I CAN’T SAY THAT MOM was wrong about my being able to look after myself. I soon recognized Bea Edwards for the ticking time bomb that she was. Only three weeks into our stay, I learned that what could set her off was unpredictable. It was my job to set the table each night. Sometimes Ted didn’t come home until after supper, when one of his drinking buddies dropped him off and pushed him up the plywood ramp to the door. He could do it himself, unless he’d had a few.
One night I thought I might save time by finding out if he’d be home. “Should I set a place for Ted?” I asked Bea, as I took down the plates.
“How should I know?” she snapped.
But this was nothing. This was just normal Bea impatience. It was later, when we were washing up the supper dishes and I tucked Ted’s clean, unused plate in with our three dirty ones that Bea exploded. Her soapy hands shot up from the hot dishwater and tore the steaming eyeglasses from her face. She hurled the glasses across the kitchen, where they skittered against the refrigerator grill, and she screamed, “Do I have so little to do around here? Do I? Do I?” Her pale eyes popped wetly in the midst of the red blur that was her face. “Now I’m washing clean dishes! I’m washing dishes that haven’t even been used! Is that how you do things at your house? Here!” She began clumsily scooping clean plates and saucers and bowls and cups from the cupboards and piling them haphazardly beside the sink. She didn’t stop until she had cleared every last dish from every shelf.
I stood back, my hands knotted tightly in front of me. I watched as her face swelled, grew redder and redder, the veins throbbing at her temples. She might literally explode, I thought. But instead she went limp as a wet dishrag and with a choked sob hissed, “Wash them.” She left the kitchen, the door swinging in her wake. And so I did.
One day not too long after Bea’s explosion, I was wandering around town after school, killing time until Jenny was done volleyball practice. Jenny liked the novelty of living in a town. She’d bought herself a paisley wallet at Stedman’s and tucked the money Mom had given her into it. After school, when she wasn’t playing volleyball, she went to the Tastee-Freez with her friends. She had an easy charm that I didn’t and acted as the buffer between Bea and me. Up ahead, the doors of the Maple Leaf Hotel swung open and Ted rolled out into the sun. Ted had a way of wheeling his chair that I wouldn’t have expected from a man who couldn’t walk. There was a vigour to it, the way his hands gripped the wheels, pushed off strongly. He was not feeble, Ted, and it seemed like he wanted anyone who saw him to know it. He had broad shoulders, a straight back and large, lean hands. He had silver-grey hair, lots of it for a man his age, I thought, although I didn’t really know how old he was. He went to the barber once a week for a trim. Ted wore the same kind of flannel shirts and blue jeans as my dad had worn, so that made me like him a little.
He stopped when he saw me and waited till I caught up to him.
“Hello, Maggie.”
I thought I might do a good deed, not for Ted, but for Bea, by delivering him home for supper. Or maybe the good deed was really for myself.
“How was school?” Ted asked.
“Fine,” I said. He set off again, wheeling along the road with me beside him.
“How do you like Williams Lake?”
“It’s fine,” I said.
He laughed. “You like the bush better, don’t you? You’re like your dad.”
It pleased me so much to be told that I was like my dad that for a minute, I just walked along smiling.
“If you push me, I can show you a good place,” Ted said. The Edwards’ place wasn’t far from the hotel, but we wheeled right past their street. “We can’t go over the railroad tracks in this thing, so we have to take the long way. You’re not in a hurry, are you?”
I thought of Bea. “No,” I said.
At the end of Oliver Street I helped push him along to the highway. A small fear took hold of me. What if I lost control of the chair? What if he went wheeling down the highway towards Vancouver? But Ted said, “Here we go! Hang a right. You got a licence to drive this thing, Maggie?” I laughed and felt a lightness rise in me, the giddiness of adventure.
I pushed Ted with difficulty down a narrow trail bumpy with tree roots and fir needles. Scent rose up as we crunched over them. No wind, but a warmed air, a different air, gently wrapped me. Something invisible inhabited the long shadows and winked from the silver spiderwebs running from wild rose to birch. The knot of worry that had been twisting my gut since Mom left us loosened. My shoulders relaxed.
“Pretty place, isn’t it?” Ted said. “You keep heading up the river that way, you’ll get to the Fraser.” We could not get very far with the chair. So I parked him and sat down, leaning against a tree.
He took out his tobacco and began tamping it into the bowl of his pipe. I must have been looking at Ted in a funny way, because he said, “I can tell you how I ended up in this chair. Most people are curious and I don’t mind.” A crow began to squawk and fuss on a high branch above us and the birch leaves trembled. A swallow hovered and dove at the crow and Ted and I laughed. He lit a match, drew the flame into the pipe and a cloud of sweet-scented smoke curled into the air.
“I was working with an outfit north of here, logging a steep hillside. We lived in tents, rough and ready. It was a gyppo show. That’s what they call a small outfit. That can be okay if guys know what they’re doing. If they’re careful and they get along. But from the get-go, I never liked the way the hook tender did things. He was the boss, but he was strung tighter than a fiddle and he wasn’t happy unless everybody was going in three different directions at once. I was planning to quit as soon as I could.
“That day I had a bad feeling. It was hot, stinking hot. We woke up to heat and it stoked up to a furnace as the morning went on, sun blazing down on the hillside. Everyone was tetchy, but that joker of a hook tender poked and screamed, jumped on one foot. I sometimes wondered if he was all there.
“Three of us choker setters were on the crew that day, me, old Jim, and a greenhorn we called Dewy, because he had this soft white face he washed with special soap every morning. We were down in a ravine, attaching the choker and climbing back up in that inferno to get clear. It was exhausting. We decided to take turns, give each other a rest. It’s Dewy’s turn and he’s walking down a steep log. His cork boots got caught up on the bits of loose bark and he lost his gription. Tumbled head over heels and winds up upside down, on his head, out cold. Jim and me climbed down to him and pulled him out, gave him a drink of water and he went back to work. That’s what you did.
“The day before, some men were standing on a stump watching the logs being yarded. No one saw the haulback catch on the roots of a big old stump. The stump broke loose and came thundering down the mountain, heading straight for these guys standing there, mouths open. It hit the ground about fifteen feet in front of them and flew up and over their heads. Barely cleared them. We teased them about the shave they got that day. But those things can happen, even in the best-run show.”
Ted held another match to his pipe and the ripe cherry smell floated on the air. “At lunch I sat on a stump. I was soaked with sweat, not a dry spot on me—even my socks were sopping. The bugs were out, I was itching from the dust and bark that stuck to me. I thought about walking off the job, right then and there. That’s how sure I was that something was going to go wrong. It was Friday anyway and I was going home for the weekend, and I’d already decided I wasn’t coming back. This old-timer, Jim, he’d been a faller, was mostly deaf now. All morning he grumbled about this being the worst job he’d ever been on and hadn’t he paid his dues? This fella was comical, Jim. He had no front teeth. He had dentures but he didn’t wear them on the job. I suppose he thought he’d break them or swallow them while he was working or something. He was skinny, too, but still muscled like a racehorse. He knocked over his coffee at lunch. That was the last straw for him. He let out a blue streak of curses from his toothless old mouth. I said to him, ‘Jimbo, why don’t you and me just bunch it and head on home?’ ”
“So did you?” I asked.
Ted looked off through the lace of leaves and sunlight and was silent for so long I thought I’d asked the wrong thing.
Finally he said, “No. No we didn’t leave. We did what you do, which is to finish the job. It’s funny, when I think about it now, how sometimes the good lessons you learned can sink you.
“We were close to done for the day. I kept thinking about the ice-cold beer I was going to drink when we got to town. Jim was at the top of the ravine, Dewy was down below, and I was standing clear. The whistle blew and all of a sudden I heard a snap, like a giant guitar string busting. There was a shout, some curse I won’t repeat, and guys diving left and right. I saw Jim’s head coming up like an old hound dog sniffing the air. I shouted ‘Jim!’ at the top of my lungs and he looked at me and I saw the change in his eyes as he understood and he made a move, digging in as if to run, then the cable came whipping through the air and carried him right off the hill.”
“Oh no!” I said. “Did he die?”
“Oh yes, he died all right.” Ted’s pipe had gone out and he sucked deeply on it, twice, then held it in his big hand on his lap. The sun had sunk behind the hills and the air felt chilly now, the light gone flat and lonely among the trees. But I hadn’t yet heard how Ted ended up in the wheelchair.
“Poor old Jim deserved better,” he said. “We wrapped him up to bring him home. But then, when we got back to camp, what with all the confusion, we had to wait for our cheques. I couldn’t stand it. I wanted to go. Finally I made up an excuse, I got paid in cash and I got out of there as fast I could. I got a lift to town where my truck was parked and I had a cold beer and supper. Then I felt, well Maggie, I’m ashamed to say it, but I felt glad it wasn’t me. I was just glad to be alive. Really glad. And I wanted to go home.
“I headed out. It was getting dark, but that time of year it never does get entirely dark. And then the moon came up and the road ran out ahead of me shining like a river. Gosh I was happy. What a beautiful night. Then I thought I heard that snapping sound again, of the line right there in my truck. I thought that was strange. I shook my head and I opened the window to get some fresh air. Bugs flew at my windshield and I saw them coming at my headlights like a gentle rain. Then I heard it again, that crazy whipping snickety-snack. And there in front of me in the headlights I saw someone running along the road. Right in the middle. So I slowed a bit and this runner came alongside my open window and yelled something. I saw his face and it was Jim with that big toothless mouth. ‘What?’ I yelled back and then I heard him, clear as a bell, ‘Wake up!’
“I opened my eyes. Right in front of me was the grill of a truck, no headlights on. In the split second it took for me to figure out that it was parked on the side of the road, I jammed on the brakes, then I slammed right into it.
“Old Jim saved my life, yelling at me just like I’d yelled at him on the hillside. The truck I hit was loaded with a big load of logs, and the driver had pulled off to have a nap. The cops said the tracks showed I had been driving on the shoulder for nearly a mile. The hood of my truck accordioned under his and then the two trucks went slowly over, the weight of the logs carrying us. My truck ended up in the air, clamped onto his grill. I don’t remember any of that. I was in a coma for seven days and when I woke up, I was in a hospital bed in Williams Lake and I’d never have to work as a logger again.” Ted laughed quietly. “That’s it. That’s the story.”
I pushed Ted’s wheelchair through the chilly dusk back along the trail, across the highway and up the Edwards’ street, even when Ted could have rolled it himself. Bea and Jenny were clearing away the supper dishes when we came in bringing a drift of fall air into the steamed house. Jenny looked up in a combination of surprise and relief. Then she arranged her mouth into a tight-lipped line and tried hard not to smile. Bea said nothing, didn’t meet our eyes, just disappeared into the kitchen. Ted hung up his coat and wheeled over to the table where his bare plate sat staring up between fork and knife.
“I’ll get your food,” said Jenny. I should have helped, but I didn’t want to go in there. I went to the bathroom and washed my hands. Then I took my place at the table and began to eat. Jenny sat and watched, smiling a little now.
I waited for the slams and crashes of Bea’s rage to reverberate off the kitchen walls and come ringing through the house. But I heard only the rush of water filling the sink, the sucking of the dish detergent bottle and the clink of silverware against glass.
Jenny passed me an envelope across the table. “This came today.” Jenny & Maggie was written in Mom’s handwriting in pencil on the envelope. I took out the letter, a single thick sheet torn from a sketchbook.
Dear Girls,
I hope you like Williams Lake and are having fun living in a town for a change. I’ve sent some money to the Edwards to cover your expenses, so if you need anything, just ask Mrs. Edwards. You can buy yourselves a treat now and then, too. Don’t go crazy, though! All is well here. Bye for now.
Love Mom
There was nothing in the letter, nothing about when she was coming back, or where she was, or where Cinnamon was. My eyes filled with tears but I kept eating. I wouldn’t cry in front of Ted. I thought of him instead, out on the lonely road with old Jim running alongside him.
“I think I’m going to try and get a job,” Jenny said. “I saw a sign at Frank’s. I could be a waitress or a cook. Couldn’t I?”
“Sure you could,” Ted said.
“I’d have to arrange it around volleyball practices, though. The Duchess Creek team is coming to our school to play us. Cool, eh?”
I heard her, but I was out on that road, with the night insects flitting around in the headlights of a truck lifted right off the ground.