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Authors: Rebecca Silver Slayter

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BOOK: In the Land of Birdfishes
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I said, “Was she happy?” My voice was so quiet and it was almost the voice of a yellow-haired child.

Jason said, “Sometimes my father beat her. Not very many times. Only once I ever saw him hit her with his hand closed. But she always seemed relieved afterwards. Happier. Once, he knocked her jaw so hard I heard it move in its place, and I was behind him with a plate in my hand, with it over his head about to come down, when I saw her look up from the dishes and there was a peace on her face I never saw before.”

There was something wrong with my heart or lungs or something. There was a thing that was wrong that was why I couldn’t breathe. I thought I would say his name, Jason, and tell him he had to stop talking so he could call the hospital. I thought, was there a hospital in this place? What kind of place was it where you couldn’t breathe and someone wouldn’t stop saying these things to you and there wasn’t a hospital?

Jason said, “I don’t know why it would be that she would be glad then. I don’t have half an idea. But it makes me think that no, she wasn’t happy.”

“Jason,” I said. “Jason.”

Jason said, “It’s true what Minnie said. I tried to leave. I kept trying to leave. I don’t know why I can’t.” He ordered another drink from the bartender and pushed it toward me. I took it though I didn’t want it.

I said, “Jason. I don’t have anything to go back for. I’ll stay here as long as you let me. I won’t go like she said.”

Jason said, “She loved him though, you know. I mean, she really, really did.”

I said, “Or say you’ll come back with me. My husband can get you a job at his company. He works in construction. We could go now if you wanted.”

Jason said, “And I’ll tell you something. He worshipped her.”

“I couldn’t have known about this, Jason,” I said. I shook his arm. “I couldn’t. How could I know about this?”

Jason said, “I didn’t say you could. I didn’t say shit to you.”

There was that little girl with her hair still like pale honey and her face that would trust anybody. There was the way you could know the body of another—in the dark you could, sightless, know another person by the touch of them, by the way their hands met your own, in the air, their hands closed around your own, as if they’d been reaching at the very moment you knew that you needed, wanted to put your hand out into the dark and hope and hope—

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I’ve been so sorry. I was going to tell her. I came here because he left me and I came here because I loved her, I did. But I came here, too, because I was going to tell her, I was going to say I’m sorry, and she isn’t here and I can’t tell her, so I have to tell you.”

He said, “I’ve got some money coming to me, you know. You don’t have to give me a job. I’ve got money coming. They’ve been in talks for years now, and they say word’s going to come any day now. Any day now. We’re all going to get money from the government. For what they did here. I’ll be a rich man then. I’ll be able to go anywhere.”

“Jason,” I begged him. I said to him, “Jason. Let me tell you I’m sorry. Let me tell you what happened.” I said again and again until he listened to me, “Let me tell you what happened.”

NINE

I
HEARD THEM AND LAY STILL
, afraid to move. It had been so many years since I had heard another child speak, and if I listened hard enough their voices sounded like hers.

“She’s sleeping,” whispered one. “Megan, we shouldn’t wake her.”

The other voice was more like the one I longed for, soft as wind and sharp as the end of a saw. “It’s the
daytime
.” I felt the mattress beneath me buckle and thought, That is her foot kicking the mattress underneath me. “Wake up,” she said. “
Wake up
. Open your eyes.”

The other girl whispered, “Maybe her eyes are closed because she’s blind.”

“Don’t be stupid, Elizabeth,” said the one named Megan. “She’s lazy. She’s lazy and blind. I never heard of us having a lazy, blind cousin. Why should I have to share a room with her. And she’s ugly too. Look at the colour of her hair, it’s like no colour at all. It’s like the tail on the end of corn.”

“Corn silk,” I said. “Da said it was like corn silk. Mother’s was like that too. He said she must have grown out of a field of corn and some farmer came and picked her like a piece of corn, and she was so beautiful he let her go, while all the other
corn had to go to the mill and get cut into little bits for all the chickens and animals to eat.” I didn’t hear either of them say anything after that, so I kept my eyes shut and said, “And that’s why he fell in love with her. Because no other ladies had hair like corn silk or got picked from the field by a farmer, and so there was only one like her and that made Da love her. But now she’s dead, nobody loves her at all.”

“Jesus loves her,” said Megan, but she didn’t sound sure.

“I’m sorry you don’t have a mother,” said Elizabeth. “Mom said—”

I sat up and said to Megan, “
Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are
. Jesus did not love Mother. Jesus despised her as God did. As Da did. She died like Judas died, falling headlong, burst asunder in the midst. Our bodies are the members of Christ.”

It was quiet all around, and then Megan said, “I don’t want you here. I don’t want you in my bedroom.” I heard the door open again and then heard footsteps down the stairs and Megan calling for her mother. I thought I was all alone in the room, and then I felt a soft, warm hand take my own. It could have been
her
hand, and I held onto it like the ocean holds the sand.

TEN

S
O I FOLLOWED HIM SOMETIMES
. Could have felt shame about that, yes, could have. Could have felt it like my mother and how she’d look at me sometimes and say, “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, Angie. Weren’t you raised to be better than you are?”

But I never was, oh no, I never was. Not ashamed of that. And if there were things I thought when I was in my own bed, things I wouldn’t have told even June there, on the other side of that small window between us, that was not the same as shame. That was something different. If I let my hand go down beneath the sheet, looking for myself, if after, I lay with my hand still wet under the sheet, and felt it in me deeply, was made to cry after that and feel the salt drops without sound fall on the pillow and still feel as sweet and alone as a person could feel—it wasn’t shame that made me cry.

She told me to watch after him. Before the thing that happened to her had happened, when I thought it was only for lack of proper working eyes that she couldn’t watch her son herself. I’d come over to see him, was still young then, maybe only ten, eleven years old, and stood there in the doorway, knotting and unknotting some bit of cotton in my hand, a
scarf or a thing like that. She was just sitting at the table, peeling potatoes, and I wondered if it was safe for her to do that, how she’d know so she could not cut herself or get blood in the potatoes, and so I watched close and sharp as a knife to see if there was red there in the potatoes. She said, “Angel, didn’t you come by yesterday, too, looking for him?”

And I said yes, I did, and the day before that too. I said he’d been busy or something, I guessed. I said he’d forgot to wait for me after school was done.

She cut the potatoes still and didn’t stop doing that all the time she talked to me. She looked at me as she did it, but I knew she didn’t see me or anything. She said, “Angel, your mother and your father, have they ever been anywhere but here?”

I said Papa went sometimes to the whale camp and once he even let Charlie and Jude go with him, but not me and June. I said June said it wasn’t fair because she was the same age as Jude and anyway they didn’t like to do things different or apart, but Jude gave her a look and she shut up fast.

And she said, “Did your mother ever go away from here? Down south, I mean?”

And I said no, I didn’t think so. And she asked me if I wanted to go away somewhere when I was grown, and I said Jude and June were going to get an apartment, they already had it decided, and June said Jude was going to let her decorate it and she already knew what it was going to look like. They said it might be in Whitehorse or maybe in Memphis, because of Jude liking Elvis so much. But they said even if it were in Memphis they’d let me come be there with them. But I told her that I didn’t want to go to Memphis or Whitehorse neither.

“Why not?” she asked me, and I said because I hadn’t been there so I didn’t know if they might have the things there that I liked, like the shining beads we were learning to stitch together at culture camp and a sledding hill like up the Dome or my father. And she nodded and said Jason would stay too. Then she asked me if I would watch after him. And I said yes, but then I said, “What am I to watch?”

And she didn’t answer but she said she would like me to stay in Dawson there with him if I could and not go to Memphis or Whitehorse, and then she said I should not be sorry if he did not wait for me after school was done. She said, “Later he’ll come looking for you, and it’d be a good thing for you to do if you’d look out for him then.”

So I said yes, and even after she died and after he didn’t go to school anymore, I still looked for him like she told me. And it didn’t matter anyway, what she’d said, because June never went to Memphis. Not even Jude did, he just went to Calgary and didn’t come home anymore. And June just stayed beside me in my room and didn’t talk about Jude or about Whitehorse either. Sometimes she said she knew now how I must feel, not to have anybody who looked like me or had once been a baby with me in our mother’s belly, how lonesome I must feel, and I said yes, and got in bed with her and let her hold me like she did when I was little and muss my hair with her hand until she fell asleep. And all the time, I kept watching Jason and what he did and said, so I’d know when he came looking for me.

“Did that feel like love to you?” he’d said to me, back at The Pit. All I’d wanted was to know what it meant to him to tell
Mara’s sister what he did, and to change the Old Man story like he did. I wasn’t sure what he’d been getting at by saying it to her, if it was a way of starting to tell her something that he’d better not. I knew it would make trouble for him with Minnie and knew, too, he didn’t often tell his mother’s stories anymore, so he must have his reasons. I was wishing he would show them to me, his reasons. I felt that I knew him and why he was the way he was, but sometimes I needed him to show me his reasons.

I knew there was a way I could look at him so he didn’t get rough with me when I asked him questions, like he did with other people. I’d thought I could be the one, the only one, he’d make confessions to. Sometimes when I followed him, I imagined him turning around and seeing me there, and I would know in that second that he’d always known how I’d followed him, and we’d finally got to the place he’d been taking me all along, and then I’d say, “Confess to me,” and he’d tell me everything.

But instead, after he told her his story about Old Man, he went to a table by himself, and I went after him and in a soft voice that would make him not afraid or rough, I said, “Are you all right?” and he said, “Why would you come over here like something of me is yours. What we did by the river, did that feel like love to you?”

We’d gone to the river after that first night we saw her. I knew what it meant to Jason to see her show up here. Minnie maybe knew a little, but I knew the most what it meant. So I went with him to the woods by the river, and we didn’t say much at all, and then he put his hand in my hair so it hurt and he was
pulling me toward him. And now I, who’d wanted to keep all his secrets for him, had told Aileen we kissed.

I’d got as far as the steps of our house, and now I sat down and tipped my head so I could see the deep blue centre of the sky, which the sun had circled away from, as if it wanted to escape to the earth but the sky kept pulling it back.

We didn’t just kiss.

When we were done, he had let me lie there in the curve of his arm for a little while, and then I felt him restless again and could hear the thoughts turning between his ears.

“It’s nice she came for you,” I told him.

“She didn’t come for me,” he answered.

“It’s you who’ll keep her here. She’ll want to know you,” I said.

“No,” he said. “She won’t.”

We didn’t go to the river again, and after that he never laid a hand on me or looked at me like he knew a thing about my body that my clothes didn’t show. But he went there with her. Just a few nights before, I’d followed her there to him and seen them sit not far from where he had done it to me, with their heads together like it was secrets they were sharing, like he was telling her everything.

It wasn’t her I’d been following that night but him, and I knew she would be going to him, I knew as soon as I saw her that first day after I was done singing that she’d get to following him too like I did, and I knew he’d make it easy for her to follow after. The sky was grey as stone when she went down to meet him there at the river, and I had to stay so far back that I thought I’d lost her until I heard them speaking together
and I followed the quiet sound of their voices to where they were. I could hear what he said to her, but not always what she said back. He was talking all boastful like he would get, like he wanted her to think something was special about him. But then he said to her that sometimes he thought he went looking for a reason to be angry, because the feeling that was a feeling in his body of being angry for no reason was unbearable. I couldn’t see her face then, and I wanted to know if she looked scared or if she was sorry for him or thought it was like the stories he’d tell of himself, just him trying to get listened to. I wondered if he’d have been able to tell, if he’d told me that, that I knew he was saying something true.

Then he told her a story about one time when he was something like fourteen years old. He said he and his ma had had a goat and he tied it up behind the house, way far back in the yard. He put down a bowl of food real close to it, but not close enough that the goat could reach it. He didn’t change the food all week and it got so it stank, but the stink of it was nothing on the sound that goat made. He said his mother would holler at him to fix what was wrong with the goat, and he’d pretend to go and see it, but he’d only stand outside the house looking at it, listening to the sound it was making. Then he’d go inside and tell her he thought it had took sick and that he’d get some medicine for it, but he didn’t get anything at all for it. And after a week that goat died, and then he thought that maybe it wasn’t even for want of the food but for water that it died, because he’d thought it would be another week before he’d have to move the food closer. He hadn’t thought of the water. And he said he told his mother that the goat had died of its sickness, and when he said that, the woman Aileen asked, “Why did you do this thing?” And he said, like he had himself
all figured out, “Because of how it felt to listen to that goat. Because of wanting to keep feeling like that and know why.”

And then I got a notion that he was lying now. You had to listen so careful to Jason. He’d tell you things about himself no one else ever would. And sometimes he wouldn’t tell you anything at all. And sometimes he’d tell you a lie that you were sure was a lie and then you’d figure out that it was the truest thing he’d told you. But I couldn’t remember him having any goats. His mother had rabbits for a while, I remembered, and then she didn’t anymore. But I didn’t remember a goat.

And then again, I thought, since his mother’s sister had come to town, he had fallen into telling the truth more often than he told lies. I wondered why it was. To his own mother, lies had come from his mouth like birds. But to her sister, he was different. I watched how he was, the danger and the slyness gone from him. I saw the lies leave his mouth. I’d thought I knew him best, and then I saw how much there was I didn’t know at all.

I didn’t know if she believed his story about the little goat he did not feed. After he was done with talking, she began to talk about her husband and I heard her crying and I listened, though I couldn’t hear a word, until he took her home.

This night was dark enough to remind me of nights in winter. Blue. Steady. I was sorry I had left the bar. I was sorry for the way it would feel shameful to go back again when I did, and I knew that I would. I knew if I went back now while he had drink in him, he would let me sit beside him and maybe he would even say he was sorry or do something so that I’d know that he was, like ask me how June had been doing or
make a show of blowing his cigarette smoke out to the side so it didn’t go in my face. If I waited a day or more, he would be so ashamed of himself it would make him mean with me, and it would be weeks till he’d come talk to me again. Weeks when he wouldn’t say “
Angie
,” or look at me sideways and just about almost smile.

So I knew I had to go back and knew I would, but I let myself look at the sky for a little longer. I decided to let myself have a count to a hundred before I had to go. I lay back till my head was on the boards of the porch beneath me, and I counted all the way, and then it was time to go back.

I took the longer way there. I went down almost as far as the river, and then as I cut up past the bank, I heard a sound. It was a woman crying sound, I knew it. I looked and there, by the pay telephone, there was a woman crying into the phone. And I knew the woman. It was his mother’s sister.

I called her name, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was just staring like that at the phone box, her ear all crushed against the phone. She didn’t answer me. And so I waited.

And then, after a while, I saw that she wasn’t listening to anybody say anything and so I took the receiver from her hand. She let it go and sat on the ground, while I put the receiver to my ear and listened to the sound of a ringing, unanswered phone, and then I hung it up.

“You go home now,” I said to her. She was slumped like dirty laundry on the ground against the phone booth.

“I drank too much,” she told me. “And then he told me, he said …” She stopped speaking.

“Do you know how to get home?” I asked her.

She gave a nod and looked up.

“You want some help to get home?” I asked her. I reached
for her hand, but she snatched it away and then she got herself up. And I waited for her. And when she stumbled for a moment, I was there beside her and I caught her. And then we walked like that, her weight on me, all the way till we got to the hotel, and I remembered my father and how he’d be in my arms like that the nights he got paid, until the night he died and I didn’t have to go get him and take him home anymore.

I let her sit on the steps of the hotel while I went inside and told Ivan I was going to need some help to get her up the stairs. Ivan made a sound like all the air had got sucked right out of his mouth and said it was no good at all for the guests to see people drunk like this. He said it gave the tourists the wrong idea about the town.

“But she is a tourist,” I said. He just shook his head and said he didn’t want anything to do with it and I’d have to get her upstairs myself.

So I went back outside and I got hold of her as best I could, though she didn’t want me touching her, and I took her through the door to the stairs, while Ivan went outside to smoke a cigarette. Again and again I put her hand on the railing, and then when she took it off, I put it on again, and so finally we got to the top of the stairs. When I closed her door and came back downstairs, Ivan was behind the desk again and didn’t look up as I left.

Hardly anybody was left on the street now, and the sun leaned over town, pushing its way up. But when I opened the door to The Pit, nothing was much changed except the glasses that were emptier and the ashtrays that were filled. I walked to the bar where Jason sat next to Papa’s old friend John and I took
a seat beside them. I felt Jason’s whole body notice me, but he didn’t look at me, didn’t let me have even just that second of knowing something about him and what he thought of me.

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