by Julie Paul
“Limit’s three, if you get on,” the woman in charge explained. She was draped in various layers of beige, like a tree wrapped up against the winter. “But we like newbies, so you’ll get on for sure.” The woman must’ve seen fear on Gerry’s face, to flash her that candy necklace of a smile. “Now go get yourself a cup of tea and a cookie. There are at least five people up before I’ll call on you.”
She did as she was told and took her tea and cookie to a chair along the wall, standing her battered guitar case up beside her. The room was filled with couples in matching fleecewear and single oldsters with bowed heads, likely more from the weight of them than reverence, although it was hard to tell the difference. She knew no one.
She felt the urge to do the one thing she had done for most of her life, which was to tuck her long single braid beneath her bum and sit on it. But she’d cut her hair when she left home. It was still far from short, but if she let it loose, its ends met her shoulders like the fringed and tickling legs of a millipede. Mostly it was ponytailed or flipped further, as it was now, into an elastic-band bun. The ghost of her long hair ached like a missing limb.
There was a religious hint in the air; the low, reverent light, the unamplified musicians saying gentle things not everyone could hear. The air smelled like coffee and ginger tea, and cheeks were rosy, wrinkled, no strangers to folk fest sun. A saggy goodness seemed to hold the building up; it was a wooden balloon, and all the conversations people might have had at church years ago were happening here, tonight, out of the mouths of the Gore-Texed and the denimed, a melodious rumble that made Gerry feel both particularly welcome and extremely sad.
Every person had their heart facing the stage, open, receiving, except there was no leader, no cross to look to—only a couple of framed royals on either side of the stage, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip separated by the stage. But oh, the guitar sounds coming from the man currently onstage! A tangled, woven, multicoloured offering, like stained glass turned to filament.
Three songs. What would she choose? Should she warm them up with a cover, move into a little original, end with another cover? A sandwich. An original sandwich.
There was more plaid in the folk house than she’d seen in all her months in this city, combined. The word fellowship surfaced in Gerry’s mind, and she knew it had been hovering there ever since she left the farm—the need she could not name. Gerry was at home here, and as far from it as she’d ever been. Her identity was cracking, shifting, reforming like river ice.
Her hand trembled on her pebbled leather guitar case. Would she dare? Maybe she wasn’t scared; maybe her fingers were just picking up the vibrations of the music on stage.
The songs people were playing were all about love, it seemed, whether for people or the land, and Gerry’s chest felt like a knuckle church, folding into itself. She’d never been in love, not in the romantic sense of it, anyway. What would she play? She knew some Dylan. “Tangled Up in Blue,” done slowly, and “Blowin’ in the Wind,” of course. It would be best to keep it simple; this audience was here to sing, to take part, to support. And who was she kidding? This was her first real gig. Hello, my name is Gerry, and I am a folksinger. Hello, Gerry. Simple would be perfectly fine.
An older couple had come onstage and were singing “Goodnight, Irene,” and she was catapulted back home, to the kitchen, her father shaving by the sink, with his bowl and brush and straight razor, the AM radio wailing out the sadness. It was the first thing she pictured when she thought of him. Why? It was the only time he was relatively still, aside from his hands; she got the sense that he was enjoying himself, and he seemed to be in a better mood once he was done. Or was it that Gerry never saw him like this, in his undershirt, except while shaving? A vulnerability, an intimacy that made her feel tight inside, a fear and a thrill. Nothing sexual, not that kind of intimate, but a sense that he was soft inside, like everyone else—something she rarely glimpsed.
Farming had an intimacy, but it was the intimacy of hands clapping. Contact, pressure, sound, and yet little awareness of skin or connection in the more cosmic sense. Yet farming wasn’t cosmic. A person had jobs to do, she did them.
According to her father, Gerry was not farming material. She had the build for it, sure, but she was impractical, as soft as homemade ice cream. He was right. All she wanted to do on the land was to take her horse out to the far fields on the pretense of checking livestock. Once there, if the conditions were right, she’d dismount and unsaddle him, then let him gallop free, nothing to impede his natural instinct, no one making him do anything he didn’t want to do.
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Her mother had begun to get sick when Gerry was about ten, after having a miscarriage, and had progressively worsened. It looked, from the outside, like that had been the initial push, the instigating factor, the bit of sand in the pearl.
Gerry read the health magazine headlines in Victoria, the commands to stop inflammation by saying no to nightshades, coffee, sugar, grains, non-organic produce, red meat. But she knew her mother wouldn’t go for any of this. No, if there had been a window of time in which anything could save her, she believed it was closed now, bricked over, about to be sealed with a headstone—already chosen, in fact, for the family plot. No amount of quinoa could save her.
She’d gotten much worse in Gerry’s last year of high school, which is why she was here on the coast; her grades had dropped too low to get into university, and so, she’d worked at a small café until she’d saved enough to come west for a general arts diploma at a community college.
There were tests available to see if she had the markers of this disease, but Gerry didn’t want to take them. A part of her still couldn’t believe that someone could get this ill from arthritis and possibly die. It was like getting gangrene from a paper cut. But the ghost of possibility hung around her, along with her cut-off braid; every sensation in her joints sent a jolt of fear through her, and any other pain too. Her mother was nearing organ failure—the rheumatoid arthritis unable to stay put in the joints, spreading, diving deep into lungs and heart and eyes, so that in the end she would most likely be blind and starving, unable to breathe.
Her mother wasn’t the only one who’d suffered. A few years back, Gerry’s sister, Patti, had been diagnosed with thyroid problems. She was twenty-two at the time, and already a mother to little Joe, married at twenty to a guy named Rick whom she’d dated since Grade 11. The problem soon grew to have another name—cancer—and within weeks Patti was radioactive, her throat shot through with beams of destruction. Bam! Kill the killer.
Gerry had stepped in to help take care of Joe, who was barely walking, barely talking, and at times inconsolable without his mama and her milk. Once, she tried bringing him to the hospital to see Patti, but all they could do was stare and wave and cry through inch-thick glass. Every bodily fluid was a danger.
Now Patti, a puffier and less energetic version of herself, was clear of the cancer, and Joe had just started kindergarten, and Gerry ached to see them. But she’d put two and two together and could come up with only one reason that both her mother and sister had gotten ill in the first place: the farm itself. She hadn’t come this far west just for college or because she was a terrible nurse and that was a likely path for her if she’d stayed home—caretaking her mother—but because she was trying to stay safe.
Her father had stopped talking to her; it had been three months, and other than a strained Merry Christmas, there had been only silence. Each day, she willed her phone to ring, with his voice on the other end. Three months ago, she’d told him about the evidence she’d been gathering about pesticides and hormone-based cancers and autoimmune diseases, and he had done what she’d been afraid of: he’d seen it as blame. And who wouldn’t? Who wouldn’t feel like she’d just backhoed a bucketful of cow manure right onto his head, a shitload of guilt he was supposed to assume? Her mother couldn’t talk for lon
g when she was occasionally able to reach her on the phone; her voice was weak, and she only talked about the weather, how cold, how stormy, how hard her father was working.
Plenty of the soil on her family’s farm was rich, and it had provided full, diverse crops for a very long time: crops eaten in season and put up in jars for the long winters that followed. But somewhere along the way, someone had gotten ambitious. Her father’s father was the one who suggested his son clear another acre or two and put in potatoes to sell. Then, where the soil was largely clay, someone had come up with the idea of strawberries as a cash crop because of the sun exposure, and Barkers’ Berries was born. Much doctoring came afterwards, fixing up the pH, making those tooth-leafed plants take hold. But after all this trouble, more trouble followed. Pests, wind, and nastier weather—and the chemical fixes that matched. Strawberries were a volatile crop; they were prone to mildew, root rot, sun scald, slime mould, leaf spot, and injury from frost, just to name the common blights—never mind the pests like aphids, slugs, and weevils or how they needed to be picked every couple of days from their back-breaking, low-growing rows. And the birds! How many scarecrows had she and Patti made to help protect the berries?
Gerry didn’t blame her father for trying to make the farm yield more returns. They’d had a few good years, with gorgeous berries renowned throughout the county for their sweetness, their size. She blamed his methods and the world they were living in and how far they’d strayed from loving the land her ancestors had come to one hundred and fifty years ago with only hope and muscle.
Tonight she could see his posture in some of the men in the folk club, broad shoulders beginning to migrate forward, hair gone to white or silver. The man beside her had big, rough-looking hands resting on his lap, on well-worn jeans, and what looked like a gravy stain on his blue button-up shirt—an older version of her father. Her father, who’d had to give up most of the farming and get a shiftwork job at the 3M plant for the benefit plan and a steady income. She missed him so much—and the rest of the family too—that it felt like knives in her throat.
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The crowd was applauding, now, for the couple in matching cowboy shirts who’d played Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind” after “Goodnight, Irene” and “Red River Valley.” Was she folk enough to be at this venue?
After a heartfelt round of applause, a woman in a black one-piece fleece jumpsuit got up to make the weekly announcements. The headlining trio, younger and cooler than Gerry had expected, had come in during the last song, their shoulders speckled with petals—cherry blossoms were covering the city in pink snow. She had heard this band on the radio; it had won a CBC contest for a song about the coast.
Now two of the three men were talking quietly, back near the concession, and a hobbled older guy in a blanket coat got up to shush them. The musicians looked around for support, laughing silently, surprise on their faces at being scolded, and found Gerry looking back at them. She smiled conspiratorially, then felt her face burn. She pulled her eyes away and scraped at the edge of her guitar case, at a mark that wasn’t there.
What Gerry wanted to sing, suddenly, was “Kumbaya.” She felt like it might, somehow, be a big enough song to travel across four provinces. To her sister, who didn’t know what to make of all the information Gerry had sent; to her mother, who cried for hours a day over the rifts, physical and emotional; and to her father, who, whenever he lit their bonfires, used to sing this song in jest, mocking all who would do so for real. But still, he’d always sung it so beautifully, shaking up the calm night air with his antler-velvet voice.
She had never been lonely before. That was the truth of it hitting her here, right now. She’d done the leaving, the bridge-burning, but it didn’t matter who’d done what. She was bereft, alone. Being in the room just brought it on more acutely, the way shaking after a trauma only begins once it’s safe enough to let go—in the presence of what you need most. Her sister knew this: during her recovery, Gerry had heard her say things like, “Don’t you dare say one nice thing to me, or I will lose it.” It being her cool—steel in the face of steel was her method of holding herself together.
But art didn’t come from that—and she was getting up on that stage soon. Could she hold it together, or would a Joni Mitchell cover make her break down?
There was no one checking in on her, seeing how she was. That was the worst of the loneliness, worse than the missing them. Not to be missed.
The question she’d been carrying with her, and ignoring, was this: what would happen next? If someone told her the news, long distance, that her mother had passed away, what would she do then? The running from what couldn’t be changed was nothing more than foolish, like a hide-and-seek game when the hider closed her eyes and was convinced that the seeker couldn’t see her.
Maybe not soon, but Gerry’s mother was going to die. Everyone was. And Gerry was so far away, protesting. A lot of good that was doing anyone. And what would she be left with? A plate, a cup, a vase? Her mother’s old navy and white swimsuit, the belt of it she clung to all those years ago, afraid to float until she let go?
The year Gerry had learned to swim, when she was seven or eight, she’d had to let go, to soften, to pretend to not be afraid. Her mother was teaching her in the village, at the park on the river, and she took her and Patti there at least once a week that summer. Patti was gone as soon as they got there, swimming and playing with her friends from school, an easy banter among them that made Gerry jealous. Her mother back then was strong and tanned, comfortable in her body, and more patient than she usually was as Gerry clung to her, unwilling to let go entirely. But eventually, one August day, her mother told her that they were just going to float. “Pretend your arms and legs and head are made of marshmallows,” she said. “No bones, no muscles. Now put your marshmallow self to bed on the water. Just lie down like it’s your bed. Don’t kick!” she reminded her. “Just let yourself sink into bed.” For some reason, Gerry did what she was told, and she relaxed enough to let herself float on that river, silky, black, and slow.
And now, she was up. The draped woman had just announced her—“Ge-rry from Ontari-O”—and Gerry’s legs carried her to the front of the room, past the single seated men along the outer wall, past the elderly couples, the long-haired, and the other new performer, John, from New Brunswick, who’d been eager as a border collie.
The others had all said a few words to introduce their performances. Gerry just wanted to play and then sit down again.
But she stood in front and forced herself to look out at the audience, and the trick her sister had given her, way back in elementary school, came back: find one person out there who could act as a mirror, so that it would just seem like she was practising at home, alone.
When Gerry looked out, she found a dozen mirrors, maybe twenty, a roomful of hearts all willing her to play, already loving it. Soften, Gerry, she told herself. Let go. Float.
“Hi there,” she said. “I’m Gerry.”
“A little louder, honey,” someone called from the back.
“Okay.” She dove in. “Hi. I took the train out here from back east because I wanted to see the country from the ground. Leaving home for the first time, it’s not easy. And when I was on that train, I felt as if I could see ghosts. People who’d made the same journey, before the railway, on horseback or by wagon. When the country was young and the land was pure. I wrote this song on the train. It’s called ‘Missing What I Never Had.’”
The covers could wait. She played her song, stumbling only once on the bar chords, only playing the cheater F chord a couple of times, and at the end, there was applause, and even a little cheering—was it coming from the headliners, maybe that cute bass player? Who else would whistle like they were at a rock concert?
Gerry then moved into Joni’s “Both Sides Now” and followed it with “Kumbaya” because this audien
ce wanted to sing along. And yes, she cried a little, but held herself together until the end.
She hadn’t bombed. She took her bow to lots of clapping, then quickly left the stage with her guitar and found her case along the side wall while the woman in beige introduced the last performer before the break and the main act.
Then she felt a tap on her shoulder.
“Hey, good set,” the band’s bass player said. “I love what you did with the Mitchell song.”
She blushed, deeply. “Thank you. I, uh, love your music too.”
“You’ve heard us before?”
“On the radio.”
The bass player laughed. “Good ol’ CBC. Well, thank you very much. Come up and get a CD after the show.”
“Wow, thank you,” she said. “And break a leg.” Was that okay, to say that to a musician, or was it only for actors?
He winked at her before returning to his bandmates.
Gerry sat down to listen to the last act, a teenage boy with long hair, playing an Elvis song on the ukulele, and playing it well. She pulled her phone from her pocket—a habit she was trying to break—just to chill herself out. Her performance had been more of a rush than she could have imagined.
She’d done it! She’d played onstage. And the bass player had just winked at her.
There was a text waiting for her, from Patti.
Mom wanted you to see this.
She’d sent a photo of an old snapshot that Gerry knew well: the four of them on the front porch of their big old farmhouse, all tanned, young, and smiling, Gerry in their mother’s lap, Patti in their father’s. Their grandma’s big yellow mixing bowl sat between them, heaped full of strawberries.