Cardinal Divide

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Cardinal Divide Page 37

by Nina Newington


  “It got worse and worse. I didn’t want to be around anyone, didn’t want anyone to see me. To see what was in my eyes. Winter was coming and the prospect of the two of us in this house, nowhere to go but the barn. An idea can sink its claws into you and you can’t shake it off. Whatever sense you try to talk to yourself, it’s bigger than you. It’s got you.

  “I’d have done almost anything to get the peace back in my mind. Tried drinking too but it didn’t do anything for me.” He looks at me. “It was like the time in the Monashees, the way the images kept coming. Polly, parading. The men, choosing. That was the state I was in, the first time I met Moira. Driving down to Rocky, I started picturing my gun. I could put an end to it. Not just me. I could make sure none of them would ever possess her. I knew it was madness. I was afraid. I was afraid I could really do such thing.”

  “Oh Dad.”

  He’s gazing out of the window the way I’ve seen him do a thousand times. Shadows drift across his face. Eventually his lips move. I lean forward. He turns to look at me. “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”

  Prospero, The Tempest.

  “It humbled me, to lose control of my own mind. Perhaps the flaw was always there, the fear that I couldn’t deliver what a real man could.”

  “Isn’t that what most men are afraid of?” The question just pops out.

  Dad looks at me, startled, then he laughs. He laughs until there are tears in his eyes and he looks like himself again.

  “You know,” he says, wiping his eyes with one of his big soft handkerchiefs, “I’ve thought about it, over the years. Why it hooked me like that. Things had gone sour with Polly. We’d always”—he hesitates—“enjoyed each other. But at the end there she didn’t want anything to do with me. A fact she made abundantly clear. In her cups she had a deadly instinct for the sore spot. I think the more I felt like a man, the more I felt it that I wasn’t a real man. But I wasn’t a woman either. It wasn’t that I was both, I was neither.”

  “You were always you.”

  “I had to be or I was nothing.”

  “There wasn’t any scaffolding to hold you up.”

  He studies me. “You don’t have any scaffolding either.”

  There it is. The thing I’ve been mad about my whole life. I could laugh or I could cry. “Sometimes I feel so flimsy. As if I could just disappear. You, you’ve always been so solid.”

  “I filled my pockets with stones.”

  “The mountains?”

  He nods.

  “The way you became the oak pew thing in church?”

  “Yes.” He looks surprised. “Exactly.”

  “Being a part of everything ...”

  He nods. “But I forgot. I forgot, that last year with Polly before you came. I felt the most alone I’d ever felt. It wasn’t just Polly who needed saving.”

  “Oh Dad.”

  “If Moira was somehow responsible for you coming here, well, I’ve even more to thank her for.” He yawns.

  Chapter Eighty Seven

  I PUT THE bowls in the sink. Wind slices across the field. Turning from the window I see the kitchen as it was the day I arrived, the old wood cook stove where the stairs are now. The table nearby and the bench I sat on, observing them, these strangers. The woman with bulgy eyes, the man with golden hair. They left me by the stove, went into a room and closed the door. I heard the murmur of voices then hers, an eagle screech, No. His: Polly, we have to. In all the years after that I never heard him raise his voice to her again. Nor she to him. They never fought. Pursed lips now and then. Dad’s livestock schemes. I told you so thrumming in the air. Discussions about where the stairs would go when they built the bedroom. They went round and round on that one.

  I’ve done my time on the wheel of sexual jealousy. It’s not hard to picture how that image consumed Dad. If I forget it’s Mum and Dad we’re talking about. My experiment in non-monogamy ended in a dose of obsessive picturing. Which I dealt with by running away. Dad though, Dad cut a hole in the roof and built a new room. Not a fortress, a fastness. A mountain fastness. Or a nest. A nest on the roof of the house. Where somehow they found their way back to each other.

  Sunday mornings he’d make tea, take it up on a tray with flowers in a little vase. Or rose hips. Or sprays of dried grasses. I had a job, first thing. Mum’s main flock of chickens lived in the coop and laid their eggs in nest boxes but then there were a few who lived in the barn and roosted high up in the rafters. They fed on stray grain, scratched up the bedding, laid wherever they felt like laying. During the week I gathered eggs from the obvious spots but those hens were crafty. On Sundays, my job was to hunt for the ones I’d missed. Then I’d take them down to the river and throw them as far across as I could. It wasn’t until years later I thought to ask Mum why we didn’t float those eggs in a bowl of water the way we usually did to check for freshness.

  She blushed.

  Outside, I leave the shelter of the house, cross the field where my life began. My remembered life. I walk right up to the edge of the bluff, slide my toes to the lip. The river, twenty feet down, is directly under me, carving into the bank. It’s gone, the place where I used to stand, throwing the bad eggs across the river. The possibly bad eggs. So Mum and Dad could have their marital bliss in peace. What Connie from my old job used to call it. Our marital bliss. I only once met her husband Steve and he didn’t seem much to write home about but she was happy. Content. Never joined in the hatefulness of the other women, talking about their boyfriends, their husbands. That weary contempt. I’d think, why bother then? Can’t live with them, can’t live without them, someone would say eventually and they’d laugh. I can’t seem to live with either gender so I’m not one to talk.

  It’s too cold to stand around. My feet take me into the shelter of the cottonwood grove. The trees are different, old ones fallen down, new ones growing up. It was like a summer river, the flow of days here. No shouting or screaming. Until I hit adolescence. At fifteen I flung words like stones. Splashed them like acid. Some part of me appalled at the wantonness of it, like swinging a sledgehammer in a roomful of glass. Only of course I didn’t believe I had the power to hurt. Didn’t believe it could matter, what I said, any more than that it would matter if I disappeared. Leaving them to guess if I was alive or dead.

  “Do you have time for lunch? It’s cream of parsnip soup.”

  “Victor stopped by while I was out?”

  “He did. Have you decided?”

  “About what?”

  “The lease.”

  “No. Sorry. I’ve had other things on my mind.”

  “I know.”

  But. He doesn’t have to say it.

  “Can I ask you another question?”

  He nods and puts down his spoon.

  “How did you deal with it, that jealousy?”

  “Meeting Moira helped. Not that I talked about it but I had the feeling of being understood. Sitting there in her cabin, it was as if I remembered things I already knew. From the time in the Monashees.” He looks at me and I nod.

  “Eventually, instead of trying to push it away, I invited it in. Listened to what it had to say. Which was that I was afraid there was no place for me. Not now, nor would there ever be. Nobody would ever choose me. Not if they knew. Poor little cuckoo. It went back long before I became a man. Didn’t matter that Polly and I had loved each other for more than thirty years.

  “I wanted Polly to solve my problem and for many years she did. She chose me. But now it was up to me. Dorothy was in my mind quite a bit those days. Perhaps everybody has an image of the eyes of God, whether or not there is a God. I tried to imagine meeting Dorothy as Ben, revealing myself to her. Or being recognized. But I couldn’t picture it. Trying made me see the gulf that divided my life. Far deeper than merely crossing the ocean. More than just changing my name. I had become somebody nobody would recognize.

  “Moira, though, Moira looked out at you from a deeper cave. Dorothy had the solid loyalty, the cl
arity of spirit I found in my dogs. Moira wasn’t one you’d trust the way you’d trust Dorothy. But by then I understood life wasn’t simple.” He stops, rubs his chin. “I’m rambling, aren’t I?”

  “No, I like listening to you talk like this but I really should get back to the city.” I gather up our bowls. “We’re all—the Dreamcatcher crew—meeting at Doug’s this afternoon. I could use some clean clothes.”

  “You could always leave some here.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  “And invite him over again. I’d like to hear him play the fiddle.”

  “Dad, I should have told you this last time. He knows about you. And Manfred and Victor. I thought it was okay to tell him because he was gay himself. I thought he was. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “But you trust him?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “That’s all right then. Oh, hold on. Here’s something I remembered when you were out walking. Something Moira said. Something the brother-in-law told her. He said the niece thought her man was ‘all that and a bag of chips because he made movies.’ No, ‘because he was a filmmaker.’ It was that phrase that came back. ‘All that and a bag of chips.’ It was so incongruous, coming from Moira’s lips.”

  “A filmmaker,” I say. The hairs are standing up on my arms.

  “That’s all I know. It’s not very helpful.”

  “It might be.”

  Chapter Eighty Eight

  IT’S NOT AT all what I expected, a sprawling log cabin style house varnished a glossy orange brown. One small barn; a paddock; fenced pastures. I recognize Jay’s black Honda Civic and Heather’s silver one. No Tanya yet.

  “Come on in.” Doug’s smiling in the doorway, red and tan plaid flannel shirt, jeans that perfect faded softness.

  “Hey Doug.” He steps back to let me through at the same time I hold out the sack I brought. “Bison steaks,” I say as he says, “Come in” again and we stall in the doorway. I inhale leather and hay, looking up at him. He’s oddly serious, looking back at me.

  There’s a scatter of gravel in the driveway. Doors open and slam. “Dad.” It’s Lorraine or Mina, the younger girl anyway, barrelling toward us.

  Doug steps forward to catch her as she throws herself into his arms. The other girl is close behind. Tanya’s getting something out of the car.

  ‘They’re the real family,’ I think.

  “Meg, is that you?” Heather’s voice, from inside the house. “Come on through.”

  A hallway lined with knotty pine and framed photographs leads to a deck that faces west. Two horses graze in the distance. A cold wind ruffles faded grass.

  “How are you with fires?” Heather asks, brushing bits of bark from her fingers into the fire pit. “Doug had it going nicely but ...”

  “Hey Meg.” The collar of Jay’s jacket is turned up, framing her pale face.

  “Might have been a bit big,” I say gazing down at the unsplit log smothering the fledgling fire. I grab some smaller pieces and a length of metal bar that’s obviously been used for this before. Levering up the log I slip twigs and branches underneath then let it back down. We all watch. Nothing happens. At last one flame licks up the side of the log, then another.

  “Good thing he’s got a barbeque too,” Heather says. I glance around, betting on real charcoal.

  “What are we eating?”

  I jump at the voice behind me.

  “Mina, my girl,” Jay says, “how are you?”

  “Hungry. Starving.”

  “Well,” Heather says, smiling at her, “I brought potato salad and Jay brought smokies and Meg brought something.” She hooks an eyebrow at me.

  “Bison steaks.”

  “And Mom brought hamburgers and Dad will have steaks. Regular steaks.” She casts me a look. “And buns and relish and ketchup.”

  “Maybe,” Jay says, “I should get those smokies on the grill right away.”

  Mina nods vigorously.

  “Have you met Meg?” Heather asks.

  She shakes her head.

  “Meg, this is Mina. Mina, Meg.”

  She considers me for a moment. “You work at Dreamcatcher too.”

  “I did.”

  “You all did. This is a goodbye party.”

  “Smokies coming up,” Jay says.

  Mina races after her.

  “They’re good kids,” Heather says.

  Jay and Mina are side by side now, Jay looking down at Mina who’s explaining something.

  “How old are they?”

  “Ten and twelve. It’s so different,” Heather says, “how kids grow up now. My mother would have had my hide if I’d busted in on a grown-up conversation like that. But you’re only young once. You’ve never had kids, have you?”

  “No. I don’t think I’d know how to raise them.” I stop, embarrassed, but Heather shrugs.

  “Doesn’t stop most people.”

  When everyone is milling around the fire pit I go off in search of the washroom.

  The house puzzles me. It’s definitely nineteen seventies, down to the pale blue shag carpet on the stairs. I open a couple of doors onto bedrooms which haven’t been used for twenty years, judging by the mix of dust and ancient furniture polish. Finally, there’s the washroom then a room with boards laid across two file cabinets. A computer and a printer. Posters on the wall. Most to do with the Cardinal Divide. And bookshelves. Anthropology. History. Music. And then ‘The Manly Hearted Woman.’ ‘The Spirit and the Flesh.’ Footsteps sound in the passageway. Shit.

  They turn into the bathroom.

  I scoot past. Back in the kitchen I see that another, larger room opens off from it. There’s a Navajo rug on the floor, an older one on the wall plus a saddle blanket on the stone chimney above a large fireplace. A Morris chair with wide, flat arms is drawn up to the fireplace, a book splayed open on the leather covered seat. Same era as Dad’s chair but the legs are square, the slats under the arms rectangular. The oak’s stained a darker brown too.

  The sound of flushing sends me back into the kitchen where I fill a glass with water.

  “How are you doing?” It’s Jay. “Nice place, eh? The girls love it here. You haven’t seen the basement, probably, but they have it set up as their den. Grown-ups by invitation only.”

  “Did they all live here, when they were together, Doug and Tanya?”

  Jay gives me a sideways look. “No, they were in the city. I don’t think Doug spent a lot of time here until after they split up.”

  “Wow, that bison steak was good.” Doug’s chasing the juice around with a scrap of bun.

  “Delicious,” Heather says. “I didn’t think I’d like it. Country food, you know. Back home the Newfoundlanders were always trying to get me to eat moose.” She wrinkles her nose.

  “You marinated it,” Doug says.

  “The place that sells it did. On 118th and 60th, I think. Not that far from Yvonne’s.”

  “Next to the cake place, the shrine to icing?”

  “The butcher’s brother raises ...”

  “Eh hem.”

  We turn. Tanya’s looking round the group of us, plates on our knees, in the room with the rugs. The girls are outside, swinging on a rope hung from the branch of a pine tree. The cobalt blue has faded from Tanya’s hair. Raven’s wing black, it frames her long cheeks. She’s another one with perfect lips.

  “Since we’ve got a moment of grown-up time,” she says, “I just wanted to thank you for standing up for me. At the cost of your own jobs.” Her voice is ragged. “This is a hard time, eh? Even though Mum was ready to go. It means a lot to me.” She sits down abruptly.

  “You’re welcome,” Heather says. “You’re very welcome. And, speaking for myself, it was a pleasure. I’ve had to swallow and smile enough in my life to get by, you know? It felt fine to say ‘No. No, this is no way to treat a person.’”

  Jay’s nodding. “Hear, hear. My only regret is, I’d like to have been a fly on the wall in Brenda’s office on Monday morning.”


  “Well,” Tanya says, “I did get a call from Pam, Brenda’s secretary. Brenda wasn’t too fazed by us quitting but guess what? There’s a new aftercare coordinator.”

  “Who?” Heather asks.

  Jay narrows her eyes. “Laura?”

  They’re grinning, Tanya and Jay and Heather. “Watch out Brenda,” Heather says.

  Tanya nods. “According to Pam, Brenda looked like she swallowed a toad.”

  “She might be good,” Heather says. “Landlords won’t know what hit them. But what about us? Anyone got plans?”

  Jay’s nodding. “I’m going to finish my degree. But I was looking at the job boards and I saw something I might like. Pay’s decent too. I’m going to apply.”

  “What’s the job?”

  “Store detective.”

  There’s a moment when we’re all looking at Jay and then everyone is nodding.

  “You’d be good,” Heather says.

  “You like observing people,” Doug says.

  “Still get your drama fix,” Tanya says.

  “What do you think, Meg?”

  “Do you get to wear a fedora?” They all laugh. “No, I agree. I can picture it.”

  “And you?” Heather’s looking at Tanya.

  “I’m going to apply to the RCMP. Been thinking about it for a while. Girls are old enough now. They may not take me.” She shrugs. “It’s not just you they do the record checks on, it’s your whole extended family, eh?”

  “Jesus, they ought to snap you up,” Heather says. “You’d be great.”

  It’s not hard to picture Tanya, stern-faced, standing by my car while I wind the window down. Tanya the Mountie.

  Doug’s smiling at her but it’s okay. Suddenly I get it, how different they are. The way Bill and I were different. Too different. You fool yourself for a while but then something makes it obvious and after that you can’t help seeing it. It takes a hold of you, the knowing.

  “What about you, Meg?” Heather’s voice filters in. They’re all looking at me.

  “I want to bake bread and sell it.”

 

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