Northward to the Moon (2 page)

Ned used to hitchhike to wherever he guessed his father was and visit him and then hitchhike back to see any brothers and sisters who were hanging around the house at the time. His mother hardly paid attention to anyone’s comings and goings. They had been ripped out of a good Edmonton school and placed in a Fort McMurray school not so much bad as uninterested.

“Yep,” said Ned when he related all this, “after my dad left she was pretty oblivious to the family in general. Mostly I came back when I ran out of
money and needed a place to crash, although I generally preferred my father’s when I could find him. On the other hand, Fort McMurray wasn’t without
any
merit. You could go outside and see the northern lights any night in winter. Down south we had studied the northern lights but in Fort McMurray we experienced them. That’s when I decided that experience is everything. That there was little I could learn in a classroom that was as worthwhile as seeing it for myself. So I hit the road and have been hitting it more or less ever since.”

I am thinking about this conversation now. How Ned has managed to stay in one place with us for almost a year but how his feet must be itching for new experiences and that this business of being fired is a good excuse to go off and have more adventures. The problem is he has my mother to think of now and my mother clearly wants to go home.

I don’t think putting down roots in Massachusetts is going to satisfy Ned and I am curious to see how he will resolve things but at that moment the phone rings. Ned picks it up. When he gets off, he
says, “That was the oddest phone call. That was one of Mary’s grandsons. Mary is dying.”

“Who is that?” I ask.

“A friend from a long time ago,” he says. “A long, long time ago.” He stops and stares across the kitchen. He looks pale and strained.

“That woman who took you in all those years ago?” asks my mother.

“Yeah,” says Ned.

“However did her grandson find you?”

“Through Canada 411. He’s lucky. Any other year I wouldn’t have had a fixed address or phone number.”

“Why did Mary have to take you
in?
Why were you
out?”
I ask.

“I was lost. It’s a long story. She must be about ninety now. He said she’s really ill and drugged up and out of it but she keeps saying my name. They don’t know why. They said that if I wanted to, I should come and see her because they don’t think she has much time left.”

“Of course you should!” says my mother.

“Yeah, but now I’ve got this whole firing thing hanging over my head,” says Ned.

“Oh, Ned,” says my mother. “What’s done is done. This is more important, surely? Besides, now you don’t have to take a leave of absence. You’re
fired
!”

She makes it sound as if this has turned out to be fortuitously lucky.

“Let’s all go!” says Ned, and he suddenly perks up. “Let’s leave tonight under cover of dark!”

Finally, I think, an adventure. Ned had promised me nothing but adventures when we got to Canada but this is the first whiff I’ve caught of them.

“Leave like outlaws?” asks my mother.

I think she means it as a bad thing but she has chosen the wrong word for Ned. His eyes glow. “Like Jesse James!”

“Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid!” I say. I imagine us all on horseback with masks, robbing trains and making our way to Mexico. Ned gives me a wild look and I can tell we are having exactly the same fantasy. Life has been a little too mundane of late.

“But school!” says my mother.

For a poet she can be terribly prosaic sometimes.

“What school? You know what the last month of
school is like. There’s nothing but cupcake days and field trips, right, Bibles?” Ned started calling me Bibles back in Massachusetts because I helped a mystical preacher deliver them for a while.

“Very true,” I say.

“Besides,” says Ned, “the children can hardly go back to the school that fired me. Think of the stigma. There’s gonna be some stigma!”

“Oh, major stigma!” I say.

“The stigma,” murmurs my mother, looking abstracted. This is all happening so fast. He was just fired this morning and already we’re wearing masks and robbing trains.

“Let’s leave tonight! Ned loves to drive at night,” I say. We discovered this on the trip from Massachusetts to Saskatchewan. He says the roads are quieter and he likes to drive under the stars. “Let’s take nothing but our clothes!”

But in the coming days my mother insists on packing up the house properly and notifying banks and schools and the post office and other dull things.
Even Ned gives up his outlaw role and apologizes to the school for not knowing French.

“The board said they thought I was a darn good teacher anyway,” Ned tells us later when he returns from school with his things. “And they didn’t really care. Heck, they said they’ve known for years that Mrs. Cunningham doesn’t know any math despite her degree. No, you know who wanted me fired? It’s that lunatic fringe! That darn tiny group of parents who actually
care
what their children are learning. Let me tell you something, Jane, everyone is responsible for his own education. You can’t teach anyone who doesn’t want to learn and you can’t stop a person who does.”

This is such a stirring speech that we almost forget that the reason we are leaving is that in actual fact, you can’t teach anyone something you yourself don’t know.

“But you’re still fired?” I ask hopefully.

I don’t think Ned is paying attention to me. He is staring off into space ruminatively. “They should have hired me to teach Japanese. I
speak
Japanese.”

“I didn’t know you spoke Japanese,” says my mother as she comes barreling through the room, her arms full of clothes to pack.

Ned breaks into a torrent of Japanese words.

“I’d love to learn Japanese. I always wanted to be better with languages,” says my mother as she bustles up the stairs.

“I know a little Samoan too …,” Ned calls after her, and then he goes back to packing.

“Let’s put bandanas on the lower parts of our faces as we drive out of town,” I say to Ned, following him around and trying to recapture the spirit of our outlaw adventure through these never-ending closing-up chores.

“I think your mother is being flexible enough,” says Ned, winking at me. “Letting us traipse here and there across Canada in a car. Let’s just be costumed in our minds!”

“Sometimes I don’t think you take this fully seriously,” I say.

“Au contraire, au contraire,”
says Ned, and then, whistling happily to himself, goes into the kitchen to help Max and Hershel, who are trying to pour themselves some milk and are about to spill it all over. “That’s French, boys,” he announces, jauntily opening the cookie jar.

“I told you he speaks French,” says Max.

“I know,” says Hershel solemnly.

They are like dogs, aware of so much and yet not, and at any rate, happy to follow the pack. Maya is happy to leave because my mother says that after we drive to see Mary we are going back to Massachusetts. Sometimes I sense in Maya not just a desire but a real desperation to get home. I can never remember her being as cranky as she has become recently.

We all help my mother finish organizing and finally we find ourselves packed into our beat-up old station wagon, two adults, three children, me, my mother’s box of books and a few suitcases.

We already live on the edge of town so in minutes we are beyond its tightly crossed legs and before us stretches the flat unforgiving land, the grass standing frozen and forlorn. There is nothing ahead but the horizon and the endless wintry road.

W
e stay in bad motels. Ned and I want to camp under the stars like Wild West outlaws but it is too cold. The Canadian winter is a blue icy vastness. Cold sends up waves from the earth just as heat does. You can see them like mirages over the highway. Sometimes it is so cold that you feel you could break off sheets of jagged frozen air, which would crunch like ice or glass, as deadly as any weapon. You don’t want to fall through it. Every time we went outside this winter we gasped in disbelief; the cold like a vacuum sucks the warm breath out of you. It is hard to believe that anything can generate enough heat of its own to survive in this temperature. And yet bears roam and a
bit further north, caribou and wolves and arctic fox and owl. The fires in their bellies enough to keep them safe through the winter days. Now, even in May, after the coldest winter on record, the snow may be gone but the ground is still frozen.

We are three days on the road when I realize that Ned hasn’t told the story of his friend Mary yet. He and my mother have obviously talked about it but I have been so busy packing up that I have forgotten to ask him.

“I don’t see why we have to drive all the way across the country just to see some old woman,” says Maya to me. We are riding in the last row of seats in the back of the station wagon, facing backward, as if we are perpetually waving goodbye. “Why didn’t we go home to Massachusetts and let Ned go alone?”

“Because he probably wants Mama with him,” I say. “His friend is
dying
, Maya. She was important to him at some point, I guess. Don’t you want to know why?”

“I don’t care,” says Maya. “I just want to go home.”

“Aren’t you curious?”

“No. I want to read my comic book,” says Maya maddeningly.

We don’t speak for another half hour. Then as the car rolls down the road, with nothing of interest to see, and I fend off Maya, who has grown tired of her comic and is trying to give me a pedicure with no professional instruments or knowledge, I say, “Ned, where
exactly
are we going?”

Ned’s face has the concentrated expression of someone going
to
somewhere. You can see him casting through his memories of this place from his past.

“To the carriers,” he says.

When my mother is at the wheel it makes her chatty but Ned drives silently most of the time. I think he goes to faraway places peacefully and contentedly in his head when he drives. I wonder if he is thinking about Mary dying or what has led him to this moment where he is in a car full of children heading to somewhere from his past. My mother lets him do this. She doesn’t engage him in chitchat but instead, when she wants company, turns and talks to us in the back. Maya and I have to turn our heads around to talk to her.

“There’s no place in Canada called Thecarriers,” says Maya.

Maya since turning eight has become a great source of misinformation. She likes to expound on things she knows nothing about and when corrected isn’t deterred in the least. At eight she is suddenly sure that she knows everything. I think we are all glad, if for nothing else on this adventure, that it has taken Maya away from her teacher, the cheerful, all-knowing Mrs. Gunderson. Mrs. Gunderson shared Maya’s rarefied universe of misinformation. Seldom did a day go by when Maya didn’t bring home some incredible statement of fact, some erroneous item of history, some word usage peculiar only to Mrs. Gunderson and Maya, which if you tried to correct it, brought a storm of tears and tantrums and the ultimate last word, “But Mrs. Gunderson
says
so.” It was interesting if you thought of Maya and Mrs. Gunderson existing in their own little alternate universe. One in which its two citizens know everything. I listen to Maya ramble on about things she knows nothing about, more to find out what is happening in Mrs. Gundersonland than to learn anything useful. I regard it as
being like reading a good fantasy novel without having to go to the trouble of remembering endless ridiculous boring made-up names.

“I think the carriers are a people, Maya,” says my mother.

Now, as Ned doesn’t further explicate, I ponder what carriers these are. I wonder if Ned, as he drives so dreamily down the long empty roads, has been inventing a Middle Earth–type fantasyland of his own, where people carry things. How would Mrs. Gunderson explain this?

“Are the carriers a
real
people?” I ask him.

“Yes, of course,” says Ned.

“What kind of people?” asks Maya.

“Normal people,” says Ned. “For the most part.”

“Letter carriers, Ned?” I ask.

“Hmmm? No, no, no. They’re a First Nations tribe living in northern British Columbia. They got the name because they carried the ashes of their dead relatives a long way in some kind of pack on their backs. Didn’t I already tell you all this?”

We shake our heads no. He is looking at us through the rearview mirror.

Ahead are a diner and a gas station. Ned surprises us by pulling in. We have almost a full tank of gas and we do not eat out as a rule; it is cheaper to picnic in the car, buying groceries in large discount grocery stores when we can find them.

Ned turns off the engine. “Who’s hungry?”

The boys yip. They are always hungry. I am dying for a hot meal. My mother gives Ned a look that says, Can we afford this? but he ignores her and shepherds us inside, where the waitress puts a pot of coffee and two cups in front of Ned and my mother without even asking.

“Thanks,” says Ned with some surprise in his voice.