Shelter

by Frances Greenslade

  The cabin smelled of turpentine. He was an artist. On the shelves, held in place by a thick strip of elastic, were tubes of oil paints, brushes, and palette knives. His art was fastened to every available space. He painted recognizable things like cedar trees, totem poles, birds, but some were just triangles and squares of light and shadow.

  How did you end up here? she asked him that first day. He said it was a long story, asked her how much time she had. I better make tea, he said and that was the start. She was giddy with the attention he showed her, tucked away in the cabin of his boat with the rain pecking the windows and a man making tea for her. What had she known up until then? Cowboys her age who wanted to rope her like one of their calves and grab her tits.

  I could see what Rita was doing. She was trying to build my sympathy for Mom for something else that was coming, and that worried me. She had relaxed into the story; she was enjoying it. We were facing west, and she kept raising her eyes and gazing out towards the mountains, as if she was watching it unfold over there. I thought about lying side-by-side with Vern in our tree fort and I missed him intensely.

  Irene said that Emil was gentle and slow in all his movements. He had long slender legs and arms, long brown fingers. He was graceful, always touching things, stroking them. He liked textures, noticed them in a way most people don’t. She figured that was the artist in him. He made tea, not from teabags, but with leaves measured from a tin, poured the water over it, gave it a stir, timed it steeping. Sugar, milk from a can. He peeled an orange and put the segments on a plate. It became one of the things she loved, watching him make tea for her.

  He gave her a pillow and helped her tuck it behind her back. She could sense his desire, but said she ignored it. She was flattered by his attention.

  Emil told her he had inherited money from his aunt, lots of it, not that there was much left by the time she met him. He’d gone to New York, to art galleries, art shows, talks, coffee houses. He’d travelled, gone to Europe to see the masters. He was admitted to art school in Toronto on the strength of his work.

  Art school changed his life. When he returned to the Prairies, the landscape felt claustrophobic. He had the feeling all that sky was closing in on him. He began to have what he called visions. Weird visions, like dreams, but they happened when he was awake—intense and very real. He had a recurring one he told Irene about. Birds of prey were following him, hawks and falcons and eagles. He saw them everywhere, perched on fences, store roofs, signposts, in the tree outside his bedroom window. He’d done a series of drawings of them and he showed her. Two whole sketchbooks full.

  He had another aunt who lived in Bella Coola and he came out to visit her, to get away from the Prairies and the visions.

  That’s when he decided to buy the boat.

  Irene’s visits to his boat became a regular routine and, eventually, he asked her to go out on the boat with him. He said he wanted to fish and he needed a partner. This was a pretence and they both knew it. But the idea of bobbing in the ocean with Emil looking after her was too appealing to resist. Irene had been on her own for quite a while already by then. Her dad had left her to go to school in Williams Lake while he was out cowboying around the countryside. He seemed to think she could take care of herself. Which was probably true. He didn’t even know she’d gone to Bella Coola and it was a long time after that when she found out he’d died of a heart attack way out in the woods, looking for horses.

  Anyway, one day in the café, Irene was serving a group of men, and after Emil left, they started to talk about him. They didn’t seem to care if she overheard, in fact she thought maybe their talk was partly for her benefit:

  He knows fuck-all about fishing.

  He’s from the Prairies. He knows prairie chickens and deer.

  His boat looks good.

  Sure it does, he’s a carpenter. Not a fisherman.

  I don’t think he cares much if he catches anything or not.

  He’ll get himself drowned.

  Long as he doesn’t take anyone down with him.

  It should have made her uneasy, but being sixteen going on seventeen, she just thought they didn’t understand Emil. He wasn’t just looking for fish; he was looking for experiences. He was an artist.

  They went out the first time in June. They didn’t take the nets and gear. Emil said he wanted Irene to get used to the Elsa, learn how to use the tide charts, all of that.

  The cliffs rise straight up from the water out there and they stretch down into the water just as far, like there are two worlds, and you’re in between them. Irene had to surrender to the mountains and the bald eagles and the wind, and to Emil. That started to dawn on her as she watched him steering the Elsa—she was in his hands.

  Everything about this world was unfamiliar to her. The words galley and deck and dinghy and bunk. Emil on the bunk in his blue jeans and bare feet, eating a plate of fish that they’d caught with handlines off the boat, and watching her. It was so intimate, to see his feet. She had never seen his bare feet. And the way the boat was called “she.” The engine was called Vivian. Emil would say, I better tend to Vivian. And he’d go down below and start her up and then chuff, chuff, chuff, off they went up the inlets. Irene found out later that Vivian was the engine make, and not a name he’d made up.

  A couple of days out, Emil came up behind her on the deck, pulled her close and kissed her neck. She had a moment of fear, but it burned off in the heat of his touch.

  Rita stopped.

  “What?” I said. I almost shouted it.

  “I need a little break.”

  “Now?”

  “I’m going to get some crackers. The wine’s going right to my head.”

  I had been thinking that Mom then had not been much older than I was now, and that Vern was gentle like Emil. And that Rita’s voice had grown tender as she talked and I supposed she missed Mom, missed staying up through the night with her, talking and giggling over the things they’d done when they were younger.

  When she came back outside, carrying a few crackers, she said, “Let’s walk. I can’t sit the way I used to. I must be getting old.”

  “You’re not old.”

  “No. But telling this story makes me feel ancient.”

  So we headed across the meadow. The sun wasn’t as intense now, and the heat felt comfortable on my shoulders. Rita kept her head down, as if she was considering where to start again. We wound through a few scrub trees then into deeper shade.

  “Let’s just say Emil was a kind and gentle lover, too,” she finally began again. “I give the guy credit. He had studied it. Read books about it.”

  “There are books?”

  “Sure. And he was very patient. They didn’t even make love that first day when he kissed her. Or the next. It was a few days later, I don’t know how many. I guess he wanted her to want it as much as he did.”

  So he’d do things like take her clothes off, slowly, piece by piece, but stay fully dressed himself. And then maybe he’d trace her body with his fingers. He’d take a smooth stone and place it at the hollow of her throat, find the places of her pulse with it and let her feel how warm the stone would get. He made sure she was comfortable on the bunk and he did charcoal drawings of her. She grew to love his eyes on her. He was systematic about winning her over. And she was the one finally who knocked him down on the bunk one day and made him take his pants off.

  Life on the Elsa was sweet. They put in at little bays and took the dinghy ashore to explore. They swam in warm tidal pools at night with trails of shining phosphorescence dripping from their bodies. Every few days they looked for a mooring where they could find fresh water to wash off the salt that dusted their skin and caked their hair. Irene had had no idea how salty the ocean really was.

  They had their daily domestic tasks, crab traps to drop over the side, dishwater to heat on the Coleman stove on deck. But Emil wouldn’t let Irene play the housewife. He snatched a shirt from her hand when she went to wash it one day. Don’t
do that, he said. Why? she asked. That’s not what you are to me.

  “I like him for that,” Rita said.

  I did, too. I could see myself in Mom’s place. Nothing to worry about and all the time in the world.

  One morning, Emil ran them into a little white shell beach. They anchored the Elsa in deep water, and took the dinghy in. The terrain can be rough going as soon as you try to go inland. It’s rainforest, lush as it gets, like a tropical jungle. They bushwhacked through thickets of wild roses and devil’s club as tall as Irene, leaves as big as her head, and spiky stems. The only sound, other than the ocean, was the ravens heckling them. Before they saw it, she could hear the rumble of a waterfall, then feel the coolness.

  She said it was like an Eden, the water tumbling straight down from the mountains and at the bottom, a series of pools. She couldn’t wait to strip off her salt-stiff clothes. She and Emil stood naked under the cascade of water. It was very cold but it washed the salt away. Afterwards they lay on the warm rocks and Emil fell asleep in the sun.

  When he woke, he said, Do you see that?

  He pointed through the trees at a pole with a bird carved into it, his hooked beak overlooking the forest and beach beyond. Irene noticed boxes in the spruce trees that she hadn’t seen until she looked carefully. They were tied with strips of cedar, and some had come loose and were flapping in the breeze.

  What is it? she asked him.

  They’re graves. The dead are tied into trees with their possessions. If you walk through there, you can find copper bracelets, necklaces, maybe some skulls.

  She wouldn’t touch any of it.

  He said, No. You shouldn’t take what belongs to the dead. The ravens are watching.

  Seems like you’ve been here before, she said.

  I like it here. It’s peaceful.

  It was peaceful. Still beyond still. Even the ravens had left them.

  Emil suddenly jumped up, said I’ll be back in a while. Before Irene could ask any questions, he was gone.

  She wasn’t worried. She lay in the sun daydreaming, listening to the water spill over the rocks. She slept a little. When she woke up, she passed the time as she waited for Emil by looking for nice stones in the stream.

  She kept looking over to the beaked pole and the graves like clusters of nests in the trees. She wanted to go search for bracelets in the grass, not to take them, but just to see proof that someone had been there once, led a life from start to finish there. But she wouldn’t go alone.

  Two ravens came back and talked to her, back and forth, know-it-all remarks, like ravens do. All alone? All alone. Where did he go? He took off. He took off. They laughed about it, she swore they did.

  The afternoon wore on and still Emil didn’t come back. She began to get annoyed. The ravens cackled: Scared? Scared? Then she heard movement in the brush, branches cracking, and she saw a large shape slip among the trees. Emil had warned her about bears, but this moved too swiftly and smoothly to be a bear.

  She called out. Emil! I don’t like your jokes. She thought he was playing a game with her.

  But the shape moved past her and the sound trailed off.

  She shouted his name over and over, scared now, and the ravens seemed to mock her openly. Finally, in the distance she heard, I’m coming! Then she felt the pounding of his feet approaching.

  He appeared through the trees, two lovely trout hanging from his hand.

  Of course she was so relieved she cried.

  And he said, all innocence, Was I gone too long? Like he had no idea.

  Let’s just go, she said.

  I want to make a fire on the beach to roast the trout.

  She said no. She wanted to go back to the boat.

  It was the first time he’d seen her angry and Emil, apparently, didn’t like anger. He never got angry himself, didn’t have it in him. When he saw it in her, he turned away, like he was embarrassed for her.

  They rowed back to the Elsa and Emil cleaned the fish and fried it up. But Irene was uneasy. It was partly the place. From a distance, the totem pole looked menacing. The beak seemed like a warning. Later, when they’d eaten the trout, Emil presented Irene with a bowl of red huckleberries. And then it was hard to stay mad at him. She told him she’d been scared and she told him about the shape she’d seen in the trees.

  When he didn’t seem surprised, she left it alone. It was night by then. The tide was out, and a stink rose up from the mud flats and it drifted over to the boat. She was glad not to be on shore. The Elsa seemed like a haven of safety against the dark forest and mountains rising up out there. She missed her mother, even though Emil was there, sitting on the deck, smoking, leaning against the cabin window. It occurred to her how little she knew about him and how utterly she depended on him out there.”

  Rita stopped talking for a minute as she scrambled up the side of a large boulder and patted it. “Come and join me. I love sitting here. This time of day, the sun slants through here and warms it up.”

  I climbed up and sat beside her.

  “I once found a crab claw on top of this rock. Strange, eh? It was just the end part. I kept it. I’ve always meant to ask someone how a crab claw could end up on a rock in the interior of BC, a couple hundred miles from the ocean.”

  “A bird?”

  “That’s probably it.”

  The way Irene described Emil, he sounded soft. Like the stroke of an eyelash. He would never mean any harm. But after the trip to the waterfall, she started to sense that there was something dark that had power over him. It came in spells, and when it came, it took him away from her.

  If the water turned rough, they’d have to wait it out somewhere. One day, they’d anchored in a sheltered bight out of the worst of the weather, but the cliffs were too steep to allow them to go ashore. A couple of days passed and they ran out of fresh water. They didn’t even have enough to make their morning coffee. So they decided to make a run for a nearby bay they saw on the charts.

  After some hard going, they ran in and dropped anchor at another white shell beach. It was an Indian village—she could tell by the thick white midden, discarded shells of generations of families living in the same place. There wasn’t much left of the village itself, just a leaning totem pole and the remains of some houses near the shore. But at the edge of the beach, almost overgrown by salmonberry bushes and stinging nettle, they saw a house that was still standing. They took their water jugs and coffeepot and two crabs they had caught and rowed over.

  They had to beat down the nettles with their oars to get to the door that was watched over by a carved post of a big-beaked bird with outstretched wings. Inside, the house was empty. A low bench ran around the room. A few cooking pots hung on the walls. There was an opening along the roof rafters for smoke to escape and a stone fireplace in the middle of the floor. No sign of anyone, but Irene felt uneasy. She felt a presence, like they were being watched. It could have been that the village wasn’t abandoned, just not being used right then. Maybe it was a winter village and the people were out fishing for the summer.

  Still, it was good to be on dry land and out of the rain. They got some water from a stream coming off the mountain and Emil went looking for wood dry enough to make a fire. He was gone a long time and she started to worry. But finally he came back and they built the fire and made coffee and cooked the crabs.

  They fell asleep on the floor near the fire. When Irene woke up, the fire was out and Emil was gone. She could see pale light through the roof hole and she could hear the surf rushing into the beach. She had been dreaming about drums and a dancer wearing a mask that opened up to reveal another mask inside it. Once she was awake, she could still hear the drumming. She went to the door and looked out. No sign of Emil. But the dinghy had been carried out into the water and was slamming up against the rocks, making a knocking sound. She had to wade out and tow it back up the beach.

  Mist hung in the trees. It burned off through the morning while Irene sat on the beach and waited for E
mil. She didn’t have matches, Emil had them, so she couldn’t even make coffee. As the tide went out, she realized they had miscalculated and brought the Elsa in too close to shore. She was caught in a little pool, while around her the bay emptied out. There was nothing Irene could do about it, so she dug clams for lunch with a spoon.

  You get a real sense of time passing when you’re sitting on a beach waiting. The weather had calmed. The Elsa sat squat and helpless and behind her nothing moved out on the ocean. After a while, Irene got up and fought her way through the nettles to the edge of the forest to have a look, but it was so thick with brambles she didn’t go any further. She slept a little and when she woke it was late afternoon and the tide had begun to slop back in.

  She couldn’t stand the sense of waiting around, being helpless. She wanted Emil to come back and find her, a vision of self-sufficiency, cooking clams on the beach. Barely noticed he was gone.

  When the tide was full, she thought she should row out to the Elsa and try to move her to deeper water. She had never started the engine herself. It was a one-cylinder gas engine with a flywheel that had to be cranked. It could be tricky if you weren’t used to it.

  She took the coffeepot full of water, rowed back and climbed aboard. She was burning to do this right. First she had to turn on the magneto switch. Then, open the petcock and figure out where the cycle of the engine was: on intake or compression. You had to turn it until it was on intake; you’d hear the suction noise. Then you poured a little gas into the petcock. Stick the starting bar in the flywheel, give it a crank. The first time she did it, she forgot to close the petcock and gas blew all over the place. So she had to clean it up and try it all over again. She cranked and cranked, but she couldn’t get Vivian to spark for her.