The Gravesavers

  FOR MY FATHER

  “You look at the sky, and you wonder what’s up there, except what we see, the sun and the moon and the stars. Anything else? Who knows? Not me! Most of the time, I’m just going from minute to minute; I’m trying to get from here to there—all the chores my folks give me, and my own hassles I’ve got to get through. It’s when something unexpected happens that I stop myself and I ask what’s going on: what’s it all about?”

  “Do you find any answers then?”

  “No, not really. Only more questions.”

  —Eric, aged 12, in an interview with Robert Coles from The Spiritual Life of Children

  Row row row your boat

  Gently down the stream

  Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,

  Life is but a dream.

  TODAY

  My father says I know how to make a short story long. My mother says I was born with the gift of the gab.

  Today, I’ve got five minutes to speak—if I can. My tongue’s all puckered up, like I just bit into a choke-cherry, and my fists are clamped tighter than oyster shells. Minnows are swimming in my belly. As for my heart? It’s doing a tap-dance routine, beating faster than before the start of any race I’ve ever run. Ordinarily, I calm myself down by reciting the names of clouds or constellations or all the capitals in every province and territory of Canada.

  Today, that’s not working.

  There must be at least three hundred of us huddled around this gravesite.

  What I want to say in my speech is: everything. I’ve got this hankering, as Harv would say, a notion to tell the whole story. I want to tell John Hindley’s story. He can’t tell it himself because he’s dead. Kaput. History. Long gone—in a manner of speaking.

  But the truth whole truth and nothing but the truth cross my heart hope to die stick a needle in my eye is a slippery thing. That’s why, after I’m introduced, I’ll be telling all these good folks a big fat whopping lie. For their own protection.

  If I can make it up those steps to the podium without tripping over my own two feet, I’ll do my five-minute spiel. Croak it out if I have to. But I’ll always know one thing for certain. It’s only one part of a story inside of many stories all twisted around each other like a tangled-up mizzenmast. If, like me, your nautical knowledge is almost zero, a mizzenmast is part of a ship. Picture a humongous rope ladder. It can save your life. John Hindley taught me that. How he managed that is the kind of secret that can only be whispered to the clouds: Cirrus. Cumulus. Nimbus. Stratus. Cirrocumulus. Altostratus.

  YESTERDAYS

  — PROPER INTRODUCTIONS —

  Next month, I’ll be fourteen and I don’t believe in ghosts. Nuh-uh. At least, I don’t believe in the kind of ghost that can jump out of a mirror and chase you out of a house or anything. But spirits? That’s a whole other story.

  “The spirit of a person never dies as long as there’s someone around to remember them. And you never know who that someone might be,” says my grandmother.

  It could even be someone as ordinary as me, Cinnamon Elizabeth Hotchkiss. Mostly I go by Minn, but yes, that’s Cinnamon like the spice except with a capital C and that’s Hotchkiss, not hopscotch or hog-kiss in case you’re even halfway thinking of making a joke. The name Cinnamon comes from the buns my mother ate waiting for me to arrive. Also, the song. The one my father sang to her belly in his best country-and-western twang:

  O sweet little cinnamon baby

  O baby we love you so

  Sugar and spice and everything nice

  Our sweet little baby-yoooo!

  He yodels on the o. I know this song well because he still sings it to me. In front of my friends. Get the picture? Raymond—but hey, you can call me Ray— Hotchkiss is a real joker, all right. I think he really wishes he could yodel for a living. He’s a wannabe Wilf Carter—a famous singer “born right here in Nova Scotia,” he loves to boast. He seems to forget we live in New Brunswick and Wilf Carter is long dead. My father gets up every day, yodels in the shower like Wilf and dresses like a Canadian postcard. He’s a corporal in the RCMP. That stands for Royal Canadian Mounted Police, by the way, not Rotten Carrots Mashed Potatoes or Really Crazy Mental People. You might not know that if you aren’t Canadian.

  Being a Mountie’s daughter means I get to spit every year on November the tenth. That’s when my father polishes his boots for the Remembrance Day parade.

  I spit. Corporal Ray polishes. By the time we’re through, there I am, staring at my own reflection in the toe of each boot.

  “Shinier than any mirror in the whole of Buckingham Palace,” boasts Corporal Ray.

  But the best part? If I watch real close, I’ll catch his wink when he passes by next day in the parade. He’s supposed to be at attention and keep his eyes straight ahead like some kind of workhorse wearing blinders. Still, he always manages that wink.

  Being a cop’s kid isn’t all about having fun spitting. It’s not all parades.

  When I was in Grade Two, Davey Stevenson told me my father was a p-i-g PIG!

  “Pig child eat dirt!” he said. I ran home crying and told my mother who told my father.

  “Going to tell ya something, Minn,” he said that night after supper. “Next time Davey Stevenson tells you I’m a pig you look him right in the eye and say, that’s right, Davey, all cops are pigs. P-I-G-S. Stands for Pride, Integrity, Guts and Stamina.”

  That’s exactly what I did next time Davey started in. Shut him up pretty fast, all right.

  One night just last year Corporal Ray didn’t come home his usual time. When he got home my mother cried and hung on to him for dear life. They tried to spare me the details of what happened. Next day I found out anyhow, in the news. My father was the one who went in to get the bad guy. Buddy had a gun, too, and was holding his family hostage.

  I still have nightmares about that one.

  When I was little, Corporal Ray used to pretend he was a horse and cantered all us kids in the neighbourhood around the backyard. One at a time, he’d hoist us up on his shoulders, then gallop and whinny at the top of his lungs like some kind of idiot. Being a Mountie’s daughter means you know that the bad guys aren’t just on TV. You know that good guys are real, too.

  My mother, Dory, is a consultant for a paint store in downtown Fairvale. “It’s a dream job,” she says, “the world is my crayon book.” Office buildings and kitchen cabinets are, too. She mixes the paint, and best of all, she gets to invent new names all the time. Sombrero Sun. Cattail Brown. Foxy Cyan. Gumball Blue. That last one was one of my suggestions, by the way. Her favourite television show is Paint It Great and her most prized possession is an autographed copy of the book written by the show’s host. My mother also loves gardening and music by the old British singing group the Ladybugs.

  “Contrary to popular belief,” she says, “not all Maritimers grew up listening to fiddles and bagpipes.”

  She’s nuts about Hardly Whynot, the lead singer. “Hardly, sing to me,” she says when she puts on a CD. Then she gets a goopy look in her eyes like he’s singing just for her. Leastways, she used to.

  And I used to be the only child of Dory and Raymond Hotchkiss of 22 Redwood Drive, Fairvale, New Brunswick. E3B 1Z4. Eat three bananas, one Zamboni four.

  Everything’s changed. I’m still the only child. But my folks—as I knew them—vanished for a while. In their place? Two people—Dory and Ray look-alikes. Not Dory and Ray the parents I used to know.

  It wasn’t their fault. The winter before last, during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, a baby died before it was born. Corporal Ray and Dory’s baby. Because of what happened that week, and what happened after that and what happened after that, I got to meet John Hindley the way I did.

  — TH
E START OF THE BEGINNING —

  That winter, after my mother lost the baby, she lost her mind. That’s the way it seemed to me. After she came home from the hospital she went to her bedroom and slept for two months solid. Just as I feared she was about to become the Rip Van Winkle of Fairvale, I arrived home from school one afternoon and there she was, sitting on the sofa, all wrapped up in her shaggy pink bathrobe, watching TV. She still wasn’t much in the mood for talking, though. Whenever I talked to her, whatever I said, she had the same reaction.

  “That’s nice, dear,” she’d say, in a voice thin and flat as glass. Then her eyes would grow cloudy, like milk poured into water. She’d look right past me as if she was studying something on the wall above my head.

  By spring she sat long hours at the window watching fresh green shoots, tough as knotted knuckles, punch through frozen earth. Inch by inch by inch by inch, as if it were some prime-time drama on television. But she wouldn’t go outside and dig in the dirt like other years. She wouldn’t go outside at all.

  During those months my father wasn’t his great daddy-o-yodelling-fool self either. He wasn’t used to doing the laundry or so much cooking for one thing. We managed, but let’s just say he’s no gourmet cook and we ate enough macaroni and cheese to last me the rest of my life. The food wasn’t the worst of it. Picture this teeny-tiny ant at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. That would be me. Our house was hollow.

  At night sometimes I heard echoes of a baby crying.

  Most likely this was the result of my overactive imagination—something I seem to have been born with. In our family it’s spoken of like some sort of hideous birthmark, in a hushed tone. “Oh that’s Minn, with her overactive imagination.” Little do they really know.

  The crying I heard seemed real enough to me. More than once, it woke me up, and when I listened in the dark, it stopped. Then there was a happy gurgle like a baby’s laugh. I swear that’s what I heard, but I guess it doesn’t mean it was real. Darkness and sadness can play tricks on people.

  Still, it was not my imagination overactive or otherwise that invented the way things were. My father’s forehead was like some accordion made of skin, he was so puckered up with worry all the time. My mother was living in some kind of glue bottle. Stuck. I invented new names for her: Watcher of the Growing Grass. Keeper of the Wind Secrets.

  And for some reason I couldn’t help thinking of the church words I heard once on TV: Blessed fruit of thy womb. The man who said it was wearing a large pointy hat.

  I asked Corporal Ray what fruit of thy womb meant. I thought I’d heard fruit of the loom, as in underwear. I couldn’t understand why a church man would bless underwear.

  My father laughed so hard he choked. He gave me a mini anatomy lesson on the word womb and a brief version of the story of Mary and Joseph and Jesus. “Fruit of thy womb means a baby,” he said finally. “A child.”

  My mother: with no blessed fruit of her womb.

  Except, of course, for me.

  — THE WEIRDNESS OF WORDS —

  “Your mother lost the baby” is how my father put it the day it happened.

  I pictured this cardboard box like the one we had at elementary school for lost mittens and boots and stuff, some sort of lost and found for babies. I wanted to say, “Don’t worry, I’m sure she’ll find it again.”

  “It’s a miscarriage,” he continued, “but to your mother it’s the death of our child. Another one. Too many.”

  Miscarriage. All I could see was my old doll carriage without the doll speeding down a hill towards a baby who missed it. The same way you might miss the bus. Nancy Drew and the Mystery of the Missing Stage Coach. I’d read all the Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden mysteries in my mother’s cherished collection. I liked Trixie better than Nancy but neither one of them could solve the case of My Mother and the Mystery of the Missing Baby.

  Miscarriage. A word like a punch. It was like the wind had just been knocked out of me. See, it wasn’t just my mother’s loss. For as long as I could remember, I used to pray. I mean, I think it was praying. On my knees, I’d pray with my hands squeezed so tight I made my knuckles white: “Please please please puh-leeze send me a baby brother or sister.”

  When Corporal Ray said the miscarriage word, we were in the living room. To talk of death in a living room? It was the same room they told me about my grandmother dying and so why wasn’t it called the dying room or the dead room? Then the room began to come to life. The walls loosened and wobbled, squeezed in on me until there wasn’t space in my punched-in belly for an in breath. Something happened then I never saw before and hope to never see again.

  My father buried his head in his hands as if hoping I wouldn’t see. He began to cry the way little kids cry, gulping air as if he had the hiccups, his shoulders shaking up and down.

  My father, Corp. Raymond Hotchkiss of the RCMP, amateur yodelling champion of the world, was bawling like some baby. I blew out my breath. Then I got up to get him a tissue and hugged his head, holding it like it was fragile as an ostrich egg. He didn’t blow his nose, honking it on purpose like he always did, to make me laugh. Corporal Ray just kept crying and tearing that tissue into strips and pieces. Until that moment, I never really thought about how tears and tears were spelled the same.

  —ANGELS ON HIGH —

  Later that same day we walked to the hospital. The snowbanks were so high it was more like trundling through some marshmallow tunnel. The night was still and the sky blue flannel. It was so cold ice crystals formed inside my nostrils. I pictured miniature stalactites and stalagmites, which made me think of caves. Minn Hotchkiss and the Cave of Sorrow.

  We stopped in front of the hospital and my father pointed five floors up and three windows across.

  “That’s your mother’s room,” he said. “She’ll be home tomorrow.”

  I couldn’t help thinking that if my mother had have been there with us she’d be crooning about the colour of the sky. “Winter Blue, perhaps,” I could hear her saying. “Indigo Dream.” Or maybe just, “Purple Night.” The squares of light from those windows would really get her going. “Electric Amber! Topaz Fluorescent! No, I know, I’ve got it—Neon Gold!”

  It was impossible to me that on such a night as this my mother could be lying in there with no baby.

  “Want to go see her?” asked Corporal Ray. His voice left lots of room for saying no.

  “Tomorrow,” I said, “I’ll see her tomorrow.” He took my hand. For the first time in ages, I didn’t squirm away saying I was too old to hold hands with him. I needed to ask him a question.

  Just that afternoon Mrs. Robichaud told me that the baby was an angel in heaven with God now. The Robichauds go to church. They are French and Catholic.

  “Dis babee is now one of de purest angels because her feet, dey never even touch da groun, eh?”

  That’s how I found out the baby would have been a girl. I would have had a sister. Pippa. That was the name we had chosen. Close to Pepper, a spice, like my name. But chosen because of Pippi Longstocking, one of my favourite heroines. A boy would have been Jacob, after Jacob Two-Two.

  “And even dough you never see her, her spirit will be wid you always, p’tit poupée.” That means little doll, Mrs. Robichaud’s pet name for me. I liked what she said a lot. Now I had a sister angel. We don’t go to church and we’re not Catholic. In fact we’re not anything but I wished we were. It wasn’t the first time.

  “Honey, it’s not that we’re nothing,” said my mother. This was because I’d printed “nothing” in the blank after Religion on a school form in Grade Three. “Put in non-denominational.”

  “What’s that mean?” I asked her.

  She thought for a minute. “It’s more like we’re everything,” she said. I still leave that blank blank.

  I liked Mrs. Robichaud’s ideas. I even dared to tell my father exactly what she said and what I thought. That angels were a good thing.

  Corporal Ray smiled when I told him and squeezed my hand harde
r.

  “But,” I said, “how does anyone know if God and angels are real if we can’t see him or her or them or whatever?”

  For an answer, my father pointed to the stars.

  — STRATEGIES —

  There’s a good silence, when everything inside you hums—silence like a lullaby you settle down to listen to. That silence is like a blanket you can cuddle under huddled against a windy night. Then there is a kind of silence that sort of drips. Drips like melting icicles. Drip drop drip drop. It makes an ocean that roars so loud you think you could even drown in it. That’s what it was like at my house.

  I learned to get rid of this kind of silence. There are two ways to do this. Run, run, run. And read, read, read. Yep. You could say these were my life-saving strategies for overcoming deep-sea silence.

  My love of running happened by accident. In fact, until I discovered my hidden gift, my athletic career had been a disaster. I’d never been able to dribble for more than two bounces at a time. I hit my head with the field-hockey stick first time I picked it up. Then there was the time I vaulted over the box horse in gymnastics, drove my knee into my nose and bled all over the floor mat. In Grade Six, I sprained my middle finger trying to volley the volleyball. Picture a cast on a middle finger. At first the teacher thought I was pulling a stunt with a fake cast.

  “Take it off,” she snapped. “You’re not funny.”

  “I can’t,” I said, then yelped when she tried to yank it off herself.

  Anyhow, run in a straight line? I could do that.

  “You have the speed and the flat feet of the sprinter,” said Coach Rigby one day in gym class after he’d made us run laps. “I want you on my team, Minn.”

  He barks when he talks and has a bulldog face.

  I’ve never seen so many layers of wrinkles and frowns. He’s roly-poly as any stuffed-pillow Santa, with a face as orange as his tracksuit, but apparently he was quite a track star in his heyday. Even for me that’s a stretch of the imagination. He’s a great guy, though, and I am eternally grateful Coach Rigby noticed my speed and appreciated my flat feet.