The Dancehall Years Page 26

  That’s the most astonishing news I’ve ever heard, says Isabelle. I tried to get up to see her once, but the line-up at the border was too long and I gave up. Tell me about your girls.

  My girls are the cat’s meow.

  Are they? And how are you?

  I’m getting there.

  When the parade starts up, and the elephants pass the intersection, the thick leather of their twitching skin crisscrosses with lines. Glittery chains drape their foreheads, and their ears are like wide floppy sleeves. They keep picking up their feet and replacing them. I don’t know why they didn’t spray the streets with the fire hose, Isabelle says. It’s good to see you, Gwen.

  It’s good to see you too.

  At Birch Bay, the tide flats stretch to the water’s edge; wide striations of blown sand banded with pale pink and dusty blue reflect in the tidal pools. Dungeness crabs bracket their way along the sea floor. The local road passes in front of their weather-beaten board-and-bat-ten store leached to pale grey by the salt wind. Their house, Bide-a-Wile, is joined to the store by a wooden boardwalk. When people visit, they park their cars on the hosts’ front lawns, knock on car fenders to announce their arrival. Both the store and the house are clean and decrepit with the same worn scraped look. A few ancient looking tins of sardines and canned milk that look as if they’re long past their best before dates line the store shelves.

  Gwen’s offered a milkshake from a machine so old-fashioned it could have been recycled from the tearoom. She drinks it sitting on one of the swivel stools. A series of what look like varnished cupboard handles lie on the Arborite counter. Jack makes them for people to take out on the tide flats to measure their crabs, Isabelle says. Gwen picks one up, holds it to an invisible cupboard, puts it back down.

  The tide’s retreated so far that Jack is a distant speck on the horizon. Even at this distance, you can see he has a life of his own out there. He comes slowly up from the beach in hip waders and an old suede jacket so soft and patched it’s more mend than fabric. Looks carefully both ways before he crosses the street.

  Morning, Jack, says a passerby. See you’ve been crabbing. Catch anything?

  Five, actually. We’ll all eat today. He dumps the contents of his galvanized buckets into a tub of salt water on the café floor. A claw surfaces and grabs the stick. His forehead is tight as if something behind him is trying to pull back his head. He sits on a stool, reaches over and puts his hand on his wife’s waist. His hair is thin and grey red.

  This is Gwen, Jack. I’ve told you about Gwen.

  He looks at his niece blankly. His face is frightened, as if he doesn’t want anyone to know how high the stakes are. One minute he’s dignified and fine; the next it’s taking everything he has to remember he’s meant to shake hands. He reaches out but misses and, to his own amazement, finds himself at the end of one of the rows of shelves. It seems someone’s stolen some of the ham tins. Who would have walked off with them? They’re all the rations we have, Isabelle.

  When he looks at his wife in despair, she puts down the coffeepot and starts toward him, but when he sees her coming, he races down between the next two rows, and she returns to the counter. Then he’s back peering at them as if he’d never run away in the first place. Why are they looking at him like that?

  He starts back to the beach. Once out the door, it’s as if he’s being disassembled and reassembled by a force beyond his control. He looks wildly around the unweeded front yard as if wondering whether he can get out, but when he glances back and sees Isabelle through the window, his face relaxes as if no time has passed because the last time he was alive was when he saw her.

  He crosses the street, glancing back as if being chased, runs out to the flats again. He’s never still, says Isabelle. He’d be lost without the tide flats. If you go out with him in the morning, Gwen, crabbing I mean… She sits on the customer side of the counter, slipping specials inserts into the menus as she talks. Be patient, she says.

  I see it now, Gwen says. It isn’t right the family shunned Uncle Jack and we didn’t see you all those years. Was it the war did this to him? Isabelle looks at her, as if allowing her to surmise the wrong reason she’s been out of touch with the family while she makes up her mind about trusting her.

  You have to understand, Gwen. He was in prison camp in Japan in the war. His head was injured. He has brain damage. Know the way we have various trains of thought and we choose which one to communicate? For Jack, the choosing part of his mind is destroyed; the wrong wires have been connected up, so he tells you contradicting things one after the other.

  How do you manage all this, Auntie?

  I’m all right. I’m used to it.

  The next morning dawns bright and clear; the shore is deserted, and the tide flats seem a country unto themselves. Tiny coils of wet sand pass through the bodies of periwinkles dotting the beach. Small sea streams define new areas at the turn of each tide. Isabelle sits in a worn lazy-boy chair by the café window, smoking and drinking coffee. The water is shallow a long way out, the tide flats much older than Rocky or even the dark heaps on Sandy. The sky is long and pale. When Gwen arrives on the long stretch, Jack doesn’t recognize her. Hi, he says shame-facedly as if he should remember who she is but can’t. Lunges after a crab scurrying from the tall grasses to colder water. A few people trail burlap bags in the early dawn, the odd claw pricking through. He hands out varnished handles as if they’re batons at the start of a relay race.

  You’ll be okay if you have one of these, he says. He comes over to check Gwen’s catch. It’s a large male, but its shell is soft. It has to go back, he says. Sorry.

  The further away they get from the boardwalk, the less he seems to realize she’s with him. If they’d been children and she’d left, he’d instantly have forgotten her existence. He hands her a measuring stick as if he has no idea he’d given her one ten minutes before. Dragging the grass slowly with forked sticks, they walk for an hour and catch nothing. He doesn’t seem to be aware of how far they’ve walked, or that her stick keeps getting caught in the grass. All that matters is that they keep going. When she scoops, the crab’s claws frantically scrape the sides. Then Jack’s behind her backing her stick with his, tossing the crab and catching it with the flat of his own. He takes a measuring handle from his pocket.

  This one looks pretty good. Not quite. Back it goes.

  This one, Jack. This one’s big enough. She reaches for it.

  No. It’s a female.

  She’s beginning to get seaweed burns across her shins. Maybe she should go back and get some socks she says, but he doesn’t respond. He won’t stop, no matter what, until he has what’s going to let them survive for a day. Every day would be the same for him. If he looked back and said you look tired, it wouldn’t be with the follow-up logic that she should go back. If he was out in the bush with someone and wanted to be alone, he would walk away. If the person made it back to the parked vehicle and didn’t have enough gas to get to town, he wouldn’t care. Of course they can’t leave. It would be dangerous.

  Do you ever go crabbing with him, she asks Isabelle, as the two of them sit outside the Bide-a-Wile breaking off the ends of green beans.

  No, he likes to go alone. He feels he has to provide.

  As if on cue, he walks up to them, standing stock-still on over-alert. Hyper-vigilant as always. Later, when Isabelle needs help lifting the steamer, she hands him a ceramic onion but doesn’t say anything. Maybe it’s good for his mind to figure out what she needs, or maybe she’s tired of explaining. Maybe he likes the game. He stands there like a blind person waiting to be noticed so someone will let him know in which direction to move. After he puts the pot on the stove, he hands the onion back to her and she puts it in a bowl.

  After supper, they make a fire on the beach. Every fire’s a good fire, he says, feeding it pieces of alder. When he walks over to his rowboat to go check his nets, Isabelle’s forehead seems attached to his by a string. When he pulls away, it jerks hers as
well.

  Auntie, are you okay?

  I’m just feeling my age, Gwen.

  You’re not old, Auntie.

  I know, but it all passes so quickly. Everything goes along for a while and then something you knew was going to happen finally happens. Your coming here I mean. I knew you’d come one day. You look sad. What about your husband? Where is he?

  Back in San Francisco, she says. I got dumped actually.

  Do you feel like talking about it?

  Not now. Maybe later.

  (Maybe, just maybe, Dr. Merrick said once, standing up to show her out. It wasn’t all your fault.)

  For a moment, the fire seems to be made of discarded shoes. She leans over and kisses Gwen on the cheek, leaves a lipstick mark that she blends with her thumb. I’d better kiss the other side as well. Even things up. The light from the Cherry Point oil refinery blinks on and off.

  I want my girls to meet you.

  I want to meet them. Where are you living now?

  Mainly at Scarborough. Did you know that Grandma Flora left her half of Scarborough to Lily? I remember it used to be the Yoshitos’. Your friends, right? Whatever happened to them? I remember they moved.

  They were evacuated, Gwen. With everyone else. Sent to the interior to camps they couldn’t leave.

  I didn’t know that.

  How could you not know that? It was all over the papers.

  I was a child. They kept grown-up things from children in those days. We didn’t have it at school either. I remember mother saying they’d gone to another camp. I thought maybe it was a camp at Sechelt. It was all British and American history and literature at high school and university. A brief look, one course in First Nations history, and well, then I married the teacher. After that, I was so caught up in the politics down in the States I didn’t… I’m embarrassed.

  You should be, says Isabelle. It’s a shocking gap.

  Strange how Isabelle can say that without humiliating her. Even after all this time and separation, she knows her aunt loves her.

  I tried to get your father to help me buy the Scarborough house from the Yoshitos so I could sell it back to them after the war, Isabelle says. Instead he bought it for himself and his parents. War is war, he said. Property gets appropriated.

  He did? So the spoils of war were involved? Gwen’s quiet for a few minutes, poking the fire. No wonder it feels sad over there, she says. Nothing ever goes right. Does Lily know?

  I assume so, says Isabelle. The Yoshitos might come back and have nowhere to go. That’s why I keep the cottage set up as a beacon for them. If they came back and saw other people in their own house, they might come looking for me at the cottage. Maybe they’d look through the window and see their things. They know where the key’s hidden.

  If they did come back, perhaps we could sort something about Scarborough, Gwen says.

  I don’t know. Let’s go to bed, says Isabelle. It’s been quite a day.

  The next day, Isabelle tells Gwen that she’s been going through some of her papers. She doesn’t know what to keep. What to burn. They get down boxes of file folders, spend hours writing dates and names on the backs of old photographs. She holds up a bunch of letters tied with ribbon. I’d like you to have a look at these, Gwen. So someone in the family knows the history. I only got this first letter from Jack. The rest he managed to keep folded in his hatband all the way through his time in prison camp. The reason I don’t see Ada and Percy, Isabelle says, isn’t to do with Jack. It’s because I can’t forgive your father.

  Gwen remembers the forced smiles on her parents’ faces as they came back into the dining room that long-ago Christmas night. Then Isabelle herself in the winter garden at Scarborough, eyes blank and unblinking as if the dearest part of her soul had been obliterated.

  49.

  Returning from Birch Bay, Gwen drives straight to her parents’ house. Percy turns his book face down on the arm of his chair. He likes reading too. How’s tricks? he says.

  Not bad, Father. It’s going to be sad at the farm for a long time though. She sits on the piano bench. We miss Derek.

  We miss him too.

  I’ve been spending time at the cottage, she says. To get away. And do a little writing.

  Her mother comes in from the kitchen looking distant and angry, sits down opposite her daughter. You went to the cottage when I told you not to, Gwen? I’ll sell it. I really will.

  Gwen looks up. Auntie said it was all right for me to be there.

  Isabelle? She’s supposed to ask me. We don’t let other people go over without asking the others.

  I’m not other people. I’m your daughter. I went to see her. We might as well get straight to it. She explained about Scarborough being stolen property.

  Her mother looks frightened. It is not stolen property, she says. Dad went through all the procedures, paid what was asked. What’s she doing telling you that?

  Which was next to nothing, right, Dad? says Gwen. Does anybody know what happened to the Yoshitos? I’m trying to understand more.

  Nobody thought any of those people would come back, Isabelle, I mean Gwen, says Ada.

  Why wouldn’t they come back? Those were their houses, all those years of work. Nobody had gardens that compared to the hotel gardens, I remember people saying that.

  It was Indian fishing territory before the Yoshitos came along, Percy says slowly.

  That’s a dodge, Dad. It’s not part of any land claim as far as I know.

  It could be though.

  There wasn’t a midden anyone had left there. There wasn’t years of work.

  Bad things happen in war, he says.

  There wasn’t one proven case of a Japanese Canadian being accused of spying.

  That’s because they were all in the Interior, says Percy. As I said, you have no idea what it was like at the time, Gwen. All this bleeding-heart liberal hindsight.

  Nobody’s been able to settle there or make things go right. Derek’s suicide seems like part of it. Maybe the place isn’t working because it’s not ours.

  Of course it’s ours, says Ada. People have to make the best of things and carry on.

  Well, of course they do, but weren’t those people citizens, some of whom tried to volunteer and weren’t considered?

  Ada stands up briskly as if seeing her out. It’s pie in the sky, Gwen. It’s too long ago to think anything different can be done. Most of those people have probably cut their losses and moved on the way you should.

  I don’t know about that. It seems like a pretty complicated situation to me.

  Later, back on the island, Gwen sits on the rock under the treehouse on Miss Fenn’s Rocky, watching small waves lap pits that were once bubbles in a volcano. Thinking, of all things, about what the men she knows would be like in a war. Derek would be stoic. Leo? Leo couldn’t go. He’d have a medical excuse. Uncle Jack? He’d be in there helping everybody. At least the old Jack who wrote these letters would. Eugene would be capable and brave.

  50.

  October, 1975

  A memorial was the last thing any of them thought they were preparing the dancehall for. Gwen and Lily set chairs in front of the stage, and Annabelle silently positions her storybook and Barbie dolls like flowerpots down the back stairs. The eyes of the china one that open and shut are pressed closed.

  Quite a few come over from Jericho. People shake hands and exchange hugs. Someone tells about the time Derek passed along the twenty-dollar bill that did the rounds of the cove all winter when he was the one who needed it most. The night he’d sat up with someone who was afraid to go to sleep after group.

  Frances and Jeanette stand at the back, older now of course. The other week, Derek had posted a snapshot on the fridge door of the two of them holding pumpkin pies they’d made in the crooks of their arms. Frances is dressed in a flowing tunic. When she comes to the front to speak, she takes off her glasses and polishes them on her hem. Tells the gathering how Derek was one of the children who came from Brit
ain during the war and they were meant to—her voice breaks—keep him safe. When he left, he said he was going home to visit his other parents but didn’t think he would be able to live without the forest and the sea. She and Jeanette didn’t know how they would live without him. They don’t know how they’ll live without him now. Jeanette comes up through the crowd and stands proudly beside her partner.

  Ada, Evvie, Percy and Grandpa Gallagher sit quietly on one of the benches. As Miss Fenn passes through the formal line, Ada gets up and crosses the hall to get the men pieces of zucchini cake.

  Miss Fenn, I haven’t seen you in ages, Frances says. Do you remember me, I used to be the lifeguard in the olden days. Isabelle introduced us years ago. It was so sad that her baby died.

  I do remember you, Frances, says Lottie. (So that’s what they told Isabelle. No wonder she’s never heard from her.) I’m feeling terrible about this. I was planning on going to Scarborough to get some gardening advice from Derek and didn’t get there in time.

  Coming back across the floor, Ada hears Frances’s faux pas and glares at her. Maybe nobody but Lottie heard. She hasn’t seen or heard from Lottie since that long-ago day in Blaine. There’s so much being held at bay in this room; wonder how many people here know about Annabelle for instance. She herself only realized what was going on the night of that Thanksgiving dinner, talked about it with Percy, and they decided it was best to wait until Lily came forward. But she never has come forward.

  We’re sorry about losing Derek, says George Fenn, when he and Billy Will put in an appearance at Scarborough later that afternoon. Lily won’t look at Billy, then finally blurts out. So did you ever prove what you were after, Billy? You had no right. What doctor would…?

  Annabelle and I have the same blood type, he says.

  Well, there you are, says Lily. As if it’s not obvious. Don’t ever do anything like that again without my permission.

  The way George seems to take Lily’s words as an acknowledgement of Billy’s paternity and thus his own status as Annabelle’s grandfather is like someone taking an item they’ve given as a gift back into their own keeping when the owner dies. Well, George says, as if the meeting’s over. The last thing Derek and I agreed was that the roof needed replacing, so we’d better get on with it.