Mnemonic (23 page)

A drive up towards Sun Peaks Resort where the opulent buildings sent us back again to the solace of the Knouff Lake Road and its ranches, wild-eyed cattle standing in dust as thick as snow on the side of the road. Then returning home west to Cache Creek and south along the Thompson, the Fraser, stopping in likely places for pine needles. In this story, the children have all left home but their ghosts still run down into the kikuli pits at Nicola Lake, gather pine cones to burn in the campfire after shaking them first to release the seeds, and beg for another hour of play before settling down for the night in their sleeping bags. During pauses in the telling, loons call, a coyote yips, and listen! Wind off the lake stirs the wild roses by the shore. Or is it a bear feeding on the blushing hips?

This basket is too small to hold much more than memories, though in a way the world is constructed of such things dreamed into being and remembered in all their textures: pine needles, the stray feathers of a nuthatch, a dazed bat found once under bark, emerald green beetles in flight or tiny brown ones burrowing into healthy trees and leaving as a death sentence the strange scribble of their life cycle. Remembered as a gracious dance of the living and the dead in the perfection of sunlight. As though memories are enough to feed the beloved in their afterlife, as though nothing else would do.

Fagus sylvatica

Traces

This is what I know. My father's father,
ИВАН КИШКАН
came to North America in 1908. He landed at Ellis Island, having left his home in Bukovina; his village was Ivankivtsi, in the Chernivtsi oblast. He was a miner. When he arrived in America, he went to work at Franklin Furnace, New Jersey, and from there moved to Glace Bay, Nova Scotia; Phoenix, British Columbia; Kananaskis, Alberta; finally settling for a time in Drumheller, Alberta. He died in Beverly, near Edmonton, in 1957.

Although I was not quite three when he died, I do have memories of him. Each summer my family would travel to Beverly to visit my father's parents. I remember a small house with a metal roof. During storms, my brothers and I were frightened at the sound of hail drumming on the roof. Our grandfather spoke heavily accented English, which we also found frightening, though he was not a mean man. Our father told us his father couldn't read or write but I think he meant English because there's a postcard among my father's papers, written from someone called Sam Fedoruk to my grandfather in a Slavic language. The message must have been important enough for him to keep. My father taught his father to sign his name for legal purposes.
ИВАН КИШКАН
became John Kishkan.

When I was very young, I wasn't interested in knowing more about him. My father told us next to nothing. “Did your father have brothers or sisters?” we wondered once. “I never asked,” he replied. With a drink or two under his belt, he'd become maudlin, full of pity for his dad, implying that life had not treated his father fairly. My mother concurred. There was one little story which they repeated: when the First World War broke out, my grandfather was working in a mine in Kananaskis and was fired immediately without pay. This was because of his Austro-Hungarian citizenship, we were told. (We have a photograph of him in the uniform of the KUK Freiherr von Reinländer regiment taken during his army service from 1901 to 1904; he'd been a conscript in the land force of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.)

Later, I learned that many men of his background were interned in the Rockies as “enemy aliens.” I should have known this all along, but it's not the history we were taught at school, and our family didn't discuss it at home. The story that was told had him walking home — though where that was, exactly, is unknown. “That poor old man,” my mother would echo as the story was told any time we asked about our grandfather. Yet he was just thirty-five when the war broke out — hardly old, though probably battered by life as a miner in remote camps or towns. He hadn't yet met my grandmother, a widow with eight children. Later they would marry and have Julia, who died as a toddler, and my father, who lived.

I knew almost nothing, and my father was dying. Most of his memory was gone, or unreliable. I visited him and stood by his bed while he fumbled for words or dozed off, his mouth open, mid-sentence. He had been hospitalized for urinary problems related to prostate cancer, and during the treatment process, other tumours were discovered. A week after he was admitted, he had a stroke while sleeping, so one arm was useless — he couldn't grip with his hand or move the arm on his own. A nurse kept asking him if he could pick up his cup and he looked confused, then tried to lift it with his left hand which trembled and had no strength. My mother asked him questions about his food and about sleeping and he blinked, then said, “Noo . . . ooo,” in a perplexed but gentle way, at odds with the man I'd always known.

I told him about the herd of elk that had discovered our fruit trees and he smiled very faintly. When one of his old work mates showed up to see him, he was silent at first, then said in a weak voice, “They almost lost me last night.” “Oh, they did not,” my mother corrected, crisply. Understandably, he was depressed.

As my father approached death, there were questions. “How do you feel, can you hear me, are you warm enough? (Can you remember my name?)” There was remorse, sorrow, and anger. There was an impending sense of absence. Or multiple absences — because as my father was leaving, so went any knowledge of his father, all his half-sisters and brothers, his mother. That strand of my family was disappearing without much of a trace, and those tiny traces that do remain are mysterious beyond words. The photograph of the beautiful woman in my grandfather's papers — of course I wonder who she is. (I see my broad shoulders, my cheekbones.) She might be his mother or his sister but I will probably never know for certain. I imagine myself, photograph in hand, walking the streets of Ivankivtsi, asking if anyone recognizes her. Recognizes me by my shoulders, her dark hair.

He was dying as I wrote this, his own father a name on a colour copy of a passport, two photographs, army papers in a language I can't read.

The European beech, of which the copper beech is a subspecies, ranges from Scandinavia to France, southern England, the northern Iberian Peninsula, and east to northwest Turkey. In my grandfather's native Bukovina, on the slopes of the Carpathian Mountains, there are vast beech forests, intermixed with spruce and fir, holm oak and pine. Tracing the root of the place name, I find that there are versions in German, Romanian, Ukrainian, and Polish, all nations with footholds in Bukovina, past and present.

There's debate about when the beech arrived in England — before or after the ice age; before or after Caesar. European farmers have long known the value of beechnuts, or mast, as food for pigs, not unlike those swine in the
Odyssey
, “rooting for acorns to their hearts' content, / drinking the dark still water. Boarflesh grows / pink and fat on that rich diet . . .”
¹
In times of hunger, human beings have used both acorns and beech mast too, grinding the nuts to flour and leaching out the bitter tannins by soaking the meal. Well-ripened mast was also pressed for its oil, similar to olive or hazel oil; this was used like butter in Silesia. The cakes left after the oil was pressed from the mast were fed to livestock.

When I married John in 1979, we lived in North Vancouver; there was an enormous copper beech (
Fagus sylvatica
, spp.) at the top of our driveway. We lived in an old house, built just before the First World War, and the tree could easily have been that old as well. All summer its lovely cool foliage provided spreading deep colour to drive into as we came down the hill to our house — it was the last house at the foot of a cul-de-sac; where the road ended, a ravine continued. Our sheepdog, Friday, used to sleep in the shade of the copper beech.

I suspect the copper beech near that earlier home of ours was planted by someone who'd known the tree in Europe and for whom beeches constituted arboreal perfection. In fall, our beech tree turned a glorious gold. Among the native cedars and firs, it was like an elegant visitor, richly dressed. Everything about it was dramatic: its size; the colour contrast in its leaves, season to season; its bare architecture in winter. I wondered occasionally how it had arrived on our block — what stories were contained in its smooth bark, its trunk which several generations of children climbed to get to the spreading branches overhanging the ravine. That ravine served as a wild and secretive corridor for bears and deer that came down from Fromme Mountain to feast in the gardens and orchards of the neighbourhood — animals who became elements in our own stories. How we lost pears one autumn to a bear, and how deer could be seen on summer mornings, reaching for cherries.

We bought a printing press when we lived in that house, dismantling a basement wall so the press could be moved inside. It took most of a day to drag it along temporary skids, over the grass and into the basement using a come-along winch. The press was a platen press, a beautiful late-nineteenth-century machine, with complex gears and wheels. We loved the notion of printing broadsheets and eventually small books. The press came with some wooden type, big clumsy capital letters, and we used them for a Christmas card that first year — JOY, in green, with a big exclamation mark.

In his book
Beechcombings
, Richard Mabey tells us that the origins of the word “beech” echo the German and Dutch words for book; this was in part because early European texts were inscribed on the wood and bark of beech trees. Before Gutenberg printed his forty-two-line Latin Bible, set in moveable metal type, in the fifteenth century, block books were printed in a process called xylography; text and illustrations were cut as a mirror image into sawn wood, usually beech, an echo of
bok
and
buche
, those early texts inscribed in the bark of beeches. And maybe those wooden letters we used to proclaim our joy were in fact beech. They'd need to be hardwood to withstand the great pressure of the platen meeting the type bed.

In those years, I could have asked my father more about his own father. In the newness of my relationship with the man who'd just become my husband, I was softer than the young woman who'd argued with her father, who'd carried the sting of his comments and judgements in her heart like small bleeding wounds. He liked the sound of his own voice, which precluded generous discussion. And I was often too quick to treat him impatiently, dismissively. But he had a history and part of it was mine, or needed to be in the years that would follow when my own children were born and they asked questions about the past.

My parents visited us often in North Vancouver, younger than I am now, and I should have anticipated the change that would come, like the turning of the leaves on that tree. That stories could be hoarded, like beech mast, for the time when they might be needed. And like beech mast, the hardness of the stories could be softened over time, bitterness leached away, made palatable by forgiveness and love.

Phoenix Cemetery: Lat: 49° 06' 05”N, Lon: 118° 35' 06”W

In 1911, my grandfather was living in Phoenix, British Columbia, a copper mining town founded in the mid-1890s. Mining claims were staked, cabins erected, and the CPR and Great Northern Railways arrived in 1896 to facilitate removal of the copper ore to the smelter at nearby Greenwood. In the early days of the twentieth century, the town boasted twenty hotels and saloons, four churches, a town hall, an opera house, its own telephone exchange and electric power plant, and a hockey team, which won the provincial championship in 1911. (This team requested the opportunity to play for the Stanley Cup that year, but apparently it was decided that they'd applied too late.)

This is what I know: almost nothing. When I look at photographs of Phoenix, I wonder exactly what my grandfather did. He had worked in mines ever since arriving in North America, but I really have no idea what this involved. One in ten men in Phoenix was a “timberman,” constructing the prop posts that supported the excavations. Machines had to be serviced and maintained, pumps operated. I scrutinize photographs from Phoenix to try to understand my grandfather's work. It looks so dark and precarious in the shafts, in black and white. I can see picks and shovels leaning against the walls or gripped in the hands of a miner in overalls. And reading about these mines, I come across accounts of men killed when ore buckets fell on their heads or when the foul air from powder blasts suffocated them. There were fires and derailments and shootings. There were diseases.