House of Spells (7 page)

“It’s not that I don’t like him, hon. I don’t trust him. He was a poor man when he left for the war, scratching up a living delivering mail and selling vegetables, just like me. Then after the war he came back rich.

“I don’t know how. It just doesn’t make sense to me.”

“He says he made his money logging in the Nachako country after the war.”

“That doesn’t feel right to me. I’ve worked with him, remember? He’s always dabbling in things, never quite making a go of it. A man like that doesn’t make a fortune overnight. And now he wants to dabble in being a father.”

“What about your friend Rose?” he asked me then. “What are you going to do for her?”

I felt a flash of anger. “Why is that up to me?”

“You’re right,” he said. “Hon, it’s not up to you.”

“We’re in a very bad place,” he murmurred to himself, absently spreading handfuls of snow over the fibres. “Your mother thinks she can repair the damage done to the Giacomos, though that baby’s death wasn’t her fault! I don’t think anyone could have saved their child.”

“We’ll help Rose,” he said then, “when the time comes. I’m just not sure how yet.”

Still, I felt angry. Maybe I was being selfish, but I wanted to ask, What about me? Who was I supposed to please? You can’t please everyone when you’re put in the middle between people you love. When they’re tugging at you from various directions.

11

When I was four, before the dam was built, we lived in a grey board and batten house on the Palliser River. The aquarium was in the back room, lit by a 100-watt bulb with a black lacquer shade over it. I remember lifting the lid and emptying a jar into it: crayfish, legs and pincers spread, drifted to the pea gravel. The water smelled of lichen. Here and there on the bottom were pot scrubbers of woven plastic where the young crayfish hid. It was a 20-gallon aquarium. The bottom was littered with potshard hideouts and in the middle a broken concrete block for the female with eggs on her belly. My father showed me the female’s eggs by lifting it and turning it over. The crayfish’s tail and legs were thrashing. Her young were used to catch winter trout.

I went with my father to catch crayfish in the Palliser, an empty mason jar tucked under my arm. His fingernails, whitish, were very thick and domed. His hands, so long in the water, showed the pale colour of winter fish. Already ice laced the shallows. He was flipping over river stones and cowling his hand to trap crayfish that were as long as my thumb, almost transparent, with pepper grain eyes and trout-coloured pincers.

“You’re too small to fish on your own!” he warned me. Even at that age I had a reputation for going off on my own to catch trout. He had never seen such a child for fishing, my father told me, quick, darting hands in the Palliser shallows, flipping stones. I used to trap minnows in a nylon stocking I’d taken from my mother’s drawer, laid out lines on the lake bottom. I walked out on the thin ice near the stream mouth, tapping my gumboots and calling, “Fish, fish, I’m on your ice roof!”

I had a lot of confidence then, when I was younger.

Alberto Braz had told me that the fishing was best at night. You took out a flashlight and a jar of crayfish, the hand line wrapped on a yew wood reel and you shone a light into a hole chopped in ice. The rim ice, holding black, oily water, glows from the inside and the water at the side makes lace crystals the colour of ash.

All this I was told and wanted to try.

Calling from shore, my father got me to walk into the bay, then follow the point to the fishing huts where the ice was firm.

He weighed too much to come out after me.

Sometimes I’ve been afraid like that, too. One winter when I was eight or nine my mother was very sick. She’d worked herself to exhaustion and caught pneumonia, was so weak that she couldn’t get out of bed. Even when I went to change the sheets, she could hardly move. And when I sat there listening to her watery breath — she was asleep — I was afraid that I would discourage her, so I went to the bathroom mirror to stare the fear out of my eyes, to practice a look of composed silence and hope. When I returned, my face a cheerful mask, the sheets tangled around her legs and chest were soaked through and smelled like cold toast. She’d drawn her head back on the pillow to breathe, her throat a pale white, a hank of wet hair plastered to her ear.

She opened her eyes then, and she must have seen the look on my face.

“Don’t worry, hon, I’ll get better. I am getting better. You don’t have to pretend everything’s okay.”

It was the strangest thing: I felt the mask that was my face crumple and I heard a sob in my throat.

“I don’t know how to take care of you.”

“But you
are
helping me, hon. You are.”

12

About a week after the trip to the snowfields, in the middle of the afternoon, I found Rose in our kitchen. I’d been down in the yard outside my father’s one vat mill, spreading paper on yew boards to dry in the sun.

You’ve made the right decision, I heard my mother say.

Rose was sitting at the kitchen table and I saw her nod. Then she turned to me and smiled and I saw panic in her eyes.

Are you sure this is the right thing? I heard her ask and I heard my mother who was standing over the stove making tea say, Yes dear, I’m sure.

There were papers spread out on the table, by a small grey satchel. That satchel was the one Mr. Giacomo had at his feet when he’d helped us pack our bikes into the trunk of Johnny’s taxi, back in early summer.

What are those? I asked.

Adoption papers, Rose said.

I understood then that all summer my mother and Mr. Giacomo had been arranging this, planning this.

I sat beside Rose and she took my hand. Hers was sweaty.

You sure? I asked her.

Of course she’s sure, my mother said, and she gave me a look meant to silence me. The Giacomos are a fine couple. I’ve known them for years. They can afford to raise and educate a child.

She brought Rose a pen and then she went quickly about making tea at the counter, not looking at Rose, as if her signing or not signing was a small, everyday matter. She wanted to make the thing seem quiet and small, because Rose looked like she was ready to bolt.

I watched Rose bite her lip, pick up the pen, and sign her name. She wrote out her name slowly, her face distracted, as if she were waiting inside herself for some sign.

Well, that was easy, she said.

How do you feel, I asked her.

Relieved.

That’s right, said my mother, gathering up the papers. The last thing you need at your young age is a baby.

But Rose didn’t look relieved at all. She was looking around the kitchen as if she couldn’t believe where she was, as if she were looking for someone — or something — to tell her what her own heart wanted. All her lightness and confidence had left her; I could see her eyes welling with tears, which she quickly wiped away.

Well, that’s that, she said, smiling bravely at me. I have to head off now. Mr. Giacomo wants to talk to me about working in his café.

I’ll come with you, Rose, I said. I could feel pressure building in my chest like an expanding balloon. My hand in hers had gone cold.

No, no, she said. I need to be by myself for a bit. And then she left.

That evening, I was helping my mother peel carrots for supper. She had been quiet since Rose left, thoughtful. I was surprised when she asked me to help with the dinner. Usually she liked to cook on her own.

When Rose was born, she told me, she was a small baby with these bright black eyes like a thrush’s. I brought her home that night wrapped in a towel because her mother was exhausted and needed to sleep. I put her in your crib beside you.

Her voice was soft, distant, as she gathered up the carrot peelings from the counter.

Rose’s will be my last birth, she told me. I can’t go on like this. I don’t have any confidence left.

It wasn’t your fault that the Giacomo baby died, I said. Nobody could have saved it.

When I think about what happened, my heart freezes, she said. My hands still shake! I feel that if I’d only acted more quickly, I could have saved that baby.

This really is best for Rose, she went on. She’s too young to raise a child. She’s still just a girl, with a girl’s future ahead of her. She can’t grow up over-night. It will spoil her life.

13

One rainy afternoon in the fall, my mother brought Rose into our house. Out in the street, in her winter coat, Rose had felt a rush of warm fluid. She sat beside me for a minute at the kitchen table to touch her inner thigh. Her eyes were so still that I could see the reflection of the kitchen window five feet away.

She unfolded a list of names that she showed me. I noticed that Michael’s name wasn’t in the list of boys’ names. In our village, sometimes the son was named after the father. Michael had been away since last winter. At first there were a few letters that she couldn’t answer because he was always on the move, then nothing. She had stopped talking about him.

“I’m not really going to keep it,” she said, “but it was fun to choose names for something to do.”

My mother got Rose to stand and began to help her undress, saying, “And now here you are, so young!” She helped her into a loose nightgown.

As the contractions deepened, her face crossed by brief waves of pain, Rose took my hand.

I saw that my mother’s lips were drained of colour when she placed a jar of almond oil in a pan of warm water on the stove.

Her cloth bag was by the kitchen door and her birthing shoes and that loose cotton apron that she always wore that said
MODERN BAKERY.

“You’re in pain,” my mother said.

“A little.”

She led Rose to the bed, to spread almond oil on her belly. Smooth as lake water! my mother said as she massaged the oil in, her trembling thumbs pressing and rounding.

“You remind me of when I was young.” She smiled. “You learn to sit on your hands, delivering babies. You learn patience.”

I was sent for tea and when I returned she and my mother were laughing over the names Rose had chosen from the village telephone book. Still, there was a tension between them. Rose looked scared, unsure, and the glances she gave my mother were full of doubt. She must have felt my mother’s trembling hands on her belly, their lack of confidence.

My mother was spreading a rubber sheet on the mattress, her face quiet and determined.

“I’m setting up the mattress,” I heard her say to herself, “then I’ll get the towels and pans of hot water,” as if she were talking herself through the steps of a birth. Step by step, so that she wouldn’t forget anything important.

When my mother said it was time to lie down, Rose shook her head impatiently, walking the room with her hands on her belly. When I brought her a wet cloth for her dry lips, she dropped it to the floor in a sudden wildness that made me think she’d run, vanish.

My mother took a firm grip on her hands and said, “You can’t run from this. You’ll only hurt yourself and the baby. Try to relax, be gentle with yourself. Breathe.”

Even when her contractions were less than two minutes apart, my mother could not get her to lie down. Rose gave birth squatting over blankets heaped on the floor, holding onto the back of a chair. I held her from behind, pressing my knees into her lower back when she asked me to, my arms under hers and wrapped around her chest. I was so scared for her; I felt my own breath high in my chest, almost a sob.

“Here we go,” my mother said, crouched beside Rose. “I can see the head.” I could feel Rose pushing, her belly tight, and the baby slipped out. My mother caught it, held it up before us, a skinny body smeared with white mucous, a crumpled face with a pushed-in nose, two fists no bigger than my thumbs waving in the air.

With shaking hands, I put the infant in a towel after my mother had suctioned its mouth and nose and cut the cord with scissors. I gave him to Rose, who had climbed into the bed. My mother massaged her belly, to help with the afterbirth.

“You’ve done so well,” my mother said. “So well.” I saw flashes of relief in her eyes. She straightened out the pillows behind Rose’s head, brushed a strand of hair from her forehead. For a moment, tenderly, she placed her palm on Rose’s brow.

With one hand Rose held the baby across her chest. She lifted one of its tiny legs.

“He’s a boy,” she announced. My mother covered his chest and legs with a towel.

Her hand slipped to the sheets beside her, curled and listless. I put my hand into hers. It felt damp and cold. Though I was composed and still, my heart was racing.

My mother leaned over Rose, lifting the wad of cotton between her thighs. For a moment, before the blood welled, I could see marbled fat under the torn skin. My mother threaded a needle and then drew up an injection of anesthetic.

She told Rose, “His head was a bit too big for you.” Rose smiled at me with a defeated look that I’d never seen on her before.

I felt then that she was drifting away from me, far away, and that I’d failed her somehow. Her defeated look asked, Can’t you help me? but I didn’t know what to do.