by Amy Spurway
“I’m serious. I need you to promise me something. If I, say, get hit by a garbage truck or choke on Char’s shitty agave squares, or if the tumours start up again and —” I can’t quite bring myself to finish that thought, as I feel a breathtaking boot to the ribs courtesy the life inside of me. “Promise you’ll tell my stories.”
Peggy’s hands stop scrubbing and come to rest on the kitchen counter. She turns her head to stare down the ancient linoleum floor that just tried to fling her on her arse. For a moment, she is still. Swallowed up by a memory or an idea or the smell of Javex and the hypnotic hum of the bees in the pale-pink clusters of tiny roses outside the kitchen window.
“Nope,” she snaps, eyes flashing, aura receding. “Tell your own stories. You’re not getting off the hook for that, missy.” She flicks a handful of scrub water at me, her ample arms and face twitching to shift to something lighter than talk of death. “Listen, ya lazy brat. Got your hospital bag packed?”
“I’m not due for four weeks.” I bite into and promptly spit out a piece of Char’s horrendous excuse for a square. “The baby doctor said first-timers almost always go over.”
“Is that right, now?” she says. “Well, I don’t know what doctors think they know, but Charlotte keeps going on about the rose bush blooming early. Consider yourself warned.”
And right on cue, the little critter kicks my lung, pucks me in the bladder, and makes me piss myself just a little. So I go pack a hospital bag, just in case. Then I go outside to smell Mama’s roses, and see if maybe they’ll start telling me things I don’t already know. But all I hear is the industrious hum of bees getting ready to call it a day. And then, the grating whine of chainsaws, followed by a blood-curdling scream.
I expected to be dead by now. I assumed that by summer I’d have long since been Gem-Mortalized, resting in sparkly multi-faceted peace on Mama’s end table. I figured I’d have knocked a few easy items off my Fuck It Bucket List. Jotted down a few pages of memories, had some last laughs with my friends, dressed up like my trampy teenage self, and hauled the odd skeleton out of my family’s closet, just to waltz it around for everyone to see. But here I am, not dead, very pregnant, and going around in one of Peggy’s old floral muumuus. Mama would approve, no doubt. Only a streel would go around with a pregnant belly hanging halfway out of one of them tight tops, anyway. And now I’m pulling on a goddamn pair of rubber boots, slathering myself in homemade fly dope, and dragging my muumuu-clad pregnant arse out into the woods to find Char screeching her guts out at Sarah Spenser’s transplanted cowboy minions who’ve begun cutting down trees at the edge of my land.
Spenser Mining Inc. doesn’t care that its exploratory permit has yet to wheedle its way through a series of bureaucratic snags. Spenser Mining Inc. doesn’t care that there’s a conflicting application in the works, looking to have the back half of my property licensed as the Crann Na Beatha Cemetery, which would effectively stop anybody from disturbing the earth and the trees here for a few hundred years. Spenser Mining Inc. doesn’t care that Char says she can hear the trees crying, pleading, as their friends, their lovers, their ancestors, their children are ripped to pieces by hired assassins. These boys have orders to clear the land. To make way for the carnage yet to come.
I tromp up over the hill, knowing goddamn well that no one can hear me yelling over the squeal of chainsaws. I yell myself hoarse anyway. Char, with Daktari in tow, suddenly dips out of sight. Moments later, the saws stop and the boys wielding them disappear too, but even from this distance I can see plumes of panic rising. Twisted ribbons, like bruised banana peels, tinged with a sickening orange sherbert colour. An urgent anxiety fills the air. By the time I get to the source of all the fuss and silence, I understand. Char has scurried up into the high branches of a matriarchal maple — a mere spitting distance from where more tall trees on the other side of the property line are expected to fall — to stand on the platform of rickety old boards and road signs that served as my teenage treehouse escape. With Baby Daktari clinging at her hip.
“Bruce the Spruce warned me! Murderers!” Char shrieks, in full banshee mode. She has one arm wrapped tight around the baby, while the other arm takes mad, sweeping accusatory aim at the trio of thoroughly confused, scared shitless guys on the ground. One of them pulls out his phone.
“I’m going to call the boss,” he stammers.
“No, man, the police. Before something bad happens,” the guy beside him whispers.
“Don’t bother with the cops.” I try to sound smooth and sure, and not at all like an out of breath muumuu-Mama with serious doubts about the mental stability of the howling tree chick. “But you should definitely give Sarah Spenser a ringy dingy. She’s going to want to see what happens next.”
When Sarah rolls up in her gleaming white SUV and emerges from behind the tinted windows in an equally gleaming white pantsuit, Char and Daktari are already making themselves very much at home in the treehouse. And the boys from Alberta who were supposed to be cutting down the adjacent trees are sitting around a small fire, having a beer with Willy while Peggy cooks up a pan of baloney and home fries over the open flame.
Sarah marches toward the fire. The poor buddies she hired to cut the trees stash their beer at their feet and try to look like maybe they’re hostages. Slightly drunk, relaxed, well-fed hostages who avoid eye contact, but nod and murmur “ma’am” as she sweeps past them.
“What is the meaning of this?” Sarah Spenser looks and sounds much less powerful with the mud nudging up over the edges of her high heels, mosquitoes entangling themselves in her fragrant hair, and a teensy trace of frothy spittle gathering at one corner of her pouty pink mouth. Then there’s her aura. A thick yellow swamp of sulk, threaded with strands of corroded orange pride and toothless red fury.
Peggy sniffs over her shoulder, beyond the smell of baloney and potatoes. “Anybody else smell that?” she yells. “Smells like defeat.” Which, according to Peggy, literally smells like feet. Sweaty feet.
“We’ll see about that, now won’t we.” Sarah squelches her heels out from the mire, swatting at mosquitoes with one hand and discretely dabbing her rage froth with the thumb of the other. I watch as something new emerges from her aura swamp. Something dark and sharp and thorny. Moving fast. “August thirteenth, we start drilling. And in a few days, all of this, all of you people, will be gone.”
“The people will lay our bodies on the line!” Char starts raving from her perch. “To protect our Mother, we will root ourselves to the land. Your metal monsters and the demons of greed and destruction are no match for the immovable forces of nature!”
But Sarah Spenser isn’t listening. She’s getting back into her SUV and driving away. No doubt she’s calling her Alberta business partner to reassure him that all the proper political strings are being pulled. And she’s likely transferring a gob of money to a private security firm in Ontario that’ll send steely-eyed muscle heads out into the woods of Cape Breton to protect and secure her precious assets and investment from a little band of backwoods ne’er-do-wells.
Char is too loopy, Peggy’s too old, Willy’s too hemiplegically palsied, and I am too pregnant to be camped out in the woods, getting eaten alive by bugs, kept awake at night by the sweltering late July air, and screamed at by the birds before sunrise. But here we are. Watching. Waiting.
At night, I dream about my great-grandmother, the infamous Black Agnes O’Toole, kissing the dirt floors of the house on the Halfway Road, praying that her hellish journey — from the laundries in Ireland, to servitude in the sticks of Newfoundland, to taking the hand of a man they called Black Bernie — had reached a happy end. I dream about my nanny and the miners’ strike in 1925, how she sat cocked on her mother’s hip when the company goons opened fire on the crowd of starved and desperate men, women, and children. I dream about Mama, her body and mind buoyed by a blessedly painless limbo even before her car hit the water. And of course, my eyes snap open when I hear Mama whisper, Get your bony arse out o
f bed before I kick it out.
My bony arse hurts, Mama. Everything hurts. A couple of nights of sleeping in the woods, keeping vigil over Char and her baby in their treehouse, waiting for Sarah’s next move, praying to anything that’ll listen for the Crann Na Beatha licence to be approved before some crook in a suit can rubber stamp the drilling. It’s enough to make a body ache. Some days, I feel like dying. But not today. Today, there’s shit to do.
They roll in just before dawn, in quiet black waves. A dozen of them stood on the edge of the property line by the time the sun had stretched over the mountain. They didn’t say a word. Just stood there, with their batons and shields and an air of authoritative arseholery. The hired guns from Ontario came dressed for a riot. Me? I’m still in a flowery muumuu and rubber boots.
“Well that’s a little much,” Peggy says when she and Alec show up with tea and scones and diapers and more fly dope. “Should have worn a gas mask and mixed up a couple of Molotov cocktails to make them fellas feel like they’re earning their keep, at least.”
“You wanna fight there, thugs?” a voice cackles from the treetops. “Shove your heads up your arses and fight for air!”
The gentlemen of Phalanx Security Inc. do not respond to Char’s invitation. They don’t respond to the early morning mosquitoes and blackflies, or to the fact that it must be hotter than the hobs of hell inside those thick, black uniforms. They don’t even flinch when Peggy flings a mittful of mud at the captain’s shield. To the untrained eye, this wall of man and muscle looks immovable. But to these thoroughly squirrelly eyes of mine, there is a way in. A way out. Hints of it flit all around the captain’s head. I just need to push a few buttons to see if what I think I know is actually true, and then see if I have the guts to go out on a limb again with my fledging sense of what makes people tick.
Willy could sleep forever on a tack, so I crawl into the tent and wake him.
“Get up, b’ye.”
He flashes a fresh-from-a-dream smile. “Time for some morning nature lovin’ is it?”
“No. You got a wedding to go to.”
“Whose?”
“Ours.”
[…]
If there is indeed a divine Universe that conspires to help the plans of the righteous pan out with a spooky sense of ease and synchronicity, while giving the finger to forces of greed and stupidity, well, it gave us a glimpse of itself today. Within a couple of hours, people had begun to arrive at our little standoff site, armed with casseroles and squares and more booze than you could shake a stick at. Tents and tables sprang up all over the back half of my land. Allie’s brothers showed up with a band. Father Delahanty brought a white archway and platform, the leftover manger set from the Christmas pageant. Bonnie from the Hairport even brought a fancy flower crown and a silky white-ish muumuu for the bride to wear. And when the top of it didn’t fit quite right, Peggy pulled out that shiny old peacock brooch and used it to cinch the bodice shut.
“A Fortune family heirloom,” she whispered, “to keep your boobs tucked in.”
By noon, word was out that Crow and Gimp were getting married in the woods out on the back part of the land. By the time we clambered up onto the little platform to officially be united in holy matrimony by Brother Smart Alec Gyaltso, there were forty or fifty people gathered to watch and share in the celebration to follow. But maybe the cosmo-licious Universe of joyful abundance had nothing to do with it. Maybe this is just the kind of magical shit that people around here make happen. When it really counts.
Meanwhile, the black-clad gentlemen of Phalanx Security Inc. just stood there the whole time, sweating balls, hungry enough to chew the leg off the lamb of God, and not sure what to make of the whole spectacle as it unfolded on our side of the line. And after I tossed my bouquet of prickly rambling roses and onion stalks directly at Allie and Wendy, I walked up to the guy who looked like he was in charge. The one whose aura had started off the morning with faint flickers of baby blue and unfinished business but who is now engulfed in a sky-blue longing, even as his face stays locked, stony and stern.
“This here’s the best part of a Cape Breton wedding,” I say to him. “Called ‘the Time.’ Biggest party you ever did see. Times can rage on for days and days, especially when they’re outside and the weather co-operates, which it will. You’ll be here for the long haul, watching us celebrate love and life, buddy.”
I lean in as close as my belly and his barricade stance will allow, and speak with a hushed sweetness. “Look, I know you’re in this for the money. I also know that right now, you resent the fuck outta being here. You had something special planned for this weekend.”
I blurt out my best guess at what my vision, with its swirls of colourful love and longing and fear, seems to suggest.
“A big family gathering. You were gonna propose to your girlfriend, weren’t you? But you got called away to work and she’s so pissed. Maybe she’ll even break up with you over it. Imagine what kind of hero you’d be if you could get your ass back home and surprise her.”
I glance up and can see from the sway and shifts of the colours around him that he’s movable. They’re all movable in this moment. But before I can test the power of my own persuasion any further, Peggy’s hand drops down onto my shoulder. A thick envelope is thrust into my hand.
“Here,” she says. “Everybody chipped in for a wedding gift. Betcha there’s enough in here to make these fellas wanna head back to where they belong instead of standing around here.”
Once the gentlemen of Phalanx Security Inc. decided that what was in that envelope was a far better deal than what Sarah Spenser had nickeled and dimed them into taking, our little post-wedding party was free to spill across the property line and our little tent city bloomed in and around the very spot where Spenser Mining Inc. intended to drill in a few days. And when the other crooked bitch showed up just before the sun went down, to see a big old wedding Time in full swing, she looked like her head was set to explode.
“Welcome to our wedding.” I beam.
“You’re trespassing on Crown land. Once the Minister of Natural Resources signs exploration rights over, you’ll either get out of my way or be arrested.”
I’m dazzled by the display of searing anger and frustration rocketing and ricocheting around Sarah Spenser’s head. Against the backdrop of sunset, it looks like she’s burning and sizzling in her own self-made hell, and I can’t help but laugh. Which makes her rage burn even brighter.
“Tommy Murray, isn’t it? He’s the minister supposed to sign them papers?” Peggy sidles over, half-laughing to herself. “His wife was in that really bad car wreck. Over twenty years ago, now. Night of Crow’s graduation, I recall.”
“Your point?” There’s that frothy spittle in the corner of Sarah’s pouty mouth.
“No point,” Peggy says. “Just sayin’. His wife made quite a miraculous recovery from that accident.” Peggy links her arm to mine, with a wink and a nudge. “Effie met her once. I wonder if they’d remember. I should ask him.”
“Now, if you’ll excuse us,” I say, rubbing my giant belly and grinning at the way strands of pink in Peggy’s aura are stoking Sarah’s rage into a smoky blue confusion, “we’re having a celebration here.”
Peggy and I turn away, without even waiting to see her and her storm clouds off. I find my new husband, and my two best friends, all of whom are already three sheets to the wind, and we laugh and cry and dance and eat squares and casseroles beneath the stars, held snug in the warm embrace of family and friends and the place that needs us.
Oh, but it’s all fun and games until the chick in the off-white silky muumuu and flower crown goes into the porta-potty to take a long-overdue piss, and comes out set to have a baby.
“Labour? Are you shitting me?” Willy slurs as he takes my face in his hands, his eyes filling with tears, mirroring back the bonfire’s glow.
“Shut up before I tear your lips off,” I growl, as I slap his hands away and brace for more bone-shifting a
gony. I put my hands on his shoulders and lean hard on him, trying to sway with and through the pain as it builds, spreads, peaks, and retreats over the span of a few minutes. I look up to see a wall of my drunk friends form behind Willy, feet planted firmly to brace and keep him upright as my weight and my wails push against his soused and unsteady frame. Willy’s arms — the good one and the bad one — are wrapped around me tenderly as Char, Allie, and Wendy hold us all in place.
“This is totally your fault,” I say through teeth clamped tighter than a vice, which makes him weep and smile even more.
A guttural cry surges from my throat as my legs tremble and I buckle forward. Heads turn and stare, but the faces are blurred by shades of soft pastel concern. A bigger crowd of faintly shimmering shadows forms around me in the moonlit clearing, until a booming voice bosses them back to tending the fire, singing some songs, and having another drink. Peggy comes hustling over.
“Smell woke me. You three get down to the trailer, lay a bunch of towels out on the bed, then put the tea on and start sobering up.” Peggy shoves Willy, Char, and Allie out of the way and in the direction of the trailer. “Missy Death Doula, you look like the straightest of the pack here,” she says, taking Wendy by the arm. “Help me get her to the trailer.”
“I’ll call an ambulance,” Allie says.
“Doubt they’ll make it in time. There’s only two, and they’re both on calls. And the hospital called a code census.” Leave it to Peggy, who went home for some quality time with her scanner, to know what’s what. “Besides, my mother had all eleven of us at home. It’s not rocket science.”
All of a sudden I’m kicking myself for not taking one of those damn breathing classes. For not slathering coconut oil on my perineum three times a day to make it more stretchy and supple. For not doing this when Mama was alive, so she could be here to say Quit sooking and get ’er done, child.
“Here,” Peggy says, placing my hands around her forearms. “Squeeze the bejesus outta me. This is what I been growin’ a goodly layer of fat for all these years. Just don’t push yet. I’ll not have your baby born in the woods like a g.d. wolf cub.”