Joe
BEN MARKS THE DAYS OFF ON A SMALL CALENDAR TACKED to the wall by my
bed, a gift from the church with all the Catholic holidays clearly marked. The x’s, scrawled in thick black ink, cross off the last of my days. As the x’s take up more space than the white of the page, I become more confined to this room, to this bed. Even the smallest movement is painful. The pills help, but they also rid me of my ability to walk on my own. Ben and Mae help, but I hate being a burden, so I stay here and watch the daylight come and go through medicated eyes. By noon, the light from the sun, pouring in the window, is blistering. I stare at it until my eyes are forced closed. I wait until the light imprints on the back of my eyelids, fades into a milky yellow. Then I open my eyes and do it again. Sometimes I fall asleep. When I wake, the sun has wandered out of the frame and leaves only the fading daylight. I’m trying to get comfortable when I hear Leah coming down the hall. She comes every Tuesday at 3:30 p.m. She’s faithful, far more than I ever was to her. In my defence, if I even have one to make, I did what I thought was best. I left. But, as Mom always says, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
“Come in,” I say before she knocks.
“Hey, Joe.” She leaves the door open and takes a seat on the single bed Mae and Ben alternate in and out of. She’s never called me Dad, which breaks my heart, but I’ve never told her that. Mae says it’s not a title I deserve and she’s probably right. Leah has my eyes, but the rest is all her mother. Her skin is light, too, not as brown as the rest of us. That’ll serve her well, I guess. She’s built like an athlete, something she hates. In high school, she was always asked to play sports, but she preferred books and playing the fiddle. Her grandfather left his to her when he died, when I was
still out there somewhere and not here, where I should have been. Before I even knew that a part of me was walking around in this world. She tells me she’s not very good at the fiddle, doesn’t have the ear for it, but I can’t tell the difference. She sounds good to me.
“How’s your mother?”
“Good. She won four hundred bucks at bingo on Sunday, so she’s taking Jeffrey and me out to supper later.”
I’ve never met this Jeffrey. Mae tells me that he’s good to Leah, and Mae wouldn’t tell lies when it comes to her. He doesn’t like me, though, even if we’ve never met. Claims that I don’t deserve the love of a daughter I never took care of. And, just like Mae, he’s probably right, but I do love when she comes to visit. Each time I open my mouth, I am careful not to say anything that might make her stay away. That might kill me before this disease does.
I shiver, something I do a lot of even when the sun is shining warm. Leah gets up and goes to the closet to grab an extra blanket. Now, I don’t believe in the divine, at least not in the way my mother does, even after all her loss, but just as Leah places the blanket over my rail-thin legs and reaches behind my head to prop up my pillows, light from the last of the afternoon sun falls on a tiny pair of boots sitting on the top shelf of the closet.
“Look at that.”
Leah turns to see what I’m looking at.
“Can you grab me those little boots, the ones with the doll stuffed in them?”
Leah reaches up and takes them down. A trail of dust follows her as she hands them to me. The doll’s head flops over and the button eye hangs loose.
“These were my sister Ruthie’s. They ever tell you about Ruthie?”
She nods. “The littlest sister. The one that disappeared.” She says it so matter-of-fact-like, as if she were reading something from a history book, so far removed from the thing that it does nothing to her heart. I suppose you can’t love someone who never was, and for Leah, Ruthie’s just a little girl in a grainy photo taken long before Leah was even a thought in anyone’s mind.
“Yup, the one that disappeared.” I stroke the leather, soft with dust. “They tell you that it was me that saw her last?” I take a deep breath and
feel it catch. I cough hard, or as hard as I’m able to now.
“No. Auntie Mae said that she disappeared when you were little, down in Maine. Kiju says she’s still out there.” Leah pulls a tissue from the box beside my bed and wipes the spittle from the corner of my mouth.
“Mom never gave up hope,” I whisper.
“Did you? Do you think she’s still out there?”
“I used to. I don’t know anymore. And don’t think me strange for saying it, but I miss her even now, all these years later.”
“I don’t think that’s strange.”
I hand her the boots and she sets them back on the shelf.
“Your Uncle Ben ever tell you that he thinks he saw her once, in Boston?”
“No. Do you think he did?”
“He swears it’s true, to this day. You ask him, he’ll tell you.” “Why don’t you tell me?”
AFTER CHARLIE DIED, we stayed away from Maine, away from the berry fields. Not one of us went down the next summer, and the lands that Dad managed were transferred to Juan. Mr. Ellis wrote Dad and asked us to come back, but Mom wasn’t having any of it. That place had taken two of her babies and she wasn’t risking any more. To be honest, I think we were relieved to leave those fields behind us. At sixteen, I took Charlie’s job painting houses in town, and Mae worked at the taxi stand selling french- fried potatoes and hamburgers to men who called her “squaw” and laughed. She ignored them mostly, but sometimes she spit in their coffee.
We grew into the smallness of our family. Mae and I were left to watch our parents age, to watch Mom’s shoulders slouch a little more and Dad’s hands struggle with the axe. Besides the painting, I worked at the mill in the winters, sun-up to sundown. In the spring before it was warm enough to paint houses, I’d quit the mill and hitch a ride to Maine to look for Ruthie. I passed only a few—but still too many—years like this, living on my own and then coming home when I got kicked out for forgetting to pay my rent, or breaking a window when I locked myself out. Those small things fed my rage since Charlie died. Mae, when she wasn’t working, was flirting with every man she came across. At least she lived on her own, in an apartment in town with a mouldy bathroom and mice, but it was hers. Neither of us
was able to find anyone to love, or at least anyone who stuck around. Seemed like we were cursed.
Ben had come home with us on the back of the truck, holding Charlie’s hand. He stayed to work with Dad at the mill for a bit, but it wasn’t for him, so he quit and took his last pay and a few dollars from Dad and hitched back down to Boston with some friends. He liked it so much he decided to stay. I think it was the Nipmuc girl he met down there at one of those protests. Something about losing Ruthie and Charlie and no one giving a damn except us made Ben go political for a while. For one whole summer in 1979, he lived with that girl in a tent by a pond down there in Boston. He and a whole bunch of other Indians from both sides of the border, demanding the white man live up to his side of the bargain.
I love my brother, but I still think what he did was a little bit cruel. On a quiet evening near the end of September, when I was living back home again, and just as the air was cooling and the sun was going to rest, a truck pulled up at the end of the driveway and Ben hopped out. Mom, out hauling the last of the carrots from the garden, was the first to see him. I was out back cutting kindling when she hollered for me to come. Mom still treated the coming home of her children as a sacred thing, a holy event. When I came around the corner of the house, she was holding his head in her hands. She mumbled a prayer, brought his head down to her lips and let them rest there a while before cussing him out for not writing enough.
Once Mom let go of him, I gave him a hug, brief but solid. “Good to see ya, Ben.”
“You too, Joe. You seem taller somehow.” “Not taller, just older.”
He reached over and ruffled my hair, and the three of us headed into the house.
“How long you home for?” Mom asked.
“I’m not sure. I met a girl, Mom, a nice girl. Nina. She’s expecting me back.”
“You should send for her, bring her up here. Bring her when the apples are ready to be picked. Always a good time to meet folks.”
Supper that night was peaceful. Dad looked around at what was left of his family with a look of contentment. The only sounds were the scraping of forks and knives, the slurping of water, and the wind as it blew the curtains of the window above the sink. It was nice and it was fleeting.
Twice, Ben tried to say something in between mouthfuls of food. Twice he tried but let the words die on his lips. But each time I looked over to see him stop, I felt queasy, like I’d drunk a bottle of spoiled milk. We were all chatting about the arrival of the apple pickers and Mom was about to stand to clear the dishes when the words finally escaped his mouth.
“I saw Ruthie.”
It got so quiet so quick that I could hear myself swallow. We all turned to look at Ben.
“It’s true. I saw her walking with a white lady down in Boston. I tried to catch up to her, but I lost her in a crowd. I ran after them but there were too many people. I’ve been looking, Mom; I haven’t stopped looking. But we were looking in Maine and she was in Boston. I was hoping I could find her and bring her back. I wanted to bring her back to you. I wanted to tell you myself, Mom. You were right this whole time. She is alive and I saw her. She still looks just like you, Mom. I swear it.” Ben was starting to ramble.
Dad cleared his throat and gently placed his silverware on the table beside his plate. “Ben—”
“Was she healthy? What did she look like?” Mom interrupted. Mae reached over to take Mom’s hand but she pulled it away, her eyes on Ben. “Well, Ben, speak up.”
“She looked healthy enough. A bit skinny but healthy.”
Dad cleared his throat again. “Ben, you can’t be certain it was Ruthie.” “I know it was her.”
I looked over to see my mother, her eyes wet, full of hope, staring at her oldest child, praying for her youngest. Hope is such a wonderful thing until it isn’t. That sadness that Mom had managed to harness since Ruthie went missing, and since Charlie’s death, threatened to unravel right there and then at the kitchen table. I knew it, Mae knew it, Dad knew it, but Ben, he couldn’t see it. He couldn’t see the peace he was breaking. He thought he was doing a good thing, still thinks it to this day. But me, I felt a rage toward Ben. It came on so quick, building in the bottom of my belly, warm and churning. The same rage that had started to take over my senses shortly after Charlie died, coming out wicked and red hot.
“I think she recognized me, too. I saw her at a protest down in Jamaica Plain. She was dressed really nice. I don’t think she was there for the protest; I think she just walked into it by accident. I was sitting on the ground in front of the tent, talking with Nina about maybe taking a train or
hitching to Washington, to join the folks that walked across the country, when I saw her. I stared at her so hard I know she could feel it. When she looked at me, I knew it was Ruthie.”
Ben stopped to take a breath. He was talking so fast and was so excited he ran out of air. Mae reached for Mom’s hand and again Mom pulled it back, letting her fingers rest on the edge of the table.
“When she started to turn away, I yelled out her name and she looked at me. I swear it’s true. As true as me sitting here right now. It was Ruthie.”
“Did you talk to her?” I heard my voice crack.
“No. The lady she was with took her by the arm and they took off into a crowd. I lost her, but I saw Ruthie, Mom, and I’m going back down to try and find her.”
“I don’t believe you.” I tried to sound calm, but the more Ben talked, the more he tried to persuade us, and the more convinced my mother became, the angrier I got. I wanted Ruthie to be alive just as much as the rest of them. Probably more so. I wanted to believe Ben, I truly did, but why would he do this without bringing her back? Why would he tell us he’d seen her but not bring her back so we could see her, too?
“Joe, hold your tongue.” Mom scowled.
“You don’t believe him, do you?” My voice was getting louder with each word. “If she’s alive, if you saw her, you would have tried harder to catch her, to bring her back. You’re just full of shit, Ben.” My leg was bouncing under the table and my fists sat clenched on either side of my empty plate.
“Joseph, get away from this table right now before I lose my temper on you.” Mom was standing now, bent over her plate, her hands spread out on either side, my anger reflected back at me. “Get. Away. From. This. Table.” Her lips were curled inside, replaced by a thin line of pink.
When I stood, too fast and without pushing my chair back, my glass tipped and spilled water everywhere. My chair fell back with a loud thunk against the wall, but I didn’t care. I needed to get out of that house before I punched my brother.
“Joe, I swear . . .”
But I didn’t hear anything else as I stormed out the front door, slamming it hard. I beat my feet against the dirt, dust trailing behind me as the ground reverberated up my legs and straight up my spine. I didn’t know where I was going, but I wanted to get away from my brother. The sun was setting
and it was going to be dark soon, but I was going to walk this off, whatever it was. Anger liked to sneak up on me. The biggest things that can send a man into a rage never seem to bother me, but something small, something that doesn’t deserve my wrath, draws it anyway. And it comes up on me quick, so quick I don’t even have time to curb it. I picked up a rock and threw it as hard as I could against a tree at the end of the driveway before I turned toward the train tracks and headed into town. I passed the field where the apple pickers camped, the old tree I was told used to oversee the birth of Mi’kmaw babies, past the shallow pond, the still water reflecting the twilight sky, the water skippers glancing across the top, defying everything I knew about the world. By the time I could see the lights of town at the intersection of the main road and the tracks, it was dark. I could feel the anger melting away and I started to plan my apology to Mom, listing all the things I would say and in what order I would say them. I stepped off the tracks and onto the road. The truck driver didn’t see me. I heard the screech of the tires, saw a flash of light, and then darkness.
“MOM TOLD ME about your accident.” Leah sat cross-legged on the other bed. The evening was sneaking in the window behind her, and I knew that she’d leave soon.
“Did she?”
“Yup. Said you almost died.”
“I guess so. I wasn’t really awake for any of that.” I tried to laugh but it came out as a weak sniff. “I’m feeling good today, though. You want to help me out to the stump?”
“Sure.”
Once we were settled in our chairs outside, both of us wrapped in blankets against the cool evening air, with two cups of peppermint tea between us, I tried to remember the accident. I tried to piece the time together, but it was nothing but confusion. My first memory after the accident was waking in a dark room to the smell of disinfectant and the humming of machines. I remember being awake, but my eyes wouldn’t open, like there was glue on the lids, holding them down. I felt the exhaustion that comes from a deep sleep, one of those sleeps that settles into the marrow of your bones, where your body stops battling for control and just gives in to that element that exists on the other side.
“Were you in pain?”
Her voice startled me. I was concentrating so hard on remembering something more than thirty years ago, I almost forgot she was there.
“I suppose I was. Hard to remember all the details all these years later. Some things are so clear, and others, even those things other people remember so well, those memories don’t exist for me. And it was more than a few years ago and so much has happened since then to fill up my memory.”
She nodded and handed me my tea, wrapping my fingers around the cup for warmth and to make sure I could hold on to it. Some days, I’m too weak to hold on to anything. On those days, I feel worse than useless.
“I do remember them asking me what day it was. And all I could think of was that it was the day Ben came home. They asked me that same question each day I woke up in the hospital. First at home here, in the same hospital you were born in, but then they shipped me off to Halifax so I could learn to use all my limbs again. Now look at me.” I turned and smiled. I meant it as a joke, but people sometimes find it hard to see humour in death, especially when they’re sitting two feet away from it.
“You’re looking just fine.”
We turned when the familiar blue Mazda pulled up the driveway, Jeffrey at the wheel. He stopped but didn’t get out. I nodded to him but he just sat there, waiting for Leah.
“Want me to help you in before I leave?”
“No, I think I’ll sit here a while. Mae will get me when she gets home from work, or Ben, if he remembers that I’m out here.” Another joke and this time, I managed to steal a smile from her. “I’ll see you next week?”
“Sure will.” She bent down and kissed me on the cheek before gathering her purse. “Enjoy your dinner.”
She waved from the front seat as they backed out, and then she was gone. I was alone again, the same as the night I woke up in the hospital, confused and unable to move.
WHEN I WOKE the second time, it was daylight and my father was sitting in the chair beside my bed, flipping through a Reader’s Digest, the edges brown with age and use. This time, my eyes opened but I couldn’t talk; there was a tube coming out of my mouth. When I tried, I coughed and the pain of it made me close my eyes tight against the daylight. Then voices, some familiar, others not, joined the hum of machines.
“Joe, do you know where you are?”
A different voice: “Joe, do you know what happened to you?”
A familiar voice: “Joe, wake up, my boy. Your mother needs you to be okay.”
I opened my eyes to unfamiliar faces switching this tube for that tube, pressing buttons and taking my temperature. I don’t ever remember having that many hands on me all at the same time, and I didn’t like it. I tried to move away, but my body wouldn’t oblige. I tried to find my father, but one of my eyes seemed to have shrunk. I found out the next day that I’d broken the eye socket and the eye was nearly swollen shut. I also learned that I had a skull fracture from where my head bounced off the asphalt, a broken pelvis from the impact, a broken wrist, ten broken ribs out of twelve on my left side, a punctured lung and possibly a spinal injury, which the doctors could only examine once the swelling went down.
“You’re a lucky young man.”
I tried to cough just as my father’s face came into my field of vision. It’s an uncomfortable thing to see someone so strong look so terrified. At first, I thought he was angry with me, but later he told me that it was fear, plain and simple. As much as we tried to keep the pain away from Mom, no one ever really considered how losing his kids weighed on Dad, until the accident. Until I looked at him through my purple and red eye and saw the pain, the worry.
“I’m not leaving you, Joe. I’m just gonna go home and get your mother. I took her home to take a nap, but you know as well as I do that if I don’t get her now, she’ll never forgive me.”
I could feel the warmth of his hand as he held my cold one before he turned to leave. I must’ve fallen asleep again because when I opened my eyes, my mother was sitting in the chair beside my bed, her knitting needles clicking to the rhythm of the heart monitor.
I spent six weeks in the local hospital, having X-rays taken, bones cast and stitches removed. My breathing slowly returned to a state of ease, and my mother was by my side from sun-up until sundown. She read to me from whatever book she could find in the waiting room, left by other families keeping vigil. When I started to show strength and my skin began to turn back to brown from the reds, purples and yellows, she liked to remind me that the anger that had blossomed in my heart since Charlie’s death did this to me. She spoke of my anger as if it were its own entity,
something to be quit, to be cast out, like a bad tenant. When the doctors decided that I would survive, Dad and Ben went back into the woods to guide wealthy men on their hunts. They sent back blackberry jam and moose stew from Aunt Lindy’s kitchen.
“Your aunt wanted me to tell you that you’d better behave and get up for a visit soon,” Dad said, handing the stew to Mom.
“It’d be a sin if you survived this only to get smothered in her hugs,” Ben joked.
I tried to laugh but my body wasn’t ready, and I winced. Mom reached back and gave Ben a smack on the leg.
Ben and Mae followed the ambulance when they transferred me to the rehabilitation centre in the city to learn to walk again. Once the swelling went down, they could see the damage to my spine, and while it wasn’t as bad as they’d feared, it wasn’t good either.
“We just need to get your body and your brain to work together again, and that takes practice,” the new doctor said.
Mae took the dull brown blanket off the rehab bed and replaced it with the colourful afghan from my bedroom at home, before Ben lifted me out of the wheelchair and into the bed. The rehab was painful, frustrating and lonely, but six months later, I walked out with a prescription for a year’s worth of pain pills and a slight hitch in my step—but I walked out of there. That’s the important part.
Ben never did get back to Nina or Boston. He stayed because of me. I owe debts to so many people, debts I know I’ll never be able to pay, and it weighs on me. People have given me their time, their love, their bodies, their secrets. And I’ve given so little. Nina sent a few postcards, but the letters dwindled until they didn’t come at all. The summer after my accident, I wasn’t allowed to work. It was a decision made entirely by my mother the day I got home. I was to be kept calm and still until she determined I was ready for the world again, and nothing a doctor said would sway her. Ben and I spent a lot of time around the firepit that summer. He’d stop by on his way home from a new farm where he’d worked all day, six days a week, and we’d grab a beer and head out to sit and watch the flames. Sometimes Mae would join us, but she’d started dating a white man named James who was co-owner of the hardware store in town and bootlegged homemade booze of every kind on the weekends. James never sat with us around the fire, even after they were married. Mae
said he could only handle so many Indians at once. A bunch of us together made him nervous. She laughed it off, but it never sat right with me.
“Don’t be getting all mad at James. He’s an idiot, and our sister loves idiots.” Ben took a swig of beer. “Keep your rage in check. We don’t want you running away and getting hit by a truck.” Ben lifted his can of beer in a mock toast, laughing at his own joke. “Last time, you nearly gave Mr. Richardson a heart attack, and you ruined his truck to boot.”
Mr. Richardson owned three gas stations and was the unfortunate soul who, while on his way home for a late supper, hit me with his truck when I stepped out of the dark and onto the road. He came by the hospital when I was first hurt and offered me a job when I got better.
I’ve grown used to the quiet, but back then, it still bothered me.
Sometimes I’d say anything just to break the silence.
“Tell me the truth, Ben. Do you actually think it was Ruthie?”
Ben sat quiet—I imagine he was trying to determine whether or not I was going to go into a new rage. “Maybe it wasn’t, Joe. Maybe it wasn’t, but if you’re asking me if I believe it was, then yes, I will go to my grave believing I saw Ruthie that day. The way she turned when I called her name, the way those eyes that she got from Mom stared back at me for just a second. Yes, Joe, I believe it was Ruthie.”
We sat in the dark, the fire crackling in front of us, the stars above. An animal moved somewhere back in the woods.
“Then I will try to believe you.”
Ben reached across and patted my shoulder. “So, what are we gonna do about it?”
“You know Mom won’t cross that border, so I guess it’s up to us.”
We decided then and there that we wouldn’t give up on Ruthie. She was out there and we were going to find her. Ben would head down to Boston whenever he could to look for her, and when I was better, I’d go, too. We’d hang out near the park where Ben saw her, shop at the store near there, drink at the bars. And one last thing we agreed on was that there was no need to tell Mom about the plan. We didn’t want to get her hopes up any further, and after my accident and almost losing a third child, she’d been quiet about Ben’s revelation. If she held out hope for finding Ruthie, she didn’t let on. She put all her energies into keeping me alive.
THE LAST OF my peppermint tea has gone cold and the autumn chill has settled over me, but I don’t want to go in. I want to sit and look at the stars. I want to watch them move across the sky and disappear behind the trees. My head is resting on the back of the lawn chair, my eyes pointing toward the sky, when Ben gets home. He gave up the mill and the traipsing through the woods long ago. We’re old now, with aches and pains that don’t allow us to make money the way we used to. Instead, he works as a custodian at the church, cleaning and locking up. Tuesdays, he gets home around eight, after the men’s Bible study. Mom and Mae had already eaten and left two plates on the counter, with waxed paper and a tea towel to keep the bugs out. Through the open window I can just barely hear the news on the television. Ben comes out and lights a fire, without asking me why I’m still out here. The flames are just beginning to warm when he comes out with our plates and two cans of beer. I haven’t tasted a beer in years.
“Can’t hurt now, can it?” Ben says as he pops the can open and places it on the stump beside me. Apparently, Mae told him. My last checkup was grim. Weeks, maybe a month. Any faith they had in the good Lord making me better has all but disappeared.
“I suppose not. Not many nights like this left to enjoy. May as well make the best of it.” I reach over slowly to pick the can up. It’s heavy and I shake with the weight of it. I spill a little on the blanket before it reaches my lips. It’s cold but bitter, and it leaves a dry cotton feel on the back of my mouth. Ben places the cold stew on my lap and hands me a spoon. I spill only a little and he’s quick to wipe it off.
“How was your visit with Leah?”
“Good. Good. She’s a great girl. Seems unfair that she has to claim me as her father.”
“She wouldn’t do it if she didn’t want to.”
“I think I should be mad at you for not telling me about her all those years.”
“We didn’t know where you were half the time. Not my place anyway. And Cora asked us not to. You did a bad thing and left us with the aftermath. It was the least we could do for her. And Mae told you first thing she could. She’s never been good at keeping secrets. You could’ve come home then.”
“I almost did,” I whisper, as Ben goes back into the house.
He returns with a third beer. My tongue loosened by alcohol and painkillers, I say, “If she’s still out there, I’d just like to see her before I die.”
“Me too, Joe. Me too.”
