Pearly everlasting, p.1
Pearly Everlasting, page 1
Dedication
For all the bear-whisperers who keep the faith,
despite the odds. This is for you.
Epigraph
There either is or is not, that's the way things are. The colour of the day. The way it felt to be a child. The feeling of saltwater on your sunburnt legs. Sometimes the water is yellow, sometimes it’s red. But what colour it may be in memory, depends on the day. I’m not going to tell the story of the way it happened. I’m going to tell it the way I remember it.
—CHARLES DICKENS
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
First: New Brunswick, 1918
A Howl When the Wind Picked Up
Everyone Awake in the Swamp
Once Rivered With Light
Darkness Grafted to the Tree’s Blue Shade
Like Deep Water or Ghosts
The Sky Bloodish, the Pines Black
The Kind That Spooks the Horses
His Worn Out Words and His Worn Out Boots
When It Thundered but Did Not Rain
Into the Space Between Two Straight Spruce
A Wind That Collected Souvenirs
Wind Wolves, Made of Loose Snow
From a Dead Man to a Storied Man
Back to Their Own Quiet Kingdoms
Like a Come-Loose Hinge to the World
Warrens and Creep Passages
Bloodshot and Worn Low
Split With a Glittering Vein
A Ring Made From a Spoon
Sparkled With Carnival Glass
A Kind of Horse Without a Name
Between the Dog and the Wolf
Dirty Little Wood Rat
A Weather Vane in the Shape of a Pig
Bare Trees in Their Dark Wells
Complicated World of Bone
Mr. Nine-Dollar Man
Field Edges, Where Light Healed the Grass
Singing of Cold Glass
Nothing With a Shine on It
Some Beast’s Far-Off Heartbeat
A Stranger Was on Their Way
Meagre Anything, but Still
That Kind of Anger Towards the World
Bone and Sky and Woods and Weather
And There in the Middle of It All
In the Roar and the Setting Light
Slow Singing That Brought Down the Rain
Old Timber Tells and Wind-Levelled Stands
His Heart Beating, and Then, Soon After
Our Shared Darkness, Our Sense of World
Last
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Tammy Armstrong
Copyright
About the Publisher
First
New Brunswick, 1918
What do I remember first? Maybe sleet stuttering against the lean-cabin’s two small panes of glass—sometimes from the east, sometimes from the west—or the wood fire sawing through the deep winter months, overheating and furring our room with oily pine-cone dust and the punky kindling scooped out from the rotten hearts of stumps. Or the creak of red cedars—their crowns tangled up in storms, in that overly possessive way trees have of pressing in too close. Or maybe the spat of rain on the splint-shingle roof—spruce, green, pliable—flipped bark-side-down to varnish and keep the waters out. Or maybe the coyotes, howling their serenades, harrying deer, while wide-throated owls hooted from the boughy, wind-eaten wilderness, unafraid to meet their own echoing replies.
Maybe it’s a bit of all these far reaches that shaped me while I slept my first months away, deep inside a wicker basket, beneath a moose-skin throw. He was there then too—my brother, Bruno—curled up against my spine, his pale snout tucked under my chin, one of his long-clawed paws always resting against my ribs.
A Howl When the Wind Picked Up
Some might still talk about us, down in the valley. I suppose we’ve become another story to swap between radio shows on wintering nights. But I’ve been up here on Greenlaw Mountain so long now, I’m not sure I’d even recognize me and my brother, Bruno. I do know—if I believe the other stories—shortly after I was born in lumber camp 33, strange things began to happen that would suggest my life would not follow a traditional path. First, I was born with long nails—the good sort for grubbing in stumps and digging sleep-holes. Each night, Mama trimmed them while I slept and each morning she’d find them back—yellowed and sickled and stronger than the day before. This happened for the first month of my life and then my nails grew in again like any baby’s should.
The second thing that happened was a tramp from the Outside, calling himself a jeteur de sorts, a spell thrower, came into camp hoping to predict futures and collect some coins. Though we had no money, Mama invited him into our lean-cabin and offered him a pannikin of tea.
He peered into the little wicker basket where I slept and said, “This one here, with hands like a groundhog? She’ll see some things in her life.” He leaned in closer to study me some more. “Sure as rain, she’ll see that Jack in the Dark. Face to face.”
Mama had snatched me up and held me tight. Jack in the Dark was just something the woodsmen talked about when shadows caught at the corners of their eyes—a many-pointed flicker, a howl when the wind picked up, making the woods itch. They had a saying for him too: He’s in the trees. He’s in the ground. He’s in the wind. He’s all around. He was a creature felt more than seen, who could leap the sling of a ridge or skim a rising river or bring strange things to your door. Touched by the devil, riding his bone horse home. He had no business with the newly born.
“Everyone knows,” Mama said as she sent the tramp away, “Jack in the Dark ain’t nothin’ real.” Before he left, she gave him a poke bag of bread for his travels because jeteurs de sorts, though capable of casting spells, could also repent their transgressions, if they chose to. They were, in her way of thinking, capable of being saved.
And thirdly, Papa, our camp cook, brought home a squalling, still-blind bear cub who would come to be thought of as my brother and who would dictate, through little fault of his own, the trajectory of my life. Some might say a baby and a bear cub have no business living together, but I can assure you: seeing the world through our eyes might change your mind.
Though neither Bruno nor me have exact birthdays, I know he was born when bears are born: in January, in a den beneath a fir tree, near a cracked boulder with a sparkling vein running through it. I was born in February on a pile of fir boughs, when the deep snowbanks and ice shelvings rotted in reefs of mist. A false spring, Mama called it. Not to be trusted. That singular week of thaw, all those years ago, a team of swampers, cutting brush and wind-thrown trees, in preparation for a new tote road, noticed their horses spooked when they approached the foot of a low, knuckly ridge. As they stood beside it, a faint sound carried out from inside the rock like the cries of a baby—formless and colicky. Later that day, after dinner, the men told Papa about the horses, half joking that Jack in the Dark must be sleeping down there in a tree hollow. Like the other animals, he’d gone to ground, among the eyebright and vetch, the fall before. But here he was again, scaring horses, kicking up storms of cone scale and needle—giving away the animals’ wintering world drilled with sleep-holes.
Besides being camp cook, Papa was a good outdoorsman. He thought a bear might be about, as horses shied away from anything bear. Even sleeping bears. The men said no. Bears don’t move much in the winter. With dinner cleared away, Papa went out to check for himself. He found a fault in the mealy snow, a hole rimed with frost, at the foot of a gaunt fir—a breathing chimney that marked where something slept deep in a den, waiting true spring’s arrival. This was where the crying came from. Papa dug into the snow with his snowshoe until he found the telltale bracken marking the den’s threshold. He cut a sapling with his hatchet and poked it down, down, down into a mangle of roots and a ground-fuggy hollow until it yielded to something soft. He reached in and brought it out. A single cub. A first litter. No bigger than two apples side by side. There was no sign of its mother—tracks neither in nor away. Back then, bears were hunted and used up, just as the wolves had been hunted into stories a century earlier, though men still claimed from time to time to see one running with wild dogs, living just out of sight.
Squalling, toothless, blind—Bruno came into camp swaddled in Papa’s mackinaw. And from the moment Papa set him down in the basket beside me, Bruno wanted to stay close. It would have been too cruel to let such an orphaned creature die from hunger, he said. Ivy, my sister, danced around him, begging Papa to let him sleep in the hollows of her hands. And the woodsmen came in shy, hoping to stroke the crest of coarse hair along his skull with their rough knuckles.
So Mama rocked us together in her cane-backed chair, in the corner of the room where the lantern’s flame caught on drafts, sending long, warped shadows along the axe-hewn walls. And in that chair she suckled us together, saying, “This here’s your brother and this here’s your sister.”
One photo of our time together exists. It was taken by Song-catcher—whose birth name was Helen but I always called her Song-catcher—who came from the Outside to collect our lullabies and murder ballads. Songs carried from family to family on coffin boats, across highlands and outlands—kept alive, here, in the waste places and cutting grounds. The borderings of New Brunswick. She and her companion, Ebony, came from the Outside to see us because there’d been rumours passing between lumber camps, running back through the trees, of a wom
They saw the omens and then—ten miles, five miles—just beyond the worst of the road, where three tote roads and a skid road came together, boughed and planked in places to prevent the horses with their cumbersome loads from slipping in the mud, they might’ve reached the edge of our cutting grounds. In the distance, sharp and deep sounds: axe bites, sleigh bells, a ring of hammer strokes on the splitting wedge, and then a man might’ve called out, “Widow-maker!” And a tree might’ve shivered and leaned ever so slightly before it began to fall—first slowly then with a rushing violence, snapping limbs off neighbouring trees, before smashing onto the forest floor in a cloud of needles, sawdust, and snow duff.
From the stories, they knew to go on: just beyond the felling grounds. Camp 33. A little lean-cabin tacked onto the cookhouse where a window palely glowed like the light that sometimes comes before storms. I imagine they stood under our rough-edged awning. Song-catcher knocking twice and waiting as the rain came down and amplified itself on the duckboards where Mama had painted hopscotch squares for Ivy. Maybe Song-catcher placed her feet on two and five, while Ebony stood neatly on ten. It was Ivy who opened our door that day and considered the women. She took full measure of them then stepped aside to let them in.
I imagine Song-catcher and Ebony standing at our threshold, their eyes adjusting to the inside dark. Our room close, lit only with oil lamps—their pie-tin shields reflecting loose light and the backlog fire that made everyone’s eyes glow amber. Our walls papered with yellowy pictures from calendars and cowboy magazines, dried flowers and herbs strung above the window, and the beds—two troughs filled with fir boughs—made over with crazy quilts. A deacon’s bench. A mule-eared chair. Our lean-shed typical of the camps in its meagreness, but not so typical in its occupants.
I imagine it was only after they’d stepped into our lean-cabin that Song-catcher realized she hadn’t prepared herself for this at all. The long travel, the weather, and Mama in a rocking chair next to the fire, soot streaks running up over the chinked logs with the shapes of boneless faces. Our room would have held the afternoon dusk and the window light would have haloed Mama’s slight form, and her bare breasts: an infant on her right and, on her left, just as the rumours claimed, a bear cub, who watched the women approach, though it did not stop its suck.
I’m sure Ebony’s breath caught in her throat. Jesus, she might’ve whispered.
Deep-eyed and thoughtful, Ivy would’ve sat at Mama’s feet. A groggy housefly buzzing in the burlap curtain’s folds. She might’ve held up a cloth doll. A topsy-turvy. Now a little red riding hood, now a grandmother wolf with her spectacles and teeth.
“Look,” she might’ve whispered, pulling at Song-catcher’s pant hem with the wolf. “Look.”
* * *
I saw it once: that photo of me and Bruno and Mama. We were part of Song-catcher’s talks in the Outside about the woods. Recordings of both Bruno’s cries and Mama’s lullabies, so I’ve been told, have travelled through many parts of the world, of which I am unfamiliar. I did not have a name yet when Bruno came to live with us, though my parents and all the woodsmen deliberated on what I might be called. It was Song-catcher, on her first visit, who suggested Pearly Everlasting, a plant that likes to live beside shiny things. And from her wooden house near Smoke River, fifty miles away from our lean-cabin, in love a little with Mama for her kindnesses, Song-catcher later sent us a spoon from Bern, Switzerland—the City of Bears—with a silver bear attached to its handle and a bowl engraved with our names and birthdate: Pearly Everlasting & Bruno False Spring 1918.
Everyone Awake in the Swamp
So Bruno and I grew up together on shovelled land, cut land, sawed land, and burnt land. Land gridded and hollowed, stumped, surveyed, and pulped as companies tried and failed to tame the place—forcing on it little resurrections. And we came to know certain things at those tusky edges of what most people thought of as “the woods,” where night animals of the northern kind followed their own dark laws—their crooked paths secreting through tule ponds and high shoulders of snow. But during the summer months, when the season finished, we moved back up to our cabin on Greenlaw Mountain.
We were Greenlaw royalty, Mama used to say, because there’s always been a woman up there, though not always a man because they sometimes died too fast or left for elsewhere, but a woman, a woman has always lived on the mountain. My eighth great-grandmother, Burunild Slaywrock, came from the Outside—the Highlands of Scotland—with her collection of herbs and salves and moved onto the mountain and never left. How she came to find it, no one knows, but Mama said she’d been honoured by a king who’d fallen from his horse during a war. A strong man had lifted the armoured king from beneath his battle-killed horse and brought him to Grandma Slaywrock. She’d mended the king’s broken bones and he’d given her a gift in return: a gold double-horn necklace to protect her against the evil. Passed down from generation to generation, it now belonged to Mama. It was her sole piece of jewellery and she wore it with great pride. The king also granted Grandma Slaywrock and her six daughters safe passage to a Canada known then by many other names. In our woods, she met and became friends with the local Mi’kmaq women, and they soon realized they had some healing in common. She showed them some of what she knew and they taught her a bit of their language and how to draw cures from plants unfamiliar to my age-old grandmother—some Mama still used on camp injuries. But I’m not at liberty to say those words as they’re not mine to share.
Every year in August, we came down from Greenlaw Mountain to stay in the camps with Papa. When the men built new horse hovels, bunkhouses, and a cookhouse, they also built us a lean-cabin—much like a den with a low roof of cedar splints that covered a frame of notched spruce logs, hand-hewn with an axe and froe and chinked with moss. With the scraps left over, the men built me and Bruno a tree fort and Bruno a den box for his wintering. Surrounded by two hundred kerf-cut stumps, cordwood, sleds, snowshoes, saws, axes, and whetstone wheels, we always lived near a trail that led to the felling grounds and then to a river, in most cases the Crooked Deadwater—a snarly piece of driveable water—where the men cut, skidded, yarded, and hauled the logs that would be pushed downriver in the spring. The wind never stopped howling around those camps back then. It could take a man to strange places as both companion and haunter. I asked Papa once, “Why’s it so windy round here?”
“It’s them wolves trying to blow our house down,” he said, handing me a molasses cookie and shooing me out of the kitchen.
Men came from all over to work in the camps, most hoping to work in Papa’s camp as he was the most famous cook around. Our camp was always made up of a mishmash of hungry men: quiet, broken ones who caulked ships in New York during the war, needle-jigged tattooed ones who made hardwood staves for molasses barrels bound for Barbados or stoked grain in southern Saskatchewan. Men who worked on one-lunger steam engines, in woodpecker mills and ice houses, who came from villages named after conjoined twins and wild pigs. Men from Scottish Highlands, Swedish hamlets, and Polish parishes, from hidden valleys and deep fjords, and smoke-blackened shacks with too many children. Province men. Shanty men. Les Canadiens. Les bûcherons. Skogshuggare. Drwal. Nujatejo’tasit.
For many, it took several days or weeks to reach the Walking Bosses who’d cut the men from their raggedy lines like horses and lead them into camps. Some had to sell an old milk cow to pay for their mail-order boots. And their picking was never easy. Bosses would take a harness apart and throw the pieces in a barrel of used motor oil, and make a green teamster scoop them out and put them back together again. When the crew was hired, they’d travel in knotted groups, hauling their turkey bags, duffles, and wanigans with them—each weighed down with chattels of wool blankets, socks, mittens, darning needles, axes, and Bicycle cards for stud poker. Together they followed the Walking Boss by twitching trail and wagon and flat-bottomed scow deeper into the dark woods where our camp waited. Over those winter and spring months, we’d become a makeshift family of sorts. All of us, with our bruised kindnesses and broken parts, looking out for each other because it was a matter of survival.
