The Dancehall Years Page 32

  She drives up a small hill to the high school, which sits on a plateau, compact and alone like something that’s landed from outer space. The school is all on one level with floor-to-ceiling windows and halls radiating out from the library, the hub of the wheel of classrooms, centred and skylighted and inviting. I’m a stranger here, she says to her first group of students, pushing back the chairs and tables. If there was one thing I should know about you people that might help me to get on, what might it be?

  If a place like this were to have a crisis, what kind of a crisis might it be? she asks.

  We had one, Ms. Killam. The Norwegian Burn. Some tourists from Norway forgot to put out their campfire. It was only because the wind changed at the last minute that we’re even here now.

  Was there a lot of damage?

  There was a lot of damage. Two and a half million dollars of timber was burned, maybe more.

  What if it was still going on?

  People would be crying.

  One of the Elevens, a solid straightforward young man called Garth Vandermere, wants to be on the camcorder telling everyone how the fire is still raging through the valley, burning everything in its way. Thick black clouds push through the trees. Scorched trunks side a once green mountain that’s now covered in ash. His father is alone in their house out on the Silvermine Road. Smoke from the other side of the hill darkens the skyline. When night approaches in a roar, he pulls himself up a hill, tree by tree, and buries his face in his hands. When he opens them to stare between his fingers, a violent hem of fire spreads as far as he can see, twisting rows of trees that explode into writhing sticks of kicking black lace. Sprung red arteries whip out, tentacle the tops of the closer trees. Deer and moose run in front of the flames.

  You think we have a province? she says to the kids the next day, after spending the night in a bleak motel in the wall-to-wall cement-block town below. Flying up here in the plane, it looked like a patchwork quilt down below. A man in the café last night—what’s that restau rant called, The Valley Café, oh The Valley Café—even he, and he looked pretty much like a logger, said it looked more patch than quilt. I don’t know what they’re going to do fifty years from now, he said. Pick rocks, I guess.

  All she’d have to do is drive a few miles further east, and the same lodgepole pines would become a front for acres of plucked wide mounds of stiff black hairs rising on curved hills one behind the other, the results of the Norwegian Burn. If you turn around quickly and take off your blindfold, way up there above the slope, Mt. Abelard is barely able to hold down her soft skirts of grass.

  Up here in the north, nobody sidelines you—they don’t appear to even notice—if you find yourself in the middle of your classroom in your best pumps, a run in your stocking, a dab of mustard on the corner of your mouth and you’ve forgotten to take off your hat. Not being able to wear baseball hats for men north of Hope is like hitting below the belt. They’re embarrassed to go out in public without their beaks. They feel humiliated and naked without them, as if they’ve been asked to kiss somebody without brushing their teeth.

  A few days later when she’s crossing the parking lot, she sees a man she’s been told is Garth’s father, Nils Vandermere, looking up at the gutters of the school. Bats, he says, skin stretched tight over his face, maybe from being outside so much. He wears a jersey and fleece and has a shy habit of looking away whenever you speak to him directly. The bats look like frayed pieces of black parchment, huddled tight under the eaves. Not a good place for them, he says. It’s the… is it… droppings?

  That’s the word.

  At recess and noon hour, arms, heads and legs flick from doors at the end of the school corridors, wave around like flares on the edge of the sun. Crows twist and careen over the playing field. I’ve been thinking, Nils says, tense and relaxed at the same time. If I came to class while we’re waiting for the new mine to open, I could help Garth, and improve my English at the same time.

  Once he joins the group, the kids treat him like any other person in the class. If he’s older, they’re not going to say as to how they’ve noticed. He sits reined in like a good traveler trying not to take up too much space, a touching quality in someone who says he can’t live without tracts of bush stretched out either side. One day, he says, he’ll take her out the Silvermine Road and show her around the old mine site.

  Looking for a place to rent after school, she asks the realtor to stop at a housing unit on the same hill as the school. Built for the workers in the defunct silver mine, the rows of joined townhouses slope in ramshackle curves down the hill. Not bad on the inside though. Door frames extend almost to the ceiling, saving her from architectural starvation, as do the long windows in the classrooms at school.

  She buys a secondhand station wagon at a local garage and, on the weekend, drives out to nearby Taylor Lake, backdropped by pale grey and pink clouds that cover and uncover the top of Mt. Abelard. The reflections of spruce trees corkscrew the still water. A boy and his parents come wading along the edge of the lake collecting mint. He opens his hand to show her a tiny frog on his palm. They can’t go over their heads, or they drown, he says.

  Groups of picnic tables cluster in the disused campsites. She tucks parboiled spuds wrapped in aluminum foil into the fire, backs her tent onto the lake edge. Places a sharp knife by her sleeping bag in case a bear comes to her door and she has to slit the back wall and beaver herself into the water. As a precaution, she tramps the lakeshore wetlands to hide a dry jogging suit in a plastic bag behind a stump at the end of a nearby promontory. A clean slice, slip into the water and swim to her clothes. Bears can swim, but would they bother?

  The moon is out like a fingernail. Not my fingernail, Isabelle used to say.

  Whose then?

  On Sunday, Nils calls to see if he could take her for a drive. The road out of town has no shade trees to protect the gritty industrial expanse. The distance goes on and on, the view of pine and spruce either side of the road replaces itself with the same view of more pine and spruce. They pass her pretend driveway into Taylor Lake, stare at the silence of the Norwegian Burn marking the beginning of what he seems to think of as his territory. Waist-high trees stand bravely beside their charred parents. The Burn isn’t so bad, he says, looking at her stricken face. At least there’s more light. The raptors are starting to come back. The owls and foxes and squirrels.

  He pulls over to make way for a thundering logging truck smashing down the road toward them. I drive out here all the time, she says. Maybe I shouldn’t. I don’t have a radio.

  They know where you are. The first truck that comes your way will be saying what it is you’re driving, Honda unloaded. He did a lot of truck driving before he started working at the processing plant at the mine, drove loads of silver ore concentrate to Rupert to ship to Japan. She doesn’t like to say, because he seems proud, but to her even the forest feels industrial. A feller buncher lifts its grapple iron, raises the tall trees like pick-up sticks and shakes them.

  It’s almost sinister coming over the hill and down yet another stretch to see a huge tailings pond from the expired mine where millions of tons of waste rock are kept under a meter and a half of water so they won’t produce acid mine drainage. They get out and view a vast manufactured landscape, the piles of orange rocks oxidizing along the sides of what used to be a stream. Three tons of ore are needed to produce enough silver for one engagement ring.

  His house is on a slope down by the river, set in the middle of yellowing grasslands and occasional scrub pine. It’s a prefab—the log house he’d built years ago was destroyed in the Burn. They make their way down the slope and onto the lip of the riverbed. He pushes the canoe off the bank with his foot. I had to stay here, he says. After the fire. No one would buy the place. That’s why I’m like I am, he says. He places his paddle carefully on the ribbed floor of the canoe. The canoe seems to propel itself for a moment, as if it had a sail. All that was left of his house were charred posts sticking out of the grou
nd, he says cupping his fingers. We had to live for a while in the units you’re in now, he says. This is the first time he’s mentioned his absent wife, the “we” with its own exclusion. Oh, that seat’s taken. In one way, it’s a relief. Garth told her she’s gone to Mexico for a while.

  He wants to show her his special trees—the last ones that hadn’t been touched by the fire. After they park the canoe, he holds the branches up for her one by one. When the kids go tree planting, they compete to see how many hundred trees a day they can plant. They do it at a run: a hot and sweating two steps, shovel in, bend it forward, tree seedling in, close the flap, step step dig. They’re sitting under a spruce in his grove of magic trees. They look like ordinary trees to her, but what does she know. He keeps looking at her as if trying to ascertain the stitch that started her body.

  She hates to leave all that expanse and privacy, shadows casting a different pattern on the hills every minute. To think a person could sit beside him and know you were both looking at the same shadow passing across the same hill. Watch it lift and light up a new slope. That you would be there together doing that tomorrow.

  So you’ve never stood on top of Mt. Abelard? he says.

  Not yet.

  Driving back, she envies his wife, whoever she is. Are all marriages as expensive as hers? Sexual jealousy is the worst pain she’s ever known. Not if you’d been tortured, of course, or your children. Remember how quickly it happens? You have your focus. If you fall for him, a few days later there you are waiting for the sound of his footsteps. Maybe it’s in our genes that survival depended on his coming back with food. You’re lying there lost in the landscape of your body, and he’s already gone hunting.

  I never worry about being abandoned, he says. Do you?

  Oh yes.

  Nevertheless, something passed between the two of them on the river that was permanent. It was as if they’d exchanged keepsakes that could never be returned. There’s probably a mysterious story about his life like there is about many people in this valley, but you don’t ask. Part of his being here was that he would be left alone; people wouldn’t pry. She certainly wouldn’t.

  67.

  At Thanksgiving, she heads back to Vancouver for the weekend. It’s misty at Blenheim St., the dark cedar waves in the yard; the rhododendron and laurel have taken over the sunken garden. Annabelle’s staying with Percy and Ada now; here she is crisp as all get-out in a neat A-line skirt and tucked-in gingham shirt sitting at the dining room table eating her breakfast. She likes the leaded glass windows, the begonia borders alongside the laurel hedge. It’s a comfort that she loves everything about the house and, well, her grandparents in a word. Is glad they have poached eggs on toast for breakfast every single morning.

  Ada’s watching a rerun of an old TV cooking program, well, a gardening program that’s sometimes a cooking program. Winter pansies in a bowl with dried hydrangeas, a pink silk peony. On the screen, a chef is preparing pizza, the dough stretched between his hands like a concertina. Cuts black olives for Halloween. It’s a ruse. Fill the kids up on pizza, which they love before they go trick or treating.

  Good idea, says Ada.

  I like your French roll, says Gwen. If you cut your hair, the thinness on top would show.

  That’s because I’ve had my hair piled on top. Don’t make a mistake and do what I did—it didn’t get any air. If I sat outside for an hour a day and let the top of my head air, it would start growing again.

  You sound like you’re talking about grass.

  I am. How are your classes going?

  I’m enjoying teaching, Mom.

  Notice I’m not saying I told you so, Gwen.

  Have you heard from Isabelle, Mom? Have you met Shima?

  Not yet. I’m sorry to have to tell you this because I don’t want to worry you, but Dad’s not well. Nothing serious, but he’s acting tired.

  How do you mean, tired?

  In bed a lot. That’s where he is now.

  When Gwen goes upstairs, Percy tells her he’s miserable because his flying days might be over. His breath comes in short spurts.

  Don’t breathe so shallowly, Dad. Take slow deep breaths.

  When I do that, my lungs hurt.

  Have you seen the doctor?

  Evidently I’m going to.

  He’s lined up all the books he wants to read in retirement but is too sick to read any of them. It can’t be cancer, he says, because he quit smoking. After the medical tests are finished—Gwen has to go back to work before they get the results—it turns out, to everyone’s shock and misery, that he does have cancer. Lung cancer. And here they thought the worry was a heart condition. She can’t bear to think how far along his illness is, that he’s going to die. Nothing to do when she gets back to Silverdale but phone every night and plan to get down again as soon as she can arrange an alternate sub for a few days.

  A troop of girls sits on the floor outside the staffroom every morning. You move them on, they creep back like cats into a garden. Crouch practising sign language for a Directed Studies assignment, singing with their fingers as if they’re stringed.

  Why here, you kids? We keep falling over you.

  We like it here.

  Oh well then.

  These look good, Gwen says, taking in her class’s writing assignments. They’re well typed and turned out. I hope they read as well. It’s better to have something serious that’s a little messy—I’m not saying I want them messy—than a tidy page saying nothing. Kind of like preferring to eat at a greasy spoon where the food is good rather than in a restaurant with a fancy decor and bad food.

  I’d just ask them to bring me a clean spoon, says Garth, looking around for laughs, which he gets. A few broken seats are stashed in the back of the classroom. Everyone take your seats, she says. Garth picks up one from the pile and carries it like a tray to the front of the class. Ha ha. After school he wants to talk to Gwen about his marks. He won’t be allowed to play basketball unless he’s done all his makeup assignments, whether he gets credit for them or not.

  You always have interesting things to say, Garth, I wish you’d write some of them down. We were talking about gifts. You had a story about Raven. But then you had to get up and walk up and down the foyer. Didn’t you have something written on the screen?

  I lost that.

  You forgot to save that?

  I forgot to save that.

  For a moment, she walks in a meadow on the mountain, then turns to see the next class coming in. By the end of the day, a hundred kids will have passed through these desks, with barely enough time to unpack their backpacks, let alone settle into a lesson. Next year, if they switch to the semester system, maybe her students will be disposed to settle down and get involved with whatever they’re studying, instead of faking it while they wait for the bell.

  What are you doing, Ms. Killam? Tripping out? Were you at Woodstock, Ms. Killam? They ask her that again and again.

  In spirit, I was, she says.

  This period it’s the Aggressors, Victims, Bullies bunch. Jenny said on the phone the other night it sounded useless to her; if anyone lets a teacher know she’s being bullied, she’s asking for a double whammy after school. She should know.

  Was it that bad?

  It was hell. You took us to that horrible commune, and you never even apologized. At least you’re not running around the woods in ethnic clothes any longer, being a witch or was it a lady?

  I was anemic. I was hemorrhaging.

  Oh I know.

  It was terrible for you, Jen. Leaving San Francisco and the apartment and your dad.

  At Blenheim St. on Gwen’s next visit, Ada’s hung a long sheet of paper over the bedroom mirror so Percy won’t have to watch himself die. They hover over his bed, watching the home nurse inject morphine. Ada gets in bed and props her back against his, looking at Gwen defiantly, as if to say, this is how it’s always been between us, but it was none of you children’s business.

  Percy checks his w
atch as if it were a navigating instrument on his plane. If he can get the timing right, he can line himself up to meet his own death.

  They eat somehow. Gwen’s so distracted she buys stewing chicken by mistake, sautés it for the usual hour. When it’s too tough to eat, Ada bursts into tears. He doesn’t want to leave, she cries. He plain doesn’t want to leave.

  How could ordinary life go on here after this? Upstairs, Annabelle lies crying on her bed. Ada goes in and takes her in her arms. Gwen’s standing by the door. I won’t have anybody if Grandpa dies, Annabelle cries. No grandpa. No Derek. You’ll have me. You’ll have your cousins, says Ada.

  They’re not even here. I want to see Shima.

  It’s not the right time for visitors, dear, with Grandpa so sick.

  Mom, what’s going on? Your prejudices are still making themselves felt, I see, says Gwen, back downstairs folding flannel pads to cushion Percy’s mattress so he won’t get bedsores. If Annabelle wants Shima to come over, why shouldn’t she come? She’s the one who helped her when Derek died. Maybe I should call her.

  Please don’t. It’s an awful time, Gwen, please.

  As Percy’s laboured breathing becomes shallower, his skin clarifies and his body grows gaunt. Gwen’s sitting beside him when the fish jaw shape takes hold of his face. Who knew that human noses could tip down and their jaws turn up when they die? His breath becomes more and more spaced until it holds itself into silence. She wants to say breathe, Dad, breathe, get to the surface and breathe, but he’s gone.

  Leo arrives to supervise the attendants from the crematorium whose burner Percy once fixed. He insists they respect the way Percy felt about funeral services: accepting his own less than miniscule place in the universe was his way of respecting reality. He took offense that anyone could think the physical universe Leo was dedicated to studying was anything less than miraculous in itself. The girls want to come up from San Francisco, service or no service, but Leo persuades them their grandfather would rather they say goodbye to him from there.