House of Spells (11 page)

For a while he looked at me quietly. “Well that’s it, then,” he said. “I guess there’s nothing more I can do.”

He looked at me again and in his eyes there were still flashes of hope. “Rose has changed her mind before,” he said. “Maybe she’ll change it again.”

In the stern at his feet there were paper lanterns with cutouts pasted to them: horses and stars, half-moons, birds. Those were lanterns for the parish supper. Mr. Giacomo had brought them along for me to repair. I reglued the curled arms of foil stars, horses’ heads, crumpled birds’ wings that the Grade Twos had made from construction paper, fingertips numb in the river wind that came up in the morning.

He asked me if we should pull up our lines to try another pool, but I didn’t know for sure, and briefly his face looked sad. He couldn’t fish in one place for fear the fish might be caught in another. I really don’t know the river that well: a lot of easy and broken water, light and dark places.

He touched the corners of his eyes. His face was almost grey in the cold mist rising from the river.

I thought about what he’d said: about how he thought people in the village saw him and his wife in their grief. Like old, used-up people, he’d said, like cardboard cutouts. And he wanted a place of honour in our village. He’d always wanted to be among the best people, to fit in that way. Yet his wealth had not been enough to guarantee the health of his family, the respect of our village.

“I’m sorry,” I said to him then. “It can’t be helped.”

It was not Mr. Giacomo’s boat that caught the priest’s fish. Mr. Beruski caught it. Early afternoon, by way of a gaff-hook in its jaw, Mr. Beruski pulled the sturgeon onto the sandbar. It was lying on its side, gasping, and I covered its black eye with my hand.

“Over one hundred pounds,” said Mr. Giacomo. He walked its length, prodding its belly full of roe, a disappointed look on his face.

Sometimes I look for a change in my luck too. The morning before I came down from the fire tower, I saw three crows fly by the north window, each making the point of a triangle and I said to myself that’s a sign things are going to get better for my friend Rose. I was that desperate for encouragement.

Later that afternoon, pulling handfuls of soppy rotten leaves from the rain gutters on our house, I saw my mother hurry across the street. She’d been working at the hotel, lost track of time, and wanted to be home waiting for my father who was down at his one vat mill. On the ladder I saw what she hadn’t noticed — that he, too, was in the street. He had stepped behind a transport truck so that she wouldn’t see him under the street light that had just come on. This was a new game that they played, the waiting for each other. For the pleasure of seeing you. If she had slipped and fallen in the icy street he would have run to her. Her new life of nonemergencies was making her happy again, and so he was happy.

16

Four men carried the fish to the priest. With the sturgeon wrapped in a black tarp, they stood at the church doors. They had brought it up a river path, then along 3rd Street to the church. Although Mr. Giacomo was at the head walking with Rose in her waitress outfit, the others did not allow him to carry any of the weight. He might as well have been carrying air. He pretended for the onlookers, but his arms were slack. I saw this, standing on the corner of 3rd Street and Columbia Avenue.

In our village, when people make up their mind that you’re generally more trouble than you’re worth, the hints at first are often subtle. There was this drifter who took a job on the green chain at the Odin Mill. Things started to go missing: gloves, work boots, a sandwich from a lunchpail. One day he sat down at the lunch table to pour tea from his thermos. He filled his cup with bunker oil. No one said anything, the whole crew was there at the lunch table, watching. He quit within the week, took his pay and left.

People could see what was happening with Rose, I wasn’t the only one. People could see how worn and tired she’d become, that a wall had been put up around her.

Earlier, in her room above the café, I’d brought Rose the rust-coloured paper raincoat I’d found in the Grizzly Bookstore. I told her that the procession was about to start and that Mr. Giacomo was waiting for her by the river. I said she could wear the paper raincoat in the procession. On an unpainted wooden table there were roadside cornflowers in a slender vase, their leaves curled and withered. She had changed into her waitress clothes to go to work in the Giacomo café and was combing out her hair that clung to the brush with static.

Along the sill, light played on small pieces of driftwood she’d collected. On one she’d painted, bright blue, the eye of a fish because it looked like a fish and on another she’d painted a horse’s mane. She’d sanded the pieces and polished them with beeswax. Light spilled over them as the shine spilled on her combed hair. After I picked one up, my hand smelled faintly of honey.

She said, “Early in the morning before shift we go along the river to find new pieces he can play with. I like to make my own things for him.”

“I couldn’t see myself in Field,” she said. “I felt scared thinking about it. Mr. Giacomo is nice enough, as long as I go along with what he says. If I don’t he gets mad.”

She had no dresser, so her clothes were carefully folded in the two open suitcases she had taken on the train to Field. The baby’s clothes were stored in bins under the secondhand crib my mother had bought for her, and he was asleep in there. Because the apartment was above the café, she only had to walk downstairs to work, and she would call the bar telephone and leave hers off the hook so that she could hear his cries should he awake while she was working. She hadn’t put up curtains because she didn’t know how long she would be there. After shift she’d carry up a plate of leftovers to make baby food — whirred squash or peas and pabulum — in a blender that she’d take apart and leave to clean in the sink. There was no music or radio and all you could hear was the traffic in Columbia Avenue or the crackle of the frost melting on the east windows when the sun came up over the alley at midmorning; she had a towel bunched there to collect the dripping water.

The place filled me with silence, the silence of waiting and of being unsure of yourself. It made me feel quiet and expectant and I didn’t know what I was waiting for. Even the creak of the floorboards sounded loud and edgy, maybe because there was hardly any furniture and the echoing ceiling sloped on two sides to join the walls at shoulder height.

I’d bought the paper raincoat for her, thinking she’d like to wear it, but she laughed and said no, turning down my gift.

She held the raincoat up to herself to check the fit; it had the luminescence of corn snow. It had been waterproofed with persimmon tannin.

“No,” she said again, stroking out a sleeve to flatten it along her arm. “Honey I don’t think so. Mr. Giacomo won’t like it. He wants me to show up in my waitress things, to represent the café.”

“Why don’t
you
wear it?” she asked.

I thought that she would have been bold enough to wear it in the procession, to stand up to him, but I was wrong. Her laughter had sounded sharp and false.

“Do you like this place?” I asked her.

Now she looked at me thoughtfully. She picked up her brush and wrinkled her brow.

“You’re my friend, right?”

“Yes, Rose,” I nodded.

“No, I don’t like this place. It doesn’t feel right.”

“Why not?”

“It doesn’t feel like my home. I always feel we’re being watched. I can’t go anywhere without Mr. Giacomo asking, Where are you going? When will you be back? I try to pretend that we’re okay but we’re not.”

At that moment she had lost her defiant, determined look. It no longer felt like she was pushing me away, and I could see how lonely and vulnerable she had become. I felt then that I could help her, and a memory came to me.

“Do you remember the night we went wading in the lake in the snow, when that house came out of the mist?”

She nodded, smiling.

“And Mr. Giacomo in the window?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember how anxious and worried he sounded when he called out to us, Who’s there? Can’t you hear Mr. Giacomo saying to your boy, ‘Where are you going? When will you be back?’ while he grows up in that Burton house? And where will
you
be?”

“Why is he that way?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I feel he’s always trying to hide something.”

She was sitting at the table by the window, the hairbrush in her hand. I bent down and gave her a kiss.

17

Each year I have to climb farther, a little farther, a few hundred yards or so, to bury my father’s paper in the snowfields. Everywhere there is reflected light.

The morning of the parish supper, before I loaded the truck to drive up to the snowfields, my father laid out a two-by-three-foot sheet on his work table. You could see the impression of the grain of the yew wood drying board on it, under a powder snow luster. It smelled like straw.

Lacey, he said to me, running his hand over it, not one flaw, not one impurity. It’s like a new human soul.

I drove up to the snowfields to lay out the paper and cover it with snow. Those sheets were translucent and they had a fine satiny sheen. Because of their purity, they’d last maybe hundreds of years. They were so strong you could pass them through a finger ring and they wouldn’t shred.

They would outlast me.

I thought of all those trout I caught when I was ten years old. I knew the ones on the outside of the pile were already dead: all the light had gone out of their eyes. No light, no life.

When I got back to town, I went to look for Rose in the Giacomo café. She was disinfecting the kitchen counter where the fish would be prepared; her hands and arms, flushed to the elbows, smelled of bleach. Mr. Giacomo asked me to help him carry glass panes and the winter door up from the café cellar. We unhinged the sidewalk shutters, unscrewed the hinges from the cedar sash and fitted in winter storm panes and the pine wood door. Watching us, some passersby stood for a moment under the awning, under a darkening sky.

All the storefronts were lit up and the sky had turned a dark grey. Trees on the mountain stirred. In the café washroom, I folded and rolled an evening’s fresh towels and placed them in the
V
-shaped rack by the sink.

When I came into the dining room, Rose was standing by the bar.

“I’m going back to the Big Bend to live with my parents,” she announced.

“Oh, you’ll not be leaving,” Mr. Giacomo said and he touched her ducked head, laughing and smiling at me. “This is where you belong.”

I couldn’t imagine Mr. Giacomo touching me like that; it just seemed impossible that you’d allow him to touch you.

All of a sudden I felt very tired, and I went to sit in a chair by the window. It smelled of varnish because Mr. Giacomo had varnished the sill. I was wearing a loose-knit sweater that I’d bought in the Grizzly Bookstore. It felt like the weight of an extra blanket, because in one pocket there was a folded page torn from a book and in the other a Japanese bowl.

Rose came up behind me, to drape her arms over my shoulders. I couldn’t see her eyes and I couldn’t imagine the expression in them. I could feel the light weight of her forearms on my shoulders, the stillness of her gaze. I could see the freckles on the back of her hands and on her wrists that smelled of bleach. Under her resting arms I felt like a bundle of tense sticks.