Through Different Eyes

by Karen Charleson

  The next morning, Nona was pretty sure that Ruby was still not home. After the kids headed off for school, Nona waited for Martin to leave for his boat. There had to be so much work left to getting the Queen ready, but there was still no sign of Martin making a move. By mid-morning, Nona was stiff from sitting in her kitchen chair. Her knees seemed to freeze up these days whenever she kept them in the same position for too long. She got up and walked around her small kitchen until she could feel her legs loosening up. She had best get busy with her own cleaning. Watching out for Martin and Ruby would have to wait.

  Two full days passed before Ruby came home. By that time, Martin had finally left for his boat. Shortly afterward, Nona saw that Ruby was still wearing the same blue jeans and pale red jacket that she had worn three days earlier. She walked ever so slowly towards her own house. No light went on in the living room or kitchen. In fact, there were no signs of Ruby even being home for the rest of the morning or afternoon. No one — not Martin, Thomas, Rebecca, or Millie — went home for lunch either. Ruby did not leave again though; Nona was pretty sure of that. The prodigal wife had probably gone straight to bed.

  Ruby must have gone on a bender. Though she was not a regular drinker, there were stories about her drinking in the past, just like there were stories about Martin’s drinking in the past. Yes, there were always stories if you went back far enough. Even back then, Nona could have counted on the fingers of one hand how many times she had heard anything about either of them. Ruby was probably sicker than a dog. Word had already spread around Kitsum that Ruby had been drinking at the Clydesdale house. Sure, Ethel Clydesdale was her relative, but even so, what a place for her to go!

  Then life seemed to return to normal. The next morning, Martin was seen walking towards the floats. Brenda and Junior sauntered down the road in the opposite direction toward the high school bus stop. Tom, Becky, and Millie piled out of the kitchen door after everyone else had left, also on their way to school. Then Nona could see Ruby’s familiar shape passing behind the kitchen window.

  Later on, she heard Martin talking to one of his fishing buddies on the marine radio that she still used. He would be leaving for the fishing grounds after lunch. Ruby would have her radio on across the street too; Nona knew that she would have heard. That was what you did when you were married to a fisherman: you listened to the radio to find out what he was doing, if he was catching fish, and when he would be home. That was exactly what she had done when Harry was alive and fishing.

  Soon enough, it was time for bed. She had already stayed up a lot later than she had intended. However, her neighbour stayed up in her living room, and the kids stayed up with her. It was nearly ten o’clock when the car pulled up in the driveway. By the light of their porch, Nona recognized Monica, Ruby’s younger sister. She wondered if Ruby had called for her, although that seemed unlikely. She could not imagine Ruby asking anyone — even her sister — for help with this one. She would have had to give her the gory details, and Ruby was far too proud to do that. Monica’s arrival must have been sheer coincidence.

  Nona had always had a soft spot for Monica. The girl had been just a teenager when she came to live with Ruby and Martin. Her and Ruby’s parents had died in that horrible truck accident on the way to Port Hope from Campbell River. Thomas had owned a truck before most folks in Kitsum. He had parked it at the Chinese restaurant in Port Hope whenever they were home. People said that he used to give the restaurant owners fish for watching it. He was another good fisherman — Thomas. Nona remembered that his boat used to be called the North Sea.

  Monica had done well for herself. When it was time for her to graduate at the new high school in Port Hope, she was already a bit of a local celebrity. A story about her was even in the Hope newspaper on account of her winning an important university scholarship. The Port Hope school made a big deal out of that, using her as their Kitsum success story. They had included Kitsum students to increase their enrolment numbers and get the high school built, although they would never admit it. Instead, they used Monica as proof of how good their school was for Kitsum.

  Monica was special though; there was no doubt about that. Not many Kitsum kids had done as well as she had. She had enrolled at university in Vancouver and came home on the holidays. Monica had also come for Harry’s funeral; that was what mattered to Nona. She had come to the house and had sat with Nona and Charlie and Harry’s family. She had even helped with feeding everyone and keeping things tidy. Monica was younger than Charlie, but Nona had always thought that the two of them would have made a good couple. Though by the time Monica was going to university, it was too late. Charlie had fallen head over heels for Molly, a woman his own age from Hartley Bay — way up the coast. She had taken Charlie away from Kitsum, and for Nona, that was awfully hard to get over.

  Nona went to her bedroom, still lost in thought. Yes, life would have been very different if Charlie and Monica had married. However, before she had even put her head to her pillow, she realized her foolishness. To wish away her precious grandchildren; what was the matter with her? She was overtired from staying up too late. Maybe she had made too many assumptions about the Joes. They would do okay without her holding vigil. She would bake bread in the morning and clean her house. Then she would get back to her own business and see if Charlie and Molly and the children were still coming for a visit.

  THREE

  Monica had left the apartment while Saul was still asleep. She had not even dared to take a shower or turn on the overhead kitchen lights or do much of anything that would have risked waking him and beginning another dragged-out conversation. This day, she had only wanted to get to work, put in her hours, and be on her way home to Kitsum. Arriving at the office before seven meant putting in an extra two hours before most of the others arrived. Those hours — plus the overtime she had gathered in the previous weeks — were more than enough to excuse her from the job for the time that she needed to make her long trek back home.

  Monica had been in the Membership Branch at the Department of Indian Affairs for nearly three years. She had worked her ass off to complete an anthropology degree, only to end up in the maze of a downtown Vancouver office building, another flunky in a labyrinthine bureaucracy completing tasks and reports that were largely useless. Saul had advised her that the job was merely a stepping stone. It was an entry point, he had explained, a place from which she could “springboard” to another position where she could make a difference. Monica had once believed him. His coaching had got her through the first two years.

  The trip to Kitsum involved a two-hour ferry ride to the Island, followed by another two hours on the highway to Campbell River. That was only the first part of the trip. From Campbell River, there was a minimum four-hour drive with the second half on unpaved logging roads. A late-morning ferry would put her back in Kitsum after dark. She figured that the roads would still be good though. It had not snowed yet that fall. Saul — ever practical Saul — had wanted her to wait until the Christmas holidays. Then she could stay for more than the weekend and really make the most out of all that travelling time. Once again, his logic was flawless. Monica did not have the energy to explain to him that Christmas was too far away. Saul had not appreciated her reasons for leaving early; he had only noted that she was skipping out of the conference they had planned to attend together. She had packed her overnight bag without another word.

  The drive always took longer than she planned. She made one stop to use a gas station washroom and then another to pick up fresh fruit and vegetables and treats for her nephews and nieces. She had not intended to take a long time, but the sky was already darkening when she reached the cut-off from the highway. From that point on, the way turned into a mostly single-lane gravel road that made its own convoluted journey through the mountain passes across the island to the western coast. Within ten or fifteen minutes of slow travelling on that logging road, blackness had surrounded her. This was nothing like drivin
g at night in Vancouver. Here darkness meant the complete absence of light. She no longer felt like she was even inside her vehicle. She was crawling along the road with only her meagre headlights separating her from an infinity of blackness.

  It was impossible to count or individually identify all of the switchbacks. She imagined, rather than saw, the road clinging to towering walls of rock — sheer cliffs that fell into voids of apparent nothingness. In the vastness of the dark, whole mountains and entire forested valleys were simply absent. The pouring rivers at the bottoms of the cliffs, the canyons and narrow carved valleys, the boulders and discarded tree trunks, the gnarled root mazes that had slid down mountainsides shaved of their forest coverings; they were all gone. She knew their presence solely from memory. The anticipated two-hour drive from the blacktop highway stretched into three, then nearly four, hours. Around every corner she was expecting her car’s high beams to pick up the Welcome to Port Hope sign that the town had hired some laid-off logger to create with a chainsaw. Gravel and loose stones struck the bottom of her car. Through her partially open window, she awaited the first faint taste of salt in the air.

  They had found her and Ruby’s parents along one of these stretches. September, it had been. Over ten years ago already. Their truck was flattened, bent nearly beyond recognition amidst the boulders and debris only metres above the rapids on the Tasgish River. The big storms with the really heavy rains had arrived early that year. The river had been raging. Only a helicopter and rescue unit could pry the old red pickup from between the rocks so that it could be lifted with the bodies of her parents still inside — out of the canyon and over the last mountain to the scrapyard in Port Hope.

  The road never failed to remind her. Her mother and father had been forced off the road by a loaded logging truck. The skid marks — where the huge truck tried to stop — had been long erased, but she could still see them clearly. It had been for her that they had made the trip out. She was their youngest, the one who was attending high school in Campbell River. They had been driving home after dropping her off at the start of another school year.

  When Monica had all but given up waiting for it, suddenly the Welcome sign was there, looming just above her. She stepped on the brakes to look at it. There was a painted mountain scene with snow and a glacier trailing down to a blue-green sea. Beneath “Welcome to Port Hope” someone had printed, in identical but smaller letters, “and Kitsum.”

  Port Hope residents liked to consider themselves a town, but that label was quite a stretch. Well under a thousand people lived there. As far as Monica knew, Port Hope remained the incorporated village that it had become when she was a kid in the early 1960s. She remembered hearing her parents talking about it. The road that Coast Forest Products had forced through the mountains is what did it. Once the loggers could drive their own trucks in and out, they were no longer content to stay secluded in a logging camp for weeks on end. They brought their wives and girlfriends to visit and soon the company was bringing in trailers for family housing. Before the loggers had moved in — people in Kitsum still talked about those not-so-long-ago times — Hope had been a straggly collection of fishing families. There had been no road to the highway and no connection to Campbell River then — just a freight boat that arrived once every few weeks when weather permitted.

  Coast Forest Products kept extending their network of logging roads into new areas. When they started logging the Kitsum River Valley they pushed a connecting road from Port Hope into Kitsum. It took a matter of months for people in Kitsum to substitute their daylong boat trips into Port Hope — to visit the post office, the grocery store, the hospital, and liquor store — for an hour’s drive in a truck. Learning to drive and getting vehicles were the only things that slowed the process down from one of days to one of months. A few years after the road was put in, BC Hydro and BC Tel extended their lines into Kitsum. In the span of a small handful of years, Kitsum became a cog — albeit a very small one — in the wheels of the twentieth century.

  As soon as Monica spotted the gas station lights at the entrance to Port Hope, she flicked on her turn signal. Her car was still the only vehicle on the road, but she had learned to drive in the city, and those habits were firmly ingrained. After that journey through the darkness, she needed, much more than she needed the washroom or another cup of stale coffee, to announce her successful arrival to some living soul.

  Beneath the brightness of the station lights, Daniel Smith was looking up from filling his truck’s gas tank at the antiquated pump. Monica released and stretched her cramped legs one at a time from her small car. She zippered her thin jacket against the night air that always felt colder at home than in Vancouver. “Uncle Dan,” she called.

  “Monica,” the elderly man answered slowly with intent. There was not a trace of surprise in his voice or on his face. Her uncle could have seen her only yesterday or, heck, even earlier that morning, the way he reacted. It was always like this, Monica thought, like she had never left or been away for any length of time.

  Pushing open the convenience store door, Monica came face to face with Daniel’s wife, Linda. In other circumstances, or if they had not found themselves so close to one another, the two women probably would not have hugged. As it was, staring one another in the eye, within touching distance, and with Daniel only steps away, they had little choice.

  “How’ve you been?” Monica was first to speak. “I’ve just gotten in. Just now.” She was still excited. Arrival was always a victory of sorts.

  “Oh,” the older woman responded. “You’ve come to see Ruby, then?”

  “Yes, yes.” Monica watched Linda’s cheeks jiggling ever so slightly. She had gained weight since the last time Monica had been home.

  “Good luck, dear.” Linda patted Monica none too gently on the shoulder and squeezed by her to exit the open door. “Wish Ruby the best from Dan and me. If she needs anything, tell her to let us know.”

  Linda spoke as if someone had died. Was that it? Monica panicked for a brief moment. Had someone passed away? She had been gone from Kitsum for enough years to no longer have the patience for the meandering, wait-and-eventually-find-out style of conversation that most of her relatives used. She followed Linda back outside.

  “Hey, what’s going on?”

  “You didn’t hear, then?” Lowering her voice so that Monica had to bend closer to catch all her words, Linda continued, “Ruby’s been having some trouble with Martin. Everyone thought that he was way past all of that, but he must have figured he could get away with it again. Running around like that.”

  By the time Daniel had returned from paying for the gas, Monica had a full enough picture of what had happened. Or what might have happened, she corrected herself. Linda was not exactly a person known for her accuracy. Still, Monica had heard the stories — from her own mother — about those times Martin had “gone haywire” when he and Ruby were still a young couple. Monica remembered it to be around the time that Brenda and Junior were still small, but before Tom and her younger nieces were born. He had been the talk of Kitsum then, her older sister’s husband. But not for long, she remembered. There had been maybe a month, she was guessing now, the first time, and then another month maybe a year or so later. But after that, there was nothing. Martin and Ruby settled down. They were happy. Those times were put into the background and they had faded away.

  Monica drove as fast as the potholed road to Kitsum would allow her. She had considered Ruby’s house to be her own home for many years now. Ruby and Martin had taken her in when their parents died. There had been no question about it. Ruby was a dozen years older than Monica. She had been married to Martin for what had seemed already a long time when the accident happened. Thomas was a baby then; Junior was starting kindergarten; Brenda was in elementary school. She remembered Brenda with absolute clarity. Her niece had been ecstatic and enthusiastic as only a six-year-old could be. The prospect of sharing her bedr
oom with her Auntie Monica had been a dream come true. Monica now realized that Brenda was one of only a few shining lights for her during what otherwise had been a very dark and depressed period.

  Once Monica was inside the old familiar kitchen door, there was no longer any time for her to think, worry, or recollect. Here, her nieces and nephews were talking and smiling and laughing. It was Monica’s first trip back since the previous spring and there was endless news. Ruby had kept supper as Monica knew that she would. It was food from home too: smoked dog salmon with baked potatoes. Nothing she had eaten in the city could compare to this.

  Ruby was quieter than usual, but with Becky and Millie and even Thomas chattering, there was no way to speak directly to her. Monica merely ate and listened, as Junior and Brenda joined in, taking turns at sharing a whole barrage of information. Her sister stood, leaning into the cupboards beside the stove, waiting for the kettle to boil. She looked tired, more tired than Monica could remember seeing her. Stress lines etched her face. Monica silently cursed Martin. It was his fault. He was the one who had done this to her sister.

  Normally, the kids would have stayed up as late as possible. Monica’s coming home was a special occasion and that would have given them a perfect excuse. Ruby would have had to threaten them to get them into bed. This night though, the suggestion of going to sleep came from Brenda, and her brothers and sisters went straight to their rooms without a word of complaint. Sensitive kids, Monica thought, and not for the first time. They knew very well that she and their mother needed to talk. They wanted their mother happy again.