Algoma (6 page)

In an attempt to avoid the insomnia that had plagued her from her teens, Josie spent most nights driving around town and the outlying regions in search of leftovers. She knew the secret dump sites on the outskirts of town and the streets where the credit cards had higher limits and the houses were more prone to renovation and discard. Homeowners would haul their furniture out to the curb, knowing that it would be gone by morning. They did not have to pay to have it removed or haul it to the dump themselves. Josie needed them and they needed her. Her heart was a twenty-five-cent cracked knick-knack salvaged from an estate sale.

At the end of her shift, Algoma picked up a pencil from beside the register and wrote on the debit board. Each week, Josie checked the debit board for staff purchases, clothing and other items taken in lieu of pay, which was also the main reason the best offerings never made it to the sales floor. With a couple of quick strokes, Algoma marked down twenty dollars worth of purchases for two full-length fur coats. Two furs. Women’s. Damaged. $10 each. AB.

Outside, she retrieved four bungee cords from the trunk of her car and lashed the two coats—fur facing out—to the front seats. Muskrat for the driver, fox for the passenger.

Comfortably seated on a soft bed of muskrat fur, Algoma drove home and felt warm for the first time in months. The fur cushioned her aching back from the jarring potholes that pocked the weather-ravaged streets. She drove fast and loose, one hand flat on the wheel, and the other fingering the wrist-worn hem of the coat sleeve like an amulet, like luck, like a lottery ticket before the numbers are called.

The youngest of seven children, Algoma had never worn a piece of new clothing in her life. It was a fact she was proud of. Even as a teenager, she had “shopped” for clothes in her friend’s overstuffed closets. They had readily given her the things they’d confessed to no longer liking or wanting. An excuse to buy more.

Well into adulthood, she continued to accept the castoffs of her friends and siblings, however outdated and misshapen the pieces were. She could not bear the stiff seams of a new shirt, or the extra button sewed to the bottom hem that seemed to portend disaster. She preferred clothing that had already been vouched for, shoes that already knew the way home, a dress already comfortably stretched over the hips. Unconcerned with fit or style, only function, she had discovered that old silk scarves were the perfect way to cinch oversized shirts and dresses to her thin frame. If there was even a slight wind, Algoma was a tornado of fabric and scarves. Dogs barked, children cried.

Unlike her, Algoma’s family had strict clothing requirements. While they would eat anything, and regularly did, they would not wear just anything. Even the boys wouldn’t share the same clothes.

For Gaetan everything had to be one hundred percent cotton: “I need to breathe.”

Leo had required all pants be long enough to roll: “I hate getting wet.”

And now Ferd would only wear his brother’s clothing: “Why shouldn’t I?” His last teacher, the one who had also taught Leo, had been disturbed by the trend and prayed for the moment when he would outgrow the clothes. It’d been like teaching long division to a ghost.

It was dark by the time Algoma arrived home, a low moon visible through the picket fence of trees that lined the street. Looking through the windshield, she’d momentarily mistaken the moon for a streetlamp. She pulled into the driveway, careful to leave enough room between the car and the hedge so she could get out. The lights on the main floor were out, which meant that either no one was home, or someone wanted people to think there was no one home. She got out of the car and fumbled with her house key in the lock. She’d asked Gaetan two times in the last week to replace the burnt out light over the side door, but it remained dead in the socket.

“Use the front door,” he’d said.

“It’s taped up for winter.”

“Oh, yeah.”

Inside, Algoma let her purse slide from her shoulder down to the stiff bristles of the welcome mat. She kicked her boots off, draped her coat over the banister, and tossed her keys into the empty iron birdbath she’d put beside the door specifically for that purpose.

She heard a splash. What now, she thought, but already knew.

The birdbath was filled to its scalloped brim with water. A paper boat floated on the small tap-water lake. She plucked the pulpy ship and stuffed it, still wet, into her skirt pocket. At least he was getting creative.

Gaetan was at work and Ferd was likely writing more notes in the basement. She looked down the stairs at the basement door. It was shut, a thin strip of light at the bottom. She thought about confronting Ferd with the latest note, but didn’t. He’d gone through enough in the past year. She hadn’t seen his breaking point yet, and didn’t want to. She walked upstairs to the kitchen.

“I’m home,” she called out.

“Okay,” Ferd yelled up from the basement. He sounded distracted.

The evening stretched out before Algoma. She willed herself to ignore the breakfast dishes stacked in the sink, the hardened gobs of jam and peanut butter. She made herself a toasted tomato sandwich for dinner and pulled out her favourite deck of cards. The cards were well used, the edge so frayed, they were as soft as thumb-worn cotton. One of her sisters had given her the pack after returning from a trip to Las Vegas five yeas ago. “For luck,” Steel had said. Casino cast-offs with a hole in the middle of each card. She held up the ace of hearts and looked through the punched hole, her world further reduced.

Halfway into her game, the phone rang. Algoma ignored it and focused on her cards. The answering machine picked up and she could hear Cen’s voice. She could wait, Algoma thought, and flipped over another card.

After Leo died, her sisters had called and dropped by unannounced with such regularity she’d wondered if they had created a schedule. It was a rare day that passed without a call or visit from two of her six sisters. They almost always arrived in pairs—twin with twin. To have one over was to have both over. While she longed for solitude, she was grateful for the heavy casseroles they stacked in her fridge and freezers. The casseroles—layered beds of re-purposed leftovers—allowed her to feel as if she was not taking from her sisters, or the world. She was simply living off the oven-hardened edges.

Algoma’s father, Richard, had been a large man who towered over everyone he met. He had the broad shoulders of a boxer and the soft jowls and dark piercing eyes of an aging movie star. When the girls were little, they’d fought over who could sit in his lap and watch Westerns with him, which was all he ever watched.

Repairing refrigerators and air conditioners was Richard’s life calling and it was the only job he’d ever had even though his wife hated air conditioning.

“It’ll rot your lungs out,” she said, when he brought a unit home during an unusually hot summer. She refused to let him install it. “It’ll bring up the electric bill.” The air conditioner sat in a corner in the basement until his eldest daughter took it with her when she moved out.

Richard could fix almost anything. His large hands had a strange grace. Anything could be repaired, he figured, as long as you had the right tools and some time. His wife, Ann, did not fix things as much as she manifested them. She had a way of making everything turn out the way she wanted it to. “If I’m happy, you’re happy” was her favourite saying.

Ann was a plain woman who managed to convince everyone that she was an “unconventional beauty.” Of average height, she had wispy brown hair that she styled strategically to hide her large forehead. It was almost impossible to find a photograph of her taken head on. Her face was always angled, her eyes looking somewhere else, possibly at the life she thought she should have had. The one she deserved.

Between children, Ann worked as a waitress at a restaurant in town that catered to the elderly—soft foods, stews, and soups—although she acted more like a therapist or doctor than a waitress. Over soup and sandwiches, customers told her about their problems and their pains. Ann gave out her advice and diagnoses freely, which the customers readily ate up. She left each shift with her pockets full of tips. There were few things that Ann wasn’t a self-professed expert on, especially on the home front.

Ann let Richard have his way from time to time, allowing him a few big coups a year so she could hold domain the rest of the time over everything from dinner to how often the lawn was cut. There was only one instance in their marriage when Richard put his foot down. The names of their daughters.

While Richard had never been so much as the captain of a rowboat, he was obsessed with the freighters that navigated through the Great Lakes and across the Atlantic Ocean, the self-unloaders and gearless bulk carriers that transported everything from grain and ore to salt and gypsum from port to port. He was so taken by the ships that he named his daughters after freighters in his favourite fleet: Algoma Central Corporation. A photograph of the Algoma black bear on a stack or bow caused his heart to pump like a diesel engine and made his blood run hot.

In the final weeks of Ann’s first pregnancy, when she looked ready to topple over from the sheer size of her belly, she’d begged Richard to consider more traditional names: Rebecca, Jane, or Julie. “Something normal,” she said.

He refused.

“They’ll be a team,” he said. “And we’ll be the captains.”

Richard imagined his future children as empty ships he would send out into the world—across lakes, rivers, and oceans, and through all weather—children who would return to him with riches that would see him through the rest of his life, so that he could stop dreaming of the mille-feuille metal fins of the air conditioners he fixed. The ticking time bombs of failing motors.

And so he named his girls Algocen, Algosteel, Algolake, Algosoo, Algobay, and Algoport. Ann tried to tell people they were family names that had been passed down through the years, but no one believed her.

Richard favoured Algobay the most, likely because her namesake ship was also his favourite. He’d been heartbroken over the freighter’s troubles in those first years after her launching: a collision that resulted in the loss of two lives, running aground the following year after the steering gear failed, and only a year after that a head-on collision with the Montrealais on the St. Clair River. He blamed the ship’s bad luck on the wife of the bank chairman who’d christened the ship, and refused to deal with that bank his entire life. After each minor catastrophe in which the Algobay found itself, Richard would sit Algobay on his lap and ask her if she was okay, holding the confused child tight to his chest, tears in his eyes.

A fleet of girls was born, pair by pair, until the final installment: one singular baby girl, unlike the rest.

Ann’s last pregnancy had surprised even her. When she discovered she was pregnant again, she was sure it was twins. Even when the doctor told her it wasn’t, she left his office to buy two matching sleepers to celebrate. Months later, after the nurse put Algoma into Ann’s arms, Ann asked the doctor for a second opinion. He’d laughed and walked out of the delivery room. “Enjoy your little girl, Mrs. Belanger.” She’d left the hospital with one baby, almost convinced they had forgotten one inside her.

Algoma’s birth had shattered Ann’s theory about herself, and she went into a deep depression that lasted months. Privately, she’d considered herself a Noah-like figure, her destiny to guide pairs of God’s creations into a world where she cut the sandwiches and poured the milk. She wore a pink plastic rosary around her left wrist, a gift from her younger sister who’d been to Jerusalem, and practiced her “Mary smile” in the bathroom mirror.

“God’s willing vessel,” she said to her reflection, and then said it again, trying to look humble.

Publicly, the town wondered what was in the water on the Belanger property. Twins had run in their family since the first Belanger ended up on the continent, but Ann’s numbers were staggering. It was rumoured that women with fertility problems stole onto the property at night to drink water straight from their garden hose. When Ann went to church on Sundays, would-be mothers tried to brush up against her in the aisles. Ann recognized the “accidental” grazings and enjoyed them.

Richard let his seventh and final child go unnamed for an entire month before he settled on a suitable name for what he deemed a very special child, a child who had even defied her mother’s command to be born as a pair.

Algoma.

Not the name of a ship, but the name of the entire fleet.

As the years passed, the girls’ names were shortened to versions that were easier to yell, the unifying prefix dropped: Cen, Steel, Lake, Soo, Bay, and Port.

Algoma, however, remained Algoma.

At the age of sixty-one, Ann died of a heart attack. As she lay on the potato-strewn aisle of the produce section in the grocery store, she used her remaining strength to point at the cardboard bin of stacked grapefruits: “I’ll take two.”

Like a dead man’s switch, the cessation of Ann’s heart caused Richard’s to stop. He fell at the plastic altar of a humidifier he was trying to repair for a neighbour. A thick fog of steam drifted over his body, filling the ravine between his spread legs.

Outside the Church of St. Joseph, the seven sisters escorted their intimate convoy of double-varnished mahogany toward its final harbour.

Years later, each one of Ann and Richard’s girls would document—whether they admitted to it or not—news on their namesake ships. The details were prophecy on how their lives would turn out: which was built to Nova Scotia Class and could weather ice; which had been renamed and sold only to be bought back again; which was on long-term layup; which sold for scrap; which upgraded and lengthened; which could shoulder more and how much; which made it out to sea; which had taken on water, split in half, sunk. Algoma could only watch her sisters for signs of what was to come for herself.

She was still awake when Gaetan stumbled into the house at 4:00 a.m. Blurry with sleep, she was no longer sure of her cards, what needed to be placed where, yet she kept playing. She was sure she was winning. She had to be.