by Tricia Dower
Mussels anchor their crow-black shells to moss-slicked sidewalks at the edge of flooded areas. Akin pulls a few from their bed, pries them open with a knife and scrapes out the meat, exposing the shell’s pearly inside. Thank you, he whispers to the mussels. He removes his shoes and shirt, rolls up his pants to the knee, and wades into the tidal pool. Crouching, he splashes water onto his arms and scrapes his skin until flakes drop into the water. Day by day he removes more clothes until he can stand naked in the water and not shiver. All his senses are heightened, the feel of the air he inhales almost overwhelming. Day by day more cells flake off, exposing new and clean pink skin. He won’t stink when she arrives. He’ll be pure and respectful. No wild dog will catch his scent.
“The salt water is drying your skin,” Mother says.
“Mercy knows what poisons are in there,” Ada says.
Stay out of that water, they both say, as though he’s an ignorant child. The word No rises from his gut into his throat but he’s unable to set it free.
The rain flings itself in gusts against windows and roofs that winter, and food stores are insufficient to get anyone beyond hunger. So many suicides make it hard for even Mother to take solace in there being fewer people to feed. Sometimes at night, Akin catches the loose skin on his arm with his teeth and sucks on it. Thievery of winter crops is high, but Water and Fire don’t have the heart to stop anyone from yanking a parsnip out of the ground. Snow Nation is fractured, little pieces of despair among ashes of confusion and fatigue. Chloe takes him to The Land where he lies on a soft mattress of earthy smelling fern leaves, listening to the distant sound of drumming. If, as Aapa says, prayers are visits to a peaceful, still place, his dreams are prayers.
In early spring, Akin catches the flu that spreads like a blaze among mostly the young. His body shakes with fever, his dreams a cacophonous torment until Mother – or is it Chloe? – curls up beside him, pressing cool fingers on his forehead and behind his ears, humming in a soft, low voice.
“The wild dogs have stolen your children,” Chloe says. “You can steal them back with music.” Her words don’t make sense. The only missing children have been taken by starvation and disease. Is she scolding him for stopping his ritual cleansing? As soon as he’s well, he seeks out his grandfather.
“Dreams are like curtains drawn against a too-bright sun,” Aapa says. “You have to look behind them for the meaning. If my mother, your great aaka, Pilipaza, were still alive, she would help you look behind yours.”
“When the whalers sang their secret songs, did they play instruments?”
“Yes,” Aapa says, surprise lifting his voice. “I’d almost forgotten. Although I never heard them play, they took water drums with them and flutes, rattles. We all sang, you know, not just the whalers.”
“She’ll want to hear our songs and see our dances,” Akin says, “and we don’t have any.”
Aapa fills an empty can with water and covers it with a piece of a boot. He and Akin carry it down to the water’s edge, take turns beating it with their hands and letting out whatever sounds want to escape from their throats: ah-oh-oh-oh, ay-ay-ay-ay, ah-oh-oh-oh, ay-ay-ay-ay. Aapa says the sounds have remembered themselves after so many years.
Aaka Katsi and Aapa both come the next day, carrying metal spoons to beat together in time with Akin’s drumming. “The visitors will bring smoked fish,” Akin tells them. “They will expect us to hold a feast.”
Aaka Katsi studies him with her tired, patient eyes and smiles. “Will they, now? My mother used to smoke fish. A few elders might remember how. But when was the last time anyone here caught a fish?”
Aapa leaves and comes back with Einar, Narberi, and a canoe. “These young men have never been fishing,” Aapa says, “and I’ve been too lazy to teach them before. Narberi says he knows where we should look.”
Asalie brings Tandrea to see Akin who has begun dancing while he sings and drums. He dances like the seagulls that gather around him, strutting and moving their heads stiffly from side to side. He mimics the eerie shrieks they make when they circle the air, cries of pain and warning. Tandrea spins in one spot, whirling with her arms in the air until she gets dizzy and falls down.
More and more people show up each day with homemade drums and rattles. They try their own tentative dances, stomping their feet and twisting their dwindled bodies, self-conscious at first. Their voices are pocked with suffering. The songs they send up into the clouds sound like cries to the dead. They ask Akin why the Mountain People would choose the Snows to visit. He most wants Mother to hear the answer, but she won’t come down to the water.
“Some say the fever took your mind away,” she says one morning as he slowly pours water onto a porous, old cloth she holds over a large pot. The cloth is folded into eight layers.
“Too thick,” Akin says, his arm aching from the water jug’s weight. It takes forever to filter the water and they have to do it every day.
“Just thick enough for the lesson in patience I need,” she says. “I’ve decided to give you some of my rations. Hunger can cause delusions.”
Her hands are so bony they could be claws. “Then everyone must be deluded.”
She looks up at him with such exhaustion in her eyes he wants the Mountain People to come now, to take Mother back with them and let her rest.
“These people,” she says. “When will they arrive?”
“Soon.”
“And if they don’t?”
“Then, they will come later.”
“How can you believe in people you’ve never seen?”
He shuts his eyes briefly against a sudden sting – she thinks he’s crazy, too – and says with more bravado than he feels, “I’ve never seen the wind, but I know it exists.” He cannot wait for her.
The next day he reveals what Chloe told him to those who come to the water’s edge. Recites it, afraid to put it in his own words and get it wrong: “The Mountain People seek the one who will fulfill a prophecy. When the White Wolverine Woman’s spirit comes to stand upon the earth, they will find the brothers and sisters from whom they were separated thousands of years ago. It will come to pass at the birth of a white wolverine.”
No one says Akin’s mind is missing. They want to know what a wolverine looks like. Akin doesn’t know. Some guess wolf. Narberi is sure it lives up island even though he’s never been there. Akin visits each neighbourhood, seeking out those tending gardens and feeder fires and those too weak to work. He tells them of the prophecy and asks if they can describe a wolverine. No one can. He invites them to bring songs and dances to the edge of the sunken city. So many show up, it gets too crowded, so some begin gathering on their own streets. Then several neighbourhoods get together to sing, dance, and share food. People begin sitting in hoops again, talking about what this prophetic wolverine might look like and where they might find it. Many shave their heads in hopes it will show the Mountain People how worthy they are.
Mother complains about Akin taking time away from his chores and about his luring others away from theirs. “What will we live on if you’re all off following some dream?”
“Don’t you want to sing and dance sometimes, too?” he says.
She turns her head away, wipes her eyes.
“Children can break your heart,” Ada says later. “Believe me, I know. Since the time she was your age, she has thought of nothing but those people. Some of them wouldn’t be alive if not for her but do they thank her? No. They praise her son, ‘the one called Water,’ they say. What’s wrong with the name she gave you?”
“I’m not that boy anymore.”
“You might as well burn her books.”
A delegation of elders arrive at the water to say they’ve determined that an ancestor’s spirit has entered Akin’s body. They are setting up a schedule of Watchers to post in multiple spots throughout each day to en
sure the Snows don’t miss the Mountain People’s arrival. More food will be needed and, as it is rumoured that orchards of apples, pears, and cherries are not more than a few day’s walk away, a few people will arm themselves against the wild dogs and head out in search of the fruit and whatever else they can find. Others will take the few canoes and kayaks they have and head up the coast to look for a white wolverine.
Akin is alone at the water late one afternoon, alone with his doubts and the setting sun, when Mother appears, carrying a book. “Remember this?” she says.
He does. It was as big as his lap when she read it to him, teaching him names of animals he would never see. Kangaroo, can you say kangaroo?
Her finger marks a page she opens up to him. “Not a white one,” she says, “but it might help those who go searching.”
A picture he can’t recall. Maybe she thought it would frighten him when he was little. A hairy creature, part bear, part dog, its head too small for its fat body. Deep brown fur with pale yellow streaks along each flank. A disappointing herald.
“It’ll be hard to find,” she says. “They like isolated places away from humans.”
“Fire is trying to talk his father into going on the search with him.”
“Aapa thinks the Mountain People are shadows of our deepest desires,” she says, closing the book. She holds it out to him with both hands as if in offering.
“What do you think?” He takes the book without dropping his gaze from her eyes.
“I think they’ll be tired after their journey and need places to stay, food, water.”
“Fire asked if I’m the One. I told him I think it’s you. The one who kept so many of us from starving.”
“There are different kinds of hunger,” she says.
“When the Mountain People go back, I’m going with them,” he says more defiantly than he intends, but part of him wants to hurt her.
She reaches over and gently traces his scar with her finger. “Your eyes are the very colour I pictured when my Aaka Elin described the morning light on her icy home.”
He studies her face as if he were crossing the great water today, never to find his reflection in her again. “Come with me,” he says. He can see her in The New Land, her long strides carrying her across fields of red, yellow, and blue flowers she’s only seen in books, flowers allowed to grow for their beauty alone.
She just smiles. “May I tell you a story?”
He nods warily – she hasn’t told him stories for years, but he wants her to stay. He sits cross-legged on the ground. She does the same, facing him, close enough so their knees touch.
“Once upon a time,” she says, “a woman gave birth to a child such as her heart had never seen. He was the length of her arm from elbow to wrist and full of infant sweetness.”
“Is this a poem?”
“It could be. The child grew into a man such as the world had never seen. He’s no longer yours, the world said to her. Be sad, if you must, but proud, and she was.”
He closes his eyes and takes in the sounds of life carrying on: birdsong, wind breath, ocean throb. He rises and dances for her then, a new dance: sea spray erupting in joyous spumes.
Backstage
An excellent University of Toronto production of Othello sparked this collection. I had studied the play years before without having seen it performed. Watching and reflecting on how willingly Desdemona allowed her life to end, I thought of domestic abuse victims and the seeming collusion of some in their own misfortune. Many, like Desdemona, are socially isolated. The story that resulted from that evening – Nobody; I Myself – ended up being as much about idealism and racism in the United States in the 1960s as it was about social isolation, but that’s the thing about stories: they often end up being about something other than what you intended.
So it was with Not Meant to Know. Miranda in The Tempest isn’t a particularly complex character. She exists dramatically to become Ferdinand’s bride and thus help his father and hers reconcile. She falls in love with the first good-looking guy she meets. Boring. What interested me, initially, was how she would relate to that guy, not having had any female role models in her life from the age of three. I intended to tell the story of a girl who is kept hidden from the world by her father but, as I began to write, it morphed into something else.
Other stories were triggered by questions I had about specific characters. For example, what was behind Gertrude’s hasty marriage to her husband’s brother in Hamlet? She doesn’t come across well in the play, primarily because we see her through Hamlet’s eyes. She has overstepped gender bounds by not remaining grief-stricken and devoted to her husband’s memory. We don’t see her inner conflict. Her son’s struggle is the heart of the play. It’s possible her second marriage was a pragmatic move. Denmark is under threat of invasion by the prince of Norway. It wasn’t as if Hamlet could take the red eye from Wittenberg to assume the throne and defend the kingdom. In Passing Through, I give my Gertrude a chance to explain herself, time to reflect on what’s important to her.
In Silent Girl, the question sprang from the improbable plot of Pericles. The hero’s wife, presumed dead, is buried at sea yet turns up later, alive and untouched by another man, having hidden herself in a temple to the goddess Diana. His daughter, Marina, is kidnapped by pirates and sold to a brothel yet retains her virginity. Shakespeare didn’t shirk from revealing incest between King Antiochus and his daughter. Why, then, leave Marina’s virtue intact? This was the incongruity that fuelled Silent Girl. Researching the story was painful, writing it even more so. I am stunned by the scope and range of the sex slave trade that isn’t happening only “over there, somewhere.” In North America, tens of thousands of women and girls are kidnapped or coerced into sexual slavery every year.
Kidnapping also figures in Kesh Kumay. I had been searching for a modern counterpart to The Taming of the Shrew’s Kate whose abdication to Petruchio at the end of the play always makes me squirm in empathetic humiliation. By lucky accident I caught Petr Lom’s illuminating and moving documentary The Kidnapped Brides on CBC’s Passionate Eye. When one woman tells Lom, “After the kidnapping, you’ve no choice – you start loving, even if you don’t want to, you have to build a life,” I knew I had found my Kate in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan.
The Winter’s Tale, like Shrew, presents a problem for feminist sensibilities. Hermione’s husband Leontes falsely accuses her of adultery and locks her up in prison where she gives birth to their second child, a daughter. He orders the baby taken out into the wilds and left for animals to feed upon. When he gets word Hermione is dead and their first child has died of a broken heart over separation from his mother, he repents and goes into protracted grieving. Too darn late, you think, forgetting this is a romance. In the last act – which takes place sixteen years later – we learn Hermione is alive and has been in hiding. She reveals herself to Leontes as a statue that comes to life and they stroll off into happily-ever-after land, she apparently having forgiven all of his treachery. Pondering Hermione’s sixteen years of fealty to an unhealthy relationship led me to imagine, in Deep Dark Waves, another woman’s suspended animation. Through research I learned of a tendency in social work circles to deny that some women are violence-prone, resulting in a scarcity of therapeutic services to help them and their families.
I was intrigued with the atypical mothering of Volumnia in Coriolanus. Thinking I would work with some of feminist bell hook’s theories about the continued disempowerment of North American blacks, I envisioned a story about gang culture. That it evolved into The Snow People, a parable about oppression in an environmentally degraded future, I can only attribute to alchemy.
Cocktails with Charles allowed me to explore the complexities and fluid boundaries of gender. Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare’s “trouser plays,” as a writer friend calls them: plays in which women disguise themselves as men either
to be able to travel without molestation or to gain entry into the privileged world of men. It’s laughable that they get away with it, but the plays are comedies, after all. In my comedy I wanted my characters to get away with breaking old patterns to find new meaning.
It became apparent to me as I got deeper into the research and writing of this collection that some things haven’t changed for women since Shakespeare’s time. The reason, I suspect, is that we are still locked into gender roles and a patriarchal value system despite the efforts of many women and men to change their thinking and their behaviour. We need different kinds of stories – a new mythology, perhaps – to free us.
Glossary of Terms
NOT MEANT TO KNOW
Junket—brand name of a rennet-based pudding.
White Castle—self-declared first hamburger fast-food chain, offering hamburgers for five cents each in 1921.
SILENT GIRL
Anh—a Cajun reply when one does not understand, or an expression of surprise.
Chirren—Cajun for children.
Dipped in de Bayou—Cajun for unsophisticated.
Duckanary—a made-up word.
Empress of Heaven, Goddess of the Sea, Ma-tsu—the patron saint of seafarers in Taiwan; she began as a real person born in 960 who, because she didn’t cry until more than a month old, was named Lin Muo (muo meaning silence) and often referred to as Muo-niang (“the silent girl”). According to legend, when she was sixteen years old she received some kind of initiation from Heaven and was given a bronze amulet. After that she could ward off evil spirits, forestall calamities, heal the weak and the sick, and save imperilled fishing boats. It’s said that if you call one of her names, she will appear to help you. If you call her as Empress of Heaven, she will be delayed coming to your aid by having to dress in her finery.