A bird on every tree

by Carol Bruneau

  Turning my back on it, I take a last look at the nearest cliff, blunt sandstone that once glinted like a fat archie rolled in sugar—in my mind’s eye, at least—and pick my way over the spray-pocked sand. Such are childhood’s mirages, and the feelings that come, at a certain age, of having occupied some lost universe.

  Black clouds meet the horizon. Spray beads the car’s windshield and my husband flicks on the wipers; the engine throws off heat. The dog yawns, curling up on the back seat. It wasn’t always so disgusting, I say, a feckless protest, and again the past seeps forward in dribs and drabs—as if it’s dammed and its pouring out too fast would exhaust it, a reservoir emptying like the pond back there, where stories lie of this or that one drowning, learning to skate or swim, of the model boats my grandfather built and tested before anyone had cars. Isn’t the past shaped of exactly these things?

  “We used to say you’d catch polio from that stream,” I tell my husband, smiling at how it brings what’s lost to life. “It was so frigging cold, we believed it too—you believe anything when you’re six, I guess.”

  Flo’s little bungalow is as she left it: the living room with its floral upholstery, plants dropping leaves. How did we forget to water them, certain she’d return from hospital? “A bird that tough makes you think they’ll last forever,” says Gregory, her only nephew.

  On the table lie the reception’s leftovers: store-bought finger-foods, an extravagant Tim’s cake which no one’s had the nerve to cut—foods Flo herself would avoid, disliking chocolate and the prospect of sharing germs with a roomful of people: a staunch wielder of fork and knife, Flo. My cousin from away, Felicity, uncorks a bubbly white that Flo would’ve snubbed for a red.

  “Thought I’d go all out,” says Gregory, self-congratulatory, helping himself to a large slab of the cake, his doing. The last of our kin in the town, Gregory will miss Flo the most. So good of you to have stayed for her, the rest of us say—Felicity, Grete, also come from out of province, and I. Silently my husband drains his glass and leashes the dog for a walk, though rain begins to streak the windows.

  Such good care you took of her, we agree—though it wasn’t Gregory the hospital called with Flo’s diagnosis or her passing, wondering about arrangements. His phone oddly, mysteriously out of range.

  “You’ve had so much to deal with, Greg,” repeats Grete, who, like Felicity, has always nursed a strange attachment to down-homers, the town itself no place you’d visit without good reason to, unlike the misty sea- and mountain-hugged villages north and west of here. Yet we came, as often and as faithfully as we could, staying close to Flo in ways we didn’t, haven’t, with each other.

  “To Flo.” Felicity raises her glass—one of our aunt’s, a miniscule, crystal sherry glass in which even the chips are ladylike. Grete laughs, dangling hers, already emptied.

  “God yes, to Flo!” booms Gregory, and Felicity busies herself topping everyone up. Her green, almond-shaped eyes already register the dust overtaking knick-knacks and pictures with names masking-taped to their undersides. Trinkets and tokens of a life of comings and goings in rising then weakening waves like radio signals, or rings on the pond’s surface.

  “Well, it’s too bad she missed the summer.”

  “Loved a beach day, didn’t she though.”

  “Damn rights—never gave a crap how cold it was, either.”

  “Just peel off, jump in, and give’r.”

  Maybe it’s the wine, though I’m wondering where my husband’s got to, keen to leave us to our grieving. Because I’m laughing and nodding, though the Flo I knew was not such a swimmer but a cautious breaststroker who hugged the shore, permed curls snug inside her bathing cap.

  “She saved my life, you know,” our cousin brags and Felicity and Grete snort—“Here we go”—recalling when we were kids and Gregory locked himself in a fridge. But he shakes his head, and I feel the echo of icy currents, the kind pale as stretch marks over the sea’s calm. So the past comes back.

  The scorching sun marooned his ma and mine and Flo on their blankets, while he and I plovered and hopscotched—the ocean too frigid for more than toe-dipping, cold enough to give a kid like me polio, teased Gregory, who knew how to swim. Since I didn’t I was happy snuggling close to Ma, sucking on a Rory-dory while Aunt Glenna tugged up her suit and rolled over to bake. Throwing fistfuls of sand then dipping his blue plastic pail, Gregory threatened to fling it—Polio, polio, who wants polio! A polio bomb! A joke? Ma gritted her teeth. Auntie Flo, who didn’t have children, ducked under her towel.

  Glenna’s laugh switched to a shriek at Gregory’s selective dousing. Why wasn’t Ma jumping up to give her first aid? Take her temperature, hold her hand, give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation? The things a nurse did in a bad situation. Ma’s smile was knotted; she rolled her eyes at Flo. I guessed what this could be about: Ma said polio was in the hospital, not the ocean; she should know, she had a friend who limped from catching it as a child. Vaccination was a word I knew from school. A drop of something pink on a sugar cube? A round scab on someone’s upper arm, like a brand from a car’s lighter, I speculated, having watched Bonanza and my aunts lighting cigarettes off one. What I also knew was that kids got sick, the children’s hospital full of them in oversized cribs and iron lungs, kids in casts and in wheelchairs, on crutches and in leg braces: Ma said so.

  “It’s no joke,” she said, her voice enough to put us in a cast—well, Gregory, who it was aimed at. “You never joke about disease.” She glared so hard that silent Glenna scowled and drop-jawed Gregory. Gregory, who could do no wrong, grabbed his pail to refill it. “Don’t,” his ma said, and after a while the sisters leaned back watching the slow, glassy swells wash ashore, gulls bob, and a tiny white fishing boat haul nets—the sea a perfect blue thunder that rolled us with it. My small feet shaped waves in the sand, the light through my eyelids the red of a plastic bucket drying in the sun under that fixed, cloudless sky.

  “Your mother could be a hardass, eh,” Gregory says—a joke except for the way his eyes cross mine, this middle-aged, balding man who does caretaking for a living. “Some serious, wasn’t she.”

  But that afternoon I remember her laughing, pointing down the beach to the stream glinting in the sun. “If you were going to catch anything,” she said, “it’d be from there.” Both her sisters, peeling back the flaps of their bathing caps after one last, futile attempt at a dip, nodded, Glenna adding that just that March a kid had almost died going through the pond’s ice. For some sort of emphasis she slapped her quivering thighs, Ma shaking her head and Flo mimicking their complaints about orange-peel dimples, till Gregory, stabbing the sand with his plastic shovel, complained of thirst. Refusing Flo’s Thermos of juice, he yelled for pop, then whined to go home. I zipped my lips, of course. It was Greg’s way or the highway, Ma once said, nothing at Aunt Glenna’s ran the way Ma ran things at home, like in a hospital—everything having its time and place—except in the case of the ashtray beside my uncle’s chair and the bird that drank from a glass atop their TV, bobbing and dipping “till the cows come home,” Glenna said.

  “I could stay forever,” my aunt moaned, a sand flea hopping from her girded stomach to Flo’s knee.

  “I-want-pop! Give-me-pop!” Gregory ranted louder and louder. “I’m dying here, I’m dyin’!” His feet squeaked, kicking sand. His fists pounded the blanket. Nestling closer to Ma, I clung to her neck. “Orange Crush, Oraaange Crussshhhh,” Glenna mimicked the sea, shaking her head. “Give us five more minutes, Greg—you can do that, right? Just a little longer.” Sighing, “Run off now. Just for a bit. See what you can find.”

  “You too, Marcie,” Ma nudged me. “Keep him company—just for a sec.” I knew that voice: it was for yet more catching up, never enough time to hear all about who’d died, gotten sick, or suffered other awful things since the sisters had last been together. Its impatience made me miss my dad in Halifax; he’d have taken my hand
and run along too.

  “See what treasures you find,” coaxed Flo, the one who’d never married.

  “I’ll bet there’s treasures—jewels,” Ma said over Glenna’s whisper, something-something about their other sister, the one they were missing, stuck in Ontario.

  “Try thataway, maybe?” Ma waved us towards the spot good for finding beach glass, best of all the blue of VapoRub jars. “And pick some shore coal!” she called cheerfully. The three of them had already moved closer, Glenna sifting sand through her fingers: the sign of rapt attention.

  “I don’t agree with pop,” I heard Ma say, squelching my sugary hopes. Gregory was out of earshot, tearing towards the stream. Its banks a proven trove of feathers and seashells and, once, a dried squid as papery as onionskin, the bead of one eye staring up.

  Veering that way, dropping our buckets, we toed the hem of seafoam, felt the undertow grate our heels. “The frigger’s a time machine!” Gregory yelped as the beach and the froth roared us backwards. Pebbles glittered. Gulls wheeled. My feet felt webbed and numb, my heart thumping as the waves dragged then shoved us back to dry sand.

  “C’mon, bacteria,” he called me, making a beeline now for the stream that swung and chiselled its way to the surf. Its banks caved under his giant, trouncing steps. “Josh-wah fought the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho,” he yelled tunelessly, stomping the dark sand as fast as the current could sweep it away. “And the walls come a-tumbling down!” I sang out, hanging back. Its gold glint deepened to the brown of cola; rank with eelgrass and mussel mud, it smelled brinier than the sea. “Is it poison?” I hollered, my question lost to his splashing.

  Gingerly I parked my bum on its cool, sandy ledge. Light enough to sit without toppling it, I kicked my feet, watched the tickling yellowness glide over them. Whooping, Gregory scooped up armfuls of it, geysers flashing down over me. “Gonna be a cripple! Marcie the cripple! Won’t be able to walk ’cause the polio’ll take your legs off!”

  It felt the same as when a wave had once knocked me under: the wanting to cry but being too scared to, the sting up my nose. From down the beach—far enough that her bathing cap looked white instead of pink, like the head of one of Flo’s hatpins, not the dahlia it mimicked—Ma waved. Standing, Aunt Flo draped something over herself; shielding her eyes, she waved too. Gregory’s ma was still pressed to the sand, so it really looked as if there were just Ma and Flo, Glenna no more than a beach bag or water wings without air. Then Ma lay down too, leaving only Flo sitting up. My cousin went on splashing and jeering, though his teasing eased into something gentler, brotherly—didn’t they all say he was as good as a brother?

  “Frig off—you won’t get the polio. Don’t cry.” His sunburnt face darkened under the cruising shadow of a gull. “But you don’t wanna know what’s in the pond, bacteria.” Sucking in his lips, he made a sombre, popping sound. A guy had drowned in there when our mothers were small, he said, and a kid too, late last winter, trying to skate.

  Gregory had a habit of talking through his hat, Ma said.

  With a wild yelp, he raced off when the sand under him let go—the ground in a cartoon earthquake. The yellow only came up to my frill, but next was quicksand—the stuff that buried people alive—pulling me downwards. The stream tickled my ribs as my cousin waded near its mouth. Filling his pail repeatedly, he flung the water back at itself, then dropped to his knees, digging feverishly. No matter how fast he scooped sand, the hole filled in. Distant laughter filtered down to us.

  Gregory waded deeper and deeper, to where the yellowness thinned, buckling over itself in thick, fast wrinkles. As I sank deeper, I guessed that Ma and my aunts were having fun—and I still had legs and feet, the yellowness no different from peeing under water, a warming clamminess, as waves pushed closer. Their tingling cold swelled and slid away, swelled and slid.

  Polio lived in hospitals.

  But where was Gregory? Where had he got to? His pail twirled on the ripples, bouncing on the froth. As if buckets grow on trees, Ma would say—pop and chocolate bars too. Once, well out of Glenna’s hearing, she’d called him spoiled. The thought of salty sweetness filled me, until a wave knocked me backwards, pushed bubbles up my nose. Through its gurgling thunder I heard myself howl. But I was okay, I was fine, crawling onto hot sand.

  Out in the swells a bird was fishing—diving, sinking, beating the water with its wings—something I’d seen more times than Ma and them could shake a stick at, Gregory would say: nothing special, nothing to turn your head. Eating sandwiches Flo packed, all through lunch, over and over we’d watched flashes and bobs of white, tiny fish wriggling from beaks.

  Now what I saw was a paleness—the paleness of curls?—as I squirmed against the grit caught in my suit. Everyone said Gregory had such pretty hair, what a sin being wasted on a boy, even Ma said. Next there was a scream—a squawk—as pale and scratchy as the sand, a sound rolling in and rolling out. Too, too far away to be a person, to be him.

  It was Flo who twigged to it, Flo who’d glanced over as he ventured out swinging his bucket. Who’d seen the waves tighten around him and, who knows, when his feet left bottom. It was Flo who broke from a trot into a dash; Glenna peeling herself from the blanket, hurtling forward, Ma too—all three having removed their bathing caps, despairing of a swim. They were fully inflated water wings the way they skittered over the sand, wisps of it like smoke trailing them.

  Somebody shrieked. Perhaps it was Flo, petite but full-bosomed, the oldest of the sisters, waves zooming around her and breaking as she plunged in. The water past her chest, she waved her arms over her head as if flagging someone down. A wave smashed over top of her, and another.

  No matter how I squinted, no matter how I stared, I could no longer see Gregory, that bird. There was a shout, and there they were: Flo buoying a small flailing thing in her arms, sinking, bobbing, thrashing—Glenna frozen in the surf up to her neck. The noises she was making were like an animal’s as Ma waded out, held onto her so the sea wouldn’t take her too.

  I’d seen the man earlier spreading out his towel below the dunes, taking off his shoes. Not noticing me he angled closer, flying past. Red bathing trunks. Dodging the stream, he jack-knifed under the place where yellowness fanned into blue. Slicing through waves, his arms chopped the sea. Glenna was screaming, screaming, screaming as he swam. The sea had moved the buoy that was Auntie Flo and my cousin farther and farther down the beach and out and out, so it wasn’t hard to imagine them disappearing past the horizon like the fishing boat.

  All I could do was close my eyes.

  I remember the white string swinging from the man’s trunks. I remember him carrying Gregory ashore, Flo staggering behind. I remember the man pushing on Gregory’s chest and my cousin barfing water. My aunt Glenna lying on the sand crying, then kissing them both—and Flo sitting on the beach, her head between her knees.

  “He could’ve killed the two of them,” Ma whispered later, out of their hearing.

  I remember that Gregory got to drink all the Orange Crush and eat all the Oh Henry! bars and Scotties chips he wanted. He was the king of the castle that night, the two of us allowed to stay up past bedtime to watch Bonanza—it went without saying.

  I remember Flo bending to kiss my forehead, trembling but patting my cheek as if nothing had happened.

  “Flo said it herself, she’d thought we were goners. She told herself, ‘Well, at least it’ll be quick.’” Gregory rises stiffly, shakes out his legs, thick and white and still quite sturdy in his khaki shorts. He disappears to the kitchen for a minute—we think it’s to find more wine—but when he comes back he has a long brown envelope in his hands, legal-size. “No time like the present—guess we should get to it.” He is the executor, of course.

  I hear my husband come in, the scrabble of wet paws, the leash being hung, a hush.

  Felicity’s eyes water. Grete holds a cherry tomato between her long fingers; sh
e takes forever bringing it to her mouth.

  “Ah, Flo always did like you best, Greg,” Grete laughs wryly, glancing around as if waiting for a bottle—a magic one—to appear. But there’s just the empty one and a vase with her name on the bottom, already noted.

  “She decided to leave everything…well, what can I say, you know it’s all here, right? She signed it all over.”

  The room goes silent.

  “What was I gonna do?”

  The well-kept house is a broken shell without Flo, we all know it, as is our shared past. From the kitchen there’s just the sound of the dog licking herself and my husband trying to stay invisible.

  “Yeah?” Grete’s voice is harsher. Felicity looks stricken. Gregory natters now about power of attorney, responsibilities, doing his best.

  “She saved my life, for fuck sake,” he says, and then something unexpected: “Here’s the thing. The house? I’m signing it over—youse can all do with it what you like. I’m outta here, I hope. Been thinking of McMurray, Red Deer, Nanaimo, what the hell. This way you’ll have somewhere to come to—how she would’ve wanted it, really. The least I can do.”

  Grete folds her tomato, barely nibbled, into her serviette.

  Felicity looks aghast.

  My husband waits in the doorway. Nobody speaks; there’s just the jingle of dog tags.

  I picture Gregory boarding a plane, flying across the continent. It is easier to imagine the skeleton of a gull soaring over dry, dry land.

  It is the least he can do, unload this place on, unto, us, and in some sort of bargain free himself.

  “Sure,” I finally say. Because it is the least and also the most, finally, this unburdening of shored up things lost, unsalvageable, their encumbrance no more ours than it ever was his.