Shelter

by Frances Greenslade

  “Have you ever heard of Chiwid?” Jenny asked.

  “The old lady who lives outside?”

  “Yeah. People see her all over the place, camping out. They say she doesn’t sleep in a tent or anything. Even in the winter. What she does is she makes a little fire in a hole in the ground, then she scrapes out all the ashes and she sleeps in there. The heat keeps her warm till morning. Pretty good idea.”

  “I’ve seen her,” I said.

  “You have not,” said Jenny.

  “I saw her once when I was with Dad. She had all these bundles of stuff she was carrying alongside the road. Dad said he’d offer her a ride but she didn’t like strangers, especially if they were white. He said if we stopped she’d run away.”

  “Cool,” said Jenny. “I heard she has a lot of money and she hides it all over the place, like in swamps and stuff. I bet there’s some hidden around here.”

  “I doubt it. Where would she get money?”

  “Josie’s grandpa knows her and he says she gets money from somewhere. She hardly needs any, living out like that, so she hides it. Josie said maybe she gets the money from her husband because he feels bad for what he did to her.” She looked at me as she said this, as if she wasn’t sure she would tell me what it was he did. She put a handful of berries in her mouth.

  “She doesn’t have a husband,” I said. “Dad said she’s on her own, even though she’s an old lady. Some people say she’s part coyote, that’s what Dad said.”

  “Maybe she is. But she used to have a husband. She used to be normal. Live in a normal house and stuff.”

  I couldn’t hold back anymore. “So what happened?”

  Jenny looked at me intently and hugged herself. “This is true. You can ask anyone. But don’t ask Mom because she’d kill me for telling you.”

  “Okay,” I said, but now I wasn’t sure if I wanted to hear it.

  “Her husband was really mean. Josie said she heard her grandpa talk about him. He once saw Chiwid’s husband take a harness and whip a horse with the metal bit, in the head and everything, till the horse kicked him in the stomach. He thought it was funny. He didn’t care who saw. Sometimes he’d say he was going to shoot Chiwid. He’d hold the rifle to her stomach and then their kids had to go running off to get help.”

  “She has kids?”

  “She used to, a long time ago. Like I said, she used to have a normal life. Anyway, one time her husband was so mad he took a chain, one of those big ones for logging, and he beat her with it. She was beautiful, too. Well, she’s old now, but once she was beautiful. Some people say he was jealous. He didn’t like how other men looked at her and that’s why he did it. He choked her with that chain and almost killed her. That’s when she ran away and she never went back to living with people. It is like she’s a coyote, because she’s spooked like that. She’s afraid to come near people now.”

  “What about her kids?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” said Jenny.

  Dad had said that Chiwid was happy. “She likes sleeping out,” he’d said. “Some people say she’s a bit crazy, but she’s right as rain. She’s lived this long. She must know what she’s doing.”

  Mom had come down to the creek. She slipped out of her shorts and T-shirt and waded into the water. I put down my berry pail. A chickadee was singing on the other side of the creek.

  Jenny took off her runners and tossed them, one by one, beside a stand of willow. “Let’s go wading,” she said, pulling me up by the arm.

  Mom sat on a rock with her feet in the water, and as the sun grew hotter, Jenny and I stretched out and let the cool current bubble over us. I thought of Chiwid alone in the bush sleeping in her little warm spot in the ground. I couldn’t decide if I pitied her or envied her.

  Night dropped again as suddenly as it had the evening before, and with it the light breeze that had been sifting through the firs fell calm. Mom built a fire, her rustlings and twig-snapping echoing in that strange silence. Worn out, Jenny and I drew our legs up in the lawn chairs with a shared blanket over our knees and watched the heat curl bark into orange embers that leapt into flame, grew and twisted.

  “What a perfect day,” said Mom, settling into her own lawn chair.

  “Are you ever afraid?” Jenny asked her.

  “Afraid of what?”

  “Anything. Like bears or wolves or cougars.”

  “I’m more afraid of humans,” said Mom.

  “What humans?” asked Jenny.

  “None in particular,” she said. “There just seems to be more to fear from humans than from any of those animals. Humans are unpredictable.”

  After we lost her, I tried to put together a list of the important things Mom told us: Never make big decisions late at night. Don’t touch the sides of the tent when it’s raining. Never lean on a stove because you never know when it might be hot. Don’t drink from a creek if you don’t know what’s upstream. Humans are unpredictable.

  A sound outside the tent woke me. At first I thought it was the wind coming up. Then I recognized the low hum of an engine and the soft crunch of tires, moving slowly towards our camp. Mom was still out by the fire. I heard her push her lawn chair back and saw her shadow on the tent as she stood. I held my breath. It seemed to me that if I didn’t let on that I was awake, I would not have to be a part of whatever happened next, or even that it would not happen.

  The vehicle stopped and a door opened, then closed with a soft click.

  “You nearly scared the life out of me, coming in here with your headlights off like that,” said Mom quietly.

  A man’s low voice answered her. “You knew it would be me, didn’t you? Who else knows this road in the pitch dark?”

  “What, have you been following me?”

  The words alarmed me, but there was a teasing tone to her voice. She wasn’t scared of this man.

  I heard the chairs scrape again and then the mumble of their voices wove into the gurgle of the creek. I wanted to get up and look out at them. I thought about lifting the door flap. But I was too close to sleep. I woke again later to the sound of a high wind moaning through the tops of the firs. I tucked my blankets closer. Mom’s soft laughter sounded below the wind. She was still out by the fire. The man’s voice murmured, deep and soft. The fire snapped. I felt cold. When I sat up, Mom was beside me, her body curled warmly between Jenny and me.

  I was the first one up and out in the chilly morning. The bright blue sky promised a nice day. Sun filtered through the feathery fir branches. No high wind, only the gentle swaying of the wild rose bushes near the creek. A squirrel scurried along the ground and flew up a tree trunk. Behind the tent, I scanned the earth for tire tracks. I couldn’t see any. Our car still sat on the road, the windshield winking in the sun, and I felt as if I had dreamed the night visitor.

  After breakfast, Mom sat sipping her coffee from a blue enamel cup. She closed her eyes as she drank, then tilted her face a little to the sunlight streaming through the fir trees.

  Jenny laid two battered tablespoons on the ground between us. “Guess what these are for?”

  “Cereal?”

  “We already ate. Guess again.”

  “We’re going to make something?”

  “No—we’re going to look for something,” Jenny corrected. “Chiwid’s treasure.”

  “Using spoons.”

  “We don’t have any shovels. Anyway, she wouldn’t have to bury it very deep.”

  Mom smiled and tilted her head towards us. “Chiwid’s treasure?”

  “She must have some,” Jenny said. “Don’t you think so, Mom?”

  “I suppose she would. I’m not sure she’d bury it, though.”

  “So no one would steal it. It makes sense. She knows the bush like nobody else. She wouldn’t carry it around. That would be too dangerous.”

  “And heavy,” I said. “What are we going to do if we find some?”

  Jenny’s face fell for a moment, then she brightened again. “I know. We’ll add
some money to it—just a bit. And we can write her a note saying we found your money, but we’re not going to steal it. So maybe she’ll start to trust people again.”

  “That’s a nice idea, Jen,” Mom said sleepily, and closed her eyes again.

  “Why do you want her to trust people?”

  “Let’s just dig,” said Jenny.

  The day warmed as the sun’s angle widened and lit the pink fireweed along the creek edge and the scrub aspens and tangle of salmonberry bushes growing in over the logged clearings. We dug in the springy fir-needled soil, beside unusually shaped trees and deadfall that we thought would make landmarks for Chiwid’s memory. Some distance away, Mom crouched, in her baseball cap, picking berries. She had found a patch of ripe wild strawberries, late for the time of year, and she ate as she picked, humming happily.

  I kept looking for an opportunity to ask Jenny if she’d heard the night visitor. But I didn’t want Jenny to dig into it in her usual fearless, reckless way. Jenny could ask so many questions she’d make herself cry with the answers. I never did that. If I could picture an answer I didn’t want, I wouldn’t even ask.

  Mom had hummed yesterday, too, I told myself. Camping with Jenny and me made her happy. But that distant soft pleasure I saw in her as she foraged in among the radiant pink feathers of fireweed and shafts of sunlight—that was something else, I knew. It was not a gift given to her by Jenny or me.

  [ SEVEN ]

  BACK AT HOME A FEW DAYS LATER, Mom bent to sip her coffee and Rita bent to sip hers, the two heads nodding in unison in the shade of the spruce tree. Then Mom leaned back the way she did when she savoured her coffee, the tang of spruce, the perfect warmth of the day. Rita turned to her and smiled.

  Their conversations differed from the ones Mom had with Glenna—less actual talking, more pensive sipping, bouncing of bare crossed legs, watching of swaying grasses and patterns of summer light through the trees.

  Rita liked to talk about her projects. She had built a three-compartment composter that could break down almost anything—bread, bones, paper, pasta, along with the usual potato peels and coffee grounds.

  “No rodents, not a one. There’s no smell if you do it right.”

  Mom nodded and smiled. They sipped, in unison.

  “I could make one for you,” Rita said.

  Mom’s snort caught on her mouthful of coffee and she jerked forward to spit it in the dust. They both broke into giggles and had to set their cups on the ground.

  They often broke into helpless laughter that way, set off by almost nothing, and they laughed till their eyes ran with tears. I sat on the step making cigarettes with a little black machine Rita had brought. For every twenty-five cigarettes I made for her, she’d promised to pay me twenty-five cents. I liked the fresh smell of the tobacco when I opened the tin and spread a line of it along the paper in the rubber holder.

  A car came slowly up the driveway, an old maroon Mercury Monterey with the back window missing. It stopped a small distance away and Agnes got out. She walked slowly towards us with her careful, elegant gait.

  “Agnes.” Mom smiled, wiping her eyes.

  “Irene.”

  “Have you met Rita?”

  Both women nodded. Mom went in the house to get coffee for Agnes.

  “You’re the one who lives without a man out Nakenitses Road,” Agnes said.

  “That’s right.”

  Mom came out with a mug and handed it to Agnes.

  “I have something you better come look at,” Agnes told Mom and pointed with her chin towards the car. The three women walked out to the car. I understood that I was not meant to come. They bent over the back seat and Rita straightened and shook her head, but she was smiling. They spoke for a couple of minutes, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Then Agnes lifted a cardboard box out of the back and handed it to Mom. They walked slowly back to the house, all of them now looking at me. Mom put the box down in front of me. Inside it was a little white and orange kitten curled up on an old towel.

  “That one’s the runt,” said Agnes. “Other ones, five other ones, won’t let her near the mother. She needs to be fed.”

  Mom asked me, “Do you want a kitten to take care of?”

  “Really?”

  “Feed her with an eye dropper,” Agnes said. “Give her goat’s milk.” She brought a jar out of her pocket and handed it to me. The milk was still warm.

  I named her Cinnamon, because of the orangey patches on her head and back. She lapped goat’s milk from the dropper with her tiny pink tongue, then fell asleep on my chest, her little paws kneading me in her dreams. Cinnamon purred like a tractor, that’s what Rita said. I liked to take her under the spruce boughs and watch her bat around spruce cones and test her claws on the tree roots. She didn’t wander. She ventured out in a small circle around me, returning to me every few minutes, climbing onto my legs. She liked me to hold her on my chest, with her paws and head resting on my shoulder so that she could observe from a safe height.

  “That kitten is more dog than cat,” Jenny said. “The way she follows you around. That’s not normal cat behaviour.”

  It was true that when I walked in the bush, Cinnamon hopped along behind me, sometimes stopping to sniff the ground or cackle at a bird, but always running to catch up with me again. She didn’t go out unless I did. Mom had warned me about coyotes and eagles that would be attracted by Cinnamon’s snowy white fur. When school started in September, I left her each morning sleeping safely on my bed. But I worried that she could get out the kitchen window that Mom left open a crack. Or that as Mom went about her day, she might leave the door ajar and Cinnamon could slip out.

  “I’ll be careful,” Mom said each morning as she kissed me goodbye at the door.

  Jenny and I walked up the driveway after school, with the early fall chill taking the summer edge off the afternoon sunshine. The yellow aspen leaves flickered like lights against the turquoise sky, like the day Dad and I had built the lean-to by the lake. A familiar ache spread out from my centre. Sometimes it felt like it slowed my whole body down—I couldn’t run as fast as normal, and my feet felt leaden. It would grow if I couldn’t find a way to stop it.

  Jenny chattered about the oil pastel drawing of a deer she’d done in art class and how she’d tried to get the shading right for the ears. “Ears are hard,” she announced, getting no response from me.

  Our house appeared beyond the big spruce tree. The front door was closed; a pot with a lid on it sat on the step, a wet newspaper beside it, covered in a pile of potato peelings. Mom liked to peel potatoes on the step. I opened the door, dropped my books and went to my room where I expected to see Cinnamon stretching her legs and yawning at my arrival. She wasn’t there.

  “Cinnamon?” I bent and looked under the bed where she sometimes curled herself up on a triangle of bedspread that touched the floor.

  “Mom!” I heard Jenny call. She came to our bedroom doorway. “Where’s Mom?”

  “Is she lying down?”

  “No. She’s not in the house. Maybe she’s in the shed.” Jenny headed back outside. I heard her calling.

  I followed her out, calling for Cinnamon. She always greeted me when I came home; she was always here. Jenny stood by the shed and screamed “Mom!” at the top of her voice. Just then Cinnamon came bounding out of the woods past the edge of the vegetable garden. She ran right to me and I picked her up and buried my face in her fur. I realized I was crying, my tears wetting her soft fur, and she licked at my hand with her rough tongue.

  Mom was right behind her, tripping through the underbrush and bursting out of the trees like someone who had been lost and has at last blundered on home.

  “Mom!” Jenny shouted. “What are you doing? We didn’t know where you were—we came home from school and you were gone.” She ran to Mom and threw her arms around her and now Jenny was crying, too.

  “Girls, girls, relax,” Mom said. “I was just out for a walk in the bush. I lost track of time. I’
m sorry.”

  But something seemed odd about it, about her. She came in the house, picking burrs from her shirt and laughing as she drew Jenny close.

  “I’m sorry about the cat, Maggie. She followed me. She was with me the whole time. Are you two hungry? I’m starving.”

  Her eyes shone and she was flushed and giddy, her skin mottled with red, not just on her face, but down her neck and chest, into the white skin beyond the soft V of her flannel shirt.

  “But what were you doing?” Jenny persisted.

  “I just needed to get out of the house for a while, so I went for a walk. Cinnamon must have slipped out when I opened the door, and I didn’t notice. But after a while I saw her following me.” Mom got out bowls and the chocolate syrup. “Time for our reward!” she said brightly.

  “You bought ice cream?” Jenny said.

  Mom pulled a small carton from the icebox. She scooped a large curl of vanilla into each bowl, then broke bits of graham cracker over the tops. She set them on the table and let us pour our own chocolate sauce.

  I watched Mom as she ate her ice cream. She was absorbed, not noticing my eyes on her. She licked her spoon slowly, thoughtfully, then she got up and went to get the pot of potatoes from the step. She bent and took another pot from the icebox and carried it to the stove. Then she stretched her arms over her head, a long, deep stretch, and said, “I’m going to take a nap before supper.”

  I was mad at her about letting Cinnamon out, but what bothered me more was the distance that seemed to have opened up between us. It seemed as if, for now, she was not really my mother, but some beautiful woman with flushed skin going to have a nap in my mother’s bedroom.

  [ EIGHT ]

  WHEN I REMEMBER the first fall without Dad, I think I can see that a change was coming. I should have been expecting the second thing, known it was building from the grey days when we came home from school and found Mom lying on top of the blankets on the bed, Cinnamon stretched innocently alongside her. But I could never have guessed where it would come from.