One Year in Coal Harbor (19 page)

I thought the vegetarian war orphans would be ecstatic that the logging had stopped but they looked a little
bemused, as if they’d had their protesting carpet yanked out from underneath them, all dressed up in placards and no place to go. But in the end they graciously forgave Uncle Jack for this and headed to their next protest, on the mainland. All except for the one who had once been a hairdresser. He decided to stay in town.

After that, Uncle Jack took off for the Alberta oil fields, where men could make a lot of money fast if they were lucky. He had hoped to get money for the mountain from the land conservancy but even with that and Miss Honeycut’s Coal Harbor fund, he had to put all the money he had planned to spend on the B and B into buying the mountain. So he had to start all over to make his fortune. And he had to do it quickly before someone else got the B and B. And it was just like Uncle Jack that he didn’t make a fuss or promises or complaints. He just took off to do what he had to do. So that was that. Indefinitely.

“I’m an idiot,” Miss Bowzer was saying to me and my mother as we sat around our kitchen table and admired her ring for the millionth time.

“Because you tried to make him jealous by pretending to care for Dan Sneild?” I asked. I had been curious on this point for some time.

“Primrose,” said my mother warningly.

“No,” said Miss Bowzer shortly.

I still thought that that had some choice idiot qualities about it, but if she wasn’t willing to discuss it, there was no point in pursuing it.

“No, because he offers me the B and B I have always wanted, gives me a ring and I send him off to buy a mountain instead.”

“It wasn’t quite like that,” I said. “You didn’t really send him off. I was the one who suggested buying the mountain but it didn’t occur to me that was actually possible. And besides, he’s going to make it all work. That’s what he does best.”

“And what good would the B and B be if you sat on that porch and looked at that clear-cut? No, you did the right thing,” said my mother, and sighed. “Old hotfoot Jack.”

“He just wants to give you what you’ve always wanted,” I said. “It’s very romantic, really.”

Miss Bowzer just shook her head. “Ha! Don’t kid yourself. He’s having a wonderful time. There’s nothing he likes better than losing all his money and having to make it again. Part of me thinks he bought that mountain just so he’d have the thrill of having to start at square one.”

I wanted to protest but I suspected she was probably right.

“No,” she went on, “he just went whistling off. Well, who knows if he’ll ever make enough money for the B and B? Who knows how many years we’ll waste apart while he tries? Who knows if he’ll ever come back? That man is going to drive me crazy.”

With all the excitement and fuss in town over, and everyone returned to their normal routines, I had time to
brood more about Ked. He was always on my mind. It made me kind of angry that everyone else seemed to have accepted that he was gone and that was that. I wondered if my parents would be willing to take a family trip to Yellowknife in the summer. I was asking my mom about this after supper one night when my dad flipped on the news.

“HUSH!” he said to my mother and me, which was so unlike him that we froze.

Then we heard what he did. The tail end of a story out of Yellowknife.

A reporter was saying, “… since a fourteen-year-old boy has disappeared off a frozen lake outside Yellowknife. His father, Jack Schneider—”

“That’s Ked’s last name!” I said.

“HUSH!” said my dad again as he strained to hear. My mother and I sat on the couch next to him.

“RCMP officers say that the father claims to have forgotten his tackle and left the boy alone on the ice while he drove back for it. A bartender says Mr. Schneider arrived at his bar and began drinking, at one point got agitated, seeming to suddenly remember that he’d left his son out on the ice waiting for him. The bartender became concerned and called a local constable, who drove out to the lake and found footprints but no other signs of life. Search and Rescue has been called out but so far there is no sign of the boy.”

My dad drove over to tell Bert and Evie in case they
hadn’t already heard, while my mom and I sat in the living room glued to the television, but there was no more news.

My mom let me stay home from school the next day. I watched the news and took hot baths but I could not get warm and nothing more was reported.

“Do you think he found shelter?” I asked my mom when Search and Rescue was called off. “Just because they didn’t find him doesn’t mean he isn’t alive.”

“That’s right,” said my mom. But I knew she’d heard what I had, that it was thirty below.

Evie and Bert looked as haunted as I felt. We didn’t talk about it. The first week we all hoped to hear something, anything indicating that Ked was all right. And as time went on, any other kind of speculation seemed unthinkable. Finally the only way I could cope was not to think about it at all. But it existed like a fifth appendage that hung on my body, throwing me off balance.

Miss Bowzer sensed I didn’t want to talk about it but she kept saying she had faith in Uncle Jack coming back soon, and I thought half the time she was really talking about Ked. She must have had some faith in Uncle Jack making the money he said he would, too, because when she and I walked out to the end of Jackson Road, as we did from time to time, to sit on the B and B steps and gaze at Miss Honeycut’s park, Miss Bowzer would tell me in detail how she saw each of the rooms decorated.

“He thinks he needs something to offer me before he can marry me,” said Miss Bowzer. “It’s stupid but you
can’t do much about people’s built-in stupidity. I mean everyone’s stupid in
some
form. I always thought that poor boy Ked was so quiet and shy because he thought he had nothing to offer anyone.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said stonily as I always did when someone brought him up.

We stared at the mountaintop with its ridiculous barely-able-to-be-seen statue perched high on top.

“Maybe you’ll see Ked again someday. Maybe I’ll see Jack. Life takes a lot of courage, Primrose. You can candy-coat that idea all you like but that’s the truth. A lot of it’s just hard.”

“I don’t want to talk about it. Sometimes it helps to pretend he was never here.”

“Of course Ked was here,” said Miss Bowzer, and I couldn’t tell if she was intentionally misunderstanding me or not, but she seemed determined to keep resurrecting him with talk. “He was getting to be quite a fixture, coming into the restaurant every day. I really liked him, even though he hardly said a word.”

“He didn’t go to the restaurant every day. I was with him every day after school,” I said.

“He came while he was waiting for your school to let out. I’d’ve thought he’d told you. At first I thought he was just killing time; then I realized he came in to pump the seer. He bought Harry something to eat every single day—a piece of pie or at least a cup of coffee or Coke or
something. But he never bought himself nothing. I wanted to give him his own piece of pie for free, because he was always watching the seer eat it like he could put away half a pie himself. You know teenage boys. But the first time I offered he looked so embarrassed I didn’t do that again. You know, I think he just didn’t feel like he could show up and ask the seer to tell his dreamtown visions for free.”

“But Ked never had any money,” I said. “It was one of his chief complaints. That’s why we were making the cookbook.”

Then a thought struck me.

“How did he pay for the meals?”

“Cash,” said Miss Bowzer, looking surprised.

“No, I mean bills or change?”

“Oh.” She thought a second. “It was always change. Loonies, toonies, once he tried to pay for coffee all with pennies and I told him not to do that again. I don’t need a hundred pennies.”

“What did he ask the seer?” I said, putting my head in my hands. Eleanor had been right and Uncle Jack must have known it. But I didn’t care. It didn’t change my opinion of any of them.

“Well, gosh, let me think,” Miss Bowzer said. “What did he ask the seer? I think Ked wanted to know what was going to happen to him next. Seems that when I did overhear Ked that’s what he was asking about. But you
know no one can tell you what’s coming down the chute. Just as well.”

Uncle Jack made his way back the following spring with a bank account full of money, just as he’d planned. Miss Bowzer sold The Girl on the Red Swing to Bert and Evie. Bert and Evie came over one night to tell us excitedly all about it.

“It was when we were helping Miss Bowzer run it that we got the bug,” said Evie.

“The restaurant bug,” said Bert.

“And we need something to do. Macramé is nice but it don’t take up all your hours.”

“And Evie loves feeding people.”

“We got lots of ideas.”

“Not that we’d change much really. We’d still serve everything on a waffle. But Evie’s got some new recipes.”

“With mini marshmallows,” said Evie happily.

“But not everything with mini marshmallows,” said Bert.

“Because some folks don’t like them,” Evie said to me in amazement. “They don’t even like having to pick them out.”

“And we want people to be happy there,” said Bert.

“At least as happy as they were when Miss Bowzer ran it.”

Nobody could have been as happy these days as Miss Bowzer unless it was Uncle Jack. We had the wedding for them in our backyard and Miss Bowzer, whom I was now
supposed to call Kate, looked so beautiful I thought there could never be a more glowing bride. My mom and I got to help her make her dress, which was a lovely ivory simple thing. I don’t know what she reminded me of, a mermaid or an angel or something. I swear she had a little golden aura around her all through the ceremony and for the rest of the day. I asked my mom if she could see it and she said she could. Evie made the wedding cake, which of course was chock-full of mini marshmallows. Uncle Jack said it was his favorite kind, although as far as I knew neither he nor anyone else had ever tasted such a concoction. But it was such a day that if things there weren’t already your favorite, forevermore they would be.

I was happy the day of the wedding, you couldn’t not be, we all were, glowing and golden and shining with it. And as usual I included Ked there, as if I carried him to events in my thoughts the way I used to drag my teddy bear along.

After the wedding when everyone had gone and my mother and I were sitting together in the garden sharing one last piece of cake, I mentioned all this to her. That I brought him places in my mind. That he should have been here eating cake too. That some fates seemed so unfair, right from the start, and then, as for Ked, all the way through.

“I hesitate to say this because I don’t think it’s something you understand until you’re much older,” said my mother, pausing and reconsidering, “if you understand it then. It’s something my mother said to me and I didn’t
understand it, but now, as I get older, I begin to get inklings of what she meant. You know she died when I was sixteen, don’t you?”

“From breast cancer,” I said. My mom didn’t talk about it much. Her mother died and left my mother with a younger sister and two younger brothers. My mother left home right after to find her stepfather, who had disappeared three years before. The older I got the more horrible my mother’s teenage years sounded, although she always claimed they weren’t horrible at all, just eventful. Only her mother dying was really terrible, she said.

“Well, when she was dying I kept saying it wasn’t fair. She was such a wonderful person, everyone loved my mother. Well, most people did. She was such a beautiful poet and there was always a kind of awareness of the intrinsic sacredness in everything when you were with her. And it didn’t seem right that some of the people I thought were horrible and who hadn’t my mother’s great love of life were perfectly healthy and here she was dying from something dreadful. And she said that she had come round to see that everyone’s fates were beautiful. Even the ones that seemed most horrifying. That you had to be careful who you said this to because most people didn’t understand and if you said you thought some child dying had a beautiful fate, well, they thought you were crazy or some kind of a monster. But she said she could see it now. Even her fate had a kind of luminous beauty to it.
Peculiarly and absolutely her own. That what we give back to life is our own unique experience of it. And I was angry because I didn’t want her to die and I didn’t want her to see leaving us kids as beautiful. But now as I get older and see a bigger picture, well, I think she was right. Maybe someday you’ll see that.”