Journey, page 30
Jenny stayed with the baby in the maternal and newborn unit of the hospital for the better part of two weeks. Constable Hoye came every day between shifts or he had another constable cover while he left his watch for an hour or two. He spoke to his son in whispers while Jenny slept.
* * *
—
The Marchuk trial had been set for a neutral, closed court in Calgary. It started on a Tuesday morning and did not look like it would last a week, so shoddy was the defense. Hoye gave testimony on the third day of the trial and when he came home he found his mailbox rent apart, pebbles of buckshot rattling around inside the deformed container when he pried it clear from the post. He flung it into the garage and drove to the hardware store in town.
The clerk limped slightly as he took Hoye down the shelf rows. A tall man of nearly seventy with a white moustache and short-cropped hair. He had no glasses but seemed to need some more than a little. He showed Hoye toward the mailboxes, most of them antiquated and covered in light dust. Hoye picked out the plainest one and followed the old man toward the buckets of screws and fasteners.
“Heard you had a boy,” the man said.
“We did.”
The clerk offered his hand. Hoye took it. Hoye was of the same height and wider by a foot but the old man’s hand outsized his by far.
“You gonna raise him here?”
“Likely not,” Hoye said.
The clerk smiled a little and stood with his knuckles to his hips, picked a stray bolt from a bin and put it back where it belonged. They started back toward the register. Hoye held up.
“Hang on a minute,” he said.
Hoye went back to where he’d been shown the mailboxes and he came back to the counter with a second. The clerk had set the first on the woodtop beside the till. Hoye handed him the other and the man nodded and started to tally it all. He found a cardboard box behind the counter and filled it with the goods. Hoye paid him in cash.
“I suppose I don’t have to tell you to be careful out there,” the clerk said.
“No. But I appreciate it.”
“It’s not the whole town that’s sided against you, young man, or even the half of it. But those that have are awful loud. If you know what I mean.”
Hoye nodded and shook the clerk’s hand again.
“If you run through those two just come back and I’ll get you another, on the house.”
Hoye laughed. Waved at the clerk as he went out the door. Wind chimes jangled where they hung from the lintel.
* * *
—
On a dry and sunbleached afternoon Constable Hoye pulled up to his homestead with his wife and newborn son. He’d been given a week’s worth of leave. A cruiser waited at the roadside near the house. Hoye stopped to say hello and the constable in the other cruiser made faces at the baby in the back seat, the little boy in a safety chair beside his mother. The other constable shook Hoye’s hand.
“How’re you all handling it?” Hoye said.
“They got a fella from up near Viking that makes his rounds a little further south. He don’t seem to mind. Shifts go long they’re givin’ us OT.”
“Well, thank ’em for me will ya.”
“Sure,” the constable said. “Keep your radio nearby. Anything comes up I’ll squawk at ya.”
Hoye nodded and drove on, turned onto the width of gravel in front of the house. The cruiser crept out and took off down the county road. Hoye parked and came around the car to help Jenny. He wore her many bags and bundles on his arms like he were a clothes maiden. Jenny took the boy up in her arms and swaddled him to her chest and neck. She turned him slow so that he could stare out goggle-eyed at the fields and fencewires and hovering birds.
“We get a new mailbox?” she said.
Hoye stood there with the bags dangling. He nodded.
“Old one sort of blew in. So I got another, pegged it down a little sturdier.”
Jenny studied the box some more and then she kissed the baby on his pale and peach-fuzzed head and went down the walk to the house. Hoye kicked the car door shut with the toe of his shoe.
* * *
—
Hoye lay in the bed until they both slept. When he got up he went quiet as he could, clicking sound in his knees and his left ankle joint. He turned at the door and saw the dent in the mattress where he rested his bones of a night, his tiny son but inches from it, curled up and pinned to his wife. It hurt his heart just to look at her there, wild-haired as she was in sleep, snoring lightly, so much bigger than their boy. It flooded hollows in him. Cold travelled along his spine and short ribs. He didn’t want to leave but he did. He’d found cargo shorts in the laundry hamper and put them on, along with a clean undershirt. He went through the dark house and he knew it less by touch than he should have.
* * *
—
Out on the driveway he sat, garage door open to a tiny nightlight and a fridge of cold beer. Crickets had gotten into the garage and they trilled from their hiding spots. He had an old poker table set up with cans of beer in every cup holder, a bottle of Irish whiskey standing quarter-empty on the felt. The Remington pump lay on a wooden crate beside his chair, five cartridges in the magazine. Chinook wind blew warm across the prairie, slowly spun a crooked weathervane that had been long ago fixed atop the high front gable of the house. Hoye had his Kevlar on over his cottons and the shirtcloth clung to his stomach and lower back. He heard distant reports of riflefire. High whine of small engines. Coyotes whooping at each other in a nearby field. Hoye sat there and watched either end of the long, country road. His portable CB radio sat on the table, silent except for sparse chatter between the dispatch and the constables as they roamed the territories.
Alicia Elliott
Tracks
For the twelfth time in two days I watch as Laura shreds her vocal cords screaming and still she’ll take no drugs. Her eyes are hooded with exhaustion, her hair a wet mass on her sticky forehead. It was a twenty-two-hour delivery, most of which she spent foodless and hunched over a birthing stool in the biggest suite at Tsi Non:we Ionnakeratstha Ona:grahsta. She wanted a natural delivery, she’d said. If she could feel the conception she sure as shit was going to feel the birth. That was Laura. Ever crude and to the point.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go to the hosp—”
“How many times do I have to tell you? No no no no no no. No. Heck, Roy!”
The camera shrinks away. It focuses on me spitting encouragement through the pulsing crush of Laura’s grip. I glimpse up at the camera—at Roy—and give a pained smile. Back then I didn’t know for sure that I couldn’t conceive but I had my suspicions.
I fast forward to the end, when Sherry is finally in her arms. Laura looks tired as hell, but when the camera comes for a close-up, she swats it away. “You’re not allowed to catch my wrinkles on camera just because I gave birth to your kid.”
There’s a time lapse. When the camera starts again Laura’s made up like some eager starlet. But she’s not looking at the camera from beneath pristine eyelashes or blowing kisses the way she would when she was young. She’s looking down at Sherry. Every touch and gesture is full of yearning, for both the present and the future. Tracing Sherry’s veins with her fingers like she’s following a map. Like in those small trails of blue, peeking from beneath crystalline skin, Laura saw their lives: love and anger, tenderness and humour, pain and envy. Like Laura saw their worlds—separate but interlocking: two halves of a Venn diagram.
No one watching could have seen anything but a mother and a daughter, each absolutely smitten, adoring and sizing one another up. I’m not sure I see anything different now but I continually find myself trying. Nothing ever really comes out of the blue. There must be shifting eyes somewhere in the grainy footage, a hesitation, a smile held a moment too long.
“Em.” Tom is standing in the doorway in a too-big black suit. He’s holding my black pumps and watching me, a question on his face. I wish he would just ask it.
“Is it time?”
He nods. I stop the video, get up, and grab my shoes.
* * *
—
There is a persistent, musty smell in the viewing room. It’s hidden well beneath strangers’ perfumes and plug-in deodorizers, but it’s there. I imagine it’s the smell of formaldehyde or death, though I’ve never really smelled either. I haven’t been to a funeral since Uncle Rob’s and that doesn’t really count. I was so young; for all I remember I wasn’t there at all. Laura said she remembered everything, from the music (“Fucking Garth Brooks”) to the “huge ass mole” on the priest’s chin. I didn’t consider it at the time but it was strange a priest was there. Mom said when she and Uncle Rob were at the Mush Hole together, he was constantly in trouble, back-talking the priests and refusing to speak English and biting the unlucky teacher tasked with cutting his long, black Indian hair to a more “civilized” length. They beat him so he hated them; he hated them so they beat him. And yet at the end of his life a priest was praying over his Mohawk soul.
Twenty years later I’m at this funeral. Three generations—almost an entire family—gone, all put to rest courtesy of Styres Funeral Home. Laura planned her funeral shortly after she and Roy were married. It should have set off alarm bells but it didn’t. At least her preparations have helped Roy. All he’s had to do is nod, mute.
The room is orderly enough. Chairs arranged with absurd precision. I have the feeling that were I to take a ruler and measure the distance between each one, I’d come up with the same number every time. There must be some sort of science to grief, some manual funeral home directors adhere to, detailing the most manageable chair arrangement or flower placement for friends and family of the deceased. Everything is too calculated: the beige wallpaper, the overstuffed couches, the pre-packaged condolences.
Aunt Chelsea is at the podium, mascara that took thirty minutes of applying and re-applying to perfection now sliding, sap-like, down her cheek. Otherwise she is composed, wearing the stiff, proud pout of a once-great general facing a war tribunal. Her voice is level and dry.
“Laura was such a smart girl. Rob loved her so much. When we lost him she was four. It was…difficult. But she was strong.”
“Smart.” “Strong.” Adjectives any parent could slap on the dead child they didn’t care to know. I look around for evidence of skepticism. Not even a raised eyebrow. No one is thinking about Aunt Chelsea and Laura’s relationship, which was tempestuous at best. In the face of death, ugly truths are redacted.
As long as I can remember, every conversation between them had notes of danger—as though any minute they’d collapse into fists and fire. I don’t remember Laura ever mentioning Aunt Chelsea with anything resembling love. Even when she was six and should have still been under her mother’s spell, she ignored her almost constantly, called her “Chelsea” with satisfaction.
I remember in grade nine when she was asked to prom by Mark Hanson, a white twenty-year-old senior with a car and nipple rings. She was one of the only ninth graders going—probably one of the only kids from the rez going, too—a fact she loved to remind us of, dangling it in front of our faces like a succulent piece of fruit. Laura couldn’t do anything without thoroughly pissing off her mother, though, so she decided to wear Aunt Chelsea’s low-cut red cocktail dress—the expensive one she bought herself in Toronto to celebrate graduating from nursing school. The way Laura told it, she sauntered home drunk at 3 a.m. wearing Mark’s leather jacket and swinging her panties around her finger. She greeted her mother with a smile, slurring, “Guess who’s a woman now?” before throwing up on the kitchen floor.
“You should’ve seen her face, Em,” she’d said, laughing. “I’ve never heard her scream so loud. And all for that ugly dress! Never mind her piss-drunk daughter shooting vomit like a fucking sprinkler.”
But a month after prom, when it became obvious that Mark Hanson’s “gravity’s as good as birth control” claim was bullshit, Aunt Chelsea didn’t yell or tell her she had it coming, even if she thought it. She calmly described Laura’s options, then asked what she wanted to do. When abortion was chosen, Aunt Chelsea didn’t flinch or grimace in that self-satisfied way she usually did when Laura chose anything. She diligently set about doing all the work: finding a clinic, booking the appointment in Toronto, borrowing a car to drive us there. All Laura did the week before the procedure was talk about Mark. He hadn’t even looked in her direction since prom.
“I’m gonna keep the fetus so I can send it to him. Like in a little jar. Oh! I should put a fake birth certificate in the bag, init? You know, like, ‘Mark Hanson Jr. was aborted on this day, child to a naive girl and a small-dicked asshole.’ ”
“You haven’t been naive since kindergarten.”
“Maybe I should send it to his mom. She’d already be pissed enough an Indian snagged her son, but wouldn’t it be great if she was one of those crazy pro-lifers? Like with the signs and bombs and stuff? She might actually kill Mark. Save me the trouble.”
But when the day came she didn’t even mention Mark. She didn’t say anything at all. Afterwards, she cried against her mother’s chest for almost an hour. It was strange to watch them in that embrace, as though they were any mother and daughter at any moment in history, timeless.
* * *
—
Laura never really mentioned the abortion to me after it happened, and out of respect for her, I never mentioned it either. I only heard her reference it once in an offhand kind of way the day Sherry was born. I didn’t hear it when she said it, I must have been talking to Roy or Aunt Chelsea. It was something I noticed when I watched the video. The camera is on her bedside table. It only catches the pale curtain’s flutter, but I imagine her gazing down at Sherry, maybe touching her nose with a manicured nail. Then you hear it.
“I get to keep you.”
The first time I noticed it I rewound the tape to make sure that’s actually what she said. Each time I heard it I felt sick. Even all those years later, on what was supposed to be one of the happiest days of her life, tragedy was playing in the background. She put on a good show but she couldn’t forget. She couldn’t escape. Until she did.
Maybe Laura was trying to atone for her sins. Sacrifice the child she chose for the child she didn’t. Maybe that was a clue. A dot I should have connected. As though hearing those words the first time could stop the train that was, months later, barrelling forward.
* * *
—
Aunt Chelsea’s voice has gotten thicker, the tears faster. She wobbles on her heels. Mom gets up and quietly approaches.
“It’s okay, Chels.” She tries to lead her away by the hand. Aunt Chelsea only clutches the podium tighter as she continues to melt into the wood. Her cries are guttural, inhuman. She knows she wasn’t a good mother—the type who’d stay up all night and watch movies with Laura, or ask what she wanted to do with her life and really listen. She wasn’t the type of mother a daughter would come to when terrified by her own thoughts.
Had Laura seen this, she would have offered a bemused cliché. “Better late than never.” As if time is infinite and lives don’t end. What good is remorse now? It might as well be never.
I lean toward Tom. “I need a cigarette.” He moves to get up and I stop him quick with a shake of my head. Any time I’m alone for more than ten minutes he calls to me, or peeks his head in, or comes along with a cup of coffee or a bowl of corn soup. It’s suffocating.
I stand in the doorway and inhale deeply. Freshly-shorn grass and charred hotdogs from a fundraising barbecue across the street. Evidence that other lives continue, unchanged. A slow nausea creeps up, stops short at my esophagus.
The only other person outside is a woman wearing a simple black dress. About my age. White, blond. She’s whispering into her phone with her back turned. As the screen door clicks shut she turns around sharply and thrusts her phone into her purse, her eyebrows squeezed in agitation.
“Sorry.” I pull out a cigarette and try to light it. My hands are shaky and imprecise.
The woman looks wary for a moment, then all creases smooth.
“It’s okay. I was looking for a reason to hang up anyway.”
I raise an eyebrow and she rolls her eyes.
“Ex-boyfriend,” she offers.
I nod, focusing on my still-unlit cigarette. Once, twice, three times, four, and still no flame. The woman reaches into her purse, pulls out a red lighter, and flicks its head ablaze without hesitation. In a moment the end of my cigarette’s aglow.
“Thanks,” I say as I inhale.
“No problem.”
I can feel her eyes darting back to me as she digs through her purse. I wonder what she sees. Looking in the mirror hasn’t really occurred to me lately. I could have grown crow’s feet overnight. My lips could have decided once and for all they were done pretending, leaving me frowning forever. I’ve seen other people like that. Old Mohawk women with faces like scored leather. They couldn’t have always been that way. They must have been happy once, even beautiful, before some event came down on them with such unrelenting force that the smiling ended.
Laura, of course, will remain young, beautiful, tragic.
“You couldn’t handle it in there, either, huh?” the woman asks.
“Nope.”
She lights her own cigarette and takes a drag. Her nails are a familiar shade of pink. Showy and grossly inappropriate for a funeral.
“Viva la Vulva?”
The woman looks down at her hands and laughs. “It always sounds so much worse when said out loud like that.”
