“A cat?” I had never owned a pet and considered animals in the house to be unclean.
“Sure, there’s a lady in town who has a batch of kittens ready to give away. Your little girl might like one.”
As we climbed back into the kitchen, I wondered how Bridget would feel about a kitten.
“Now for the upstairs. I want to see how the roof is holding up,” Old Joe said.
We mounted the carved staircase to the upper floor where Young Joe had uncovered the windows. By this time I had an idea what to look for, so I checked the walls for visible cracks and opened and shut the hall doors, which swung smoothly. My untrained eye couldn’t find anything wrong.
“What are those things?” I pointed to the pale blue tin plates on the walls, decorated with hand-painted flowers.
“Those are flue covers. They cover the stovepipe holes when the furnace isn’t being used.”
We went into the big bedroom facing south. Under the windows ran a full-length seat, a wooden bench covered with a padded cushion, and a gathered floor-length skirt of rose printed fabric.
We walked to the uncovered windows, drawn by the sun-drenched landscape. The view was even more spectacular than I remembered.
“Your great-aunt wanted these windows, even though everyone told her they would leak the heat. And they sure did, but it’s hard to argue with a view like this.”
“Mr. Daley.” I took a deep breath. “Do you honestly think that we could live out here by ourselves?”
He raised his bushy eyebrows, as if perplexed. “Well, why not? You’ve got good water, plenty of firewood, and a roof over your heads. What more could you want?”
It sounded so logical when he put it like that. I opened my mouth, then closed it again.
We went back into the hall and opened the door leading to the narrow attic staircase. I followed Old Joe as we climbed eight stairs, turned on a small landing, and went up another eight. My head and shoulders emerged into a huge room with slanted ceilings on all four sides, each with its own dormer window.
Unlike the rooms below, which were dusty but neatly organized, this was the repository of a lifetime of possessions. Steamer trunks and wooden crates were piled under the eaves. Several rugs, rolled up and tied with twine, were stacked in a heap. I opened the lid of a nearby wicker basket and found it filled with balls of colourful yarn. Pieces of a broken chair were tied together with a rag. Several round wooden hatboxes, picture frames, and lamp chimneys were jumbled together in a heap. The most startling object was a large stuffed moose’s head tucked into the far corner.
I was still staring at the clutter when Old Joe let out an exclamation. “Jesus Murphy, what have we got here!”
He was standing under a small hole the size of a human hand, almost hidden between the trusses in the roof. The blue sky was clearly visible through the opening.
“I’ve got to check the bedroom underneath this hole!” I heard his boots clumping down the stairs, and a few minutes later, clumping back up again.
“You’re damned lucky. This hole must have just happened. If it had opened up this spring, the whole house would have gone. First you get a hole in the roof, then the snow and water come inside, the moisture works through the floor and down into the next room, and finally right into the basement.
“The hole gets bigger, the floor starts to rot, you get squirrels building their nests and birds flying around inside, and it doesn’t take long before the whole house is wrecked.”
He paused and looked at me, grinning widely for the first time, revealing tobacco-stained teeth with a gap on one side.
“I’d say you got here just in the nick of time.”
August
Bridget sat beside me in the cab of the truck, her new kit-ten on her lap. It was an adorable grey tabby with four white paws, a “giveaway” kitten, as Old Joe explained when he dropped it off at the motel along with a plastic litter box and a bag of kitty litter. I wasn’t very pleased about acquiring a cat even before moving into the house, but Bridget’s cries of joy had won me over.
“Have you thought of a name for your kitty?”
“Fizzy!” Bridget announced.
I smiled. “He is fuzzy, isn’t he?”
“No, Mama, his name is Fizzy. When he saw a dog in the parking lot, he made a noise like this: Fizzzz.”
“Fizzy it is, then.”
“He’s so clean!” Bridget said with motherly pride. “He washes his face with his paws. And he even buries his own poo. I wish we could do that, don’t you?”
I was seated behind the wheel of our new vehicle — at least, new to us. It was a ten-year-old four-by-four half-ton Chevy Silverado that Edna’s teenaged son had sold to us. The truck was silver in colour, and I was already mentally calling it Silver, after the Lone Ranger’s horse: “Hi-Yo, Silver! Away!”
The boy had assured me it would last for another year, and it came with a set of winter tires. He showed me how to determine if they were too worn, by pressing a quarter into their broad zigzag treads. If the treads were deep enough to bury the caribou’s nose, the tires passed muster. These were stacked in the back, along with a huge load of supplies.
It seemed to be taking forever to get to the turnoff. I checked the mileage gauge again and mentally slapped myself on the forehead. I had forgotten that it was marked in kilometres! Instead of fifty miles an hour, I was driving fifty kilometres an hour — I did the mental math — thirty-one miles per hour. Canada used the metric system, and I would just have to get used to it.
I carefully changed gears, thankful that my first car had a standard transmission so I knew how to drive this truck. I stepped on the gas pedal, and Silver surged forward as if breaking into a gallop.
“I like sitting up here, don’t you, Mama?” We were elevated so high off the ground that I had to lift Bridget onto the bench seat. Fortunately she was just over the forty-pound limit for needing a safety seat. We could see for miles. Topping one of the gently rolling hills, we looked down on the surface of the forest, a green carpet sprinkled with little dark triangular points, the tips of the tallest spruce trees.
After I turned onto the gravel road, Silver navigated the ruts easily, although the ride got a bit rougher. According to Old Joe, the county didn’t bother maintaining the gravel road since it led to the Indian reservation, or reserve, as they called it here. Not only was that word different, I thought, I had to remember not to call them Indians. Apparently they didn’t like being called Indians, and who could blame them, really. Here they were called Indigenous peoples.
Fizzy objected to the bumpy ride with a faint meow. “Don’t be afraid, sweetie, we’re almost home.” Bridget spoke in a tone exactly like mine. I looked over my shoulder into the back of the truck, hoping nothing had fallen out.
That morning we were waiting outside when the big double doors opened into the town’s main grocery store, Juniper Foods. Bulk dry goods were first on the list, so while Bridget stood on the front of the shopping cart, I piled in ten-kilogram bags of flour and sugar, plus oatmeal, cornmeal, rice, macaroni, and spaghetti noodles.
Since we didn’t have any way to refrigerate our food, I stocked up on canned meat, fish, vegetables, and soup.
“Excuse