Celia's Song (24 page)

Celia admits to her cousin that she didn't much listen to Stacey in those days. Stacey made her feel tired then. Mostly she daydreamed her way through the conversations. Alice thinks this is funny, but she goes on to remind Celia: “The night was pale. You know how it gets when the clouds stretch themselves into a dull see-through sheet dimming the sky, dulling the moon and the stars but not quite making them disappear, until you aren't sure you really see them or not. Stacey told us then that not singing made her feel tired.”

Celia wakes up. “Yes. I remember that. I remember it just like I am feeling it right now.” Stacey must have known the songs Momma sang. That's why she slipped into them so easily. “She is an old skunk,” Celia decides. “Why didn't I know those songs?” Her blood starts to run hot.

“Fish,” Alice answers. “Fish.”

“Fish?”

“Yeah; someone cast a net and Stacey got caught and you didn't.” Celia looks at Alice, goes blank, and pushes out a chuckle, holds it
in, then laughs and cries all at the same time. When Celia is done, Alice shoves a plate of berry pie forward. Politely, Celia tastes the pie, shakes her head, and pushes it back. Alice thinks this is different, but she lets it go. They sit together, remembering one thing after another until dawn's light accuses them of wanting to sleep in. Then they part.

Alice watches Celia trundle down the drive, still trying to figure out why Celia ate just a small bite of that pie then left it. That's when she thinks she sees it: Celia's hips aren't taking up so much space. She wonders if Celia is trying to lose weight.

On the way home, Celia remembers the pie, the song, the lights, and the memories she and Alice had played with. She smiles at the rising of the sun. Alice had looked at her funny when she didn't finish the pie. Likely thinks I am on a diet or chasing some man, she thinks, and laughs. It wasn't either of those things. After seeing that child's hunger, she cannot bear to eat so much anymore. It just feels wrong.

XX

CELIA MISSES JACOB. SHE
wants to show him her poem. She has reworked it in calligraphy, trimmed the edges of the paper with flowers, and hung it on the wall. She has cleaned the house and is waiting for him to come back. She had heard Jim tell Ned he believed Jacob was up on the mountain, trying to figure out something about something. Jim found that amusing, like wanting to know something about something was the damnedest, most ridiculously wonderful thing a man could want. She recalls Jim hiking up the mountain and being gone for days. She had asked Gramma if she could too.

“Of course you can. That's why you don't have to,” was all she'd said.

Celia looks at her poem and thinks she understands what Gramma meant. She runs around the house, tossing chocolates into the garbage. If that child could fight so hard for life on an empty stomach Celia figures she can go on living without all this chocolate. She makes plans to tell Jacob all that has happened to her as soon as she's cleaned her house and found just the right words. Then the phone rings.

“Miss Celia James?”

“Yes?”

“You don't remember me, do you?” Yes, she does. She remembers his voice and everything about him. She could not forget, but she does not want to admit it, not yet. She wants him to work for it. “Who is this?”

“It's Alex. Do you remember me now?”

“Alex who?” Celia teases her words out slow and easy, hoping they urge him to stay on the line; at the same time, she purses her lips together and thinks, How dare he imagine that I would have forgotten him?

“Ah. You're breaking my heart, girl. Twenty years ago, I was at the North American Indian Brotherhood Conference and you were there with your sister Stacey and your dad.”

How could he possibly imagine that she does not remember? Alfred Hope Junior had been on the agenda of the Conference. She had gone with Stacey and Ned. Alfred was some sort of distant relative and he was about to take his case to the
BC
Supreme Court. They went to raise money for him. Alex had been one of
the young organizers for the Brotherhood. He talked her into staying in his room with him. He was smooth as glass and his voice was buttery sweet and full of promise. She had no way of knowing that he didn't mean much of anything he said.

“Oh, right. You were sent to torment me. I remember now.” They exchange silences, and then he tells her he is organizing a women's conference.

“That makes sense, the women organized the chief's conference, the least you men could do is organize one for us. But isn't that some kind of an oxymoron — organized men?”

Celia still has a good bite to her sense of humour, he thinks. He remembers that he had promised her he would call her and hadn't.

“You must think I'm a lying sonofabitch.”

“No.” She pauses to let it sink in. “To call you a sonofabitch, I would have to call your mother a dog. I have no ill thoughts about your mother at all. I wouldn't have called her a bitch for all the
berries on our entire mountain range. I blamed you.”

He stays quiet for a minute. “Celia. I was walking down the street yesterday, watching the flowers bloom, and I thought about you.”

“Why are you really calling me?” She suddenly wants off the phone. Not enough to hang up, just enough to hurry him along.

He considers saying it is his job to call every woman he knows. It is the sort of honest little fact that cowards rely on to cover the truth. He doesn't wish to be a coward anymore, so he tells her the truth. He had been completely taken with her, but he hadn't been ready for a family. He busied himself with a career. When he was ready to talk to her, he told himself it had been too long. Celia was likely married. So he married. It had taken ten years for the woman to realize she was doing all the loving in the relationship. She had asked for a divorce. He acknowledged that if he had not been asked to call every woman he knew, he would not be on the phone admitting to Celia that he had been a cad two decades ago.

“I realize that I've missed you all these years.” Even to him it sounds false. How could he miss her after spending one weekend with her? But he has. He'd searched for something more intelligent
and persuasive to say, but couldn't find the words. He hated this language. There were so many ways to say “pass the peas” and no believable way to express his missing Celia and his not calling.

“How am I supposed to tell the difference between this story and the other one?”

“You won't know unless you try me out.”

“You give me your number and I will roll this around for a while, then I'll call you.”

“You're a tough woman, Celia.”

“Men like you force me to be.”

Now what? He doesn't know that she had had a son for nineteen years; that his son was raised by a stepfather who left when he was six years old. She had made the stepfather come back to build the coffin. This stepfather, this husband who had never bothered to divorce her, who had withheld his own feelings, had buried this man's son. He had called her, twenty years ago, before the Conference. She hadn't turned him down, but she wasn't convinced she wanted to spend her life with him. They were dating. The Conference interrupted. After it became clear to Celia that Alex was not going to call, she had taken up with him again. When she realized she was pregnant, she told Jimmy's stepfather. He wanted to do the right thing.

When Jimmy reached three years of age, it became clear that he looked neither like Celia nor her husband. Her husband stayed as long as he could bear the humiliation and until Celia's assurances that Jimmy was his son wore thin. Finally, she told him the truth. He met someone new and left. He came back to bury her boy because he felt guilty about leaving his wife and his stepson,
but not because he loved them. Now this man she had loved so instantly, so completely, was back.

She hadn't told anyone but her husband about the child's real father. She had been dating this man both before and after the Conference, so there was no reason for them to doubt the parentage of the child. They would not have said anything anyway. It didn't matter. Jimmy was Celia's son and that made him Momma's grandson and Stacey's nephew. He had his own place in the life of the family, free of his parents' identity.

Celia lights a candle. She watches it burn and then she goes to her bedroom and leafs through an old box of papers. She finds an instant photo of herself and Alex at the bus depot right after that first night. In the picture, she is smiling bigger than that damn mountain. She holds the picture and her tears roll out. Where were you all this time? I was so fucking young. I needed your love then. I needed the kind of attention that belongs to youth. I wanted to feel so pretty, so sweet, and so treasured. I wanted us to be there together, holding our child, walking him, rocking him, and then loving one another the way we did that first time. Damn you. You have no idea how much I have tried to hate you. The hum begins. It fills her ears, the room, the house. It is a magnificent hum. It licks at her skin, warms it as it makes its way to her softening lips. It crackles and burns as it travels down her throat; it warms her belly.

HE WAS STANDING THERE
, legs apart, so handsome and so male; his body angled slightly, one hand adjusting blue jeans, the other stroking hair like he was getting ready for her. He was elegant, graceful, and light-footed. He was talking to someone else. He
turned to look and saw her. He touched the arm of the man he was speaking to, wrapped up the conversation. He headed Celia's way. His eyes wandered subtly across the litheness of her body as he walked toward her. The room came alive. He put out his hand and introduced himself as the primary organizer of the Conference.

I do not want to remember you, she thinks. I never wanted to remember this and now I will never be permitted to forget. You bastard. I feel myself opening up, skin screaming for your touch. She sinks into her bed and pleads for sanity.

The phone rings. What disaster now? Celia rolls off her bed.

“It's me again.”

“Who's ‘me'?” Her voice is curt.

“Come on. I called you not an hour ago. Your memory can't be that bad.”

“What can I do for you?”

“I'd like to visit.”

“On Saturday?” she asks.

He feigns a laugh.

Celia does not respond.

“Come on, Celia, please. I want to apologize in person.”

Celia looks at the picture of her son on the wall. Their son.

“You come on by. Wear a nice black suit. I have something special to show you.”

She commits herself to walking down a dark hallway with Jacob, even before she hears Alex's grateful goodbye. She hatches a terrible, awesome plan. She thinks it will mean brightening Alex's path when she first says it to herself; but now she realizes it will mean sharing her darkness with him. It would be cheating not to. He may be the only who can help her.

Celia bites into the cold northern end of her breath. She thinks it might be nice in a serves-him-right kind of way to introduce him to his son. She gets her things ready and trots over to Momma's house. It's high time she tell her family the truth. Before she leaves her house, Celia calls the old man from up Boston Bar way, who will do a proper burning for her boy now that his father is coming home.

HER FAMILY GATHERS AND
listens to Celia's story. She leaves nothing out. She had slept with Alex. She had become pregnant. He did not come by. She phoned him twice on someone else's phone using her savings from berry picking to pay for the call.

“He promised to come, but he didn't. All those years my son wondered why his daddy didn't like him — his stepdaddy, really. In the beginning he was too young to know Melvin was not his
daddy. In the end, I didn't have the courage to tell him. Melvin told him in a drunken fit one night. He told me in the last month he was alive that Melvin had told him about his father. Then he killed himself. I so wanted to kill Melvin. Now his daddy calls and wants to see me like nothing happened.” She looks at Momma and says, “That's when I stopped drawing, Momma. When Alex didn't come by. It had nothing to do with you.”

She hands her mother the folder of her childhood paintings. Momma gasps. She picks up the folder, then drops it as if it is too heavy with paintings. She fondles the outside of the folder. Finally, she opens it. Inside is a record of Celia's view of many significant moments of this family's life. On one page, there are wisps of paint suspended, two human shapes wrapped around one another. In the background are fire colours. Only the face of the woman seems real. Momma sees herself. The faceless man is Ned — she can tell by the body. Their love is a rainbow of pastel against fire colours. She likes it. The next painting is of Stacey and Momma standing on the bridge, arms locked together. The sun lights up every detail of the shrubs, the aging wood of the bridge, and their skirts. The last picture is from the point of view of the window in Gramma's house. It's of Momma and Celia strolling toward it, arm in arm. Celia looks so lonely through Gramma's window.

Momma weeps. She sees what she has not been able to see until now. Celia has always yearned for her, for Stacey, for the family that had forsaken her.

“You were lonely, lonely for your momma. Sometimes a child lonely for her momma grows up too soon; she thinks giving her momma a gift like Jimmy will close the gap between them. It wasn't your fault, baby.”

Celia does not want to think about this right now; the emotions circling her mother's words might deter her from carrying out the decision she made this morning. She is considering telling her this when Momma hands the pictures to Stacey, jumps up, and runs into the kitchen. She comes back with clear plastic shelving paper, sticky on one side, and a pair of scissors. Stacey runs for another pair as soon as she sees the first painting. They let Celia go on while they cut up the shelf paper and laminate the paintings so they will keep forever.

Celia has kept the grisly pictures of her dead son; she keeps them in a box and now she holds that box on her lap. She wants to weep, she says, not for the loss of her son, but because this man could take her, promise himself to her, and then just walk away, not even calling to see if there was a child.

Now he wants to look her up as if twenty years haven't elapsed.

Celia tells them she called an old man from up the river to do a burning for her boy. She means to burn these pictures, but not until his father has seen them. She passes the photo album around. They are full of police photos of Jimmy's suicide. Jimmy, blue and breathless, rope marks circling his neck, face twisted. A closeup of Jimmy's face as he hangs from the rope. Another, taken from a distance, the shed behind looking sombre, nearly evil. Jimmy looks like he is being swallowed by the shed instead of hanging from the rafters.

Underneath these photos are his baby pictures, toddler pictures, and school pictures, all happy and sweet. Under these pictures are pictures of Momma and Jim holding Jimmy. Beneath that is Ned, Jim, and Jimmy with Stacey holding Jacob. There are pictures of Celia's son waving to his aunt Stacey as Celia pushes him on the swings Ned had built in the yard for his grandsons. There are pictures of his first bike ride, his first baseball game, his first soccer game; pictures of him trying out his hand at pulling a dugout. Birthday
party pictures. Momma weeps as she views the life of her grandson.