A story rose in the darkness, a story of a man who lived in the shelter of a burden so huge he was impervious to ordinary fear. He wasn’t afraid of grizzlies or cougars, lightning strikes or snowstorms or the birds of prey that made their nests in the trees beside his cabin. Sometimes when his aunt took the motorboat up the inlet and hiked in to see him, she found him outside his cabin in the clearing, his hands red with cold as he sat in the drizzling rain drawing birds in charcoal on damp cardboard.
She stoked his fire and made him soup and pan-bannock and stayed to make sure he ate it. He had been scraped clean—there was nothing more for loss to scavenge from him. Guilt had spread in him like rampant stinging nettle and choked out every other thing so that he no longer felt it like other people did, because he had no other feeling to compare it to. It was only because of this that he could live at all.
This is a sad story. Don’t think about approaching him gently like a wild, cornered animal. Don’t think about holding out a hand to him. This will not be allowed.
After some time, we emerged into the sunlight, splashed ourselves with river water from the barrel and listened to the birds scolding each other as they built their nests in the trees on the far bank.
When we went back inside, the rocks hissed, steam rose and the heat deepened. Hooves rushed past outside and thunder rumbled. Stories peopled the dark.
A woman named Irene in a cabin in the bush with the snow just melting and the Solomon’s seal blooming under the trees and the tender turquoise broken shells of hatched birds’ eggs cushioned in the moss. Irene, our mother, who had beautiful red hair and legs as shapely as a fawn, labouring in childbirth with only a man who loved her and a self-help book several years old. The sun shone on the cabin floor and moved up the walls, then the shadows lengthened and the windows darkened and the fire popped and crackled, the water boiled again, steam rose and still she laboured and the baby refused to come.
He offered to carry her to the truck and she spat at him and called him an idiot. But he’d read about that. How mothers could turn ugly that way. It didn’t stop him from trying to massage her with olive oil, which didn’t stop her from slapping his head and telling him to get away from her.
The story, you have to understand, is told by a man who loved our mother to the woman who was his protector who told it to me to protect him. But I suppose that most of it is true. When he could see the crown of the baby’s head, Emil held a mirror for Irene to see and when the head refused to budge any further, Emil tried to help it out. Irene was worn out from pushing so long and couldn’t do much more. It was dark outside. An owl hooted at the window and Emil felt he was being taunted. Sometime after midnight, Emil finally pulled the baby out. He was a boy and he was blue. At the same moment, from somewhere deep within our mother’s body, blood began to flow in a torrent. Emil had never seen a torrent of blood like that.
It gushed onto the floor while Irene lay spent and asking for a blanket. Emil didn’t know whether to tend to the baby or Irene. He stuffed towels between Irene’s legs and tried to get the baby to breathe. The books said you weren’t supposed to spank the baby, but in desperation he did it anyway. It didn’t help. So he put the baby in the basket they had prepared for him and he turned to Irene and the blood.
She had stopped asking for the blanket but he tucked it around her anyway and kissed her forehead. The colour of her skin was like the inside of a mussel shell, luminous gray-purple. The towels were soaked through and there were no more, and when he tried to look, the blood just gurgled out, a viscous gelatinous purply red. He thought of cold water, to stop the bleeding, but he had only hot water.
The owl was hooting and Irene was still and cold to the touch, her breathing barely discernible. So he ran outside to the woods and found some snow and scooped it into a clean pot and carried it back into the steaming, bloody house. He kissed her again but by then she was dead. The cat, Cinnamon, hunched in the chair by the stove.
He spent part of the night in the rank-smelling bloody house while the fire cooled. Then as dawn came, he carried the cat outside in his arms, took a can of gasoline and splashed it on the front door, on the walls, at the four corners of the cabin and he lit it. He stood in the trees and watched it burn to the ground with both Irene and the baby inside. He himself disappeared with the cat and was not seen for a long time. When he surfaced, he was not a man anyone who had once known him would recognize. His aunt Alice saw the ghost of him that one night when he brought her the cat. Then she did not see him again until she heard the rumour of the black-bearded rake of a man living in the bush drawing birds on cardboard. She knew it must be him and she went to find him.
The heat had laid me out flat on the ground. A baby wailed. Snot streamed from me and into the cool mud under my cheek. The light, when I crawled out of the heat, stung my eyes. Sun and turquoise sky. Steam billowed from my body as a woman rinsed me with cold river water.
We ate salty salmon soup and buttery rolls. Berry pie. Sweet tea. Birds hopped from branch to branch, chattering, working on their nests.
“There’s a piece of land up the valley,” Alice said. “Emil has the deed for it. He told me it’s in a safety deposit box somewhere. He meant it for Irene. I think he will want Jenny to have it now.”
The fire snapped and smoked with the rich scent of cedar. We watched the shadows change; sunlight striped the ferns and fallen trees. And then it was time to go back.
In the morning, when the sun came over the mountains, Vern and I packed up the station wagon and drove out of the valley. We saw two bears, three deer, and wild roses blooming everywhere. I held Cinnamon, who watched out the window, alternately meowing and purring, then climbed into the back and curled up on the floorboards in the same place she used to. Alice had insisted I take her. “She’s all I have of her to give you,” she said.
I closed my eyes and slept. I dreamed of Mom, and in the dream I was cradling her in my arms.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wrote the first draft of Shelter in 1992, five years after my mother died, and shortly after I’d met my husband, David. David told me stories of his childhood, some of which took place in the Chilcotin where he had lived for a short time on a wilderness ranch about an hour from Williams Lake. The first summer after we met, we travelled Highway 20 and the back roads between Williams Lake and Bella Coola in David’s indestructible Volkswagen Scirocco, and it was on that trip that the two sisters, Maggie and Jenny, and their missing mother, began to haunt my imagination.
I finished the novel a year or so later and sent it to a publisher, where it was rejected. So I put it away and began work on other things. But a few years after I became a mother myself, Maggie and Jenny’s story drew me again and I began rewriting it completely.
I mention this because there are people I would like to thank who supported me in various ways through those first drafts in the early ’90s: Jay Draper and Barbara Johnston; Allan MacDougall of Raincoast Books; and my colleagues at UBC where I was finishing my MFA.
For the current Shelter, I owe thanks to the Saskatchewan Arts Board for initial financial assistance. I am grateful to Okanagan College for supporting the research and writing of the manuscript. My talented colleagues in the Okanagan College English department inspire and sustain me. Anne Cossentine, Deborah Cutt and Surandar Dasanjh in the Penticton campus library went out of their way to chase down microfilm of newspapers from the 1960s and ’70s, as well as any obscure articles I needed. Stan Chung talked to me about growing up in Williams Lake in the 1970s and I consulted his book of essays, Global Citizen. Sage Birchwater’s beautiful book, Chiwid, gave me insight into the people of the region, as well as the inspiration for the fictional Chiwid in Shelter. Mr. Birchwater also met with me and answered my questions about the Chilcotin area during the 1970s.
While researching the novel, I stayed at Bracewell’s Lodge in Tatlayoko Lake twice. My thanks to Connie for making me welcome. The hike from the lodge up Potato Mountain in June is unforgetta
ble. My generous hiking companions on the second trip were Al, Jesse, Jack, Lynn and Maggie, our guide. They named the wildflowers for me as we climbed.
The Cowboy Museum in Williams Lake provided historical details. Gaines McMartin answered my questions about logging. My father-in-law, Dan Joyce, was an invaluable source of information about fishing and boating on the BC coast. He told me stories of fishing in the 1950s, and read parts of the draft and corrected details.
Although I have tried to incorporate all the information that I received, any inaccuracies are mine. People who live in the region will notice that I have fictionalized most of the smaller place names, out of respect for the people whose histories are intertwined with the names.
Thanks to my very good friend Rozanne Haddad for inviting me to stay with her at Nimpo Lake, where she worked one summer as a baker for a fly-in fishing camp. Her effervescent personality helped introduce me to a side of the Chilcotin I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. In the novel I’ve given a tip of the hat to Fred (whose last name I still don’t know), who drove me to Bella Coola on the Freedom Road and showed me “the good place” that I’ve tried to re-create here.
I want to thank the Naramata Centre, where I stayed on several occasions during the writing of the manuscript. The peaceful setting beside Okanagan Lake allowed me quiet, uninterrupted working hours. Melanie Murray and I shared manuscript drafts while staying at Naramata. Anne McDonald encouraged me at various stages along the way. I appreciate their ongoing interest and support.
Denise Bukowski is not only an indefatigable agent, she also offered advice on my initial rewrites, advice that I took, and that strengthened the novel considerably. I thank Louise Dennys for her enthusiastic response to the manuscript. My editor at Random House Canada, Anne Collins, seemed from the start imbued with the spirit of Shelter; her editorial suggestions were both insightful and exacting. Thank you to Angelika Glover for fine and careful copy-editing.
I am so grateful for the unflagging encouragement that comes from my family, siblings Anne, Mary, Pat, Barbie and Neil. My father, Arthur Greenslade, died before Shelter was published, but he never failed to ask me, each time we talked, “How’s the writing going?” As I write this, David is in the kitchen cleaning up the breakfast dishes and my son, Khal, is playing a tune on the harmonica in the living room. Having them in my life gives me the joy and sense of security that make my writing possible. I thank them deeply.
FRANCES GREENSLADE was born in St. Catharines, Ontario, and has since lived in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and BC. She has a BA in English from the University of Winnipeg and an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. Her first book, a travel memoir called A Pilgrim in Ireland: A Quest for Home, won the Saskatchewan Book Award for Non-Fiction. Her second memoir, By the Secret Ladder: A Mother’s Initiation, was published in 2007. Frances teaches English at Okanagan College in Penticton, BC.
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