Tell It to the Trees (6 page)

“What’s that?” Hem asked.

“A Person of Colour,” Nick said.

“As if you aren’t, Nick Hutch,” I retorted from my usual spot in the bus, the rear window seat right at the back, far away from all the dumb kids from our school. Nobody ever takes that seat, or the one for Hem beside it, even when I’m late getting out of class. Everybody who has any sense knows it’s my seat. Everybody remembers how I nearly killed Warthog a couple of years ago, even though he’s three times my size and could have pulverized me. Warthog had called me a dirty name so I stuck his face in the snow and sat on his head until his legs stopped kicking and he nearly suffocated. Of course I got in trouble with the principal who called Papa to school and told him that I had anger management issues and would be expelled if I attacked anybody else. Warthog’s mother was there too, all teary and accusing. I cried and
told them what Warthog had called me and added that he’d tried to molest Hem, which was why I reacted the way I did. It was a whopping big lie but it worked. Nobody was very fond of Warthog—he doesn’t wash and he smells bad, so it was not difficult to convince Mr. Russell that he was a pervert.

I stared Nick down. “You’re a POC too,” I said. “You’re pink as your Mom’s bum, Nick Hutch, so watch what you say about others.” But I wasn’t really in the mood to pick on Nick. He says dumb things but he isn’t a bad guy.

“Oh look, what’s that thing there?” Nick turned away and pretended to be engrossed in something outside the window. He can’t bear it when I make fun of him. He would like me to be his girlfriend, but I am not his girlfriend and will never be. He wiped his hand across the foggy window, jammed shut forever, cloudy with old dust and layers of child-breath, jammy hands and spit, and pointed to a small heap of flowers glowing like red coals against the new green of the field we were passing. There was a cross too, sticking up like a raised hand.

“Look,”
Nick insisted. I peered out of the window, my hair blowing into my eyes. The bus created a wind and stirred up dead leaves that flew like butterflies. Then the sad little cross was invisible, and the road behind was just a long stretch of emptiness, not even another car on it, not even a bird.

“Somebody just got killed there,” Nick said. “And
that’s a cross to show where the person died. That way god can come get his soul.”

“Could be
her
soul,” I pointed out.

“Could be,” agreed Nick.

I know he has a crush on me because a few months ago he offered to pay Hem four dollars and thirty-two cents, all the money he had in the world, to steal a pair of my hair clips, my socks, anything. My brother reported this to me, of course. He can’t hide anything from me.

“Tell him he would have to pay you twenty-five bucks,” I instructed Hem.

“Won’t Papa get mad at us for selling your stuff?”

“How would he know? Are you planning to carry tales to him? Hmmm?” I gave Hem my special LOOK which really scares him. Then I relented. “Think of the things we could buy with twenty-five dollars. You could get that book and kit on how to make your own snow, if you wanted to.”

But there was no way Nick could get so much money. Joe Hutch is always watching him. He caught him one Christmas pinching a dollar from his pants pocket. “My dad socked me for stealing, but I wasn’t really, it was to buy him his Christmas present,” he’d complained, nursing his sore ear.

I just had to laugh. “You stole money from your dad to get him a present? You are a moron, Nick Hutch!”

He gave me a pained look. “I was just borrowing it. And he would have got his rotten dollar back along with three of mine anyway—that’s how much his present
was going to cost. But he didn’t even want to hear me.”

I’d laughed again. Nick can be an idiot, but he’s also funny and the only one who gives me birthday presents, even if they are kind of weird and useless. At least he remembers.

I hung halfway out of the bus window, and looked back, searching for those red flowers in the distance. I felt sad. We have no crosses or markers for our dead—we burn them. If we didn’t, there would be one for our grandfather, Mr. J.K. Dharma, and one for Vasant, Suman’s baby who died because he was born prematurely. Suman had named him for Spring, her favourite season, even though he was only the size of a tadpole when he died. Sometimes when I close my eyes, I think I can see him. I tell Hem this and he starts to cry. He is such a wuss. It is so easy to scare him. “Really? Really truly? You can see ghosts?” he asks. And I say, yes, yes I can. I can see my dead Mom and Grandpa and our baby brother. I tell him if he doesn’t listen to me and obey me and love me always, I will call the ghosts to take him away to the other side of our gate where they all live. Or to the bottom of the lake. Now when we pass the lake on our way to the bus-stop, Hem always walks on the far side of the road. But I only scare him sometimes, when I want him to obey me and he doesn’t.

I think it would be nice to have a marker or something where I could place bunches of fire-red flowers—for my dead brother anyway. Instead of a cross, perhaps
I could stick a statue of Papa’s favourite god Ganesha in the ground. How strange would that look, a dancing elephant-man in the middle of nowhere c/o Merrit’s Point? That’s what I would like when I die—a god stuck in the snow to look after me for all eternity.

“My baby brother died too,” Hemant said as if he had jumped into my head and stolen my thoughts. “But we didn’t put up any crosses.”

“That’s because we cremated him, Hem,” I said from my corner of the bus.

“I don’t know anyone who’s dead. What did your brother look like?” asked Nick.

“Like a dead baby. What d’you think?” But I didn’t actually see my dead brother, only pictures of fetuses about his age in a medical book I looked up in the library. He was ten weeks old, so he had dots for eyes and small hands and feet. I felt like crying when I saw the pictures, but I didn’t. Papa would have been ashamed of my weak nature. The baby died on my twelfth birthday, which came and went unnoticed because Suman fell and the baby started coming and the ambulance had to be called. And while we were waiting Suman kept telling us, “I fell down the stairs, silly me. I tripped over my slipper. If anyone asks, don’t forget, I fell down the stairs.”

Then Papa held her carefully like she was a piece of precious glass. He asked her if she was comfortable and she smiled at him even though her eyes were full of tears and nodded yes, I am fine, yes, I am fine. But I knew it really hurt.

Aunty Chanchal came to look after Akka and Papa drove me and Hem to school before going to the hospital. At the school gates Papa got out to open the back door of the car. He hugged both of us and said, “Be good, children, I love you.”

Hem didn’t say anything back, but I did. “Love you too, Papa.” Even though I knew. He got back in the car, looked out of the window at us and waved. We waved back, our hands high in the air. It’s what he likes. It’s what he expects. A fond farewell when he leaves and a fond greeting when he returns.

After the car had disappeared down the road, I smacked Hem’s head. “Why didn’t you say anything? He’ll be upset. Just hope he didn’t notice.”

“I hate Papa. He hurt Mama,” he said.

“He didn’t hurt her. She hurt herself, didn’t you hear? She tripped over her slippers and fell down the stairs.”

“No she didn’t,” he said. “He pushed her out of their room. We saw it.”

“No we didn’t.” I smacked his head again.

“Yes, we did,” Hem insisted.

“Okay. But he didn’t push her. She tripped on her slipper and fell on her own. And you are not to mention it to anyone. I’ll call the ghosts to punish you if you do.”

“What if it comes out of me by itself?”

“Hold on to it, it’s a secret. Hold on and tell it to Tree when we get back from school, okay?”

“Why does he beat Mama? Why does he beat us? Doesn’t he like us?”

“Of course he does, silly. He loves us, wants only what is good for us. That’s why he has to punish us when we’re naughty. For our own good.”

“Was Mama naughty?”

“Papa didn’t do anything to her,” I reminded my brother. “She
fell
, Hem. Fell. On her
own.”
He was a baby. He needed to be taught how to keep secrets. Family secrets.
Our
family,
our
secrets. Nobody else had to know.

We reached our stop and the bus ground to a halt in a cloud of dust. The doors folded open and Hemant and I got out. Mr. Wilcox the driver waved and took off down the road, farther and farther, until the low roar of the bus became one with that of the wind which always blows down from the mountains through Merrit’s Point.

There was no sign of Suman. Later she apologized humbly, but we were mad at her, Hem and I. It’s her
job
to come and get us. That’s what mothers are supposed to do—look after their kids, make sure they’re safe. Anything could happen to us between the bus and the house,
any
thing. That’s what Papa says, although Akka thinks it’s ridiculous. She says I’m old enough to bring my brother home myself and that Papa is being a tyrant for making Suman do it when she has so many other things to attend to.

“Where’s Mama?” Hem asked, looking around as if she might be hiding in the fields on either side of the road.

“How should I know? Come on, let’s go,” I said. “Maybe Akka is ill or something.”

Hem squatted down on the ground. “I’m going to wait. She’s always here. She said she would always be here no matter what!”

“Come on, Hem, don’t be a giant squib!” But I was worried too. It was so unlike Suman not to be waiting for us—she’s there every day, sun or snow. What if she had had one of her fits of illness? What if she’d fallen and broken her arm again? Or if Akka had finally died, as she kept hoping? I started to walk homewards fast, dragging Hem behind me.

“Do you think she’s dead?” He sounded tearful.

“I don’t know,” I snapped. “Come on, hurry up and stop behaving like a baby.”

We passed old Mrs. Cooper’s house, the only other home on that long road. It’s shuttered and silent now. I always wish, when we pass the house, that Mrs. Cooper’s granddaughter, Gilly, was still around. She’s the only friend I’ve had. After moving to Calgary to live with her dad, she sent me a single letter. Then I heard nothing more from her. Mrs. Cooper moved away a few years ago as well, to live with one of her sons—Billy or Dave. They were both construction workers and Mrs. Cooper told us stories of how they spent the winters in the ski resorts nearby, busy renovating, maintaining or building the posh hotels and cottages that had grown up around the resorts. They came home every weekend to be with her, sometimes bringing beautiful girls with long legs who walked with a swing and a sway of their tiny hips. Once I tried to copy the walk to entertain Hem,
swinging awkwardly around the house, one arm bent at the elbow and hand glued to my waist, my nose in the air, until Papa noticed and slapped me about the head for being silly. Good thing he didn’t figure out who I was mimicking—I’d have been beaten black and blue for sure. Papa used to remark that the girls looked cheap, like tramps, even though they had seemed perfectly nice to Hem and me. Even Suman had liked them, but then she likes everyone. Papa says that she has no
discernment
. Afterwards, as always, he was sorry for smacking me. But as he explained over ice cream treats the next day, it was only to teach me the difference between good and bad, dross and gold. Poor Papa, it’s not his fault that he has to be hard with me sometimes. I know he’s worried I’ll turn out like my real mother, the one who abandoned us to our fate.

So I always stare at the shuttered windows of the Cooper house when we walk past. They’re like dead eyes. When Mrs. Cooper was there, even after Gilly had left, she’d watch for us to go by, sometimes call us in for some fresh-baked cookies, and we would run up her driveway guiltily. And Suman would follow, saying,
Only one cookie each, hurry up, and don’t tell Papa, don’t tell
.

In winter, the old lady would keep the living room lights on warm and friendly as her smile, and reassuring, informing us that we were only about twenty minutes from home, not lost in the wilderness of snow that spread out in every direction, borders and edges blurred and lost.

“It’s a long time now. I don’t think she’s coming back, do you?” Hem said, thinking my exact same thoughts again, like he’s my twin.

“Don’t know. I miss her.”

“Me too. Her cookies were the best in the world.”

“Greedy little thing, all you can think about is food.” I yanked his arm. “Race you home. Last one there is a miserable, bandy-legged spider.”

I swung my bag over my shoulder and started running. We slowed down out of breath as we approached the gate. Noticed the car parked outside.

“I wonder who that is,” I said. The car looked crappy, worse than ours, which Papa calls his
rusty steed
. Sometimes my father can be really nice and really funny.

Hem started running again and barged through the front door. “Mama! Mama! Where are you?”

Sounds of laughter floated out of Akka’s room. I thought, would they be laughing if someone’s hurt? We dropped our bags and went into our grandmother’s room. There was Suman, sitting on the bed, cool as you please, and Akka, leaning against the pillows piled up in her chair, her white hair like silk threads spread out on the pale pink covers. And a tall woman we’d never seen before.

“Hello, hello, you must be the famous Hemant! And this lovely girl must be Varsha,” she said. She held out her hand. “I am Anu Krishnan.”

I didn’t know how to react to that. Nobody has ever called me lovely. I wasn’t sure what to say or do, so I frowned at the woman to let her know I wasn’t about
to be taken in by praise. Later on, when I read her notebook, I knew she was a smiling liar.

But I have to admit, she looked kind of cute, and her clothes were really, really nice. Her hand was still out, but I decided not to shake it, just because. Later on, after I read those pages from her notebook, I was glad that I didn’t take her hand. She was no friend. She was a liar, Anu Krishnan. She never meant a word of anything she said to us. How was it she described me in her horrid book? Ugly little thing, teeth like her grandmother’s coconut scraper, beady eyes. And Hem was a troll, pretending to be sick all the time. And Suman needed help to get away from us all, and she, Anu Krishnan, outsider, was going to give it to her. Oh yes, she lied and cheated and planned to steal.