Fist of the Spider Woman (16 page)

June 6—Basking shark matriarchal group #51 in Home Bay swimming in circles around #51 calves— white tipped dorsal fin observed about 200 metres out. What's going on here? No indigenous species of shark fits this description.

June 10-12—(University of Victoria Marine Library) studied shark species sighting reports for region (1922–present); no sharks fitting description recorded. Three great white shark sightings near Queen Charlotte Islands—could this be an atypically marked great white?

June 15—Kokum Bear (SkyBear's grandmother) told me a story she'd heard from the elders about a fearsome white marked shark that attacked a Haida war canoe (1840s?) and devoured seven men. During the next few days two more canoes were attacked, eight more people killed in the water. Haida observed shark hunting off Home Bay for an entire summer, forcing them to move to Storm Bay fall camp two months early. Kokum B remembers seeing a totem pole commemorating the sea beast erected at old fall camp.

June 17—Cripple Creek spit 18:35 hrs—grey-blue dorsal fin circling seal colony, observed shark (ten metres)—not a great white. (If not a great white, what is it?)

It was her sighting again of that dorsal fin circling just starboard of our dock that led to everything that came after.

We'd been to town for supplies and library books. Mama had insisted that Baba stay home and rest on her one day off from working the Crisis Line. Mama was always making sure Baba didn't work too hard. She lovingly ironed her shirts and whispered sweetness into her blushing ears. And Baba could make Mama laugh and cry and sing all at the same time—I heard them many nights. On that night as we drove down the hill toward home, Mama caught sight of that thing again—the fin cutting the surface of the water. She drove out onto our dock, headlights streaming through the fog, searching for the flash of white on grey on sea-ink blue. Baba heard us arrive. She stepped out onto the widow's walk at the top of our house and called out, “I missed you, my love.”

“Come and get the children,” Mama called up to her. “I'm staying down here with the shark for awhile. Love you …” And before Baba could reply, “Love you, too” (though Paul insisted that Baba had said it and Mama had heard her), the dock buckled and our truck slipped into the deep.

Baba howled as our truck sank. She was at the dock, ripping off her leather jacket and plunging in, before our truck sank below the surface. She pulled me out first and flung me onto the dock. Paul was next, his small body twisted at the waist. He crawled on his elbows to find me in the dark. It took a long time to free Castor from the tangle of car seats. Baba was heaving as she dragged him to the surface, but Castor wasn't breathing. Paul said that Baba paused in the water for a heartbeat, staring desperately below before climbing onto the dock with Castor limp in her arms. She smacked Castor on the back while he spewed sea water, then blew air into his sodden lungs. She implored, demanded, prayed, “Breathe, son, breathe.” The moment Castor drew a breath, she jumped back into the water and dove again and again and again, trying to free Mama.

SkyBear said his dad heard Baba's howls that night, but Bear Senior maintained it was the truck's headlights bouncing off the ocean floor onto his front window that roused him. By the time our neighbour arrived to investigate, Baba was storming back from the dockside tool shed, a crowbar in her belt and a hack-saw in her hand. Baba decked SkyBear's dad with her bare fist, all 250 logger-muscled pounds of him, when he tried to stop her from cutting Mama free.

Baba must have known Mama was dead by then, dead before the truck even settled into the sea bed, dead before she knew her children were saved, dead with her feet crushed and ankles trapped in the truck's twisted front end. What we know and what we believe sometimes do not correspond. Maybe Baba couldn't go home without her, couldn't leave her love trapped in the deep, couldn't face us kids without bringing Mama to us. So while we huddled on the dock with her leather jacket protecting us, and as SkyBear's dad groaned back to consciousness, Baba hacked and cut Mama's feet off at the ankles and brought her body to the surface. Then dove twice more and freed the bits of bone left in her boots, and brought her—maimed, but all of her—back to us.

Baba rocked Mama's body in her arms and crooned sorrow into her unhearing ears. Castor wetly inhaled and exhaled, staring straight up at the stars. Paul's legs were twisted under him at an impossible angle. I clutched Baba, my cheek pressed against Mama's belly, staring down at her mangled legs. Mama's bones, or the bits that jutted out from her ankles and poked jagged from her boots beside her, were yellow. Not the yellow of fresh-churned butter or new-hatched chicks or the colour that played across our kitchen walls when the sun burned bright in summer, but more like the shade of the empty eggshells you find outside the hen house when the raccoons or foxes get there before you do. Or like the yellow-grey of a pearl you choke on and almost swallow.

She didn't bleed much, just two small pools draining out onto our dock, and some red fluid mixed with sea water sloshing out of her mangled boots. It didn't smell like the blood I knew—not the copper-and-kisses smell of skinned knees and Band-Aids.

Mama's blood smelled like every promise you knew wouldn't ever be kept, like every secret that is revealed against your will. Her blood smelled just like the saddest tears, right before you cry. And her blood wasn't warm or cold I discovered when I reached down to touch the fluid seeping from her legs. It was the same temperature as the summer night air. Baba saw me touching the places Mama's feet should have been and she lifted my hand and printed Mama's blood onto her own chest just above her second shirt button. Then did the same for Castor and Paul. And then she placed the last smear of Mama's blood on my fingers against my chest and all of us were marked by Mama's blood and by her life and death, forever. And I lay back against Mama's belly and felt the warmth of her body slowly fade, each layer of skin releasing its heat into the darkness.

We were medevacked down to the Big Smoke by the harbour air ambulance. Baba refused to board until the zippered body bag was loaded in beside us. She held Mama's body and us all the way down to the hospital. What all the newspapers and local gossips described as a scene of unimaginable horror was just Baba's way of keeping our family together.

I found a picture in Mama's sea chest that was taken at the cemetery where we cremated her. Baba was wearing her best suit and the last white shirt Mama ever ironed for her. Her shoulders were rigid with grief, arms around Castor, whose head drooped and eyes stared vacantly. Paul sat in an oversized wheelchair, eyes burning. Both boys were in their little suits, ties neatly knotted by Baba, me tucked into her jacket, purple velvet dress scrunched up over my skinned knees, smiling solemnly. When Castor and, later, Paul were discharged from the hospital, we came home to scatter Mama's ashes off the dock and begin our life together without her. I barely remember those first months after Mama died. But I do remember the ten years we all lived together after that, before the shark came again.

Castor started to walk again, then run and fish and swim. But he never learned to write in anything but a precocious six-year-old's neat block printing, or read much beyond the books he'd sounded out for Mama. When, in the sixth grade, Paul tried to help Castor study for a history test, he prompted, “‘The cliffs of Dover held archers, bows flexed, and as the enemy landed, the sea turned crimson.' Come on, Castor, answer the question, why did the sea turn red?”

Castor pondered cause and effect. “Shark attack?” Castor finally offered.

We stopped trying to teach Castor schoolwork after that, and just let him learn how and what he wanted. And though he never graduated, he could name all the plants and animals in the rainforest and all the sea creatures in the tide pools. He could navigate his sailboat by starlight and catch and clean fish for our dinner and chop enough firewood to keep us warm all winter.

His eyes were content with all that needed to be forgotten.

Paul's broken back healed, but he never walked again. Baba carried him everywhere at first, with me balanced on her other arm. She built ramps to the porch and dock and beach, and Castor helped her renovate the house for Paul's wheelchair. Paul's mind was as quick as his body was broken, and he devised engines to power his beach buggies, and he mapped and plotted every trail he blazed. He could reason and debate, and he read his way through Mama's library and Baba's too. His eyes burned with the need of remembering.

I ran bare-chested through all our childhood summers. It seemed like me and SkyBear, whose mother wasn't around either, were always dogging the twins, building sand forts and scavenging the beaches for treasure, raiding the rainforest for wild berries, fishing off our dock and staying up late to watch the moon rise out of the ocean. Through all those long rain-lashed winter evenings we'd toast bread and cheese over the woodstove and snuggle under blankets while Paul read to us; we'd listen to the fog horns mourning when he paused to turn a page.

Baba dedicated herself to caring for us, to being our mother and dad, both. It's not like Baba never had any female companionship during those years. She'd sometimes pack her duffle bag and head out to the Big Smoke, or Seattle, or even back East. Sometimes she went to leatherfolk gatherings, sometimes to feminist conferences, often just for a night at the opera or a night at the bar.

“My lost weekends,” she called them, dragging herself home with lipstick smears on her shirt collars, leathers and suits smelling of cigar smoke and strong liquor and some lady's perfume.

Whenever I asked her if she had a girlfriend she'd just laugh it off and dance me around the kitchen, saying, “Nah, you're my best girl.” I think Baba closed her heart to loving anybody but us, for many years after Mama died. I know it wasn't love she was looking for when she went off for her weekends because when we were older and they didn't think I was listening, I once heard Paul ask Baba, “Are you going whoring?”

Baba didn't tell him to watch his mouth, but looked at him like you'd look at another adult, and answered him like he was a grownup. “Well, I call it hunting. Yeah, I'm going down to the bar next weekend.”

“What's it like, to bare yourself to a stranger?”

“Well, the women I like do most of the baring, and they think I'm the stranger. Sometimes it's like growling into the void: you can feel the past erased and have nothing etched on the future. That's really all I want, just to take something for myself in the moment. But maybe it's just all I can bear.”

“Can I come with you?” Paul asked, just as serious as she was.

“You're a bit young for it, boy. When you're older I'll introduce you around,” Baba promised him. They shook hands, all solemn, then laughed and hugged each other.

It's not like I didn't know that Baba dated women. So I wasn't really paying attention that summer when Baba went down to the Big Smoke weekend after weekend, returning late, grinning and looking pensive at the same time. I had my own adventures—me and the twins and SkyBear had finally found his cousin's secret pot patch in the woods and we were busy stuffing our pockets and our pipes. And I'd spent most of the summer hanging out at the lake campground, playing ping-pong and swim-racing with the summer kids. I'd even kissed a girl that year, though she said she was just practising for when she got a boyfriend. So I really wasn't paying attention to Baba's affairs. It certainly never occurred to me that Baba was romancing a shark. But a shark she was, I discovered the first time I met her.

That Sunday Baba returned home early. From the widow's walk at the top of the house I watched her help some lady down from our truck. She took Baba's arm and strode assertively up the porch ramp, her stiletto heels clacking against the wood. She looked with disdain at our house, scraped a pointy fingernail over the weathered cedar siding and waited, tiny nose wrinkled, for Baba to open the front screen door for her. She acted like she owned the place, and Baba.

“Brooke, I'd like you to meet my daughter, Lambeth. Lamby, this is my girlfriend Brooke.”

“That's Brooke with an ‘e',” she directed.

“Uh, there's no ‘e' in brook,” was all I could think of to say.

“There is in my name, so don't you forget it.” I stared into the eyes of a shark. Not a woman with sharky eyes, but a real shark.

The room stayed the same, and so did Baba and the view outside our window, but Brooke had turned into a shark. I could smell her, an oily crushed reek overlaid with rotting guts exuding air-drowned puffs from her gills. Her grey-white skin stretched taut over cartilage, fins and tail flexing. Teeth bared in limitless hunger. Murky black shark eyes, reflecting nothing, fixed on me. I fled from the room, from the house, from my childhood, and hid in the forest.

Baba came looking for me at sundown, and I let her find me.

“Oh Lamby, I'm sorry that this seems like such a sudden change.

I've been meaning to bring Brooke home for some time now. I didn't think you would be so upset.” Baba cradled me in her arms with her leather jacket wrapped around us both, just like she had done when I was little and needed comforting. “Brooke is going to have a baby and I've asked her to move in with us. I was hoping that maybe you and Brooke would like each other,” Baba said to me.

“Do you like her?” I asked. “Or do you love her like you loved Mama?”

Baba looked uncertain, like she had gotten lost in a fog patch and couldn't find her way out. “Lamby, your mother was the only woman that I ever loved with all my strength and all my soul and she loved me right back. And I never thought I'd want to love like that again or let anyone else love me. But I think I want to try, with Brooke. She needs a home and family. It will be good for us to have some femme energy in the house again. You and the boys might like it. I know I do.” And though I was filled with foreboding, I promised Baba I would give Brooke a chance.