Very Marrow Of Our Bones , livre ebook

Ecw Press - Christine Higdon

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253 pages

English

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Defiance, faith, and triumph in a heartrending novel about daughters and mothers On a miserable November day in 1967, two women disappear from a working-class town on the Fraser River. The community is thrown into panic, with talk of drifters and murderous husbands. But no one can find a trace of Bette Parsons or Alice McFee. Even the egg seller, Doris Tenpenny, a woman to whom everyone tells their secrets, hears nothing. Ten-year-old Lulu Parsons discovers something, though: a milk-stained note her mother, Bette, left for her father on the kitchen table. Wally, it says, I will not live in a tarpaper shack for the rest of my life . . . Lulu tells no one, and months later she buries the note in the woods. At the age of ten, she starts running — and forgetting — lurching through her unraveled life, using the safety of solitude and detachment until, at fifty, she learns that she is not the only one who carri

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Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	03 avril 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781773051857
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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The Very Marrow of Our Bones
A Novel
Christine Higdon
Copyright
Copyright © Christine Higdon, 2018
Published by ECW Press
665 Gerrard Street East
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4M 1Y2
416-694-3348 / info@ecwpress.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Editors for the press: Michael Holmes / a misFit book
Cover design: David Gee
Author photo: Peter Higdon
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Higdon, Christine, author
The very marrow of our bones : a novel / Christine Higdon.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77041-416-7 (softcover)
Also issued as: 978-1-77305-186-4 (PDF)
978-1-77305-185-7 (ePub)
I. TITLE.
PS8615.I368V47 2018 C813’.6 C2017-906188-7 C2017-906189-5
The publication of The Very Marrow of Our Bones has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays. Ce livre est financé en partie par le gouvernement du Canada . We also acknowledge the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.
Contents Toward the End Part One: Daughters 1967, 1968 1974, 1975 Nearly Now Part Two: Mothers 1967, 1968 1977 Nearly Now, Too A Musical Playlist to Listen to While Reading The Very Marrow of Our Bones Acknowledgements About the Author Copyright
For
my father
my brothers
my sons
I used to think of marriage as a plate-glass
window just begging for a brick.
Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body
It was under the milk jug on the kitchen table. A wet ring cut across the centre of the paper, a lined sheet she’d torn from one of our scribblers. Mine probably. The ink had run milky blue, veins emptied onto the page. Why I hid it, I can’t say. Why I didn’t say anything about it to anyone, even when the police came, even years later, when my brother Trevor hammered a little wooden cross with her name on it into the garden, like for a dog’s grave, and I kicked it over, I will never know.
The note said: Wally, I will not live in a tarpaper shack for the rest of my life. Love, Bette.
None of us knew about pain. Not the kind that leaves you shattered and speechless. I had watched Trevor fly from the tree fort once—a graceless trapeze artist—and heard the sharp, unexpected snap of his wrist against the moss and cedar blanket of the forest floor. I’d seen my twin brothers Alan and Ambrose knocked bloody and unconscious in a dirt-bike crash at the gravelly corner of Forward Road and Hemlock Street. And when Jed was a puppy he ran headlong into the moving wheel of Mr. Tenpenny’s half ton. But no one had died. No one had left us. Not even a dog.
Once, my eldest brother Geordie and I came across the carcass of a freshly killed young possum in the back woods. Its arms were raised above its head, as if in disbelief. Beseeching. Whatever killed it had ripped open its belly and eaten all its tender bits. My mother’s disappearance left us all like that. Gutted, hapless creatures flung unceremoniously into raw isolation.
Sometimes pain brings people together, helps them to cross the grand abyss of human discord. The lost are found. Sons reach out to fathers after years of silence. Sisters forgive brothers. Sometimes it’s too late.
Toward the End
My brother, he could use some mercy now.
Mary Gauthier, Mercy Now
I was early and Trevor would be late. When the rain came, I took cover under the awning of the Sylvia Hotel with half a dozen others. The sky had been overfilled and resentful, waiting all day for its moment, and the rain pelted down, kicking up puffs of sand on the beach. Then, almost as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped. The sky had told us what it was feeling. Now it was ready, like a lover, to lie serenely above us, purged.
Not me. I don’t know what set me off. I was regretting having agreed to meet Trevor, so maybe the heavens and I were commiserating. Or maybe it was just my turn to glower and the sky’s tantrum had given me permission. Whichever, I walked along the beach path, away from Stanley Park, my mood matched by the tossing sea.
A young man skated by, then another, chasing. Grace on wheels, shoulders forward, arms back, rainwater spraying up behind their calves. Their lithe bodies flew away into the distance and I sighed. My most recent romantic encounter—a middle-aged American theatre critic—was still causing a commotion in my heart. Never again. I kicked a rock on the path and watched it fly off the seawall. I found a bench. It was dedicated to a dead person. This one read: Mac Clifton and Nippie. Beloved Husband and Father. 1920 – 2006 . Nippie. Faithful Companion. 1995 – 2007 . Playing fetch in the greatest field of all . Poor Nippie. I sat on the wet bench, covering the plaque with my back.
The tide was now as out as it could be. A knot of small children and a couple of women were combing the beach for shells and bullwhip kelp and other sea treasures. Another pretty young couple skated by hand in hand. I watched them, feeling even more irritable, until the boy tripped and the pair of them flew hands first to the wet asphalt. The Good Samaritan got the better of me, but not before an agreeable if completely uncharitable wave of score-settling washed over me. Enough, Lulu, I told myself. Pull yourself together. It’s just Trevor.
Trevor was loping down Bidwell then waiting to cross Beach Avenue. Too thin, and always the same—receding hair in one of those pathetic pencil-thin ponytails, skinny jeans, his ancient leather jacket. He was carrying two motorcycle helmets, one the kind you might as well not wear—a skid lid, Dad called them. I hadn’t been home for a year, hadn’t seen Trevor in longer, but he hadn’t changed. A little more gaunt maybe, if that was possible. He hadn’t noticed me yet. For a moment I considered slipping into the public washrooms at English Bay, pretending I hadn’t shown up. I’d done it before. That way I’d be sure of ending this stormy day without an argument. I should have.
He saw me. His arm went up, a long slow salute, a cool cock of the hand. Right on, Trevor. A car swerved, honked. Trevor gave the driver the finger and danced, Mick Jagger, across the street, pretty spry for a lifelong addict.
“Hey, Lulu. Little Sis. How are ya?” His hug was hard. No meat on his bones to make it sweet. Not that women seemed to care. Trevor, of all my brothers, had always had the gift with women. They fell for him. Smart, interesting, ought-to-know-better women left boyfriends, husbands, other countries for Trevor. And he unfailingly left them for some cherished wisp of freedom, or one of his other addictions.
We walked toward a big driftwood log on the beach; already we had nothing to say.
After a moment he said, “Remember Great-Aunt Nellie’s story about Joe Fortes?”
“No.”
“Old Joe, she called him. He lived around here somewhere, in a little cabin. He taught all the kids in English Bay to swim. Her too. Nineteen oh seven or something. The city gave him a friggin’ state funeral when he died. Don’t you remember her telling us about him?”
I shook my head. Trevor often remembered things I didn’t. And I had memories of things he didn’t. Even the stories we both remembered seemed authored by two different pens.
“What did you want to see me for?” I said, foot, as usual, in my mouth. It was not the kind of question I had intended to ask nor the ones I had rehearsed in the car on the way into town. But Trevor was well defended. He turned to me, no sign of injury in his eyes.
“A guy’s got a right to say hello to his little sister every once in a while, don’t he?” He smiled and leaned into my shoulder. “Besides, I wanted to talk to you about something.”
At the same time, I said “What?” and he said, “You’re never home, Lulu.” Surely that wasn’t what he wanted to talk to me about.
“Sorry,” I said. A dog ran past hauling a stick longer than itself. A stout woman in her seventies, her hair covered by an old-fashioned chiffon kerchief, shambled past shouting after the dog. Mum would have been seventy-six, but nothing, I imagined, like this woman. More so than with any of my brothers, being with Trevor made me think of her.
“What are you sorry for?”
I shrugged. “Do you ever think of Mum?” I said, nodding at the woman with the dog.
“Mum? Kind of weird to call her Mum, don’t you think?”
“Well, what do you call her?”
He didn’t say anything for a while, then, so forlornly I grimaced: “You bet, Bette?” It was Dad’s phrase. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I don’t call her anything. You kind of forget after forty years, don’t you?”
He looked down at his hands, examined his knuckles. His fingernails were dirty. I looked at his face in profile. He’d never had acne but