Snow Apples (19 page)

After that the bleeding seemed to stop. I replaced the stones with colder ones from the creek.

I kept the baby near me. He rested like a pale blossom on the emerald moss. I didn't know what I was going to do with him, his body. If I buried him here, he would be dug up by animals. Eaten.

I traced the tiny spine with my finger.

By now the sun was disappearing below the tree tops, and the woods with their sweet berry smell cooled and moistened.

After burying the afterbirth in some soft earth beneath a rotting cedar stump, I wrapped the tiny body in burdock leaves and took it with me.

I found myself following the path down the side of the creek and passing under the bridge that divided Helga's place from ours. Birds were calling out their last songs of the day as my feet kept taking me along, right down to the edge of the ocean.

It was almost sunset, and the beach was deserted. There was Helga's boat tied up to the float. Before I knew it, I had climbed in it, untied the rope and cast off. I rowed out toward Keats Island. When I was halfway there, I pulled the oars and let the boat drift.

The world was golden all around me from the last glow of sunset, and the ocean lay, a sheet of gold, as far as I could see. There wasn't a hint of breeze to mar the surface. It was almost like being in a dream. The hazy blue mountains hung like shrouds over me. Not a sound anywhere.

Rummaging under the stern seat, I found a discarded waxed bread wrapper—perhaps from a lunch Helga had packed for herself—and a broken fishing line, complete with small lead weights. I placed the baby in the wrapper, tied it securely with the fishing line and weights, and let it over the side of the boat.

I let the line slip through my fingers until it reached the water, then sank beneath the surface. The boat rocked with the tiniest of movements.

I watched the package dip, spin for an instant, sink rapidly
and disappear down in the deep black water. I let the line go.

Nothing moved on the water. Or below. I sat and watched the sun begin its curve behind the spiky tops of the trees on the headland, saw its red orb halve, quarter, slip over the edge of the world.

I stayed out on the water until night had blotted out everything but the faint outlines of the shore and orange coal oil lights from cottage windows.

Finally I rowed back to the land, the oars cutting flashes of phosphorescence in the night water.

Helga was there on the float when I got back. She helped me tie up the boat, and then she helped me out. I felt weak and dizzy. I tried to speak, to apologize for taking her boat, but all I did was cry.

All the time Helga was saying, “Is okay, is okay,” in a soothing voice as we walked up the float, along the beach trail and to her house.

I have a faint recollection of her putting a soft, loose nightgown over my head, of drinking an eggnog, of being tucked into bed. Her eyes were steadfast in the lamplight when she blew it out.

I slept—a deep sleep like a stone being pushed over a cliff, but once the deep stage had passed, I began to dream fitfully. The dreams were images of Nels: Nels laughing, Nels talking...I was trying to reach him, but although I walked and walked, I could never get any closer. He faded back, out of my reach. Then came a kaleidoscope of changing
colors: branches, moss, sky, water and a bud-baby that swam before my eyes, glistening with streaks of blood that wouldn't wipe off, seemed even to spread.

I woke crying. The nightgown and the bed were soaked with perspiration. Helga was there in an instant, and she dried me off with a towel, gave me a fresh nightgown, changed the sheets, and poured me a drink of something that tasted of...herbs? I didn't like it.

“No,” Helga insisted, refusing to take the glass from my outstretched hand. “Is good for you. Drink.”

I drank it down but only to please her. But I found I couldn't go back to sleep. My legs were cramped with pain. What I wanted to do was walk.

We walked, Helga and I, side by side, she with an old jacket over her shoulders and I wearing one of her heavy woolen sweaters. Her hand was ready whenever I stumbled.

The night was cool and dark. Now and then I heard small skitterings in the night stillness—an animal or perhaps a bird. Along the trails, as far as the beach and up the creek, Helga and I walked until I was exhausted and glad to go back, drop into the bed and there, finally, sleep without dreaming.

*  *  *

In the morning I couldn't seem to waken. I didn't want to. But when Helga said, “Breakfast, come,” I had to get up, bleary-eyed and dull, and follow her into the kitchen. She
took my breakfast from the warming-shelf above the stove and set the plate before me.

I wasn't hungry. I wasn't anything. I wanted not to bother, or be bothered, or made to care.

Helga sat beside me at the table and buttered my toast.

“Eat,” she said.

It was only the sight of her hard brown hand lying at rest on the spotless cross-stitch tablecloth and that look of hers that was like love—but simple, without hurt—that made me pick up my knife and fork.

It was grief that was overwhelming me. I hadn't expected it. I thought I would only feel relief.

A boy. Somehow I had thought it would be a girl. All along it seemed—because it was a problem and not want-ed—that it had to be a girl.

Helga made me go back to bed for an hour and again, after lunch, another hour's rest. In between resting and eating, I sat outside in the shade of the house. From where I sat, comfortable in a wicker armchair, I could watch Helga weeding in the garden. She used a hoe and worked with a quick chopping motion. She seemed to like padding barefoot in the soft brown soil. Sometimes I could hear her singing to herself in Norwegian.

Hours passed. I slept, I ate, I sat outside in the summer sun. The day ended, passed into another. I lost all sense of time. I only knew that I felt stronger and that Helga was there. She never asked me any questions, and I never told her anything.

Thursday came and with it the realization that I had to get back to work. Helga walked with me to the end of the beach trail to catch the boat, and we stayed there until the very last minute, to avoid being seen by anyone I knew. I was glad to see Mr. Percy go up the wharf before the boat was ready to pull out. When the
Lady Rose
did blow her whistle, I hugged Helga—staying for a moment close to her brown spareness—then ran from the gangplank.

I didn't stay on deck but went below and stayed there until we were well out in the Gap.

N
ELS WAS MARRIED
in late July. My mother sent me the newspaper clipping. He married Emma Hoffman, of all people—she of the red hair who works in the telephone office.

“She's years older than Nels,” wrote my mother. “I can't imagine what he sees in her. Some people say she's in the family way.”

How do I feel? I hurt—a sharp, physical pain just under my ribs. All this time, in the back of my mind, I must have held out some hope that Nels and I would be together again.

Working at the Jolly Jumbo helps the hurt, and so do the people I work with, especially Don. He makes arrangements to have the same days off. We rent bikes and explore
Stanley Park, play pitch-and-putt, go to see Doris Day movies, and sit on benches and watch Kitsilano Showboat.

It is hard to save money, though. Each payday I try to put fifteen dollars in the bank, but more often than not it is only ten. Now at the end of August I have saved only seventy-two dollars, and the tuition fee at nursing school is one hundred and ten dollars. Besides that, students are expected to buy their own books, shoes and stockings, and uniforms. I'm not going to be able to make the September class. I'll have to apply for the January one instead. My marks have come from Victoria in the mail, first classes in everything.

I thought of asking my father for the balance of the tuition fee. He probably would give it to me. But I feel now that I'll never be able to ask him for anything again, although I'm not quite sure why.

I have phoned him once since that time. The clerk at the Campbell River Hotel said he wasn't in. I left a message— “Everything fine. Sheila.”—and have tried to put the whole episode out of my mind. It works most of the time if I keep myself busy. And my father doesn't write or phone me, and I am just as happy he doesn't.

Labour Day is our last very busy time at the drive-in. Then I have three days coming to me, and I've decided to go home to visit my mother and brothers. I've written every week. If I'm one day late, my mother phones me from Mr. Percy's store, wondering if I'm all right.

*  *  *

Mr. Percy has put awnings above the store windows and painted the porch. He has a little more white in his eyebrows, a little rounder paunch under his belt. But his eyes are as bright and astonished looking as ever.

“Well, Sheila,” he kept saying every two minutes as we walked up the wharf together the morning I went home. Then he told me all about the happenings in the village. You'd think I'd been away forever.

We stood there in the September sun, and a smell of ripening apples came from the orchard on the other side of the store. Most of its trees are too old to produce anything more than small, hard fruit, but there is one Snow apple tree off by itself that has somehow managed to thrive. Its apples are large, juicy, sweet—much like a McIntosh but larger—and with fine red lines running through a snow-white flesh. I could see the tree from where I stood.

“Are the Snow apples ripe yet?” I asked Mr. Percy.

“Almost. It's funny, Sheila. I've never seen another Snow apple tree on this whole peninsula. Come to think of it, I've never run across it anywhere before. And you've never seen such a crop as it has this year! Can't understand it. Doesn't get any more sun or rain than the other trees.”

On my way home I walked through the orchard. Mr. Percy was right about the heavy crop of fruit on the Snow apple tree.

The apples weren't quite ripe. I bit into one. In another couple of weeks they would be sweeter still.

I cut back along the beach. The summer cottages looked forlorn, all closed up for the season. The diving float had been towed away, and I saw it riding behind Shelter Island, where it had been tied up for the winter.

When I got to the bridge between Helga's place and ours, I hung over the rail to watch the migrating salmon crowd up the creek. Some of the fish looked soft already, even though they had not come that far from the salt water.

I was afraid to go home. Would my mother be able to tell by looking at me what had happened since I last saw her? Or was it possible that she could understand? If what my father said was true, that they hadn't married...

Pep came bounding up the trail to meet me, racing round and round in circles and barking until my mother came out the back door to see what was the matter. She shaded her eyes against the sun.

“Is that you, Sheila?” She made it sound as if I'd been away for a year and never sent a word home. It was hard not to cry. I bent down to scratch Pep behind the ears.

Straightening up, I said, “Just home for a few days, Mom. Saved up my time off.”

Nothing had changed, it seemed. The door was left open to catch the thin yellow September sunlight, and it lit the varnished plywood walls, showing clearly the swirls in the wood. There was a bowl of tawny chrysanthemums on the kitchen table. Their sharp dry aroma was like smoke. A
golden bantam hen stood on the doorsill and put her head on one side, watching us with yellow eyes.

My mother was in the middle of canning pears. I took up a paring knife to help her, and we worked together, the smooth peelings falling from our knives like butter.

“What about nursing school, Sheila?” she asked. “Have you got your application in?”

“Yes,” I said, “but I won't be able to get in until January's class. I haven't been able to save enough money. I thought I could but...”

“How much money do you need?”

I explained.

“That's not much,” she said. “Maybe something will turn up.”

As I sat across the kitchen table from my mother, peeling pears, their smell in the air between us, I became aware that there was an aloneness now dividing my mother and me.

I no longer believe what she told me about life, about being a woman. I see now that much of her thinking is colored by her upbringing and by her frustrations and disappointments with my father. And that because she thinks I am like him, she tried to get back at him through me.

But I am neither one of them—not my mother, not my father.

The boys came in from school. I could hardly believe that Tom had grown so tall in just two months. His voice had deepened, and he had an Adam's apple I'd never noticed before.

“You must have grown six inches!” I told him. “What was it? The hard work in the mines at Trail?”

He told me about school.

“I've decided to go on to university. I'd like to go into engineering. Working at Trail this summer convinced me of that. And I made fantastic money there!” His voice was steady. It no longer broke unexpectedly at the end of a sentence.