The Gravesavers Read online

  Once the spring arrived, every day after school I showed up at practice. And did I run! I ran until my legs burned, ran until my heart thumped double time, ran until my shirt got sweat slickery to my skin, ran until I tasted salt when I licked my lips.

  Every day, I ran away from home.

  When I got home, it was the reading that saved me from drowning in that sea of silence. Thanks to Mr. Forest, there are more than enough books to choose from in our house. Once a month ever since I can remember he’s lugged over this big box crammed full of comics, magazines and novels. He works for a book distributor and brings me the damaged ones that don’t sell. Their covers are ripped off.

  “They’re good books,” he says, “even if they don’t have the covers. ’Member now, Minn, ya can’t judge a book by its cover, eh?” When Mr. Forest laughs, he wheezes. His chest rattles. His belly jiggles. “Seems like I’ve worked up a thirst bringing over those books.” He winks at me.

  That’s my signal to fetch him a cold beer. Then he plays a game of crib with Corporal Ray. While they’re in the kitchen shouting “fifteen two, fifteen four!” I hunker down and crack open the first book. Just the smell of a new book gives me shivers.

  He’s right about the books being “oldies but goodies.” This past winter I read The Red Badge of Courage, Old Yeller, Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson and Treasure Island.

  They’re right up there with my mother’s old collection of Nancy Drew and Trixie Beldens.

  Thanks to Mr. Forest and the books and Coach Rigby and the running, I got through the long Grand Canyon winter and spring. I was pretty sure with the summer coming we would soon be the family we once were.

  But my parents had other plans.

  — BANISHED —

  Right out of a blue-sky morning one day in June at breakfast my father dropped the news.

  “We’ve decided that you should go spend some time with your grandmother when school is through. Only for a month,” he said.

  My whole universe cracked like the shell of the hard-boiled egg he’d just placed in front of me.

  “It’s not all summer, only half the summer,” he added, as if this halfness would make some difference to me. He sounded like someone had gagged him, stuffed cloth into his mouth so he couldn’t talk. Not again, I thought, he’s not going to cry again, is he? I still hadn’t recovered from the first time.

  I am not especially proud of what happened next. I could have said I shall go gladly Father for I am an obedient daughter. I could have said whatever you wish Father perhaps next time you’ll ask me first? Instead, I scraped my chair back from the table and screamed “I’m not going!” up every step to my room. There are twenty-one plus the landing. I didn’t slam the door but cried so loud I hoped my sobs would sink right through the floor into the hardness of my father’s heart. Then I tried to bargain. Not with my earthly father.

  On my knees, I prayed. At least I think it was praying. Loudly. “Please if I do not have to go to Boulder Basin I promise when I grow up I will be a missionary and help starving children in Third World countries, the ones with milk like dry chalk around their mouths, their eyes black pools of need, their bellies swollen with hunger.”

  “Cut the melodrama, Cinnamon! You’re going. That’s final!”

  I went to the top of the stairs and yelled back down at him, “What about my running? What about my track?”

  “I’ve already talked to your coach. He’s drawing up a schedule. You can run just as easily in Boulder Basin. You’ll be back in time for the provincials.” But this time his voice sounded less sure. That’s when I slammed the door.

  “Cucurbita maxima!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. Translation: big pumpkin! I am only allowed to curse using the Latin names of plants. This was my mother’s idea after I repeated something Corporal Ray said when he banged his thumb with a hammer when I was three. I am also allowed to use geographical place names. Kalamazoo! Tatamagouche! Shawinigan! This is something I refrain from doing, however, as it is an irritating habit of my grandmother’s. My grandmother, the retired history and geography teacher, still loves giving little pop quizzes even in moments of anger or excitement.

  My cussing got no reaction from my father. I shouted louder.

  “Cnicus benedictus!” The c is silent. Translation: bitter thistle weed! Still nothing.

  “Ni-PISS-i-quit!” I hollered next. Nipisiquit is in northern New Brunswick.

  That did it. My father leapt up the stairs two at a time and barged into my room. As I hightailed it onto my bed he lifted his foot. To boot me in the butt, I think.

  My father, who never ever hits, struck his toe on the metal mattress frame.

  He yelped. He forgot the Latin-plant cursing rule and all his geography lessons. He shouted out the Lord’s name in vain as well as a few other words that would have been bleeped out on TV. He hopped around on one foot, held the other foot in his hands. That’s when my mother appeared with her crumpled bed face.

  She was pale and as see-through as the last sliver of a bar of soap. Strange sounds came from an o in her mouth—mouse squeaking sounds. Her shoulders were shaking up and down and her head jerked back like she was taking some kind of seizure. She was, wonder of wonders, laughing. I mean really laughing.

  My father froze. Then, in slow motion, he floated towards her, wrapped his arms around her and began to laugh himself. My mother poked her head out from underneath his armpit. She was framed perfectly in the triangle of his arm.

  “Madonna,” she said to me. (That’s the name she’s always called me whenever I made a scene, or Pre Madonna when she’s really ticked off. I hadn’t heard it for months.) “Madonna, you’re not going to win any Academy Awards in this house for …,” she broke off for another fit of laughter, “for a performance like that one! Your father and I need some time alone. We’ve things to do, like …”

  Her voice broke then, like a twig snapped clean in two. “Like empty … out the baby’s room.” The laughter was over.

  “The thought of you going to your grandmother’s this year is more than I can bear. But she’s old, she’s family, and we need you to do this for us.”

  I nodded. Maybe because it was the first time she said more than one whole sentence in a month. Maybe because it made me think that there was hope things might have a chance of being normal again. Mostly, though, it was the guilt that made me cave in. They’d never said a thing to me, but I knew.

  Everything was my fault. The baby dying and my mother the zombie and my father the troubling gourmet.

  “I’ll go” is all I said.

  What I was thinking is anything, anything, anything, if it means you coming back from this ocean of silence we’ve all been drowning in. If you and Corporal Ray will keep laughing together. Just like this.

  Dad went to get the poor toe x-rayed. I can’t help it. I still have to laugh remembering the look on his face that day as he hopped around my room like some one-legged kangaroo.

  I’ll always be able to say the first and only time my father raised a hand to me, he raised a foot instead. And broke his toe. He does a much better job catching the bad guys.

  — WITH FRIENDS LIKE CAROLINA —

  For my parents’ sake, I pretended everything was tickety-boo. This is an expression my mother used to use a lot—before she forgot how to smile. Before she lost her voice. When she used to care about what I felt. I saved my complaining for Carolina. Carolina Jenkins is my best friend.

  “And who would ever thunk it?” she loves to remind me. We didn’t exactly get off to a great start. We were only six, after all.

  “Her name is Carolina.” My mother told me that as I was chasing an O around my bowl of alphabet cereal. So how would I ever be friends with a girl named Carolina, a name that tripped off my tongue like a song? Besides her name having four syllables and mine having only three, a difference that made all the difference in the world, was her skirt.

  “Nova Scotia tartan—that’s what that is,” s
aid my mother, “and why don’t you wear that jumper your grandmother gave you last Christmas more often?” Fat chance.

  And her shoes. Carolina that new girl who moved in next door had black patent-leather shoes with bows in the middle and never, not even for special, was I allowed shoes like that. On account of my flat feet. Instead, I had to wear brown lace-up lock-your-feet-in shoes—Oxfords is what they were called. Ugly is what they were.

  “So go on over there after breakfast, just go over there, dear, and make friends,” said my mother. Just like that.

  The houses on our street are exactly the same, like shoeboxes made of brick. The veranda railings almost touch, so I didn’t have to go next door to meet her. I just plunked myself down on our back steps and started peeling the paint, getting warm yellow slivers underneath my nails, sticky as gum. Carolina was sitting on her back steps playing with dolls. We were almost in spitting distance of each other.

  “Take a picture why don’t you?” she yelled and stuck out her tongue. I was just about to go back inside when her back door wheezed open. A boy, her brother I supposed it was, came out and thumped her a good one on the head. She ran after him, tackled him like a pro wrestler, jumped up and down on him and threw him around like he was some old sack of potatoes. Then an upstairs window scritched open and a voice sharp as thistles cut through everything.

  “You two hooligans stop that this minute! I leave you alone for two minutes and look what happens! Git in here, I said git in here, this minute!”

  Carolina looked over at me. “I said take a picture, fart face,” she said. Then stuck out her tongue.

  I skedaddled into our house to tell my mother what happened, especially about the swearing I heard. The f-word.

  My mother acted as if it was no big deal. In fact, I am sure I caught her trying to smother a laugh. Later that afternoon we baked chocolate chip cookies and invited the Jenkinses over for tea. Carolina was putting on her best manners for my mother.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Hotchkiss,” she said, and then when my mother’s back was turned she made a face at me. I made one back—my best face, the one where I can cross my eyes and stick my tongue almost to the tip of my nose. She liked it, I guess, because she laughed. I told her I liked her shoes. “Wanna try them on?” she asked. That was all it took. Friends forever!

  Our mother’s never did become too chummy. I guess they had too many differences. For example, my mother wears a terrycloth housecoat with bacon grease always spattered on the collar and Carolina’s mother wears a pink see-through thingy that reminds me of cotton candy. My mother’s a scruba-holic. Carolina’s mother lets her keep rabbits in the living room. She never mentions the rabbit turds scattered like raisins over their carpet.

  After I complained to Carolina about being shipped off to Boulder Basin, she stood in my bedroom, with her hands on her hips. She takes being three months older than me very seriously.

  “So then, here’s what you’re going to do. One: you’re going to go practise running so you can come back here and be track star extraordinaire in the August meet. Two: you are going to do detective work. Find out if Hardly Whynot really does have a summer home in Boulder Basin and is living incognito. That means in disguise. You can get his autograph and cheer up your depressing—I mean depressed mother. Three: you can write me letters. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll miss you loads, but you’re going to be fine just fine.”

  “But you don’t know my grandmother!”

  She squeezed my hand. “Maybe you don’t either,” she said.

  “What’s with you?” I snarled.

  “I can’t believe she’s as witchy as you say.”

  “She is! A sour old Vinegar Witch.”

  “Least you have a grandmother—I don’t. Maybe I could come down for a visit. In the meantime,” she giggled, “I’ll try to keep the other girls away from Gavin.”

  She poked me in the ribs and started chanting, “Gavin and Minn, up in a tree …” Made me furious.

  Gavin is not important to my story. Gavin Williamson was a long-distance runner. I was a sprinter. We trained together all spring. When he smiled his teeth were as polished as Chiclets. His skin was the colour of coffee with double cream. He smelled like herbal shampoo. When I told him I was leaving for most of the summer all he said was, “Bummer.”

  “It’s a sign,” said Carolina, “that the feeling between you two is mutual.”

  “I couldn’t care less,” I said.

  “That’s a double negative and a lie as big as Australia,” she replied.

  “I have other more important things to think about,” I said to her.

  She giggled. “What’s more important than l-u-v?”

  My father says that Carolina is boy crazy. He hopes I’ll always be able to keep my head on straight when it comes to boys. I’m embarrassed for him whenever he tries to talk about stuff like that. It’s as if it’s a foreign language or something. He stutters and stammers and can’t quite put a sentence together. Still, I have to admit, he was better than my mother, who still wasn’t even trying to talk to me at that time, in any language.

  — EVERYWHERE A PIPPA —

  My mother wasn’t the only one with problems. I noticed that the world was suddenly filled with sisters. There they were, holding hands in line at the supermarket, dressed in matching outfits. There they were, shopping in the mall. Hand in hand, sisters walked to school together. I saw them on TV brushing each other’s hair and trading beauty secrets. In one show, two sisters had a huge fight over some boy but hugged and made up in the end.

  Sisters ate from the same box of large fries at McDonald’s. They cheered for each other at basketball games. Sisters were maids of honour at weddings and fairy godmother aunts. Sisters were also Catholic nuns.

  The word sister echoed in other words: transistor, persister, resister. It rhymed with mister and blister and twister. And that’s how I felt. As if I’d been burned and blistered. Everything was twisted upside down and backwards. We were supposed to have had a birth in our family. Instead we had death. My parents were ghosts of the people they used to be.

  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. That’s all my mother did. Dust her china cabinet and play sucky songs by Hardly Whynot. Hardly? Hardly my mother. And there I was, doing my homework and the laundry and the dishes. Night after night. All this after trying to swallow Corporal Ray’s nightly concoctions. His so-called suppers were more disastrous than mine.

  “It tastes worse than dog food,” I told Carolina.

  “Yuck.” She didn’t ask how would you know unless you’ve eaten dog food—like a normal person might. That’s because we tried some once when we were seven. “Really yuck,” she repeated.

  I love it when someone understands.

  — CONFESSION —

  Sometimes growing up

  feels a lot like throwing up.

  That’s the best, the shortest and the only poem I ever wrote. It summed up how I felt exactly.

  “Good use of graphic detail and evocative use of simile,” wrote Miss Armstrong-Blanchett on my final test. Although her name is half French she was my English teacher. In winter, she wore a calf-length navy blue skirt with different coloured turtlenecks that matched her tights. Every spring she blossomed into a flower. She wore gauzy dresses that flowed to her ankles. She didn’t walk, she glided across the room like a ballerina, saying things like that was a cliché, I know you can be more original, think deeper. Her hair was super short and never the same colour more than a month. Her earrings were miniature mobiles.

  When Miss Armstrong-Blanchett talked, words danced from her lips. Ono-mat-o-pee-a. Sir Charles G.D. Roberts. I think she knew we all said the G.D. stood for God dam because it was a bonus question on the exam. I wrote in George Douglas and got my A plus.

  Miss Armstrong-Blanchett called me in to her class just before school was out and asked me if there was anything I needed to talk about.

  “No, but thanks for asking,” I said. I squirmed. She had a stare tha
t could burn right through to the inside of me.

  “I was intrigued by the metaphors on your exam,” she continued. Just as I thought. She liked the throwing up one, so I knew which one she meant. “‘My mother is a bleached-out dishrag full of holes’? I wouldn’t read too much into it.”

  “So your mother’s okay?”

  I was very close to saying no, she’s not, in fact she’s gone missing and doesn’t seem to know or care I am alive. But I just looked at the floor. It was stifling hot in the room. Someone down the hall started pounding on the piano.

  “And the other one. The extended metaphor?” she said finally.

  I frowned as if I couldn’t recall it.

  “‘The heart has four chambers: isolation chamber, torture chamber, chamber of horrors and chamber of ghosts.’” She had it memorized?

  “I was under pressure,” I said. “I just wrote the first thing that popped into my head.”

  “I know. That’s why we’re talking.”

  “I’ve got what my folks call an overactive imagination.”

  “Overactive? I don’t know about that. Compared to whom? Maybe it’s just your imagination. A poetic imagination.”

  I think it was supposed to be a compliment but I wasn’t sure. Especially when she said what she did next.

  “When you were little, did you ever have an imaginary friend?”

  I gawked at her. “No!” I tried to sound insulted. It was also a big lie. I had Orangey. Orangey was a teeny-tiny elephant who went everywhere with me. Orangey listened when I talked and often talked while I listened. Of course I’d outgrown Orangey. Years ago.

  “Too bad,” she went on. “I did. I had a fairy named Flower.”