One Good Thing Read online

  The raven is swooping above their heads in a high, wide circle.

  “Why do they do that?” she asks. “With the wolves? Why don’t they eat the dead animals themselves?”

  “They can’t break through the skin with their beaks. Smart, like I said. The trick to life is knowing your weakness. Knowing what you’re good at and what you’re not, and finding ways to cover for what you can’t do.”

  Delilah watches the bird differently now that she knows it can summon wolves. Not only summon them, but make them do what it wants without it even occurring to the wolves that they’re being tricked. How can something so small be so smart? She wishes she was a raven. What would she make the wolves do when they came?

  He gathers his cigarettes and lighter and stands. “You know what I think? I think you’re going to love it here. I can get my friend Muddy to take us up in his plane when the ice is gone. Once you’re up there, you’ll think you’re the luckiest kid in the world to be living here now.”

  She looks at the sky, the shards of disappearing sun. Feels the crisp air like clean, fresh water on her skin.

  “It was a damn good decision your mother made,” he says. “Bringing you here.”

  He wouldn’t say if he disagreed. She knows that. Delilah has never heard her father say a bad word about Annie. Even when she loses her keys or money or doesn’t come home when she says she will or forgets to check dinner when she’s drawing and it chars to a lump of smoking coal in the oven. It’s not that they don’t argue—they do. But usually it’s Annie telling Mac the things she doesn’t like about him. Not the other way around. He never complains about Annie, even when he has a right to. It bothers Delilah sometimes. Like now, when he has so many reasons to complain . . . most of which he doesn’t even know about.

  He smiles at her, dying light reflecting in his beard. So far most of the men Delilah has seen up here have big beards. She isn’t sure how she feels about it. All these men with their hidden faces.

  “CHARLIE! CHARRRLIE . . .”

  Delilah startles awake. Somewhere outside the shack, a woman is calling for someone. She sounds angry. Delilah tries to pinpoint the source and decides it’s coming from the rundown little white house next door.

  “Charlie . . .”

  Weak light filters through the small square of her bedroom window. She turns on her side, burrowing under a heavy pile of blankets on the hard couch. Her back aches from the dip in the middle. She pulls a pillow over her ear, but she can still hear the voice calling through her dreamy early-morning fog.

  “Where you at, Charlie Boy?”

  A dog howls a mournful response. The woman isn’t angry, Delilah realizes as her eyes drift shut again. She’s sad. Something she loves is gone, and she wants it to come back.

  ANNIE IS SINGING JONI Mitchell when Delilah wakes again. Delilah can hear her in the little kitchen with its sloping floor and the plywood counter, exposed cupboards and an old gas-burner stove that had resident mice when her dad first opened it.

  Delilah’s room is just big enough for the old couch and a drooping wardrobe that’s missing its front doors. There are a few shelves nailed to the walls and hooks to hang her clothes. Delilah has piled the miner’s belongings in the small room near the back door and lined up her books and Archie comics on the shelves. Under the bed is a box with her art supplies, journals, and old stuffed animals.

  She yawns and turns toward the heavy wool blanket that serves as a door until her dad builds her a real one. He said this was pretty near the top of his list, right after getting her a bed, fixing a hole in the roof, and putting a door on the bathroom. Which she would prefer he did first. It’s not actually a bathroom, as she had pointed out when she first saw it, because it doesn’t have a toilet. Or a sink. Or a bathtub. It’s a tiny, dark closet with only a hand-built wooden box with a toilet seat on it. A honey bucket, her dad had said. Most of the shacks in Old Town had them, if they were lucky. Either that or an outhouse.

  “Bucket?” she had said.

  “Yes, it’s basically a plastic bucket with a lid on it.”

  “But . . . how do you flush?”

  He had laughed. “You don’t. There’s no running water in this house. No plumbing. We get our water delivered by truck, and we use that for dishes and baths. We have a little aluminum bathtub out back. We can bring it into the living room by the fire and fill it with hot water from the stove. I’ll show you later. But mostly we’ll go for showers at my friend Red’s place.”

  Delilah was still staring at the wooden box. “But . . . if you don’t flush, where does it all go?”

  “We empty the bucket once a week. The City comes and collects the bags.” He was grinning at her.

  This was new. This was something that, in all the places she had lived, she had never experienced. They always had a toilet that flushed. It never occurred to her that it was a privilege, that she had somehow been living the high life until now.

  “Gross,” she’d said.

  “I AM ON A lonely road, and I am travelling, travelling, travelling, travelling,” her mother sings now. “Looking for something, what can it be?” Pans bang, water swishes.

  Delilah sits up and looks out her window. All she sees is lichen-covered rock. It’s the side of the pilots’ monument where she climbed with her dad the night before. There is a fly buzzing angrily around the window. Her dad has warned her about the mosquitoes, like the coming of the apocalypse, but she hasn’t seen one yet.

  She pulls the wool blanket aside, letting in the oven warmth of the kitchen. Her mother is swinging her hips, long velvet skirt flowing, as she bangs the bottom of a rusty bread pan to loosen the freshly baked loaf.

  “Do you want, do you want, do you want to dance with me, baby?” Annie sings, letting the bread pan clatter on the counter as she turns to Delilah, arms wide.

  Delilah allows herself to be embraced, swayed. Annie smells like cinnamon, yeast, and rosewater. Over her shoulder, Delilah can see six loaves of bread cooling on the counter, a pan of cinnamon buns crusted with brown sugar and raisins. A tiny, familiar alarm sounds in her chest.

  “Mom?”

  Her mother releases her. Cups her face and peers into her eyes. Delilah looks away. Annie kisses her cheek and turns back to her work. There’s another batch starting, a bulging damp cloth covering a large silver bowl.

  “That’s . . . a lot of bread.”

  Annie waves a delicate hand. “I’ll freeze some. I could probably leave it outside at night. I won’t need to bake for weeks.” She digs a fork around a cinnamon bun and releases it, turning to offer it to Delilah. “Breakfast.”

  Delilah takes it. It’s heavy, probably from barley flour and molasses. Delilah has seen the fluffy kind of cinnamon buns with the white icing, but she has never tasted one. She imagines they would melt like snow on her tongue.

  “Thanks. Where’s Dad?”

  Annie shrugs her thin shoulders. “Don’t know. Outside, I guess.” She dumps the dough out of the bowl and starts kneading, humming to herself.

  Delilah pulls on her Keds and her rainbow sweater, opens the door, and walks out into the bright morning, gnawing on the cinnamon bun. The wind chimes tremble when she closes the door, singing a hesitant song behind her.

  The little hill outside their shack is a sloping dirt road that curves at the bottom and heads toward a strange building that looks like a tin can stripped of its label, cut lengthwise and then plunked cut-side down onto the ground. A sign outside by a rickety wooden porch reads weaver & DEVORE TRADING. There are brightly coloured shacks scattered on either side of the road like a string of mismatched beads. She can feel herself acclimatizing to her new surroundings, a strange calmness descending on her after the last few months of chaos. She likes this place.

  Her dad is standing by an old yellow truck heaped with firewood, talking to a large man who’s unlatching the tailgate. Delilah wanders toward them, tossing the cinnamon bun into the brush beside the road for the birds. She hugs herself t
o keep warm. It looks like a sunny spring day, but it has bite.

  Her dad looks up as she approaches. “Hey there.”

  “Hey,” she says, tracing her fingers along the side of the grungy truck. She feels like she’s interrupting something.

  Her dad points to the man. “This is Will. I told you about him. He lives down the road in Rainbow Valley.”

  She’s seen him before. He’s the man who gave them directions. He’s huge, at least six inches taller than her dad. He’s wearing a suede jacket with fringes and flowers made from tiny beads. There’s a grey and white knitted hat on his head that’s unravelling on one side. “Rainbow Valley?” She wipes her fingers on her jeans.

  “Yup,” he says. “Sounds like some kinda heaven or something, doesn’t it?” There’s a husky curled near the back wheel of the truck licking its paws.

  “I met you,” she says.

  “You did?” he says, feigning shock. “Where’d you meet me? You been hangin’ out at the Gold Range or something? How old are you? You look pretty short for nineteen, kid.”

  “You told us how to get to Old Town.”

  He laughs and starts piling wood into Mac’s arms. “I see you made it here okay,” he says.

  “Will and I work together at Giant,” Mac says. “And we’re planning a little trip out to the bush.”

  “The bush?” Delilah thinks of the blackberry brambles that had invaded their backyard in Vancouver the previous summer, she thinks of cedar hedges, the frond-like leaves of huckleberry plants.

  “Out in the wild. They call it the bush here. We head out in a few weeks. Going out to the Barrens.” He walks toward the woodpile and Delilah trails behind. “We’re doing some staking for a mining company. We’ve done it once already. It is utterly gorgeous out there, Delilah. You would not believe.”

  Delilah likes the sound of this word. Barrens. It sounds dangerous, somehow.

  “Hey there, Mac!” her mother calls from the porch.

  He turns toward the shack, his arms still full of wood. “Hey yourself!” he calls back. “What’s the princess of Yellowknife doing up there in her castle?”

  “Come on in here and see!” Annie does a little spin, her skirt swirling.

  “She’s baking a hundred loaves of bread,” Delilah says.

  “Ah,” her dad says. “That’s okay. We can always give some away. It’s great she’s settling in.” Delilah rolls her eyes. He dumps the wood and heads to the house, calling over his shoulder to Will, “Be right back, man.”

  “Sure thing,” Will says from beside the truck.

  The wind picks up, and Delilah can hear the chimes starting.

  “You know why those chimes are there, kid?” Will starts loading up his arms with firewood.

  She shivers. “No.”

  He gestures to Delilah with his chin. “Come give me a hand, will you? Load me up. It’ll go faster.”

  She walks to the back of the truck. He holds his arms out like he’s offering her something. She picks up a chunk of wood and places it awkwardly on top of the others.

  “That’s right. Get as many as you can on there.”

  When he’s fully loaded she follows him to the side of the house. She sees that the white cabin next door has a sagging porch and two broken stairs, a blanket over the window. There’s a cooking pot and the cracked ribs of a broken lawn chair resting on the ground in the yard.

  “Martha Shearwater’s place,” Will says as he dumps the load and starts stacking it on the woodpile.

  “I think I heard her this morning,” she says. “She was calling someone’s name.”

  “That’d be Charlie. He goes out every morning. Walks uptown and goes for coffee. He tells her where he’s going, but she forgets. Calls him, goes looking. Phones people, knocks on doors. Been doing it for years. She thinks he’s run out on her. God forbid she’s still in a bad mood when he comes back home.”

  Delilah thinks about this a minute, about waking up every morning and thinking you’ve been left. “That’s sad.”

  He piles the last piece on top of the stack. “No shortage of sad things, kid.”

  “You know her?”

  He brushes his hand on his filthy jeans and grins at her. “I know everybody.”

  “What about the wind chimes?”

  “Right. So Josie Apple, she was an old-timer back from the gold rush days. She claimed that wind chimes were used in ancient India and China to scare away the evil spirits. She put up as many as she could fit because she believed bad spirits are always after us, trying to make us do bad things. Trying to hurt us. She figured if she protected herself then nothing bad would happen. You believe in that kinda thing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Most folks say that. Or they say it’s a bunch of superstition.” He points up the hill toward the shack. “But you know something funny?”

  She follows his gaze to where the chimes are dancing under the eaves, playing their strange symphony of wood and bone.

  “Those chimes have been there ever since she died nine years ago. Five different people have lived in that house since, and not one of them has taken them down. What do you make of that?”

  She watches the chimes. “That maybe . . . people don’t want to believe in those kinds of things, but they’re scared they might be true?”

  “Right you are, kid.” He starts walking to his truck. “Okay. I’m all done here. The rest of the wood is for someone else.”

  She doesn’t want him to go. She wants him to stay so she doesn’t have to go back inside and watch her father praise Annie for all the unnecessary bread.

  But she can’t think of anything else to say. Will lets the husky jump into the back of the truck before he hops in the cab and slams his door shut. “I’ll see you around,” he calls from his open window.

  She watches him drive away, mud spinning from his tires, until he disappears over the hill.

  DELILAH SITS ON A battered couch, clutching a towel and a big bottle of discount apple-scented shampoo. She is mortified to be sitting in a stranger’s house waiting to use their shower. She imagines hair in the bathtub, crumpled tissue in the garbage. But for a week she’s been splashing cold water on herself every morning from a chipped basin, and she needs to wash her hair before she starts school on Monday. The last time she washed it had been the motel in Fort Providence. The lank, greasy strands are pulled back into a lumpy ponytail now. Her dad had offered to heat up buckets of hot water and drag the aluminum tub out, but there is no way she’s having a bath in the living room. The stranger’s shower is the lesser of the two evils.

  There are cozy blankets thrown over couches and chairs, the walls covered in stained and curling nautical maps and large, abstract paintings of naked women. Mac told her the owners of this ramshackle house on Yellowknife Bay are Red and Maggie and their thirteen-year-old son, Jones. He said she would have met them already, but the family has been away visiting friends.

  Mac has been having showers at Red and Maggie’s ever since he moved to Yellowknife. “That’s what people do here, Lila,” he had said as the three of them drove the bumpy road from home. “That’s why we’re here. It’s all about community in Old Town, people working together to survive the harsh elements. This is uncharted territory. A melting pot of folks from all over trying to make it in the big north.”

  Annie had smiled, trailing an arm out the window. “Well, my love,” she said lazily, “if having to shower with our neighbours makes us a community, I’m all for it.”

  “Why?” Delilah asked, trying to change the subject. “Why don’t people have their own showers?”

  “Running water is a challenge, like most things are here,” he said. “Things that are easy in the city, that people don’t think twice about, are a lot harder here. You see what I’m saying? Sometimes even finding a carton of eggs is a challenge. That’s the beauty. You know?”

  “No.” Delilah couldn’t see how a lack of eggs was beautiful.

>   “Red’s a fisherman,” Mac said to Annie as they chugged around a corner. “Salt of the earth. Grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan. You’ll like him.”

  He was always trying too hard, Delilah thought. It mattered too much to him that Annie liked everything he wanted her to like. Annie didn’t respond, gazing out the window, her floppy suede hat pulled down over her hair. She hummed to herself softly.

  Annie had been quieting down. It’s what usually happened after what Mac brushed off as a “creative burst.” Days of frantic activity followed by some sort of artistic episode. After two more days of baking, she had started putting shelf paper in the crooked cupboards, sweeping out dark corners, scraping black stuff from the windowsills. The day before, she had washed all their clothes in a plastic tub outside in the yard with a bar of Ivory before hanging them on a line in the back. Delilah wants to believe this means Annie will want to stay, but she knows it doesn’t mean anything at all.

  Once, in Toronto, Annie had spent two days waxing the floors and washing the drapes by hand before making a three-foot-high sculpture of a rose bush out of wholewheat macaroni and Delilah’s kindergarten glue. Once it was a small rock waterfall in the backyard of their Winnipeg house. Last night it had been sketches. Dozens of them, all of the vacant lot out back with the rock beside it. They were strewn across the living room floor now, abandoned by Annie when she finally fell asleep on the couch after hours of sitting and chewing her hair while she sifted through them, asking Delilah and Mac their opinions on the best one, the shading techniques, the composition.

  “Maggie’s an artist too,” Mac said, reaching over to trace the brim of Annie’s hat with his calloused finger. “She’s from Montreal. Used to be a nurse until they came here.”

  “Mmm,” Annie said. “What does she do?”

  “Paints, I think. They have big canvases up all over their place. You two’ll get along just fine.”