In the Land of Birdfishes (19 page)
T
HERE WAS SOMETHING I KNEW
. And I kept it deep in my head, and I kept it quiet there, and I didn’t tell anyone the thing I knew of myself, but went on knowing it, all the same. I knew it the way my heart beat and knew it beat. I knew it the way air found a way to my lungs and knew how it did. All of me was the fact of what I knew, a secret that was in me and part of me, and I told no one.
August now, and all the dying leaves and grass were shrinking into the dirt that they were made from. There was gold in the dying grass and the flowers that had become seeds. Gold even in the sky, which made a little space, at the end of days, for dark to come, blue and deep, for a few hours and then it was gone again.
And then one day, rain came. After all the dry weeks and days, rain came down, so hungry for the ground it fell all over it, fast and heavy, spreading slick, wet fingers over all, all. All the town was an appetite for the rain that fell, without stopping, from the long grey sky. I called to Momma that I was going out, and she yelled, “In this weather?” and I didn’t answer.
I left my shoes on the porch so that I could feel the wet grass on my bare feet. And then I stepped into the road, where a thin
river was hurrying along the tire tracks, heading downtown. I felt the cool mud slide between my toes and it made me smile.
And then I followed the road down to the end of town, and then I climbed down the bank to the river and by then the rain had turned slow and soft.
The river moved so fast. If I were to fall into it, it would carry me away and I would have no choice but to let the river change me, to make another plan for me and where I was going. I wondered if all the salmon we fished from the river were our people, and they had long ago fallen in the water and found it ran too fast to fight. I thought it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to be one of those silver backs that flashed in the water. I imagined being snatched out of the pull of the waves and brought to land to feel for the first time what it was to not be carried by the water, to be urged toward something by every bone and scale. Some fishy thought in the salmon’s brains must tell them the place where they are going. They must dream it will be somewhere beautiful and without pain.
And then I thought of the nets that would tear them from the river and all the beautiful, dark fish thoughts that they’d had there. They would feel air and all of a sudden, just like that, they would be full of knowing that air took them nowhere, led them to nothing at all. Open close, open close would go their gills. And their gills would not bring them oxygen, could not. Into the air, out of the net, back again.
Snap
go their spines, which cannot ever take them back to the river.
I loved salmon, which knew what they were and did not fight to be anything else. Their travel on the river was what they were made of. They could no more resist than have lungs or wings.
When I was a child, Papa used to take me out in his boat to fish for dinner for our family. But I would just lean over the
side and watch those dark thoughts swim under the water. It would make him mad, most times, or sorry, shaking his head when he asked me to show him what I’d caught and I would have nothing to offer up to please him but a song I’d made up about the salmon. But the last time he took me in his boat, he said at the end, “Next time I’ll take Charlie. Your heart is too good. You may well turn out to be happier for it. Hungrier, but happy.” He went out one more time with Charlie after that, and then, another season later, he died.
I crept to the lowest rocks and sat. My feet were tucked under me and I bent to touch the water with my hands. It was so cold that it took all the feeling from my fingers.
I thought that I had not made so many decisions in my life. I would have liked to be like the salmon, but instead I had just always said, “River, take me where you will go.”
And I had a thought that from time to time would come to me. The thought came to me as a knife can open something soft. I had thought that loving Jason was one single, fierce thing I had done. I thought I had swum toward him as if all the river ran downward and I ran up. I thought that was a good, brave thing, loving someone who didn’t want it. I thought one day the river would say, “Angel, I am tired and you have never been tired. Let me take you to him.”
But then I saw that it was possible also that all this time the river had been carrying me just behind him. And I had never, not once, been like the salmon.
It was that night I went to The Pit to find him. Not John.
A band that must have come from somewhere down south was playing. The singer’s face was shiny with the sweat coming
out of him, and as he sang, he would toss his head to take the hair out of his eyes, but it would stick to his face, and the sad way he sang made me sorry for him and his too-long hair and too-shiny face. This was true of white boys, and I had seen it before, how they would sweat for no reason at all, and make their pinky faces even pinkier. No native man I knew made singing a song look like hard work. But this kind of music sounded like work too, like the song was being scraped out of the singer and the band was trying everything they could think of to stop him.
And I sat there, listening and waiting, because I knew he would come. He came every day. He came to see me, I had thought once. It had gone through my head like a cloud passing over the sun, that thought, but when it was gone, there was the sun again and it would always be, as I would always know better.
And I watched the door open and she came in, without him. I had come to think it was for her he came to the bar now. If it had ever been for me, it was not now.
“Hello, Angel,” she said.
“Hello, Aileen.”
But I did not think it had ever been for me.
I watched her wonder if she should sit with me and then wish she had pretended not to see me at all. I watched her finally take a seat at the bar with her back to me. Because of how he’d looked at me the first time I told him, I hadn’t let Jason know how many times now I’d caught her on that pay phone. I didn’t think she’d ever seen me find her there, she was so swallowed up by whoever was at the other end of that line. So I couldn’t ask him if he knew who she was calling or if he noticed she looked happy now, as she had not when she came.
And I sat there, turning the spoon in the grounds at the bottom of my cup, looking at her back and thinking of her sister.
I was only just thirteen when she came to me and whispered I was to ride to the city with her in her car. Since that day when she’d told me I was to watch after Jason and wait for him, she’d had a way of talking to me, like there was a secret between us. And then there was.
We were all bent over our bowls of oatmeal and listening to Charlie boast about the pretty mule deer doe he’d shot that morning that still lay staring from the bed of his truck. I had seen it there, and looked into its dull black eyes, and I had touched the sticky fur where all that was living in the deer had seeped out. And it was that I thought of when the phone rang, and Papa answered and then said that Jason’s wife wanted me to go to the city with her, to pick out a present for my thirteenth birthday, though already it had come and gone. Papa said he wasn’t sure, but Momma said, “Oh go ahead, she’s a good girl and deserves a special treat, like a ride into the city with that white lady.”
And I remembered what Minnie had told me she had seen, at the beginning of the summer, and wondered what Mara wanted from me and why she would ask to take me all the way to Whitehorse when she never went anywhere. But I had never gone away from home overnight without my brothers and sister, and felt a longing in me at the thought of a whole wide bed to myself and of coming back to tell June and Jude all I had seen in the city, so I said, “Please, Papa, I never went to the city before, and June went three times already,” and he nodded very slowly and said, “
Tejù!
I have told you you must learn to ask for what you want, or others will take it from
you.” “I want to go to the city with Jason’s mother,” I told him then, and he said, “All right, little one. All right.”
And I’d thought that Jason would be going with us, that he would drive, and I would ride in the seat behind him and his mother and feel his glance on me in the mirror maybe, while the wind blew in the window beside me and snatched up my hair, and maybe he would let me lean outside and feel the air beat back my hand when I reached it out. He’d only got his licence a few months before, but he’d been driving for years, since he was fifteen. Mara needed him to take her places, and she never seemed to want to ask the other Jason, her husband, not for that or for anything. There was a silence grown up between them like a bed of weeds. He never reached out his paddle of a hand to slide over her hips or bottom like Papa did when Momma passed him in the kitchen, and she never slapped his hand away, like Momma did Papa’s, rolling her eyes with a look of happiness. Once, I sat beside Mara, showing her how to do beading the way they taught us at culture camp, and Jason’s father came and stood in the doorway, watching her for a long time before he told her, “Mara? I’m going to make some dinner now.” And she never showed she knew he was there, but I felt her hand tighten around the thread as soon as we could hear his steps on the floor, and all the time he stood there, she hardly breathed, and she dropped the beads for the first time that afternoon. And so I wondered what it was they both were listening to when they weren’t speaking to each other, but I was too young and never knew the answer.
But when we went outside, it was not Jason’s father’s truck in the yard, but a car I didn’t recognize with a licence plate from British Columbia. And inside a man sat at the
wheel, and for a moment I didn’t know who he was, and then I remembered he was the minister the Anglican Church had got to come stay for a year till they found someone to replace Reverend Wallace, who had been found frozen solid in the woods a year before, dead of a heart attack and left for days till Sunday came and he didn’t, and someone finally thought to look for him.
“Reverend Eames is going to give us a ride in his car,” she said, and so I got into the back seat, and she sat down in the other front seat, beside the white man from the church no one I knew went to.
None of us said anything all the drive there, and then when we arrived in the city, the man got out and took our suitcases from the trunk for us. We were stopped beside a hotel, and I climbed outside to look at it and almost missed the way the man looked at Mara as he helped her from her seat. His face had the kind of question in it that Jason’s father’s did when he looked at his wife, but now, for a moment, there was something in Mara’s face that answered it. He had one hand around hers and the other behind her back as she stood up and turned her face to the sun, her eyes closed. They stood, like that, and I watched her face and his and tried to understand them, while they stood, his hand still around hers, his arm bent behind her back, and though everything else between them was separate, it was as if all his body and hers were pulled, each toward the other, as if though their hands were all that touched, only their hands kept them apart. Then the man got into his car and drove away, and Mara told me to help her to the desk, where she told the woman that she had booked a room for herself and her daughter.
“Where did the man go?” I asked her when we climbed the
stairs to her room. I did not know why it made me feel afraid to think of going into that room alone with her.
“It wouldn’t be right,” she said. “A man with a woman not his wife. And Whitehorse isn’t that far from Dawson. And he has his career to think of. No, it wouldn’t be right. There are gossips everywhere. Did you know Paul counted those who gossip as equal in sin to the haters of God?” She did not wait for an answer, but kept climbing the steps, her suitcase going
bump bump bump
all the way.
She made me unpack our pyjamas and clothes into the drawers in the room, and then she told me to order us bacon sandwiches from the phone. She said if I just picked up the phone, someone would answer, and that if I told them we wanted bacon sandwiches, they would bring them to us, and it was true, they did.
When we were finished, she sat on the bed and her eyes got fixed fast on the door, though I knew she couldn’t see it or anything else.
“Is the man coming back?” I asked at last.
Her pale face went paler and I was afraid. Her hand hovered around her throat, shaking and fluttering around the necklace of beads she always wore there, and then she tore it off, and all those little beads that I’d thought were pretty went rolling here and there all over the floor. “Of course not. What do you think, what foul thoughts have …” She reached out the hand that had torn the necklace. I knew Jason would have walked toward it, as she wanted, but I would not. At last, she let her hand fall into her lap.
I could not look away from her pale, pale eyes. What could they see?
“I need you to take me to the doctor tomorrow. It is not
appropriate that Reverend Eames take a married woman, one not even part of his congregation. But you can help me, can’t you?”
I nodded, but she waited, looking unsatisfied, and I remembered to say, “Yes.” She made me say it again. “Yes. Yes.”
“And you won’t tell Jason of this?”
“No.”
She smiled. And then she reached out her hand, and this time I took it, and she made me go and find her nightgown, and I watched, afraid, as she pulled the clothes off her bony body, with its white, stretched skin. Her breasts were loose as balloons with all the air let out, though her nipples were large and dark, and in the lamplight, they looked like marks of blood.
The next morning, she woke me and told me to dress as fast as I could because we were late. She told me we had no time for breakfast, and then we went down the stairs, to the desk, where she told the woman to make a taxi come for us. The taxi brought us to a hospital, and she made me wait on a chair among strangers reading magazines, while a nurse led her away. Sometime later she came back, and when I saw her face, I knew to put away the questions I had wanted to ask.