When the Saints (12 page)

“Poppy, you gave Janis and Swimmer the name Saint for a reason. You must have believed things would get better, that someday they’d be wearing it like a purple heart instead of a badge of shame.”

“It ain’t that.” She shrugs one sharp shoulder. “I just wanted them to be all mine, same name and everything in case anyone tried to take them.” Her eyes glaze as she wanders into some torture chamber in her head. “They shouldn’t even have let me bring Swimmer home from the hospital. I was so high, I don’t even remember him coming out of me.”

I look down at the bedspread.

“I’m so sick and tired of being who I am,” she says.

“Then start being who you’re going to be.”

She nods and grabs my hand this time, squeezes it hard.

W
HEN
W
EST WALKS INTO HIS KITCHEN
, I
’M STANDING
there in Poppy’s pretty dress, hauling a steaming pan out of the oven. His roast has all the trimmings: turnip, carrots and rosemary potatoes. He tosses his jumble of keys onto the table and circles me like I’m a new model car on the showroom floor.

“You’re making me nervous,” I say. “Do you like it or not?”

“I love it … all of it. The dress, the food. I feel like I just got out of prison or something.”

I set the pan on the stove and feel his breath on the back of
my neck. He starts kissing my neck and I detach myself from the erection growing in his jeans.

“Come on now.” I push him into a chair. “You’ve been asking for this roast since I met you.”

I grab some plates out of the cupboard and serve him a heaping helping. When I sit down across from him, he’s got this lovesick look on his face.

“What?”

“I feel like we should say grace or something.” I think he’s joking, but he closes his eyes and says, “Dear Lord, thank you for this roast,
finally.
It looks goddamn delicious. And thank you for keeping hothead hicks out of my tavern and helping Tabby find her sister in Jubilant. Oh, and for her walking into my life and the good sex and all that. Amen.”

I hold my breath as he takes a bite. He must approve because he cleans his plate before I finish my roll.

“Where’d you learn to cook?” he asks after his second helping.

“Barbara Best. It was the only thing she did that interested me. I didn’t even know the names of most of the vegetables she had in her garden because I’d only ever eaten them out of cans. One day Barbara picked a pea pod, slit open the casing with her fingernail to show me where peas come from. It just about blew my mind.”

West goes quiet the way he often does when I talk about my past, and I wish I knew what he was thinking. After dessert, I come back from the bathroom and he’s got my homemade apron on, standing over a sink of soapy water scrubbing dishes. I grab a beer and hoist myself up on the counter.

“How’s the truck running?” he asks.

“Pretty good, considering it’s old enough to have an eight-track player.” I dangle his key chain in the air and he pulls my wrestling card out of his back pocket. We switch. “I’ve been wondering about our old house,” I say, examining Macho Man for creases. “Do you think the land still belongs to Ma? She says she never paid any taxes, but she’s still got the deed. Think that counts for anything?”

“I’ll ask around, see what I can find out.”

“Holy shit,” I say, pointing at the wall with my beer. “You flipped your calendar to the right month.”

“All by myself.”

I notice he’s been keeping the place a little neater. The afghan is neatly folded on the back of the sofa and it looks like he watered and trimmed the plants. I take a sip of beer and swallow hard.

“So now that you have your truck back, are you going to ask me to find another place to stay?”

West sticks his hands back in the suds and pulls up a fistful of cutlery. I watch him diligently clean each piece. Then he dries his hands on the apron, hangs it on the stove handle and takes me by the hand. I let him lead me down the hall to the bedroom, where he opens a drawer in the nightstand, removes some scented candles and lights each one with a Zippo. I watch as he starts setting them around the room.

“What’s all this?”

“A romantic gesture.”

“Oh. I don’t think I’ve ever had one of those. Someone spray-painted my name under an overpass once.”

“Tabby.” West tosses the lighter on his dresser. “Shut up.”

After all the wicks have burned down, I lie naked next to West trying to picture him walking around the general store sniffing different candles, dropping the ones he liked into a store basket.

“Thank you for the romantic gesture,” I whisper, and he murmurs, “You’re welcome,” even though I was sure he was asleep. Then he says, “Can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“Is there a tattoo of two horses doing it on your backside?”

“No.” I flip over.

“Are you sure?”

“They’re unicorns.”

“Oh, okay, then. Good night.”

He snorts into his pillow until I hit him with it.

T
HE NEXT DAY, WHILE HE’S AT WORK,
I
TAKE A WALK TO
the old house. A couple of cars slow down to offer me a ride, but the drivers are both men in sunglasses who look like they have too much time on their hands. I’m in no mood for perverts, so I tell them I’m out walking for exercise. The one with the bumper sticker that reads SOLACE RIVER PRAYER AND COUPON CLUB yells, “Lezzie!” as he pulls away.

It’s a long way around the river and I have a lot of time to think. I’ve been dreaming about Raspberry lately. Two nights ago I dreamt that I got a notice in the mail saying I’d been selected at random to win an all-expenses-paid vacation there.

How I actually ended up there is no less ridiculous. I was on
probation when I left Solace River for vandalizing the bus shelter, a small detail Ma forgot to mention to Barbara Best, so I was probably in violation for missing my check-ins with the lame hockey jersey–wearing probation officer they assigned me to. All I know is Barbara made some calls and went to meet with someone at the courthouse. When she came back, she sat me down and told me I had to go to a detention centre where they had some programs I might benefit from. Then she put me in her car and drove me out to the country like some feral animal she had to release back into the wild. She wouldn’t even pull over to let me pee. She’d decided Raspberry would be better for me than my own family and I have no idea by what channels of incompetence no one investigated that claim. Barbara knew about Daddy’s law troubles from Ma and she was certain I’d end up a career criminal if I went back. I guess no one told her juvenile homes are career criminal factories.

During the ride, she pulled out an envelope full of cash and said that, when I was a little older and out on my own, I should use it to get some therapy.

“Gee, thanks, Babs,” I said, stuffing it in my back pocket. “Just let me out in front, so you can get back to bedazzling bingo daubers or fingering yourself to Billy Joel or whatever.”

She insisted she had to escort me inside. In the lobby, she tried to give me an honest-to-goodness hug. That’s what she called it. I staggered back about six feet. There was no way I was going to let anyone touch me who was wearing peach heels that matched the buttons on her cardigan. She frowned and clicked away, back to the land of dry-cleaned underpants and stackable Tupperware.

They made me sign a contract as part of the admission
process. I had to sit and read three pages of rules out loud until my eyes rolled back in my head. They left me alone to think about it “very seriously” and I took out the little pocket knife they hadn’t found in my inside pocket, sliced my finger and signed it in blood. No one there could take a joke. When they came back in, I was sent for a strip search and a psychiatric evaluation.

Barbara Best sent a few letters sealed with fruity scratch ‘n’ sniff stickers, but I chucked them out without opening them. I thought about writing to Ma with no return address, but all letters had to be sent through Raspberry and I couldn’t be sure they wouldn’t add their stamp. I didn’t want my mother to know I was in there. She’d never sleep again. Plus, if Daddy ever found out where I was, he’d probably spring me just to make me sorry I’d left.

O
UR ROAD STILL ISN’T PAVED.
E
VERYONE ALWAYS CALLED
it the Old Solace River Road, but now it has a street sign. I never noticed this last week. Victory Road. I wonder what that’s about. The only victory I know of on this road involved a court battle over whether it’s sanitary to run a daycare out of a barn.

After ten minutes walking along the riverside, I hear voices. I round the bend and see a group of kids doing bottle tokes on the road near our house. They freeze when they see me coming, but as I start up the driveway, one of them calls out, “Hey! Do you know whose house that is?”

I turn to see a girl who’s about the age I was when I left home. She’s wearing a miniskirt, sitting on an anthill.

“Why?” I cross my arms.

“Everyone says they’re still in there, hiding in the walls.”

“Everyone should smoke less pot, then.”

I feel all their eyes on my back as I head up and around the side of the house out of their sight. I find a busted plastic chair lying on its side, drag it down the grass and plant it upright. It pinches my ass as I sit.

“Jesus Christ,” I say out loud. “We’re a goddamn ghost story.”

I turn my face toward the breeze, trying to block out the memories playing like little horror films along the outer walls of the house. Even with my eyes closed, I see my brothers throwing chicken bones at each other, setting fire to anything they could get their hands on, baby Poppy toddling out to the road in a dirty homemade diaper, Ma yelling at her to come back, Daddy gunning his truck up the driveway and almost clipping her. I see fights, broken glass, cold meals, all of us pissing into the wind any time we tried to spin our bits of straw into gold.

What a childhood. We had no books, no toys from our own decade. The only thing I owned that was truly mine was a little marble I found in the river reeds. I kept it on me at all times, rubbing it between my fingers trying to wear it down enough to free the colours locked inside.

I had one friend, but that only lasted a month. Kids at school normally kept their distance, but Summer’s family moved here from Prince Edward Island and didn’t know any better. One day she came over to play, and when her mother arrived to pick her up, Ma was coming out of the woods holding a rabbit she’d just killed, blood dripping all down one arm. At the same time, Bird
and Jackie were showing off, playing a game where one of them would spit straight up in the air and the other would catch it in his mouth. Her mother looked as if she was going to have a heart attack. After that, Summer was only allowed to talk to me at school, and when she had a birthday party I didn’t get invited.

Ma said that birthday parties were no fun. She said all the little girls feel like shit if they aren’t wearing the prettiest dress or if the gift they brought isn’t the best one, and that I should be glad I didn’t have to go. I felt like shit anyway. I wanted to go to a party. I wasn’t even sure if I was crying because I wasn’t invited or because, if I had been, I wouldn’t have had a dress to wear or a gift to bring.

Soon after, I invented Tough Girl. I’d wear all black and scare kids at the playground by freezing my arms in the snow and putting out cigarettes on my wrists. I told them Summer had a restraining order on me and that was why we didn’t hang out anymore. They didn’t even know who Summer was. They barely knew who
I
was, except that I was dirt-road people. That’s how we classify people in Solace River: you’re either up the hill, across the bridge, before the bridge or dirt road. Whenever I told other kids that I lived up the dirt road, they took a step backward and looked at me like I probably ate my own shit for breakfast. If I added Saint onto that, they’d scatter like pigeons.

Not long after, I became Truck Driver. In the back field behind the garage we had an old pickup that didn’t run anymore, and I’d make like it was an eighteen-wheeler, put on one of Daddy’s mesh caps and go to Sacramento, Australia, Moose Jaw, any place I liked the name of. I’d make up stories about how
I really had to gun it to save the day. Once, I was carrying a load of hay for a bunch of starving horses in Russia and showed up in the nick of time before they all dropped dead.

In my truck-driving days, Daddy had a friend named Terry Profit who used to come by to borrow tools. If Daddy wasn’t around, he sometimes slept on our sofa for a few days. One night I heard him try to go into Ma’s bedroom, but the door was locked. He knocked and knocked, but she wouldn’t let him in. The next day, he was going into the garage and saw me playing in the truck. He strolled up and tapped on the window, asked if he could catch a lift. At first he said I was a damn good driver and checked the map for me to be sure we’d make it into Paris by nightfall. He said we even had time to stop at the next exit for cheeseburgers, and when I pulled in at the truck stop, he said, “Paris is the city of love, you know. We better start practising.” Then he pushed his hand down my shorts. I started to scream, but he put his other hand over my mouth and held it there. It smelled like the compost bucket after it had been left steaming in the sun a few days.

Terry Profit’s the reason I didn’t get the red guitar Barbara Best promised me if I stayed out of trouble. She got me enrolled in school in New Brunswick and one of my new teachers had a paperweight on her desk shaped like the Eiffel Tower. It had
Paris: City of Love
written on it in pink cursive and I swiped it because I couldn’t stand looking at it every day.

Anyway, after what happened to Truck Driver, I went back to being just Tabby. I started drinking with the older kids down at the country club and walking home along the river letting the moonlight on the water mess with my eyes. I’d see all kinds of
things swimming in there. Sea witches, lampreys. Once, when I was stoned, I saw Grandpa Jack floating by on his back, singing the executioner’s song. I said hi and he stopped, turned his head and looked right at me.