The Gravesavers (2 page)

When Corporal Ray said the miscarriage word, we were in the living room. To talk of death in a
living
room? It was the same room they told me about my grandmother dying and so why wasn’t it called the dying room or the dead room? Then the room began to come to life. The walls loosened and wobbled, squeezed in on me until there wasn’t space in my punched-in belly for an in breath. Something happened then I never saw before and hope to never see again.

My father buried his head in his hands as if hoping I wouldn’t see. He began to cry the way little kids cry, gulping air as if he had the hiccups, his shoulders shaking up and down.

My father, Corp. Raymond Hotchkiss of the RCMP, amateur yodelling champion of the world, was bawling like some baby. I blew out my breath. Then I got up to get him a tissue and hugged his head, holding it like it was fragile as an ostrich egg. He didn’t blow his nose, honking it on purpose like
he always did, to make me laugh. Corporal Ray just kept crying and tearing that tissue into strips and pieces. Until that moment, I never really thought about how
tears
and
tears were
spelled the same.

Later that same day we walked to the hospital. The snowbanks were so high it was more like trundling through some marshmallow tunnel. The night was still and the sky blue flannel. It was so cold ice crystals formed inside my nostrils. I pictured miniature stalactites and stalagmites, which made me think of caves.
Minn Hotchkiss and the Cave of Sorrow.

We stopped in front of the hospital and my father pointed five floors up and three windows across.

“That’s your mother’s room,” he said. “She’ll be home tomorrow.”

I couldn’t help thinking that if my mother had have been there with us she’d be crooning about the colour of the sky. “Winter Blue, perhaps,” I could hear her saying. “Indigo Dream.” Or maybe just, “Purple Night.” The squares of light from those windows would really get her going. “Electric Amber! Topaz Fluorescent! No, I know, I’ve got it—Neon Gold!”

It was impossible to me that on such a night as this my mother could be lying in there with no baby.

“Want to go see her?” asked Corporal Ray. His voice left lots of room for saying no.

“Tomorrow,” I said, “I’ll see her tomorrow.” He took my hand. For the first time in ages, I didn’t squirm away saying I was too old to hold hands with him. I needed to ask him a question.

Just that afternoon Mrs. Robichaud told me that the baby was an angel in heaven with God now. The Robichauds go to church. They are French and Catholic.

“Dis babee is now one of de purest angels because her feet, dey never even touch da groun, eh?”

That’s how I found out the baby would have been a girl. I would have had a sister. Pippa. That was the name we had chosen. Close to Pepper, a spice, like my name. But chosen because of Pippi Longstocking, one of my favourite heroines. A boy would have been Jacob, after Jacob Two-Two.

“And even dough you never see her, her spirit will be wid you always, p’tit poupée.” That means
little doll,
Mrs. Robichaud’s pet name for me. I liked what she said a lot. Now I had a sister angel. We don’t go to church and we’re not Catholic. In fact we’re not anything but I wished we were. It wasn’t the first time.

“Honey, it’s not that we’re
nothing,”
said my mother. This was because I’d printed “nothing” in the blank after
Religion
on a school form in Grade Three. “Put in non-denominational.”

“What’s that mean?” I asked her.

She thought for a minute. “It’s more like we’re everything,” she said. I still leave that blank blank.

I liked Mrs. Robichaud’s ideas. I even dared to tell my father exactly what she said and what I thought. That angels were a good thing.

Corporal Ray smiled when I told him and squeezed my hand harder.

“But,” I said, “how does anyone know if God and angels are real if we can’t see him or her or them or whatever?”

For an answer, my father pointed to the stars.

There’s a good silence, when everything inside you hums—silence like a lullaby you settle down to listen to. That silence is like a blanket you can cuddle under huddled against a windy night. Then there is a kind of silence that sort of drips. Drips like melting icicles. Drip drop drip drop. It makes an ocean that roars so loud you think you could even drown in it. That’s what it was like at my house.

I learned to get rid of this kind of silence. There are two ways to do this. Run, run, run. And read, read, read. Yep. You could say these were my life-saving strategies for overcoming deep-sea silence.

My love of running happened by accident. In fact, until I discovered my hidden gift, my athletic career had been a disaster. I’d never been able to dribble for more than two bounces at a time. I hit my head with the field-hockey stick first time I picked it up. Then there was the time I vaulted over the box horse in gymnastics, drove my knee into
my nose and bled all over the floor mat. In Grade Six, I sprained my middle finger trying to volley the volleyball. Picture a cast on a middle finger. At first the teacher thought I was pulling a stunt with a fake cast.

“Take it off,” she snapped. “You’re not funny.”

“I can’t,” I said, then yelped when she tried to yank it off herself.

Anyhow, run in a straight line? I could do that.

“You have the speed and the flat feet of the sprinter,” said Coach Rigby one day in gym class after he’d made us run laps. “I want you on my team, Minn.”

He barks when he talks and has a bulldog face.

I’ve never seen so many layers of wrinkles and frowns. He’s roly-poly as any stuffed-pillow Santa, with a face as orange as his tracksuit, but apparently he was quite a track star in his heyday. Even for me that’s a stretch of the imagination. He’s a great guy, though, and I am eternally grateful Coach Rigby noticed my speed and appreciated my flat feet.

Once the spring arrived, every day after school I showed up at practice. And did I run! I ran until my legs burned, ran until my heart thumped double time, ran until my shirt got sweat slickery to my skin, ran until I tasted salt when I licked my lips.

Every day, I ran away from home.

When I got home, it was the reading that saved me from drowning in that sea of silence. Thanks to Mr. Forest, there are more than enough books to choose from in our house. Once a month ever since I can remember he’s lugged over this big box crammed full of comics, magazines and novels. He works for a book distributor and brings me the damaged ones that don’t sell. Their covers are ripped off.

“They’re good books,” he says, “even if they don’t have the covers. ’Member now, Minn, ya can’t judge a book by its cover, eh?” When Mr. Forest laughs, he wheezes. His chest rattles. His belly jiggles. “Seems like I’ve worked up a thirst bringing over those books.” He winks at me.

That’s my signal to fetch him a cold beer. Then he plays a game of crib with Corporal Ray. While they’re in the kitchen shouting “fifteen two, fifteen four!” I hunker down and crack open the first book. Just the smell of a new book gives me shivers.

He’s right about the books being “oldies but goodies.” This past winter I read
The Red Badge of Courage, Old Yeller, Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson
and
Treasure Island.

They’re right up there with my mother’s old collection of Nancy Drew and Trixie Beldens.

Thanks to Mr. Forest and the books and Coach Rigby and the running, I got through the long Grand
Canyon winter and spring. I was pretty sure with the summer coming we would soon be the family we once were.

But my parents had other plans.

Right out of a blue-sky morning one day in June at breakfast my father dropped the news.

“We’ve decided that you should go spend some time with your grandmother when school is through. Only for a month,” he said.

My whole universe cracked like the shell of the hard-boiled egg he’d just placed in front of me.

“It’s not all summer, only half the summer,” he added, as if this halfness would make some difference to me. He sounded like someone had gagged him, stuffed cloth into his mouth so he couldn’t talk. Not again, I thought, he’s not going to cry again, is he? I still hadn’t recovered from the first time.

I am not especially proud of what happened next. I could have said I shall go gladly Father for I am an obedient daughter. I could have said whatever you wish Father perhaps next time you’ll ask me first? Instead, I scraped my chair back from the table and screamed
“I’m not going!”
up every step to my room.
There are twenty-one plus the landing. I didn’t slam the door but cried so loud I hoped my sobs would sink right through the floor into the hardness of my father’s heart. Then I tried to bargain. Not with my earthly father.

On my knees, I prayed. At least I think it was praying. Loudly. “Please if I do not have to go to Boulder Basin I promise when I grow up I will be a missionary and help starving children in Third World countries, the ones with milk like dry chalk around their mouths, their eyes black pools of need, their bellies swollen with hunger.”

“Cut the melodrama, Cinnamon! You’re going. That’s final!”

I went to the top of the stairs and yelled back down at him, “What about my running? What about my track?”

“I’ve already talked to your coach. He’s drawing up a schedule. You can run just as easily in Boulder Basin. You’ll be back in time for the provincials.” But this time his voice sounded less sure. That’s when I slammed the door.

“Cucurbita maxima!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. Translation: big pumpkin! I am only allowed to curse using the Latin names of plants. This was my mother’s idea after I repeated something Corporal Ray said when he banged his thumb
with a hammer when I was three. I am also allowed to use geographical place names. Kalamazoo! Tatamagouche! Shawinigan! This is something I refrain from doing, however, as it is an irritating habit of my grandmother’s. My grandmother, the retired history and geography teacher, still loves giving little pop quizzes even in moments of anger or excitement.

My cussing got no reaction from my father. I shouted louder.

“Cnicus benedictus!” The
c
is silent. Translation: bitter thistle weed! Still nothing.

“Ni-PISS-i-quit!” I hollered next. Nipisiquit is in northern New Brunswick.

That did it. My father leapt up the stairs two at a time and barged into my room. As I hightailed it onto my bed he lifted his foot. To boot me in the butt, I think.

My father, who never ever hits, struck his toe on the metal mattress frame.

He yelped. He forgot the Latin-plant cursing rule and all his geography lessons. He shouted out the Lord’s name in vain as well as a few other words that would have been bleeped out on TV. He hopped around on one foot, held the other foot in his hands. That’s when my mother appeared with her crumpled bed face.

She was pale and as see-through as the last sliver of a bar of soap. Strange sounds came from an
o
in her mouth—mouse squeaking sounds. Her shoulders were shaking up and down and her head jerked back like she was taking some kind of seizure. She was, wonder of wonders,
laughing.
I mean really laughing.

My father froze. Then, in slow motion, he floated towards her, wrapped his arms around her and began to laugh himself. My mother poked her head out from underneath his armpit. She was framed perfectly in the triangle of his arm.

“Madonna,” she said to me. (That’s the name she’s always called me whenever I made a scene, or Pre Madonna when she’s really ticked off. I hadn’t heard it for months.) “Madonna, you’re not going to win any Academy Awards in this house for …,” she broke off for another fit of laughter, “for a performance like that one! Your father and I need some time alone. We’ve things to do, like …”

Her voice broke then, like a twig snapped clean in two. “Like empty … out the baby’s room.” The laughter was over.

“The thought of you going to your grandmother’s this year is more than I can bear. But she’s old, she’s family, and we need you to do this for us.”

I nodded. Maybe because it was the first time she said more than one whole sentence in a month.
Maybe because it made me think that there was hope things might have a chance of being normal again. Mostly, though, it was the guilt that made me cave in. They’d never said a thing to me, but I knew.

Everything
was my fault. The baby dying and my mother the zombie and my father the troubling gourmet.

“I’ll go” is all I said.

What I was thinking is anything,
anything, anything,
if it means you coming back from this ocean of silence we’ve all been drowning in. If you and Corporal Ray will keep laughing together. Just like this.

Dad went to get the poor toe x-rayed. I can’t help it. I still have to laugh remembering the look on his face that day as he hopped around my room like some one-legged kangaroo.

I’ll always be able to say the first and only time my father raised a hand to me, he raised a foot instead. And broke his toe. He does a much better job catching the bad guys.

For my parents’ sake, I pretended everything was tickety-boo. This is an expression my mother used to use a lot—before she forgot how to smile. Before she lost her voice. When she used to care about what I felt. I saved my complaining for Carolina. Carolina Jenkins is my best friend.

“And who would ever thunk it?” she loves to remind me. We didn’t exactly get off to a great start. We were only six, after all.

“Her name is Carolina.” My mother told me that as I was chasing an
O
around my bowl of alphabet cereal. So how would I ever be friends with a girl named Carolina, a name that tripped off my tongue like a song? Besides her name having four syllables and mine having only three, a difference that made all the difference in the world, was her skirt.

“Nova Scotia tartan—that’s what that is,” said my mother, “and why don’t you wear that jumper your
grandmother gave you last Christmas more often?” Fat chance.