Once, in a Town Called Moth

by Trilby Kent

  Papa got there first, and almost as soon as he did, he shouted at me to stay inside. From the kitchen window, I watched Frank and his brother climb up a ladder that someone had set up against the outside wall and listened to the scuffle of their feet overhead as they hauled something—draaaaaag-THUMP…draaaaaag-THUMP—to the edge of the roof.

  By now several of our neighbors had come out to see what was going on. My father asked for someone to bring a tarp, and one was rustled out of a shed somewhere and laid out on the ground beneath the bit of roof where Papa and Frank stood. I didn’t want to watch, but even though I knew whatever was coming was going to be bad, I couldn’t look away. I thought Papa would shout for me to go to my room, or close the window—that there would be some warning—but he must have been preoccupied because all of a sudden there it was, dropping onto the tarp with a thud and a cracking noise that made the others outside gasp.

  It was a wild dog, or it had been. Its jaw was hinged open to show a long black tongue, like an eel or a monstrous slug crawling out of its mouth, and the tawny fur at its neck was stained a reddish brown where its throat had been slit. Its long hind legs were crossed at the ankle but its forelegs had splayed as the body fell, so it looked as if it was reaching up for help. Its mane was puffed, frozen in alarm. It wasn’t as big as some of the dogs we’d spotted prowling on the chaco plain, sizing up our chicken sheds, and its enormous ears made it look more like a fox than a wolf. My stomach churned as I felt my fear turn to pity.

  “Its hip was crushed first—maybe hit by a car,” someone said.

  “But its throat…”

  “To put it out of its misery?” my father suggested. It sounded halfhearted.

  “On your roof, Miloh?”

  I opened the kitchen door and edged onto the step, thinking that everyone would be clustered around the other side of the house. I was wrong. Gerhard Buhler stood a few paces away, his back to me, using a piece of straw to pick his teeth.

  “What a thing, eh, Anneli?” he said, without turning around. “Poor old Milobo.” He dropped the straw and walked around the corner to join the others.

  Milobo. I hadn’t heard that name for a long time. Some of the Spanish workers used to call my father that, years ago. In their language, lobo solitario meant lone wolf.

  I went back inside, locking the door behind me.

  Toronto

  THREE DAYS, AND NOTHING. Two days of checking her email, and an extra day when Ana couldn’t get to the library because Suvi insisted on dragging her to a Dance Crew tryout after school.

  “Lame,” said Mischa. “I thought you played real sports.”

  “I do,” huffed Suvi. “I can do this too.”

  “To get guys to notice you.”

  “Not true!”

  “Whatever.”

  “You’ve got the legs for Crew,” said Suvi to Ana, when he’d gone. “And the hair. If you ever take it out of those braids, that is. Honestly, Ana, braids are for third graders.”

  She was joking, Ana knew. She told herself this.

  The reality was, the thought of dancing in public terrified Ana. She didn’t even know how to dance; it wasn’t an instinct for her the way it seemed to be for these kids. It was something other people did, something suggestive and a bit wrong and also kind of silly.

  “Karen Spelberg is Crew vice-captain this year, so she gets to help Miss Kaplan choose the squad.” Suvi rolled her eyes. “Karen totally only got chosen because her sister was captain three years ago and her dad’s company sponsors the costumes. A monkey could dance better than she does, but she hides it by bossing everyone else around.”

  “I’m going to look ridiculous,” said Ana.

  “Everyone will be too worried about themselves to notice you. Honestly, ninety percent of the girls who try are awful. I’ll probably be awful, but I promised Julie and Steve I’d give it a go anyway. Steve kind of dared me.”

  “So how is me being there going to help?”

  “Moral support, duh!”

  They were put in different groups almost as soon as they arrived. Ana could tell that Suvi’s was the preferred group: athletic girls, keen girls. The ones in Ana’s group were the geeks who thought they could dance, the wannabe cool girls and over-confident loudmouths. Ana stood at the back and marked the steps without actually throwing herself into it, and no one seemed to care. They were taught the words to a cheer for an upcoming basketball game, which was easy enough because it was just call and response. Putting the words and the steps together was another matter—but when the time came for her group to perform, Karen Spelberg didn’t even bother watching them fumble their way through it. She was too busy teaching a new routine to the preferred group.

  “It’s kind of a Lady Gaga tribute,” she was saying, and Ana saw Suvi roll her eyes.

  “Callbacks on Thursday,” they were told at the end.

  “That was the stupidest thing ever,” Ana said as they walked home.

  “You were OK,” said Mischa, who’d hung around to watch the last five minutes. “You were actually keeping in time.”

  “No I wasn’t,” Ana said. “I can move my feet, or say the words, but I can’t do both at once. What is even the point of it?”

  “What is even the point?” laughed Suvi. “Dude, you sound like us. You’re becoming real Toronto.”

  “Wonderful,” said Ana.

  “What’s not to love? You can get a 416 tattoo now, like Drake.”

  “You know you love us,” said Mischa. “You know you love it here.”

  “Gimme a T! O! R! O! N!—”

  “You’re giving me a headache,” snapped Ana.

  “Whoa. What crawled up your butt and died?”

  Mischa snorted.

  “You think Toronto’s great because everyone’s always saying it is,” Ana said. “But that’s only because they’ve never been anywhere else.”

  She’d surprised even herself. But then, in the seconds it took to speak, a feeling she hadn’t known she had assumed its ugly form.

  “Just because people tell themselves it’s great doesn’t make it so,” she continued. “They go on and on about how tolerant everyone is here, but that’s only if people behave the way you expect them to. You’re not tolerant just because you eat at ethnic restaurants. This city is neither here nor there. It’s like an awkward teenager trying to be cool.”

  Both of her friends stared at her, and she realized that it was unthinkable to them that someone should suggest that this wasn’t the greatest place on earth, a beacon for the huddled masses of the world. Maybe because for them Canada didn’t mean frozen pizzas, soggy fried chicken and casseroles like cat sick in plastic microwave containers.

  “And it’s ugly,” she continued, even though by now she wished she could take it all back. “All those big apartment blocks. Gray and flat and concrete and it just goes on and on and on. Even the nice bits. All those fake fancy houses and the fake beach—”

  “Come on, Mischa,” said Suvi with a hard look. “Next thing you know, Little Miss I’m-Too-Good-For-This will start calling us fake too.”

  As they went, Ana pretended to ignore Mischa’s doleful backward glance. It made her ashamed to punish him; he didn’t know how to wound and he wounded so easily.

  “No tarrying after school on Friday,” her father said that night, as Ana peeled the plastic from a tub of potato salad about to pass its expiry date. “We’re going away this weekend.”

  Ana’s fingers froze over the tub lid. For some reason, her mind flitted to the purple ribbons tied up and down the street.

  “Only for two days,” he said. “We’ll come back on Sunday.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To visit friends. Family, actually.”

  “Mama?”

  Her father turned away from her and filled his glass with water from the tap.

  Colony Felicidad

  Here, just about everyone was family. It was sort of a joke among Mennonites, because the community wa
s so small and self-contained, but it’s the kind of joke that you can’t take too far or people start to get offended.

  Most of our neighbors were cousins or second cousins or, if they weren’t, then their grandparents were, or maybe their great-grandparents. Sometimes I’d see a glimmer of Susanna in the corners of an old woman’s eyes—watering eyes, maybe, behind thick spectacles, lined with crow’s feet—or the curve of my father’s mouth in Frank Reimer’s smile. At a distance, the little boys could have been almost entirely interchangeable with their white-blond hair, crinkling blue eyes and freckled, upturned noses.

  But being family doesn’t stop evil from creeping in.

  There were rumors, a long time ago, of things amiss in Wilhelm Penner’s house. Whispers among the women when his wife and three daughters turned up at church one morning with four black eyes between them. The eldest daughter became pregnant, even though she wasn’t married, but she lost the baby just a few months in. More whispers—Terrible to say, but it’s probably for the best—but it wasn’t until my mother’s father stood up and insisted that the elders do something that anything happened. There was a lot of tension around that time, Justina later told me: her father had been the only man to bring the whispers out into the open, and it embarrassed some of the elders so much that there was almost a falling out. But at last a meeting was convened by the church leaders. They brought Wilhelm before three ministers, who between them got to decide on the punishment for his crimes. The ministers were the most powerful people in the colony, elected for life and entrusted to try any colony member for any crime apart from murder. Those ministers heard the charges brought against Wilhelm at a trial attended by all the male members in the colony, the worst crime being that he’d made his own daughter pregnant. If he’d been excommunicated, he’d have gone to Hell; as it was, he begged forgiveness and was allowed to stay. His wife’s uncle arranged marriages for the younger two daughters then and there, and that got them out of his house. The eldest daughter went to live with cousins. No one talked about it after that. Most people probably figured that if God had wanted to intervene further, He would have.

  Sometimes, I can’t help but wonder if God occasionally falls asleep on the job.

  Toronto

  THE NEXT MORNING, Ana didn’t bother waiting for Suvi to walk by her house. Instead, she went early to the library, logged on to a computer and waited.

  No new messages.

  She Googled “MennoCan Book Club” and scrolled through pages of discussions about books she’d never heard of. There were four pages of threads, some of which ran to fifteen or sixteen pages each, where conversations had grown heated. She tried to search for posts just by Perdita, but this only worked page by page, and there were too many for Ana to go through so laboriously.

  She returned to Google.

  “First Light Congregation Toronto,” she typed. There it was: a website, an address. The church building was an old brick Victorian affair with a modern addition that looked in need of some sprucing up. But the faces on the page about language classes looked friendly, albeit nothing like the faces Ana remembered from Colony Felicidad.

  About Us, History, Contact, Gallery. Ana hovered the cursor over the gallery page and clicked. Six albums: English School, Summer Fair, Meet the Team, Choir Trip, Junior Cooks, Bible Study. She clicked on an image of a man wielding barbecue tongs and grinning broadly.

  Most of the faces were close-ups, with a few group shots. Ana scrolled past thumbnails of the aerial snaps—too little detail—and the shots of children and men. She clicked on a few of the shots of women, some of which opened in another window and some of which wouldn’t.

  She scrolled on. Stopped.

  Ana leaned forward so that her nose was almost touching the screen. It looked like a picture of herself, but as far as she knew no one had taken her photo since she’d arrived in Toronto. Besides, the hair was too dark, and loose. But the nose that she’d always felt was too big, the way one eye squinted more than the other when she smiled…

  She clicked on it.

  This page cannot be displayed.

  She returned to the gallery page. There, in a pixelated square the size of a matchbox, was a picture of a woman who might be her mother.

  “Or not,” Ana said. She tried tilting the screen, double clicked. Still the same error message. Her heart drilled in her chest.

  It has to be. Is it? Is that you?

  In History, Suvi sat next to a girl called Katie Stamper. Ana caught her eye and smiled. I’ve seen her, she wanted to say. I can show you. I’m pretty sure it’s her! But Suvi seemed not to notice and turned the other way.

  Suvi didn’t join them at lunch. Mischa ate in silence, grunting in response to Ana’s attempts at conversation. He said he had to leave early for an art club meeting.

  Suvi and Mischa emerged together from a different door at the end of the day, leaving Ana waiting outside their usual exit with her backpack hugged to her chest. When she saw them rounding the corner without her, she called out to Suvi. A backward glance, a death stare, something whispered in Mischa’s ear. They quickened their pace, leaving her there.

  “This is as bad as it gets,” said Mr. Peterson.

  He was standing by his car, grinding a cigarette butt into the tarmac with his heel.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Other kids. In a couple of years they’ll stop wasting so much energy being mean. Everyone will get on with life again.”

  “Um…ok.”

  “For now, you should make the most of being fourteen. No bills, no mortgage, no snotty-nosed kids needing feeding and clothing and permission forms signed and lifts to the mall. You have all the time in the world to listen to music, read books, watch movies. Start figuring it all out while you have the time. Your brain’s forming all these crazy pathways right at this very second. You can make them stretch further now, in a way you won’t be able to when you’re older. It’s what you’ll have to work with when you’re forty and up for the same job as a fat guy with coffee dribble stains on his shirt.”

  “OK.”

  “No, not OK. Say ‘What the shit have you been smoking, Peterson?’ ”

  “I thought it was just a cigarette.” Ana dropped her bag on the ground.

  “Got any plans for this weekend?”

  Going to visit some strangers that might know where my mother is. “Not really. What about you?”

  Mr. Peterson looked surprised to be asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said at last, frowning as he nudged the cigarette butt with his toe. “I haven’t thought about it yet. Usually it’s my wife who makes the plans.”

  “Is she away?”

  “We’re separated.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s better. Less arguing. More time on the weekend to do nothing.”

  “Right.” Ana nodded as if she knew what he meant, as if she’d been a high school French teacher with a car and a smoking habit and an estranged wife too. “Could I borrow that book you mentioned? It’s not in the school library.”

  “Papillon? Sure. I can bring it in for you on Monday.” He took his bag from the hood of the car, pulled out a set of keys. As he moved Ana caught the faintest suggestion of cigarette smoke, a breath of it glancing off his skin, coloring the air with his smell.

  “I’d wanted to read it this weekend.” She swallowed. “My dad and I are going away.”

  Mr. Peterson nodded. “OK,” he said. And then, “OK. I, uh…” The parking lot was empty. A group of kids came out of the gym exit, talking loudly as they cut across the field to the road.

  Mr. Peterson turned back to her. “We could get it now. My place isn’t far from here.” He unlocked the door. “Hop in.”

  They drove south, toward the lake, past squat brick houses with beer-belly porches. The porches were an affectation, Ana decided, since they actually prevented light from coming in through the front windows. Inside, the houses would be dark, even the south-facing ones.
r />   A bridge took them across an enormous valley, a green gash in the middle of the cityscape. Other cars glided past them, fast and smooth and soundless. Mr. Peterson told Ana that he’d spent entire summers in the ravines as a kid, building forts and collecting golf balls that had washed downriver from the golf course. He and his friends would sell them back to the golfers for twenty-five cents apiece. The ravines were dark and cool even on a sunny day, a relief from the hot concrete and glaring glass downtown.

  “Once, my pal Rocky and I built a raft and floated it all the way down to the viaduct,” he said. “Like Huck Finn.”

  “Who?”

  “You’ve never heard of Huckleberry Finn? C’mon, Ana!” He shook his head and smacked the steering wheel. “God, if our mothers had known half the stuff we got up to. We weren’t supposed to play in the ravines, period.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because in their minds the ravines were filled with rabid coyotes and poison ivy and pedophiles. And what if the river flooded? And what if one of us broke a leg down there and no one heard our screams…”

  “That sounds unlikely.”

  “It does, doesn’t it?”

  They had reached the neglected fringes of the harborfront, where the lake met industrial yards and empty parking lots. In the distance, the islands nodded their bushy heads.

  “What a waste, eh?” said Mr. Peterson. “Paris has the Seine. London has the Thames. Even Vancouver has the freaking Pacific. We’ve got a perfectly decent lake and some sweet islands, and look what we do with it. Nada. Screw you, beauty—that’s what this city is saying. We just go from un-space to un-space and live in the bits in between.”

  “I kind of like it. There’s space to think. Nothing here tells you what to think.”

  Mr. Peterson looked at her.

  “OK,” he said. “I’ll give you that. And ugliness has its own beauty, I guess.”

  It felt strange, hearing her teacher talk about beauty, and Ana hoped she wasn’t blushing.