House of Spells (10 page)

One night we were sitting below the prow, a little raised platform in the theatre where the sawmill crew usually sat. Michael Guzzo had come in. My mother was asleep and I watched him take short steps down the aisle, feeling his way in the blinding screen light, turning to look over us. He smelled of cedar sawdust, and the sawmill crew called out as he went past,

Keep your head down, Guzzo, we can’t see!

Where’s Rose?

Is she here?

He raised an embarrassed hand to brush away their laughter and to shield his eyes.

Yes, she was here somewhere.

They were showing
North by Northwest
and in the light of Mount Rushmore’s face and Cary Grant’s frantic running, I saw Rose reach up to take his hand and I heard her whisper:

It’s you!

She took his hand to draw him down, and he put an arm around her to muss her hair.

I felt jealous then, watching how they sat so close together, and I wondered whether a boy would ever hold me like that.

How did he go from her life?

That winter he was only in town to earn money to travel. His uncle, almost blind and no longer able to work, had bought an interest in the Odin Mill. They had hired him as a family obligation, though he turned out to be a good worker, reliable, and even when they were cutting edge grain cedar for the Vancouver boatyards, he showed up for work, forearms bandaged because the oil in the dust raised welts on his skin.

Rose told me that he’d left to travel in Central America before she even knew she was pregnant.

The mill was going to shut down because of the coming snows, and he couldn’t see sitting out the winter idle. He promised her that he’d be back in the spring, when the boss said they’d be rehiring.

Why are you going, Rose had asked him. They were sitting together on the narrow, cushioned seat by the linoleum table in his trailer on the Palliser, and she’d drawn away to look at him carefully.

She could see that this wasn’t the whole truth. There was a sadness in him that she couldn’t touch or hold or lessen, and it confused her.

He told her that he’d been drifting since his family had lost their land, their village, that he couldn’t find a place to settle down in.

But you are coming back?

Yes, he reassured her.

There was a lake in Central America he wanted to see, in a volcanic crater where the Maya said clouds were born. Once in the Grizzly Bookstore he’d shown me a photo of it: there was a lone fisherman on a shore of pumice stones; bundles of sticks with ribbons tied to them showed against the water, and the sides of the crater, covered in pines, rose steeply all around. He had found this photo in a book at the back of the store, among the secondhand volumes he called train books.

What’s so special about a lake? I asked him.

He closed the book then, touched its cover, a childlike, fragile look in his eyes that I felt drawn to.

Who knows what I’ll find there? he said with a smile.

A sacred lake that he wanted to see. Have you ever felt that, amazed at what people do? That the wanting was enough for him to go? What are “wants”? And do they really matter that much, “I want this” and “I want that” and therefore I shall go? Doesn’t it get a bit tiring after a while, wanting things? Don’t you get worn out? What if you didn’t want anything at all, what would happen to you then?

14

This morning I weeded the herb beds, painted the outhouse.
I got a call from a lookout in the Asher Valley and went
out on the catwalk to watch a narrow, boiling mass of
clouds send bolts, some of them visible for seconds, into
the ridge at my feet. I could hear the electricity zinging
around the aluminum eavestroughs, crackling and sparking.
Curtains of virga swept across Leon Creek.

Because maybe the cabin would be hit by lightning
I knelt trembling on a stool with glass insulators in the
bottom of the legs. Helicopters were in the air to the south,
tracking three fires that I’d spotted. Every time I finished
taking a bearing from the fire finder I’d look up to see
another tree explode into flames before I could finish filling
out the last message.

Later this evening, the unmistakable smell of wood
smoke. I sat up in bed to look north and made out in
moonlight a column rising straight up, thick with burning
fir or pine pitch.

Because it was night, no one could be flown in to that
fire in the Bremmer Valley. The road in was switchbacks
through canyons, so it would take three or four hours to
drive to the scene. High, strong winds, I write in the log
book.

In the Bremmer Valley, there’s a wet hollow of alder
saplings. I don’t know how they got in there. The valley is
narrow and dark and only gets a couple of afternoon hours
of light. A raw wind must have carried in alder seeds, all
at once, so that a field of them grew young and springy,
their trunks no thicker than my thumb. Someone had tried
to farm in there once, leaving only a fence line of rotten
cedar posts grassed over, a scattering of lichen-covered apple
trees that looked crouched and huddled in themselves, like
cats moved into a new house, and a hollow for a root cellar.

A few weeks before Senna was born, I walked from
the fire tower to the Bremmer Valley, to lay out an armful
of alder saplings to dry in the field among the apple trees,
shaking the soppy earth that was full of shale from their
roots. A week later I took in a saw to cut off the root
balls and I stripped the canes of withered leaves, carried
them back to the cabin to weave into a crib. I wasn’t
sure it would ever be used but I wanted it just in case
Rose needed me to take him. I’d offered to help her and I
wanted to be sure I could. I laid in towels for bedding in
a frilled pillowcase and tied to the side a mobile of painted
pinecones that I knew would make her laugh, so that he’d
have something to look at. I even made rockers out of bent
saplings tied with fishing line and I placed it under the
north window and moved my little collection of books to
the east sill. Those were warm days, maybe the last of the
season, and the fireweed was in second bloom along the
Palliser Ridge. When I sat out on the catwalk for hours,
it felt like midsummer and I could smell the heat in the
cedar siding, waiting.

Whole days and nights went by, billowed in time, and
I didn’t know what was happening to her.

Now I see headlights on the dust roads, crews driving
in to take out weekend campers and river runners. By
now the fire is in the pine and fir, trees torching off like
matchsticks on the slopes of Bremmer Mountain. Burning
debris tumbles and ignites more fires across the Palliser
Ridge.

Later this morning a cold front is supposed to move in,
bringing sleet and rain.

15

When I had a few days off, a month or so after we returned on the train, I went down from the fire tower to see Rose in her new apartment and to serve at the parish supper. It was hard to see her, after her decision to return. She always looked tired, as if she wasn’t sleeping well, worn and quiet.

Though she had her own place now, though she was still in our village, every day she grew more distant, more unreachable.

Yet when I asked her how she was, she’d say, Fine! and look at me defiantly.

It grieved me to be around her. All the lightheartedness had gone out of her step; she no longer laughed in that quick, bright way that made you feel good. Another time when I was in town I didn’t even go see her. I told myself I was too busy.

On the first morning of preparations for the parish supper, I got up early because my mother was up: I could hear her in the kitchen. She was making toast and coffee though it was still dark outside and the birds were asleep. She was dressed as I’ve never seen her before, in loose, light blue cotton slacks and a plain blue blouse. She looked younger.

“Where are you going?” I asked, wondering at the brightness in her eyes. All the worry had gone from her face. Though she was no longer dressed as a midwife, I asked, half-asleep, confused, “Is someone having a baby?”

I looked around for her midwife’s bag that she usually put on the kitchen table to check through before leaving.

“I’ve given that up,” she said. “I’ve another job.” And in my astonished silence, she added, “Cleaning rooms in the Mackenzie Hotel.”

I’d never seen her smile like that. She looked wide-awake, as if she’d just come from a swim in the lake. She was making herself a bag lunch, slicing bread and laying lettuce and sliced tomatoes and shredded ham on it, her hands light and quick. She took a couple of apples out of the refrigerator and a handful of raisins. These she put in a paper bag and she took a thermos of tea.

In her old job, she never had time to make food to take with her. When the call came, she would just get up, check the contents of her bag and go. Usually the family would feed her. Now she had time to sit and drink coffee before she went to work. She got up early, to sit at the kitchen table and listen to the awakening birds. Sometimes, she told me, she even read a newspaper or listened to the radio. There was no hurry, no emergency.

She called her new job — cleaning toilets, she said: “I clean toilets in the Mackenzie Hotel”— the work of nonemergencies. She had no disasters to anticipate. No one was turning to her, full of pain, with a look that said, You’re the only one here who knows what to do. Do something.

Lunch bag in hand, she said Mr. Giacomo had called to ask me to meet him by the river.

“He wants you to show him where to fish,” she said. “For the parish supper.”

On the Palliser banks, he asked me, “Do you think we’ll have any luck?”

I said I didn’t know.

We left the shore in his boat. I knew the deep pools under the bridge, where the sturgeon sleep like old dogs.

I remembered how he’d tried to touch my knee on the train and how my body had drawn away from him without even thinking. I didn’t feel that I was myself around him anymore. It slowly settled in me that I was afraid of him. His smile was calm and inviting, the friendliest thing about him, but it made me afraid.

The metal line he let out had thread woven over it the colour of the shadows that flowed along the river bottom. The tip of his fishing rod was as thick as his thumb. The river was littered with alder leaves, so many coloured with a blue bloom, like ripe plums.

I counted eight boats on the sturgeon pool under the bridge. Every year at this time the village fished the river. By agreement only one sturgeon was taken, and it was offered to the priest.

“Since the death of our boy,” he said, “my wife and me are like old people.” He laughed. “We must look like we’re cut out of cardboard! I believe people here see us that way,” touching the corners of his eyes. When he looked at me his eyes were full of shame.

“Mrs. Giacomo hasn’t left her room for weeks. Do you think Rose is going to keep her child? It must be so hard for her.”

His face showed the same quiet patience that I’d seen on the train.

The sky had settled over the river and already a few flakes were falling; almost like night the way the light had faded, the snow beginning to cling to the sandbar. The jacket he handed me smelled of wood smoke, of the campfires the village had lit on the sandbar while we fished for the new priest and of the gasoline he’d poured into the outboard motor tank. He draped the jacket over my knees with raw hands touched by the cold, his knuckles swollen. He was massaging his knuckles and I wanted to give him my mitts but he said no, he was fine.

“Of course she’s going to keep the baby,” I said then. I’d put on a look of complete confidence. “Your helping her isn’t going to make any difference.”