Watermark

by Christy Ann Conlin

  Our mother read us fairy tales from books our grandmother had given us as “Yule” presents. They had been our father’s childhood books. He did not approve of his old books. If he came in when she was reading to us at bedtime, he would stand with his arms crossed.

  “Tut, tut. Apsara, you’re filling their heads with stories designed to make children afraid of the woods rather than feel at home there. They’re stories engineered to rob children of their innate ability to connect with nature.”

  At first my mother would just wait for him to finish preaching and he would eventually go outside.

  When he started taking the book out of her hands and gently closing it, she stopped reading to us. We cried and Ocean pointed at us and clucked that this was exactly what he was talking about — our mother had filled us with needless fright. He took over our bedtime stories then. Ocean told us about animal spirits and magical beings. And his plans for the property. He had started to convert the old barn. All he needed was money, he said. The universe would provide. Morgaine snuggled in his lap and dangled on his every word as he stroked her hair. She would reach up and play with the driftwood talisman hanging by his collarbone.

  * * *

  My mother got a nursing job down in the Valley at the hospital. Although Ocean had been happy when she’d originally abandoned her career to join him as his muse on his mystical journey, now he was thrilled she was bringing in money. When we did career day in school, he told me he was a currency trader. I thought this had something to do with ocean swells, but never asked about it for fear I would sound silly. He was working on a computer program that would make us rich. Apsara could do her part now.

  “Like I haven’t been doing it all along,” she snapped back at him.

  While having children had made my father more of a child himself, what he called a free spirit, it had made our mother more cautious and protective. He would send us out to play and she would come out and tell us where it was safe to play.

  My father was pleased with how my mother understood how to interact with a variety of people in what he called “the mainstream world.” They all loved her and no one treated her like “a flake,” as they treated him. She could infiltrate linear society. She could move in all worlds, with no barriers. He wasn’t able to do it with the same ease, he said. She’d roll her eyes at this and sigh. By then she was reluctantly living at The Mists, as most people called it. My father had decided to call the property “The Mists of Avalon” when he was looking for people to join. He got the name from the title of a recently published novel my mother was reading. She told him it was a reinterpretation of Celtic myth, from a female perspective, and that if he had read it he would know it was not the right name for the property. But my father insisted it was the perfect name. He didn’t need to read the book. Ocean knew what was in it without even seeing the words.

  By then, there were people camping on the property and building their own huts in the woods. Nova Scotia was a spiritual siren, my father said. It called to their souls. There was a young woman named Wildflower, with braids and a man named Fern and his friend Spruce. And Spruce had a girlfriend named Evening Star. And more came, all with nature names, some with Sanskrit names. They did yoga and meditated and chanted and drummed. There was an architect whose wife had died in a car accident. “Transitioned,” they called it. He helped my father with expansion plans. He would winter in Lesbos and come to The Mists of Avalon in the spring. He was originally from Malta and found the Nova Scotia winters too harsh.

  Without even asking, they replaced my mother’s small garden with a huge herb garden in the shape of a Celtic cross. My mother just shrugged. She didn’t even weed it anymore, so she was relieved to have someone else claim the garden. Ocean had someone fly over and take an aerial picture. He put it in a brochure to advertise the property and more visitors found us. Eco-travellers, he called them. Spirit travellers. Sojourners in The Mists. The old barn had been fully converted now. My mother was permanent staff at the hospital by then and her entire salary was going into The Mists. There must have been thirty people living there at this time in various small buildings and yurts.

  My father would make me big bowls of oatmeal with ground flax and maple syrup. Syrup making was a community event, everyone carrying their pails of sap from all over the property to the cookhouse. We’d have a sugar shack and make buckwheat pancakes and maple syrup candy. And in the other seasons, we’d have the amber syrup to remember the trees’ blood.

  My father would hold my hand and walk me to the end of the driveway on school days when my mother was at work. He’d make shadow puppets with his hands. We’d pretend to be dragons when the air was cold and our breath was steamy. He’d leave Morgaine sleeping in the house. She never liked to get up early.

  “Your mother worries too much. When an adult worries, a child worries, Eve,” Ocean advised me. Sometimes he would carry me on his shoulders and I felt like a tall prehistoric bird that had known the crows back when the world was new.

  During the day Ocean would look after Morgaine, if you could call it that. When I came home she’d show me the rye bread they’d made, or the pictures they’d painted, or the dream catchers they’d woven. He would take her to the beach to harvest kelp, and they would prepare a stew that made the house reek. But often she just played by herself all day. Even as a very young child she was able to spend her day playing with toys and invisible friends. Morgaine said Wildflower came over to clean the house and do laundry. When I’d come home on the bus, usually it was just Morgaine waiting, her hands clasped together by her heart like a little priestess. The kids on the bus called us the hippie people who lived in a cult. I had just turned eight and remember being self-conscious in a way I had not been the year before.

  Sometimes my father left me alone to wait for the bus. I was terrified to wait there. Across the road was a thick forest and I was sure I heard unearthly things in the trees. The woods on our property were familiar, I told myself. They were safe and rang with birdsong. But I didn’t know what lurked across the road. I never told my father. I didn’t want him to think I was afraid.

  One morning my mother came home sick from an early shift. She’d turned around at the hospital and driven right back. I was waiting alone for the bus. The coyotes next door had killed the neighbours’ sheep. Now they had two Great Pyrenees dogs on the property to guard the new flock. My mother was terrified of the enormous white dogs. I wondered if this was what lurked in the forest across the road but I still didn’t say a word to my father. I remember how Ocean had started yelling at my mother around then, about how she had to get in touch with her heritage.

  She had black hair, like Morgaine. My father said it was their Indian blood, that the Native peoples out there on the Pacific were holy and she should tap into the power — it was nothing to be embarrassed about.

  She rolled her eyes. It was just an old family story he wanted to believe.

  He would pick Morgaine up and call her his Indian princess. I had blue eyes like him.

  My mother started getting a ride to the Valley with a neighbour so my father could have the car at home. This way he would have no reason to make us walk so far to catch the bus in nasty weather. When the weather was bad, she started staying down in the Valley, in town at a friend’s house, a friend she worked with.

  It wasn’t long after that she told Ocean she was going on a maternity leave. It was early spring. She said she’d be staying down in the Valley permanently. Ocean was convinced she’d been contaminated by self-indulgence. But then my mother told him about what he called the “sacred breech” — the baby belonged to the friend she was spending the nights with, a man who worked at the hospital with her, a doctor. He didn’t live on a reserve, but he was Indigenous. That he lived in town seemed to bother my father the most.

  “That’s how it is, George,” my mother said, using our father’s real name like a swear word.

 
We could hear him crying up on the top floor of the tree house. We could even hear him crying all the way through the woods on the meditation bench perched by the dangerous cliff, howling into the wind and salty spray, wailing down toward the jagged rocks where the ocean smashed against the cliffside far below, the mists blowing in through the trees and carrying his weeping to us.

  My mother said it was our opportunity for a solid life with a tangible future. The Mists would never be anything more than a run-down idea, his computer program would never be finished, and we wouldn’t know how to function in the real world. Besides, our father had Wildflower.

  My mother got custody of us and she decided we would live with her during the week and spend weekends with our father. She packed up, taking us but not her sandals and her hippie dresses, nor her beaded necklaces and patchouli oil, her Tibetan singing bowl and her gong. She left all her glass jars with dried herbs. And the strewing herbs tied with string and hanging from the rafters — the lavender, sage, rosemary, and meadowsweet. The vestiges of Apsara, she said. From then on, she would only answer to Matilda, her real name.

  We had to share a bedroom in our house in town, in the Valley, but it was big enough for two single beds. She bought us Cabbage Patch dolls and Barbies and My Little Ponies. We had a Lite-Brite set and an Easy Bake Oven. She took us for supper with our grandmother every Sunday. Morgaine became very quiet, and she would climb trees and hide in the high branches until my mother would find her and send me up to bring her down. My sister could climb effortlessly, even with tears on her cheeks.

  For all his sobbing, my father carried on as though our mother had never even been there. Wildflower moved into the tree house. Ocean said that to everything there was a season and love had many seasons. We were forging reality at the forge of life, stoking our fires, and moulding and bending our paths, pounding, shaping, and polishing, and then casting once more into the embers, reshaping yet again.

  Our mother was into material comforts, Ocean said, despite her heritage. It was an affliction which had taken hold of society. She was a woman, and women were more vulnerable to material wants. This enraged her. And even then I doubted his logic, endlessly circuitous and never debatable. No matter what happened, you could put it off on the universe. It was meant to be out of your hands. Quitting midstream was hearing the call of another path. Changing paths was merely answering the calling, not lacking the tenacity to stay the course. My father had retained the same sense of wonder children had. He would try anything. He was not afraid of eccentricity. He was not afraid of the edge.

  Looking back, it’s easier to understand why my mother wasn’t more concerned with our weekend visits. She was exhausted. She worked through most of her pregnancy. All through my twenties I hated her, no matter how my stepfather tried to explain things. Then I blamed him as well.

  At first we did see Ocean every weekend, but he was busier than ever. My father lugged an enormous telescope to the balcony and we saw the North Star and the constellations, Orion’s Belt, the Big Dipper, the Milky Way. Later that summer he showed us the Perseids. He thought nothing of getting us up in the middle of the night or before dawn to see a celestial sensation.

  When he’d go off on “business” he had to attend to, he would leave us with Wildflower as the babysitter.

  “If her mother finds out they’re left alone she won’t let them come anymore,” our father said. “So you stay with them.”

  If Wildflower was away, he brought us with him wherever he went and if he felt it was too sexy or too hedonistic and might get back to my mother, he would send us off to play. “But stay within calling distance,” he said. “That’s the only thing I insist on, my only commandment.” And when Ocean and Wildflower were upstairs in the loft, with their drums and incense and beeswax candles, he’d send us outside to play. But he never bothered calling us to see if we had obeyed his one commandment.

  At the outdoor bonfires we would sleep in the grass and he’d bring mats and blankets for us. Morgaine could fall asleep, but I’d lie there listening to them sing and chant. In the house, sometimes Morgaine would have bad dreams, and our father would appear wearing an old silk kimono as a bathrobe, smelling of salt and sandalwood, slick with sweat, Wildflower’s giggles trailing in behind him.

  I remember finding it odd when Morgaine was no longer afraid of the crows and began to feed them. My father’s crow in particular seemed attached to her, so much so it unnerved even him. At that time I thought Ocean was afraid for her but later, when I’d think of his voice, how quickly he would tell her to leave the birds alone, I realized he was jealous. He was king of the birds. He was the one who could speak to them.

  When she kept it up, he gave her a talking to. Did she want to stop coming on the weekends?

  Morgaine had clasped her hands behind her back and put her head down, chastised. That was the last thing she wanted. The bird still would perch near her but she would not acknowledge it, not when our father was around. When it was just the two of us, Morgaine would wave her arms at the bird in greeting. The crow would dip its beak and caw until she croaked back at it.

  At our new home in town I played with other children and spent time in my room with my drawing and paint sets, making imaginary maps for make-believe kingdoms. The four years between us seemed an abyss, with Morgaine standing on the other side. She would trail about behind me. Occasionally I would play with her and let her order me around. She liked to play “blindfold” with my mother’s abandoned scarves when we were at The Mists. She even brought one to our new house in town.

  “Guess what flower this is?” she’d whisper, holding the petals to my nose.

  I felt sorry for Morgaine when we were with our father, how there were no other young children her age at The Mists. There were only babies and pregnant women. We were the oldest. To make Morgaine happy when we were there, I played tag and hide-and-seek with her, and all the games with elaborate rules and rituals she had made up.

  At summer’s close, things changed. Our father forgot we might report back to our mother. He often did not come home at night. He’d stay in another hut. He’d tell Wildflower love was boundless. We wandered in the woods playing hide-and-seek and kick the can while Ocean took pilgrims on spiritual walks and quests in the woods. And sometimes he’d go away on trips and we’d be with Wildflower for the whole weekend.

  “Your father is a mystic,” she would tell us at bedtime. Wildflower was twenty-two years old but she seemed much older to me then. She would whisper to us, as though she were imparting secrets about our father.

  He can bend things with his will.

  Ocean is able to hear the beat of his own heart

  and walk in its rhythm.

  He is busy stretching his soul

  through the universe.

  * * *

  When school started and my mother’s due date approached, she wanted us at home with her and my stepfather. She got very clingy and only let us see Ocean on alternating weekends. She had us help her with the baby’s room, picking out wallpaper with ducks and ducklings and golden suns with smiles and dancing feet. She would burst into tears, and she would fall asleep as she read us bedtime stories. My stepfather took over the bedtime ritual. We lived in his house in town, with a big backyard, and he’d take us to the library when my mother’s feet were too swollen to walk. He registered me in hockey and coached the team. My mother bought me a pink helmet.

  But Morgaine always missed the meadows and woods of The Mists. She chanted in her bedroom. Sometimes my mother heard the drone of Morgaine’s voice and she’d tell her to stop. She wanted her to forget. “You live in the Valley now,” we reminded Morgaine. “You don’t live up there on the Mountain anymore.”

  My mother took an old feather away from her, saying it was full of bird parasites. She didn’t notice how Morgaine’s face collapsed.

  The baby was due any day, and we went to see our father
for the weekend. It was a Friday evening. Ocean was having a harvest ceremony. Thick, chilly dew fell down in the twilight. After supper we went to “the temple” in the converted barn. People had come from all over and the upper field was full of cars and hippie vans. My father led a smudging ceremony. Then they danced, the women swirling scarves above their heads. We spun in circles with them, but when they sat down cross-legged to chant and began to smoke the sacred herb and eat little mushrooms, we got bored. We slipped outside and no one noticed. We walked through the barn door and climbed down the stairs in bare feet. The fire circle was prepared, the great logs standing upright, ready to be lit aflame.

  It was evening but still so bright with the harvest moon rising. Morgaine wanted to play blindfold. She wrapped the scarf around my face. I tightened it and Morgaine pulled the silk even more. It hurt my eyes. She took my cold hand in her sweaty little one, the palm so meaty, and led me into the trees. The pine needles were cool and sharp under my feet. At first I was worried she was taking me through the labyrinth to the cliff. But Morgaine just guided me straight ahead, bringing me low to dodge the odd branch. But then I could feel the mist on my skin. The air was tangy. The silk blindfold was damp and I heard the waves crashing below. She had bypassed the labyrinth path, taking us straight through the woods to the bench by the edge of the cliff.

  I let go of Morgaine’s hand and pulled at the blindfold, but it was so tight. Finally I hauled it down. I did not see Morgaine, only the crow.

  The bird was there.

  The bird flies into the mists.

  This is what I remember.

  And then I saw her ahead of me by a tree, and the bird was by the tree. There was sky above the mists, sunset sky like a strip of ribbon, but the wind was picking up, the mist expanding.