Thirteen July 1969
THIRTEEN
The year I turned fourteen, at the end of October, the apple pickers had retreated to their homes, their pantries stocked and winter clothing bought with the money they made in the orchards.
Kiju and I had a few chickens and the pig slaughtered and smoked as soon as the weather got cold enough to store the food in the underground cellar.
The pleasant chill of fall quickly gave way to a snowy winter, one of the worst in years, or so Kiju said.
It seemed like every other winter to me.
The snow fell soft but heavy and covered the world in white.
We didn’t see anything green for nearly four months.
I loved the winter, despite having to shovel the path to the outhouse nearly every day and trudging down the road to catch the bus, a clean pair of socks in my backpack in case the ones I started with got wet.
I loved how, when you stepped from the cold into the warmth, winter lingered on you, and the smell of wet wool mittens mingled with the scent of freshly baked bread.
I loved the quiet when the snow fell, or the blue light of a reflective moon.
But eventually the snow melted and turned the yard into a muddy wasteland until the late spring sun dried it up.
John and I had resumed our letter writing after the village celebration.
The letters were more frequent now. He still hadn’t come to visit, but that only made me more anxious for his letters.
Every day after school I would walk through the door and pretend I wasn’t longing for there to be a letter on the table by the door with my name in John’s messy writing waiting for me, and Kiju would pretend she didn’t see my disappointment when one failed to arrive.
Letters from Sally arrived regularly, but that spring one arrived addressed to me.
Kiju handed it to me and I looked at it, turning it over in my hands.
I couldn’t imagine why Sally would write to me.
“It’s a letter, Aliet, not a spider. It won’t bite.”
She was proven wrong when I sliced the tip of my index finger trying to open it, a small line of blood soaked into the paper.
I licked the blood and unfolded the letter.
Sally and Big Ben asked if I wanted to come and spend some time with them during the summer months.
Sally needed help. They were opening a shop in the front room of their house to sell baskets, trinkets to tourists, kindling for the local folks, preserves, and anything else that they thought people could use.
Sally would need help with preparing the shop and handling all those boys when Ben went out to fish or into the woods.
I handed Kiju the letter and she read it intently.
“You should go. It’d be good for you to get away from your grandmother for a little while. I don’t want to turn you into a little old lady.” Kiju smiled.
The thought of spending the summer in the same place as John was terribly exciting, but at the same time, I worried about leaving Kiju alone.
“I’ve only really been alone in that short time between when your grandfather left and your mother arrived.
” She patted her stomach the way I’d seen pregnant women do.
“And I talked to her, that was true. But since then, there have always been two. Might be good for me to spend some time alone.” She stopped for a second as her smile waned.
“Before you know it, you’ll be out on your own and I won’t have a choice.
You’d be doing your grandmother a favour.
Getting me ready for when that day comes. ”
I wrote back to Sally and told her that I would come.
And I wrote a letter to John to let him know I would be close all summer.
The day after school ended, I walked to the train station with my backpack and a small suitcase in my hand to spend six weeks with Sally and Ben.
Kiju stood by the front door and watched me go.
I don’t know if she cried, she never said, but I felt her absence as soon as the house was out of sight.
The train was slow. It stopped at every town along the route, but the trip was quiet.
We passed the house and the field of the family whose little girl had gone missing down in Maine.
They never found her. The mother came each year and bought some of our preserves, and she always seemed sad.
Kiju said she had once been a happy woman.
“You don’t ever get over losing a child, Aliet. I think of your mother every day. And I know what happened to her. This poor woman doesn’t even know where her little one went.”
The train passed out of town and into the purple-and-green mountains.
Hills really, small mounds left astride the valley when the glaciers passed through.
Those same glaciers also left fertile ground, and farms littered the landscape, barns rose above the roofs of houses, and workers in the fields tended to the crops.
The train passed the grand Victorian houses of former apple barrens.
Signs painted on the sides of barns advertised Pepsi-Cola and announced the second coming of Christ. For a short time we followed the river, its brown water the result of the muddy bottom.
But it quickly curved away from us until it was just a thin brown line in the distance.
I had a book with me, but the scenery captured my attention the entire way.
As the train slowed down into a station, I was surprised to see Big Ben standing on the platform waiting for me.
I grabbed my bags, rushed down the aisle and hopped off the train quickly.
“I was wondering where you were. Thought you might have missed the train.” Ben bent down to give me a hug and took my suitcase. I slung my backpack over my shoulder.
“Nope, just in a daydream.”
We walked toward the door with the only other person who had exited the train.
“Your mother was a dreamer. She would be so lost in daydreams that anyone could scare her just by saying hello. She’d jump a half a mile in the air, I swear it.”
It was good to hear someone talk about her in a real way, about when she was alive. People always wanted to talk about that moment when she died instead of the sixteen years she walked the earth.
“You were close, weren’t you?”
“We were. My family came down to pick apples every year and camped in your Kiju’s yard. I think your Kiju and my mom were cousins somehow. Maggie and me, we grew up together.”
I wanted to ask him. I wanted to hear it from Ben’s own mouth, that he wasn’t my father.
But more than anything, I wanted him to say that he was.
But Kiju was right: If Ben knew he was my father, he would have claimed me.
And the thought that he would say he wasn’t my father was a little too much to bear. Sometimes it’s better not to know.
Ben had an old, beat-up truck, something he bought second- or third-hand and fixed himself when it got cranky on him.
It was rusted around the wheels and there was a trick to get the passenger-side door to open; a hip to the middle of the door and a pull on the handle at the same time and pop, it opened.
None of us were rich, but I never really realized that until later in life when I went to live in the city for school and saw how other people lived.
Only then did I realize that we’d been poor.
But I was never hungry, and I had love, and I think that made the difference between knowing and not knowing.
The house was only a few minutes from the train station and Sally was outside waiting for us when Ben pulled into the narrow driveway.
“I heard the train whistle and knew you’d be here any minute. My god, Aliet, you keep growing and you’re going to be as tall as Ben here.” Sally grabbed me into a hug. The boys lined up like little soldiers behind her on the doorstep, tallest to shortest.
“Wow, you boys are growing so fast.”
“Hi, Aliet,” the oldest said shyly. All three of them were spitting images of Ben.
Except for their eyes: They had those deep-brown eyes of their mother.
The youngest aside from the baby, only two, sucked his thumb and swayed from side to side.
I looked at each of them, trying to find myself in their faces, but I couldn’t.
“Where’s the baby?”
“Sleeping. Come in and get settled and you can see him. I’ll tell you one thing, he’s growing like a weed. Only one year old and I already know he’s gonna be big like his father.”
There were three bedrooms upstairs and Ben had built two sets of bunk beds for the boys, so I got my own room.
The window didn’t look directly to the river, but if I stuck my head out far enough and twisted it to the right, I could see it.
And even if I couldn’t see its fullness, I could always hear it.
At night I slept with the window open and was lulled to sleep by the sound of the river.
The bay, while not visible, could be felt in the breeze.
When the tide was coming in, it broke the heat of summer and offered a welcome reprieve.
At night, the lace curtains in my room billowed out over my head, a ghost of the winds that had travelled across oceans to reach me.