The Dancehall Years Page 12
In the middle of the night, Flora goes downstairs and writes herself a note. The Tuesday Alex, 10 am. By morning, she’s forgotten her wishful-thinking, hears steps downstairs, thinks she’s at home and Lyndon’s on his way out to do chores but, no, he’s in the bed beside her. When she goes down again, she thinks it must have been Percy because the writing on the note is backhand, same as hers. He probably didn’t want to wake her. Tuesday, the morning Alex. Which means he’s changed his mind and will pick Eleanor up and put her on the boat. He must have realized it’s only fair that she have her sister. His wife has her sisters. Once Eleanor’s there, they’ll have the place sorted in no time. Candied violets in their salads at lunchtime. Feet up, rest on their laurels. They deserve it. If it’s too hot upstairs in the summer, they’ll make a bedroom for Eleanor in the basement. There’s a lot to be said for basements; you feel tucked into the earth and cool. When Tuesday comes and Flora makes her way to the wharf, she’s thrilled to see Eleanor coming down the gangplank on the captain’s arm, but when her sister lifts her chin, it’s not Eleanor at all. It’s a woman with marcelled red hair she’s never seen before in her life.
21.
When Isabelle hears her name called across the lobby, her face blanks out as if recognizing the name of someone she knows but can’t remember from where. A squat woman with gold-rimmed teeth, freckles and neatly waved red hair insists her way over to the desk, a crooked pencil line stitching the contours of her non-existent eyebrows as if with black thread. Isabelle Gallagher, says the lip stick on her teeth. You’re Isabelle. I’m not Pinocchio, thinks Isabelle, arch as always under pressure. She’s taken a second job to turn extra money, has a room at the back of the hotel, is working double shifts and avoiding everyone. She’s barely even been able to nod at Frances. Who else would have told Ada where she was? When something’s supposed to be funny these days, she stretches her neck back and laughs her face down in a bray. Checking the day’s guest list, she blanches when she reads the name Mrs. Martha Long, remembering Jack Long telling her his mother comes to the Bowen Inn every year. Thumbing the tiny diamond on her silver ring around to her palm as if locking a diary, she pulls a clean smile out of her face like fresh Kleenex. Mrs. Long, your usual room is taken, I’m afraid. The person is staying over so we’ve upgraded you to a deluxe cottage. They’re getting it ready now.
O God, is he back? He can’t be back. He’d be with her. He’s got to still be overseas, he has to be. Mrs. Martha Long takes her by the hands. I’m pleased to meet you, Isabelle. Jack’s told me all about you. He told me he would marry you if it was the last thing he ever did. Now I know he didn’t give you that ring before he left, so he must have sent it to you from over there? So my son’s alive.
Sure hope so, Isabelle says stalling for time. She parks Jack’s mother by the hostess station, the woman’s legs so short her feet don’t meet the ground although she’s wearing built-up pumps. A narrow green carpet stretches the length of the large sunny dining room famous for the tomatoes Mr. Yoshito had grown in the bay windows, a trademark of the hotel: guests could choose their own, and the waitress would take them back to the kitchen to be sliced and presented. Outside, the striped awnings quiver in the breeze; sweet honeysuckle and the smell of sea salt strike high and low notes through the open windows. Isabelle’d tried to keep up the tomato tradition, but the plants came up all legs. The cucumbers she put in as a replacement turned bitter—the south window exposure may be too hot—but she’s done well with Shinsuke’s gorgeous purple bougainvillea in the lobby. Hibiscus and orchids thrive in the upstairs glassed-in balconies. Mr. McConnecky doesn’t like to say because his employee verges on panic if the plants are threatened, but he isn’t sure the best possible use of his desk clerk’s time is running around adjusting venetian blinds. Testing the moss for moisture gives Isabelle an excuse to turn her back on this brash woman who’s arrived to demand well, what?
Where’s your hairnet, Jeanette? Isabelle asks the waitress at the end of the inspection line-up. In my pocket. What’s it doing in your pocket? Jeanette would say if she were asked—she’s not—that Isabelle Gallagher is impossible to work for, the way she goes berserk if there’s a melted piece of ice in the dish presenting the shrimp appetizer. Passing the bench on her way to the Ladies, Jeanette comes face to face with Mrs. Long, a large short toad of a woman who’s wearing, could it be a red wig, and is parked smugly on the reception bench. That hostess over there is going to be my daughter-in-law, she says.
Is that so? says Jeanette. My alarm clock didn’t go off again, and now she’s given me the worst station in the dining room, can you believe it? Behind the ferns where all the old ladies who don’t tip sit. Frances is at the hotel collecting her paycheque when Jeanette comes into the lobby; she takes her chin between her thumb and finger and plants a lingering kiss on her friend’s forehead. Every time she bends a half grapefruit in her palm, she thinks about what it would be like to make love to this woman.
They’ll tip you, she says. Nobody could resist tipping you.
Oh yes they could and they will.
At the hostess stand, Isabelle spills a few drops of water on an orchid leaf by mistake, wipes it carefully with a napkin. Down the hall, even though she’s been avoiding her, when she sees Frances bestow an intimate kiss on Jeanette’s forehead, she can hardly breathe for realizing. Frances’s frightened look not only acknowledges that she knows Isabelle’s seen and understood, but also sends a message that she knows her friend will have concluded she’s the only person who could have told Ada about Blaine. Frances lobs back a look that says I had to tell her. Ada was desperate. Isabelle returns the shot. Now that I see what’s between you and Jeanette, if you even think of telling anyone else about my pregnancy, one word from me to your boss at the community centre in town and you’ll be fired. Up here as well. Frances returns with yes, but if you expose my secret, I have a card to play that will ruin your life. Mrs. Long looks back and forth between the two of them as if watching a tennis match.
I’ll have my lunch now, she says to Isabelle. At that table over there.
It’s a choice one, in a window corner. Once she’s sitting down, Mrs. Long takes her hostess’s hand as if she’s behind a counter about to fit her for gloves and turns the ring back to the front. That belongs over there, she says.
Up Narrows Inlet, Takumi is trying to thrash a platform into place so he can dry meat; the small fire he’s made to speed the process flares and has to be banked down. The food needs to be dried, not cooked. It’s the first day with no rain he’s had in weeks but the clouds are piling up, and the far banks have misted over. His conical bark hat drips around the edge. If only he could get dry. One warm week to bake the damp out of everything. The wettest August he can remember. Is that mould coating the last few blackberries or frost? The weather teases him with an occasional slit of blue. Then the overcast flattens, and the clouds seal off. It couldn’t pour any harder. Then it does. Then another downpour.
He’s made it through the winter by rebuilding the old logging cookhouse, laying flat pieces of driftwood for the roof. Only lit the fire in the battered oil drum on foggy days so the smoke would blend with the mist. Managed an extra bit of light by building a traditional two-tier shingled overhang. Fishing before dawn, it’s unlikely any boats will be coming through the narrows, but even so, there’s something about bringing in yet another left-eyed flounder and turning it to its blind side that appalls him. Worse, when he casts his line again, the last of the wire hooks he fashioned from what was left of a coil he found falls off. Gutting the rockfish cuts his hands to shreds.
Getting the fire going at least cheers him into an idea for dealing with the canoe when the maple and alder leaves fall. He’s exhausted from carrying the boat down the hill to fish and then back up to hide. He attaches a line of knotted kelp rope to a pulley from the camp, then to the canoe as a painter to secure the boat; that way, he can reel in the canoe as the tide comes in. Why didn’t he think of this in his lif
eguarding days?
Still so lonely and angry in the fitful night, he expects the Tin Pan Alley crowd to routinely file in as soon as he’s closed his eyes and keep up their usual hour of drumming fingers before they let him sleep. Let it be the wind tonight, not the ocean spirits he’s continually trying to placate. He’s infused enough kelp to make dashi and more dashi, but can’t bear the thought of another bowl of seaweed soup. If only he had a dog who could nail an occasional hare. Return with it splayed in his mouth. Tonight, it’s the faint hum of an unseen presence in a language he still doesn’t understand; when he’s learned enough, will he be allowed to sleep well for once? Down on the beach at dawn, he nicks off two-inch lengths of kelp stem and stuffs them with small lengths of cedar sticks. Plugs the ends of the kelp with stones and buries them in the ashes of the fire, hoping the tubes will inhibit any burning but allow the wood to become soft enough to bend into fish hooks. Another trick he’d been made to rehearse years ago.
The next day, he carves a series of small molds in a planked log, lays the curved warm pliable sticks in them like in vitro specimens. Once they’re cool, he shaves a few barbs of grouse bone with the knife Miss Fenn gave him, lashes them to the hooks with spruce root, carries the line carefully to the canoe, holding it at either end like a necklace. Stretching a thread of his semen far enough that it would spin before it broke, she smiled and cut it with her finger like a spider web.
She’ll be back with her family now; his mother was right, Isabelle would never know what it was like to feel your people were unseen and taken for granted. She’s never had to feel that her every move has to be guarded. Knew enough to say that it was dangerous for him to be at Killarney but not enough to make sure she wasn’t being followed. When he’s tired, and he’s very tired, it seems the rain even obliterates their precious traces back at the lake camp where he’d pulled out of her so fast it felt like her skin ripped with him. Listen to the spirits in the rocks and branches and sea, son. They’re better company.
A few reconstituted meadow mushrooms from last spring for breakfast. Out in the canoe, he finds the hooks are too light and float uselessly back to the surface. Clouds drift around the ridge as if steaming up from underground. A huge jellyfish hovers like a poached egg in the water over by the bluff. When he hears a boat coming through the narrows, he pulleys up the canoe, hides it and climbs back to his winter lair. The next day, he ties a small rock into his line as a sinker, but it keeps slipping out. Sitting on a log, discouraged, he finds himself tracing a small whorl with his finger, oh that, carves a short length of the denser gnarl; after it cools overnight in its kelp tube, the new hook sinks and stays.
That evening, Isabelle takes the road northeast from the Girls’ Dorm up past the fallen-in greenhouse. Weeds have taken over Shinsuke’s beautiful raised beds. No one’s picked the plums. She turns onto the trail around the back of Killarney Lake, hacking branches as she goes. Throwing down pieces of wood to bridge the boggy areas, finally, behind the forest of stripped trunks as if staked in the water when they dammed the lake, she manages to stamp her way through the overgrowth into the small clearing where Takumi’s tent is collapsed on the ground covered with old leaves and pine cones. She straightens the poles, smashes the tent pegs in with a rock. Inside, she finds a mildewed shirt that she holds to her cheek like a pillow. Our baby died, my love, I’m so sorry, she whispers. Wherever he is, she knows his days and nights are so dank and dark they close in before they even start. If only he’s found shelter; if only he’s alive. When they’d dragged him off, she’d staggered back along the trail throwing up. Maybe if she spends some time here where he was so wretched and unravels her own moves back to the first stitch she dropped, catches up the threads back there and starts again, she might help him in some way she doesn’t understand now.
22.
Only half as many kids as expected show up for the Killarney Lake hike. Glad you’re here, son, Dr. Stan says to Leo, staring at Billy and his henchmen astride their two-wheelers beside the First Aid Station. Leo chucks his bike against the fence like the rind of something he doesn’t need. One look at Leo’s stricken face and Dr. Stan says maybe the lad could help him batten down the hatches while they wait for the other kids. Battening down the hatches is closing the shutters, watering the hanging moss baskets until the water drips out the bottoms.
Once they start hiking, the minute they even think they might hear the enemy coming, they should fling themselves flat into the ditch at the side of the trail. Something’s scratching on a tree. Is that Jerry? No, it’s a squirrel. Jerry hasn’t come up behind them yet, but he might be around the next bend. Billy and the other boys whip by on their bikes so fast you don’t even know they were there.
At Killarney Lake green lily pads lap over each other like giant artichoke sepals; spearmint grows along the shores beside the dam. Beetles bend their legs on the rocks and quiver their delicate antennae. A band of silver streaks across the lake underlining the penciled dead trees at the other end. Yellow-balled lilies cup on their shocked stems. If you reach out your hand, a chickadee with stiff knees and feet like black wire might hop on and settle its plump feathered body into your palm. When the wind comes in from the west, the stronger laps on the distant shore sound like someone running softly. The cement dam stretches from shore to shore holding back the lake the coho no longer inhabit.
When Billy stands astride his bike against the edge of the lake, his shadow looks like an elongated insect with wheels. A butterfly noiselessly claps its wings together; crates of glistening dark bottles built in glass rounds like stacked translucent coins cool in the lake. No-see-ums churn off each other several inches before they collide. Dr. Stan wipes each bottle on his sleeve, rolls the glistening spine between his palms and tosses it to a drinker. Gwen raises her bottle to her mouth like a trumpet as Dr. Stan starts to tell them about the people who used to camp at the other end of the lake before it was dammed. There was a summer they were so feverish they lay moaning on bulrush mats while crows dropped clam shells to break on the rocks. Up the Sound and down a jagged inlet, some inland people discovered something soft and tender called salmon and that salmon passed through the bodies of bears and fertilized the trees that protected the streambeds. The sick people at the lake sent their spirits up through a channel they could only navigate when the tide was high. A bank sloped to a gentle landing where the chief of the inlet people asked some of the children on the beach if they’d mind stepping into the water for a few minutes. The children began to swim and play in the shallows until slowly, very slowly, they began to turn into salmon. The inlet people caught them and ate them, but every… single… solitary… bone had to be put back in the water until the bones formed again as children. But one day, one of the inland people kept back a single bone, and when the children came out of the water, one of them was missing a nose.
Suddenly, Dr. Stan sits up as if hearkening to a sound none of them can hear. He leaps up with the same alarmed look he had when Jeanette came up the stairs of the First Aid Station. Hold the fort, Billy, he says. I’ll be right back. No one is allowed out on the dam. They all know the rule, but Billy heads straight for the barrier. Time’s up Saturday, he hisses to Gwen before he steps onto the cement border. When he jumps the gap in the cement designed to drain excess water if the lake’s high in the spring, a large piece cracks off and rolls into the streambed. Far more water than before pours through the enlarged opening now too large for him to jump back. His face drains as if he’s on the ledge of a tall building and wild air blows beneath him. No trail on the other side of the lake where the dam wall ends. Leo’s down at the lake edge; when he sees Billy silently beseeching him not to tell how scared he is, it’s like an age gap between brothers that seems large when they’re young diminishing as they get older.
Leo runs up through the meadow to alert Dr. Stan, but stays out of sight when he sees him reach into a hollow stump for a dark liquor bottle and stuff it in his knapsack. Dr. Stan takes a booklet from his
inside shirt pocket, hunkers down and lights it with a match. When he hears shouts back at the lake, he stomps the half-burned pages and smothers the flames with gravel. Once he’s gone, Leo rakes the half-burned army ID papers from the smoldering heap, waits for them to cool and opens the booklet to see a photograph of Dr. Stanley, but the name underneath reads Murray Alderson.
Isabelle knows she’s late for work; she hardly slept at the lake and comes down the road past the lawn bowling green to the hotel to find Mrs. Long sitting on her own stool behind the desk filing reservation cards. Pinch-hitting until you got here, she says proudly. Oh, and I’ve taken care of the upstairs watering, dear.
That night in the attic, Leo sits on Gwen’s cot and shines his flashlight on the half-burned pages. Dr. Stan must be a spy, he says. They change their names. He knows all about Jerry because he is Jerry.
I don’t think so, says Gwen.
The tin around the chimney flashes. Do heaven and hell turn with the Earth so heaven can stay above people’s heads? Or what? The silence shifts, and Lily cries out from her bed.
Go back to sleep, Gwen says. It’s only the dance.
Downstairs the grown-ups are so quiet, you can tell their dad wants to tell Mother something but is holding back because she goes by the saying if you can’t say something nice about somebody, don’t say anything at all, which is what the Wise Old Owl said to Thumper. Leaning his knees together, he slants his long legs one way then the other, trying to get them under the table. If Ada wants to know what he’s thinking, all right he’ll say it; there’s something about this Dr. Stan character that doesn’t quite meet the eye. Why would a bona fide doctor pick up bits of leftover food from the sink with a spoon, the way he did the night he stayed to supper? No real doctor would be so squeamish.
He’s a first aid attendant, says their mother. We just call him a doctor. A first aid attendant who’s turned up and helped out every single solitary mother whose children have earaches and are up here on their own, she might add.