Blasted (16 page)

“I know, dear,” she said, patting me on the head. “But we can bring a few of the plants home to this garden, and then they'll grow here, where they'll be safe.”

I was skeptical and determined to be tragic, but drive to the schoolyard we did. We parked there, the lot strange and deserted on a weekend. Mom knew the school from having worked there as a substitute a couple of times, and as she got out of the car she looked at the ugly, low building and her lips pressed together. I knew she was thinking about supply teaching and how (as she was fond of saying to me, or anyone, in front of my father)
some
people took
sick
all winter in a fit of the vapours and
someone
had to bring home a pay-cheque.

She didn't know the land around the place, and I felt very important leading the way to the garden. When we emerged from the stand of big old poplars and the little hollow opened before us, Mom gasped with pleasure. She dug up poppies and put them in plastic bags, oblivious for once of grass stains on her white skirt, and then wandered around trying to get a sense of what that garden had been like. “A garden is a map of a person's imagination,” she said. She plucked two wild roses and put one behind her ear, pink against her light hair, and one she stuck amidst my dark tangles.

We brought the poppies home and planted them, and they did so well and looked so beautiful that Gramma took some the next year. Soon both gardens were in grave danger of becoming poppy-dominated, and the struggle to control the plants became one of the few points of concord between by mother and grandmother. They called them “Ruby's poppies” and waged war on them with such cheerful enthusiasm that I knew I'd done something right. They were less enthusiastic about the pocketful of snails I'd also brought home; these soon flourished in the damp stone of the Southside. “What I can't understand,” Gramma used to say, “is why they didn't live here before.” “It's an act of Ruby,” Mom would reply.

The snails, the poppies – all of that – it was one of the few happy memories I had of my mother.

I rummaged through the linny to find the long screwdriver-like tool used to stab out unwanted dandelions, and began. Some of the tender leaves I saved for dinner that night. I found dandelion bitter, even early in

the year, but Grandpa loved it; maybe we could have a bit of fish with that, and potatoes. The dandelions took almost an hour. Then I started on the other weeds, and the tremendous task of thinning out the poppies. In places the stone walls bulged out, sagging dangerously; if they weren't seen to soon, the next big rain would bring half the hillside down into the backyard. I wondered if I could tackle them; it had always been Grandpa's job, “man's work.” Gramma would have known just how to get him to do what she wanted. I went into the house, dropping dandelion leaves into the sink with cold water on the way. Then I went in search of Grandpa. He was lying full-length on the sofa in front of the TV.

“It's a gorgeous day, why don't you come outside?”

Grunt.

“Some of the walls in the garden are coming down.” He didn't even twitch. The TV switched to ads, and in the sudden burst in volume I took a breath and continued loudly, “So I was
wondering
if you'd
consent
to do a little
work
on them.” Grandpa didn't move. And didn't move. I was about to go away when he sat up.

“Alright.”

We went outside and I showed him what I'd done. Oblivious to the plants, Grandpa climbed into the beds and examined the walls, kicking at the stones where they'd shifted, pressured by the weight of rock and soil behind them. He squinted obscurely at the sky, then looked at me.

“Alright.” He stepped back down and disappeared into the linny, emerging moments later with work gloves and a shovel.

“Try not to kill
too
many plants,” I begged him, and he winked at me, grinning. I giggled. The rogue could go from miserable bastard to charmer in three seconds flat. A good thing he was my grandfather; he'd be just the sort to reel me in otherwise. When he and Gramma had been courting, did he reduce her alternately to giggles or tears? I couldn't picture it. But then, by the time I knew her, she'd had decades of living with her moody, handsome man. Suddenly I felt a bit sorry for her, an emotion I never dared feel for the woman alive and in person.

I pottered around the beds for a bit, trying to rescue plants from Grandpa's rampaging feet. He pulled down whole sections of wall and took to the rock-infested soil with the shovel, then started re-laying the stones. He was methodical about it, and very particular. It was like assembling a puzzle, deciding which rock went where; I wanted to help, but he wouldn't hear of it.

After a bit I announced I was going in to take a piss. Grandpa only did his grunting thing, by which I knew he was happy; otherwise I

would've gotten an earful about “language.” The house was cool and dark after the sunshine outside. I felt my way half-blinded up the stairs. At Grandpa's bedroom door, I paused. The mattress was slightly askew. I could hear Grandpa's stones clinking musically as he placed and shifted them. A gull screeched.

I crept into his room, feeling like a kid stealing from Mrs. Breen's corner store. I'd always gotten caught stealing. Always. I gripped an edge of the mattress and lifted. Sure enough, squashed beneath it were the flattened old shoebox and a bunch of photos. Propping the mattress on one shoulder, I reached under with my free arm and hastily gathered the photos to my chest. I snuck down the hall to my room and sat on the floor by the window.

Some of the pictures had been bent by the mattress. They weren't Polaroids, they were older than that, like the single one I'd seen of my great-grandmother: black and white with a crinkly edging. Pictures of my grandparents in the early years of their marriage, all taken, I thought, on one trip, a picnic with another young couple (at least, there was another woman besides Gramma, and someone had to be taking the pictures – her beau?). Grandpa looked like an old-time movie star, tall, broad across the shoulders, dark hair swept back. Gramma was never a pretty woman, even young – there was a determination in her eyes and a capability about her blunt, square fingers that shriveled “pretty” right up. The bleak, magnificent landscape of stone and a sweeping crescent of shining ocean spread behind, dwarfing them all – I recognized Bell Island on the horizon – they must have taken a trip to Horse Cove or maybe Portugal Cove.

The other woman was very stylish, and in several pictures she and my grandmother had their arms around each other, an easy friendliness between them. In one they had put on the men's hats and stuck seaweed on their upper lips as mustaches; they stood in mock masculinity, guts out and legs apart. I looked more closely at the slender woman and gasped. Great-Aunt Queenie? Aunt Queenie and my Gramma, seemingly the best of friends.

Grandpa coughed from outside. I jumped, raising my head above the window sill to look. He was leaning on the shovel, wiping his brow. He looked up and I almost ducked, but he simply stretched his back then returned to the wall. All stealth, I sank out of view.

I rifled quickly through the pile, flipping past the photo of the woman I now knew to be my great-grandmother, hoping there were more; but no, that seemed to be the only one. There were pictures of people I didn't know or didn't recognize, some more of my father, a few of my mother, none of me. Another set was bundled together with a disintegrating elastic band: brushing away crumbs of rubber, I found pictures of my grandmother holding a new baby – Dad. She brooded down at the baby with an almost frightening intensity. The pictures caught the child, unashamed, full of wonder. There was down on the baby's head, so different from Dad's thick, dark hair. This tender, laughing creature would turn into my father?

I heard Grandpa cough again. He must be thinking I fell down the toilet. The baby, older now, alone. He sat in a high chair, an iced cake in front of him with a lonely candle. First birthday. The dark fuzz had been replaced by short dark hair, and the child's eyes were large, shadowed, melancholy. The eyes of my father. In one chubby fist he clutched a new toy, but his face was drawn with old sorrow.

And one more. It came into my hands and I crouched, stilled and staring. It took the sound of a car speeding by the house to cut into my consciousness, and at last I broke, I shivered. It was only a photo of a baby, another photo of my baby father, badly taken, blurry; he'd moved as the camera'd gone off, maybe the flash had gotten into his eyes. Gleaming eyes, dark, no whites, and flat, twin sparks of cold star-white where each pupil should be. His heavy head turned in a curiously adult posture, as if he'd been surprised at something. The child's lipless mouth hung slightly open, and teeth gleamed over the tender tongue where no teeth should be, surely, in a baby so young. Vicious. Vicious, angry, ancient baby.

A voice whispered in my head: don't leave a baby by an open window. Never leave a baby alone. Keep bread in the cradle, or else they might take it. If they touch you, you'll never be the same.

I stuffed the photos into my bedside table and fled.

Later that evening, I phoned Juanita.

“Wanna go out?”

“Oh, I'm good enough for you now, is that it?”

“All my other hot dates have fallen through, so I thought I'd grace you with my presence. Are you free?”

I heard the click of a lighter and her indrawn breath as she lit a cigarette. “No, but I'm reasonable.”

“Ha, ha.”

“No, I'm not free tonight – unless you want to hang with Dennis too.”

“No,” I blurted out, then tried to amend, “I mean, he's a nice kid, but…”

“…you'd rather stick pins in your eyes,” she laughed.

“How about tomorrow?”

“I'll be at work. But I'm free the night after.”

I started to feel a coldness in my gut, and bared my teeth in a smile. “Yeah, that's great! I'll call you the day after tomorrow, then. We can go out and get loaded.”

“
Destroyed!
” Juanita responded.

“Obliterated. Talk to you later!” My voice was getting more and more cheerful, my teeth trying to jump out of my mouth.

“Yup, talk to you later!”

“Bye, girl!!” I sounded positively manic. I needed to get out of that house, talk with a normal person – someone who didn't have huge tracts of their mental and emotional landscape labeled
Here there be Dragons
.

After dinner with Grandpa, I went directly to bed. He was in a good mood from the work on the garden; he was pleased to eat the dandelion, pleased with my cooking, pleased and chattering away. We were living on either end of a goddamned see-saw. I went to bed and lay there. Awake. For hours and hours.

I couldn't stop thinking of the photos: wondering why Grandpa had hidden them, why they'd never gone into a photograph album, why there were so few of them. Queenie and Gramma. Grandpa's mother looking so like me. And that last, that baby. I turned the light on and opened my bedside drawer; the photos slid across the wood with a papery whisper. I slammed the drawer shut again and plunged the room into darkness, then thrashed around on the bed, pretending sleep would come. Wind rose and my window rattled; I could feel the vastness of the night sky, could feel the mass of the Hill leaning over the house, and the empty ache of the house next door, looking-glass to this one. Full of ghosts.

I'd never really had photos to help map my memory. For me it had been, until now, drawings. Not that I was an artist; I had no real talent for drawing. Not like my bar-tending artist friend Steve. He'd had a recurring nightmare as a little boy about a bear attacking and eating his entire family while he hid, unable to do anything. He told me about it one night; we were drinking and spilling our childhoods. He drew the bear with a Bic pen on a bar napkin, and it took my breath away, that drawing. Every line expressed fear, the power of the bear, the vulnerability of the people. It reminded me of Shanawdithit's drawings, the ones she'd done for Cormack. The maps of events, the killings of her family, her people. A small red dot, and Cormack wrote next to it:
Here Mary March's child died two days after its mother's abduction.

When my parents were killed, I didn't cry. I remember Gramma getting me dressed for the funeral, me throwing a temper-tantrum because I hated the dress she'd bought me: “You didn't
ask
if I wanted a stinking dress!”

“You'll wear it,” Gramma said, in a voice that brooked no argument.

“You'll wear it.” I grabbed the dress where it lay on the bed, intending to throw it on the floor. But I couldn't. I just stood there, clutching it, and a gust of desolation shook my skinny thirteen-year-old body. If Gramma had touched me, or even looked at me, I would've broken down. But she turned and left the room. “Unnatural child,” she said, closing the door on me, shutting me in.

I wore the dress. But I didn't cry.

Soon after I moved in with my grandparents, the clandestine visits to my old house began. The first occurred one afternoon when both grandparents were out. I squeezed through the boarded-up back window and wandered through the strange, empty place, opening and shutting doors, wondering at how dead it all felt. In the closet of my old bedroom I found nothing but a yellowing roll of newsprint. I didn't talk about Shanawdithit any more, not since the demolition of the cross on the monument, but I still thought about her. I remembered her drawings. And time after time, sitting cross-legged with a flashlight on the cold bedroom floor, I took a black marker and a red marker and I drew. I drew the highway, surrounded by all the landmarks of the Hill that I knew – the special places that had been destroyed by the highway – the Fairy Rock and its magic circle of blueberries and wild roses where I had first seen her; the Crashed-Up Car, where I used to play race games with the other kids; the magic waterfall, all dry now, all gone. And I drew the Arterial Overpass. I drew it from different angles. How it looked underneath, how it looked when you were standing above it on the Hill, how I imagined it would look from an airplane. I drew the overpass in black. In red I drew a car with two red people inside it. They were smiling, stick figures with dots for eyes and upward curving mouths. One had long hair. She sat in the passenger seat. One had short hair. He was driving.