Five Roses

by Alice Zorn

  Kenny lumbered behind her, huffing. “There’s perch in that lake, did you know? I caught a couple, but they were so little, I threw them back.”

  The path opened into the clearing of tall maples that circled the cabin.

  “Wow,” Kenny breathed. “Cool.”

  The cabin was not cool. There was no toilet or electricity. You had to pump water from the well, light a fire to cook and to heat.

  “Come.” She crossed the clearing to the shed. “I’ll show you the loom.”

  They tipped the loom on its side and tried with one edge, then the other, butting its splayed wooden angles against the unyielding rectangle of the doorway. Kenny suggested they carry the pieces they could to the van — the remaining harnesses and the beams. Every time they stepped from the woods onto the road and he unlocked the van doors, Rose imagined someone spying through the trees, though there wasn’t a house close enough and they would have seen a parked car.

  “But what about the loom?” she asked Kenny.

  “Let me think.”

  The sun had already dropped behind the trees. Above the clearing the sky was still blue, but at ground level dusk was grey. Mosquitoes whined around their heads, though they’d sprayed themselves with the repellent Kenny had brought.

  He squinted at the loom with its front corner thrust from the doorway. They’d managed to detach the treadles, which he kept calling pedals, but that hadn’t made the boxy frame of the loom any smaller. Inside the shed it was already dark. “I don’t know, Rose. Nothing’s moving tonight. Either we head back to Montreal or we sleep here and figure this out tomorrow.”

  “I don’t want —” she began.

  He raised a palm. “I know you don’t want to stay in the cabin. I’m talking about your loom. How badly do you want it? Tomorrow … I don’t know. We’ll figure out something. But it makes no sense to drive all the way to Montreal and come back tomorrow. That’ll just waste time.”

  Rose stared at the obstinate loom stuck in the doorway. She’d already bought the yarn for her first project — a gold-and-brown herringbone bolster to match the satin cover on Yushi’s bed. She hadn’t thought it would be so hard to move the loom. She’d imagined having it in her studio, with its view of the canal, as early as this evening.

  Barely moving her lips, she said, “You have to sleep on the couch.”

  “Sure.” Kenny tilted his head. “Is that what’s bothering you? Hey.” He lifted three fingers. “No monkey business. Scout’s honour.”

  That meant she would have to sleep in Maman’s bed — as Maman had when she returned from Montreal, sleeping in the bed where her parents had once slept. The hypnotism of patterns repeating.

  Mouth tight, resolved now, Rose strode to the cabin and shoved the door open. She knew there was no gas left in the Coleman lantern. She’d finished it last fall. She reached behind the cutlery in the drawer of the table for the emergency candles. As she dripped melted wax onto two plates to fix the candles, Kenny said, “What can I do?”

  “Chop wood.” She pointed at the axe behind the door.

  She held a candle to the Mason jars. Rice. And a can of tuna. She grabbed a pot for water and followed Kenny outside. The metal hee-haw of the pump screeched, but the water spurted fresh and cold. When she stopped, the woods were so silent she realized that anyone listening would have heard the rusty cry of the pump and Kenny’s blows with the axe.

  Back in the cabin, she stared at the rocker with the rope seat. The plank steps that led to the hole in the ceiling that opened into the small attic bedroom. On the wall hung a crucifix Maman had kept in memory of her parents. Rose had never seen her pray. More useful, she’d said, was the fly swatter hooked on a nail by the door.

  Here I am, Rose thought. Though it wasn’t the same. She would sleep at the head of the stairs where the roof slanted close over the iron bedstead. She would sit in Maman’s chair at the table and let Kenny sit in hers.

  The door crashed open with Kenny breathing heavily, clasping an armload of wood. He tumbled the long wedges onto the floor by the stove. “You want more?”

  “Yes.” She bent to the stove.

  At supper Kenny said little. His hair was still raked at a slant. Either the silence in the cabin — only the sounds of their eating and the snapping of the fire — kept him silent or he was too tired to talk. When he asked about a toilet, she directed him to the outhouse behind the cabin. “But if you only have to pee, go in the trees.”

  She’d forgotten how much longer it took simply to cook rice when you couldn’t turn on a tap or a stove dial. After they ate, she washed the dishes in the water she’d heated on the stove. Kenny dried. Each gesture was exaggerated by wavering shadows and light.

  She opened the chest where she kept her sheets and woven blanket, and tossed them on the sofa for Kenny. He fingered the ribbed blanket. “Wow, this is real old-timey Quebec. My grandma had blankets like this. They’re made from rags ripped into strips.”

  “I know, I made it.” She turned to the stairs, the flannel pajamas she’d taken from the chest under her arm. She didn’t want to think about him sleeping on the couch. Alone in the cabin together was already closer than she wanted them to be. Eating in the silence, handing him the plates and forks to dry, hearing the stream of his pee against a tree outside.

  “Rose, stop.” He waited until she looked at him. “I want to thank you. I love sleeping in the woods. It’s one of my absolutely favourite things to do.”

  Was it the candlelight or emotion? His eyes gleamed bright. “Okay,” she breathed, not sure what else to say. Was he really that excited about staying in the cabin?

  She carried a candle up the stairs. Each step creaked. No one had walked here since she’d left last fall. Light yawned up the slant of the gabled ceiling. Heat from the stove had risen, so the attic was warm. She undressed quietly. Didn’t answer when Kenny called, “G’night! Good dreams!” She didn’t want him to hear how close they were in the small cabin. She could hear a spark pop in the stove. His body shifting on the sofa.

  She blew out the candle and slid between the sheets onto the sagging mattress. She’d been afraid that being in the cabin would deepen the emptiness she felt between its walls, but the weight of Maman’s blanket comforted her. In the pillow she could smell the faint scent of Maman’s hair. The anxiety of the day came to rest under the steeply angled ceiling.

  She felt more at ease now that the cabin was dark and no one could see in. While she and Kenny were eating at the table, she’d sensed how easily someone could be standing outside among the trees, spying through the window. Maman had never hung a curtain because she wanted as much light as possible in the cabin. It never occurred to her that a person might sneak through the trees and watch them.

  Rose had been thirteen, alone in the cabin, examining her newly swelling nipples in the light from the window, when a furtive movement outside caught her attention. Armand, the neighbour who rented land from Maman, stood under the trees closest to the cabin. Legs braced. The bristle of his moustache. His mouth. He didn’t move away, didn’t hide that he stood there watching. The glass between them was no barrier. She hugged her arms to her chest and turned her back — but not before she’d felt the rove of his eyes on her skin and seen how the lines of his cheeks deepened.

  After the first time, she watched for him watching from the shadows of the trees. Sometimes he was there. Sometimes he wasn’t. Sometimes Maman was in the cabin. When Rose was alone, she stood in the window and unbuttoned her shirt. She let him look at what she could tell from his expression he craved to see. His hands hung loose at his sides as she touched her small breasts. He watched, then pivoted and strode off so quickly she worried she’d frightened him. She couldn’t remember if she’d left the cabin to run after him, deeper into the woods, or if he’d coaxed her outside.

  When Rose was younger, she sometimes saw Armand waiting in the car in
the IGA parking lot while his wife did the shopping. She used to wonder if he was Maman’s boyfriend, because he was the only man who ever came to their cabin. For a while she even thought he might be her father. But he never even glanced her way. He stood at the door to talk to Maman about wood and land and planting corn.

  Later, when Rose began meeting him in the woods, she tortured herself imagining that he used to touch Maman the way he did her. That they’d lain on the same grey blanket. That Maman, too, had opened her legs or crouched beneath him — until she was pregnant with Rose. It couldn’t be true! A man would betray his wife but he wouldn’t desire his own daughter. Would he? Would he?

  Maman had had a baby in Montreal. Rose’s father must be there. Though Rose had also heard that Maman hadn’t been in Montreal long enough to have had a baby. She must have been pregnant when she left Rivière-des-Pins.

  Rose couldn’t bear to think of Armand with Maman, or that she might be his daughter. Except that, if she were, then that was a bond that held him in a way nothing else could. Even if he’d done this and this and this with his wife or Maman, his pleasure wasn’t as deep as with Rose because Rose was his very flesh.

  Rose squirmed her head into Maman’s thin pillow. Armand was so long ago. The last time she’d seen him he moved liked an old man with a sore back. Hard to imagine that he’d ever kneeled between her thighs. Still, after Maman died and Rose was alone, she’d thought he might return. In the silence of the cabin, grieving for Maman, she’d waited. When weeks passed and he didn’t come, she decided to leave — as Maman had. To go to Montreal.

  In the hush of the night Rose woke again. She lay, listening to detect any sounds from outside. Was that a mourning dove? Armand used to call with a mourning dove’s long, yearning coo to let her know he was waiting. She sat up, convinced he stood outside in the dark, watching the window. She could feel his longing envelop the cabin, as commanding as ever.

  The iron bedstead rasped and groaned as she eased her legs from under the blanket. She crept down the stairs and stepped softly to the window. She squinted, then widened her eyes, staring into the dark haze of trees. Their thick shadows.

  Behind her, embers in the stove crumbled. A man breathed in sleep. Her foot touched his jeans on the floor. She turned to the sofa, stooped, and brushed her fingers down the ribbed weave of the blanket, down his stomach to his sex. Armand had shown her how to caress him, sliding his hand around hers on his penis.

  Up and down, up and down. It worked even through the heavy blanket. She felt the animal thickening, and slid her hand under the blanket into his underpants.

  His breathing changed. She jerked the blanket away and kicked off her pyjama bottoms to straddle him.

  “Rose?” he croaked.

  “Shh!” She batted his hand away, rocking into him hard when — already? — he gasped a light, feathery cry. She ground her teeth, her hunger still bottled, and fumbled off him.

  “Rose —”

  “Quiet!” she cried harshly, snatching her pajamas from the floor and sprinting up the stairs.

  Rose surfaced once from dreams when it was still dark. Already the birds were calling to each other about the kingdom of their nests, the fat insects they would snap from the air, the clouds the sun would send to decorate the sky for them. Strident, confident melodies.

  She woke again to the round metal bars of the bedstead outlined by the angle of light from the stairway. She was immediately alert to danger, but didn’t yet know why. Then she heard the rumble of voices outside. She recognized the cadence of Kenny’s, but who was he talking to?

  She pulled on her T-shirt and capris, and tiptoed to the stairs. The air in the cabin was chilly. Kenny hadn’t made a fire, though he’d folded his sheet and blanket, and set the pillow on top. She pressed her forehead to the window but still couldn’t see. She tugged the doorknob softly, but the wood squeaked and the voices stopped.

  Jerome. Of course. Beside him stood Kenny, his hair even more like a woodpecker’s. Didn’t he ever touch it or pat it down? He lifted a mug toward her, though his glance slid away. “Jerome brought us coffee.”

  “Mom sent it. We didn’t know what you had out here since you weren’t expecting to spend the night.”

  We. Did that include Armand? Husband and wife discussing Rose in the cabin. Rose and her supposed boyfriend from the city.

  “There’s bagels too.” Jerome nodded at the Thermos and bag propped on the fieldstones that bordered Maman’s small flower bed. Greenery had snaked as best it could through last year’s tangled stalks, which no one had cleared away. Jerome and Kenny, who still didn’t look at her, turned back to the loom that blocked the doorway of the shed.

  Jerome’s mom had even included plastic camping mugs. Rose sipped the coffee, grateful for its milky warmth, though it was too sweet. The bagels were all in a row in a plastic bag. Grocery-store bagels.

  Last winter she and Yushi were coming home from a walk on the mountain. It was cold and snowy, which Yushi said was perfect bagel weather. Rose had never had a bagel. They waited in line beside refrigerators packed with jars and large, flat packages. Lox, Yushi said. Rose recognized the smell of bread baking in a wood fire. A man in a turban slid a long paddle into the oven to scoop out hot rings of dough he flipped into a bin. Yushi asked for six black, and the woman tumbled fresh, seed-encrusted bagels into a paper bag.

  “Rose,” Jerome called, “why don’t we undo the bolts?”

  “They won’t. I tried.”

  “Got any machine oil? Or just oil.”

  She headed to the cabin, not sure if there was oil, then remembered the can Maman kept with the tools. “In the shed,” she said. “On the shelf on the right. By the hammer.”

  Kenny rummaged about inside. “Found it!” He and Jerome bent over the loom.

  “This’ll do it. Just a question of …”

  “Yeah. Give it a minute.”

  “Grease up the works.”

  Rose didn’t want to remember what had happened in the night. Nor, from the way he was acting, did Kenny. She walked over to the chopping stump and sat with her coffee and grocery-store bagel. She wondered if Jerome knew that a real bagel tasted a lot better than this. She hoped he’d seen that Kenny had slept on the sofa. Alone.

  “Hey, Rose, it’s working!” Kenny sounded more like himself.

  “Grab that part,” Jerome cautioned.

  She watched the two men ease the wooden structure apart. Above her, pine branches swept the morning breeze gently. A chickadee flew to a branch and cocked its head at her. There were only a few polka-dot poppy seeds embedded in the shiny dough. She scraped a fingernail to pick loose the seeds, then crumbled a bit of bagel, and held out her palm.

  The chickadee darted to another branch. Not wanting the men to overhear, Rose whispered the singsong call. “Chickadee-dee-dee-dee.” She lifted her arm higher toward the bird. “Chickadee-dee-dee-dee.”

  The bird fluttered from the branch. The weightless pincer-grip of its skinny claws gripped the fleshy edge of her palm. The jab of its beak. She wondered if chickadees in Montreal would come if she called them. Here was something she could show Yushi.

  Maddy

  Monday morning, as Maddy coasted across the bridge to the market, she saw Yushi’s green bike and Yushi sitting nearby on a bench, knees splayed. Was she waiting for her? Maddy felt a happy prick of surprise. She liked Yushi, but up until now hadn’t been sure whether Yushi singled her out from the others who also worked at the patisserie.

  Maddy swung off her bike. “Got your bike fixed already?”

  “I wish. I worked this weekend, remember? I wheeled it over here yesterday because it’s too far to get all the way home, but I don’t know where to get it fixed around here.” Yushi sounded indifferent, but her expression, considering her bike, was glum.

  “There’s a great place.” Maddy waved east. “They’re cheap and
I trust them. I can take you.”

  Yushi peered at the buildings that lined the canal, the trusses of the Charlevoix Bridge, the skyline of silos. The gel in her hair gleamed in the sunlight.

  “I can take you,” Maddy repeated. And after they went to the bike shop, maybe she could invite Yushi back to her place for supper.

  “Okay. But not today, I’ve got something after work. How about tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow’s good.” Maddy tried to sound as casual as Yushi. She felt she’d scored a point — like taming a wild creature — and didn’t want to scare her off.

  “I’d better get in,” Yushi sighed. “I’ll bet Pettypoo’s waiting with a stopwatch in hand.”

  That afternoon, before Maddy left the market, she bought eggplants, tomatoes, mushrooms, and zucchini to make ratatouille. That way, supper tomorrow would be ready if Yushi agreed to come. At Pierre-Paul’s stall she saw his wife, a big-shouldered blonde, easing a basket of strawberries into a bag for a customer. Pierre-Paul gave Maddy a discreet nod she ignored. If he couldn’t be friendly in front of his wife, forget it.

  She cycled past her usual exit, heading toward Griffintown. She wanted to make sure her bike repair place hadn’t closed. It wasn’t a shop, only the open steel doors of an abandoned warehouse, staffed by a few ad hoc guys who were handy with a bike wrench.

  The man with the bushy red ponytail who’d tuned her bike in the spring was leaning against the sunlit brick. She smelled the joint before she saw his cupped hand. She cruised to a stop. “Hi. Are you here tomorrow?”