Order of Good Cheer (37 page)

I myself informed Lucien of the Sieur's decree — and that he is now twice confined — and at this redundancy Lucien weakly though bitterly smiled, and his chest buckled in what was part laughter, part spasm, for he is not yet well. But nearly so. Yes, nearly so, for that is what I climbed the stairs to see, and that is cause for joy. If not his, then at least mine.

ANDY RATTLED OPEN
the old French door to his mudroom, reached in and squeezed a pine bough to feel the needles for dryness. They felt as turgid with sap as ever. The room smelled like a version of his father's aftershave. Did anyone still use aftershave? Online yesterday he'd learned that this was a kind of white pine, which he thought an interesting coincidence. It was a broth made of white pine needles,
annedda
, that Champlain had seen cure scurvy in Quebec but couldn't find in Port Royal.

In any case the needles were for smoking the mussels tonight — Jesus, his party was
tonight
— and the mudroom was a three-dimensional maze of boughs, impossible to walk through. He'd chainsawed them off his blown-down tree and it was clear that even if the needles shrank and shrank he'd have far more than needed. He'd got carried away with the fun of bucking the branches. With the upright root-ball clinging to the edge of his yard and the tree aiming down, its tip resting on the gravel beach, he'd balanced himself on the trunk as he sawed off the big bottom branches first and then gradually scaled down the tree, or actually up, taking off branch after branch, climbing the tree upside down, as it were, until, near the tip, he jumped to the gravel. What he now had, besides all the branches to haul, was a cool ladder back up to his yard, an apparatus he would have loved playing on as a boy. He wondered who he knew with kids the right age to enjoy such a toy, and couldn't think of anyone.

At his feet, tucked just inside the mudroom, was the big blue cooler. Leonard's scrawled note lay on the lid:
Went to Terrace for moose, maybe a fish
. Andy lifted the lid again to appreciate, under melting crushed ice, the biggest mussels he'd ever seen.

From down the hall he heard Laura's seventeen-year-old daughter, Amelia, flush the toilet, a sound he found a little thrilling, except he was afraid of her. It was Amelia's fault that, all day, his world felt off-kilter. It was almost a visual thing. Even here in his house the space between objects felt tilted, iffy. Her presence made him think of “time out of joint.” You feel like you might fall on your face, but you don't. It was probably just graveyard shift and sleeplessness. If you kept a dog awake four days it would die. He had probably only a bit of that. Tibetans, they had a feeling they called
diagonal-line hell
— what would that be like?

Over two days he'd spent more time with Amelia than her mother. The day after Laura's arrival, while she worked at death certificates and funeral arrangements, he'd ferried over again to greet Amelia this time, and it was just one more oddity among many lately, welcoming this younger version of Laura. She'd said “nice car” climbing into the Mustang, and the way she said it made Andy like his car a little less. He had to keep himself from staring as he tried to parse her father's features from her mother's. She was stunning, truly, in a classic feline way. The father must have been kind of pretty himself, Slavic or even Asian, or at least a Johnny Depp. In any case great cheekbones and jaw. He talked with her as casually as he could; she seemed a typical teenager. She let slip that she was missing a skiing holiday with friends, and getting back to Vancouver only a day before the start of term was the shits too. He sussed that she hadn't been fond of her grandmother and was here more out of duty to her mother.

This morning they'd been at the funeral together, Amelia seated between Laura and Andy. It was just the way they ended up in the row. Andy's mother and Marie Schultz's other friends comprised the row behind them, and Andy could smell their intense perfumes wafting at him due to two large fans at the back (he had the grisly thought that these fans were to drive any waft-of-
body
away from the audience), and he wondered if he wasn't becoming sensitive to chemical scent, as people apparently were. He'd read that most perfumes and deodorants now used a highly allergenic enhancer chemical that helped fragrance knife into the olfactory nerves more efficiently, saving a company money.

It was an open-casket affair, and while most people lined up to peer in, or pat a folded hand, or bend to kiss, Andy was happy to sit and wait it out. He could see her well enough from there, her auburn hair with its new 'do, the coffin's white satin lining puffed out like heaven's own comforts. Mrs. Schultz was made up to barely resemble herself. In fact Andy jerked awake staring at that face, and an odd vision he'd been enjoying of her. Perhaps it was the tan makeup, but in death she looked vaguely Native, and in his vision Andy saw three hummingbirds tied with black thread to her hair. He'd read about this rare spectacle, of a Haida chief's favoured wife entering a ceremony so adorned, making a once-in-a-decade splash with this highest peak of fashion. And it
was
the best ornament, these three tethered hummingbirds —three seemed perfect. He could almost see the birds buzzing, straining along the farthest arc of their tether, and he could hear the three-part thrumming, a beautiful little chaos of orderly sound, and he almost liked Marie Schultz now because of it. He could admit she'd had a nobility about her. Though he did note that, on either side of him, neither Laura nor Amelia was crying.

For reasons she kept to herself, Amelia refused to go to the graveyard for the burial, telling her mother, “I just can't do it,” and Andy said he was fine with hanging around with her till after.

So he asked if Amelia wanted to see some sights and she said sure. First he drove her up to the hospital grounds for the view (it was momentarily odd because he could see the hearse and funeral procession moving east through town, though he didn't point this out to her). He indicated the various islands, and the directions things lay, like the airport, and Japan, and the Charlottes if you could see their mountains through the mist. Amelia stood hunched overdramatically in what was barely rain, nodding dully, her gaze more inward than out. So they drove back downtown to do the waterfront.

They trod the short boardwalk in front of the tourism building, Andy pointing out the last fish plant — a crab cannery — the cruise-ship dock, the bald-eagle tree, and the long slips where cruising billionaires tied their three-storey yachts. As her eyes followed his knowledgeable pointing arm, he felt content with his city and proud to be this closely linked to such a beautiful young person. He wondered if it would feel much different being her father.

“What are you taking at
UBC
?”

“Um. I'm not exactly majoring yet, but I think environmental studies.”

“Ah.” That was a program? He flicked his hand out at the water. “Out just past those islands,” Andy told her, “they made one of the first discoveries of ‘deep ecology.' Know about that?” When her silence told him she didn't, he told her how these waters once swarmed with sea otters, wiped out two hundred years ago to make hats for Paris and Moscow. The otters lived in the vast kelp beds that, from here to San Francisco, also protected the beaches
from surf. Then the strangest thing happened — when the otters went, the kelp disappeared too! Then the newly pounding surf washed the sand away. The beaches could no longer launch canoes, so that was it for lots of villages. Plus, with no kelp, the herring couldn't spawn, so they left, then the salmon did too. Some figured it was evil magic, but the scientists who came found that the kelp had been eaten by a suddenly huge population of sea urchin. The otter had been the sea urchins' only predator. “It's a funny logic,” Andy said. “If you make otter hats, the sand washes away and villages die!”

Amelia had half turned from him and might have stopped listening, so Andy ceased stabbing in the direction of the outer islands where all of this was discovered. Maybe she felt lectured to. Maybe she owned a fur hat.

He wanted to joke to her, So if they keep shipping grapes up from Chile, would his backyard fall into the sea?

He didn't tell her about the mystical Queen Charlottes out there too, untouched by the last ice age, an unglaciated
refugium
for animals found nowhere else — he understood that this was simply more stuff he'd been saving up for Laura, stuff he'd read, since she'd been gone, about their home.

They headed uphill to the municipal grounds. Silence grew quickly weird so he described how in summer when a cruise ship came in, this side of this street was crammed with vendors' stalls, and though most sold six-inch totems and vacu-pak smoked salmon and little necklaces, some were colourful, like the old Norwegian guy in his seventies who wore spats and busked, playing hymns on his fiddle, ending each with a long baritone “Ahhhmennn.” And here was where a friend of Rachel Hadley's — Magda? Magma? — set up a table under a “Wiccan Fortunes” shingle, and she read people's lives with tarot cards, or by holding
their two hands in hers. Andy had spent a few evenings beside her in the pub, and she hadn't seemed, well, “wise.” Though how much wisdom did it take to read a face and say, “You've had it rough, but you can begin trusting life again,” to make you happy enough to part with twenty bucks.

“It's the closest thing we have to a farmers' market,” Andy explained. “Except there's no farmers, or vegetables.”

“The tourists couldn't cook vegetables back on their ship anyway,” Amelia instructed him, unsmiling, and Andy wondered if she was mean or if she really hadn't understood his quiet little joke. He thought of her grandmother, and how genetic traits often leapt a generation.

Enthusiasm stunted, he pointed out the spot where one vendor sold T-shirts, some with typical “I Survived Prince Rupert Rain” logos, but others with weird Photoshopped creations, Andy's favourite being a monster, the Thing from the Fantastic Four, but with three heads: Bill Gates, the Dalai Lama, and Michael Stipe.

“Do you have a favourite band?” he found himself asking her. Saying Michael Stipe's name had made him feel contemporary, until he remembered R.E.M. had had hits before she was born.

“A few, sure.”

“Who?”

“You wouldn't know them, I don't think.”

“Probably not, no.”

They reached the grounds where, in behind the antique locomotive, in a clearing of maples, stood a decent totem pole. Most poles got painted these days, but this was ash-grey untreated cedar, which was how they were in the old photographs and in Emily Carr paintings. The animals and faces depicted weren't the usual ones either. Andy read the small plaque under glass and tapped it with his finger.

“Eagle Person. The Uncle. White Marten. Split Person. Small Humans. Gitksan Crest.”

“Wow. Look at The Uncle.”

She pointed to a face that was the embodiment of goofy, one you could imagine Jim Carrey straining for. When Andy asked Leonard about Split Person, a carving that suggested two faces uncomfortably conjoined above and below, anticipating Picasso by centuries, Leonard eyed him dismissively and said, “White people don't even
know
crazy.” Leonard went on to tell him about the ancient villages and their degrees of banishment for degrees of mental illness. There was a specific kind of permanent insanity ascribed to surviving a tipped canoe in winter.

“Were you very close to your grandmother?” he asked Amelia.

Amelia looked down, then squinted back up at the pole. “I don't know. She didn't seem to open up much. Couldn't relate to . . . I don't know.”

“Couldn't stoop to your level?”

She picked her head up, smiling. “Exactly.”

“There's something about that generation that's really stuck,” he said, insinuating that there was nothing stuck about his, and she could open up if she felt the need.

“I guess. My granddad on my dad's side is pretty cool. He's really cool, actually. He's a painter. Lives mostly in Prague.”

“Holy cow. Prague. Prague's the new Paris.”

“You like Prague? I didn't at all. It was all like dirty and rusty. And how taxis try and cheat you as much as they possibly can?”

“Well, I've only read about it.” Read a lot about it, he wanted to add. Not that it would help his case that he knew their system of parliament, or Vaclav Havel's brand of cigarettes.

“But that's not why I didn't do the graveyard,” Amelia insisted. “I just don't like the whole burial thing. It totally scares me.”

“I'm not a fan either.”

“The whole death thing really gets to me,” she added. “Her body lying there like that? It's so unnecessary.”

“I totally agree.” Maybe not totally. It was closure for some, seeing the body.

“You know that like, North America's the only place that does the whole embalming thing? You know Europe doesn't?”

“That's right.”

“What's with putting preservative in your veins, and then
burying
you? I mean, it delays the whole ‘getting eaten by worms' deal, but so okay what's
that
about?”

“Well exactly.” Though no one is buried alive, a primal fear. Only a hundred years ago the best-selling coffins came with an interior handle you could yank that made a little flag pop up and tell any passersby to please start digging.

“You know they did an autopsy?” Her shoulders hunched, as if she was cold. Andy made a motion with his hand and they started walking back to the car. “She was old, old people die.”

“They do.” But that explained her new 'do, which might be a wig. Someone had taken her brain out to weigh it and puzzle over Alzheimer's. Andy pictured a brow-knit grad student toothpicking at a pocked brain, hunting aluminum.