TWENTY-FOUR

1962

Using a plant book of her father’s, Tessa drew the Atlas cedar onto her map, then the pines, with a little gathering of crows in the high branches. A cork elm in the southwestern corner. The stones themselves were more difficult. But she resolved this to some degree by taking a little notepad to the cemetery and sketching the stones from life (if it could be put that way). Then she carefully cut out around the drawings and pasted the images into their approximate locations on the map. Some of them were difficult to draw. The angel at Charles Edward Pooley’s grave, for instance. It was so elegant that she worked for a long time to get it as right as she could—which was not good enough. Several with doves were easier. And the Rithet mausoleum was fun. Mick, a good artist, taught her to use perspective; two lines coming to a point could show a road heading towards the horizon and angled lines could make a building appear less flat. So she drew the mausoleum’s arch and stonework, shading and erasing until it was as real as she could manage. She wished she could have indicated every grave, but there wouldn’t have been enough room on her paper so she selected the ones she felt closest to. Baby Campbell’s chair and booties. Mr. Spencer’s tall grey obelisk where she could hear the water and which also gave her the opportunity to sketch in part of the West Creek flowing underground, something she did by drawing wavy blue lines that, her legend explained, represented hidden water.

She worked for some time to make faint shadowy figures, those whose graves had washed away in the storm of 1909. Some of them she lightly sketched under the sea, as though swimming. And she paid attention to another grave Miss Oakden visited, with a woman’s name on it, and a long inscription:

I lay myself on these wounds

As though upon a true rock;

They shall be my resting place.

Upon them will I soar in faith

And therefore contented and happily sing.

She wrote the passage into her notebook, and wondered at it. It sounded like music, maybe a hymn that would be sung in church. Tessa hated church. Mostly her family didn’t go, but sometimes they had to and it was hard not to laugh when the old people sang in their shaky voices. This inscription was on a tall stone of the deep red granite, polished like glass, with little flecks of silver in it. Bluebells grew around it, the same colour as the sky. She supposed if you lived long enough, as many people you’d known all your life would be buried as not. And she knew what good company the dead could be. She sat and made a daisy wreath for her hair, right by the grave of Baby Green. But instead of putting it onto her head, she left it draped over the small footplate commemorating that baby who had no first name.

The cemetery was a cool place to while away summer afternoons when she was not needed by Miss Oakden or her mother was unable to walk with the children over to Gonzales beach. The grass, kept clipped and raked, was lovely to stretch out on, under a favourite tree—maybe the cork-bark elm down near where Memorial Crescent met Dallas Road. She could hear the sea just a few yards away. The crows were busy in the canopy, squabbling and muttering. Smaller birds nested in the hedging, and she watched them dart in and out with worms or insects to unseen young. She had taken to carrying a little notebook everywhere in order to record details that might be needed on her map. The nest sites, for example. The location of the perfect snakeskin she found shed on some rocks near the Helmcken mausoleum, its eye sockets intact. She had not wanted to touch it but sketched it so she could remember it exactly as it lay draped over the rocks like an empty ghost. And she sketched the seal skeleton too, from memory—its hands open to the sky.

On the evenings when there wasn’t Little League, most of the neighbourhood children gathered at Bushby Park for a game of scrub. Teams were chosen by the two captains, usually Mick and David Grey, a boy from Joseph Street; positions were assigned—Tessa was almost always a fielder. It was exciting at first to hover in the outfield with her glove, one Teddy had outgrown, and wait for someone to hit a ball in her direction. Once she surprised herself and everyone else by catching a fly. Mostly she chased balls like the other fielders, to the end of the park, across Bushby Street, into yards, fishing among flowers and shrubs while the runner loped around the bases and her own team groaned at her slowness. The one time she played shortstop, someone hit a line drive directly into her face. Her lip immediately swelled up to about four times its size; her mother was called and came running with ice. There was quite a lot of blood from both her nose and her mouth where her inner lip had been cut by her teeth, but luckily that was the extent of the damage. The swelling took five days to go down, and she kept to herself during that period, working on her map and resisting the call of the children in the park in the evening, their voices dreamlike in the falling light.

She drew in the monumental works, on stilts at the back, with stones leaning on one another in the yard. She had been looking at other maps, several she’d brought home from the library, and liked how some of the mapmakers worked in the details of cities and buildings. The librarian spread out a map showing a bird’s-eye view of Victoria, seen from the water. There were boats and lots of open areas that she knew had been covered with houses by now (the map was created in 1889). She loved how it made the city seem so real; it inspired her to make the important buildings on her map as close to real as she could. After working hard to get a house just right, she would put a face in a window, a door slightly open with a bloom leaning against it. And after thinking about it for a day or two, she drew Miss Oakden kneeling before the stone with the Latin word for horse, a basket of rosebuds beside her.

One day Miss Oakden asked her to help weed a border. At first the woman stayed close to show her which were weeds and which were garden plants, either mature ones or seedlings self-sown from the robust perennials. Tessa caught on quickly and soon worked on her own. It was satisfying to clear out the buttercup runners and dandelions and see the clumps of columbine, asters, and delphiniums with the clear dark soil between them. The earth was full of worms, which Miss Oakden told her were necessary for soil health. Their tunnels aerated the soil and their castings (a nice word for poo) fertilized it. Tessa was fascinated to think of all this activity right underfoot where you couldn’t tell it was going on. It reminded her of the streams passing under May Street and under the cemetery, anxious for the sea, no one knowing they were even there. Except for her. And a handful of others, she conceded.

•  •  •

That day, after weeding, when she was drinking her lemonade, she mentioned a ball game and something Tommy Gurack had said. Miss Oakden looked interested.

“I knew his great-grandfather,” the woman commented. “He was a very nice man who helped me a lot in the job I had during the war. The Great War, Tessa, not the one that came after.”

“What kind of job, Miss Oakden?”

“I designed tiles, the kind you see around fireplaces in old houses, or even in bathrooms—if you go into mine, you will see a panel that is my work. And Tommy Gurack’s great-grandfather was a master at glazes. He knew how to make such rich beautiful colours. And he was a brave man, Tessa. He came to Canada alone, sending money back to Hungary for his family. He went back to Hungary for a time but then returned, with his wife. His daughter—she is Tommy’s grandmother—came later, after losing her husband in the 1956 uprising, to live with her married daughter, already in Canada.”

“She was at his birthday party, the one who lost her husband. She told us to eat the candles, and I didn’t know it was a joke so I did. The boys all thought it was hilarious; my brothers still tease me. But the Guracks have no father. Did he die too?”

“I believe he simply left, Tessa. And as for the candles—these misunderstandings happen. She never would have intended to embarrass you. She made wonderful pastries, I remember, with poppy seeds and sweet butter. Mr. Nagy—that was his name—died, possibly from accumulating poisons from the glazes, though no one knew of the dangers then. It’s a household that has seen its share of hardship. Mr. Nagy was an artist, though. He made beautiful pottery himself as well as working in a commercial enterprise.”

And Tessa remembered the beautiful plates, the goblets that held the party Freshie, all highly coloured and shining.

The family went for their annual August camping trip to St. Mary’s Lake on Saltspring Island, the blue tent aired in the yard and then repacked into its canvas bag, the old black skillet cleaned and oiled in readiness to fry the fillets of bass that Tessa’s father would catch on his early morning ventures onto the lake in the little wooden boat he had made himself. They spent a week camping, all of them sleeping in rows in the tent with their sleeping bags and the air mattresses that never held air for a whole night through. The dog came too and slept on an old towel just inside the tent beside the pink plastic pot that one could pee in at night if it was raining too hard to head to the outhouse.

Tessa loved Saltspring Island. There were old houses and fields of sheep and long wharves tilting out into the sea. Herons waded in the shallow bays. There were oysters, which her parents loved, but which she couldn’t imagine actually eating. They looked like snot. Her brother Mick said this, and the three children all laughed until their parents told them to stop or risk not being allowed to swim that day. But then Teddy would snort and that would set them off again. She saw her father go quite red; her mother smiled at him and touched his shoulder.

They swam every day, almost all day. Sometimes they drove to ocean beaches and stopped at Mouat’s Store for ice cream. The children were allowed to row across St. Mary’s Lake to an abandoned homestead where they feasted on green apples from trees draped in Spanish moss. Many of the trees were broken by bears. You could tell because there were mounds of bear scat, black as tar but filled with apple pulp and seeds, at the foot of the trees. Branches were torn away, stripped of apples, and left to lie in the golden grass, little scales of lichen on them. The house was covered in weathered grey clapboards; its generous windows faced the lake. It was sad to peer in through broken windows and see remnants of the lives lived within: a cupboard with dishes on its spiderwebby shelves; a blue coffee pot still on the rusted old range; mattresses covered in blue and white ticking torn apart by mice or larger animals for the stuffing that lay on the floor. Tobacco tins full of nails and bolts. A bedstead once white but now corroded by rust, left in a field. It was as though a family had awoken one morning and decided to leave. Tessa wondered if they’d dreamed of the place for years afterwards, in all its magic. She tried to draw it; the place ended up looking shabby and old in her little sketchbook, so she burned the page in the campfire that evening. Some things were best stored in the imagination, where the rust and the weathered boards were beautiful and not derelict.

And leaving Saltspring that summer was sad too. There had been four rainy days during their week of camping, but on the last day, as with the day before, the sun rose hot and yellow. Fish were surfacing on the lake, the smell of the morning campfire was sweet with fir sap, and the pancakes were exactly the way Tessa liked them best—a little black around the edges but puffy inside with bubbles to catch the melted butter and syrup. They took down the tent, rolled up their sleeping bags, helped the dog into the back of the station wagon. Before they knew it, they were on the ferry out of Fulford Harbour, waving goodbye to the herons. It wasn’t until they were back home that Tessa realized they all smelled of woodsmoke, their T-shirts and shorts permeated with it. She loved the smell and held her kangaroo shirt back from the laundry, tucking it into her closet so she could bury her face in it and remember the snap of the fire as they roasted marshmallows and wieners on sticks Mick had sharpened with his special Swiss Army knife.

“Will we ever go back?” she asked her mother as she helped with the laundry the day after their return.

“What a question! Of course we’ll go back. We’ve always gone to St. Mary’s Lake! Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know. It felt so final, leaving this time.”

“Watch your fingers, Tessa. And please hand me my basket; you’re closer to it than I am. I’m going to take this load up to hang out.”

She tried to think of a way to add Saltspring to her map, but there wasn’t room. When she finished this one, maybe she would make another map. But somehow it felt that everything belonged on the same map. The cemetery, the old houses, the curve of Ross Bay, and even the lights of Port Angeles across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and now when she thought of it St. Mary’s Lake and the homestead in its ruined orchard. She was sorry she had burned her sketch, but she hoped she could draw another from memory.