with me inside, she’d say that the Amish don’t like to have their picture taken, as if she still held her ancestors’ view that posing for a photograph meant pride swelled in the soul.
“Besides,” she said, “I was the one taking all the pictures.”
I wondered if this was her cover for never having carried me at all, if she wasn’t telling me the true story. That I came from somewhere else. Someone else. Even though Mrs. Bergen had never been pregnant, she and Mr. Bergen showed up at church one Sunday with a baby in their arms—a girl they named Elizabeth, born from a different mother who lived in Manitoba and who didn’t want to keep her, and so they adopted her. On the sanctuary bulletin board beside the staircase to the nursery, Elizabeth’s photograph, along with her name and birthday written in fancy black script on a pink card, were thumbtacked to the cradle roll, which announced all the fellowship’s new babies.
My name, too, had been listed on a pink card, and my arrival announced like good news. My mother had carried me into the sanctuary, been swarmed by the women who wanted to get a look, to peel back the folds of the blanket and see my fat pink cheeks. Before me, it had been my mother, swaddled in her own mother’s arms. And before her, my grandmother, pink and small and bundled. Back and back we went, my mother, her mother, and the grandmothers long dead, tethered by the same cord strung beneath a sky that stretched from river valley to canyon to coast to plains, replicating and aglow across a continent and ocean, back into the dust and stars, back into the holding pen of Heaven, where another one waited to swing down on the line, come sliding into the doorway of the world, her body, my body, and whoever came next.
“See?” my mother said. “Here’s one of me holding you.” She pointed to a picture of me on her lap in the rocking chair, my brother squished in beside her on the seat, fighting for space. My cheeks flushed, my eyes wide and shining red, stunned by the camera flash. And looking down at me with an almost smile, my mother, green-eyed, younger, her shoulder-length brown hair pulled back from her face.
While I studied the picture, she headed back to the sink full of dishes and the pots simmering on the stove. The hunch gnawed deep, a question mark, a pang.
“Come, have something to eat,” my mother called from the kitchen.
There was more to the story, more that I wasn’t being told. I turned the pages and saw myself in miniature—pale and fuzz-headed, lying in a crib with that pink stuffed cat in my grip, chewing on a squeaky toy, cruising in the walker, sucking on a bottle, crawling on the linoleum in pursuit of my brother. In photo after photo, I repeated like an echo, starting small but growing, the way the belly grew and swelled. I’d come from far away, all the parts of me composed from other parts, like hand-me-downs turned into scraps and ready for the sewing. My eyes the same blue as my grandma’s mother, my hair the colour of my Tante Nite’s, my turquoise veins bright as my dad’s on the sallow skin beneath his shirtsleeves. If I really looked, I saw it—where I’d come from, who carried me here. At the table waited my place, the food laid out for me, my glass already poured full.
My Father’s World
IN THE SATURDAY morning hours, before the yard filled up with the smokestack exhaust and engine rumble of Peter-bilts and Kenworths, before all the loggers returned from their shifts and before my dad was home to shoo me back toward the house, I headed across the yard pocked with fallen leaves and pine cones, dodging the small puddles potholed in the gravel driveway, and snuck into the side door of the shop. I stepped over the threshold and into darkness. Friday night’s woodstove fire had gone to ashes, and the concrete floor beneath me had cooled in the night. The building’s only light shone from a strip of windows in the bay doors. Gone were the usual hiss of the air compressor, the tire gun’s jolt, and the flying sparks from the welder’s torch. Tools, chains, hoses, and cords dangled from hooks. Machines whose names I didn’t know lay propped against the walls. The only sound was the hum of the refrigerator and the scuff of my footsteps echoing.
At the far end of the shop, a staircase led to a small balcony. When I climbed the steps, I felt the same thrill as when I wandered alone inside the empty church on cleaning days. While my mother vacuumed and dusted the basement of the church, I would tiptoe through the sanctuary, snooping behind the pulpit, turning the pages of the preacher’s huge black Bible, reaching my hand into the velvet offering bags passed around each Sunday by the ushers, feeling for lost coins. In my dad’s shop, on the balcony overlooking the work bays, I opened and closed the tiny plastic drawers that lined the shelves. Nuts, bolts, screws, washers—the cold silver in my hands felt like money. I sorted them into small piles and clinked them together in my palm, dreaming myself rich, but on edge, listening for a logging truck heading up the driveway and my dad returning home.
We called it the shop, though no goods or services were for sale there. If anything was bought or sold at the shop, it was done by swap or dicker, as in “I’ll give you fifty bucks for that wheel rim” or “How about a case of beer for a hunk of moose?” When we moved to the five acres off Kenney Dam Road, the first thing my dad built was his shop. He was tired of renting space in someone else’s truck garage and wanted to buy a second logging truck—to be not just a log-hauler, but a company owner with a crew that drove for him.
The shop was big enough to hold two logging trucks with their empty trailers loaded on the backs. The double-bay doors raised and lowered on a pulley system, the metal chains jangling a silver echo off the concrete floor every time someone yanked them up to open. By my dad’s command, the chains were off-limits to me.
“You’re not strong enough,” he said. In a child’s grip, the chains could easily slip and the door come slamming down.
“It could crush you,” said my dad.
The threat alone became a magnet that drew me to the chains. When my dad wasn’t watching, I slipped them out from behind their holding hook on the wall and pulled just enough to let in a crack of light. As I lowered the door, I held the chains taut, careful to anchor myself to make sure it didn’t thud when it shut. I could feel the weight of it. It could crush you. I pictured myself splayed across the threshold, the door slicing down, cleaving my torso in two, guts spilled on concrete.
This was my father’s world—big rigs, horsepower, air horns, oil drums, tire guns, ratchets, rad hoses, woodsmoke, whisky, country crooners, raunchy laughter, and ashtrays brimming with ash and smouldering cigarettes. The shop was a world of men in coveralls, in grease-stained work pants and snap-front shirts, in steel-toed boots, and in ballcaps crested with logos for Aro Automotive and Pine Country Inn. My dad had his own line of ballcaps printed, royal blue with a white crest, and in bright block letters: Dave Funk Trucking, Ltd. He handed out his hats like handshakes or high-fives, eager to impress, to draw a new fan to his social crew. In his world, goodwill toward men was a freely given ballcap bearing his name. When he passed a man in town sporting one of his company hats, he nodded and lifted two fingers from the steering wheel in a kind of peace-salute hello and gesture of approval.
Old Alec with one glass eyeball. Doukhobor Joe. The Jakes, all three of them with dark-tinted glasses and puffy sideburns. They were members of the crowd that congregated at the shop, coming and going with their loud trucks. They borrowed my dad’s tools to do what monkey-wrenching needed to be done before the next shift in the bush, and after the work was finished, they hung around to pass a bottle of whisky or share a case of beer. Falcon, the pock-marked, lanky trucker, whose fear of snakes led my brother and me to chase him around the shop with a plastic cobra until he scrambled into his cab and refused to come out, even after we put the toy away. Clem, slit-eyed and always smiling, rosy-cheeked, with a kind, red-lipsticked wife who wouldn’t leave her house. Pack-sack Lewis, who lived in a travel trailer on the far side of the driveway and taught my brother how to trap squirrels, then skin them and stretch their tiny hides on homemade tanning frames built from twine and sticks. Sparky, who didn’t drive truck but knew all the loggers, who came for the free booze and always offered to finish off whatever bottles my dad had stashed away.
The shop crew loved their rye and Cokes,