“Not cool at all,” Mom had snapped. “Tragic. She leaned out of a chariot to smash her head on a rock.”
This time Dad intervened. “It’s okay, Deirdre. He’s learning lots. But no traplines, laddie.” He reminded Jeremy that he would have to kill, gut and skin the animals, and Jeremy quickly lost interest. But his fascination with the quinzhee didn’t wane.
Days later, the snow pile stood seven feet high and we began to hollow out a shell. Even Chaucer seemed more appealing, and I felt the ticking clock of approaching midterm exams. But Jeremy was possessed, his quinzhee demon urging us both to hours in the cold. We carved an entrance like a keyhole into the south face where the wind was at its least fractious. Then Jeremy used the grain shovel, kneeling to scrape a tunnel into the core of the pile. I was relegated to clearing the entrance, snow flying between my knees as I struggled to keep up.
“I built a platform, up off the ground. Come look.” Jeremy said from inside the quinzhee. I could barely hear his voice unless I knelt at the keyhole and put my head into the tunnel. I inched inside on my belly and elbows. Jeremy, knees up to his cheeks, perched on a small escarpment. “Stop!”
I froze. He pointed at the curved ceiling. Patches of light played like seawater, washed blue and pale green, through the packed snow.
“Look at that. So beautiful,” he breathed. “Let’s see how thick the snow is.” He made me wiggle out to pull a twig from the nearby aspen. I passed the stick in to him, a good foot long, and he jammed it into the ceiling’s luminous arc. When the twig’s entire length was buried, he waved me out of the tunnel. Outside, no twig was visible on the snow’s curving wall.
We recounted the latest development at dinner. Our mother raised her eyes to meet my father’s, and she said quietly, “You’ll not be going in there alone, Jeremy.”
My father came into my bedroom later and made urgent “get off the phone now” motions at me. After I said goodnight to Leo, he sat down along the edge of my bed, pushing my phone and my copy of Shelley aside. “Jessie, you remember your mom talking about your uncle Brett? I know she hardly ever mentions him. Before we were married, on the farm in the Peace Country, Brett suffocated in a granary full of barley.”
“Dad, that’s ancient history.”
“It might be to you, but your mom still misses her brother.” He gathered me into a hug.
My face was muffled against his sweater. “I know this story. It’s awful. Why are you talking about this now, Dad?”
“You know your mother. She thinks that Brett might have survived if your uncle Peter had been around. Peter was driving the grain truck. It was harvest, and they were rushing to combine the last quarter. Brett lost his balance and fell into the granary. Your mother is superstitious, you know that, and nervous about this snow fort. Don’t you leave Jeremy alone out there, you hear?”
“Dad! Why did she send you to do her dirty work? She always does that. She makes you take her bad news to people.”
“Don’t cry, Sugarplum. Your mom didn’t mean any harm. She just had a bad feeling. You know, that goose.”
My mother. A goose walking over her grave. It wasn’t her own grave she was haunted by. It was everyone else’s. I swore I would never be such a worrier. Never. But to my father, I just nodded. “Okay, Dad. Whatever.”
By the following week, the quinzhee was a glittering room with a curved inner ceiling, like the onion dome on the Ukrainian church we had seen on a school trip to Calgary.
Leo came over to look, and admired the quinzhee’s even dimensions, but Mom wouldn’t come near it. Mario liked to lie outside the entrance, whining and snuffling when we both disappeared inside. We took turns as inside ferret and outside snow scraper. The ferret used the old short-handled hoe, holding it horizontally to scrape the walls, kicking the snow down to ground level. The scraper scuffed the loose snow away from the entrance. When we described this to our parents, even our mother laughed. She said it reminded her of that Steve McQueen movie, The Great Escape, when the Tunnel King’s sidekicks scuffed dirt from inside their pant legs onto the ground right under the noses of the German guards. I had seen the movie on TV at Leo’s not long before, so the story and characters was fresh in my mind, and I explained it to Jeremy. At breakfast, I called him “Danny,” after Charles Bronson, the claustrophobic Polish tunneler in the movie who panics when the ceiling caves in, and my mother winced, her smile fading. I didn’t call him Danny again.
Jeremy cajoled me into going out when the moon was high and we gathered candles to illuminate the quinzhee. Mom handed us the matches reluctantly.
“I’m not liking this affair at all.”
“Mom, I’ve called Leo, he’s coming over, so don’t worry. And Dad said — ”
“Don’t you be quoting your father at me, my girl. You’re old enough — ”
“I know, I know!”
The quinzhee’s platform was just big enough for the three of us to lie side by side, reggae music flooding from Leo’s Walkman. Jeremy loved the ceiling. He said it reminded him of a caliph’s tented canopy, studded with diamonds and embroidered in silver. I just laughed and threw snow at him. I was going to be the poet, not him. He and Leo were both going to be scientists and count all the stars that hadn’t been found yet. We learned that the easiest way to leave the quinzhee was like otters, head first, sliding down on our bellies from the platform and emerging from the tunnel shaking with laughter.
One evening, it started to snow as if heaven had opened its vault. After supper, we pulled on our snow wear, and stepped into the gale, but couldn’t see our path to the quinzhee. We crept through the yard by memory, hands out like blind beggars. The aspens north of the dugout whispered and whistled.
“Jeremy, it’s too dark,” I said. “Let’s go back, C’mon. This is no fun, I’m freezing.” I couldn’t see his face, but his hand was reassuringly there in mine. We turned our shoulders to the wind and retreated.
When we came home from school the next day, the bus wobbled on the grid road, sliding and skidding so ominously that even Leo and the other seniors who sat in the last four rows were silenced until Mr. Wiebe headed the wheels solidly south. As we walked past the clearing, Jeremy grabbed my arm. I could barely hear his voice through the layers of scarf over his mouth. “Let’s go to the quinzhee right now. It’ll be so quiet. We can listen to the birds. Maybe you can write a new poem.”
“No, let’s go have something to eat first, Jere. The birds are all hiding in the trees. We won’t hear anything.”
“You jam tart. I’m goin’.”
He was so stubborn. He shouldered his backpack and marched toward the dugout. The snow fluttered and swirled in eddies at his back. I hesitated. Mom would have a fit. But I was hungry, and I would come right back with a thermos of tea. I headed down the driveway.
The house was empty except for Mario, asleep beside the stove. He woke when he heard me, yawning and stretching, and snuffled my face when I bent to say hi. I put on the kettle and picked up the note from where it lay on the table beside a plate stacked high with raisin cookies. Dad’s tidy script, a relic from his business days, said they were both gone to town on errands, and please put the lasagna in the oven by four thirty. Mario thumped his stubby tail on the floor as I fed him a cookie, and he curled up at my feet. I poured the boiling water into the teapot, and picked up my book.
When I looked up from Shelley, my tea was tepid and the kitchen was growing dark. A sharp blast of wind rattled the windows. Mario barked once, sharply. I could feel the house shiver and shake.
I poured the tea into a thermos and scrambled into my parka. Anxiety caught in my throat. I lurched out the door, Mario jostling for space on the stoop. “Chill, big guy. Let’s go get Jeremy. He’ll be ready for some tea.”
Mario whined when I led the way toward the dugout. He threaded his tall body between my legs and I stumbled, dropping the thermos. I let it go. The wind yanked my hood from my forehead. Mario came to heel, and I leaned on his shoulder as we push
ed against the gale, snow like grit in my eyes and face. I turned around and pulled my scarf up over my nose, wanting to be eight again, wishing Mom was here to tighten and snug its folds, wanting Dad’s arm to hang onto. Jeremy would be worrying, or trying to find his way back. I had to get to him.
I didn’t recognize the quinzhee when I stumbled into its curved wall.
An aspen had fallen, the wind carrying it like a twig across the north side of the quinzhee, the rest of the structure collapsed into a heap without discernible edges.
“Jeremy! Jeremy!”
Beside me, Mario started to howl.
I was crying, gulps that I choked on and couldn’t swallow, as I dug frantically at the entry with my hands, afraid to leave for a shovel, afraid of what I might hear or see, desperate for my brother to be whole and breathing, calling his name over and over. Mario kept trying to lick my face. I couldn’t push him away, and as I dug in the dark and the wind, his tongue and my tears glazed my face in a sheer ice cake that cracked with each sob. I wanted to hear Jeremy’s voice telling me again about the blue and green sparkles that lit the quinzhee’s ceiling. I wished I had never helped hollow its heart, and I wished my parents were home.
It was half an hour before the truck finally rolled silently down the lane, its headlights around the curve slicing through the falling snow to illuminate me where I knelt. I stayed where I was, scraping snow from the pile, my head gone numb and hopeless. My tears had stopped, and I was shivering, wheezing with fear and cold.
My mother, screaming like the banshees, had leaped from the pickup before it came to a stop. She ran across the field and fell to her knees beside me, clawing with her gloved hands at the jammed entrance. My father, right behind her, stopped, stared at me where I knelt at the ruined walls, then came to my mother’s side. He pulled her away with gentle hands, and carried her back to the truck. When he came back to me in the whirling snow, his face was white slate, his mouth like solid iron. He wrapped his arms around me and we walked around to the front of the truck, out of Mom’s earshot.
“Jess.”
I could barely hear him. He put his mouth next to my ear. “Jessie! I want you to drive your mother to the house. Call 911. Then call Leo’s family. Ask them to bring the John Deere with the front end loader. Stay with your mother. I’ll start moving the tree. Can you do that?”
I nodded.
They say that when disaster strikes, time slows and stretches, turns to pulled taffy, and that you can see through its membranes to the other side. That it protects the innocent and the victims from the truth’s stark immediacy. I don’t know if that is true. I do recall that long trip up the driveway, my mother weeping, her face turned away from me, the truck groaning in low gear as the storm raged, as one endless moment edged in the silk of unfeeling time. It was the last semblance of peace I would feel for decades.
Witnessing my mother’s sorrow, the intensity of her loss when her favourite child died so young, so needlessly, and enduring her years of subsequent silence to me, chipped away the pleasure I’d felt in poetry and birds. I didn’t want to have children of my own despite Leo’s pleas. I put off marrying him for years, struggled in therapy, my mother’s grief and anger breaking over me, merging with my guilt.
I became an anthropologist, not a poet. I work alone in my home office, poring over maps and computer screens, researching boys’ coming-of-age rites in central Asia. Sparkles from dangling glass spinners in the window flame the wall, amber and ultraviolet, scarlet and aquamarine. But whenever I close my eyes, the light refracts, translucent as the quinzhee’s roof, Jeremy’s shroud of snow.
I finally married Leo at thirty-two, a year after my father died. Each night, I wrapped his arms around me like a blanket. “Hold me tight, Leo.” He is the only one, other than Jeremy, who lay beneath the ceiling of the quinzhee with me, and he knows how the sky spins and wheels.
The night after we learned that we were going to have twins, I lay beside him, unmoving. “Will she rejoice or curse?”
“Who, sweetie?”
“Mom. Who else?”
When we went to see her, she did neither. She looked at me bleakly. “I wish you joy of them.”
We named them Jeremy and Deirdre. For the sorrows.
Appetites
THE BLUE JAY IS HANGING AROUND again. I haven’t seen him for months, and now here he is in the front yard, shrieking as he clings to the twigs on the outside of the birdfeeder, his crest catching on its roof as he pokes his spiky beak inside to get at the platform. Finally he gives up, flies the few feet to the ground. Pecks at the peanuts that lie scattered among the sunflower seeds in the meagre grass at the foot of the cherry tree.
There were years when I couldn’t abide the smell of peanuts, years I wondered if I’d ever go back to eating them, if I’d ever make peanut and chocolate tart for the dessert menu or peanut butter and honey sandwiches for my kid’s school lunch. Course, that was before the big allergy lookout — peanuts are verboten now at Jared’s school. But it’s not the peanuts I want. It’s my appetite. The enthusiasm that blue jay brought to his precarious roost on the edge of the feeder. The alacrity that sent him scuttling through the grass to eat. That’s what I miss on these colourless days. That, and my sense of taste. Everything I put into my mouth tastes like scorched beans or burnt nuts. My nose recognizes just a few aromas, the most pungent ones — garlic, sweat, caramelized sugar that’s gone past amber to the edge of bitterness.
My MD was sanguine. “A small anomaly, maybe stress,” she told me three months ago as I perched on the edge of the examining table in her spartan office. Easy for her to say, to suspect that the flu and a nasal infection had simultaneously fried my sensory input channel. As if I’m a damn computer or a video game. That I’ll regain my palate. Eventually. That’s no consolation. I’m a cook. My life revolves around having a highly developed sense of taste, a nose that can tell the difference between caramelized and burnt. What if it doesn’t come back? I cook from memory now. I haven’t told my boss.
Lance comes into the kitchen at work as I dust a steaming pot of clam and leek chowder with smoked paprika.
“Hi, Chef,” I say.
He nods absently, heading for his paperwork. “Sandy’s replacement starts today. Guy named Maurice, friend of Philip’s.”
I think of leprechauns when the new waiter follows Philip into the kitchen. There’s no Irish accent, but he’s spry and merry, soft voice and bright eyes, his nose and cheeks too puckish to be considered handsome. When lunch service ends, I pull out the box grater and start on the beets while I ask him where he’s from.
“I’ve lived in lots of places,” Maurice says. Is he trying to be coy? Shy? He doesn’t seem shy.
“He’s been to Europe six times. Worked on a cruise line in the Mediterranean, he’s just the most terrible flirt,” Philip interjects as he unloads dishes at the dish pit. A wine glass falls and shatters at Maurice’s feet. “Damn! Sweep that up, will ya?” Maurice folds himself forward, one hand on the broom, watching me and not the glass shards in the dustpan.
I’m ladling the chowder into containers for the walk-in when Lance walks past. He backtracks, picks up a clean spoon. Dips it into the pot and tastes. Makes a face. The spoon clatters into the sink.
“Flat, Stacy.” I wince as he adds a handful of kosher salt and squeezes a lemon into the pot. He tastes the soup again, his long horse cheeks flat and incurious. “Another bad day?”
“Yeah.” When I look at the clock, my heart lurches. So much yet to get done. “Gotta go early, Chef, Jared has a basketball game.”
But I can’t distract him. “You know, yesterday’s lentil salad was salty. And so was last week’s sweet potato soufflé. S’up?”
I shrug. Let him think I’m tired or preoccupied. Working in a small restaurant will give anyone wrinkles. The long hours make me tear out my hair, and I can’t count how many of Jared’s games I’ve missed. Whatever let me think I could do this alone?
A couple hou
rs later, when I step outside to the bus stop, winter is in every breath of wind. A battered grey Corvette pulls up, starfishing cracks in every window, Maurice at the wheel. “Give you a ride?”
“I’m going to the north side,” I say. He nods and I climb in. “How was your first shift?”
“Oh fine, you know, same old.”
“Up here.” I wave at the boulevard. Maurice swings his car around the corner as if he was parking a yacht. Ten minutes pass in silence before I catch sight of Jared, hurtling toward us through the school’s gate, ambushing the car door to lean through the window.
“Hey, Mom! Cool car! Can I go for a ride?”
“Honey, we’ve got to get home. Maybe Maurice can take you for a spin another day. Thanks, Maurice, see you at work.”
“Hang on half a sec,” Maurice says. “I may as well run you home, I’ve come this far.” The growling car makes short work of the trip. Jared, fiddling with the power windows, is all smiles when Maurice promises another ride. “Next time, bud. See ya, Stacy.”
Today’s special is rogan josh, my favourite lamb curry, rich with garam masala and ginger. I’ve made it dozens of times. It’s typical of what I most love about cooking, that transformation as raw ingredients soften and blend with each other, their edges melting into something new, opening, like lovers tangled in a bed. I know, and to the milligram, exactly how much lemon juice those hot peppers need as flame tamers, how much salt reins in the sharp edge of the spices, when I mix in the yoghurt. Before lunch service, Lance’s spoon dips, pauses. He nods. Why doesn’t he comment on it? Why just mention the dishes that need help?
Seems I’m messing up everything. After twelve years of marriage, Matthew left me. No hint he was unhappy. He just left one evening after dinner. He still loved me, he said, but he needed to be himself. I’ve never hindered you, I said, why can’t you be yourself with us? What about Jared? Mushrooms on linguini. I can’t imagine the smell of mushrooms and sherry without hearing the door slowly creak and click into silence. Took a suitcase, left everything behind in the apartment for Jared and me. Sleeping alone in our king-size bed after years of sheltering within the curve of Matthew’s body, I feel stripped to the bone. Jared still doesn’t believe it. Thinks his daddy’s coming back every night to tuck him in. I want to believe that too. But the divorce papers changed that when they dropped through the mail slot last fall. If he ever comes home, I’d throw things at him. And then hug him.
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