Flying With Amelia

by Anne Degrace

“Anything?” Armstrong asked.

  “Nope. But I almost killed a packrat, trying to get it out of the kitchen. It was near tame, that thing. You okay? You look terrible.”

  “I need some sleep,” Armstrong said. “My shift starts at noon. I’m going to see if McGrath will take it.”

  Weiler leaned the broom against the wall. “Mail came. Col. Trevaine ordered all the mail held ’til the prisoner is found, but I’m sure he didn’t mean staff mail. Here.”

  “Damn. I almost had one ready to go.” Armstrong reached for the letter. The handwriting on the envelope was not Stephen’s, and he turned away so Weiler wouldn’t see his eyes.

  “Next time,” said Weiler, already returned to his duties, broom in hand.

  WHEN THE SEARCH party returned, Armstrong had been lying on his bunk for almost two hours, his eyes on the ceiling, but he wasn’t really seeing it. He was remembering Stephen, as a newborn, a toddler, a boy learning to gut a fish. Learning to drive a car. Learning to like girls.

  Learning to fire a rifle.

  Now a young man, missing in action.

  Horgan came in and flopped onto the bunk below. “Got him,” he said.

  Armstrong said nothing.

  “I dunno what he was thinking. He’d gone to see some girl, but then he just kept going. He was walking down the tracks, about three miles past the Dauphin station, like he was heading West to seek his fortune. Big red bull’s-eye on his back, broad daylight, it’s a wonder nobody stopped him. He said he was just tired, that’s all. You listening?”

  Armstrong said nothing.

  “Block was ready to shoot him, and I think he would’ve if we hadn’t been there. That would’ve caused a stink, wouldn’t it? Never mind we’d’ve had a revolt on our hands. Anyways, he’s gone. They sent him to Neys. Turns out he was as black a Nazi as they come. Dunno if he was here to stir things up or just have a bit of a holiday. Well, he’ll be with his own kind, there, anyways.”

  Armstrong said nothing.

  “Funny, you wouldn’t have thought so. I mean, he seemed like a nice guy. As nice as any of ’em are. I mean, do you ever think? You know, that they’re just like us? For every one we’ve got here, one of ours is over there.” He poked the bottom of the upper bunk with his foot. “Hell, you’d know, Charlie, wouldn’t you?”

  Horgan sighed and shifted in his bunk, and was quiet for several moments.

  “I mean, you gotta think, sometimes, what’s the point?”

  IT WAS PAST midnight when Armstrong made his way back to the shore. He hadn’t eaten, and as a result was light-headed, but the shaking had stopped. In the night sky were a million points of light, the effect dizzying. Walking slowly, left leg just a little slower than the right, Armstrong moved past the dugout canoes, his fingers tracing the gouges left by prisoners’ chisels. He lowered himself to the ground with some difficulty, stretching the offending leg out slowly beside its mate, absurdly grateful for the cold ground beneath him. He lay back and, putting his hands behind his head, regarded the brilliant firmament above.

  There’s Cassiopeia, he said in his mind to the boy who wasn’t there. There’s Orion.

  From somewhere in the forest rose a chorus of canine voices, in all of their colours, their song a strange and glorious comfort.

  SEVEN

  TO BE LIKE YOU

  ·1957·

  IT WAS A beautiful evening as I walked back from work, with the scent of dry leaves and just the slightest hint of snow in the air. Behind me, the dark buildings of the dormitory for the Doukhobor children receded; they would be sitting down by now, at the long tables for the evening meal, while I considered what I might make for our own. There was a chilly sunset that turned the sky and the surface of the lake a rosy pink, even though you couldn’t actually see the sun for the mountains. Mrs. Sato’s tiny house looked like something from a fairy tale as I approached, with its dark shingles and its windows glowing yellow in the dusk.

  When the door opened I was struck first with the smell of some sort of food cooking, something Japanese. Something sour, and salty. Then I was struck with Audrey, who threw her three-year-old body full tilt into my legs, almost knocking me over. Mrs. Sato came up and put her dark hand on Audrey’s white-blonde head, and Audrey looked up at her with a smile that made me just a bit jealous. Audrey loved Mrs. Sato.

  “You look tired.” Mrs. Sato made ushering motions with her hands, and I stepped inside and shut the door. It wasn’t hard; I was tired. “You and Audrey stay,” she said. “I made some nice food. Come. Sit down.”

  Mrs. Sato’s voice reminded me of a bird. She was very slight; around her I felt large and awkward, and yet I was no bigger than I was before Audrey was born — and I felt young, my twenty-three years to her years, whatever they were. Forty? Fifty? I couldn’t tell. I am five foot six to Mrs. Sato’s five foot nothing, and yet she filled her small kitchen as she bustled about between the stove and the wooden table with its two chairs, while I sat gratefully with Audrey on my lap. My feet throbbed.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Sato,” I said, and I meant it for more than just the bowls of rice and vegetables and pork she put in front of us. “You’re so kind to us. And I don’t pay you enough.”

  It was always this way for me: the push and pull of gratitude and jealousy. I wanted Audrey all day, every day. This separation wasn’t fair. Mrs. Sato smiled and sat across from me, picking up chopsticks. For Audrey and me, she keeps two forks in her drawer.

  “Ah, no. You pay me fine. And Audrey is a very good girl. It is good to have a child in my home. I will call you Bernice? And you must call me by my other name, now. I have been looking after Audrey for how long now? Two months? Call me Natsumi.”

  “It’s a pretty name.”

  “It means ‘summer beauty.’ It was my mother’s name. If I had had a girl, it would have been her name.” She looked at Audrey. “Maybe you could call me Obaasan,” she said to her. “It means grandmother.”

  Audrey didn’t like her fork, and was pointing at Natsumi’s chopsticks. “No, you’ll make a mess,” I told her.

  Natsumi rose and retrieved a pair from the drawer. “Show your mother what you learned today,” she said.

  When Audrey fitted the small sticks in her three-year-old hand and brought a piece of pork to her lips, then looked at me proudly, I had to swallow to keep back the tears. “Finish up, Audrey,” I told her. “Mrs. Sato needs her house back, and we need to go home.”

  WHEN NATSUMI TALKS about her sons, I think: that’s what I want for Audrey and me. Natsumi’s boys are living away, now, one in Vancouver and one in Salmon Arm, but they come home as often as they can, Natsumi tells me, her voice warm whenever she speaks of them. I want that kind of warmth, that kind of family. I want Audrey to have exactly what I didn’t have growing up in Kamloops.

  When I was leaving my final foster placement at George and Norma’s, Norma sat me down and said: “Bernice Murphy, it stops with you. Whatever bad things happened for your mum and for you when you were small, and I don’t know, maybe your granny before that — that’s all behind you. It has to stop somewhere.”

  Of course, one thing I didn’t have in Kamloops is the thing I can’t give to Audrey either, and that’s a father. One of my earliest memories is seeing a man lying down under a tree in the park near our house. I was sure he must be my dad, because the other kids all had one. Who knows where ideas come from in the mind of a little kid? I picked a big bunch of flowers from somebody’s garden and brought them to him. We sat and talked — I can’t remember what we talked about — and I thought my father was a very nice man after all, so I didn’t understand when I was spanked, later, for talking to a stranger and for stealing flowers.

  I never did find my dad, and Harvey won’t find us. Joyce at the store says the right man could come along for me and Audrey any day now. But I have a job, we have
a house, and we have Natsumi and Joyce, and I suppose we’ll be all right anyway.

  I would pick up Audrey from Natsumi’s each day as soon as I got off shift at the Dormitory. I was off at five, having got through lunch preparation and cleanup. There are fewer of us now, and I was lucky to get the job at all. Principal Neilson has told me more than once we are on a shoestring budget. We have the kids doing a lot of the work, which doesn’t seem right to me. Kids should be kids, I figure, no matter what their parents did. I think about how much I miss Audrey over the course of a workday, and I can only imagine how much the Doukhobor parents must miss their children. They come every other Sunday, visiting through the chain-link fence. Breaks my heart. But then I think: this must be better for these children. It has to stop somewhere.

  But how would I feel if it was Audrey?

  I was thinking about Audrey, as usual, as I was opening cupboards in the Dormitory kitchen. Wondering if I could ever convince Mr. Neilson to let me bring her to work with me, where she might colour pictures quietly in a corner, but I knew the answer already. As I pulled out a sack of potatoes for peeling, I wondered what was keeping my helper, Anna, a sullen girl of twelve or so. It was Saturday: some of the kids were raking leaves, and those assigned duties later in the day were playing ball or hanging around in small groups. The Matron, Mrs. Doerksen, was somewhere else, which was fine with me. Pale light came through the big windows in the kitchen, and I could hear childish voices outside, now and then a Russian word, although speaking Russian was forbidden here.

  I didn’t hear the girl so much as feel her behind me in the doorway. A younger girl than Anna, perhaps nine, but small for her age, with wide-set, pale eyes and fine, light hair. For a moment she made me think of Audrey, the way Audrey might look a few years from now. She didn’t smile, but stayed there, staring.

  “Where’s Anna?” I asked her.

  “She went home.”

  “Home?” Nobody went home.

  “Her father died. She was allowed to go to the funeral.”

  She said this without emotion, as if it was an everyday occurrence. I wondered, not for the first time, what went on in the heads of these children, but then, I had only been here since September; as Mrs. Doerksen said, perhaps it takes more than a few years to undo the damage done at home. “You’ll get used to it,” she told me. “They’re not like Canadian children.” And yet when I looked at this girl I thought: she can’t be so different.

  “What’s your name, then?” I asked.

  “Vera.”

  “Well then, Vera, if you are to be my helper today, let’s get started.”

  It was the quietest potato-peeling session I’ve ever experienced. I found myself looking down at that blonde head, those fingers working the peeler, as my attempts at conversation fell flat until I gave up and let her work in silence.

  IN KAMLOOPS, THE Indian kids spent the school year all together in a residential school, a big brick building with small windows. I never thought about them much until I graduated from high school, and for a short time before I met Harvey and got pregnant and married and abandoned all in the space of a year, I worked at the Woolworth’s lunch counter with an Indian girl called Leona.

  It was a town favourite, that lunch counter. You could get a ham and cheese toasted three-decker sandwich for fifty cents, and top it off with the Deluxe Tulip Sundae for two bits. Sometimes staff were allowed to eat whatever was getting old, and once Leona and I, at the end of our shift, sat down and between us polished off an apple pie. And we talked.

  I hadn’t talked much to Leona before, as she kept to herself for the most part. Once when we were counting tips she looked at my pile of silver and abruptly swept her smaller pile into her hand and into her pocket without counting. “Goes with the territory,” she said, then pulled her long, shiny black hair out of its ponytail and pushed through the glass doors to meet a boy with black hair like hers, who was waiting in a rusted pickup truck.

  Anyway, it might have been the lazy summer evening sun coming through the windows that evening, our full stomachs and the clean counters, or just that nobody was waiting for either of us and there didn’t seem to be any hurry to go anywhere, but Leona got talking. She told me about the day the RCMP came to take her and her little brother. About the look on her parents’ faces the day they left. About how she and her brother were separated, and how afraid she knew he felt, and she couldn’t do anything about it. She told me about getting the strap for speaking Shuswap, and she said that wasn’t the worst of it. She spoke in slow, measured tones as she twirled her fork in her long, slender fingers.

  “Why?” I asked her when she had finished speaking.

  “Why what?”

  “Why did they make you go?”

  A fly buzzed in the window. We had locked the door and flipped the sign closed, but someone rattled the door anyway, then moved on.

  “Because they wanted us to be like you.”

  We had been talking companionably, but she spat these last words. I had no words to return, my mind a turmoil of feelings I couldn’t quite identify: offended; hurt; something else, something like shame. We put our sweaters on and she pushed through the door ahead, leaving me to lock up. I had the keys anyway; Mr. Ferguson had given them to me, even though Leona had worked there longer.

  THERE WERE A lot of potatoes, but Vera didn’t complain. When she was finished, on impulse I told her to wait, and she stood, hands at her sides, by a bowl of peeled potatoes almost as big as she was. In the staff cupboard were all sorts of things to keep a boring job at bay: bags of nuts, cookies. At the back, a bottle of rye whisky. There were packages I suspected came from the parents for the children, and although I hadn’t asked, Mrs. Doerksen had volunteered the information that it was better to take the food and give it to the children a bit at a time, or there would be fights. Still, I never saw the children receiving anything from the cupboard. I took an orange from a bag, and then, on impulse, took a second.

  “Thank you, Vera,” I said. “You’ve been a help today. Maybe there’s a friend you’d like to share with.”

  It was the first time she smiled, and it lit the room. Later, as I left through the big front gates, I felt that stare again. I turned, and Vera waved at me through the fence. I waved back, and hurried home to my own girl. There was an odd feeling in my chest, and I picked up my pace, my heels clicking on the road, and pulled my coat closer around me.

  Mrs. Sato — Natsumi — did not ask us for supper that evening, which was fine as I would have had to say no. Audrey was happy to see me but gave Natsumi a long hug around her knees before we left. As we walked the short distance to our own small house I held Audrey’s hand perhaps a little tighter than I might have.

  The house was what brought me to New Denver in the first place. It was left to me by George and Norma. Sorry as I was about their car accident, the house — it had belonged to George’s family, I guess — couldn’t have come at a better time, with Audrey not quite three and Harvey clearly not coming back.

  Our house, when I pushed open the door, was cold, and no smell of cooking greeted us. But I got things warmed up and Audrey into her pajamas, and we read The Little Engine That Could in the big armchair. I tucked my little girl into bed with her stuffed cat. Her breathing was soft, her mouth relaxed, while just above the edge of the covers the wide-spaced button eyes of the cat stared at me. I knew it was silly, but I pulled the covers up a little higher, until I could no longer see them.

  I GOT MONDAYS off because of working Saturday at the Dormitory, and so it was one Monday a few weeks later that I gathered up my change, dressed Audrey in the blue sailor dress I’d bought from the Simpsons-Sears catalogue, and walked to the grocery store. Joyce, who had become something of a friend, waved me to sit on the opposite side of the counter and stay for coffee, as I’d hoped she would. I was lonely, I guess, for adult company. There was
nobody in the store, and Audrey began jumping from square to square on the tiled floor and singing “Teddy Bears’ Picnic”: If you go down to the woods today —

  We talked about this and that, and then: “It’s nice that you’ve got Natsumi to look after Audrey,” Joyce said, leaning on the counter and watching as Audrey came to the last twin squares of her imagined hopscotch at the same point as she got to the word surprise!, then jumped on her chubby legs to face towards us and, head down, continue: For every bear that ever there was —

  “Audrey likes her,” I nodded. Joyce had poured us both a cup of coffee and I had pulled the tall stool up to the counter. She felt like a real friend at that moment, which might explain why I said: “She’s teaching her stuff I don’t know I like very much.”

  “Like what?”

  “Japanese stuff. Maybe I should find someone else to look after her. A Canadian.”

  Joyce put her cup down. “You won’t find anyone kinder than Natsumi,” she told me. Her voice was firm, and made me feel the twenty years between us. “And anyway, she is Canadian.”

  “She is?”

  “Sure. She was born in Vancouver. She came with her husband and her boys at the start of the war. The boys would have been in their early teens, I guess.”

  “Why did they come here?”

  “They didn’t have any choice.”

  Audrey had become bored with her game and came over to tug on my hand. “Let’s go, Mummy,” she said.

  “Just a minute, honey.” I put my hand on her head; sometimes it seemed as if my hand and her head were meant for one another. I looked at Joyce. “Go on.”

  “Let’s go, Mummy,” whined Audrey, pulling.

  Joyce waved us off. “Just ask her sometime,” she said, and we left with the door banging behind us and a dozen brown eggs tucked under my arm. I didn’t realize until later I’d forgotten to pay for them.

  VERA BECAME MY regular Saturday helper. As time passed, we learned to work in companionable silence most of the time. I wasn’t even sure how good Vera’s English was. I wondered about her parents. How would it be for them to see Vera so seldom? She had told me that she had no brothers or sisters. And as I worked with Vera beside me, our hands, as usual, in a bowl of potatoes and peels, I wondered at the stories I’d heard.