Through Different Eyes

by Karen Charleson

  “Now wait a minute, Saul. It’s not like that. Michael had nothing to do with my not wanting to move to Ottawa or not going back to Vancouver. I already explained that to you on the phone and in my letter. I was as honest as I could be.”

  “Yes, honest Monica.” Saul practically spat the words. His voice was louder now. “Did you think I was too stupid to notice how interested in Kitsum you became? After years of barely wanting to come here, you suddenly had this need to be home all the time.”

  Saul was getting uglier. Monica cursed herself again for inviting him inside the apartment. She should have had it out with him in the schoolyard, the way the kids did. Then she could have walked away, and slammed her own door in his face. “Look, Saul, I am not going to listen to baseless accusations, especially not in my own home…”

  They both heard the doorknob turning. They both watched as Michael entered the room and took a cup from the shelf. He poured himself some tea and settled onto the second kitchen chair before venturing an introduction. “Michael Clydesdale,” he said, extending his hand to Saul.

  Saul ignored it. “I’ve heard,” he muttered.

  It took him but a moment to recover. Monica knew that Saul would have been horrified to see himself as intentionally rude. Then he leaned over and shook Michael’s hand. “Saul Arbess,” he said clearly.

  Michael did not betray a thing. Saul could as easily have been a parent of one of the schoolchildren, a teacher, or one of Monica’s relatives. He sipped his tea and prepared himself to listen.

  “You see…Michael…I’ve travelled here to Kitsum, to ask Monica to come back to Ottawa with me.”

  Only Michael’s presence saved Monica from complete outrage. How dare Saul? She clenched and unclenched her fists beneath the small table. Michael reached for the candy dish that Monica had set out the night before. Tilting it slightly forward, he offered it toward Saul. “Candy?”

  “No…no thank you.” Saul looked confused, maybe even afraid. He had studied Aboriginal peoples and cultures and languages for so many years, and yet he still stiffened whenever he passed a Native man on the street. He would have never thought that Monica noticed, but she noticed every single time. Reality for Saul never quite matched his research.

  Not taking his eyes from Saul, Michael removed his hand from the dish and rested it atop Monica’s. He stretched his legs beneath the table and stifled a yawn. Monica inched sideways on her chair and leaned against him.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she said quietly.

  Without another word, Saul rose and left the apartment. Monica and Michael sat in the stillness, finishing their tea. Once she felt certain that Saul was not coming back, Monica got up and started supper.

  Monica watched as the blinker at the entrance to the harbour cast its light over the trees at First Point. From the beach fronting Kitsum, she and Michael watched the moon rise in the eastern sky. Neither of them had much to say. Monica believed that something of consequence had been settled that day. She had also made a profound commitment to the man standing beside her. Michael suggested that they stop by his uncle’s house on their way home. Monica recalled having been there only twice before, years ago when she had gone there with other teenagers to party. She nodded and followed Michael. It was not far.

  Ethel and Fred were obviously surprised to see them. They invited them to stay for tea, and nodded courteously when Michael introduced Monica. They already knew who she was, but they followed Michael’s lead. Ethel poured tea and sliced fresh bread for the table. Then she explained to Monica how they were related, something Monica had never clearly understood and would have been too embarrassed to ask about directly. According to Ethel, her mother and Monica’s mother, Joan, had been first cousins. Ethel’s mother’s father and Monica’s mother’s mother were siblings. Ethel explained the relationship with care. It was closer than Monica had realized. Maybe it was because of all the deaths that she did not remember the connection so well. That older generation was all gone by the time she was a child, including Ethel’s parents and her own mother’s parents. Joan had been the oldest one in her family still alive when she and Ruby were growing up.

  The four of them, along with Michael’s Uncle Murray, sat in the kitchen having tea and bread with peanut butter and jam. There was not too much conversation after Ethel’s explanation; there were definitely plenty of awkward gaps in their talk, but Monica could not say that it was wholly uncomfortable. Ethel and Fred clearly made an effort to smile and appear friendly. There was no way that Michael or Monica could feel that they were not welcome. Occasionally, Fred or Murray said something to Michael about work or the fishing coming up. They talked some about the herring run that year. The stretches of quiet did not seem to bother Michael. Monica watched him calmly sip his tea. She noticed that he held his cup — not by the handle but opposite the handle with his whole hand — exactly like his Uncle Murray. When Michael said that it was time for them to leave, Ethel told Monica to give Ruby her best.

  On the walk home, Michael kept his arm around her. “They’re pretty quiet when they’re not drinking,” he observed, partly to himself. Then he began to hum. By the time they reached the school, he was singing.

  One day, there was one of those bursts of hot sunny weather that appear unexpectedly in the midst of the usual chilly wetness of mid-April. Monica and Michael decided to pack a lunch and leave early in the morning to walk out to Lone Point.

  “My mom used to like to party here,” Michael told Monica as they took their first rest break at Corner Beach. “I remember being out here lots when I was a little kid. They’d build a fire, and sit around it. It was lots of fun in the daytime. Me and some of the other kids, we’d run all over, all the way to Sandy Beach sometimes. The part I never liked was heading back home in the dark. I’d have to watch out for my mom all the time. She’d be pretty loaded by then and it wasn’t easy in the dark. We never brought flashlights. I don’t know how many times I thought that I had lost her…”

  Michael had not talked much about his mother or about growing up. Monica, in contrast, seemed to constantly be remembering aloud. Living back in Kitsum brought all her old memories to the forefront. Seasonal events, people, sounds, even smells; they were always triggering recollections. She was about to tell her own story about Corner Beach — the one about the day that she and Ruby, along with preschoolers Junior and Brenda, had been within touching distance of a mother deer and her three white-spotted fawns — but Michael continued.

  “The caves there.” He pointed up the beach toward the hollows in the rock face that had been worn deeper and deeper by centuries of waves pounding the shore. “That’s where they’d take her.”

  The look on his face kept Monica from interjecting.

  “My mom,” he answered softly as though she had spoken. “Even as a little kid, I knew what for. I guess it just seemed normal then. Christ, I was just a dumb kid. I thought about it later, as a teenager, and it pissed me off so much. Still does, actually. Those men — and I still see some of them around Kitsum — they abused the hell out of my mom.”

  Monica did not say anything. She stepped closer to Michael. His childhood had been quite different from hers. He had often told her how lucky she had been, and she did not doubt the truth of that. They had walked a fair ways past the caves before Michael spoke again.

  “You know what still gets me? They were there too…my uncles, Fred and Murray. Plenty of times, they were there and they just let those guys take advantage of my mom. Their own sister!”

  “It was the booze, Michael,” Monica said softly. “You know it was the booze.”

  “Yeah, I do know that. They would do anything for a bottle or another drink once they’d started. The nuns at school — at Christie — they made it sound like they were just depraved somehow. Savages, without morals. Heathens. That Sister Margaret, she was the worst. I was maybe seven years old and she’d tell me that
my uncles were drunks…that my mother was a whore…that they were all going to hell.

  “Back then, I believed her. Part of me, for sure, believed. I’d get back home at Christmas or in the summertime, and I’d hate my uncles for a while. I’d try to stay away from them, but I didn’t have anywhere else to go. Uncle Fred and Uncle Murray, they’d see how I was, but they’d just keep taking care of me anyways. Feeding me, showing me stuff on the boat, taking me fishing until gradually…I’d forget about what those damned nuns had said.”

  Sandy Beach was visible in the distance. At its far end was Lone Point. Monica squeezed Michael’s hand. Though this was all bad stuff that he talked about — horrible stuff — learning about his past made her feel closer to him. He was speaking these things aloud and acknowledging them, and also in that acknowledgement putting them further away where their rawness could scratch less at the heart. They sat together on a partially dry log that had been pushed above the high tide line. The sun was hot now, so hot that Monica had to remove the sweater she had been wearing. A pair of bald eagles glared down at them from a single treetop branch. The forest was predominantly spruce here, dark and seemingly impenetrable. However, they both knew of a multitude of ways inside the woods; there were bear and other animal trails, natural openings created by fallen trees or bushes bent by the wind. Once you were past the initial thicket of growth spurred on by direct sunlight, the forest opened into far more accessible spaces beneath the upper canopy of branches.

  “Allison talked it all out of me. Made me face some of that anger that built up as a kid. That anger I didn’t or wouldn’t admit that I carried around, and for sure had no idea how to control. I was lucky. Just lucky to end up with her and Mitch. They understood. Not in the way counsellors and those types ‘understand,’ but she knew what I was going through. She didn’t say too much but I guess her own growing up was pretty tough. She’s a real caring person. She was the first one who ever told me straight out that everything wasn’t my fault. It may not have been the fault of my mother or my uncles, but it certainly was not mine. That was the start, you know. The start of me learning how to let go of blaming them all the time. To look at them instead and see all the good, how hard they tried, how much — despite impossible situations — they had tried to do for me.”

  Michael had promised to bring her to meet Allison and Mitch when they next went to Campbell River. She already knew the bare bones of how he had ended up in their home. Michael had told her that when he finished Grade 7 at the residential school, his uncles had wanted him to stay in Kitsum even though his mother had moved to Vancouver. The high school in Port Hope was opening and some Kitsum kids were attending. It was in response to Monica telling him about her staying home for Grade 12 that Michael had told her about that. They had joked about it then, about how Monica could have started “dating” him when he was in Grade 8. Before he got the chance to stay home and go to school in Hope, however, Social Services had stepped in. They deemed Fred and Ethel unsuitable as guardians and placed him in a foster home in Campbell River. After two of those foster homes — and getting into a whole lot of trouble — Michael had been placed with Mitch and Allison.

  The section of shoreline covered with boulders took the longest to cross. For close to a kilometre, they passed a field of wet rocks made slippery by strewn kelp, seagrasses, and the slime left by tide after tide. They knew enough to take the long route, largely above the high tide line, where the biggest rocks appeared only sporadically and where it was possible to sometimes weave their way through the boulder field across gravel and pebbles. The last long section of beach was a leisurely stroll. They stopped to examine particularly strange looking pieces of driftwood, battered plastic bottles imprinted with Chinese or Japanese characters, floats that had broken from fishing nets, and a hodgepodge of remnants tossed by the sea onto the shore. They remembered other occasions when they had walked the beach, and they agreed that for both of them, it had been a long time — too long.

  They reached Lone Point by early afternoon. The walk had taken them nearly four hours. Michael made a fire. They unpacked and began to eat their sandwiches, watching the driftwood burn and staring out at the open Pacific. Waves, even on such a calm day, pounded the gravel beach. Each wave carried a hundred, a thousand, tiny little pebbles back and forth, back and forth. Monica and Michael made plans to come back some other weekend. They would come in the summer, and bring blankets, and sleep under the stars. The possibilities were as vast as the ocean in front of them.

  EIGHTEEN

  It was not until her father got back from herring fishing — not all the way back to Kitsum, but back to Port Hardy at the top end of the Island — that Brenda’s mood finally altered a little. She only had two months left in her pregnancy, and the days had brightened. Her brothers and sisters no longer returned from school in semi-darkness; they actually had time to play outside before being called in for supper. Monica had not been over to the house, not even once. Brenda told herself that she would be satisfied if she never saw her aunt again.

  It was early afternoon when the phone rang. Ruby — anxious and cranky since Martin had been away for well over two weeks — answered on the second ring. From across the living room Brenda could tell that it was her dad. Her mother’s voice went from dull to thrilled immediately. After she had hung up, her mother beamed with replenished energy.

  “He’s in Port Hardy,” she told Brenda. She sounded as excited as one of the kids. When her mother was happy like that, Brenda thought she even looked like one of them. The beginnings of wrinkles, the ever so slight stoop, the weighted shoulders — they all seemed to vanish.

  Her mother’s happiness was contagious. Just as the arrival of herrings and kwukmis was an anticipated annual celebration, so was their father’s annual return from herring fishing. The whole family already knew that they had done well on the Pacific Queen. Her father had phoned home every time he had gone in somewhere for fuel or food. There would be new clothes for all of them and lots of groceries. Ruby still felt ashamed for having ruined the couch and television, and she had never mentioned new furniture, but Brenda guessed that was on the list as well. Thomas, Becky, and Millie took it to be a second Christmas.

  “You going to see him?” Brenda asked. She had already assumed that her mother would go to Port Hardy to meet her father. She did that almost every year.

  “The kids are all in school,” her mom started. “If I take them out now, they’ll miss the whole week. I don’t know.”

  All of them had taken a week off school the previous year. That had been lots of fun too, staying in the hotel and eating out and buying stuff. Mostly it was fun to fool around on the Pacific Queen, and to listen to their father’s stories about fishing that year. What was her mother’s issue with this year?

  “I’d like to go,” her mother ventured.

  “You should,” Brenda agreed.

  Ruby remained quiet. Perhaps she had guessed correctly that Brenda did not want to go to Port Hardy. It was bad enough seeing people from Kitsum. She did not even go into Port Hope for fear of running into anyone, but the prospect of seeing her father’s fishermen friends was too much. Was her mother afraid to leave her home alone? Was that preventing her from going to meet Martin?

  “I can stay home and take care of the kids. We’ll all be fine.”

  Her mother hesitated, but Brenda became excited by her own idea. “I’ll get them up for school, and make sure they don’t stay up late. If we run out of anything, Junior can charge it at Jimmy’s.”

  She half-expected a refusal from her mother, or at least an argument. Instead, her mother seemed to catch her enthusiasm. “Are you sure?” she asked.

  All her life, Brenda had seen her parents as her parents. It had only dawned on her in the past few months that they were also a couple. She had begun to recognize that her mother yelling at Tom for spilling the juice or Millie for soaking her last pair of dry shoes wa
s perhaps not about Tom or Millie. Brenda felt foolish for taking so long to see that her mother’s irritability had more to do with missing her husband, especially when he had been gone for such a long time. This year, she was pretty sure, had been worse than others. With all the worry Brenda had brought into the household, plus the crap about her father and Charmayne, her mother was having a tough time. “Mom,” Brenda said firmly. “You should go. Me and the kids — we’ll be okay.”

  Her mother did not need any more convincing after that. Packing for the trip would take only a matter of minutes. Brenda told her mother that she could leave right away, but she insisted on telling the children her plans first. She would leave before Martin called back though.

  “He said he’d phone again this evening. You can tell him I’m already on my way up.”

  Brenda smiled at that one. Together they sat waiting for Junior, Thomas, Becky, and Millie to get home from school. Brenda was impressed; despite her mother’s childlike excitement filling the air, she still had the patience to wait.

  Junior did not argue. In fact, he barely commented. Brenda knew that he was old enough to make his own arrangements if he wanted to go to Port Hardy badly enough. It was the younger kids who seemed unexpectedly understanding. Her mother’s promise to take them all to Campbell River when she and their father got back seemed to satisfy them. Just like that, their mother was heading out to the truck to drive up to Port Hardy.

  Brenda could not say that anything bad or even unpleasant happened over the next few days. However, the sunny days full of their bright promise were replaced by rain-full gusts and dark greyness that rolled in from the southeast. Once again, spring had been subdued by the still formidable power of winter. For the most part, the kids stayed on their best behaviour. Junior kept to his routine, leaving for the hall after supper and arriving back at the house just after ten. Thomas, without being asked, helped Junior with splitting, packing, and piling firewood. Thanks to the two of them, there was always a full pile beside their stove and plenty of small dry pieces to stoke the fire back up each morning. Becky and Millie willingly helped with the dishes after supper and even made extra efforts to keep their bedroom and the living room tidy.