Wallflowers (10 page)

A man in a sealskin vest stood outside the house. He hacked at a cedar log with his knife, and two young girls with chin-length hair distributed strips of bark to guests. Natalie tied hers around her head as she watched the others do. Then she followed them in.

She selected a bench as far as possible from her uncle, who stood on the other side of the house, his lilac golf shirt tucked into khaki shorts. He was chatting with a local elder and a white woman she figured to be a town council member. His eyes shone pale in the firelight and met her own. When he waved for her to join them, she looked down and pretended not to see.

Someone sat beside her, knocked his knees against hers. She glanced up, saw it was Milton, and turned away.

“I said I was sorry,” he said.

For some reason, she thought again of the orchid. Her faceless milkmaid. Its roseate and waxy tongue.

“Christ, you people think
we
hold grudges.” He poked her hip. “Well, did you find the wild man of the woods?”

He meant Bakwas. Who fed cockles to the dead and ferried their souls to the other side.

She stayed quiet.

“You look disappointed,” he said.

She shrugged. “I’d have eaten his cockles in a heartbeat.”

“Don’t be silly,” he said. “You wouldn’t have a heartbeat.”

The sound of shaking stones, or beads, rattled from the corner of the house, followed by drumbeats. A man entered from the far edge of the circle. He wore a mask with a black beak as long as the girl’s canoe, harnessed to his chest for support. Its lips were painted red, its eyes skyward ovoids, and cedar bark hung in shreds over his back. He cocked the mask left right left right, then yanked a string that snapped the beak closed.

“That’s the Man-Eating Raven,” said Milton.

The raven capered to his feet, then squatted, then capered again toward the fire, black button blanket flapping at his ankles like heavy wings. Another dancer entered the circle. The beak on his mask was curled like a tidal wave.

“Crooked Beak of Heaven,” said Milton. “Both serve the Cannibal at the North End of the World.”

The birds leaped at each other, snapped their beaks with wooden cracks that made Natalie flinch each time. The fire threw their oblong, man-eating shadows onto the faces of the guests.

“Follow me,” Milton said.

She felt his rough, moist fingers on her elbow.

FOUR

The canoe in the trees must have been carved for a child, because Natalie couldn’t lie lengthwise without her calves slung over the edge. She sat cross-legged instead. Next to the bones, which were folded loosely inside a wool blanket. The bundle was wound taut at the feet, but it had unravelled at the hips, maybe picked apart by gulls. A spiny branch of the pine tree poked between two ribs. Plates of a copper necklace fanned over the skeleton’s clavicle. The smallest one dangled in the gap above its breastbone.

The dead grey sides of the dugout were chiselled and grooved. Tree needles filled the bottom. The sky was dark now, and in the moonlight the Chinese beads glittered from the hull like discarded fish eyes. They dribbled from a small, capsized cedar basket and piled in the most tilted side of the canoe with the toys—cedar bark tops, buck antler gambling sticks, which she recognized from the museum, and whalebone dice, dotted with black grease. A woven doll lay under the Popsicle-stick ligaments of the body’s hand. Natalie lifted a finger bone to compare the doll’s eyes with the one she found that morning on the beach, but at the same moment she heard the twigs snap from the forest floor. Leaves rustled; maybe the wind. She wasn’t afraid. She wanted to meet the man who fed you cockle shells, 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 never heard of Milton’s man of the woods, though she had read up on stories 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 northern Tlingit boys, who reached the other side by a chain of wood-carved arrows. She read about the Hamatsa, the secret cannibal society who 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 tree.

Her left thigh felt like it was 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 smeared the canoe’s lip, then spilled back into the branches.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “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 there all night.”

She gathered the spilled beads one by one and dropped them into the basket.

“See you tomorrow at the potlatch?” he said.

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

“It doesn’t really hurt them.”

THREE

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?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe Japan?”

“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 as he massaged it into the twine.

“Some objects drifted here from old merchant ships,” he said. “Maybe beads.”

He plucked another slug from the bucket. “Sometimes we 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 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 lay back in the grass and shut her eyes.

“Some clans used to bury their dead in trees,” he said.

Her eyes opened. She looked at him.

“Or on scaffolds. But trees were easier to come by.”

He said this slowly, as if recounting a ghost story. She couldn’t tell if he was trying to trick her.

“That way, their souls were nearer to the wild man of the woods,” he said, with a small smile.

“Who?”

“Bakwas. He lives with the spirits of the drowned, in an invisible hut in the forest.”

Milton paused, his eyes on the bee balm. A hummingbird had whizzed through the strings, and it hovered above the plant, bill needling into the scarlet throat of a flower.

“He feeds them the meat from cockle shells,” he said. “Ghost food. Eat it and you become like him. That’s how he takes the dead to the other side.”

Natalie considered this. Considered whether her mom and brother counted as “spirits of the drowned.”

“You buried people in canoes instead of coffins?” she said.

“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, a high-necked collar of iridescent fireweed. The bird dipped under the balm and cornered right for an exit, but a wing caught the yarn. Its feathers were welded to the slug slime.

She stumbled up, cried, “It’s stuck,” even though its entrapment was plain and Milton didn’t seem bothered. He cupped the hummingbird in his palms, then clutched it with only one. His other hand guided a threaded needle into a hole at the base of the bill, then thrust it through. He folded the thread so he could hold the needle and knotted end, then spread the fingers of his other hand, releasing the bird with a gentle bounce. 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 its shape blurred into an exhale of green wind.

“Do you like it?” he asked. He held the thread like a kite.

She didn’t answer. She speed-walked past him, past the plum tree, then sprinted down the overgrown path to the woods.

TWO

“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 found that morning in the surf. It spun out from her fingers until the nose dipped into a crack between the table planks.

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

“I think so.”

The older boy carried an empty margarine bucket. He squatted between the peonies in the centre of the church flower bed and sifted wood chips through his palms.

“What are you looking for?” She studied the line on his biceps where the flesh turned darker. That was their goal back home—sunburned summers of FM radio, diet colas, and squeeze bottles of 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?” she said, and pulled herself up. She felt the fiddleheads graze her calves from her back pocket, so she lifted her haunches to remove them.

“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. A pearly string of slime linked it to the ground.  “Show you mine if you tell me yours.”

She waved the fiddlehead in figure eights through the air and watched him scour the bed. He paused and straightened his spine, 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, but now I have to live with my uncle.”

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 spiral at the end bobbed forward like her uncle’s dashboard Jesus.

“Why do you collect fiddleheads?” the boy asked, his face shrouded in the bush. Then he pulled himself up and squatted in her direction.

“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 pinky and ring fingers. “Or the end of an octopus arm.” She added a fourth spiral, then looped her hand through the air.

The boy joined her on the tabletop and plucked a coil from her fist. He held it up to the sunlight.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Milton. What’s yours?”

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