In the Land of Birdfishes (25 page)

The caribou say that you have taken her child, said his mother
.

He wept and said it was because he loved her. He told them how she had disdained his love
.

Fire-man is looking for you, said his father
.

He will find you, said his mother
.

He lay down on the ground then and held fast to the child. I will not let him take the child, he said
.

The fish have eaten the child, said his mother. And he looked and saw the child in his arms was eaten
.

The caribou beat out its brains with their hooves, said his father. And the brother saw that it was true, and he opened the bloodied caribou skins on the snow and wept upon them
.

I will kill you, said his mother. He raised his hands up to her to plead for his life, but she rose taller above him, till all the sky was her face, and the trees dwindled to bony sticks beside him, and the snow grew deeper, and the wind more bitter
.

Hide me, he said to the wind, but the wind blew harder. Bury me, he said to the snow, but the snow made a valley around him. Shelter me, he said to the trees, but they were only sticks and could shelter no one
.

His father then appeared by his side and said, You are my son. I will not let her harm you
.

I have loved you, Father, he said, his tears ice in his eyes. Do not leave me now
.

I will not leave you, said his father, because you will be always with us. No one will be able to leave you. You will be cold. You will be ice. You will be the snap of frozen branches that betray the feet of hunters. You will be the moonlit glare of the river. You will be dark. You will be the sleeping of all living things. You will be waiting that does not end. You will be time that ages without passing. You will be the endlessness of all things, of all endurances, of all suffering. You will be weather and winter, and there will be no summer again
.

The brother thought to change his mind and ask to be only a mortal, not a god or a season but something that could, at last, die, but it was too late because already he had no mind to change, only snow and the thin light of the moon
.

I was quiet after Jason finished. Aileen stood and turned her back to us, but we could see that she put her hands up to her face.

“Well,” said Jason. “I feel like getting out of here.”

“You want to go down and see who’s at the bar?” I asked.

“No,” said Jason. “I mean out of here.”

“Let’s go up north,” Aileen said suddenly.

I laughed at how seriously she said that, and how she said it like it was a place to go, but Jason answered her seriously. “Where would we go?” he asked.

“I don’t care where we go,” Aileen said. “We could take the Dempster Highway. We could cross the Arctic Circle. Get away from all of this.”

Our mother used to say, “Be careful not to take yourself too seriously.” I thought about saying that to Aileen sometimes.

“I could call Peter tonight,” Jason said. “He won’t care if I don’t show up tomorrow. We could be gone by tomorrow.”

Aileen leaned against the window, her forehead pressed against it. “Good,” she said.

Then neither of them said anything. If we’d been out, I could have gone and talked to someone else, but I was in Jason’s house at Jason’s table, so I had to just wait and watch while the two of them sat there so quietly that the ticking of the clock seemed to shake the walls.

The first time Lopita spoke to me, she had said, “You gonna come sit down here or did nobody ever teach you you can’t fuck with your eyes?” I had just got the job, my first real job, and was still focused on busing the tables fast enough that the waitresses would slip me five bucks from their tips. I was hardly twenty and as shy in Vancouver as I’d been ballsy in Dawson. I hadn’t been looking at anybody. Not even Lopita, who was more beautiful and weird-looking than anyone I had ever seen before. But when I looked at her then, I realized I didn’t want to stop looking, and maybe that was why Lopita had said that. To make me look. And keep looking.

“I gotta go to the bathroom,” I said. Jason nodded and Aileen seemed startled to see me standing there. Jesus, I thought, as I found my way to the same old white-painted plywood door that you had to pull open and closed by a tiny round hole in the wood you could hook a couple fingers through. I’d always been surprised by how rundown this place was. Growing up, I thought, well, Mara had enough to do with Jason and being blind and all. But there was really no excuse for Jason not fixing the place up.

I had to give a good tug to get my pants down. I was getting my mother’s ass. Violet had four children and was still as thin as a stick. The window in the shower was open, and cold air was coming through. The toilet seat was ice-cold. I pissed and listened to a dog barking somewhere outside.

Lopita was from Mexico, and had a broad brown face and narrow black eyes. All her features were narrow and doll-like, lost in her wide face, except her mouth, which was much too big. It was full at the centre and then got thinner as it snaked up into her cheeks. It was a bent mouth. It was never closed or open in a normal way. It was always twisted or laughing and
showing too many teeth. She wore coral lipstick. She made me sit down at one of her tables that first night while she counted all the money she owed the restaurant and separated out her tips. She didn’t give any of her tips to me. When she was finished, she put the biggest pile of money in an envelope, and the smaller pile she stuck in the back pocket of her jeans, which were too tight. Then she leaned across the table and put her hand under my face and kissed me.

I let the water keep running over my hands after I finished washing them. The hot water felt so good. In the cold, my fingers always stiffened.

Lopita had said, “Why did you get a job here? You’d make better money downtown.” I had explained, “Back home, a few times I heard American tourists ask why there were so many Mexicans in the north. One asked me once if it had been hard for me to get used to the cold. No one in the city wanted to hire me, and I thought maybe they would here if they thought I was Mexican. I never had Mexican food before, but Raul gave me a quesadilla after I filled out my application. I thought it was delicious. I never had anything like that before.”

“Well,” I said now, as I walked back into the room, “I should get going, I guess.”

“You just got here,” said Aileen, who was washing dishes at the sink. “Let me put some coffee on for you.”

“If you’re going on a trip tomorrow, you’ll have to get ready,” I said. “I’ll stay out of the way of that.”

Jason was still in his chair at the table. “I’m glad you came by, Minnie,” he said. “Thanks,” he said.

“You can keep the beer,” I said. “Take it with you on your trip.”

“Wait,” said Aileen. “I’ll walk you out.” She slipped her
feet into a pair of worn leather sandals and pushed open the door, without looking back at Jason.

I let her go out first and then closed the screen door behind me. “Yes?” I said.

“I just wanted to walk you out,” she said. I found lies so boring. “Well,” she said, “I guess I wanted to ask you something, but I’m not quite sure even what, or how to ask.”

“I’ve got to get home,” I said.

“I know,” said Aileen. “I know. Just wait a moment. I’m trying to figure something out and I don’t have anybody to talk to about it.”

“Except Jason,” I said.

“But it’s especially him I can’t talk to.”

I nodded slowly because I knew now where she was going.

“I used to think that right was always something you could think up in your head. That if you did the wrong thing, it was because you hadn’t thought about it enough. Shit. Let me start again. You’ve known Jason a long time, haven’t you?”

I nodded again. “When we were kids, I’d babysit him. Mara needed lots of help watching him. I mean, the watching part. Later we got to be friends.”

“I know how much you matter to him. You must really know each other well.”

“I don’t know that he wants to be known that well. But I know him better than anybody else, I guess. I guess that’s true.”

The words came out of her mouth like she was chasing them out. “Stephan—my husband—he wants to try again. He asked me to come home. He said he gave it a lot of thought and he wants me to come home.”

“And you figure that’s back in Toronto.”

“That’s back in …” She scowled. “Say it to me straight.”

“The way I heard it from Jason, you thought your home was here now.”

“I did. And maybe I still do. I haven’t figured it out. I just haven’t figured it out. Maybe I could take him with me. Or maybe we should both stay here. But I wanted to ask you, do you think, if I were to go … Or even just with Angel gone … Do you think he’s going to be okay?”

“Well,” I said. “I don’t think that really has to do with either one of us. And I don’t think it’s anybody’s business to say that about anyone else. Are you going to be okay? Am I?”

“I know,” she said. She sat down on the porch steps, where she’d been when I arrived. “But everybody let him down, didn’t they. He told me about what his father did to him. I’m sure you must know that. And then when Mara died, it must have been like she was leaving him.”

“I don’t know what you mean about ‘his father did.’ What did his father do? He didn’t do anything wrong to Jason.”

Aileen’s eyes widened and then got sad. “So maybe no one knew then,” she said softly. “His father used to hurt Jason and Mara.”

“No, he didn’t,” I said.

“Minnie, he did. He wouldn’t lie about a thing like that. He told me about the fights they’d have. He showed me where the table was broken from him once trying to hit her with the back of an axe.”

“God, Jason,” I said. I thought of how he never spoke about his mother and of what he must have got going on in his head about her. I remembered the day, a couple months before Mara died, that the three of us were in the kitchen, and she wanted Jason to go split some wood for the fire. But Jason
and I had planned to drive to Alaska that morning, to see my cousin Deke about a job. Deke said he could get Jason good pay for a job on his boat, and Jason had just finished school and thought he might like that, being out there on the water all the time. “Well, you’ve got it wrong,” I said.

“He has a scar, Minnie,” she said. “I’ve seen it. He left a scar on his son.”

“He didn’t,” I said simply. “It was her. It was always her.”

“What do you mean?” She stopped. “You mean my sister?”

“You can’t even blame her, not really. She was troubled, that’s what my father would say. She knew the Bible inside and out but she didn’t know anything about being a mother. There wasn’t anything Jason could do right. I saw her come down on him like a pack of wolves over nothing. She was half crazy when she shouted at him, every time she told him how worthless he was. Maybe all-the-way crazy. Because she loved him. Jason couldn’t tell that, but I could. She was obsessed with that boy. Even more than his father, and he loved Jason and was just heartbroken to watch her grind him down. But he was a coward and he worshipped Mara, and he could never get her to leave Jason alone. I remember once she came to get Jason from my house, and my mother and I watched from the window, her dragging him up the road and hissing something mixed up about hell or sin, and he didn’t even try to defend himself. He let her treat him like dirt and convince him that he was. My mother said, ‘That woman is as sad as the stones. Look at her try to beat her love out of that boy. Who do you think she’s punishing.’ You know, if she hadn’t been blind, somebody might have thought to take him from her. But the whole town pitied her, and Jason’s father too, and they were miserable enough to be their own punishment for whatever wrong they did. And no one thought of Jason.”

“But he loves her,” Aileen whispered.

“I know,” I said. “He did then too. He’d get angry at his father if he tried to get between them. I think he hated him for letting it happen, but he wouldn’t let him try to stop it either. And Jason was always so protective of Mara. She never had a cane or a dog or anything like that, so the only way she’d get around anywhere was if Jason took her. And everywhere he took her, she’d be telling him that he was less than nothing. And as twisted as it was, I thought I understood. I thought I got it and why he put up with it. I thought there was something more between them that only they understood, and it wasn’t anyone else’s business. And then one day, I saw her hurt him.”

Aileen flinched, like I had hit her myself.

“I didn’t see it coming. She was angry, but she was always angry with him so I didn’t make much of it.” It was one of the few times I had seen him stand up to her. He’d been so excited about that damn trip to Alaska, and he told her he’d be back in a couple days and would do the wood then. There was no earthly need to be cutting wood that time of spring anyway, and it was like she’d made the job up, like she needed a reason to stand there, in the way of the door, so neither of us could leave without moving her from it. And finally, Jason tried to push past her, and she had the splitting maul in her hands, and brought it down over his head, and I closed my eyes and when I opened them and saw the axe on the floor where she’d dropped it and the table cut from the blow, I didn’t know if she’d missed or he’d ducked. I wasn’t even sure he would have. That was the way they were. If she had wanted to bring that axe down on him, he would have stood there and taken it. “I’ve seen mothers slap their kids when they mouth off, or give them a smack on the ass to shut them up, that’s not something
anyone I know would get in a twist about. But this wasn’t that. She brought an axe down on her son.” But it wasn’t even that, the axe or that moment. As I’d opened my eyes and seen the axe on the floor, he went and stood before her. He put his hand around her wrist and waited, like he knew what was coming. And she hit him hard enough that he stumbled. He knocked his face on the door as he fell. It took weeks for the cut on his cheek to heal, and after that, I’d look at the scar and think, It must have happened before. He’d walked toward her like it was something he had learned to do. “I told Angel what I’d seen and she agreed with me that it must not have been the first time. That he might have been keeping this secret as long as we’d known him. And we decided to get him out of town as soon as we could. But then, before the summer ended, she was dead. And not long after that, his father too. And after that, you’d move a mountain easier than you’d get him to leave this town, and we thought, well, maybe it didn’t matter, now that he was on his own and free. And then you showed up.”