by Anne Degrace
“Keep. Going. No, give her to me.” And now Melissa’s on her side and the twisted thing snakes up from between her legs to the blue baby, almost hidden beneath Melissa’s long brown hair. She’s breathing into the baby. I can hear Michael saying oh my god oh melissa oh my god but I can’t see him because I can’t take my eyes off Melissa. She looks around, sees me.
“Open the windows.” Almost a hiss. “Open the windows now.” I don’t think, I just do what I’m told. I start opening them, all of the sliding windows down the length of the bus. I start at the back, moving forward, and after the fifth window I know why I’m doing this and a sob comes out.
When I get to where the baby is, lying on its back in the crook of Melissa’s arm, Michael pushing with two fingers onto its tiny chest, I am about to open the sixth window and I can’t look at it, I have to look at the window, I have to follow instructions, my face all wet, a roaring in my ears, and then I hear it, a tiny cry.
There is laughter as the small voice gets louder, crazy laughter. When I finally bring myself to look there is a pink, slimy baby in her mother’s arms and I step outside into the sunshine and throw up, finally, into the tall grass at the side of the road.
I sit there on the concrete for a while and drink some from the water can even though the water tastes like old metal and rust. I don’t want to go inside, now. It’s not the place for a man, at least, not this one. It’s private, that’s all.
After a bit Michael pokes his head out. “She delivered the placenta,” he says. “Want to see?” he asks, and I can’t think what to say to that, then I realize to my relief that he means the baby. I do. Can’t come this far, after all.
I come in and there are fresh sheets under Melissa and the baby’s all wrapped up in a little flannel blanket. “You can touch her,” she says and I reach out a finger, which looks huge and coarse. Dirty from the rad cap. She is pink, now, and cleaner, and she looks like a tiny old man. Touch her little hand and she curls her fingers around mine. Never felt a thing like that before.
We get the bus started after just a couple of tries. Maybe it was just flooded, I don’t know. They want the midwife to check things out, don’t care if they can’t get the bus turned around after. They just want to get there. Melissa gives me a hug and a big sloppy kiss on my stubbly old cheek. Michael thanks me too, and I can’t say I’m used to being hugged by a man but I take it because there was just a baby born, after all. Michael’s still a little shaky, and Melissa teases him about whether or not he should drive. I’m a little shaky myself as I watch the bus with all its crazy colours head on up the Ross Creek Road. I forgot to ask them what her name is.
When I get back to the rig the wind’s died down again. Before I climb in I look down the drop-off by the shoulder, a tumble of boulders with this one scrubby little pine tree growing sideways out of the rock like some kind of miracle. Life, when it wants to, can grow just about anywhere.
Jo
There’s a lull in which no-one comes in the diner, and I decide to clean up under the counter, something Cass probably hasn’t done in the last two decades. When I pull out the box-of-many-things, I find a nest of miscellaneous stuff so much like a packrat’s nest, I think for a minute that’s what it actually is. But no, it’s an eight-track tape disintegrating into spaghetti folds. Good thing: Cass has told me a tale or two about pack-rats. The tape goes in the garbage, as well as half a deck of playing cards and several bottle caps: Hires, Crush, Pepsi. There’s a photograph of Cass and Archie, in younger, thinner days, which I put back in the box after noting the smaller girth of the trees around the diner. There is a handful of emergency candles—hard to find way back there if the power did go out—and, in the corner, a baby’s bottle.
It’s glass, with flattened sides. The nipple is old, its rubber breaking down, powdery. What baby lips touched it, once? What small hands held it?
There were nights when I felt the baby kick and roll, an alien thing inside me. At the end I slept with four pillows: under my head, at the small of my back, between my legs and, finally, one to wrap my arms around. In the morning, the baby would wake up with me, stretch inside me. I could imagine it yawning, eyes squeezed shut.
The papers were all in place. “You can change your mind,” the social worker said, “but we don’t encourage it. You’ve certainly been responsible, keeping up with your appointments, eating well. Not every pregnant teenager is like you’ve been, let me tell you.”
Change my mind. I thought about it every waking second, and dreamt about it every night. Then I’d think of the basement apartment, with its mis-hung cupboards, its damp bathroom. Upstairs, the bull terrier barked all day long.
Irresponsible conception, responsible pregnancy, irresponsible fantasies, responsible conclusion. Does each responsible action cancel out the irresponsible one? If so, where does that leave me, now?
Change my mind.
Which would have meant acknowledging that my daughter had a grandmother. Has a grandmother. Now, my mother doesn’t ever need to know. Not my mother, not my daughter. Just me, in the middle, girl with a secret.
Whirlwind
A people without history
is like the wind on the buffalo grass
— Sioux saying
Pixie settles herself on a rock. It’s almost time to go back to work, back into town. To make her Monday shift at the co-op, she really needs to get going. Who knows what the rides will be like? But the old woman is speaking, and she can’t seem to leave whenever the old woman speaks.
Pixie met the old woman one day in the spring, when she caught her stealing bananas. Pixie had just started at the co-op, and so she wasn’t at all sure what to do. Besides, the woman looked—odd. Long skirts, layers and layers of clothing, greying hair in braids, wrapped around her head Scandinavian-style. Round, lined face; blue eyes.
When their eyes met, the woman put a finger to her lips. Shhhhhhhhh. Pixie nodded once, corkscrew curls bobbing, and continued stocking the lettuce.
The woman was there when Pixie emerged from the side door at the end of shift. It was a spring evening, the days just getting longer, the air warm. There was a pink tinge to everything, Pixie presumed it was from the sun beginning to set somewhere on the other side of the building.
“What have you got there?” The woman’s eyes were fixed on the two bags Pixie held in either hand, groceries she was taking to her attic apartment just up the hill.
“Umm. Groceries.”
“Apples?”
“Yes…”
“Carrots?”
“Can I help you in some way?”
The woman smiled, a million creases around her eyes. “Yes,” she said, clapping her hands.
Pixie couldn’t say why she followed the woman to the lookout, amazed as she did at the old woman’s agility in contrast to her wrinkled face. “Best place for a picnic,” the woman had told her, “and the best place to watch the sunset.”
At the edge of the trees a coyote emerged and watched them while they ate. The sun dipped over a mountain range that faded to the palest purple, making Pixie think of a colourized postcard like the ones her own grandmother had collected. There was nobody waiting for her back in town, wondering where she was, an effect of being a little odd herself. She was glad to have gotten the job at the co-op, where eccentricities tended to be embraced, or at least overlooked. In fact, sometimes she thought her co-workers didn’t even see her. She looked at the woman and asked the question that was in her mind at that moment.
“Why am I here?”
At which the old woman began to laugh.
The old woman sits across from Pixie now; she’s dressed in a man’s shirt, her various skirts and socks are the same earthy tones as the log on which she sits. The lookout where they had their first picnic isn’t far away, perhaps fifteen minutes’ walk at most. The canvas tent behind them is braced with branches lashed together; there is a good woodpile, and a neatly dug latrine out back. The campsite has a hidden feel to it, as if
it could not possibly be discovered by chance by hunters or hikers, although she can’t say why this is so. Pixie doesn’t know how long the old woman has lived here, but Pixie herself has been here every weekend throughout the summer, arriving with sleeping bag and groceries after work on Fridays, heading back into town on Mondays. Once she knew the route through the bush, it wasn’t as far as she’d thought. If the weather was bad, she could usually thumb a ride. When her co-workers would ask about her weekend, Pixie would be evasive. “Winter comes, think I’ll move to that old cabin,” Grannie told her once. She assumes it’s the cabin near the diner, but she isn’t sure.
Now, “Guess you’re going soon,” Grannie says.
“I’ll be back next weekend.”
“You need to bring me tea. And sugar. And I want some bananas.”
“Okay.”
“And you need to do something else for me.”
Pixie shifts on one haunch. “What?”
But the old woman is settling the way she does when she’s about to begin. Pixie tucks her knees up, tiny feet perched on the rock, hands clasped across them. There is often a story at about this point. She likes mulling the old woman’s words as she makes the trek back to town. The tales are myriad and colourful: philosophies and fables, myths and parables. Strange creatures: minotaurs, cyclopses; extraordinary adventures, noble deeds, clever tricks and double-crosses. Some, she recognizes; others could be an old woman’s fabrication, or rooted in a place unfamiliar to Pixie. She is fascinated, their tellings satisfying a new and surprising desire.
“In the beginning,” the old woman begins, “there were the Little People.”
“The pixies,” says Pixie. Her own grandmother had once told her stories about pixies. It was her grandmother who had given Pixie her nickname in the first place.
“If you like. In Africa, Abatwa. Some are called Asparas, whose job it is to keep science from challenging the spirit world. Ha!” The old woman laughs for a moment at the absurdity of this. “Brownies, some call them. Seelies. Ghillie Dhu, with their clothes of leaves and moss. Kul, the water spirit who helps the northern people find fish. The Mazikeen, the Ohdows. The hooved Polevik, the Yakshas, the Sidhe.”
“How do you know all these names?”
“Mythological Studies. You think I’ve lived up here my whole life?”
Pixie had wondered. This was the most the old woman had ever offered about any previous life. She wants to ask more, but the old woman is speaking again, and Pixie has learned not to interrupt too often.
“Do you ever wonder that everywhere, the world over, there are tales of little people. Do you think this could be a coincidence?”
Pixie shakes her head. She tries to imagine Grannie at a university. Studying, or teaching? She can imagine neither, here in the woods, the wind blowing the treetops all around them. She shakes her head again and leans forward on the rock, hoping to coax the old woman to continue.
“So. Before anybody else, there were the little people. These creatures had a favourite colour. You’d think it was green, being spirits of the forest and all. But actually it was blue.”
Pixie shivers involuntarily. Blue is her favourite colour. Grannie is eyeing her. “Someone walking on my grave,” Pixie says, shrugging.
“You shouldn’t believe nonsense like that,” says the old woman. “Anyway. They loved the colour blue, and here’s why: because they were navigators. They navigated by the pale sky at dawn and the bright blue of high noon, the deep evening blue and the blue-black of night. They navigated by the evening star, that twinkling blue star that appears in the west. They navigated by the lake and flash of minnows, and by the river and its fast blue water. They charted their courses by watching the flight of the Mountain Bluebird and the Stellar’s Jay, and mapped routes by fields of forget-me-nots and wild iris.”
“I know: they lived on blueberries.”
“Did I say that?” But crows’ feet gather at the corners of her eyes. You never can tell about the old woman, what she’ll find funny, what will make her clam up. Perhaps this is what keeps Pixie coming back: to unravel the enigma that is Grannie. She’s wondered at her own motivation more than once. Pixie is glad when Grannie continues.
“In the beginning, the little people told the animals where to go. Where to catch the best salmon, where to hide a new fawn, the route to run when lightning strikes and sets the trees alight. They were the ones who charted migratory paths for geese and caribou, told the trout to swim upstream and the mountain goat where to place his feet on the rocky ledge.
“Then the Indians came, and the little people had to tell them how to follow the animals and the weather. It was hard work, sometimes: these new people thought more about what they did, and they didn’t always listen to the whisperings of the little people because their heads were full of thoughts. Still, the little people got through most of the time.
“Before long the Indians figured out all on their own how to navigate by watching the seasons and the animals, and the little people could relax. But it’s a good thing they had the Indians to practise on, because when the white people came they were altogether deaf to the whisperings of the little people. Actually, the first thing the little people did when these new people came was tell the Indians to steer clear. It was something about the way they didn’t listen, couldn’t even hear the wind— which was how the little people sent their messages— because they were making so much noise themselves. Because there was so much noise in their heads! They were thinking about new things, shiny things, things that made life easier.
“The little people felt they’d failed as navigators, so they had to try a new approach. They tried talking to the new people while they slept, but the new people would wake up and stretch and laugh and tell one another what funny dreams they’d had. Then they’d forget everything they heard and go about their day, which mostly involved killing animals and pulling up trees and generally making a mess of things. Occasionally, it meant shooting at the Indians and eventually it meant telling them they could no longer follow the paths the little people had taught them about weather and animals. It meant making them all live together on a patch of land with a fence around it and a whole bunch of rules they made up to give the Indians a better life. It was a bad time.”
There is a pause for long enough that Pixie wonders if she should collect her things to leave. Sometimes, the stories end midway, and she has to wait until the next weekend. This is always dissatisfying, making Pixie feel out of sorts for the week; she doesn’t like it. The wind blows, and the old woman watches it sway the trees.
“You want the rest,” she says, finally, fixing Pixie with a blue-eyed stare.
Pixie nods.
“You like a good story.” A statement, not a question.
Pixie waits.
“That’s good. That’s what we have. It’s all we have to leave our children.”
The wind blows, a crow caws from high in a red cedar, and Pixie holds her breath. The old woman continues.
“Some gave up. Some stopped sending their messages on the wind, went back to their forest hideaways and sparkling brooks and peat bogs and whathaveyou. But one persevering little sprite, frustrated with a cocky young man who thought he knew everything, thought she’d give it one last, good blow, and—” the old woman inhales, holds her breath, and then blows as hard as she can. “Blew herself right into his ear!”
Hands clasped around her knees, Grannie leans back laughing. Pixie laughs, too. It’s hard not to laugh, she finds, when the old woman laughs.
“And then what?”
“Well, it was murky inside, as you can imagine. Messy and cluttered. But that sprite got to work and cleaned out the cobwebs, and next thing you know that young man was telling people how to live. And they were listening.”
Grannie is quiet, and Pixie figures this is the end of the story. They stopped like that sometimes, abruptly. But the old woman isn’t quite finished.
“Sometimes people need steering. You
can call it intuition, or luck. A dream, maybe. Right place, right time.”
“What about coincidences?”
“There are no coincidences. What have I been telling you? Little people. It’s the little people.”
“Is that the end of the story?”
Grannie sighs. “There’s no end to the story. We are all stories, layers and layers of stories. We are vessels for stories. Put them all together, they make a new story, but blink, and the story changes again. That’s the best thing about them.”
Pixie imagines a street full of people shaped like jugs full of swirling liquids of different colours. Sometimes, bright splashes spill out, catching the sunlight as they run down the pavement.
“As for this vessel, it’s time for my whisky,” says the old woman now. Above them, in the stand of cedar, the crow cackles.
Now Pixie is on the highway, walking. After having a shot of whisky in a cracked china cup, the old woman had dozed off. Pixie sat beside her for a while on the mossy ground, listening to the crow and the soft breaths of the old woman. At one point, as she looked at the sleeping wizened face, one eye opened and focused on Pixie where she sat. The lips moved. “Get lost,” they told her.
At the co-op Pixie ties her green apron around her and begins refilling the carrot bin. On the other side of the fruit display she sees a man about her age, long hair, eyes like a husky. He looks hungry. Without thinking, unaware she is about to speak, she thrusts a bunch of bananas towards him.
“On the house,” she tells him. “Special today. Good food for the road.”
Pink looks at the girl speaking to him. She is small and bony and all one colour: brown hair, brownish, almost coppery skin, clothes in shades of brown. She’s holding the bananas like they’re an offering. Pink takes them from her almost without thinking.
