When I was eight -or nine - or maybe ten or eleven - I don't remember for sure now, Klopinum would share her stories with me. My mom was working as an aide in the white hospital at the top of the hill where black-haired kids with eyes like sad holes burned in wool blankets stared through windows at the rolling fields their TB lungs would not allow them to run in, or to jump or yell or chase or ride bikes or do any of the things kids were intended by creation to do.
"You be good now," my mom would say and off she'd go, leaving her own kids at home, walking a mile or so to the job that provided the money there was no other way to get, the money that bought the food that kept us healthy. Sometimes, especially when she was on afternoon shift, Id half waken, and she'd be standing by my bed looking down at me, her eyes glistening damply in the one A.M. moontinted darkness. She had a real thing about those forms they sent home from school; she'd always sign, and they'd jab us in the arm with all this stuff she said would keep us from getting sick. Didn't matter if it was smallpox, typhoid, diphtheria, she didn't even look at the form, she signed and we got stuck in the arm. But we didn't get the TB or anything else, except one summer I got undulant fever from cow's milk. She'd tell us, "Stop complaining, the kids where I work would give anything to be able to do what you do." Not much we could say in answer to that, just roll up the sleeve and get jabbed again, and put a good face on it. Life could be worse and for a lot of people it is.
Anyway, she'd go off to work, and Id feed the few scraggly hens I had in a coop under the steps against the front of the house, safe from neighbours' dogs and hungry 'coons. One of my first abortive attempts at capitalism, probably the reason I sympathize with wheat farmers today. Fill their water, gather the occasional egg, take it in the house and wash off the chickenshit, feathers, mud, and who knows what all, clean the sink, wash the dishes, clean the sink again, and the day was mine.
Get the red CCM from where it was leaning against the outside wall, start running with it ' pushing it alongside, then, when everything felt right, jump up on the seat, as close as I could get to the running starts the cowboys took in the Saturday matinees. Even then I wondered how often they fell off before they learned how.
Down the camp road to Fifth Street, then straight down Fifth, all the way to where it turned into Pine. Why two names for one street? Nobody ever explained. To the highway, turn left, then turn right, down, over the tracks to the reserve, past the big building, and you could see the church off to your right, standing in a field of grass, the whitepainted walls and big cross on the black roof sharp in the summer holiday sun. Down the street that ran along the beach; it had no name then, God knows if it has one now.
Dogs, dogs, dogs. Everywhere. With and without puppies tagging along behind. Some friendly, some waiting for the chance to rip your flesh, they'd run and boil around in the soft dusty road, yapping and barking, almost upsetting the bike, until someone would holler, and then the whole mad lot would chase off in search of some other entertainment. Kids yelled, or waved, or grinned, or ignored me. Adults sat on the steps or porches, the men in dark pants and undershirts, the women in cotton dresses, the old women with kerchiefs over their heads, tied at the back of their necks, white hair straying and wisping from under the blue or green cloth. The kids, like me, in old clothes, "play clothes" we called them to distinguish them from "school clothes" which had to be kept clean.
The open doors gaped darkly, even in broad daylight, windows shoved up and held open with a length of kindling stick, no screens in evidence, mosquitoes and flies probably waiting inside, but only the toddlers seemed to have any bites. Nobody ever seemed in a rush, nobody ever seemed to be out of sorts. Oh, once in a while you'd see some guy draped over a fencepost or on his knees by a ditch puking his guts out drunk, and sometimes there'd be a couple of guys sprawled near the steps they hadn't been able to manoeuvre, sleeping it off in the heat, but none of the sober ones seemed to pay attention to it. A lot of the kids had marks like the kind I wore a lot, those hot red blotches where the old man's hand connected with a good one, or those fire red strips where the belt cracked sharply against your skin. But in that town at that time all the kids were marked up like that, it was how they socialized you, making the boys into men and the girls into women, fitting them for the coal mines or the kitchen, the logging slopes or the bedroom.
Where the road, such as it was, ended, the path started. Unless you knew where you were going, you'd think the houses stopped at the place where the road stopped, but two minutes down the path, shoving the CCM through grass and tangleberry and ground blackberry that committed mayhem on your bare ankles, was Klopinum's house. Set all by itself. Small, tidy, if it had ever been painted the salt air and wind had fixed that; the boards were silver gray, grainy where the fine sand had rubbed the soft part and left the harder wood exposed in dry pencil-like strips. Her dog would come down the walk, moving oddly, almost half-curled in a sort of slinky-skulk, and for the first few visits, I was sure the dog was going to bite me. I could see teeth, see its lips wrinkled back in what I was sure was a vicious wolf-like snarl, and then I realized the dog was smiling. I'd never seen a dog smile before in my life' was afraid to mention it in case everyone laughed at me and said I was either making up stories again, or so dumb I didn't know a snarl from a grin. Sort of pale honeybrown splotches on a mostly white body, smiling and whipping its tail in circles. Klopinum insisted it was a border collie, but I never saw one like it before or since, although border collies are known to smile that way.
I suppose that dog had a name, but I can't remember what it was.
For years I didn't even know Klopinum's name; if she'd ever told me, I had forgotten. I just called her "Auntie." If any other Auntie came to visit while I was there, Klopinum would tell her my name and add, "her momma works at our hospital," and the other Auntie would look at me as if I had just been forgiven something. Twenty-five years later, in Alert Bay, on hearing my name, someone, a fisherman who sang country and western, asked "'where you from?", and I said, "Nanaimo." He asked if I was related to the woman with the same name who had worked in the Indian hospital. I said, "She's my mom," and right then and there I had to go to his house, meet his wife, see his kids, hold the baby, and out came the photo album. There was my mom, magically young again, standing by a white painted metal crib, her arm around a boy of five or six, both of them smiling, and another picture, the same boy in pajamas, sitting grinning from ear to ear at a small table, and on the table a stack of presents, a birthday cake, some funny paper hats. And my mom again, laughing, ready to help him blow out his candles. "She was like my own mom when I didn't have one," he said, and his wife told me to stay for supper. Before the meal was over there were brothers and sisters, an uncle and a few aunts, smiling, telling me to please tell my mom thank you for being so nice to Sonny. And when I got home and told her, out came her photo album and there was Sonny with my mom again, and even a picture of him in new clothes, going home to Alert Bay. It never occurred to me as a kid, but I wonder now, if any of that made up to her for the economic desperation that forced her to work such long hard hours, looking after other people's kids while her own ran half wild.
Sometimes Klopinum and I would just walk along the edge of the water on the lip of dampness where the spindrift had dried and crackled under our feet with the stiff brown baked seaweed. Sometimes we followed the path into the bush, stepping from hot bright sunlight to cool shaded dampness, our feet squishing the underlay, sending up scents and smells and tastes it took me years to rediscover.
"Look," she'd say, "yellow vi'lets. Smell," she'd say, "thimbleberry leaves. Here," she'd say, "chew this," and when I did, it tasted like licorice, only sharper, fresher, not as sticky-sweet.
Sometimes we wouldn't talk at all, other times we both yapped and chattered. But the best times were when she told stories.
"Hear that?" she'd ask. "Old Raven sitting up in a snag, minding everyone else's business. Hear her? Bossing and scolding and giving advice nobody wants to hear. That Raven. . . . " And she'd smile, and there would be a story. "Raven is the trickster, she fools and gets fooled, her voice is a sharp stone that breaks the day. And one day, Raven. . . . "
"Sit on this log," she'd say, "and let's watch Snipe working for her dinner. You never see that Snipe wasting her time. But if you watch her long enough you'll see that even though she's working all the time, she's having fun too. Hear her talk talk talkin' to her family? Hear them talk, talk, talkin' right back, everybody out there busy, busy, busy and havin' such a good time. . . ."
"Oh Eagle," she'd shrug, "what's so great about Eagle? Just a big garbage truck is all Eagle is. Just another kind of sea gull except she can't swim like a Gull does. Now, if you want a bird, look at Osprey! She never eats somethin' that's been dead in the sun, never eats a thing she doesn't catch all herself. You don't see Osprey chewin' away on spawn dead salmon. . ."
"Here, you twist the heads off like this, then peel fem. like this, see? I'll show you one more time, and then you can do your own." The prawns, pink with red stripes, still steaming from the boiling sea water, dumped in the colander to drain, dripping onto the bare boards of the porch. We sat on the steps and shelled them, all, ate a few dipped in butter, ate a few more. "All the small ones," she said, "are boys and all the big on... (
Preface by Anne Cameron and an excerpt: Ta-Naz Finds Happiness )
