by Carla Funk
Through the speakers, the announcer crackled his enthusiastic thanks and farewell and see you next year, and the national anthem played us out, a swelling soundtrack for the great exodus from the litter-strewn fields: dust clouds and exhaust fumes and a bumper-to-bumper migration inching along the road into town, creeping over the bridge, through the traffic light at Stewart and Burrard, across the train tracks, and back up the hill toward home.
Whatever grandness and glitz our town gained during the air show weekend receded like the river, quick as a dream. The streets went quiet again. Pickups idled in the Co-op parking lot. The dust and dry weeds of late summer shifted to frost-glitter on the fields in the morning and a fat, low-hanging harvest moon at night. Along the highway ditch, the scrawny man in the cowboy hat and boots buttoned his flannel jacket to the throat against the coolness as he walked with his garbage bag slung over his shoulder, bending every few feet to pick up another empty, making his way toward the depot at the back side of the laundromat, where a man named Diamond Jim exchanged cans and bottles for cash.
WHEN I SPUN our plastic light-up globe, I couldn’t even find Vanderhoof. On most maps, it was a pinpoint, its name so small I needed a magnifying glass to find it, but still, I loved it. All of it. Its streets and buildings, the lettering of signs in storefront windows, the busted-up winter-thrashed sidewalks whose cracks I tried not to step on for fear of breaking my mother’s back. Every store and shop held for me a clear and peculiar feeling. In the same way that a song like “This Ol’ Riverboat,” with its jangly tambourines and sunny harmonies, conjured in me a golden warmth, or the tinny trumpet of “Red Roses for a Blue Lady” left me hollow and tight-throated, every building I passed or entered gave off its own mood and tone. Taylor Brothers Hardware felt like Saturday-morning chores, mostly boring, but full of brightness—all those shiny washers, bolts, nails, and screws. Royal Foods was lit with possibility; if Tante Nite was working, she might slip me a free chocolate or cluster of grapes. The bank stretched out like Sunday sermons, blank and full of the same long waiting only to listen to words that held no meaning for me—overdraft, transfer, withdrawal, interest. But Toyland owned all the confetti-cake joy of a birthday party. At the corner of the two main streets, in a narrow storefront that once housed a perpetual church rummage sale and would eventually become Black Bob’s Billiards, a seedy arcade where all the troublemakers hung out, Toyland beckoned every child with its rainbowed bubble-lettered sign. Inside—dolls, trucks, Tinker Toys, boxes of the latest Lego, racks of die-cast metal cars, cap guns, squirt guns, rolls of stickers, bags of marbles, bins of rubber balls in neon colours, parachute men, army figures, whistles, balloons—a wish list come to life.
“You have ten minutes,” our mother would say, and then showed me and my older brother her wristwatch so we knew our starting time. As we walked the aisles and eyed the shelves, holding up items for each other to see—“Check out this air rifle!” and “Whoa—remote control!” and “I’m gonna save up pop bottle money to buy this!”—I felt both the adrenaline of high hope and, as our minutes wound down, the inner sigh of resignation. Three dollars in a plastic change purse emblazoned with “Jesus Loves Me” only bought so many marbles or stickers and was never enough for the electronic Speak & Spell computer with a robot’s voice that said You are correct! whenever I punched in the right answer.
Farther down the block, the Department Store’s double glass doors opened to a realm that left me with the breezy pleasure of a new haircut’s flounce and curl. In the store, I felt dressed up, grown up. The word “department” seemed to me a formal word, a city word, one that might appear in a movie about New York or in a book about a rich girl who lived in a high-rise apartment. The Department Store was the only store in town with wall-to-wall carpeting, which added an air of luxury, especially when I tromped over the orange-and-yellow diamond pattern in snowy winter boots.
Racks of clothing, shelves of footwear, and display cases of costume jewelry took up most of the store’s space, but in the back corner was the section I loved best—fabric and notions. Here, I ran my fingers over lace, ribbon, rickrack, and buttons, turned the glossy pages of pattern books, and followed my mother down rows lined with bolts of calico and flannel, silk and brocade. At the cutting counter, a woman with silver shears and a measuring tape draped around her neck rolled out fabric and cut it into the length required for whatever my mother was sewing. The sound of the scissors slicing cleanly through the cloth was the beginning of something new—a Christmas dress for me, a blouse for my mother.
One block over and down lay the post office, cool and aloof and satisfyingly eerie. Before we entered, we paused a moment to look at the pieces of paper taped to the glass front doors. Here, photographs of the newly deceased were displayed, along with their death dates and upcoming funeral details. My mother read to me the names, told me if and how we were related, and then said what she always said if there were only one or two announcements: “Deaths always come in threes. You just wait. Someone else will die soon.”
The post office made me feel like I was inside a story in the pages right before a mystery was about to be solved. I loved it when my mother let me go in there alone with her ring of keys. On the concrete floor, my footsteps echoed, and the walls of small numbered mailboxes felt like clues. When I slotted the key into our box, turned it, and opened the little door, I could see beyond the envelopes into the inner world of the mail-room, where torsos of women at work bustled by and boxes, parcels, and stacks of more envelopes waited to be sorted. Once, as I looked through the portal of the open mailbox, a face appeared. With only one eye and part of a nose in view, it looked like a cutaway from my nightmares, a demon winking through. When the eye met mine, a lady’s voice screeched in surprise. I slammed the metal door and, with shaking hands, slipped in the key, locked it, and ran back to the car.
So much of the town remained hidden, and it left me feeling small and curious about what I didn’t know. The law office, the courthouse, Frankie’s Pub—places like these existed in the empire of the unknown. I watched for people going in and out of doors to these mystery buildings, searching for a familiar face. What was Bud’s Electric, and who was Bud? What did people eat at The Chuckwagon Café? Who slept in the beds of the Reid Hotel? But I never asked these questions aloud, only let my imagination work them over into a personal mythology. Bud’s Electric became a shop owned by a bald man with flowers that plugged in and lit up, and chandeliers whose glass pendants dangled in the shapes of tulips and roses. Frankie’s Pub, I imagined, belonged to a man with a mustache and a huge room full of bumper buggies, the word “pub” sounding to me like the rubber punch of carnival cars bouncing off each other. If we happened to drive past on a late weekend evening and I saw out my backseat window a cluster of women and men huddled and smoking in the cold air, I looked for one who might be Frankie, a mustached man with the keys to all the cars.
The town, sprawled over a grid of streets that stretched beyond my experience, seemed to me inexhaustible. There were still alleys and streets I’d never walked down, whole neighbourhoods bordering the core that were full of houses full of families full of kids whose names I didn’t even know. On the outskirts and beyond were the rural districts—Sinkut, Mapes, Cluculz, Braeside, all geographies that marked the people who lived there. To live out at Mapes meant you raised livestock, usually hogs, sheep, and cattle, and definitely horses. To be from Cluculz Lake made you backwoods tough and tuned to wildness. Those around the base of Sinkut Mountain hunted, held traplines, and fished the creek. The Braeside families farmed in wide-open, river-fed fields of wheat, hay, canola, and barley, and raised dairy herds. We drove the narrow gravel roads, passed acres and acres without a single house in sight, until the world looked uniformly uninhabited. But the town itself—the village centre—full of people whose daily work dressed them up in ironed shirts and slacks, blouses and skirts—teachers, municipal workers, bank clerks, and insurance brokers—remained the true exotic.
That the world could be this close and yet so full of secrets magnified its allure. Like when the preacher spoke words like transfiguration, sanctification, justification—all those “-ations”—and read from the Bible those names so strange they seemed like a spell—Mephibosheth, Zerubbabel, Abednego—like other realms still veiled and obscured to me, the town held back its hidden stories. When we passed the old hospital on our way from Sunday-evening church, my mother, at the wheel, pointed at the building and said, “That’s where they kept the bodies.” My brother and I leaned forward in our seat, waiting for more. “Some people say it’s haunted,” she said, and then told us again about the year she worked as a nurse’s aide at the old St. Joseph’s Hospital. In the basement, at the far end of the building, was the morgue, where all the dead were stored in long metal drawers. Sometimes, she said, the nuns came to wash and prepare a body for burial, and to say a final prayer. In their long black robes, they seemed to float down the dim hallway, rosaries swinging as they walked. In the night-shift hours, no one wanted to go to the basement. The nurses swore they’d seen and heard strange things. An empty wheelchair rolling down the hall. The sound of footsteps. Creaking doors slamming shut when no one was around. A child crying for her mother.
Down the hill and across the bridge we drove, past the St. Joseph’s parish, with its low-roofed school, church, and convent housing. On the radio, quiet through our car speakers, a man’s voice intoned on a singing single note, Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. His voice turned everything misty, as if we had drifted inside a cloud of incense. The autumn fog rising from the river knit us together into mystery. My mother shook her head at the radio’s strangeness, reached out with a quick hand, and clicked the dial off. Behind us, the Catholic church vanished in our wake. Down the main street with its blackened store windows and empty sidewalks, through the green of the town’s single traffic light, we rolled. The night train’s long, slow whistle sounded, a far-off moan wearying toward us through the dark. If I leaned my head back against the seat and closed my eyes, I could see them still, those nuns floating in their black-and-white robes, their swinging rosaries, and I could hear the steps of someone walking, the doors swinging open to even more rooms, and the sound of a girl calling out from a hidden place on the north side of the river.
Where I Come From
THE WHOLE HOUSE sang with the voices of women—chatter in motion as they scurried from kitchen to dining room to living room and back to kitchen with napkins, dishes, glasses of fizzy punch, and laughter, at ease as they perched on stack stools, one pantyhosed leg crossed over the other. Aunts, great-aunts, grandmas, a great-grandma, cousins—first and second and third—abounded, as did the Bible-study and sewing-circle ladies from the church. A shriek and holler sounded by the stove, and there stood Aunt Mary with her white half-slip bunched around her ankles. Behind her, Auntie Margaret laughed and pointed. This was the standard family kitchen prank: sneak up, reach beneath a woman’s skirt, and pull down her undergarment. When the uncles tried it, spatulas slapped the air and wooden spoons flew, but when the women did it to each other, we all thought it was hilarious.
I’d come for the finger foods, the glass platters of marshmallow balls, fudge squares, antipasto on fancy crackers, dishes of olives and trays of meat, pinwheel sandwiches with Cheez Whiz and a slice of dill pickle rolled into the centre, and the huge watermelon my mother had decoratively knifed into a jagged basket filled with chunks of fruit.
I circled the table, the youngest of the guests except for the new baby, a pink swaddled lump that drew the women to hover over it with their oohs and oh buts. In the corner of the living room, amid a swag of pink crepe paper streamers and pink balloons, flanked by stacks of presents wrapped in various shades of pink, in a rocking chair plumped with pillows, sat my distant cousin Darlene, nursing her week-old daughter.
Because of the flannel receiving blanket draped over Darlene’s torso, I couldn’t see the baby, nor the breast. Always, the female body remained hidden. Beyond my own body and the occasional flesh-coloured blur of my mother as she darted from the bathroom to her bedroom, half-clad in a too-small towel, the most I’d spied of the female form was in the underwear section of the Sears catalogue, where women in pale girdles and brassieres smiled at something unseen, off camera, with their long-lashed mystery eyes.
It would be years before I’d hear the anatomically correct names for private body parts. For now, my mother referred to everything as a “peeter,” as in “what you pee with.” Everyone had a peeter, and you kept your peeter covered and quiet. You didn’t talk about your peeter, unless you had trouble with it. Then you went to your mother and said, “My peeter hurts,” and she handed you a tin of diaper-rash cream and said, “Here. Try this.”
With all the men named Peter whom I knew, the word and what it denoted became confusing. Great-Uncle Pete, my dad’s brother Peter, Peter Wiens, Peter Giesbrecht, Peter, Paul and Mary. I supposed they had peeters, too, but I couldn’t imagine them, even though I tried. When someone called out, “Peter!” at a family gathering, across any room, I held back my laugh, but barely, and tried not to look my brother in the eye for fear we’d both burst and be scolded, grounded, no Wonderful World of Disney tonight.
“Do you want to hold the baby?” said a voice behind me. Aunt Sharon, the new grandmother, shuffled me and my overflowing plate toward the rocking chair. “Sit down,” she said, and patted the sofa, took my food from me, and lifted the pink lump from Darlene.
I took the baby as I would an armload of firewood, like a log in a forklift’s grip, cradled.
“Be sure to hold her head,” said Darlene, her hands outstretched as if to steady me.
But I knew this baby rule, that they had soft and lolling heads, and if you didn’t hold them right, you’d snap their necks or make them brain damaged. This baby, the one mouthing the air with milk-lips, arched her back, clenched her fists near her cheeks, and stuttered out a cry.
“Are you pinching the baby?” said Aunt Sharon. She gave me a stern eye, hands on hips, then laughed.
“She’s just gassy,” said Darlene. The baby’s rear end rumbled against my forearm.
“You can have her back,” I said, and inched forward on the sofa cushion, but Darlene said, it’s okay, you can hold her for as long as you want. Just rub her back, said an aunt, pat her bum, hum to her, but hold her head, they said, her neck is weak, and put this blanket on your shoulder just in case she barfs.
THE NEXT DAY, on the bus ride home from school, I slid in beside my assigned seatmate, Tasha Penner. She was a year older, attended the public school up the road, and wasn’t forced to wear a navy-blue polyester jumper every day. But she, too, was Mennonite, so we knew we were probably related, somehow, way back on our fathers’ sides. Tasha was loud, large-limbed, the kind of girl my mother called “a handful,” and she was completely unafraid of the older boys who hissed names at us from the back of the bus and shot their spitballs through drinking straws when Mr. Jordan, the driver, wasn’t watching.
“I got to hold a baby last night,” I said. “Newborn.”
Tasha hunched down in the seat and leaned in close. “You know how babies are born, right?” she said.
I nodded. I knew. “From bellies?”
I’d seen the swollen stomachs of my aunts and the ladies at church, standing with a hand pressed to the growing roundness or against the small of the back, their pregnant shapes belling out inside their vast dresses as they shuffled. And when the baby showed up, their bellies, like risen bread dough punched down, sagged back into place, hidden beneath generous folds of fabric.
“Nope,” Tasha said. “Not from bellies. My sister Candace just had a baby, and she had to push it out.” Here, Tasha thrust her face right close to mine, her breath hot and smelling like tuna sandwich. She whispered, the words coming out in rhythmic pulses: “She had to push it out her bum.”
Revelation in childhood comes in strange and unexpected ways, like a pair of metal
scissors jammed blades-first in an electrical outlet—a shock, a spray of sparks, and a bright shudder that, for hours after, leaves the body abuzz.
“Her bum?” My voice came out thin, choked.
“You have to push a baby out of your butthole. You have to push really hard,” said Tasha. “Like when you have to go really big. You have to push even harder than that. Way harder.” She leaned back and nodded.
I tried to picture it. A woman on a toilet, and a baby easing out into the dirty flush and swirl. Then I tried to not picture it. Impossible, I thought. I’d held the newborn, Nicole. Her floppy pink head was bigger than an orange, bigger than a grapefruit, too big to fit.
“It’s true,” said Tasha. “That’s what my sister Candace had to do. She had to push Bradley out her bum.”
On that ride home, with the late-September sun cooking the bus to stuffiness and sticky vinyl seats, dressed in holy uniform like all the other Christian-school girls, suddenly carsick and sweltering in my polyester jumper, white knee socks, and Buster Brown shoes, I vowed I’d never have a baby, never let one grow inside my belly, and never push one out that hole.
“HOW WAS SCHOOL?” my mother asked. I set my orange Muppets lunch kit on the counter, opened it, took out the balled-up waxed paper, and chucked it in the trash.