Shelter

by Frances Greenslade

  “Who are you?” Her voice was funny, not child, not adult either.

  “Maggie,” I said.

  “Where do you come from?”

  “From up the road.”

  “Up the road.” She laughed. “What tribe do you belong to?”

  “I don’t have a tribe,” I said. “I have a mother and a sister.”

  “No tribe? But you must have a tribe. Who keeps you safe at night? Who does the hunting?”

  “My father is dead.”

  “Dead, is he? Maggie’s father is dead. Would you like to belong to our tribe? You have to climb through a hole in the curved tree to get to our land. Follow me. I’ll show you. Can you run fast?”

  She smelled of pine pitch and wild roses and her twig feet barely scratched the earth as she ran. I followed, dodging trees and leaping deadfall. She disappeared and then I heard her voice, a chatter shivering through the trees. “This way!” Her head came down from the crook of a gnarled pine. “I’m a fast runner, aren’t I? I’ll help you up.”

  I reached for her twig fingers and they closed around mine.

  “Shut your eyes and when you open them again you’ll be in our territory.”

  I did as she said.

  Soft blue-flowered hills, bathed in lemon light, rolled away to the edges of dusky blue mountains. Down in a shady valley, a jade-green river sparkled in the light. Smoke rose from fires beside the river and small figures moved near them. Across the lemon hills, herds of mountain sheep ran, turning as one like a flock of birds.

  “Let’s go swimming. Our river is so sweet and cool. I have ten sisters and they’ll play with us.” The twig girl ran through the field of blue flowers, trailing a shadow of a path that undulated in the wind, leading me down to the river flats.

  “Oh dead, dead, dead,” she sang. “Maggie’s father’s dead!”

  Her sisters were twig-girls, too, their dresses made of different wildflowers, orange Indian paintbrush, yellow buttercup, blue forget-me-not, white violet, blue chicory, purple foxglove, and the prettiest, on a tiny little girl, delicate red columbine that drooped below her knees.

  “Swimming! Swimming!” they shouted to me and dropped their dresses in the grass. I stripped off my shorts and jumped in after them. Cool water closed around me like a skin. The heat of the pinewoods slipped away.

  The girls gathered in a circle in the river. One threw a white hollow bone to another and they sang, tossing it around the circle:

  Maggie’s father, hair of red

  Right as rain when he went to bed

  Went to work, so they said

  Now Maggie’s dad is dead dead dead!

  “Join in, Maggie!” they called. The water splashed and rolled off my skin, the drops travelling down my fingers, my arms, spilling down my sides and the twig arms of the girls sprayed glistening droplets through the air.

  Maggie Dillon out to play

  Fell asleep on a sunny day

  Knock knock knock. Go away!

  Maggie isn’t dead today.

  We swam and I dove with my eyes open, parting tall weeds with my hands and gliding by, watching the sun cut through water and shine on the deep rocks and glimmering sand bottom. I shot back to the surface and swallowed great gulps of air and the girls sang until the sinking sun turned the water red-orange.

  I climbed out and sat on a rock. I watched the water bead on my legs. As the hills shadowed and changed, I felt a sudden chill pass over me. Night must be beautiful here, the hills bathed in moonlight, but I wouldn’t wait for it; it was too lonely and I felt cold now.

  “I have to go home,” I told the twig girl.

  “I guess you do,” she replied.

  I pulled on my shorts and took her hand. When I opened my eyes I was standing by my bike near the side of the road. The sun had not yet begun to set and it was still hot. My walking stick was peeled clean and lying on the ground. I picked it up. I felt for my pocketknife. Still there, nestled in my pocket, smooth and cool. Beneath my shorts, though, my underpants were cool and wet with river water and the bottom of my T-shirt was damp.

  I felt very hungry. I wanted hot deer stew, salted tomatoes, a whole saskatoon berry pie. I fastened my walking stick onto my handlebars with a shoelace and hopped on the bike. My legs burned as I rode towards home.

  I felt hungry all the time then, a constant gnawing in the pit of my stomach. Two things filled me the longest: our neighbour Mrs. Erickson’s homemade bread, which she brought over to our house two loaves at a time, wrapped in dish towels, and the mountain potatoes Agnes brought back for us.

  Agnes came up our road one day in July. She was carrying a burlap sack. I sat on the step and watched her come. She stopped in front of me, then opened the sack and let me look inside. The fresh earth smell of the potatoes wafted out.

  Agnes smiled at me. “Take you with me next year,” she promised.

  Next year seemed a very long time away, but I did feel a small thrill at the thought.

  “Your grandpa used to go,” she said. “My grandpa and him were friends. Used to round up the wild horses together, take them up Potato Mountain for the races.” She stood there and we looked out at the road as if we might see them riding by.

  “Ask your mom to take you to the bush,” she said. “You’ll start to feel better.” She held my gaze for a minute, then Mom came out on the porch.

  “Agnes,” she said.

  “Irene. Heard about what happened to your man.” They disappeared into the house and shut the door and the low chicken mumblings began again.

  That night Mom boiled some wild potatoes and put a pat of butter on them and salt and pepper. We ate them along with a jar of salmon someone had brought and early green beans from Glenna’s garden.

  “We’re going camping,” Mom announced. “Get out of this quiet house. It’s driving me crazy. We’ll leave in the morning. I have a place I want to show you girls.”

  Over and over I have dreamed of that meal, the crisp green beans, the salty, oily salmon, and the sweet little potatoes hot with butter. My grandma had wanted to see the wildflowers of Potato Mountain again and I want to eat that simple meal again, with my mother and sister around the table.

  [ SIX ]

  “WE’RE HITTING THE Freedom Road,” Jenny said as she carried her sleeping bag past me to the car. It was something we said whenever we went west on Highway 20. The night before, Mom had begun packing for our camping trip and Jenny was trying to get me excited. Freedom Road was the name the locals had given the highway in the 1950s when they had chopped the route from the coast to the interior, without the help of government, so they could get out with their own vehicles. “Or die trying,” Mom said. The steep drop to the valley was sometimes called Courage Hill. Like Dad had, Mom scoffed at the idea of fortifying herself with alcohol to drive it. “People think liquor makes them better drivers. Idiots. It just makes them care a bit less about going over the edge.”

  It had rained during the night and when we got out on the highway, Mom opened her window. A fresh rain scent drifted in; the road steamed in the morning sunshine. “Pour me some tea, please,” she said to Jenny, who sat beside her in the passenger seat. I was in the back. These were our usual places. Dad had rarely come with us when Mom took us camping. He had hardly been in the station wagon at all. It was Mom’s car, and ours, a tan-and-white 1963 Chevy Impala with creamy white seats and brown dashboard and trim. Mom loved the car. She kept the seats clean and had a little garbage can on the hump that she emptied, along with the ashtray if it had been used, each time we stopped at a gas station. She kept good tires on the vehicle, checked her own oil and fluids and wrote her oil changes in the owner’s manual, which she kept neatly tucked into the glove compartment. “But it’s a car,” she’d say. “And cars are made for driving. I’m not going to baby it.” That meant she would take it down most any road where we had enough clearance and there were no sharp rocks that could pierce a tire.

  Driving like this, the three of us, it felt li
ke nothing had changed. Jenny poured the tea from the thermos and I settled into my job, which was to watch for wildlife. I didn’t have to be so vigilant at this time of day; dusk was when the deer came out and grazed the open spaces along the highway. Mom’s strong hands held the steering wheel. Jenny leaned into a pillow propped against the door. A sense of safety filled the car. I think we all felt it. Nothing could go wrong and there was no such thing as trouble coming in threes.

  “Roll me a cigarette, sweetie,” said Mom.

  I smelled the spicy tobacco as Jenny opened the pouch, then the sulfur flare of the match as she held it for Mom. Mom only smoked when she drove or when we were camping, and only hand-rolled cigarettes. Sweet, light smoke perfumed the air like incense, like every other trip we’d taken in the safety of that station wagon, with Mom at the wheel.

  When we entered the Redstone Indian Reserve we could see the mountains in the distance ahead.

  “I want to stop,” I said. My voice sounded rusty and odd even to me.

  Mom’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. Jenny whirled in her seat and put her arms out, as if to hug me. “Maggie, you’re alive!” she said.

  “This is near where Dad took me last fall,” I said.

  “Okay.” Mom said it almost cautiously, as if the spell of ordinariness could break again at any minute. “Where do you want to stop, Maggie?”

  “The road’s just past here.”

  Mom slowed the station wagon and made the turn. The track cut straight and flat through a meadow, then entered the woods, the way I remembered. The trees grew thicker, their branches tangled above us.

  “Are you sure, Maggie?”

  “This is it,” I said.

  For a moment, when we came out in the clearing by the lake, I was disoriented. The water was in the right place, but everything else looked different: green reeds piercing the surface of the water, grass grown up where there hadn’t been grass before, trees leafed out and obscuring the entrances to the paths. But then I saw our lean-to, tucked into the shade of some aspens with the entrance facing the lake.

  “There it is,” I said, and I jumped out of the car. Mom and Jenny followed, stretching and yawning. Someone had made a fire pit in front of the lean-to with a circle of rocks. Charred logs, mostly burnt, lay in the pit.

  “Did you and Dad find this?” Mom asked.

  “We built it,” I said.

  “You built it? What’s it for?”

  “You sit in it,” I said, leading the way. “It’s a shelter. We built lots of different ones. We can all fit in if we squish.” I backed in feet first, leaving my head and shoulders in the opening, then Jenny followed. Mom wriggled her hips to squeeze between us. She was as supple as a girl; the muscles in her thighs showed when she moved, even through her blue jeans. Her forearms, too, exposed to the sun beneath her rolled-up shirtsleeves, were tanned, freckled and muscled. She wasn’t afraid of anything, either; anyone could see that.

  The sun shone full on our three heads poking from the opening. Mom rested her forehead on her arms and closed her eyes. The lake lay dead calm, the only movement made by clouds of insects moving in unison above the reeds. In the warm sunshine, Mom was soon asleep. Like Dad had said, the way the sun landed on her hair, she was lit up. Jenny traced a stick through the sandy soil, writing her own name in curlicue letters. I watched for horseflies looking to land on Mom’s bare arms and flicked them away when they did. The lean- to seemed even more solid than the day Dad and I had built it, and I wondered if someone had reinforced it, made it more waterproof. The ground underneath me felt dry, even after a night of rain. Maybe someone had even spent a night in it.

  “Dad never took me out to build things,” Jenny whispered. Her voice was matter-of-fact; I didn’t hear any bitterness in it.

  “Maybe he thought you wouldn’t like it. I’m the tomboy, remember?”

  On the lake, we caught sight of a heron standing near the shore.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I guess that was it.”

  After Mom’s nap she drove us back to the highway, then west. “Rocks!” I warned, and Mom swerved the car just as a small avalanche came tumbling down the rock face beside the road. One pinged off the bumper.

  “It’s like Maggie has ESP,” Jenny said. “She knows things are going to happen before they do.”

  This wasn’t new. Jenny liked to say this about me. It gave her the creeps, she said.

  “She just pays attention,” Mom said, trying to nip Jenny’s Maggie-is-weird theme in the bud. Jenny could warm to it, and she sounded so persuasive that I started to believe it myself and didn’t even mind hearing her say it. But I did pay attention and I couldn’t relax, like Jenny did, her bare feet up on the dashboard, or sometimes sticking out the window in the breeze.

  We began the precipitous descent down the Hill, the famous 18 percent grade. Mom pumped the brakes so they wouldn’t get too hot, but even so we could smell the linings. On the north side of the road the rock face rose up sharply, but on the south a clipped ledge crumbled then dropped, tumbling thousands of feet through jack pine and rock to the bottom of the canyon. When I had the guts to look over, I saw only empty space and treetops. Were there rusted-out bodies of cars down there, those whose brakes had failed or whose owners had bitten off more than they could chew and lost their nerve for just a second? I pictured them, sailing out into clear blue sky, then the moment of pure wonder before they dropped, bounced, once, twice, and rolled, over and over to the canyon floor.

  It was dusk when we got to the fir forest, the place Mom wanted to show us. Usually, Jenny and I were boisterous as we settled into a new campsite, abandoning the gear we hauled from the car to run off and explore. Tonight was different. The fir trees around us were giant and unmoving. A thick carpet of moss and needles spread out cleanly beneath them. It was very quiet, very still and the slam of our car doors echoed unnaturally. Even though it was evening, the air felt warm, heavy with the rich piney fragrance of the forest.

  “This looks like a good place to put the tent,” said Mom, walking off a square in a flat area among several large firs. Jenny and I stood beside the car, watching her. She looked up. “Do you like it?”

  Jenny asked, “Did you used to come here with Dad?”

  “No, I found this place myself. Quite a long time ago. Before I even met him. This is an old forest. You can feel it. Bring the tent, girls.”

  Jenny and I lugged the heavy canvas tent from the station wagon as Mom laid out the poles and began fitting them together. I liked the familiar oil smell that rose from the canvas as we unfolded it. Mom moved confidently; she knew exactly what she was doing here.

  Even before we had the tent all unfolded, we knew where the door was by the patch in the canvas over a hole from a hot ember. “There’s the patch,” said Jenny. “Which way do you want to face?”

  “The sun will be coming up over here. Let’s face that way,” said Mom.

  She had to turn the flashlight on before we were finished. Pale light still washed the sky above the trees, but didn’t reach the forest floor where we clattered around with our supper dishes and frying pan.

  “I could make a fire,” said Mom. “But it’s so warm, maybe we should just make our wieners on the Coleman stove?”

  When we didn’t answer she got the stove from the car and began pumping it up. I put our lawn chairs in a semi-circle and Jenny lit two candles in mason jars and set them in the crook of a rotted log. We sat mesmerized by the barely moving candle flames and listened to Mom stir the beans and wieners in the frying pan as the stove hissed gently. She handed us the steaming plates then closed the valve on the stove and the blue flames died.

  Our human noises barely made a ripple before the quiet folded in again, like a thick liquid we were moving through.

  “Sure is still,” said Jenny, bending her head back to look up at the treetops.

  “No coffee for me tonight,” Mom said. “I’m beat. There’s a creek over that way, girls. We’ll find it after
we eat.”

  The wieners and beans were smoky and delicious. My eyes followed the progress of a beetle making his way up the side of one of the mason jars as we ate.

  “Look at that,” Jenny said, reaching for my arm. “It’s pitch black over there.”

  When we were done, Mom picked up the wash basin and led the way into the dark with the flashlight. Just a few yards from camp a sandy bank sloped down. We could hear the creek before we saw it, the gentle trickle of slow water flowing over rocks. Mom splashed her face and neck and ran her wet hands over her hair. Jenny and I did the same. Then Mom plunged the basin into the water and let it fill. We stood on the sandy bank watching the creek flowing in the dark.

  “What are those little lights in the water?” Jenny said.

  “Where?” Mom and I said together.

  “Look. Watch carefully. There.”

  “It’s starlight!” said Mom. We turned to the open sky above the creek, where a wide path of stars fuzzed the night sky.

  I still remember the feeling of falling asleep that night, sunk deliciously into my sleeping bag like I had no bones, like our tent was floating in a still, warm sea, the baked canvas smell enveloping us like a cocoon. Some time in the night I woke to the sound of an owl’s low hoot. Owls were supposed to be harbingers of death, but even that didn’t disturb me. Its call was clear and reassuring. I didn’t move my sleep-heavy limbs but let the peace of this place and the soft breathing of my sister and my mother on either side of me carry me back to sleep.

  Bees darted among the wild raspberry bushes as Jenny and I filled our pails in the sunny clearing by the creek after breakfast. The raspberries were firm and juicy; we raced to see who could fill her pail fastest. When we were done, we sat by the creek eating them one by one.