Celia's Song (18 page)

It didn't matter. She was awake, wide awake. She paced, hunting around the shack for something to put her to sleep. This awake was so strange and unfamiliar, it seemed to hang outside her, in the air, on her skin, then it was in her mouth; at some point she swallowed it. She didn't like it. Awake she saw things differently; she felt things she did not want to feel. Awake she remembered things in crazy fits and starts; she remembered the hillsides before she was tormented by that old snake. She remembered her mom's words, “Fucking bitch, what have you done?” She remembered Celia and some other blurs and some crazy kind of unnameable feeling they brought with them.

Memory forced her to know things
.

She was wrong. She knew she was wrong. She didn't know if she was mis-wired or something, but she was definitely wrong. This shack, this life, this dirt, this child, this torture, this hunger — it was all wrong. Everything about it was wrong. This blur was wrong. She sat in her filthy chair and slept again, musing on her wrongness.

Memory moved her to dream.

Gramma was sitting at the edge of the river, her tiny feet dangling in the swift water, angling her legs out from her knees. Stella sat next to her. She told her gramma her legs looked funny. Gramma did not share the same definition of funny with her granddaughter because she had laughed as though Stella had told a joke when she had meant her legs looked odd. It didn't matter though, it felt good to be sitting there, feet being pulled by the river's current, the soft west coast sun kissing her skin and the warmth rolling around in her mind slow and sure. Gramma pointed upward to the top of the mountain at the edge of sky and Stella saw a goat with big horns. That goat crawled up that mountain sweet and easy. Stella wanted
to be him for just a moment. He was balanced at the edge of a stone face, fearless about climbing, sure he was going to make it; he skittered toward the top of the mountain.

“Where is he going?” the child asked, still squinting into the bright sunlight to follow the goat picking its way up the mountain's face.

“Home,” her gramma said.

“Where has he been?”

“Why, he came down to leave his hair on the thorn bushes, devil's club, so we could pick it and spin it up.”

“What's spin?”

“That's when you twist up the fur of the goat so it makes a yarn like wool.” Gramma pointed at her sweater.

“Do you know how to do that?”

“Sure do.”

“Do you use his hair to make wool?”

“No, not anymore.”

“How come you don't go get his hair and spin it?”

“I spin sheep hair now. We aren't supposed to spin that goat without dog hair. The white man killed our dogs, but he never told the goat, so the goat still comes on down anyway to leave it behind.”

“How come we don't just spin it anyway?”

“Because it would be wrong, we made a deal and it would be wrong to break it.”

“Why does he still do it then?”

“Because he loves us, child, he is like us. When we love we scale mountains for our loved ones. When we don't love, we wallow in the shit on the valley floor.” With that, Gramma had laughed long and hard.

Stella woke up in a sweat. She did not like her dream. She tried to forget it, to bury it, but the damn thing just sat there squarely in the centre of her mind and nagged. She stumbled around, looking for something to help her forget, then remembered she didn't have anything. She lay down again, tried to sleep, but it wouldn't come.
The sheets on the bed she was lying in smelled of stale beer and sour soap and it bothered her so much it kept her from sleeping. She tried to convince herself she had not been bothered by it before and so she should not let it bother her now, but the smell kept reminding her of her dream. When she thought of the dream, the aroma of the river and the plants edging it sneaked up behind her; they competed with the smell of her bed. Her body started to feel something she did not want it to feel. She got up with a string of curses and tore the sheets off the bed and threw them onto the floor. She lay down on the bare mattress. This didn't help; the mattress smelled worse than the sheets.

“Shit.” She grabbed the sheets and looked around the room. Her hands shook. The DTs were coming. “Shit, not now. Not now.” She sank into a rickety chair next to the bed. The floor moved with the hallucinations. Remnants of her filthy past came back to life. Her shoes bounced off her feet and onto the floor by themselves. They did a little jig; the tops looked like faces that were laughing at her. She threw the sheet at them and hollered for her child. Silence. Where was the damn little shit? Stella crawled on the floor toward where she had last seen the child tied up. She finally found her thongs where they lay on the floor and, like the shoes, they grinned at her, teased her. This made her body shake; she was near to convulsions.

“I'll kill you when I find you, you little bitch.” She shook so violently she could no longer crawl. Her skin burned, itched, strained to get loose of her shaking flesh. The room continued to move; it swayed stupidly. She swore at it, grabbed objects and threw them at the walls, cursing and shaking by turns. “I need a fucking drink.” That was when the door opened. She saw three men. She lifted up her skirt, spread her legs and whimpered, “Please, a drink.”

One of them handed her the lip of a bottle. They looked so familiar, but the blur was too thick and she shook so violently she could not get a bead on their faces and so could not determine who they were. Another of the men pulled her to a sitting position while he rearranged her skirt. The bottle pulled away from her mouth with a popping sound, its froth bubbling up as it left her lips. She reached for it. “Not yet, you let that settle a minute first.” She went to lift her skirt. The one on the left said, “No way,” and she thought he wanted it the other way so she flipped herself onto all fours and offered them her backside, holding her skirt around her waist. One of them slapped her behind and told her to sit up right. “You want it rough, hon. I don't mind. Just give me another drink.” The shaking grew more intense.

She sat on the floor legs wide open, hair matted and hanging in front of her face, lips drooling, last night's madness interrupting today, while she waited for the roughness these men had in mind. They gave her another drink. The shakes subsided.

“Another one,” she whimpered. “Don't be cruel.” She started to sing some old song the young man did not recognize. The old one told him what it was. Stella felt the familiarity in the tones and the rhythm of the voices, but she couldn't drag hard enough on her memory to identify them. One of them offered her a hand. She got up on her knees and started to fiddle with his belt buckle saying, “This you want. Give me another drink.” He smacked her hands. She sat back down and whimpered.

“Get those lamps going?” This was such a foreign request for her usual company. Stella grew afraid. These men did not want anything she offered and they meant to watch her and hold on to their beer. What were they here for? Who were they?

“This is Ned, Stella.” It came out hard and sharp. It sliced at her stupor cutting away the blurry veil, leaving only the pain of her skin again. The shakes that had almost settled down returned after he finished telling her why he was there. “You are going to sober up, Stella. We are going to watch every painful minute while you do that. Then, when you are good and sober and not shaking, you are going to tell us just exactly what happened to your child.” She looked around. Where was that child? Then she passed out.

JACOB DOES NOT WANT
to watch the child back at the house. He wants to be here when they talk about it with Momma. He asks to come. Now, seeing Stella vibrate in the haunting backlight of the bright lamps that fail to fill the room with light, he isn't sure he can watch this. This relieves him. He had been afraid he was mean, like the old snake, but now he feels that he was on some other trail. He looks out on the mountain her window faces and sees trails of berries hanging plump and ripe and he wants, for some strange reason, to leave this woman and go pick them. He does not want to watch.

Jim motions his nephew outside. “Those are our mountains,” he says, pointing. He lights a smoke. They stare at the mountains wordlessly. Jim tells Jacob that he had climbed these mountains and stayed up there in their dark for four days as a teenager.
Jacob wants to know why. This surprises Jim, but he tells him. “So I could know what I was about.” He wonders if the other nephew, the one who killed himself, had climbed the same mountains.

“How come everyone who has ever done anything Indigenous talks in riddles?” Jacob asks. He throws his cigarette to the ground, crushing it out almost at the moment the butt lands. Jim laughs and waits a minute before he answers. “You can only know what our stuff is all about if you do it, that's why.” He turns to go inside. Jacob tells Jim he doesn't think he can watch after all. Jim says he would be able to, if he had climbed Cheam Mountain. Jim leaves Jacob sitting on the half-rotted-out stoop, pouting. He rejoins his father inside.

Ned's anger is a hot rock rolling relentlessly; it sears everything he thinks about. This is his clanswoman. She has no right to be this way. It outrages him to see what she let happen to her child — his blood, his great-niece. He is determined to will his rage along a path to sober Stella up, exactly as the women in his house instructed him. Every indignant thought diminishes his empathy for Stella and every time he feels a soft feeling for her coming up, he stokes the fire of his rage and sends it flying in the direction of his spirit. This cools his empathy. He is not ready to empathize with her.

Jim watches his father, making sure he is successful at keeping the
woman on the path to sobriety. He is not the conductor of this ceremony, so he can let his sympathy rise. He locks it to his voice. His uncle seethes at Stella when she tries to throw fits, but Jim calms and soothes her when she cries. When she quits crying, she appeals to Jim, who gently tells her that she is talking to the wrong man. Ned is in charge. This sends her into a frenzy, crawling around in half circles for minutes, letting go curse words some of which Jim has never heard. When she settles, she lies down and shakes. If the shaking becomes too severe, Ned will give her another pull on a beer.

Jacob sits on the stoop, stewing over what he saw or did not see. When he was down at the old shack he had thought he was seeing what was happening and not imagining it. But when he went to tell his uncle and his grandfather, he wasn't sure. If he'd actually seen it, then was he not as perverse as he had originally feared? If he imagined it, then is he no different than the men who did this? He stares at the skirt edges of their mountains. Cheam is at the end of the valley; her seven peaks jut higher than the rest. The old folks talk about a screaming woman inside the hills. Between what Jim
said and Jacob's curiosity over the screaming woman, he is driven from the stoop and toward the base of the tallest mountain.

XVI

STELLA CURSES, SWEARS, WEEPS
, crawls, shakes her way to some semblance of sobriety. It takes two and a half days, during which time Jim makes tea, cooks, and cleans what will need to be clean for him to feed her, but not a dish or pot more. There are two boxes of Kraft Dinner. They will do. Jim eats a bite directly out of the pot, offers Stella some. She takes a bite, heaves it up. Jim cleans it up with ashes from her stove and determines that only tea will work here. The first time he offers the tea Stella takes a good pull, then she spits it out all over him and curses. He takes her hand and gives it a good whack, as if she were a naughty child. This infuriates her. She leaps for his throat. He dodges her. She goes sprawling across the floor.

Ned picks her up and sits her down.

“You're strong enough to want to whale on Jim, then you're strong enough to tell us what happened to your child.”

Stella takes a slow look around the room and wonders where her child is. Her mind grabs fogged-up pictures of pokers, a man, her mother trying to strangle her, and some force that keeps grabbing at her ferocious mother and stopping her. The pictures waltz around her mind, disordered and deranged. She cannot seem to
sort them. The dream of her grandmother flies at her through the fog and she starts recounting it like some crazy woman.

“She said the goat loved us. How can a goat love us? She was sitting with me on that rock. We could see that goat. High up on the mountain …”

Ned looks at Jim, whose head is tilted with his left ear to her.

“That your gramma sitting on the rock with you?”

“Yes,” she says slowly. “The water felt so good and my feet were so small. Gramma, she said that mountain goat climbed down and then up because he loved us. She said he was like us. How come I am not like us, Gramma?” Stella sinks into the chair and drifts back into her gramma's night world.

Ned stares at her.

“You nap, Pop. I'll wake you when she comes out of it,” Jim offers. “I'll catch some winks myself then.”

Ned takes a look around and decides to nap in his car. He can't bear sleeping in this hellhole. “How did she get to this?” he asks no one as he staggers out the door.

Jim shrugs and settles into looking out the window toward the hills. He never wonders about anything. He remembers when he has moments like this; he remembers things that take his mind off worrying about the present.

HIS MIND WANDERS ACROSS
the old yard. He hears Stacey's bare feet scampering in his direction. Must be suppertime, he tells himself, and gathers up his tools to put them away before going in to wash up. She looks at the neat little piles of nuts, bolts, and gears and asks him what he's doing. “Putting my hub back together, the gear inside is stripped. Got to replace it.” He shows her the piece he is talking about and puts it back on the paper in the same place he picked it up from.

“Why is it stripped?” she asks.

“Don't know,” he answers simply. At dinner, she pushes her fish around on her plate, looking quizzically at him. When she asks him why he never wonders about anything, he answers, “Doesn't help. Something breaks, you fix it. You don't need to know why anything happens. You only need to know what to do is all.”

“You got that right,” his grandpa says.

“But if you know the why of things, couldn't you prevent them from happening?” she asks.

“For a while,” Jim answers without any concern for the paradox in his point of view. “But someone else more curious will have to figure that out.” He laughs in that self-satisfied kind of way that marks who he is and will always be. Stacey looks disconcerted, so Gramma explains to her that Jim is a man. She says it under her breath, so Jim cannot hear her. It appeases Stacey's misgivings enough for her to accept Jim's response. Jim looks at
the picture of his family, sees Grandpa's diminishing mind, Gramma's diminishing health, and Momma's increasing fatigue; he wonders about none of it. In his mind, if Grandpa gets stupid, someone will act as his guide; if Gramma dies, Momma will rise to the occasion; if she gets too tired, she won't. The sun will rise and set, chores will need to be done, things will break, and he will have to fix them.

He and Stacey are on the stoop later that night, his bike is fixed and Jim is fed and content. She asks him where he found the part. He tells her he rummaged around the dump for it. “Doesn't it bother you?” she asks.

“Not if I don't wonder about it. You going to make me wonder about it?”

“I don't understand how you can go rummaging around in the dump and not wonder how come Mom and Pop work so hard and still can't afford to buy you a bike part.”

“Wouldn't help to wonder,” he says flatly. “It wouldn't get them any more money. It would hurt like hell to let myself go there. If I wondered about it, instead of going to get it, I may not want to rummage around in the dump and then all I would be left with is a broken bike and a bruised ego.”

“And you need your bike,” she finishes for him, unconvinced but resigned to Jim's way of seeing things.

Jim knows she will never stop wondering about things. Wondering is a gamble. So is climbing that mountain. Stacey gambles on wondering and Jim decides to gamble on that mountain. “No sense
wondering” is an instruction for himself, not Stacey. He is going to fix what he can and let the rest take care of itself. He likes that Stacey wonders, but the danger is that she might never figure it out, might never solve the riddle. If she does figure it out, the next generation may not have to rummage around in the dump. That would be all right too.

He told her so on that stoop so long ago.

STELLA SLEEPS FITFULLY, CURSING
in her sleep. Jim looks at her when she stirs. Jim has spent his life translating the words of others into action. He has always seemed to be able to figure out what to do to make something work, how to get people to back up, back off, or turn around. The trick is to get Stella going in a different direction, away from this hovel and the men who have demeaned her and tortured her child. He does not need to know the why of how she got to this low point. He's sure he doesn't want to know, it will anger him and he'll be fired up about what she did or didn't do or what happened to her or didn't happen. Jim knows he can't do anything about that. The past is over; the present is already dying. His knowing what happened to her in the past will not help her stay away from the road she's travelling. The future is what counts.

Humans are going somewhere all the time. Every act, every moment, is leading them somewhere whether they know it or not. The trick is to make sure their actions help them to go in a good direction. Jim knows this. Everyone leaves behind tracks showing the way that led them to wherever they are; “breadcrumb trails,” he calls them. Stella will wake up eventually and show him her breadcrumb trail, and it will mark the way out. All he has to do is recognize that first little crumb, get her talking, and get her to follow the next crumb and the next crumb until she finds her way out.

Stella stirs again. Jim sits up, ready for another round of cursing, crawling, fighting, and shaking. He decides to deal with it before waking Ned up. The smell of the place is starting to bite his nerves. Stella must not have ever completely cleaned the place up. He decides to make her clean it up as soon as she is fully awake. Might help her to sober up.
Meanwhile he grabs a branch of cedar from outside, builds a fire in the stove, and tosses the branch on top of the hot stove. It masks the stench.

Stella's eyes open. She thinks she recognizes this man.

“Jim?” she asks.

“Right here,” he answers.

She almost brightens for a minute at the thought that she has dragged his name up from some clear place of memory. Something about her is right. Then she looks around.

“Shit.”

“That's right, Stella, and now you have to clean it.” He calls her by her name. The men who cross her path rarely call her by her name. She waits for him to plead with her, to prod her or threaten her, but he doesn't. He leans against the windowsill and stares at her. The hard edge in his eyes commits her to cleaning. She waits for him to help. Her mother always helps. Standing motionless, Jim's eyes bore holes in her. In front of him is that damn beer they will only let her have in tormenting little sips before they pull it away. She saunters over, sultry and coy. His eyes narrow. He grabs the neck of the bottle without taking his eyes off her. She stops. He looks capable of murder. The anger of the other men wasn't wilful; it had no decision attached to it like this man's anger does. Jim has decided she is going to clean up the place. He pushes anger into his decision. She sees it and relents.

The sunlight shakes the shadows out of shadowland, it transforms wet moss into dry tinder and opens up wounds to filth. Right now the light Jim has fired up shines on the mess Stella's home has
become. She can't think of a way to contemplate it. The light burns her eyes and frightens her. It wakes something up in her she cannot name. Jim is neat and trim in the shadow, wearing this smug I-know-what-I'm-doing kind of look. It comes at her from the half-light just beyond the lamp's range. She wants to hide. She tries to bolt. Her body will not move. His eyes hold her, will not let go of her. She can see his eyes pinning her to this place, this moment, this spot. She gives up the idea of bolting. This frees her to move. Best just to clean up like he wants.

Stella moves gingerly at first, trying to figure out what cleaning up is all about. She picks up bits and pieces of something in her rubble-filled home and stares at each item, confounded. The need to decide what to do with each piece floods her addled brain and taxes it to distraction. She looks about. There are so many things all over the place, on the floor, on the sorry excuse for a table, on the bed. Each one screams for her to decide where it should go. There are so many decisions to make. What is this? Where was it before it was on the floor? Who owns it? Where does it go?
Where does it live? She picks up a sock, tries to recognize it, tries to trace its origin, some foot belonging to somebody whose name should roll easily off the tongue, but which refuses. She cannot remember. She looks around the room, trying to find some place for it, her head shaking from side to side like an old blind bear. Unable to find a place, she puts the sock back on the floor where she found it. Item after item, the process repeats itself.

Jim watches. After an hour or so, he hands her something to drink. It isn't what she wants, but she has no fight left. She drinks it in one pull. It's hot. She doesn't seem to feel the heat sufficiently to register pain or to slow the pull she took from the cup until it is too late. It burns her lips, tongue, and throat. She goes back to the rubble and tries to put it in some kind of context that will tell her how to order it. She looks at herself. Her dress is filthy. She looks for something clean. There is not a clean garment in the place. She looks at Jim, and says she's sorry. She sits down and cries. Her voice is so loud it wakes Ned. He stumbles in.

“My dress is so dirty.”

Ned wants to slap her. Jim sees this and puts up his hand. The dress is the first breadcrumb. He does not want Ned to pull it out of her path, hooked as it is to the journey away from this mud hole. Ned knows what Jim's hand means and backs off.

“What do you want to do about it?” Jim asks.

“I have to clean it,” she says in the small voice of a child.

“Go ahead,” he says. “Clean it.”

She looks at them both. “Could you …?”

Jim turns around. Ned wants to spit. It's ludicrous, this sudden modesty coming from someone who has lived worse than an animal. But he turns too. They hear her fill a bucket with water and wash the dress. She dumps the dirty water and replaces it with clean. She examines the dress and puts it back in the bucket.

“I have no soap,” she weeps.

“I'll get you some.” Ned is fighting for civility.

She kneels, staring at the dirty dress in the bucket for a long time, like she's trying to remember how it got this dirty.

Ned returns with soap. He hands it to her, careful to avert his eyes; but by now the notion of modesty has vanished in the
woman. She washes her dress and wrings it out. She puts it on still wet.

“Do you want us to dry that next door?” Ned asks.

“No. It will keep me cool. I'm so warm,” she sighs. She goes about the room, discovering things again. She decides to clean every dirty thing she finds. She finds a little shirt-and-skirt covered in blood and puts it in the bucket of soapy water. She picks up socks and finds another empty bucket to put them in.

“I have a lot of empty buckets.” She gives a half-embarrassed laugh.

“That you do,” Jim answers, smiling back at her as if she were the most delightful company he'd stumbled across in a long time. Ned wonders how Jim got to be this way. How could he look at all this, see that child, then warm up to the woman who set in motion her terrible suffering? “You get it washed and I will fix you
up a clothesline outside.”