by Carla Funk
On Loop Road, I learned to ride the orange banana-seat bike without training wheels, learned to pump my legs to make the swing arc higher through its pathway in the trees. On Loop Road, I slipped pieces of Juicy Fruit gum to Phoebe through the wire fence after she fell out of their moving car, her shins dragging along the gravel as she clung to the passenger door, and came back from the hospital bandaged and unable to walk for weeks. And that’s why you need to keep your seat belt buckled, said my mother, pointing out through my bedroom window at Phoebe, who lay on a blanket in her backyard trying not to cry, her raw, oozing legs smeared white with ointment. Good thing she didn’t lose them, my mother said, and I pictured a legless Phoebe pulling herself across the lawn for another stick of gum.
Memory drags back its bits of bone, handfuls of dust, surfaces like snapshots in a crawlspace scrapbook buried by years, a broken line of a song whose melody keeps playing, the image of a dream upon waking. Pluck one memory from the album and the story doesn’t hold, won’t bear up. The single part won’t speak the whole. But honour the fragments, all those broken pieces, and see them find a true design, fitting to the pattern of a bigger story, no matter how small the town, the life, or the child.
To go back to the ground of my making, to stand inside that world again and sift those early years, see what’s left, what stories lift, who speaks, who sings, what haunts and shimmers into sight—this salvaging illuminates the days ahead, and pieces together—re-members—the shape of what’s to come. In a future house, away from Loop Road and south over the river, the train tracks, and up the hill, I’d stand again, holding on to every little scrap and wonder, every stitch and scar, listening to my mother sing the same song in a different kitchen, my brother holler from a new acre of poplars and pine, to the black dog barking and my dad’s truck rumbling up the drive, air brakes hissing as he pulled into the yard, kicking up the dust.
In my earliest memory, I wake to the scrape of my belly over the wooden side of the crib and the whump of me landing on blue carpet. Shh, my brother says, his dark eyes before me, finger to his lips. He takes my hand, and down the dim hallway, I follow. The back door swings open to daylight and the green world. He leaps from the doorway—disappears, and leaves me standing on the threshold, teetering mid-air at the drop-off, the staircase not yet built. Jump, his voice says, and his hands stretch up to me. I crouch, fall forward, slide into his arms, through his grip, down his body, and land, wobbling, on ground, barefoot, grass-prickle between my toes, sunshine in my eyes.
The photograph my mother took shows me in a white dress smocked with red stitching. My white-blonde hair sticks up from my sweaty head in tufts. I squint beside my brother, three years older than me and brown-haired, brown-eyed, olive-skinned, both of us caught in the act of escaping from our afternoon nap. In the next photo, I’m smiling with a wide-open mouth, free to roam the yard with the black dog at my side, my brother, the punished, sent back to his room.
When called, memory comes back, but never whole. In pieces, it comes—this trinket, that strange perfume, this camera flash, that shred and remnant. You can use anything from the rag bag, said my mother, and held out for me the huge clear plastic bag overflowing fabric scraps, bits of lace, rickrack, and ribbon. At the kitchen table, I dumped it out. The world spilled out in pieces. A gingham strip from my embroidered pillowcase. A slip of vivid green Fortrel—my mother’s dress, the birthday one with emerald buttons running down the bodice, the one she wears in the photograph of her and my father standing in front of his new logging truck, my brother still a baby, balanced on the bumper. The red and orange cotton of my nightgown’s Raggedy Ann. My brother’s navy corduroy from his pair of school pants.
I chose two calicos—mint green with rosebud sprigs, and red apples on a sky-blue check. With my mother’s silver scissors, I cut them into matching squares, a little crooked on the edge, but close enough. I lay them side by side so that the colours sharpened, brightened, blue on green on pink on red, then flipped them front to front and pinned a seam. I slid the cloth underneath the needle’s foot, locked it in position, ready to stitch.
Each evening after supper, my mother in the basement sewing room bent over her machine, mending what needed mending, altering what needed to fit. Around her neck, the measuring tape hung, and in her mouth, the heads of pins jutted out so that her lips glinted silver when the overhead light caught. Everything that ripped apart, she fixed, and from the old and worn-out, sewed something new. My dad’s grease-stained jeans with the knees frayed thin became a denim camping blanket. Even my bedspread, pieced together from clothing I outgrew or the fabric scraps left over from their sewing, testified that anything could be salvaged and made new. Before she turned out the bedside lamp, my mother would point out the different patterns. This is from the dress you wore three Easters ago, she’d say, the one with the velvet bodice. This is the dress you called “Applejack.” This was the jumpsuit you wore to Hawaii. This is the one from your first-grade Christmas concert.
At my own machine, the little chainstitch Singer for beginner sewers, I pressed the plastic pedal with my foot, and as the needle punched down and up, binding with its thread, I guided the fabric through and watched the pieces join, and when they did, I pulled more scraps from the overflowing bag—grey flowers on a stiff black cotton, gold stars on deep blue sky, sheer white as gauzy as a veil, still bearing hints of red smocking thread—remnants from a wider life, a bigger story, a patchwork quilt I’d sleep beneath, autumn, winter, spring, and summer, dreaming toward morning and the voice at the bedroom door calling me to wake up, sun’s out, the food is on the table.
Acknowledgments
I AM GRATEFUL FOR grants from the BC Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts, which allowed me time and space to write.
Earlier versions of “Rules of War,” “The Lady of the Lake,” “The Pledge,” and “All the Ways to Fall” were published in The Tyee in September 2017.
Thank you to Jackie Kaiser and the team at Westwood Creative Artists for championing this project and welcoming me to their vibrant literary crew. To Greystone Books—thank you for enthusiastically embracing this book. Paula Ayer, your deft insights, keen editorial eye, and bright faith in my writing have been a gift.
And thank you to my stellar community of friends who cheered me on in the writing, who walked beside me and listened to me mull, and who corroborated and reminisced. To Jeanine, and to Jo and Dave—thank you for your kindness and clarity of sight. A special thanks to Brother Rob, who daily stoked the fires behind the scenes, to Amelia, to Richard, to my mother, to Grandma Shenk, and to the whole family—those nearest on the tree and those on farther branches, for giving me the rich inheritance of story.
Most of all, thank you to Lance, my long-haul love, for making this marriage large and spacious, and for saying, Write.
Copyright © 2019 by Carla Funk
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Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada
ISBN 978-1-77164-466-2 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-77164-467-9 (epub)
Editing by Paula Ayer
Proofreading by Doretta Lau
Jacket and text design by Nayeli Jimenez
Jacket photograph by Casey Horner on Unsplash
Greystone Books gratefully acknowledges the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples on whose land our office is located.
Greystone Books thanks the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, and the Government of Canada for supportin
g our publishing activities.