Shelter

by Frances Greenslade

This time, I found the outside envelope from Mom’s letter by accident. It was lying in the kitchen garbage can and it caught my eye as I threw some orange peels in. I smoothed it and looked closely. Again there was the cancelled stamp from Kleena Kleene, but nothing else.

  The first day I wore my jeans with the new patches to school, I went and sat on the swing next to Vern at recess.

  “You going anywhere for Christmas?” he asked.

  “No. You?”

  “Maybe. I might go see my mom.”

  “Cool. Where does she live?”

  “Nistsun Lake. Know where that is?”

  I nodded. We swung in lazy half circles, our feet on the frozen ground.

  “What’s that on your knee?” he asked, leaning over. He didn’t say anything, just tapped my knee twice with his finger and, as the bell rang, headed back to school.

  After school I had two things to do. I walked over to the bank and opened an account. My first deposit was twenty dollars. Next, I went to the Esso station on the highway. Inside, there was a man on his knees arranging quarts of oil on a shelf.

  “Are you the manager?” I asked.

  “Who’s asking?”

  “Me. I’m looking for a job. I can pump gas and work the cash register and I know how to check oil and top up radiators.”

  “Hand me that box, will you?” He gestured to a box on the counter and I lifted it down for him.

  He took a jackknife from his shirt pocket and slit open the top. “Can I trust you?”

  “I billet in town here and I’m very responsible,” I said.

  “How old are you?”

  “I’m thirteen,” I lied.

  He pushed himself to his feet. He had a round paunch under his Esso shirt. He stuck out his hand. “I’m Bob,” he said and we shook. “I could use some help over Christmas. How about I try you out? I’ll give you two weeks to show me what you can do.”

  “Two weeks is great!” I nodded. “I can start today if you want.”

  Bob looked around the store. It smelled of motor oil and chocolate bars. “Don’t you have to let someone know where you are?”

  “I can phone.”

  Just then the gas bell rang. Bob looked out at the pumps where a long Chrysler had just pulled up.

  “Okay,” he said. “You can start with this guy. He’ll only get a couple dollars of gas but he’ll want his oil checked, windshields washed, front and rear, and he might even ask you to check the air in his tires.”

  Vern’s uncle worked for the highways and stopped at the gas station about twice a week. The first time I met him, I was filling up his tank and peered over the edge of his truck into the back. He had some bags of sand, a large folded-up tarp, rope, axes in a bucket, a shovel, a spare tire and a large wooden box locked with a latch and padlock.

  “You’re Maggie, aren’t you?” he said, as he climbed out of the cab. Two long braids hung down the front of his plaid jacket, tapering to neat, skinny ends.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Leslie. Uncle Leslie, Vern’s uncle. He’s told me about you.”

  I smiled and hung up the nozzle and tightened the gas cap.

  “Want me to check your oil?”

  “Good idea,” he said. “He says you come from Duchess Creek.”

  I nodded.

  “Come up to the trailer sometime for dinner. I’m a good cook.”

  “Okay,” I said. I checked the dipstick. “You’re down about half a quart.”

  Now that I was earning my own money, I started buying some of my own food. I used the excuse that I didn’t want to inconvenience Bea when I got home from work after suppertime. I stopped at Safeway and picked up canned stew, instant mashed potatoes, tins of devilled ham, and oranges. As I put the food in my basket, I liked to imagine that I was outfitting for a wilderness trip. I would need some packets of instant oatmeal and some sugar and tea. But I wouldn’t buy those just yet because Bea would ask questions.

  At the checkout one day someone behind me said, “Real potatoes are just about as fast.” It was Uncle Leslie. He had a cart full: a big bag of flour, oats, potatoes, onions, fresh carrots, tomatoes.

  “You were going to come for supper. I guess I’ve got to give you a day. How about tomorrow?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Come with Vern after school. Make sure you ask Mrs. Edwards first.”

  The next day it was snowing as Vern and I walked up the hill to the trailer park. Big flakes floated in the air, caught on the wind, and seemed not to land at all.

  “Uncle Leslie thinks you must be homesick,” Vern said. “He’s making deer stew.”

  “Really?” I said, so eagerly I felt embarrassed. I tried to reclaim a casual tone. “Yeah, we used to have deer stew a lot.”

  “Ever go hunting?”

  “Not really. Not with a gun, I mean. You?”

  “Yeah. But I don’t really like it. I mean I like everything but the killing part. And that’s supposed to be the point, right?”

  The trailer was a neat white one with a bay window on one end. There was a cedar porch with two wooden loungers on it, dusted in snow.

  “Come on in,” said Uncle Leslie when Vern opened the door. “Leave your boots there and I’ll give you a pair of moccasins to wear. The floor gets a bit cold.”

  The trailer smelled of stew and a hint of wood smoke. A stack of wood was piled beside a black woodstove.

  “Will these fit?” Uncle Leslie held a moccasin next to my foot. “Looks about right.”

  I put them on. “Perfect,” I said. “Thank you.”

  The only trailers I’d been in were the kind you pulled behind a car. This one seemed bigger than the Edwards’ house.

  Uncle Leslie made three mugs of hot chocolate from some packets and water from a kettle that was steaming on the little woodstove. Then he washed the spoon, dried it and put it away. I caught a glimpse of the inside of his cupboard, neatly loaded with food, boxes on one shelf, cans on another, jars of canned fruit and salmon on another. A pair of oven mitts hung on a rack by the stove, along with a ladle, spatula, slotted spoon, long fork and different-sized frying pans in a row. The knives were ranged in a block of wood on the counter, from large to small, and beside that were big jars of flour, rice, sugar, tea and coffee, all neatly labelled. On a dishtowel spread on the counter, various sizes of jars and lids, washed and with their labels removed, sat drying. On the window ledge above the sink were four potted plants. I recognized one as parsley. My eyes went to the drawers alongside the fridge. I was tempted to look inside them. The neatness, all the order and organization, was as appealing here as it was claustrophobic and repulsive at the Edwards’s.

  Uncle Leslie sat with us as we drank our hot chocolate. He got up once to stoke the stove.

  “I got this deer we’re about to eat right around Duchess Creek in the fall,” he said.

  I nodded and we sipped.

  “Well, no rest for the wicked.” He stood and carried his dirty cup to the sink.

  Vern and I played cards as the smell of baking buns filled the trailer. A pungent scent of deer stew wafted up each time Uncle Leslie opened the lid of the pot. I glanced over at him, clad in an apron, with his braids tucked inside his shirt. He whistled and rattled pots and pans busily. Something sweet floated below the savoury smells.

  When supper was almost ready, he called Vern to set the table.

  “I’ll help,” I said.

  “Okay, because it’s a lot of work,” Vern said, smiling.

  Uncle Leslie set down the pot of stew, a steaming dish of spinach, roasted potatoes, a basket of fresh buns and a saucer of butter.

  “Uncle Leslie thinks you eat too much junk,” Vern said.

  “Girls your age need iron,” Uncle Leslie said. “Now take spinach, for instance. There’s lots of iron in that.”

  “My mom used to make stinging nettle,” I said.

  “Oh yeah, that’s even better. Takes a bit of work to get it, though.”

  “I used my
Dad’s work gloves.”

  “Then you need to boil it twice to get the sting out.”

  “Mrs. Edwards won’t eat any of that kind of thing. ‘Weeds,’ she says. ‘They could be poisonous.’ ”

  Uncle Leslie laughed at my imitation of her voice.

  “Sure,” said Vern. “You’ll wind up dead and then who’s going to take out the garbage?”

  When we were done the stew, Leslie put bowls of apple crumble and vanilla ice cream down in front of us. “I wonder what you two sound like when you imitate me,” he said.

  [ FOURTEEN ]

  WHEN THE MONEY FROM Mom stopped coming, we didn’t know for three months. For some reason Bea had decided to keep it to herself. I can’t decide now what motivated her, if she had gotten used to having us there, or if the money had become less important now that Jenny and I both had jobs. Maybe it was compassion, who knows. Stranger things have happened.

  The last letter had come just before Jenny’s fourteenth birthday in May. Mom wrote that she hadn’t been feeling well. She didn’t say where she was or what she was doing. The envelope, which I had taken from the mailbox myself, was addressed in someone else’s handwriting—small, tight writing that I took to belong to a man. I couldn’t make out the cancellation over the stamp, but it didn’t look like it said Kleena Kleene.

  I can’t say it worried us that Mom wasn’t feeling well. It barely registered. We took it as a thing you say as a little tidbit of news in a letter that tries to be intimate, but is really hiding something. Namely, that she wasn’t coming back yet, but wouldn’t say why.

  Jenny pocketed the twenty dollars Mom sent. For her birthday party, she and her friends Tracy and Lila went to see The Poseidon Adventure at the Starlight Drive-in with Tracy’s brother.

  Ted and I were playing Canasta at the table when they came home, wound up, playing a game where they would only speak lines from the movie.

  “Hard left!” Jenny said and steered Lila into our bedroom.

  “You’re going the wrong way, dammit!” Tracy said.

  “That’s our only chance!”

  “Sail yourselves into the kitchen and have some cake,” Bea called.

  “She’s right. That’s the way out!”

  They gave Ted and me a blow-by-blow of the plot as they ate the cake at the table, then they disappeared into our bedroom to drink orange pop. Later, when Jenny was giggling uncontrollably as I got ready for bed, I learned they had spiked the pop with lemon gin that Tracy’s brother had given them.

  By summer, Bea had things to worry about other than money. One night about an hour or so after suppertime, I arrived home from the gas station. A couple of neighbour boys squealed and hopped in and out of the sprinkler sweeping across the dry patch of sunlit lawn in front of their house. The sprinkler cast a rainbow in the air, and behind it, a man sat on the step smoking and watching the boys. He lifted his hand to wave at me and I lifted mine in return. It was a hot evening and Bea had the screen door open and a fan going in the living room, the stale hamburger grease smell floating out into the street. I didn’t want to go into the hot house. I would have some supper, then go for a hike down to the river before dark.

  “You’re finally home!” Bea said as soon as I stepped inside.

  The clean plates were still on the table.

  “I was at work,” I said. “I’m not late.”

  “Did I say you were late?” She advanced towards me, waving her dishtowel wildly. I stepped backwards; I was familiar with the winding-up Bea. She would begin shrieking any minute, and she did. “Go find Ted! I can’t think what in God’s name he thinks he’s doing. It’s not like I don’t have supper on the table at the same time every night. If anyone notices, I try to provide a routine around here. Like you give a damn. You show up whenever you damn well please …”

  Bea didn’t need to tell me where to look. I walked towards the Maple Leaf Hotel, where Ted spent his days in the cave-like dimness of the smelly, windowless pub. I passed Francie’s Famous Bakery, which always radiated the smell of fresh bread and reminded me of the summer in the log house at Dultso Lake. And I passed the three drunk men who hung out on the sidewalk in front of the liquor store and called me sweetheart when they asked for money.

  I was still half a block from the pub when I saw him, slumped in his wheelchair by the side of the road. I assumed he was drunk, although he rarely showed any visible signs of drunkenness. Once in a while he fell asleep in the pub and the owner, Mr. MacNeil, phoned the house for me to come and get him.

  “Ted!” I called.

  He didn’t respond. When I got close, I saw he was running with sweat. A drop of it was poised on the end of his nose, ready to fall. His eyes were only half-open.

  “Ted!” I said and shook his shoulder. He winced. The drop of sweat landed on his shirt front.

  “Mag,” he whispered. “Better take me home.”

  Ted had stomach cancer.

  “I told him what it would lead to,” I heard Bea say to her sister on the phone. “You don’t pour that much alcohol into your system without some kind of consequence.” Then she started to cry, tried to poke her Kleenex up under her glasses, had to take them off. “They have him on morphine—for the pain.” She said it pitifully, lingering on the word “morphine.”

  But Bea rose to her trouble; it enlivened her. She shredded apple and made it into puree for Ted. She boiled up beef bones, added a hash of cabbage and carrots and carried it to his hospital room in a Thermos. “They give him broth made from powder,” she said disdainfully. “How is that supposed to make you healthy?”

  She brought him fresh pyjamas and a stack of National Geographics, left them with him for a few days, then exchanged them for new ones. There was no evidence that Ted read them. He mostly kept the tiny TV a few inches from his face, and dozed in and out with the ebb and flow of morphine. But Ted reading them was not the point; Bea needed to be the model bereft wife. For her efforts, she received tender pats on the arm from the nurses at the hospital, as well as sympathetic noises from the grocery store clerk and her sister’s late night phone calls. Her life finally had purpose.

  I believed that my worry was a jinx. I had never saved anyone with it. Quite the opposite, it seemed that, one by one, those I cared about were slipping under the spell of my worry and being carried away. And so I was determined not to worry about Ted.

  I went to see him after school. He was awake and playing solitaire on the table pulled up to his chest.

  “Mag!” he said. “Sit down. I’ve got sweet bugger-all to do here.”

  “Want to play Canasta?”

  “Get the other deck out of the drawer.”

  Ted shuffled the cards and began dealing. He looked different in the hospital bed, smaller, and older. The light blue gown tied loosely around his neck emphasized his bony collarbone, the pale blue veins of his neck and the almost translucent skin of the hollow at his throat. He had lost about thirty pounds, according to Bea’s phone reports, and he was in constant pain. But today he was awake, at least.

  We played, cards snapping quietly on the table. Ted shifted his position gingerly every few minutes and I saw his face twist with pain. He tried to hide it.

  After a while, he said, “I can tell you what I know about your dad if you like.”

  I nodded.

  “I met Patrick in about 1957, I think it was. He told me he came to the U.S. from Northern Ireland when he was twenty. There was some bad feeling between his father and him. His father was a drinker, I understand, and he could get pretty mean when he tied one on. Didn’t work much. Sounds like they were hand to mouth, most of the time. When Patrick got old enough, he joined the RUC. Do you know what that is?”

  “Dad said he was a policeman once.”

  “That’s right. The Royal Ulster Constabulary. A kind of police force and border patrol combined. The pay was good, but there were very few Catholics. Patrick’s dad was livid when he found out. They were Catholic, of course.” Ted paused and laid d
own two more eights to make his first Canasta. “I got lucky there,” he said.

  “My mother’s family is Irish, too,” he went on. “We’ve got long memories, the Irish do, and we know how to hold a grudge like nobody else. I don’t know where exactly your dad lived, but his father thought joining the RUC was a cop-out. Said they’d never accept Patrick, being Catholic. Patrick could do a funny send-up of him, with his Irish accent. ‘You’re after turning soup-taker, me own son. Never thought I’d live to see the day. Colluding with the filthy prods.’ Well, I can’t do it justice.

  “But the thing is, Patrick said, his father was right. The little songs at first, then the taunts. One of his partners started each shift by saluting: ‘For God and Ulster.’ One day Patrick found something nasty scrawled on his locker. He wouldn’t tell anyone about it, and for damn sure not his father. So he took his next paycheque and bought a ticket to the United States. Left without saying goodbye to anyone. He couldn’t bear to tell his mother. I imagine he felt bad about that to the day he died. I suppose your mother would know that story. After he’d met your mother, he told me they had that in common: they were both orphans.”

  Ted had started a meld of queens, so I threw down a three of clubs to block him from taking the discard pile. I knew Dad had come from Ireland; he had a lilt in his voice that his friends teased him about. But he rarely talked about it.

  “Living in such a sensible place as this, it’s hard to imagine the bitterness back there. Families turning against their own. And that was in the good times. Now, well, your dad didn’t live to see Bloody Sunday. What am I going to discard here? What’s going to do the least damage?” He threw down a nine of hearts and I took the pile.

  He picked up Dad’s story again. “In New York, he met up with a guy going to Oregon. Patrick went along. That’s where he learned to log.”

  Ted exhaled a long slow sigh and I thought he was about to tell me something I wouldn’t want to hear. My stomach contracted in readiness. But he reached for the buzzer to call the nurse instead and then sat back against his pillow and closed his eyes. He let his cards fall on the table, face up; I pushed back my chair and went for the door just as the nurse was coming in.