House of Spells (9 page)

All the anger and fear that I’d seen in his eyes when he’d found Mr. Giacomo in our house had faded. “You’re right to get away,” he’d told Rose in the car. “Mr. Giacomo isn’t one to give up. Stubborn as a mule in the beginning, but he spoils everything he touches.” Then he asked me to go with her, to help her get settled.

Now he said, “Call me from Field.” He was such a quiet man; usually he hardly said anything. Soon after the Giacomo baby’s death, my mother told me that she didn’t know what to do with herself. All the joy had gone out of her work. Standing there on the platform, I felt her entire desolation. I understood then that trying to replace that lost baby with Rose’s wouldn’t heal my mother. I was torn between going with Rose or going home to her. You can never tell how much you really matter. The kind of difference you make.

My father, watching Rose return from the station, said, “You
have
to go with her.” He must have sensed my hesitation.

Carrying that baby, she was hurrying, and she looked at the same time vulnerable and alone, determined and scared.

She took me by the hand down the train corridor. We climbed into a narrow bed behind heavy curtains. I raised the blind to the lit-up platform that was rolling past at a walk, the clacking of the wheels and she on her side. Rose combed her hair while the newborn nursed at her breast. She had a nightshirt for me in a marbled green suitcase, warm from the stove where it had hung drying. Lying beside her I touched the little hollows in the small of her back that were the colour of pips left on raspberry canes after you pick the fruit.

The bed was narrow, and I felt pushed against the metal wall. The heavy curtain smelled of rug cleaner. Rose’s feet were icy cold on my ankles. She said, “We’re going,” and I could sense her smile in the dark. She was going away to her new life, eighteen years old. People talk about responsibility, being mature, but they don’t know what they’re talking about. Mostly they mean, Do what I tell you. Outside I could see the dawn over the mountains through the flickering snow and when we went over the Palliser Bridge I saw my father’s mill upriver on the bank, snow-covered ice in the shallows. “Your feet smell, Lacey,” Rose said.

I saw that the toes of my socks were stained with blood and fluid. In the hurry to leave our house, I’d put on the shoes I’d had on when I’d pressed my knees into the small of Rose’s back during the birth. Some of the blood must have seeped into them. I climbed out of bed to throw away my socks in the washroom, scrub my shoes in the sink with hand soap. I couldn’t scrub them hard enough to get that smell off. I hooked one foot then another in the sink, scrubbing at my feet and between my toes with a facecloth till they were red.

When I returned to the train bed, Rose handed me her baby and said, “Walk him a bit for me, won’t you? I need to sleep.”

That child hardly weighed more than the winter blanket I wrapped him in, and I felt his toes wriggling. I was worried that he might wake up and that I wouldn’t know what to do. So I kept walking, afraid that he would cry.

We were standing on the metal plates between cars and I was watching the mountains through a window opening that had no glass in it. Snow hissed over the face of the mountain. We were slowly climbing out of the valley and I drew the blanket loosely over Senna’s face to keep him warm.

In the train bed she’d told me she’d decided to call him Senna.

I felt afraid without knowing why. In the village museum there are school photos from the 1920s: dirty-haired boys with wide, still eyes and girls with prim smiles, all out there in their faces —
they
had gone on to work in the sawmill or drugstore, marriage, the house on 4th Street, the kids, a trip to Scotland or Italy, piling up experiences like money deposited in a bank. Then a car accident or a heart attack, a funeral and a mossy stone, mostly the usual thing. It all made me feel so tired. But maybe a class photo, a bit of a second, was more than enough in any life, if you just paid attention to what you already have in your arms.

In the winter of 1964, when I was eleven, I sneaked out at night to go ice fishing on Olebar Lake. I took a flashlight and a yew wood reel. I had a mason jar of crayfish in my coat pocket. It was so cold that the ice hummed like a violin string and stars glittered like a thousand miles of mica. Alberto Braz had marked the hole he’d chopped in the ice with a bundle of sticks tied with a ribbon that shimmered in the starlight. It was a long way out there and quiet and once I heard the huff of a moose in the dark firs along the far point. No one else on the lake that night, all the fishing huts closed up. I cleared ice out of the hole with my bare hands; I ran around in circles to attract fish by underwater vibrations. I laid the flashlight down, set my line, and soon I was hauling in trout after trout, little things with a blue and green speckle on their sides and the smell of archival water on them. Soon I had a heaped pile at my side with the ones on the outside beginning to freeze. Hungry, they just kept taking the bait.

There was no one else out there to see how lucky I was that night.

I kept looking around for someone to see what was happening.

And then, all of a sudden, I saw myself and what I had at my feet: way too many, too quickly and without much effort. Looking at the poor little things, I felt my stomach turn. I cleared away the frozen ones, the light had already gone out of their eyes. Five or six in the middle of the stack were still alive. Heartsick, I let them go.

Now I heard the car door slide open and Rose was standing beside me. To stay awake, I’d rested my forehead against the metal wall. The wind in the window opening was numbing my ears. The forest ran by and the rock peaks above were just beginning to show. After a while she said, “Give me him, I can’t sleep.”

When she returned to the sleeping car, I felt the train slow between high, sooty banks. We were climbing into the mountains. I walked through the dining car past linen-covered tables with flower vases bracketed to the wall and on each a peach in a silver bowl. An unripe peach is hard and sounds like an empty wooden box. The skin of a ripe one bunches under your thumb. I was hungry and tucked one under my shirt.

Then, thinking of Rose, I felt she was in trouble.

I hurried, almost ran back to our sleeping car.

I was remembering how in the fall of ’68, Mr. Giacomo had paid us to find his horses that had come down from the alpage. I remembered that in the Slocan Gorge we could smell their grassy breath: his two buckskin horses were on the path. I could hear the clop of iron shoes and the suck of heavy shoes in the mud. They were coming down slowly, unsure, because the Palliser Range was buried in snow. In those days Mr. Giacomo was a trail guide, and he often took them into the mountains. They were coming down to their winter stables in the first snow.

“Lacey,” Rose said then, “it’s Mr. Giacomo’s horses.”

To let them approach, we stood by the path under the pines. I felt a warm muzzle brush my shoulder and arm. On their breath I could smell the sweet range grass that crackled when you walked through it. I could hear snow melting in the bearded moss that hung from the pines. The air had turned warm and it smelled of rain. Suddenly the horses tore away.

The clouds we’d seen south of there had gathered overhead. Hailstones raked through the pines. Shadows rolled over the mountainside and the air, suddenly cold, smelled like breath out of a well. We heard splintering wood in the trees across the ridge, then thunder heaved the forest floor.

I ran into the forest to press my forehead against a pine trunk. Whimpering, I locked my arms around the tree. Rose unlaced my fingers one by one.

“Look at me,” she said, backing down the path, gazing into my wild eyes and holding me steady in her gaze. My hands clutched hers like old roots.

And now on the train I felt the same way, and I went looking for her.

When I got to the observation car, I heard Rose talking. She was sitting on the carpeted platform under the glass dome at the rear. Until I was beside them, I couldn’t see that it was Mr. Giacomo she was talking with. He was wearing his sheepskin coat and riding boots. He was in one of those tall, cloth-covered observation chairs, his hands clasped between his knees. He must have walked to the station to get on the train before we did.

“You belong at home,” he told Rose, adding, “Honey, you’re leaving a good place behind.”

“You really don’t care about us,” Rose said.

“What will you do away, in Field?”

“I’m going to work in a hotel.” Rose looked at him defiantly.

“But who will look after your baby?”

Rose handed me the baby and unwrapped the cold omelet that she’d brought. She hurriedly and silently tore it to pieces to give me some. I could see her wrinkled brow and I saw her begin to hesitate.

So little warmth came through the blanket, it was almost like the baby wasn’t there; a hand floated up to touch my cheek. He reminded me of an owl I’d found on the Palliser road, stunned by a car. I’d covered it with a beach towel to carry it to the gravel shoulder, wings tucked under my arm next to my rib cage so that it couldn’t push them out. Though it was bigger than a cat, it weighed hardly anything, all feathers and hollow bones.

“We have to keep going,” I told her. “It’s what you wanted, remember?”

I could see that all her excitement at leaving for a new life was fading, worn away by her fear of being alone. There was a sudden desolation in her eyes. She was wrapping up the pieces of omelet that she’d left untouched, wrapping and unwrapping them as if not sure what to do with the food.

“Field is too far away, “ Mr. Giacomo nodded, watching her fumbling hands and mocking her gently. “Farther than Mrs. Hiraki’s.”

I hated his know-it-all patience then. He was trying to turn her around, turn her around with his mild confidence, his answers for every problem that she might have.

He was telling her that she could have the apartment above the Giacomo café and that she could work for him there. “Just a few afternoons a week to get you settled, then we’ll see from there. You can stay with us as long as you like. Lacey here can visit when she wants.”

“But he can’t have two mothers,” Mr. Giacomo advised her. “
Don’t take away his good fortune
.”

He smiled and leaned in to touch my knee, as if to tell me that he was right or maybe to show that I agreed with him. I pulled away, shrank back in my seat.

“All right,” I heard Rose say. “All right then. I can’t do this on my own. I’m too scared.”

“Thank you for helping me,” she said to me. “Thank you! We’re going back.”

When I crawled under the blanket to hold Mrs. Giacomo after her baby died, I felt how icy cold she was, shivering, and now that cold grief flared through me.

Now, when anyone touches me, I pull away without thinking. Have you ever felt that way? It comes to me like a spark of static electricity, as when you barefoot it across a carpet on a dry morning and touch a door handle.

In the winter of ’69, a few months after Rose met Michael Guzzo, I saw him in the Starlight Theatre.

In those days, my mother bought theatre tickets so she could sleep in the theatre. We’d go up the side aisle to where there was hardly anyone and wrap ourselves in blankets. She said she slept best in places where sleep surprised her, in the depot waiting for the bus to Naramata, on trains or in farm trucks returning home after a birth, jarring down the valley roads with a towel bunched on the rocker panel for a pillow, sleeping while the sun climbed over Odin Mountain, a dusty, rosy light flaring over the windshield. She slept a dreamless sleep and she awoke reluctantly, touching her dry lips and rubbing her eyes, looking around in all innocence or startled by where she was. Till all the worries rushed in, she briefly looked young and she had all the mussy-haired sleepiness of a little girl. Then she’d remember the Giacomo baby’s death, but there was a moment or two when she didn’t remember and I imagine the world was as it was, the flare of light on the Illecillewaet snowfields through the truck window, the long face of Cary Grant on the screen, the Palliser Valley orchards spreading by the bus window, and she was momentarily okay.