fat, but I’d rather he was fat than sad. I don’t say it out loud. I love him so much. His eyes are all hollow and he hardly moves around anymore. He misses his boys so much. I bring him tea and sit as near to him as I can. I bring him his book and I bring my book and we sit on the swinging deck chair and just be together. He watches the water and I watch anything but the water. I don’t want to be looking at it the minute something crawls out of it. And that day will come. I feel it in the creep-o-meter in my back (that’s the zingy part of your spine) and I wait for it, keep my eyes on my book.

  Papa says, “Don’t worry, Juniper,” and “Is Crystal coming over?” and “Let’s have beans on toast for supper.” That’s all. He doesn’t tell stories like he used to, so I have to read or make up my own. I try to do that. It’s better than stories you hear from strangers. Even out here I hear stories, out here and at school. The stuff I hear at school makes me want to cover my ears and run. That’s when sitting on the deck with Papa is best—when they say at school that my mother was a whore and now she’s dead, that my mother’s a murderer, that my mother left me for dead and my papa rescued me from a Dumpster. That one’s the dumbest. We don’t even have Dumpsters in Fort St. James.

  Who cares what my mother did? Not me. I’m almost eleven and I can make pizza from scratch. Crystal comes over with Bud and I cook for everybody. Next summer I’m going to get a new bike, Bud says, and he’s going to ride with me all the way over to Southside. Crystal looks at him with her side eyes when he says stuff like that, but I heard him whisper to her that it would be good for me to see it, whatever it is. Hopefully it’s not a sea monster or a sarcophagus. No, thank you. If he means my mother’s place on Southside, I can already see it. It’s a place I have in my mind. There are windows looking out at the water, but the lake is smeary, all soft and blurred like Papa’s quilts, and there are dirt floors and you can hear the waves every minute because the walls don’t hold out the sound. She’s there. I can see her through the window. Her hair is like a black flag in the wind and she’s down on the beach looking out at the water. Her face is away from me, but she knows when I come to visit. She doesn’t talk to me, but then, Papa doesn’t say much, either—it doesn’t mean they don’t love me. She says, look at the weather—that storm’s come all the way down from Portage. In my mind she says, make me a cup of tea, would you? and I do, somehow, on the little two-burner thingy, in a kettle that used to be Nana’s. I know it because I heard a story about that kettle once. And sometimes stories come true. Not really, but sort of, because I can feel Nana’s hand inside mine when I pour the water, and I can hear my mother singing, and I can feel the wind off the lake when I bring her tea in a sky-blue mug I made out of my dreams.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Huge thanks are due for support during the writing of this novel.

  Thank you to Invisible Publishing, and Leigh Nash especially, whose expertise, and whose enthusiasm for and dedication to this story inspired me.

  Thank you to early readers of Glory—each comment brought me closer to the book I meant to write. Most enormous thanks to Laisha Rosnau, whose suggestions and undying support grew the book, and to Fabienne Calvert Filteau, who lived the story with me, from early imaginings through multiple endings.

  Thanks are due to the Prince George Public Library, to Cafe Volatire and Books and Company, to the City of Prince George (for investing in trail maintenance and development), and to my husband for agreeing to move north. Thanks to my parents and siblings and friends who make living in here fantastic.

  I’m grateful that Jim Henry built a series of trails at the base of Pope Mountain. I wouldn’t have survived the winter/spring of 2002 without them, and they continue to bring joy to all who use them.

  Thank you to Travis Sillence for everything—I can’t even list it all. I am so lucky to share this journey with you. Thanks also to Elly and Emmett Sillence, who endure all manner of dinner conversation and whose companionship and insight I value more than they know.

  Fort St. James is real, but this version is imagined, inhabitants and occurrences included. I took a great deal of liberty with the layout and buildings in this story, so please don’t use it as a map. It was important for me to name the town so we are closer to my goal of knowing other places in literature than major metropolitan centres, and so y
ou would have the opportunity fall in love with this little northern town as I have. Fort St. James is a haven - one of the most beautiful, terrifying places on earth; it is my ancestral place, and the place I always return to. I’m grateful to be taken in each time I come home.

  Invisible Publishing is a not-for-profit publishing company that produces contemporary works of fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry. We’re small in scale, but we take our work, and our mission, seriously: We publish material that’s engaging, literary, current, and uniquely Canadian.

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