Wake The Stone Man

by Carol McDougall

The coffins at the front of the church were closed. Someone had put photos on top of them. One of my mom when she worked for the Red Cross during the war; she was wearing her uniform and she looked really tough and really beautiful. The photo on my dad’s coffin was of him standing beside his racing boat. He was hoisting a trophy over his head and had a big silly grin on his face. With his curly hair he still looked like a kid.

  There was another one of them together in a canoe. Dad was at the back paddling and Mom was leaning back on him, and her hair was falling over his legs. They looked young and happy.

  I looked down at my feet and saw two black shoes and I wondered where they had come from and when I’d put them on. Maybe I didn’t put them on. Maybe those weren’t my feet.

  People were praying and singing hymns but I felt like I was floating under water. The minister stood at the front with his mouth opening and shutting like a fish but I couldn’t hear any words. People stood up and sat down but I sat staring straight ahead. Then eight men went to the front of the church. I recognized a couple of uncles and the rest were guys my dad worked with I think.

  They stood around the two coffins and grabbed the brass bars along the sides, and when the organ began to play “Abide with Me” they carried the coffins down the middle aisle. The people around me started to cry, and that scared me. I didn’t know what to do. Someone was making moaning sounds like an animal caught in a trap. I started to shake and realized the moaning sounds were coming from me. I couldn’t stand up. Everyone was standing up but I just folded up and turned my head away so I couldn’t see the coffins being carried out.

  Someone put an arm around me. It was Anna. She said “Stand up Molly.” I stood up. She put one arm around my waist and balanced herself on her cane. When I got out into the aisle behind the coffins I felt my legs wobble and another arm held me. Anna’s mom on the other side. I let them carry me out of the church.

  Outside snow was falling. It fell softly on the steeple of the church and on the two oak coffins being carried down the stairs. Snow fell silently on the roofs of the two black hearses and muted the sound of traffic in the street. As I walked down the steps I could feel snowflakes melting down the back of my neck.

  That night after the funeral I put on my parka and took my blankets and pillows out to the garage. I crawled into Dad’s boat and made a nest under the deck. I thought I would feel safe there but I didn’t. I felt like a rogue wave was about to swamp the boat and take me down.

  Oh yeah, here’s another Fort McKay Christmas tradition — every Christmas Eve someone goes out partying and gets shit-faced drunk then gets in their car and wipes out some nice happy family. On Christmas Eve 1970, it was my nice happy family. My nice happy family, minus one. I was supposed to be in the car with them.

  book two

  chapter ten

  I was living with Anna then. My rich aunt and uncle had finally made some lame offer to take me in, but come on. I made an excuse about wanting to finish Grade 12 at my own school and they seemed happy to be off the hook. They high-tailed it back to North Fort and their martinis.

  Anna’s mom came and got me. Didn’t say anything, just came over and took me home with her. And that was OK by me.

  I called Anna’s mom Kiiko and her dad Toivo and we all got on OK. I learned to eat puuro for breakfast and pulla bread and lihapullat, which is just meatballs. We played cards, and some nights Anna and I drank beer at the Wayland with her dad and his buddies from the mill.

  About a month after the accident Kiiko and I walked back to my house carrying empty cardboard boxes. The house had to be sold. I knew that. A bunch of ladies from the neighbourhood came over with sandwiches, and Toivo and a friend parked their trucks outside ready to haul stuff away. Kiiko got everyone organized, and sent the ladies into the living room and basement. She took me up to my parent’s bedroom and I sat on the bed as she went through their things.

  “Molly.”

  I looked up at Kiiko. “Sorry, what did you say?” I wasn’t listening. I was thinking how weird it was to be sitting on Mom and Dad’s bed while Kiiko went through their closets.

  “I’ve got your mom’s jewelry box.”

  “OK.”

  “I’ll put it in here honey, and anything you want to keep just put in the box at the end of the bed.”

  “It’s OK. I don’t need anything.”

  Kiiko put down the armful of clothes she was holding and sat beside me. I picked up the fur coat from the top of the pile. My grandmother’s beaver coat. I ran my hand across the short soft fur.

  “You want me to do this?” she asked. “If it’s too hard I can do it.”

  “I just can’t…”

  “It’s OK, I’ll finish this. You go on home.”

  Home. That was the problem. I was home. I went out of my house with my grandmother’s fur coat over my arm and walked down the sidewalk. Before I turned onto Anna’s street I looked back to see some men carrying our sofa down the front stairs and putting it in the back of the truck.

  I finished high school. My marks were crap but they cut me some slack, I guess because of the dead parents thing, and said as long as I showed up for classes I’d graduate.

  I got up, had breakfast, brushed my teeth, went to school. All the normal stuff. Normal from the outside.

  Inside I felt like I’d gone insane. I remember once when I was about eight I got invited to a pajama party at Linda Dell’s house. It was a big deal because I’d never been to a sleepover before, and well, to be honest, I wasn’t usually invited to parties. It was fun at first. We played games, ate pizza, and I showed them how I could make pop squirt out my nose. They liked that. Then it was time to crawl into the sleeping bags and that’s when it hit me. I wanted to go home. I hated being in a strange house with someone else’s parents. I wanted my dad to come in and kiss me on the forehead and say “Goodnight sweetie,” like he did every night. I wanted Mrs. Dell to call my dad and tell him to come and get me. Right away.

  That’s how I felt the year after the accident. I felt like I was curled up inside my sleeping bag, crying so no one could hear me, so no one would know how scared I was, waiting for my dad to come and take me home.

  ***

  Everyone was careful not to talk about the accident. Nobody spoke about my mom and dad. I got it. It was best to pretend that nothing had happened because it upset people.

  Since I couldn’t talk about my parents I talked to them. Every day, in my head I told them stuff I was doing, just normal stuff like what I was eating or what was happening at school and funny stuff the neighbours were doing that would have made them laugh.

  Sometimes at night, in bed, when I was almost asleep I got angry. I was angry with them for leaving me. I knew the accident wasn’t their fault, that they didn’t want to die. I got that, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that they were gone and I was alone. What the hell was I supposed to do?

  I guess I was pissed off with everything that year. With school and my teachers and the lawyer who kept asking me to come by his office to sign papers. I didn’t want to sign papers. I didn’t want to talk to some fucking lawyer about my parents being dead.

  I was pissed off with Nakina too. She never came to the funeral. I needed her.

  ***

  “Who the hell is St. Urho?” Anna had dragged me to a parade in front of the Finlandia Club.

  “Patron saint of Finland. He chased the grasshoppers out of Finland.”

  “No shit.”

  “I want to get to the front; I can’t see anything,” she said.

  “I hate parades.”

  “Philistine.”

  “Seriously. If there’s clowns or bagpipes…”

  “Bagpipes? Idiot, it’s a Finnish parade!”

  I moved to the front of the crowd in time to see an eight-foot grasshopper coming down the street. The giant bug was strung up betw
een two poles. Four Finlanders were holding the ends of the poles on their shoulders and they were hauling that big-ass bug down the street.

  “Told you.”

  “OK. So how did this St. Arsehole…”

  “St. Urho.”

  “St. Urho guy drive the grasshoppers out of Finland?”

  “Dunno.”

  “What were they doing there in the first place?”

  “Shut up and watch the parade.”

  Behind the giant grasshopper was a mess of people carrying pitchforks and rakes, and behind that a half-ton truck hauling a polka band and everybody was screaming, “Heinäsirkka, heinäsirkka, mene täältä hiiteen,” which means something like “go to hell grasshopper.” Funny stuff.

  After the polka band rolled by everyone poured in behind and followed the parade into the Finlandia Club where the singing and dancing carried on all night.

  “So when did this St. Urho guy drive the grasshoppers out of Finland?” I was sitting at a table in the Finlandia Club, with Anna and Toivo drinking green beer. Green for grasshoppers.

  “He didn’t.”

  “You told me he did.”

  “Ya, well I was just screwing with you.”

  “Fuck off. Seriously.”

  “Seriously. The whole thing was invented by some guy in Minnesota a few years ago.”

  I thought it was funny — the parade, the big freakin grasshopper. My dad would have split a gut laughing. And suddenly I wanted him with me, sitting beside me drinking green beer. Most of the time I was alright, but sometimes, when I wasn’t expecting it, grief punched me hard in the gut. I guess I was looking pretty serious, because Anna knocked me on the shoulder and said, “Molly. Lighten up, it’s a party!”

  ***

  Grief did strange things. Before the accident I was addicted to reading, but afterwards words jumped around on the page and didn’t mean anything. I couldn’t figure out the code. After a while I gave up trying. Didn’t want to read, didn’t want to do anything. Not a fucking thing.

  One day about three months after the accident I picked up a copy of Slaughterhouse Five. Had to. English assignment.

  “Molly, you’re next, could you come to the front please.” Miss Sewell was my Grade 12 English teacher. She was good — really knew her stuff, and she tried to encourage me. I knew she was trying to help, but I was a lost cause.

  I went up to her desk and stood looking out the window for a while. There were clouds in the sky that looked like big fat butts floating by.

  “Molly, are you ready?”

  “Yeah. OK. So, my book was Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut.” I looked down at my notes and the letters were dancing all over the page. I shook my head to see if I could get the flippin letters to stand still. I heard someone at the back laughing.

  “So, my book was Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Kurt Vonnegut Jr.” I cleared my throat and looked at the words. They were still bouncing around and I couldn’t catch my breath.

  “So. It’s about this guy Billy Pilgrim who goes off to war and comes home nuts.” I headed back to my seat.

  “Molly.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Could you come back up please.”

  “Yeah OK.” I could hear some kids at the back of the room laughing their heads off.

  “Could you tell us, in your own words, what the novel is about?”

  I stood looking at my feet. Pretty small feet really. Which is weird because I’m so tall.

  “Molly?”

  I kept my head down so I wouldn’t have to look at anyone. “So, Billy Pilgrim, when he was a kid, his dad threw him in the swimming pool to teach him how to swim but Billy sank to the bottom.”

  “Loser!” Jackie Slaunwaite shouted from the back of the room and everyone broke out laughing.

  I looked at Jackie. “It wasn’t that he couldn’t swim. He just didn’t want to. So he got sent off to war and he was a crap soldier. He didn’t want to be there, but he ended up in Germany and got taken prisoner of war and was locked in a meat slaughterhouse. And that’s where he was during the Dresden firebombing. So when it’s over Billy comes out of the slaughterhouse and everything is flattened. Burnt to a crisp. And they make him dig the burned bodies out of the rubble. So Billy’s digging up bodies and he gets unstuck in time. He’s zapping back and forth from the present to the past and then suddenly, whap — he’s in the future and gets kidnapped by these aliens who look like upside-down toilet plungers.”

  Jackie started laughing again. Probably the toilet plunger thing.

  “Anyway Kurt Vonnegut was Billy. He was in Dresden during the firebombing. He was just trying to say that war is crap.”

  I walked toward my seat, crumpling my paper into a ball.

  “Molly, could you stay at the front for a moment while…”

  I ignored Miss Sewell and walked past my seat, out the door, down the hall and out of the school. I walked across the parking lot, along the river and didn’t stop walking till I was deep in the bush.

  Shit happens. People die. So it goes.

  chapter eleven

  At least Slaughterhouse Five got me reading and I started hanging out at the library again. Miss Black, the librarian, seemed glad to see me.

  “Molly, do you have any plans for the summer?”

  “No, not really.” I’d known Miss Black since I was a little kid. She used to let me help shelve the books. Funny thing though, I never really knew anything about her. She was just Miss Black, short and round and nice. I think she liked her job, and she liked kids. I think she liked me. When I was little I used to think she lived in the library and I imagined that when they turned off the lights and locked the doors at night she’d still be sitting in her chair behind the reference desk.

  So here’s something about Miss Black. The day of the funeral, when I was walking out behind the coffins, I saw her sitting in the church. She didn’t have to be there, wasn’t like she was family or anything, but she came.

  “The library got a LIP grant.”

  “A lip grant? A grant for lips?”

  “L.I.P. — Local Initiative Project. One of Trudeau’s ideas.”

  I noticed that Miss Black always blushed a little when she talked about Pierre. I think Pierre was her Leonard.

  “The grant is to catalogue our photograph collection. Would you be interested?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve never done anything like that before.”

  “It’s simple. You just have to number the photographs and file them.

  “OK. I guess so.”

  “Good. Come back tomorrow afternoon and Mr. Klein will interview you.”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Klein, the new chief librarian.”

  I went to the library the next day and Miss Black took me behind the check-out desk and down a hallway past framed black and white photos of old guys in suits. Former chief librarians. As we walked into Mr. Klein’s office I was wondering why the chief dudes were all guys and the librarians were all women.

  “Mr. Klein, this is Miss Bell. She’s here to interview for the cataloguing project.”

  “Have a seat Miss Bell. I don’t know how much Miss Black has told you about the project.”

  “Not much.” I was thinking he looked younger than I expected — maybe late twenties.

  “Well, the grant is for three months and basically the job is to catalogue the library’s historical photograph collection.”

  “Yeah.”

  The hours are nine to five, Monday to Friday.”

  “OK.”

  “Are you interested?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We’re looking for someone to start right away.”

  “OK.”

  “OK, you can start right away?”

  “Yeah.” I knew I sounded
like an idiot but I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I wasn’t really paying attention because I was looking at his dark eyes and his black curly hair, which was pretty long for a chief librarian if you asked me. He had a weird accent and was wearing these thick, black-frame glasses, and I could see his lips moving but I was thinking … Woody Allen. This guy reminds me of Woody Allen. So I just kept nodding and saying, “Yeah.”

  “Good, well you can start Monday then.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes. Is that OK?

  “Sure.”

  Monday morning at five to nine I was standing at the front door of the library. It was locked, of course, because the library didn’t open until ten. So I was standing there with my knees shaking and my palms sweating thinking maybe I should have paid more attention when Mr. Klein was talking instead of thinking about how long his hair was.

  “Miss Bell?”

  It was Mr. Klein.

  “It’s locked.” I said.

  “I know, that’s why I told you to use the back door. Follow me.”

  I followed him around the building to a small door near the back parking lot.

  “You can leave your coat here in the lunchroom. We have coffee at ten and we have tea around three in the afternoon. You’re welcome to join us.”

  I followed Mr. Klein into the basement, past the furnace room to a small room with cement walls and no windows.

  “I’m sorry, it’s not a great spot, but it’s the only space we’ve got.”

  “It’s fine.” I said.

  There was a small oak desk and chair, a grey metal filing cabinet and stacks of cardboard boxes piled up beside the cabinet. Mr. Klein opened one of the boxes.

  “Go through each box; they’re in no particular order. Each photo will need an accession number and you’ll have to devise a numbering system. Once you’ve entered the number on the photo you can put the number on the index card along with a description of the photo. If the photo falls into several categories you can fill out additional index cards and cross-reference. Then, once you’ve finished with the photo you can put it into one of these acid-free envelopes.”