1953
—
Salt Spring Island, British Columbia
On the first day back, Luke received the packet of stamps he had ordered from a catalogue. He spent the morning categorizing them by country, measuring their perforations, stroking their gums. He knelt in a pool of light in the dining room, his leather album beside him, a magnifying glass, the flannel of his pyjamas wound around his knees. In his palm, he fingered a copper-shelled beetle on a blue frame. Cuba 1950.
In the study, Eugene folded his socks. He owned a delicate selection—calf-length, dandelion green. He did not fold them how Dad folded them, the way he’d learned in the war. Eugene pressed the socks together to fold them in thirds, then opened the elastic and tucked the toes inside. The pairs formed neat parcels, which he arranged in a row in his suitcase. I wondered who’d taught him to fold socks so discreetly. Eugene did not fight in the war.
The kitchen smelled sunny with coffee. No one had cooked, but I could smell the fragrance of other mornings. Charred toast, sulphurous eggs, newsprint. Dad wiping yolk off his chin with a corner of the business page. I lifted the lid of the percolator. The basin was full—no one had touched it. So I poured myself a cup. The liquid smelled vinegary up close. I could not bring myself to sip, but I didn’t want to waste the coffee either. I carried the mug outside.
Mom sat on the terrace swing in a network of afghans. The wool bound her feet at the bottom like a fish’s tail. She drank what looked like cream from a whisky tumbler. A cigarette balanced between her fingers, Eugene’s carton open beside her. She lowered her glass and smoked. After a studied drag, she tapped her ash into one half of an oyster shell.
Is that you, Will?
I stepped onto the terrace and shut the French doors behind me.
She said, Sometimes I think of you as a forest creature.
Like a metal, her voice warmed and cooled with her environment or whom she spoke to.
You know what I mean, don’t you? she said.
I stared into the sunlight. She watched me blinking and smiled. I think I did know what she meant, but I didn’t want to get it wrong. I let her continue.
I’m never alone in the forest, she said. Even if it’s silent, I will find bushtits and minks and voles.
Bears, I said, thinking of the zoo.
Sure, bears. Mountain lions. Bryophytes.
I waited.
Moss, she said.
She smoothed her hair into place and sipped from her drink. She used to curl her hair and fold it inside a snood, or else plait a wreath behind her ears around the crown of her head. I was relieved when she cut it. I worried she would stop combing and her hair would grow stringy, and I’d have to listen to other women’s comments at Ganges. Salt Spring Island was a small place.
You have to be particularly mindful of moss, she said.
She lifted the cigarette to her mouth and inhaled the smoke languidly. She had found a new kimono in California—honey pink, patterned with windows. Stained glass windows, grey windows, windows with birds. She released the smoke through her lips. The kimono’s silk sleeves pooled around her elbows.
Have you brought me a drink? she asked.
Both our eyes lowered to the mug. I had nearly forgotten I was holding it.
Coffee, I said.
No, thanks, Ducky.
She lifted the mug from my hands and placed it on the table beside her. Joan and I used to play old maid at that table. It came from Grandmother’s set of iron garden furniture.
Mom patted the cushion beside her. I climbed onto the porch swing. She lifted her glass, but paused before it reached her lips. She dipped it toward me.
Sip?
I took the tumbler with both hands, the ice bumping my teeth as I drank. The liquid tasted sweet and eggy. A curl of heat wiped my tongue.
Mom took her glass. She rocked it, watched the ice slide back and forth.
Now I’ll have to get more, she said after a moment. She glanced at me, as if considering whether I could do it. After another moment, she combed my hair with her fingers and pushed it behind my ear.
Eugene’s packing in the bedroom, I said.
She continued to rock the ice in her glass. The cubes plinked louder as they melted.
Big suitcase or little suitcase? she asked.
Little suitcase.
Okay, she said. Good girl.
But he’s folded a lot of socks.
Has he now?
Yes.
Little suitcase, many socks, she said. What do we make of that?
She tried to sip from her glass, but there was only ice.
Maybe he wears two at once, I suggested.
She sucked a cube, then opened her mouth to spit it back. The ice was too wide to slip out subtly.
Willa, she said, after she had completed the manoeuvre. —Why don’t you go for a walk?
She rested her head on the back of her wrist.
Pick us some flowers, she said as she slouched, her knees nudging me off the swing. The kimono had unfurled around her heart, and I couldn’t help but pinch the collar together.
Your fingers are cold, she said.
I paused, my hand between the silk and the bars of her chest, her muscles tensed. I stepped back into the sun.
Dad had built the house on Salt Spring Island’s North End. It was wide, with six French doors across and as many windows—you could see the ocean through every pane. Mom furnished the main room with her mother’s antique chesterfield, the leather creased like an old face, rubbed so raw in patches the material had callused. It sat opposite a rocking chair my dad had constructed from driftwood and the set of nesting tables where Mom had kept the dollhouse. The ceiling of the main room tented up like a wooden big top, painted sesame, carved into triangular panels that seemed to billow within the dome like the sails of a boat. Dad had seen the style on a business trip to New Zealand, and he spent months on the designs and construction—he would disappear to Salt Spring for entire weeks while Joan and I attended school in Victoria, the neighbour cared for Luke, and my mother puddled on the sofa, occasionally rousing herself to snip peonies from the garden, cramming the old, clammy bouquets in the trash. Dad originally planned all of the rooms for a single floor, but toward the end of construction, he decided to add a second storey behind the main dome. This extension was shoebox in shape, like the lifeless high-rises sprouting in Vancouver, but Dad hid the hard edges with a thick arm of wisteria and other vines sucking the wood. We each had our own room at the beach house, Joan’s the largest with a double bed. I used to climb in with her so we could tell stories at night or tickle each other’s back. Luke had his own room with sailboats painted on the walls, near the bathroom because he had trouble reaching the toilet at night. Sometimes he dragged his sheets to the tub, then lingered at our door until I tented the blankets and he wriggled in beside me and our bodies grew so warm, Joan kicked off the duvet.
Dad let us live like beach clams. We burrowed in the sand and sucked nutrients from the salt, sand fleas exploring our noses like luminous shrimp. We built clam gardens. We cleared the rock from our beach and constructed a wall. The clams stretched their tongues and spat water between our toes. Joan told us they did not have tongues but feet. We saved them from gulls so we could gather the shells ourselves in a beach towel. Smooth, sombre clams, their shells ringed as trees. I heard them ticking inside their cases. It felt hard to believe these were live creatures, not lockets you slung around your neck. My sister gathered them in the belly of her dress. I cupped the shells to my ear and waited for the foot to swab my cheek.
Until Dad left, he and Eugene worked together for the Puget Sound Navigation Company. Eugene lived in California at this time, but travelled to Seattle regularly for work, and bought a house there. Together, he and Dad negotiated the purchase of auto ferries from San Francisco Bay. That was in 1936, one year before Mom and Dad married. Dad moved out three years after the war. It wasn’t until later I realized Eugene had already left his wife and moved to the house in Seattle full-time, that he had seen my mother while Dad was overseas. He hadn’t fought in the war himself because of a bad foot from polio. When Dad left, Eugene took my mother for dinner once a month and joined us for a week at the beach house. I had thought it was out of charity.
Washington State bought the Black Ball Line in 1951, and Eugene moved to the Canadian subsidiary company, Black Ball Ferries. He ran the boats between Horseshoe Bay in Nanaimo and Gibsons Landing on the Sunshine Coast. Joan and I sailed the first crossing of the Quillayute three years after Dad left. I remember we wore Easter crinolines and white socks. Mother bought strips of chiffon to tie our hats down in the wind. In Gibsons, they had threaded the streets with bunting and provincial flags. We drove off the ferry in a parade of pipers and two brass bands. Spectators sang “God Save the Queen.” Children jammed the sidewalks—boys in striped jackets and Sunday shoes, girls with their hair curled into perfect sausages. And I could smell sausages. Some of the ladies’ groups had set up food stalls. The children watched as we passed. They did not wave because their palms were filled with wedges of yellow cake. They stared at us and licked their fingers. A Scottie dog capered after our car and barked. The pipers led the cars to Bal’s Hall for the luncheon. We found fewer children there. Aside from a few infants in prams, we were the only ones. The waiters served watercress sandwiches and roast beef. Joan and I knelt under the table, flanked by twill trousers and nylon shins. We inspected their shoes. I could have sat there all lunch, but Joan felt silly, our legs too long. I remember two men boxed in a ring on the front lawn. We slipped outside to watch them before the waiters served lemon pie. The boxers wore copper shorts, their chests coiled with hair. One of the men cupped the other’s jaw between his gloves. The other man grunted and locked his own bulbous fists around his opponent’s neck. Their shoes stamped the mat; they orbited the ring. They looked angry. And also that they might kiss.
In a colander, I collected: honeysuckle, trilliums, a Nootka rose. Then I rested on my secret beach. Luke and I went straight to the beach house with Mom and Eugene after we returned from California. Joan stayed in Victoria for a week-long tap dance camp with her friend Linda, a poodle-haired windbag with skinny legs. They used to babysit me together. We’d sit in her polyester room and survey the Eaton’s catalogue. Joan and Linda sprayed perfume on their wrists; Linda would lift her heels onto the bed and wipe the fragrance under her knees. She learned that in France, she said. The room always smelled like Chantilly and Cheez Whiz.
One of my goals that summer was to find a phantom orchid. Joan said only one hundred grew in the province. They bloomed in columns of waxy petals, no leaves. As if someone plucked the wings off a swan and wrung them into a garland. They preferred the soil you found under cathedrals of cedar. And compost piles, shell middens. I think it’s the calcium. My secret beach had a shell midden. You could see it in the dirt that cut over the sand. Grass grew overtop now. Dad said the first people tossed their shells here after they ate. Now the shells had chipped into fragments small enough to scrape inside my fingernails. I liked to imagine who ate these clams. Ten thousand years ago, someone cradled this mollusc in her mouth and sucked a fringe of chewy meat.
Dad knew a lot about the island. He hired one or two guys from the village to help build our house, and they shared morsels of information, like the best end of the island to fish for salmon. There was a contract builder on Salt Spring, and it vexed him that Dad sourced the work elsewhere. City boy, he said. After cheap labour. But I knew Dad paid everyone the same wage. I proofread his books to practise my long addition. To be honest, I think he preferred the villagers’ company. He knew the island’s bays too, from his marine map, which Eugene had left pinned in his study. I memorized the map so I could find new beaches. My memory started to merge this map with his other posters. He would pin inserts from National Geographic and Popular Science on the walls—in case he needed to refer to a constellation chart, say, or a diagram of the human body. As I sat on the shell heap, I began to imagine the islands as an anatomy, a system of organs. On Salt Spring, we were locked in the centre. A pancreas. Vancouver Island loomed to the south and west like our fat, glandular liver. Across from here, Kuper was what? The gallbladder? Then Galiano to the east—our descending colon. Mayne, Prevost, Pender. I wasn’t sure what those were. Farther south, Washington. The anus, I guess. On an island, it’s easy to feel confined.
I couldn’t see anything on Kuper from my secret beach. No houses or docks or pillars of smoke. It looked the same as any shoreline from here—a green feather landmass, edged with shells. Salt Spring appeared the same from the ferry, but up close this rock was a tangle of trees. The end we lived on, anyway. Dad cleared the wood at the front of our house, which faced the sea, but the rear was hemmed by firs and alders, boughs so thick they blocked the sun. On the beach, an arbutus grew sideways from the forest. I could walk across the trunk as though it were a balance beam. The bark peeled from the boughs like sheets of butcher paper. Some of those trunks grew so crooked with salt. They were my favourite. I liked the trees with trunks bent like spoons. I liked the forking trees. The corkscrew trees. Trees like a giant’s pliant cutlery.
Dad left from the house in Victoria. He packed two suitcases and asked a colleague to collect the remainder. He sent a telegram from Seattle. I remember the messenger’s trousers were cuffed in mud. Our lawn in Victoria did not absorb water well. I watched the boy kick the stand of his bike and step into a puddle. We rarely received telegrams to the house in those days. Even family sent mail to Dad’s office. I remember the paper exactly—Western Union yellow. It smelled of envelope seals.
MORLEY WILL COME FOR REST
His last words to the family. I don’t know what I expected.
Dad never said where he was going. I’d have gone to California if I was him. I used to visit his downtown office after school. He let me organize the brochures they collected from other ship companies. They always featured girls in the ads—women in swim costumes with bell-shaped bums. Women in rowboats, faces tipped to the sun, a woman in a nile green bikini, her arm raised, a starfish slipping from her hand. I filed the brochures by destination—country first, if applicable, then state or province, then each city. On Santa Monica Beach, the girls linked hands in the surf. They leapt into the air with beach balls. They waved from their towels on the sand. On the street, buildings were sun-bleached with frilled Spanish windows. Palm trees lined the boulevards. The ocean was everywhere.
It felt funny to dream about this from an island, where the ocean was already everywhere. But Luke and I were the only ones you’d see in the surf. It was too cold for adults, unless the day was very warm. The trick was to dive under and swim until you needed to come up for air. By that time, you would be used to the temperature, or deep enough that you needed to tread water, which helped. Sometimes the cold took my breath away. I tested my new vocabulary, which Joan taught me.
Fuck, I would say, my lips blowing out the consonants.
Sonofawhore.
Most vessels in the water were fishing crafts. They passed between the islands in dinghies and canoes, or larger boats, the floats of gill nets trailing in their wake like a string of tin cans. On the brochures for Canada, men stood in the sun and rolled up their sleeves.
From my secret beach, I thought I saw a canoe. Its bow rose from the water at a lean angle, like the throat of an ascending goose. It appeared unmanned. A bird shrieked behind me, and I turned to find seagulls jousting over a crab shell. By the time I looked back, the canoe was gone. The sun shone brightly away from the trees.
When I returned to the house for lunch, I found the terrace doors open. Mom and Eugene sat on opposite sides of the living room—Mom in the sunlight, on Dad’s driftwood rocking chair, Eugene on the loveseat near the kitchen. I stayed outside on the porch swing to arrange my flowers. Sometimes I wanted to snip their stems and suspend them in a jar like carp. Then all the flowers would match the trilliums, which were ground blooms. I had picked too many of those. They wouldn’t stand inside the vase.
They need you for a week? said Mom from inside.
I have a lot more to manage now.
Now?
Don’t play dim, Dolly.
Dim Dolly, she repeated. What do they call that?
Who’s they?
I don’t know. Poets. Don’t, dim, Dolly . . .
Are you drunk?
Drunk dim Dolly . . .
What’s in your glass?
Drrram . . . buie, she said. Now that’s a nice word.
I sat on the swing with one foot on the ground so I could push myself. I snipped the vines of honeysuckle with scissors from my sewing tin. It served as half sewing tin, half first aid kit: moustache scissors, two needles, a spool of thread, band-aids.
I don’t even know if I should leave you alone with the kids.
Oh, Willa’s very good.
I’m serious.
Then don’t go.
I invited the boys up.
We just saw them.
I know. But I spoke to Eveline last week. Pat’s up to no good.
So?
I’ve asked him to man the house for a few days. Teach him some responsibility.
Why didn’t you tell me?
I’m telling you now.
Who’s looking after who, then? Couldn’t hire a nanny so you ask your son to spy?
No one’s spying on anyone.
No? What’s he done, anyhow.
I strained to listen. Would he be coming this week? Had he already left San Diego?
Oh, you know. Public drinking. One incident with a dog. Are those my cigarettes?
Yes. What happened to the dog?
Didn’t the doctor say to ease off?
Probably.
He continued in a low voice. I leaned nearer to the door.
Kenneth can’t come. He’s working at the marina.
I didn’t hear her response—something brushed my knee. I opened my eyes. Luke stood beside me on the terrace, his arms folded around his stamp album.
Willa, I’m hungry, he said.
Hush, I’m eavesdropping.
Can you make me tomato soup?
Not now. Mom and Eugene are talking.
I patted the swing seat beside me and he climbed onto the cushion. He fingered the flowers in the colander, his hand tracing the five fragile petals of the rose.
Careful, I said. Watch the thorns.
Why didn’t you tell me earlier? said Mom.
It’s not your decision. They’re my sons.
It’s my house.
You mean his house.
In the silence that followed, I worried she would hurl her glass at him. Instead she said, Where are the matches?
Eugene didn’t respond.
She sighed loudly and creaked off the sofa.
Don’t waste those long ones on cigarettes, said Eugene.
Her match wiped the strip; I heard it from outside.
After a moment, Eugene said, Maybe I’ll take Luke with me.
Beside me, Luke stared at his knees. He clutched the hem of his white-and-blue conductor shorts, the rose stranded across his lap. I draped my arm over his shoulder and pulled him close to me.
Mom still hadn’t responded. Or if she had, I could not hear her.
Luke dipped his head onto my shoulder. I tried to hold his hand, but he gripped his shorts too tightly. I had to pry his fingers one by one. That’s when I saw the wet strawberry of blood smeared into his shorts. He flipped his hand and opened his fist. We both stared into his palm—he had to hold it as a cup so the blood didn’t spill.
I cuffed the back of his head. —You touched the stem, I said.
He nodded, eyes still fastened to the blood.
I told you to be careful.
The crease of his palm provided a shallow channel. I cupped my hands under his. Inside, I couldn’t hear their voices anymore.
Come on, you ape.
We lurched off the swing like conjoined twins, my hands clasped around his palms as though we carried an egg. We hobbled inside through the kitchen doors to avoid Mom and Eugene, who still sat in the living room, though they were quiet now, their mouths wooden and still, bodies reclined on their doll’s chairs. A drip spilled into my hand, perhaps because we were running, or trying to run, our shoulders twisted toward each other, away from our hips. We reached the bathroom and tipped Luke’s hands into the sink. There was not as much blood as I thought. But his skin was hot with it. I ran warm water from the faucet and yanked a ribbon of toilet paper from the roll.
Hold this, I said. I crammed the wad into his palm. —Then I’ll give you a band-aid.
I decided we should cycle into Ganges for ice cream because I didn’t like tomato soup, and Eugene had opened a bottle of Cointreau, which meant they would smoke in stiff silence until they ran out of ice and Mom offered to walk to the neighbours’. Probably he would not leave today. Probably he would leave tomorrow, when his eyes ached and Mom refused to fry him eggs.
We bandaged Luke’s cut and I wrapped his hand with a clean rag so he did not feel it on the handlebars. It was forty minutes to town—fifty with Luke, as his legs weren’t long enough to pedal fast. I used Joan’s bike, he used my old one. It was large for him—the wheels as tall as his hips. He looked like a cricket.
We rode down North End Road, between columns of trees that separated the road from farmland. Sun filled the leaves—the arbutus trunks plump with it, a warm gauze of light thickening the air between their boughs and the boughs of fir trees. There is a pigment where green becomes gold, I think. You see it in apples. And the gaps between branches. Between the branches, we saw brassy meadows and a pear orchard. The pears wouldn’t ripen until August, but already I smelled the hard green of new fruit. We passed the schoolhouse, then the northeast lobe of St. Mary’s Lake. Luke asked to go in. You could jump from the road, if you minded the nettles. I told him to wait until we bought ice cream.
My den chief said not to eat and swim.
I ignored him. I thought about how this island was the most beautiful in the world. More beautiful than California. Palm trees were unfriendly—their fronds like thin spears or paddle blades. I didn’t like avocados much either. I’d rather eat a pear from the orchard, or a sweet, crisp apple.
What’s your favourite ice cream? he asked.
I shrugged. The sun glanced off the lake and filled my eyes.
I like chocolate peppermint, he said.
I was not sure which I liked. I liked to say the words “burgundy cherry,” and I liked how Mrs. Lee used whole cherries, which I tugged from the cream with my teeth.
Frozen custard with cherry, I said.
The sea smelled different at Ganges. The seagull shit and salt off the docks smelled pleasant, somehow. Organic like dead crabs. The scent mingled with vinegar from the chip shop, and waffle cones, boat bilge, the musk of warm ropes.
We ordered from the soda counter at the drugstore. I chose cherry. Luke asked for fudge. We stood outside the shop in the sunshine. The road was not gravel here, but warm and silty, like flour between our toes. We sat on the curb and tried to lick our ice cream faster than it melted over the lip of the cone. The boy who delivered for the creamery had parked his wagon in the middle of the road. I recognized him. I think he brought our milk last summer. As he heaved a can off the cart, the sun lit the hairs that dusted his forearms. He didn’t look at me or Luke. Maybe we were too young for him to see. He was older than Joan, I thought. Eighteen. His shirt striped white and red like a boiled mint. His tan reminded me of the brothers, but his skin tone looked more honest somehow, from hefting crates and chopping wood rather than surfing. When he bent to lift two more cans, the muscles in his forearms purled. I looked away as our eyes met. Blood flushed my cheeks. I felt embarrassed by my bare feet.
Willa, said Luke.
What.
Your ice cream.
I looked to find it had melted down my wrist. A milky drip of it, drying into a band of taut skin.
Can we go now? he asked. The boy had passed us into the drugstore. Luke stood and petted his horse. The animal huffed and several flies sneezed from his nose. I stood as well and walked to the rear of the cart, where a blanket screened the bottles from dust. I lifted a corner of the blanket. Underneath, the boy had arranged the glass by size into rows: tall bottles for milk and squatter vessels for cream that cinched at the centre like hourglasses. I reached inside and freed a jar of cream. I tucked it inside my shirt.
We cycled back toward the lake. I pushed the jar of cream inside my waistband. If Luke saw the bulge, he didn’t mention it. We pedalled up the first hill, and I focused all energy into my torso—into clenching my navel, as though my solidity would stop the jar from falling. We tipped over the hill and coasted down. I placed one hand over my stomach. The glass warmed against my skin.
Luke didn’t ask to swim, though I knew he wanted to. I felt bad, because I’d said we would stop, but I wanted to go home. I wanted to hide this cream under my bed, then tiptoe along the trunk of my arbutus tree and think about the boy who drove the dairy cart. We lived so far up the island. I wondered if he still delivered our milk. For the first time, I felt glad that Joan wasn’t there. They loved her so effortlessly, boys.
Luke’s gaze hung on the lake, which glittered beyond the horsetails and spirals of blackberry. I nearly braked, but pretended I forgot my promise instead. The water glinted sharply—at that moment, it seemed a lake reflected more light than the sea. The ocean absorbed light, held the sun. A lake spat the sun at you.
It took an hour to reach home because I rode one-handed, cradling the jar of cream against my belly button. Luke didn’t say anything as we arrived. He walked his bike to the garden shed and slotted it neatly beside the skiff. I slid my bike next to his. On his way out, he unwound the rag from his hand and folded it inside his pocket. Chocolate had dried into the corners of his mouth. He continued outside and crossed the grass, pausing on the porch to collect his stamp album. I followed him inside. Eugene had driven to the neighbours’ for ice. Mom sat on the chair with an empty glass between her palms. Her lips were parted around a wedge of lemon.