Starlight

by Richard Wagamese

  Deacon nodded. It was a long speech for Starlight, and he recognized the effort it took. “It might become too real,” Deacon said. “You might take the mystery out of it.”

  Starlight looked at him levelly. “Something like that,” he said quietly.

  * * *

  —

  He found Roth at the Regal with a pool cue in one hand and a beer in the other. When the skinny man saw him enter he raised the beer in salute and grinned. Roth was one of those young men who seemed to naturally gravitate to his elders rather than finding cronies of his own age. The Regal in the afternoon and the local Legion at nights were where he could always be depended on to be surrounded by loquacious, voluble old men brimming with stories of foreign wars, simpler times, lost virtues, and colourful adventures of misdirected youth. Roth was one of their favourites. He had outrageous stories of his own and delighted in his chance to hold the floor whenever it came. He could swap tales with the best of them, flashing his toothy grin, his hands busy articulating a parallel language in the air, punctuating all of it with a raised glass and a nod or a wink. Starlight figured he was an old soul in a young man’s body and he never minded if his friend stayed longer with the elder men than he stated. He wandered over and sat at Roth’s table.

  “So there I am,” Roth was saying. “Higher than the arsehole of an eagle tryin’ to make sense of what she was trying to get across to me.”

  The four old men he was with laughed and eyed Starlight when he sat and grinned at him.

  “So as it turns out,” Roth continued, “she’d been a stripper once. Nimble little thing. Had more moves than the BC Lions backfield.”

  “Gotta make some moves ourselves, friend,” Starlight said.

  Roth looked at him gape-jawed in feigned amazement. “You’d actually deprive these gentlemen out of the end of this particularly arousing tale?”

  Starlight grinned. “Afraid so. But there’s always another occasion.”

  “That is a fact,” Roth said. “Gentlemen, you’ll have to wait for another time for the ending of this adventure. The big guy and I have errands.”

  They shook hands all around and turned and walked out of the Regal and stood in the late-afternoon sunlight.

  “You do know that I was just on the verge of relatin’ to those fellas the amazing and mindbending shapes and poses a girl like that can get herself into, don’tcha?”

  “Good thing I showed when I did then. You were likely to give heart attacks to those old guys.”

  “Ruth Ann,” Roth said wistfully. “Stage name was Casey Fox. I ever tell ya?”

  “You did. I ain’t been the same since.”

  Roth chuckled. “Shame a guy can’t hold on to adventures like that.”

  “I was amazed ya held on when it happened.”

  Roth roared with laughter and they made their way down the street toward the supermarket.

  IT SEEMED A SERVICEABLE SIZE. Endako. The town was a mix of new and old, the newer, bigger, more fashionable homes in a ring around the outside fringe with the smaller, more rustic, and history-laden buildings and homes strung out along the town’s centre. Emmy liked it immediately. It sat in a lush valley seemingly dropped down between the opposing line of ridges, cliffs, and mountain and the deep thrall of bush. It was miles away from any larger centre. If there was work here it would be good and honest. Emmy drove slowly through the streets and followed the road out of town and into the rural section to the northwest. She was looking for something in particular. She didn’t know where to find it, only hoping against hope that it actually existed. The girl had rolled her window down and pushed her face out to let the cool air blow across it. They followed the grid of concession roads into the bush and after a few miles she found what she was looking for.

  It was a long driveway, rutted and high with grass and weeds, and sheltered from view from the road by a stand of windbreak poplars and lilac bushes grown wild along the length of one side. No one had been there for a very long time. The house was a squat little building, wooden, with a small verandah in the front. A shed, busy falling in on itself, sat out behind. The house was greyed with age but the windows appeared whole and while tufts of grass thrust upward through the planks of the verandah there was a chimney and a solid-looking door. An outhouse stood thirty yards opposite the shed. There was a rusted water pump set on the concrete slab top of a well. A laggard wire fence encircled the house and there was a large garden gone to weed and rot to the south side. Paper and various articles of windblown junk clung to the walls. She parked the truck on the far side of the house and sat with both hands gripping the wheel, surveying everything.

  “This is it,” she said.

  “We’re gonna live here?” Winnie asked.

  “Yes. No one will come here. It’s abandoned.”

  “Geez. No wonder.”

  “It was likely a pretty little place in its day.”

  “Must not have been if people could just walk away from it.”

  “All places have stories in them, Winnie. We don’t know what this house would say if it could talk.”

  “It would probably say, ‘Ooh, that stinks.’ ”

  Emmy laughed. “Come on. Let’s take a look around.”

  They climbed out of the truck and wandered about the yard. Winnie kicked at clumps of shin-high twitch grass until she found a fallen limb and swept it back and forth in front of her while she walked. Emmy let her gaze travel everywhere. It was sunny and quiet and the breeze felt cool against her skin. She closed her eyes and spun in a lazy circle with her arms flung out wide at her sides and she heard Winnie giggle and the two of them swept around in circles with the ticklish feel of grass on their skin.

  “Can we keep it like this if we’re gonna live here?” Winnie asked when they stopped spinning.

  “Well, we’re gonna have to,” Emmy said. “For now anyhow. Once I find work and start bringin’ in a wage we can save for a regular place. Let’s look inside.”

  They walked to the sad and canted back porch. The boards were rotted out on the steps so they clambered up onto one corner using the support beam for leverage. When she leaned on the door it popped open easily. The air was dry and hot and odoured with dust and how she imagined loneliness must smell. But the walls were kempt except for curls of peeling wallpaper and faded paint, and though the floorboards creaked they were solid. She recognized the careful, accurate work of old tools and the precise, assured feel of callused hands on rough wood, a throwback to dim, younger days she barely recalled and inhabited even less. It was a workingman’s house. She admired the wainscotting, the mouldings, and the sculpted corners of door frames and windows. The newel post at the foot of the stairs was covered with dust and she rubbed it away with her palm so she could see the grain of the wood and marvelled at the sheen left upon it by a generation or two of children and elders and relatives in their daily ups-and-downs and tos-and-fros in this house, perched on the edge of a pasture in a valley limned by mountains. This was a house raised from the ground up with a clear-eyed and patient vision. A house built in community. She could feel the energy of its raising and the thrum of the thrust and trajectories of the lives it held within its grasp, nurturing them until they flew away, leaving their calls and shouts and laughter, whispers and talk to be held forever in the wood and beams and walls. There was a part of her she recognized in the old house and a part she did not recognize at all. It left her feeling wistful and she wanted to cry. Instead, she wiped her eyes and walked up the stairs with her daughter trailing along behind.

  There were three small bedrooms. One at the top of the stairs to the left and another to the right. Down a narrow hallway a third looked out over the backyard. The windows were guttered by dust and she cleared a circle with her sleeve and peered out across the yard to the adjoining fields then picked her daughter up and let her see too. None of the floors creaked. Winnie went to her hands and knees and peered through the floor grate to the ground floor.

  “How come we
can see right down, Mama?” she asked.

  “This house is old,” she said. “There’s a big stove down there that they burned wood in and the grates were so the hot air would rise and warm these rooms.”

  “You could spy on people and they wouldn’t even know it.”

  “You could. But spying was just a little bonus. Let’s go back outside and check out the water pump.”

  Winnie ran ahead of her and Emmy could hear her fling open the front door. She walked slowly out of the house, admiring its quaint, subdued aura of age. When she reached the hand pump Winnie was busy trying to lever it down. She reached past her and laid hold of the handle. It was gritty with rust. It barely moved even when she leaned her weight into it. She had to bounce on her toes to find leverage enough to move it a few inches and then jump up and down a handful of times before the handle dropped to its lowest. She wrestled with raising it again. Finally, after another round of struggle she felt the oxidation give way and the handle was easier to work. She pumped and pumped. She began to sweat with the effort. Winnie watched her with her lips clamped together and a determined look on her face. A small spume of dark brown water spilled from the spout and darkened the steel plate set into the concrete.

  “Yay!” Winnie cried.

  “Not yet,” Emmy said and pumped more furiously. Eventually the brown thinned and disappeared and she coaxed clear water from the well. She cupped a handful and raised it to her face and sniffed at it. There was no hard mineral odour. She took a small sip and smiled. “We have water,” she said.

  “Yay!” Winnie exclaimed again.

  “That’s the biggest thing. But we’re gonna need some things to clean this house up. I have enough money left for that and for some food. There’s no electricity so we’re gonna have to only buy what we can eat before it goes bad. I have to find work right away too.”

  “But we’re gonna stay here?”

  “We’re gonna stay. We’re gonna make this work. You and me. We can do this.”

  “And I get my choice of rooms, right?”

  “That’s right. But maybe in the beginning we’ll sleep together. I’ll buy blankets in town.”

  “Endako. That’s where we live now.”

  “Endako,” Emmy said. She looked around the property and along the visible length of the valley. “Who’da ever known.”

  * * *

  —

  She bought old-style mops with a rolling bucket that had a press handle for rinsing and a smaller, lighter one for washing walls. She bought several kinds of soap for floors, windows, and walls. She bought a heavy broom. There were blankets on sale at a market and she took four of them and a couple of pillows and a double-sized foam pad to sleep on. With the little cash she had left she bought bread, jam, cookies, fruit, vegetables they could eat raw and a sharp knife to cut cheese and a can opener for the cans of beans, tuna, sardines, and pudding for the girl. The townsfolk smiled at her and took her reticence for shyness and she felt a rural sort of welcome from them and was glad for the brief interactions. Winnie seemed to love the town and ran about ahead of her in the stores, exploring shelves and watching people. Endako was a small wonder to them both and they felt lighter and more keen on creating a home for themselves in the dilapidated house.

  She filled the bucket with water from the pump and together they carried and rolled it to the house and up the steps. She bent to the task of washing the floors. It was hard work. The years had left crusts of dirt and dust and she leaned into the washing. It took several trips to the well to clean the main floor. Then she washed the walls. Winnie helped with the reachable parts of the windows, and when she’d finished the walls she cleaned the upper portions and wiped them with newspaper. They worked at the kitchen together. She climbed up on the counters to wash the cupboards and promised herself to get a short ladder as soon as she could afford it. She scoured the sinks and fixtures then rubbed them with a cloth until they gleamed. It took hours, and when the day dropped slowly into gloaming they stood in the middle of the main room and looked around them. The wash was imperfect but it changed the nature of the house. It felt to her like an inhabited thing then, something tended to and nurtured in a way that lends itself to the energy of those who live beneath its beams, and she was happy. Happier in a way she could not recall being before. They went and sat swinging their legs off the edge of the back porch and watched the sun sink behind the purple seam of mountains and the sky come ablaze in sweeping veils of colour.

  “Home?” Winnie asked.

  “Home,” she said.

  “For always?”

  There were points of light in the swaddle of deepening blue and she looked up at them and the girl followed her lead and they sat there as night came in on its unrelenting tide and the moon came to centre that pelagic expanse. She found herself whispering to the stars, the sky, the pale yellow rondure of the moon, and the small girl sat beside her against that fall.

  “If this is how always feels? Then yeah,” she murmured. “For always.”

  THEY LOADED THE CHAINSAWS, mauls, heavy crowbars, gasoline, oil, chain oil, and sharpeners with a cooler for their lunches into the back of the truck and headed off in the first glimmer of morning. There was a stand of dead firs Roth had spotted during the winter and Starlight had gotten permission from the rancher to drop and buck them and carry them out for winter wood. They’d leave half for the owner. Starlight liked to get his winter wood early. Of all the chores around the ranch he loved gathering winter fuel most. Late spring and early summer, when the air was free of heat and humidity, was the best time, and over time it had become a ritual, a ceremony he found himself craving at the first seep of melt in the spring. The old man had worked until his final years as a woodcutter for extra income and if Starlight stopped to consider it, he’d probably find connection to him in the act of dropping trees, in the dry smell of sawn wood, the thin choke of gas and oil and sweat against the tang of coniferous gum. He could work all day and barely notice time passing. It was meditation. It was absorbing. It was letting go. Roth, in the three years he’d been with him, had learned very quickly that the big man preferred to work in silence and he kept that truce with wordiness until they broke for water or a rest or a cigarette. Even then he held the reticient ground. He admired his friend and employer for that. The ability to let himself sink into things, to feel them, to understand them through the deliberate actions of his hands and the strength of his back.

  So they unloaded the gear and placed it on a ground sheet away from the cutting. They filled the saws with gas and oil and sharpened the teeth of the chains. Then they pulled on the heavy canvas safety pants, goggles and helmets and gloves, drank a few long draughts of water, picked up the saws and mauls and wedge bars, and made their way into the stand of trees. The sun had risen high enough to become like the light of a locomotive through the trees. Birds sang. The snap and crackle of their footsteps through the deadfall echoed in the shadows and they strode purposefully to the farthest edge of the stand. Starlight set his gear down and stood and stared upward, studying the line of trees.

  “I figure we work backwards from here,” he said. “We drop and limb the first seven. I’ll start in to buck ’em while you bring the truck around for loading.”

  “Seems best,” Roth said. “Rough drive over but I done worse.”

  “You ready?”

  “Hell, yeah. I was born ready.”

  “Drop ’em to the west. Straight out. Yell when you’re makin’ that last cut.”

  “Yell what in particular?” Roth asked with a grin.

  “Whatever you choose.”

  “How about the name of the last woman I was with?”

  “Geez, by the time you recollect that I’ll be smashed to pieces.”

  “Love’s a dangerous business,” Roth said.

  Starlight shook his head and began walking to the farthest tree in the stand. Roth headed the other way. Soon the air was cut by the cough of cold engines, then sliced open entirely by the w
hine and climb and attack of open throttles. They set into the work earnestly. Each time either one of them had made their angle cut to direct the fall of a tree, they yelled, and the other stopped and watched while the last cut was made from the opposite side of the trunk and the tree shuddered, then slowly leaned into the cut and eased forward, eventually losing its equilibrium to drop like a sodden drunkard, slamming into the forest floor. They dropped seven like that. Roth walked back to get the truck and Starlight set about removing limbs. It was tough work. He was careful to cut away intrusve smaller branches so he could get at the larger ones. Manoeuvring the saw in those tight spaces was tricky and he didn’t notice Roth arrive with the pickup until he paused to rest. He only nodded. The two of them set to limbing the fallen trees.

  Now their pace gained in intensity. Once the limbs were sawn, they took to the task of bucking the great lengths of trunk into burnable lengths. The wood was dry and the cutting went quickly. They had to stop now and then to refill the gas and chain oil but they worked until all the trees on the ground were bucked. Then Starlight waved to Roth and they shut down the saws and walked back to where they’d left the cooler and the gear. They found a fallen tree to sit on and Roth took off his goggles and helmet and set them on the ground. Starlight studied him.

  Roth was a small man. Slender to the point of attrition but wiry and muscular and a forthright worker. His hands were knobbed and veined, and he was scrupulous about his fingernails, carving dirt away with a knife in idle moments, trimming them and flicking remnants into the hearth. They were callused and hard, red-looking now with the morning’s labour. He rubbed at his head. He’d lost most of his hair except for a tonsure that ringed his pate and faded down to the nape of his neck. His cheeks were sunken from tooth loss and he lacked a devotion to close shaves so that he appeared at first glance to be derelict and slow but he was quick-witted and observant, garrulous and loud, always eager to share ribald, hilarious episodes from a life lived or well imagined. He sat and looked about the glade.