House of Spells (4 page)

Mr. Giacomo was quiet for a while. Then he said, That dam was built ten years ago. Before it was built, in winter we’d get a week of twenty or thirty below. Six feet of snow fell. Now the weather has changed, he said, because of the reservoir behind the dam. You can even plant grape vines here.

I thought to myself then, I’ve never seen that dam. I’ve heard that it flooded the entire Renata valley, now a lake. Though I have never seen it, I dream of that water sometimes, pressing down on a drowned forest and I’m swimming over stripped trees that have lost their needles and that peer up at you like miles of ghosts.

These were all dirt farms we were going by, and the car lit up corn or sweet potatoes, or a tororo field, a quarter-acre vineyard, the nets furled and bunched on an overhead wire. You could smell manured soil and the sweet, heavy scent of grape flowers that, early for that time of year, spread through the valley on still evenings.

He told us he was the one to start wine growing in our valley and where once there had been alder copses, scrub land, and apple orchards there were now vineyards. He had even gone to Italy to buy Veneto vines that would grow on the village slopes and produce grapes that would ripen here in autumn. Over the years he’d bought up over fifty acres south of our village.

Whenever he’d come by our 4th Street house or my father’s paper mill, not often over the past years, he never said hello to me. Once when I was standing right in front of him — was I eleven then? — holding out a roll of paper that he’d just bought from my father, he took it out of my hands and gazed right through me.

Now he was looking at me in the rear-view mirror, studying me, and I felt a little afraid of him. I sensed he wanted something from Rose, and maybe he had already begun to suspect I might get in the way.

As we drove along, he explained that he was redecorating the downtown café he’d just bought from Mr. Mallone with things he’d picked up on Shido Island during the war and that he was bringing in ash wood tables and chairs that would need to be varnished. Afterwards there would be regular work, serving.

You girls have finished high school, he said. Do you want to work for me?

What will you call it, Rose asked, Johnny’s Café?, and in her high spirits, in her not having to pedal home in the dark, she burst out laughing.

He didn’t turn round to look at her. He kept himself still, maybe listening to her laughter. Rose, wiping the tears from her eyes, was suddenly quiet. She looked at me and shrugged, though I was sure she felt the change in him too, and it confused her, made her unsure.

After his stories and his offer, he was quiet. Maybe he was hurt by her laughter or maybe he was just amused; I couldn’t tell by the expression in his eyes when he glanced at me in the mirror.

We drove into the village past the roundhouse, the doors flung open and spilling out light. We stopped in front of Mr. Giacomo’s house on
4
th Street. On his porch, he showed us a 30 power telescope and a drawing board lit up by a battery-powered reading lamp. He told us that he was sketching the basaltic areas south of Vieta and the Imbrium Sea on the moon, difficult because of the way the light passed quickly over the Crisium Plains.

He had to sketch quickly, he said, because the moon kept slipping out of the telescope’s viewing area.

Ten degrees of brightness for the peak of Aristarchus, he said, the highest degree of brightness on the moon. It could only be expressed by the purest white paper. Five degrees for the walls of Argo, expressed by slight shading. He drew on paper my father made; it got whiter as it aged.

Rose smiled at the drawing he showed us, her teeth chattering.

You girls are cold, Mr. Giacomo said then. You’d better go home and change.

When we had closed his gate behind us, Rose turned and said,

Thank you for the ride!

He called out to her, Pioneer
E
is going to pass by the moon on its way to the sun tonight, and take photos of the face of the moon we never see!

Who cares, Rose said under her breath, and she glanced at me in a way that made me laugh.

I turned round to see if Mr. Giacomo had heard. He’d given us a ride home, offered us work in his café. He had been kind to us. Yet I also felt that what Rose had said was her way of keeping to herself. Maybe even then she sensed that his kindness had a cost.

On the walk home, pushing her bike and shivering in her wet towel, Rose told me how she’d met Michael Guzzo. He was working in the Odin Mill in the fall of ’69, and she used to bring lunches to the scaler Mr. Beruski on night shift, when she was living at Mrs. Beruski’s. It was one of her duties for reduced room and board, to take those lunches to Mr. Beruski who measured the logs as they came into the mill, calculating board feet. The scaler would thank her as he unpacked his hot meal, gnocchi sometimes, or a chicken wing pasta with a flask of diluted wine.

Michael Guzzo was a sandy-haired eighteen-year-old boy who drew lumber on the chain and he wore doeskin gloves that were too big and loose on his hands. The cedar they were cutting raised welts on his arms, so the scaler had called to say bring some salve along with my lunch. It was a night shift in November and the snow she walked through had changed to fine powder, heaped on the stacks of logs that reached to the river and collected in the chain link fence that surrounded the mill. The crew was gathered around the wood stove in the scaler’s shack, under a forty-watt bulb, and this boy was at the table, his sleeves rolled back. The scaler took his flask and the metal canister of warm pasta. The others in the green chain crew smiled at Rose, standing around the stove. Their wool jackets steamed and smelled of cedar, machine oil, and the winter cold.

And when she brought out the salve from her pocket they said, From your hands, Rose, challenging her, a smile in their eyes, gentle or mocking.

She sat across from the boy, poured some salve into her hand to warm and spread on his enflamed forearms, but her hands were cold! So, elbows propped on the table, he cupped her hands in his and gently blew on them, eyes laughing at her. His eyes reminded her of her father’s, so mild and chestnut-coloured. Two shy people who couldn’t talk to each other. He wasn’t even a year older. He wasn’t particularly cute: his hair was long, sticking out from under a toque, his eyes reddened by the cold, and when he stood to rebutton his sleeves to go back to work, she saw that he was thin and a little taller than she.

He had built the raft that we’d kicked along off Olebar Beach. On weekends he used it to fish for landlocked salmon with a hand net.

I knew who he was. I often saw him in the Grizzly Bookstore, rummaging through boxes of books that people had left or forgotten on the trains. Once he said to me there is no other bookstore like it in the valley, because of those train books that came from so far away and from lives so unlike our own:
Anna Karenina, Cannery Row
, and Spinoza.

Sometimes he’d hold a book just for the weight of it, for the feel of it, as though, if he were sufficiently still and watchful, it could communicate to him its own life. And sometimes he sat there for a long time in a disused chair in the back, an unopened book in his hands. He seemed sad then and little inclined to talk. Once he held out to me the collected dialogues of Plato; the paper in that book was like a Bible’s, tissue-thin and almost transparent.

There, too, you could find treasures, clothing abandoned or left on the trains. He showed me a rack of such castoffs in the back.

Who owned these things, he asked me then, smiling. Doesn’t it make you wonder?

He asked me if I wanted to try on any of those clothes — a pair of jeans that looked like they would fit me, a paper raincoat from Japan, a plaid scarf, a siwash vest that was almost in style — but I shook my head. I could see a sadness in his eyes that I didn’t understand.

I asked where he was from because he wasn’t from our village.

He said he was from south of here.

South? I asked. Where?

Nowhere in particular, he said. My family’s land is under the Hydro reservoir.

I touched his arm, shocked.

Jesus! I said.

He laughed. What can you do about it? he said. They took our houses, our land, gave us some money and told us to move on, go live somewhere else. And there’s nothing we could do about it.

I felt sick, the colour draining from my face. I didn’t know what to say.

Maybe that’s what I feared most: to have the place where I was cared for and loved taken from me. It made me feel dizzy to think about it. If our village were wiped out, who would I even be?

It’s not your worry he said, smiling and gazing at me.

All I could do was look at him.

Then he said, The dreams are the worst. Sometimes I wake up at night with a crushing weight on my chest, I can hardly breathe. It feels like the weight of all that water.

7

A few weeks later, I went to my father’s one vat paper mill. I didn’t often go there because he didn’t like to be disturbed when he was working. That day he wanted to show me a windsock made for a newborn. I touched the painted eyes of the trout on it. It was made to swim in the wind on a long pole and he said it was for Rose’s child. He had learned to make windsocks at the internment camp in New Slocan. That was during the war, when Mr. Hiraki taught him to make paper. Mr. Hiraki and others had raised flying fish and paper horses over the camp on long poles.

“They remind us this won’t last forever,” Mr. Hiraki had told my father, watching the figures in the wind over the rows and rows of wooden shacks. “They give us courage.”

I felt shy around my father when he was making paper; the work required his total attention. Yet I wanted to ask how he knew Rose was pregnant.

He said she swayed on her hips as though wading in a strong current, gripping her way over stones with her toes. Besides, he’d noticed her thick wrists and the loose clothes she wore.

Did I know who the father was, he asked me.

I was surprised at his curiosity. It wasn’t like him to ask about other people’s secrets, though in some ways our house was the clearing house for village secrets and stories. My mother was often away in other people’s homes, there for grief or joy, birth or death. People often dropped by my father’s mill to review their problems. His work was seen to be either odd or useless and therefore worthy of interruption. Sometimes, when he heard a truck or a car drive up, he’d go out the back door to sit among the river poplars and wait till the driver left so he could get on with his work, fretting over the thought that the paper in the press was spoiling.

Did I know who the father was, he asked me again. I shook my head, though Rose had told me his name.

I wasn’t sure how much Rose wanted me to tell others then. I felt like I should protect her secret. On the raft she’d told me the father’s name, Michael Guzzo. On the walk home from Mr. Giacomo’s, she told me how she’d met him and that he’d gone traveling in Central America.

I was watching my father make washi paper. He was sprinkling harmica petals into the pulp, a pale mauve that was my favourite colour and that reminded me of the shadows under Mr. Giacomo’s eyes and at the corners of his lips.

“What?” he was saying, he thought he’d heard me say something, but I’d said nothing, my mouth pressed into my rough sleeve and my gaze following him. I kept still because I was remembering a story I’d heard from several different people. Around here it’s hard for an interesting secret to stay secret, and I’ve thought of it many times.

One summer in the ’40s, my father and Mr. Giacomo worked together. In those days, a young man starting out on his own, Mr. Giacomo delivered mail in the valley. He took rice, letters, and packages to the Japanese internment camp in New Slocan. My father went with him, to buy vegetables and eggs in the camp that he sold to the railroad cooks.

Mr. Hiraki was interned down there. He was my father’s friend from before the war. They’d worked on a section crew together, repairing track in the Odin pass, and when Mr. Hiraki had earned enough he’d bought a small farm in the valley south of our village. My father used to drive down to his farm in summer to buy vegetables.

Mr. Hiraki grows the best vegetables in the valley, he used to say, and soon he was taking orders from the village wives and the railroad cooks.

After the Pearl Harbor attack in December
1941
, all Japanese-Canadians were identified as enemy aliens. Mr. Hiraki spoke out against the forced evacuation of Japanese-Canadians from the coast. Many times he said to anyone in our village streets who would listen that the war was against Japan, not Japanese-Canadians. “And what about you Italians,” he’d ask the Pradolinis, the Staglianos. “Why are you not being arrested? It’s because of the colour of your skin!”

He and his family were sent to the New Slocan camp. Before the
RCMP
came for them, the Hirakis asked their Canadian friends to store household goods. They thought they’d be back on their vegetable farm within a few months, that the forced internment was only brief. My father was a young man then and he was building his first house on 4th Street. They didn’t ask one Canadian family to take all their belongings, they asked three or four. My father hadn’t finished the second floor, so they asked him to take the piano and a big record player.