“So,” says Monroe, looking around the room, “what do you think?”
The windows are tall, and several are filled with stained and bevelled glass. One of the windows is a religious scene of some sort. There’s an old man with a white beard who has a book in one hand that is nothing but clear glass because you can look through it and see the sky outside. I figure they probably ran out of stained glass when they got to the book, or the window got broken and that piece had to be replaced.
Next to the old man is a small child, and next to the child is a skinny dog with skinny legs. I don’t know the Bible well enough to know who these figures are supposed to be, but my guess is that the old guy is God and that the kid is Jesus. The dog is probably a pet or maybe one of the animals from the ark who escaped the flood.
“I’m just getting started in here,” says Monroe. “Had to get the outside going before winter. You hungry?”
“Sure.”
“Grilled cheese?”
“Sure.”
Monroe heads back to the kitchen. “Look around,” he shouts. “Make yourself at home.”
There is no altar at the front of the church. I look around to see where Monroe has moved it and that’s when I see the buffalo. It’s not real, and I know that right away, but it’s pretty good.
“Swiss or cheddar?”
The buffalo is taller than I am and lighter than I think. I go over and push on it, and it rocks back and forth.
“Processed?” I tap the buffalo a couple of times. It sounds dull and hollow, and I figure it’s paper mâché or something like that. In the very centre of the church is a large wooden box. It is carved and painted, but I can’t see any way to open it. There’s no lid and there are no seams. My father would like a box like this.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Monroe comes out of the kitchen with two plates on his lap. “It’s a bentwood box,” he says. “The Northwest Coast tribes make them.”
“It’s great.”
“I bought it when I was in Vancouver.” Monroe puts the plates on top of the box.
“What’s it for?”
“Storing things.”
The cheese isn’t processed, but it’s good.
“What’d you think of my buffalo?”
“Neat.”
“It’s the first one I did.”
“Is it paper mâché?”
“The real ones are on their way.” Monroe smiles at me and eats his sandwich. It’s quiet in the church. You would think you could hear the sound of the wind outside, but you can’t. We eat like that. In silence. “You want another one?”
I shake my head.
“So,” says Monroe, “you want the job?”
I look around the room. “Doing what?”
“Helping me,” he says.
“With what?”
Monroe puts on the wig and starts rolling around the room. He circles the buffalo a couple of times. “I’m planning to do some restoration work.”
“Neat.” I don’t know if I like Monroe better with the wig or without it.
“And you can help me.”
“Neat.”
“And I’ll pay you.”
I think I like him better without the wig. “How much?”
“Plenty,” says Monroe. “Did they tell you I’m crazy?”
“They said you were dead,” I say.
“‘It is better to be a fool than to be dead,’” says Monroe, and he leans towards me. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he whispers. “Did you know that?”
I shake my head.
“It’s true.” Monroe shakes my hand. “Congratulations,” he says. “When can you start?”
I don’t know what to say.
“Day after tomorrow,” he says. “That’s when the truck arrives.” Monroe grabs the wheels and rolls himself backwards towards the door so he can watch me all the way. “You ever been in a museum?”
“No.”
“You ought to see the stuff they have in museums.” Monroe waits at the door, the wheelchair leaning against the sill. “Pull me over,” he says. “And don’t dump me.”
“The paint job’s pretty neat,” I say. “How’d you do it?”
“Don’t tell anyone you saw me.”
“Sure.”
“It’s a surprise,” says Monroe. “I want the whole thing to be a surprise.”
Outside the church, the wind is blowing. From the porch, I catch glimpses of the green square in the tumbling grass. The kite is so high in the sky that if the string broke, it might never come down.
“Is that yours?”
Monroe nods and shades his eyes. “‘Teaching the Sky About Blue.’”
“It’s a kite, right?”
“Thought I’d better start with the easy ones first.”
“What about the green thing?”
“‘Teaching the Night About Dark’ is going to be a lot trickier.”
The Cousins are nowhere to be seen. Soldier steps off the side of the porch as if he can see what he’s doing and waits for me in the grass.
“So the green square is art?”
“Can you imagine all the grass in the world that colour?” Monroe straightens his wig and turns his face into the wind. “Exciting, isn’t it?”
I feel my way off the porch, searching for the steps with my toes, and by the time I reach solid ground, Monroe has disappeared back inside. Soldier is waiting for me at the green square. I stand on the platform, close my eyes to a squint, and stare at the church from
different angles to see if I can figure out how Monroe has managed the trick. It must have something to do with the paint and the way the colours of the land and the sky carry over into the wood.
In the distance, clouds are on the move, thick and white. But as they clear the bridge, they begin to separate and change, and by the time they reach the church, they look like long, slender bones. They settle for a moment in the afternoon sky before the current catches them, and they float over the horizon as if they were being carried along on a river.
W
hen Soldier and I get back to the shop, my mother is waiting for us. She’s sitting in front of the sink, her hands gripping the arms of the chair as if she expects it to try to bolt out the door. “You’re late.” She’s wearing her good dress. “Get changed.”
“It’s auntie Cassie,” I say. “Why do we have to get dressed up?”
I see my mother’s hands squeeze down on the arms of the chair. Soldier leans against me with his head and tries to move both of us towards the back and cover.
“All I have are jeans and T-shirts.”
My mother closes her eyes and relaxes her fingers. “Find something with a collar,” she says.
My mother gets a little tense whenever auntie Cassie comes home. My father thinks it’s because auntie Cassie travels all over the world while my mother is stuck in Truth and Bright Water. I figure it’s because they’re sisters and are excited to see each other and don’t know where to start.
I look through my drawers, but in the end, the only thing I can find is the green knit shirt my father got me when he came back from Edmonton. I’ve never worn it because it is the same colour as the carpet they use at the miniature golf course behind Mel’s Drive-In and because it has a red patch on the front that says “Four Square Farm Store.”
My mother is standing by the front door, arguing with Soldier. The door is open just a crack and Soldier is trying to manoeuvre his way past my mother’s leg. “Stay,” she tells him.
Soldier feints left and goes right, which is what he always does, so my mother’s ready for him. She shoves her knee into his side and pins him to the wall. “Go,” she tells me, and I open the door quickly and slip out. I can hear Soldier and my mother jockey for
position along the wall, but from the street, looking in through the window, all I can see are the flowers in the green vase.
“No!” my mother shouts, and the door opens and she backs her way out. Soldier drives a shoulder past her legs and has his head through the door. But just when it looks as if he’s going to escape, my mother reaches down quickly and flicks his nose with her finger.
“Go back,” she says, and she flicks him once more, harder this time.
I’m not sure that flicking is fair. Soldier whimpers and pulls his head back into the shop. My mother shuts the door and locks it.
“He’s not as bad about the ferry as he used to be,” I tell her.
“Don’t have the time to fool around,” says my mother.
“If we had a car,” I say, “we could take him with us.”
“Talk to your father.”
Soldier is at the window with his face pressed hard against the glass. When he sees me, he does a little leap and wiggles around. I wait until his back is turned before I follow my mother down to the river.
“If we had a car, we wouldn’t have to ride the Toilet.”
My mother doesn’t even glance back. She picks up the pace, and by the time I catch up with her, she’s already standing on the platform. “You want to do it?” she says.
I wait for her to climb into the bucket before I release the cable. “If we had a car,” I tell her, “I could practise my driving.”
My mother opens the box at the side of the bucket, takes out the old leather gloves, and puts them on. She pulls hard on the line and the bucket swings out into space, creaking as it pitches and rolls like a log in a flood. “This is the way everybody used to cross the river,” my mother tells me as she pulls us along.
“The good old days, right?”
“When Cassie and me were girls, nobody had a car, and this was the only way to get to Truth.”
The sun is behind the mountains now. The light flattens out across the prairies and the air cools. As my mother hauls us across the river, the fog rises off the Shield, thick and low, and by the time we get to the middle, the river is gone and it feels as though we’re floating
above the clouds and that if we were to fall, we’d fall for years before we’d find the water.
“This ferry is a landmark,” says my mother.
“Cars hadn’t been invented yet, right?”
My mother stops pulling for a moment and looks over the edge of the bucket. “It’s been here since the beginning of time,” she says. “Did you know that?”
“The ferry?”
“No,” she says. “The river.”
My mother takes the gloves off and puts them on the box. Then she leans back against the side of the bucket and begins to hum. I can see that she’s thinking about singing, which means we could be here all night. I put the gloves on and grab the cable. The bucket jerks and lurches forward.
“Not so hard,” says my mother.
I pull hand over hand, trying to keep the pulls smooth and quick. The bucket settles into a rhythm and we slide across the river. My mother begins singing a piece from
The Desert Song
that is particularly awful. I put my back into it and pull faster.
My grandmother lives in Bright Water. She has a small house just up from the river, a chicken coop, and a large garden. Beyond the garden, under a row of cottonwoods, is an old silver trailer that my grandfather won in a poker game. My grandmother keeps it tidy in case someone comes visiting whom she doesn’t want in the house.
The trailer is made out of the same stuff as aluminum foil, and when the sun hits it and sets the shell on fire, it looks like a roasting pan just come out of the oven. But inside it’s dark and cool, and you feel as though you’ve just walked into a cave.
By the time we get to Bright Water, my grandmother and auntie Cassie have already moved to neutral corners. There’s a pot of coffee and a plate of cookies on the table. The two of them sit patiently in the floral wingbacks, sipping coffee and munching gingersnaps, waiting for the bell to ring.
“Hi, auntie Cassie.”
“Tecumseh!” Auntie Cassie slips out of the chair. “Last time I saw you,” she says, “you were a baby.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
Auntie Cassie grabs both of my hands and spins me around slowly. “Now you’re as tall as me.”
“Taller.”
“And strong, too, I see.” Auntie Cassie laughs and takes my head in her hands and kisses me, hard, on the cheek. “There,” she says, “that’s better.”
“He’s a little old to be running around with lipstick marks on his face,” says my mother.
“How you going to know who I’ve kissed if you can’t see the kisses?”
“Whole world knows who you’ve kissed,” says my grandmother.
There is a ritual to auntie Cassie’s returns. Auntie Cassie tells us all about the places she has been, the things she has done, and the people she has met, and my grandmother sits quietly, perched in her chair, her chin thrust out like a beak, her thin, leathery arms folded against her body like wings, waiting for something to move in the grass.
“So, we left Sydney,” says auntie Cassie, “and drove up the coast in Terry’s Volkswagen as far as Rockhampton. When we got there, Terry pulled off to the side of the road, turned off the engine, and said, ‘Okay, which way do you want to go?’”
“I’d go east,” I say, even though I haven’t heard the first part of the story.
“You can’t go east,” says auntie Cassie. “That’s the ocean.”
“Okay,” I say. “I’d go north.”
“That’s what Terry said,” says auntie Cassie. “But you know what I said?”
“Who’s Terry?” says my mother.
Most of the time, my grandmother sits with her eyes closed. But every so often she will raise her lids just a crack, lean out of her chair towards auntie Cassie or my mother, and work her jaw back and forth, as if she is chewing on something tough or nasty.
“Pat had a thirty-foot sloop that we sailed from Papeete to Mooréa.”
“Who’s Pat?”
“But the best place,” says auntie Cassie, “was this beach just outside of Tofino on Vancouver Island. Chris has a house there and each morning we would go out and watch the surf break on the rocks. That’s all we would do. We’d take a thermos of coffee and some bread and jam and watch the surf.”
Once auntie Cassie came home with an older woman who was supposed to be really rich. The woman had one of those fancy German cars and she talked with a funny accent. I thought she was from Montreal or Newfoundland, but my mother said that she was from Sweden.
“I wanted to see the Red Indians,” the woman told me.
“Here we are,” I said.
The woman didn’t wear any makeup. Her hair was cut short and her skin was the colour of winter ice. I was staying with my grandmother at the time because my mother was trying to get the beauty shop set up in Truth. I slept at the back of the house and could see the trailer from my window. That first night, I could hear them laughing and having a good time. It was hot and I couldn’t sleep, so I climbed out the window and snuck over to the trailer. All of the windows were too high up for me to see anything, and after I had walked around the trailer looking for something I could stand on, I just walked up the steps and knocked on the door.
There are people in Truth and Bright Water who think my grandmother is a witch, that she can do things such as turn herself into a bear or a wolf or a mountain lion whenever she feels like it. It’s not true, of course, but she can work words down deep in her throat so that they come out sounding like something an animal would make if it were angry or hungry, and when she puts on her bulky sweater and looks at you hard, she seems heavier and fiercer than she really is. It’s all in her eyes. They grow large and darken into deep pools beyond light and sound, darken down to depths where black shapes float in black water.
“So, how have you been?” says my mother.
Auntie Cassie looks at my grandmother, and I can see the two of
them are ready to start round two. “Fine,” says auntie Cassie. “Just fine.”
I grab a gingersnap. “How long you going to stay?”
“Long as it takes,” says auntie Cassie, and she gives me a big smile.
“For what?”
“Now wouldn’t you like to know,” says auntie Cassie.
“I suppose this is about Mia,” says my grandmother.
Things go quiet then as if somebody has done something rude and no one wants to admit that they did it. Auntie Cassie looks at the floor. My mother closes her eyes and rocks herself ever so slightly.
“Another life,” says Cassie. “Another time.”
“Who’s Mia?”
“So, how have you been?” says my mother.
The woman from Sweden opened the door. Through the screen, I could see that all she was wearing was a bra and panties. She was smoking a cigar and holding a glass.
“It’s the little Red Indian,” she called back to auntie Cassie in her strange voice. “What shall we do with him?”
Auntie Cassie was sitting on the bed. On the table in front of her was a deck of cards.
“Do you want to play pokie?” said the woman from Sweden.
“Poker,” said auntie Cassie, and she lay back on the bed and began laughing.
Auntie Cassie and my mother look a lot like each other. I haven’t really noticed it before, but seeing them sitting there together, you can tell they’re sisters without looking twice. Auntie Cassie is a little taller and her hair isn’t quite as dark. And she smiles a little more than my mother. But that’s about it.
Except for the tattoo on her hand.
“What’s Elvin up to these days?” asks auntie Cassie.
My grandmother shifts in her chair and the legs cut into the hard-wood.
I look at my mother. “He’s making little wood coyotes,” I say.
“Shit,” says auntie Cassie, and she starts to laugh.
“Watch the mouth,” says my grandmother. “There’s a child in the house.”
Auntie Cassie shakes her head and smiles. “Don’t worry,” she says to me, “she’s not talking about you.”
“You going to stay?” I ask.
Auntie Cassie straightens her skirt. “Now aren’t you the Curious George.”
“Mom wanted to know.”
“Monroe Swimmer is back in town,” says my grandmother casually, her lips yawning around her teeth.
Auntie Cassie sits back. She’s smiling, but the hand with the tattoo is clenched and the letters on the knuckles are pulled tight and stand out against the skin. AIM. I don’t know if auntie Cassie has really been a member of the American Indian Movement or if she just got the tattoo to be cool.
“You remember Monroe.” My grandmother closes her eyes and holds her hands in her lap so you can’t see the fingers.
“He’s painting the old church,” I say, and this must be the wrong thing to say because everyone stops talking.
“Honey,” says my mother at last, “why don’t you go out and check on the chickens.”
“They’re asleep.”
“Check on them anyway.”
“This adult stuff?”
“Go on.”
“I won’t listen.”
“Go on.”
Inside the trailer that night, in the light, you could see right through the Swedish woman’s underwear. I tried looking at the deck of cards, but every time the woman spoke to me, I had to look at her.
“Do you know how to play poker?”
“Sure.”
“All right,” said the woman, and she sat down in the chair. “You can deal.”
Auntie Cassie sat on the bed in a pair of pants and a bra. She was
drinking but not so you could tell right away. I won the first hand, and before I could pick up the cards to deal again, the Swedish woman reached around and undid her bra and slid her breasts out of the cups. They were large and white and soft, and the nipples were dimpled with tiny creases and tucks, like golf balls.
“That’s better,” she said, scratching under each breast as if it really itched.
On the next hand, I wound up with three sevens. “I call,” I said.
“Two pair,” said the Swedish woman, and she laid her cards on the table. “Kings and nines.” She looked at me and hooked a thumb in the waistband of her panties. I could see she was hoping to take them off.
“Beats me,” I said quickly, and I threw my hand in.
“Maybe you should go back to the house,” said auntie Cassie.
“Let him stay,” said the Swedish woman. “I’ll be great.”
“Good,” said auntie Cassie. “You’ll be good. If my mother knew he was out here, she would kill me.”
“Do you have your teeth yet, young Indian boy?”
“What?”
“Have you seen a woman naked before?”
“No.”
“Refreshing,” said the Swedish woman. “Deal the cards.”