Celia's Song Read online

  VII

  CELIA FIRES UP HER vacuum, throws her laundry into the washing machine. She pays no attention to the interruption by the serpent in the late hours of the previous night. While she has no idea why she keeps on having these crazy dreams, she has reconciled herself to them and learned not to think about them after she wakes up. She carries out the mundane task of cleaning to ready herself for another round of living.

  It is the last Friday in March. From the window, Celia notices that the first crocus has unfolded, its white-and-purple petals thrusting its face toward the sun, grateful to be blooming. Damn, I missed it again; she wishes she had looked out yesterday, or earlier today. She regrets missing the first crocus bloom.

  Celia has taken to going to her momma’s on Friday all winter to tell the story of Ravensong to her nephew. Although she has finished telling the story by now, she cannot think of any other thing to do on Friday, so she saunters toward Momma’s after supper. What began as a ritual in response to Jacob’s question has now became a habit. No one sees any reason to stop after the story has ended.

  Celia arrives and is disappointed. She can tell the story still hangs in the air at her mother’s house and, while she does not want to witness it again, she wants to haul the story out of the air and be done with it. It has become a tired old beast that torments Celia and holds her captive. It wafts its way over her body, teasing and torturing her with its images of her dead son. It keeps repeating that Jimmy is never coming back.

  Jimmy is gone. Her robust son hanged himself. Her nephew Jacob wants to know why. No one knows why, but they feel obligated to tell him something; so they gather every Friday to tell him the story of Ravensong. She had not wanted to hear it, but could not escape its telling, because she was one of the narrators. She thought she wanted it to be over, and now that it is she wants the lingering feel it leaves behind to evaporate. She thinks it would be easy to sit among her relatives and escape to her musings, her wakeful dreams, if only the story’s feel would disappear.

  NO ONE IN THIS family knows it, but the entire story has not been told. I know it. No one knows that Loyal found Jimmy, shapeshifted, entered him, and tried hard to let Jimmy know that the serpent belonged on a house front west and north of their village, that he needed to be feasted. But Jimmy proved too fragile for the mission. Instead of feasting the restless head and returning him to his position of honour, Jimmy killed himself. Loyal was beside himself with grief at his error in judgment — some other gentler roadway than the original one had to be found. In the meantime, Loyal surrendered to the havoc of Restless. Each time Restless ran amok, Loyal slept for a long time; this sleep was his only relief. He could not find anyone who could help. What is wrong with the people?

  I know what is wrong. The people have no idea who they are anymore. They are sad, hurt, angry, and disconnected; some of them have gone crazy and are busy tormenting each other, not all of them, but enough of them. The ones who are trying to figure out how to heal have little of their original knowledge to work with; they are barely succeeding. It is not my job to make the serpent understand or restore peace or knowledge to the people. My only job is to witness the story and tell it. I leave the tormented head of the serpent to watch the women at Momma’s house.

  MOMMA ENDS THE STORY with a song that is supposed to bring closure to Celia’s son’s death, but it doesn’t — not for Celia. The sound of the story hanging from the rafters taunts her memory without bringing any end to the mystery or the pain. During the song Celia holds her breath. The sound rises, filling the room and seeming to sink into the very wood grain of her mother’s house beams, but Celia cannot feel its power and so cannot swallow it and be settled by its beauty. It is as though she cannot truly hear it. The song makes her feel like she is stuck in a blinding watery fog. Without swallowing the song, she cannot accept the way Jimmy died. Unable to benefit from the song, and tired of the story, she cannot stop reliving the moment of Jimmy’s death.

  Night after night, all winter, Celia had confined herself to her bedroom. Lights out, not even a candle burning, she sat at the edge of her futon and replayed Jimmy’s last day alive. It became her private obsession, watching the light from his eyes over and over, trying to see the precise moment of his departure from the living. This obsession became her private torment, as his gaze told her nothing. It just stared back at her, burning her, burning her somewhere in the middle of her mind. Jimmy’s eyes accuse her of some small neglect, some failure that led him to this crazy dance of death. The accusation in his eyes drove her to relive his suicide and wonder why he might do this, why her son? The why of it hid somewhere in the dead quiet of night, making her hungry. Restless thought he could hear her. He had waited by her house often on those nights, but something had stopped him from entering, something gossamer thin he could not penetrate had kept him outside.

  Celia had rushed Jimmy’s burial. She had wanted to hasten his body’s exit. She had buried him just three days after his death, which left little time for a wake or the burning. It was a fragile coffin, built with slivers of space between its cedar planks. She wanted the coffin built this way. The spaces would be an easy entrance for the small beings so they could feast on his body and destroy his flesh without much trouble. The thought of Jimmy rotting slowly and uselessly in a store-bought sealed coffin had been too much for her to bear. The small beings would need to hurry his decay in some final, useful way. She insisted her ex-husband build the coffin. Ned had helped. He burnt an old design onto the lid. The only other death that had disturbed her like this was her gramma’s. She cocked her head to one side trying to recall her. She could barely remember her gramma’s fading from there to absent. Now she could not stop remembering her son. Every waking moment she was not daydreaming, Celia was plagued with remembering him.

  Inside the house, Celia nods to Jacob, who squats in the corner and chews a toothpick like some old man satisfied at having been fed a full feast of salmon. Momma, Rena, and Stacey talk about some non-existent school, and Ned and Judy sip tea without seriously listening. Everything is normal: they are talking and ignoring Celia.

  She pulls the curtain down on the room full of people, turns the volume of voices off, and lets herself drift into her private world of scattered moving pictures, disconnected from current time. The warm fire inside rises as does a current of images from her past. They drift outside of a particular context, far from time, as though time were an insult to her memory. She watches them in a forgetful, insignificant way, not at all the way she might recall a list of items she needed from the grocery store or someone’s birthdate, but in the mindless way she drops her keys in their habit-formed spot. Her memories have no order. They roll forward of their own volition in a series of scenes that slip and slide across the floor of her mind. They hook themselves onto her mind as though they have just stopped by for a brief visit. They slide in and out, tentative and unsure, as though they do not belong to Celia, as though they have been looking for a home and have accidentally stumbled into Celia’s memory but are not sure this is the place they want to stay.

  These memories don’t come to her in the normal way memories do, when the rememberer knows that she is in fact remembering. They sit in her mind, independent of her voice — as though the memories have met each other on some arc of light, a place between where her voice originates and where it can be heard reciting memory and the origins of memory. They come to her, independent of her will. She watches them spring up and follows them as they spirit along bent light waves. She watches them settle themselves in her mind, each one free of the emotional encumbrances that accompany ordinary memories.

  Relief comes. Celia needs relief from the summer Stacey left. She wants relief from the empty life in between that summer and Jimmy’s birth. She wants relief from the emptiness of her house since he died.

  I ponder the value of following Celia around; she seems stuck inside herself. Up to her elbows in her own muck. I can�
�t help cursing, Oh, crap. But I hang about anyway. Maybe that is the point of this story.

  Celia relives the day Stacey left. Momma and Stacey were walking arm in arm toward the bridge. Celia listened to the crunch of gravel under their feet, heard the murmur of their voices recede under the gentle fall wind. Their skirts flapped to the rhythm of wind and walking and their bodies grew small. Celia grabbed her gramma’s hand and squeezed, Gramma turned to her, smiled, picked her up, and said, “She’ll be back in no time. Not to worry, little girl.” Gramma’s assurance was fiction. Time flies only for the old. Celia had no way of knowing how long five years was going to be. There had been talk the night before of visits and holidays, but it had all been false.

  There were no visits. Visits cost money and the family had none. Once every three months the whole family gathered to hear Stacey’s letters filled with words none of them understood. Rena and Judy had taken turns reading them aloud, trying hard to explain the strange language that Stacey now used. One of the concepts they failed to understand was “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.”

  Celia did not return to her momma’s house, she stayed with her gramma. When Gramma died, she took care of Grandpa as though she were the oldest daughter. She did Stacey’s job and had to fight her own resentment over it.

  SHE IS STILL IN Grandpa’s house — the one with the kitchen window facing the road to town.

  CELIA WAS OUTSIDE. SHE was little and she snuck in the rear door to Gramma’s house. She crouched, unseen and still, under the kitchen table in view of the dressing of Gramma for her funeral. Celia faced the curtain to Gramma’s bedroom, but dared not enter. No one she knew dared to sneak a peek besides Grandpa. Even he had always asked if Gramma wanted to go to bed, like he was looking for permission to enter her room every night.

  Grandpa stayed quiet during the funeral deliberations. The women decided to have him lay her out in the living room. He did what they asked. They had fetched new clothes for her. The women who dressed his Alice for her burial did not want to dress her in the bedroom. He shuffled over the threshold, mumbling about would she mind if he might come in, and carried her out into the living room. The girls wanted to dress her, and did she know she was going home? After she was dressed, the keeper of the dead, the man conducting the burning, asked that her things be brought out. The women left then. Celia left too. She skulked out the back door.

  CELIA SITS ON THE back porch, staring at the clearing in front of the poplars.

  I watch from behind the poplars, standing upright, my hands clasped, my fur glistening. I look straight at her. Some vague memory of an old trapper’s tale comes forward.

  “MINK SKIN SLICES NEAT and easy.” Some white man is talking to a younger man standing next to him. The yard collapses. The mink in the trap squirms under the man’s knife. Celia is appalled. The nicks the man makes on all four legs are neat. Celia tries to look away, but she is caught. My one leg quivers. Nick, slice. My second leg shakes. Nick, slice. Leg three quivers. I wait. Celia wonders if anyone notices her staring at the carnage. It’s coming any minute now. Any second — nick, slice, and pull. One wave of pain, one massive convulsion, and my skin is gone. Celia convulses with me. It is almost over. My eyes water. I retch. Celia gags along with me. In a second I give up and the shock nearly kills me before I scream and shape-shift out of my body to fly away as owl. Tears stream down Celia’s face, but she makes no sound. Celia looks down and thanks the white man for disembowelling me before he skinned me. Sometimes they don’t.

  Just as he begins to remove the pelt, my body disappears. The white man, startled, throws the pelt into the bush. It lands in the stream not far from his trap. He heads back to his trapper’s cabin, terrified by what he witnessed. I disappeared.

  Okay, I shouldn’t have played with the trapper like that, but I still felt a strange kind of smug satisfaction at freaking him out.

  Celia is still quivering long after mink disappears. She forced herself to watch and wonders what happened to mink’s little body. Celia still stands in the corner, near the door to the room, barely able to focus. She feels like mink, stripped clean of her skin, but she knows that isn’t fair. She is not mink, she has not been skinned, she is a voyeur. Mink had to endure the process; he had no choice.

  Never mind, I am not entirely dead. I try to reassure her, but she is a seer not a listener. I reappear as owl, floating above her grandpa and the women who helped him bring her gramma’s things out of the bedroom.

  Celia’s hallucinations are crowding one another, slipping from one to the next. She wants to focus on one hallucination or the other; these split delusions scare her. She lets her wondering about mink go.

  THEY BROUGHT GRAMMA’S CLOTH out a piece at a time. Every piece of cloth jarred Grandpa. He held each one in his hands. The men waited while Grandpa decided its fate, then they touched his fingers. Each time Grandpa looked up, it was as though he had just then realized why they were there. He nodded his head to the kitchen table or the fire heap outside.

  The windows of the living room had been blackened for the wake. But for the candles glowing around the body, the room was dark. Celia stared at Grandpa. He was out the day Gramma died and even though he laid her out, he sat on his chair at the wake and looked about the house, like he was trying to find her, like he was not really convinced she was gone and he expected her to show up any minute.

  After Gramma’s wake, under the light of a sliver of moon, Grandpa faced the funeral pyre. The women gathered behind the men and the grieving song began. The men murmured words in the old language, tossed cedar on the pyre, and then lit it. Grandpa lurched forward. Two men grabbed him. They sang deeper. One of the men holding Grandpa urged him to sing. He held cedar against the middle of Grandpa’s back. Grandpa’s head lolled back and forth for a minute, the song jerked its way out at first, then it reached full sound and finally Grandpa was grieving, the sound of it loud, long, deep, and beautiful. That’s when they began burning her things; red bits of cotton, stripped blue cloth, wool panels cut from old men’s pants, bits of ribbon, and a mountain load of colourful cut-up squares and triangles preceded the larger pieces; finally the bolt of white cotton was unravelled and thrown at the pyre. Momma had very nearly clenched her teeth at the bolt of cotton.

  Celia recognized the song. It was the same song Momma had sung for her Jimmy. Tears filled Celia’s eyes. She tossed her head to one side; why hadn’t she remembered hearing this song before? This time she let the song fill her up. She swallowed it. It tasted full, round, and hopeful. Why had it been so hard for her to sing that song last week? It was as though this was the first time she had heard it and felt it.

  Celia watched the funeral fire until the last ember died, and then she returned to Gramma’s house. Momma wept over the burning bolt of cotton, but Celia paid her no mind, Gramma’s kitchen was filling up with the scent of blackberry pie in the oven. Over the stove a cone-shaped cheesecloth sack, plump with blackberries, dripped juice into a jar below, setting itself into jelly. Grandpa was not there. Celia scoured the house for some evidence of illness, maybe some pills with strange Latin-sounding names that would point her in the direction of the big medical text in Stacey’s house, where she could solve the riddle. “We didn’t go to them people then,” some mocking voice told her. She turned to look to see who was talking, but no one was there. She shivered and kept looking.

  No pills in the kitchen cupboard, just clean white un-matching dishes, un-matching mugs of all shapes and sizes; white bowls, there were plenty of white bowls threatening to spill out of Gramma’s curtained cupboards. The cupboards strained to hold Gramma’s dishes from view. She stopped looking at the details of Gramma’s kitchen and looked about for the bathroom, and then she remembered: Gramma had no bathroom.

  Celia faced the curtain to Gramma’s bedroom. She stood at the entrance to the bedroom and waited. She waited for some sign of permission to invade this sanctuary, this room that no
one had dared enter while Alice was alive and was now off limits because she was dead. Grandpa had taken to sleeping on the couch in front of the television; he could not face the room that was now so deeply empty without his wife. No voice, no permission was forthcoming. Celia shrank herself small. Small children are forgiven transgressions. She slid the curtain aside.

  Gramma’s room was awash with gold light. Filtered through the yellow-pink-magenta paisley curtains, the light was a fluid pink and pastel yellow. The fussy pleats and ruffles of the curtains stood like managers of siem, self-important. The pleats bent the light into a golden fan that hovered over the oak-and-cedar cupboards and trunks in the room. Gramma’s shelves were peopled with masks, carved bowls, and spoons — some modern, some so old and black Celia wondered if they were made of argillite. She touched the black spoon nearest to her. “Haida,” she heard her grandpa’s voice say, “I am from Haida Gwaii.” Her hand snapped back at the sound of his voice. She looked. He didn’t seem to mind her being there. Haida Gwaii. The waters of the seas swirled around the word. Whalers, seafaring traders, men of song, of purpose; indomitable men. “I canoed all the way from Skidegate to here.” He chuckled as though even he couldn’t believe his youthful silliness. She stared at his stilllithe body and nodded. She could see Grandpa canoeing a thousand miles to be with Gramma. She smiled. It pleased her to know that he had left his pristine island home, dipped a paddle over miles of water, voyaged to this village, this place, and this woman who was her gramma. If Jimmy … She stopped herself and continued to look.

  One cupboard held communities of white porcelain geese, swans, ducks, and little white girls getting ready to waddle through whatever garden they were standing at the edge of when someone conjured them from clay, up to kiln, up to this sweetly lit golden wood reality. Where had Gramma found them? Celia turned to Grandpa. He was already gone.