Read In the Land of Birdfishes Online

Authors: Rebecca Silver Slayter

Tags: #Fiction, #General

In the Land of Birdfishes (8 page)

BOOK: In the Land of Birdfishes
11.34Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

“Dead.”

The band was playing some reeling country song, and the bar folks were loving it. A crowd of girls and women were kicking their heels up and spinning each other around in time with the clinging, ringing snap of banjo strings.

“None of those girls were here two days ago,” Jason said, flat.

“This band just touring up here?” I asked him.

“No, they all the time play here. Just not usually for a bunch of tarty southern city girls.”

I looked at his hands, loose at the end of his bent arms, which rested against the bar. I looked at the way the fingers were long and thin and ever so slightly squared at the tips. I looked at my hands.

“Maybe you should go get Angel,” I said.

“She’ll find her way back,” Jason said. He took his eyes off the band and I felt the angle of his face turn toward me, though he looked down at the floor. “When’d you get here,” he said.

“Just yesterday. I didn’t know how I would find her.”

“You drive here,” he asked.

“I took the bus, and then … I got a ride with someone,” I said. The top of my head was perfectly aligned with the top of his shoulder. I was precisely the height of his shoulder.

“Uh-huh,” he said. He shifted his body and looked at me straight. “So what are you doing here.”

I told him.

I started with when we were small. Not when we were
together, but after we weren’t anymore. After Aunt Una took me in to her south-end townhouse. I told him about how I was pulled out of the school she first sent me to because I couldn’t seem to learn the letters and finally someone noticed it was my eyes and not my brain that couldn’t figure out the difference between an
f
and a
p
. I told him about the school for the blind I was sent to, where we were taught to read with our fingertips. How after several years, I began to notice that I could make out larger print—street names on signs, children’s books, the titles on book covers—the words that once were smeared shadows emerging into something like clarity. Until one day the commission gave me a special typewriter and told me I’d recovered as much of my vision as I ever would and was being transferred to the regular high school, where a special reader was being assigned to read me any books that weren’t available in large type.

I told him I fell in love. And Stephan was the first thing I had ever been able to see clearly.

I finished my beer and took another from the bartender, but left it on the bar beside me, untouched. I told him how my aunt used to take me to see my father in the hospital once a year. How while I was at university I started to go more often, on my own. It would confuse things to say that I loved him, because I hated him a little, hated how even at the end of his life and the end of the beginning of mine, he was so mind-blowingly inadequate. How he was the smallest possible scrap of a family, but he was mine and I couldn’t stop myself from seeing him. He was feeble and thin and looked like a paper man—I’d look at him and think of what he’d done to me and how I could take a deep breath and fill my lungs with what he took from me and blow it out and sweep
away this paper man who was not even a paper father. Who was less even than that.

Angel came in the door and leaned against the wall beside us, listening for a moment. Then her eyes met mine, and she stepped away into the crowd of people stamping their feet and clapping at the whirling, winding, whorling thing the band was playing now.

I told him the doctors had asked me not to talk to my father about when Mara and I were young. They said it would only upset and confuse him, and that he wouldn’t remember it anyway. So we never talked of another daughter, another sister. I’d tried as a child to find Mara. A teacher had helped me write to the family of a second cousin in northern Alberta who’d agreed to take in the fully blind child Aunt Una had felt incapable of caring for. But they had given Mara up after just a few months. She had been taken in by a Catholic charity home for the blind, which shocked me then but made me laugh inside my head years later by my father’s bedside, because it would have killed him years before his heart did to know the papists had a hold of his own blood. The second cousin said she was better off there and never wrote again. The older I grew, the less I thought of my sister as a person who still lived in the world. When I was mistreated at school, I’d remembered this person who once was as close as my skin, but as if she was someone irretrievably gone.

The day I went to tell my father I would be leaving Halifax and would not be able to visit anymore, he asked if I was going to see Mara. He told me he had got a letter once from the cousin in Alberta. That she’d married and moved to some far-flung corner of the Yukon Territory. After I arrived in Toronto, when I phoned, he spoke more and more often and
urgently about Mara. He often asked when I would visit her. Eventually I began to answer, “Soon.”

“I didn’t know until he died if it was true,” I told Jason. “At the funeral, the daughter of the cousin in Alberta came. She told me it was true, and said Mara was living in Dawson last she heard. I swear I meant from then to come. But it was so far away, and I didn’t know what kind of place this was, how you’d find someone here.

“Two weeks ago, Stephan left me. I waited for twelve days for him to come home. He didn’t.” I said, “I had nowhere to go.”

Jason was turned so far from me I could almost see his back. I looked up at his face. His eyes. He was watching the dancers.

In front of the band, the long, swing-haired girls in their loose jeans and shiny lips were tiring. They were drunker, sexier. They wanted to be taken home. The boys watched from chairs and were too tired or too sad to take them home. A couple older women laughed to themselves and danced in a clumsy way, apart. In the dark, behind the other dancers, near the door, Angel held her hands above her like a child and moved her body ever so slightly, like a steel string plucked and ringing. Her black hair had light in it.

We tipped our bottles to our mouths and watched.

FIVE

W
HEN YOU HAVE A CHILD,
it’s like all you are and everything that happened to you is just one story, and that is the story of how you got there, how you arrived to being the start of another person’s life. Every story I told him was essentially that one, because that was the story he wanted, and after a while, that was the only story I had to tell. So I’d tell him the story of how I left the place where I started, but somehow that story always ended before it got to the place where I finished. Somehow we never came to speak of what had happened in between, about all the mornings and nights I lay awake alone in a bed far, far from the place I’d once thought to be the world, and how as I lay there I had not one idea of how my life would end. I never told him about the doctors who made me hold still so they could press their instruments against my eyes and sigh, so that I could imagine them shaking their heads at the woman who had brought me there.

All the things that got lost in the story I told him, all that happened in between, began with her, the woman who had brought me there. If I were to tell him now what I could not then, I would start by telling him about Nellie.

Nellie was a distant cousin of my mother and would often
heave sighs of her own and repeat to herself, as if reminding herself it was true, that her own mother would have wished it so. At last she told me the doctors had done all they could do for me and there was nothing left but to take me home with her. I didn’t dare to ask her the question that was as much a part of me as the bones beneath my flesh, because I feared her answer.

She took me in her car with her to a hotel that she told me was near the airport, so we could get an early start. She took my hand to the surface of the bed so I could find my way along the mattress to take the other side beside her. I lay awake and listened to the sound of her turning pages beside me and knew the answer to the question I hadn’t asked and that it would be only us two who’d take a plane into the sky tomorrow.

SIX

I
KNEW THE SECOND
I saw her what I was looking at. There’s trouble in pants, I thought to myself, and I went right up to it like someone who didn’t know that the things that ruin people’s lives can show up with dyed blond hair and a suitcase. I knew better, but I couldn’t stop myself. Maybe, just for a second, I wondered what if he’d been telling the truth all this time. But I should have known better. He came out of his mother lying, and there wasn’t anybody who could show up out of nowhere and make his lies true.

And of course, after that, there wasn’t anything else to be done. I had maybe a moment when I could have pretended I didn’t see her there, and maybe that would have been that. I looked hard at her the first time I saw her, when I was still trying to figure out what I was looking at, and I saw all of her. She was sharp and soft at the same time, bony hands and knees and elbows on arms and legs that looked like they had no muscle to them at all. Her face would have been good-looking once, like Mara’s, but it was more worn out than Mara’s ever got, with worried lines back and forth on her forehead and around her pale, watchful eyes. If I said this, nobody would know what I meant, because his were dark
and much narrower, but they were Jason’s eyes in her head. Her mouth was the only thing I liked about her. Her mouth looked like it could laugh good and hard, or tell a dirty joke. But I would have rathered I never heard one word come out of that mouth. And maybe if I’d just left her standing there by the river, looking like she’d been dropped there from the moon and didn’t have the sense God put in a peanut, maybe then she’d have gone back wherever it was she came from. But there’s no sense to that, to even wondering about that, because it isn’t what happened, and after I’d let her say who she was, it was over for Jason and I knew I just had to wait for him to figure out what I’d known from the first second I saw her.

She didn’t leave. She was moved into that hotel and had started calling it home. And I didn’t buy it, because she came here from somewhere and that was where she’d go back to, sooner or later, and home was the place you were headed, not where you’d holed up for a while. But Jason did. “I’ve got to go home,” she’d say at the end of a night and peel herself out of her chair, and I’d see his eyes shining when she said the word, because to him, I knew, she was saying, “I’m here.” Or “I’ll stay.” Or something like that.

At first, she’d just sit at the bar beside him, mouthing the neck of a beer, and some nights hardly a word would pass between them. Or she’d listen while he talked to someone else. Or she wouldn’t listen, just sit there glassy-eyed and looking like her mind had gone back to where she’d come from and left the rest of her there in the chair. It took nearly two weeks before she started to ask questions.

That night, he had his back turned against her, though he wasn’t talking to anybody else. I was watching the two of them, because I had it in my mind to keep an eye on her and because I could feel the stare of Glenn Stuckey on my back like it was his hot, stinking breath on me. I’d heard Glenn called a mean drunk, but he wasn’t any nicer sober. “That kid should be with his father,” he’d hissed at me when I sat down. “Some mother you are. Out at the bar till all hours with a kid at home. I pity that boy.” He had the palest eyes I’d ever seen, and back when we were in school a lot of girls were taken with those eyes. There were a lot of kids without fathers in this town, and people figured at least a few of them were his. But it was the only mercy I’d seen him show that he never laid claim to them. So I kept my mouth shut and turned my eyes to where Aileen was twisting on her stool like she had something to say.

I thought she’d just sit quiet like she usually did and wait till he let on he knew she was there, but then out of nowhere she said, “So your father’s dead.”

He turned his face and gave a little nod but didn’t look at her.

It was like she was testing whether he’d answer the way she was expecting. “Before Mara?”

“No.”

She was braced like she thought he might hit her. “How?” she asked.

“Well,” Jason said slowly, getting more interested, “for weeks, hunters had been returning from the woods, saying there was a grizzly out there bigger than any they’d ever seen before. Some said it wasn’t even a grizzly but some new creature, like a grizzly had come across something else, one dark day in the woods, and the two animals had lain together and
created this new beast. My father didn’t believe the stories, and so one day—”

I lost patience listening to this. “Just a wreck,” I told her, and she looked up in surprise, startled to see me there, two seats down the bar from Jason. I looked right back until she lowered her gaze. “He wrecked his truck. It was bad weather and he lost control of his truck. It happens,” I said, and I looked at Jason. “And that’s
all
that happened.”

“I’m sorry,” she said to Jason after looking back and forth between us for a moment, and then she watched as he lit another cigarette and put it down beside the one already burning in the ashtray. She reminded me of someone. If I ignored her eyes. If I looked only at her mouth.

“I’ve been drinking too much,” she said to Jason, more quietly, but I could hear her fine.

“You know what they say about Dawson,” he replied. “What we’ve got here is a drinking town with a mining problem.”

She laughed, relieved, like she hadn’t thought he could tell a joke. She’d asked Angie what he did for a living the second day she was here. That’s how you could spot a southerner two steps into a conversation. What do you do, they always wanted to know. Like the most interesting thing about you was what someone paid you for. She acted like she thought Angie was joking. “A
gold miner
,” she kept saying.

Now she said, sort of casually but there was something intent in her, “Will you take me there sometime?”

“To the claim?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Yeah. Okay.” I saw him think about the idea and start to like it. It was things like that that let me know what he was
starting to feel about her. “I’ll tell you one day when and we’ll go.”

“Okay,” she said and a smile started on her face and then went all the way across, but slowly. There was something about her sometimes, like she wasn’t all the way grown up. Like she hadn’t earned the wrinkles on her face. She was all kinds of trouble. “Okay, you tell me when.”

“I’ll take you fishing too,” he said. “We’ll go down by where the old nets used to be and take my boat out. I’ve got a boat, you know.”

She shook her head, and her dull eyes widened and then she dropped her face. I wondered again who she reminded me of. “I don’t go in boats.”

“Not ever?”

She shook her head again.

“Neither did she,” he said.

And I saw that Aileen didn’t have to ask who he meant, so she wasn’t stupid and she knew what it was they were all the time really talking about. And maybe she was behind the whole conversation, already knowing how it would go, because the next thing she said was, “Jason, how did she die?”

It had come out rushed and stiff in a way that made it clear she’d practised it, and I could tell Jason noticed that too. He opened his mouth and I had no idea what he was going to say, so I said, “It didn’t happen here in town.”

“Where did it happen?” Aileen asked, looking from Jason to me, like she wasn’t sure which one she was talking to.

“It was—” I began.

Jason was looking straight at me when he said, “You weren’t there.” Then he turned back to Aileen and said again, “She wasn’t there.”

“But Jason …” Aileen stopped herself, seeming to see how he was doing his thing of leaving the room from the seat beside her, going back somewhere deep into himself. More gently, she asked, “Can you tell me what happened? She was my sister. I don’t have anybody else.”

Jason was thinking hard. I saw his hands in fists in his lap.

“There’s nothing to tell,” I said. “It was just a—”

Jason cut me off again. “Aileen, you like stories?”

“What?”

I was so pissed then I almost left them to it. If there was a way to circle around a thing instead of getting to it, he would find it.

“Aileen, I’ll tell you a story, okay.”

Joey Innis was sitting at the table across from us, same place he sat every time he came down to the bar, doing the thing he did most times he sat at that table, with his hand tucked down his pants, and the tears just running down his sorry cheeks. He didn’t make a sound, but somehow Aileen had noticed him there. She was staring at him. Good, I thought, let her be a little afraid of this place. Let her think there’s something a little wrong with people here. Then Aileen looked up at me as if she knew what I was thinking. I grinned back at her. “You’re going to tell me a story?” she asked Jason. She hesitated. “Like a … First Nations story?” She looked like she wasn’t sure what he would think of those words, or as if she’d just learned them. “I mean, it is, a Tr’ond …” Her voice faded away.

“Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in,” I said. It didn’t surprise me she hardly knew the word, because it was the one we gave ourselves. She wouldn’t have hesitated to say her own people’s word, when it was still our name, even a year ago.

She had the sense to look ashamed. “I didn’t know. I thought you were … I thought everybody up here was Inuit. But a man at the hotel told me—”

“Sure,” said Jason. “Sure, I’ll tell you a Han story. That’s not just our people, that’s a whole bunch of First Nations around here. But sure, I’ll tell you one of our stories. My mother used to tell me stories she learned from my father’s mother. I can tell you how the world began, if you want.”

She was looking at Joey again. There was something pitiful about her. Something I almost liked and something I hated, something weak. I remembered that Jason had said she came here because her man had left her. She was that kind. Went and fell in love with someone that didn’t want her. Weak and hard at the same time. So I couldn’t even all the way feel sorry for her. “Okay,” she said softly.

“Well,” said Jason, “things began with a man and a woman.”

Old Man always was. There was not a time when Old Man was not. Long ago, there was only water, and Old Man travelled the water in a boat, looking for land. After he had travelled a ways, he sent down a duck to swim beneath the water and see if he could find land below it. But the duck came to the surface and had found no land. Then, after some time, Old Man sent down an otter. But the otter came to the surface and had found no land. Then the Old Man sent down a badger. But when the badger came to the surface, he, too, had found no land
.

At last, Old Man sent down a muskrat. But the muskrat did not return. The muskrat was gone so long that Old Man
said to the other animals in the boat, Duck, Otter, Badger, Muskrat has drowned. And as he was preparing to paddle away, Muskrat appeared at the surface. He was exhausted and nearly drowned. In his claws was a ball of mud
.

Old Man took the ball of mud from Muskrat and rolled it between his hands. Then he blew on it and it became the world. In the world, he made mountains and rivers. He made oceans and lakes. He made fishes and birds, berries and flowers. Then, with a bit of clay he had, he made a wife
.

Together, Old Man and his wife, Old Woman, decided how things would be in the world. Together, they made people. Old Man said he must have first say about how things would be made. Old Woman said, All right, but I will have final say
.

Old Man said, Let people have eyes and a mouth, set up and down on their faces
.

Old Woman said, Yes, they shall have eyes and a mouth. But let them be set crosswise on their faces
.

Old Man said, Let people have ten fingers, five on each hand
.

Old Woman said, Ten are too many. They will have eight fingers and two thumbs. Four fingers and one thumb on each hand
.

And so people were made
.

Then Old Man and Old Woman argued. Should people live forever, like gods, or must they die, like animals?

Old Man said, I will throw this buffalo chip in the water. If it floats, people will die for four days and then live again. If it sinks, they will die forever
.

He threw the buffalo chip in the water and it floated
.

Old Woman said, No, no, no. I will throw this stone in the water. If it floats, people will die for four days and then live again. If it sinks, they will die forever
.

She threw the stone in the water and it sank
.

Old Woman said, Then people shall die forever
.

And so people die forever
.

But Old Man was angry with Old Woman. He thought he should have got to decide about the world. So when Old Woman went to cook some fish for dinner, Old Man said that women would have to bear children. He said that out of the suffering and humiliation of their mothers’ bodies, children should be born. And they would carry with them their debts. Their debts would be like secrets in their hearts that made them dark and quiet. They would sometimes hurt each other and would not know why. After their children were born, mothers would grow old, and their children would find them ugly. But because they had debts in their hearts, children would become men who would find wives who looked like their mothers. And their wives would love them. As their mothers had. And the love of men for their wives and mothers would be a kind of murder
.

When Old Man sat down to eat fish with his wife, he found it was cooked in fat and delicious and hot in his mouth, and he ate up his share and hers. Although it burned his hands, he did not wait for it to cool. He saw the way she looked at him and knew she was sorry for what she had done, but he would not forgive her
.

When he fell silent and looked at us, my mouth was still open. Not much surprised me, but I never thought he’d make a lie of something like that. Those stories were ours. I never remembered half of them, though my father had liked to tell them to my sister and me. His stories were not the same as my mother’s
or the Elders’, and he never told them the same way twice. But somehow they were always the same. And the stories were about the way they’d always been told by other families before us, and not about twisting them to tell someone something you didn’t have the guts to say.

BOOK: In the Land of Birdfishes
11.34Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Bloodthirsty by Flynn Meaney
A Different Sort of Perfect by Vivian Roycroft
Time Out by Jill Shalvis
Word of Honour by Michael Pryor
All Yours by Translated By Miranda France By (author) Pineiro Claudia
PostApoc by Liz Worth
To Love a Wilde by Kimberly Kaye Terry