by Carla Funk
That morning, Grandpa had arrived at the dump to see the Dairyland truck backed up to one of the junk heaps. The uniformed driver stood at the back of the truck, the doors swung open, unloading pallets of ice cream.
“Past its best before,” said the driver, nodding to my grandpa. “Shame to see it go to waste.”
Grandpa poked around the dump, fiddled with the junk in the back of his pickup, and waited for the driver to finish unloading. As soon as the dairy truck drove out of sight, he began hefting the pallets into the back of his truck. When he realized that his truck wasn’t roomy enough to carry all the ice cream, he drove to a payphone and called my uncle for backup. The two of them worked like bandits on the lam, hurrying to load the ice cream before it melted in the sun and before anyone else pulled into the yard, then speeding down the dump road with a dust cloud in their wake and hundreds of cartons in their trucks.
Once back at my grandparents’ house, they began calling the rest of the family.
“Hurry up,” Grandpa said. “It won’t stay frozen long.”
By the time we arrived, other aunts and uncles and cousins filled the yard, everyone gathered around the back of Grandpa’s pickup, pointing, exclaiming “Black Cherry!” and “Tiger Tail” and “a whole pallet of Chocolate Chip Mint!” At a time when gallon buckets of Neapolitan were our household norm, this array of flavours was our own manna in the wilderness.
Each family claimed a share of the cartons, which had begun to sweat and drip in the heat. Because “best before” dates and the fact that most folks didn’t get groceries at the dump were beyond me, I failed to pay full attention to my mother and her siblings huddled around Grandpa, holding an impromptu family meeting in which low voices uttered phrases like “don’t say anything” and “our good name” and “what would people think?”
LATER, THAT EVENING, before Janice, the neighbour girl, arrived to look after us while my parents went to an Elks Hall dinner and dance, my mother sat me and my brother down on the living room sofa. She leaned in toward us with the look of one about to foretell a plague of locusts, her eyes the serious, scary kind.
“You will not,” she said, “tell Janice about the ice cream. Do you understand?”
My brother bounced on the edge of his couch cushion. “About how Grandpa stole it from the dump?”
“Grandpa did not steal it,” my mother said. “Dairyland threw it away. And anyways, it’s fine to eat. And there’s nothing wrong with it. And it was free. We didn’t steal it.” Her words came fast, spilled out.
She made us promise and repeat after her: not one word about the ice cream. Yes, if we finished our supper, we could eat some for dessert. Yes, one bowl each. Yes, three scoops, okay, four scoops if we’re good. But not one word about the ice cream. Not a single word.
Had my mother said nothing about the ice cream, had she not made us promise, I would have licked my bowl clean and simply asked for more. But her intensity, and the hard glint in her eyes when she made me repeat back to her the pledge that I would keep the secret, made the secret glitter illicitly. I was too young to consider what others might think of us eating food retrieved from the town dump. I had no reputation to uphold. I only had the ice cream, and the secret inside me that grew and thrummed as the evening wound down toward bedtime.
“Our mom said we can have ice cream before bed,” my brother said. He shot me a look, nervous, on edge. “It’s really good ice cream. You can have some, too. It’s really good to eat.” His voice was more eager and higher-pitched than normal.
Janice, whose heavy-lidded eyes made her seem perpetually drowsy, whose nose was so big I couldn’t help but stare at it, stood with us over the panorama of cartons as we chose. “That’s a whole lot of ice cream,” she said.
“We really love ice cream,” I said. “Even when it comes from—” my brother elbowed me in the ribs.
Janice let us scoop our three scoops and filled her own bowl high. We sat in the living room, Janice on the chair, my brother and me on the sofa, swapping looks between spoonfuls. Before I even spoke the truth aloud, I felt it on my tongue, as if the very letters were practicing formation for their arrival into syllable and sound. The questions formed, too, like why did my mother want to keep it hidden, and what was the big deal about free ice cream, and did other people get ice cream from the dump, and didn’t the ice cream mean we’d won the prize? Janice, smiling at me over her bowl of rainbow sherbet, spooned into her mouth what I already knew. My mother’s warning hummed from far away, but too far off to haunt.
“I bet you’ll never guess where we got this ice cream from,” I said. At the thrill of this edge, teetering from secret to full-out revelation, my heart hammered in my throat.
“Hmmm,” she said. “Maybe the Co-op?”
“Nope.”
My brother jabbed the handle of his spoon into my leg and glowered at me.
“Shoppers Food Mart?” Janice tried again.
“Wrong,” I said.
“Lucky Dollar?”
Again I shook my head. She was running out of grocery stores.
“Don’t,” my brother seethed through gritted teeth. “Don’t you tell.” He stood up and stared down at me where I sat cross-legged in my pajamas, wide-smiling at the dam about to burst.
“The dump!” I blurted. “We got this ice cream from the dump!”
Janice cocked her head. “The dump?” Her smile straightened, then slipped. “Actually the dump?”
I felt a swell of triumph. I’d said the thing I wasn’t supposed to say, and it felt like victory, the same surge of heat that came with being right, scoring highest, having my name called aloud in Sunday-school class for the monthly perfect attendance award.
My brother rushed to explain about Grandpa, how he liked to dig through garbage for stuff, how the truck driver said the ice cream was still okay to eat, it wasn’t rotten or gross, that all our cousins had dump ice cream at their houses, too, plus it was free, free ice cream, all you can eat, like a smorgasbord—but free. What was left in her bowl, Janice didn’t finish. She washed our empty dishes, quiet in the kitchen, cleaning up the mess we’d left behind, saying little.
“You weren’t supposed to tell,” my brother hissed as we headed down the hallway toward our bedrooms. I knew I’d trespassed our mother’s words, but nothing I’d said was a lie. I had no frame of reference for the decorum of family secrets, hadn’t yet learned that some information stayed behind the veil, because what would people think. I had barely begun noticing that before we drove to church or to a gathering on her side of the family, my mother always made a quick clean sweep of the pickup. She took the bottle of rye whisky tucked in its brown bag out of the side door and stuck it in the garage. She emptied the ashtray into the woodstove and hung a new pine-tree air freshener from the rearview mirror. She covered up what she felt needed covering. But to me, my dad’s smoking habit, our cable TV channels, the Kenworth swimsuit calendar of half-naked ladies tacked on the shop wall—these were still only details from our ordinary world, not yet facts of life that needed hiding.
I WOKE TO my mother drawing open my curtains and letting in a sudden stream of sunlight so bright it made me squint. She sat down on the end of my bed, quiet. It was Sunday morning, and she had already dressed for church in a skirt and blouse, but her hair was still rolled in pink foam curlers. Across her lap, she held the wooden spoon.
“I told you not to tell.” She tipped her chin down, which made her eyes dark and sad. “Not anyone.”
We didn’t want to be known as the family who scavenged for dessert amid smouldering tires and rusty old stoves, did we?
We didn’t.
We didn’t want to people to think of us as dirty, as dump-divers, did we?
Clearly, we did not.
When I bent over the bed and offered myself to the wooden spoon, squeezing out tears as was my usual trick to lighten the blows, the music of the proverb hit me again. Be sure. Your sins. Will find. You out. For every flavour tasted—
Candy Cane with flecks of red-and-green crushed peppermint, Tiger Tail swirled orange and black, Tin Roof Sundae ribboned with fudge and roasted peanuts, and the rainbow swirl of sherbet melting on my tongue—one quick thwack of the wooden spoon on my pajamaed backside. With every thwack, my mother’s words struck like revelation. She was right. The child who steals the honey from the comb, who breaks the oath, will be found out. Every hidden thing rises to the light. Every secret will be sussed, hoisted from the heap of junkyard shadows and held up as proof, that the one whose deeds are done in darkness will always be brought out into the open, laid bare for every eye to see.
The Lady of the Lake
LATE FRIDAY AFTERNOON, in the high heat of July, my dad rumbled down the driveway in his logging truck, his week of night shifts in the bush behind him, those long hours and miles of hauling logs over washboard gravel roads. He swung open the front door of the house and called up the stairs.
“Hurry up,” he said, “get ready, we’re going camping at the lake.”
As my mother brisked from fridge to cupboard to cooler, packing our sudden rations and loading up for a weekend away, she clucked her tongue, sighed, and shook her head over my dad’s decreed spontaneity, for which he had little responsibility except to hook up the trailer and drive.
For the early years of my childhood, our family camping happened inside an oiled canvas cabin tent so awkward and heavy it took all four of us—my dad and mom each hefting one end, and my brother and me with the wooden poles, ropes, and stakes—to carry it from the box of the pickup to the pitching site. But at the start of that summer, my dad drove into the yard towing a fifth-wheel trailer behind his pickup.
“A house on wheels,” he said, and flung open the door, motioning for my mother to step inside for the grand tour. A narrow galley kitchen with a diner-style booth. A scratchy plaid hide-a-bed with sagging cushions. And up the four stairs carpeted in green shag rug, two narrow captain bunks with a nightstand between them. The colour scheme—rust and avocado—betrayed the second-hand trailer’s early-seventies origins, but the bones of the RV were solid, my dad promised.
“What’s wrong with the tent?” my mother said. “I like the tent.”
But my dad insisted that this was a great deal, and besides, he’d already paid for it, cash, on the spot, no returns.
“It’ll be our family getaway,” he said. “Our home away from home.”
IN THE BACK seat with my brother, I counted telephone poles, tried not to ask again how long until we got there. My mother glanced again and again in the rearview mirror, eyeing the fifth-wheel trailer that listed behind as if it might unhitch around the curve in the road. Up the Yellowhead Highway, past the reserve with its low-roofed, plywood-sided houses, over the bridge and down a gravel road flanked by fireweed and willows, we lurched.
Fraser Lake was just under an hour’s drive from home, past the lumber mills, the truck weigh scales, and past Fort Fraser, the tiny village that was once a fur-trading post. We followed the railway and the river west, but as my dad steered us toward our weekend trip, I wasn’t thinking about geography and history. I knew nothing of the ancient lava beds and the Red Rock volcano, of the thousand trumpeter swans that wintered on the Nautley River, or of the pictographs of the Indigenous tribes who first walked the territory. With my dad at the wheel, our family focus was fixed: drive fast to claim the biggest campsite. Windows rolled down, the local country station blaring classic hits, we headed into the glare of sun and billows of dust rising from a caravan of campers, trucks, and trailers heading for the lake.
We were escaping for a more spacious place, or at least, my dad’s version of it, a place where the party hooted all day and roared all night. He was happiest at the centre of the noise and crowd, calling for another round of drinks, another log on the fire. In our camping crew of relatives and friends, my dad was among his own kind, never alone with his bottle of beer or cup of Crown Royal. At the lake, the Sunday church pew didn’t haunt him. No logging truck’s flat tire or monkey-wrenching called him away from his game of cards. He could sit by the fire however long he wanted to without my mother telling him he’d better go to bed. As soon as we turned off onto the narrow lane that zigzagged through the campground’s fir and pines, he grew light and loose at the wheel, tapping the dash to the beat of the radio’s song.
“Looks like the biggest one,” said my dad, as he backed the fifth-wheel trailer into our spot.
The sites around filled with the usual crowd, the party growing in noise and bodies. Our camping clan was made up of my dad and three of his brothers—brothers who, like him, didn’t feel enough guilt to sit through a sermon every Sunday. Along with their wives and kids, some fellow truckers and lumber-mill friends, and a small group of families who’d immigrated from what was then Yugoslavia, we formed our own lakeside tribe.
As eager as we’d been to leave behind the daily rhythms of home, camp life quickly fell into a parallel and familiar pattern. The boys, a pack of them with slingshots in their pockets, wandered the network of trails that wound through the trees. The men unloaded firewood from the backs of pickups and broke out cases of beer. The women set to work recreating a sense of domestic order, wiping off the picnic tables and laying out communal trays of cookies, potato chips, and thermoses of juice. My dad made his rounds, going from trailer to camper to motorhome door, shooting the breeze and offering to pour a free drink from his brown-bagged whisky bottle to anyone who was thirsty. And when he grew restless, he called our names, told my mother to put down her dishcloth, and motioned for us to follow him.
“Let’s head down to the water,” he said, “and go for a ride on The Lady of the Lake.”
The Lady of the Lake belonged to his buddy Sparky. He’d spent years designing and crafting the forty-foot houseboat, and had used my dad’s shop as his work space. When he finally launched it, our family had been there to watch him and his wife, Viola, a tall, brassy-haired Swedish woman, smash a bottle of Baby Duck champagne on one of the bright-red metal pontoons.
As we neared the water, we heard the unmistakable horn, a half-honk air raid siren that cut through the light wind and carried across the lake. The Lady of the Lake was far from elegant, and looked less like a sleek vessel than like a compact portable trailer bolted atop a barge. As the houseboat motored toward us, red and white and boxy, my dad grinned. He had never learned to swim, was fearful of the water, and yet, as soon as that boat motored toward shore, as soon as the bow gate swung open and the ramp lowered to welcome guests aboard, he grew light and loose, jokey and bright. I felt it, too—that thrill at being lifted out of the ordinary and set adrift into possibility.
When I stood on the open front deck, I felt like a child movie star, waving at beachgoers on shore, thinking I am here, and you are there, I am going somewhere, and you are not. To the strangers we passed, my dad pulled off his ball-cap and tipped it above his head like a captain’s hello. Up and down the lake we cruised, with Sparky setting course and trading off with my dad at the wooden ship’s wheel. In the cabin, my mother sat alongside Viola and the other wives.
With the sun angling down toward the horizon and gulls circling in the cirrus-streaked sky, the houseboat scraped to a stop on the shore of a small, nameless island at the east end of the lake. There, Sparky tossed out a rope and my dad looped it around a piece of driftwood. The men gathered driftwood and over it, my dad poured gasoline from a jerry can, then tossed a lit match to spark a fast, high blaze. When the flames settled, the adults dragged lawn chairs and blocks of wood into a circle around the fire, and we kids took off to explore.
Away from the fire, I took off my shoes and socks and rolled up my pant cuffs to wade in the shallows. With a Styrofoam cup, I tried to scoop minnows that darted around my ankles, but every step lifted a murky cloud of silt and made it hard to see. Farther out, the water rippled black and revved with the engines of evening speedboaters jetting in circles, going nowhere in the chop.
WHEN I WADED out of the wa
ter, little brown clots clustered around my ankles and dotted my calves. Specks of mud or lake-slime splotches, I thought, and bent over to brush them off. As my fingers slid over the slickness of what clung, what wouldn’t come unstuck, what clearly wasn’t mud, I knew the truth.
I kicked, but they didn’t shake loose. I thrashed my arms and legs as I took off shrieking down the beach, but the leeches with their razor teeth held on. Before I could reach my mother and before Viola could grab a salt shaker from the houseboat galley kitchen, my dad stood up from his block of wood and with a fluid single movement, tucked his cigarette to the side of his mouth and grabbed my arm.
“Hold still a minute,” he said. He reached into his left chest pocket, took out his lighter, and thumbed it to a tiny flame.
With one hand, despite my squirming, my dad anchored me, and with the other hand, he brought the lighter close enough for me to feel the heat on my leg. I feared the worst—that I’d burn, too, like that girl in the fire safety film—but my dad held the lighter steady. At its singe, the first leech shrivelled, dropped to the rocks.
One by one, each leech shrank and fell away, leaving behind a thin trickle of red at its sucking site. My dad thumbed away the blood and wiped it on his pant leg, and when my legs were clean and free of leeches, he turned me loose, went back to his stump, and rejoined the circle.
WHEN WE BOARDED the houseboat for the trip back across the lake, when we reached the campground shore and trailed back to the site and the company of campers roasting marshmallows and pouring more drinks, when I climbed the four shag steps to the upper bunk and my narrow captain’s bed with the old foam mattress, all I wanted was to go home. Across from me, my brother’s bed lay empty. Somewhere in the trees, well away from the watchful eyes of parents, he huddled in his sleeping bag, murmuring in the boys’ tent. All the day’s heat and sun had drained away from the forest and the lake, leaving the night air with a chill that threatened frost. I slipped into my cold sleeping bag. Through the screen of the tiny sliding window, men’s voices poured forth laughter, then fell to quiet, all of them listening to one man speak, until finally they roared back again with the joke’s punchline, the story’s next turn. All the while, the pull of an accordion droned through the talking, a low harmony that swung into a slow oompah-pah.