The Journey Prize Stories 24 (15 page)

She wasn’t afraid. She wanted to meet the man who fed you cockleshells, who paddled you to the Other Side, and now she had a companion for the sail. Natalie could return to the girl her second doll, the one with abalone eyes, and they could trade necklaces, her own a silver cross, and the girl could teach her how to spin a top. She’d never heard of Milton’s man of the woods, though she had read up on myths before she came. She read about the Thunderbird, who flashes lightning with the whites of his eyes, who eats whales for breakfast. She read about the Tlingit boys who reached the Other Side by a chain of wood-carved arrows. She read about the Hamatsa, the secret cannibal society whose tribe members whirl the dances of man-eating birds – the raven of many mouths, the crane whose beak cracks skulls. She wanted to meet all of them. To find that patch of sky where the stars seep light like milky cobwebs, where the indigo between suns is gauzed.

“Natalie,” shouted a voice from a few metres down the path. A beam of light tore between the branches of her pine tree.

Her left thigh felt as if it were filled with sand, so she shifted to release it from her weight. The canoe squeaked against the pine bough and a bead rolled off the dugout lip, but she couldn’t hear it land.

“Natalie,” the voice said again, from directly under her. “I know you’re there. I see the canoe.” The flashlight beam quavered along the canoe’s lip, then spilled back into the branches. “I’m sorry. It was a silly trick.”

She hugged her wrist around her knees and watched the beam shiver back and forth on the tree trunk.

“I let her go. It was supposed to be funny.” Milton’s voice paused, silent for her response. “Fine. Stay up there all night.”

She gathered the spilled Chinese beads one by one and dropped them into their woven cedar basket.

“See you tomorrow at the potlatch?”

She could hear his sigh, and the swish of wet leaves between his shoes as he shifted.

“It doesn’t really hurt them.”

The flowers were shaped like paper crowns, as fluorescent as the sockeye that hung in strips outside the smokehouse. Milton stalked the bush with a ball of twine. He looped knots around the wax heads of neighbouring black-eyed Susans and through the lichen-crusted fingers of an overhanging plum tree.

Natalie watched him work from the grass, which reached her waist when she stood and tented over her as she sat. She could feel the air get wetter as the sun drooped copper and low behind the trees. “Milton,” she said, and fingered the porcelain beads in her pocket. “What’s across the ocean?”

His eyebrows lifted and wrinkled his forehead as he stepped away from the tree.

“Is it China?

“Maybe. Maybe Russia.”

“Oh.” She clenched a bead inside her fist. “Do things wash up? From the other side?”

“Like what?”

“Beads. Chinese beads.”

“You found Chinese beads?” He peeled a slug from his bucket and wrung it between his fists. Slime farted from its tail
in wet ribbons, and she stared, lips-parted, as he massaged it into the twine. “Some objects drifted here from old merchant ships,” he said. “Maybe beads.” He plucked another slug from his bucket. “Sometimes our people traded with the immigrants. The rail workers.”

“What about canoes?”

He stared at her. “The canoes are our thing, moron.”

“No, I know.” She bent low to tie her shoes so that he couldn’t see her cheeks. “But what if you found a canoe in the forest? In branches.”

“Where were you?”

“Nowhere. What if.”

He worked his slugs fist-by-fist along the twine and didn’t respond.

She eyed him through the stalks. “What’s this for, anyhow?”

He smiled and stepped back to review his strings, then leaned against the tree. “You’ll see.”

She rested her forehead against the back of her hands and shut her eyes.

“In the long ago, we buried our dead in trees.”

Her eyes opened and she flicked her chin to face him.

“Or on scaffolds. But sometimes trees were easier to come by.” He swayed his back against the trunk and spoke with the slow luxury of a Scout at a campfire. “We buried our dead in trees so their souls could be nearer to the wild man of the woods.”

“Who?”

“Bakwas. He lives with the spirits of the drowned, in an invisible hut in the forest.” Milton paused, eyes on the beebalm. A hummingbird had whizzed through the strings, and it hovered above the plant, bill needling into the scarlet throat of
a flower. “He feeds lost wanderers the meat from cockle shells. Ghost food. Eat it and you become like him. That’s how he takes the dead to the Other Side.”

Natalie chewed the ridge that lined the inside of her cheek – had she been so close to a corpse, to the wild man of the woods? “You buried people in canoes instead of coffins.”

“Sometimes,” he said, and removed a spool of white thread from his pocket. “Sometimes cedar boxes.”

She shifted her gaze to the hummingbird – most back home were brown, but this one was silver winged, its tail dusted green, and a high-necked collar of iridescent fireweed. The bird dipped under the balm and cornered right for an exit, but its wing caught the yarn, feather tips welded to slug slime.

Natalie stumbled up, feet tangled, and cried, “It’s stuck!” even though its entrapment was plain and Milton didn’t seem bothered, and a twine cage wound around beebalm should have tipped her off in the first place. He cupped the hummingbird in his palms, then clutched it in only one. His other hand guided a threaded needle into a hole at the base of the bill, then with a thrust to the other side. He folded the thread so that his fist clutched the needle and knotted end, then spread the fingers of his other hand and released the bird with a gentle bounce into the air. It zipped the length of the thread, then rebounded back, and forward again, whisking the air in hard ovals like the propeller of a beanie, so fast that the shape of a bird blurred into an exhale of white wind that blushed pink in sporadic bursts. Milton held the thread as a kite.

“Do you like it?” he said. Natalie speed-walked past him between the beebalm and the plum tree and sprinted down an overgrown path into the woods.

“You’re the preacher’s girl,” the older boy said. He wore jeans and a black beater, and he tied his bandana like a pirate.

“He’s my uncle.” Natalie lay stomach-down on a picnic table. She flicked the cedar bark top she’d found that morning, and it spun out from her fingers until the nose dipped into a crack between table planks.

“So you’re going to the potlatch tomorrow? They always invite your uncle.”

“It’ll be my first.”

The older boy carried an empty margarine bucket. He squatted between the peonies in the centre of the church flowerbed and sifted woodchips through his palms.

“What are you looking for?” She studied the line on his bicep where the flesh turned brown-orange. That was their goal back home – sunburnt summers of FM radio, diet colas, and plastic squeeze bottles filled with olive oil.

“Slugs.”

She laughed. He didn’t. She flicked the top again, but it wouldn’t go, and the boy leaned forward onto his knees and snatched something from the paddle-shaped shadows of leaves on dirt. A slug – fat and Dijon-coloured. He held it out for her, the slimed crest of its back contracting between his fingers.

“What do you do with slugs?” Natalie said and pulled herself up. She tugged the squished fiddleheads from her back pocket and laid them on her lap.

“That’s secret.” He grinned and dropped the slug. It landed in the margarine container with a thwack. “Why’d you move here?”

“Secret.”

The boy pinched another slug from the chips. This one was black, and a pearly string of slime linked it to the ground. “Show you mine if you tell me yours.”

She waved a fiddlehead in figure-eights through the air and watched him scour the flowerbed. He paused and straightened his spine and watched her watch him. “My mom and brother died,” she said. “On that fishing boat.” The boy didn’t respond. “I stayed with my neighbours in Vancouver to finish the school year.”

The silence stretched as the boy bent low to peer again under the peony leaves.

Natalie made a fist and poked the plant in the space between her middle and index fingers. The pea-coloured spiral at the end bobbed forward like her uncle’s dashboard Jesus.

“Why do you collect fiddleheads,” the boy asked, face shrouded in the bush. Then he pulled himself up and squatted in her direction, the knees of his jeans patched with mud.

“Dunno. I like how they look.”

“How’s that?”

“How’s what?”

“How they look.”

She stuffed another fiddlehead into her knuckle. Its infant leaves wrinkly and balled into a bent finger. “Like a baby’s fist,” she said. She added a third between her pinkie and ring fingers. “Or the end of an octopus arm.” She pawed her fist toward him.

“What else?”

She examined the spirals, looped them through the air. “The goose head on Mary Poppins’ umbrella.”

The boy heaved himself onto the tabletop and plucked a coil from her fist, balancing it in the groove of his collarbone.
Then he knotted his other hand around an imagined bow and arced it against his fiddle’s strings.

“You look like a grasshopper,” she said. “What’s your name?”

“Milton. What’s yours?”

“Natalie.” She laid her three remaining fiddleheads in a palm-sized fan over the table. “Now what’s your secret?”

He beamed at her, laughed with his eyes like a wink. “Meet me tonight at seven?”

“Where?”

“Lane’s meadow. By the beebalm.”

“The what?”

“The red ones.”

Natalie found the first beads beside the tree trunk. Chinese porcelain – stick letters shaped like tents and Shanghai suns, inked below glaze; she had been scouring the forest floor for fiddleheads. The two beads sat on a bed of wet clovers and pine needles, and she collected them in her palm. Then she saw another a few feet away, and another, so she stuffed the baby ferns into the back pocket of her cut-offs and followed the beads off-trail. The fifth was egg-shaped and painted with a blue lily and the sixth wore a fish tail. The seventh bead, a crane, perched beside a pinecone on the edge of the crag. She pocketed it and searched the rock for more, wiped her fingers through crevices, lifted loose stones – and then she saw the cradle. It had washed up below, on a reef that tongued from the side of the cliff. Woven cedar, a broad hood, empty; the tide rocked it to and fro against the barnacles. A nut-brown bundle bobbed in the surf beside the reef. Natalie sunk to her butt and
shimmied down the crag, feet dangling, her fingers curled around lips of limestone until she could jump to the shore. She tiptoed the reef to the bundle and stretched her hand toward water, eyes squeezed shut. Her fingers grazed a stiff stream of hair, then the blanket, which felt like wet suede, buckskin maybe, and she tugged it, bent into the surf to gather the bundle in both arms. She opened her eyes because it felt too light. Tucked inside was a cedar doll – lips painted with salmon eggs, a horsetail braid, and abalone eyes that shifted like oil puddles. She hugged the doll to her chest, felt her heart pound into wood and pretended it was the other way around. Her canvas shoes were grey with seawater, and she felt something under her heel – an eighth bead. She spotted the spinning top after the next wave. A stringy bark cone pierced with a stick, which swirled in a puddle of yellow foam and sea ribbons. She rescued it and stepped into the water. Her eyes combed the waves, her fingers plucked through seaweed, the cold gnawed her ankles. Between crushed clamshells and pebbles she found another bead, and something shaped like a thumb-sized boomerang, carved from bone and etched with black dots. She clenched them both in her fist and gazed at shore, at the trees that feathered from cliff – and that’s when she saw the canoe. It jutted from a pine bough, and might have passed as a dead branch if it weren’t tilted to show it was a dugout. Natalie waded to shore and up the rocks until she stood directly under the tree, but the canoe wasn’t angled right for her to see its contents. Suspended in pine, the wood silvered, it looked like a vessel errant from Nod, swan-nosed and lined with eiderdown, ferrying heavy-lidded children between dreams.

H
e came out onto his porch and there was some hippy mother changing her baby on his lawn. On a Hudson’s Bay blanket, the mother was wiping and dabbing at the muddy rolls and creases of her little girl. A gust of wind whipped up leaves around the two, and it was like last night on TV. Some pear-shaped Spanish grandma had been crammed into this glass booth with money being blown all around her. The grandma grabbed at the bills, stuffed her clothes with money, and wore a twisted look of desperation on her face. She looked so stupid. He couldn’t tell if the point was to degrade the grandma, but he could tell that this particular grandma didn’t care. When the wind in the booth was turned off all the money dropped and lay in a pile at her feet. All that money just right there, but not for her. She had gotten some, but not enough. Never enough. The brittle and wet leaves stuck to the hippy mother’s dreadlocks and onto the swamp of the little girl.

“I’ll just be a sec,” the hippy mom said when she saw him there on the porch. He took a sip from his mug and nodded, slid a hand into the pocket of his housecoat as a sign of being A-okay with things.

The hippy mother stood up with a bundle in her hand and walked to him. The baby writhed on the blanket as if it were trying to crawl along the air.

“Hi,” the hippy mother said. She had one of those cute faces that would have been ugly if she had tried to pretty it up with make-up, he thought.

“Morning,” he said.

The mother winced at the sun high above them and looked back at him, squinting still.

“Listen,” she said, “I’m sorry to do this, but I’ve got nowhere to toss this.” She held up the bundle. “I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind taking it for me.”

“That’s shit in there?” he asked, gesturing at the bundle with his mug.