Celia's Song (13 page)

XII

IT WAS SUNDAY MORNING
and while half the village was at church the other half lazed about wondering what they should be doing. Stacey and Celia were at Momma's and Momma was fixing Sunday brunch. Celia leaned against the back of her chair, sticking her belly out trying to get some relief. Any day now her baby would come. She watched Jacob. He was in the centre of the living room, just off the kitchen, playing with some blocks Ned had made for him. He left his blocks and wandered over to the kitchen. “Here, Gemma.” His awkward little tongue had uttered his first words. They slipped from his mouth into this circle of women and spawned the purest kind of excitement. The giant women gathered him up. They accoladed him for these his first recognizable sounds. He didn't seem to know he was being adored or that these words were his doorway to communion with them.

He has no memory of that moment, not that this matters because Celia remembers it. She clings to Jacob's first words and fights to remember Jimmy's, his first communion with the women of his house. Those first words elude her. All she can think about now is Jacob. He has found his second doorway. Celia has witnessed it.

SOME DAYS ARE SO
ordinary they make you feel grateful. Everyone needs ordinariness to settle the dust kicked up the night before. Momma is getting ready to go to Celia's to look at her paintings. Ned thinks this odd. Momma does not like visiting her daughters, she prefers they visit her. He says nothing. He has his own restlessness to deal with, which means heading to the river to fish. He walks with Momma a bit, and then swings into Stacey's to see if Jacob wants to join him. Jacob is anxious to get out of the house; he wants to be busy at something that might erase the horror of the night before and relieve some of the guilt he feels at what he might have seen. Fishing will do, he decides. He needs to be lost in some place a long way from this memory. Dipping a net in and out of a fast-moving river will keep his mind in the moment and a good distance from memory.

Stacey sallies onto the porch and hands Jacob a backpack filled with bannock, coffee, and the odd sweet. She sees Momma's back sauntering down the road toward Celia's and is about to ask Ned about it when a car pulls into her yard.

“Say. Jim!” Stacey runs toward the car. It is full of little people. Jim and his wife, Esther, are laughing before they get out of the car. The kids hit the dirt running, jumping and squealing with delight the moment the doors open. Stacey twirls the children one by one until they've all been whirled around. Jacob and Ned look at one another. They still want to fish, but they have missed Jim. He doesn't come by as much as they would like. They look at their gear, then each other with the same expression.

Jim hugs his sister, sticks both his hands in his pockets, looks at the fishing gear. He pulls his hands out, lights a smoke, and tosses his head toward Ned and Jacob in a “let's go” gesture. Ned's walk looks less tired, Stacey thinks as she watches them disappear into the tall grass to be swallowed by the cottonwoods that edge the river. They will be gone all day. Stacey decides to call on Rena and the rest of the women. She doesn't want to spend all day alone with some woman who is not quite a relative and is completely devoted to a religion this family does not subscribe to.

The river looks outraged today. It scrambles the logs at its centre, bangs their ends together; splinters fly and the sides of the banks are slowly scraped away, muddying up the blue, the grey, or the green, or whatever colour the water wants to be. In a few quiet parts the
river looks like she wants to be blue, but where the mud is thickest she is khaki green. Jacob's mind lacks the language to interpret what he sometimes sees. He likes playing with the colour of things and imagining the character attached to a shade or hue, the way he attaches mood to light and sound. From the colour of the river, Jacob decides she is angry. The shades of rage change, whirl, and jump from khaki to steel grey to near black. It sends shivers up his spine. He prays she isn't mad at his silence. The spot on the river he is staring at settles into a sheer blue swirl and he decides it isn't him she is mad at. It settles him to think this.

“What you been up to, Jim?” Ned asks his son.

“Having too many kids is what.”

“You know how to stop that,” Jacob teases his young uncle as he saunters in the direction of a rock jutting out into the river, his net in his hand. “Put a jacket on that soldier.” Jacob stops to shift his hips a little to sharpen his point and makes them laugh in that bragging kind of satisfied-man way. Jacob teases his uncle a little more, telling him about the kind of jackets they make to cover that little man of his.

“You obviously don't know my Catholic wife. You ought to let me introduce her to you sometime.” This makes them all laugh more.

Jacob is ready to dip a net into the river. He takes off his shoes so his toes can get a good grip on the slippery rock he will stand
on. Bending slightly at the knees he plants his feet apart, and breathes nice and deep.

“Wait,” Ned says, and ties him off. The two other men carry on talking while they hold the rope. Jacob knows that the rope will not save him if he slides off, but it will give them a body to bury if the river takes his life away. This is satisfying to the two men on shore and all right with Jacob. Jacob does not give falling into the river a moment's worry. He does not intend to slip. He turns to give his uncle and grandpa a smile, as he remembers Uncle and Grandpa having done before challenging this river, then he dips the net in a wide arc against the current. The dip and swing wake his arms up and anchor his feet to the stone he's standing on. He looks across the river, with its sun-dappled surface changing colour, and his memory melts. All that is left is the peaceful quiet of the dip and the swing of his net.

“I was coming up here last week, and the heel fell off one of the baby's shoes. I don't even know which one, there are so many. There goes gas money, I thought. I swear, Ned, how do other men manage?”

“Most of them don't,” Jacob says. Jacob's words almost get a rise out of the other men, but the net starts jumping in his hands. He tosses its contents onto the bank. Ned and Jim give each fish one good blow. The fish flip-flop a couple of times, make a kind of screaming sound, and die.

This is the hard part of witnessing. Seeing the fish and not being able to eat the carrion left behind right away.

Jacob hands the net to Jim, pulls his knife out, and kneels next to his grandpa, who has already severed the gills from the head of one of the fish. Ned jerks on the gills and guts and pulls out a neat string of eggs. He pulls the eggs off the string and looks at Jacob, hoping like hell that Jacob has brought something to pack them in. Jacob winks, cups his hands, and shakes them up and down. This gets a rise out of Ned. They laugh as Jacob pulls a freezer bag from his jacket. Ned feigns a punch at Jacob, and they both crack up again. Jacob nods in the direction of his backpack and begins gutting the second fish. After the fish are cleaned, the men eat a little bannock and drink some coffee.

From Jacob's backpack Ned pulls out an old gym bag filled with several small plastic bags and a large green garbage bag. He puts the bag of eggs in one of the smaller bags. Jacob cuts both fish in half. Ned sticks them in another of the small bags and puts the works
in the big green one. He shoves these into the gym bag. He hands some food to Jacob, and adds, “Although you don't deserve it.”

“Two with eggs, three without,” Jim says. “What you think, Jacob? We get the whole damn family?”

They had not caught the whole damned family and I know so. The salmon with eggs were not partner to the ones without. That's the problem with open fishing. When the people used weirs, they could choose couples. Now it's random. The partners will die without progeny. Ten sets of family lines dead. What a waste.

“You always were disgusting, Uncle.” The notion of catching and eating the whole family makes Jacob squeamish. Jim likes seeing it.

“They wouldn't be any more related than your gramma and I,” Ned assures Jacob. “Fish aren't as stupid as some people.”

Jacob is startled by this remark. Jim makes a note of it and commits himself to remembering Jacob's response. They smoke. Jacob wants to set again, but Ned shakes his head. “There aren't so many fish left in this river.” They will have to let most of them go. It makes Jacob sad that he can't just take what they need as he mentally sorts out which ones to keep and which ones to let go. The sadness passes through him, leaving as quickly as it came. He selects three more and puts them back into the river. Jacob wants to stay by the river, half-afraid the snake memory will come back. He tries pushing conversation, but the other men just sit quiet. He shifts from one foot to the other, and looks at the river, hoping for something from it. He looks back at the men and then over to
the net.

“I swear, boy, you got some wild hair up your ass. What's eating you?” Ned drops his question almost like an accusation. Is Jacob withholding information that they need? It's a test, Jacob thinks. Can I pull this past my grandpa?

“I don't know,” he answers.

“Who the hell does know then? I have me here a quarter. You tell me who would know and I am going to call them right goddamned now,” Ned bellows. He does not like being told “I don't know.” It unnerves him that a grown man could feel something he is not able to name. He suspects such men are powerless. He especially does not like the suspicion of powerlessness when it arises from one of his boys.

“I think you know,” Jim says to Jacob, helping his father out. “Fact: you are the only one who knows.”

“Oh yeah, tell you right here with my back to the river and no witnesses, just go ahead and drop on your furious cranky-ass selves the story of the worst thing I've ever done.” Jacob bites his lip.

“What did you do.” Ned turns the question into a near-threat
by dropping the usual inflection at the end.

Time and Jacob freeze. He considers saying that he does not feel like sharing with them. He heard one of the women say that, and it had killed the men's curiosity. They would respect him for it, but then again, maybe they would not. He has never heard a man tell another man he didn't want to talk about something. It is tearing him up to hang on to this thing. Ever since he went to the old snake's he's found it difficult to stay focused on things. The images return to haunt him, making him restless, so he decides he'd better let it drop.

The restless head of the serpent lies in wait, hoping Jacob will retreat from telling his grandpa the story of the snake. He had lured Jacob there and tried to seduce him with the images of Amos
tormenting the child. Amos was an outsider, but Jacob lived inside the village. It would be a victory to create this terror inside, but it is Loyal's turn and Loyal breathes desire on Jacob, the desire to speak, to tell, to let go the nightmare he has witnessed.

“I went to the snake's house.”

Ned is about to bellow, when Jim holds his hand up to stop him. Jacob closes his eyes so he won't see their faces or the blow he is sure is coming.

“What did you see?” Jim asks gently. Jacob starts and looks at his grandpa, who glares back at him.

“Do you see things that aren't there? Does anybody? Is it possible? I swear I saw him, the old snake, at his house. In a corner of the yard there was this dog, skinned and stretched. There was this little girl tied up. That old guy was doing things to her with that hot poker. What the hell was wrong with him, Grandpa?”

The sickness comes again.

Jacob wants to know the journey of these men to the horror they had visited on this child so he can be sure he might travel it himself. His cowardice at not trying to rescue the child makes him feel that he is capable of going there. He feels like the difference between him and these men is a matter of them having taken the wrong path when faced with a fork in their journey. He is repulsed that the snake's behaviour is just a matter of a fork in the road. What he saw was sick. Could he do terrible things but never face that they were terrible? His mind flips pages back in time to a hillside, to a child, a small child, tied up. He is poking the child with a stick, making him whimper. Some beast inside him is laughing. It wasn't Jacob. It can't be Jacob. Jacob is nice. Jacob would never do such a thing.

Now he faces his uncle and his grandfather with the truth of his
looking upon the unspeakable, wondering if they see how close he was to the snake's pit. What is he more afraid of? Them knowing what he is thinking about, or them not knowing?

“What scares you, Jacob?”

“Wondering if I saw it.”

“Wondering if you saw it, or wondering if you made it up?” Jim queries. Ned is starting to see what Jim is getting at. His line of questioning unnerves Ned. Not one of us. Can Jim be thinking that Jacob might be like the snake? Ned is accustomed to giving his son a lot of rope, unnerving as it sometimes is, so he just lets him be.

“I guess I am wondering if I made it up. And I am wondering about me.”

Jim has him. He knows that Jacob will answer any question he asks now. All he has to do is make sure he asks the right ones.