Thirteen Shells Read online

  But Shell’s roots don’t ever come out with the stem. The gardening gloves are too big and the earth is hard. Shell’s knees get stiff, so she weeds sitting down, her legs stuck out. Then her back hurts. Sometimes her fork turns up bits of eggshell or a peach pit, but there’s not a single piece of glass or porcelain or brass button like Dad’s always finding in their yard. She follows the weeds along the fenceline. Through the slats, the perfect circle of swimming pool in the neighbour’s yard is covered with a shiny sheet of silver foil: a casserole in the oven. The wicker lawn chairs have been painted white and there’s a glass-topped table. Beside a forgotten pack of cigarettes, a glass of iced tea sweats — lemon slice belly-up and pink lipstick on the straw.

  The sun creeps high and hot. Above, the sky is the colour of blueberry-flavoured slushies Mum lets Shell have sometimes walking home from swimming lessons as long as she doesn’t tell Dad. Shell turns her jean jacket into a pillow. The grass beneath her is crunchy. Somewhere close, a fruit perfume. And were it not for the buzz of bee she could maybe hear mealy worms squishing through the earth. When she is just about asleep — high orange sun toasting her lids — a crow screams. There is the rustle of treetop and the hard beating of wings. Shell sits up. Just as the crow scoops up and away from the darkness of the ravine, Dad comes across the grass, swinging the cooler.

  They wash their hands with the hose and hold it to their lips to drink. Dad’s T-shirt is damp and dirty; so is his beard, and his sweaty hair wings out. Olivia’s patio chairs have no cushions. Dad brushes the seats free of leaves and twigs but says to ignore the white traces of bird dropping. He takes big bites of his sandwich and swallows hard. The cheddar is sharp and the mustard is the grainy kind, and because the bread is crumbly, Mum put on extra lettuce and pickle. Instead of cookies there are Brazil nuts and dried apricots down at the bottom of a Mason jar, which Shell fishes out when Dad’s pouring his coffee.

  “Why does Olivia have a vegetable garden when she’s got a job?”

  Dad brushes crumbs from his beard and points next door, the silver pie dish of the swimming pool glinting above the wooden fencing. “You think they care that robins hear worms moving underground?”

  Dad waits until Shell says no, they don’t care.

  “Well, Olivia does,” says Dad. Then he says that Olivia grew up in the Prairies too. “She’s got a farmer’s soul,” he says, making a fist.

  Dad has a key for the sliding glass doors. They leave their shoes outside and walk right into the basement. The washroom down here is even bigger than the one Dad built on Cashel Street. There’s a glass bowl of dried flowers on the toilet tank and a dish filled with tiny soaps shaped like fish and shells. Everything is navy and pearl — the soaps, the tile floor, the neatly folded hand towels looped through a silver ring attached to the wall. The real soap is in a ceramic pump bottle by the faucet. It smells so lilac, Shell washes her hands twice, and when they are dry, she plucks a scallop from among the soaps in the dish, wraps it in a pull of toilet paper, and tucks it in her pocket.

  Dad says he’d better use the toilet too. The basement is dusky. Through Shell’s socks, the slippery tiles are cool; the pine walls are warm beneath her palms. Olivia has stacked the drinks bar with canning jars and boxes marked kids’ stuff. A big wooden TV faces a brown leather couch, and the pictures Olivia’s got everywhere show a girl with a horse and a boy with a dirt bike and there’s a bunch of ribbons and medals. The door next to the furnace room will be for going upstairs. Shell puts her hand on the knob and, heart beating, gives it a twist. But the knob stays fixed. She tries again, shouldering the door with all her weight. It will not give. Olivia has locked it from the inside, keeping her and Dad out.

  The lawn mower grinds in the front. Shell picks up her gloves. Next door, the cigarettes and tea are gone. Then the patio door slides open. Between the slats, the lady is mostly visible: jeans, white T-shirt, dark hair in a tight ballerina bun. Cigarette smoke infuses the tartness of cut grass. The lawn mower stops. Dad comes trundling around the side of the house, blades of grass stuck to his beard and arms.

  It only takes a minute: the lady is at the fence with her hand stuck out.

  Dad says he’s the gardener.

  “Oh, yes. Olivia said she’d found someone.” And what a coincidence both she and Dad have daughters about the same age; hers is called Fiona.

  “Shell,” Dad calls, “come say hello.”

  Shell waves her weeding fork. A wash of cloud suddenly conceals the sun. Chill bites the air. The lady must be standing on a box or she’s really tall, because the fence comes just to her ribs. Through her shirt she gets what the big kids at school call “party hats.” Mrs. Gibbons gets them too, and when she does, she crosses her arms or puts on her cardigan. But Olivia’s neighbour just lights another cigarette.

  Dad and Shell ought to know there was a coyote in Olivia’s yard yesterday. “Normally there are dogs and grandkids outside all up and down the crescent. But,” she says, smoke steaming out her nose, “folks are being extra cautious.”

  “There’s a lot of life in the ravine down there,” Dad says.

  The woman shakes her head. She’d prefer not to think about that.

  Shell holds open the bag while Dad scoops in raked grass cuttings. The sun dips low. When the yard waste is bundled up on the curb, Dad gets some canvas grocery bags and his small curved knife from the glove compartment. Garlicky meat is roasting next door. To go with the fiddleheads, Dad left a big orange triangle of steelhead trout thawing in the sink, and Mum’s making wild rice.

  “What about the coyote, Dad?”

  Dad’s forehead gets those wavy ridges. “Don’t be silly.” Whatever animal hears them coming is going to run scared before they even see it. Shell should know that.

  The fence at the back where the yard drops off is not as high as it looks from the garden but is still taller than Dad. When he crouches down, fingers interlaced, Shell grabs his damp shoulders and then steps into the cradle of his hands. One, two, three — Shell reaches high, grabbing the chain-link. She hoists herself up and over.

  “Good girl, kiddo,” says Dad when Shell hits the ground on the other side. Her skull shakes from the drop, as does the fence from her rough clamber. Then Dad makes his thick hands into starfish, grips the fencing, and scrambles over. His breath is heavy when he lands.

  The ravine is musty and cool, all wet velvet. Crystals of sun spill down through the lacy canopy above. So he’d find his way back to the fiddleheads, Dad tied a strip of red ribbon to a thick white birch. Heads ducked, they plunge down into the depths of the ravine and as the earth slopes down, Olivia’s garden, the tinfoil pool, and Mohawk Court seal up behind. Following in Dad’s wake, willow switches whip Shell in the face. Low branches catch her clothes and hair, and thistles cling to her jeans. Their footsteps sink into layers of wet duff, unearthing crushed Styrofoam, drink cans, burned paper, all the way down into a gully of mud, its bottom lined with soccer balls and chip bags.

  Dad stops. His hand clamps down on Shell’s shoulder. “Smoke,” he says, nostrils flaring.

  A crisp earthen burn weighs in the air, but there is as yet no taste in the mouth, no sting in the eye. Shell says, “Someone’s barbecue?”

  Dad steps to the left. “Coming from over there.”

  In a clearing some ten feet ahead, a campfire smoulders. The dozen or so empty tin cans half buried in leaves — pork and beans, jalapeno sardines — throb with a glaze of red ants. Also there’s a pile of wet clothes clumped in a ball near the mushy log that someone has shifted over so that he or she or they could sit near the fire. The embers are young. They glow the angry orange of roadwork pylons.

  “Fools,” Dad says. With his rubber gardening boots he stomps out the embers then douses them further with a toe kick of damp duff.

  Shell tries to swallow but has no spit. When Dad and Mum and Shell are camping, they leave their site
for the whole day to go canoeing. There’s no way anyone would come ashore and look in their tent, steal their food. Because, Dad says, the rangers don’t let bad people into Algonquin.

  “Dad,” Shell whispers. “They’ll be coming back.”

  With hands on his hips, Dad steps around the clearing. “This is city land, Shell. There’s a reason why you can’t just camp here.”

  “Why?”

  Dad frowns and pushes his glasses up his nose. With right instep, he drags the cans into a pile. The scuffing sound is so loud.

  “Because people are reckless, Shell. That’s why. They don’t know what they’re doing.”

  Crows circle above, attracted by the silver glint of the cans.

  “Let’s go, Dad.” Shell tries walking off, but Dad’s poking around the brush now, peeling back the branches from a cluster of sapling oak.

  “Shell,” he calls. From beneath a tarp of army green, the yellow cord of a knapsack snakes across the leafy ground. Magazines and newspapers are wrapped in clear bags. Dad’s brows arch way up over his glasses. “See that?” He releases the branches and the brush snaps back into place. “Come on, kiddo,” he says. Dad’s strong hand cups the back of Shell’s neck, steering her away from the campsite.

  The canopy tightens above. Some twenty yards along, the forest deepens to garnet. The shadows that fall from the trees are as thick as those in Shell’s nighttime bedroom. Dad and Shell keep moving; air cooling, skin getting wet. Shell trips over a tree root, and when Dad glances back, she swallows down the water in her eyes.

  Then up ahead: as cranberry, as cherry, as winter cardinal, as blood, Shell sees Dad’s marker first. “Look, Dad!”

  They move in on the red ribbon, which has been cut from the same spool Mum used on Shell’s strawberry sundress. The morning of Shell’s last birthday, when she turned six, the first thing she saw waking up was the dress. Mum had finished it the night before and placed it at the foot of Shell’s bed. The best part is the shiny white buttons all up the front, as well as the pockets — big enough for a baseball — and the strip of red trimming the hem.

  The ribbon is tied to a thick white trunk of birch, its bark peeling away in horizontal strips — the spiralling ringlets look like tails of pigs. This birch is one of a grove, throughout which fiddleheads blanket the earth, a miniature forest of furled-up ferns. Water trickles in what must be a nearby stream. Dad grins as he unsheathes his paring knife. There’s a canvas grocery bag for each of them to fill. Shell crouches next to Dad, tiptoeing among the fiddleheads. He says that for so many hundreds of years the Malecite people would have been really happy to see these guys after a long winter of salt fish.

  “Look how green that is, Shell,” Dad says of an emerald disc pinched between his fingers. “In terms of vitamin content, that’d have been gold.”

  Dad shows Shell how to pick: gentle, right at the base. The smell, each time, is a burst of both rotten and fresh. Shell tells Dad the fiddleheads look like they’re from prehistoric times. But they also look a bit like seafood and just-hatched birds.

  They sweep across the boggy fiddlehead forest, rapidly shrinking its size. Shell hums as she picks. Dad just picks. In as little as twenty minutes their bags are jammed. They’ll stop at the French restaurant on the way home.

  Will the nice chef be there? “Remember he gave me a sherbet cone? Dad, remember?”

  Dad carries both bags, trudging up what is now an incline. Amber lozenges of day shimmer through the trees ahead. As he walks, Dad’s forearms flex, the handles of the bags pulling tight. After some minutes Shell calls out, “Dad! What about my ribbon?”

  Dad’s face, when he turns, is tired. His glasses have slipped way down his nose. “God, Shell.” A spot of red ribbon is still visible through the brush. “We’ll get it next week.”

  Dad turns. It only takes a minute before his footsteps disappear, leaving Shell alone. She runs after him, calling for him to come back.

  “Look,” Dad says, pointing. He’s waiting for Shell by a crashed hickory. Spongy caps of white burst within the rotting pulp. Next time they’ll forage for mushrooms too. They go on. A woodpecker knocks, high and hollow. Last week on the radio someone said the woodpecker’s head is made of special membrane so they don’t get brain damage from all that pecking. Shell thought they should make motorcycle helmets from that membrane too, and Mum told her to write that idea down and send it in to the show. “Hey Dad,” Shell calls out. She’s been meaning to remind Dad about the woodpecker helmets —

  Behind her, brush crashes. Branches crack. Leaves ripple and surge.

  Dad stops and twists around. Shell stands frozen, which is funny, because inside she gets very warm. Blood floods her ears, blending in with the sound of the brush snapping behind them. The white of Dad’s grocery bags is too bright. Seeing Dad’s face, now Shell knows what she looked like when he caught her rummaging for candy money in Mum’s purse.

  “Hey!” a man calls. Footsteps come crunching.

  Shell’s knees knock together. Bone on hollow bone.

  “Hey asshole!”

  At Dad’s gesture, Shell walks quickly towards him, ducking behind his legs. His jeans are greasy and warm. Reaching up, she hooks a finger through a belt loop.

  Like an actor entering through a curtain, a man emerges from the brush. In her chest, Shell’s heart is about to burst. She presses into Dad’s legs, whose tense muscles make them as hard as the tree trunks that surround them.

  The man is Dad’s size. His grey hair is yellow, sort of like his eyes. And, like Dad and Shell, he wears jeans and a denim jacket. The tight gloves stretched over his hands are full of runs.

  “You the shithead that put out my fire?” His deep voice is as scratchy as the oldest of Dad’s blues records.

  Shell lets go of the belt loop and reaches for Dad’s hand. But his hand is a fist; from it dangles the heavy fiddlehead bag.

  “I hope you would have done the same,” Dad says.

  “No,” the man says. “I would have minded my own goddamn business.” He has no more matches, he says. “Shit!” Then he calls Dad and Shell a couple of goofs.

  Blood, pooled in Shell’s ears, rushes her eyes, her head. “Shut up!” Shell steps out from behind Dad.

  Dad hisses at her to behave.

  The man is missing his eye teeth, so when he laughs, he looks like a horse. Then his face loses all expression. “Whatcha stealing in the bags?”

  “Not stealing.” The echo in Shell’s head competes with her hard gym-class heartbeats.

  “Fiddleheads,” Dad says. He sets down the bags. Shell takes the handles of the bag that is less full while Dad opens the other. The man steps forward, bringing in the smell of damp wood and smoke.

  Dad says, “They’re baby ferns.”

  The man pokes a finger into Dad’s shopping bag. The collar of his jacket is sprinkled with white flakes and he is wearing the same dirty-white tennis shoes with green stripes that Dad has in the downstairs closet.

  Dad is going on about the vitamin content of fiddleheads and how good they are with salt and butter. There’s more back in the birch grove. The man should harvest them and sell them too. “Plenty for all,” Dad says.

  The man squints at the fiddlehead between his fingers. “How much you get?”

  “Three bucks a pound. We’ve about ten pounds here.”

  “Could be okay.”

  Dad says to try the market downtown. “I know a few vendors there who’d be glad to have them.”

  The man looks at Shell. “You mean coming from you and her they’d be glad.”

  Dad shrugs and gathers up the bags.

  “You live around here?” the man asks. He scratches his yellow hair. More flakes fall, settling on his shoulders now.

  “Working for someone who does.”

  “Good gig?”

  “Makes ends m
eet.”

  “Yeah. I need something like that.” Shell gets a nod. “Got a boy about her age.”

  Dad picks up both bags and says, well, if he wants to pick, there’s still some left. He’s to look for a red ribbon tied to a birch some fifty yards on. Then Dad turns away. “Come on, Shell.”

  They leave the man behind them and walk, then jog, away.

  Mum and Dad don’t say hi so Shell does, extra loud for everyone. The opera is on the radio and the kettle’s going. Mum’s biting into a whole wheat fig roll and also there’s bags of raw cashews and sticks of black licorice with brown inside.

  “The rice is already cooked,” Mum says, without looking up from a book Shell’s never seen before. There is no picture on the cover. Mum takes the cooler from Shell and Shell tries sounding out the book title.

  “Laugh of the Medusa,” Mum says.

  “Medusa with snakes for hair?” There’s a story about Medusa in Shell’s kids’ mythology.

  Mum says, “Not really.” The book is a loan from Barb Nutt, the co-op manager whose son Soren is a bit older than Shell and lives with his dad and not Barb anymore. Barb speaks French to Shell, though Mum has told Barb a million times that Shell’s not learning French yet.

  There are only enough fiddleheads for three, but Dad’s got a pair of twenty-dollar bills tucked in his wallet and there’s a carton of lemon sherbet for dessert.

  Shell does as Mum says, changing into a clean shirt and washing up to her elbows. The scallop of decorative soap is stuck with bits of toilet paper. She dries it off, wraps it up again, then tucks it into the button box under her bed.

  Dad, beer in hand, gets the charcoal going for the fish. Mum is rinsing fiddleheads in the tin colander. Then Shell double-checks for bugs. The baby ferns are rubbery between Shell’s fingers and they smell of tar, peppermint, moss. Mum switches on the double boiler.