The Gravesavers (6 page)

“Good for training,” said my father. My mother handed me a boxed set of the Ladybugs’ greatest hits. Not my taste, but better than the hum of the motor.

I was grateful for the noisy three-year-old who had been playing peek-a-boo with me the whole trip. She was wearing a hat with a rubber dinosaur on top. Its jaws snapped open and shut every time she moved her head. A laughing dinosaur. What will they think of next? Just an hour outside of the basin, she worked up enough nerve to come and crawl up in the seat beside me.

“Honey, get down, don’t bother the nice girl,” said her mother, who looked like those women in postcards of the Swiss Alps, a woman someone might call Fraulein. Maybe because she called me a nice girl, I piped up right away.

“She’s no bother,” I said.

“Okay,” shrugged Fraulein, “but I warn you, she’s a talker.”

That turned out to be the understatement of the decade. Her name was Abby. For some reason, this rhyme started up in my head:
Gabby Abby talked so much, she talked of this and that and such.
That’s all I could get to because she kept interrupting me.

“What’s dat?” she said.

“My key chain,” I replied.

“What’s dat?” she said.

“A book I’m reading,” I told her.

“What are dose?” she giggled and poked two fingers right in my … “Boobies!” she squealed. “Boobies boobies!”

I wanted to choke her. I was sure every person on the bus must have heard.

“Shh!” I hissed. The way she looked at me then, all pouts and with her eyes as innocent as could be and then whispering “Booby” one more time, cracked me up. “Here,” I said. “Want some chocolate milk?”

I rummaged in my knapsack and found my last carton and a straw. When she got to the bottom she did that straw-sucking thing kids do.

“I sink it’s all gone,” she wailed. “I sink it’s all gone.”

“Was it good?” I asked.

“Dee-licioush! Any more?”

“Sorry, that’s all,” I said. “I like your hat,” I added, hoping to change the topic. She took it off and put it on my head and then snuggled right beside me with her book.

“Read,” she said.

So I did. I sat there on that bus with a dinosaur hat on my head and read
Go Dog Go
until she fell sound asleep. Her hair smelled of baby shampoo, and her breath, despite the chocolate milk, was more like apple juice and barbecue potato chips.

“Boulder Basin,” the driver announced over his microphone. “Ten-minute stop.”

When I went to get my duffel bag from the luggage compartment, I heard a thumping above my
head. There was Gabby Abby squishing her face against the window as if kissing me. I blew her a kiss and turned away. I had what my mother used to call a sad throat. It’s the feeling you get when you watch a really sad movie or just before you are going to cry. Sometimes a sad throat means tears. Other times, you just have to swallow hard and it will pass. I swallowed. Still, it had happened.

For just a second, I couldn’t help wondering what Pippa would have looked like at three.

Boulder Basin is not what you could even call a village. It’s just a strip of road that forms a semicircle around the harbour. There’s a wharf, a straggle of houses, a post office, a small fish-and-chips restaurant and Harv’s.

Nana was deep in conversation with Harvey himself. Harv Jollymore of Harvey’s Fuel-Up and General Store must be at least six foot five. That’s a giant around Boulder Basin. For some reason, they seem to make all the men around there old and small. Harvey’s not young himself, his hair the creamy white of vanilla ice cream and his face creased like an old map that’s been folded and unfolded in all the wrong places. The thing about Harv I always remembered from when I was younger was his hands. They were big, all right, like the rest of him, but it was his fingers that amazed me the most. They reminded me of those large fat cigars Corporal Ray smokes at New Year’s, and stained that colour too. They looked like
they had been dipped in tar that just wouldn’t come off. Even in church on Sundays, you could tell he’d scrubbed and scrubbed. I guess you just can’t get grease off a mechanic’s hands. Harv saw me before the witch did.

“Well look here, when’d you go and grow up? Makes me feel right old,” he said. And he winked, as if we shared some sort of secret. “Still just a wisp of a thing, though.”

Nana turned around then, in all her splendour. She was dressed in her trademark green rubber boots and khaki trousers, her hair tucked under the same mud-splattered hat she had worn so long I’m sure it was stuck like Velcro to her head.

She hugged me, the kind of hug that says don’t go getting too mushy on me now, eh? Or, let’s just get this over with. She smelled like always, too. It was a strange mixture of Lux soap and oatmeal—not bad smells one at a time but when you mix them together, just a bit sour. Nana Vinegar, like I said. Her chin hair was whiter than ever and longer too. She was a twin of one of those mountain goats in
National Geographic,
coincidentally her favourite magazine.

She grunted a thank you to Harv for chucking the bags up into the back of the pickup. We eased out onto the main road for about half a minute before turning onto a dirt road heading towards Boutillier’s Point.

When we rounded the bend by the barrel factory and Ludlow’s Lumberyard, the ocean spread out before us, dotted with islands. They looked like giant clusters of broccoli. It was a spectacular view. I had to gulp a bit and catch my breath when I spotted the house.

My father’s house—the homestead, as he calls it—is built on a slab of land that juts out like a hitchhiker’s thumb right into the Atlantic, at the entrance to Boulder Basin. A gingerbread house, some would call it. The trim along the eaves is all loops and dips and swirls like sugar frosting. Behind the house is a small, run-down barn, where Nana used to keep a pony, a pig and a few hens. Behind the barn is the hill. Just a hill too, although when I was little it seemed like a mountain. Walking up it took forever, and the grass was taller than I was. Things really do shrink as you get older. Still, it would be a good hill for training on, and the view from the top was, as Corporal Ray loved to say, a million-dollar view.

“What kind of get-up is that you got on?” Nana sniffed at me. That was it. Not “How was your trip, dear?” or “How are your folks?” First thing, she starts in, as if she’s a fashion plate herself. But I was determined to get off on the right foot.

“Bell-bottoms, Nana.”

“And what’s with the dirt around your belly button?”

“It’s a temporary tattoo. It’s just a stencil, and it washes off.”

“That’s good, because you’ll either be washing it off or making sure you wear something more decent that doesn’t announce to the world you’ve got the ugliest belly button I’ve ever seen. It reminds me of a pollywog.”

That’s when it struck me that maybe she was about as thrilled with our summer arrangement as I was. I don’t know what came over me, but I started to giggle. I couldn’t stop.

“What’s with you?” she snarled. She tried to scowl her fiercest witchy sour vinegar scowl.

I just kept laughing as she swung into the driveway. She braked so hard, if I hadn’t had my seat belt fastened I would have gone clear through the windshield. She slammed out of the truck.

“Supper in an hour. You know where your room is. Get freshened up and don’t be bringing the pollywog to the supper table.”

She started up the steps to the veranda but stopped to rest halfway up, as if she had to catch her breath, something I’d never seen her do before. I got my duffel bag and followed.

Try as I might, as I showered that diesel fuel out of my hair, I never figured out how my belly button looked like a pollywog.

Part of me was terrified we’d have tongue of beef for supper. We had herring with new potatoes and fresh garden peas and sour cream and cucumbers. It was delicious. I did the dishes and cleaned up, then made a pot of tea. Nana went into the sunroom and smoked her corncob pipe. Tell me, what kind of grandmother smokes a pipe?

“Hot out the teapot first!” she shouted out. I did as I was told. Poured hot water into the pot, swished it around, poured it away, put the Red Rose tea bags in, then filled the pot with water up to the brim. The bags bobbed to the surface like swimmers with bloated bellies floating on their backs around the pot.

“By the end of the summer, I’ll have you brewing lots more interesting kinds!” she shouted out.

Well, whoopdy-doo. Such fun ahead.

When I took in the tea, the sun was going down and the sky was streaked with fingers of cloud, all fluorescent pinks and golds. The ocean held the
reflection, as if the sky had tumbled into the waves. I had been missing a long-lost friend, I thought. The ocean, I mean, not my Nana.

We sat in silence. There was the taste of salt in the breeze that was blowing in through the window. Yep. This place, this smell, that going-on-and-out-forever ocean gave me as much and maybe even more of a feeling of home than the one I’d just left. That was my last thought before I feel asleep that night.

I dreamt of snow. It was a dream of last winter, the day the baby died. My dream was like an Etch A Sketch drawing. I kept erasing the dream as I dreamt it. Then I woke up and remembered what really happened and that I couldn’t erase it. I sat up in the dark and wished I could scrub the truth away and keep the dream I wanted.

I had to go to the bathroom. Too much information? No big deal, you think? Maybe if I were home. But I wasn’t.

There were two things about going to the bathroom at the witch’s house in the middle of the night that terrified me. First off, there were the moths. Big fat-bodied moths with bulgy eyes that came in through the window screen, swivelled around the light and then glued themselves to the baseboards for a good night’s sleep. When you sat on the toilet seat they attacked your toes. For real. My grandmother
said that was nothing but foolishness. She said this after I screamed myself silly in the middle of the night at age five.

Once, I worked up enough nerve and killed one. It crunched as if it had bones and splattered yellow guck. After that, killing was not an option. I learned to always wear socks and do my business fast.

As if the moths weren’t bad enough, in order to go to the bathroom in the dead of night, in the darkest dark, I had to go past the Witch’s Closet. Ever since I could remember, my grandmother had a padlock on this door. I even heard my mother ask my father what the big deal was. “What on earth does she do in there, Ray? What is she so damned secretive about?”

“Oh, I think it’s just her stamp collection,” my father said once, “and photos and stuff she’s saved over the years. I think she even has some of my dad’s old Wilf Carter records in there. Wouldn’t mind taking a peek myself.” But Nana guarded it like she was secret service at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police herself.

But once I saw it
open.
A naked light bulb dangled from a long chain. The ceilings were very high and my grandmother very short. A red ribbon was attached to a smaller chain to switch the bulb on and off. Nana turned and saw me peeking in at her. She clicked the light off and hid what was in her hands.

“Do
not
go snooping! You might not like what you find!”

I ran off crying for my mother but never told her what happened until years later.

“I think it was a skeleton,” I told her. “In her hands, I think she had bones, lots of bones, a
bunch
of bones.”

“Oh, honey, it was probably a dream or your O.I. going wonky. Besides,” she said with a little laugh, “everyone’s got skeletons in their closet, get it?”

Even though my mother tried to joke her way out of it, she didn’t ever convince me. There
was
something spooky about that closet. And I know what I saw.

Besides, why did my mother always whistle really loud and walk super fast every time she passed the closet herself? It gave her the heebie-jeebies too. I know it did.

I scared myself more just lying there thinking on it. But I really had to go. What else to do? I
mustered
up my courage. How do you muster? I used to wonder when I heard folks say that. When I was really little I pictured myself covered with invisible mustard that kept away all bad things. Things that you didn’t want to ketch up with you. Ha ha.

I confess that at the ripe old age of twelve the game still worked wonders. I sprinted safely to the
bathroom. Whistling. There were only five moths and they slept the whole time!

On my way back, I tiptoed past the Witch’s Closet. The door rattled. Maybe it was unlocked. I could go in. If I wanted.

If I dared.

I reached out. The knob was as cold as metal in winter. I turned it. The door didn’t even budge.

I sprinted back to my room. Nana mumbled in her sleep. I held my breath. She snored.

By then I was wide-awake as a Saturday morning. I started reading. It worked, finally, but it was sunrise when I fell back to sleep. Nana shouted up not long after that.

“Get up—get cracking!” She had the same squawking voice as the gulls circling the basin and shrieking the day to life outside my bedroom window. You should have heard her down there, clomping across the kitchen floor, rattling the drawers on purpose. It’s amazing how one little old lady could make such a racket. The radio was up full blast and she was whistling away, off key. I think it was “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” or some other cheery working or wake-up song. She’d already have written out a list of chores longer than her arm for me because “idle hands come to no good” or however it went.

“Early to bed, early to rise, the early bird gets the worm,” she shouted up just then.

“Eat your oatmeal by yourself and may your tongue stick to the roof of your mouth for all I care,” I muttered. I gagged at the very smell of her porridge.

Besides, I had a plan. I would take an hour for running first thing every day. That way, I could avoid sitting across the table from her and wouldn’t have to listen to her dentures snap when she chewed.

I got dressed beneath the covers. Not only was I afraid she’d burst into my room like a tornado at any moment, but it was so cold it was polar. Even by midsummer, this house would be damp and clammy and she’d still be poking wood in the stove to take the chill out like she was doing now. Much as I love the place, it’s always too cold and smells like the dust of potatoes kept too long in the storage cellar.