ONE MORNING IN JUNE, when I was ten, Mom called Jenny and me to the door to watch the Indians from Duchess Creek Reserve heading to Potato Mountain, where they’d camp and harvest wild potatoes.
“Used to be a lot more of them,” Mom said, leaned against the door, watching. “Big caravans, like you’d imagine crossing the desert. When I was a kid they used to take the trail right behind our cabin. When my dad saw them headed to Potato Mountain, he’d get antsy. He wanted to go up there, too. The Indians used to move around more back then, for fishing and hunting.”
It still seemed like a lot of people to me, more than I ever saw when we rode our bikes around the reserve. Where had they all come from? They had their horses loaded down with packs and tools and bedding. Some of the horses had five-gallon cans strapped to their backs. These were to bring back the potatoes they would dig. A long string of dogs trotted along behind the horses. A team pulled a Bennett-wagon, made from the frame of an old car, with old folks and kids riding in it, some of them holding even littler babies.
When Mom raised her hand to wave, a woman left the group and came walking up the driveway. She was about Mom’s age, with long hair as shiny black as a crow’s wing and wearing a purple-flowered print dress over her pants. Even with the pants, I could see her legs were thin and a little bowed. But she walked like I imagined a ballerina would walk, graceful, her toes touching down first, lightly, on the gravel.
“Agnes,” Mom acknowledged.
“Brought your moccasins,” the woman said. She had a soft whispery voice and a way of cocking her head, like she was shy. Jenny, sitting next to me, pinched my arm as a warning. When I looked up at Agnes’s face, I gasped. Her lip had a mashed gap in it that joined her nose in what looked like an open wound. She smiled at Jenny and me kindly and I felt my face flush in embarrassment for reacting.
“You remembered,” my mother said. She took the moccasins from Agnes, a large pair made of soft moosehide, beaded with blue and orange and white beads. Dad’s birthday was coming. “Get my purse, Maggie.”
I realized that Agnes was the woman Glenna sometimes talked about. “I feel so sorry for the poor thing,” I’d heard her say. “She says no one will marry her because of the harelip. And you know she’s probably right.”
Mom never agreed with Glenna about Agnes. “I think she does all right. There’s something about that woman that’s made of steel.”
I’d also overheard Glenna talking to my mom about the time Agnes came to the nursing station with bruises on her face. “And with that harelip. What a mess!” The man who had promised to marry Agnes had done it. My mother called it rape, a word I didn’t know then, and she and Glenna had argued about the word. “But can you call it rape?” Glenna asked, and my mother had gotten angry.
As for me, I had not understood how something so minor as a harelip, which I had pictured as a kind of soft mustache, could have such an impact, and I thought this was something maybe peculiar to Indian men, this dislike of hair, like some of the other traits that they were supposed to have, like never allowing themselves to be rushed, or spending money as fast as they got it.
I brought the purse back and handed it to Mom, deliberately looking in Agnes’s face to let her know I wasn’t bothered.
“Bring back potatoes for you girls,” she said, as if she was telling us a secret, and she smiled again.
“Thank you,” Jenny and I said.
We watched her go. Her long hair swung gently down her back as she picked her way carefully along the road to rejoin the caravan.
“Some years Dad would get up to Potato Mountain,” Mom said then. “He went looking for cattle but he stayed to race horses.” She rarely talked about her parents. Her mom had died when she was little, and her dad wanted to be a cowboy, not a father, that’s what she said. “Mom went with him once. They joined the Indians camping one night. She said she’d never seen so many wildflowers as she did in the meadows they passed through on the ride up: Indian paintbrush and yellow balsamroot and blue mountain lupines covering the hills. And then at the top, the blankets of white potato flowers. She only went that once, but she talked about it as if she’d gone every year. She would say, ‘I remember that mountain covered in little white flowers.’ ” Mom made her voice wistful, teasing: “ ‘And the berries. So many you couldn’t pick them all. Dik. That’s what the Indians called them. We ate dik and wild potatoes, this big, the size of my thumbnail, and deer meat cooked over the fire. And at night the stars were so thick. As thick as the white flowers covering the hills. We slept outside under the stars. I say slept. The music and singing and dancing all night, who could sleep? You couldn’t imagine all the stars.’ And then when she got fed up with us, with the snow, and being trapped in the cabin all day, she used to say, ‘I wish I could go to Potato Mountain. I want to see those wild flowers one more time before I die.’ ”
“And did she?” I asked.
“No, she never did get back up that mountain.”
“I wish I could go to Potato Mountain,” Jenny said. “Instead of going to school. All those kids are skipping the end of school. Lucky ducks.”
“I don’t think I’d like it now. I used to want to go,” Mom said, still watching the caravan, the horses’ hooves sending up little puffs of dust. “Too much drinking now, from what I’ve heard.” She looked away and to the house, then added, “That might not be true. That’s just what people say.”
That night I had a dream that Mom, Jenny and I were getting ready to go up Potato Mountain. We were outside packing the car, even though in real life you couldn’t get up the mountain in a car. We came in and out of the house with our suitcases and blankets while Dad sat in his green vinyl chair by the stove.
“Isn’t Dad coming?” I asked Mom.
“No, he’s not strong enough. He’d never make it up that mountain.”
I felt so sorry for him. Mom was right; he was only a little boy and he’d hold us all back. I looked at him sleeping in the chair. Then it hit me: he was not sleeping at all—he was dead. The shock of it woke me up.
A bright half moon shone in our bedroom window, washing our bedspreads with ghostly blue light. Our clotheshorse cast the shadow of a hunched old woman on the wall. I listened to Jenny’s gentle breathing and felt my own heartbeat clipping raggedly along. I sat up and looked at my sister for signs that she was actually awake. My feet touched the cold linoleum. Even in summer, our floor was cold at night. I bent over Jenny and she mumbled a bit then went back to snoring. She really was asleep. She’d be mad at me if I woke her up. I had the uneasy feeling that someone was outside watching me and so I forced myself to look out the window.
I thought of Agnes and her harelip and imagined her walking gracefully in the moonlight, along the road to Potato Mountain. Shadows crisscrossed the grass and driveway. Something black darted across the yard, a bat probably. No wind at all, not a shiver.
I went to Mom and Dad’s room and stood at the door. It was open about a foot and I listened to them breathe, Dad making a choppy, whistling sound. He was fine. I turned sideways and slipped into the room without a sound. On the dresser, Dad’s jackknife gleamed in the moonlight. He kept it in his pocket all the time, pearl-handled and decorated with a moose and the words Beautiful British Columbia printed on it. He used it to cut twine, thread, fingernails, fruit. I picked it up and held it in my hand, and then took it into my room. I sat down on my bed and opened the blade. I turned it and watched it glint. I looked for something to test its sharpness. I didn’t think it would cut the doubled edge of the sheet’s hem, but when I ran the blade along it, it sliced through the fabric easily. Mom would be annoyed. When I went to snap it closed, the blade sliced my finger. A dark drop of blood spread on the sheet. I had to pad through the dark of the house to the bathroom for a piece of toilet paper to wrap my finger in. I fell asleep holding the knife in my hand.
When I woke up, Dad had already gone to the sawmill. I fished around in my blankets for his knife. I found it near the bottom of the bed, twisted in the sheets.
“Isn’t that funny,” I heard Mom say from her bedroom as Jenny and I were eating breakfast.
“What?” Jenny called.
“Oh, your dad was looking for his jackknife this morning and he couldn’t find it anywhere and here it is on the dresser, where he always leaves it.”
“Weird,” said Jenny, bent to her cornflakes. After a minute she raised her head and looked at me.
I felt guilty then, but it was it was nothing like the guilt I felt later, when we suddenly became a family like the Lutzes, our grief unfolding at the nurses’ station for everyone to see. I pictured Dad that morning, looking for his knife and not finding it in its usual place, checking and re-checking the dresser-top, his pants pockets from yesterday. How many times that morning had he thrust his hand in his pocket to finger the smooth imitation pearl and not found it there?
I was the one who saw Roddy’s truck at the nurses’ station as we went by on the school bus that afternoon. Both cab doors were wide open and I thought of saying something to Jenny, but she was laughing with her friend Josie, and the two of them always made fun of anything I said. So instead, after we got off the bus, I yelled, “Race you” and ran up the road ahead of Jenny with the worry boiling into panic.
“Why is Roddy’s truck at the nurses’ station?” I burst out as soon as I saw Mom. So in a way, it was me who brought the bad news.
“What?” I could see her fear was instant.
“The cab doors were open.”
“Stay here.” She grabbed the station wagon keys from the hook near the door. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“Mom? What’s going on?” Jenny asked, trailing into the house.
“You two stay here. I’m going to the nurses’ station.”
“Why?” said Jenny, but Mom was already out the door. We watched her drive off, dust flying up as she turned onto the highway.
Jenny says I didn’t speak at all after Dad died. I don’t remember not speaking, though I remember Mom crouched in front of me, holding my shoulders, looking into my face. “Say something, Maggie,” she begged. I wanted to, for her sake. But what did she want me to say? I understood now how Dad had felt. There was absolutely nothing in my mind that seemed important enough to put into words. I heard Mom in the bedroom whispering with Glenna. Their whispers went on and on, crescendoed into anger, then fell back almost to silence, a soft mumbling like chickens settling in their roosts at night. What could they possibly have to say so much about?
I remember physical sensations—smell, hunger, heat and cold. I sat in Dad’s green vinyl chair by the woodstove and I smelled him. Sawdust. Tobacco. Motor oil. Sweat. And something else. Warm, musty, spicy. Not really spicy. Not musty either. Like the top of his head, a familiar skin tang. I could smell it too if I went into Mom and Dad’s room and stood there.
Women came with casseroles and tubs of stewed rhubarb and home-canned salmon and I watched them bend to try and find room in the icebox. I watched their strong legs—a hot spell had settled into the Chilcotin and the women wore the first shorts of the season. Their legs were rosy from the weeding they’d done under the noon sun. How could legs hold you up without you even having to think about it? But somehow there was something in your brain that kept them working and it could let go all of a sudden too, like Jenny’s and Mom’s had that afternoon when we found out what happened to Dad.
Mom had barely been able to stay standing when Glenna and Ron brought her through the door, each one holding her up by an elbow.
“Mom?” Jenny had said, then without even hearing a word, she folded like a lawn chair whose old aluminum legs have finally given out. Mothers don’t have to be held up between two people unless the worst thing you’ve imagined as you sat staring out the window, waiting for the station wagon to appear at the end of your road, has actually happened.
“There’s been an accident, girls,” Glenna said.
I hated her for saying it. I hated her instantly and ever after, the sight of her and her self-satisfied sympathy, as if she had immunity, and her a nurse who should know better.
“Is Dad dead?” Jenny managed through her tears.
Mom said simply, “Yes.”
They say that when you get food poisoning, you’ll never again eat the last thing you ate before getting sick, even if it was something else that poisoned you. I had the feeling that Dad died because I’d taken his jackknife. Later, I would learn that a pile of logs had rolled loose and knocked him flying. I would learn that Roddy had carried him like a baby into the nurses’ station. Why this detail? Why ‘like a baby’? But that’s what people said, and so it made it hard to blame Roddy; people could go on liking Roddy if they wanted and not hate him for living when Mr. Safety had died.
The wake went on for four days, during which time a constant stream of food flowed into our little house. A big aluminum coffee pot bubbled on the stove. Someone’s white coffee mugs were arranged in a row on the counter. Glenna even brought her Sweet’N Low. I watched her set out a little margarine tub of packets beside the mugs. I watched her tear them, two at a time, shaking the powder into her mug as the candle for Dad burned beside his photo. Her routine, at least, would not be broken, not even by the death of her best friend’s husband. She was counting calories.
When there was no more room in the icebox, someone got the idea to dump ice into the unused shower and store the food there. Mom grumbled about this after everyone had gone home for the night. The ice had melted and she had to try to find room in the icebox for the pots of potato salad and plates of Nanaimo bars.
“Why all this eating?” I heard her saying to herself.
That’s what I wanted to know, too. But I realized the food wasn’t really for us. It gave each person who walked through the door something to say. “I brought a rhubarb pie,” was something at least. “Is there any room in the icebox?” was something else and “I’ll make another pot of coffee” was something else again. And so the talk went on and the ache and the anger and the fear burned like the candle, endlessly.
Dad himself was nowhere to be seen, except in the framed photo that sat on top of a tall shelf that Glenna and Ron had brought over. I heard some adults whisper that there would be no viewing of his body because of the heat, and another corrected authoritatively that it was really because of the accident. I didn’t know what either of these things meant.
After the funeral, as the reality of Dad’s death descended, Jenny’s grief gathered and built like a summer storm. Her crying spells piled on top of each other, majestic and furious, then died to small, helpless sobs as her body collapsed on her bed, beyond the ability of her mind to call it back together and stand and walk. Jenny’s grief drew people to her. Glenna and the other women brought cups of chicken noodle soup to her bed and later came out with the cup saying, “She took a little more than half,” or, “She barely touched it.”
For me, where Dad had been there was a hole now, gaping with the memory of him. I couldn’t find a way to put it into words. But each night Jenny talked to Mom, who sat with us until Jenny wore herself out with questions.
“Are we going to be poor now?” Jenny asked. “Like the families who have to wear other people’s hand-me-downs?”
“No, sweetie, that’s not going to happen.”
“Did Dad love me?”
“Of course he loved you, don’t be silly.”
“Why did he always take Maggie to the woods and not me?”
“Oh, Jenny. I don’t think he ever knew you wanted to go. He thought you preferred girly things. He brought you Barbies from Williams Lake, didn’t he?”
“Maggie’s more of a tomboy, I guess. No offence, Mag.”
In this way, her storm began to calm.
After a few days, two of Jenny’s friends came and took her outside. They would sit on a blanket in the sun with their Barbies, dressing them up in different outfits and combing their hair with little pink combs and brushes. They went on picnics, with their lunch in a cloth sack. I watched them disappear into the trees, three sets of legs pale against the rich green of the woods, their ponytails swinging softly down their backs. Hours later I saw them reappear on the road, coming from the other direction, blurry in the heat haze rising from the highway.
After the hot spell, the rain came. The noise of it woke me early one morning, the hollow ping ping on the stovepipe and a gentle steady pattering on the roof like small pebbles were falling. It picked up force as I lay there listening, until it hammered down in a roar of water. Mom got up to close her window, then went out to the kitchen and closed those windows, too.
Jenny opened her eyes and lay there blinking at me. I pictured the rain soaking the road, the patchy lawn around our house, our vegetable garden, and the scented, springy earth beneath the spruce outside our window. The roaring abated a little, like an engine gearing down, then rose and rose and rose to a thunder of water, as if the sky had cracked wide open and an ocean of rain poured on Duchess Creek.
I felt the creep of worry. A steady dribble of roof run-off twisted in a finger-sized stream across our bedroom window. It wasn’t that. Mom clattered in the kitchen and the leak trickling in by the stovepipe drummed into an aluminum pot. It wasn’t that, either.
After breakfast I put on my rubber boots and went outside to crouch under the limbs of the spruce. The rain continued, a steady slanting volley.
“In a pinch, you can always find natural shelter,” Dad had told me the fall day we’d built the lean-to by the lake.
“Like under the spruce tree at home,” I’d said.
“That’s right. If you just need something temporary, there’s almost always something you can use. But you might as well build yourself a shelter. It helps you think, keeps you from panicking until you’re found.”
A puddle seeped into the thick bed of needles under the spruce and crept closer to my rubber boots. If I was going to camp under here, I would need to dig a trench to catch the runoff and a trough to carry it away. I realized that what I was worried about was the lean-to by the lake that Dad and I had built the fall before. I hoped it was still standing. And if someone was in it, I hoped the rain was not seeping in through the branches.
After the rain started, we were left alone with our grief like a family in quarantine. For a time, even Glenna seemed to be avoiding my mother.
“If this rain keeps up, I’m going to have get up there and fix that leak,” Mom said as she made lunch in the dull light of another rainy afternoon.
“Why don’t you ask Glenna to get Ron to do it for you?” Jenny said.
Mom looked at her for a minute, thinking. “I guess I’ve never really fit in in Duchess Creek,” she said. She didn’t seem regretful or upset. She spoke as if this was a fact she’d only just learned. “I was more at home on the ranches where my dad worked. I could go into the hills for hours and never see anyone. I even preferred the coast, where I didn’t know anyone. Though I hated the rain,” she continued, to herself, it seemed, more than to Jenny.
Late in the afternoon, the sun came out and shone on the puddles and brightened the leaves and grass. Mom got the wooden ladder from under the front porch and asked me to hold it for her as she climbed onto the roof.
“Maggie, Jenny you’ve got to come up here,” she called, as she looked out over the land. “Jenny, you hold the ladder for Maggie.”
I scrambled onto the wet roof where Mom was straddling the ridgepole. She held out her hand and guided me up to sit facing her, one leg on each side of the roof.
“Look how far you can see.” She pointed with her hammer out beyond the glistening highway and across the meadows that ran down to the valley. I was still not talking and I knew Mom was doing her best to unlock whatever had a hold over me.
“Things look different from up here, don’t you think?”
I smiled at her. Jenny climbed up and joined us.
We watched as a white pick-up truck slowed and took the turn at our driveway. I could see into the box: a cage with chickens in it, a stack of two-by-fours, some buckets. The truck stopped below us and the door opened and a blonde woman in overalls and a white T-shirt got out.
“Need any help up there?” she called. “I saw you from the road.”
“Know anything about roofing?” Mom yelled.
Her head appeared above the eavestrough. She had long braids and bangs cut evenly across her forehead. “Is there room for me? It looks like a party up here.”
It turned out that the woman, whose name was Rita, knew quite a bit about roofing, and a lot of other useful things, too. I liked the way she helped without taking over. She showed Jenny and me how to place the shingles we’d found in the shed and then watched as Mom nailed them into place. After that job was done, Mom made coffee and they sat on the damp step in the sun and drank it. Mom leaned back against the warm wall of the house like she always did and I saw her relax. Rita talked about the deer that had been eating from her garden, a young one who came by herself. No tin plates or bars of soap could keep her away.
“I finally just planted some lettuce and spinach for her,” Rita laughed. “She seems to know that’s her part of the garden. She doesn’t eat from the main one anymore.” I wanted to ask if she’d given her a name, but I didn’t. The sun lit Rita’s pale bangs; the sharp smell of coffee and rank mud rose up from under the step.
“Does she have a name?” Jenny asked.
“A name?” Rita turned to Mom. Her eyes shone very green, like cats’ eyes, and they were lazy, too, like a sleepy cat. “Yes I have. I have given her a name. And the name I have given her is Fond. I call her Fond.”
“Fawned?” said Mom. “Like pawned?”
“Sure. Like pond. Fond. F-O-N-D, because she’s a fawn and I’m fond of her, you know.”
I liked Rita.
Later that night, Mom came to our bedroom. Jenny was already sleeping and Mom whispered to me. “You know Rita lives out on Nakenitses Road all by herself. She has a nice little place with a house and sheds and a small barn. She keeps chickens and she delivers the mail. I was there once, a long time ago. She can fix anything. She fixes her own truck. She built her shed and her barn. She doesn’t really need anybody.”
When I didn’t say anything, Mom smiled and kissed my forehead. “I’ll tell you a little secret.” She waited again. She smoothed my eyebrows. “I hope Rita will be my friend. That’s my secret. I like the way she can take care of herself, don’t you?”
I nodded. Mom tucked the blanket up under my chin and I let her, though the night was warm.
“I have a present for you,” she said. And she uncurled my hand and in it placed Dad’s jackknife. “I want you to be able to take care of yourself, too.”
I should have said something then. She left the room. I wanted to call her back. She had never mentioned the sharp cut in the hem of my sheet or the stain my bleeding finger had left. Yet she must have seen them both and wondered. Maybe she was waiting for me to admit that I was the one who had taken the knife and left Mr. Safety vulnerable.