by Lee Maracle
Ned stares at her.
“You nap, Pop. I’ll wake you when she comes out of it,” Jim offers. “I’ll catch some winks myself then.”
Ned takes a look around and decides to nap in his car. He can’t bear sleeping in this hellhole. “How did she get to this?” he asks no one as he staggers out the door.
Jim shrugs and settles into looking out the window toward the hills. He never wonders about anything. He remembers when he has moments like this; he remembers things that take his mind off worrying about the present.
HIS MIND WANDERS ACROSS the old yard. He hears Stacey’s bare feet scampering in his direction. Must be suppertime, he tells himself, and gathers up his tools to put them away before going in to wash up. She looks at the neat little piles of nuts, bolts, and gears and asks him what he’s doing. “Putting my hub back together, the gear inside is stripped. Got to replace it.” He shows her the piece he is talking about and puts it back on the paper in the same place he picked it up from.
“Why is it stripped?” she asks.
“Don’t know,” he answers simply. At dinner, she pushes her fish around on her plate, looking quizzically at him. When she asks him why he never wonders about anything, he answers, “Doesn’t help. Something breaks, you fix it. You don’t need to know why anything happens. You only need to know what to do is all.”
“You got that right,” his grandpa says.
“But if you know the why of things, couldn’t you prevent them from happening?” she asks.
“For a while,” Jim answers without any concern for the paradox in his point of view. “But someone else more curious will have to figure that out.” He laughs in that self-satisfied kind of way that marks who he is and will always be. Stacey looks disconcerted, so Gramma explains to her that Jim is a man. She says it under her breath, so Jim cannot hear her. It appeases Stacey’s misgivings enough for her to accept Jim’s response. Jim looks at the picture of his family, sees Grandpa’s diminishing mind, Gramma’s diminishing health, and Momma’s increasing fatigue; he wonders about none of it. In his mind, if Grandpa gets stupid, someone will act as his guide; if Gramma dies, Momma will rise to the occasion; if she gets too tired, she won’t. The sun will rise and set, chores will need to be done, things will break, and he will have to fix them.
He and Stacey are on the stoop later that night, his bike is fixed and Jim is fed and content. She asks him where he found the part. He tells her he rummaged around the dump for it. “Doesn’t it bother you?” she asks.
“Not if I don’t wonder about it. You going to make me wonder about it?”
“I don’t understand how you can go rummaging around in the dump and not wonder how come Mom and Pop work so hard and still can’t afford to buy you a bike part.”
“Wouldn’t help to wonder,” he says flatly. “It wouldn’t get them any more money. It would hurt like hell to let myself go there. If I wondered about it, instead of going to get it, I may not want to rummage around in the dump and then all I would be left with is a broken bike and a bruised ego.”
“And you need your bike,” she finishes for him, unconvinced but resigned to Jim’s way of seeing things.
Jim knows she will never stop wondering about things. Wondering is a gamble. So is climbing that mountain. Stacey gambles on wondering and Jim decides to gamble on that mountain. “No sense wondering” is an instruction for himself, not Stacey. He is going to fix what he can and let the rest take care of itself. He likes that Stacey wonders, but the danger is that she might never figure it out, might never solve the riddle. If she does figure it out, the next generation may not have to rummage around in the dump. That would be all right too.
He told her so on that stoop so long ago.
STELLA SLEEPS FITFULLY, CURSING in her sleep. Jim looks at her when she stirs. Jim has spent his life translating the words of others into action. He has always seemed to be able to figure out what to do to make something work, how to get people to back up, back off, or turn around. The trick is to get Stella going in a different direction, away from this hovel and the men who have demeaned her and tortured her child. He does not need to know the why of how she got to this low point. He’s sure he doesn’t want to know, it will anger him and he’ll be fired up about what she did or didn’t do or what happened to her or didn’t happen. Jim knows he can’t do anything about that. The past is over; the present is already dying. His knowing what happened to her in the past will not help her stay away from the road she’s travelling. The future is what counts.
Humans are going somewhere all the time. Every act, every moment, is leading them somewhere whether they know it or not. The trick is to make sure their actions help them to go in a good direction. Jim knows this. Everyone leaves behind tracks showing the way that led them to wherever they are; “breadcrumb trails,” he calls them. Stella will wake up eventually and show him her breadcrumb trail, and it will mark the way out. All he has to do is recognize that first little crumb, get her talking, and get her to follow the next crumb and the next crumb until she finds her way out.
Stella stirs again. Jim sits up, ready for another round of cursing, crawling, fighting, and shaking. He decides to deal with it before waking Ned up. The smell of the place is starting to bite his nerves. Stella must not have ever completely cleaned the place up. He decides to make her clean it up as soon as she is fully awake. Might help her to sober up. Meanwhile he grabs a branch of cedar from outside, builds a fire in the stove, and tosses the branch on top of the hot stove. It masks the stench.
Stella’s eyes open. She thinks she recognizes this man.
“Jim?” she asks.
“Right here,” he answers.
She almost brightens for a minute at the thought that she has dragged his name up from some clear place of memory. Something about her is right. Then she looks around.
“Shit.”
“That’s right, Stella, and now you have to clean it.” He calls her by her name. The men who cross her path rarely call her by her name. She waits for him to plead with her, to prod her or threaten her, but he doesn’t. He leans against the windowsill and stares at her. The hard edge in his eyes commits her to cleaning. She waits for him to help. Her mother always helps. Standing motionless, Jim’s eyes bore holes in her. In front of him is that damn beer they will only let her have in tormenting little sips before they pull it away. She saunters over, sultry and coy. His eyes narrow. He grabs the neck of the bottle without taking his eyes off her. She stops. He looks capable of murder. The anger of the other men wasn’t wilful; it had no decision attached to it like this man’s anger does. Jim has decided she is going to clean up the place. He pushes anger into his decision. She sees it and relents.
The sunlight shakes the shadows out of shadowland, it transforms wet moss into dry tinder and opens up wounds to filth. Right now the light Jim has fired up shines on the mess Stella’s home has become. She can’t think of a way to contemplate it. The light burns her eyes and frightens her. It wakes something up in her she cannot name. Jim is neat and trim in the shadow, wearing this smug I-know-what-I’m-doing kind of look. It comes at her from the half-light just beyond the lamp’s range. She wants to hide. She tries to bolt. Her body will not move. His eyes hold her, will not let go of her. She can see his eyes pinning her to this place, this moment, this spot. She gives up the idea of bolting. This frees her to move. Best just to clean up like he wants.
Stella moves gingerly at first, trying to figure out what cleaning up is all about. She picks up bits and pieces of something in her rubble-filled home and stares at each item, confounded. The need to decide what to do with each piece floods her addled brain and taxes it to distraction. She looks about. There are so many things all over the place, on the floor, on the sorry excuse for a table, on the bed. Each one screams for her to decide where it should go. There are so many decisions to make. What is this? Where was it before it was on the floor?
Who owns it? Where does it go? Where does it live? She picks up a sock, tries to recognize it, tries to trace its origin, some foot belonging to somebody whose name should roll easily off the tongue, but which refuses. She cannot remember. She looks around the room, trying to find some place for it, her head shaking from side to side like an old blind bear. Unable to find a place, she puts the sock back on the floor where she found it. Item after item, the process repeats itself.
Jim watches. After an hour or so, he hands her something to drink. It isn’t what she wants, but she has no fight left. She drinks it in one pull. It’s hot. She doesn’t seem to feel the heat sufficiently to register pain or to slow the pull she took from the cup until it is too late. It burns her lips, tongue, and throat. She goes back to the rubble and tries to put it in some kind of context that will tell her how to order it. She looks at herself. Her dress is filthy. She looks for something clean. There is not a clean garment in the place. She looks at Jim, and says she’s sorry. She sits down and cries. Her voice is so loud it wakes Ned. He stumbles in.
“My dress is so dirty.”
Ned wants to slap her. Jim sees this and puts up his hand. The dress is the first breadcrumb. He does not want Ned to pull it out of her path, hooked as it is to the journey away from this mud hole. Ned knows what Jim’s hand means and backs off.
“What do you want to do about it?” Jim asks.
“I have to clean it,” she says in the small voice of a child.
“Go ahead,” he says. “Clean it.”
She looks at them both. “Could you …?”
Jim turns around. Ned wants to spit. It’s ludicrous, this sudden modesty coming from someone who has lived worse than an animal. But he turns too. They hear her fill a bucket with water and wash the dress. She dumps the dirty water and replaces it with clean. She examines the dress and puts it back in the bucket.
“I have no soap,” she weeps.
“I’ll get you some.” Ned is fighting for civility.
She kneels, staring at the dirty dress in the bucket for a long time, like she’s trying to remember how it got this dirty.
Ned returns with soap. He hands it to her, careful to avert his eyes; but by now the notion of modesty has vanished in the woman. She washes her dress and wrings it out. She puts it on still wet.
“Do you want us to dry that next door?” Ned asks.
“No. It will keep me cool. I’m so warm,” she sighs. She goes about the room, discovering things again. She decides to clean every dirty thing she finds. She finds a little shirt-and-skirt covered in blood and puts it in the bucket of soapy water. She picks up socks and finds another empty bucket to put them in.
“I have a lot of empty buckets.” She gives a half-embarrassed laugh.
“That you do,” Jim answers, smiling back at her as if she were the most delightful company he’d stumbled across in a long time. Ned wonders how Jim got to be this way. How could he look at all this, see that child, then warm up to the woman who set in motion her terrible suffering? “You get it washed and I will fix you up a clothesline outside.”
This is the first connection she has made with her cousin in a long time.
“Okay,” she says. She scampers, collecting up the laundry as if traipsing off into the fields to pick flowers. She picks each filthy item up like they are small jewels. She finds a washboard and kneels on the floor, scrubbing the shirt-and-skirt until clean. She puts a sheet in the bucket and scrubs it as well, then the other things. She tries to drag the bucket of dirty water outside, but her arms fail her. Ned moves to help her. Jim puts up his hand and says, “She has to climb this mountain on her own. Wait till she asks.”
They wait. Stella wrestles one more time with the bucket. The bucket moves. She walks it toward the door, rocking it and moving it forward, sweating and grunting, finally dumping half of it over the side of the porch. She hauls the bucket farther away before she dumps the rest.
Ned and Jim stand in the doorway in case Stella bolts for freedom.
From the fringe of the overgrown lawn, she looks up and says, “I don’t want the bloody water near my door.” Her standards are changing; she has a principle to hold on to. It takes hours, but finally she has washed and hung every dirty thing in the house. She flops onto the uncovered bed and sleeps.
While she sleeps, the two men plan out the restoration of her house. There is a lot of second-hand wood in various people’s yards. Ned will fetch it and bring some tools. When she wakes up to clean out her house, they will build cupboards wherever she wants. Ned still harbours ill will toward this woman, but he swings in behind Jim and feels a little easier about it.
XVII
JACOB REACHES THE TOP of the mountain as the sun sets on the flatlands in front of her seven peaks. He looks about him. There are mountains to the east, south, and north as far as his eye can see. Before him is the valley floor. He sees the twinkling lights of the white man’s towns and identifies them in the growing dark. The moon changes places with the sun shortly after he arrives. He marvels at the view, like everything is right with the world. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a packet of smokes, takes one from the box, and lowers himself onto a log. Just as he lights up, a voice jumps up from beside him.
“Them is all your relatives.” Jacob turns around to see an old woman sitting on the log with him. She grabs his lit cigarette, helping herself to a good long pull on it before handing it back.
“Who are you?” Jacob asks.
“They called me Alice. I’m your gramma’s gramma.” This piece of information makes Jacob dizzy. First he’d seen living people who weren’t really there, doing what he saw somewhere at some other time. Now he is seeing dead people who aren’t really there. He’s climbed the mountain without anything to eat. It took him all day. He had witnessed the worst thing he could imagine happen to his small relative. He’d seen it before it happened. He watched it shape itself into a movie. Now this dead woman is sitting next to him, sucking on his cigarette. This cannot be good. He feels sickness coming up again. She disappears.
“Oh Christ, I am too goddamned sane for this,” he declares. He curls into a tight ball and prepares to sleep. Jacob does not dream. The forest wraps him in its sounds, its smells, its feel; he drifts in its dark cool world until the cold wakes him up. The sound of birds meets his ears and soothes the dark. It will be light soon. He has never seen the sunrise, the mountains have always blocked his view of it from the village. He wonders if from up this high he’ll be able to see it. He sees the moon pale and stands up. It worries him to stand. He isn’t sure his memory serves him very well in the dark. Where is the edge? He decides not to think about it, just to stay there, not moving, praying he is facing in the direction of the sun.
A golden hue bleeds into the western skyline, painting the edge of the sky with the promise of light. In the growing dawn, Jacob sees he does not need to stand. He is about to sit when the fireball of the sun meets the valley between the two mountains he is staring at. It seems rude to sit now with the sun entering the territory. He stands. The sun pushes hard against the golden-hued black edges of dwindling night. The pale blue under gold fires the sky. The sun rises to a bright gold, no red, no orange, no other colour to taint its gold. The purity of its light bathes the mountains. Jacob breathes in the sight of the sun fighting with the overwhelming dark of night.
Jacob ponders what his uncle did up here for four days. There does not seem to be much to do. He remembers he hasn’t eaten. “Pick the berries; they like it,” he hears his gramma say. He wanders about. There are berries everywhere, different ones on different bushes. Some of the bushes have no thorns and some do. Some of the berries grow on vines, others hang from what look like small trees. There are berries of all sorts of hues and shades from white and blue to red and purple to black. Which ones should he pick?
“Be wary of shiny things,” pops into his mind. He picks the dull
est purple berries he can find from a laurel bush. He holds them in his hand, hesitates, then pops one into his mouth. Its sweet flavour bursts, and he waits to see if it is toxic. Nothing happens, so he gathers a handful more and sits down to breakfast.
After he’s filled himself up, he sits on his stone again. High above the valley, he sees its size; it stretches between two sets of mountains, in the middle of which the river winds lazily through it. It is sixty miles across, north to south. Jacob remembers the stories old Alice told about how the land was underwater until the Dutch drained it and put up windmills and canals. He wishes he had been around to see the mills chugging excess water. The valley has flooded twice since the mills were removed; it is probably not a good idea to live below the water table without windmills. It doesn’t take long for his belly to begin rumbling dangerously. He has to relieve himself. Those berries are doing their duty. He hadn’t thought about that. Where? He takes a look around and decides it had better be far from this stone. He walks through the bush to an old log, grabs a stick, and digs himself a small hole. What to do about toilet paper? An old vine maple hangs over his head, the answer to his question.
AGITATED, HE STRIDES ABOUT for a while, carefully marking where he had just been, which direction he had walked in, trying not to lose sight of his stone. He stands still for a minute, trying to think. Rivers begin as creeks in these mountains. He listens. He hears the sound of water and heads for it. He approaches the creek politely. No one there. Just as he is bending to wash his hands, a doe comes by for a drink. She drinks, sniffs the air, smells him, and bounds off. He is stunned by her grace and closeness. In place of soap he uses sand. It feels good. It satisfies him to know that he could eat, wash and clean himself, and watch the whole of his known world without help from anyone.
He walks back to his stone to study the colour of the world he knows. In the distance, he sees a discoloured chunk of sky heading toward the valley near his home. There is something wrong with it. It is huge. It takes up a good portion of the blue as it floats ominously toward the valley. It is moving steadily and, as it does, he sees that it is picking up clouds and discolouring them too. It must be smog from Vancouver. He sits down on the rock to consider what smog could do to the valley. He lights another cigarette and Alice reappears.