Unravelling Read online

  UNRAVELLING

  ESSENTIAL PROSE SERIES 183

  Guernica Editions Inc. acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. The Ontario Arts Council is an agency of the Government of Ontario.

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada.

  Nous reconnaissons l’appui financier du gouvernement du Canada.

  UNRAVELLING

  Josephine Boxwell

  TORONTO • CHICAGO • BUFFALO • LANCASTER (U.K.)

  2020

  Copyright © 2020, Josephine Boxwell and Guernica Editions Inc.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication,

  reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,

  mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored

  in a retrieval system, without the prior consent

  of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Michael Mirolla, general editor

  Lindsay Brown, editor

  David Moratto, interior and cover design

  Guernica Editions Inc.

  287 Templemead Drive, Hamilton, ON L8W 2W4

  2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, N.Y. 14150-6000 U.S.A.

  www.guernicaeditions.com

  Distributors:

  Independent Publishers Group (IPG)

  600 North Pulaski Road, Chicago IL 60624

  University of Toronto Press Distribution,

  5201 Dufferin Street, Toronto (ON), Canada M3H 5T8

  Gazelle Book Services, White Cross Mills

  High Town, Lancaster LA1 4XS U.K.

  First edition.

  Printed in Canada.

  Legal Deposit—Third Quarter

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2019949246

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Unravelling / Josephine Boxwell.

  Names: Boxwell, Josephine, author.

  Series: Essential prose series ; 183.

  Description: Series statement: Essential prose series ; 183

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190177373 | Canadiana (ebook) 2019017742X |

  ISBN 9781771835442 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771835459 (EPUB) |

  ISBN 9781771835466 (Kindle)

  Classification: LCC PS8603.O97675 U57 2020 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  For Erica

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  1 9 9 4

  ELENA REMEMBERED EVERYTHING. Not just the street names and the blackboard lessons and the number plates of every vehicle her parents had owned. She remembered the stories. There were stories everywhere: rolling out of people’s mouths, blowing in the summer dust, printed on the walls of the tiny village museum. She collected all of them, whole or in pieces, and she was sure there was a way to fit them together.

  Mamma had to raise her voice—something she tried to avoid—to be heard. “Turn that down! You’ll damage your ears!”

  They were on their way home from church, the three of them. Rob thumped his leather shoes on the tarmac while Mamma kept pace in her floral print dress and kitten heels. Elena trailed behind, shaking gravel out of her sandal. Rob removed his headphones to taunt Mamma. The tinny beats from his mixtape crackled out of the foam ear pads.

  “I don’t have to listen to you anymore. I’m getting out of this dump.”

  Rob always lost his temper on hot days. Sooner or later, he would boil over. He marched ahead of them with his thumb stuck out, kicking up dust that stuck to his sweating face, looking for vehicles heading out of town toward Stony Creek. The collared shirt Mamma bought for him two months ago was already tight around his shoulders. He was 14 and desperate to be his own man. Mamma dismissed him with a wave of her hand. She didn’t believe he’d really do it.

  Her expression hardened when a pale blue truck appeared on the horizon. It wasn’t one they recognized. There was only one way in or out of Stapleton. (The old highway ended at the railway tracks.) No one new arrived in town except by mistake, or in Mamma’s mind, to do something nasty, like dump garbage or steal things.

  “Roberto! Aspetti!”

  Mamma couldn’t keep up with her son, especially in her church outfit. Her mouth opened into a little “o” when the truck’s indicator started flashing. It pulled over right in front of Rob’s outstretched arm and he addressed the open window as Mamma clip-clopped toward them as fast as she could. She pulled her lips up into her sort-of-smile, slid her shades up and latched onto Rob’s shoulders with a firm grip.

  Bony, black-haired Frank leaned out of the window but Mamma showed no pleasure at the sight of a familiar face. Frank ran the Stapleton Inn and Mamma didn’t much like either of them.

  Frank stared at Mamma a bit too long without speaking. Mamma was pretty, Elena knew that. Dad said Mamma could stop traffic (if there was any). Her hair was naturally dark like Elena’s, but she had highlights and layers done at the Stony Creek salon and people often commented on how she looked so fashionable. Mamma never appeared in public with what she called her “plain face”. Elena wanted people to think she was pretty too, but Mamma said 10 was too young for lipsticks and lash curlers.

  Elena guessed Frank was older than Mamma but she couldn’t decide his actual age. Sometimes he giggled like a kid. He wore ripped jeans and tie-dyed t-shirts and she thought he cut his own hair because it was always shaggy and snarled at the back.

  Frank stretched his palm out of the window toward Elena as she skipped up to the vehicle. “Gimme five.”

  Beaming, she slapped his hand. Mamma was frowning but Elena liked him.

  “New truck, Frank?” Mamma’s words were friendly but her voice was flat. That’s how she spoke when she didn’t want to.

  “It was ... a couple decades ago.” He patted the door like it was his dog. “I bought it for parts.”

  Elena had never seen Frank fix cars but he was always collecting new hobbies. She liked that about him. Whenever she saw him around town, he was fired up about a new project, or he’d picked up something unusual.

  Frank flashed Rob an apologetic look. “I can’t drive you to Stony Creek. How ’bout I drive you all home instead?”

  Rob and Elena both turned to Mamma, Rob wiping the beads of sweat from his forehead, Elena pressing her palms together as she begged. “Please!”

  Mamma also found the heat unbearable yet today she had a shawl draped around her shoulders. Maybe she thought God would be offended by her bare, sweaty armpits.

  “Thanks, but we’re nearly home.”

  “Mom! Please!” Rob said, moaning.

  Frank was still leaning out of the driver’s window. “It’s no trouble, Giulia.”

  Mamma made a last-ditch attempt at a smile before turning away. Rob offered Frank one more desperate look. “Sorry, dude,” Frank said, stepping on the accelerator. Elena and Rob slowed to a crawl as they watched the truck stutter away. Mamma was right; home wasn’t that far but it seemed so much further now.

  Every week on the way home from church, the three of them passed an abandoned graveyard. Only Elena paid any attention to i
t. It wasn’t visible without crossing the concrete barrier that separated the road from the steep slope, but she knew the old Chinese cemetery was down there. It sat on a scrap of land just above the river. Dad had cautioned her there was no easy, or safe, way to reach it. The trail that cut along the eroding base of the riverbank was completely overgrown.

  Dad had told her about the cemetery after he swaggered into the house one morning swinging two dead grouse by their ankles. Mamma shooed him outside. Elena followed.

  “It ain’t easy getting down there but the birds sure like it,” he explained as Elena brushed her fingers against the soft feathers.

  “Isn’t it spooky?”

  “Nah. Grouse don’t care about ghosts. They like the gravel. They swallow it to help them digest their food.”

  Dad said the gravestones in that cemetery were marked with fancy dashes, that’s how the Chinese wrote. They’d come during the gold rush and Elena wanted to know where they’d all gone. Almost everyone she knew in Stapleton was white and the rest were mostly Native. Dad told her that Stapleton’s Chinatown burned down ages ago. Dad wasn’t from Stapleton and didn’t care much about history, but he’d do his best to find out about things when she asked. He drove her down to the gas station one afternoon and they bought cans of orange pop and drank them at the picnic bench beside a Moments In History signboard for the visitors that never came. She thought about how Chinatown’s ashes had been absorbed into the ground, leaving no trace. The sign didn’t explain how their cemetery ended up down by the river, so close it was practically falling in, but now those souls were trapped on the edge of their nowhere town forever.

  Mamma strode off down the highway, determined to prove how easy it was to walk home in 30-degree heat. Elena hesitated beside the barrier that came up to her hips and casually examined the tiny bumps and grooves on its surface. She glanced ahead to see if Mamma had noticed. She hadn’t.

  Straddling the concrete barrier was easy enough, even in the pale yellow dress that ended just below her knees, but something shifted when her jelly sandals sank into the coarse earth on the other side. She had moved from feeling safe to being aware, and she could feel every speck of her being twitch. She was like a small animal testing the air for danger, her heart pumping hard in her chest.

  Tiptoeing on the cusp of the slope, she could still only make out the shapes of the headstones. From up here, there were no visible markings, no inscriptions written in a foreign language. She shuffled her right foot half an inch further and squinted at the stones as hard as she could.

  “Elena!”

  Mamma screamed. Elena swung around, too quickly. She slipped out of balance and her heart hit her throat.

  The scree shifted rapidly beneath her feet, rushing around her ankles and carrying her with it as though she had been caught in a river current. She dug her heels in and it slowed her a little. Her shaky legs gave in about two-thirds of the way down and her back hit the dirt. She cried out as sharp edges shaved her skin.

  When she first hit the ground, all she could hear was the river, noisier than she thought it to be. Then Mamma’s screams rang down from the highway.

  Elena’s body throbbed with the aches of a thousand scrapes and twists. Her palms pulsated as she pushed them into the dust and sat upright. She craned her neck and looked up through the dusty clouds of her descent. There was the imprint of her journey written in the scree—light where she slid, heavy and compacted where she had stomped into it.

  Rob stepped gingerly onto the top of the slope. “You alright?” His voice squeaked under the pressure of his breaking vocal cords. “Yeah,” Elena called back. Beside him, their trembling mother had come as close to the edge as she dared, which wasn’t very far at all. She kept one hand on the low barrier.

  “I’m okay, Mom.”

  “Stay there!” Mamma shouted. She reached her other hand out to Rob but he found his own way back onto solid ground.

  Elena curled up into her bruises, bloodied skin and self pity, wrapped in dull brown cotton that was supposed to be yellow. The strap around her left ankle had snapped and one purple jelly sandal lay broken at the base of the slide.

  As the shock subsided, she remembered where she was. She pulled the remaining sandal off her right foot, hauled herself up and shook off some of the residue that clung to her dress and skin. Around her were small grey stones with symbols that ran up and down in black or white. She could see them clearly now that she was actually down in the place, covered in its dirt. The markings of people who’d lived there once. Dad was right; it wasn’t spooky. It was sad.

  Stapleton’s other graveyard was still in use. It also had a river view but it was part of the village. A row of houses stood between it and Main Street but one of the grand willows was visible from the post office. The Stapleton Cemetery was well cared-for; mown grass shaded by huge trees. People left colourful bouquets on those stones.

  There were no manicured trees to admire here. Yellow and brown grasses had overtaken the dirt between the grave markers. Sagebrush and taller, spindly bushes took root near the plateau’s edge, then spread across one side. Somewhere in there was the overgrown trail Dad had mentioned, running parallel to the highway.

  Elena could hear the water but she wanted to see it. She grimaced as she limped across the graveyard and pushed her way through the sprawling bushes until she could see the wide, bluish-brown river a few feet below. She found a large rock to perch on and listened to the water, her aches pounding away at her thoughts. A salmon jumped. It flew into the air and re-entered the water in the next instant, barely making a sound.

  A short distance upstream, men were waiting to catch salmon just like that one. Every August, they camped under blue tarpaulins north of the village where the river narrowed and the sockeye were easier to seize from the violent water. The fishermen stood on the rocks and used nets with long poles to lift out the thrashing fish. The carcasses were split open and hung to dry on wooden beams, the bright red meat interrupted by lines of pale skin where they’d been sliced widthways at regular intervals. Elena had seen the men at work only from a distance—Dad said that was their land, and their way of doing things. They didn’t need little girls interfering. It didn’t stop her from being curious.

  “What happens to the salmon that escape the nets? Are they free?”

  “They are until the bears swipe ’em up.”

  “What if they get past the bears?”

  “They make their way upstream to lay their eggs.”

  “Then what?”

  Dad hesitated. “Then they die.”

  “All of them?” Elena’s mouth had gaped in horror.

  “It’s a cycle,” he said, trying to reassure her. “It’s natural.”

  They would die anyway, even if they escaped the bears and the nets. It didn’t seem right for nature to be so unkind.

  A sound cut across the noise of the river, like the crunch of a footstep on dry grass, but it was difficult to make it out against the roar of the rushing water. Her spine shivered. She crept off her rock and wriggled through the bushes. Turning toward the graves, she caught a shadow of movement. Then nothing.

  She must have imagined it. This cemetery had been still for many years, since the time people referred to as “long ago.” It wasn’t a spooky place. The grouse didn’t think so.

  Another noise; her body tensed. This sound was worse, because it had a weight to it that couldn’t just be part of her imagination, and it wasn’t the light crackle of leaves disturbed by a mouse or the flutter of a bird’s wings. It belonged to a larger animal, like a coyote or a bear. She grabbed a small rock from the dust and held it tightly. The headstones were much too small to conceal her, so she squeezed into the bushes near the water’s edge, hoping that the animal wouldn’t hear her against the river’s clamour. She stood so still she barely even breathed.

  Swoosh, swoosh, then a pause. She listened to it a few times until she realized it was too consistent for a wild animal. As she peered
across the cemetery, fat sticks rose and fell in the brush beyond. Someone was clearing a path.

  Ken was a big man who might have been strong once but was now mostly soft. He cleared the bushes and loped toward her until he was close enough to scoop her up. Ken wasn’t family but Dad said he was like a brother. Brothers that looked not at all alike.

  Rob emerged from the trail behind Ken and dropped his path-clearing stick. The sweat from his efforts stuck his floppy hair to the sides of his face. Rob looked a lot like Dad. They both had square heads and small brown eyes and a few pale freckles on their cheeks. Elena had the freckles too but her hair was dark like Mamma’s, not dusty like theirs. Dad’s hair was always shaved, except in the few photos they had of him as a kid.

  Rob heaved a big sigh. She could tell she’d scared him but she didn’t say anything. He’d only deny it. She had Mamma’s green eyes and short stature and he had all her worries. He must have sprinted to the village to get Ken. Dad would have had to drive all the way from the mill.

  Mamma was waiting at the point where the freshly beaten path met the road. Flustered, she asked Elena so many times if she’d hit her head that Elena wondered if she had. Mamma turned over her arms and legs, examining all the scratches. She eventually decided nothing was serious enough to disturb the doctor on a Sunday.

  “I’ll drive you to the café,” Ken said. “I’ve got a pretty good first aid kit.”

  The potholes jolted Elena’s strained muscles and made her wince. No doubt Ken was trying to distract her by ramping up the radio, which was playing Alan Jackson’s Gone Country. Elena had seen him on TV in his cowboy hat and blonde hair and blue overalls. Ken knew all the words and sang them with extra twang, just to make her laugh. His scrawny blonde ponytail switched back and forth as he bobbed his head with the music. That’s what he and Dad had in common. They both made her laugh.

  Elena was perched on one of Ken’s plastic-wrapped chairs, reeking of pink antiseptic when Mary wobbled in. She threw Elena a suspicious glare as Mamma applied even more ointment to her scrapes. Mary sat down and dropped a dollar on the table. She didn’t look that old, but she moved as slowly as the oldest old people in town and talked like there was nothing she hadn’t seen before. Ken brought over the pot of coffee, poured her a cup and picked up the coin. The mounted fan clicked and whirred as Mary dabbed her forehead with wispy napkins from the dispenser.