by Jan Conn
The money at Stacey’s disposal mostly equaled what she’d had years previous, but she had to think about money in a finite way now. She bought herself a new outfit for school. Flared puffy skirts didn’t work for her. Glitzy fabrics and ornamentation were the order of the day, but denim was, mercifully, still possible. The ad in one magazine she’d thumbed through said: Don’t be mad at me because I’m beautiful. Tanned skin looked healthy and beautiful, but she had spent little time in the sun all summer. Still, she found an outfit she liked, something she suspected even her mother would have approved of, and she dressed purposefully, ready to start her last year of high school in a way unlikely to cultivate enemies.
Most of what she’d packed up from the house remained in boxes, and she had no immediate plans to unpack anything other than the clothes she needed. In the end, she hadn’t been able to get in the car and drive to San Jose to start what would have been a completely different life. When friends, neighbours or classmates asked why she had not gone with her aunt, and several did, she couldn’t furnish an answer that made any sense to anyone but her.
Aunt Sadie had offered to take her in and give her everything she needed to graduate and chart a new path in life. Her response to Stacey’s decision turned out to be hardest part of all. When Stacey had made up her mind that she couldn’t leave Fernie, she expected her aunt to be relieved. Instead Aunt Sadie wanted to explore her trepidation from every angle possible. She tried every plausible argument she could think of to reverse Stacey’s decision and even got Martin involved for support, though Stacey had the feeling that he, at least, felt relieved. Not until mid-afternoon did Aunt Sadie and Martin drive their SUV south, after everything loaded had been unloaded and the dog blanket set for Lucky to lie on returned to the floor beside Stacey’s bed. It had been important for Aunt Sadie to take her in and help her, that much was clear.
Molly the Nose kept appearing on her front porch while Stacey sorted out her life, and she watched as all Stacey’s belongings made their way from the car back to the house. Although she couldn’t easily articulate why she had to stay, Stacey felt clear about it all. It was Lucky who was most confused. He knew something was changing, and he wanted to know how it involved the life of a dog.
Probably at Hart’s insistence, Molly the Nose kept her distance that first night. Stacey made a toasted cheese sandwich and sat on the couch with her dog at her feet. She had a journal of her own, a new one, in which she intended to record the events of her life. She wasn’t sure what to write first. Lucky always understood her thoughts, or she felt that he did. When her breathing became uneven, he knew something was up. She wrote: I love my dog. A perfect, short sentence that expressed how she felt, and it had an even number of words, letters and syllables.
At eight-thirty, Aunt Sadie called from Spokane. She wanted to know if everything was all right. Was there any chance she’d changed her mind? No, Stacey said, it was better this way. You’ll consider coming to San Jose for Christmas like last year? Yes, Stacey said she would consider that. A consideration of the future was as much as she could promise for now.
Six hundred and fifty dollars had been Hart’s guess, and it turned out that was exactly the monthly rent Stacey could get for the house. A teacher and her husband moved in the first of September. They owned a small black and white dog with a pug nose that barked during the day if left alone and any time, day or night, if they let him out in the yard. Hart was away most of the day, so while he despised the dog, he said he could put up with it. Molly the Nose wouldn’t admit it, but she was getting deaf in her old age and hardly noticed the dog. Stacey found the constant barking irritating, but she coped by imagining that every time the dog barked a twenty-five cent deposit went into her bank account. She’d moved into Fort Whoop and paid Hart a hundred dollars a month for the privilege. Hart said he didn’t feel right charging her anything. She told him to get over it. She had enough money left over to pay the mortgage and the taxes, and she worked on Saturdays at the clothing store so she would have a little extra to put into a savings account. She had no idea what to save for, but she knew her mother would have insisted she save something, just in case.
At first, Hart and Molly the Nose wanted to take responsibility for her situation and help her out. They offered a room in their house, but Stacey wanted her independence, and she also wanted clear lines drawn. Growing up she had learned the importance of drawing the line. Unless she did something eventful on Sundays, she ate supper with Hart and Molly and watched the Sunday night movie on either NBC or ABC, depending, while the two of them hunched over cups of Darjeeling tea. The rest of the time, Stacey kept her distance from all the neighbours. Thursdays she walked to Amber’s house, ate supper and watched the Cosby Show after. She missed watching TV at first, and Hart said if it meant a lot to her, he would figure out a way to hook her old TV up at Fort Whoop. Stacey knew how important it was for him to keep his fort as authentic as possible and said she didn’t want a TV. Hart recognized her intention and accepted.
Once she crawled out of the cave called August, life became illuminated once again. August had been a month of resolution, and her focus turned to coping with the next ten months. She felt older, busier and more in control of her life. She had needed August more than she’d realized, and now she could move on.
Hugh had also moved on. He was volunteering at a kibbutz for a year, then he planned to backpack in India for a while before returning home. Stacey thought he was working on his sense of humour when she first heard about it, but he was dead serious. With him so far away, she knew they might never see each other again. When she thought of him at all, she remembered what he smelled like.
She worked every Saturday, all day, and got to like meeting the people who came into the store. Every customer represented a story or a cartoon about life, and they were diversions she looked forward to. If she went anywhere, it was on Saturday nights, to house parties mostly, though she didn’t drink much and wasn’t fascinated by drugs like many of her peers. Plenty of boys attended these parties, and she had plenty of offers, but it had been months since she’d put her diaphragm to good use. Lucky was her most steadfast companion, and she took him everywhere she went. The dog had slowed down noticeably, and she guessed she should expect that. Hart had her car running again (it was the solenoid, he said), and some Sundays she’d take Lucky for a drive somewhere, if for no other reason than to say they got away.
She had assimilated everything her mother had written in her diaries, and most of it she accepted. In her weaker moments, she found time to feel sorry for herself, and sometimes felt rage surfacing from what had gone on, but she had learned how to quiet her mind when these ephemeral bouts arrived. She avoided the temptation to pick away at the scab of regret. She no longer had the diaries; she had insisted that Aunt Sadie take them with her, and she didn’t want to know what she did with them. She didn’t have a phone, but on the first Sunday of every month, she phoned Aunt Sadie from a pay phone. Her aunt sent her letters and postcards almost every week with pictures of San Jose and the beaches of California on the postcards, reminders of what she’d turned her back on and what she could embrace once she’d graduated. Every letter arrived with American money stuffed inside, and Aunt Sadie said she was putting two hundred dollars a month into a special account in case someday she wanted to attend San Jose State. Christmas came up in every correspondence. Don’t forget about San Jose for Christmas.
A routine would create the grid she needed to see her through to graduation. Amber and Stacey managed the Environmental Club. They still did some of the work, but mostly they trained a group of grade tens and elevens so they could carry on the following year. They both felt like parents in their new role. Parents who, like it or not, would leave a legacy behind.
People around her were all preoccupied with events that didn’t consume her. The Winter Olympics were coming to Calgary in a few months, just up the road a few hours, and people acted as if it was the event of a lifetime. It was
n’t often she thought about such things. She had only one issue on her mind that had not been resolved. It had taken months for her to decide what, if anything, she would do about it.
She asked Hart if he would go with her. Throughout the fall, Hart sporadically visited Sage at Uphill Manor. He chose sunny days and wheeled Sage in his wheelchair out to the corner of the grounds where the two of them would smoke a joint or two before they got too cold. Hart said he would take her, not a problem. What day did she want to go? She wanted to take Lucky too, and one Sunday they went as an entourage. I don’t want to stay long, Stacey said. I just want to see him and go.
They stayed more than half an hour. Stacey brought him a box of his favourite cookies, which delighted Sage, but he also wanted to visit and ask questions and pet Lucky the whole time. On the way there, Hart told her how Sage liked to hear news, so she told him about her living in Fort Whoop and renting out the house. Hart had already told him that, she could tell, but he pretended to hear it for the first time.
That wasn’t so bad now was it? Hart said on their way back home.
No, she said. It was good.
It’s the right thing to do, what you’re doing, he said. I don’t need to tell you why. You wouldn’t have gone there to see him if you hadn’t already figured it out.
There’s something I’ve lost, Stacey said.
Lost?
His voice, she said. I can’t remember his voice. It’s been only a year since the stroke, but I can’t make myself hear what he sounded like.
Stacey went on her own after that. Every second Sunday, she and Lucky drove to Uphill Manor and visited Sage. Every second Sunday was about right. With the life she was living, she could only hand over so much that could be deemed news. Some Sundays Molly helped her bake cookies to take. She always brought cookies, but she also thought of something else that would capture his interest. She brought a picture of them as a family, several years back when they still owned the purple car, and he liked that, she could tell, by the contorted half-smile that unfolded on his face. One week she read him a short story she’d written for her English class, a story about a mining disaster, fictitiously set in Fernie, though there had been many mining disasters in the town that might have been close. The walls of a horizontal shaft had collapsed leaving seven miners trapped. The town worked in twenty-four-hour shifts trying to get to them, and on the third day, they found six of the miners. One was dead, but the other five had lived. Every day that the miners toiled to rescue those missing, a dog came along, and every day he moved away from where everybody else worked and sat at the mouth of a mine shaft abandoned for almost a year. The man who owned the dog finally noticed the animal’s behaviour. After the fourth day, having still not located the last of the seven missing miners, the dog’s owner insisted they pursue the abandoned shaft. Many thought of the old shaft as too risky and didn’t want to lend a hand, but enough agreed to follow the dog owner’s insistence, and halfway down the cavern, they heard a tapping sound. Always three taps in a row. Tap, tap, tap. Then nothing for a long time, and later they would hear it again. The rescuers mimicked the tapping, and when they did, the tapping would start again. They drilled into the rock wall and wedged a thirty-foot plastic pipe through the rock. The trapped miner made the pipe move. They fed soup through the pipe for the next two days and eventually rescued the man who had a leg badly crushed. The last of the seven miners survived, and the dog became a legend. A few years later, the dog died, and some thought there should be a monument or a statue on the mountain in his honour. The mining company wasn’t in favour, saying it provided a reminder of what had gone wrong in the past, so the seventh survivor said he would pay for it himself. A statue carved from anthracite coal paid tribute to a dog who had put his instincts into practice.
By the middle of November, the visits became weekly affairs. It wasn’t much of an effort to drive there, and Lucky looked forward to it every time. If the air wasn’t frigid or windy or filled with yet more snow, Stacey would wheel Sage outside so he could stare at the mountains. Once she brought her camera and had a nurse take a photo of the three of them. She lifted Lucky up so he could sit, however awkwardly, on Sage’s lap for the photo. She wasn’t sure why she wanted the image. She just did.
Her visits to Uphill Manor grew more comfortable over time. She avoided discussions of the past, and the nebulous future garnered little attention. She related what was going on in her life now, almost eagerly. When the week leading up to her visit had been close to uninspiring, she made up events to give him something to think about. When she explained things to him, she called him Sage if she felt she had to use a name of any kind. She wasn’t ready to use the word “Dad,” but she imagined that someday she would.
Photograph by John Hemmings
About the Author
Bill Stenson was born in Nelson, B.C., went to a one-room school-house on Thetis Island and grew up on a small farm in Duncan. He became a teacher because he loved literature and taught English and Creative Writing at various high schools, the Victoria School of Writing and the University of Victoria. He and Terence Young founded the well-known Claremont Review, an international literary magazine for young adult writers that is still going today. As well as editing the magazine for many years, he wrote a short story collection, Translating Women, and two novels, Svoboda and Hanne and Her Brother, published by Thistledown Press. He has also published stories in many magazines, including; Grain, The Malahat Review, The Antigonish Review, filling Station, Blood and Aphorisms, Wascana Review, Prairie Fire, Toronto Star, The New Quarterly, Prism International and the Nashwaak Review. Stenson was a finalist for the 2nd Great BC Novel Contest (2013) and a winner of the 4th Great BC Novel Contest (2017). He was also a finalist for the Prism International Fiction Contest and the Prairie Fire Short Fiction Contest. He lives with his wife, poet Susan Stenson, in the Cowichan Valley and writes every day.
Acknowledgements
Research for this novel was helped along by Rosalee Fornasier and the Sparwood Historical Society, Terri Tombossa and Ron Ulrich and the kind folks at the Fernie Museum and also David McCoy whose insights into mining were invaluable. Thanks to all of you.
Thanks also to John Lent and Audrey Thomas for their belief in the manuscript and to Mona Fertig, Pearl Luke, Mark Hand and Judith Brand at Mother Tongue Publishing for their patience and insight. I have been blessed by you all.
PREVIOUS WINNERS OF THE GREAT BC NOVEL CONTEST
Everything Was Good-bye by Gurjinder Basran (2010)
Lucky by Kathryn Para (2013)