Six October 1996
SIX
During a particularly nasty autumn storm, I had to set pots in four different places around the house to catch the rain.
It was frustrating but also beautiful to fall asleep to the sound of water striking metal.
The next morning I was up on the ladder, inspecting the holes in the roof, when a truck turned up the drive.
I knew instantly it was Ben and Sally. I hurried down the ladder and over to the truck just as Sally was getting out.
I grabbed her in a hug. She was still strong for an older woman, the result no doubt of all that mothering.
“What are you doing here?” I said as I ran around to the driver’s side to hug Ben. I looked across the road to the bare field, a field that hadn’t seen pickers in decades. But the ghost of the past came back to me in the scent of a campfire carried from somewhere by the wind.
“We came to help you fix the place up. I wish Kiju had let me know the state of it—I would’ve come down to help out.” Ben walked past me, his eyes on the ladder.
“She was stubborn,” I said as I followed him. “How’d you know I was here?” I’d only been home a week and hadn’t had the chance to let them know.
“Saw Will Francis down home in the grocery store and he said he’d drove by and seen you here trying to fix a window with some cardboard.” Ben laughed.
“I haven’t seen him in years.” I marvelled at how news still travelled so fast in Indian country.
Sally and Ben set up in Kiju’s old bedroom and then set right to work, Ben on fixing the place and Sally on salvaging the garden and preparing it for the cold weather.
Ben was back and forth to the hardware store, gathering supplies for the house, burlap to cover the garden for the winter.
I went between the two, going to where I was needed most, holding a ladder or on my knees in the dirt pulling weeds with Sally.
It didn’t take long for the house to start resembling itself again, and as it did, I found myself wondering about the things I had wondered when I was young, before the scar, before all the loss.
When I could, I would sneak a look at Ben’s hands, aged now with a few spots littering the dark and weathered skin.
His hands were ones of a man who had worked hard all his life.
But also of a man who I could never imagine would use them in violence.
A man who had the devotion of a strong woman and who had held his babies and raised them with love.
Once, he caught me staring at his hands.
“You expecting a penny?” he said, and I looked away, my face warm and red.
“Lost in a daydream,” I answered. “But it has been a while since I got one of those pennies. I could use them now that I’m unemployed.” I still had a few months’ worth of savings until I had to decide on whether I wanted to go back to nursing.
I was adding new wire to the chicken coop in preparation for a few chicks I intended on purchasing, and Sally was turning soil in the garden, when we heard a crash.
Sally and I looked at one another before breaking into a run.
We reached Ben at the same time. He was laid out on the ground, the ladder beside him.
As he struggled for breath, Sally knelt beside him and rubbed his chest.
“Just the wind knocked out of you. Stay calm.” Her voice was soft and comforting as it had always been, but I was not comforted.
The air around me began to turn cold as I watched Ben struggle for air.
My vision blurred and I saw my own body lying on the ground—not Ben’s, mine.
I felt the cold earth on my back, the pressure on my arms. I felt myself struggling.
I felt the sting of snowflakes as they landed carelessly on my naked face.
Then I felt light again, and John’s face was in front of me.
I felt his hands hold me as I prayed for the earth to open up and swallow me.
“Aliet?” Sally hollered.
“Sorry,” I said as I shook my head and returned to the present.
“Help me get him inside.”
Ben slung one arm over my shoulder and the other over his wife’s. When we got him indoors, he fell heavily onto the couch. Sally went to the kitchen.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Nothing too serious. You okay?”
Sally returned and handed him a drink of water.
“Yeah, sorry. Not sure what happened just then.”
“You want to talk about it?” Sally asked.
“I do not.”
“Okay, then.”
Under strict orders from Sally, Ben spent the rest of the day on the couch or wandering around the yard when he got antsy, which was always. He was never a man to be still, so Sally sent him to the store for food.
We were sitting down to eat—a roast chicken with boiled potatoes and coleslaw—when Sally asked, “So why now?”
“What do you mean?” I asked as I spooned some coleslaw onto my plate.
“Why have you moved home now? I thought you never wanted to come back. So I guess I’m wondering what made you come home.”
“Kiju died and . . .” I paused, not entirely sure I knew what I was going to say next. “And I miss her. She was all I had.”
“What do you mean? What about us?” Sally asked.
“Sally,” Ben said, a hint of warning in his voice. But she would not be deterred.
“It took her death to remember that there are people in this world who love you? Now that she’s gone, you want to be around her?”
I found the hint of disappointment in Sally’s voice unsettling, and I started to well up. A lump in my throat felt constricting.
“Where is this coming from?” I could hear the confusion in my own voice.
“You’ve always had people who loved you. Remember that you chose to walk alone.”
“Sally,” Ben whispered.
“Don’t Sally me,” she said before turning back to me.
“You’ve had it hard, no one can deny it.
Grief seems to favour you. But you’ve never been alone, you’ve never been abandoned, you chose loneliness.
And it also meant that Kiju was alone. Did you ever think about her?
She worried over you all the time. It bothered her to the end. ”
This was the first time I heard that they’d been worried about me, that they’d discussed the life I’d lived behind my back. And I wasn’t sure if I should feel guilt for making them worry or anger for talking about me that way.
“She worried about me?”
“Of course she did. She was afraid that when she crossed over to the spirit world, you’d be completely alone. All she wanted was for you to love and be loved. And now here you are, getting close to mid-life, alone, unemployed. Living in the past?”
“I . . .” My voice dropped off as my fork sat across the plate, a lump of mashed potatoes sitting on top. Sally seemed finished with me and moved on to a conversation with Ben about one of the children.
Later that night, while I lay awake and went over the conversation in my head, I tossed and turned and let my anger grow disproportionately in response to what I perceived as an offence but in reality was the truth.
Most people, I find, only appreciate the truth when it is directed at others and not themselves.
I was particularly annoyed since she was right.
The window beside the bed was open and the crisp autumn air was carried in on a strong breeze.
Normally this was enough to put me to sleep in minutes, but not that night.
“I heard you get up.” Ben walked into the kitchen behind me. I poured a glass of water and set it in front of him and another for myself. “She doesn’t mean to be harsh. She’s just telling you like it is.”
“Of course, you take her side.”
“There are no sides. There is only truth.”
“Her truth. What does she know about my life?” I sounded like a spoiled child and I knew it.
“Not much, I must say. And whose fault is that?”
“You’re not very subtle.”
“Not trying to be.”
I went to take a drink from the glass and tipped it too soon, spilling cold water down the front of the T-shirt I was wearing as pajamas.
Ben let out a quiet laugh and I tried to hold mine in but failed.
“You got to admit to yourself that you don’t let anyone in, you don’t let anyone love you fully, no matter how hard we try. You live too much in the past.”
I wiped the water from my chin with the back of my hand, set my glass on the counter, gave Ben a hug and returned to my room. It was too late in the night to talk about this. I didn’t have the energy, physically or emotionally.
The next morning, I was up early and made breakfast. Bacon and eggs, oatmeal with homemade strawberry jam and coffee.
“This you apologizing?” Sally was already dressed when she came into the kitchen.
I handed her a cup of hot coffee. “I suppose it is.” We both sat. “I just hate it when you are right.”
“You must be filled up with hate, then.”
Now it was my turn to laugh.
Harsh truths are something we all like to avoid.
It’s uncomfortable having the worst parts of you, the parts you know are the worst, held up like a mirror.
I could have been angry, I could have denied it, I could have raged against Sally.
She didn’t know my thoughts, she didn’t live my life, experience the world through my eyes.
But I knew, always knew, that she was right.
“Let’s you and me take a walk,” Sally said after lunch on their third day at the house. “Ben can handle things here.” Ben nodded and Sally took my hand in hers and headed to the trail that led to the birthing tree.
“You still have your grandmother’s recipe cards? The ones with all her tonics and cures? The ones she wouldn’t let anyone have except you?”
“I do. They are in her wooden box.”
We walked to the tree, and to my surprise Sally sat down between the same roots where she had given birth to three of her five children. Sally mirrored the tree, her dark skin, wrinkled now with age, becoming one with the bark. She looked as comfortable there as she did anywhere else.
“You look like you belong to that tree,” I said after she had gone quiet and closed her eyes.
“I do. We all do. This tree holds our stories.”
“That’s what Kiju used to say.”
I sat down across from her just as I had all those years ago when I thought Kiju was going to leave me to deliver a baby on my own. I smile now when I think about it.
“She was a smart woman. If you’re not going back to nursing right away, you have some time. You could get those cards out and start learning again.”
The afternoon wind rustled the leaves on the tree and I looked up into her canopy.
The sun tried to penetrate her leaves, but she protected us from its glare.
For a moment, I imagined that each leaf was a baby born here, the way each star was a person taken to the other side.
This tree was our record of us on earth, and she needed love.
“Maybe I will.”
“Maybe is a weak word.”
Sally was getting to her feet. I stood and offered a hand, which she swatted away. She dusted her hands off on her skirt and turned toward home.
Ben and Sally stayed for another two days.
By the time they left for home, the roof was patched, the new windows were in, the table had been sanded and stained, the garden was ready for winter, five hens and a rooster had taken up lodging in the chicken coop, and before Christmas they would be joined by two pigs, all of whom I refused to name, heeding the advice of my grandmother from so long ago.
The house was spotless, not a drop of dust to be found.
I hadn’t seen it shine this way since Kiju lived here.
We agreed they might come back and help me with the bathroom, maybe in the spring.
The bathroom that Kiju was forced to install was small and cramped and the shower was tiny, Ben couldn’t even fit into it.
Besides, the floor under it was starting to rot since there was no proper ventilation.
I hugged them before they left and promised them both that I would focus on myself as my next project.
And as luck would have it, if luck is something to be believed in, just a month later I would meet someone who quietly and gently reintroduced me to the life I had been meant to lead.