15.

The stairs chastised Berta as she trod their backs. No more bounding, those days were gone now. Her two feet firmly set on each step before testing the other. Ned had blamed her; that much she knew, for exposing his son to the breath of the world running bitter, foul across the Georgia Strait, where he couldn’t protect, couldn’t keep them all safe.

One chick was down, the others wounded. Ned felt himself wounded above all, no thought to the mother. to the children, to the world. He and his Mistress Sufferance retired together to the barn, to the fields, away from them, leaving Berta, alone plus seven, answering their questions:

            Will God take us too?

            Did Jamie cry?

            Is polio like ravioli?

            Will he be back for Thanksgiving?

            Is he with Grandma?                                                                                       

I’m hungry

Berta was thankful for the kindness of neighbours, for the casseroles, lasagna, chile con carne left stacked neatly in her freezer. Those weeks in shock passed by somehow,            conscious streams flowing one into the other, all of them numb. Jamie was large in his absence, his bed vacant, screaming, until they took it one day, piece by piece apart, out of the house he had been conceived in, and stacked the pieces neatly against the shed wall

in the back of the shed, behind the feed bins, close enough to touch, but not to haunt.

They burned the mattress, just in case, bleached walls, floors, every inch of the bathroom, watching each other, nervous, for signs, for weakness. They waited until one day went by, without a tear and then passed another. Then came laughter without guilt, a game of catch on the front lawn, spring teasing, a sunny day after what seemed a forever of rain.

Ned, hearing Frank and Pat badgering, the slap of pigskin on cupped palms, pushed his way out through the heavy barn doors, squinting his eyes, unused to the light. He was compelled to make his way through the new years’ grass shoots dotted with daisies. Ned in black rubber boots, muddied from the morning chores, approached the front yard.

Ann and Janie, too old now for tree forts, trolls or faeries were on the front porch with their “Teen” magazines. Sandy was in overalls; her head and torso swallowed up by the heap of metal beside the driveway she was determined to drive someday. The twins were even finding their own separate placesoften as not, Laura at the piano, Leslie writing in her journal as Ned appeared, almost a stranger to them now.

He paused at the chicken wire gate. One by one the children stopped whatever they had been doing to turn to their father, unsure but expectant. Berta sensing a quiet too loud from inside the house, made her way to the living room window to see Ned open the gate.

Then of all things, he lifted his arms, cupping his hands in the air to summon a perfect pass from Frank.

Ned caught the football then paused, turning it over in his hands before he launched it to Patrick, who lunged, air born to intercept, landing, skidding shoulder first onto the dew soaked, unkempt, thatch-tangled lawn to his sibling’s cheers and hurrahs and that was it.

Ned had reintroduced himself to his children after months of solitude with a toss of a football! But Berta was angry now, angry at the ease of her husbands’ atonement. Now!

Now she would grieve and in her grief she would blame him for her losses, for her son, her poor mother, dying heartbroken in a country Ned had asked Berta to leave. And this Island! This damned Island! Cut off from civilization, these simple people mired in the same conversations day in and day out; the weather, a new hair style, a breech born calf, their gossip, myopic, deafening, whipping round the community like a summer storm.

Berta longed for museums, dances and theatres, for cafes! She longed to be held, to be touched as her family spilled past her into their home, red-cheeked and electric. She longed for Ned, as he used to be, while wondering if she had it in her anymore to love what he had become

16.

A teenager, visibly relieved as the old man docked, wobbling as the rope slapped onto the deck tied rough round a post. Ned, much lighter now, pulled himself up onto the cedar planks, dusk settling on the lake top. Frogs were warming up their throats as he made his way back down the trail, old blue truck still waiting patiently on the roadside.

What now? The small towns, lights and road signs were falling fast away. She would be waiting of course, nose deep in some novel. Those damn travel brochures would be piled on the kitchen table. She would have picked them up by now.

Ned did not want to “See Italy!” or “Fly to Sunny Hawaii!” He was too old to go, they were too old. Too old!  Berta had snorted that morning in the kitchen, You’ve been too old for thirty years! You’ve been too old your whole life! You think the world begins and ends on this land! You’re afraid! You’ve been afraid ever since Jamie …

But she still couldn’t say the words. Berta still couldn’t say that her baby had died.

Ned was still just as unable to hear it.

So he had stormed out, knocking the brochures to the floor on his way and now, as sure as he had been driven to leave, he felt compelled to return, to stop along the way for take out Chinese food on the way through Ladysmith. Ned made sure he ordered Barbequed duck chow mein and Szechuan prawns for her, sweet and sour boneless pork and vegetable fried rice for himself, soy sauce, plum sauce, chopsticks and two fortune cookies, and then Old Ned Rice got back in his truck and headed home.

17.

Berta heard the truck slowing on Sabey’s corner first, then she heard the driveway being pounded by road-weary tires, the truck door creaking, pausing and then slamming, paper bags crackling, the familiar crunch of Ned’s feet up the gravel path.

The chickens knew, she had told them at lunch. The walls knew, she’d been cursing him all day long. The cat knew, he’d gone off to the barn, tired of listening to her rant.  Berta was done. Done with the moods, with the sulking, the emotional armour, done with the old man she heard trudging up the stairs. She’d be sure to show him, she would!

The door was clicked open by his tired, familiar hand, Berta focusing hard on a paragraph, read now by habit through leaking eyes as Ned came in with the warm summer night. Standing in the living room, Ned held up the bags of food, as Berta gazed at him coolly, wounded, dangerous.

            These’ll need heating                                                                                       

Another night Berta might have jumped up, taken the bags and set to the task of heating and table setting but this night she looked up at Ned and said without a word,

For fifty years I

Have stood beside you

I have loved you

To the core of my being

And hated you

Just as deeply

I have lived my life

In the shadow of your dreams

I have given you hope

And you have given me

Distance in return

I have trusted you

With my world

And you have thrown it

In my face

Ned used her silence to deliver the bags to the kitchen, setting the metal take out trays to warm in the oven, picking up the brochures, and garnering strength from her temporary weakness he stepped back into the living room, waving a destination in each hand and asked, Which one?

Berta looked up at Ned, her blue eyes leveled, untrusting the old lunatic guarding the gate to her dreams, waving paper and reason to reclaim her soul back to a road well traveled, well tested, hard driven and proven. She felt a sense of herself thawing. Ned smiled, hopeful, boyish, stoking the fire as she gazed back and forth from Italy to Hawaii.

Just one? She was playing, Ned knew. Reaching down, he dropped the brochures gently in her lap.

            Don’t push it…

Leathered lips, soft on a weathered cheek, Ned kissed Berta, who then listened as he found his way around the kitchen. Tucking her feet up on her chair she opened her book to where she had left off, then taking a deep breath Berta smiled and turned the page. 

The End

13.

There had been all kinds of shouting and laughter bouncing off the back field as the twins regaled their siblings waving the dark blue medallion in their faces, story after story, words spilling, emptying into the air between them. Jamie, almost a man now, had wondered tall into the fray, leading a somewhat bewildered Coughdrop into a chorus of   good boy!s and atta guy!s , as they competed with each other to rub the white patch on his forehead.

Berta had walked to the kitchen door, after passing the letter off to Ned, where she stood quietly watching her children, their prize calf parading about in front of the barn. Would they mourn their grandmother’s passing? They had only met her once, when tired of waiting for her daughter to come home, their grandmother had braved her fear of flying, to cross an ocean and a continent to come to Berta. She had stayed long past her welcome, as far as Ned was concerned.

But then he had no frame of reference, but that of his wife’s, as to what a mother was, his own mother breathing only in that boy’s frayed mind and in a ring stored in a chipped teacup on a kitchen shelf. Ned had tried to keep his mother alive in his children’s minds, but at best it was patchwork, frayed fabric held together by a flimsy thread. There were no pictures, no letters, nor locks of hair. He knew she had existed only as evidenced by the reflection in his own mirror, in his children when he saw glimpses of a smile, of a busy hand, used just so. In Jamie he saw her most, the blue eyes, always shining, ready to burst when he laughed. He saw her in the way Jamie walked, so aware of the ground, hands fluid, at peace with his long arms streaming down, fanning each side of his lanky frame.

The next week the sun shone exceptionally bright, the fields splendid in gold, waving, rippling seas cut square by green. Grey brown jags marked tired trunks, every so many feet a gash of silvered cedar twined with barbed wire, keeping rogue cows at bay.

The harvest was early, unrepentant in it’s beckoning. Ned answered, taking Jamie by his side to the tractor and the thresher, the rest of them raking, piling, digging potatoes and carrots with pitchforks, carrying buckets and burlap, wormy loam welcoming the small hands searching for errant spuds.

Berta lost herself in canning. Her mother’s hands washed the glass jars, then Berta wiped

them on the apron her mother had stitched on her visit. Being there, so close to her mother’s touch, the memories, the simplicity of love; a daughter working to find peace in her loss.

Apples were greased, set in barrels in the root cellar, beetroot, onions shaken of excess dirt and set out to harden, then packed in baskets, in gunnysacks, wooden buckets holding the strays, the runts, the deformed, ready for immediate consumption.

Then, suddenly Jamie’s long arms, flagging Ned at half-day, one week into the harvest, tractor shut down, sudden silence in the dust seeming odd, amiss the roar of industry. Then two of them walking together, Jamie leaning on Ned, took Berta’s eyes away from her blackberry jam bubbling angrily on the stove. Her firstborn son’s long legs seemed at odds with the rest of his lanky frame. Were they broken? She shut off the stove, the pit of her being cold, sunk, twitching, stepping to the door jammed open by an old red brick.

Ned holding Jamie up now just yards away. What is it?

            I don’t know…he just felt hot   then his legs started gettin’ weak and…

Berta running down the steps to her son’s side, holding onto his elbow, almost at her shoulder. He’s so tall now! Between the two of them they barely got Jamie to the room he shared with Frank and Patrick, his feet inching past the foot of a shrinking single bed.

The rest of the children, running in now news spreading like morning glory, rooted, stubborn, curious and afraid. Berta’s hand on his forehead, Jesus Ned!  He’s burning up…never seen anything like it….Frank! Call Doctor Heath!

Ned feeling fear now, fear in her voice, fear where it had never been sounded. Jamie was coughing.

Kids!  Get back outside!

Seven children backing quietly away, worried mute, senses chafed, rubbed raw from this big thing facing them. Surrounded, they retreated, scattering into the alder brush.

The doctor hurried, hushed in his manner; touching, prodding, whispering. Berta’s baby groaning, then, Just to be sure….just to be safe, an ambulance with strangers, kind, efficient. Ned was silenced, disbelieving, on the edge of sanity; peripheral. Then speaking…yes….no…is that really?    Yes…I see…

But he didn’t see. He didn’t see at all! Who were these people? Why were they picking up his son? His son!

My son!  Excuse me, don’t you think…

I mean….Oh Christ Jamie!

Hands reaching up, steadying his shoulders, gentle blue eyes locked on his, tears filming, inching onto the rims but not passing. The telephone was ringing, the front door opening and closing, screen door slamming.  Jamie’s sisters were crying quietly, his brothers trying to be brave. Neighbours coming to sit with the kids, ambulance doors firmly pushed shut with Jamie inside, pulling away.

Ned and Berta, in the new blue truck, gravel spitting up behind them, the fields, the barns, the fences, the jars and the barrels, the tractor standing still, eternal, forgotten.

Their life, a landscape interrupted.

14.

The idea of drowning was nothing new.  Ned’s fingers reached up to touch the water, as it dripped off the withdrawn oar. He had thought that he might step over the edge of the hydro dam one day, or jump from the trestle that forded the railway access over the rapid black water of the river, sliding mad over huge sanded boulders below him, teetering.

He conjured these images numbly, reckoning with his conscience, with a need to just make it stop talking. Water, cradling the boat, rocked him, air pockets sucking and feeding at its’ bottom.

Jamie’s lungs freezing, struggling, eyes closed, for the most part, then suddenly jerked open, spasms wreaking his fever paralyzed body, veiled by thin white sheets.

His fearful hands reached, grabbing at wrists, then worse, his long arms limp, sweat filming a cold brow, nothing left of the boy who looked up at his father and said, Then what happened?

Ned’s arms bruised from Berta hanging on so hard, just hanging on. Holding up?

Neither of them were sure anymore. Then, again, everywhere people surrounding their son, whispering, and then quiet.

Too quiet, surreal. No. Lips pressed  hard against themselves, quivering. No!

Madness is this? This is madness? Is this?

No!!

I’m so sorry…

No!!

Then no one but the three of them alone again, but one of them was not.

Berta falling across her son, Oh God!  Oh Jamie!  Oh God!

My boy!

Ned, backed up between history and destiny knew then that God was dead too.

Dead in his heart, dead in his mind, dead in the face of his oldest son.

Giveth and taketh away! What game was this? He’d have none of it!

Anger as the doctors came in to coax them away. It’s time…

            It’s time?

Berta standing up slowly, face rumpled, wet, working to control herself.

Ned frustrated, sputtering, incredulous.

It’s TIME?

Berta at his elbow again, steering him away from himself, him blustering,

pain spilling at his feet, tripping him, reaching for his ankles, her pulling him away, keeping him from falling.

It’s time

10.

Berta made sure she used up the last of the hot water for her bath. Ned wasn’t there with his belly-aching about the cost of heating it, bemoaning the wasting of electricity and water, which Berta admitted to herself, a little slyly, took some of the fun out of it.

As she settled into the foam, steam curling over its’ surface, she found that, but for the occasional popping bubbles, the silence quite startled her.

11. 

The sun was busy burying itself in the ridge of fir and cedar trees, a ragged mountainscape framed the lake. Insects looped, spat then dove onto the steely surface, reappearing, sometimes not, just a sun-jeweled eddy marking where a trout had sucked them in whole.

The rowboat’s hull slapped against the lake, cool in the evening breeze, soft, yielding to the water, embracing the bow then ducking away as Ned sat, oars dangling in the sunset’s reflection, lumping then shattering on liquid glass, justifying acceptance. Shimmering up from the dark clouded blue and gold he heard laughter, again the laughter. Why was it when Ned just wanted to sit and think a bit did he hear the giggling? The little boy looking up, waiting to see, blue eyes twinkling, porcelain skin crinkling, erupting, raucous, unchained.

Ned ached, remembering, a smell, a touch, an echo off of the jagged banks of the lake,

a mirage left for Ned to cry over and to his own great surprise, he did, over and over.

He cried so much, he wondered would he sink himself?

You see, Ned had never cried before, maybe as a baby, but then no more. Not even when his brother, then his sister, then his sister again, his mother, then his father, then Jamie       died.  A world of love went by and never once did he mourn it’s passing, accepting it as his lot, counting his losses like war stories held deep in the dark of the pit of his soul, but he cried now like he’d meant to all along. His body shook, convulsed, broken sinew, bones conveying agony into the space all around him

Ned was conscious of his pulse beating, of nature pulling, hoping, recycling and spent.

He lay his aged muscles and brittle back upon the bowels of the boat floor huddled against the bench and looking up at the advancing moon, straining for observance in the early evening light Ned Rice asked for forgiveness from himself.

12.

From her bedroom window Berta could see the copse of alder trees that flanked their farm along the eastern side, away from the road. Over the years it had been a lofty arboreal home to her children’s imaginations. She had watched them often from this vantage point, playing, stalking, charging, building, negotiating and growing. Most of the time they were happy to stay there though the twins were prone to wandering.

It was the twins who first heard about the Exhibition, the Pacific National Exhibition. They had a Jersey calf they had raised, named Coughdrop and they wanted to enter himin the Farmer’s Fair. He was a beauty and they were sure he would win. Trouble was the PNE was in Vancouver, which would involve a trailer, a ferry ride and a night at a hotel, a big expense at that time for the family. That night at supper the twins pled their case, in earnest, Can we, huh? Lot’s of kids from the 4-H Club are goin’…

Ned sat chewing quietly, staring at his plate, knife and fork in hand, still, stiff, thinking.

He didn’t want them to go, and had told Berta so much the night before when the twins had first started going on about it. He swallowed, dryly and took a drink of his water.

Leaning back in his chair, Ned wiped the corner of his mouth with a well-worn cloth serviette. It’s too expensive

With that he had dismissed the subject, or so he assumed, going on with his meal. The rest of the family had followed suit, unthinking, it was what it was, but for Berta’s voice from the other end of the table, quiet, intentioned, reasoned out, measured. Perhaps we could give this some more thought.

Coming from her, a slap upon his judgment, her who had never faltered, never questioned, jumping with him from tall building to tall building, always in sync, otherwise they might have fallen and crashed among the rabble, her who knew him, who knew how important he placed their agreement in matters of the home!

Ned looked up coolly across the table at Berta as the faces of the hopeful turned from her to him, then back again, twice. We will discuss this later. Ned’s fork scraped against the blue willow plate, skewering a shaky silence as he finished the last few bites.

Berta said nothing more, but got up, a storm brewing upon her brow. She was reaching an age where she no longer felt the need to acquiesce by default. Popping eight babies out of her tiny frame had given her fortitude, perspective. You can stay here if you like. I’ll take the twins and Jamie can drive the truck. We can borrow a trailer for the calf.

Fork smashed against plate, tall and imposing, venom in his height, Ned strode through the kitchen door and kept walking under the evening sun until he was swallowed up by the copse of bracken softened alders hugging edge of the field.

No more was said about it.

The next week Berta borrowed the neighbour’s horse trailer, the twins barely coherent in their excitement as Jamie herded Coughdrop onto the ramp, tying him to the whitewashed metal post inside the straw floored box closing the dented steel gate behind him. Ned watched them from the barn where he pretended to oil the thresher. He never admitted it

but after twenty years Berta knew how his eyes felt on her back.

With the twins wedged between Jamie and his mother, the truck steered away from the house, all four of them high on the adventure of it. Berta now winced unconsciously as she remembered feeling like an odious weight had been lifted off her soul when they turned onto the main road, Ned’s burning eyes left far behind them.

That trip came back to Berta in time-dulled snippets. Driving onto the ferry, clanking and muted, softly ramming it’s moorings, cars end to end, trusted to their brakes and wooden wedges as the ship bobbed and pulled. The twins scattering on the car deck, chattering, giggles unsuppressed, unrepressed. Jamie relaxed, proud to be the driver, handsome, framed in the truck window, smiles reflected in the rearview mirror            s.                                                                                       

There was no order, no judgment, no distain, no Ned. It had been gradual enough, his unhappiness had crept under her skin, unseen until it was too late, until she was unhappy too. Not that she had blamed him…much. Eight kids! It was all she could do to breathe some days. Seemed every time he touched her made one child more. Twelve years pregnant or nursing, she was tired. He was tired.

From the top drawer of the dresser Berta pulled a frayed blue ribbon. Holding it in her left hand, she softly stroked it with her right fingertips. A lonely tear wandered down her leathery cheek, dallying in wrinkles, webs of long living netting her face, giving of itself and then finally disappearing close to her chin.

She reached out, tentative, fingers splayed, hoping. Are you there? A jagged breath escaped, involuntary. Her hand turned, slowly lit by the last shards of sunlight spilling through the window, inspecting cuts, scars, lines, stories written, typed between the age spots on mottled, sagging skin.

This was real; this was life, memories etched, solid in flesh.

They had returned home triumphant. Best in show! We got Best in Show! The twins didn’t wait for Jamie to stop the truck before they were out, running into the house with the news. Berta had followed them in to find Ned reading a newspaper at the kitchen table.

Hello.

Hello.

She hadn’t expected much of a welcome after the way she had left, but there was something else in his voice that unnerved her. He got up from the table stiffly, he had become inflexible in body and spirit as of late. From his plaid breast pocket Ned pulled a letter, passing the Belgian postmark it carried to Berta, who stood puzzling over the handwriting and the address.

Whoever says there is a code to how one must behave when slapped presumes too much.

As she read her uncle’s scratching Berta felt her skull compressing, colliding with itself, her blood racing to fill her feet, to ground her as she, almost translucent, looked up at Ned, who softened, reading her as she read the letter, her eyes welling with tears and said, Oh.

8.

In Ned and Berta’s bedroom was a queen-size bed, a small dresser beside a standing walnut wardrobe with a mirrored door. There were more pictures of the children scattered among coins, receipt ends and an empty glass on their bedside table. On the bed itself rested two hand-stitched pillows, worn and a little frayed by decades of reading heads.

Berta stood in front of the mirrored door, barely recognizing herself in the landscape.

When had she gotten so dowdy? Trim but bowed, time had borrowed from Berta a promise of someday that she had never realized.

She undid her apron, letting it drop on the floor beside her, then smoothed her rumpled,

white, cotton shirt over her middle then stood back to assess.

Somewhere outside a crow complained as Berta unbuttoned herself            and her shirt, letting them both fall on the floor beside her apron, watching her reflection awash in tired pale skin, dimpling out from under a matron’s bra, slumbering breasts doomed to gravity.

Her work crafted, life weathered hands moved, familiar, easily to her skirt waist, released to the carpet, her in next to naked, unhooked, peeled down, then nothing, just Berta and a mirror. Image betraying soul, she stood at odds with herself now, the memories of what she had once been taking solace in the infinite magic and possibilities of forgetting. A bath!

She would have a bath.

9.

Just beside the dock there was a boat rental office, a cedar hut with sun beaten, silvered siding, least that’s how Ned remembered it, trudging down the forest trail marked by arrows, For the tourists. Ned felt a kind of entitlement, ownership. Every step marked a stake, a claim; a piece of him left so long ago. Then an impulse, an urge to speed up his pace as he rounded the bay, the water sanded granite softening the breach of reeds and cattails stalled where the dragonflies kissed the lily pads, locked backs clicking.

There was the dock. Ned was surprised at the way his stomach lurched. Twigs and spent leaves crunched, crackled and sighed under him as he made his way down the wooded path, to the glassless window where a long haired teenager with a head that seemed too big for his neck was in the process of putting away brochures, closing up as Ned arrived, a little breathless on the wood slatted porch, clearing his throat to get the lad’s attention.                                                                                                           

I’m closin’ up! the boy offered, smiling but firm as Ned fished in his pockets for the bills folded there. I just want an hour…Ned shoved his money over the window ledge, willing it into unwilling hands. The boy stared at him, uneasy with the need shining in Ned’s eyes. It’s gettin’ dark an’ I gotta wait for every boat to get back so’s I can lock ‘em up on the racks.

Ned tapped impatiently on the bills, hands shaking slightlyleaning in, frustrated. There’s thirty dollars there! The sign says twenty dollars an hour. I’ll only need one at the most!

You can keep the rest.

Looking back between the dock and the old man hanging desperate off the ledge the boy finally picked up the bills, stuffing them roughly into his shirt pocket, an act that caused Ned to wince involuntarily. These kids would never know the value of money, not until they had to do without.

He followed the boy, who kept looking back at Ned, skeptical, bemused, down to the end of the dock, grasping onto the rail, shaky at it’s roots, pulling one weathered leg and then the other over the side of a shellacked plywood row boat. Ned settled stiffly, starched with pride on the bench as the boy unwound the cable, tossing it to Ned, who missed and then grabbed at it impatiently, tossing it into the bow. You gonna be ok?

Ned looked up at the kid. He couldn’t have been more than seventeen.  Sixty years ago! Then he pushed the boat away from the dock with one of the oars and smiled, reassuring.

I’ll be back in an hour.

6.

At the top of the stairs stood an old china chest Berta had been promised by her mother when her daughter left Belgium. Is it now? Her mother had asked when Berta appeared in a pressed new wool suit, cream gloved hands on the landing by the             cherry wood paneled front door, carrying a grey suitcase of dreams; two skirts, three blouses, a pair of real nylon stockings she had paid dearly for, along with a few under-things, toiletries, two books, some photos, memories jammed in a small hard case.

Is it now? No mother dreams of the day her children leave.  Berta’s mother smoothed her skirt, stopped, uncertain of how to proceed. After a few awkward words, wet, salty cheeked kisses, promises to return that would not be kept Berta left her mother standing, clutching her white cotton apron on the front steps of the two storey gray brick walk-up she had been born in, setting out to join Ned Rice, the young Canadian she had met just three months before at a V-Day dance and married a few weeks after that at the Registrar’s Office in Bruges, on August 22^nd, 1945.

Berta smoothed her skirt, conscious of the static making it cling to her stockings. It was so long ago…so long. Another Berta stared back at her from the hallway mirror now. The china cabinet had arrived in Nanaimo two months after she had after traveling three weeks by ship, train and bus, before touching the shore of Vancouver Island.

For Berta the trip had been a thrill of discovery! At each stop she had tried to breathe deep, to capture it’s essence. She knew instinctively that memory would have to do; she would not be passing this way again.

When Ned met her at the ferry dock she disembarked, apprehensive, searching for his face in the muddied crowd. The rain was pelting the deck as she stepped gingerly on the waffled metal walkway sloping gently down to the tar soaked timbers that served

to guide both ship and passengers to their destinations.

He moved forward, stiff and nervous as she teetered once or twice on the uneven grate.

Almost strangers, they picked each other out of the crowd at about the same instant.

Berta had been imagining this moment ever since Ned had disappeared into the train that had taken him away leaving her shrinking on the platform just a few short weeks before. Now she was here, in this soaking wet forest-drenched island coastal town at the other end of the world. And Ned was there, a drowned red rose uncomfortable in his hand.

He did not seem the brave soldier who had charmed her on sun-drenched beaches with picnics of wine and pomme frites and mussels, in cafes, on park benches, the stuff of hearts that smashed into each other so hard it was all they could do to beat.

There was Ned, standing nervously beside the entrance to the rest of her life; a man, a mortal…her husband.

He walked toward her, his long awkward arms swinging, curly black hair slicked with pomade and rain. As he neared her, Berta was sure she had made a terrible mistake! But as he finally smiled, a second before he scooped her up and spun her ‘round, she was just as sure she hadn’t.                                                                                               

7.

Being an only child, Ned had never gotten used to large crowds or family gatherings.

When Jamie was born, first out of the chute, pink, mottled cherub that he was, Ned and Berta both felt that God had winked at them, the three of them alone, nights spent reading by the autumn fires. Then came Sandy, then Patrick             too fast, too soon, on the bedroom floor with Berta screaming, then laughing…then screaming again, old Mrs. Hayes

calming her down, Doctor Heath’s on his way dear, don’t worry   be strong dear! Berta was strong! One thing Ned was sure of from the start was Berta’s strength.

That first night, just outside of Bruges, Ned was fidgeting with his collar. Damn thing was sticking disproportionately into his neck! It was hot in the dance hall; everyone young and   drinking home brewed beer, sharing flasks, winking, and laughter everywhere. With the laughter there was dancing to an accordion that wheezed drunkenly along with a fiddle, soldiers careening off each other. They were done! Done in this land, in this grey, bruised and bloody land.

Ned was lost in the prospect of returning home, still fiddling with his collar when a woman’s hand reached up through the throng to one by one unbutton, from top button down, his uniform jacket. Two blue eyes skewered Ned, an impossible mouth smiled as Berta first spoke to him. I couldn’t help but notice your discomfort sir. This is not the time for convention!

Ned stared at her face, struck by the stories he could see dancing in the depths of her eyes. Berta gently pulled at his tie and he mouthed no protest as she led him into the pulse of her soul and they danced. They danced on the floor, on the tables, into the street

and then down a lane to a field where a barn sat warm, waiting.

Ned and Berta danced through the creaking heavy wind stained wooden doors, interlocked, breathless. A horse was interrupted, snorting and indignant, ignored by the trespassers, now fallen and urgent upon the straw piled beside his stall. Ned remembered Berta was strong beneath him, nothing tentative, their ferocity soon softened by the knowing that this was it. This was love.

He let her imagination colour his dreams until the sun rose up through cracked pine planking. Spider webbed windows whispered, Rise! The morning mist settling around them they held hands as they walked back to the village.

Will you come?  Ned was desperate. He had been telling Berta about Canada and he was sure that even though the war hadn’t killed him, leaving her behind certainly would.

Berta smiled to herself. Come?  What are you asking me, Edward?

Come to Canada! He stopped and put his hands on her shoulders, turning her face to his.                                                                                                   

Marry me Berta! Ned remembered the silence, both of them frozen on the sidewalk, a silence broken by a bus rolling, filled with soldiers still drunk and singing, catcalling, whistling, more laughter, then they were gone, just as suddenly, leaving Ned and Berta alone by the canal.

Berta raised her eyes to his. A few short hours before, she had been giggling with girlfriends, chattering, smacking lipstick lips, their heels clacking over worn cobblestones, on their way to a Victory dance and now she was here with Ned, a stranger, who had just asked her to spend the rest of her life with him…in Canada!

She bit her lip, like she always did just before jumping. For a split second Ned’s stomach turned as he thought,             She might say no! But Berta just stood on the tip of her toes to pick a piece of hay out of his hair, laughing as she let it drop into the water swirling beside the two of them and softly said, Allright!

3.

Well ain’t I the fool? Ned Rice took a long drink. All her pushin’ an’ shovin’, a man’s got no time to think! You got a wife? He punctuated with foam.            The bartender replied, uncomfortable, No sir!  Not me…no. Ned sputtered, Well, take it from me! You just take it from me…his words taken from him like the flow from his mug, lips moistened with regret and beer, in small sips.  Got by just fine before she came along…s’not like I can’t take care of myself…I can take care of myself alright! Just fine…

Ned drummed his fingers then picked up his change as he downed the last of his beer careful to fold the two remaining bills, head to head and stick them in his pocket, leaving four nickels on the bar. It’s them books she reads fillin’ her head with nonsense! I tell you! You stay clear of women with ideas and maybe you’ll get some peace in your life!

Nothin’s ever good enough! Nothin’! I tell you…

But he never told the bartender anything else. Ned just harrumphed and turned away to follow the dusty beam of sunlight back through the open door to the glaring open air of the parking lot as a loaded logging truck rumbled by causing the road to shudder, bark chips flipping sharp and haphazard in it’s wake.

4.

It occurred to Berta as she dried the last dish that Ned really might have left her this time.

She hung the wet towel on a hook by the stove giving her damp hands a wipe on her skirt and shuffled to the living room window and stared down the driveway where Ned had gone.  Of course she’d have to sell the farm.  She couldn’t stay here on her own; it was too much for her alone.  The kids weren’t too keen on the life that had shaped them.

They were all adults now but still too young to yearn for their roots.

She’d sell the farm and go see the world, at least see Italy! Berta would go to Italy and drink red wine from an earthenware jug, lemon blossoms in the air.  Maybe she’d see a real opera, not like when the kid’s high school music teacher, Mavis Trampsley, took her to see the local production of La Boheme, which suffered from a lack of masculine voices, being hunting season and all.  Mavis’ new neighbour, Mr. Caroll, a retired care-worker, who loved show tunes and tiramisu, played the part of Rodolfo. The butcher’s wife played Mimi but because of Mimi’s fondness for fresh roasted pork crackling and beer, she dwarfed Rodolfo, who at his diminutive best sang like Ethel Merman with a cold, in both height and width.

No, Berta would see a real opera this time, at La Scala!  She would meet a nice man, a widower, who would listen, nod and smile at her dreams, not scoff and walk away, leaving her soul bare, exposed and cold at the kitchen table.

She stepped back from the window and sat down in her chair, a gift from her family at least twenty years before, for her birthday?  She couldn’t rightly say. Time had a way of hazing things, memories best viewed, like Monets, from a distance, eyes softly out of focus. Across the room on hand built shelves were pictures, trophies of a life, proof in ink on paper of a journey taken, a path strapped into a river she knew she would never tame.

She had let herself drift, head above water, for the most part. There was Jamie, dear sweet Jamie…smiling holding up a fish, a trout, freshly caught up at Sproat Lake. Ned was beaming behind him, yellow fishing rod and tackle box in hand. On the shelf above

sat pictures of Janie, Frank, Patrick and Ann, faces red and muffled beside a giant snowman rolled between the house and the barn, leaving a maze of trails, laced with ice, mud, bits of frozen grass and snow chunks, winding in and out of each other.  Beside them sat Sandy’s snow duck, apart from the crowd. She had wanted to build a snow horse but the weight of its’ body kept crushing its’ legs, so she had turned it into a duck, climbing on it’s back, whooping and hollering, I’m the Lo-o-ne Ranger! Over and over she shouted until Patrick, the little tyrant, armed with a wooden sword and a jubilant throaty yell lopped the snow duck’s head right off.

Sandy screamed and chased him down, Patrick hiding and giggling            by the salt lick shed, soon had his face scrubbed with hand knitted mittens soaked with matted snow, Sandy burning with anger so intense it melted the day. Both of them were sent in tears to their rooms, again, leaving a headless blob and a hatless snowman abandoned to the frozen night.

That year the power to their home became prey to wind-felled trees.  It was unreasonably cold and there were two long weeks of stoking constantly burning fires in the old wood stove. Ned was handsome in the act of providing sawed and chopped truckloads of wood, a chicken, freshly killed, a pig, throat cut was dripping blood for sausages into a bucket upside down in the barn, permanently distracted. Nine months later the twins were born.

Eight children! I never would’ve dreamed it!  Berta stood up and crossed the floor softly creaking, obliging bare footsteps, whispers compared to the pounding, grinding stampedes of the past, eight pairs of feet thundering down on a Christmas morning, poetry in chaos.

Berta smiled to herself at the thought as it branched out in her mind into fractions, instances, snap shots, fragments of time and lives well lived.

5.

Windows down, ocean air slapping at his cheek, Ned Rice barreled along the Island Highway, past Nanaimo, Lantzville, Parksville, then headed inland toward Comox.

He stopped on the highway to clamber up a gravel bank into the shrubs behind ferns and berry-speckled scrub trees.  Damn beer! Ned cursed, relieving himself. Then he climbed back down into his trusty blue steed, which coughed then obliged an impatient old hand, pulling back onto the highway to gallop “Up Island”, Ned’s heels in its’ sides.

Steel whipping steel, rode the two tough old hides. There wasn’t one inch of his truck that he was unfamiliar with. He smiled to himself as the radio blared Hank Williams yodeling the Lovesick Blues, Ned Rice yodeling too. He was sure he sounded none too pretty, but who the hell cared? It wasn’t like Berta was there looking down her snooty nose at him.

Her! With her books, her art and travel magazines left open, hinting, her mope faced sighing eyes grown beady with age, wisdom and disappointment.  Nothing’s ever good enough, nothing! Always wanted more, always! Ned punctuated the miles to the lake with growls and snorts. It had been more than thirty years since he’d traveled this road, newly paved and constant, lined and contained, it no longer resembled the gravel logging road he remembered.                       

Directional signs seemed less frequent now and Ned slowed the truck down, unsure, his memories elusive. Was that the turnoff? Was it this… that one? So much changed, so much new, the firs growing denser, taller, flanking the side of the road. Burnt lightening- struck shards among old growth and deciduous crowding, pushing into the asphalt, reclaiming tar, their roots raising, seeking moisture, cracking out from a patch of dwarf thistle. Dandelions, white lines chaffed, dimming, dragged with the pavement random   curving, clinging to the bosom of the West Coast mountains.

Ned was tired. Surely he was close now? He didn’t remember it taking this long with Jamie in the truck chattering next to him. Lord! The boy could talk! His mind always running ahead of his mouth or was it the other way around? Ned would offer him a penny a mile to get him to shut up. Jamie never made more than ten cents on those trips. What price those pennies? Ned wondered now.

The truck slowed, as if by habit and turned off the main road onto a rutted jarring path barely wide enough to accommodate it. Rolling to a stop, Ned turned the key to hear silence, listening for the sound of insects dipping, ancient strokes of a Master’s brush sweeping horizon to sky and back again. A lake, a mirror, a breath deep and measured lifted Ned, placing him on the edge of reed and stump laced water, darkening in the setting sun. Perched on a craggy roost of granite, Ned engaged in his own reflection.

The Anniversary                                                      Fiction-by Kirsten Nash

1.

That’s it! He said, I’ve had it this time! Slamming out the door, he crunched down the driveway muttering, cursing through the air that pulsed off his sagging blue truck with the sticker on the rear rusty bumper: If you can read this, you’re too close! The heavy steel door creaked, grudgingly supplied Mr. Rice a tall seat, four load weary wheels set off in a huff, old Ned Rice muttering, Enough is enough!

Dust was settled atop the crackled tar, on the brambles and salmonberries, shade running from the might of the sweating sun, dripping like fingers left by scant trees, their leaves dropped afire, crippled on the roadside. In the back of his consciousness Ned heard the song of gravel munching into the paunch of his wheels, sticking in grooves, flying up to bounce off of split cedar fencing onto the unsuspecting windshields of Saturday drivers. Oh look, Honey! There’s a deer on the side of the…Shit! What was that!

Old Mr. Rice was muttering, seething as the tourists motored by until he got to the pub                                                      on the edge of the Town where his eight kids were born, where he helped build the Church, where that damned and infernal Woman would go on Wednesday nights to the stale smoked, sticky floored Community Bingo Hall.  Oh the stench and the dank and the shit of it all!

He took a deep breath and opened the truck door, complaining again with a cold steel groan, a slam, then a silence as he stood in the sun. It stroked him, soothed him, whispered, be done. Footsteps echoed by the slap of the tar, freshly patched potholes, spat gum, stray stones struck, tumbling in his path.  The keys in his pockets were singing along too as he twice cleared his throat, eyes locked on the gap-toothed front door, listening for voices.  He thought he heard one, so he followed it in through the curtain of darkness that blinded him, so used to the gold blue glare of fields under a scorched crystal sky.

Squinting to make out the shape of the bar he shuffled, drawn by the cool neon light.  Hey Ned! Whatchya havin’? Can I pour you a beer? Twenty-two years he’d been coming in here, legions of bartenders marking the time in gouges and scrapes on the old wooden bar, scratched voices whispering through the grain of it all.  Ned Rice grunted and nodded his head, I’ll ‘ave a small one, no wait!  Make it a pint! He threw his leg up over the stool heaving with derision a dull snort. Well! Ain’t I the fool….

What’s that? The barkeep smiled, pulling the tap, amber sweet froth spilling, kissing the icy glass, old Mr. Rice fidgeting in his pocket, damn keys, to find a twenty. Then on the red terry mat he laid three crumpled bills prone to pay for the beer but not that one beer alone.

2.

The chickens out back of the kitchen were griping, hungry for their afternoon feed.

Clucking, ducking, their Rhode Island Red wattles shaking in the afternoon dust they scratched for stray barley, seed pellets, a twig or a stone, their claws set in folded yellow skin furiously working to unearth a worm caught in the dry leathered mudflat by the coop.

And don’t think I’ll take ‘im back this time, ‘cause I won’t!  Berta was stooping, bent by the bucket of fresh drawn water from the old stone well.  Fifty years it had never run dry.

Even when the city ran a maze of twisting steel pipes up through the forests and fields to snake along their driveway into the kitchen sink, she swore by the water from the well they had built, just her and Edward, Jamie newly tucked in her belly, so long ago…almost a dream now.

The chickens nodded as the water sloshed from the bucket to the aluminum trough, then disappointed, still hungry, they followed Berta back to the chain link gate, where they were stalled, mobbing while she dipped her plastic scoop into the feed bin inside the shed that leaned, groaned with the wind.  On wet autumn nights she could hear it complaining.

There you go ladies! Mind you get your share!  Feathers kicked up in a feed bred frenzy as thrown pellets pocked the soil and thatch.

A stick found leaning on hived fencing wire nudged the rooster to the back of the queue.

Get back you scoundrel!  It’s them hens that does all the work,  Berta scowled, shaking her head, then tossed another handful to the indignant cock before trudging away across the yard back to the kitchen.

The old Tabby cat with one eye and eight lives left scurried under her feet as she stepped through the door left wedged open in the afternoon heat.

Hold up you Rascal! What good’s the rush? The Rat’s done and left us! Again!

He has! What’s all the fuss?

Berta snorted slamming the screen door behind her.

‘Course I knew he’d be wanderin’ today of all days…

A sink full of morning dishes was staring at her like owls in winter. Left of the sink on a shelf mined with memories, pictures, baubles left haphazard, a ring left from yesterday.

Berta, while canning peaches had never liked the feeling of sweat under metal.  A ring, a token left for safekeeping, twisted, pulled impatiently from her dry bloated finger with the help of Dove soap, then stuck in a crackled tea cup chipped on the rose, with three white buttons, a thimble, a small scrap of paper and an elastic band.

A ring, a thin slice of gold…it was Ned’s mother’s, left to him after she died slowly by the light of a goose wax candle in the old farmhouse in the middle of Saskatchewan.

Ned had told the story so many times, every Thanksgiving, about the snow piled so deep, so bitter, the only thing that could warm a soul was the fire of the fever that sent babies and mothers, brothers and sisters to rest under tombstones weighted under cement formed lambs come to rest in the Saltcoats fields. He spoke of corpses stored in snowdrifts, night after night, waiting for winter to offer up earth for spring, of black ice and pick axes, wood handled shovels, stiff faced, stiff sheeted goodbyes in the April sun.

Ned and his father were left together…but alone.

The kids would all look at each other, at least when they were younger, solemn and worried and usually Jamie, it was always dear Jamie, would ask Then what did you do Dad?

Ned would puff up, proud to be asked, proud that his son seemed proud to be his. Well son we did a lot of quiet prayin’. Your grandfather wasn’t much on talkin’, said it got in the way of gettin’ things done.

Then Ned would tell the story of how they ended up here, practically giving away the old farm for the price of two seats west on the CN train.  Not much older than you I was…

Ned would conspire to whichever child had just turned nine. The rest of the kids would be wide eyed too, caught up in his phrases and flourish.  Their father wielded a vivid and fierce tale, like a sword out of scabbard, the needing, the not having had, had created     escape. Then Jamie was gone, first his lungs, then his legs. One day he was there, the next day he wasn’t.

Mrs. Hayes                                                                   Fiction-By Kirsten Nash

 I didn’t sleep well last night.  I got up at least ten times to pee, then just when I was about to finally drift off, Caesar was up prowling around and I guess he got up on top of the hatboxes I had stacked by the piano and knocked the whole darn pile over!  Scared me half to death, but I think he scared himself more.  Poor little bugger let out a howl and streaked past me so fast you’d swear he had the Hounds of Hell behind him. That was it for me.  I got up and made myself a cup of tea, and turned the TV on.  I only get three channels in this godforsaken place, that’s all the rabbit ears will pick up, and with my back being the way it is, if I can get one of the channels tuned in decently, I leave it there.  It’s just too hard on my old bones to keep getting up and down to change the program. There’s pretty much the same crap on each channel anyways, especially at five in the morning.

I thought about cleaning up the mess Caesar made, but decided to wait until it got lighter out.  No point wasting electricity turning all the lights on.  I should really get those hatboxes organized properly someday but it’s not like I ever entertain anymore, not since Jim died.  It’s been eighteen years.  God where does the time go?  Jim would have had a fit to see all the hats I’ve bought since he passed!  He was always such a cheap bastard.  He moved us to this ramshackle town, if you can call it a town, two weeks after my thirtieth birthday, promising me the world to get me to leave my beloved Vancouver.  He had taken a job at the local pulp mill, which is where almost everyone in River’s End worked those days, before the layoffs in’74.  We bought this little house, the mill co-signed the mortgage and Jim “cheaped” his way to paying it off in ten years.

We kept waiting for the baby that never came.  There was a school within walking distance and I had imagined holding hands with a faceless child and walking her to school so many times it still makes my soul ache to think about it.  One of the few curses and blessings of old age is the narrowing of options, the dulling of dreams. 

Even when I was teaching their kids piano, seemed like it was hard for the mothers around here to get their feet all the way in my front door.  They would stand on the steps to hand their children over, then return an hour later to pick them up, toes glued to the invisible line between out and in.  Their necks craned through the doorway far enough though, and they tried to disguise their snooping with tight, polite smiles and small talk about the weather.  Like I was some kind of idiot!  If I asked them in, they were in a hurry to get somewhere else and I stopped waiting for invitations from them round about the same time I gave up hoping for a child.  My barrenness formed a wall of difference that the River’s End mothers were not prepared to climb.

When the sun got up, so did I.  I poured a little shot of brandy in my second cup of tea and made myself a piece of cinnamon toast and stood eating it as I surveyed the mess of boxes Caesar had toppled.  I have over two hundred hats I think.  I’ve tried to count them a few times, but I generally lose interest at about a hundred. In Vancouver a young lady in my day wouldn’t be caught dead out in public without a hat!  Which was good for me, because I always loved hats, and they loved me.  Still do.  I could take any old dress, pair it with a feather-topped pillbox number and cut a figure that would give Grace Kelly a run for her money. The mill and farm wives of River’s End had a different notion of fashion I soon learned from the way those cackling biddies looked at me when I’d go out walking on a sunny day, a new hat pinned at the perfect angle on my thick auburn hair.  I always said the only culture in this town was primarily bacterial.

Jim thought my love of hats frivolous and that if I must embarrass myself wearing them, then two hats would do, one for summer, one for winter.  So I started making them.  I sewed and wove and pinned my way through the seasons, trying to at least bring a little style from the magazines I read at “Betty’s Beauty Barn” to my wardrobe. 

When Jim got sick I stopped teaching piano.  I stopped making hats too.  No need for hats when there’s an anchor of cancer in the house.  There were about twenty people at the funeral, mostly guys from the mill, our accountant.  They came to the house after.  I was conscious of the smell of death still hanging off the walls, and so busied myself opening windows and passing around trays of dainties and sandwiches I must have made.

Then they all left.  I picked up the trays and glasses and took them to the kitchen.  I didn’t hurry to wash them.  I opened the manila envelope the accountant had left.  Jim had really done a good job taking care of things that way.  Although I would start teaching piano again, I didn’t really have to.  He’d seen to that all right.

That very day I bought my first mail order hat.  I picked up the phone and called the number advertised in the back section of Woman’s Weekly.  Three weeks later it came, COD, and I can still remember the absolute joy I felt opening the box.  A black button hat, a simple tuft of black tulle held on front with a fake sapphire pin.  Now it’s spilled on the floor by the piano, half out of its’ box and Caesar is sniffing at it suspiciously. 

Oh Christ!  My back’s sore today.  Too sore to be stacking boxes. Besides, it’s Easter Sunday and the sun is shining to boot! Another shot of brandy and a walk in the sunshine. Yup, that’s what I’ll do! Take a nice walk in the sunshine on this beautiful, spring day, daffodils nodding, birds saying how do you do to the bees! Now, let’s just see if I can find the right hat…

Katie and Me                                                      Fiction —- by Kirsten Nash

Katie and me were sitting in the field and we were smoking.  We were smoking grass, and not the kind of grass that you could brag about behind the backstop at school, but the kind of grass that you rolled in the paper insides of cigarette package foil.  You needed a Bic lighter to run the flame under the tinfoil part until it kissed the paper goodbye.  When the paper was lifted from the glue, we curled the hay up in it, because that’s what the grass really was…shredded hay, and we licked, twisted and snapped at the edges of the paper until we had a cigarette.  We were desperate for any vestige of sophistication, and so we took long, languid drags from our “cigarettes” and pretended we were big city bohemians in bookish, jazz-laced coffee shops, arguing over the respective mojos of Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan.  I thought Leonard Cohen was the sexy one, dark and lost, but Katie thought Bob Dylan was the renegade, the cool one.  After all, he smoked pot with the Beatles!  Then we pretended we were Bob Dylan groupies, which seemed kind of lame after awhile, so we changed to Katie being Bob and I was Leonard, smoking each other up at a rock concert, in San Francisco, 1968, backstage at The Airplane and Grateful Dead concert.

“Now that would be cool!”  Katie had the joint, and was trying to get some continuity out of it.

“D’ya think maybe Jimi an’ Janis will be joinin’ us?”  I was trying to lay myself out like I was reclining on the velvet couch on the front of the Janis Joplin record my stepbrother had left behind for me when he moved out.

            “I don’t think so, man,” Katie droned in a mock stoned voice, “But we can check out Jimi at the Filmore next week, man…”

“Cool man…” 

We sounded more like Cheech and Chong than Bob and Leonard, but we didn’t care.  Whoever we were being wasn’t from anywhere near us, and that was all that we cared about as we dreamed our dreams on that late summer day.

Even through the smoke we could smell the shedding arbutus and the impatience of autumn. The week before the fields had been splendid, waving and arguing with the split beam fences, but now they sputtered and lisped with the urgency of time out of hand, ruing any wasted seconds of sunshine, heads bent, waiting for the thresher. 

We both took turns sucking at the reefer, fat and bulbous, roughshod and lacking.  Lacking in substance and conformity, it flared and stifled, and one match after another was sacrificed on the path to its’ eventual demise.

Katie’s new stepfather had false teeth that clicked.  When I sat down to dinner with their family before our sleepover the night before, it was the one thing at the table that everyone knew but nobody talked about.  Click-click…clack-slurp-click…all through the soup and the salad his dentures rubbed and crackled. Listening to him chew a steak was like hearing a drunk tap dance; no cadence you could count on, just spastic rhythms and sliding, grating tendons engaging in a kind of tribal, primal mastication.

Katie and I looked at each other across the table and she kicked my shin when I crossed and uncrossed my eyes in time with her father’s porcelain maracas, trying to crack her up.  Then later, when we were in our pyjamas, we stood in front of her dresser mirror in her bedroom and I tried to show her how to cross her eyes, but try as she did, only one eye would reach it’s corner.  Her other eye was a “lazy” eye, and stayed a few beats behind.  But she could bend her thumb right back on itself, like there was no bone there at all, which was pretty cool once I got over the way it made me feel like puking.

When Katie’s new dad finished supper, he took out his false teeth for a while and set them on the table beside his chair, then lit a homemade cigarette (a real one, not like ours) and his face collapsed.  He had a mechanical cigarette maker, cartons of hollow cigarette tubes and bags of tobacco that he set on the kitchen table with a box of red wine. When the butt was ready to be stuffed in the glass ashtray they got from Reno on their honeymoon, he popped his teeth back in then he and her mother sat down and took turns stuffing the tobacco in the metal groove and cranking the lever that filled each paper tube as they drank the wine box dry.

I tried to get the last gasps of smoke out of our hay cigarette, sucking my lips in like Katie’s stepdad, but there’s no way you can get the same depth with teeth in your gums to stop your cheeks from imploding.  The best I could do was to look like a cross-eyed grouper fish on fire, with the smoke pouring from my nose and mouth.  Katie started laughing like there might have been something more than hay in that cigarette, and I joined in, between coughs and wheezes.  We laughed the kind of laughter that only two newly teenage girls can laugh, rolling side to side, convulsing under the harvest sun until, our stomachs both aching, the last giggle had been spent.

            I can’t believe school starts tomorrow…Katie didn’t much like school.  She didn’t have the clothes for it.  All summer on the farm left the dust she wore thicker and less patchy than her t-shirts.  No one saw fit to teach her about hygiene, and as her body changed no one seemed to notice or care about the new odours coming from her pubescent pores.  Except for early last spring at school when her favourite teacher, Mr. Hines, had to take her aside and tell her that other kids were refusing to sit beside her because she was smelling so bad and went on to tell her how to properly wash herself and use deodorant.  She was even more humiliated because she had thought he was going to tell her she had the lead in the new school play.

            WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME? YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE MY FRIEND!!  Katie yelled at me on the way home that day.

I didn’t really notice…honest!  Maybe ‘cause I’m around you so much, maybe I’m used to the way you smell!                          I was getting angry.  She was always blaming me for something she should have been angry with her parents for.  I was proud that she looked up to me, but sometimes her trust fell a little heavily on my shoulders.  Besides, most mornings I got up, the first thing I did was milk the cow and feed the chickens.  I smelled more shit before seven in the morning than most people did in a lifetime. By the time I got to school, my nose was used to a funky smell.  How would I know it was coming from Katie too?

It’s not like you can tell your best friend their smell blends in with your cow shit, so when we got to my house, I gave her one of my Dad’s old deodorants to try as a peace offering, after I picked a couple of hairs off first.  I would have given her one of mine but I only had one, and it was the first one.  Dad and me got it just a couple of weeks ago, with his sister, Aunt Jo, who was visiting us all the way from Nova Scotia and said “You know…” a lot in a high, twangy rasp and then usually went on to tell you something you actually didn’t know at all!

“You know, Abe, she really needs a trainin’ bra…an’ you know, some deodorant would be useful right about now too.  You can’t just leave the girl growin’ wild like them raspberries out back, you got to prune her, clean her up now an’ then!  Jaysus!  Don’t her mother even come an’ take a look at her ev’ry so often?”  And Aunt Jo paced the kitchen with her cigarette fidgeting in her hand, ashes in feathery chaos settling on the floor around her.

Dad took her rant in stride, fidgeting with the saltshaker as he stood by the counter.  “I guess now’s just as good a time as any.”  And he started walking to the front door and out to the car, just expecting us to follow, screen door slapping shut behind him.  Aunt Jo jammed her cigarette in the sink’s hole and as it hissed a quick death she grabbed her purse and sweater off the bench she’d set it on when she first came in.  Her wedge heels were shaky on the gravel driveway as she followed her brother out of a lifetime of habit to the truck waking and coughing beside the garage. 

I stood for a minute more in the kitchen, trying to process what had just happened and what was about to happen.  A bra?  Deodorant? The awkwardness of the mission overwhelmed me.  I was only thirteen!  As yet, only one of my nipples had popped out, and the other had caved in!  What kind of bra was going to work for me?  Katie had talked a few months ago about getting a training bra, but neither of us could figure out what she should be trying to train her titties to do?

For me it went deeper than that.  I had one of the best arms in the school.  I out shot the boys in shot put, discus, javelin and I had a mean over-hand pitch.  When I struck a boy out sometimes they would snort and smack their bat on the diamond or chuck it at the backstop and get a warning.  They’d be blaming the wind, blaming the bat and the umpire for not calling my pitch a foul ball.  They’d just about do anything than admit that a girl just struck them out. But up until now I hadn’t been much of a girl. If I were to start wearing a bra, that would be the end of it, there was no way the boys would let me keep playing with them.

Katie stood up. Bits of hay stuck to her pants and she was brushing them off but I was rolling on my back, side to side in the bristled grass.

“Whatchya doin’?”  Katie cocked her head critically to one side, watching me writhing in the dust.

“My back’s itchy…” I jumped up, suddenly self-conscious and dusted myself off.

            “What do ya’ think you are?  Some kind of cow or somethin’?”  She set off impatiently, shaking her head toward the gravel road without waiting for an answer that was in no hurry to come, and I followed, distracted, our footsteps absorbed by the matted field.

The road kicked up more dust as we set off to where my bike was waiting, leaning against the fence.  My backpack, stuffed unceremoniously with my pyjamas, toothbrush and the training bra my aunt had picked out for me, was hanging off the handlebars.  I would be waiting until the last minute to put the ridiculous pink contraption on. Just before our driveway there was a large cedar and cottonwood thicket, and therein was my impromptu change room.  It would go on to serve me through most of grade eight as I did my best to fend off the inevitable changes that nature was hoisting upon me.  Every morning I would stop in the thicket on my way to school, take off the bra and stuff it in my backpack, and rain or shine, wet or dry, every day I would stop on the way home and put it back on again. Not that Dad would have noticed its’ absence.  I figured that he had made an effort in getting me the damn thing, so I ought to respect that by wearing it around the house. But the Devil’s ass would be frostbitten before I’d be shackled by it in the schoolyard.

The truth was, for a year or so nobody, even Aunt Jo, would be likely to notice if I was wearing a bra or not.  Not like Katie.  No boy had looked her in the eyes for a few months now, especially at the lake in her new two-piece swimsuit.  She said she thought the boys were creepy, but I’d known Katie long enough to know that she thought boys were anything but creepy.  Her body was just catching up to where her spirit had been all along.  Soon, I knew, not only would she have her own deodorant, scented like lilacs, but she would be taking long baths almost every night and nagging at her mom for bath salts and musk oil soap.

We said goodbye a little stiffly and as I bounced along her driveway on my bike steering clear of the potholes, Katie disappeared down the forested trail to her house. Turning out onto the pockmarked country road, I was conscious of the slapping of my backpack on my hips as I pedaled through the maze of blazing maples, fields, fences and roadside brambles that marked my way home. It always seemed that around the end of summer was when things started ending and beginning.  Some people think that the beauty of it happens in springtime, but I think it’s at the end of summer.  For something to be born, it seems like something’s eventually got to die and what could be more beautiful and selfless than that?  As I jumped off my bike in the cottonwood thicket and pulled my bra, already hooked, up my legs, under my t-shirt and slipped the straps over my shoulders, I wondered too if autumn was nature’s way of testing your faith. As the world browned all around, I reasoned, one had no choice but to believe in spring. Things are always simpler when you have no choice but not necessarily easier.

I walked my bike slowly out of the thicket and onto our driveway, wanting to hold the last few memories of summer close to me.  School started tomorrow.  It was Katie and my first day of junior high school.  There would be new girls, girls with curls and lipstick who dotted their “I’s” with hearts and gobbled up gossip and sugarless gum in the halls. There would be boys who would stand around them, shifting foot to foot, trying desperately to be cool.  I didn’t much care how or if I fit in, I never had.  But Katie was different. It mattered to her so much that just my not caring seemed to threaten her these days.  Of course, that idea could have been more rooted in my own insecure teenage imagination than in fact, but one thing I did know as I leaned my bike against the back porch and clomped up the stairs to open the creaky kitchen door, was that times, they were-a-changin’.

Dad and Ben                                                                       by Kirsten Nash

Last week Mother and Mr. Barton got married.  That’s what they told us anyway.  I wasn’t actually there.  It was what they call a civil ceremony, no church.  Then they went away on a honeymoon somewhere, but I don’t think it was in another country.  Just over to Vancouver or somewhere close to it.  It all happened kind of quickly, so I wasn’t really sure where they’d gone, but Ben and me were holding down the fort there at Barton’s Berry Farm on our own.  Except for Mrs. Grimes, who came two or three times a week to help clean and cook up some stews and soups for us.  Mrs. Grimes also happened to make the best lemon meringue pie in the world, and she wasn’t too shy to bring one for us when Mother wasn’t there to make it a competition.

I was sitting under the magnolia tree churning some butter in our hand-crank churner and thinking that the next time I would see Mr. Barton I’d be calling him Dad like he told me I could.  Mr. Barton (Abe)(Dad) told me I could call him whatever I liked until I was comfortable with him being my Daddy. It’s not like there’s anyone else on deck to be my father, and as I’ve said before, Mr. Barton has a kindness in him. I don’t recall asking for much more in a father or anyone else.

There wasn’t much for Ben and me to do.  It was the end of August and everything you do on a berry farm is usually done before then.  We finished mulching the fields with hay, and except for tending to a few late tomatoes, and of course the broccoli, cabbage, onions and potatoes, there was not much to do in the vegetable garden.  Mother said we’d be canning when they got back because she found a bunch of cobwebbed old mason jars in the basement under the stairs.  I wasn’t sure what we’d be canning, and I don’t think she was either, but I was sure she’d find something.  Then, most likely, she’d do the first batch and go on and on about how fulfilling it is to be living off the land, then get bored and leave me with the next ten batches of whatever we were canning to do on my own.

Ben had gotten over his moodiness.  Matter of fact, a few weeks before this one, when Mr. Barton and Mother decided to get married, we had a jam session in the living room!  Turns out Mr. Barton plays clarinet!  So Ben got his acoustic guitar and Mr. Barton got his clarinet and they started playing all these old blues songs and I just hummed along quietly.  Mother was dancing, one hand on her hip and the other balancing a martini.  Ben and Mr. Barton had had a few beer and they were laughing and telling jokes while they played.  Sometimes they laughed and made jokes with the music.  I got the jokes but Mother didn’t.  She was up too high on her martini cloud, lost in her hips gyrating, her soul reaching out to reclaim a lost dream with a clawed and desperate hand.

While Mother was swaying, Mr. Barton came over beside her and started playing this snake charmer music like I heard on the Bugs Bunny Hour once when Bugs was hiding in a snake basket and Elmer Fudd was trying to hunt him down. Trying, because no one ever did catch Bugs Bunny.  He was quick and clever and funny and didn’t mind showing his feminine side off in a flowery dress if it meant getting away from the Tasmanian Devil.  Actually Bugs was pretty quick to put on a dress if you ask me, and that had me wondering sometimes.  I asked Ben about it one Saturday morning after the chores were done when we were both sitting on the couch eating our cereal and watching the Bugs Bunny Road Runner Hour.  Do you think Bugs Bunny is gay? 

Ben just about spat his cereal all over the coffee table.  Where do you get ideas like that at your age?  Of course Bugs Bunny isn’t gay!  He’s a cartoon!

I kept looking at the television, enjoying his reaction. He wears dresses a lot and is always shaking his fluffy tail at everyone.  And he lives alone in a little hole, no Mrs. Bugs.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen him go out on a date unless he was dressed up like a woman! 

Ben just shook his head and got up.  You’re a strange one! He headed to the kitchen, as I wondered out loud if there was a little more to the Tom and Jerry story than they were saying too.

 Mother’s eyes were closed and she was gyrating and jerking to the clarinet’s taunting as Ben stopped playing his guitar and watched his Dad and my Mother drift off in their boozy dream.  Ben’s gaze was on them and my eyes squinted at Ben from the corner of the couch, where I was cuddled up with an old crocheted throw pretending to be asleep.  It was late, and I probably should have been in bed, but I figured all three of them had stopped noticing me about an hour ago. I was in no hurry to leave.

Ben stood up with his guitar, slowly, stretching and yawning elaborately, he announced, I’m tired.  I’m goin’ to bed. The snake charmer and his bride to be didn’t seem to notice as Ben held his guitar in one hand and easily scooped me up off the sofa with the other.  Come on sis-to-be! It’s bedtime for you too.  He threw me over his big, tall shoulder and carried me to my room, dumping me on the bed like a sack of spuds.  I still pretended to be asleep until he started tickling me and then all was lost.  I giggled and tried to tickle him back but his long, long arms turned my attempts into a romp with futility.

Good night Ben, I whispered when he had finished tickling me and was heading to my door, turning the light out on the way.  He stopped, massive in the doorframe.  The bright hall light behind him darkened his front and made him look kind of spooky, but when he smiled that all went away.  Ben had the best smile.  He would never need a clarinet to charm a snake.  Just one smile and Ben had the world kissing his fingers.

‘Night, kid, and he turned away and closed the door. I heard his footsteps disappear into his room and the click of his door and then all was quiet.  Mother and Abe were done with their show and although there were two beds in my room and one of them was for my mother as far as the neighbours were concerned, I didn’t think I would be seeing her in it that night.

…………………………………

The butter started to lump up on the wooden paddle and the buttermilk I had bashed out of it swished against the glass jar until solid and liquid were completely parted.  I stood up halfway and ducked out from under the tree to see Abe’s old blue truck coming around the bend in the driveway.  I could see my Mother waving, with a new scarf knotted under her chin and new red, red lipstick pasted around her teeth.  Abe was laughing and waving too.

Ben came out onto the front step, with his shirt off.  He’d been working on his truck out back behind the garage, and was wiping some grease off his hands with a blue towel. They pulled up in front of the garage and Mother waited for Abe to get out and come around to open her door.  She stepped out slowly so as to best model her new strappy high heels.  Gone was the school marm dress.  Mother was back to her natural fashion inclinations, and I felt a sense of relief in that.  At least I knew who she was again.

Abe was still smiling, but he was looking at Ben with a pass of clouds in his eyes. Where’s your respect Ben?  Get a shirt on boy!  But Mother was already up the stairs, hugging Ben, grease and all.  That’s ok Ben, it’s great to see you!  And where’s my little girl?  Oh there you are!  Come and give your Mother a hug! I put down the butter churn on the edge of the front stairs and braced myself as she teetered over to hug me.

She insinuated herself upon me then just as abruptly switched courses and clicked her way up the wooden stairs, her shoes challenging gravity and into the house then back out again, giggling like a school girl.  Oh I guess I just completely forgot to let you carry me over the threshold Abe! I am so sorry!  OK! I’ll wait here for you an’ you come an’ lift me up like you would, you know, with a new wife!  Mother was almost feverish, like maybe if she believed hard enough she could be good enough to really love Abe, she would.

Ben stepped past her and back into the house.  I heard the back screen door slam and figured he’d gone back to his truck.  Abe…Dad…smiled up at my mother who was curtsying coyly on the front landing and with a couple of long strides he was swooping her up in his arms and she was squealing and giggling and then they disappeared into the house leaving me and the butter churn on the landing to watch them get swallowed up by the hallway leading to what would now be officially their room.

The door clicked shut, the giggles faded. I took the butter churn into the kitchen, dumped out the buttermilk into a jug and then scraped the butter off the paddles and into a dish.  I decided to salt and pat the excess moisture out of it later, because the house suddenly seemed too quiet to feel comfortable.  The refrigerator door squeaked as I put the jug on a shelf and the butter beside it.  I left the butter churn on the counter and watched out the back window as Ben crossed the yard, his shirt on this time, and shut himself up in the shed.

It seemed like a good time to go to my fort. 

Snuggled up to our driveway was a strip of forest about two hundred feet wide that cut back from the road like a big green band-aid joining us to the fields next door.  I didn’t know who owned it, didn’t much care.  I never saw anyone there so I became its’ warden, soaking up the scents of the ferns and the thick-lipped fungi fused with rusty barked trunks as I stepped over the fallen logs working my way deeper into the thicket.  There was a deer path running through the core of the cedars, firs, and molting cottonwoods, and near the road the ragged, chaffed maple trees poked out of the white-berried scrub to greet people in the spring and surprise them every autumn with their flashes of lime, crimson and fire.

Mossy twigs snapped under my bare feet.  Although even then I appreciated the finer aesthetics of shoe wear, I preferred not to actually wear the shoes, especially in the summer.  In the winter I even liked the feeling of the crystallized snow crunching beneath and between my toes, but not for too long.  Most of the summer I had been barefoot except when milking our pretty Jersey cow, Josephine, who was apt to step on your toes just before she lifted a caramel leg up and stomped it down petulantly in the bucket.  You just hoped that happened at the beginning of the milking instead of when you were almost finished stripping the last teat.

I got to name her when my mother and Abe had her delivered at the beginning of summer, just after we moved in.  Mother liked the name when I came up with it because she was thinking that I was getting it from Empress Josephine, Napoleon’s wife, but I was actually thinking of Josephine Baker, the “Black Venus” of jazz.  I didn’t bother correcting her.  We didn’t often have the same ideas about things.

In a couple of minutes I was at one of my favorite spots with deeply fern-clad carpets of cool moss and mulch soothing my calloused feet.  Over the summer I had meticulously cleared the area that I stood in now of prickly things and poking sticks.  I pulled rocks from their cedar dropping nests and made them into walls. I spent hours dragging large branches, dropped jagged off their wind worn hosts, from all over the woods to lean them against each other in Seussian shapes and then wove smaller branches and ferns all over them to discourage the rain.

Ben had taken to calling me after a Hobbit because of my bare feet and the fact that I spent almost all my spare time after the chores were done in my fort. Hey Bilbo! he would call out from the back porch, Supper’s ready! He’d stand there and laugh at me as, I scrambled out, my hair wild and peppered with twigs and leaf bits, from a hole I had pruned between an overgrown holly bush and the scraggly cedar hedging that Abe had planted when he first bought the place. When Ben’s mom was still alive.  I wondered if Abe had carried her across the threshold and if she had giggled until the bedroom door closed like my mother had.  Abe would have looked more like Ben then, not much older either.

On hot summer mornings I would get up early, before it got too hot, to milk Josephine, because although Mother really enjoyed the idea of fresh, non-pasteurized milk from our very own cow, after the first few milkings she lost her enthusiasm for that part of the process. So the milking of Josephine was added to the rest of my daily chores, which included twice daily feedings and weekly pen mucking of the chickens, turkeys, ducks, pigs, all installed on Barton’s Berry Farm in the past few months as a result of some whim or another of my Mother’s.  And all were passed on to me to care for once the novelty wore off for her.

After the chores were done, I would get myself some cereal or cinnamon toast then head off to my fort with a book.  There, with a cushion of leaves in a cavern I had carved out of the peat and moss I would get lost in dreams and possibilities, adventures and betrayals, love and it’s inevitable flipside of madness as sunshine leaked through the leafy canopy and pooled, mottled with shadows on the pages and all around me.

Ben liked to read too, science fiction and epic books like the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, or anything by Hemingway.  And he collected guitar magazines.  He had tons of Guitar Player magazines.  Mother borrowed one and said she wanted to learn how to play guitar when she got back from the honeymoon.  She asked Ben if he’d teach her and he more grunted than replied.  It seemed funny to me that when Ben and me were alone together we could talk and talk about things and he was funny and charming, and then as soon as Mother would come into the room, he’d clam up tight and found his own feet a lot more interesting than her face.  When he did look up I thought he looked more like he was trying not to laugh than anything, as he shuffled his feet and chewed on the inside of his face where the lower cheek and bottom lip met.

You know, Ben, you could make some extra money teachin’ the kids around River’s End guitar in that old shed of yours out in the back!  I bet you could charge twenty dollars a lesson!  And you could get them to pay you in cash so you wouldn’t have to claim it on your income tax…

            Ben was at the kitchen table a few days ago when she came up with that one.  He almost spat out his chicken pot pie.  No one’s gonna drive all the way out here for guitar lessons!  Besides, I got enough to do with the farm to be thinkin’ about somethin’ like that.  He took a long drink of his water and then a bite of mashed potatoes and broccoli, putting a great deal of concentration into his chewing.

Well I think they’d come, especially those kids from your old high school…they all looked up to you so much!  Mother sat down across from Ben and next to me, her plate hitting the table about the same time as her rear end hit her chair seat.  She was wearing a low-slung peasant blouse and push-up bra over a pair of white cotton Capri pants and white Keds, her version of farm-wear.  As she leaned forward elaborately to pick up the salt, putting her best faces forward, I couldn’t help but notice Ben’s face redden and his half-eaten plate become even more interesting than his shoes had ever been.

Abe had gone overnight to a berry grower’s convention in Victoria.  I couldn’t believe they had such a thing, but he told me that was where he would be ordering next year’s new crop.  He liked to rotate the crops, and bring in new plants every couple of years to discourage pests from figuring out ahead of time where they would be feeding on the next year.

It was the first time the three of us had been alone in the house.  Mother had made a big deal of saying goodbye to Abe, kissing him on the front porch longer than Ben and me were comfortable with as we stood by in the living room to wave goodbye from the window. But as Abe’s truck turned from the driveway onto the road, Mother took a deep breath, smiling to herself as she exhaled and walked into the kitchen to pour her self a cup of coffee.  Adding some brandy from Abe’s liquor cabinet she announced to no one in particular, I’m going back to bed.

When she reappeared just before lunchtime, she was fully made up, hair curled and sprayed and happier than I’d seen her in months.  I was about to make myself a peanut butter sandwich when she breezed into the kitchen.  I’ve got a great idea!  Why don’t we put together a picnic for the three of us and drive to the beach for lunch?

I looked up at her, incredulous, untrusting.  Who are you and what have you done with my mother?

She ignored me as she went about taking out sandwich meats and cheese from the refrigerator.  Why don’t you run and tell Ben to come in for a minute?

No matter how many times she let me down, I always held out hope that one day my mother would be like other people’s mothers.  She would love me and take me to the mall for girl’s days out, or sign me up for Brownies and put herself up as a den mother!  As I ran out the kitchen door I couldn’t help but feel that maybe this was a turning point.  Now that Mother was married to Mr. Barton, she might have enough happiness in her life, maybe so much that she could share some of it with me.

Ben was head-first in his engine again when I got to his truck, it’s red and rusty hood yawning wide beside the garage.  He lifted his eyes toward me as I bounded to a stop and climbed up on the running board to get closer to his height.

Mother wants to take us on a picnic!  By the ocean!  She’s making sandwiches right now!

I was hanging by the chrome door handle, my voice rasped with excitement, my feet shifting one to another, bare toes pushing on bare toes as I waited for Ben’s reaction.

He smiled that Ben smile at me, no worse for the oil smudges on his cheek and brow.  Sorry Bilbo, I got work to do.  Gotta get this truck tuned up so I can get to the gig on Saturday night.  He stuck his head back in the pistons and hoses leaving me stuck for words.  I hadn’t seen that coming.  As much as I wanted to go to the beach, the idea of a picnic with just my mother and me was not quite as appealing as the idea of Ben joining us, bringing his guitar to play on some grounded log.

C’mon Ben!  You can do this later.  It won’t be any fun if you don’t come!

He rubbed his hands on a cloth that was rumpled up on the battery as he slowly drew himself up and away from the truck, laughing at me as I fell to my knees on the scrub grass and clasped my hands toward him in prayer.

Tell you what.  If you and your mother (Ben refused to call her Mother even after she was married to his Dad) can wait for an hour or so, I’ll get the oil changed, have a shower and give the truck a test drive out to the beach, O.K?

I jumped up and almost knocked him over with a hug, then ran back into the house to tell my mother.

Ben’s gonna come!  Ben’s gonna come!  I relayed Ben’s plan to my mother who looked up at the kitchen clock and said, Well that gives me time to make some cookies for us!  Do you want to help me?

Now I was sure once again that aliens had had their way with my mother, but I wasn’t going to do anything to jeopardize this new-found interest in being with me.  Sure!

What kind should we make?

                        Oatmeal raisin?  She started rifling through the baking supply drawer and pulled out a bag of Hershey’s chocolate chips.

            Chocolate Chip?

Chocolate chip cookies won the day and she let me measure, sift and stir and then she even let me crack the eggs!  She hummed along to the radio, patiently showing me how to measure the butter, then the sugar.  This was the first time we had ever cooked together and yet she made it seem like this was a daily event.

I was enjoying every minute of it.  I loved cracking the eggs and letting the whites drip and pool, holding the electric beater so that it’s paddles clanked furiously against the metal bowl, spinning ingredients into the oven to bake, the aroma pulling Ben into the house like a willful genie. Mother slapped his grease-stained hands playfully as they made away with a cookie fresh from the oven on his way to the shower. Then she gave me one once he’d gone, winking at me, Sshhh! We’ll keep it between us girls!

Ben’s truck coughed a little now and then on the highway but by the time we turned off onto Rathtrevor Road it was running smooth as can be.  I had heard of Rathtrevor Beach at school but this was the first time I’d been there.  It was beautiful!   Long strips of sand as far as I could see, fingers of water crossing in ripples and glimmers harboured sand-spitting clam-holes.  Golden-white grasses surrounding ocean tossed sun bleached logs bade us picnickers welcome and mother set out the food on an old tablecloth as Ben took the Frisbee and guitar out of the back of the truck.

I kicked off my sandals and ran to the water’s edge, my feet celebrating in the sand and salt water.  The beach was so flat you could walk for miles it seemed to me then, and still never be up to your waist in water.  I looked back to wave at Mother and Ben, who were sitting on a blanket by a huge log, every few minutes, in between scooping up sand dollars and poking at starfish.  A sturdy stick served to unearth baby clams, and sometimes huge horse clams were surprised, their long wrinkled necks flopping out like nothing I wanted to think about!

We ate while we watched the tide tug at the coastline, sea gulls, ravens vying for shallow prey, a soaking wet black lab grinning madly in full fleet, with what seemed like half a log sticking heavy out of his dripping mouth.  Ben picked at his guitar in between bites of his tuna fish sandwich, his notes dispersing quickly in the open air and sea breeze.  He and Mother shared a bottle of her homemade dandelion wine out of paper cups and I was happy because it seemed like finally they were getting along and we would be a family after all.

They were giggling about something when I came back with a bucket full of shells and pinecones my mother had sent me to get for her.  I asked them what was so funny and they said it was the wine.  Then they giggled again.  I could see the bottle was empty and I knew Mother’s homemade wine could clean pitch off a window, so I was pretty sure it had done a bang up job on their brains. Mother was leaning back on the driftwood log and Ben was lying on his back with his guitar across his belly, his head resting by her hip, strumming distractedly.

I was getting tired, the sky was thickening and as much as I wanted our family to be close someday, this kind of closeness wasn’t what I had been picturing.

When are we goin’ home?

            Oh honey, we’re gonna just stay here a bit, let our stomachs settle…

Ben’s eyes were closed against the afternoon sky but there was half a smile on his face as he handed me the Frisbee.  Here Bilbo…go practice throwing this on the field over there and I’ll be over in awhile…His voice trailed off as I took the Frisbee, and sliding his guitar to the side he turned away and started to snore.

            Go on, do like Ben says!  My mother tried to sound crisp but the wine was setting up roadblocks on her lazy tongue.

Sometimes realization hits you like a brick, slap upside of your head and it hits so hard, so fast you’re spared the pain of it.  Then there are those times that realization drips and seeps it’s way into your soul, tasteless, like a poison, numbing you, causing you to grimace, to smile and so smile I did as I headed out to the field to play Frisbee with myself.

The ride home was cold and quiet. I shivered. There was a weight in the air of the truck cab that was so dense I sensed one day it might crush us.  Mother and Ben sat beside each other, staring straight ahead at the road and I leaned away into the locked door to be safe from them.  Under the waking stars flickering in the bruised blue evening sky through the truck’s cracked windshield I weighed the situation carefully and being so very tired of it all, I chose to close my eyes.