Smoke River (31 page)

She has failures to make amends for. Recently she has given up on the family meals. Their eating has become unstructured, loosely cobbled together. She makes salads, cold pasta dishes, grilled meats, and leaves them out like a self-serve buffet. Her children come and go like comets unbound to her gravitational pull. For the first time as a mother, she has not been able to say with any certainty where they are at different hours of the day. When did she last see Las, exchange a word with him? A day ago? A week?

“No, Ella. You can leave him here. You could use a good sleep. Staying is totally unnecessary when we can come back first thing.”

Ella brings her finger to her lips and shushes him, then waves away her husband and his unspoken reproaches. Her son is a rudderless boat. She stopped trying to fix his direction and now he is veering, listing.
There’s always a point in any season when I get the feeling Las will pack it in, that he resents his talent
, his swimming coach said once. That haunts her – it rang a little bell that won’t stop resonating.

Mitch is angry with her. He kicks the empty bed beside the one Las occupies, so hard that it makes a metallic screech as the braked wheels scrape across the tiles.

Ella gasps. Footsteps sound from down the hallway. Mitch winces, looks down at his foot, and she’s tempted to show concern. Instead she says, “Don’t forget to find Stephanie. Take her home with you.”

He grunts and limps a little too dramatically out the door without looking back. She senses that the prospect of Scotch and a cigar is a siren song to him, pulling him away. He will have a nice little session of it. She imagines him keeping his office door open so the fragrance of the Fuentes will linger for hours afterwards in the halls and the curtains of the entire house, to infuriate her, to assert his command of their space.

“You can hear me,” Elijah Barton says to the girl in the bed.

“You’ve dug in pretty deep inside yourself, but you’re still there.”

There is a shameful lack of security at the hospital. He just walked in. He had to see for himself before believing the wild, high buzz of rumour. She looks neither better nor worse than he imagined. Her bruises have yellowed. The imprint of recently removed stitches has left a treacly crescent under her cheek. The quirky, pretty girl from behind the smoke-shack counter is re-emerging in that battered face. Still, he feels lightheaded. There’s failure here, and it surprises him to realize he may have a part in it.

He pulls up a chair. “The whole Indian princess thing, you know, is a load of crap,” he says to the unmoving face. “All the tobacco that’s up here today, making us all so much money, is because a starving John Rolfe saw a pretty Algonquian girl whose people knew how to grow food and tobacco. That marriage made the colonizers rich. But there was nothing in it for her. She died of tuberculosis in a cold, rainy city that was foreign to her.”

The girl does not move. Her closed eyes do not twitch. But he sees the delicate flare of her nostrils and knows she is conserving her energy, surviving in her own way, in the old way. He wants to give her something, a way to get through this. But his emotions cloud him. There are two kinds of anger, and the kind that wells ups, crawls into a man’s belly and temples, is no good to him – it lacks cunning. Yet this is the feeling crackling behind his jaw, turning his fists into mallets. He waits for it to pass. He watches her breathe.

Seven years earlier he plucked her from the river, from a piece of ice. The strangest thing – a girl on a piece of ice floating down the Smoke, drifting farther away from the edge, moaning for a certain, quiet death like some legendary Sioux princess. Had he been looking a different way, facing the direction of the current instead of against it, there would be no story to tell. He’d blinked, looked again, and then there was no time to think. He backed his truck down the riverbank until it hit water; he jumped into the truck bed, hooked up the rope, wrapped it around his waist, and waded into the river, his toes cramping painfully in the icy water, his legs instantly leaden and senseless, his fingers and forehead a palsy of chills. When he reached out and grabbed her by the ankle and yanked her towards him, pulling her off the ice into the river with him, the frigid water brought her to life, flicking some butane behind those green eyes. She flailed; the dark icicles of her frozen hair scratched his face.
My dog! My dog!
she cried.

But he saw no dog. All he felt, with the weight of her resisting him, was that he knew this girl, that he’d known her forever, that Rita had used some kind of witching to put her in his path, an almost-baby floating through the frozen bulrushes. A rebuke.
You are always choosing not to belong, Elijah
, she’d said on the banks of this very river. And when he had wrapped that shaking, sobbing, wretched daughter of Rita in the hunter’s blankets
from his truck cab, poured her tea from his Thermos, waved his own red knuckles over the vents blasting heat from his running engine, it didn’t matter that the girl was Joe Montagne’s. It didn’t matter that he himself had no wife, no offspring. Saving the girl made her a different kind of progeny – one with whom he had no legal, familial, or blood tie, yet a child of his no less.

“Don’t be a martyr to anyone else’s system,” Elijah whispers into Cherisse’s ear. He pulls a wad of bills from his pocket, gives it a quick count, and slips it under her pillow. His hand brushes her forearm and he feels that it is warm. She is in there, listening.

He leaves the hospital smiling. Now that he is calm, he will find a way to do something for her that matters. He feels no loyalty to anyone but her.

One summer, for three happy months, Cherisse woke to hear her mother singing along to the radio in the trailer kitchen, with a voice as big and high-ceilinged as church. All her June days that year began with burnt sweetgrass and ended in long hikes. Sometimes her mother remembered to make them peanut butter sandwiches ahead of time, and other days they just set off walking through meadows for hours, counting the number of butterflies, picking handfuls of tickweed, patting the paddocked nags they encountered, flushing out crayfish from stream beds until they were dizzy with heat or hunger, and her mother would say,
Don’t tell your dad
, before sticking out her thumb to hitch a ride home. There were days when her mother talked and days when her mother did not speak at all. And one special day when her mother opened her mouth only to sing, nudging Cherisse’s shoulder so she would sing back to her.

And then it was July. Heat settled over them like heavy cream, making their skin slip against the trailer’s Naugahyde sofa,
their breath thicken in their throats. Too hot for long walks. Her mother took her down to the banks of the Smoke River instead, and they swung into its warm, olive-coloured waters from scaly tree vines that chafed their elbows and thighs. Her mother showed her how to lie completely still floating on the Smoke, so that the part of her above the river’s surface was heated by the midday sun and the part below cooled by its shadowy waters. They floated side by side, her mother telling tales of princesses and witches while the river slouched forward, slow and relentless, cradling them in a soft otherworld between dreams and wakefulness. It always stopped abruptly – her mother’s grasp on her forearm, the quick, sharp command,
Up –
and then they were both wading out of the river within yards of where it dipped into rocky shallows or the current quickened. Her mother laughed like a young girl at this trick of hers for knowing. In the afternoon when they had returned to the trailer, the heat pinned them into stillness and they fell asleep side by side.

The temperature broke with the arrival of August. The cooler air woke her mother’s craving for freshness, for food. They pulled beans off the runners in front of the snack shack, shelled peas by the bushel for freezing, and squeezed their neighbour’s corn husks, testing them for fatness. Her mother stopped men on their riding lawnmowers, pointed to their fruit trees and offered to pick them for a cut. They ate sweet cherries by the handful and salted the green apples they’d taken too soon. But her mother seemed most pleased by the peaches: three six-quart baskets for two days of picking. Cherisse shimmied into the higher branches and lowered them with her weight so her mother could reach.

Pie
, her mother announced.
I am going to make Joe a couple of fresh peach pies for his birthday
. This was an exciting development: there had never been any baking in the trailer. Cherisse sat quietly at the Formica counter while her mother spread open a book on
the table, pushing her palm down on the crease so it would stay flat and tracing her finger under the black type, squeezing her eyebrows, pushing out her lower lip. The studying of the book went on for a long time, and Cherisse began to wonder if baking was like schoolwork. Her mother picked things out of the cupboard, slowly at first, reading the label of each, then reading the book. She chose spoons from the drawer, and a bowl and a cup.

Everything was lined up but nothing seemed to be happening.
Run over to Mrs. Porter’s and tell her we need these things to make pie
. Cherisse was handed a scribbled list and released from the dull tension of the trailer kitchen to sprint through a ditch of Queen Anne’s lace. When she returned, her mother seemed to be frozen over the same arrangement of ingredients and utensils, worrying them with her eyes. Cherisse started to unpack the bag from Mrs. Porter, careful to put each item in the right category.

Her mother’s eyes flitted down.
No, no, not there
, she said, hands batting at her as if she were a tiresome housefly. Cherisse backed away into a corner, and for the next hour her mother mixed and sifted and rolled. When she lifted the pastry, it stretched and tore like damp newspaper. Her mother tried to patch and plug it enough to cover the pie plate, until finally she cried out in anger, balled up the pastry, and threw it at the sink. She looked at Cherisse and said,
Go find something else to do. I need some time
.

Cherisse sat outside the trailer, played hangman in the dirt with an old stick. She sang to herself to misplace her hunger – her mother had forgotten about lunch again. She snuck back into the trailer, into the cubby with her mattress and treasures, and flipped through her comic books and counted the change in her piggy bank. Finally she lay her cheek on the little mound of quarters to cool her face and promptly fell asleep.

Hey, little one
, her mother whispered when she woke up and wandered into the trailer’s quiet and dark main room. The kitchen was clean but for a pie with a braided edge and a golden
crust that smelled the way Cherisse imagined newborns smelt: buttery and floral.
Only took me three tries and eight hours
, her mother said with a tired laugh.

Okay, little wolf, back to bed for you
. And her mother returned her to the mattress in the corner.
I’m hungry
, said Cherisse. Her mother kissed her again.
No mind. I’ll make you a big breakfast tomorrow. Now you must sleep
.

Outside the trailer, Cherisse heard a man clear his throat and she knew it was Joe returning late from work, impatient to go visiting. As she lay in her bed, her eyes filled with tears at being alone all day, cast out of the kitchen and the pie making, only to be left behind again. Her stomach cramped from hunger and her mouth was gummy with a terrible urge – the very worst kind. She flung all her quarters at the trailer’s walls so they made a loud noise, flickered, and fell like dying stars. It was over too soon.

In the morning, her mother was singing, the same as always. The taps were on. Cherisse woke up smelling coffee. Her tongue found sweetness in the crook of her mouth, glazing her lips. She looked down at her fingers; they were stuck together with crumbs and glue like dried honey. Her first impulse was to bolt from the trailer, yet her mother continued to sing. Cherisse washed her hands and face in the small washroom at the foot of her parents’ bed and entered the kitchen, afraid and curious.