I left the passenger door open and picked my way down into the ditch. A thin runnel of water wet the plants at the bottom. I hopped over it and made my way up the bank toward the small green baby pine at the top. I recognized the long needles from Girl Guide sleep-away camp. I squatted behind a spindly tree, pulling my pants down so I could crouch and pee in the hot sun. Then a car came. Four faces watched me as it drove past. They pointed and waved but no sound reached me from behind the window glass. The sun warmed my bare back. I blushed all over.
That’s how it came to be me driving into Fort St. James, dizzy, slightly feverish, embarrassed, on a hot September day, leaking from the nipples because we’d missed a feed, Danny still hysterical with laughter at my having been caught with my pants down, Thomas fussing in the back. “Dog Creek,” Danny said. We slowed to ninety, minding the speed limit posted on the signs, then slowed to seventy. Stuart River, he said, and I saw it: the lake, stretching all the way to the horizon. We drove onto the bridge and I felt its yawning pull, a great emptiness: lake on one side, river on the other, me trying to keep between the lines while my eyes darted all over, trying to take it all in. A lake like the ocean.
“You didn’t tell me,” I said.
“I tried. There aren’t words for it.”
I tried, too. There weren’t. Thomas wailed in the back for milk. “Can you lead us home from here?”
“I think so,” he’d said. “Just follow the shore.”
A hard winter later, I walked the empty road we’d first driven that fall, heavy with memories of leaving and arriving. I was sweating in my clothes again, the sun having broken through the clouds. I could feel the prickle of milk in my breasts—it was almost time for Thomas to wake. I picked up my pace, my steps purposeful and swift, but I had something new to remember now—maybe a new friend. Glory. I tasted her name in my mouth. It felt like a new beginning.
CHORUS
Dan Bebenall, Dream Beaver Pub
Oh, sure I know Glory. She’s been working at the pub for years. She makes your eyes feel better after you’ve been staring at what’s her name, the bartender, Sandy.
Glory’s alright. I like it when she plays on Friday nights. I’m usually here, anyway, but I’d come up just for that. She’s a bit of a kook, with those short skirts and boots, but if you’ve had a few, she’s real pretty. Like not-from-here pretty. She wears lots of eye makeup and she’s got this real dark hair and skin. Lots of girls up here have dark skin, but Glory, she’s cut from different cloth.
Oh, I don’t mean she’s crazy or nothing. She’s just not like some of them other bar girls. And she’s a bar girl, alright. You don’t see her at the grocery store or the drugstore. Maybe the cold beer and wine, but other than that, you see her here at the pub, at the Cabaret, or maybe at a party. And she can be wild! I seen her dancing on a table at Tom Reid’s in a skirt with no panties on—three sheets to the wind! And cranky! Man. That girl could strip the skin off anyone—bangs her fist on the table until whoever she’s firing off at slinks away. Glory don’t suffer fools gladly. She’ll tell you you’re an ass, then thank you to buy her next drink.
No, I don’t usually have much tolerance for snarky women. Glory can sing, though. I’m a country man myself. Not that new rock ’n’ roll country. I like a Hank Williams song, or Patsy Cline. My dad listened to that stuff back in the olden days and it means something to me. I heard Glory sing some old sad country song just a while ago and I cried. Serious. I sat here at the bar, and I wasn’t the only one, neither.
Glory sings all that folk stuff and she sings too damn much Bob Dylan, but she can sing a sweet country song like it was her who wrote it, like her own heart was breaking and nothing could stop it. I’ll tell you something. You look around the bar during one of those songs and no other woman exists. She could have her pick of men. Yeah, I heard those rumours, too. No telling who her little girl’s daddy is. The word around town isn’t pretty.
Sounds like I’ve done a study, hey? I’ve spent a lot of time on this stool, a lot of time watching people walk by, slap each other on the back, buy each other drinks. I’m here through every season, seen every type who saunters in—the dirty tree planters flush with cash and ordering water, the loggers just in from the bush leaving stupid big tips for the girls and pinching their asses if they get too near, old guys like me. I never said I was much of a catch, but I know this place and, yes, I know Glory some. Enough to put a fiver in her guitar case every few months, but I know enough to leave her alone, too.
RENEE
The radio voices prattled while I ate canned soup, nursed the baby, and put him down for his nap. The CBC played non-stop from the tinny little radio I’d found in the shed. I thought maybe it would improve my lonely mind, but I retained nothing of the documentaries and new stories. I’d tried to read or sleep while Thomas slept, but my mind would never settle. I’d tried to write letters, but failed. What would I say? We had no W-Fi, so email was out of the question. There was a computer with Internet access at Chow’s Diner, but it was busy all the time, plus it was in town. The only answer for blank midday hours were yoga videos, and smug Rodney Yee rubbed me the wrong way, so I left the radio on to fill the room with living voices and went out to the deck. The steps were only a memory under a lumpy, treacherous coating of ice and snow. It had snowed, melted, frozen, and snowed again so many times that spring felt like a hurtful lie. How could the roads be clear and the ice almost off the lake while our stairs were still covered with snow? It didn’t make sense.
I got the chipper from where it leaned against the side of the cabin. I slammed the blade into the top step and an ice chunk the size of a pumpkin broke off and fell down the slope toward the lake. Satisfaction surged in me. I chipped the melted snow off the top deck and worked my way down the stairs. I chopped and smashed and kicked the chunks of ice, and it was pleasing to see the wet wood emerge after a month of pussyfooting around.
I heard something and stopped. The ice on the lake shifted and moaned. It was thinner than yesterday. The Ski-Doo tracks were darker, going from grey shadows on the snow to precise black lines stretching off toward the blue horizon. The horizon was different, too, I thought, less a white line in the distance and more a deep blue wall. The lake amazed me. I’d seen the ocean-sized expanse of it ice up overnight, and still couldn’t believe it. I’d stood mid-lake at night listening to it groan while stars whirled in the black sky above. I’d watched a truck drive across a week ago and I’d stopped breathing. The ice held. It was April and the thermometer in my body was set to southern time—the world should be green and blooming. My cells ached for it.
I scanned the ice for change and thought about Danny. I tried to listen to him talk about his job—he’d say it was loud at the mill; so-and-so was a blowhard; this one guy had so much seniority he did nothing but watch movies all day; he liked one guy a lot—Bud, was it? Bob. No, Bud. I listened, but I couldn’t really imagine the people or the place. Danny said he liked it, working at the mill, and I wondered about that but didn’t ask how he could pack his sharp and critical brain up in his hard hat and settle down to this existence.
I listened, but I was fighting panic, as usual, trying to appear calm while a lightning storm raged inside me. It was impossible to reconcile where we were with where we’d been, or where I’d thought we’d have gone. I was going to be a writer. I was going to travel, to see great things, and share them with the world. He was going to be a professor, I’d thought. Instead, he worked at a mill, and I wallowed, fearful and hateful and small.
In my first year of university, I’d wanted to teach philosophy. I read ahead in the texts and challenged the professor on every point. It was introductory philosophy, not difficult, but I loved the way my brain felt bigger each time I learned a new term and applied it cavalierly in class before we’d been taught the definition. Danny had sat the next row over. I knew he had his eye on me. I let him work the courage up to talk to me, and when he did, just before he opened his mouth, I pu
t my hand on his and said, “Let’s get coffee.” We were friends before we were lovers—good friends. For three years, while I changed my mind about majors and minors before finally settling into my English degree, he listened to me, paid for my movies, walked me to class. We had witty repartee; he made me laugh, I made him roll his eyes. We were lovers, eventually, because he was so precious and earnest, and I couldn’t resist the eye-rolling. We got pregnant because I was careless.
“What do you want to do?” he’d asked. It was Christmas break, our last year of undergrad.
All the scenarios rushed through my head: I was pro-choice; I wanted a baby; I would get an abortion; I could be a mother.
“We’ll do whatever you want,” he’d said.
I couldn’t believe him. What about his degree? My degree? What would we live on?
“Let’s do this together,” he’d said. We were on the phone. I was at my dad’s condo in Coal Harbour, in the dark of the living room. He was in his apartment across town. I could hear him breathing. I could picture his face. I remembered lying on his mattress when we’d first started sleeping together, how he’d told me about his father, drunk in the morning and throwing eggs at him from the porch, how he was laughing when he’d started the story and crying by the end of it. He had his head on my chest, my heartbeat audible to both of us. I remembered the smell of his clean hair. I wanted always to hold him, to be the only one who saw him cry.
“Okay,” I said, and suddenly we were parents-to-be. Separate, immediately, from all our friends and fellow students, though we did graduate, but we were already living in an afterward none of them could imagine.
We lived in his little apartment with the weevils and roll-up bugs. His dad died in July. Thomas was born in August. He had the idea to head north sometime in between.
From where I sat, I could see black patches on the lake far out from shore and I wondered if these were open water. I climbed the clean stairs and set the ice pick aside, retrieved cigarettes and a lighter from a plastic baggy in the woodpile, and climbed up to sit on the picnic table to watch what the weather would do next. I thought it might storm.
There was something in the light that made me uneasy. I looked far down the lake to where it narrowed, and the mountains on the north side curved almost all the way around to touch the low hills on the south side. Between the shoulders of land, the sky was navy blue going on black. The wind, if anything, was getting warmer, and although I thought about putting my sweater back on, it was mesmerizing to finally sit outside without a toque and mittens and scarf. The dark sky moved east, toward me—the lake was like a funnel that drew the weather right to the cabin, perched where it was in the crook of the bay. I’d stood on the point when we’d arrived in the fall, shaken and amazed, the wind howling and rain pelting out of a pitch-black sky.
I smoked the cigarette down to the filter and put the butt down a crack in the deck. I stowed the packet and lighter. I still had enough of a sweat going that I didn’t need my sweater, so I left it and took up the ice chipper again to get the parts I’d missed. I slammed the flat of the blade into a hunk of ice and pried it loose, sending shards skittering in all directions. I smashed the chipper down again and again. Soon, my breath was coming in gasps, and the gasps made me think of sex. I was suddenly furious that sex was on my mind, that Danny had stopped reaching for me in bed, even though it was my fault. I never had cause to roll away, but I did it, anyway. Every time.
When I used to lie awake, naked and waiting for the touch of his hand, I’d thought it would always be like that: anticipation and consummation. There were nights of climbing his body like it was a dock ladder. There’d been mornings of trying to leave the bed and failing.
I rode him like he was a fine specimen of horseflesh sixteen hands high. I said, “Keep it steady,” “Hold still.” I called him “boy.” I lay down with him, intending never to get up.
There were nights of words and glasses of water and sleep, but I always knew I could have him just by fitting my butt into his lap when we lay side by side. I could be on the bus and think of his fingers and be wet instantly, wanting to be back at the apartment, pulling down his shorts. I had the idea that this wanting and having was permanent.
Now each night I lay beside him, crystallized: every particle of me columnar and hard and cold. Somewhere in the winter, I’d lost him. If I thought of his fingers, it was how they gripped the steering wheel while he drove us to town. It was when they wiped the baby’s face with a cloth. I thought of sex and couldn’t remember ever wanting to be so penetrable.
He’d looked at me at breakfast this morning, and I knew he was confused. Why had it turned off? Could I turn it back on again? I didn’t know. My skin felt brittle over the angles of my bones, and I couldn’t bear him to touch me. Even in that regard, I was a failure: a mother who couldn’t love her son enough, a wife who wouldn’t open up to her husband, even for sex. I was broken and it made me want to cry. I shook my head. I wouldn’t start that again. I felt like I’d been crying for days.
I stomped my feet and turned to go in the cabin. I grabbed the wooden handle on the sliding door and pulled, but it stuck. It wouldn’t open. I tried again. I tugged on it and it creaked against my weight, but didn’t give. I looked through the window at the baby monitor on the counter where I’d left it. The light flashed—a steady blinking eye in the gloom—but I felt panic welling. I grabbed the handle and pulled hard. I grunted, heaving and tugging, doing nothing to the door, the baby monitor flashing away. I yelled and stopped and stepped back.
I wound up and kicked the door hard on its frame, then kicked it again and again, my winter boot bouncing off the wood, a spike of sharp pain driving through my foot with each blow. I was sobbing. I kicked until I thought my toes would break. I grabbed the handle again and rattled. I heard a soft thunk. I gulped air. I tried the door again and it slid open.
I stood, panting at the threshold. Thomas’s amplified breaths came steady and slow, but the fury I’d built up had made me light-headed. My cheeks burned. I stared around the empty room, at the dusty clock showing half past three and the couch where my housecoat still lay in a heap on the seat, a dirty coffee cup on the floor. I didn’t move. The radio droned on. I couldn’t get in and then I could. I thought about that. The panic was real, my need to get to Thomas was like something I’d read in a book: a mama-bear response. That was the right response, I thought, and I was glad I’d had it, but I was empty now, and that wasn’t right. All the feeling in me had puddled and slid away down the cleared stairs. I stood on the doorstep until my heart beat normally again, then I stepped carefully inside.
CHORUS
Lana Delmont, Pentecostal Church foyer
I heard that, too. Some people moved into Roy’s old cabin on Chance Bay. Me and Jim went past there last fall before the ice come on, and there was a fire in the stove, smoking like a you-know-what. We were headed out to close up our place on Jenny Cho Island and we seen the smoke and come in close to shore in the boat to see. Lulu at the Petro-Can said some family was living there but she didn’t know any more than that. At choir the other night, I heard they was American. Also heard that they was on the run from something, like some bad tragedy, but Jim said they were probably bank robbers or those pot farmers growing marijuana up in the bushes under the mountain.
It looked just same as ever, with the porch tilting down to the lake. They got an old wood table and some chairs on the deck and the woodpile’s been built up some. Not so wet and musty-looking, maybe, ’cause they got a car in the clearing, but mostly the same as when Roy lived there himself.
That was always a lonely place. No one out there but Roy and his dog. No one coming to visit or stay, and him with the best view on the north side. Sad place. Roy’s wife dead, his boys gone. Roy living out there till, what? He died? Just gone one day. I should ask Lulu about that. She might know that story about old Roy.
So, anyways, me and Jim was boating and we saw that tippy-roof cabin with smoke co
ming out of the chimney and I says to Jim, “Who’d live there?” and he says, “Ghosts.” Just like that. Gave me a chill. “Ghosts.” Could almost believe it.
RENEE
You couldn’t call the deer path a trail, really. I pushed through the willow shoots, my sweater sticking on branches, burrs latching onto my pants and socks. I followed the faint path through the bushes between our house and the neighbours’ with Thomas in my arms, just wrapped in a blanket because I was in too much of a rush to put his snowsuit on. He cooed and laughed. Everything was an adventure for him. I held the branches back from whipping him in the face and tried to quell my panic.
People said nestled when they talked about a cabin: nestled in among the trees. They said quaint, rustic, hand-hewn. About this one I would say haunted. Frightened would work, too. The trees were so big they made the cabin look like it was cowering, like it had crawled to the cliff edge to get away from the hundred-year-old firs that stood around it and all the way up Pope Mountain—huge Douglas fir, brambles of dogwood and Labrador tea, spruce that raced each other for the sky—everything was overgrown. It made me feel miniature and stupid—like I’d only been living long enough to know my own unhappiness, nothing else, nothing like these tree sentinels who’d seen centuries. I knew they were old because I’d seen a photo of Danny’s granddad standing next to a baby spruce in front of a shack, and that shack was our cabin, and that spruce was now taller than a telephone pole.
There were so few clues about his grandparents. I had plenty of time to look—there were no boxes of love letters or journals or diaries anywhere in the cabin that described the feeling of the place. It was an awful feeling and I felt it all the time: the cold seeping out of the bathroom despite the morning sun that made its way through the trees to the window; the blue, blue of the bedroom; the lethargy in my bones when I dragged myself out of bed to see to the baby, the tears that overcame me when I crept back. There were only four rooms in the cabin and I hated each one.
Glory Page 3