“We can’t say that,” I cut in, noting the pained look on Chris’s face. “Others fish and log and live long, healthy lives.”
“Others,” snorted Mother. “We’re not talking about others, Sylvie, we’re talking about your father—and how he slaved at two jobs for twenty years. Others didn’t do that—two jobs for twenty years.”
“He was never working when he was fishing,” I argued. “Would’ve killed him in a worse way if he couldn’t fish.”
“Well, it has now, hasn’t it—it’s killed him in all ways.”
“He’s not dead—cripes, you talk as if he’s dead. He’ll find his way through this. He’ll start doing things differently, is all. Perhaps a bit of fishing, with his rod—or his jiggers. He always loved jigging, no strain there.”
“Providing he’s sitting in an armchair on the wharf, there’ll be no strain,” said Mother dryly. “That what we’re going to do—keep him in an armchair on the wharf?”
“I’ll haul his boat,” said Chris. He was still hunched over, elbows on his knees, head hanging like a weight from his shoulders. He raised his eyes to Mother’s. “I’ll haul his nets, too. The fish are making a comeback. So might Father. Maybe he can just go back to the way he used to be.”
“The way he used to be?” Mother stopped her pacing and sat between me and Chris, laying an arm around Chris’s shoulder. “Was there a time he wasn’t slaving his self to death?” she asked with a glimmer of a smile. “But you’re right. Least with fishing he’s not cursing his soul to hell like he is in the woods. God, he hates the woods. No wonder he’s near dead, always working against himself.”
Her hands fell onto her lap. So helpless they looked, lying there palms up as though waiting for something. I touched one, then folded my hand around it. “What else did the doctors say?” I asked quietly.
She rose in a huff, my hands falling away like the discarded hands of a toy doll. “What else is there to say?” she answered absently. “Chris, did he speak to you—did your father speak?”
Chris stared at my discarded hands as I held them oddly in my lap. “Sylvie,” he said softly. “He spoke to Sylvie.”
“A few days—is that all you can stay?” Mother asked me, her tone softening. “You should be with him, then. Go. Go sit with him, he don’t like being alone, not in this place. Did you see Gran? No. No, course you didn’t, I already asked. That’s another worry, Kyle driving your father’s new truck—you know your father bought a new truck, do you, Sylvie? First time he ever went to a bank—pray Kyle don’t have an accident—god forbid, not just for the truck’s sake. Are you sure you can only stay a few days?”
“I—well, if you need me. Or if Dad needs me here, I can stay—”
“Rest is all he needs,” said Mother. She wrung her hands and started pacing again. “Rest and making sure he stays in that bed once we gets him home.”
“I can come back from Alberta. Maybe I’ll move back.”
She looked at me in wonderment. “My, you don’t mind flying across the country like that? You makes it sound like a trip across town. Certainly, you were never one for sitting still. Always on your feet, running here and there.” Her blue eyes shimmered for a second, as though gazing through a veil of tears onto a beloved memory. “You’ve done so well,” she near whispered. “Making the dean’s list—my, you should’ve heard Gran—poor Gran.” Just as quickly the blue eyes darkened and she was wringing her hands and pacing again. “She’s too old for this, too old and worn out. God forbid she sees another of her boys die. She’ll be glad now that you’re here, Sylvie, she’s been watching planes, wondering if that’s the one you’re on— will you go, sit with your father—Chris, perhaps we can have tea, did you have supper?”
“I’ll sit with Dad—” Chris began, but I silenced him with a sharp look. After waving him back to his seat, I gave Mother a quick hug and left the room.
A series of wrong turns and I found my way back to the unit. Quietly I stepped behind the curtain draping Father’s bed. He was sleeping, his face grey upon his pillow, and with his eyes shuttered behind thin, crinkly lids, he looked like an old weathered house without light. I laid my hand on his heart, feeling its faint pulse beneath the rise and fall of his chest. His mouth twitched.
“Dolly,” he mouthed, without opening his eyes, and in the quiet of his love my heart broadened. I sat, folded my arms onto the cool white sheet covering him, and cushioned my head, my cheek touching the warmth of his hand. Through the oxygen tubes his breathing sounded loud and deep. I slowed my breathing to match his and must’ve fallen asleep, for I awakened to slobber on my arm and Mother talking lowly to Chris about the long flight from the prairies, how tired I must be.
“YOU LOOK NICE,” said Mother at the hospital doors as Chris and I were leaving. “Your face is nice.”She touched a hand to my cheek. “Must be that prairie air—nice and dry. No salt chafing your skin,” she ended with a smile.
“Perhaps you can visit sometime,” I offered. “You always talked about travel.”
“Talked lots of foolishness when I was young.” She looked at Chris, who was pushing out through the doors. “Be sure you drives, Chris—your sister’s tired. You let him drive now,” she called after me, and followed as far as the curb. “Chris, you drive now. Watch for moose—be careful.”
I stood beside the car, raising my face to the darkening evening sky. A faint drizzle dampened my brow and I closed my eyes, grateful for its coolness.
“You all right? I can drive,” said Chris.
But I motioned him towards the passenger seat and slipped behind the wheel, lowering the window. I drove slowly past the hospital doors, and Mother was still standing outside, her eyes wearing the same wariness as when I used to trot from Gran’s house to hers, clamouring for Chris to come play. “Take his hand, take his hand,” she’d call. And me, just two years older than Chris, guarding his every step as we mucked about the meadow, forever steering him away from the cliffs, from rotting jelly fish, rotting capelin, dead birds, dead anything that might hurt him, forever mindful of Mother’s eye watching after us.
“Worse thing ever happened, she got pregnant with Kyle,” I said sulkily.
I felt Chris’s look of surprise. “What’s that suppose to mean?”
“She got sick and I had to care for you, is what it means. Like she was jealous every time she seen me walking off with you. Like I was taking you from her.”
“Whoa, Sis, now how foolish is that?”
“Not foolish at all. I can still hear her singing after me every time I led you along shore, Don’t go too far, don’t go too far—it was Cooney Arm, for gawd’s sake! Six boarded-up houses. Where’d she think I was taking you?” I lapsed into silence, hating the sulkiness of my voice, hating even more that I’d spoken out loud and Chris was staring questioningly at me. Not at my sulkiness, though, for he understood that, and was always apologetic in the face of it, as though a part of him also remembered our mother’s breasts milking for him but not for me.
“Jealous!” he exclaimed. “Now, how’d you come up with that—jealous of who, of what?”
“Of me, you—that it wasn’t her out running about with you.”
“Cripes, Sylvie, now that’s foolish.”
“What would you know—you were lots younger, and always looking at your feet.”
“Nerves, Sis. She had bad nerves, she always got bad nerves.”
“Right, bad nerves. Chase down a grizzly, Mother would.”
“So she’d chase a grizzly—don’t mean she wasn’t scared of it. She was scared of something.”
“Yeah. She read too many books. The old always said too much reading drives you mental.”
“Oh, come on,” chided Chris, and I had the grace to flush at my own silliness. “In the hospital, after they wheeled Dad away, first person she said to call was you,” he said. “Always talking about you—how hard you works, graduating university with honours, how you’ll travel the world—she’s always saying tha
t, you’ll travel the world someday. And—and,” he repeated for emphasis, “when you’re coming home next! She’s always wondering when you’re coming home next.”
“And when I’m here she never knows what to do with me.”
“You’re always arguing with her, that’s why—the both of you, always arguing. Why don’t you come home more often? She don’t like you staying away. True,” he added as I drove in silence, “she’s always talking about you. And Dad—jeezes, Dad—he looks bad, don’t he—gawd, he looks bad …” His words trailed off.
I steered us onto the grey, darkening highway, rubbing my brow tiredly, seeing our father’s face, all worn and ashen on his pillow. Aside from the yellow line shooting rhythmically beneath the car, that was how the whole world appeared to me this evening—the hills, the trees, all limp and grey against a pewter sky.
Till I neared home. Till I turned off the highway and finally onto the rutted side road leading to our house on the wharf. Then the rocks themselves burst into colour, the trees and sky and all else around me dissolving into a thousand pictures of Father: walking wearily from his stage after a day’s fishing back in Cooney Arm, sitting at Gran’s supper table, falling back on the daybed after he’d eaten, cuddling me on his great, heaving chest, his snores rattling my bones, hugging me tight against his itchy, worsted sweater, hugging me tight against his wet, scaly oilskins, trundling about his stage, shouting for me to come help lay out the fish, laughing at Mother’s complaints that he had me smelling like himself, a pickled capelin.
I didn’t care about his smell. I loved sniffing pickled capelin. I loved it that Mother, Chris, Kyle—all of them—squirmed against his itchy, worsted hugs and his scaly wet oilskins; that nobody else liked going into his stage as I did, helping him lay out his fish in the puncheons; that only I worked the flakes alongside him, laying out his fish to cure in the sun; that only I accompanied him in boat sometimes, crouching anxiously in the stern as he leaned easily over the gunnels hauling his nets, grunting and cussing if the catch was poor, whistling and singing if the fish were thick and he was piling them at my feet.
More pictures came before me—pictures of me sitting at Mother’s table, being home-schooled along with Chris, and Dad winking at me across the room; Dad looking innocently away should Mom, all prim, proper, and teacher-like, turn her attention towards him; Dad sitting beside me at the table, learning from Mother how to read and write and laughing at his clumsiness with a pencil; Dad walking me home after lessons—staying for a while during those cold, bitter nights, running the heated flat-iron over my bedsheets before tucking me in—as Gran always did—and heating dinner plates in the oven, wrapping them in towels and placing them beneath my cold feet before bundling the blankets around me. It felt like he was mine then, when he sat on the side of my bed, his head so close to mine as I said my prayers that I could smell his sour, pickled breath and feel the scattered strands of his hair, all soapy and vinegarish, tickling my face and making me squirm through the amens.
Abruptly the pictures changed. We were no longer in Cooney Arm. The soft darkness of Gran’s firelit corners was blasted by garish electrical lights that lit Mother’s house on the wharf, leaving me—along with Gran, Father, the boys, and sometimes even Mother—blinking like nocturnal creatures, flitting about the house like bats searching for a rayless niche in which to roost. How disoriented I’d felt those first months in Mother’s crowded household, with all the attention constantly heaped upon me by Mother, the boys. Times I’d run, looking for Father and finding him equally disoriented, hunched over the wharf, looking back to Cooney Arm, gutted by the loss of his stage, his flakes. Home from a day’s work in the woods, he’d sit carefully amongst Mother’s new, brightly patterned cushions on the sofa and watch, confused by my resistance to Chris and Kyle’s overzealous attention to my every move, confused by my defiance with Mother over some small thing, confused by my new math and the queer gawddamned way of mixing letters and numbers.
My most favoured imprint was the day of my first birthday living in Mother’s house. Father had bought a watch from the store in Hampden and hung it on the outside knob of my room door because he was too shy to give it to me and wanted to make a joke out of it. It hung there all day—nobody else saw it, and I refused to see it, fearful of its not being mine and that he’d see the want in my eyes. Gran finally spotted it, and brought it to the supper table and gave it to me, chiding him for his foolishness. I felt too shy beneath his gaze to properly hook it around my wrist. And so Mother, looking a mite shy herself in her new dress that she was wearing just for my birthday, leaned close, helping me hook the watch strap, she too chiding Father for his foolishness—all of us hiding our shyness behind his foolishness.
So why had Mother looked shy, I pondered now, but then pushed the thought away as I drove past Father’s woodshed and pulled up to the wharf. Turning off the headlights, I sat for a minute, staring at the house, at the smoke pouring from the chimney, the windows yet unlit in the growing dusk. A wooden cubbyhole was built to the side of the house, Father’s chainsaw, his bucksaw, his handsaw laid inside, along with a box full of jiggers and bits of fishing gear. Other stuff, his barrels, puncheons, nets, was stored in the woodshed or rotting into the ground in Cooney Arm.
Wrapped in canvas at the end of the wharf lay an anchor, an old motor, some boat parts. Poor Father. He hadn’t the heart to build another stage here on the wharf. Why bother when fishing had become more of a fun thing than a mainstay? And now everything he owned was all scattered about—like Father himself, his soul wandering the emptied fishing grounds of Cooney Arm, his heart fighting for resurgence in some hospital room in the city.
TWO
“WHERE’S THE NEW TRUCK?” I asked Chris.
“You passed it, back by the woodshed. Tucked a bit behind.” He got out of the car and headed towards the boat tied to the wharf. I climbed out behind him, a stout breeze gusting my hair across my face.
“I don’t want you going,” I called out, then cursed as his step didn’t falter.
The house door flung open and Gran appeared, clutching the front of her woolly green sweater and clinging to the doorjamb like a withering old vine.
I ran to her, wrapping my arms tight about her shrinking, knobby shoulders, scolding her for being out in the cold.
“Much odds, this old bag of bones,” said Gran, her voice quavering. “Did you see him?”
I nodded, kissing her soft, powdery cheek. “Yes. Yes, I seen him.” We held each other tighter in the face of this new thing. Taking my hand, Gran led me inside, her grip not as strong as I remembered, her voice more brittle, shaky as she asked about Mother.
“She’s fine, worrying more about you than herself.”
“Ahh, she worries for nothing. Sit. Tell me about your father, I makes tea.”
I sat in Gran’s rocker, speaking assuredly of Father’s recovery. Fire snapped inside the stove, and I relished its heat. I relished, too, Gran’s wiry frame, her hair all white now and caught at her nape, her darkish brows lending strength to her fading green eyes as she moved about the kitchen in her odd, faltering manner—from bending over in her garden, plucking weeds at every turn, we always teased her.
“She got a fright, my Dolly, your mother got a bad fright,” said Gran, “seeing him crumple across his boat like that. She was watering her plants when she seen him through the window. Did she tell you?”
“No. Did you? Did you see him, too?”
“I was in the room. She never called out at first—didn’t want to frighten me. Poor thing. Wonder she didn’t drown, running over the pan ice like that.” Gran’s mouth quivered— whether from emotion or age I couldn’t rightly say—as she continued telling the horrible story of Mother dragging Father off the boat and onto his back on the ice, screaming out for Chris to run, run, for the doctor. He was conscious by the time the doctor got there, his eyes moving, his breathing short and quick, but he was making no sound, no movement. Pain, he told Mother after he
woke up in the hospital, he was locked so hard into pain he thought it was crushing his chest, and he could do nothing but breathe—seen an angel, he said, but then the angel cursed and he saw it was his Addie instead.
Gran smiled and sat a cup of tea and plate of scones before me, kissing the top of my head. “Lord bless them both. Sugar your tea, I gets some milk.”
The door opened and Chris came in, his nose watering from the cold, and Kyle behind him. No matter his seventeen years, Kyle looked a boy with his stout, pudgy frame—still carrying his baby fat, we always teased him. His face was rounded, not comely like Chris’s, yet his cheeky grin had always been an instant draw. He looked at me now and I half thought he’d come lumbering over as when he’d been a youngster, pulling his ears or plugging his nostrils with his fingers to garner a laugh. Instead he offered me the saddest of smiles, crossing the room to sit stiffly on the arm of Mother’s rocker.
Mom won’t like that, loosening the arms of her rocker, I wanted to say, to tease him, to lighten his worry. Instead I dumped two spoonfuls of sugar into the cup of tea Gran laid before me and took it to him.
“Suppose you still got your sweet tooth,” I said, and ruffled his hair. He smiled a tiny, frightened smile. Keeping his eyes from mine, he took the cup, nervously jiggling his foot. “Hey.” I touched his shoulder. “Dad’s gonna be fine. Truly.”
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