by Jan Conn
We’ll find out, I guess.
And don’t you need a permit to build?
Oh, probably they’d want you to ask for one, but asking comes with the risk of them saying no. By the time I have it finished, they’ll be so impressed, they won’t have an argument that makes sense. Back in those days, they didn’t have building codes anyway. They had survival codes.
Fort Whoop-Up, Sage said. You’ve got yourself an idea there, I’ll say that much.
I might just call it Fort Whoop, Hart said. It’ll be smaller, and I don’t want to come off as some kind of competition.
What does Molly say, Sage asked. Is she okay with all that?
The older that woman gets, the more ornery she becomes, Hart said, passing back the last of the smoke. If there’s nothing bothering her, she’ll turn rocks over until she finds something. She’s good at it.
Sage felt certain Hart’s project was designed to get him out of the house and away from Molly’s relentless scrutiny. Hart said once he finished, if she went through two or three days of mean and nasty, it would give him a place to hunker down. For the rest of the summer and well into the fall, Sage didn’t go fishing or work on his own house so he could help Hart with the fort, but only after watching him toil for a week by himself with the well. Hart dug and kept on digging until he had a square with walls three and a half feet that went down into the earth seven feet or so. Hart had taught himself the art of witching for water using a forked piece of willow. In the back corner of his yard, the willow bobbed fifteen times once and twenty times on the second try, which he said meant there would be water twenty feet down, maybe less. After he got the square dug down over his head, he had trouble getting the dirt out of the hole. Sage considered lending a hand then, but he wasn’t enthralled with the project yet, so he held off. Next, Hart built an auger bit and attached it to pvc pipe that had wings on it so he could twist the contraption and dig a narrow hole below the seven feet he’d dug by hand. He spent three days doing this, and eventually water came bubbling to the surface. His tenacity impressed Sage, who went over to help him fit a cement casing into the water flowing into the cavity. Hart then built a wooden frame for the top and found an ancient hand pump from a salvage depot, and sure enough, with a little effort, he could get a pail of water when he needed to.
I’ll take a few gallons out every day for a while, he said. That way things will settle down and the water will run clear.
The effort of it had tuckered Hart out. He sat down and mulled over the plans he had for the fort. Sage said, It seems like a lot of effort you’ve put in when you’ve got running water in the house. Why, you could have run a hose out from the house for water.
I know, Hart said. I could have done plenty of things. But I want this fort to be an exhibit. I want it to be true to life—a place where a man can spit on the ground. Few things are true to life these days. There’s a word for what I’m looking for. Bucolic. Right here in the middle of the city, I’m going to capture some bucolic.
So Sage said he would help him on weekends. He ended up helping in the evenings as well, and by late September, the two of them had logs in place and mortared and floor boards set down in two of the four rooms. This turned out to be a long-term project, but Sage was committed. There would be no electricity in the fort; Hart wouldn’t hear of it. Instead, he had three kerosene lanterns that allowed him to putter away after dark in the winter. Sometimes, past midnight, Sage wandered out into the backyard and saw the lanterns still burning, with Hart out there roughing it, secure and away from the venom he wished to avoid, much like the pioneers he so revered.
Della had no idea if Stacey had been baptized as a child and didn’t want to involve Molly the Nose in her solution. A revival meeting and baptism had been planned by the Pentecostal Church down at the river in mid-July, and Della wanted Stacey to be saved, to give her being over to the grace of God. Della had been baptized as a young girl, and would do it again with Stacey, if she agreed. She didn’t.
In September Stacey would begin grade five. She was a good student, her teachers had said at the end of grade four, and could have straight As if only she weren’t so stubborn about some things. Spelling was a strength, they said, but Stacey refused to represent her class in the district spelling bee because she hated having to spell words that didn’t have an even number of letters like her own name. The compositions she started in class she finished at home because she favoured words that didn’t have an odd number number of letters, making the process laborious. When she had to use “a” or “the” she wrote “an” and “they” and drew a line through the last letter when she finished. When given a math problem that challenged her to determine the cost of seven people to ride the bus when two people were senior citizens and one was a child and the total came out to $23, she answered, then put in brackets: (+1 = $24). She told her teacher odd numbers felt lonely, but when they got together with other odd numbers, they became happy because they were finally even. Her last teacher set up an appointment with the district psychologist and informed Sage and Della after the fact. Sage had stormed the school and told them to call off the dogs or they could expect a bucket full of trouble.
Stacey gave Della a hopeless look when she mentioned the baptism. I’m not exactly falling off a cliff, she said, so I don’t see why I need to be saved from anything.
It’s not that kind of saving, Della said. You know better than that. It’s to assure your redemption once your life on Earth comes to an end. It’s publicly stating your faith in Jesus Christ.
I’m not convinced about the whole Jesus Christ, God thing anyway. I’ve never met him, and I haven’t met anyone who has. If there was a god out there looking after us, then John Lennon would still be alive today.
John Lennon had been shot on a Monday, and Stacey had refused to go to school for the rest of the week. John had been her favourite Beatle, and she told everyone that when she grew up, she would visit John Lennon in New York and they would record a song together. Sage threatened to destroy all their Beatles music if she didn’t return to school. The hollow threat seemed to work, though Stacey went back because Della had insisted she stay in her room to brood during the week if she felt too sick to go to school. Because she missed her friend Amber, she had agreed to return.
Well then, why do you even go to church if that’s how you feel? You come almost every Sunday, and you sing along with everyone like you mean it.
I like the singing, okay? There’s nothing wrong with singing. I sing at home too, but that doesn’t mean I’ll come through the back door forever. It’s a great story, though.
What story? What do you mean?
The whole Adam and Eve thing. Adam was born so Eve was created, and that should have been the end of it, but there was a problem. Adam and Eve got bored with each other and started picking fruit they weren’t supposed to. I think Eve wasn’t very good-looking. How could they be so bored they wanted to steal fruit?
Where did you hear such a tale?
I didn’t hear it anywhere. I made it up. It’s what I think.
Della could do nothing to sort out her daughter’s mind once it got wound up in a knot. The following Sunday, Stacey declared that she would go to the river; she would take a break from church and go fishing with her dad and Tommy and Amber on Sunday.
And why the sudden interest in fishing? You’ve always said no when your dad asked if you wanted to learn.
Nature’s like a church. That’s what Dad says. He also says it’s up to people like us to catch enough fish to feed the Catholics on Fridays.
Why are you always so stubborn? I’m going to consider this conversation closed.
Closed works for me. If you ever want to open it up again, I’ll be down by the river.
Della went to church with Molly as usual. It didn’t feel the same, and Molly had to ask why Stacey wasn’t coming. Molly’s advice rarely offered comfort, and it wasn’t much different on this occasion. She said an ideal solution would be if they a
ll attended church as a family, like the Pierrynowski and Smith family. They entered the house of God as a family, Molly said, and left as a family, cohesive and blessed. Della wanted more than anything to remind Molly the Nose that Hart didn’t attend church as part of his family, but that would be a futile argument because the way Hart saw it he attended church every Sunday: the one he had created himself in the backyard.
Della had toured Fort Whoop on two occasions, both times because Sage wanted her to see what had been created over the years. The help he’d offered went on longer than he had imagined, and he took pride in what they accomplished. The fort had four rooms according to its original design and a centerpiece river rock fireplace in one room with a bison pelt Hart bought from a farmer in Saskatchewan. The fireplace took him most of one winter to construct, and he made a point of cooking supper there once a month, although Molly wasn’t interested and made herself a sandwich and a pot of tea on the nights he did so. They tested the water from the well, and it was safe to drink, though hard and full of minerals, which Hart said were good for you, nature’s fortification against disease and an important part of our ancestors’ diet. Hart had an outhouse in the backyard, albeit a compromise, a chemical toilet, as he didn’t have enough land at his disposal and he didn’t want to compromise his water supply. The largest room was the living quarters, with two beds against the wall on one side and a small piano and rustic bar on the other. A room at the back Hart kept as a workshop and forge, though the forge wasn’t yet functional, and on the side of this room, he had a counter with supplies, a diminutive version of the Indian room found at the original Fort Whoop-Up. On the walls in various rooms, he displayed his burgeoning collection of artifacts from the Wild West, including two new guns and an original whisky jug he had paid too much for at a secondhand store in Medicine Hat. Stacey brought all her friends to see Fort Whoop whenever she could, and she always pointed out the bow and arrow that hung on the wall, as Hart had helped her make it in the original style a few years earlier. Stacey never laid claim to having made the bow and arrow because Hart always passed it off as a genuine article and that was sufficient commendation. Framed signs in various places inside the fort explained the function and purpose of what he had so those who visited Fort Whoop could make better sense of it. Originally, the plan had been to charge admission, but Hart thought it best to let people enjoy the facility for free, and he placed a donation box on the way out. A surprising number of people found their way to Fort Whoop, and any money collected he put back into building his collection.
Sage never said so, but it impressed him that Hart’s vision had come to fruition. Hart was a different man in or around Fort Whoop. Unless it was ungodly hot, he wore his light brown leather jacket, fringe-styled like he’d seen in his photo archives. In his car and doing his insurance rounds, he looked like a well-kept puppy, but when he wore his jacket and toured the fort, he had a more confident air about him.
Molly the Nose had let anyone who would listen know she didn’t think the fort or museum or whatever it was would ever get done. Her at first vociferous commitment to her husband’s impending failure only petered out like a seasonal creek near the end. She told Della the one good thing about the building was how it provided a place for Hart to store the ugly saddle chair that had taken up room in their master bedroom for too many years.
15
Stacey learned to swim. Not proficiently, but she could do the dog paddle and tread water, and that satisfied Molly the Nose who knew better than most the importance of such a skill. Learning had less to do with her next-door neighbour than it did with Amber’s parents who went to Surveyors Lake every summer, and the summer before grade eight, she came home with severe sunburn and had to spend most of a week in the shade of the backyard with a tube of aloe vera cream, which didn’t bother her much because she was reading the Flowers in the Attic series by V.C. Andrews. Amber was reading them too, and they spent hours of impassioned discussion on events that carried them through the summer. The books contained all sorts of family troubles, including the main character, Cathy Dollanganger, falling in love with her brother after he rapes her.
I don’t see how that could happen, Amber said. My brother is two years older than me, and I can’t stand him. Cathy must have had a mental problem.
They all have mental problems, Stacey said. I guess I can imagine it happening if the conditions were right. I mean, look at the house they’re living in. The family is nuts. Besides, it’s what’s called a broken family, and that means the people in it are broken.
Reading about the Dollangangers made most of what Stacey had to put up with tolerable. Sage fabricated a reason to be miserable and foul-tempered every few weeks, and she held more hope of changing the Fernie weather patterns than of adjusting his tirades. It was Amber’s family Stacey idolized. They had two parents and two children, and that seemed right. When she went somewhere with Amber and her older brother wasn’t there, she pretended to be Amber’s sister, living in a normal family. Amber’s father referred to them as “you girls,” and Stacey thought that a father with two daughters would say that. He would lump them together as part of the puzzle, inseparable.
Most of the time, Stacey’s mother and father got along, but once a month, as if it were an event marked on the calendar, they would fight about something that resulted in either Della taking refuge in her bedroom or Sage heading out late at night to the pub, sometimes both. The next day, everything would be back to normal, and Stacey could forget the battle had ensued, but as the conflicts repeated themselves, over time she developed an air of wariness, an expectation that at any time Sage could run mad. A couple of years earlier, when she had just started grade six, her father came home late from work and had stopped off at the pub with Emery first. Della and Stacey had finished their dinner, as Della for several years had stopped waiting for him if he didn’t come through the door by six, and Sage sat at the kitchen table, eating alone. When he finished, he joined them in the living room and watched Della get her weekly fix of Dallas, with Stacey keeping her company.
Sage wasn’t interested in the show because he said it wasn’t realistic. He waited until an ad came on, then said, Have you two had the talk yet?
What talk? Della said. What are you talking about?
The talk. You know. The birds and the bees. Emery says they teach them everything they need to know in grade six. I wondered if you’d filled her in yet.
Well, we talk all the time, Stacey and I. I’m sure she’ll be prepared.
Big changes are coming, Sage said. He turned away from his wife and focused on Stacey. You’ll menstruate before you get to junior high, that’s a given. Your breasts will grow, and before you know it, you’ll have to hold them up with a bra. Then what will happen—
That’s enough, Della said. Stacey knows what’s in front of her. You don’t need to make it sound vulgar. She’ll become a woman in her own time. A beautiful woman I might add.
Stacey sat inert, staring at her mother and regarding her dad skeptically in her peripheral vision. She thought about the hefty episode that would make its way into Della’s journal later that night.
That’s what I’m saying. She’ll be beautiful, and that’s when the action starts.
Stacey took the book she had been half reading, went to her bedroom and closed the door.
What was that all about? Della had said. We were having a perfectly relaxed evening watching TV, and you come and spoil everything.
Excuse me for asking a question. I guess you’ve thought of everything. There’s no need for me to think anymore.
Since that night, Stacey had felt a new separation between her and her father. Every room in the house felt one way when he was in it and another way when he was not. If she had a point of view about something, he would enter the room and her idea would vanish. It felt eerie to her that, just as Sage had predicted, she had her first period before grade eight began, as if he had willed it to happen, and that part felt abnormal. Many
of her friends, including Amber, had been complaining about their plight for almost a year, and where they once held ties as children, they were now bound in the mysterious journey of adolescence, through more than physical changes. Stacey and Amber now wove their way through the world with knowledge of something new and startling, and although it didn’t have a label, they had become members of a vulnerable species. Teachers looked at them differently, or so it seemed. They did look at them differently, didn’t they? This they discussed over and over, and boys, particularly older boys they had known for years who had tried to avoid contact at all cost, now suggested games like tag football that would be fun to play together. The grade nines had three sock hops a year, and the grades eights were invited to the last one of the year, in June. Most of the girls and some boys couldn’t wait. Stacey wasn’t so sure. She thought about what Sage had said about this being when the action started. Sage did so much that was infuriating, but while he acted like a dumb ass most of the time, he might be smarter than she thought.
Unless she could come up with a good excuse not to, Stacey was responsible for cooking on Monday nights, and Della said this was good preparation because when she left home, she knew how to boil water and scramble eggs and not much more. Stacey often fried sausages because it was the one meal Sage never complained about, but sometimes she would cook fish if he came home with any on the weekend. Della encouraged Stacey when she could and reiterated that learning to cook was an important part of becoming an adult. When Sage joined in the discussion, he talked about the real world and how Stacey had no clue what a chore life would be.
On sausage night, no fish in sight, Della had taken the two kids she was babysitting to the park for exercise and a Popsicle on the way home. A year earlier, Stacey might have joined them if she had nothing going on, but now she yearned for time alone, and one way to accomplish being alone was to announce she wanted a bath. Today she had the house to herself, and with no announcement needed, she shed every stitch of clothing and put them in the hamper, then laid out a comfortable pair of shorts and a top for when she finished. She started the water running and stood in front of the bathroom mirror. The contents of the bathroom cabinet had changed over the years. She now used Wild Madagascar Vanilla body wash and Grapefruit Scented Dead Sea bath salts on alternate days in her bath water, and she always coated her skin with ultra shea body lotion when she got out. Her breasts had changed but were still not much more than bloated nipples. She liked to examine their progress before her bath and again after, convinced they got puffier after every bath, and some days she thought the one on her right side had gotten a head start. She owned a training bra she wore with certain outfits, but the training consisted mostly of learning how to put it on and take it off. Amber owned two bras and was lucky enough to need them.