Five Roses

by Alice Zorn

  She would use the dresser to store yarn, shuttles, bobbins, and combs. When she finished painting the drawers and set them on their backs to dry, she peered out the window along the canal. Where was Kenny? She finally walked down the hallway to the loading dock. The sculptor waved her around to the side of the building, nowhere near the canal.

  Kenny stood on a bank of grass, swinging his rod back smoothly, then forward, abruptly stopping short. The rod formed an elegant arc of movement tethered to his stocky arm. Sunlight caught the long glint of string slithering through the grass as he reeled it in. She backed away, not sure if he would be embarrassed to be discovered fishing in the grass. Though anyone cycling by could see him.

  Today he planned to go fishing while she took her loom apart. She wanted to tell him not to mention her name if anyone stopped him or asked how he got there. She’d taken care to disguise herself, getting her hair cut to frame her face, wearing a new pair of capris.

  She sat in the van, staring straight ahead, pretending not to see the outlying houses of Rivière-des-Pins. Modern prefab bungalows, the bank, the pharmacy, the Corvette where Maman bought clothes, the IGA. Once a month she and Maman came to Rivière-des-Pins to buy flour, oats, rice, molasses, lentils, and potatoes.

  “The old hometown,” Kenny said.

  She wanted to say no, home was where she lived now, with Yushi — except that she knew this place and its stories. The stone church with the steeple. The street to Lisette’s house. Maman used to bring Lisette the rugs and shawls they wove, because Lisette knew a woman who distributed to stores that sold Québécois crafts.

  In Montreal Rose had seen the price of hand-woven goods. Four cotton placemats cost more than Lisette used to give Maman for a whole woollen shawl with a braided fringe. The placemats weren’t even hemmed properly. Rose understood that stores needed to make a profit, but Lisette must have taken a hefty cut as well. Rose didn’t ever want to see her again.

  “Here,” Rose said as they approached the gas station. “Turn.”

  She felt disembodied, sitting high up in the van with Kenny, driving through a landscape she recognized but where she no longer felt she belonged. The horizon of trees. The dip in the road. The Tremblays’ yellow house. Jacques Tremblay collected disability for his back and worked under the table for a buddy of his who was a plumber. Madame Burns stood on her porch shaking out a mat, her periscope head following the van as it passed. Madame Burns lived for bingo, driving not just to Rawdon for a game, but as far as Joliette and Mascouche.

  With surprise Rose saw that the land Armand used to rent from Maman had been planted with corn. The plants were almost waist-high, shading the long furrows of rich brown earth. Where and how did he pay rent? Maybe there was an account at the bank. She’d never thought of it, though she knew Armand was honest to the last clod of earth for any detail related to farming.

  A windbreak of cedar trees hid his white clapboard house. She jerked her head away, not wanting to look, but she’d already seen the car set on blocks beside the driveway — another of Jerome’s projects he’d begun and never finished. Jerome was six years older than she was, Armand’s youngest son who still lived at home. No one understood how a hard-working man like Armand could have fathered such a useless son. When Rose was in high school, Jerome often sat in his car at the back of the school parking lot. He wasn’t in school anymore, just hanging out with the older boys, selling whatever it was they smoked. She never told Armand. They didn’t talk about his family. Nor about Maman. She couldn’t actually remember a single word Armand had ever said to her, though they must have talked to arrange meetings. When, if not where. Where was always the same. Deep in the woods by the lean-to where Armand stacked the wood he cut in the winter and fetched with the trailer in the summer when the ground was dry.

  “Are we there soon?” Kenny asked. The fields and few houses had given way to densely wooded land. Thick cedar and pine, the smooth white trunks of birch trees, the grey bark of maples.

  “Soon.”

  He drove slowly on the dirt road. “You really did live in the sticks, didn’t you?”

  Rose didn’t understand the admiration in his voice. “Here,” she said. “Slow down.”

  “Stop?”

  “Not yet.” They passed the dead tree where, at the top, an owl nested. The pine with a tuberous growth on its trunk. “Here. Stop.”

  The weedy edge of the road dropped to a deep ditch. Rose stared out the window into the shady depth of the trees.

  “Wow. We’re really in the middle of nowhere.”

  Madame Burns had seen their van. And who else? Kenny had to leave before someone drove by and saw where he’d stopped. She pointed down the road. “You continue to the end, then turn right.”

  “Aren’t you going to show me your cabin?”

  “I need to go alone.”

  “Because of your mom, eh? I thought it might be easier if I came with you the first time.”

  Nothing would be easier. With or without him. But she wanted the loom.

  Kenny leaned between their seats into the back of the van to snatch a red hazard rag from the floor, hopped out, and crashed through the weeds.

  “No!” Rose clambered from the van when she saw him reach for a branch to tie the rag. “If someone sees it —”

  “I need to see it. I’ll never find this spot again.”

  She couldn’t think of another way. “Okay, I’ll meet you here.”

  “Around four?” He jiggled his legs, anxious to get going. “Wish me luck! We’ll have trout for supper!”

  The canopy of trees grew so dense that only puzzle pieces of sky could be seen high above. It was cooler in the woods than in the city. Fern brushed against Rose’s legs. A chickadee dipped in flight across her path and landed on a branch. She and Maman used to hold out handfuls of seed in the winter. She remembered the grasp of thin claws on her finger. The greedy black eye and quick peck on her palm. The air smelled of cedar, pine trees, and resin.

  The trout lilies should have finished blooming long ago, but here was one late yellow flower poised like a lantern over the sleek, speckled leaves. Maman had taught her the names and habits of the flowers. The puffed jowls of the orchidées that grew under the maple trees. The intricately pleated crowns of wild columbines.

  There was the story, too, that Maman used to tell about the five roses. There once was a girl who lived in a cabin in the woods with a garden of five magic roses. The story changed with each telling, because the roses told the girl different secrets about the woods. How bees lived in decayed tree trunks where they made their honey. How the owl swooped through the dark to catch mice. The biggest secret was about the girl’s name. She didn’t have one so the five roses named her. They called her Rose.

  Rose walked slowly, remembering. Another chickadee flitted past — or maybe the same one — sending her a questioning chirp.

  Through the trees she glimpsed the slap of sunlight on the metal stovepipe. The tarred black peak of the roof. In the clearing she stopped. After only one winter empty, the cabin seemed to have sagged into the earth. The blank window stared at her. Who are you?

  She wasn’t going in the cabin. She only wanted the loom. She followed the short fieldstone path through the cedars to the shed, but when she saw it she was startled. She’d remembered it as white. She’d forgotten she’d painted it blue last summer. She’d worked alone because Maman kept losing her breath. Rose had thought she was tired. She hadn’t understood why she was so tired, but she also hadn’t asked. And Maman never said.

  She grasped the doorknob but — of course — it was locked. The key was in the cupboard in the cabin. She had no choice. Move, she thought. Get it. You need the key. Go.

  The key to the cabin hung on a nail in the shelter where they stored wood. There were no more than a dozen logs left — pretty well advertising that the place was abandoned. She wondered
if anyone had used the key since she’d last touched it. It slid into the lock of the cabin door and turned, but the door had swollen in its frame. She had to shove hard with her shoulder, each ram thudding through the cabin and her body.

  When she burst through, she stumbled over the doorstep into the box of her past — the sofa where she used to sleep, the enamel-top table, the chairs, the wood stove. The faint stink of a squirrel nest or mice. How had she ever lived in such a cramped and dim space? Except that it had felt different with Maman there.

  She had to step on a chair to reach the top shelf of the cupboard, tapping her fingers along the shelf until she found the key. She kept her eyes on the task and didn’t glance around the cabin. She slammed the door behind her.

  She felt calmer as soon as she unlocked the shed and saw the squat angles of the loom and the warping frame hooked on the wall. They were old friends waiting for her to fetch them. The loom was still dressed with a runner in brown linen that was only half-finished. Rose had wound the warp and put it on the loom, but Maman had tied it. Rose lay her hand on the width of threads that spanned from the back beam. She felt the give of strung linen against her palm and fingers, and wished she could keep the sensation to remember Maman.

  She straightened. She had to get started. No choice but to cut the runner off the loom. The linen would be ruined in any case. Left on the loom all winter in an unheated shed, the tension would be stretched and uneven. She grabbed the heavy steel scissors and rasped long, sharp bites across the threads. Tension chopped, they collapsed against the heddles in sloppy twists. She unrolled the cloth that was already woven off the front beam and rolled it again, carefully folding the unfinished edge inside. She would hem this half-piece and keep it. Maman’s last weaving.

  Moving more quickly now, she unknotted and bundled the remaining threads off the back beam. What a waste. Though maybe not completely wasted. If she scattered the threads outside, the birds would tug ends free for their nests. The marmottes and the chipmunks could line their holes.

  She realized she should have brought boxes to carry the shuttles, bobbins, hooks, and extra heddles. The harnesses lifted off the loom, though each one swayed with the weight of three hundred heddles — too heavy for her to carry through the woods. She tried to open the frames to remove the heddles, but the clips were jammed. She squeezed and pulled, then tapped with a hammer until the metal began to bend, but it still wouldn’t release its hold.

  She would have to undo the bolts that joined the parts of the loom. She clutched the wrench tight, but the first bolt wouldn’t budge. She tried another, leaning her weight against the wrench, and sent it flying, smashing her hand into wood. “Ow! Merde! ” She squeezed her hand in her armpit, then took up the wrench again, more gingerly. She tried another bolt. Crawled beneath the breast beam. Each bolt seemed to have been fused in place.

  She stood with her hands hanging useless, unsure what to do next. She’d expected to take the loom apart and carry the pieces through the woods to the road by four o’clock. The harnesses were too heavy and the loom wouldn’t come apart. It was a wide-legged skeleton, too unwieldy to manoeuvre out the door.

  Her stomach grumbled. She’d made lunch for herself and Kenny but had forgotten it in the van. She knew there would be some food in the cabin — in the Mason jars on the shelves by the stove. She couldn’t wait until four o’clock to eat. She strode to the cabin and shoved against the door. She ignored the sofa and the table, looking only at the jars. Kidney beans, split peas, rice, oats.

  She didn’t want to light a fire but she was so hungry. If she didn’t eat, she wouldn’t be able to carry the heavy harnesses through the trees. She grabbed the axe from behind the door. A tree stump served as a chopping block. She propped a log upright, her hands and arms remembering the movements. She wedged the axe in the log, knocked the log on the stump. One more knock and the log split in half. She split the pieces again, gathered the kindling, scooped twigs off the ground. Dry pine needles, yes. That would start a fire.

  Rose waited in the trees by the road. She’d staggered along the path with a harness on her shoulder — only one. There were four.

  She needed Kenny to help. Where was he? She’d already waited so long that she could have walked back to the shed for the wood crate she’d stacked with reeds, shuttles, and bags of yarn. She bit the skin around her thumbnail. The loom was still in one awkward piece. If they turned it on its side, maybe they could angle it through the shed door. Or maybe not. She couldn’t tell.

  She heard a car in the distance and leaped across the ditch to wave, then scrambled back into the trees when she saw two vehicles. She hid behind a cedar, but they still slowed and stopped. A door slammed and she heard Kenny. “Hey, thanks, I appreciate it. She should be here soon. Why don’t you wait and say hi?”

  Through the cedar branches Rose saw a red car in front of the van. She didn’t recognize the driver until he turned his head to peer into the trees. Jerome. Armand’s do-nothing son — who had, however, spotted her. He opened the car door and stepped out. “Hi, Rose.”

  Kenny still scanned the trees. She walked out from behind the cedar, surprising him. His jeans were muddy, his thick hair raked to one side. “Sorry, Rose, I know I’m late, but I couldn’t find the place. Did you take down the rag I tied?”

  Rose had forgotten about the rag. But he was right, it was gone.

  “Yeah,” Jerome said. “Your friend here was lost.”

  Rose expected Kenny to object that he hadn’t been lost, but he only grinned. She saw him as he would appear in a story Jerome would tell over supper tonight: a soft-fleshed city boy trying to fish minnows. Not even smart enough to stay out of the mud. Armand would be sitting at the table, listening. Jerome would describe her, too — in her silly capris, ankles scratched, hoping no one would notice she’d come to Rivière-des-Pins. How stupid could she be?

  Kenny said, “Man, was I lost! I’m lucky Jerome helped me. He knew who you were right away. Even though you left, Rose, people still remember you.”

  Remember her? People in Rivière-des-Pins still remembered how Maman’s parents died — one coughing to death without even the benefit of oxygen, the other in a field under the wide open sky. When Rose was a child, people had told her. Had told her, too, how Maman left for Montreal and returned with a baby. Not for a minute did anyone ever forget that Rose was that baby. When she was four years old, then fourteen, then twenty-four, she would always be the baby Maman had borne in secret in Montreal. And who was her father? Who? People squinted at Rose as if she must know but was too stubborn to volunteer the details.

  Kenny was explaining how he’d driven up and down the road looking for the rag.

  “I would have seen you,” Rose said. “I’ve been waiting for a while.”

  “When I couldn’t find the rag I went down some other roads. Then I couldn’t find this one again. There aren’t any signs.”

  Of course there weren’t signs. Strangers didn’t belong on these back roads. Rose wished that Kenny would stop talking — and that Jerome would leave.

  Jerome peered past her into the woods. “So you came to get your loom.”

  What else had Kenny told him? Everyone in Rivière-des-Pins would know before nightfall.

  “Is that it?” Kenny pointed at the harness she’d leaned against a maple.

  “That’s a part,” Rose said. Could he try any harder to look stupid?

  “How are you going to carry your loom all the way out here?” Jerome asked.

  “We’ll manage,” Rose said. And to Kenny, “We should go while we’ve still got light.” He was such a city boy that he might not realize there weren’t streetlights hanging off the trees.

  “I’ll put this in the van.” Kenny hopped across the ditch for the harness but didn’t expect the heavy sway of the heddles when he lifted it. “Jee-zus!”

  “Need help?” Jerome asked.


  “Thanks, bro. I’ve got it.”

  Jerome leaned against his car. “I can’t figure out why you’re in such a rush to drive back tonight. You’ve got a cabin.”

  “That’s what I was telling Rose —”

  “No. We’re not staying here.”

  Still hopeful, Kenny said, “My buddy said I could have the van for the weekend.”

  “It’s not yours?” Jerome gave it a slow once-over.

  “Nope.” Kenny obviously didn’t know that, in the country, not owning your own wheels meant you were socially retarded.

  “Come on,” Rose said, turning to head into the woods.

  Kenny slammed the van doors. “Got my marching orders. See you around, eh?”

  Rose heard Jerome start his car and the crunch of gravel as he drove off. She walked quickly, impatient to get the loom and leave. Her steps were quiet, but Kenny scuffed and stumbled as if there weren’t even a path. The sun wouldn’t set for three hours, although here among the trees, with the light filtered through the branches, shapes were already beginning to lose definition. The trees grew close. The loom would be bulky and difficult to carry.

  “Rose … don’t you like Jerome?”

  “He’s not a friend.”

  “He sounded really interested when I said who you were.”

  “What did you say?”

  “That you used to live in a cabin in the woods with your mom, who passed away. He knew right away who I meant.”

  “What else?”

  “Nothing.”

  He wouldn’t have had to tell Jerome much. Jerome would have enough of a story describing Kenny. Even if he didn’t tell his father directly, Armand would hear. There would be gossip in the village or his wife might tell him. Rose had always believed it was his wife who found out about her and Armand. Or maybe one of his sons. Someone who’d been walking in the woods and had glimpsed the unlikely movement of bodies among the branches and foliage. She couldn’t bear to think it might have been Maman.