Four September 1996 #3
I ordered a coffee, decaf to go, and paid the bill.
I placed the slice of apple pie on the passenger side of the car and headed across the road to the used bookstore.
There was only really one street with stores on it: two banks, one on each corner, a flower shop, the diner with the hardware store attached, a shoe store, a pizza place that delivered, a small grocery that held only the basics, and the used bookstore.
The bookstore was closing, but the owner let me take a look anyway.
The shop was musty and the collection was stacked haphazardly in piles or on crooked bookshelves in sections delineated by Post-it Notes stapled to the shelves.
Fiction, romance, classics, music, business, philosophy.
I thumbed through a few mindless fiction titles and stacked them in the crook of my arm before sidling through a narrow hallway to the reference section.
I needed books that would tell me how to replace a window, how to fix soggy floors and shingle an old roof.
When I left, sixteen dollars less in my wallet, I had enough information to fix the house and some reading materials for the evenings.
I stopped at the hardware store and got some cleaning supplies, an oil lantern, some sandpaper and wood stain before I headed out of town.
As I drove home, past houses that had once held other people like me, I noticed that nothing looked familiar anymore.
Three decades ago, I could have told you who lived in each house and who their grandparents had been.
But now, I passed by unfamiliar faces out mowing lawns in the cool autumn evening, people sitting on front decks waving, not because they knew me but because that’s what people around here did.
The brown faces of my youth had scattered to the wind, the younger generation no longer satisfied to stay in one place their whole lives, particularly somewhere they’d never been welcome in the first place.
They moved to town, to the city, a few to other countries.
The older folks died and were placed in the ground, and their houses were sold to strangers looking for the quiet life of the small town.
A myth of urban-dwelling people, that everything is better in the country.
Quieter, yes, but better, no. And it was strange to see these houses, these yards where brown people used to live, used to love, used to grow food and celebrate holidays together, where berry pickers returned to become apple pickers, their tents in parallel lines dotting the fields.
No babies born under our tree, no families made bigger, my grandmother’s songs long silenced.
Where the feet of generations before me had wandered.
I remember visiting just after I got my first job as a nurse in the city and asking about the new faces and wondering where the old ones had gone.
The Jeremys next door had sold and moved away.
Kiju said that they sent letters, but it wasn’t the same as having a neighbour you’d known your whole life.
After they left, the others started to trickle out, until Kiju was the only one remaining, surrounded by unfamiliar faces.
“Some of them went down to Boston. More opportunity down there. Some to the city like you. Some just in town.”
My grandmother poured tea into my cup. I reached over to scoop a teaspoon of sugar into the brown liquid, steam wandering toward the ceiling.
“It’s not like it was thirty years ago. Although I don’t know why anyone would want to live in town. The houses so close together. Anyone can look in your window and see you in your underthings.” She laughed at herself.
“No Indians here anymore?”
“Just me now.” She shrugged her shoulders and sipped her tea.
I parked the car outside the dark house, far enough away to take it in, to really look at it for the first time.
The grass was still untamed, and I had covered the broken window with a piece of cardboard.
The roof was in desperate need of shingles, but the setting sun hit the windows and the whole place glowed.
Kiju always said that home was the place where the people who loved you were.
I had avoided this place immediately after her death, preferring to stay at the motel because I foolishly thought that she wasn’t here.
But she was. She was in the creaking of the floorboards and the wooden furniture made by her husband’s hand.
She was in the garden, sad now but still green with hope that someone would come to revive it.
She was here, and as I sat and gripped the steering wheel, I understood this.
That night was spent reacquainting myself with the sounds of rural life.
A life empty of honking horns or screeching buses.
It was quiet—not silent, since there is no such thing, but quieter than I remembered it—the sound of the breeze in the trees sneaking through the cardboard window, the house settling as the temperature dropped slightly.
The snapping and cracking of the fire, the sound of a raccoon or skunk wandering around outside, curious about the light from a window they’d only begun to get used to as dark.
That night, the sounds that never would have bothered me twenty-five years ago unnerved me.
Sometime in the night—late, I assumed, since the warmth of the fire was waning—I heard a bird.
“When you hear a bird sing at night, it means that there is a skite’kmuj about, a ghost wanting to talk to you.
The birds can see them, so best be keeping your ears open.
Might be a bad ghost.” I heard her voice for a moment, so fleeting, but it brought a smile to my face until I heard the bird again and wondered.
I slept in an old sleeping bag on the couch since the beds were still in need of washing.
It was a restless sleep, full of dreams that vanished as soon as I opened my eyes, leaving me with nothing but a sense of uneasiness.
I needed to use the bathroom, but I held it until the first light of dawn despite the fact that it was no longer outside but just down the hall.
“Get it together, Aliet. This is your home.”
But I couldn’t seem to get it together, so I got up and found the bag from the hardware store.
I took the sandpaper and gently erased the initials from the table that my grandfather had built.
I took my time and watched as the unfamiliar faded into the wood, then I stained the table.
The colour was slightly off, but I massaged the stain into the wood, working my way out from the centre of the blemish until I couldn’t tell where the original ended and my repair began. Only then could I fall asleep.