by Anne Degrace
Once I’ve hung my clothes in the small banged-together plywood closet and thrown my underwear and stuff in the drawer in the bottom, I sit on the single bed and look at the room. The whole room is tiny, and stacked up one side right up to the casement window are boxes; this is a storage room for Cass’s stuff, obviously. “Just throw this stuff wherever,” Cass had said, referring to the pile of papers and things on the cot, so that’s what I did. On the top of the pile I put on the floor last night, a photo album. I feel a little guilty, looking, but Cass didn’t seem to care about privacy, leaving me to clear some space for myself.
Inside the front cover is a brown folder with Cass’s birth certificate, title of ownership for this place, and a few other odds and ends. They’re the sort of things you’d think would be kept in a proper file, but this seems to be Cass’s style, and after my mother’s insistence on order, it’s comforting, if you want to know the truth. Cass was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, January 12, 1930. The title for this place is dated June 17, 1958. There’s not much else in the folder except a photograph. Little girl, maybe three years old. Red hair like mine.
The photograph album is the kind with black paper and picture corners, and I spend some time looking at the black-and-white photographs of people I don’t know. Cass is there, I can tell it’s her, still chubby, and not more than ten or eleven. She has that same smile that takes up her whole face. She’s with four other girls who could only be her sisters. I wonder at that: what it would be like to have sisters or brothers. Someone to take your side.
The baby was a girl. I didn’t get to hold her.
I hope that, in her new family, she has sisters.
Windswept
And blow ye winds, heigh-ho!
A-roving we will go.
— Folk song
The pavement is heating up: Pink can feel it radiating, warming his right side. It’s good to be out this early, even if there isn’t a whole lot of traffic. The way the sunlight limns the pines as it rises over the curve of mountain, the smell of earth and leaves, birds going crazy in the treetops. He can hear the call of a song sparrow, answered by another more distant, perhaps a mate or a lover-to-be, a heartbeat later.
A car approaches, a pale green Pontiac coming over the rise like a sea creature. The man in the driver’s seat is middle-aged, jowly, and reminds Pink of Stan, not because of the car—Stan has been driving the same red pickup as long as Pink can remember—but because of the plaid shirt and something about the way the driver grips the steering wheel with both hands, mouth firmly set. In the pickup, if Nora was there, she’d be all soft in the seat, where Stan was a hard, straight line at the wheel. As a boy, Pink always sat behind Nora, as if siding with her maternal, comfortable sponginess by virtue of proximity. But there were the times with Stan, in the woods, in the workshop. The patience when he showed the boy how to do something new, the shared pride of accomplishment. He can feel, even now, the weight of that hand on his shoulder, the warmth of it. Good job, son, it said. I’m proud of you. The warmth might last a day or a week, sometimes months. At other times, he means well, Nora would say.
As the Pontiac passes Pink’s outstretched thumb, the driver gives him a look: another hippie, it says. Get your hair cut. Get a job.
Leaning now against his pack at the side of the road, Pink sits in the peace of the moment and remembers another time: a massive oak tree, sunlight, like today, streaming through its branches, while beneath it two small boys play with plastic soldiers. Eight-year-old Elvis—as Pink was known until recently—particularly likes making the sounds of explosions. Elvis’s friend Kevin likes to be the captain, barking orders. Before them is the battlefield: ambushes, hoards attacking from behind roots. Blood and gore everywhere. Lots of sound effects.
Then, one afternoon Stan finds them at their game. Hauls Elvis up and tells him it’s about time he grew up. Says he’ll show the boys how to shoot after lunch. Elvis tries avoidance: he takes his Classics Illustrated comic book under the back step and stays there for half the afternoon, reading Oliver Twist by flashlight. When he hears the crunch of boots he looks out from his cave and sees two pairs of shoes, Stan’s work boots and Kevin’s running shoes. There is no getting away from this. The sound of gunshots and tin cans being hit— and Stan going off at him over the cans that are missed—permeate the neighbourhood.
Later on Kevin gets a B-B gun for Christmas. It’s all anyone talks about in the neighbourhood, Kevin’s B-B gun. Elvis hears Stan tell Nora that maybe they should get Elvis one for his birthday. “First thing, they cost an arm and a leg,” Nora tells him, “and second thing, somebody’s bound to lose an eye.”
The day Stan and Kevin’s father, Lloyd, decide to take the boys deer hunting, the rifle is oiled and gleaming by the back door when Elvis comes down to breakfast. Despite his apprehension, Elvis feels the heady power there. It looks formidable, imposing, all metal and woodgrain. No-nonsense. Not a plaything.
“Can I have eggs?” asks Elvis, who always has oatmeal with brown sugar for breakfast. He wants to ask for coffee, too, but doesn’t quite know how.
In the woods, the boys flank the men, quiet in the seriousness of the event. Dawn has just broken, and the early fall air paints their breath white, makes boots crackle on dry grass. There is a quickening in the air at the outset of the adventure that subsides as the sun traverses the sky towards midday, the excitement settling into an irritable resignation at the absence of game that both boys can feel. Now, Elvis and Kevin just want to go home. Elvis thinks of his comic book, of the character’s forced apprenticeship to the coffin-maker, and feels an affinity for Oliver Twist.
The wild turkey has a bewildered look about it; perhaps it is already injured in some way, because it doesn’t take off in a rush of feathers when they accidentally flush it from some low brush, the edge of stealth on the part of the hunters long since dissipated. It’s Elvis who spots it first, the sound out of his mouth before he has a chance to think better of it. “Here you go, son,” says Stan proudly, down on one knee to help him sight the rifle. Elvis catches Stan’s glance at Lloyd, knows this to be a contest.
Elvis fires, and misses. The turkey finds its wings, and is gone.
The missed shot sends Stan and Lloyd into a must-kill frenzy; the boys, Elvis knows with eight-year-old perspicacity, are just excuses. “Gotta make sure these boys don’t go home empty-handed,” Stan and Lloyd say to each other, ploughing across fields, through stands of trees, the boys stumbling behind with burrs in their pants, snot-nosed and cold and just wanting it to be over. Elvis catches Kevin’s eye and receives a small grimace in return. After a while, Elvis is determined that one of them will kill something, just so they can go home.
As it turns out, it is Elvis. Stan sees the doe, and Lloyd has to admit Stan saw it first and so Elvis should get to shoot it, but Elvis can tell Lloyd wishes it were his son Kevin. The deer just stands there, and part of Elvis is thinking run, and part of him just wants to kill it and make Stan proud. At the moment Elvis sights the deer through the scope, he really does want to kill it, the feeling drug-rushing through him, powerful. Intoxicating. He’s come a long way from playing with plastic soldiers; this gun is real. The feeling that has enveloped his whole body comes to a knife-sharp point, pulsing where his finger meets the trigger.
It takes three shots to get the deer to stay down, Stan taking the gun from Elvis when it is clear the boy will not shoot again. Elvis can see her thrashing, trying to get up, falling. The men beckon the boys closer, shouting, urging the final shot to finish her, and Elvis sees the look of terror in her eyes. Stan pushes the gun at Elvis, shoots a look at Lloyd; Elvis throws an agonized look over his shoulder at Kevin, but there’s no help there.
“Between the eyes, boy,” Stan hisses, and there is blood on the dry autumn grass and on the soft dun hide of the doe; there is the thrash of legs that seem impossibly delicate; there is the limpid brown of the eye as it rolls. From a place Elvis did not know existed comes a sob.
“Buck fever,” says Lloyd to Stan knowingly, humour in his voice.
“Come on now, son. It’ll be easier next time,” Stan says, but Elvis, feeling humiliated by the laughter, pushes away the proffered hand. It’s all too horrible: the doe, the vomit, the laughter. There will be no next time. The ground swims in front of him, and his ears roar; he thinks he will be sick again. Behind him, Elvis can feel Kevin standing, arms at his sides, watching.
Later, Lloyd cleans the doe, hanging it in the shed by the Ford he’s restoring. Elvis sees the dark stain in the earth floor below the slack, hanging head, the milky white of the dead eyes. The meat is divided between the families, brown paper–wrapped packages in odd shapes in the old freezer. When Elvis looks inside, his chest feels funny, so after a while he doesn’t look.
A crow calls, and Pink comes back to the moment, the highway stretched before him. The Volkswagen van appears on the road like sunshine: yellow, carefree, friendly-looking. The girl, filling bowls with granola and applesauce in the back, smiles at Pink under a soft moustache, raises her heavy eyebrows and gestures at the empty bowl. “You?” Thérèse asks, and he hears a French accent. Her breasts swing under a peasant blouse as she moves. Stefan, driving, turns and smiles, eyes friendly beneath a leather hat, feathers in the rawhide band. They look tanned; there is the smell of earth, sweat, and patchouli.
After a while they pull over at a rest stop. Thérèse stretches out in the morning sun while Stefan brews coffee on a camp stove. Pink’s pack is in the van, and he ambles over to pull out some packets of sugar he keeps in a pocket and waves them, his small offering, but Stefan shakes his head. “Miel,” he says, pointing to a jar. As they drink their coffee, Stefan lounges beside Thérèse, lying on her back on the grass, her legs under her long skirt crossed at the ankles. Pink watches them, thinking of the ease with which they live together, picking up work through the summer: cherries, peaches, apples. He thinks about companionship, the warmth of a body in the night. He envies Stefan’s hand on Thérèse’s thigh. Abruptly, he rises and walks to the creek.
He’s taking off his socks to cool his feet in the water when he hears the van start up. “Hey!” he yells, running after it. He grips the door handle, feels the panel door slide as he runs alongside, bare feet on sharp rocks. With his other fist he hammers against the side of the van and manages to get one foot up to jump inside, his face wrenched with fury.
“No way, man!”
Stefan looks over his shoulder, and, as if surprised to see Pink still hanging on, accelerates. Thérèse shouts, her voice panicked. “Oublie ça—donne le lui, Stefan!”
With that his pack hits him full in the face, knocking him backwards out of the van and onto the shoulder where he rolls, grating his face against the gravel. He clutches his pack while the van speeds away, and lies there for a full minute before rising awkwardly. He had pulled his jacket from the top of the backpack when he looked for the sugar. It was still in the van, now vanishing over the curve of highway. Most of his money in the lining.
He goes back to the creek, and there spends some time batheing his cut feet in the icy water before letting them dry in the sunlight, propped against a rock, all the while willing his heart to slow. Anger, at being ripped off, but resignation, too: bad stuff happens. What goes around comes around. He thinks of that John Lennon song, about Karma. He thinks of Stan and Nora, of all the times he’s taken off, taken with him a part of somebody.
After a cold night in a picnic shelter Pink wakes early, thinking of coffee. The wind’s blowing west, so he plants himself accordingly on the highway shoulder, feeling the sun warm the pavement, his right side. But there is no traffic, so he begins walking. When he turns at the sound and sees the massive truck that comes over the rise it looks almost prehistoric in the morning light. Pink is grateful when the rig pulls to a stop fifty feet down the road.
The guy in the cab smiles in a friendly way and says: “Goin’?”
“Yes,” says Pink, and although he hasn’t answered the question about where he’s going, the driver waits while he hauls himself into the cab.
“There’s a diner a ways up,” says the driver. “Cass makes a mean breakfast, missed it last time I was through. You can go on from there or stop along with me, makes no difference.”
6:25 a.m.
Two eggs over easy
Cass stands at the screen door in the slant of morning sun wearing stretch pants and tennis shoes. On each pudgy finger is a ring; to Jo, looking through the kitchen window into the restaurant, Cass looks like a costume jewellery store. When Cass makes pie dough, as she did last week, she takes every ring off and lines each one up on the side of the green Arborite counter in the kitchen.
“Don’t you have anyone wondering where you are?” Cass had asked the day she taught Jo how to make pies. “She must’ve blown in from somewhere,” she heard Cass say to Bob the Mountie later, when he stopped in for pie and coffee.
Now, Archie’s truck pulls into the lot, chrome glinting in the sunlight, and Jo smiles to herself. It’s like a dog whistle: Cass hears it first, and then, there it is. But what she hears next isn’t Archie’s voice, so she peers from between the swinging kitchen doors so she can better see the front door, to see who spoke.
He’s slight of build and ponytailed, with eyes like a Husky. There’s an accent. American. Then Jo hears Cass’s voice, raspy like the gravel in the parking lot.
“I only got regular eggs. Nothing fancy. Scrambled, over easy, or sunnyside up,” says Cass.
“Over easy, man.”
He stands a few feet inside the restaurant, dust motes swirling around him in the morning sunlight. He’s wearing a multicoloured t-shirt and jeans. His sandy hair is long, reaching his shoulders. His face looks soft, almost feminine. Jo watches Cass take him in, sees her little eyes narrow.
“Can you pay?”
He takes a few bills from his pocket: two green one-dollar bills, a brown two, crumpled around a handful of small change. Cass nods, and he sits down at the counter.
“Jo?”
He doesn’t look up as Jo pushes through the swinging doors. He’s looking at the pine trees across the road, at the way the tops blow in the wind. She fills a cup and sets it down in front of him.
“Eggs’ll be a few minutes.”
Cracking eggs the way Cass has shown her, Jo peers through the little window where the orders get set when they’re ready. As Cass ambles over to wait at the doorframe, Jo watches the customer scan his surroundings. With her hands doing what they’ve become used to doing—eggs in pan, salt, pepper, toast in toaster— she follows his eyes as they take in the room.
The screen door bangs. “How’s my Mama Cass?” says Archie, and then he nods towards the kitchen. “And how’sa girl making out?”
“Good enough.”
Archie settles on the stool beside Pink, the vinyl seat disappearing beneath him. Resting both elbows on the countertop, he lights a cigarette, holding it between his thumb and forefinger. When he exhales, he speaks to Cass, ignoring Pink, who’s reading the words on the side of his mug: Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?
“Picked this guy up back a ways,” he tells her. “Get this: hippie says he won’t go against the wind.”
“Says what?”
“Against the wind. Like, now it’s blowing southeast and I’m heading northwest. I told him I’m going northwest ’til I get on the TransCanada, but noooooo,” his thumb jerks at Pink while he rolls his eyes, “says he’s gotta stop here.”
“Well, that’s one way to get a customer,” Cass laughs. Pink doesn’t speak, but smiles to himself and sips his coffee, glancing once again at the treetops on the ridge.
Archie nods at Cass, the tilt of his head indicatin
g the trailer. “Got some breakfast for me at home?” he asks, winking. Cass looks at Pink, tilts her own head in his direction, a question. Archie shrugs his shoulders: he’s okay, the gesture says. Cass appears satisfied.
“Jo! Look after things for a bit, hey?”
When Jo brings him his eggs, she takes a good look at him. He is nothing like Eamon in his manner; none of the cocky self-assurance there. She refills his half-empty cup, watches as he wraps his fingers around it. When he offers his name there is a softness, perhaps even a shyness.
“Do you really only travel with the wind?” she asks him, overcoming her own. She studies his face while he speaks. Slightly overlapping teeth. Mole above one eyebrow. Those eyes.
“A good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent upon arriving.” He waits a beat. “Lao-tzu. Actually, the rules aren’t quite that strict. I just can’t travel against the wind. But the wind tells me where to go.”
“Whose rules?”
He smiles, but continues eating.
“The wind told you to come here?”
“Well, I’m here, right?” When he looks at Jo she feels the colour rise. To mask her blush, she busies herself writing today’s soup on the board. Vegetable beef. Cass made it yesterday afternoon.
“And you like it? Just travelling with the wind?” she says over her shoulder.
Pink appears to consider this. “Most times,” he says finally. “Stuff happens, sometimes. Good stuff, bad stuff. It’s all part of the journey.” The last statement sounds to Jo as if it’s something he’s said many times before.
Pink nods towards the trailer. “That your mother?”
She laughs, shaking her head. “I don’t have a mother.” It’s the first time she’s said it: I don’t have a mother. She’s not going to consider what that means, the import of having said it. “I suppose I sort of blew here, too.” She likes the way that sounds: carefree, a leaf in the wind. It sounds a whole lot better than lost.
