On island, p.13
On Island, page 13
The federal government, which had constitutional responsibility for Indians—as Aboriginal citizens were called—did not have the money or personnel to provide education to their Aboriginal charges, scattered in reserves in small coastal communities, and turned to the Church.
The young priests and nuns who were assigned to the residential schools believed they were following Holy Orders, committed to bringing education to a neglected population, people beyond reach of civil society at the time, the Oblate priest told his young cousins at a family dinner.
“We were given no Aboriginal history, no instruction in Native cultures,” he told the fascinated children, brought up on stories of Cowboys and Indians. He described how, on Saturday nights, he lay in his cot in a room behind the school’s chapel, listening to the young Aboriginal men drinking and dancing around the bonfires on the beach, fearful that he was going to be scalped.
While there were many reports of government agents and police bringing children to the school, the Oblate recounted how some Aboriginal parents brought their children to the school willingly, asking that they be taught reading, writing, and arithmetic so that they could do business with the traders who supplied the reserves with basic supplies, like flour, sugar, and tea.
She remembered a nun telling them at a dinner in Oblate House, “We had forty cents a day to feed, clothe, house, educate, and provide medical services for each child. People now complain the students were forced to wash dishes and scrub the floors. With such limited budgets, we all scrubbed the floors.” She added bitterly, “It was part of the culture of service.”
The wife reflected on how she and her classmates earned trading cards of the Saints by scrubbing the stone steps of their modestly affluent convent school.
The nun and priests at the Oblate dinner had never been accused of any form of abuse, and certainly did not condone it, yet as a result of the actions of others, they believed that their whole lives had been in vain and submitted themselves to society’s general condemnation.
The Church Warden’s wife wondered why few, if any, former students came forward to say that the education they received from their residential school teachers had helped them get jobs, enter professions, leave the reserves. When the Oblate cousin died, many of his former Aboriginal students attended his funeral and told, with tears and laughter, stories of his mentorship. Where were their stories recorded?
Now, as the ferry switched course and the island with its abandoned residential school receded in the ship’s wake, she wondered why she too stayed silent, why she never told her family and friends the story of her Oblate cousin, and she felt an inexplicable sense of shame.
When the bus from the ferry terminal reached downtown the wife walked over to her favourite teashop to meet her friend and recounted, with indignation, the tale of the stolen book. Her friend was a librarian, well schooled in the value of beloved books. She was sympathetic to the wife’s dilemma but took a pragmatic approach.
“Maybe she didn’t mean to steal the book,” said the friend, sipping her decaf Earl Grey blend. “Maybe she thought you had abandoned it and the paper.”
“Not likely,” replied the wife. “How many people abandon books in the loo when there are all those recycling bins on board?”
The friend persisted: “Have you ever picked up anything by mistake?”
The wife considered herself an honest person, incapable of the criminal act of theft. “Of course not,” she said.
“What about the time we went to the grocery store and when we got home you found those one-dollar gloves in your purse. You said you would return them. Did you?”
“I picked them up by accident and stuffed them in my purse because that is where I keep my gloves,” protested the wife. “I don’t know why I did that. I kept the sales tag in my wallet for a year but we never went back to that store.”
“Anything else?” probed the friend.
The wife wavered. “Then there was the time we bought the Aboriginal print for your son’s wedding, and when he broke off the engagement I never unwrapped the print for a year or so. When I finally did, I found the store had wrapped two copies of the print, but I had only paid for one. I thought it was too late to return it, so I never did.”
“And what about St. Joseph’s statue?” the friend persisted. “The one you left planted upside down in your garden and never removed when you sold your house in town? Wasn’t that deceptive?”
That was true, the wife remembered. She was superstitious as well as religious, and wore a Celtic cross while fingering Anglican prayer beads. When she and her husband decided to sell their house in their mid-coast community to move to the island, she purchased a small plastic statue of St. Joseph, husband of Mary and Earthly Father of Jesus, reputed to be the patron saint of real estate transactions and guardian of convents.
She planted the statue in a pot and buried it in the ground upside down, feet pointing to Heaven, by the FOR SALE sign. When the house didn’t sell, she unearthed St. Joseph from the pot from time to time to check if he was properly planted.
When the house did sell she forgot to remove the St. Joseph statue from its pottery grave. She wondered if the statue was still there.
“I thought I could creep back one evening and remove him,” she told her friend. “On second thought, maybe not! If the door opened and the new owners appeared, could I just say ‘Sorry, folks, but I left something important,’ then pick up the pot and leave?”
“Well?” said the friend in a smug tone that the wife found so irritating.
“Well,” the wife answered, chastened. Maybe she wasn’t as nice a person as she thought. Maybe nobody was what he or she appeared to be.
The wife went back to the island on the afternoon ferry. But God is in Her Heavens. At the library’s next book sale, the wife found the copy of Dropped Threads. It was in fine condition.
She hoped whomever took the book had learned something she needed from it. As she had.
HARBOUR GIRL
SHE WAS A HARBOUR GIRL, with her blond-streaked hair, Siberian Midnight fingernail polish, and brown eyes spiked with mascara, like sea anemones. She wore too-tight jeans, a black leather jacket, and boots cut cowboy-style. She looked like many other girls her age in the Harbour, although she was pushing it, with her thirtieth birthday in her sights.
She escaped from her south island home by being kicked out of high school for supplying her classmates with home-grown pot, an island specialty. Shipped off to the Harbour and her aunt and uncle by her Puritan parents, she married young and spawned early, producing twin boys ten months after her teenage marriage vows, disproving rumours of premarital pregnancy, a common motivation for Harbour marriages. She was what she was, which was like everyone else in her peer group.
Her one distinguishing aspect was early widowhood when her young husband, a faller, bailed over the stern of his crew boat into the black water one night to fix his engine and never came up again.
Alcohol was involved in the marine accident. “Why are we killing our young people?” despaired the local Lutheran minister at the memorial service in the Community Hall, the young man’s body laid out in the open casket, beautiful in his youth. The minister recounted horrific auto accidents, fights, shotgun accidents in the surrounding forest, and acts of alcohol-fuelled violence that had killed the Harbour’s young people. Drugs and alcohol were the Pied Pipers of coastal communities, although rarely in the logging camps or on the fishing grounds themselves.
The young widow and her boys lived in the rooms over the ramshackle waterfront store her aunt and uncle owned near the entrance to the Harbour by the new fish plant. The store was painted sky blue and the black roof lured the waterborne clientele with signs advertising BEER BAIT ICE FUEL, the basic requirements of the maritime community. Feral cats roamed the dock, hoping for bait scraps.
The Harbour girl worked behind the store counter with its shelves of candy bars and mints, cigarettes and cigarette papers, packets of tobacco, and cans of Copenhagen chewing tobacco plugs for the nicotine addicts who worked in the woods and couldn’t smoke on the job. She flirted with the weekend sailors who tied their powerboats, sometimes called gin palaces by the locals, up to the dock. On weekdays she served coffee to the locals who gathered each day around the communal table to pass on gossip and trade stories flavoured with a vocabulary unique to the Harbour.
“He is one log short of a load,” someone might say about a colleague deemed slow on the uptake. Or “I hung a beating on him with my pike pole,” referring to the pole the boom men used to sort the logs in the booming grounds. Infidelity and domestic discord were common themes: “I heard she beat him up with a vacuum cleaner.”
After coffee and gossip they climbed into their pickup trucks parked outside the store, or boarded their boats tied up to the ancient dock, and dispersed to various coves and bays that collectively made up the Harbour.
Actually, there was no town known as the Harbour, which was shown on the marine charts as a narrow inlet punched through the coastal mountain range. A chain of islands guarded the entrance. The residents lived in various isolated settlements scattered around the shoreline, recently connected by a narrow road but traditionally accessed by boats, nine-horse outboard motors hung over the transoms like leeches and oil-stained life jackets stowed under the bow.
The younger ones drank beer on the government wharf, with no fear of police harassment since the local RCMP detachment was back at the ferry terminal in town to clock the speeders on the coast highway. One youth bet that he could run his outboard across the water faster than another could drive his old beater on the road circling the Harbour. The driver lost the bet.
As the older fishermen died off, their skills died with them: how to read the water for wind and rain and changing tides and currents; how to sink a prawn trap thirty-five or fifty fathoms deep to the ocean floor where the prawns lived. Maybe they grazed on krill. Nobody knew.
Few of their kids were fishermen or would experience the beauty of a mackerel sky, orcas slapping black and white tails on the sea, bald-headed eagles and wide-winged ospreys circling the cedar and Douglas fir forests on the distant mountains.
Her new man was a prawn fisherman whom she met in the Legion pub. He had curly blond hair and a body hardened by physical labour in all kinds of weather. He had KISS tattooed on the knuckles of his left hand and ASS inked on the right-hand knuckles. She read them upside down, his hands clenched around his cold, glass beer mug.
She left a note for Aunty to look after her boys and ran off to the Big Island with him, away from his angry wife, until things cooled down and the wife moved to town and they returned to the Harbour and the tidal tugs of life.
The Harbour girl liked to go out on the prawn boat, using landmarks and depth sounders to search for the red scotch buoys that marked a line of sunken prawn traps strung out over one or two kilometres of ocean bottom. She liked picking the prawn traps off the line as they were winched over the stern of the boat, filled with live, vigorously snapping prawns sparkling with water, throwing out the odd red rock lobster and shaking the pale prawns into the ice-filled coolers, baiting the empty traps with pet food and stacking them on the slippery deck ready for the next setting.
Hard enough work for a man, let alone a young woman.
She liked the song of the wind, the smell of oil and rust, the flopping sound of prawns squirming in the traps, the angry exchanges when the prawn fishermen leaned out of their cockpits shaking their fists at a competitor who laid his prawn traps over another fisherman’s trap line on the ocean floor.
Not for her the wifely task of picking salal up the mountain when money was short, leaving the bundled leaves on the end of a logboom for their husbands to collect when they came in from fishing. Harbour wives were expected to stay in their kitchens close to the VHF radios when their men were on the fishing grounds to monitor the oblique messages, often silenced by radio static. A fisherman never wanted to give away too much when the boat crews asked each other how they were doing.
She liked to dump the fresh prawns, tails and all, into the salted water, cooking them for four minutes until they turned pink and then plopping them onto newspapers covering the galley table, eating them hot and greasy and flavoured with garlic butter, washing them down with a can of Coke or maybe beer.
On the way back to their dock they might check out their crab traps. Sometimes they landed a salmon that they froze for her family on their island four ferries away. She and her man rarely ate fish. Many fishermen prefer steak.
Uncle was never much of a drinker until he and Aunty took over the store, with its Mom and Pop liquor store licence, issued to small coastal communities that lacked a government liquor store. Uncle drank most of the profits in the form of bottles of Alberta Vodka, which he swilled from morning to night, tottering unsteadily down the wharf ramp, bottle in hand, to gas up a customer from the decrepit fuel dock.
The trouble started the day he was too hung over to unlock the gas pumps and snored away the morning in his bed, and the Harbour girl left the safety of the store and went down to work the fuel dock.
It was a fresh morning, the arbutus trees on the shoreline glowing ruby red in the early sun. A seagull trailed a white wake on the green sea as it took off through the narrow pass where signs posted onshore warned boaters entering the Harbour SLOW TO FIVE KNOTS, so the wash from their boats wouldn’t swamp others moored at the docks nearby.
She watched as a sleek Sunray powerboat glided up to the dock and the young man at the wheel cut the engine. A real gin palace, this one, she thought.
“Gas or diesel?” she called as she caught the bow line thrown her by the skipper, who then jumped onto the splintered dock with the stern line in his hand, looping it swiftly around the stanchion with a clove hitch secured by a half hitch. He knew what he was doing, she thought. Then he checked her bow line, which annoyed her.
“Diesel,” he answered. “Is the store open? I need ice.”
Naturally, she thought, they all do, with their beer and wine-filled coolers and veggie stick snacks. She noticed a hooded barbeque positioned on the afterdeck of the powerboat. Sports fishing gear and nets were stashed in the locker behind the Naugahyde seats. “Yup,” she answered. “We got fresh bait too.”
When he nodded his consent, she fished some herring bait out of the tank attached to the dock while he walked up the aluminum ramp to the store where Aunty guarded the cash register. By the time he came back she had finished both fuelling and transferring the bait to the boat.
Stepping back, she looked the Sunray over expertly and thought of her man’s prawn boat, with its high, handsome Hourston hull. A working boat, with clean but smelly fish tanks and a Coleman stove for the tea and the chowder he prepared below deck. Before she could guard her tongue she called, “Nice boat.”
He was already on board, reaching for the key to turn on the ignition, but at her comment he paused and looked her over, standing on the dock in her short shorts and T-shirt and sneakers and sun-streaked hair. “Want to take a spin?” he asked.
She looked him over, in turn. Tall, tanned, cut-off jeans, wearing a hoodie as protection against the wind out on the water. A real Dude, in the lexicon of the Legion crowd. She thought of her store chores, her boys at school, her man out in the channel checking his prawn traps, her uncle snoring in his bed. Every day like every other day in the Harbour during the prawn season.
“Sure,” she said, helping him release the lines and cast off, and hopping aboard the craft like she owned it.
Well! What a day that was! The Dude eased the boat past the islets guarding the Harbour and headed around the Cape, pushing the throttle forward until the Sunray was riding on the step, like the boats in Pacific Yachting magazine. They ran up the broad channel that paralleled the Harbour, past the deserted fish farms, whose operators had moved north in search of colder waters, the odd shuttered cottage beyond the end of road, slipping around the car ferry that waddled across the channel to the next headland, the forest shoreline flitting by, the morning sun on their backs.
She opened a beer from the cooler and crossed one bare leg over the other as she lounged back in the Naugahyde seat, watching the Dude, legs braced, guide the Sunray through the channel markers. They stopped for lunch at the Lodge, fabled haunt of old movie stars and once-famous singers, where she sat in the sun on the patio looking for all the world like a Dude herself, with her dark sunglasses and her hair with its golden streaks tied back off her face.
Then they roared on to an empty cove that formed a natural swimming pool, the water warmed by the sun-seared rocks and where mussels and barnacles glimmered under the surface of the translucent sea. They stripped off their clothes and swam until they were salt-soaked and drunk with the glory of the day.
With the setting sun on their faces, the Dude boat headed back to the Harbour and the store dock, and the girl jumped ashore. “See you around,” she said, releasing her hair from its restraints.
“I guess,” said the Dude, waving and gunning his boat away from dock.
A local barge operator hauling freight to the channel’s small logging camps spotted the Harbour girl aboard the Dude boat and reported back to the Legion crowd when he returned to the government dock in the Harbour.
That night the Legion crowd talked of little else but the young widow and her Dude boyfriend, speculating and discussing possibilities and probabilities as they talked about how many Mainland cars had gotten off the ferry that day.
Did they make love on the warm sand beaches, cushioned with golden kelp that girdled the rocky shores? That’s what the Harbour asked when people heard of the Harbour girl’s uppity exploits. But who would know, except the black bear nosing the oyster shells on the beach and the river otter sliding down the bank on its belly? That is what left the local gossips tongue-tied.
When her prawn fisherman came back from his shift on the water, tired and sweaty from hauling his traps and dumping his catch onto the ice in the hold, and heard the talk in the Legion Hall, his hands tightened around his beer mug until the tattoos KISS and ASS couldn’t be seen. That night he slept in his narrow berth on the prawn boat.
