“CINNAMON,” I SAID and bent to pat her. She was sitting right at the door when it opened.
“What did you call her?” the woman said.
“Cinnamon. Isn’t that her name?”
She studied me. “I didn’t name her. My nephew gave her to me. She’s an old cat.”
“She’s not that old. She’d be about five. She’s my cat. I named her Cinnamon.”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Maggie.”
“I don’t know you.”
“Margaret Dillon.”
“I’m sorry, no. I don’t know the name. Who are you looking for?”
“I’m looking for Emil.”
She studied me again. “You better come in then. Sit. You can move those buckets. I’ve been out picking berries.”
She looked nervous. She wiped her hands on her apron. “Would you like some tea?”
“Please,” I answered. When her back was to me, I said, “Is he still alive?’
She turned to me abruptly. “You’re going to have to tell me who you are.”
“My sister is Emil’s daughter.”
Alice, Emil’s aunt, piled the counter with potatoes, onions, carrots, and celery as I sipped my tea slowly, waiting.
“I’m making fish soup. I could use some help.” So, while she cleaned and cut up the salmon, I chopped the vegetables. Cinnamon came and sat patiently waiting for her share of the fish trimmings. Alice made up a small plate and handed it to me. I set the plate on the floor, smoothed Cinnamon’s fur and watched her eat.
“She was the runt of the litter,” I said. “I had to feed her goat’s milk with an eye dropper to keep her alive. She was just tiny. I got her just after my dad died. My mother is Irene.”
I could feel Alice stir at the name.
“Do you know her?” I asked. I handed over the chopped celery and she put it in the soup.
“I know the name. I never met her. I didn’t know she had children.”
“I haven’t seen her in three years.”
Again Alice bristled, then sighed.
“Emil is my brother’s son. He’s artistic, always was. Grew up kind of a quiet boy, very serious. Not like his brother. I think that was hard for him. Edward was everyone’s favourite. He died suddenly when they were teenagers and Emil never really got over that.
“I always had a soft spot for Emil as a boy. He used to climb into my lap and sit watching the world. That was when he was really little. But I didn’t really know him as an adult until I moved out here. He came out to visit me and he ended up buying a boat. I understand he met Irene around that time. I didn’t see him again for many years. A couple of years ago now, late summer, he showed up at my door in the middle of the night with the cat. Your Cinnamon—I just call her Puss.” She looked at me apologetically. “Emil didn’t tell me her name. He was in no state.”
He had been thin and wild-eyed, barely recognizable. He had only come to ask her to take the cat. He had not even spent the night, only left the cat after making her promise she would take care of her and then he had gone. It was months more before she learned where the cat came from and the story it was a part of.
Alice promised me she would tell me all she knew. But she said it was a story that should be told in safety and that she wanted me to spend the night and the next day with her. I said I would.
I walked down to the dock to find Vern and we drove back to Alice’s house together.
“I’m sure,” I said.
“I’ll come round here tomorrow afternoon.” He had a hold of my hand and seemed reluctant to let go. “Sleep well,” he said and leaned over to hug me. “It’ll be just me and the bears tonight.”
All that evening, Alice and I kneaded dough, rolled out pie crusts and cleaned berries.
Alice told me she had left Manitoba in 1955.
“I ran away,” she said.
“Ran away from what?”
“My husband. I had inherited some money from my sister. She knew what was going on in our house and when she died she left money to me and to Emil. I didn’t actually have the money yet, but I couldn’t wait. I had enough for a bus ticket to Calgary. Then I hitchhiked. I wanted to go somewhere my husband would never have heard of. I got a ride from a logger who was heading to Bella Coola. He told me about this road that had been pushed through a couple of years before. Told me it was called the Freedom Road. And that convinced me that it was the place for me. Mind you when we drove that road, I didn’t think I’d live to enjoy my freedom.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Oh, it’s nothing now compared to what it was.”
Before bed, the counter was laden with fresh buns and berry pies.
“You need to get some sleep,” Alice said.
I had waited this long and I would have to wait some more. I could hear the river from the spare bedroom where Alice had made up the bed for me. The room was chilly and I pulled up the extra blanket. I heard the rain coming down hard again. Vern would be listening to the steady rhythm on the station wagon roof. In the middle of the night I woke hot and tangled in the sheets, dreaming that Vern was touching me. A sweet ache spread from my centre out to my limbs, my fingers, my toes. I tried to open my eyes, to remember where I was, but I was held on that warm, soft edge of sleep. There was a sound, familiar and comforting, in the room. It was Cinnamon, purring beside me, her warm body curled against my back.
In the morning, we didn’t eat breakfast. Alice gave me a cup of weak tea. She led me to the edge of her property and into the bush. We followed a muddy path through the trees to the rocky river’s edge, then down along the riverbank until we saw smoke rising from a fire on a strip of pebbly beach. Two young women were tending a fire. They smiled at me as we approached. Not far from the fire was a shelter made of a frame of bent branches covered with blankets and canvas. The rain had stopped in the night and the mountains and sky were bright-washed blue. The river tumbled cold and clear over rocks. One of the young women dipped a pot into the flow and scooped the fresh water into a barrel. She did this several times. Cedar smoke scented the air. The other woman gave me a flannel nightgown to put on and asked me if I was wearing any jewelry. I wasn’t. The women and Alice put theirs on a bench beside the fire.
When everything was ready, we went into the shelter. Blankets were pulled down over the door. The darkness was total. Water hissed and a blanket of steam enveloped us. My heart slowed. My eyes closed. The heat burned the surface of my skin, then seeped still deeper into my bones and loosened them.
A story rose in the darkness, a story of a man who lived in the shelter of a burden so huge he was impervious to ordinary fear. He wasn’t afraid of grizzlies or cougars, lightning strikes or snowstorms or the birds of prey that made their nests in the trees beside his cabin. Sometimes when his aunt took the motorboat up the inlet and hiked in to see him, she found him outside his cabin in the clearing, his hands red with cold as he sat in the drizzling rain drawing birds in charcoal on damp cardboard.
She stoked his fire and made him soup and pan-bannock and stayed to make sure he ate it. He had been scraped clean—there was nothing more for loss to scavenge from him. Guilt had spread in him like rampant stinging nettle and choked out every other thing so that he no longer felt it like other people did, because he had no other feeling to compare it to. It was only because of this that he could live at all.
This is a sad story. Don’t think about approaching him gently like a wild, cornered animal. Don’t think about holding out a hand to him. This will not be allowed.
After some time, we emerged into the sunlight, splashed ourselves with river water from the barrel and listened to the birds scolding each other as they built their nests in the trees on the far bank.
When we went back inside, the rocks hissed, steam rose and the heat deepened. Hooves rushed past outside and thunder rumbled. Stories peopled the dark.
A woman named Irene in a cabin in the bush with the snow just melting and the Solomon’s seal blooming under the trees and the tender turquoise broken shells of hatched birds’ eggs cushioned in the moss. Irene, our mother, who had beautiful red hair and legs as shapely as a fawn, labouring in childbirth with only a man who loved her and a self-help book several years old. The sun shone on the cabin floor and moved up the walls, then the shadows lengthened and the windows darkened and the fire popped and crackled, the water boiled again, steam rose and still she laboured and the baby refused to come.
He offered to carry her to the truck and she spat at him and called him an idiot. But he’d read about that. How mothers could turn ugly that way. It didn’t stop him from trying to massage her with olive oil, which didn’t stop her from slapping his head and telling him to get away from her.
The story, you have to understand, is told by a man who loved our mother to the woman who was his protector who told it to me to protect him. But I suppose that most of it is true. When he could see the crown of the baby’s head, Emil held a mirror for Irene to see and when the head refused to budge any further, Emil tried to help it out. Irene was worn out from pushing so long and couldn’t do much more. It was dark outside. An owl hooted at the window and Emil felt he was being taunted. Sometime after midnight, Emil finally pulled the baby out. He was a boy and he was blue. At the same moment, from somewhere deep within our mother’s body, blood began to flow in a torrent. Emil had never seen a torrent of blood like that.
It gushed onto the floor while Irene lay spent and asking for a blanket. Emil didn’t know whether to tend to the baby or Irene. He stuffed towels between Irene’s legs and tried to get the baby to breathe. The books said you weren’t supposed to spank the baby, but in desperation he did it anyway. It didn’t help. So he put the baby in the basket they had prepared for him and he turned to Irene and the blood.
She had stopped asking for the blanket but he tucked it around her anyway and kissed her forehead. The colour of her skin was like the inside of a mussel shell, luminous gray-purple. The towels were soaked through and there were no more, and when he tried to look, the blood just gurgled out, a viscous gelatinous purply red. He thought of cold water, to stop the bleeding, but he had only hot water.
The owl was hooting and Irene was still and cold to the touch, her breathing barely discernible. So he ran outside to the woods and found some snow and scooped it into a clean pot and carried it back into the steaming, bloody house. He kissed her again but by then she was dead. The cat, Cinnamon, hunched in the chair by the stove.
He spent part of the night in the rank-smelling bloody house while the fire cooled. Then as dawn came, he carried the cat outside in his arms, took a can of gasoline and splashed it on the front door, on the walls, at the four corners of the cabin and he lit it. He stood in the trees and watched it burn to the ground with both Irene and the baby inside. He himself disappeared with the cat and was not seen for a long time. When he surfaced, he was not a man anyone who had once known him would recognize. His aunt Alice saw the ghost of him that one night when he brought her the cat. Then she did not see him again until she heard the rumour of the black-bearded rake of a man living in the bush drawing birds on cardboard. She knew it must be him and she went to find him.
The heat had laid me out flat on the ground. A baby wailed. Snot streamed from me and into the cool mud under my cheek. The light, when I crawled out of the heat, stung my eyes. Sun and turquoise sky. Steam billowed from my body as a woman rinsed me with cold river water.
We ate salty salmon soup and buttery rolls. Berry pie. Sweet tea. Birds hopped from branch to branch, chattering, working on their nests.
“There’s a piece of land up the valley,” Alice said. “Emil has the deed for it. He told me it’s in a safety deposit box somewhere. He meant it for Irene. I think he will want Jenny to have it now.”
The fire snapped and smoked with the rich scent of cedar. We watched the shadows change; sunlight striped the ferns and fallen trees. And then it was time to go back.
In the morning, when the sun came over the mountains, Vern and I packed up the station wagon and drove out of the valley. We saw two bears, three deer, and wild roses blooming everywhere. I held Cinnamon, who watched out the window, alternately meowing and purring, then climbed into the back and curled up on the floorboards in the same place she used to. Alice had insisted I take her. “She’s all I have of her to give you,” she said.
I closed my eyes and slept. I dreamed of Mom, and in the dream I was cradling her in my arms.