Every Little Scrap and Wonder

by Carla Funk

  With a doodle pad and pencil, I sat at the table, writing and crumpling, writing and crumpling.

  “What are you drawing?” my mother said.

  “I’m not drawing. I’m writing.”

  The wads of paper around me felt like proof of my work ethic, a sign of how serious were my letters on the page. I wanted my poem to be like Frank Jordan’s, but also not like Frank Jordan’s. I wanted him to read what I wrote and think of me as different from the other kids on the bus, those loudmouthed boys, those shrieking girls.

  In my neatest printing, with my pencil held steady, I copied out my final draft:

  “He’s the only one”

  He’s the only one I want.

  He’s the only one I have.

  He’s the only one I would have

  if I would choose between a man.

  He’s the only one there is

  to follow day and night.

  He’s the only one I want

  for his name is Jesus Christ.

  The next morning, when I boarded Mr. Jordan’s bus, I paused at the top of the steps and handed him my folded slip of paper.

  “I wrote a poem for you.”

  I watched him unfold it, scan it, read it, and stood waiting for his response—a look on his face, some sign the words I’d given him were good.

  “Thanks,” he said, and nodded. He tucked the paper in his chest pocket, cranked closed the bus doors behind me. “Better take your seat.”

  LESSON BY LESSON, on my typewriter, under the guidance of the instructor’s recorded voice, I moved on to words and phrases—men man map may made many make—and then into full sentences.

  Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party.

  Every time Mr. Smith-Corona spoke the words, I echoed them with my fingers, his syllables transposing into the hammer-strike of black ink on crisp white paper.

  Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party.

  Why the time was now and who the men were and what aid they were coming to and why the party needed it and what sort of party anyway—these questions thought-bubbled above me as I typed. I imagined my dad and his truck shop rye-drinking buddies bent around the woodstove for their nightly card game, and a sudden holler from the trees out back, and all of them leaping up from their seats, throwing down their cards, the whole gang running out into the darkness to come to another man’s aid, to keep the party going.

  WHEN I SAW the sign in the window of the Vanderhoof Pharmacy advertising a Father’s Day writing contest, I knew it was a sign for me.

  Write an essay about your dear old dad and why you love him—and you could win a prize!

  “Do you want to enter?” said my mother. “Do you want to write about your father?”

  With my fingers rested lightly on the keys, as Mr. Smith-Corona advised, I sat straight-spined, shoulders relaxed, and waited for the first thought. Dear old Dad and why I love him. No baritone voice came to prompt with me with a word.

  Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party.

  Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party.

  My dad hollered down the stairs, wanted to know what all the racket was about, the constant clack clack clack ding! coming from the basement.

  “I’m writing,” I said.

  “Huh?” he called.

  “Writing!”

  I knew that a contest-winning story had to be true and good and full of the right happy elements. I could not write, “My dad had to shoot Grumpy the Saint Bernard because she bit Sparky on the butt,” or “Sometimes, if I beg enough, my dad lets me drink beer from his bottle,” or “My brother dipped my dad’s cigarettes in pee to make him stop smoking so he won’t get cancer and die.”

  I knew I needed to write a story that everyone would want to read, one about a father and a daughter who had adventures together, who liked spending time together. Though the smell inside his logging truck—Export A’s and pine air freshener—and the washboard winding gravel roads made me feel like barfing, I imagined myself into a girl who said yes when her dad asked if she’d like to go along for a load.

  My dad drives a blue Kenworth logging truck. On Saturday mornings, he takes me for a ride to the bush to get a load of logs.

  The twisting rutted roads, my queasy gut, the cigarette smoke and dust that filled the cab—I left them off the page, along with the hour we spent waiting our turn while the feller-buncher hacked the trees off their stumps, the skidder dragged them into stacks, and the loader grappled the logs onto the swaying trailers ahead of us in line. I didn’t write down my whining about black flies, about boredom, didn’t write my dad telling me to quit my gruntzing, get into the truck, and stay out of the way. Instead of everything I didn’t love, didn’t want, I wrote of how the machines were fun to watch inside that widening clearcut, how they hacked down trees that hit the forest floor with a shudder, then bunched them into bundles for hauling. I wrote of the tiny lady’s-slipper orchids that grew wild in the bush, and of how my dad helped me dig them up and bring them home in an empty ice cream bucket for my mother to plant in the patch of dirt beside the fir trees that swayed with our rope swing. How he let me call the miles over the CB radio, naming our distance on the logging road to warn other trucks we were headed their way, and how when we climbed the hill up from the valley, and I said how hungry I was, my dad pulled over at The Blue Spruce to buy me breakfast. How we sat at the table together, me with a stack of silver-dollar pancakes drizzled with syrup, and him with his two fried eggs on toast, yolks running gold over the plate, and he let me sip his coffee, double cream, double sugar, even the final swallow, that silt of sweetness heavy at the bottom of the mug.

  ON WEDNESDAY MORNING’S front page, I stared back at myself in black and white. In the photograph, I stood, half-smiling, beside Mr. Stark, the pharmacy manager, and held like trophies the prizes I’d won: a giant stuffed panda with a pink satin bow cinched around its neck, and a gift set of Gambler cologne and aftershave, with Kenny Rogers’s signature sleekly etched in white ink on the box.

  Read inside the winning entry about her dear old logger dad.

  My mother flipped the page and scanned the column that bore my name. I watched her face to see how much she knew, what she would read inside the story. I wondered whether she’d show it to my dad, and if he read it, what he would understand—about his daughter, about himself.

  My cheeks flushed with heat, the same heat I felt when I unlocked my diary and wrote a slanted version of the truth, words like I am adopted, and I wish I was an orphan, and God is angry at me now. When I read back what I’d written, I didn’t know what to believe—what was real, what was dreamed, and how much to keep secret.

  Soon it would be Father’s Day. At the breakfast table, while he drank his coffee and smoked his morning cigarette, I’d give him his cologne and aftershave, the box wrapped in shiny paper. As he tore open his gift, he’d say I didn’t have to buy him anything, just spending the day together would be enough, a roast-beef Sunday lunch and an afternoon drive up Sinkut Mountain. At the top, we’d climb the steep stairs of the forestry lookout tower and write our names in the visitor log. We’d stand at the high window and survey the world below—Sinkut, Nulki, and Tachick lakes, the Nechako River winding through the valley, the highway leading back to town and curving west, then south, back up the hill toward our house.

  Inside, the newspaper lay folded on the kitchen table, my words, in small font and neat columns, spelling out someone else’s story, one version of my life as witnessed from a different angle, a view that gave a wider scope. Outside, in the yard, my father’s logging truck rumbled into gear, and the air brakes hissed as they let go. Through the frame of the living room window, I watched him drive away into his next shift, heading toward another load to haul, more miles on the radio to call, and the lonely hours until he came back home to me.

  All the Ways to Fall

  ONE IMAGE SHADOWBOXED by
memory, one emblem left open to the touch—that’s all it takes to draw me down. My fingers stray across my forehead, feel the tiny divots, and the story splits open, spills its colour, scent, and sound. Like inverse Braille half-hidden in the skin, the scars read back to me the sunshine glint on the silver rungs, the amber tang of sawdust, and my dad wagging his “obey me” finger in my face, his voice growly and curt: Don’t. Don’t climb that ladder.

  “You could get hurt,” he said. He held me by the wrist until I looked him in the eye. “You stay off it. You hear?”

  I nodded. I heard. And pulled loose from his grip, a pattern I’d repeat for years to come. My dad in greasy coveralls squinted up toward the sun and the sound of hammers reverberating like shotguns in the open air, then turned back to his shop, where the air compressor hissed and hours of monkey-wrenching lay ahead.

  The carpenters were halfway through construction of our new house at the top of the Kenney Dam hill. What had for months looked like a mud bog, sinkhole, gravel pit, and scrapyard was now rising into a two-storey split-level classic. The gold hue of the new lumber shone. Echoing from the joists and rafters of what would be the attic floor, hammers on nails pounded.

  Happy to be left alone, I poked around the yard. Always, a story took shape in this pocket of solitude. Across the property, my mother knelt, pulling chickweed and thistle in the rototilled dirt of next summer’s strawberry patch. Easily I imagined her into someone else’s mom, a stranger who’d take pity on me, an orphan, lost and starving, surviving on wild berries and moss as I straggled through the world in search of home. I plucked a petal from the bloom of an Indian paintbrush and sucked. That nectar on my tongue—sweet but scant—was hardly enough to keep me alive, but it would have to do. Somewhere in the poplar scrub, my brother stalked with a bow and arrow, tracking grouses. He became my invisible enemy, the shadow stalking me. My pulse kicked up a notch. In the ditch that bordered the driveway, spring rains had turned the clay-heavy dirt to a smooth mud. I stamped my sneakers in it and left a chain of footprints in my wake, the clues my predator would use to find me, unless someone swooped down to rescue me first. Past the silver fuel tank on its stand in the trees, past the trailhead that led to the road, past the sandbox and woodshed, I crept, glancing over my shoulder, making myself afraid of what was coming, until I circled back to where I started, at the far end of the house, and the plot fell away.

  Against the side where the chimney had been roughed in, the aluminum ladder leaned. I watched one of the carpenters descend, load the leather pouch on his tool belt with nails from a box on the ground, then climb back up. Every time a steel-toed boot landed on a rung, the ladder shuddered and creaked, but it held. When the man neared the top, he swung his leg up and over the final rungs, shifted to the roof, and disappeared.

  When I curled my hand around an eye-level rung, the aluminum surprised me with its heat. My father’s words turned and twisted. Don’t climb that ladder and you could get hurt warped to if you climb and don’t get hurt. I tested my foot on the bottom rung. The sole of my sneaker gripped the grooves, and when I reached higher, the foot still touching the ground seemed to follow naturally in response. I knew the Eden story, how God told Eve and Adam, Eat what you want, just not from this tree growing in the middle of the garden. Every time I heard about how sin came into the world, I saw Eve reaching out to pluck that rosy fruit, and wanted to crash the scene and slap her hand away, yell for her to stop, don’t do it, don’t listen to the snake. That devil-serpent sliding in the grass, weaving up the tree trunk, circling Eve’s shoulder like a sneaky necklace was trickery, and still she fell for the charm and hiss, bit in, swallowed, and passed the poison on.

  I was halfway up before my father’s voice came back again—don’t climb, distant and dim, more whisper than warning. I looked back across the yard, toward the shop, which seemed so far away and smaller now from where I stood. My dad was gone, in greasy coveralls beneath a truck, invisible, unseeing. I only wanted to see what the carpenters could see, what the world looked like from their lofty vantage. I’d make it up the ladder and down again before he noticed.

  Once I reached the final rungs, I swung myself over the top and off the ladder, half-crawling on my belly until the surface beneath me was solid and flat. In front of me, two ballcapped, tool-belted men knelt. Around them, tools. A level, a hammer, a silver square. Handsaws and tape measures. From the centre of the roof, a portable radio with an angled silver antenna chattered news. The man closest to me wore dark glasses and had a flat, wide pencil tucked behind his ear. His face, when I stood up, lifted to meet mine with a look of surprise, but he smiled, friendly enough, and thinking that I might walk to the end of the roof and back, I took a step toward him.

  From that high up, I could see our full five acres—the tractor-tilled garden plot, the rust-red pigpen, the clearcut of stumps, and the birch and poplar trees beyond. The landscape stretched out wide and far, but from my higher station, the world and its inhabitants looked small. My brother, a rustling in the bushes. My mother, only a dot of blue and white amid the brown. My father, the whirr of machinery and work drifting from across the property.

  Whenever my mother chided me with the proverb about how pride goeth before a fall, I pictured the Looney Tunes cliff edge with its wide-eyed coyote scrabbling for traction, a joke in which the predator becomes the punchline, and everyone laughs because the villain gets what’s coming to him. Before I had even taken a second step forward on that roof, the foreman jumped to his feet and held out his hand like a crossing guard signalling stop, knowing what was about to happen, seeing what I couldn’t see—that where the chimney flue had been roughed in, an opening in the roof remained, half-covered by a sheet of plywood, but with enough room left for a girl my size to slip right through. Down on air, surprised by gravity, I fell.

  From a great height. From grace. On stony ground. Flat on my face. To my knees, to pieces. All the ways to fall tumbled with me, around me, in me. The word itself cracked open, first utterance of the plunge from glory, light to dark. One moment I stood bathed in sunshine, thrilling to my new high place. Though I couldn’t see as far as the future, all those coming falls—scorch of whisky from the bottle, bedroom window sliding open like a secret, cigarette haloes on a stranger’s front lawn, first taste of his mouth, other mouths—flickered, flashes of how I’d try to leave the low-level view of the world, find a shaky rung and climb. I saw enough to know how height can feel like power. When I plummeted to blackout, that fall, like every fall, was a falling both forward and back, the story throwing out its hitch to hook me, the apple not far from the tree.

  I woke up stumbling on rocks. Beneath my feet, the shifting crush of gravel made it hard to walk. My chest hurt, like when I had tried to turn a backflip on the trampoline and landed on my head, my neck bent back, the wind knocked out. I lurched forward, blood in my eye. My arm dangled like pins-and-needles asleep, stinging. My shoulder burned.

  The foreman found me in the framed-up basement, crying, looking for an exit. Perhaps because he was a father with a daughter only a few years older than me, he scooped me up, held me like a baby in his arms. Every step of his jog across the yard lolled my head and made the pain rattle and stab. He yelled my father’s name, my mother’s name, called out, Hey! Hey! And though my eyes were swelling shut, I saw it all, like a movie, in flashes, from far away and overhead, but with the soundtrack dialed down. Voices and faces blurred to underwater sounds. My mom rising from the garden, her white sun hat falling to the dirt, her hands over her mouth. Then my dad, rushing out of the shop in his coveralls, wiping his hands on a grease rag. He throws open the pickup side door, and my brother flies from the bushes and scrambles over the tailgate into the box, pressing himself against the open rear window. I’m cradled in arms. I’m floating overhead, hovering like in my dreams of flight.

  Faster, my mother said, drive. I lay across the bench seat, my head in her lap. The rev of the gas pedal gunned us down the hill toward town. The crackle
of my father’s CB radio and his voice cutting into it, calling out to a passing logging truck that we were heading to emergency. Tire squeal on the corner at the light, my father’s name, sirens, the idling engine, and through the open window, another man’s voice, and my dad saying, Kid’s had an accident. Then the gas pedal, wind rushing from the open windows, and sirens all the way down the main drag, across the bridge, up the hospital hill.

  The scissor blades slid cold across my chest. The doctor, his face hovering over me, told me to hold still as he cut away my T-shirt—the new one, red and white and blue with stripes. Hem to collar, the T-shirt with the lace-up front, the one I’d learned to tie with a bow at the top, fell open, fell to pieces, then flew from the doctor’s hand to the garbage can in the corner of the room.

  “You’ll have to keep her head from moving,” said the nurse. A black cloth fell over my face, and then again, cold scissors, snipping above my eye so that a slit of light came through.

  My mother said, “Pinch my arm. Pinch as hard as you can”—her code for this is going to hurt. The needle in my forehead like a wasp, a fleck of hot ash. I kicked the air, gripped my mother’s forearm, her skin between my thumb and finger pinched so tight, the welt remained a week.

  On the gurney, I lay beneath a paper sheet as the doctor hooked the suture needle into my forehead and tied off stitches in a jagged row. My favourite T-shirt, gone. My pants, pulled off and rolled up in my mother’s purse. My hair, matted and crusted with dirt and blood. Dazed beneath the overhead surgical lights, I sat up, hunched, as hands fitted a halter brace around my torso and cinched it tight to hold my broken collarbone in place.

  WHEN MY MOTHER held me up to the mirror above our bathroom sink, a stranger looked back. A girl with two black eyes nearly swollen shut, and above the left brow, a line of stitches. Dried blood streaked the cheekbones, scraped by rebar jutting from the chimney’s cinderblock. I couldn’t look away from her, that other self that peered back at me, proof I’d earned it all, that the fault was mine. I’d heard my dad say to my mother, I told her to stay off, their voices tense in the brightness of the room.