One Good Thing

by Rebecca Hendry

  In the back seat, Delilah had watched Bessie’s little checked curtains flutter in the breeze and kept the hood of her red parka pulled tight around her head. She was getting used to the tickly feeling of the fur around the hood. Her mom bought it for her at Second Hand Rose, a thrift store uptown. She liked the jacket, even though it was red. She would have preferred blue, but they didn’t have a blue one.

  “Beggars can’t be choosers, Delilah,” her mom had said, inspecting a long silky dress printed with daisies.

  “Are we beggars?” Delilah had asked.

  Her mom had just laughed. Delilah knew they didn’t have much money. She knew there were student loans and bank loans from when her dad tried to start one of his businesses. They always shopped at thrift stores, but Annie told her it was because she believed in sharing, reusing, being kind to the environment. She gave the same explanation for why they often lived with other people in co-op rental houses. Delilah’s friends usually lived in houses with their parents and maybe a sibling or two. A dog, perhaps. But not other families, or lone drifters who slept on their couches, played their records and made giant communal pots of lentil stew.

  Here in Yellowknife, though, the definition between what Delilah would call rich and poor wasn’t as clear as in the cities. She would have thought, because the newer, fancier “regular” houses were uptown, that all the people uptown had lots of money, while the people who lived in the shacks with the knotholes in their walls would be poor. But it wasn’t necessarily the case.

  Her dad had told her, for instance, that Josie Apple, former resident of the green shack, had hidden jars of cash under the floor in the back bedroom for years, money she saved up from cooking out in bush camps, plus money her husband Walt made from the mines. Uptown, aside from the government workers and the mining bosses, were a lot of young families trying to get by. They didn’t want to live down where the shacks were, so they had higher rent and some of them could barely make it. Lots of people had left Old Town over the years, Mac said. Lots of people came and went. He said every season a few new Yellowknifers were born, but lots of them died away.

  RED AND MAGGIE’S IS a little shack by the water, the ghosts of fishing equipment in a heap in their front yard, a lean-to filled with wood against the house. Red, a thin man with coppery hair and a beard even longer than Mac’s, had pumped Delilah’s small hand in his own enthusiastically. Maggie, with her gauzy skirts and long dark curls and her French accent, reminded Delilah of a princess in second-hand clothes. There was something deeply dignified yet carefree about her. She seemed to be exactly where she wanted to be, barefoot in the cool May air. Maggie and Annie had hugged as though they were old friends.

  Now her dad and Red and Maggie are laughing and drinking dandelion wine in the small kitchen while Annie showers. Delilah sits on the lumpy couch and tries to read the nautical maps, which is impossible. There are lines of tiny numbers and words she’s not sure of. Sounding line. Magnetic north. Fathom.

  She’s squinting at the one nearest to her when a gangly boy bursts through the door, a shock of red hair around his freckled face, his entire body covered with dirt. Both knees of his jeans are torn and blood seeps from the jagged denim holes.

  He stops short. “Who are you?”

  She hugs her shampoo closer. “Mac’s daughter. We’re here to use your shower.”

  “Oh.”

  Dirt is encrusted in every nail; dust coats his hair and eyebrows.

  “What happened to you?” she asks.

  He looks past her toward the kitchen as a peal of Maggie’s laughter trickles out. “It’s a long story.”

  She wouldn’t mind hearing his long story. Anything that doesn’t involve politics of the north and the Berger Inquiry and gold mining operations and charcoal versus pastel.

  The boy sits on the other end of the couch. His filthy sneaker taps on the orange shag carpet, and the rest of him seems to be hovering like a bee, barely touching down. Delilah has the sense that if she moves too suddenly he will fly away, not out of timidity, but out of some sense of urgency and importance. She doesn’t want to accidentally remind him he should be somewhere else.

  “Who are you again?” he asks.

  “Delilah.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Why? It’s a name.” Like Jones isn’t a weird name, she thinks.

  “Isn’t that a Bible name?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wasn’t she the one who shaved off that guy’s hair and made him weak?”

  “Yes. But I . . . they didn’t name me after her. My mom just liked the name. Plus, she says that the Bible Delilah wasn’t evil or anything. She was just trying to make a few bucks.”

  Red comes through the door from the kitchen and ruffles the boy’s already messy hair.

  “Hey, hey, there Jonesy. What the hell happened to you? You fall in a dumpster?”

  “What happened to who?” Maggie floats out of the kitchen with a bunch of celery in her hand, Mac following behind. He heads down the hall, probably to check on Annie, who is taking forever.

  “Your kid,” Red says. “Take a look at him.”

  Maggie shakes her head. “Crazy boy. You’re going to get killed out there. What were you up to?”

  He shrugs.

  She waves the celery at him. “Okay, Jonesy. I’ll make you some soup. This is the best I can do. I relinquish control.” She returns to the kitchen.

  “Well, I’m gonna take off,” Jones says. He’s already heading for the door.

  “Hold it,” Red says. He points at Delilah. She tries to squirm into the couch cushion and disappear. She knows what’s coming.

  “What?” Jones asks.

  “Take her with you. She doesn’t know anyone here. Take her down to the docks or over to Weaver’s or something.”

  “Oh, no, that’s okay,” Delilah says. “I’m waiting for my shower anyhow. I think we have to get going soon.” She peers down the darkened hallway where her mother disappeared so long ago.

  Red laughs. “Well, if you want hot water, you’re gonna have to wait until after dinner. You can only take two showers here before you run out. It’s a good tank, but it’s not huge. This ain’t the Hilton!”

  After dinner? They’re staying for dinner? She remembers the celery stalks Maggie had been waving around. She’s making soup. And she just started. It could be hours.

  “Go on,” Red says on his way back to the kitchen. “Jonesy won’t bite.”

  Jones and Delilah stare at each other. “Come on then,” he says.

  Delilah dumps her towel and shampoo bottle on the couch, miserable. The smell of pot wafts through the beaded curtain hanging in the doorway to the kitchen.

  They head out into the afternoon sun, Delilah pulling her rainbow sweater around her. She left her parka at Red and Maggie’s. Her rubber boots slog through the thick mud on the dirt road. Dogs bark from a handmade pen on the neighbour’s property, about ten or twelve of them from what Delilah can see. They’re beautiful silvery white huskies, and she stops a few feet from their pen.

  “Can we pet them?”

  They bark vigorously, but some of their tails are wagging.

  Jones turns. He’s been walking several feet in front of her. “Are you nuts? No. You have to know them. They would attack you without even thinking about it.” She pulls her sweater tighter, trying to hide the cloud buttons. “Come on,” he says. He stays closer this time.

  At Weaver’s, Jones buys her a Coke with the handful of change he has in his back pocket. They browse the magazines, the rows of lights above their head trapped under metal cages and humming like busy mosquitoes.

  She sneaks peeks at Jones over her Betty and Veronica Summer Digest. His hands are still covered in grime, his mother’s demand ignored. He flips through a movie magazine with Star Wars on the cover. A jagged cut criss-crosses the length of his left thumb. When he’s flipped to the last page he closes it and puts it back on the shelf.

  “Let’s go.”
<
br />   They wander the road in silence, sipping Coke. They pass a man lying under a rusty old-fashioned truck, his unlaced boots sticking out underneath. A small child wearing only an undershirt and yellow rubber boots is running circles around the truck holding an empty beer bottle upside down and singing “Husha, husha, we all fall down!”

  As they approach Jones’s shack near the shore, there are crooked docks jutting out over the thin, broken ice of the quiet lake, fishing boats tied to them, men and women calling to each other and hauling gear.

  Delilah closes her eyes for a second and listens. She hears the demanding singsong of the child, a man from the fishboats yelling “Lenny! The beer ain’t gonna walk to you,” a dog barking. She smells freshness, lake water, sunshine on warm rock.

  Her toe catches on something and she stumbles, lurching forward. She looks around her feet, embarrassed. Jones assesses her again with his green eyes narrowed. “You’re kinda spaced out, aren’t you?”

  There it is. A small rock the size of her fist.

  “Yeah,” she says. “I guess.”

  He nods. Chews his injured thumb. He walks toward the house, where a bunch of rundown vehicles have appeared in their absence. She follows his skinny frame across his front lawn, watching for rocks and sidestepping a dismantled bicycle lying in a heap. An old oil barrel sits in the dry grass, flames licking its edges. As they approach the house, Red comes out holding a big pot, carefully, like he doesn’t want to spill whatever’s inside.

  “Heya, guys. Good timing. Jonesy, go shuck some corn. Your mother’s got it inside there. Muddy brought it up on his latest trip from the big smoke. You can bring it out and chuck the husks in the fire.” He sets the pot on a metal grate over the barrel.

  “How much?”

  “Oh, all of it, I think. City Jane and them are here too.”

  Jones hooks the edge of Delilah’s sweater sleeve with his pinky, barely holding on before he lets go again. “C’mon.”

  He leads her inside where the kitchen is buzzing with laughing adults and thick with the smell of Drum tobacco. He weaves through the crowd but Delilah hangs back by the door.

  Maggie is in mid-story at the stove, stirring her pot of soup and smacking away the hand of a short man with grubby work pants and a plaid shirt. “Four days in intensive care and this poor old man still can find the strength to slap my ass,” she says. Her laugh is lyrical and sweet. Everyone seems riveted.

  Delilah’s dad is at the crowded kitchen table in his quilted work jacket with a bottle of beer. He seems to be having a serious conversation with a man with long, stringy hair and funny-looking eyes, watery and pale blue. He looks like he got something in them and hasn’t had a chance to rinse them out.

  Mac’s voice rides the waves of the noisy crowd over to her like a radio signal she just tuned into. “. . . Have to be ready to take the risk . . . like anything else, you could win, you could lose, but . . . gold’s not going anywhere, I’m just saying . . . yes, absolutely, politics are always a factor. In anything.” Steady, calm, insistent.

  Her dad rarely yells or even raises his voice, but sometimes Annie says things like, “Jeez, it must be nice to be right all the time, Mac. Tell us what that feels like.”

  Annie stands in the far corner, her hand on the shoulder of a man with his back to Delilah. Annie is looking at him intently, listening, really listening. Delilah knows that look. When Annie does it to her, it makes her feel like Annie is trying to crawl under her skin, be somehow absorbed by her.

  The wafting smoke is making Delilah wheeze, and she wants to go back outside. She’s jostled from behind. She turns, and there’s Will in his fringed jacket, carrying a large aluminum roasting dish covered in foil.

  “Sorry, kid.”

  Maggie yells hello from the stove, and Will raises the dish.

  “Got it,” he says above the voices.

  “Yes!” she shouts. “Red’s starting the fire. You can bring it to him, he will cook it up.”

  Will jiggles the dish at Delilah. “Want some?”

  “What is it?”

  Her dad has noticed her from across the room now and gives her a wave. The watery-eyed man downs the rest of his beer and lights a smoke.

  “Caribou,” Will says. His round face is pockmarked, Delilah notices. It’s rough, like small chips in smooth pottery. He has a scar by his left eye that cuts through the eyebrow. “You know all these folks yet?”

  She shakes her head. He shifts the dish to his hip and points with his free hand, first at the watery-eyed man.

  “That’s Muddy. He works the ball mill with me and your dad. That man talking to your mom, that’s Bear. He works out at Con Mines.” He points over to a blond woman with her hair parted straight down the centre and feathered softly around her face. She’s wearing bell-bottom jeans and a thick wool sweater with holes in it, but she’s easily the prettiest woman in the room, or could at least give Annie a run for her money. “City Jane. Reporter for the Yellowknife News.”

  Maggie shrieks as Red grabs her from behind and tries to waltz through the room with her. City Jane hops down from the counter and walks over to them. She smiles and her teeth are white and perfect.

  “Hi Will. You need a hand with the meat?”

  “Nope, thanks anyways, but I’m gonna pass it off to the big man there.” He walks past her, bumping her shoulder gently on the way by, and heads outside. Delilah can see Jane watching him as he goes.

  Jones appears beside Delilah, swinging a bag full of shucked corn. “Come on, space cadet,” he says. He drops the corn by his mother’s feet, and Delilah follows him out the door.

  Outside the air is cooler now, and Delilah tries to take a deep breath and roots around in her sweater pocket for her inhaler. She wonders if she should go find her parka. The other guests are trickling out of the house, and more have come from neighbouring shacks. The yard in front of Jones’s house is like an outdoor living room. There is a listing picnic table and an old kitchen table with rickety chairs that people seem to be carrying over from their houses. Red is forking hunks of dripping meat onto the grill on the rusty barrel.

  Soon everyone is outside, seated around a big open fire that someone has started in a pit. Steaming platters are on the picnic table, a giant bowl of bright yellow corn, Maggie’s soup and a collection of mugs to eat it out of, a stack of half-charred meat, boiled potatoes, and salads.

  Delilah sits on a log by the fire and chews on a piece of the caribou. It’s delicious, cooked in some kind of sweet, tangy sauce. Will comes over with a loaded plate and settles beside her on a lawn chair. There’s a woman with him, plump and much shorter than him. Her hair is in long braids on either side of her face. She’s wearing layers of skirts, moccasins, and a man’s blue ski jacket. Will’s silver dog curls at his feet.

  “Good meat, eh?” he says.

  Delilah nods. She’s watching the dog. “Is it friendly?”

  “What, Laska?” Will picks up a cob of corn. It drips salty butter onto his plate. “Laska never hurt a fly. Chased a bear out to hell and gone a few times, though.”

  The woman laughs and pats Laska on the head. “Good dog. She’s a good dog, Laska.”

  Will takes a bite of corn, then wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “This is my sister, Mary Ellen.”

  Delilah raises her hand. “Hello.”

  “Mary Ellen, this is Delilah. Mac’s girl.”

  The woman reaches across Will for Delilah’s hand. She’s beaming, little crinkles around her eyes. She looks older than Will, who Delilah figures must be around thirty-five like her dad. She reaches out her hand, and Mary Ellen clasps it tightly above Will’s plate of food. She doesn’t say anything.

  Finally Will says, “Okay, let me eat.”

  Mary Ellen releases Delilah. “Eat! Yes, eat, eat.”

  “Are you going to eat something?” Delilah asks politely. The woman doesn’t have a plate of food.

  But Mary Ellen is gazing off at something across the yard and doe
sn’t respond. She rises from her chair and wanders over to where some children are playing with an old hula hoop.

  Delilah feels there’s something different about her. When they lived in a housing co-op in Victoria there had been a woman who always wanted to play with Delilah’s dolls in the common room. She would pick them up and dress them and undress them, sing to them softly. Delilah hadn’t liked it because she didn’t understand why she had to share with an adult. Annie had explained that the woman looked like an adult but she was a child on the inside. She told Delilah to treat her as she would treat another little girl, respectfully and kindly. If another seven-year-old took Delilah’s doll, she would have grabbed it back, but even at that age she had understood the difference.

  “She doesn’t say much,” Will says. “She likes to take care of people. Feed them, make them things, give them jam. She lives next door to me with our brother Jethro.”

  He points with the corncob toward a thin, grey-haired man standing by the front porch smoking. He looks at least ten years older than Will.

  Delilah takes a delicate bite of potato. She wonders where Jones is and sees that he has been pulled into his mother’s lap on the other side of the fire. He looks mortified. City Jane is singing softly while someone plays a guitar. The sun slips below the hills on the bay, turning the sky a pale yellow.

  Annie has been curled beside Mac in an old easy chair, but she wanders up to Delilah and Will now, a mason jar of red wine in her hand.

  “Well, hello,” she says, easing gracefully into the chair Mary Ellen left behind. She takes a sip of wine and runs her fingers through her long hair. “How’s everyone doing over here? It’s Will, right? You gave us directions when we rolled into town.” She extends a pale hand to Will.

  He takes it, shakes it once, and releases it. “Yup. How’d the bread turn out?”

  Annie smiles, the tiny dimple showing in her left cheek. “Perfectly. Bread isn’t easy. It’s a skill I learned from my pioneer grandmother.”

  This is the first Delilah’s heard of a pioneer grandmother.