Cardinal Divide

by Nina Newington

  “Haven’t looked yet. Tell you what, James, work on your life line now, before the meeting. See how far you get.”

  “Aw ...” He catches Jay’s eye and grins. “Okay.” He saunters off.

  “I need that look.”

  “This one?” Jay gives it to me: level hazel gaze, tiny quirk of amusement in one eyebrow.

  “James would argue with me until I got mad. You just look at him.”

  “Me and Tanya, we have the eye. You’re getting it. You’ve only worked here ... how long have you worked here?”

  “Since the beginning of July.”

  “See, I’m coming up on three years.”

  “Excuse me.”

  Tanya’s voice startles me. I step sideways, almost bumping into Jay. “Sorry.”

  “Like the hair,” Jay says.

  It’s blue today.

  “Did anyone go to the counsellor’s office yet?”

  “Not yet,” Jay says.

  “I’ll go then.”

  “I’ll count cash,” I say.

  “So is anyone else on?” Jay asks.

  I squint at the chart. The lay-out’s been changed again. “Heather.”

  “It’s not like her to be late.”

  “She’s coming in at five.”

  In the back corner of the office a low door opens into an oversized closet. Inside are a coat rack, a small table and chair, trays of bulging Ziploc bags, and a safe, door ajar. I shove aside heaps of contraband to pull out the cash box.

  “Done?” Jay’s framed in the doorway. “You okay?”

  “I got a letter from my father. He wants to see me. He has something to tell me.”

  Jay’s eyebrows arc. “About where you came from?”

  “What else could it be?”

  “A little synchronicity, eh?”

  “Dreamcatcher Lodge, Meg speaking. How can I help you?”

  “My son, he’s in trouble ...”

  My sister, niece, uncle, mother, grandchild. “Let me put you through to Admissions. If you don’t get Janet, leave her a message.”

  I hang up and reach for the log book. The phone rings again.

  “Is Tanya there?” asks a clear young voice.

  “She is but she’s not at the desk. Shall I ask her to call you?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Is it urgent?”

  “It’s kind of an emergency.”

  “Shall I page her?”

  “No. Thank you.”

  The door alarm beeps. Heather clicks across the floor.

  “Hello Meg.” She unwinds a black and silver scarf, shrugs off her mauve down-filled coat. In her late fifties, retired after thirty years in government service, an administrative secretary of no doubt ferocious efficiency, she looks like a tight-arsed white spinster, silver hair, sharp face, trim body, only if you look twice there’s a sexiness to her, the red lipstick on her small mouth, big breasts she doesn’t hide.

  Tanya rounds the north side of the dome. Seeing us, she holds up the cap she’s carrying, a bill cap with the familiar jagged leaf on the front. “Warren, Theresa’s brother.”

  “Buddy with the tattoo on his face?” Heather asks.

  “The one and only. Says he was wearing this when he checked in this afternoon,” Tanya shakes her head. “Hate to think what else they let them bring in.”

  “I like the hair,” Heather says.

  Cobalt blue looks good with Tanya’s copper skin. Her face is round, cheeks full and long so there’s a groove to either side of her hooked nose. Her mouth is wide and when it turns down it makes a perfect arch. The day she came back to work here she plonked her mug down on top of the office fridge. THE REAL BOSS, it said. She scowled for most of the shift. I kept overhearing muttered conversations between her and Jay, how the place had gone to hell, clients never used to ... But she’s smiling now. “The girls like it too.”

  “That reminds me. Your daughter wants you to call her. She says ‘It’s kind of an emergency.’

  “They’re arguing over what channel to watch.”

  “Somebody else called for you yesterday, a woman. She didn’t leave her name.”

  “Probably Viola. Remember her?” She looks at Heather. “Went back out. Finally got her kids back and now she’s high again.”

  She goes into the office, picks up the phone.

  “Hey Meg, where’s Jay? Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you.” James leans over the gate to peer into the office. I can’t see his face, just the back of his head and, beyond, Tanya, eyebrows raised. “Oops.” He pulls his head back smartly.

  Alphas, Dad would call them, Jay and Tanya. At best I’m in the middle of the pack, as ready to grovel as growl.

  James tugs a stick-thin, blank-faced girl forward. “Hey Meg, hey Heather, meet my cousin Shannon. My kokum is sisters with her aunt’s mother.”

  “Just like where I come from.” Heather’s accent is flat as a rock skipping over water compared to James’s lilt. “All anyone wants to know: Who’s your father?”

  “Whoo’s yeh faathuh?” James repeats. “Where you from, Heather?”

  “Nova Scotia.” Her voice tips up at the end: Sco-sha?

  “Ah. Well, like I was saying, this is my cousin.”

  “You again, James?” Jay lets herself in.

  “Meet my cousin Shannon. My kokum and her aunt ...”

  “James, you’re related to every single person in western Canada.”

  “Not to you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Look at you.”

  “Because I look white? Seeing isn’t believing, James. Seeing isn’t believing.”

  “You Native then, Jay?” He’s grinning at her.

  “So do your life line, James.” She nods at the alcove off the common area. “Nice to meet you, Shannon.”

  Shannon smiles a flat, plastic little smile. Her hair pulled up in a tight pony tail, she looks exactly like three or four of the other girls.

  “Tanya back from the counsellors?”

  “In the office.”

  We shuttle bedding for new clients, talk them through the pattern of the days. Some Wednesdays are a zoo but only six came in this week. Four women, two guys. Warren, short and muscled with a scorpion tattooed up his neck, the tail arching onto his cheek, and a tall, stick thin man in his forties who has yet to say a word.

  “Suppertime, it’s suppertime.” Jay’s voice booms from the speakers.

  We meet back in the office, clearing space on the desk for our trays. “So,” Tanya says, “they’re not going to replace Georgie.”

  “Why not?”

  “Budget won’t cover an after-care worker.”

  “What are the clients supposed to do? Camp? There’s no frigging housing.”

  “They had enough to hire Cathy to supervise us.”

  “This place makes me tired,” Heather says.

  “Heard it before. Heard it all before but here we still are.” Jay forks up mashed potato shiny with gravy.

  I push around the parade of carrots and peas, complaint, mockery, resignation lapping like waves.

  “Meg?”

  I look up.

  “Nice job.” Jay’s grinning at me.

  I look down. I’ve piled the peas and carrots on top of the slices of brown beef, buttressed the wall with mashed potatoes. If I’d taken gravy I could have made a moat. “If they’d just give me a sandbox,” I say. My voice is supposed to be light. Now Heather is looking at me too.

  “Heather,” I say, “would you be willing to trade shifts with me? Take mine tomorrow?”

  “Certainly, if I can.” She gets up to look at the schedule. “How about Friday? No, we’re both on then. Can you take my Monday? That would work out well for me actually.”

  “Fine. Thanks.”

  “I’ll write it in, shall I?”

  “Against the rules these days,” Tanya says.

  “That’s right,” Heather says, changing the names anyway.

  “Excuse me?”
A woman’s head pokes around the door. “Can I make a phone call?”

  “Not until six, hon,” Jay says. “But if I were you I’d stick around, make sure you’re first in line.”

  “Okay.”

  When her head disappears Jay mouths, “Who’s that?”

  Heather and I shake our heads.

  “Wendy,” Tanya says. “Which reminds me, two of the new girls, Janice and Mona, they had some kind of beef in prison. We’re supposed to watch them.”

  Jay puts down her fork. “They let them come at the same time?”

  Chapter Three

  TRAFFIC ON THE Yellowhead grinds to a halt. I reach across, fold back the cloth, rest my hand on the warm loaf.

  Brake lights flick off. The line moves forward ten feet. Stops. The loaf’s the shape of a mushroom, the mushroom I found among the poplars by the river, fishing with Dad the first spring. Sun risen on the flat lands, pinking the mountains, shadows reaching. I pointed to it, the dome of the cap pushing up through the leaf litter. It was the exact reddish tan of Dad’s pants.

  The line of traffic edges out past an old pick-up truck that’s shed half its load in the roadway. I looked at the mushroom and at his pants and he smiled. He told me they were made of tin cloth, his pants. But that didn’t mean they were made of metal, it was the name the company gave the cloth. So the prospectors would know how strong it was.

  At the end of the day the mushroom stood alone and perfect among the tree trunks. We stood there too, side by side. He never tried to make me talk. I can see him, fishing poles leaned against his shoulder, golden hair thick as a brush on top, a growl of brown at the back and sides, faded blue shirt, baggy pants.

  They’re still the only pants he wears, except for funerals. A new pair every five years. The same size, too. He doesn’t even have a gut to hang over his belt the way the other ranchers do. Did. They’re gone now, Ralph and Russ and Jimmy. A few wives linger, Betty living with her daughter, Agnes spry still and almost as old as Dad. She was always strong, a scrawny strength. Took over the ranch when her husband left which was no loss to anyone. I remember Dad saying that.

  For him to speak against someone was memorable but everyone knew the husband beat on Agnes and drank and ran around. Word was one day she found him with their daughter who was fourteen. Told him she’d shoot his balls off if he ever came around again. She and her daughters, there were three of them, ran the ranch for years. They were stuck up, the daughters, wouldn’t talk to me, but I don’t know who they got it from because Agnes wasn’t like that. I might stop and see Agnes.

  Or not. I turn on the radio. A man is talking about dead zones. Dead zones and jellyfish. The dead zones come from fertilizer. Too much run off from the land. Jellyfish are the only creatures that can live in the dead zones. Jellyfish and bacteria. In the dead zones the jellyfish grow and grow.

  Where the city ends I turn off the radio, leave the jellyfish among the traffic lights, but the round bales in the fields are like beached whales. Whales dying in the sun. I should expect this, Lip-tooth told me, when a parent dies. ‘Your world is dying. For a child the parents are the world and we are all children,’ she said, and she was pleased with her formulation. I nodded as if I was pleased too because I couldn’t be bothered to say, ‘What if the world is dying?’ She would smile at me sympathetically, her lower lip sticking to her tooth the way it did, and I would want to tear her apart with my hands which would also be normal.

  Driving past the shorn fields, the chocolate bloom of ploughed prairie earth, it’s as if I am driving toward a shadow city, a city that has always existed just beyond my vision. I’ve heard its voices, alarms and celebrations, whispers in a wind I thought blew across empty land only it was there all the time, of course it was, the place I come from, the people I left. My father at last, my father who is not my father, my father will tell me where it is I come from.

  Tell me what I can’t tell myself. Hypnosis, EMDR, past life regression, nothing has worked. The life I remember begins the day a man driving an old orange tractor saw me at the edge of his field.

  You forget for a reason. What they’ve all said. If you were ready, you would remember. So you’re not ready. Perhaps you’ll never be ready. Accept.

  This Way to Heaven

  Go Right—Stay Straight

  How many years has that stupid sign been up? I scowl at the drab little church. Don’t even remember turning onto 22. Missed the moment the mountains come into sight.

  I signal and turn down the dirt road. Pump jacks. Clear cuts. All used to be ranch land, Dad said, but it was abandoned during one slump or another. The land begins to tilt and roll and there’s the rusty ostrich, cut out of the hood of the old blue Chevy. The drive slices through a band of tamarack and spruce then the land smoothes and opens out, pasture now except for the ten-acre field the brothers ploughed in the spring, the best soil on the place, Dad says. He showed them where it began and ended, told them how he dug the toe of his boot in that ground sixty some years ago, the brothers nodding like two bald dolls.

  Cresting the rise, the red roofs of the house come into view. A four-square white house like a thousand others except for the second, smaller but otherwise identical hip roof that pops up from the middle of the main one like a prairie dog poking its head out of its hole. I drive slowly past the brothers’ trailer, the barns and the machine shed. Someone’s smoothed out the driveway since I was last here.

  The front door used to match the roof but the paint has faded. It’s the pinkish red of rose hips now while the metal roofing’s still a rustier red. Yellow leaves off the aspens have drifted up against the clapboards. The light’s different here, softer. Moisture from the river, Dad says. And it’s quiet. Home. This is home. My cheeks burn. All my thrashing around, whining about where I come from.

  There’s a movement in the living room window. I spread the cloth back over the loaf. As I’m getting out of the car, basket in one hand, the front door opens. Dad stands there, the shock of white hair, navy cardigan with leather buttons, sheepskin slippers. He’s thin, so thin, and bending forward as if the years are hung from his frame the way he trained the apple trees, hanging stones from the branches. Wild white hairs spring from thick eyebrows, his nose a ridge of bare rock.

  “Hello Dad.”

  “Come in, come in.” His voice has never lost its crisp British intonations. He shuffles backward, keeping his hand on the door knob until he can reach the walking stick leaning against the wall.

  I hold up the basket. “I brought you some bread for a change. Shall I make some tea?”

  “Of course.” He sounds odd, short of breath.

  “Are you alright?”

  “Tea would be nice.”

  Chapter Four

  I FILL THE electric kettle I bought after I found Dad sound asleep, the kettle whistling itself dry on the range. The sink is still the same white enamel, the fridge has the comfortable lines of the retro cars they’re selling now, but something is different.

  My eyes settle on the window over the sink. Beyond the vegetable garden the brothers planted, beyond the invisible river, the mountains march across the horizon. Mum and Dad sited the house so you can see them from the kitchen, the living room. Upstairs in the tiny bedroom they shared, both windows face west. At dawn you can watch the first rays touch the face of the mountains.

  That’s it. The kitchen curtains are gone. Red and white gingham. They met in the middle at the top and were hooked back to the sides midway down. I helped Mum wash them and iron them every spring and fall until I turned fifteen and became a raging asshole. What’s left is the bare aluminum rectangle framing the view. My father and his beloved mountains. My father the mountain. That’s what I used to think, resenting his implacable reasonableness, his refusal to hit back. You could hurl yourself at him, beat yourself bloody against the rock of him and never make a dent. The only way to get to him was to attack Mum which, God help me, I did with all the venom at my disposal. ‘If you can’t be civil
to your mother, you can leave this house.’ The opening I’d been probing for, a way to make it their fault.

  Christ what a fucking mess I made. And mended. The best I could. I scald the pot, spoon in tea twice as strong as I like it, slip the cosy on.

  “Can I cut you a slice of bread, Dad?”

  “That would be nice.”

  “Butter and marmalade?”

  “Please.”

  He looks weird, eyes skittering around the room, jaw so tight a muscle flutters in his cheek.

  I don’t even notice when I cut into the loaf. It’s only when the bread smell hits my nose that I stop. Pay attention to the bite of the blade into the crust. But my mind’s not on it. I smear the slices with butter then marmalade, carry the plates through, sit down in the other armchair.

  “Shall I be mother?” I reach for the pot. He stiffens. Shit. That was always his line, arch and English, Mum smiling. Their little joke. I pour a cup for me, swish the tea around in the pot. Pour half a cup and hold it out. “Strong enough?”

  “Yes. Thanks.”

  Milk and sugar. He stirs, watching the orange brown liquid swirl around the cup then looks up and past me. Sunlight glints on a long white hair curling from his chin. “Growing a beard, Dad?”

  He puts down his cup, stares at me.

  “Sorry. A joke. That hair.” My stomach hurts. “More bread?” He’s only taken one bite.

  “No thanks.” He picks up the slice, lifts it to his lips, puts it back down. We reach for our tea cups at the same moment.

  “Sorry.”

  “Sorry.”

  Christ, my mouth is dry. The tea doesn’t help. He’s got his cup tilted in front of his face as if he’s drinking from it but it goes on too long. When he puts it down he’s going to start.

  He sets the cup down on the coffee table and puts both hands on the arms of his chair. He levers himself up and reaches for his cane. “Won’t be a moment.”

  It takes a long time, these days, his journey across the room, but it’s never taken this long. I close my eyes. Breathe.