Dorryce Smelts

CRIMES AND DISOBEDIENCES

My father worked for many years in the Arctic and spent whole seasons away from my

mother and me. This was in the late 1950s. His absences were sufficient for me to ask, even when

he was home, “Do I have a father?”

“She’s observant, alright,” my mother said.

“She thinks she’s so smart,” my father said. “I’m standing right here.”

He sat me down—I was maybe five—in front of an atlas open to a map of the Canadian

north. The lines in the map stretched up and down, and crosswise, and gathered to a point at the

top of the world, like strings cinching a purse, or the neck of one of my mother’s blouses.

He folded his enormous height into a chair beside me. With a soft, thick pencil, he drew a

heavy black line, from west (near Alaska, I learned later) to Greenland in the east. For emphasis,

he drew over it again.

“West to east, got it?”

I nodded.

“Now watch.”

He had put down the pencil and picked up a fountain pen. Moving along the pencil line he

had drawn, my father pressed down with the tip of the pen, leaving black ink pearls which stood

shining for a second before absorbing through graphite and soft paper. It looked like a string of

beads, or black seeds. Some of the larger ink dots spread into pools and these flattened and dried

into buttons. I was caught by the movement of my father’s hand, so precise, leaving so many

pearls, seeds, buttons and beads.

“There, that’s called the DEW Line. And here,” he tapped one of the black beads, “is

Cambridge Bay.” He tapped along the line—the long line—from west to east and swung back

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west again to show me where Inuvik was. My father was an electrician. He brought light and heat

to places that lived in darkness half the year.

I think he sounded proud. I saw him relax a little. He had impressed upon me the

knowledge of something important to him.

I kept the atlas, and always open to the page, tracing the pencil line, careful that there was

no moisture on my finger to smudge the dense black. I had no comprehension of distance. One

day, my mother who was standing over my shoulder, drew her own line with a long fingertip

straight south from Cambridge Bay and gently to the left, to our little foothills town in Alberta.

She did it again, her fingertip dropping, falling into the south, over the crisscross lines. The sudden

dropping motion brought a rising panic in my chest. It was dizzying. What would keep anything

that far north from falling if not for the net of crisscross lines at the top of the world?

“Can it catch him,” I asked, “catch him before he falls?”

“What?” my mother said. “That’s silly. It’s only a book.”

Eventually my mother would throw the atlas out. My finger had worn through that delicate

paper.

I could do nothing to convince myself that there was anything about me that would keep

my father away. I was a normal girl—a mere girl—as was the common thread of belief in those

days. Maybe if I had been a boy my father would have found a reason to stay at home. He stamped

on me his initials, though, when I was born. I was given Madelyn Theresa and my father’s name

was Melvin Thomas. He only ever called me by the formal Madelyn; my mother preferred Maddy

or Mads.

In the beginning, though, I refused to accept his authority. I had no idea it had anything to

do with his being away so often, whether he was or not was inconsequential to someone as young

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as I was. My earliest memory of defying my father was watching him unwrap a candy and offer it

to me. I took the candy and dropped it on the floor.

He told me to pick it up. I refused.

You can worry about someone falling off the top of the world, worry yourself sick even,

but when they’re in front of you, you won’t grace them with your obedience.

I had gotten used to my father spending springs and summers away from my mother and

me. When I was able to understand these rhythms, and I think it must have been when I started

school, my mother would say, “Soon your father will announce his presence.” This was always in

late October.

It was a way of her preparing me, or so she believed, but by then I had also developed a

habit, as seasonal birds that migrate do, because they know by the smell and the feel of the air

when it is time. I knew when it was time to dream of my father in the late fall season. I pictured

him as a nomadic being, trailing dry crackling leaves, clothed in snow and his beard a forest of ice

crystals. I knew he was searching for us, trudging through impossible drifts of snow.

Even when I was certain my father could be counted on to come home as faithfully as the

birds migrated, I played another game in those years—a delicious game because it could be

stopped and started at any time. I pressed my fists to my closed eyes until the black in front of my

vision was populated with yellow spots and flourishes. I stayed like this until the yellow spots

changed to a white mist. In my mind, I opened my eyes and stepped into the mist where my father

stood but I when I tried to go to him he dissolved into the mist, only to reappear and then

disappear again.

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Why did I do this? Because all children imagine the terror of abandonment. It was more

tantalizing than death, even the death I visualized for my father, falling from atlas heights into an

unspeakable void. The gulping sobs I muffled into my pillow were all the more delicious because

I could snap my eyes open and from the bedroom across the hall, hear the monotonous barks of

my mother sleep-talking, and carry on imagining my father walking the tundra, shooting light and

sparks from his hands like some kind of magician, and delivering the land from darkness, because

I had dreamed him up and he would arrive home safely.

I had a thousand questions I wanted to ask my father when he was away. By the time he

came home there were only a few left I could muster.

“Were you hungry?”

“No.”

“What did you eat?”

“Same as you.”

“Cereal?”

“Yes.”

“Were you scared?”

“What?”

“What were you afraid of. Were you afraid? Ever?”

“Maybe fire, maybe.”

“Why.”

“There’s not much you can do if there is a fire, except run outside.”

“Is it safe? Where you are.”

“Safe as milk bottles.”

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In those seasons of all my father’s absences, you might think that I had drawn closer to my

mother, but it was she who cleaved to me. She maintained a close domestic guard, and allowed me

to play only in the back yard with the neighbours’ children. She monitored the furnace and

checked and rechecked the burners on the stove, before going to bed, and again in the morning.

When I started school, she accompanied me there and back, denying my independence to my

everlasting shame. We rarely went anywhere, even when the parks and outdoor attractions

beckoned, and especially in the summertime because, she said, who would know to tell your father

if something terrible happened?

But there was another purpose at work. She shunned people and places because of what

she heard from neighbours and from her own history, at that time, which was what it meant when

a woman was home alone with a child, and the husband away. I’d heard my mother refer to herself

as a grass-widow.

But in the schoolyard at recess I heard less romantic references.

“You’re a bastard.”

“Your father hates your mother.”

“Your mother has lots of boyfriends, doesn’t she? Whore.”

I let these crude words wash over me because I held to a certainty in those days—I was the

centre of my mother’s life. I was her Maddy, her Mads. My mother projected a fierceness of

protection, an abundant radiating supply of it that enveloped me, and that I used as quickly as she

could resupply it.

“You should wash your mouth in a pig trough, that’s how dirty you are,” I said back.

We had no fixed routine, my mother and me, except when I went to school. I managed to

find my breakfast while my mother fixed herself for our morning walk. Afternoons and evenings

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and weekends, we might have only had a can of soup or a sandwich between us to eat. Just that,

but enough. She kept me to regular bedtimes and once it was dark, I was never allowed out, and

she would lock the doors. My mother tented a sheet between the sofa and the coffee table, and we

flopped on our stomachs under its shelter, playing Chinese checkers and rummoli. She made me

read out loud from my school readers and drilled me on addition and subtraction.

I never liked displeasing my mother. If she was ever cross she would squeeze her eyes shut

and rub her forehead, as if she was trying to forget what she had seen, or heard. I was rarely sick,

but it was one of those things that agitated her. I didn’t catch colds often but I was prone to small

infections like styes and gum boils for which she kept me at home and applied hot cloths, hotter

than I could stand. I would howl and stamp my feet and when the infection pointed and the poison

drained, she gave a curious reaction of disgust over my behaviour and satisfaction with the result.

The secret was this: my mother rarely cooked or did housework. She did enough for us to

get by with a few clean clothes and clean dishes to eat from. Around the house we wore our

shabbiest things. My mother called it letting ourselves go. But I was always smart for school, and

my mother made sure I had a clean and pressed skirt or jumper every day.

Once a month I was banished outside while she opened all the windows, scrubbed the

bathroom, and cleaned the filthiest parts of the kitchen, throwing out the fridge contents and

sluicing down the floors.

On an evening around supper time, my mother asked me, “Want to walk up to the

hilltown?” Our neighbourhood was in the valley and the hilltown was connected by the highway

that travelled into the mountains. The better ice cream was always in the hilltown. My mother put

on a skirt and flat shoes, and we started out. Our neighbourhood was quiet as most families were

inside having their meal.

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To get to the hilltown, we had to walk on the highway shoulder. The traffic was busier and

every now and then I heard a car honk and words sometimes thrown out—I think for my mother

because she had to hold down her skirt against the wind, and her hair kept tossing. My hair never

mussed like that, it was molded to my head and came straight down in thin wisps. But I was

getting almost as tall as my mother. She was petite, and her figure curved behind and in front as

they used to say, where it counts.

“Good lookin.’”

“Ladies want a ride?” Laughter.

The shoulder gave to a long boardwalk, crossing the river. The boards were loose

underfoot, and nails and supports were missing and we held hands. My mother took the railing to

be sure.

We stopped on the boardwalk and I peered through the railing slats to see the beaver dams

way, way down. The water undulated and my mother pointed to the sleek brown and black beavers

splitting the surface of the water. “There”, she said, “there”, before they disappeared.

At the ice cream stand my mother gave me money and told me what to order. Two soft

serve, 30 cents apiece and if we wanted chocolate dip another 5 cents and I looked at my mother

and she nodded alright.

The sweetness of the ice cream and the cool air and the beavers splashing in fresh water

and even the casual crude shouts flung our way, I didn’t want this to finish too soon. We were

vagabonds on an adventure.

“Please Mom, can we take the long way back?”

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But on this hill going down, going down in the same straight line to the valley town, my

mother held my hand tightly, and her skirt with her other hand, and we didn’t stop to see the

beavers, we didn’t stop. My mother threw her half-eaten cone in the tall grass along the highway.

Walking downhill she got out of breath and I was just getting started. I wanted to run.

“Don’t run.”

My mother walked as if every step was a breath she was forced to take.

The closer we got to the house in the valley the more I felt like the horse being led to tether

on a stake in the middle of a field and made to go around and around. Helpless.

My mother held open the front door. “Come in to the house now. I won’t ask again.”

I paced the grass from fence to fence.

She sat on the front step. “I’m not leaving.”

“I don’t want to go in. Not in there.” The sour smell in the house, and the low-grade grime,

the furniture furred with dust—I knew it was all there but I had already gone too far another way

and I couldn’t go back. I had pulled against her hand. I was refusing her protection when I wanted

to run, and when she gripped me harder, a feeling like electricity started to spread down my arms

and legs and my mind overflowed with all the possibilities of jumping free.

“I’m right here,” she said.

I stayed on the grass until dark.

Because of the state of our house, my mother discouraged visitors and shooed all the

Jehovah’s Witnesses away from the door, and all of the salesmen, except one Watkins’ man who

managed to sell her a large yellow tin of cinnamon. She actually brought him into the living room,

(recently vacuumed) and I sat on the carpet as he unpacked all of his samples on my mother’s

coffee table. He had spices, and things like cracked peppercorns which he invited me to taste. I

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took a peppercorn on my tongue and bit it. It didn’t crunch as I expected, but it compressed softly

between my teeth and its lemony sharpness was a surprise. The Watkins’ man said he ate a

teaspoon of peppercorns every day.

“Some tactic,” my mother said after he left, “he didn’t even try to sell me on that.”

When my father returned home from the Arctic for his usual stay, my mother reversed

course. Everything sanitized and polished, the freezer filled and a side of beef on order. She put

on nylons and a housedress and had her hair permed, and teased it up and sprayed it stiff every

morning.

In the initial stages of their reunion, they made no demands on me. I looked older for my

age, and by the time I had turned nine, my mother decided it was time to let me walk to school on

my own.

At home my father’s most vivid quality was his constant activity. He rarely rested and if he

was sitting with a cup of coffee (which my mother invited him to do often) one or the other leg

was always jumping, as if he couldn’t wait to get back to what he had been doing. Or he would

talk, and talk on about his work.

It was late fall, in keeping with the rhythm of his visit, and a very short window of time to

get ready for the winter. There was the garden to tend to—it had gotten unruly and most of the

perennials had been attacked by a fungus and wouldn’t come back. He congratulated my mother

for doing a boffo job looking after the house. He said ‘boffo’ a lot in those days. My mother said it

was because he’d met many Americans while working on the DEW Line and picked up their

speaking habits. She said this with a tone I took as wistful, as if she wished there were things she

had overheard, or learned, or experienced while he was away.

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When all she had to do, was look after me and our house and wait for my father.

One afternoon I heard my father calling to me from the garden.

“Come here,” he said. He was waiting, leaning on the spade with its tip piercing the earth.

I could see he had cut down all the stalks—irises and rudbeckias, which I liked calling daisies

because of their dense black centres and outspread petals.

My father was a patient man. I ignored him and went to change my shoes. I drank a glass

of water. I checked the clouds, the angle of the sun. I wasn’t asked to do anything, or was I? At

last, I went outside.

My father shifted feet, turned the spade around. “Ready when you are.”

When I thought I was ready, I gathered up the stalks like a great sheaf that over-balanced

in my arms. I dropped the whole load and the great heavy black and yellow flower heads landed

on the ground, scattering the petals.

“Look at those damn daisies,” I muttered.

He’d heard me.

“I’m sorry.”

I gathered up the stalks again and he showed me where the compost heap was. I never

knew it existed, this heaped mound scabbed over with dead leaves and grass clippings. I

instinctively flared my nostrils.

“No.” he said. “It’s rotted, sure, but there’s no bad smell to it. Natural as nature.”

I laid the flower stalks on the heap and he gave me the garden fork. He showed me how to

turn the earth. What came up was a marvel—fine and crumbly rich. My father bent and pressed a

handful of the soil, hard, as if he was satisfied. He turned the spade over and tapped the mound,

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like he was knocking on a doorway. He stood and brushed black matter from his hands and

forearms, where it had caught in the long hairs.

He praised me for helping him. He didn’t mention that I had been rude. I knew I was, and

shame crept over me and then something like gratitude or resolve—I wanted to do better. I

remember straightening my shoulders and discovering that when someone trusts you because they

are willing to overlook a small disobedience, it makes you feel older.

I wasn’t a shy child but I had a habit of sitting still in places and letting words wash over

me, or appearing in places people didn’t expect me to, and seeing their surprise.

My father in the kitchen, his jumpy nervous self, and the soil from the garden sprinkling to

the floor from his workpants. His fingernails dirty. Good honest work, he said. A good day’s

work.

My father talking about all of the chores he had yet to do.

My mother rubbing her forehead, upset. Saying she hated how busy he was. She said, his

‘busy-ness’.

He didn’t understand. He said, Grace, I don’t understand. Look at this house, everything

needs looking after. It’s a real job you did, a good job.

He was praising her, like he praised me. Why wasn’t she happy?

It’s too much when you’re worried all the time, she said. Worried something is going to

happen.

On the boardwalk, her hand holding tight to mine.

My mother saw me, watching and listening.

I came into the kitchen.

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Sometimes we let ourselves go, I said. My father laughed at that.

Leave now, she said to me.

This was a punishment.

What are you asking her to leave for, my father said. We’re having a nice conversation.

Don’t, she said to me.

I don’t remember how it all came out. I don’t remember if I said we were like tramps

living under a bridge with dirty clothes. Maybe I thought I did. I remember my favourite

Hallowe’en costume was a hobo getup where I wore my mother’s long coat and rubbed a charcoal

briquette on my cheeks and forehead. That’s how we lived, but I don’t remember saying it.

I ran into the hallway. She followed me.

I started to howl. It went from there, unbelievable.

Unbelievable, unbelievable, my father said. Grace, Grace.

I was sprawled on the hallway floor between my bedroom and my parents’ bedroom, my

head and shoulders propped up against the door to the linen closet, as far as I could get away from

my mother, my heels beating the floor. My mother stood over me with her long, long arm that

seemed like it could snake anywhere, snake out of any place she wanted and hit me anytime she

wanted.

A conversation, rooted in a thousand unasked questions, floated up out of the thick past. I

asked my father once, What do you do?

Build the radar. Shh. I’m not supposed to tell you. It’s top secret.

Is it dark all the time?

Not all the time. Only for a few weeks. Most of the time it’s like twilight.

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Only a little bit dark.

That’s right. Like if you close your eyes, only a little. What do you see?

I closed my eyes, then peeped them open. I saw a familiar mist fleeting past, and that I

could make disappear quickly enough and my father became solid and sure again.

It doesn’t matter, my father kept saying. It doesn’t matter, Grace.

Of course my father knew. The house and its condition were no secret as I believed it was.

The important thing to remember was, I had taken an initiative when I wasn’t supposed to. I had

been disloyal to my mother in front of him. I turned my father’s praise into a brimming

overconfidence that spilled into disaster, like the flower heads in the garden.

I never did tell my father about the Watkins’ man.

My mother sat on the sofa next to him. He opened his sample case and took out can after

box after tin and put them on the coffee table, all with his sales patter about this value size and that

hard-to-come- by ingredient. I was still, sitting on the carpet, watching. I was in my play clothes

which is what my mother was wearing too. She was in her tight pedal-pushers, and a top that came

just to the waistband. Not what you wear when you invite company in for a visit.

She leaned in to sniff the cinnamon in its marigold tin, and the expanse of her smooth

lower back was revealed, and I saw the Watkins’ man glance behind her. He thought I didn’t see

him. He was staring at my mother’s bare skin.

Now, my mother was a beautiful woman, but I didn’t realize how lonely she was until the

Watkins’ man took advantage of both of us. When he fed me peppercorns, he didn’t know they

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didn’t taste vile. He thought he might chase me from the room. He never expected I would sit in

solidarity with my mother.

On the spring day my father returned to the Arctic, my mother sent me to a craft camp at

the Baptist Church. I learned to make a paper bowl, and paint it with water colours. The camp was

supposed to be non-religious, approved by my mother who was strict about these things. She had

no faith in anything except the reliable return of my father and my own disobedient behaviour.

When I came home with my paper creation, I poured water into it and let it sit on the

coffee table. I went out to the garden where some early narcissus had bloomed and cut them down,

and brought them inside, the dirt still clinging to the stalks. I plopped them in the paper bowl,

which had already started to weep.

Because my father had left that day, my mother didn’t fuss about the leaking bowl or the

ruined coffee table, or even the mess on the carpet. She threw everything out, eventually.

We got along, my mother and me, and there would be more days when I felt older than

myself, and my irresponsibility got me into trouble. When my father came home for good I

learned not surpass my own maturity, and not to celebrate it either. It wasn’t yet the time for

female celebration.

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