come in threes. You just wait. Someone else will die soon.”
The post office made me feel like I was inside a story in the pages right before a mystery was about to be solved. I loved it when my mother let me go in there alone with her ring of keys. On the concrete floor, my footsteps echoed, and the walls of small numbered mailboxes felt like clues. When I slotted the key into our box, turned it, and opened the little door, I could see beyond the envelopes into the inner world of the mail-room, where torsos of women at work bustled by and boxes, parcels, and stacks of more envelopes waited to be sorted. Once, as I looked through the portal of the open mailbox, a face appeared. With only one eye and part of a nose in view, it looked like a cutaway from my nightmares, a demon winking through. When the eye met mine, a lady’s voice screeched in surprise. I slammed the metal door and, with shaking hands, slipped in the key, locked it, and ran back to the car.
So much of the town remained hidden, and it left me feeling small and curious about what I didn’t know. The law office, the courthouse, Frankie’s Pub—places like these existed in the empire of the unknown. I watched for people going in and out of doors to these mystery buildings, searching for a familiar face. What was Bud’s Electric, and who was Bud? What did people eat at The Chuckwagon Café? Who slept in the beds of the Reid Hotel? But I never asked these questions aloud, only let my imagination work them over into a personal mythology. Bud’s Electric became a shop owned by a bald man with flowers that plugged in and lit up, and chandeliers whose glass pendants dangled in the shapes of tulips and roses. Frankie’s Pub, I imagined, belonged to a man with a mustache and a huge room full of bumper buggies, the word “pub” sounding to me like the rubber punch of carnival cars bouncing off each other. If we happened to drive past on a late weekend evening and I saw out my backseat window a cluster of women and men huddled and smoking in the cold air, I looked for one who might be Frankie, a mustached man with the keys to all the cars.
The town, sprawled over a grid of streets that stretched beyond my experience, seemed to me inexhaustible. There were still alleys and streets I’d never walked down, whole neighbourhoods bordering the core that were full of houses full of families full of kids whose names I didn’t even know. On the outskirts and beyond were the rural districts—Sinkut, Mapes, Cluculz, Braeside, all geographies that marked the people who lived there. To live out at Mapes meant you raised livestock, usually hogs, sheep, and cattle, and definitely horses. To be from Cluculz Lake made you backwoods tough and tuned to wildness. Those around the base of Sinkut Mountain hunted, held traplines, and fished the creek. The Braeside families farmed in wide-open, river-fed fields of wheat, hay, canola, and barley, and raised dairy herds. We drove the narrow gravel roads, passed acres and acres without a single house in sight, until the world looked uniformly uninhabited. But the town itself—the village centre—full of people whose daily work dressed them up in ironed shirts and slacks, blouses and skirts—teachers, municipal workers, bank clerks, and insurance brokers—remained the true exotic.
That the world could be this close and yet so full of secrets magnified its allure. Like when the preacher spoke words like transfiguration, sanctification, justification—all those “-ations”—and read from the Bible those names so strange they seemed like a spell—Mephibosheth, Zerubbabel, Abednego—like other realms still veiled and obscured to me, the town held back its hidden stories. When we passed the old hospital on our way from Sunday-evening church, my mother, at the wheel, pointed at the building and said, “That’s where they kept the bodies.” My brother and I leaned forward in our seat, waiting for more. “Some people say it’s haunted,” she said, and then told us again about the year she worked as a nurse’s aide at the old St. Joseph’s Hospital. In the basement, at the far end of the building, was the morgue, where all the dead were stored in long metal drawers. Sometimes, she said, the nuns came to wash and prepare a body for burial, and to say a final prayer. In their long black robes, they seemed to float down the dim hallway, rosaries swinging as they walked. In the night-shift hours, no one wanted to go to the basement. The nurses swore they’d seen and heard strange things. An empty wheelchair rolling down the hall. The sound of footsteps. Creaking doors slamming shut when no one was around. A child crying for her mother.
Down the hill and across the bridge we drove, past the St. Joseph’s parish, with its low-roofed school, church, and convent housing. On the radio, quiet through our car speakers, a man’s voice intoned on a singing single note, Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. His voice turned everything misty, as if we had drifted inside a cloud of incense. The autumn fog rising from the river knit us together into mystery. My mother shook her head at the radio’s strangeness, reached out with a quick hand, and clicked the dial off. Behind us, the Catholic church vanished in our wake. Down the main street with its blackened store windows and empty sidewalks, through the green of the town’s single traffic light, we rolled. The night train’s long, slow whistle sounded, a far-off moan wearying toward us through the dark. If I leaned my head back against the seat and closed my eyes, I could see them still, those nuns floating in their black-and-white robes, their swinging rosaries, and I could hear the steps of someone walking, the doors swinging open to even more rooms, and the sound of a girl calling out from a hidden place on the north side of the river.
Where I Come From
THE WHOLE HOUSE sang with the voices of women—chatter in motion as they scurried from kitchen to dining room to living room and back to kitchen with napkins, dishes, glasses of fizzy punch, and laughter, at ease as they perched on stack stools, one pantyhosed leg crossed over the other. Aunts, great-aunts, grandmas, a great-grandma, cousins—first and second and third—abounded, as did the Bible-study and sewing-circle ladies from the church. A shriek and holler sounded by the stove, and there stood Aunt Mary with her white half-slip bunched around her ankles. Behind her, Auntie Margaret laughed and pointed. This was the standard family kitchen prank: sneak up, reach beneath a woman’s skirt, and pull down her undergarment. When the uncles tried it, spatulas slapped the air and wooden spoons flew, but when the women did it to each other, we all thought it was hilarious.
I’d come for the finger foods, the glass platters of marshmallow balls, fudge squares, antipasto on fancy crackers, dishes of olives and trays of meat, pinwheel sandwiches with Cheez Whiz and a slice of dill pickle rolled into the centre, and the huge watermelon my mother had decoratively knifed into a jagged basket filled with chunks of fruit.
I circled the table, the youngest of the guests except for the new baby, a pink swaddled lump that drew the women to hover over it with their oohs and oh buts. In the corner of the living room, amid a swag of pink crepe paper streamers and pink balloons, flanked by stacks of presents wrapped in various shades of pink, in a rocking chair plumped with pillows, sat my distant cousin Darlene, nursing her week-old daughter.
Because of the flannel receiving blanket draped over Darlene’s torso, I couldn’t see the baby, nor the breast. Always, the female body remained hidden. Beyond my own body and the occasional flesh-coloured blur of my mother as she darted from the bathroom to her bedroom, half-clad in a too-small towel, the most I’d spied of the female form was in the underwear section of the Sears catalogue, where women in pale girdles and brassieres smiled at something unseen, off camera, with their long-lashed mystery eyes.
It would be years before I’d hear the anatomically correct names for private body parts. For now, my mother referred to everything as a “peeter,” as in “what you pee with.” Everyone had a peeter, and you kept your peeter covered and quiet. You didn’t talk about your peeter, unless you had trouble with it. Then you went to your mother and said, “My peeter hurts,” and she handed you a tin of diaper-rash cream and said, “Here. Try this.”
With all the men named Peter whom I knew, the word and what it denoted became confusing. Great-Uncle Pete, my dad’s brother Peter, Peter Wiens, Peter Giesbrecht, Peter, Paul and Mary. I supposed they had peeters, too, but I couldn’t imagine them, even though I tried. When someone called out, “Peter!” at a family gathering, across any room, I held back my laugh, but barely, and tried not to look my brother in the eye for fear we’d both burst and be scolded, grounded, no Wonderful World of Disney tonight.