Claudia Casper - The Mercy Journals

The next few days I woke, ate, drank, and sank back into the warmth and the quiet. I asked Parker if she had seen any trace of my boys when she arrived. All the supplies I had laid in were gone, and the rifle and ammunition and all the water purification kits, gone also, but she said there was nothing to indicate who’d taken them.

She asked if we’d seen many people on our journey up. A few people digging clams, I answered. A few people fishing, an occasional chimney with smoke coming out. Mostly near towns — Nanaimo, Courtenay/Comox, Campbell River. How about here? Anyone living around here?

Not that I’ve seen, she answered.

One day I woke to a loud clatter. I made my way to the kitchen where the noise was coming from and found Leo on his hands and knees, pulling out all the pots and pans from the cupboard under the electrical wall oven. He held up a desiccated mouse by the tail.

Must’ve been poisoned by Mom, what, thirty years ago.

What are you doing?

Glad you’re feeling better.

Yep.

I went over to the woodstove and opened the door. The feel of the worn wooden handle in my hand was instantly familiar, like putting on an old shoe. I could picture my parents’ hands holding it as they threw in another chunk of wood and I felt the layers of their grip under mine.

I looked up and saw, hanging on a hook, the metal rod for lifting the eyes of the woodstove. It was attached by a leather thong, and I thought about the fact that that thong, that thin piece of animal hide, had outlasted two living, breathing, full-bodied adults, and then I thought how many of the things around me would continue to exist when I was gone, and discovered that was a good feeling.

Are you okay? my brother asked.

I nodded and filled the kettle.

I’m reorganizing the cupboards.

You’re kidding me.

No. We’re going to be here for a while, and I thought I might as well get things organized.

He went outside and tossed the mouse into the bush. Never say people don’t change.

I woke to the sound of my old guitar and it flooded me with a laughing/crying feeling remembering summers of fun, fun, fun, when everything was still pretty good in my world. The old man was working on the base and Mom would feed us meals whenever we were hungry, leaving Leo and me free to play until the sun set late at night. The days were warm and sunny and harmless.

I called out to see who was playing. Griffin came into the sunroom. He had found a supply of new strings and replaced the broken ones. I asked him to keep playing. He laughed sheepishly and strummed a few bars of a couple of songs, each time falling away apologetically. How is it I never knew he played so well? Crap uncle.

I sat up and tried myself. The last thirty years hadn’t exactly loosened up my fingers. I played the opening chords of the first song I made up. Like bees around a flower, Like a dog around a bone, you and I hit puberty, and now we’re on the pho-o-o-ne. I put my arms around you, and planted my first kiss.

Leo came in from the living room singing, I’ll be coming back for more girl, that’s a thrill I’m gonna miss. I remember that, he said. I thought it was sheer genius. I thought you were going to make a million. Wow.

It’s good to be here. An eagle called out by the ocean and I heard an echo of my mother’s laugh. The memories are good and the place is beautiful and largely undamaged by the catastrophes. We lost a grove of cedar trees, a small chunk of land eroded into the sea at the north-eastern tip, and the beach is almost gone, but on the plus side, the access to the peninsula from the main island is almost gone too. We’re all glad to be here. Leo and Griffin look more or less relaxed. We all like Parker. Leo and Griffin gave her all our supplies — we had enough to last a couple of months — and put her in charge of doling out the food. Griffin’s going to fish and Parker’s excited about the possibility, with all of us here, of digging up a field and planting crops. She thinks there’s still time in the season.

She came in from the kitchen where I could smell one of her soups cooking, drying her hands on a tea towel Mom had embroidered during one of her crafty periods. I picked out the opening notes for “Come as You Are.”

I used to think our parents called this place after the band, I said.

What did they call it after? Parker asked.

While the band used the name ironically, I imagine, my mother was full-on serious. She never lost the hippie side of herself, even when she married a guy in the military.

It’s an Indian word for heaven, I said. Freedom from suffering and desire.

Griffin said, I always felt happy here. At home. I miss Gran. He glanced at Leo.

I remember the feeling of endless time, I said, and feeling free. Too free maybe. Remember, Leo, when we bought weed from that guy at the cove and we took the boat out with the wakeboard you made in woodshop and it completely came apart? You almost drowned we were laughing so hard.

Remember when the drug squad ’copter buzzed real low over Waterstone’s and we waited for an hour, then went to check it out and the cops had loaded up all the plants from the bust in the back of their van and left the doors wide open? We pulled up, Leo said to Parker and Griffin, and I don’t know where the cops were but they weren’t there. We stuffed as much as we could into Mom’s hatchback and took off. Then we heard the helicopter following us and we freaked. Luckily, Allen remembered the big maple tree at Hasek’s so we tore in under the canopy, unloaded everything, brushed out all the leaves and twigs with a T-shirt, I think, and took off back down the highway. We drove for half an hour until the ’copter veered away. They pulled us over later, but they had no proof.

Yeah, I smiled. I definitely remember that.

That little prank started me on the road to success. And you, Leo sneered happily at me, wanted to give it all away.

I noodled away at a few chords. I’d forgotten I was partly to blame for your life of crime. I laughed. Where was my cut then? Did I ever get anything?

A lifetime’s supply of free dope as I recall, risk-free.

Leo looked out the window at the old rope swing strung between two firs. I wonder if we could grow any now, he said. Did I stash any seeds? Goldilocks, you seen any plants that looked like weed growing out there? Do you even know what they look like? She shook her head. Bro, let’s check it out tomorrow. The clearing in the scrotum. Maybe there’s something. Maybe I can even find my old bong. That would be the ticket, eh?

Parker is five or six months’ pregnant. It can be harder to tell in taller women. She seems happy to have company, though the three-guys-one-woman dynamic is not ideal. Griffin seems definitely interested, helping her work in the garden, helping her cook, doing the clean-up. Leo also seems interested. His focus intensifies when she’s in the room.

Yesterday I was looking through Mom’s bookshelf in the living room before dinner and heard Parker in the hallway. Not so fast, monsieur.

Time is short, madam, Leo said, his voice thick and low.

Not for me it isn’t, she said.

She walked toward the kitchen. Leo waited a couple of seconds then followed at a trot. On the scent. Then at dinner tonight Leo came into the kitchen transformed. He’d cut his hair to an inch long around his head and trimmed his beard close to his face. The removal of so much gray hair had a startling effect. First off, he looks more sane, though his blue eyes are still too intense. Second, he looks younger, almost a generation younger, granddad to silverback, and he looks handsome, I suppose, compact, experienced, fit, hyper-alert. Griffin’s soft-hued, quietly perceptive blue eyes, clear skin, and mop of reddish-brown curls probably look boyish in comparison.