Every Little Scrap and Wonder

by Carla Funk

  “Fine.” I said. “How was I born?”

  “How were you born?” My mother paused at the kitchen sink, her hands still dunked in the suds. “What do you mean, ‘how were you born’?”

  “How did it happen?” I wanted to hear her side of the story, her version of events.

  “Well,” she said. “I guess I went to the hospital. Your aunt Carol dropped me off. And then—well, then you were born.”

  I waited for more details, but she gave up nothing.

  “That’s it?” I said. “I was just born?”

  “Then Dad drove back from bush camp and came to the hospital.”

  This part of the story I knew well. My dad told it often, especially in the presence of dinner guests and at family gatherings.

  “I looked through the window where all the babies were sleeping,” he’d say, “and I said to the nurse, ‘That one can’t be mine! She’s the ugliest one in the nursery!’” And then he’d laugh and laugh, and an uncle would say, “Is that right, Zusa?”—a play on my middle name, Sue, and the Low German word for sugar.

  In the living room, I sat on the rug in front of the bookcase, pulled out the photo album with the red and black velvety flowers—my album—and opened to the first page of pictures. Me, pink-faced, fat, hairless, swaddled in a white blanket and lying on a pillow next to a vase of red carnations.

  My mother stood over me. “Your father sent those flowers.”

  In the next photograph, he sat on a dining room chair and held me on his lap, a box of Corn Flakes foregrounded on the table beside him, as if we were a Kellogg’s breakfast ad. More photographs of me blue-eyed and bald, smiling into space, chewing on a pink stuffed cat, grabbing at my brother’s face. But no further clues as to the birth. No pictures of my mother clutching her swollen stomach. None of her grimacing on a hospital bed. No toilet. Nothing to confirm or deny Tasha’s story.

  My mother sat down on the couch and turned on the TV for the last half of The Young and the Restless. “What are you looking for?” she said.

  In cartoons, a flapping stork dropped its bundle on a doorstep, through a bedroom window, or right into a crib—a fairy-tale joke, I understood, but why the secrecy, and why the lowered voices at the edge of the kitchen where all the pregnant aunts clustered together whenever the family gathered? They rubbed their bellies, fat with the knowledge of how we all arrived.

  Where I came from began with that first damp patch of Genesis earth, God scooping and sculpting that dirt to make a creature, then blowing his breath into it to turn it human. But that origin was bound to another story that had bloomed in my mind, one of babies floating around in Heaven like balloons without strings, waiting to be born. All it took was a husband and a wife to say, “We’re having a baby,” and somehow—and this had been the mystery until now—somehow, God plucked a floating baby from the air and fired it down through the clouds, the way we chucked stuffed animals down Grandma’s laundry chute. Out the baby came, into the arms of its mother, but first, the pushing. Oh, the pushing.

  “Did you have to—” the words stuck. “Push me out?”

  My mother cough-sniffed, muted the TV, and looked over at me and the open album. “Push you out?” A series of other noises sputtered forth—pffft, chk, uhf—and finally, “Well, yes, I—I guess I did—push you out. And then you were born. Do you want some cookies and a glass of milk?”

  NO PHOTO SHOWED her pregnant. In one, she stood in a white dress at the front of Gospel Chapel, clutching a bouquet of roses, her long brown hair beneath a gauzy veil, my dad beside her in his skinny black suit and thick black-rimmed glasses, his thinning hair slicked back, ducktailed. When I flipped the page, she stood next to him again, this time in a purple flowered dress, my brother balanced between them on the shiny chrome bumper of my dad’s new logging truck. But mostly, my mother stood outside the frame. When I asked where were the ones of her round belly, the ones with me inside, she’d say that the Amish don’t like to have their picture taken, as if she still held her ancestors’ view that posing for a photograph meant pride swelled in the soul.

  “Besides,” she said, “I was the one taking all the pictures.”

  I wondered if this was her cover for never having carried me at all, if she wasn’t telling me the true story. That I came from somewhere else. Someone else. Even though Mrs. Bergen had never been pregnant, she and Mr. Bergen showed up at church one Sunday with a baby in their arms—a girl they named Elizabeth, born from a different mother who lived in Manitoba and who didn’t want to keep her, and so they adopted her. On the sanctuary bulletin board beside the staircase to the nursery, Elizabeth’s photograph, along with her name and birthday written in fancy black script on a pink card, were thumbtacked to the cradle roll, which announced all the fellowship’s new babies.

  My name, too, had been listed on a pink card, and my arrival announced like good news. My mother had carried me into the sanctuary, been swarmed by the women who wanted to get a look, to peel back the folds of the blanket and see my fat pink cheeks. Before me, it had been my mother, swaddled in her own mother’s arms. And before her, my grandmother, pink and small and bundled. Back and back we went, my mother, her mother, and the grandmothers long dead, tethered by the same cord strung beneath a sky that stretched from river valley to canyon to coast to plains, replicating and aglow across a continent and ocean, back into the dust and stars, back into the holding pen of Heaven, where another one waited to swing down on the line, come sliding into the doorway of the world, her body, my body, and whoever came next.

  “See?” my mother said. “Here’s one of me holding you.” She pointed to a picture of me on her lap in the rocking chair, my brother squished in beside her on the seat, fighting for space. My cheeks flushed, my eyes wide and shining red, stunned by the camera flash. And looking down at me with an almost smile, my mother, green-eyed, younger, her shoulder-length brown hair pulled back from her face.

  While I studied the picture, she headed back to the sink full of dishes and the pots simmering on the stove. The hunch gnawed deep, a question mark, a pang.

  “Come, have something to eat,” my mother called from the kitchen.

  There was more to the story, more that I wasn’t being told. I turned the pages and saw myself in miniature—pale and fuzz-headed, lying in a crib with that pink stuffed cat in my grip, chewing on a squeaky toy, cruising in the walker, sucking on a bottle, crawling on the linoleum in pursuit of my brother. In photo after photo, I repeated like an echo, starting small but growing, the way the belly grew and swelled. I’d come from far away, all the parts of me composed from other parts, like hand-me-downs turned into scraps and ready for the sewing. My eyes the same blue as my grandma’s mother, my hair the colour of my Tante Nite’s, my turquoise veins bright as my dad’s on the sallow skin beneath his shirtsleeves. If I really looked, I saw it—where I’d come from, who carried me here. At the table waited my place, the food laid out for me, my glass already poured full.

  My Father’s World

  IN THE SATURDAY morning hours, before the yard filled up with the smokestack exhaust and engine rumble of Peter-bilts and Kenworths, before all the loggers returned from their shifts and before my dad was home to shoo me back toward the house, I headed across the yard pocked with fallen leaves and pine cones, dodging the small puddles potholed in the gravel driveway, and snuck into the side door of the shop. I stepped over the threshold and into darkness. Friday night’s woodstove fire had gone to ashes, and the concrete floor beneath me had cooled in the night. The building’s only light shone from a strip of windows in the bay doors. Gone were the usual hiss of the air compressor, the tire gun’s jolt, and the flying sparks from the welder’s torch. Tools, chains, hoses, and cords dangled from hooks. Machines whose names I didn’t know lay propped against the walls. The only sound was the hum of the refrigerator and the scuff of my footsteps echoing.

  At the far end of the shop, a staircase led to a small balcony. When I climbed the steps, I felt the same
thrill as when I wandered alone inside the empty church on cleaning days. While my mother vacuumed and dusted the basement of the church, I would tiptoe through the sanctuary, snooping behind the pulpit, turning the pages of the preacher’s huge black Bible, reaching my hand into the velvet offering bags passed around each Sunday by the ushers, feeling for lost coins. In my dad’s shop, on the balcony overlooking the work bays, I opened and closed the tiny plastic drawers that lined the shelves. Nuts, bolts, screws, washers—the cold silver in my hands felt like money. I sorted them into small piles and clinked them together in my palm, dreaming myself rich, but on edge, listening for a logging truck heading up the driveway and my dad returning home.

  We called it the shop, though no goods or services were for sale there. If anything was bought or sold at the shop, it was done by swap or dicker, as in “I’ll give you fifty bucks for that wheel rim” or “How about a case of beer for a hunk of moose?” When we moved to the five acres off Kenney Dam Road, the first thing my dad built was his shop. He was tired of renting space in someone else’s truck garage and wanted to buy a second logging truck—to be not just a log-hauler, but a company owner with a crew that drove for him.

  The shop was big enough to hold two logging trucks with their empty trailers loaded on the backs. The double-bay doors raised and lowered on a pulley system, the metal chains jangling a silver echo off the concrete floor every time someone yanked them up to open. By my dad’s command, the chains were off-limits to me.

  “You’re not strong enough,” he said. In a child’s grip, the chains could easily slip and the door come slamming down.

  “It could crush you,” said my dad.

  The threat alone became a magnet that drew me to the chains. When my dad wasn’t watching, I slipped them out from behind their holding hook on the wall and pulled just enough to let in a crack of light. As I lowered the door, I held the chains taut, careful to anchor myself to make sure it didn’t thud when it shut. I could feel the weight of it. It could crush you. I pictured myself splayed across the threshold, the door slicing down, cleaving my torso in two, guts spilled on concrete.

  This was my father’s world—big rigs, horsepower, air horns, oil drums, tire guns, ratchets, rad hoses, woodsmoke, whisky, country crooners, raunchy laughter, and ashtrays brimming with ash and smouldering cigarettes. The shop was a world of men in coveralls, in grease-stained work pants and snap-front shirts, in steel-toed boots, and in ballcaps crested with logos for Aro Automotive and Pine Country Inn. My dad had his own line of ballcaps printed, royal blue with a white crest, and in bright block letters: Dave Funk Trucking, Ltd. He handed out his hats like handshakes or high-fives, eager to impress, to draw a new fan to his social crew. In his world, goodwill toward men was a freely given ballcap bearing his name. When he passed a man in town sporting one of his company hats, he nodded and lifted two fingers from the steering wheel in a kind of peace-salute hello and gesture of approval.

  Old Alec with one glass eyeball. Doukhobor Joe. The Jakes, all three of them with dark-tinted glasses and puffy sideburns. They were members of the crowd that congregated at the shop, coming and going with their loud trucks. They borrowed my dad’s tools to do what monkey-wrenching needed to be done before the next shift in the bush, and after the work was finished, they hung around to pass a bottle of whisky or share a case of beer. Falcon, the pock-marked, lanky trucker, whose fear of snakes led my brother and me to chase him around the shop with a plastic cobra until he scrambled into his cab and refused to come out, even after we put the toy away. Clem, slit-eyed and always smiling, rosy-cheeked, with a kind, red-lipsticked wife who wouldn’t leave her house. Pack-sack Lewis, who lived in a travel trailer on the far side of the driveway and taught my brother how to trap squirrels, then skin them and stretch their tiny hides on homemade tanning frames built from twine and sticks. Sparky, who didn’t drive truck but knew all the loggers, who came for the free booze and always offered to finish off whatever bottles my dad had stashed away.

  The shop crew loved their rye and Cokes, their rum and Pepsis, their Pilsner and Molson and O’Keefe Extra Old Stock. The squat white fridge in the corner by the woodstove displayed rows of labels peeled from Royal Reserve whisky bottles and stuck on the door. I counted the black squares with the red maple leaf and A PROUD CANADIAN lettering over and over, never getting the same number twice.

  Between the woodstove and the fridge, half a dozen blocks of wood formed a ring, with the biggest block at the centre. These were the makeshift barstools and card table where the men played “Stop the Bus.” Three quarters to play, three cards to a hand. Collect the same suit, and the first player whose cards add up to thirty-one stops the bus. Loser pays a quarter. I didn’t understand all the rules, what it meant to “knock” and “pay the driver,” but I loved to watch the empty ashtray fill with quarters, to see a cussing man kicked off the bus and out of the game while the other men laughed at him and raised their bottles in a mock toast.

  I watched my dad’s mood for signs that he might let me in. If I offered to clean the shop bathroom and scrub the sink of its black grease and the toilet of its spatter and scum, if I leaned on his shoulder, if I sweetened in his presence, then he might let me hold his hand of cards and throw down a jack of spades, draw an ace, then knock on the wood to signal the final round.

  “Rugrat,” he said. “You little potlicker, come here.”

  I didn’t care what name he called me, only that his voice was soft when he said it, not the voice that hardened to get outta here and a hand waved toward the door. Not you’re in the way or go home and help your mother.

  He let me perch on his knee so that he could see the cards I held and tell me when to draw and what to throw away. When I said I was thirsty, he passed me his bottle for a sip. The other men talked above me, puffed their cigarettes, laughed, slammed down their hearts and diamonds, paid their quarters to the pot. When the final round ended, and all the men had lost their money, and I was the only one left on the bus, my dad picked up the ashtray and dumped the coins into my hand.

  “Better take that home before you lose it,” he said, and nodded toward the house.

  The bay doors hung half-cocked on their chains, and in the dusk, light from the shop rolled the warped shadows of trucks and trailers into the yard. I walked from the shop to the house with the quarters jingling in my coat pocket and the bitter, yeasty taste of beer still on my tongue. My breath in the night air whitened like a puff from a cigarette, like smoke from my father’s mouth. Up ahead, past the garden’s black soil tilled over after harvest, against a backdrop of wind-stripped birch and poplar, framed in the light of the kitchen window, my small, aproned mother stood, stirring and slicing, cooking to a Hagood Hardy piano solo wavering on an 8-track. How long until your father comes home, she would ask me. I never knew the answer. Pretty soon, he always said, pretty soon.

  Between the shop and the house, I followed the groove he’d worn in the gravel, morning and midday and evening, as ritual as prayer before meals and sleep. As a boy, he must have followed a path his own father walked before him, to the barns, the woodshed, and the fields, carrying back to the house the buckets full of milk or an armload of kindling. When I reached into my pocket, the coins slid coolly through my fingers, proof of where I’d been, where I’d come from. Behind me, voices crackled and hooted, the talk and laughter of men hunkered on old stumps around a woodstove’s fire, their sound drifting out into the falling night. Among them, my dad, calling for one more game of cards, one more round of drinks.

  First God

  I CAN STILL SEE them in their circle of hardback wooden chairs, heads bowed over the onionskin pages of the King James, those women of the Wednesday-morning Bible study. In church-soft voices, they read aloud from Psalms and Proverbs, the prophets and epistles, following a paper script with questions for discussion. While they prayed and softly spoke, I roamed the building freely. Downstairs, I marveled at the men’s urinals, flushed every toilet. Sprayed the can of aero
sol deodorizer until the room smelled like a chemical bouquet. In the upstairs nursery, I crawled into a crib, trying to remember what it felt like to be a baby. I tugged the plastic cow by its string and made it moo. I stacked a tower of wooden blocks and made it topple. In the Sunday-school rooms, I snooped through stacks of coloured construction paper, sniffed the pots of white glue, stood at the front of the class and pretended I was the teacher, telling a flannelgraph story with boils, locusts, and blood.

  Upstairs in the sanctuary, the women told their own stories, pored over the scriptures, sniffled into Kleenexes and touched one another’s hands, and prayed on. Afterward, there’d be fellowship in the basement kitchen, tea and weak coffee, friendship cake and matrimony squares and egg-salad sandwiches cut cleanly into triangles, but first, they studied, bent over their Bibles with the devotion of ancient scholars, these Anns and Tinas, Sarahs and Netties, grandmas and never-marrieds and stay-at-homes with school-aged kids. Among them, my mother, quiet, smoothed her skirt and bowed her head.

  She was one of the church’s devout, a Wednesday-morning Bible study lady and a Tuesday-evening sewing circle member, a volunteer in the church nursery and a Sunday-school student in the adult class. Every morning at the breakfast table, she read to us from Devotions for the Family, a slim paperback she bought at Streams of Life, the Christian bookstore and gift shop run by the preacher’s wife. Monday through Friday, as my brother and I gummed our oatmeal and chewed our toast, we heard about Jack and Jeanie, twins who sinned, confessed, repented, and were forgiven, all within a two-minute story. At the end of it, she read the daily Bible verse, which we repeated back to her until we could say it without mistakes. Sometimes, before the breakfast devotional, I’d stand at my mother’s bedroom door, peeking through the crack to see her kneeling by her bed, forehead propped on her clasped hands, slim black Bible lying open beside her. Then she’d rise, run through her exercises—toe touches and bicycle legs pedalling in the air as she lay on her back, counting aloud through her panting and puffing.