In the Land of Birdfishes (24 page)

Mara

It was early May already when he drove me up to Dawson. For the first day and night, I listened to him talk, and then the second day, I tired of him talking. He was so worried for me. He kept asking if I was hungry, if I needed to stop and relieve myself, whether the music was too loud or not loud enough. He wanted to know too many things about me. He asked where my family was and why nobody had come to our wedding, but there was no one that showed up for him either.

The second afternoon, I picked a fight with him, over the radio. He tried to please me, but it only made me more angry and I didn’t know why.

I had been proud to leave school, and then, very suddenly, I wasn’t anymore. I thought of my bed in my room and how I liked to sleep to the sound of Agnes snoring. I felt as if we were driving too far and might go off the map altogether. I didn’t want to fall off the side of the world with this man I hardly knew.

I stopped answering his questions, and then I stopped saying anything at all. He was even patient with that, and said silence
was a blessing and it was his shortcoming to forget that blessing too often. But I could hear in his voice how worried he was, to have married a blind girl with no family, whom no one had ever come to look for. Hours later, when he stopped for gas, I slipped out the passenger door with my cane and went walking down the road. I forgot my shoes.

I didn’t know if he would drive on or look for me or wait before he gave up. I thought maybe he’d be relieved or even glad. I thought I’d just go walking down that road and see what happened. It wouldn’t have mattered very much if he didn’t ever come to put me back into the truck.

The night wind was a crack in the warm evening. It was cool and dry and tasted of burnt things. Already dark was settling. I stumbled often. Sometimes cars passed me and I heard them slow, noticing me, and I hoped it wasn’t Jason, not yet.

After a while the sidewalk ended, and I swept the curb with my cane and found my way down to the road. It was easier to walk there, I found, than on the rough sidewalk. I could still hear the worrying, hissing noise of a transformer, and knew there were homes near me. I smelled green—things, soft, wet curled things, dreaming of the sky from deep underground. I smelled the sweat of them, the way they were fighting. I smelled earth, still warm from the day, damp and both perished and living, taking more dead things into it and then pushing living things out of it. I smelled the earth letting the green things win. If I opened my mouth, I could taste all that I smelled. The air tasted like things
still
, not things not moving, but things
still
moving, things unstopped.

And the Lord shall scatter thee among all people …
There was the sound of people near me, not so far from me. Maybe across the road, or somewhere behind me was a house. I heard
a screen door open, close, open and then slam, far in the distance. I heard it slap against a wooden frame, falling closed one last time behind someone leaving.

A dog barked, rang his chain. A woman was laughing, high and loose, and I had heard very few women laugh in my life. The nuns only smiled. I’d got so I could hear them smiling.

My mother never laughed. But
she
did. When
she
laughed, after he made the bandages go over our eyes, sometimes I’d have to touch my mouth to know it was her and not me laughing.

Far away, a man yelled, “That’s what everybody says!” I couldn’t tell if he was talking to the laughing woman or someone altogether different.

Jason had said his sisters would be kind to me, but he didn’t know that. They might not like me. They might think me a bad wife for him, or make fun of me because I couldn’t see. They might find me strange. Agnes had said lots of people did, but she liked me anyway. What if they didn’t like me anyway?

I had never thought of where I would go when I was done at school. I had thought they would tell me, when it was time, what I would do next, and there would be a place I could go to, not a school but another place with a little room for me, a little bed, a place to be when I was awake, to lay me when I was sleeping. It didn’t surprise me that this had been what came next. Only Jason surprised me. I hadn’t thought there would be someone else with me when I went to the next place.

The baby was moving. At first when this happened it had frightened me. But now I was glad and I put my hand there so it knew that I loved it, even though it was not even a baby yet, only something inside me, just started, new. I put my hand there because even what it was already was mine.

A strange thing was happening. It was growing brighter. I looked up and all the dim colourlessness of the world was brighter. Night had never come, just day, like this, like something throbbing. Day beat again, harder, deeper. It was holy.

Bird sound. Like the thrush. I remembered that from nights we had left the window open and in the pale hours before we were allowed to rise from our beds, when Mother would be waiting in the kitchen rolling oatcakes with a wooden pin and calling our names when it was time to leave our room and see her again, at the start of a day. The thrush sound was the first we heard in summers. Then the crows.
She
liked the crows best, but I loved the thrush song. That slippery flute sound, the water of it, the stream and rush from one note to the next, like water moving fast over rocks. But the crow sound, that sad, distant winter sound, the spread of its long arced call, its hysterical grief, hanging over frozen fields, that was
hers
.

From the one end of the earth even unto the other
… Now I could hear trees bending near me. Old trees, the wind whistling in a dry way between them. I must have been past the town now. For a long time, the soles of my feet had hurt like the pain of something reminding me, each step the bloody feel of the road and its stones, the weight of my body pressing against each soft foot, down against that pain. Now I could not feel them at all. Now it was as if I were walking not on the ground, but inches above it, the air between my feet and the earth skimming past, bearing me up this road, to the north place where I’d be home now.

“Your father lost his name,” I said to the child moving in my belly. The man called Jason had told me he was not always called Jason. It was a name given him at the school he’d had to go to in the white village down the river that his family finally
followed him to. The white teachers had given him the name Jason, and for months, he’d gotten in trouble for not answering to his new name. He didn’t understand how a name could be a thing that changed.

“I’ll give his name to you,” I told the child in me. I knew he would be my son. I knew he would suit that unwanted name. Because I hadn’t known I wanted him until he was already a thing that had happened, and then I knew I wanted him most.

A vehicle passed me, and only as it did did I realize none had for some time. But it stopped ahead of me; I heard the stones hop and skate along the pavement as it slid over onto the shoulder of the highway, just ahead of where I was walking. And then I knew it was my husband.

He threw open the door and came to get me. I heard his steps in the loose stones beside the road, heavy, running. He shook me and told me, “Where did you go? Mara,” he shouted, “Mara, why did you leave me?”

He asked me what the fuck I was thinking. He said he had looked for me for hours, everywhere searching for me. He asked where I had been. He said, “I don’t ever want you to do that again. You understand me, do you understand? Not ever again.”

The sky was getting hotter. I asked him why did night not come. He said, “Up here in summer the sun doesn’t go down.”

“Not at all?” I asked.

“Gets close,” he said, “but doesn’t ever get there.”

I didn’t know why I was crying. I pushed the cane into his hand to take for me and then I wrapped both arms around one of his. With his other arm, he opened the door and helped
me inside, into my seat. There was a bird somewhere above us, again, I heard it passing over us, calling out. This time it reminded me of the bird sound
she
loved, but the cry was deeper in its throat, more rasping and more desperate.

And then I wanted to punish him. As he got into his seat, he reached out a hand and set it down on my knee. Without a thought, I bent at the waist and snatched up his hand between my teeth. I bit as hard as I could, feeling my teeth burying themselves in his soft, yielding skin. He gasped but didn’t draw his hand away. There was a moment when he said nothing, and I let the weight of my head fall in my lap, easing the grip of my jaw on his hand but not removing my mouth. I stopped the tears that were dropping from my cheek to his hand. Nothing he or I could do could change anything that had happened to us. “Why,” I asked him, in a whisper, “does God not forgive us?”

His other hand came down and stroked my hair. “What is it, honey?” he asked. “I can’t hear you with your face buried like that.”

I raised my face and pushed his hands away from me. “Tell me about it again,” I said. “What it will be like.”

“Well, first thing, we’ll go to Aida’s house and she’ll make us something to eat. She’ll fuss about you. She’ll call Joannie to come over and meet you.”

“No,” I said. “Tell me what it will be like.” He was confused and while he hesitated, I thought of what it would smell like. If the stove would already be on when we opened the door. The smell of something warm and ready, a pot of something smelling darkly of meat, hot, thick food smells, waiting for us. His sisters opening their arms, the laundry smell of
their blouses, the soap and flowers of their hair, the coolness of their cheeks, the warmth of their hands.
Let us take our journey
, I thought as I waited for his answer,
and let us go, and I will go before thee
.

Minnie

late August 1996

I
F I DIDN’T HAVE CIGARETTES
, I would need people. I said that to my sister all the time. “Oh, you don’t need me?” Violet always said. “What,” I would say. “You don’t think I could pull some drunk off a bar stool and have him watch Amaruk for me? That boy’s so good, you don’t have to be able to see straight to watch after him.” Violet would then make this
tsk tsk
sound our mother used to make when she was pretending to be annoyed with us.

Right now, I was sitting in Violet’s kitchen, watching her iron, and I was thinking about my cigarette but I decided not to say it out loud. A joke could run itself out if you weren’t careful. It wasn’t really a joke anyway, because I knew it was true. Since I was a girl, I had been independent. Our mother always said the day she gave me shoes was the day I was out the door. Violet was different. Though she was a year older than me, she always did things after me. She hesitated. You could just ask her a simple question, and she’d stop and you could see her weighing it out, how to answer. She was cautious. But cautious wasn’t a bad thing. She got married later than me and look who still had her husband. And the kids and the ironing to go with it.

It was a cool, clear day, but sitting up on the counter with my back against the window, I was heating up. “Can you get a sunburn through the glass?” I asked Violet.

Violet paused and tucked her long bangs back behind her ears. She had cute ears. Little and round, like a monkey or something. I always envied her ears. “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “It would definitely take longer than if you were outside.”

“That iron’s heating it up here too,” I said. I liked my sister’s house well enough, but it was cramped for just her and her husband and their four kids. With me and Amaruk in there too, it felt like it was getting a little smaller every day. And the kitchen was teeny to start with. I admired how Violet never seemed to get tired or feel sorry for herself, but it exhausted me to see how full the basket of unironed clothes was and how empty the basket of ironed clothes was. And we’d been there near an hour already. Some chores weren’t rewarding. I liked vacuuming, in a really dirty house. Somewhere where you could see the difference you were making. Ironing seemed unreasonable. So much work over just a few wrinkles that would be back next wash anyway.

But she didn’t take the hint and just kept going back and forth, up and down, with the damn iron. Last year, for her thirty-second birthday, her husband, Hughie, had invited everyone over for ice cream and cake, and he called us all into the kitchen so he could give Violet her big birthday surprise. And he showed her how he’d built an ironing board into the wall so it was hidden away in a little cupboard, and then you could just open the door and pull it down from the wall on a hinge. Jesus, I thought and I looked to Violet to see if she’d show she was mad in front of guests or fake a smile and wait till they were all gone to tell him why an ironing board was
not an acceptable birthday gift for your wife. To my surprise, Violet walked up to the cupboard and ran her hands along it, opening and closing it like she just couldn’t believe it (a door! open! closed!), and then she looked at him and had tears in her eyes as she thanked him, like she was the luckiest girl on earth.

“Just a few more weeks, anyway,” I said, as Violet sprayed one of Hughie’s shirts and the iron hissed.

“A few more weeks, is it,” she said. I saw that she was sweating a little too. And this room really was too small for a big family. Just the two of us and a stack of wrinkly clothes and it felt filled to burst. I didn’t like the fussy wallpaper she had got put up the year before, with its little blue flowers all over. It made the place seem even smaller, even more
indoors
somehow.

“Till I’m back at the Baders’ place,” I explained. I wondered if she would say, “You could stay with us all year if you wanted,” like she sometimes did. I house-sat for a German couple through the winter—they had a whole big house but only came to it in the summer. A year ago, I’d got fired from my bartending job when Amaruk got sick with pneumonia and I had to miss ten days straight of work right in the middle of tourist season. I hadn’t been able to find a decent job since, so I’d been living on what I could string together and the money Ed, Amaruk’s father, sent, scrimping pennies while I waited for something to come along. In the meantime, Violet and Hughie put me up in the summer, and they always seemed like they wished I’d stay longer. I wondered if Violet was lonely.

“I know,” said Violet.

“You know that’s when I’m back there, or you knew that was what I meant.”

“Both,” said Violet.

“So June said Angel called home finally,” I said.

Violet stopped and set the iron on its end. “Oh,” she said. “How is she?”

“Dunno,” I said. “I didn’t talk to her. But June said she didn’t think she was going to come back till after the baby’s born.”

“Has she called Jason?” Violet said.

I shook my head. “Maybe. I wouldn’t know.”

“You sound like you’re mad at her.”

“Well,” I said.

“Now why would this make you mad?” Violet asked.

I shrugged and lit another cigarette and listened to the thump and hiss of the iron while I looked out the window into the scruffy, stunted fir trees around the house. “Your window’s dirty,” I said. I touched a handprint on the glass. Small. Maybe the size of Amaruk’s hand.

“I’m going to go out tonight,” I said. “Maybe I’ll swing by and look for Jason.”

“Maybe you should leave him alone.”

“Huh,” I said. “Well, anyway, can you watch Amaruk tonight?”

“Of course,” said Violet. She never came out to the bars. She had made Hughie promise the day he married her that he wouldn’t drink anymore, and she didn’t either to make it easier for him. I told her she could come out and just drink coffee, like I did, but she said that was tempting fate.

There really was something about cigarettes, I thought as I put mine out in one of the ugly china ashtrays Violet always set in front of me, as a protest against me putting them out in the sink or on dirty plates. Every single time I finished one, I wished I were just starting it.

I went straight to Jason’s house. Along the way, I passed Rita’s little cabin, where I knew Amaruk would be somewhere inside, playing with Rita’s son Sean. I decided not to stop. Amaruk would want me to stay home. When he was young enough for me to still pick him up and carry him home, he would look at me with deep, sad eyes when I was getting ready to go out. But he wouldn’t say anything. Even once he learned the words that he could have said if he wanted to, he never did. I’d thought, at the time, that those eyes were worse than whatever he could have said. Sometimes I’d hardly known why I even went out at all; half the time I was bored sideways by everyone, and just depressed with thinking of those eyes, watching me from the doorway as I dressed, watching from the screen door as I left. Then for a while, he grew so attached to Violet, he couldn’t stand to be away from her. He’d cry when I came to bring him home. Sometimes I’d have to give him a little slap to stop him crying for her. And I thought that was worse than those sad eyes. But for more than a year now, he’d got so he’d come and beg me not to go out, he’d ask when I’d be back, and he’d tell me he would not sleep until then, and when I came back, if I went up to his bedroom, I’d find him there, watching the door, with his thumb in his mouth, which he still wouldn’t stop doing, though at least he knew now not to do it in front of other kids. And that was worse.

Aileen was out sitting on the steps of the porch when I got there, and I wasn’t expecting that.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello,” I said, and I stopped there, looking at her.

Aileen had her hair pulled up with pins on top of her head
and she was wearing a pale pink cardigan, buttoned up wrong, so it buckled on one side. She had a long, flowered skirt on that went down to the ground, and she’d tucked her feet under it. I couldn’t figure out if she was dressed like a little girl or an old lady. Something was changed in her.

“Anyway,” I said. “I came by.”

“Are you looking for Jason?”

I said I was and followed Aileen in. It had been a few years since I’d been in Jason’s house, I realized, as I discovered how weird it was to see things just as they’d been. I wondered if Jason had kept it that way on purpose, to honour her, or if he just hadn’t bothered changing anything.

Jason was on his knees in the kitchen, putting wood in the stove.

“Is this the first fire?” I asked.

He looked up at me and shrugged. “I guess so,” he said.

“We haven’t lit the stove yet. There’s been a couple nights we could have used it though. It’s getting cold early this year. Going to be a long winter,” I said.

Neither Jason nor Aileen answered me and so I got tired of trying to make conversation. I sat down at Mara’s old pine table that still had Mara’s old flowered tablecloth on it. “I brought some beers,” I said, pushing them down the table toward Aileen.

She pulled one out and offered it to Jason. He shook his head and she opened it. I watched her take a long swallow. I remembered one time when I was a child, I was walking home from my cousin’s house at dinnertime one evening, and suddenly, between the road and the house I was passing, I saw a body in the snow. I went closer, not quite scared yet, still just interested, and saw it was a woman, her reddish hair stretched
out in the snow and over her face, her arms and legs bent up into a ball. I touched the lady’s shoulder with my boot, and she moaned a little but didn’t move. I had to get my mother, who helped the lady stand up and then drove her to her house, me in the back seat, trying to see the reflection of the lady’s face in the window she was leaned against. After my mother came out of the lady’s bedroom, she told me the lady would be fine and we could go home now. “Too much alcohol,” she said. It was the first but not the last drunk I saw passed out in the snow, but I always remembered her. Sometimes when I was talking to white people, women especially, I’d remember the lady. Aileen made me think of her, how her hands weren’t even in mittens, just little fists in the snow.

“So, you doing okay?” I asked Jason.

“He’s fine,” Aileen said, and you could tell she didn’t want us to talk about it anymore.

“Maybe it makes sense that she’d be the one to go. She was the last one to leave of the three of us. Maybe for her, it will take. While me and you grow old here.”

“Shut up, Minnie,” said Jason. I looked at him more closely then, and honest to god he looked like when Mara died. Not a lick older either. He was almost as white as Aileen.

“It’s okay,” Aileen said. I looked at her, her face all open, like she was exposed there, even if that was just another way of lying. “This is going to be all right. Jason is going to be all right.”

“She doesn’t have any right though,” I said.

They both stared at me.

“Angie’s like my own sister. But she doesn’t have any right to take that kid from you, Jason.”

Jason had left the stove door open and it was hot, hot, hot.
It was just dim enough outside that you could see the patterns of the flames shifting the light around the room.

Jason said, “I was going to tell Aileen a story.”

“You and your stories,” I said.

“He’s got two left to tell me,” she said. “Only one after tonight.”

“Well, you’re going to live here now, aren’t you. All winter long. I’m sure you’ll get to hear lots more stories.”

For a moment, Jason and Aileen had the same pinched face. Then Jason pulled a chair out and turned it around and sat on it backwards, so his arms hung over the back. “Pass me a beer, Minnie,” he said. I gave him one, and he said, “She had a child.”

“No, she didn’t,” said Aileen quickly.

“She did.”

The brother cut his sister up into small pieces, so he could hide her in the ground, beneath the snow, where she’d be eaten by spring. It took him hours to clean up all the blood, and as he was cleaning, he heard the sound of someone crying
.

Be quiet, he said, thinking it was an animal looking for food. Go away!

But the crying continued, and he thought perhaps it was the wind, and he closed the door
.

But the crying continued, and the brother became very afraid that it was Fire-man, come to cry for his dead woman. She’s gone to walk in the woods, he called, in case Fire-man was listening. She’ll be back in the morning. I am just making some breakfast for us now
.

But the crying continued, and finally, the brother went to
find the crying sound. In a little cradle in the corner, he found a baby. It could only be a few days old. He knew it was the child of his sister and Fire-man
.

Then he became afraid, for he knew Fire-man would return, looking for his woman and his child. So he wrapped the baby in some caribou skins and took him in his arms and left the cottage. He went deep, deep into the woods, and waited for the sun to rise, so he could find his way home to his people
.

But the sun did not rise. He waited many days, but the cold got deeper and darker. He had to sleep on boughs of fir, blanketed with snow, the baby close to his chest so they would not freeze to death. He heard the trees around him whispering, Get the caribou. He did not want to see what the caribou would do when they came, so he ran and ran, the baby in his arms, and the sound of hoofbeats behind him. He stopped by a brook and made a fire to melt the ice so he and the baby could drink, but he heard the water say then, Get the fish. He saw, then, salmon frozen in the ice, and their tails began to move, slowly back and forth. They are only fish, he said. They cannot hurt me. One rose to the surface and watched him and the baby with its wet eyes, then it disappeared into the frozen brook, and he saw the flash of it moving in the ice, travelling far, far upstream. He left the brook then and began to climb toward the mountains, when his father and mother appeared before him
.

The fish say that you have killed your sister, said his father
.