Loggers' Daughters Read online

  Loggers’ Daughters

  Loggers’ Daughters

  by

  Maureen Brownlee

  OOLICHAN BOOKS

  FERNIE, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA

  2013

  Copyright © 2013 by MAUREEN BROWNLEE ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper or magazine or broadcast on radio or television; or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from ACCESS COPYRIGHT, 6 Adelaide Street East, Suite 900, Toronto, Ontario M5C 1H6.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Brownlee, Maureen, 1960- author

  Loggers’ daughters / Maureen Brownlee.

  ISBN 978-0-88982-294-8 (pbk.)

  I. Title.

  PS8603.R698L65 2013 C813’.6 C2013-902161-2

  eBook development: WildElement.ca

  We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council through the BC Ministry of Tourism, Culture, and the Arts, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, for our publishing activities.

  Published by

  Oolichan Books

  P.O. Box 2278

  Fernie, British Columbia

  Canada V0B 1M0

  www.oolichan.com

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  for my mother, Irma

  and my daughter, Lesli

  for teaching me, by example,

  what it means to persevere

  and in memory of Sam Brownlee

  who taught me to laugh

  and for Ron

  for the love

  Contents

  Preface

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Acknowledgements

  The lawyer was young. He had pink hands and neatly trimmed fingernails. He wore a grey suit with a navy tie, pulled tight. He listened while she told him her story, looked at her papers, nodded, and jotted notes. Then he outlined the normal sequence of events after an intestate death.

  “That means where there is no will,” he said. Of course, he assured her, these were not the usual circumstances.

  He glanced at his watch, she looked at hers. Fifty minutes had passed since she sat down.

  “Here’s what I want you to do,” he said. “Leave it with me. You go home. See if you can scare up the title. And while you’re at it, make some notes. They don’t have to be too elaborate. Just jot things down as they come to you—when the subject came up, where you were, who said what, that kind of thing.”

  He raised a hand though she hadn’t intended to speak.

  “I know. You think you’ve told me everything, but just try. You might remember something else. You might not. In the meantime I’ll follow up on a few things here. You make another appointment, see Judy on your way out, or give her a call when you know when you’re going to be back in town. When your husband can come too. We’ll put our heads together and decide how we want to proceed.”

  He wheeled backwards in his brown leather chair with the high padded back, bent over, and scrabbled around inside a cabinet.

  He tossed a yellow pad onto the desk in front of her. It had blue horizontal lines and one thin red vertical line that separated the left margin. A legal pad, she thought, and felt a quiver at the base of her spine.

  “Just some notes.” He gestured to the pad of paper. “Who. Where. When. What was said. Just the gist of it. And, in the meantime, if any of them ask…?”

  She shifted on her chair.

  He sighed, leaned forward. “You’ll tell them?”

  “Oh, right.” She nodded. “I’ll tell them that you think I’ve got a case.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  She had turned forty-four that spring. The lawyer, a junior associate, might have been thirty. She sat quite still, a stocky woman with short, curly black hair, wearing a flowered blouse and blue polyester slacks, her calloused hands tucked beneath the matching jacket folded across her knees.

  The lawyer sighed again, picked up the yellow pad and held it out until she took it. “Just notes.” He opened his soft palms toward her, as if to say how simple a thing it was that he was asking of her.

  He stood. She stood.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  She extended her hand, and he shook it.

  At precisely fifty-five minutes, he ushered her out the door.

  Adare tossed the yellow pad onto the car seat. Sat a moment looking at it.

  She dug through her purse and found the nub of a wooden pencil. She positioned the notepad across the steering wheel and then paused, nibbling at the empty metal eraser casing, squeezing it over onto itself with her teeth.

  She wrote a date.

  Wednesday, March 23, 1983.

  All of us.

  Deighton Hospital.

  One

  Adare woke knowing.

  She felt it in her eardrums, in the same tiny hollows above her jawbones where she felt the first big snowfall. There was a delicate variation in the atmosphere, a faint thickening of the air. During the night, while she had slept, the world had changed.

  In groggy segments between snooze buttons, as she drifted in the fog of sleep and dream for the nine minutes that was both shorter and longer than itself, she dreamed of her mother.

  In one of the dream fragments Myra sat down on the edge of the bed. The mattress sagged and Adare felt her body roll toward the woman who was her mother and not her mother. Ethereal, with black curls flowing around her face, the dream woman had high cheekbones and a sharp, smooth chin held up and to the side, backlit by a halo of streaming white light. The woman leaned in, smoothed Adare’s cheek with a cool hand, and whispered.

  Please.

  The whispered plea mingled with the dawn seeping under the blinds and fluttered against Adare’s eyelids. She couldn’t tell whether the dream woman was pleading for something, or against it. She kept her eyelids closed and willed herself back into the darkness, away from the light, away from the world beyond her dream.

  They would pull the plugs today.

  This morning.

  Garth would sign the papers. Nurses would remove needles and drips, feeding and oxygen tubes.

  The alarm buzzed and Adare smothered it again. She hauled her hand back under the covers, grasped the corner of the quilt, tucked it in along her chin. The dream opened, she let herself fall.

  This time the dream mother wasn’t sitting on the bed beside her stroking Adare’s cheek, as unlikely a circumstance as Adare could imagine, but fixed, a photograph in a brown cardboard frame. The same black curls, the same defiant chin, eyes distant, white blouse buttoned tight against her neck. Adare remembered the picture. It had been taken in the thirties, on a trip to Vancouver the year her mother had turned twenty-one.

  “It was all Daddy’s idea,” Myra had said. “First we went to the hairdresser and th
en to the photographer’s studio. You know,” she’d said, “you go in and they do your hair and your makeup, until you look like a movie star. Then, flash, you have a picture, looking like you never have before and never will again.”

  Adare remembered this exchange because they had just come from a funeral where such a photograph had graced the coffin. A glamour photograph, Myra had said and snorted, in that way she had, and Adare had felt uncomfortable, like she always did, at the underlying malevolence.

  But you have one too, Adare had wanted to say.

  Another snooze button. Blessed darkness, and then, from far away, behind a closed door, his voice deeper than usual, Garth demanding:

  Well?

  What do you say?

  Yes or no?

  We have to decide.

  Yes or no?

  Nancy?

  Joe?

  Adare?

  Yes or no?

  She heard her name again.

  Adare?

  Yes or no?

  “Adare?”

  “Adare! Are you here? Hello, the house! Anybody home?”

  “Ooh, shit!”

  Adare rolled out of bed, pulled on jeans under her flannel nightshirt, snatched open the bedroom door. It was Garth calling. From her kitchen.

  “Coming!”

  She heard the bang of the screen on the back porch.

  “Garth!” She hurried through the kitchen. “I’m here!” She hauled open the door to the porch and smacked into him coming back in. He grabbed her as she fell back and she caught the forearms of his jacket. They swayed, let go, backed apart. Adare laughed, a quick, nervous laugh.

  “Wow! Would you look at you,” she said. “Two days in a row without a hardhat, I barely know you.” She was accustomed to seeing him in wool pants, orange suspenders, a tattered, grey sweater, trademark tin hat. Today he wore black jeans, a white dress shirt open at the collar, and a chocolate leather jacket. No hat, not even a Finning cap, hair slicked down. They shared the curse of Brennan curls. Even cut short they were an unruly inheritance.

  “There you are.” He frowned. “I thought you said eight.”

  Adare grimaced. She had said eight. She’d also said she would meet him at the highway. “Did you drive in?”

  “Of course not. I know what that road is like this time of year. Drive on it now and you’ll be scraping your oil pan on the ruts all summer. Dave needs to get some more gravel onto that soft bit.”

  Adare nodded. Wanted to say that they had poured enough gravel into that soft bit to reach to China.

  “Does anything need to be done at the barn?”

  She shook her head. “Dave feeds before he goes, and we’re between calves. The cows are done; the heifers shouldn’t be starting for another couple weeks.”

  “So, what? You slept in?”

  She dropped her chin, rolled her eyes.

  He softened. “I don’t blame you. I’d have rather stayed in bed today too.”

  There was a pause. Adare looked away. “It was a long day, yesterday,” she said. “Then Dave didn’t get home till late.”

  Dave had blown a hose on his skidder before lunch so he’d run to Prince George for a replacement. On his way home he’d stopped to help a trucker.

  “I heard a couple guys on the radio,” Garth said. “Something about that Bolton kid who bought McNulty’s bed? What happened anyway?”

  “He got hung up. Right at the Bowron turnoff. Turned too sharp, pulled the bed right up onto the shoulder, high centred it, couldn’t go ahead, couldn’t go back. Didn’t have a clue. Dave had to unload the Cat, get him to unhook, pull the trailer off.”

  “He’s lucky Dave came along.”

  “Yeah, no doubt, he’d have been out there a long time otherwise. Dave didn’t pass a single soul the rest of the way home.”

  Garth chuckled. “He’d have figured it out eventually.”

  “Maybe.” He was close to forty, the Bolton kid, but it was generally agreed that he wasn’t the sharpest crayon in the box and not likely to last long in the lowbed business.

  “Always something,” Garth said.

  “Or somebody.” She gestured to the counter, to the flickering orange light on the coffee pot. “Dave made coffee. Cream’s in the fridge. I’ll get dressed.”

  It was dark in the bedroom. Adare went to the window, gave the blind a quick yank. It surged up, wrapping itself an extra turn at the top with a sharp thwack. It hadn’t snowed in the night. Hadn’t cloaked the dirty March mounds or masked the looming spring work. The snow was edging back from the raspberry patch, gray canes tilted and broken. It wouldn’t be long before she could get out there.

  Garth shouted something from the kitchen.

  She cracked open the door. “What?”

  “Where’s the sugar?”

  She hollered back, “Beside the sink, left-hand bottom shelf.”

  “Got it.”

  Adare turned to her closet. Last night, waiting for Dave, she had settled on the jade pantsuit that Brianne had helped her pick out for their twenty-fifth anniversary party last spring. She lifted it off the rack, laid it on the bed, reconsidered her choice. Garth was wearing denim. She hung the suit back in the closet, and felt a flicker of nostalgia for a time when she’d had two town dresses: one for weddings and dances, one for funerals.

  “Ugh.”

  She flipped through hangers. Plucked out a pair of black dress pants and a cream blouse, bronze stitching along the yoke. Holding the clothes up against herself, she examined the look in the full-length mirror on the back of the bedroom door. She returned to the closet, found a mohair sweater with a swirling pattern of beige and brown leaves. With the bottom three buttons fastened, it hid the place where her stomach swelled over the waistband of her pants. She sucked in her stomach, smoothed the front of the sweater. The fuzzy wool snagged at the dry, cracked skin along her index finger. She held out her hands, palms down and examined her chapped red knuckles.

  “Shit!” She fumbled in her night table drawer, found a tube of hand cream and tucked it into the pocket of her purse.

  Garth was in her seat at the kitchen table, looking out the window. “If you took those poplars down you’d be able to see the mountain.”

  Dave was of the same opinion, but Adare liked the poplars. “If I want to see the mountain, I can walk down to the barn.”

  She dropped her purse and dress shoes by the porch door, circled the kitchen. She flicked off the coffee pot, swept a handful of crumbs off the counter into her palm, flung them into the sink. Dave’s breakfast dishes were neatly stacked, egg-smeared plate inside the frying pan, cutlery at the side. Beside them a beef roast thawed, blood seeping through brown freezer paper onto a dinner plate. She poked the roast with her finger, gauging. Garth brought her his coffee cup, she set it in the sink, eyed the roast again. There was no telling how long they would be, so she took the roast to the fridge and made a space for it on the bottom shelf.

  “Ready?” Garth asked from the porch.

  She snapped off the kitchen light. “As I’ll ever be.”

  The Department of Highways had built up the grade when they put in the new road. Garth’s truck was perched at the top of the too steep approach.

  “This is where we need more gravel,” Adare said.

  “Yeah,” Garth said. “Jerks. They should have put more fill in here, built you a proper approach.”

  Adare nodded vigorously. Especially in winter when she had to gun the pickup to make the hill, and then just hope and pray no one was coming while she slid out onto the highway. Mind you, as Dave pointed out when she ranted, there was very rarely anyone coming.

  “Is that the new one?” Even dirty it was a good-looking truck, crew cab, dual tires on the back, an impressive array of cab lights.

  Garth laughed. “Yep.” Mud was
caked along the sides and the windows were smeared, except for two half moons above the wipers. “Pretty bad, eh?”

  Under the mud Adare could still make out the logo on the door, two stalwart spruce silhouettes, three little pines huddled alongside, and the handsome lettering of BRENNAN LOGGING INC. “It’s pretty bad,” she said, “but there’s no sense washing it now.”

  “Nope.”

  Adare stepped out of one muddy gumboot, retrieved her dress sock from the toe, slipped her foot into her dress shoe, stepped up into the cab. She shook off her other boot, breathing in deeply the familiar mingle of fresh sawdust, chain oil, and tobacco smoke. Something that had been clamped around her spine, deep in her lower back, relaxed. She sucked in another breath.

  A radio handset dangled from the rear-view mirror, its twisted cord stretched to a radio bolted to the underside of the dashboard that was crammed with scale slips and time cards. A pair of smudged green ear protectors held down a battered chequebook. Beside her on the wide bench seat a sturdy thermos, once green, now a camouflage of rust and grease and tarnished stainless steel, lolled between an open mickey of whisky and a half-empty bottle of cola.

  “Jeez, Garth,” she said. “Haven’t you heard that drinking and driving is on its way out?”

  He chuckled. “Toss that in the glovebox, will you?”

  She was focused on getting the glove compartment open when he said, “Yesterday was kinda rough.”

  The door fell open and she tucked the mickey inside.

  “Do you think we’re doing the right thing?” He was twisted toward her, arm along the top of the seat, as he backed onto the highway. She turned her head, looked him full in the face.

  “Yes,” she said. “I do.” She realized as she said it that it was true. Last night she would have said that she hadn’t had anything to do with it. That it was Garth’s decision. Garth and Nancy’s, maybe, but mostly Garth’s. His was the hand that would hold the pen that would make the mark that marked the decision.

  She slammed the glovebox. It flopped back open. She slammed it again.

  “Here.” Garth leaned across and fiddled with the latch and slammed it closed and it held. “It’s finicky.”