House of Spells

by Robert Pepper-Smith

  Rose smiled at the drawing he showed us, her teeth chattering.

  You girls are cold, Mr. Giacomo said then. You’d better go home and change.

  When we had closed his gate behind us, Rose turned and said,

  Thank you for the ride!

  He called out to her, Pioneer E is going to pass by the moon on its way to the sun tonight, and take photos of the face of the moon we never see!

  Who cares, Rose said under her breath, and she glanced at me in a way that made me laugh.

  I turned round to see if Mr. Giacomo had heard. He’d given us a ride home, offered us work in his café. He had been kind to us. Yet I also felt that what Rose had said was her way of keeping to herself. Maybe even then she sensed that his kindness had a cost.

  On the walk home, pushing her bike and shivering in her wet towel, Rose told me how she’d met Michael Guzzo. He was working in the Odin Mill in the fall of ’69, and she used to bring lunches to the scaler Mr. Beruski on night shift, when she was living at Mrs. Beruski’s. It was one of her duties for reduced room and board, to take those lunches to Mr. Beruski who measured the logs as they came into the mill, calculating board feet. The scaler would thank her as he unpacked his hot meal, gnocchi sometimes, or a chicken wing pasta with a flask of diluted wine.

  Michael Guzzo was a sandy-haired eighteen-year-old boy who drew lumber on the chain and he wore doeskin gloves that were too big and loose on his hands. The cedar they were cutting raised welts on his arms, so the scaler had called to say bring some salve along with my lunch. It was a night shift in November and the snow she walked through had changed to fine powder, heaped on the stacks of logs that reached to the river and collected in the chain link fence that surrounded the mill. The crew was gathered around the wood stove in the scaler’s shack, under a forty-watt bulb, and this boy was at the table, his sleeves rolled back. The scaler took his flask and the metal canister of warm pasta. The others in the green chain crew smiled at Rose, standing around the stove. Their wool jackets steamed and smelled of cedar, machine oil, and the winter cold.

  And when she brought out the salve from her pocket they said, From your hands, Rose, challenging her, a smile in their eyes, gentle or mocking.

  She sat across from the boy, poured some salve into her hand to warm and spread on his enflamed forearms, but her hands were cold! So, elbows propped on the table, he cupped her hands in his and gently blew on them, eyes laughing at her. His eyes reminded her of her father’s, so mild and chestnut-coloured. Two shy people who couldn’t talk to each other. He wasn’t even a year older. He wasn’t particularly cute: his hair was long, sticking out from under a toque, his eyes reddened by the cold, and when he stood to rebutton his sleeves to go back to work, she saw that he was thin and a little taller than she.

  He had built the raft that we’d kicked along off Olebar Beach. On weekends he used it to fish for landlocked salmon with a hand net.

  I knew who he was. I often saw him in the Grizzly Bookstore, rummaging through boxes of books that people had left or forgotten on the trains. Once he said to me there is no other bookstore like it in the valley, because of those train books that came from so far away and from lives so unlike our own: Anna Karenina, Cannery Row, and Spinoza.

  Sometimes he’d hold a book just for the weight of it, for the feel of it, as though, if he were sufficiently still and watchful, it could communicate to him its own life. And sometimes he sat there for a long time in a disused chair in the back, an unopened book in his hands. He seemed sad then and little inclined to talk. Once he held out to me the collected dialogues of Plato; the paper in that book was like a Bible’s, tissue-thin and almost transparent.

  There, too, you could find treasures, clothing abandoned or left on the trains. He showed me a rack of such castoffs in the back.

  Who owned these things, he asked me then, smiling. Doesn’t it make you wonder?

  He asked me if I wanted to try on any of those clothes — a pair of jeans that looked like they would fit me, a paper raincoat from Japan, a plaid scarf, a siwash vest that was almost in style — but I shook my head. I could see a sadness in his eyes that I didn’t understand.

  I asked where he was from because he wasn’t from our village.

  He said he was from south of here.

  South? I asked. Where?

  Nowhere in particular, he said. My family’s land is under the Hydro reservoir.

  I touched his arm, shocked.

  Jesus! I said.

  He laughed. What can you do about it? he said. They took our houses, our land, gave us some money and told us to move on, go live somewhere else. And there’s nothing we could do about it.

  I felt sick, the colour draining from my face. I didn’t know what to say.

  Maybe that’s what I feared most: to have the place where I was cared for and loved taken from me. It made me feel dizzy to think about it. If our village were wiped out, who would I even be?

  It’s not your worry he said, smiling and gazing at me.

  All I could do was look at him.

  Then he said, The dreams are the worst. Sometimes I wake up at night with a crushing weight on my chest, I can hardly breathe. It feels like the weight of all that water.

  7

  A few weeks later, I went to my father’s one vat paper mill. I didn’t often go there because he didn’t like to be disturbed when he was working. That day he wanted to show me a windsock made for a newborn. I touched the painted eyes of the trout on it. It was made to swim in the wind on a long pole and he said it was for Rose’s child. He had learned to make windsocks at the internment camp in New Slocan. That was during the war, when Mr. Hiraki taught him to make paper. Mr. Hiraki and others had raised flying fish and paper horses over the camp on long poles.

  “They remind us this won’t last forever,” Mr. Hiraki had told my father, watching the figures in the wind over the rows and rows of wooden shacks. “They give us courage.”

  I felt shy around my father when he was making paper; the work required his total attention. Yet I wanted to ask how he knew Rose was pregnant.

  He said she swayed on her hips as though wading in a strong current, gripping her way over stones with her toes. Besides, he’d noticed her thick wrists and the loose clothes she wore.

  Did I know who the father was, he asked me.

  I was surprised at his curiosity. It wasn’t like him to ask about other people’s secrets, though in some ways our house was the clearing house for village secrets and stories. My mother was often away in other people’s homes, there for grief or joy, birth or death. People often dropped by my father’s mill to review their problems. His work was seen to be either odd or useless and therefore worthy of interruption. Sometimes, when he heard a truck or a car drive up, he’d go out the back door to sit among the river poplars and wait till the driver left so he could get on with his work, fretting over the thought that the paper in the press was spoiling.

  Did I know who the father was, he asked me again. I shook my head, though Rose had told me his name.

  I wasn’t sure how much Rose wanted me to tell others then. I felt like I should protect her secret. On the raft she’d told me the father’s name, Michael Guzzo. On the walk home from Mr. Giacomo’s, she told me how she’d met him and that he’d gone traveling in Central America.

  I was watching my father make washi paper. He was sprinkling harmica petals into the pulp, a pale mauve that was my favourite colour and that reminded me of the shadows under Mr. Giacomo’s eyes and at the corners of his lips.

  “What?” he was saying, he thought he’d heard me say something, but I’d said nothing, my mouth pressed into my rough sleeve and my gaze following him. I kept still because I was remembering a story I’d heard from several different people. Around here it’s hard for an interesting secret to stay secret, and I’ve thought of it many times.

  One summer in the ’40s, my father and Mr. Giacomo worked together. In those days, a young man starting out on his own, Mr. G
iacomo delivered mail in the valley. He took rice, letters, and packages to the Japanese internment camp in New Slocan. My father went with him, to buy vegetables and eggs in the camp that he sold to the railroad cooks.

  Mr. Hiraki was interned down there. He was my father’s friend from before the war. They’d worked on a section crew together, repairing track in the Odin pass, and when Mr. Hiraki had earned enough he’d bought a small farm in the valley south of our village. My father used to drive down to his farm in summer to buy vegetables.

  Mr. Hiraki grows the best vegetables in the valley, he used to say, and soon he was taking orders from the village wives and the railroad cooks.

  After the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941, all Japanese-Canadians were identified as enemy aliens. Mr. Hiraki spoke out against the forced evacuation of Japanese-Canadians from the coast. Many times he said to anyone in our village streets who would listen that the war was against Japan, not Japanese-Canadians. “And what about you Italians,” he’d ask the Pradolinis, the Staglianos. “Why are you not being arrested? It’s because of the colour of your skin!”

  He and his family were sent to the New Slocan camp. Before the RCMP came for them, the Hirakis asked their Canadian friends to store household goods. They thought they’d be back on their vegetable farm within a few months, that the forced internment was only brief. My father was a young man then and he was building his first house on 4th Street. They didn’t ask one Canadian family to take all their belongings, they asked three or four. My father hadn’t finished the second floor, so they asked him to take the piano and a big record player.

  One day my father went to look for his friend in the camp. He found Mr. Hiraki doing what he always did, hoeing soil to receive rain and to trouble the roots of young weeds that he pulled by hand. The garden earth smelled musty, like an empty chocolate box and it had flecks of eggshell in it. Under dark, shiny leaves my father could see the bulge of beetroots and under feathery leaves carrot tops the colour of the lichen you sometimes see on the north side of cedar trees. He saw that Mr. Hiraki loved every plant, every little tree, and he gave them tender care. Still, something was wrong, something in the way his friend moved from row to row said he was afraid of being singled out and attacked.

  Mr. Hiraki gathered sacks of beets and potatoes, carrots and lettuce for my father. Then he raised a trout on a barbless hook from his well. It was as black as charred wood and its eyes had skinned over from a lack of light.

  “The fish tells me the water is still pure,” the farmer said. Then he let it down on a rope tied to a bucket, the trout circling and nosing the sides. It lived on insects that fell into the well and it was healthy and strong.

  Mr. Hiraki said that he expected the well would be poisoned by people who attacked at night; he stayed awake at night, listening.

  When they went into the shack for tea, Mr. Hiraki spoke of ripped-up camp gardens, of young fruit trees snapped at the trunk or torn up and laid on the ground with their roots exposed as if by a windstorm.

  “Do you know who is doing this?” my father asked.

  “People from the village,” he replied. “They drive away before we can get to them, teenagers mostly. I’ve recognized a few.”

  “But it doesn’t stop there,” he went on. “The government sends us moth-infested rice. The shipment of seed potatoes that arrived last week was full of rot.”

  The shack that his family shared with the Kitagawas was divided into living sections without walls: a kitchen, two sleeping areas, a small altar in the main room. Lumber was expensive in the war years, so there were no inner walls.

  He wouldn’t accept money for the vegetables.

  “What do you want, then?”

  “Mulberry bark,” he said. “So that we can make strong paper.”

  He explained that the paper would be used to make screens to divide the shack into smaller rooms for privacy; here the two bedrooms, he said, there the kitchen.

  “Paper walls,” my father said, intrigued.

  “If you’re interested,” Mr. Hiraki said, “I’ll show you how.”

  On the drive back to the village Mr. Giacomo left the camp mail sack in the back of the truck. They went through a rainstorm and when my father insisted they pull over to bring in the sack, Mr. Giacomo drove on. He said there was no room in the cab for the sack. “Besides, everything they write is censored, torn up, misplaced, forgotten.”

  My father shouted at him to pull over. Mr. Giacomo looked at him, surprised, and drove on. “No one deserves to hear from them,” he said.

  When they got to the village, the mail was a sodden mess, a pulp of cheap tissue paper and glue.

  Later that summer, Mr. Giacomo went off to a war that the Japanese were about to lose. Because his mother was Japanese-Canadian and he knew the language, he was taken to Shido Island off Korea. High-ranking prisoners of war were kept there. He interrogated officers of the Imperial Fleet, a captured prince of the imperial family. He was told to ask about artifacts and bullion that the Japanese had stolen during their occupation of Asia and their retreat.

  Mr. Giacomo was proud of what he had done on Shido Island for the war effort, and he often spoke about it.

  My father stayed behind. He was too young to go to war.

  Instead, he learned to make paper from Mr. Hiraki almost by chance.

  He delivered a truckload of mulberry branches to the New Slocan camp and stayed on to help Mr. Hiraki cut the branches to length, steam them in a steamer made out of an old dairy tank. He was ashamed of how his friend was being treated, forced off his farm to live in a shack.

  My father learned to peel the green and black bark from the white bark, as if he were peeling a stick-on label off a bottle.

  He scraped away bits of clinging bark with a knife.

  He washed the white bark in the Lemon River, to free loose specks of black bark, and in the New Slocan camp he hung the strands to dry.

  By then, the Custodian of Enemy Alien Property was selling off the inmates’ belongings for a song.

  The inmates made records of their possessions. They wrote on the new paper called washi that Mr. Hiraki made. It was so tough you could hide it in the well. They wrote letters to Canadian friends, instructing them to sell a fishing boat or a house on paper that could not be pulped in the rain. These letters had to be delivered by hand; any mail sent through the post office was censored, and the sale of unconfiscated property was illegal.

  Now, after asking about Rose, my father was making paper that he knew I loved. With no decoration, it could be cut and folded into greeting cards. The harmica petals, stuck in the fibres, were an attraction, and the cards I made from the paper sold well in the Giacomo café. I was watching the petals fall from his sifting hand onto the deckle, pale rose colour of the Illecillewaet snowfields last evening, light that I’d seen torn into a spreading grey that vanished.

  To concentrate, he kept his back to me as the sheet formed in the deckle over the vat.

  He was watching the pulp settle on the bamboo screen and now I could see what the petals had made, a leaning girl with her arms out. He could feel my stillness, my gaze, and he heard me stir and get to my feet and say, “I’ll bring the lanterns in for you.” He didn’t turn to see me go, waiting for the fibres to bind. One slight tremble of his dear hand would send out a wave that would thicken the fibres at one end and ruin the sheet.

  When I returned with the lanterns, I could tell he liked this one; he was smiling over the sheet.

  The swirl of petals made me think of Rose, one arm a gentle curve for balance as if she were leaning to place a glass on the floor. I remembered how she used to walk her family’s Clydesdales down our main street, the reins draped loosely over her arm, a lightness in her step.

  All of a sudden I felt that the figure in the paper showed me who she was.

  That’s you, Rose, I would have said to her, if she’d been there with us.

  Some thin flicker of light to touch down, a lightness of spirit,
tentative and apologetic. Later on, when events began to wear her away, to bear her down and push her to earth, when I’d need the courage to help her, I’d remember that figure in the paper.

  Now my father was lifting the bamboo screen from the sheet draped on the post. I could smell snow in the air that had drifted in when I went outside, not that it was much warmer in the mill, too warm and the paper would spoil. He rubbed his hands in warm water on the stove; his fingers, thin and arthritic, ached so at night that sometimes he drank grappa to sleep.

  “Why doesn’t Rose go back to the Big Bend,” he asked me then, “to stay with her parents?”

  “She has no friends up there,” I said. “And her mom’s mad at her for getting pregnant.”

  He shook the water off his hands, dried them on a towel by the sink.

  “We’ll have to help her, then,” he said.

  8

  Today I got out the homemade ladder and caulked the eavestroughs in a few places, hammered a few nails in the frost-heaved catwalk. A storm was building over the eastern ridge, and I tracked a harrier working its way above the pines. Harriers are pale grey long-tailed hawks with black-tipped wings. Usually they keep to the valley grasslands. They hunt rats and mice by quartering the ground, buoyant and tilting to clear the Palliser Valley fences.

  Warm southwest winds climbing the ridge met colder winds from the glacier and I watched as clouds were born. Out of clear air, mare’s tails appeared and rose into the mass above them. When it began to rain and sleet, I went inside to build a fire in the woodstove with chunks of subalpine fir and pine that lit like paper.

  Outside, the trees bent over, the rain came in torrents, sheets that swept through the trees like hundreds of ghosts marching north.

  What happens when you begin to lie to yourself?, I say to my ghosts. My mother remembers helping the young one to breathe. Yet I saw her paralyzed by grief and indecision. So it is not events themselves that make us, or what we remember of them. It’s what we choose to forget, what we just can’t stand to remember, that leads us by the hand down a road we can’t recognize.