Love Letters of the Angels of Death (11 page)

“Do you have any ‘Moncton's Magnetic Hill: Canada's Third Greatest Natural Wonder?'”

“Nope. Go fish.”

In these woods, you're acting bold and well-oriented, but I know it's mostly just noise and bravado. You've been here many times before, but these are still not quite your woods. The trees crowd the ground around this Maritime river differently than they do in the scanty stands of trees on the prairies where we grew up.

Nanny's forest is close and canopied but there's room for us to walk between the long trunks of the deciduous trees. I keep plucking maple leaves, eyeing them like I'm going to press them in books and keep them forever – even though you're laughing at me.

“What?” I protest. “Maple leaves are cool. They don't grow wild back home.”

Ahead of me, you stop walking and look around us. It kind of freaks me out, the way we know this forest spreads to the very edges of the continental landmass where the earth is worn away to bedrock and butted onto the sea. In the light filtered by the leafy trees, spruces grow out of the moss in tightly spiked copses and let their sap stand out on their trunks in yellowed, purple knobs. You tell me people used to pick the sap and chew it up like gum. But when I dare you to show me, all you do is get close enough to notice the spruce gum is actually covered in tiny spider webs. After that, you won't even touch it.

And I know what the real difference is between these trees and the ones I know from the west. These ones are more human, less wild. Centuries before people like my ancestors were anywhere near the prairies, these woods had already snagged and held small traces of settled, human life. There are still wet remains of old foot bridges across streams, or flaky red nails rusting where they have been pounded into tree trunks and bent over for some long-forgotten purpose. The forests here have overgrown and outlasted generations of families like ours. All the history makes the place heavy with your ancestors' lives and deaths. It's like they've left an imprint here you can almost sense – like you're just on the verge of remembering something.

And we are trying to remember something. The Aunties say there's an old family cemetery out here somewhere – the place where your grandmother would have been buried in an alder wood crate, without a cement liner, if the county still allowed it. Instead, she's buried up on Butcher Hill in the “new” cemetery. The new cemetery was started just in time to receive the nine of your great-great- grandmother's eleven children who died in an influenza epidemic still known by the old-timers around here as “The Black Death.”

“Yep,” you'll rasp out of bed at me at least once during the course of every flu you ever get. “It's true. I come from a long line of miserable Scottish people who coughed themselves to death.”

Influenza isn't what scares you out here in the woods today. You tell me how the last time you traipsed around here looking for the old graveyard, you were just a kid terrified of your Mom's canon of true, family ghost stories – stories you're repeating to me now, as we walk over the moss, side by side but metres apart, like a search-and-rescue party.

“And as they ran, they could hear old Sarah – off in the distance, always ahead of them – waving her blue-white light and justa screamin' in the dead of night.”

I think it's funny how you start to take on their Maritime accents more and more with every hour we stay here. But I don't mention it now. Instead, I just laugh as the ghost story ends. “You don't scare me.”

“That,” you say, “is only because you've never been out here at night. There's no light at all in the woods after the sun goes down – nothing. It's like being locked in a closet with nothing but spruce trees hanging from the rod.”

“I don't know.” I'm a little bit worried about you, so I'm trying to sound sceptical. “I guess I don't find trees that spooky. It's just a bunch of wood planted in the ground, right? It'd be like being afraid of the dining room furniture, wouldn't it?”

I hear your scoffing sound. “It's not the trees themselves. It's what's in them – all the ghosts and shadows and stuff. And I still say it's easy to be cavalier about it in the daytime. When the sun's up even these old graveyards are just part of the Earth. You know – like any features on the landscape.”

I stop and scan the terrain around us. “Well, where is the graveyard then?” I'm starting to get a soaker in the toe of my gumboot.

You're not answering my question. “Hey, check it out.” You're bending down and picking a little oval leaf off a twig growing out of a low, hollow spot in the moss that covers everything.

I squint down at the groundcover. “Kinnikinnick?”

“No. They're teaberry leaves.”

I've never heard of teaberry leaves, but you're rubbing the dirt off them and putting the leaves right into your mouth anyway.

“Come on, Brigs. You're supposed to be the mighty forager in the family. Try a teaberry leaf. It beats the heck out of your lame prairie chokecherries. Trust me.” You pluck a leaf for me. It's tiny and kind of disappears between my teeth when I bite it. The taste is strong and hot – like sandy wintergreen toothpaste spread on a twig.

I'm nodding. “Sure. It's nice.”

But you're grabbing me by the waist with both of your hands. “You didn't swallow it, did you?”

I sweep the cavern of my mouth with my tongue. “Yeah, I think I did.”

“Brigs!”

“What? Don't tell me you just got me to put something in my mouth that you didn't expect me to eat.”

“Well – yeah. I mean, teaberry leaves are like spruce gum. You aren't supposed to swallow them, you big animal.”

“Why not?”

“I – I don't know. Nanny never told us it was okay to swallow the leaves whole so – I don't know.”

You're looking up at me with the little girl face from the funeral again – all wild with the terrifying superstitions from the Stone Age of your childhood.

I pull your hands off my torso and pile them on top of each other in my palm. “I'm fine,” I say. “I'm going to stay fine.”

You're trotting after me as I walk away from the teaberry patch. “Are you sure?”

I hold out my arms. “Look at the size of me. One little leaf's not going to hurt me – even if there is a possibility that they aren't so good for eating.”

You cross your arms and purse your lips. “So spit out the rest of the saliva left in your mouth.”

“Come on…”

“Brigs – please. Get rid of it. Please.”

I turn my head and spit onto the ground. You jump up to kiss me on the cheek as I wipe my lips with the back of my hand.

“Thanks, Sweetie.”

I breathe out a noisy sigh. “Back to grave hunting, okay?”

“Right.” You nod and start to walk again. “Remember: we're looking for stones stood on their narrow ends, set in a group – like a small, haphazard Stonehenge.”

“Not like that?” I say, pointing back into the grove where we just stood chewing teaberry leaves.

And then you're crashing past me, stomping over the twiggy vines, back into the open space in the trees where flat sheets of natural, ragged-edged shale – nothing like Stonehenge – stand on their ends, half buried in the ground. The earth in front of each of the stones bows down in long rectangles the size of small graves – the size of you. At least five of the shale monoliths stand in the glade, reverently apart from one another – uncut headstones pried raw from the earth and set in unnatural positions by people who are long gone. You stoop and scan their surfaces, but there's nothing written on the stones – nothing that can still be read, anyways. So instead of looking any further, you stand up straight and you listen as if you're trying to read something in the low, spiritual hum you so badly want to hear resonating though the forgotten boneyard. You look up through the trees, straight above us, where a flat white sky spreads like a drab, painted ceiling overhead.

“Do you see Caroline anywhere?” you ask me. “Lost Caroline?”

I know you mean the grave of your great-grandmother's aunt – or someone like that. She's what someone might try to call a “romantic” figure. She was a young mother – just a newly married teenager, really – buried somewhere in the ground out here with a tiny son still closed between her arms. We were warned that her grave wouldn't have a natural marker hacked out of shale or wood but a real milled granite one – smooth and symmetrical and modern. They say Caroline's stepson – one of the many of them born years after Caroline's death, the children of her husband's strong, new wife – had replaced her handmade, wooden cross with a real granite monument. Everyone said it was silly but the stepson was a prosperous person who could afford to be sentimental.

I step into the grove with you, combing all the wet bracken into a kind of flatness with the side of my boot. As I knock the ferns down, it comes into view – the machine cut stone lying out of time and place in the moss.

“Here she is.”

You're hopping over the undergrowth to see for yourself. “Here she is,” you repeat, taking my hand in yours. But you let go of me again before I can close my fingers around your flesh and bones – just like you did at your grandmother's graveside this morning. You're about to revise another burial – the second one of the day – no matter how late it might be for Lost Caroline.

There's a thin, creamy birch trunk – no leaves, no branches – standing dead and jutting at a forty-five degree angle out of the moss. You kick at its base and the trunk snaps off so easily you nearly fall down right along with it.

“Help me break it into pieces,” you tell me, carrying the trunk to where I still stand over Lost Caroline and her baby.

The wood snaps easily into short lengths when we crack it over our knees. “What now?” I ask.

You hesitate, standing over the pile of white, broken wood. “Her headstone – it's nice but it doesn't quite belong here. Everyone says so but no one will do anything to try to salvage it. It just needs – something,” you say.

There's another pause – a long one. “Do you want to mark it with a cross – the way they would have originally marked it right after they buried her?” I venture.

It's a difficult question. You squint, furrowing your forehead, shifting your mouth to one side of your face. The truth is we'd no sooner use a cross to refer to anything heavenly than we'd use a Nazi machine gun shell to commemorate our great-uncles who were killed in the war.

It's what you're thinking right now as you say, “Caroline didn't die on a cross.” Your face softens and you look up at the flat, white sky again. “She died – all torn up in love for this baby and his father.”

I let my hand fall, cupping your shoulder.

You drop to kneel on Lost Caroline's grave even though the downward force of your weight wrings water out of the mossy earth. It soaks through your clothes, all the way to the skin on your shins and kneecaps. You're laying down the lengths of broken birch wood – piece by piece.

I squat beside you. “What are we making?” At first, you don't answer, but you don't stop laying the wood down either. It's starting to form into a shape like a tight curve. “Are you making her initial: a letter C?”

“No, Brigs. We are marking this grave,” you tell me, “with a wedding ring.”

We get back to the house of the Auntie we're staying with – a photo of Lost Caroline's headstone stored in the memory of my cell phone. Our plane leaves from the Fredericton International Airport in a few hours, so it's time to dry our feet and get ready to leave. The trip from here to the airport should only take a little over an hour but everyone else in the house is getting fussy and acting like it's a long way. I guess one hour's traffic is a lot, here in a tiny Maritime county.

I'm zipping my black suit into a garment bag when I catch you sitting on the edge of the bed, stalled, with a sock dangling from each of your hands.

“Auntie sure keeps it warm in here,” you say when you see me looking at you.

I frown and cover your forehead with the palm of my hand. Your skin is dry and hot. “You're sick.”

You clamp your hand over mine. “No.”

“Don't tell me you swallowed your teaberry leaves.”

You almost smile. “No. That's not it.”

“Then you must be coming down with a virus or something.”

“But I can't be sick. What if someone at the airport notices I've got a fever and they won't let me on the plane?”

I don't even shrug. “They'll let you on the plane.”

You're pulling your socks on quickly now, as if hurrying will help. “But they have all those pandemics going around these days. What if someone decides I've got SARS or bird flu or something?”

I laugh. “SARS? That was ages ago.”

“So? We need to get back to the kids tonight. Aunt Marla's been too generous already. We need to get the boys out of her house.” You look around the room from where you're still slumped on the edge of the bed. “I need to find some medicine to take before we try to board the plane.”