Every Little Scrap and Wonder

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Every Little Scrap and Wonder Page 18

by Carla Funk


  At home, every night as I lay beneath a hand-stitched patchwork comforter, my mother’s face would hover as she joined me in saying our bedtime prayer—Now I lay me down to sleep. With the final words—the plea for the Lord to take my soul if I should die before I wake, she touched my forehead and pulled the covers to my chin—amen—and slipped out the door, leaving it open a crack so the light from the kitchen shone in and the sounds of her clinking cutlery back into the drawer, dishes back into the cupboard told me where I was in the world. But in the upper bunk of the fifth-wheel trailer, with the firelight flaring and waning and sparks popping into the darkness, no mother crept down the stairs, no shadow floated out the door.

  One of the men—Aldo or Bruno or Mr. Petrović—started to sing. His baritone voice, clear and bright, rang out in a language I didn’t understand, and soon his fellow Croatians, who had come from so far away, leaving behind bloodshed and war, joined him in singing. Together their voices made a sound both sad and happy, full of hunger, soaked in wine, singing about the homeland they had left behind. When I pressed my face against the window screen, I saw my mother at the picnic table with the other wives, their backs to the flames and the men. In that circle around the fire, my dad hunched in a lawn chair, elbows on his knees, a cigarette hanging in one hand, a squat brown bottle in the other, his ballcap low to hide his eyes—and the song drawing us in, taking us all away—through the darkness and over the waters.

  Rules of War

  IN THE MUSTY heat of the canvas tent, I sat brushing Malibu Barbie’s shiny blonde hair, wishing for a gun. Outside, through the trees and in the yard, my brother and the neighbour boys tore around, their weapons slung over their backs as they dodged back and forth across enemy lines. Instead of fighting alongside them in their war game, I was listening to Carrie and Bonnie invent reasons for the Barbies to change their clothes. A doctor’s appointment. A meeting at the bank. They flexed and twisted their dolls’ arms and legs, snapping and unsnapping skinny pantsuits, pencil skirts, and flouncy gowns. A surprise birthday party. A horse ride on Dixie, the dream pony. A trip to the grocery store. They chattered happily, as if these storylines were the only ones worth following.

  “GIRLS! GIRLS YOUR age!” my mother had declared when a family with two daughters moved into the empty house down our rural road. Within days of their arrival, she had introduced herself to the new neighbours and invited the girls for an afternoon of play. Up our driveway the pair came, each carrying what looked like a miniature suitcase.

  “We brought our Barbies,” they said. The brightness in their voices made me wary. Carrie, in a pink-and-white-striped T-shirt with matching pink shorts, was tall and thin, dark-haired. Her younger sister, Bonnie, wore the same short set in red. They seemed to have walked out of the pages of the Sears catalogue, clean and combed and glossy, smiling and without guile, the kind of girls who made me feel uneasy, awkward in my girl-ness.

  I led them to our old cabin tent, which my mom had erected on a flat patch of grass beside the garden—“Like a playhouse!” she said. Once inside, we sat in a triangle, facing each other, waiting for something to happen.

  I reached for the green mosquito coil smouldering in the corner. “Smell this.” I held it up to them for a sniff.

  Carrie and Bonnie pinched their noses and drew back. “Ew!” said Bonnie. “It stinks!”

  “It’s poison,” I said, with triumph. “If you eat it, you’ll die.” Neither girl seemed impressed.

  Carrie unclasped the metal buckles on her case and opened it to reveal a nest of dolls and dresses and tiny plastic accessories. “Let’s play,” she said, and handed me a Barbie in a turquoise swimsuit. “This one has her own sunglasses and everything,” she said. “You can be her.”

  I WAS USED to being one girl in a pack of boys, following like a dog behind the hunters, crashing through the bush of our back acres, searching out the enemy. My brother and the other boys from our rural neighbourhood—Kenny and Gordy from through the trees, Marvin from Poplar Road, Santana and Ira, the scary Sinclair brothers—dictated the terrain and the kind of war we waged, whether on foot within the boundaries of the yard and its outbuildings—garden, pigpen, tree fort, garage—or off into the wild on kid-sized motorbikes.

  We fought by a shared code, rules of war concocted after much consideration. No sissy time-outs. One gun per player, plus whatever grenades—pinecones and dried mud clots—you could carry. We built our guns by hand. A scrap of lumber tossed on the burn pile became the body of a gun, sanded smooth to stave off slivers. A length of old pipe or rebar got hacksawed into a barrel and scope. With the drill press in our dad’s shop, my brother fit the barrel to the frame, polishing the metal until it shone. Finally, with a ballpoint pen, we inked the make and serial number into the wood, registering every weapon in our cache.

  Each gun had its own noise, depending on the model. From the stuttered nasal eh eh eh eh eh of the semi-automatic, to the low, plosive front-teeth-tucked-inside-the-bottom-lip fire of the submachine gun, to the high-pitched volley and descent of the tossed explosive, our battlefield noises defined us. The ferocity and authenticity of the sound effect contributed to the soldier’s credibility and threat. For the boys, the noises came naturally, as if they’d been born with mouths formed for the violence of this music. They shifted with ease between weapons, from Uzi to sniper rifle to .44 Magnum, their spit flying as they fired. No matter how much I practiced the kackackackackackackack of my AK-47, my bullet stutter never was as loud and powerful as theirs, but it seemed enough to keep me in the war.

  I’d be on my belly, army-crawling over the forest floor, wet dirt caked on the front of my shirt, camouflaged by the stinkweed and saplings, when ahead, from behind a stump, an enemy popped up, surveying for movement. If I stilled myself, ignoring the black flies that wheedled around my head, if I held my breath and made myself a stone, my enemy might move on, veer down some other trail blazed through the birch and poplar. But if I shifted the wrong way, snapped a twig, sniffed too loudly or swatted at the insect swarm, the gun found me. One way or another, whether by Marvin’s fully-automatic dakkadakkadakka or by Gordy’s pew pew pew, I was done, it was over. After the shooter yelled, “You’re dead!” I lay on my back, eyes closed, clutching my imaginary gut wound as I bled out, and started counting to one hundred, the only way to bring myself to life again and back into the battle.

  IT WAS KENNY’S idea to introduce hostage-taking to the game. “It’ll be like real war,” he said, “like in Russia or Yugoslavia.”

  “Or like how 007 gets captured and tied up,” said Gordy, Kenny’s little brother. He yanked up his T-shirt. “For your eyes only!” he said, and flashed his scrawny chest, then began to laugh so hard, he fell to the ground and pounded the dirt with his fists.

  With a stick, Kenny dragged an X in the clay to mark our start, and then explained the new rule of engagement. In real war, soldiers didn’t just automatically shoot the enemy dead. In real war, soldiers took people prisoner and held them at gunpoint until someone rescued them, or they got killed. “It’ll be fun,” he said.

  After we picked our teams—Gordy and me, the youngest, left at the end to choose each other—we bolted from the X, scattering in all directions to race down trails and through the trees, leaping stumps, brush and thistle, singing in our heads—one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three—counting down toward the opening of war, I found a deadfall log to crouch behind. As I cooled my thumping heart and slowed my breathing, I scanned for enemies ahead, my assault rifle propped and ready to fire. The brush behind me crackled with someone’s footsteps.

  “Hands in the air,” the voice said. The tip of a gun barrel knocked against my shoulder. “Stand up!”

  When I turned around, Kenny was grinning, triumphant over me, the war’s first prisoner. I was his, he said, his hostage, and I’d be the bait to bring in a rescuer so he could kill him, too. Kenny marched me toward the tree fort, headquarters, prodding me every few feet with his gun, telling me to keep
quiet, or else.

  In the bottom floor of the tree fort, as Kenny wound old rope around my hands and feet, I felt the strange thrill of the unknown, but a little fear, too, at how real it all felt—the rope scratching my wrists, a strip of cloth tied as a gag over my mouth. Kenny pulled down the rope ladder and clambered up to the top storey.

  He looked down at me through the hole in the floor before letting the trap door shut. “Don’t move,” he said. “Or else.”

  Or else what, I didn’t know, but his voice held the threat of a growl. Boys could do that with their voices, could make them go low and menacing so other boys perked up and girls backed down. Boys were stealthy as foxes, agile as rats. They climbed with an ease I longed to possess, up trees, ropes, ladders, forever up and up. They rode full-throttle to the crest of a hill they called Kamikaze, and left me in the gulley. In winter, they stood at the top of the snow pile and taunted, You’re no king of the castle—you’re a girl. No matter how many times I tried to reach the peak, one of them—Kenny, Marvin, Ira, my brother—sent me back down to the bottom.

  Girls at the bottom, boys on top. Girls on this side, boys on the other. I had begun to notice the line drawn between us, to see that it was darkening, deepening into a trench. On the playground, at the bus stop, at Sunday-school choir practice, the girls clustered in their own giggling world while the boys huddled together, talking and laughing over jokes. I craned to hear from the outskirts, suspicious that I was missing out on something important, some secret that could crack the system’s code. But the whole system seemed built on a broken foundation. Everywhere I looked, I saw the widening split. At our church-run school every Friday afternoon, all the students divided into groups for what the teachers called “Arts and Crafts.” We girls funneled into age-appropriate activities like macramé, crocheting, embroidery, and other domestic arts. While the boys took part in outdoor survival, learning how to set a trap, build a snow shelter, and start a winter fire with only one wooden match, I sat in a semicircle of girls in a quiet room indoors, watching our volunteer craft leader, one of the church grandmas, demonstrate basic cross-stitch. How to thread the needle. How to read the pattern’s design. How to sew a row of diagonal stitches, then double back and make them into a chain of X’s. I bent over the gingham fabric held taut inside the embroidery hoop and drew the needle up and down, cross-stitching the tiny cells, X on X, like all the other girls.

  More than the scent of Love’s Baby Soft perfume, I loved the whiff of sulphur smoke wafting from the cap gun’s barrel. More than the crochet hook, the pocketknife, and how it whittled a willow branch to a perfect spear. I played the games that most girls liked—house, office, beauty salon—but tired quickly of their scripts. Always, the house needed cleaning and the babies needed changing. The secretary answered the telephone for her boss. The hairdresser said, “I have just the style in mind!”

  All the way back to Genesis and that first garden, my future seemed rigged. I tried to count my ribs to see if the story was true—that I’d been made the same as Eve, fashioned from a borrowed rib. Had the Creator’s hand really reached down to Adam’s sleeping body and unclipped one from its cage? I imagined God stewing that bone in the dust until it gathered steam, His breath like magic on it, and then in a whirl of mist, poof!—a woman. But I always lost track in my counting, and could never figure out how many ribs made up a girl.

  I didn’t want to be a boy; I only wanted entry to a boy’s world. Full access. To do without restraint what boys could do. I wanted to shoot the moose, kindle the fire, rev the engine, and then come home to my pink-walled room, flop on my bed, and crack open my Trixie Belden mystery to see what clues the girl detective might sleuth out to solve the secret of the haunted mansion. I wanted to erase the line scuffed in the dust and go back to the beginning, before the world split in two. I wanted to pull from my body the borrowed rib and give it back, or better yet, for that borrowed rib to mark me as one of a band of brothers—and sisters, all of us built from the same breath and blood, bone of the same bone, flesh of the same flesh.

  THE WAR WENT on without me in the field. Above me, Kenny fired his M-16—a vocal barrage of bullets—and launched explosives out the window with a shrill whistle and subsequent kaboom! When Gordy tried to get close enough to the tree fort to spring me loose, Kenny pulled an all-out assault. Through a knothole in the wall, he let loose a stream of urine, peeing on his little brother as he passed below, which triggered the other boys to raucous laughter, sent Gordy raging back at them with a stick-turned-machete, hacking at their backs, and left me in the dark.

  Whatever thrill I’d felt at the start had fizzled. I was the only prisoner, which seemed boring and unfair. I was the only tagalong straggler, too, the lone girl added to the pack because no one gets left out, so said my mother, even when my brother huffed and rolled his eyes and argued for his freedom. For now, he had to take me with him into the wild world of boys, but in my hostage state, I felt it—that world tilting, shaking me loose from its adventure, and sending me to the other side of the dividing line.

  Though the rope cinched around my wrists and ankles was thin and frayed, though I surely had enough muscle to break free of my makeshift chains, stand up, kick open the door on its flimsy hinges and bolt through the trees with my weapon ready, bolt for the hill and race to the top, to claim it, call it mine, my new ground, I didn’t even try. No one had talked of escape as an option. I hunkered in the windowless dungeon of the tree fort and waited for rescue, or for someone’s mom to call out, Suppertime!—and send us all back home.

  INSIDE THE SUN-COOKED tent, with the screen door zipped to keep out bugs, we readied our dolls for an evening on the town. Bonnie stood her Barbie up and wiggled the doll back and forth. “I need a new hairdo,” she said, her voice high and breathy. She dug through the pile of accessories and pulled up a tiny plastic mirror. She fitted it into the hand of her Barbie, who held it up to her face.

  Carrie slid her doll’s feet, forever fixed on tiptoes, into a pair of silver heels. “To match her silver dress,” she said.

  We girls played out our story, shadows of a sisterhood more ancient than we knew, of tents alive with other girls who sat inside and waited for a voice to call them out, for the broken world to reconcile, girls who sat inside and peered through the opening to see the moon and the path in darkness by which the men came home to them, carrying the meat and blazing torches.

  I kept brushing my borrowed Barbie’s plastic golden hair, listening for what came next.

  Outside, from the trails cut through the forest at our backs, my brother and the boys yelled their war. Laughter from the bushes. Gunfire from the trees.

  Taking Up the Remnants

  I CAN STILL SMELL the bridge’s greasy wood cooked by summer sun, the scent of forest and fuel, and when the wind angled a particular way, the cool fishiness of the river beneath. As logging trucks rumbled over the structure, shaking the frame and winging sawdust and grit from their loads, the Nechako River flowed on, twisted and snaked, swirled with eddies that threated to pull a child under. One death by drowning every summer, said my mother, don’t let it be you. The river that divided the town into north and south also stitched it together. The same current that cut the land in half bound us to its shores.

  Until I was five, we lived off Loop Road, on the north side of the Nechako. Who built the house, how much my parents paid for it, the style of its construction—these facts meant nothing to me in those early years. Home was the way the curtains lifted with the open window’s breeze. The crystal butter dish tucked behind the sugar. The blue glass hen on a nest filled with lemon drops. Home was my mother singing along to the vinyl LP spinning on the stereo, Chanson d’amour, ra da da da, and my brother and I taking turns holding the black dog’s paws for a dance. Home was my dad awake at two AM for another night shift in the bush, him sitting at the dining room table, a cigarette balanced on the glass ashtray and a cup of coffee in one hand, and my mother standing at the kitchen counter in her
turquoise housecoat, loading food into his huge black lunchbox.

  Home was the kids who lived around us—Rachelle and Mallory, Wendy and Phoebe and their wild cousin Isaac—and the sandbox between our yards, the swing my dad hung between two poplar trees, and the rutted uphill driveway that led to Loop Road. Turn right to walk to Grandma Reimer, who lived with her two bachelor sons. Keep going to the Castellos and their skinny mutt that strained at the end of a chain and snarled at anyone who passed. Farther still, where Loop Road met Northside, lived Tante Nite—my father’s eldest sister—and her family. Down left of us, my mother’s sister lived with her family, grain-farming the river-frontage acres. Down farther, more cousins, more aunts, uncles, folks from church, and next door, the game warden and his wife, and their baby.

  When we rode our bicycles together along the shoulder of Loop Road, the game warden’s wife always took the lead. She strapped her infant daughter into a plastic seat on the back of her bike, and over her handlebars, carried a long stick with a nail hammered through one end. To any dog that chased and snapped at our ankles, she gave one swoop of the stick, the nail-end whooshing down through air to strike the dog’s rump. A yelp, a blur of fur flying away from us down the gravel road—and the animal tore back to its doghouse and old soup bone.

  Around and around the loop, we walked, ran, pedaled, and drove. Every house had a name, a story, a barking dog. At Uncle George’s trailer two driveways over, my mother caught the oldest Castello boy jumping out the window, a jar of coins in his clutch, and hauled him back to our kitchen, threatening to call the cops if he tried to flee. Shame on you, she said, and telephoned Uncle George to come, then offered the boy something to eat while he waited for his reprimand.

 

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