Hannah & the Spindle Whorl (2 page)

“
I EXPECTED YOU TO
stay horizontal for a while longer this morning,” Dad says, finally sitting down with a mug warming his hands.

“I just felt like I needed to get up.”

“I see. Women’s intuition?” he asks. But he’s got his head in a pile of papers already and I can tell he’s having what he calls “a brainstorm moment.” Which means that in a few minutes he’ll only be able to say things like, “Uh — mmm — that’s nice,” without much enthusiasm. It doesn’t really bother me. He is a creative genius, so it’s allowed.

“Nope. I just get the feeling there’s an adventure waiting for me today,” I tell him, noticing that Chuck has already grown bored of the laundry basket and found his way back to the table. I carefully place a soggy Cheerio on the end of his nose. It sticks.

“Uh — mmm — that’s nice,” Dad says vaguely.

As I walk down the dock toward the shore, I can really smell the bread from the Toad in the Hole bakery. Raisins, too, which usually means cinnamon-raisin scones! I walk a little faster. When I stick my head in through the door, Nell has both her hands buried in a big green bowl.

“Hey, kiddo!” she calls out. She has flour in her hair, but it’s hard to tell because her hair is pretty much the colour of flour anyway.

“I smelled cinnamon.” I smile.

“Well, anyone up this early needs something to keep her strength up,” she tells me, and hands me two big warm scones from a cookie sheet beside the biggest oven. “Here, one for each hand.”

“Wow! Thanks!” I stuff half of one straight into my mouth; not exactly proper, but I just can’t help myself. The raisins are warm and sweet, and I think to myself how much better the scones are than a lame bowl of cold cereal.

“Where are you off to so early, Han?” Nell takes a big jar of walnuts off a shelf by the sink.

“School, I guess. I just had a feeling I should get up early today. You ever get a feeling like that?” Then I feel really dumb because Nell is up half the night, baking all the delicious treats for the next day.

But she just chuckles and looks out the window for a moment. “Nope. Although I sometimes think I should lie in bed for about thirty-four hours straight and do nothing but read books and drink really good French coffee.”

What is the big deal with adults and coffee anyway? Personally, I think it’s gross. I’ll never drink it. Not in a million years.

Nell and I chat for a long time, until eventually I hear the school bus braking just outside of Joe’s Bait Shop. That means I have just five minutes of freedom left. I lean against the Toad’s doorway until I see Wes and Michael coming along their dock, bashing each other over the head with their backpacks and yelling rude things at the seagulls.

Sabrina Webber is sitting at the front of the bus, just as she always does, scowling as usual. Sabrina never has a nice word to say about anyone, so I’m secretly thrilled when, after I sit down, she realizes that I’ve been watching her pick her nose for the last two minutes. She looks horrified. My intuition was right. It is going to be a good day!

Mrs. Elford is my grade six teacher. She’s probably the best teacher I’ve ever had, except for maybe Mr. Butler, who I had back in grade four. He used to tell us stories of how he river-rafted down the Amazon with his brother and his German shepherd named “Ox.” He could also juggle devil sticks and speak four different languages.

This morning in math, Mrs. Elford stops us just as we’re about to start our page on fractions and goes to the door. Mr. Wallace, our principal, is standing outside the door with a kid. After a few moments, Mrs. Elford brings the boy inside and says, “Class, we have a new student joining us today, all the way from 100 Mile House. This is Max Miller. I know you’ll all make him feel welcome.”

The boy has dark straight hair and is looking like he’d rather be anywhere but standing at the front of this classroom. I feel sort of bad for him because it must suck to have to start a new school in June when the year is practically over. He’s wearing a green sweatshirt printed with a log cabin logo that says Flying U Ranch. His jeans are baggy and one of his shoelaces is untied. I can see Sabrina looking down her nose at him. Her shoelaces would never come untied in a million years.

“So, Max, do you have any brothers or sisters here at Elliot Elementary?” Mrs. Elford asks him.

“Yeah. I have a sister in grade three. Her name’s Chloe,” Max says quietly, and I notice he’s kind of red in the face. Sabrina snickers into her hands and then looks innocently out the window when Mrs. Elford gives her a look. I see Max raise his eyebrow at Sabrina and then she goes red in the face too.

I think I’m going to like Max.

MAX SITS IN THE ROW
beside me and I smile over at him. He looks grateful. When I’m halfway through the questions on page sixty-eight of my math workbook, I glance over again and notice the doodles on the edge of his notebook. There are beautiful drawings of a fish, a bear, a moose and a hummingbird. Each one is totally detailed and shaded, so it’s only natural that a person would stare. But then I notice that Max is looking at me, and all of a sudden I feel like I’m spying or something.

“You’re a really good artist,” I tell him.

“Thanks,” he says.

“How’d you learn to draw like that?”

“I dunno. I like animals, I guess. I watch them a lot.”

“Have you ever seen a bear up close for real?” I ask.

“Hannah. Could you and Max save your conversations for recess, please?” Mrs. Elford smiles. Max and I roll our eyes and turn back to our math workbooks. When the bell finally goes for recess, Max sits with me near the monkey bars and tells me about the time, when he lived in the Chilcotin, that a bear came right onto his back porch and ate a forty-pound bag of dog food. I tell him about our homemade houseboat, and he doesn’t think it sounds crazy at all. He thinks it sounds seriously cool.

I find out that Max and his family live at the other end of Cowichan Bay, in a house ten steps from the beach. His parents said that even though school was almost out for the summer, he had to start at Elliot anyway. They thought it would be easier to start grade seven in September if he knew some of the kids there first. When I ask him how come he wasn’t on the bus, he tells me how his dad gave him a ride on his motorcycle. Cool. We hang out all day and by three o’clock I feel like I’ve known Max since the beginning of the school year.

“Want to come over tomorrow?” he asks.

“Sure.”

Later on, just before dinner, I sit out on the deck with Chuck and open my journal — the one Aunt Maddie gave me for Christmas. I’ve written in it every single day except a few days in February when I had the stomach flu. I love it. It has cream-coloured pages, a blue cover, and a pattern of shiny golden sun-faces all across the front of it.

For supper, Dad brings out a tray of corned beef sandwiches made with Nell’s whole grain bread. Hot spicy mustard and sliced dill pickles are already on the table.

“Well, Hannah Banana? What extraordinary thing happened to you today?” He’s wearing bright green shorts and a T-shirt that says “When it rains, we pour” — advertising a coffee shop (of course, what else?) in Vancouver.

“A new kid started in our class today. His name’s Max,” I tell him, picking a sunflower seed out of my bread.

“Oh? So what’s Max like?”

“He’s kind of a slob, and his pants are too big.”

“Ah. I see. A kindred spirit.”

“
DAD
!”

“Truth hurts, eh?”

“Well, if I’m a slob, then I guess it’s genetic, right? Oh yeah, Max’s dad has a motorcycle. Can I go over to their place after school tomorrow? They live at the other end of the bay.”

“Sure. I guess so. Just be home for supper, though. Aunt Maddie is coming over to cook.”

Great! Aunt Maddie is my most favourite relative. She’s my dad’s sister and she’s what a lot of people would call “eccentric.” That means she isn’t afraid to sing old Beatles songs really loud in the grocery store, and she wears pink and orange at the same time, even though my grandmother thinks it’s a sin. Aunt Maddie likes to cook for us a lot; she thinks Dad doesn’t feed me properly and stuff.

Later, when I crawl into bed, I pull my comforter up around my chin and listen for a while to the waves slapping against the houseboat. Then I take my journal out from under my pillow and continue where I left off this morning.

When I wake up the next day, Chuck is sitting on my head, anxiously waiting for his breakfast. He’s like that. You have to feed him immediately or he’ll dig his claws into your chin and start gnawing on your eyebrow. It’s very irritating and impossible to ignore, so I get up and stumble down the stairs to the kitchen. My father has fallen asleep on the couch, again, surrounded by a pile of papers, and Chuck has discovered the bowl of melted mint chocolate ice cream on the floor. I go over, pick up the cat before he makes himself sick, and drop him onto my dad’s chest. Chuck lands heavily and Dad wakes up.

“Whoa! Did I oversleep? I don’t even remember going to bed. Oh, I guess I didn’t. Geez, I hate falling asleep in my clothes.”

“I think it suits you,” I tell him, smiling. Dad’s thinning hair is rumpled and his cheek is a roadmap of creases. My guess is that he pulled an all-nighter. He does that quite a lot when he gets his teeth into a good story.

I dump a smelly mess of canned chicken nuggets into Chuck’s bowl, but he bumps my hand at the last minute and the whole mess lands on the kitchen floor. He doesn’t care though; he just settles in to eat it straight off the linoleum.

“Are you going to this Max fella’s house after school then?” Dad asks, reaching for the coffee beans in the freezer.

“Yep.”

“No motorcycling though, okay?”

“Dad, I’m going to hang out with Max, not his dad.” For a cool parent, sometimes he worries as much as a few fussy moms I know.

SCHOOL’S PRETTY BORING,
but I don’t mind too much because, well, it’s Friday. The bell finally goes at five to three and I stuff my homework into my backpack and hurry to meet Max by the lockers. We climb on the bus and manage to score seats near the back, which is cool, because on the way home they usually get snapped up first. We don’t say much during the ride; I stare at the forest which lines Cowichan Bay while Max draws a leopard gecko on the corner of his language arts binder. We finally get off just past Holly Ridge Bed and Breakfast. Max points out a house just past the corner store. It’s a big white one with black trim and a deck that stretches off the back and out over the beach grass. We go inside, put our backpacks on the kitchen table, and Max pours us grape juice. He grabs a huge handful of oatmeal cookies; they’re the really good kind — sort of undercooked and squishy in the middle. We sit out on the deck and eat about fifty cookies each before deciding to go and comb the beach for crabs and stuff, maybe make a fort out of some driftwood. That never gets old.

I love living near the beach. Even in the wintertime when it’s raining, I still like to explore along the shore. The wind whips the trees back and forth and the ocean turns a slate-grey colour. But the best part is the fog. And the foghorn. It’s kind of a sad sound, but, still, it makes me feel safe. I guess because I’ve heard that sound my whole life. When I was little, my parents and I used to sit out on the deck of our houseboat under the lean-to, and wrap ourselves up in blankets and watch the storms pass by. We’d usually drink hot chocolate, and Chuck would hide right under the blankets and not come out until it was all over. He’s such a wuss. Sometimes there’d be an electrical storm, and we’d count the seconds between lightning cracks and booms of thunder to tell how far away the storm was. But most of the time in Cowichan Bay it’s just whitecaps and wind and power outages.

Max and I make a really cool driftwood hut and there’s enough wood left over to make a fenced area in front of it.

“I could totally live in one of these,” he tells me, looking out to the ocean. There’s a tugboat working really hard just a little ways off shore, pushing around a big barge out in the bay.

“What? You could? Even in the winter? Kind of cold, don’t you think?” I decide that Max is probably a dreamer like my dad.

“Well, people used to live on the beaches like, a zillion years ago, in longhouses and lean-tos and stuff. With like, fire pits in the middle. I bet it was cool, eating smoked salmon and just chilling and stuff.”

I think of the longhouse in the museum in Victoria, and remember the great smells of cedar and smoke. The chants that they play from some hidden speaker somewhere sound so real. Even though none of it is real, the forest at the museum is still my favourite part.

“Yeah, I bet there was a village right here on this bay,” Max says. “They’d probably canoe over there to Kuper Island to trade stuff.”

I look over the sea, trying to imagine what it would be like to see canoes there, paddling against the wind.

“And I bet there was more than one Bigfoot around here back then, too,” he continues, his eyes kind of big and staring.

“You mean Sasquatch? You can’t be serious,” I scoff, sitting up straighter on the log.

“Oh yeah,” Max nods. “Dead serious. Why? You’re not a believer?”

“Is anyone?”

“Well, our neighbour in 100 Mile House said he saw one once when he was hunting moose.”

“Get outta here.”

“No. Seriously. He saw it take a package of hot dogs from his campsite, and he said its footprints were the size of trash can lids!” Max has told this story before. I can tell.

“Know what else?” He goes on before I can say anything. “I found an arrowhead once.”

“Really? Do you still have it?”

“I had to give it to an archaeologist in Williams Lake even though I found it on Long Beach. It was a really big one, too.” Max holds up his hands about six inches apart.

“It was kinda white, and sort of chalky.”

All arrowheads I’d ever seen were shiny and black, made from that volcanic rock called obsiddy-something.

“The museum guy told me it was a trade item that actually came from the middle of BC somewhere. He said it was important that I found it on Vancouver Island, because it meant that the people here traded stuff with inland tribes in the Okanagan or something. The museum sure was stoked about it.”

I wish I could have seen it. I love collecting things. The best thing I have is an orca’s tooth. I found it on a beach on the mainland when I was seven.

“Why don’t you do your report on that?” I ask him. We have to write our last report in social studies on something to do with British Columbia’s history. Anything we want. “You could do some really wild scientific drawings with tons of detail and stuff too!”

“That could be pretty awesome. I’ll think about it,” Max tells me, checking his watch.

I notice that it is getting kind of late.

“Well, I guess I better get going,” I say. “I think I’ll follow the trail home from here. It only takes about twenty minutes. You know about the trail?”

“Nope,” Max replies. “I haven’t really had a chance to explore yet.”

“It’s great. It runs through the forest and comes out right across from the bakery at the other end of the bay. There are some really big trees in there.”

We say goodbye, and I head off across the road and into the forest. The sunlight is filtering through the cedars, and the sword ferns on the ground are lush and thick. As I walk along, I decide that I really like Max. I like that he’s sort of quiet and listens when you say something, even if sometimes it might be something sort of dumb.

A little Douglas squirrel darts across the path and runs up an alder tree, yelling at me the whole time.

“Chill out! I’m not trying to catch you,” I tell him, but I hear him chattering long after I’ve gone.

I love walking in the woods. I like the way the forest floor feels under my feet when I run along the trail. Kinda spongy. And when it’s dry, the moss smells warm and sort of sweet. Like hot berries. Summer is pretty much here, and I can smell things growing. It’s hard to describe it, but Aunt Maddie knows exactly what I mean because she’ll say, “Yep. It sure smells like green out there!” Right away it makes you think of reading your favourite book while sitting on a warm rock at the beach and pushing sand between your toes.

I look up through the cedar boughs. Big puffy clouds are moving quickly across the tops of the trees. A wind is beginning to pick up and I remember that Aunt Maddie is cooking dinner. I start jogging briskly toward home.