by Kris Bertin
I remember feeling angry, knowing that no matter how stupid her story was I was going to research every last word. But every member of the family confirmed the house never burned, even a little. And Missy never left—she couldn’t walk, or at least refused to. I read the only two clippings I had over and over again, looking for some indication of blindness—as if I had somehow missed this enormous part of the story—but found none. When I was feeling generous, I imagined that her other disabilities might have been reduced to a loss of sight in the telling and retelling of the story. When I was being honest, I felt like all embellishments had a source, a point of origin, a person who’d punched-up the story. Now that I had come through youth, through motherhood, and into late middle age, someone like her had lost the veneer of authority they once had. I could see people like her for what they were.
The old twat was a liar.
It was her withered mouth I imagined when I pictured all those who led me to waste my time, looking up false leads and impossible outcomes on the off chance there was a grain of evidence to be found. But here, I was being hypocritical. I was mad at a person for using a story—using a fact—for themselves, for their own end. Even though I thought I was on a quest for truth, even though I had real sympathy for the girl in the story, I was doing the same thing.
My mother was transformed.
I was told it could go one of two ways, and she could either become a pleasant little girl who doesn’t want to be a bother, or else you’d have what I got. A woman in fight-or-flight mode, a woman who thinks her dying body is a plot against her, the house a hellish panopticon, and me and the nurse—a woman only five years her junior, named Kim—her captors. She shouted at us, fought us at dinnertime, in the bathroom, when we had to change the sheets. She hid in closets and stole food—squirrelled it away under mattresses and forgot about it—and tried to escape whenever she could. So we installed motion sensors and an alarm on her door, fitted the doors with push-button locks with a four-digit code—an upgrade that cost almost as much as the nurse.
She still knew who I was, still knew I was her daughter, but came to believe I was a kidnapper also. That I had locked her up for my own amusement and was in the process of committing a very serious crime. She would add things like You’ll pay for this and I have notified the police to otherwise ordinary sentences about the weather or what was on television. But those were her worst days. Mostly she would simply refuse to speak to me altogether, scowl when I came near, stare off at nothing. She lived in a state of perpetual indignation.
All of this made my work with the Missy story more important, but I still wasn’t getting anywhere with it. It didn’t occur to me that she and I were among the last people in possession of the real story, who had access to the earliest versions of it. That was something I had claimed for myself. In truth, dealing with my mother became so difficult that I forgot there was anything of value left in her head. Even though we shared a home, and I clothed and fed her, I never thought to see if she had anything for me.
Then, one day—after six months of my new life with her—when we were sitting at the kitchen table, the both of us drinking tea, in silence, she said:
“They all had their way with her.”
She had lost her sense of propriety long before that, but I knew this wasn’t just a scandalous outburst. I knew right away who she meant.
“Missy,” I said.
She nodded, like it was a secret. She elaborated:
“Even the boy fucked her. He had her when—when they couldn’t—get another person. To switch.”
This took place at the beginning of the loss of language, when she could still talk but would mix up her words, or throw together two sentences that had nothing to do with each other. But I could get her to talk about it easily and without her usual disdain for me, so for the first time since I started caring for her we were having real conversation—or something approaching one, anyway.
During our first of these talks, she said Missy got pregnant again and again, and that the yard is filled with her little babies. She even said That’s why there’s so many mushrooms in the spring. Another time she said that there were so many babies they hid them in the walls, in the ceiling and under the floorboards. She also told me that we nailed a ballot box to a tree outside, and men would put their names into it, and we would draw a name to see who would get to fuck her. She pointed to a birdhouse I had hung there myself in the spring.
I didn’t take any of these things as true, but I couldn’t disregard them either. I knew they were crazy but I still imagined there could be some tiny little piece of truth in every thing she said about it. Maybe they were only my mother’s guesses about Missy, the thoughts she’d once repressed, now coming out as facts, distorted but still meaningful. After a certain point I realized I had given up on my research, on my investigation, on everything except her. My mother had the only evidence that mattered. She was all I focused on because she would be gone, very soon, and her version of the story would be gone too.
I asked her about Missy every day. When Kim was there, and when she wasn’t. When we ate, when I was cleaning her or sitting with her, when we were watching television, when we drove to the doctor’s, when she was pacing around in her room after sundown when everything got really strange and she was anxious and irritable and prone to acting out.
She told me Missy had both of her legs sawed off by lumberjacks. She said Missy had been an “Injun Princess, like Pocahontas.” She said that Missy was bought by the banker in town and kept in a floor safe. Other times, a safety deposit box. She said that Missy used to get burned with a fire poker by men for five dollars a poke. When I asked Which men, she just said Gentlemen in suits and dark hats. She said Missy had a twin sister named Paulette, who would visit in the night. Other times, she said the thing that visited was something called The Nighttime Animal or other times just The Nighttime Man, whose job it was to make Missy feel afraid. One night, she even said she saw him, and pointed to the empty window with a trembling hand. I remember leaning close and looking with her. She had a blanket on over her head, and had hand lotion all over her forehead and in her hair. She didn’t have her teeth in.
“What does he look like?” I asked, staring out into the night.
“He—he’s got, hair,” she said. “Curly and yellow, but it’s not—it’s on his face.”
“He has a beard?”
“No—it grows…from the middle.”
She motioned to the centre of her face with her fingers, over her eyes and nose, then drew her hand away.
“Long hair instead of a face,” she said, then turned to a whisper, “and there’s another way he can get in.”
Then she started to cry, big deep sobs that brought Kim in from the living room, but I didn’t turn away to greet her or answer her question when she asked what was wrong.
Instead, I put my face in front of my mother’s and watched.
“What else?” I asked.
Acknowledgments
Thanks first to Ryan Paterson and Alexander MacLeod for your continued kindness and generosity over all these years, and for helping filter the good from the bad. You are my kidneys and liver. I love you, I appreciate you, and I could not survive without you. This book also owes its existence to the efforts of Steph Sinclair and Sam Haywood at Transatlantic, and to the special care of Whitney Moran and Elaine McCluskey at Vagrant. Thank you all, so much.
I also wish to acknowledge the following institutions for promoting, publishing, or supporting my work: Atlantic News, Automatik & Grandview, the Bertins, Bearly’s, Biblioasis, Bookmark II, Canada Council for the Arts, Conundrum Press, Flying Books, Lexicon Books, the MacCuishes & Rudderhams, The MacLeods, Monastiraki, Nimbus, Oddfellows, Pow-Pow, Strange Adventures, TLA, TWUC, and The Walrus.
Thanks also to the writers and artists who inspire me: my darling Ashley, AJ & Becky, Amy Jones and the Many Andrews, th
e Donahoes, Rudrapriya, Kevin, Corkum, Mike Christie, Casey Plett, James O., Jason Canam, Andy & Christy-Ann, Billy & Sherwin, Meags Fitzgerald, Joe Ollman, Erin Frances-Fisher, Ken Harvey, Grant Munroe, Nick Mount, Lee Sheppard, Emily Bossé, and so many others. A great big thank you to Eliza Robertson, Craig Davidson, and Lisa Moore for bearing the burden of endorsing my stories. I truly appreciate it.
Lastly, I want to give a very special thanks to my true pal and collaborator Naben Ruthnum, who read these stories and gave valuable support, feedback, and encouragement. If it weren’t for your daily insistence and nagging, this book would have been an orphan. I am lucky to have a friend like you.
About the Author
Courtesy of Nathan Boone
Kris Bertin is a bartender and writer of short stories, graphic novels, and longer work. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with his wife, Ashley.