Season of Salt and Honey (19 page)

Jack goes over to a crank on a wall and twists it to close the
skylight. Flanking him are shelves upon shelves of glass containers: some tiny globes, like the one he gave Merriem; others almost a meter tall. Many of them house little ecosystems of tiny ferns, moss-covered stones, ground cover dotted with purple flowers shaped like stars. It's like bonsai gardening but with more elements. And more wild somehow—less manicured. The smell in the studio is heady, dark, and fecund: the rich, musty soil mixed with the sweet, strong fragrance of the resin in the timber.

I step around the large wooden table in the center of the studio; on top of it is a terrarium in progress—a tall glass vase half-filled with stones and plants and surrounded by a scattering of soil—to reach the shelving, where I stare at the rows of vases and their mini-worlds. In one I notice a tiny silver bird perched in a tree.

Jack follows my gaze as he unpeels his gloves from his hands. “For Huia,” he whispers, then adds more loudly, “If she doesn't drive me crazy before I'm finished.”

“Hey,” Huia protests halfheartedly. She's dipping her hand into a bag full of pebbles.

“She still wants to go to ballet classes?” I whisper back, but Huia's humming and no longer listening.

Jack nods. “She's unlikely to give up on an idea once she's got hold of one.”

We both watch her till she looks up and demands, “What?”

“Nothing.” Jack laughs and turns back to me. “Tea? Or I can do coffee but I've only got instant.”

“Tea is fine.”

“Good. Huia and I made banana bread on the weekend. We can have that too. What's the time?”

I look down at Alex's watch, and Jack does too.

“Hell. Dinnertime,” he says. “Where does time go?”

I shrug. The watch falls back down my wrist.

“It's this place,” he says, “
Te ngahere.
The forest.”

I stare at him. The word he uses almost sounds Italian. Huia skips over to us. “We found heaps of stuff, Dad. Enough for dinner and then some. Right, Frankie?”

I nod. “A
lot
of fiddleheads.”

“Is that so? Well then, we've got a bounty. Lucky you're here, Frankie, or we'd turn into fiddlehead blimps.”

“Daaaa-ad,” Huia groans, splitting the word into two syllables.

“What?” he says.

“Nothing.” She laughs, mimicking his reply from earlier, then tugs on one of his trouser pockets.

• • • •

I
t's comfortable inside Jack's house. The kitchen is stripped, as though he's in the middle of a renovation. All the cupboards above waist height have been removed, with timber shelves replacing them, and it's clean if not finished. Huia shows her father the basket and they go through everything inside. Then Jack plucks two cups and saucers from a shelf—green cups with saucers covered in a floral print.

Huia is busy chatting about school. “And then Nora said she wasn't going to get a pink backpack anymore but that her favorite color's purple now because—”

“Fetch the banana bread, bub?”

Huia on one leg. “Because . . . purple . . . is . . . a . . . much . . .
cooler
 . . . color.”

Jack rolls his eyes at me. “Right.”

Huia hops back with the bread. Jack cuts two thick slices and puts them into a toaster.

“Pink is for little kids.”

“Butter?”

Huia hops to the fridge. The kettle finishes boiling and Jack drops tea bags into the cups.

Huia stops hopping and looks at me. “Hopping's hard work.”

“Sure is.” I try not to smile.

“So, Dad . . .”

“Yes, Huia.”

“I was thinking . . .”

“I'm not getting you a new backpack.”

“But I didn't even ask yet!”

“You having banana bread?”

She shakes her head, disarmed.

“How about you do some coloring then? After we've had some tea I'll get your dinner ready.”

I lean over the kitchen counter. “I don't want to interrupt—”

Jack waves away my concern. “Nothing to interrupt. We're just going about our boring business, eh, Huia?”

She nods, then dashes off down the hallway. When she returns she's holding a very large notepad and a fistful of coloring pencils.

Jack plates up steaming-hot slices of banana bread with generous, melting swipes of butter, and nods towards the teacups. I pick them up and carry them over to the living room. There's an old lounge suite in faded and nubby corduroy with fat arms that have wooden rests for mugs or plates. I take the couch and Jack takes the armchair. Huia crouches on the ground and lays out her paper on a pine coffee table. I blow on my tea and we both watch her. She declares that she's going to draw birds for me, so I can learn. She expertly draws the outline of a wing,
outstretched, and picks through her pencils to find the right shade of brown.

“Huia told me she's named after a bird,” I say.

Jack nods. “That's right. A New Zealand native bird.”

“But they're all dead,” Huia says, lifting her head from her drawing.

Jack laughs. “They are extinct. But they were quite beautiful—a bluish black color with a metallic sheen . . . I mean, I never actually saw one. They had long tail feathers, tipped white—”

“And the female had a long, curved beak,” Huia adds, curving her index finger.

“Yup,” Jack says.

“And the boy bird had a short, stumpy one,” she says with a degree of satisfaction.

“Well, I dunno about stumpy.”

“Not as
interesting
.”

“Fair enough, bub, not as interesting,” Jack says. “Their feathers—well, the whole of them really—were very valuable. They were regarded as treasures. There's a painting of one of my—our—ancestors wearing a cloak with a line like this”—he drags his finger across his chest—“of huia feathers. They're really striking.”

Huia stands as though she's remembered something and wanders towards the hallway.

“Sometimes she reminds me of my sister,” I say, thinking out loud.

Jack tips his head. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. Maybe it's the hair. The dark curls.”

But it's more than that. It's something to do with the way she
dashes here and there, her thirst for life, to know more, to know everything. It makes me feel sad and strange. I'm reminded of Bella and me in the yard at our nonna's house, before she passed away. Bella used to pet the rabbits while I, like Huia, gathered food from the garden.

“We had fun today. Foraging. I haven't done that before.”

“Huia loves it. I blame Merriem.”

“I used to help my nonna in the yard, and Papa too, a long time ago, but not gathering out of the forest like that.”

“What did your nonna grow?”

Green beans, Swiss chard, onions, garlic, cucumbers, peppers, eggplants, rapini, parsley, rosemary, oregano.

“Everything?” I answer with a smile.

Jack smiles back. “Sounds like my Nan. She had a veggie garden out the back of her place that fed all of us.”

“You've got a big family?”

“Yeah, you could say that. Where I'm from we all kind of . . . muck in.”

I nod. “That's what we do too.”

“I never knew Nan to turn anyone away. If you were there, you got fed. She was never put out. She'd make it work, make it stretch. Even if there was only one bit of meat, she'd just add more veggies and more bread or eggs. I wish I'd learned more from her.”

I know what Jack means. Everyone tells me that Mama was a good cook. I've learned some things from the aunties, but they make Sicilian food. Mama didn't even speak the same Italian as the Caputos. Sicilians and Calabresi are known for having some tension between them, but Papa thought Mama exotic because
she was from Calabria, despite the fact that Calabria is just across the water from Sicily, and the two of them actually, technically, were American.

“My nonna used to keep rabbits,” I say.

“In Seattle?”

I laugh out loud at Jack's surprised expression.

“Yup. In her backyard, till it was time for them to be eaten. Then the older cousins and my uncles would prepare them.”

“You and Bella helped with that too?”

“Just me. I'd get Bella busy doing something else.”

Jack smiles. “I'm the second youngest of my siblings. My sisters used to protect me like that too.”

I shrug. “She was only little. Besides, she really loved those rabbits—she would have been upset.” No one charged me with protecting her; I just knew it was my job. Till she made it too hard. I change the subject. “So you're from New Zealand?”

Jack nods.

“We left several years ago.”

“What brought you here?”

Jack laughs a little and drops his head, and I spot those silver hairs in his crown I'd noticed the first time I met him. The rest of his hair is as black as ink and shiny. I find myself touching my own hair, hoping I remembered to brush it.

“What's so funny?” I ask.

“I won a green card. I dunno, it still seems kind of funny. I went to Hawaii for a paddling competition and heard how you could win a green card, and later, when I . . . needed a change, I put my name in the lottery.”

Of course I've heard of the green card lottery. People asked us about it on family trips to Europe, even strangers, as though it couldn't be real. People couldn't believe a country like the United States had such an arbitrary system for granting citizenship. I thought it was wonderful. There were all the usual rigorous processes and then there was the lottery—a piece of good old-fashioned American spirit. Luck. Fate. Hope.

“And you won,” I say.

“Yes.”

“Well, that's something.” The way it comes out makes it sound as though he somehow made it happen.

“It sure is. Pure luck,” he reminds me. “I took it as a sign. I wouldn't be here without it, wouldn't be working for the Gardners and the others.”

At the mention of the Gardners I feel my stomach form a fist. I take a breath. Jack looks like he wants to apologize but I glance down at the watch on my wrist, avoiding eye contact.

“What brought you here, specifically, I mean? Washington State? The work, Chuckanut, Edison?” I ask, my voice a little softer.

“Umm.” He glances out the glass sliding doors. The trees stand like unapologetic eavesdroppers, their branches furred with leaves and needles, tops leaning in a little. “I guess it was more a running away from than a running to.”

That I understand.

“I needed to be somewhere different, somewhere I could be a new person . . . you know? Without anyone calling me ‘Jacky boy' and expecting the same shit from me. Sorry . . .” he adds, for swearing.

“It's okay.”

“We didn't have firm plans. I knew Rocky, Summer's brother, from my paddling days. After I won the green card Rocky said he could get me some landscaping work, and I could bring Huia along to jobs. It was pretty reckless really. Especially with her being so young.” He glances at me as though to check my reaction. “But that was a while ago. We're settled now.”

“I wasn't—”

“No, I know. I just wanted you to know . . . in case . . . Well, a lot of people don't trust a father with a daughter. They think a girl should be with her mother. They think any child, boy or girl, should be with their mum. Some people think it's weird, unnatural.”

Jack's brow is furrowed. I know what he means. People were always asking Bella and me, “Where's your mom?” as though Papa was invisible. And they always said “mom” when they meant “parent”—get your mom to sign the camp forms, get your mom to write your name on it, get your mom to drop you off. I remember Papa taking me for dinner one night to celebrate my first full-time job, and the way the waitress looked at us, first at him, then me, then back to him. At the end, when Papa was paying the bill, she gave me a strange smile, a sympathetic look, as if she wanted to say, “You can do better than that old dude, honey.”

“I don't think it's weird,” I say. “Papa raised us. He did a great job.”

“Yes he did—do a great job. I want to make sure Huia has a good, stable life, just like your father did for you. I see how important that is. The beginning of her life wasn't very stable.”

He doesn't explain any further, and I don't ask about Huia's
mother. I'm not sure I can carry any more heartache. I prefer to think of Huia springing from the forest, like the sprite Merriem says she is; fresh and green as a shoot, barefoot and chattering to the birds in their own language.

I take a bite of the bread. It tastes of banana and cinnamon and walnuts, and the toasting has given it a crust. The center is soft and warm and cakey.

Huia returns to the living room with things to show me. A stamp from New Zealand peeled off a postcard from her grandmother, Jack's mother. A book about foraging that she borrowed from the library, with big words she needs some help with. She sits next to me on the couch and we start to go through it.
Characteristics, encounter, compound, distinguish, tenacious.

Jack stands and brushes crumbs from his shirt before heading into the kitchen. I hear the gas element clicking and igniting and then the sound of oil sizzling.

Huia leans against me. We flick through the illustrations to find the plants we gathered and others we saw.

The air smells like gently frying garlic and oil. It reminds me of home, and for a moment my breath catches in my throat. I have a vague and distant memory of Mama in the kitchen. She is out of sight but I can hear her singing and there's that same smell—oil and garlic in a pan—the way all good meals start. The beginning smell.

Huia begs my attention and we look back at the book. There are so many things we can't collect yet, things that summer and fall will bring. Berries, for instance. And I recognize some plants I saw on the path to the ocean, before Bella arrived, but didn't
pay mind to. It strikes me that we only notice things when they're suddenly of use to us.