Monkey Beach (5 page)

“I don’t see why we have to file at all,” Mick said. “The whole fucking country is on Indian land. We’re not supposed to pay any taxes on or off reserves.”

“God, don’t start again,” Dad said.

“This whole country was built on exploiting Indians for—”

“Mick,” Dad pleaded.

“Look at this.” Mom was shaking her head. “Nothing but Kraft. How does he stay healthy?”

I helped Mom by finding some wieners in the fridge. We began making a macaroni-and-wiener casserole.

“I’ll make you a warrior yet,” Mick said, punching Dad’s shoulder.

“Enough, enough. You’ll wake Jimmy.”

“Tell your brother about the dishes,” Mom said to Dad.

Dad started telling Mick about the tidal wave. I remembered that day very clearly. Late July, a bright, sunny day. Normally, you would still see people playing soccer on the field, or visiting with other people in the village, or picking up their mail—even after the warnings on the radio. You could expect a half-dozen or so tsunami warnings a year, and all they amounted to were some whitecaps. This time the evacuation order was real, and the fire station alarm was jangling in the background as Mom and Dad frantically ran to get clothes, bottled water and camping gear. Me and Jimmy were waiting in the car, with Jimmy screaming because Mom and Dad were upset and hiding it badly. Mom wanted to save her Royal Doulton and Dad said, “That’s just dandy. People are going to say hey, aren’t those the Hills floating by? They’re dead, but damn they have nice dishes.”

“If my dishes stay,” Mom shot back, “so do your golf clubs.”

“Jesus on crutches,” Dad said, getting out of the car and heading to the basement. “At least I
use
my golf clubs.”

Jimmy continued screaming and Mom came and took him out of his car seat and carried him to the front seat with her, singing him a lullaby.

She’d left the car door open. I knew I wasn’t going to get another chance. I snuck out of the car and ran. I was ecstatic. I was finally going to have an adventure! I wasn’t completely without an escape plan. I’d brought an umbrella. My idea was to turn it upside down and float away on it, just like in the books Dad read to me. I ran through the bushes at the back of our house and down the front street by the water. It was sheer bad luck that Uncle Geordie was driving to the docks to save his seiner. I saw his beat-up old Ford and I quickly veered off the road, running across the soccer field, but when I looked behind me, Uncle Geordie was pumping his gumboots, his yellow sou’wester flapping. I put everything I had into making it to the beach, then scrambled up a tree.

“Lisa, get down! Now!” he yelled, coming right under me and opening his arms as if he expected me to jump.

“Want see big wave!”

“Don’t make me come up there!”

If Mom or Dad had made that threat, I wouldn’t have worried because I knew neither of them was any good at climbing. I hadn’t even known Uncle Geordie could run, and from the way he was glaring at me, I didn’t want to find out if he could climb. He didn’t lecture me when I got down, just scooped me up
and ran back to his truck, threw me in and drove me up to the old Hall, where almost everyone else had gathered, including Mom and Jimmy. Dad was driving around the village looking for me. Before he could go to the docks, Uncle Geordie had to go find him and tell him I was safe. They were both furious, but I was already crying, mad at everyone for ruining my big plans.

That night, when everything was over and we were sitting in Uncle Geordie’s house, he told us about trying to save his boat. The docks had squealed and moaned, undulating over the water like snakes. One of the boats had swirled like a toy boat caught in the bathtub’s drain. The tide had risen so high, the ocean leaked and slid over the roads. Then the docks went underwater and the boats were floating over them, bumping and grinding their keels against them when the waves dipped down. Uncle Geordie gave up when the gangplank started twisting. Later, he found his seiner on the beach with half its keel scraped off.

That spring was lush, filled with hazy sunlight and long afternoons on the porch with Mom, and we basked like lizards on her newly ordered patio furniture. Dad sat down beside us that afternoon and announced that he was going to grow a vegetable garden. Mom opened one eye, lifted a languid hand and sipped her coffee. “Good. Go do that.”

At the garden centre, he poured over the seed packets, enlisting the help of passing clerks and other
customers. He showed me pictures of the plants and asked if I’d want to eat this or that. He spent the next three weeks happily turning ground, fertilizing, balancing pHs and planting seeds in egg cartons on our windowsills. I enthusiastically searched for worms and brought interesting bugs into the house in a Mason jar with the lid punched through with holes. Mom refused to join in, annoyed when Dad asked if she’d mind weeding.

“Look at these,” she said, holding up her perfectly manicured fingernails with their stylish red nail polish. “Do you know how long I worked on these?”

Somewhere in our deepest past, in among eons of fishermen, there must have been a farmer. Whatever Dad touched grew like it had been fast-forwarded in a film. The sunflowers in the front yard shot up eight feet, with basketball-sized flowers that stared sullenly at the ground. The pumpkins and zucchini sprawled over potato patches and fought with the strawberry runners for ground space. Bees hummed contentedly in our greenery through the spring and summer, and the kids who raided our garden said there wasn’t a better one in the village. In the pictures of the garden that year, Dad posed me and Jimmy for maximum effect, standing us beside the largest sunflowers, having us sit on the most orange pumpkins.

Over the years, he became more ambitious. He made an elaborate archway over the walk that led to our front door and planted trailing roses that everyone knew died in the winter. Ours survived to become thorough nuisances, choking Mom’s nasturtiums and displacing carefully laid bricks with their gnarly roots.
Corn flourished for him, attracting hordes of crows and sparrows. Rhubarb spread broad leaves and grew to mutant-like heights, becoming hard and inedible when we refused to pick it, sick of the sweetly sour taste after weeks of eating it. Dad even transplanted a full-grown greengage tree from a house that was going to be demolished, and despite everyone’s predictions to the contrary, the tree survived, producing fruit three years after it was plopped in our front yard, attracting kids and birds. The birds squawked and fought over the plums, and at least once a year, some kid would fall out of the tree and break an arm.

“Is a simple lawn so much to ask for?” Mom asked Aunt Edith over the phone. “Why does he always have to go overboard?”

You could always tell when Dad had done something he knew she wasn’t going to like. His shoulders hunched, his smile turned up only the corners of his mouth and his eyebrows went halfway up his forehead, as if he couldn’t believe what he’d done either.

“Now what?” Mom said, watching him gingerly carry a large cardboard box up our front steps. She opened the door for him, and we could all hear the high, sweet chirping of the chicks that poked their tiny beaks out of the air holes.

Dad smiled his silly smile, and Mom bit down firmly on whatever she was going to say and slammed the door in his face. “Chickens!” I heard her shouting at him later that night. “Chickens! You had to pick the filthiest, ugliest, most—”

Dad said something quiet.

“It’s on your head, then,” Mom said, sounding
disgusted. “They’re your babies, mister. I want nothing,
nothing
, to do with them.”

Uncle Mick howled when he saw Dad’s chicken coop. To Mom’s added annoyance, he began to sing the theme from “Green Acres,” the TV show that she hated the most. When he teased her long enough, she would give him a good whack to the side of the head, but she had to stand up on tiptoe to do it because she barely scraped five feet and he was nearly six. If he really wanted to bug her, he pretended to stagger around, clutching his head after she hit him, which drove her nuts and made her whack him even more. He never knew when to stop, and he sang “Green Acres” until the day she got out the broom and chased him through the house, and he tripped over the living-room rug and hit his head on the coffee table.

For a few weeks me and Jimmy were the most popular kids around, because all the other kids wanted to hold the chicks and feed them. I ran home every day after school to watch them. Dad defended his latest project by saying that at least it got me away from the TV, but as the chicks grew older and less cute, the kids trickled away.

Some time later, when Uncle Mick was babysitting us, we heard a chicken clucking on the roof. We looked at each other, puzzled. Dad had covered the backyard with fishnets so the hawks wouldn’t get at the chickens. Mick got a broom to chase it down, and Jimmy and I went out to help him. To our surprise, it was a crow, imitating the chickens, pretending to peck at the roof and then gurgling so it sounded almost like it was laughing. “I’ll be damned,” Mick said.

The next morning, I awoke when I heard the chickens squawking. I thought they were fighting until I heard the hawks cry. I jumped up and ran to the window. There were large tears in the net over the coop. A chicken ran around and around, spurting blood from its missing head, until it fell over. Another chicken ran through the yard with its guts trailing behind it, flapping its one wing, shrieking. A hawk plunged through the net, squashed the screeching chicken in its grip and pecked its eyes. Mom chased the hawk out of the coop. She grabbed the half-eaten chicken as it ran by her. She picked it up and snapped its neck. Dad pulled me away from the window, and held me until I stopped crying.

Seven of the chickens were killed that morning, and the rest escaped through the hole in the net and were hiding down on the beach. Mick and Dad tried to round them up, but the chickens had been badly spooked. They refused to be herded back. Reserve dogs got most of them, foxes got others, some German tourists ran over one on the highway and the hawks finished off the rest.

“Lisa, we’re leaving now,” Mom says, shaking my shoulder. “Are you all right?”

Dazed, thinking of Uncle Mick and the chickens, it takes me a moment to wake up from the memories. I have a crick in my neck from the way I’ve been sitting. Mom stares down at me, frowning, the lines creasing her forehead and her eyebrows exaggerated by the harsh early-morning slant of the light.

“Did you hear me?” she says.

I nod. “Sorry. Daydreaming.”

“You should go inside and get some sleep.”

“Who’s driving you to the airport?” I say, struggling to get out of the patio chair.

“Kate. She brought some lemon meringue pie, if you’re feeling hungry.”

I shake my head. “Too early. I’ll have some later.”

“You should eat,” she says.

Dad is already loading their luggage into his older sister’s car. I wave and she waves back.

“We’ll call you from Bella Bella,” Mom says, giving me a quick hug.

“Okay,” I say.

“Oh,” she says casually, “Aunt Edith is staying over with you.”

“Mom,” I say, exasperated. Lately they’ve been treating me like I can’t tie my own shoelaces. “I’m perfectly capable—”

“Just to keep you company,” she says quickly.

“And out of trouble,” Dad adds, coming up the steps. He gives me a hug too, squeezing my shoulders. “Don’t give her a hard time.”

“Would I do that?” I say.

“Behave yourself,” Dad says.

“Eat,” Mom says.

We say our goodbyes, and they wave as Aunt Kate drives them away. I stay on the front porch for a moment, then turn inside.