Two hundred years ago, the first Europeans to settle on the parceled land of Canada’s Campbell Road put their industrious heads together and got to work planting rows of apple trees between their fields. They started bordering the southern edges where a new road wound alongside what would soon be log homes, fields, and gardens. Together, they grew those trees in the same way they’d heard the Japanese grew their own little Bonsai trees as if they’d been sculpted from a pliable clay. They shaped the trunks to lean spiritedly eastward as they would if the powerful gusts that had carried the settlers’ ships across the sea had turned and blown back again. These apple trees were the fingers of giants, pointing back home to the motherland, reminders of a country that would be foreign to the children of this new land; one which, without the grace of some divine vision, they would never see.
Five years ago, The Great Fortune Teller Mademoiselle Magica took her two grown daughters out for white wine and tapas and made one of her famous predictions. One of them, she said, would be lost for a time, stranded inside a forest of bowing trees. She saw the trunks bow so low that their limbs scraped the ground and they appeared to be prostrating themselves in deep reverence before an arc of impossibly blue sky.
****
I am threading my fingers through Puffy’s coat, feeling for the prickly fuzz of burs, praying each lump is a dog wart and not a tick. So much to get used to in this wild country home.
“Would you say we’re stranded here, Mick? What if we wanted to sell? No one will buy if we don’t finish the renos, so technically we’re stuck. It’s like she said it would be.”
“We’re doing the renos. You liked it when we bought it.” Mick holds his hand to the dog’s nose for a lick, sweating terribly from – yes – work on the renos. Long oval shadows wet the underarms and belly of his grey tank, but his hair, where it ripples out from under his ball cap, is dry as straw in the heat.
“Do you think that wasp sting traumatized her?”
“She’s fine, she’s feeling my stress, Mick. Dog empathy. But, I mean, you have to admit the leaning trees… It’s uncanny, don’t you think?”
“Please, the woman’s a carnival act, right?” he says.
“Fifty bucks and every sucker is either stranded, haunted, or meeting a mysterious frickin’ stranger. I’d tune her out, babe. I just wonder…” And I’m dumb enough to think for a moment that he’s wondering, like me, about my mother’s vision. But he continues, “I mean, she ran from the chainsaw yesterday. It buzzes like a big wasp, a little bit.”
“She couldn’t just be scared of the chainsaw?” I ask.
“She’s fine, she could use a swim.”
So, we race each other down the path by the burn barrel, Puffy nipping our heels because excitement turns her into a naughty toddler. All around us is the dog’s huffing and chirping
birds and the echo of our flip-flops clapping on the hard dirt, while inside me, in a burning place behind my ribs, rattles the memory of years spent humouring my mother and her wild predictions. I feel a shuffling, a barely conscious rearrangement, and God oh God, for the first time I’m beginning to believe my mother.
At the small wood that lies ten feet deep between the yard and the river, Mick and I stick to the path while Puffy crashes through bushes and low branches, and the three of us thunder and clap until I catch her by the collar mid-bound. I want to scout the river for bullfrogs first, before she plunges in and barks them all away.
A clearing of the throat, a manly belch, and yes, there’s one, then another. A stony face stares. Chinless, yet he seems somehow to rest his chin on the water’s surface in the calm outside of the current, serene. The other is only prehistoric eye lumps, the real-life image of a cartoon crocodile, peering at nothing. Mick watches me watch them, amused, probably, that a grown woman would drop everything to stare at a creature staring stupidly into the middle distance, even as he stands there doing the same. If I explain, he’ll see in me a weakness, and an unhealthy reliance on my mother’s predictions. Still, if I thought he would truly listen, I might tell him –the frog is alive, real. I need to believe I’m alive and real right now, too.
****
Several yards up the bank, a dot of blue shows through the trees. It’s not a naturally occurring hue down here. The river itself and the mud at the edge of the bank are the colour of storm clouds. Further from the water the auburn ground slides into the darker shade of tree trunks and exposed roots. Everything else comes in three discernible greens. When I investigate, I forget I’m barefoot and my wet skin tracks along dry dirt and ponderosa needles that jab into the soft places between my toes. Like a fire walker, I step precisely.
As I might have guessed by its jarring colour, it’s a hunk of plastic – a child’s paddle pool, about three feet across and decorated all over with embossed outlines of grinning turtles and fish. Monstrously ugly. It’s halfway filled with water, but that must have been done days ago because the surface is covered in fallen pine needles. There are some metal objects sunk under the water; I can’t make out what they are. I bend closer, but there’s no way I’m swishing my hand in that grime to get a look without knowing where the thing has been.
“Somebody dumped their trash,” I tell Mick.
He shrugs. “So? The neighbours have a little girl, right? She probably dragged it over.”
“So… their land ends way the hell over there.”
He assures me if I care so much, we can tie some coloured ribbons to the trees around the property line. But we’ve only been here a month and I don’t want to come across as a stickler. Mick says, “If it belongs to the girl, she’ll come back for it. It wasn’t here last week.”
But it’s still there the next day, and I can’t unsee it now, there in the corner of my eye as if I’ve got a blue blind spot blotting out that section of the woods.
****
My mother calls. She says, “You’re bothered by something. I see you speaking to a mysterious girl to regain your peace. And watch out for a spider on the raspberry bush – you’ll put your hand through her beautiful web.”
Two days later, when I reach for the perfect red berry, I see it too late. The silk sticks to my knuckles, but I never do see the spider. I imagine her scrunching her spindly legs to tuck herself under a raspberry leaf, clinging to what remains of her home. But I’m being dramatic, spiders don’t think that way.
****
The first log house on Campbell Road was built in a trapezoid shape, the back being several feet wider than the front. Some said this was due to the landowner’s poor planning coupled with a defect in his right eye that caused it to sweep unexpectedly from side to side. He let them think what they would think. The real reason, however, was that he and his wife loved children more than anything in the world and had convinced themselves they would be blessed with many. They raised grey geese for good meat and plucking, and fashioned an oversized featherbed to run the width of the elongated portion of the house. But the landowner was a humble man. He kept the front of his house short so his neighbours might not see his wealth so readily.
In the end, the husband and wife were unlucky; only one child survived past infancy. The pair came to realize they had erred in presuming their own will would be done, and the trapezoid house became a constant reminder of their folly. They spoke often of what it might have been like to see into the future, how they wouldn’t have built that long wall. Tearing open the bed, they dumped half the feathers in the river.
****
The next time I look into the plastic pool, most of the pine needles have been cleared away and I can now see that the metal objects in the water are dull silver fish, five of them, each made up of three articulated segments that flick back and forth in a swimming motion when I stir the water with a pine branch. Fishing lures. They’re tied by bits of braided line of varying lengths to red and-white bobbers that hold them over the pool’s floor. The bobbers definitely weren’t there before, which means this isn’t just an abandoned toy; the girl has been back to play here.
Later, when my irritation leads to two split baseboards and a hammer-dinged third, I turn to Mick for relief. “What if we want to go skinny dipping, though? What about when I’m finally home from the office and I just want to sit in silence back there with a book? Or meditate!” (I didn’t know the word could sound so shrill.)
“She’s not our kid, Mick; we shouldn’t have to babysit her paddle pool. We shouldn’t have to babysit her.” He looks at the window instead of my face, gazing far down the path to the pines as if he can see from here the idyllic smoke curl of river curving round the offending blue.
“Go knock on their door,” he says, looking tired with his forehead pressed to the pane. “Tell them to take it away, Celeste.”
****
The Great Fortune Teller, Mademoiselle Magica, gave birth to two daughters seven years apart in the salty swells of the Pacific. There, she swam and squatted and opened to the water, feeling herself buoyant but precariously so, like a floating bucket that might tip at any moment to welcome in the heavy sea. She planned the births years in advance after predicting that both babies would be born on July evenings when the tide on sun-warmed rocks would be womb warm, thus paving the way for each infant’s peaceful transition: from womb to womb to world.
Of those two daughters, one would deliver two children of her own under angry hospital lights into a doctor’s gloved hands, a conscious act of rebellion against her own unconventional birth. The other would for years be racked with internal pain, terribly misunderstood by doctors, who handed her prescriptions for antidepressants to dull the sensitivity of her womb, before one finally diagnosed endometriosis.
Some women in her online support group would go on to have babies; Celeste would not. Instead, she would throw herself full-force into her career as Director of Sustainable Development for the city and find comfort in a large terrier-cross.
All of this was foreseen a dozen years prior by the penetrating inner eye of Mademoiselle Magica.
****
“Had… vision… orning.” My mother’s voice cuts in and out, more distant with each phone call as she follows the Briggs Brothers and their travelling carnival south. “… aw you… girl again, dirty water. Also saw you… soup Mick loves… sweet potato.”
I listen to her broken talk of Tilt-a-Whirls, Test-Your-Strengths, and Coke-Bottle-Ring-Tosses, all the noise she lives with day after day when she’s settled in some parking lot or farmer’s field instead of on the road, and the guitars and hard drinking that follow into the nights. With the same intensity that I hunt stillness, my mother chases down commotion, speeding along behind all that zips, startles, whooshes, careens. She is forever doing. Does she travel so fast and far that she really does catch glimpses of the future?
Mick quits installing bathroom tiles at six, lays on the new hardwood to scratch behind Puffy’s ears, and wonders what we should cook for dinner.
“What do we have?” I ask, checking the fridge. A whole chicken, still frozen solid, and a few cheap steaks that will need marinating.
“Mostly veggies,” Mick says. “Oh, how about we do a salad and that spicy sweet potato soup thing? That’s always good.”
I check every cupboard, recheck the fridge. How can there not be another option? Mick grabs a vegetable brush and gets to scrubbing the soil from gnarled white sweet potatoes while I shuffle cartons of milk and jars of salsa on their shelves, searching for forgotten leftovers or anything that can be combined to make a meal. I bend, sifting through bottles of fish sauce and ketchup in the door, kneel in front of crispers, come up empty handed. It’s become crucial that I prove my mother wrong.
****
Four years after planting and shaping, the leaning trees flowered prettily and began to bear apples. They tasted fine, providing worthy sustenance to those who lived on the land and those with whom the landowners traded, but they did not look like any apple the people had seen before. One half of each apple grew fat and low and droopy, much like a small red pear.
This was the half that faced east. The other half was flat, so that it looked as if the fruit’s innards had dripped like sap from the branches and solidified to form dozens of asymmetrical
masses.
In 1891, the homes on Campbell Road were visited by the census enumerator, a straight and tall, brown-bearded man by the name of George Dunbar.
Because the owner of the trapezoid house esteemed good citizenship and was proud to have his name on the official count of Canadians, he greeted Mr. Dunbar cheerfully at the property line, sitting on the inclined trunk of one of his apple trees.
“Sir, that must’ve been a mighty wind,” said Mr. Dunbar.
“Can’t say I recollect it.”
“No wind did this,” said the landowner as he plucked an apple from the tree and offered it to his guest. Thinking that the man might be so impressed as to mention the unusual fruit to the census officials, who may even bring it to the attention of the Prime Minister in Ottawa. He wouldn’t have been surprised if Sir John Macdonald were to honour them with a visit to see – and taste – for himself.
Mr. Dunbar, however, was suspicious. He dropped the apple to the dirt, breaking it open with the heal of his boot. Its crisp white flesh burst over the good soil and seeds spilled from its split core. And Mr. Dunbar, smelling now the sweet scent of apple, mild in its freshness, nevertheless said, “Poison,” and noted on his form as succinctly as possible, while fully aware that it was not in his authority to do so. The residents of Campbell Road were in possession of strange trees unknown to the country, and that these trees could be reasonably assumed to produce a poison fruit. The danger, he believed, was that some may mistake such fruit as edible, given the trees’ similarity to apple trees.
“I have no doubt you will be ordered to burn these trees immediately,” he told the landowner. “I advise that you do so as soon as possible.”
He gathered the required census information and left hungry and repulsed.
And though they never received official word from Ottawa, the residents of Campbell Road, whose sweat and hard labour had made this plain little piece of Canada the unique sight that it was, fretted over the fate of their apple trees, which now seemed to bend not as beacons pointing to the motherland, but rather as citizens under the weight of the government’s heavy
hand. Each day they did not destroy the trees was a small deception, a turning away from the patriotic spirit they’d been so proud to cultivate.
****
Although she birthed me into the ocean, my mother refused to put me in swimming lessons. Even when I threatened to hurl myself skill-less into the sea, she did not relent. Earth’s waters belonged only to her.
When I was seventeen and my classmates took summer jobs as lifeguards, she said, “Do you know it was never true that witches could float? Oh, float in the air, that was something else. Of course they could levitate, most of them. But a lake…to a witch, well, it might as well have been boiling tar; once in, they couldn’t so much as claw their way out. There was a woman in Salem during the trials, Clemence Washer, accused of witchcraft and thrown into the river by a mob of men. Sank like a stone, as you can imagine. The townspeople fished her out alive, saying, “‘Ah-ha! So, she isn’t a witch!’ But, oh, she was… she was! Right after that, she took her revenge, killing every infant within a mile of the place.”
Now Mick is teaching me to swim in the river. Each time I push forward onto my belly, arms stretched in front of me, I feel myself sinking, sinking. I panic. I touch bottom with my fingers and quickly right myself. I guess I don’t quite believe that liquid can hold me or that Mick’s one hundred eighty pounds won’t suddenly become a sinking ship. Puffy paddles rings around me, whining. Dog empathy.
“Focus on keeping your butt up,” Mick says.
I say I’m busy keeping my head up, and does he remember when I decided to learn this? Stirring circles with his palms on the water’s glassy surface like he’s brushing the clouds from a crystal ball, he says, “Yeah, and it’s only been two weeks; you’ll get it.”
“But I didn’t have to do it, right? It was a choice I made? I wanted to swim. I wanted you to teach me.”
“Wishing you’d gone to a pro, or what? Babe, you’re doing fine.”
“No, it’s not that.”
He doesn’t get it, he won’t; it’s a waste of time to go on talking. I dig my toes into the soft riverbed and kick forward, pulling up sludge that turns the water to pudding around my waist. Was this, too, chosen by my mother? Point toes, burrow, scoop, kick. Ta-da! Pudding water. Because if Mademoiselle Magica knows your every move before you’ve moved a muscle, before even the starting pistol in your brain has fired, what you thought was you can’t be much more than a puppet dancing on a cardboard stage; even the scenery is made of cut-outs.
****
Upon setting sail in iron ships, the Europeans who would one day clear the land, plant the trees, and build their homes on Campbell Road did not know what lay ahead of them. They hoped, of course, for all that one can imagine they would hope: prosperity, second chances, rich soil and bountiful harvests, a better life for their children and the children yet to come. But trials and tribulations will follow human lives into even the brightest of futures.
The bobbing and tossing of one crowded ship caused such seasickness that the stench of it rivaled the pungent sea itself. It sent whales, porpoises, and great schools of fish fleeing from the hull. The passengers watched the creatures’ shapes in the waves, flat black shadows, huge and silent, slipping away, sometimes swimming just under the surface where they rippled like muscles under skin.
On that ship was the man who would build the trapezoid house. When his wife had vomited so many times that he thought she would die at sea, he confessed that he had made a terrible choice by leading his love onto those godforsaken waters for the dream of a fool.
****
The neighbour girl is about eight years old, chubby with big loops of brown curls that hang like fiddleheads unfurling. She wears a lime green romper with the words “Aqua Duck” across the front, or bright t-shirts under denim short-alls. Her cheeks are full of freckles and neither pale nor tanned, but a deep rosy pink. Her eyes are dark. All this I have been close enough to see, but I have never said “hello,” or “move your pool.”
I will not speak to the neighbour girl. My silence is all that keeps me from full immersion in the awful truth – that my illusory will belongs entirely to my mother.
On the phone from Flagstaff, Arizona, she tells me I will push Mick into the river. Bullshit. Why would I? She doesn’t know, she says.
But in the late afternoon, my foot slips under a serpentine root on the riverbank and while I flail to catch myself, I thump right into Mick, knocking him into the water. He’s only wet up
to his knees.
“Not much to prophesy about,” he says.
In Roswell, New Mexico, she has a vision of me up to my elbows in tomato juice. Two days later, while Mick is out shopping for light fixtures, Puffy, having learned no lessons of the wild from the wasp incident, has her first encounter with a skunk. I put her outside and tell myself she’ll air out in a while.
But the smell is suffocating, making the rounds of the front yard on a light breeze and wafting into the open kitchen window, innocent as if it were the smell of the rose bush, or burgers on the grill. Puffy noses the dirt, looking like she wants to bury her head, and I know it’s time to fill the bathtub with tomato juice and get to work.
As I rub her curls and she looks away from me at the freshly tiled wall, ashamed of her stink, my throat alternately tightens and heaves like the roiling of some invertebrate sea creature. I’m not sure if it’s the smell that’s making me nauseous or if this is existential dread.
The next time my mother calls, I ignore her voice, listening instead to the sounds behind it: the high birdlike tones of a recorded calliope and the distant screams on the midway. Both rise and fall away in a sweet rhythm as if waved through the air by a conductor’s hands. Though I don’t hear my mother’s words, I hear her pauses and am careful to make some ambiguous noise at each one. She might have told me my head will pop off tomorrow – I don’t hear it.
****
It’s not what I mean. A kiddy pool dragged over roots and needles and deposited in the woods of my backyard by a colourful little girl and filled and played with is not what I mean to say is bothering me. That would make me the neighbourhood witch, and I’d believe it, too. What I mean is plastic, is trespass, is artificial construction cutting holes in natural growth, is Walmart blue blotting out earthier tones. It has rained all night and is raining now, and Mick is watching baseball and Puffy is napping, and my mother’s voice over the phone, unusually clear, tells me an overnight rain that continues into the afternoon brings with it many spirits of the night. Most are friendly, she concedes, but there are those few whose lust for power make standing under such a rain very dangerous.
“Those spirits, they’ll enter your legs, arms, feet, especially if they are bared to the elements, and they will take over your body to lead you down terrifying paths.”
And there it is, that’s what I want; that’s what I mean by leaving the house, bare feet, bare legs, bare arms, bare shoulders, rain rolling over and seeping into me. I mean for someone else to move me instead of my mother. If it can’t be me, then let it be anyone else. And I can forget about the phone calls, the visions and predictions. I can imagine and, if I’m lucky, believe again that the will which moves me is my own.
The river is high and churning, dark enough that nothing is visible below the surface, a vast empty stomach digesting itself. The paddle pool, like a miniature river, has itself filled to overflowing its slick blue banks and moves with the raindrops in tiny currents. The pines have again dropped their needles into the pool water, but those that haven’t sunk have this time spread to the curved plastic edges where little waterfalls gush to the dirt below.
There are three new things in the pool. The first is a water strider skimming over the surface like a tiny rowboat. The girl must have captured and transported him; we are too far from the river for it to have deposited him, even as it swells with the rain. He flicks his four twig legs, ping ponging across his circular prison.
“What do you think of your new manufactured home?” I ask him. “Ever seen a sky so blue?”
He is still for a moment, then flicks violently, around the pool, the ticking of a preposterous clock.
Second, spread below the articulated fish who wave their tales as if they might swim and don’t know they’re tethered, there is a new silky layer of river mud.
Third, a pile of stones rests half covered by the mud in the middle of the pool. No, not stones, but pretty glass beads. I reach my soaking wet hand into the water, which is cold enough to make me flinch, and take a few. They are red and pink and shine in their wetness, probably some sort of lure like the fish. The way they’re piled and partially buried makes me think they are meant to be salmon eggs in the tableau.
“That’s mine.”
I must have been so consumed with the pool world that I didn’t hear her coming. She couldn’t have come quietly, dressed as she is in gumboots and the sort of baggy raincoat that swishes like tree branches. With the cords of her hood pulled tightly, her chubby face is pinched into a scalloped circle, and the ends of her short-alls stick out from below the coat just enough to show she isn’t nude underneath.
“You shouldn’t let the night spirits soak your legs like that,” I say. I figure I should tell her just in case it’s true.
“No,” she agrees, as if she’s thought of it before. “Why are you in your bathing suit?”
“I came here to swim. This part of the woods is mine, I think you know, and I wanted to swim today.”
I scoop up the water strider, who has now stilled his ticking, in a handful of rain and river, and bring him with me.
The rushing water is warmer than the rain and nice, nice. It sweeps my feet from under me, takes the thrashing of my arms, their reaching, the tossing of my head, and pulls them inside itself, and makes my movements its own. I feel that I am flicking like the water strider, but really I am moved by that great mover that pulls the river on.
****
Ten years after they had blossomed and borne their first misshapen fruit, most of the apple trees on Campbell Road slouched barren before a backdrop of healthy gardens and lush pine woods. Perhaps it was bad soil from the road, dusty and underworked, packed hard in places and in others sent airborne by the swing-step of horses, which had cut short their days of abundance. Of course, some folks said the forced leaning of the trunks had done it, and those thoroughly regretted having sent nature in bizarre directions according to man’s unreasonable aesthetic.
They became fearful of guiding their crops in any particular way, as if they had no right. They suffered discomforts ranging from mere laziness to utter dread at the thought of tilling soil, pulling weeds, and even pressing seeds into the earth with their fingers, rather than allowing them to settle where they may. This was pronounced an illness by those unafflicted, though it wouldn’t spread; it was a disease of moral failing. People clucked their tongues and shook their heads. It came, they said, of an abandonment of worldly duty or an intolerance of the mysterious. It left the sick leaning on rakes and shovels, frozen in their tracks, crops withering to black rot around their feet.