Cardinal Divide Read online

  Cardinal Divide

  Essential Prose Series 172

  Guernica Editions Inc. acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. The Ontario Arts Council is an agency of the Government of Ontario.

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada.

  Cardinal Divide

  Nina Newington

  TORONTO • CHICAGO • BUFFALO • LANCASTER (U.K.)

  2020

  Copyright © 2020, Nina Newington and Guernica Editions Inc.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication,

  reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,

  mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored

  in a retrieval system, without the prior consent

  of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Michael Mirolla, general editor

  Lindsay Brown, editor

  David Moratto, cover and interior design

  Guernica Editions Inc.

  287 Templemead Drive, Hamilton, (ON), Canada L8W 2W4

  2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, N.Y. 14150-6000 U.S.A.

  www.guernicaeditions.com

  Distributors:

  Independent Publishers Group (IPG)

  600 North Pulaski Road, Chicago IL 60624

  University of Toronto Press Distribution,

  5201 Dufferin Street, Toronto (ON), Canada M3H 5T8

  Gazelle Book Services, White Cross Mills

  High Town, Lancaster LA1 4XS U.K.

  First edition.

  Printed in Canada.

  Legal Deposit—Third Quarter

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2019949202

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Cardinal divide / Nina Newington.

  Names: Newington, Nina, 1958- author.

  Series: Essential prose series ; 172.

  Description: Series statement: Essential prose series ; 172

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190173793 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190173963 |

  ISBN 9781771834421 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771834438 (EPUB) |

  ISBN 9781771834445 (Kindle)

  Classification: LCC PS8627.E8655 C37 2020 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  for Debbie Lafferty

  13th April, 1958–7th August, 2017

  Contents

  WEEK ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  WEEK TWO

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  WEEK THREE

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty One

  Chapter Thirty Two

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Chapter Thirty Four

  Chapter Thirty Five

  Chapter Thirty Six

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  Chapter Thirty Eight

  WEEK FOUR

  Chapter Thirty Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty One

  Chapter Forty Two

  Chapter Forty Three

  Chapter Forty Four

  Chapter Forty Five

  Chapter Forty Six

  Chapter Forty Seven

  WEEK FIVE

  Chapter Forty Eight

  Chapter Forty Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty One

  Chapter Fifty Two

  Chapter Fifty Three

  Chapter Fifty Four

  Chapter Fifty Five

  Chapter Fifty Six

  Chapter Fifty Seven

  Chapter Fifty Eight

  Chapter Fifty Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty One

  Chapter Sixty Two

  Chapter Sixty Three

  WEEK SIX

  Chapter Sixty Four

  Chapter Sixty Five

  Chapter Sixty Six

  Chapter Sixty Seven

  Chapter Sixty Eight

  Chapter Sixty Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy One

  Chapter Seventy Two

  Chapter Seventy Three

  Chapter Seventy Four

  Chapter Seventy Five

  Chapter Seventy Six

  Chapter Seventy Seven

  Chapter Seventy Eight

  Chapter Seventy Nine

  Chapter Eighty

  WEEK SEVEN

  Chapter Eighty One

  Chapter Eighty Two

  Chapter Eighty Three

  Chapter Eighty Four

  Chapter Eighty Five

  Chapter Eighty Six

  Chapter Eighty Seven

  Chapter Eighty Eight

  Chapter Eighty Nine

  Chapter Ninety

  Chapter Ninety One

  Chapter Ninety Two

  Chapter Ninety Three

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  WEEK ONE

  Chapter One

  INSIDE IT’S HOT, dark. The smell of spruce needles in rain washes through my chest, something browner underneath. Pelts line log walls, in one corner a bed made of stout branches. Something hisses and sputters. The stove squats in the middle of the cabin like a plump cook in a tiny kitchen. The kettle is dented and blackened. Beyond it, an orange glow. Someone drawing on a pipe. Stringy silver hair.

  “Moira McFie, meet my daughter, Meg Coopworth.”

  “Come here.”

  I look at Dad. He nods.

  Her nose is long and sharp, her cheeks wrinkled and round. Eyes the grey-green of lichen flit over me. My breasts poke out from my chest like mountains.

  “Pleased to meet ye,” she says at last.

  I duck my head, mumble, “Pleased to meet you too,” the way Mum taught me.

  “Have a seat on the bed, why don’t ye?” Her voice is cracked but it swoops and banks like a swallow. I step back from her, from the stove that pulses with heat, sit down on the bed and sink my fingers into fur. The fur is warm as if the animal is still alive.

  “Well, Ben.” She was a famous trapper once, Dad said. Went on trapping long after most people gave up. I lie back. My eyes close. I’m slipping down into a nest lined with rabbit fur.

  Something nudges my shoulder. Bounding away between dark trees, I blink, open my eyes. It’s still dark.

  “Did ye dream?”

  The voice slips in among the deer. I nod.

  “And what were ye?”

  “A deer, running.”

  “Ah, that’s fine.”

  I struggle upright. She hands me a mug of tea and an oatcake. “To tide ye over for the journey home.”

  Outside the hides are gone. “While you were sleeping,” Dad says.

  Rancid sheep fat still smears the air.

  A few yards down the trail I look back. The cabin has disappeared.

  The phone rings. I jolt upright, snatch the receiver from the cradle.

  “
Dreamcatcher Lodge, Meg speaking.”

  “Can I speak to Tanya please?” A woman’s voice, urgent.

  “She’s not on tonight. She’ll be here tomorrow. Can I help?”

  “I’ll call tomorrow.” She hangs up.

  I reach for the log book.

  19th October

  16:00–24:00 Jay, Meg

  16:00 45 clients, 3 probation

  16:15 Jay starting room check, Meg on desk

  I fill in a few more room checks. End with:

  21:55 Jay in ceremony, Meg on desk

  I swivel the chair to face the dome, eyes climbing courses of rough stone. Twelve feet up, the stone ends, just shy of a pyramidal skylight. I catch the cadence of the Lord’s prayer, close my eyes, breathe in.

  Hai, hai. Amen. The blanket at the door is pulled aside and the scent of sage and sweetgrass grows stronger. Clients file out, blinking, reclaim shoes, eyeglasses, jewellery.

  “Good sleep.”

  “Good sleep.”

  They hug each other. Jay unwinds the purple and yellow sarong from around her black jeans, folds it up and puts it back in the basket before clicking open the gate.

  Deborah’s first in line for her meds. She knows the ropes, Deborah not Debbie, old white woman with her PhD and her cirrhosis, back for a fifth try.

  There’s a longer line for the phone. I set the egg timer for the first call.

  “Smooth,” I say, an hour later, bending over the log.

  “Good thing,” Jay says. “Two of us on, forty-five clients. Anything went sideways? Frig.” She shakes her head. “Coffee?”

  “Please.”

  Before Tanya came back to work here, it seemed like we’d be friends, Jay and I. We’d worked a few slow shifts together, talked about our lives while the clients played softball in the late summer evenings.

  She rounds the dome, a thick china mug in each hand. Five foot six with short dark hair, greying at the sides, she always wears black and her hair always looks as if it was cut yesterday.

  I follow her back into the office. She sits down by the computer, turning the chair to face me. Her skin is sallow, features rubbery but her eyes are sharp as her hair.

  “How’s it going?” she asks.

  “Not bad.”

  “You look tired. New guy?”

  “I wish. Well, no, I don’t.”

  Jay waits.

  There’s a lump in my throat. My eyes prickle.

  “I don’t know what I’ll do when my mother goes, whacked as she is,” Jay says.

  Fuck. I swallow. “It’s been nine months. But sometimes, something.” I shrug, take a drink of coffee. Jay’s watching, interested. She knows my story. The outline anyway. And I need to say it to someone. “I’m going to find them.”

  “Have you ever tried?”

  I shake my head. “Mum would have been so hurt. Besides, what was I going to find out that I wanted to know?”

  Jay waits.

  “But maybe it’s why I can’t seem to make a relationship that lasts, because I don’t ...” My throat swells again. “Anyway, how’s school?”

  She studies me for a moment then says, “Great. I love it.”

  “What are you taking this semester?”

  “History. More psychology. I’m doing my senior thesis on you-guessed-it ...”

  “Jung?”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do when I graduate.”

  “Get a Master’s?”

  She grins. “I promised Annie I’d pay off some of my loans first. Have to get a real job. Maybe I’ll have this place out of my system by then. Shall we start on the overview?” She turns to face the computer.

  I was the one who changed the subject. “What we were talking about earlier. My father has to know more.”

  “He’s pretty old, right?”

  “Really old. So I’d better ...” I shrug.

  “You never asked him before?”

  “He said he’d told me everything he knew.”

  “Why would he tell you more now?”

  “With Mum gone. She ... for her there was only one story. I was a gift from God. It was God’s plan I came when I did. End of story. You know.”

  Jay nods.

  “Mum told all the stories. How Dad came to Canada. How they met. How they bought the ranch. How I showed up. The same stories, over and over. With her gone it’s like a river dried up. You see the shape of the riverbed, the banks.” Jay sips her coffee. “I don’t know where I’m going with that. Anyway, I guess it’s somewhere to start. Asking Dad. Because it doesn’t really add up, that they were allowed to adopt me without a birth certificate. Without anything.”

  “Depends. You were what, ten, eleven? Late sixties? They were snatching kids right off the reserves, putting them up for adoption.”

  “People I used to work with all assumed I was Ukrainian.”

  “Everyone here thinks you’re Cree.”

  Chapter Two

  I PUT THE kettle on, scatter flour on the counter, turn out the dough I mixed when I got in from work. My hands push and fold, finding the rhythm, the rhythm of kittens kneading the teat. The dough becomes flesh, elastic and smooth. Cover it with the palm of your hand, you can feel it press against you. I brought a loaf in for Jay, not long after I started baking. Put it on the desk. She didn’t pick it up, just said, ‘It’s a lot of work, eh?’ Heather came in, sniffed the air. ‘My mother always baked,’ she said. ‘Far as I’m concerned that’s why God created supermarkets.’

  First and last loaf I took to work. I bring a couple when I visit Dad but that’s not enough to keep up with the supply.

  I clean and dry the bowl, oil it, slip the dough back in and cover it. Make coffee, eat my toast and boiled egg then go for my walk. When I get back the dough is nudging up the cloth like the bellies of young girls at work, pregnant bellies rounding skimpy T-shirts. I rest my palm on the dough and it shrinks back into itself, but when I slide it out onto the counter, flatten it, fold in the sides, roll it back and forth, it swells again. That’s who my mother was. Some girl in too much trouble too soon. I wait for a moment, the way I do when a thought like that surprises me. In case a memory hovers, shy by the half-open door. It never does, or if it does I can’t see it. Or won’t. I’ve had more than enough therapy to admit that possibility.

  When the loaf has been in for twenty minutes I open the oven door, quickly swivel the pan, shut the door again. The smell escapes anyway and I breathe it in, the smell which is the thing itself, particles floating in the air. Actual physical remains. After Mum died I’d catch the smell of her. Back at the ranch it made sense that fragments of her body had come to rest in drawers, corners. Sixty-three years she lived there so of course she was in the air, stirred by our feet wherever we walked, a sweet sour smell. However tightly permed and scrubbed her outside was, there was a brothy ferment to her body, a gravy richness in the smell of her. It was the part of her that danced, I used to think, a wildness in her feet while her head stayed completely still which was the style and would have won her high marks if she had ever competed which she did not because she was a God-fearing and temperate woman, a God-fearing woman with wild feet who danced in the living room while Dad played the fiddle. Standing in my kitchen in the smell of baking bread I hear the clack of her heels on the hardwood floor. The woman who was my mother and who wasn’t had a rigid mind and wild feet. After she died I smelled her here in this house which she never visited because I lived here with one man or another. Out of wedlock.

  ‘Wed-lock. The word says it all,’ I said to her once. Dad looked away but I caught a flash of laughter in his eyes. Sunlight glancing off water. Mum could stare you down. Reptile eyes. Brown with a slow blink. So there’s no way her smell should have been in the air here but it was. In any corner you might inhale a particle of her until, one night, coming in from work, I knew something was different. In the morning I realized she was gone. Perhaps she hadn’t been in this house but in the crannies of my own body and I used her u
p.

  I turn off the engine, slouch low in the seat. October sun slants across fields bleached the colour of oats. The poplars by the slough cast indigo shadows. Ravens call from the alders. The low building doesn’t interrupt the sky. Some evenings deer graze, a coyote lopes alone across the field. I reach over, sift through the mail. There’s a white envelope, squarer than a bill. Spiky, slanting hand; fountain pen, blue ink. Dad’s writing, but he knows I’ll be out to visit next week.

  Dear Meg,

  At the risk of sounding melodramatic there is something we need to talk about before I die. Something that perhaps you should have been told long ago. Having reached this decision I find myself impatient to see you. Would you come as soon as you can?

  Love,

  Dad

  P.S. No health problems. I’m as improbably hale as ever.

  His face wavers in front of me, creased and angular, eyes the chalky turquoise of rock milk. Rock flour. I always think it’s rock milk but it’s rock flour, the fine particles that turn the mountain streams and lakes turquoise. Tears sting my eyes, seeing his face. His face thirty years ago, hair still blonde and thick. Even now he has a good head of hair. The Hetzl brothers tease him about it. Fifty years his junior and bald as eggs. He’s going to tell me.

  “Hey Meg,” James’s face appears around the office door.

  “Hey to you, James, let me take my coat off, okay?”

  “Sure,” he says but his head floats in the doorway, a round brown moon, shadow moon to the crescent of his smile.

  “Yes?” I step back out to the front desk. He’s wearing a necklace of teeth strung so they all point the same way, little ivory tusks against his black T-shirt. “Can I skip the meeting tonight so I can work on my life line?” He smiles his loopiest smile. “I really, really need to get it done.”

  “Yeah, right, James, you’re the hard-working man.”

  He turns. “Hey, Jay. My favourite staff.”

  Jay hoists an eyebrow.

  He raises both hands. “I know, I know. Manipulation.”

  “Easy as breathing, eh James? Hey Meg.” Jay’s leather jacket is slung over one shoulder though it’s not exactly warm outside. I’ve never seen her wear a toque. “Who else is on?”