Far Cry, page 3
I let the Bible lie. The other, I carried back to my berth.
Sums had come easily to me as a boy, but it was the puzzle of language that had occupied my mind on the long walk home from school. Those early lessons were my first roads in—Good day, Norway is a fine country, Good night. I found my way to those words that were in league with the Norsk—kniv, egg, fisk, katt. From there, båt taught me “boat,” hjerte gave me “heart.” Hour upon hour I lay in my berth, touching the thread of one word to another, fashioning webs. “Honey” connected to “comb,” to “cell,” to “swarm.” “Estuary” was a word I heard often as we entered the St. Lawrence’s muddy reaches. The mouth of a river in which the tide reciprocates. And “reciprocate”? I looked that one up too.
* * *
—
Nord Amerika. My notion of the continent’s span came from the map on the schoolhouse wall—three, four times as wide as my own country was long. It took me months to work my way across to the west coast. Do not imagine the city as you saw it four years ago, Kit—it was 1879 when I arrived. Granville, it was called then, another seven years before they would set the name Vancouver in stone.
There was work to be found clearing land, even though some of the crew bosses were starting to hire Chinese at half the wage. It was not the first time I had taken up my end of a saw—my father chose one or two of the older aspens each year to take down and sell. The tallest of those old home trees was an infant compared with the giants I came up against here. Den nye verden. People were always speaking of the New World on the passage over, but standing among those great cedars and firs, all I could ever think was “old.”
I had never known labour like it. In the main we worked a nine-pin method, weakening a couple dozen of what I came to think of as smaller trees by cutting across their backs, then sawing one of the monsters clean through, aiming it to take everything down.
You will remember the crowds, Kit, the sidewalks and warehouses, the great stone faces of the banks. Picture instead acres of felled trees and tangled brush. Miles. At times you had to climb up out of it to know where you were.
It went on for years, the city greedy for land, but after a few seasons I had had enough. I found work as a dock hand for a time, then as an oiler at the Hastings Mill. That was a filthy job, oiling the saws and winches with dogfish grease, the pistons, chains and gears. The stink of it settled in your skin. If you were not on your guard, stray dogs would follow you on your rounds, licking away the grease. The job came with a shotgun, but I threw offcuts of lumber instead—only to scare them, though at times that meant hitting the mark. Better than a muzzle full of shot, I reasoned. You did not dare chase them off with a torch, especially not in the summer of ’86.
With no rain for weeks on end, it was only a matter of time before one of the clearing fires ran wild. The wind came up, and in less than an hour a thousand buildings were gone. Every man had a bucket of sea water in his hand, but the fire made steam of whatever we threw its way. It kept on until it found the forest and burned itself out in the deep-green damp.
I thought it was finished, the city, it had to be. By sun-up there came the sound of sawing and hammering. The mill had survived, but I was done with that job. There was work to be had building, and I took it. It is what we do, Kit—most of us, anyway, most of the time. Even when it makes more sense to lie down and die.
* * *
Never mind the looks from the men in the other skiffs—it’s a joy riding out with the fleet, one of fifty or more tied onto the towboat’s line. When the view opens up past Squid Island, Kit gazes down over the side. It’s been that way since she was big enough to grip the gunwale, Bobbie or Frank or Uncle Anders holding the back of her shirt. She can’t see far: the ocean’s surface is just that, so much beneath it she’ll never know.
She takes the tow all the way down through Schooner’s Pass. It’s deep where she finally drops off the line, the Pacific itself curling round Calvert Island into the sound. A sense of the ocean floor falling away as she rows. How is it, then, that her mind, her memory, climbs?
Violet Lake. When she first heard the name, she wondered if there could be a whole lake the same shade as Mama’s best blouse. It was a five-mile hike inland, all of it uphill. The first leg followed the waterline to where it met the stream. They rested then, the four of them taking damp seats on a rotting nurse log, tucked between the saplings grown up in a line along its trunk. Mama took a swig from the water flask before handing it to Kit. Kit drank and passed it to Daddy, who likewise drank and passed it on. Uncle Anders sat with the rifle propped beside him—the berry bushes that grow along a cleared path bring the bears. He looked back the way they’d come, the inlet wide and grey below. Finally he tipped the flask to his mouth. “Skygge, come,” he said, and the dog pushed out through the ferns.
From there they followed the stream. Birdsong changed around them as they climbed. It was the same going down into the sea, barnacles giving way to mussels giving way to starfish. The world was alive in layers.
Daddy led the way, then Mama, her hair swaying under the white triangle of her scarf. Behind Kit, the shush of her uncle’s stride. Skygge wove through the ranks, slipping into and out of the brush. Kit’s legs were a child’s, feral in their strength, then weak. She didn’t complain. Daddy or Uncle Anders would carry her if she asked.
She was on the point of doing so when the ground began to even out. The stream broadened, its rocky banks turning soft. The mineral smell was gentler, too, mossier. Together they wound through the trees. The lake was there in flashes—Kit felt its light in her limbs and ran.
She’d never seen anything so clear. Mountain runoff, the snowcaps dazzling, close. The lake was wider than the bay, waveless. At the water’s edge, she sat down on the pebbles and freed herself from her boots. Skygge lowered his muzzle to drink, but stopped short of wading in. She soon realized why. Pushing her socks into her boots, she stood and stepped into the water. Cold shut like a trap on her foot. She leapt back, letting out a cry.
Behind her, the grown-ups laughed. Kit felt foolish until Mama called, “Is it freezing?” and she could look over her shoulder and nod.
When the dog moved off to join them, Kit looked down at her own bare feet. Moss ruched up along the shore. Bedded in that plush green were wild white violets—thousands of them strung around the lake. She crouched for a closer look: each plant a circle of heart-shaped leaves, each flower striped purple at its heart.
There came the sound of Daddy’s tread displacing stones. “Hungry?” he said.
She nodded again, rising.
He held three beers against his chest with a folded arm; in his hand, a bottle of blackcurrant cordial. He stooped to rest them in the water’s cold.
“C’mon.” His hand on her shoulder, they walked to the stretch of sand where Mama and Uncle Anders were laying out the food. Mama’s scarf was as bright as the snowcaps, her dark hair slipping forward over her shoulder.
There were hard-boiled eggs and thick slices of buttered bread, a can of jellied ham. Before long, Daddy returned to the water to retrieve the drinks. Kit’s cordial was dark in its bottle, icy to the touch.
The sun was strong. Daddy soon had his head in Mama’s lap, so Kit settled for leaning against her arm. She was dozing off when her uncle brushed the crumbs from his trousers and stood. Skygge followed him as far as the water’s edge, sitting back on his haunches when Uncle Anders began to unbutton his shirt. Daddy rose up on one elbow, his hand on Mama’s thigh.
“Christ, Andy, you’re not going in.”
Uncle Anders smiled back at them. “Best thing for the heart.”
Kit was wide awake now. You were meant to wait after eating—Uncle Anders had told her that. It hadn’t been anything like an hour.
“You should try it,” her uncle added.
“No thanks,” Daddy said. “I like my balls where they are.”
Mama laughed. “Me too.”
It was the voice she usually kept for Daddy alone. Kit stood and went to join Skygge at Uncle Anders’ side.
“Nuh-uh, Kitty-cat,” Mama said behind her.
Kit trained her eyes on the water: blue-green, brilliant. “I know.”
Uncle Anders was down to his trunks. As always, he didn’t hesitate, striding in without so much as a gasp. One day she would learn to dive in the way he did, fingertips parting the water like a sockeye’s nose.
He swam a straight line out into the cold. Of course, his limbs wouldn’t fail him, even if fresh water didn’t hold you up the way the ocean did—he’d told her that too. Still, she kept an eye on him as he swam, far and farther, a disturbance on the face of the lake. Beside her, Skygge whined out his nose. Kit stole a look back at her parents. They were anything but worried, both of them lying down now, wrapped in each other’s arms.
* * *
It is strange, Kit, but there is nothing like a fire to bring on the growth. Vancouver might have been a forest itself, buildings pushing up through the ashes as if they were fighting for the light. Water mains and electrics, rattling trams. Suddenly there was hard road underfoot where there had been dust or mud.
I lost my room on Powell Street when they knocked the house down to build a hotel. The move landed me several blocks south, around where the fire had first run out of control. It was rough in those parts. The railway had moved its maintenance station down from the Fraser Canyon, bringing a saloon town of workers along. I was the odd man out in my row of bachelor sheds, every one of my neighbours a CPR man, tied to the new roundhouse and surrounding yards.
For a time I worked as a hunter for one of the butcher shops in town. I found a .32 up for pawn and bought it. It was a long row out to Bowen Island in a borrowed skiff, but the woods out there were crowded with deer. These days the sight of a man shouldering a carcass down Cordova Street would draw comment, but back then no one gave me a second look. Not even when I walked back to the docks in my bloodied shirt and trousers. There were quiet spots where a man could ease out of his boots and dive in. Treading water among the pilings, I would slip off my clothes and rub out the stains. That close in, there was nothing more worrisome than dogfish—though sometimes a harbour seal caught the scent of blood and bobbed up nearby. When I had got my clothes clean, I tossed them up onto the dock and swam.
It wakes you up, my mother had said, yet as the days passed into months, I began to feel like a man making the rounds in his sleep. More than once I found myself standing where the edge of the city met the retreating line of the woods, my clothing stiff with salt, the itch of it in my skin. What was a man to do with himself? Stare into the wilds. Turn back in search of a bar.
You might think I would seek the company of my fellow countrymen, but the longer I was away from home, the more the sound of men speaking Norwegian caused me to pick up my drink and move away. So many who came over were from the North. They would know me for a Lofoten man by my way of speaking, and then the talk would turn to islands, to families, until they pinned me to my own. To this day I am ill at ease in the old tongue. Well, you have seen me when Hanevold and the others come into the store.
By then I had more than enough English to put in an opinion or two at the bar, but I had never learned my father’s trick of joining halfway. Instead, I listened, building on the game I had begun with Neville’s dictionary. In the schoolhouse we had spoken poems aloud until we knew them in the blood. I can still see Nils Laarsen standing by the teacher’s desk, his neck flushed, mumbling a passage from Wergeland’s great epic. Nu kjende vore Hjerter vi: vi vide, at deres Fordring Sandhed er og Frihed…the heart’s claim to freedom, to truth. And so I began to repeat lines I overheard—in my head to begin with, but by the third or fourth whiskey I would catch myself moving my lips.
She was worth every penny.
Lonely country up that way, a man could go spare.
Swear to God, the bugger stood up on its hind legs.
I see now the picture it makes, a man standing to one side, muttering under his breath. I can say only that there was something in the English that comforted me. It was as if I knew that one day I would have your father and mother to talk to. And you, Kit. I would have things to say to you.
4
The bachelor sheds were never truly quiet. Even when the trains slept, men sang and shouted, and there was always a dog or a rooster—or a nearby railway wife’s baby—awake and proclaiming in the night. It suited me—a door with a bolt, my coat on a nail, my boots at the end of my cot. Muscles aching from the day’s work, I slept.
From my mother I had learned the habit of reading the newspaper right through. It took patience in English, sounding out words and searching out meanings in Neville’s dictionary, but every page held clues to how the world around me turned. Much of it was for sale—syrup of figs and flood-damaged pyjamas, ladies’ buttoned boots. China-made sugar was full of bugs—only home-refined was safe. Boys were wanted for office work, girls for housework. A great whale had washed ashore in New Jersey. The Irish nationalist Parnell was dead, peasants were being sent to Siberia and an Austrian dynamite fiend was no longer on the loose.
The more my thoughts came to me in English, the easier I was in my mind. If the morning was fine, I would boil coffee on the camp stove, take my tin cup and Daily World out onto the step. Whiskey, I drank sitting up in bed. The men on the row had noses for an open bottle—no matter how softly you poured, a door would open to spill lamplight into the road. Either way, I read. Even words that were strangers, I could often grasp from their surrounds, just as my father had taught me to spot a flounder by the way it shaped the sand.
On summer nights, my shed filled with the rotten breath of False Creek. Come winter, I would lie on my cot and crack patterns in the ice forming on the wall. I could not always bear to stay home.
The night I am thinking of was warm, toward the end of May. As ever, there was life to be found at the Colonial Hotel. I could hear laughter long before I dragged open the door.
I positioned myself where I did in every such place, at the end of the bar nearest the door. The old fellow beside me had hair that stood up thick and cream-coloured, like a pony’s close-cut mane. He kept his coat on despite the fug. Fish scales sparkled on the sleeves.
He glanced at me and nodded. Said nothing until I ordered my second drink.
“Norwegian, are you, son?”
I nodded. “Anders Viken.”
“Wells,” he said, shaking my hand. “Desmond Wells.” He drained his whiskey and signalled for two more. When they came, he raised his glass. “Sláinte.”
I held up my drink. “Skål.”
“Got one or two of your boys where I’ve just come from.”
“Oh yes? Where is that?”
“Steveston. South arm of the Fraser.”
I nodded. “Salmon.”
“That’s right.”
There was quiet while we drank. Then Desmond Wells said, “Been working with a young fella, my boatpuller. He’s only gone and taken himself off to Colorado. After the gold, you know. I told him, we’ll have silver running right here on the Fraser, going to be a good year.” He looked at me. “Done much rowing yourself?”
For a moment my father was before me, cutting the oars down through the surface, leaning back to pull. I held up my hands. “You say it yourself, I am Norwegian.”
He laughed—a rough, sudden sound I would come to know.
* * *
—
Desmond Wells had not been lying—’93 was a good year at the Fraser’s mouth. Hard work, but I was used to that, and rowing always woke in me the feeling of being a boy. I was not yet thirty-five and as strong as I have ever been.
Five days a week, we were aboard Desmond’s Kerry Maid before dawn. The breeze blew inland, but Desmond favoured the salt water of the outer drifts, so I would row for three, four hours to reach the set. It is hard to believe now, with all the dog salmon Far Cry handled during the war, but in those days sockeye was the only fish the canneries would touch. How many pinks and cohos did we chuck overboard to the sharks? How many of the big fighting springs?
The liveliest fish, we knocked on the head. Some came up stunned and gulping, still others smothered under the weight of their own kind. The Kerry Maid sat low in the water, even after we had thrown everything but the red fish away. That was when you hoped the wind would be with you so you could hoist the sail. You did not want to be late back to the cannery dock. The pitchers worked without rest, jabbing the fish through the head or the tail and flinging them into the bins, but you could still end up bobbing in line with the sun beating down on your catch.
Kit, Rivers Inlet is all the life you have known—eight or nine canneries scattered over thirty miles or more, a weekly tow out to the grounds and the collector boat coming round for your haul. Steveston was a whole town of canneries. Imagine forty vast clapboard sheds built out over the brown and bloodied flood. Thousands of gulls screaming, circling in the smoke and steam.
You can get used to the smell up here. Even when the fog traps it in, there are the trees to sweeten the air and, sooner or later, there is the breath of the sea. The tides draw out the worst of the waste, the rest of it sinks away. On the Fraser, the mess washed up on shore. The incoming tide carried it upriver, marking the banks with stretches of grey, reeking rot. Not just the offal, heads and tails. On the heaviest days of the run, when the fish piled up on the cannery floors, the order came to lift the hatches and shovel the catch away.
