SMOKE FROM THE forest fire had settled over the region. There was no wind and the sun hung above the trees, a pale orange disc. Leslie stopped at the end of the driveway of our old house in Duchess Creek.
“Doesn’t look like anyone’s living there,” he said, and we laughed. The porch had caved in on one side and the window of Jenny’s and my room was broken. The hydro wire looked to be sagging almost to the ground.
I lifted my knapsack and got out.
“I’ll make a few inquiries, if it’s okay with you,” Leslie said.
I nodded, set off down the driveway. When I looked back, he was still sitting there. He waved and put the truck into gear.
I left my pack near the spruce tree. What had once been a scraggly front yard had been returned to the wild. Deer scat nestled in tufts of grass here and there. They grazed here, on the wild rose bushes. The roof that Mom and Rita and I had once fixed was missing shingles; those that were left had rotted in the heat and cold of the seasons.
It wasn’t a house built by people who meant to stay, as Mom used to say.
The door was unlocked. Inside, the house still smelled of old wallboard and mouldering insulation. But our family’s smell was gone. The house had been scavenged of almost everything. The Formica table and chairs were gone; so was Dad’s green chair and the beds in our room. The only thing left was the woodstove and Mom and Dad’s bed. I pushed open the bedroom door. A film of dust coated the mattress. On Mom’s side, a blood stain the size of a quarter. Spiders had stuck the folds of the curtains together with their webs; they crackled as I parted them to look out the window.
And then I caught a whiff of her lipstick, the briefest breath of that drugstore cosmetic-counter sweetness. I raised my head to breathe it in deep. Then the acrid scent of the forest fire billowed in on the breeze. Except there was no breeze. I turned to see if I had left the door open. I hadn’t.
I swear she was there. I know that sounds crazy, but it felt as though she’d taken my hand in hers. It felt so good, I started to cry again and I heard her voice, telling me to shush now, Maggie-girl. I sat on the bed and it stayed with me, that feeling of her being there with me. I thought of phoning Jenny to tell her, but I thought, what would that do, two of us off our rockers and hearing things?
I slept that night in that haunted house. I know that sounds crazy, too, but I wanted her to come back. Any minute she would be real, her footsteps crunching in the driveway.
But in the morning it was Agnes who came, in a sky blue cotton dress dotted with red flowers and wearing jeans underneath it, just like she used to.
She said she had wondered if she’d ever see me again and then she swallowed hard and her eyes glistened. “I’m getting so old, I cry when I’m happy now,” she said. She wiped tears from her cheeks.
“You’re not old,” I said and hugged her. She felt thin in my arms and she held on after I went to pull away. Her chest heaved with the effort of not crying. It felt strange, me comforting her as if she was a child. But I wasn’t comforting her, really. I was thanking her, though I couldn’t say the words.
“I’m canning fish,” she said, ducking her head to try and hide new tears. “Come over and help me.”
We drove over to her house, and I watched her graceful gait, maybe a little tentative and pained as she climbed the steps, though she wouldn’t be forty yet.
“I’ve got a touch of arthritis,” she said, feeling my eyes on her. “I’m too young for that!”
In the house, she put the kettle on. “Have you come to make an honest woman of me?”
“How many years ago did I promise to take you to Potato Mountain?”
“Four or five.”
“Let’s go tomorrow then,” she said. “We’ll have to put together a few things. We can take some of this fish.”
“I don’t want to mess up your plans.”
“You’re not going to believe the flowers we’ll see up there. This is the time of year to go.”
“Really, Agnes? Are you sure?”
Agnes started to laugh. She picked up the teapot and carried it to the sink and she stood there looking out the window, her shoulders shaking.
“Do you have a sleeping bag?” she said, still looking out the window.
“Yes.”
“Good.” She wiped her eyes and turned to me again. “We’ll just take one little bag each. Sleeping bags. Some food, some water. Matches. A little tarp. Who did I lend that tarp to? Oh, you’re going to love it up there. I haven’t been in three or four years, I don’t know why. You just forget how much you need to go.”
When we got to the end of the road in the cool morning, a horse stood waiting, tethered to a fence. She flicked her tail and whinnied softly when she saw us.
Agnes patted her nose and fed her an apple. “This is Linda. She’ll carry our gear for us. You can ride her for a while if you want. Gotta watch the steep parts, though.”
I shook my head. We left the sunshine and headed into the shade of the trees. We walked in single file, the horse snuffing her breaths and her tail swishing softly. We passed a big old pine and stopped to stare up at the deep fissures of its orange bark. The purple of Jacob’s ladder pushed through ferns. Grasses poked from rock and, in breaks in the shade, patches of yellow balsamroot glowed in the morning sun. We climbed and the pines grew smaller, the aspens brushier and the meadow opened up, green and awash with flowers. The sun poured down, lighting the Indian paintbrush, the balsamroot and silver skeletons of pines, twisting amid the grass.
Agnes stopped to rest on a rock beside the trail. Warm now, I took off my jacket and looked out across the valley and the snow still lying on the mountaintops, white blending to ragged white cloud. But above us, farther up the trail that wound through the meadow, the sky was friendly, unforgettable turquoise brightened by sunlight, and the mountain was softened and gentle. Wild onion tanged the air. Agnes named the plants for me: violet, speedwell, buttercup, saskatoon, kinnikinnick, saxifrage, meadow rue, foxglove, columbine, strawberry, arnica, forget-me-not, soopollalie.
Soopollalie, soopollalie.
“We make Indian ice cream from that one,” Agnes said. “The berries whip up like soap suds. That’s the name, I guess.”
A spell had been cast, or had one been broken? Here on the mountain, the sun pouring down, birdsong, wild onion and pine, among familiar flowers, things I could name and words I understood.
We had lunch on the mountaintop, looking out across the valley and the lake below. Later, settled around the fire in our little camp, Agnes told me the story she knew.
“I met your mother in Williams Lake when we were teenagers. Her mother had died—I don’t know when—she was little, I guess. Her father was a cowboy. He came up from the States somewhere, didn’t know a thing about ranching—that’s what people said. But he was a fast learner. My dad and him worked some ranches together. He came to love that life, I guess. But he never knew quite what to do with Irene. Especially when she grew to a teenager. She was a little wild, you know. And beautiful. You know that. Her dad sent her to high school in Williams Lake and she didn’t see much of him after that. I know, because holiday time everybody went home, but Irene stayed, and if there was no car at home, I stayed, too, with my old aunty. She was kind of dotty, sat in a chair in her room all day long, looking out that window at the mountains to the west. I suppose she was homesick, too, come to think of it. I made her meals, brought them to her on a tray. It was lonely sometimes.
“It was a Friday after school. Irene was walking behind me. I knew she was there. That was a holiday weekend, Thanksgiving, a long weekend. You didn’t like those too much if you couldn’t go home. ‘You have beautiful hair,’ I heard her say. I didn’t turn around right away. What if she was talking to somebody else? But I knew it was me she was talking to. I was older than her—we weren’t in the same grade. She ran to catch up with me. ‘You have beautiful hair,’ she said again. ‘Do you do use something special on it?’ I told her it was eggs. She looked at me with this funny look, like she thought I was kidding. Then she burst out laughing. I just stared at her, and then I started laughing too. My god, we laughed. Laughed till we cried. What was so damn funny, I don’t know.
“But I invited her to my aunty’s house in town. We made a big turkey dinner for just the three of us. My old aunty ate like a bird, just a bit of white meat and a tablespoon of mashed potatoes. So really, it was just for your mom and me. We made the stuffing, we made a mountain of potatoes, turnips, cranberry sauce, cauliflower with the cheese sauce. Pumpkin pie and whipped cream. Spent my aunty’s money on all those groceries. We put a white tablecloth on the table and used my aunty’s good dishes. We had to wash them first, they hadn’t been used for so long—you know, the gravy boat, the platters, she had all of that. I don’t know what possessed us, just the two of us and all that trouble, all that food. We were at it the whole day and night. We were still doing dishes after midnight. But, boy, we sure had fun. Your mom, she had that spirit in her—just up and do something, just because.”
“I remember,” I said.
“We stayed friends after that. But we didn’t run with the same bunch. Irene was in with a drinking crowd. Not that she did much of that herself. But she tolerated it. I couldn’t stand to be around it. Look what it did to so many of our people. Just wrecked them. Wrecked plenty of whites, too, but there’s more of them, so you don’t notice so much.”
The fire had burned down so I put on more wood and poked it to life again.
“Can I ask you something, Agnes?”
“Yes, you can.”
“Was my dad a drinker?”
“I didn’t know your dad too well.” She stared into the fire and I thought that was the end of it. She took up a stick and rearranged the embers so the fire flared and lit up her face.
“Some men think if they don’t do anything bad, you know, like beating the wife or kids or yelling at them, where’s the harm? Some men just open that bottle and in they go. They disappear. Maybe that’s worse. Maybe harder for the women.”
We sat in silence. The fire popped and spit bright embers on the ground and we stomped out the big ones.
“Your mother didn’t finish high school. She didn’t like living in town. She took off halfway through grade eleven. I heard she went to Bella Coola, got a job in a restaurant or motel or something. She was only sixteen or so. She met a man there.”
I felt my stomach tighten.
“Name of Emil Deschamps. Métis fellow from the Prairies. He had a fishing boat and she got a job fishing with him.” Agnes laughed. “Imagine that. That’s going to go one of two ways. I guess they fell in love. I guess maybe Emil was in love with her when he asked her to go out on his boat. I saw him once in Duchess Creek on his way through to Williams Lake or somewhere. Irene told me who he was. He was a handsome man, shiny black hair, curly, kind of tall, nice smile. Had a big old car. Maybe a Pontiac.”
“Was Mom with him then?”
“Not at that time, no. But she told me they took that boat out and went to the most beautiful places, islands and beaches. She told me I would love to see it. She told me we should go sometime and I thought I might, she made it sound so good. But I didn’t. She didn’t either, as far as I know. She was married to Patrick. She had little Jenny. That would have been 1959, because my dad died that year. Irene loved being a mother.”
I looked up at the sky and there was the riot of stars that my grandmother had missed so much.
I spoke slowly. “She did love being a mother, didn’t she?”
“She told me so, Maggie.”
“Well then I don’t understand.”
“No,” said Agnes.
“I’m looking for her. I’m out here looking for her. Jenny needs her. But I don’t really want to find her. I know that’s a terrible thing to say. But what would it mean if we found her, alive somewhere, living her life?”
“No,” said Agnes again.
A star shot across the sky just above the trees. I breathed in quickly. Then another followed, a brightness disappearing.
“You need to go see Rita,” said Agnes.