The Stone Hookers (Carol Major)

Two years before I ever heard about stone hookers stealing a place away, my mother and I had already been back and forth to Niagara Falls five times looking for the American. That was nineteen fifty-eight. She’d put on her red cherry sundress even on the days it turned cold. Mrs. Muderick, the janitor in the building, said we looked like we were off to a carnival, but I never paid her any mind. We were going to a place where people strung wire over a waterfall and walked tightrope balancing things on top of their heads. I’d heard about the Frenchie who’d done it pushing a wheelbarrow, and Annie Edson Taylor – she was a sixty-three-year-old schoolteacher who plunged over the edge in a barrel and came out all black and blue.

“No one ought ever to do that again,” she told reporters waiting at the bottom, but there are always people drawn to risks. My mother was one of them and never the kind to listen to advice.

My mother was a Wizard of Oz kind of woman – click her heels and she could be in Emerald City, a place that was surely close to California, and if the ruby slippers were missing you could always count on some prince rolling into town offering to take you somewhere just as good. Usually, he’d turn up selling Fuller brushes, encyclopedias, or some sort of life insurance, and she’d jump into his car.

We got all the way from the Manitoba border to Sudbury on those kinds of opportunities and would have kept going if we hadn’t run into the American. Now, he really was from California, or so he said, and for one magical weekend he took us to Niagara Falls. We sailed across the Rainbow Bridge in his sleek brown Pontiac, never imagining such a thing could be done, and there we were standing in a whole different country.

The day we met the American we’d just finished up living with Ron, a skinny man with rolled up sleeves and a tattoo of an Indian chief on his arm. My mother said Ron was Ojibwa, so we’d be all right with him on account that we were part Ojibwa too. Now that was highly unlikely because my mother had blonde hair and a turnedup nose and, while I was never pretty like her (I have straight hair the colour of cereal and a thin little mouth), I don’t look much like an Indian either. But I guess she carted out that fantasy because she’d been born in Kenora, a place that was owned by Manitoba at one time and then shifted back to Ontario. I don’t know why, except it didn’t make the place feel particularly solid, being swapped around as easily as that.

It had an earlier name too, Rat Portage, someone once saying that nothing much good had ever come out of there, just a bunch of half-breeds and desperate hookers. But my mother was always good at turning an insult into a compliment and opted for the half-breed part, made it noble – wigwams and totem poles, all that kind of stuff.

We sure behaved like Indians. We were constantly on the move, zigzagging back and forth across Northern Ontario like we were tracking beaver, until we eventually headed south. All the time my mother kept saying she was just trying to get back to normal, as if that was a place on a map.

Along the way we bumped into Peggy now and again. I can’t remember when she first came into our lives, only that she wore her hair in a beehive, and she told me there were real bees inside. It was Peggy who played a part in us getting hooked up with Ron. She invited my mother to come stay with her in Kapuskasing. That’s close to the Quebec border, not that I saw anything different to signpost any change. It was just more black flies and mud and everything smelling like wet canvas tents.

Peggy had got herself into some half-built house on the edge of town and my mother had been able to get a ride out with a group of other people who were going to stay there for a while too. Don’t ask me who they were. I was squished up in the back seat with pretzels and jars of bread and butter pickles. That day my mother was wearing her red cherry dress, brand new at the time, and her hair was mussed. She was the kind of person who always looked beautiful, even when she was mussed. Her skin was so white. You could see the blue veins in her ears.

When we got to the house she tumbled out, charm bracelet tinkling on that overcast day and laughing because her high heels were getting stuck in the mud. Someone carried her round to the back door because at least it was at ground level. The front of the house wasn’t finished, no porch built yet or any steps up to the front door, and you needed steps because the place was built on a slope.

A man in a checked shirt cleared a space on the sofa for me to lie down. I shut my eyes and must have slept for a while. When I woke there was music playing loud and people standing around opening bottles of beer. By then I needed the bathroom. I got up and squeezed my way through the crowd, asking if anyone knew where it was. But they couldn’t hear me properly in all the din, only whooped and made silly faces, like they thought I was looking to be amused.

I headed in the direction I thought would take me to the back door, thinking maybe there was an outhouse. But it wasn’t the back door. It was the front door. I opened it and fell four feet straight down. Lying on my back, I was pretty sure I was dead. But when I opened my eyes, Peggy was standing over me laughing so hard. My mother heard the commotion and came to the door as well.

“Why did you go that way?” she asked, staring down at me too.

I started crying and said I’d been looking for the bathroom. Nobody told me I was opening the front door with nothing on the other side. Ron poked his head out then. That’s the first time I knew anything about him. Up until then he was just another person drinking beer in the house. He told me to stop crying because people had done more dangerous things than fall off a porch that wasn’t there. That’s when he told me about the Frenchie with the wheelbarrow and Miss Taylor doing stunts at Niagara Falls. “Now there’s some distance to fall,” he said. “Dust yourself off. We’ll take you to the bathroom then I’ll get you a coke.”

I took that coke back to the sofa and lay there with the room twirling. Next thing I knew the sofa had turned into the back seat of Ron’s car. My mother was in the front seat with her arm around his neck. She swung round and told me that Ron was taking us back to civilisation. We didn’t need to worry anymore. Through the window the moon was floating all silvery and pockmarked in the sky. I shut my eyes again and when I woke, I thought we’d landed on it. That’s because we’d arrived in Sudbury, a nickel-mining town in case you didn’t know. Hardly a leaf on a tree but plenty of work.

Ron got a job in the mines but lost it soon after, something about the union walking out over wearing safety goggles. After that he lay on the sofa of the apartment we were renting, smoking Pall Mall cigarettes and watching cartoons.

My mother got a bit worried about him behaving like that but thankfully she’d become friendly with Mr. Woyce, an old Polish man who ran the corner store. He was a short little man with sad hound-dog eyes, maybe fifty or sixty, I don’t know, only that he lit up like a light bulb whenever my mother appeared. One day she began telling her sad-sack story about Ron and the union, hoping, I suspect, that she wouldn’t have to pay for the Cheerios and potato chips she’d just bought. But instead, Mr. Woyce said she could come and work for him and that Ron could look after me.

She took him up on the offer. I think she liked the idea of being one of those kinds of people who get up each morning and walk to work. She also liked the little buttons on the cash register, pressing them down until the bell rang and the bottom drawer popped out. Ron and I would come round after Mr. Woyce had gone for the day, me to get a free Popsicle and him to get more Pall Malls.

Ron said he’d pay the money drawer back later, but he never did, and then one time when my mother’s back was turned, he snatched all the cash in the drawer and disappeared.

My mother wasn’t going to hang round and explain that to Mr. Woyce. Instead, she hauled me up to the highway looking for the next car that might stop. It was a freezing day in January. She was crying her eyes out and saying she wasn’t going with Indians no more, and I was kicking the slush and moaning about being cold. That’s when she said we needed to find an American to take us to California.

“You don’t need coats and hats there.” Next thing she got it into her head that there was no two ways about it. We were going to America. She could be like that, my mother, make her mind up she wanted something and next thing she believed it was coming her way.

“Canada is a useless country,” she said, her voice growing louder. “It’s just camping round the edge. America has the Statue of Liberty and the Mickey Mouse Club. Why, even New Year is American, that glittering ball falling from a building.” She dug me with her elbow. “You’ve seen that on TV.”

Well, it was as if she’d clicked a pair of ruby slippers together because, soon enough, a big brown Pontiac slid up and Howard, that was the American’s name, rolled down the window.

“Ma’am, are you okay?”

My mother replied that her parents were dead and that her brothers and sisters had cut her out of the will. She’d been thrown out on the street so to speak and here she was, a widow with a little girl having to start all over again.

Later she told me it wasn’t really a lie because her brothers had never been very nice to her and if her parents weren’t dead, they ought to be.

Howard had bunched-up shoulders, a soft brown coat and a kind face. He offered us each a peppermint lifesaver and said he was headed to Niagara Falls. My mother replied, “Now, isn’t that a coincidence because that’s where we’re headed too.”

We stayed in Perry Sound the first night. By then it was getting too late to go much further than that. Howard said we could bunk down in a hotel and leave early next day. He booked two rooms, which was different. Men didn’t usually do that. And he didn’t come into our room either, nor did my mother go into his. The following morning, I left her sleeping, wandered round and spotted Howard drinking coffee in a dining area near the front reception. He called me over and said I should be wearing more than a pop-top because that’s all I had on under my flannelette shirt. He put his own jacket around my shoulders and asked the waitress to bring me cornflakes and orange juice. He said I should drink orange juice every morning and asked if I had a toothbrush to clean my teeth.

My mother was still all soft and sleepy when we left, wanting to rest her head on Howard’s shoulder when he was driving, but he said it wasn’t safe. And later, on the outskirts of Toronto, he stopped at a shopping plaza and bought me a blue nylon zip up jacket, a pink hat and mitts, and a toothbrush too. My mother didn’t say much, only that I’d better not lose them. “She’s always losing things,” she said to Howard, as if this was the reason I didn’t have proper clothes.

We reached Niagara Falls by mid afternoon. You don’t forget a thing like that, the roar, the mist freezing on all those fancy iron railings making them look as if they were covered in glass.

Howard picked me up so I could see through one of the binoculars positioned along the walk. He pointed out the Horseshoe Falls and the Bridal Veil Falls, and the great wide American Falls directly opposite. He said it was the Niagara River tumbling over those cliffs. This was how Lake Erie emptied into Lake Ontario further to the east.

I asked how long that was going to take and he laughed. “A very long time,” he replied, ruffling my hair.

“And is that America on the other side?” My mother pointed. She was wearing a wide blue coat over her cherry dress. It was opening and flapping like a gigantic bird’s wing in the wind and her hair fluttering frosty silver around her face. I’d never seen her looking any more beautiful than that.

“Yes, it is,” Howard shouted above all that thundering water. “And I’m starving. Let’s go to the USA and have some steak.”

So just like that we jumped into his Pontiac and drove over the Rainbow Bridge.

 

If I was to describe the America I saw, that real place, I would have to say that we’d had a much better view of the Falls from the Canadian side. It was much prettier on the Canadian side as well. There was a floral clock, even if it was covered in snow, and a huge tower with the revolving restaurant on top. But America was still really proud of itself, the waitress chewing gum and the guards on the bridge real slackjawed because they were guarding the place where baseball was invented.

Howard bought us Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes in a diner. The drinks came with little parasols and the coasters were printed with Niagara Falls, New York. My mother put heaps in her purse. She was getting giddy by then and wanted to do and see everything. Howard said it would be best to go back to Canada to do that. There was a whole row of amusement houses on Clifton Road.

I remember that afternoon as if it were under varnish, all shiny crimson and yellow gold. There were lucky dip tubs and a place where you could get photographed behind a screen that made it look like you were Annie Edson Taylor sailing over the Falls in a barrel. But my mother didn’t want a photo, she was dead set on going to Louis Tussaud’s Wax Museum. She wanted to look at statues of famous people and The Chamber of Horrors downstairs.

I’ll never forget The Chamber of Horrors. There were all sorts of tortures: people locked up in dungeons where the ceilings were too low to ever stand up, people on beds of nails, and most horrible of all, a woman hanging on a hook. The sign below said that’s how they got you to confess in olden times. They speared a hook right through your stomach and because it missed your vital organs you could remain hanging alive for days.

I wondered about that then and for my whole life later. What would make you keep your mouth shut about something when your stomach was twisted in agony like that?

Howard told me to stop looking at it. I’d get nightmares and that after such a long day we all needed a good night’s sleep. We drove around looking for another hotel, some place quiet, and as we were driving Howard pointed to a group of buildings and said they housed Community and Social Services and that my mother should know about those things. It wasn’t right she was struggling all on her own.

That night as I was using my new toothbrush, my mother said that Howard was going to take us to California so he could look after us for the rest of our lives. But next morning when I woke, he was gone. At least the motel room was paid for and our breakfasts too, if we wanted any.

My mother said he must have been called away on business. “He’ll come back,” she said. “We just have to wait.”

 

Well, we waited all through that winter and into the spring and the summer that followed, although not in Niagara Falls. We went back to Toronto because Peggy was there. She’d run into hard luck too but there was some friend of a friend of a friend who’d offered her part-time work in a hairdressing salon on the east side of the city. Her job was to mind the counter and sweep up hair. It meant she got to wear a canary yellow smock with Chic Hairdressing embroidered in pink letters on the pocket. She was pleased about that. She’d also taken over this friend of a friend of a friend’s apartment. Looking back on it, I don’t think Peggy gave much consideration to how she was going to afford the rent. She was just dizzy about the thought of having a place that she could say was hers.

“Now how about that,” she said, all giggly and happy when we first arrived.

 

There were rows and rows of these kinds of apartments on the east side of Toronto built to house all the people leaving Europe after the war, and others like us. I didn’t have much idea where I was at first, except that Peggy referred to it as being between stop thirteen and stop fourteen along Kingston Road. I got the idea that it was stop thirteen for us and tried to count back how many other places we’d stopped in, and how many more we had to go. But later I found out that it was about bus stops and nothing to do with me.

There were six apartments in our building. Two on our floor, two above us and two in the basement below. Mrs. Muderick, the janitor, lived down there. She minded the laundry room that was down there too, and the incinerator. Peggy said Mrs. Muderick had been a German Nazi, a member of the Waffen SS. She said if you rolled up Mrs. Muderick’s sleeve high enough, you’d see her blood type tattooed beneath her armpit. It’s how you could tell.

“All Nazis have a tattoo like that,” said Peggy. “Ever noticed how she’s ‘Mrs. Muderick’ but there isn’t any husband or children? That’s because she ate them. Her blood type is vampire. Watch out. She looks for dirty children. She’ll eat you as well.”

It’s true Mrs. Muderick was scary. Come down the stairwell and suddenly she’d be there with her steel bucket and stringy mop. She reminded me of a wooden ironing board, her wide bony hips, her spread-apart legs, her chest completely flat. She’d ask me why I wasn’t in school and if my mother or Peggy were putting glass bottles down the incinerator chute.

I steered clear of Mrs. Muderick as much as I could. But the good thing about this time was that because my mother was waiting for Howard, she settled a bit. About two weeks in, and probably because Peggy was starting to go on about the rent and couldn’t have us freeloading off her anymore, my mother got a job at the Mary Dell Restaurant in the shopping plaza nearby and kept it for almost six months too. She gave me a key to hang around my neck so I could get in and out of the apartment, and a quarter for my lunch. She said it was best if I wasn’t around when Peggy was there, and she didn’t want me spending the quarter in the Mary Dell Restaurant either. Management didn’t like waitresses having their kids come in.

I would go to the Woolworth’s cafeteria. It was four stores down, past the bakery and Bata Shoes. I bought french fries and gravy and a six-cent glass of coke. Afterwards I spent time wandering up and down the shopping aisles looking at the glass necklaces and earrings and trying on straw hats until someone would come and throw me out.

I didn’t mind being yelled at because at least for the first time in my life I was coming to know a place, the streets that led up to the shopping plaza from the apartments and the hill that ran down to the ravine. Out on the other side of the ravine the streets were different. There weren’t any apartment buildings just bungalows and wide front lawns that were turning lime green as summer arrived, great shady trees too. Those streets led down to the Waterworks and Bluffers Park, but I never went as far as there. Mrs. Muderick had warned me off. She said the cliff edge was crumbling. She said was easy enough to fall and land in Lake Ontario below.

Every three weeks or so during this period, and depending on how much my mother had saved, we’d catch a Greyhound bus to Niagara Falls and stand around the floral clock keeping a look out for Howard. My mother said if you went to a place where good things had happened, then it made sense they’d happen again. But Howard never showed up. Once I asked if we should walk across the bridge to America to see if he was there, but my mother said she couldn’t possibly walk across the bridge alone, not with the guards waiting and everything.

Later in the day when our legs were tired from standing so long, we’d head to Clifton Road to try our hand at the lucky dip tubs and look through the souvenir stores. Sometimes we bought a souvenir for Peggy, wanting to keep her in a good mood. I remember an ashtray with a mounted policeman on it, Niagara Falls written in gold. And I must admit that even though we’d gone off Indians after Ron, we still liked the beaded bracelets, the tiny wigwams, and the miniature canoes. The very best thing we ever bought was a snow dome with a replica of Niagara Falls inside. Shake it and silver flakes swirled around.

We usually got back late, and each time Mrs. Muderick would poke her head out of her apartment door. My mother was always breathlessly friendly with everyone, even Mrs. Muderick, and she would tell her where we had been and what we had bought. But it didn’t make Mrs. Muderick like her any better. I overheard her say that it was typical, typical of people who refused to take some responsibility for their lives. That’s why we needed John Diefenbaker running the country. Hand out welfare to those who can’t manage their money and all they do is spend it on Chinese take-out and television sets. As for my mother, well take a good look at her, take a look at me. Every weekend that we could, down in Niagara Falls wasting money on miniature wigwams and snow globes, as if there wasn’t enough snow in Canada that you’d want to shake around pretend flakes in a jar. What on earth future was that for a little girl?

But Mrs. Muderick was wrong. We didn’t have a television, and when we moved in with Peggy it was too late in the year for me to start school. And now it was summer. School was closed. Although in truth I suppose my mother hadn’t wanted to hear school people yell about me again, and as for the future, she didn’t know how to get there in any concrete, plannable way. Waiting for Howard was about as much as I’d ever seen her plan anything. My mother believed in fate, saw it like a whirligig coming around the corner. That’s why she was attracted to confused, spinning things.

But as July came to an end, and the sumac began growing those fuzzy red berries, she seemed to be reminded that the seasons were turning. Her focus on waiting for Howard blurred. She stopped going to Niagara Falls and began spending her money on movies and going out with Peggy to some bar up on Dundas Street. Soon enough she lost the job at the Mary Dell for not turning up on time for her shifts. She began forgetting to give me the quarter for lunch too. That’s when I started raiding Peggy’s stash of food on the top shelves of the kitchen cupboards, even if she said those shelves were out of bounds. I’d smooth the peanut butter down trying to make it look like it hadn’t been touched. I’d take a slice of bread out of the middle of the loaf. But she noticed.

“Want to eat my food!” she screamed and stuffed a whole teaspoon of pepper in my mouth. I coughed and coughed and coughed.

Around this time Mrs. Muderick began taking a different kind of interest in me. She took to asking if I wanted a drink and when was the last time I ate. Then came the day Peggy and my mother went out in the morning to have coffee in the Mary Dell and didn’t return. It was one of those humid days in late July when Lake Ontario stinks like rotten eggs. Sticky and hot by late afternoon I decided to go up to shopping plaza and look for them. I peered through the Mary Dell window and went into the shoe store, but they weren’t there.

When I got back to the apartment, I noticed the key around my neck was gone. There was nothing I could do but wait. But I grew nervous that Mrs. Muderick would see me sitting on the stairs and wandered down to the ravine where I tore paper bark off birch trees, coming back regularly to check if Penny and my mother had returned.

I used the back door to the building because the glass entrance at the front was heavy and made a crashing noise when it swung shut. The rear door led off the parking lot. Some of the basement apartment windows faced that way, including Mrs. Muderick’s. I noticed her face staring up from below my feet on one of my trips. It gave me the most awful fright.

On my last trip back Mrs. Muderick’s venetian blinds were closed but my mother and Peggy still hadn’t returned, so I ended up staying in the ravine all night listening to the hoot of an owl and scratching at mosquito bites on my arms and legs.

When the sun rose, I snuck down back lanes to the apartment, not wanting anyone to see me how dirty and scraped up I was. I opened the rear door softly, tiptoed up the steps to the first-floor landing. It was a relief to hear Peggy’s voice coming from the other side of the apartment door.

“Where have you been?” she shouted as she let me in. “You little thief. I can’t find my green necklace. Stole that too?”

I knew about Peggy’s necklace. She’d let me try it on one time, threads of teeny beads twisting together like a rope.

“I never touched it!” I shouted because I was so hungry and tired. “And anyways, your stuff is always lying around. You leave your clothes all over the floor!” This was true. Peggy’s bedroom was always a mess.

“Liar!” She slapped the side of my head. “How do you know my clothes are on the floor if you’ve never been in my room?”

“Because you leave the door open!” I screamed. “I see you lying with your hair-do wrapped in toilet paper and your head hanging off the end of the bed.”

This was true. It was her way of keeping the style in shape all week.

My mother laughed so hard when I said that, tossed me two quarters and told me to run to the store and buy Peggy a packet of cigarettes. “When you get back you can kiss and make up.” She was wearing her green bathrobe and had her own hair in curlers. It looked like they were getting ready to go out again.

I plunged back into the hall and there was Mrs. Muderick on the landing staring at the scratched mosquito bites. “Those will get infected,” she said. “And your hair needs to be brushed.”

I ran past her, remembering what Peggy had said about dirty children. I didn’t stop until I reached the store. I was standing in front of the counter with the quarter in my hand, trying to work out if there was enough to buy the cigarettes and anything much else. I was dying for an orange Popsicle, something cool in my throat.

The bell on the door tinkled. I swung round and there was Mrs. Muderick again. She had a handbag in the crook of her arm. She turned to the man behind the counter and said, “Look at the state of that child.” And then she turned to me. “Where is your mother?”

I guess I was past thirsty by then, and when Mrs. Muderick asked me that question it was as if someone had stuck a hook in my throat. Did I say something? I think I heard my voice but then the shop tilted to one side and next thing I was in Mrs. Muderick’s living room surrounded by blue patterned plates and a cuckoo clock. My arms and legs were covered with dabs of calamine lotion and a lady in a dark suit was sitting on a chair. She said I was going to be looked after now.

I began shouting for my mother, but I guess I was still tired from spending the night in the ravine because everything went black again and I must have slept. There were dreams. I remember the dreams. I dreamt that ants had come out of the leaves in the ravine and were crawling all over me. I dreamt about the wax museum and Mrs. Muderick being a guard. She had big keys jangling on a hoop, and she was using one of them to open a door. I didn’t want to go through the door because the woman on the hook from The Chamber of Horrors was on the other side and if I came in, she’d open her eyes and stare straight in my face.

When I did open my own eyes properly again, I found myself in a bed with white sheets. I sat up bolt right. Where were my mother’s quarters? She and Peggy were going to skin me alive. I wondered for a moment where I was and then figured I must be in one of Mrs. Muderick’s bedrooms. It was so very quiet. I hoped she’d gone out. I ran through the living room with the cuckoo clocks, out the door and up the apartment steps. I was going to explain to Peggy and my mother how Mrs. Muderick had kept me a prisoner, probably stole the quarters too. I banged on the door. Peggy opened it. She took one look at me and slammed it back in my face.

I was bawling on those steps when Mrs. Muderick came back, so I didn’t see her at first blocking my way. I decided to be brave and demand the quarters back because I needed to give them to my mother. She said it was a bit late for that now because my mother had packed up and gone away.

“Without me!” I began banging on the apartment door again calling for her.

Mrs. Muderick said she might return but I didn’t have much choice now but to live with her until she did.

Next day I saw Peggy packing up and leaving too. She wouldn’t look at me, wouldn’t say anything about where my mother had gone. A new family moved into the apartment. The father owned a green Hillman. I saw him getting into it in the parking lot. The little boy had a brush cut like a US marine.

 

I stayed on in Mrs. Muderick’s second bedroom. She bought me dresser with a threeway mirror, and a fabric covered stool with a frilly edge. She also gave me a brush and a comb set. The comb’s edge had a design made of marbled plastic. The brush had a similar decoration on the back.

I would have liked these things better if I’d known where my mother had gone and when she was coming back. But there was not much I could do but wait. The stuffed furniture in Mrs. Muderick’s living room looking as if they were waiting too, and all those cuckoo clocks going tick tock.

When September rolled round Mrs. Muderick took me to a children’s wear store and bought me a box-pleated skirt, one that had a strip of pull-out elastic in the waistband and a button for making the skirt tighter or looser depending on how much you grew. She plaited my hair in two braids and tied grey ribbons at the ends, then she took me to be enrolled in the local school.

I should have been in grade four according to my age, but the principal said I was too far behind. I don’t remember much about him, black hair plastered to one side and taking me to sit in the back row. All the children swung round. They reminded me of a candy bracelet at recess their upturned faces singing, “The big ship sails on the ally ally o”, whatever that was supposed to mean They made a long chain and dipped under each other’s arms. I was too tall to fit.

Some of them came from those houses I’d seen near Bluffers Park, and I got it into my head that they’d sprung out of the lime-green lawns. Their mothers all seemed to know each other. They had uncles and aunts who’d seen out Hurricane Hazel four years earlier, lots of shared memories like that. I wondered what it would be like to live in a place so long you turned permanent. I thought if you could do that, then nothing, not even a hurricane, could blow you away.

Miss Benson was our teacher. She wore her hair in a French roll and sometimes turned up in an orange shift with a fat bow on the back. Dresses without waistlines were just coming in. I remember lots of people talking about that.

Each morning Miss Benson would write the date on the blackboard and underline it with pink chalk. Then we had to say, ‘Good Morning’ all in one voice and sing, ‘Oh Canada’. There was a map of Canada on the wall. We were supposed to learn the names of the provinces, the capital cities, and The Great Lakes too. You’d think after travelling back and forth across Ontario and seeing Niagara Falls that I’d have some idea about geography, but the map made no sense to me at all.

At noon I walked back to Mrs. Muderick’s apartment for lunch. She kept an apron on a hook in case I spilled anything on my clothes. After I’d eaten, and before I walked back to school, I’d peek up the stairwell, believing the place where I’d lived with my mother and Peggy was still there – that if only I could get inside I’d see them again.

One day, when I couldn’t stand it anymore, I ran up the stairs and knocked on the door. The mother of the boy with the brush cut opened it. I could see a tidy living room behind her head, a green chair and a lamp with a shade that looked like a hat.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said and ran away.

 

When Christmas came Mrs. Muderick bought a stencil set and a can of spray-on snow. She said I could decorate the windows so that when she pulled up the venetian blinds we wouldn’t be looking out at the wheels of parked cars. I sprayed Merry Christmas in old-fashioned letters, and snowmen and sleighs, until we could barely see out at all. All the while Mrs. Muderick was baking nutmeg cookies shaped like horseshoes and sprinkling soft icing sugar on top. She even bought a tiny wire Christmas tree with green hog-hair bristles and made decorations out of coloured pipe cleaners and some acorns she’d gathered in the fall.

At the end of the holidays there was an ice storm. Piles of snow came first and then freezing rain. Kids weren’t allowed to go back to school because the hydro lines were covered in thick ice and as it began to melt great shards crashed onto the sidewalks, sharp as knives.

It took three days for everything to settle down and for school to begin again. But on that first morning Miss Benson wasn’t there. The principal came into our classroom and said she was sick. He introduced us to a substitute teacher, an older woman, whose slip was showing at the back. It looked like he’d pulled her out of some wastepaper basket filled with crumpled paper and bits of gum. Lipstick bled around her mouth. Her name was Mrs. Graves.

After the principal left, Mrs. Graves asked us where we were up to in our studies. Hands flew up wanting to tell her that we were learning all about Canada and the Great Lakes. Mrs. Graves tottered up to the map on the wall. She was wearing high heels that didn’t fit very good. She peered in close like she needed glasses but was vain enough not to put them on. Suddenly, as if she’d thought of something, she swung to the window.

“See that ice storm we had? There was a time when it was like that all the time. Those were the Ice Ages. Huge glaciers came and scraped the hills and mountains away like a gigantic snow plough.” She stretched her arms wide. “That’s how the Great Lakes were formed. The ice melted and filled them up and this one here… ”, she pointed to Lake Ontario. “During the Ice Ages it was Lake Iroquois. So large its edges splashed up as far as this school. No, even further. We’re sitting in a place that was once underwater and the places that were land are all gone now. That’s because the lake kept filling up and draining away.”

Lots of mouths were open by then, trying to take in what she was saying. I guess that spurred her to say more. “There used to be Indians living round that shore.”

She peered at the map again like she could see them. “But stone hookers came to dredge the edges and took all the evidence away. But if you go down, down under ancient waters, down under time, you’ll find those places again.”

She paused for a full minute, her eyes wide, and then I think she realised she’d gone too far, because she sniffed and rubbed her nose.

“What are you all staring for?” she asked in a plain regular voice. “Stone hookers is what they used to call the men who came to get boulders for the building industry. They dragged them out of the water with huge steel hooks. Much of Toronto’s foundations were built from those stones.”

She went to the bathroom after that.

 

I don’t think any of the children ran home to tell their parents how Mrs. Graves frightened them because I never heard of it being spoken about in the months to come. I think they decided if they put it out of their minds, how she made the landscape seem so frightening, that the creepiness would disappear and along with it any thought that a stone hooker could take a place away. They could go back to seeing their streets as solid streets, of themselves and their time being solid too.

But for me her story made too much sense, and I was filled with a wonderful terror that if I was brave enough, I could find my mother again. That the places where we’d lived together would be at the bottom of Scarborough Bluffs.

I didn’t go back to Mrs. Muderick’s apartment after school that day. I walked through the snowy ravine, past the pretty houses and right to the cliff’s edge. There were paths to the bottom. I knew about them. Teenagers climbed down in the summer and built campfires, but it was winter and the way was covered in ice and snow. I held onto a branch trying to stop myself from slipping and reached for another. It broke. I slipped some ways and crashed into a lump of stone, bruising my hip. Dark was settling in by then. I was frightened and didn’t know whether to try climbing back up or keep going down.

Then I saw her, just a little further away on the path. My mother. She was pointing to the lake below. “Have you ever thought of living down there?” she asked, with that cajoling tone she would use whenever I got stubborn about getting into another car. “We could make a camp.”

I slid toward her and flung my arms around her waist. “But it’s late,” I said, holding on so tightly, not wanting her to get away. “It will be dark soon and it’s starting to snow.”

“But there’s something I need to show you.” Her hands were trembling with the cold. “And I can look after you down there.” she said pointing to the lake below. “We could make a wigwam like the Indians. We’re Ojibwa, you and me.”

I slid down the path behind her. I fell twice again, but she was always there, picking me up and brushing me off. Finally, we reached the shore. The lake was black and still. My mother said she needed to find driftwood to make the wigwam frame. I began gathering pebbles for the floor. But suddenly I heard splashing, looked up and saw my mother wading into the cold, cold water. She called out that there was no driftwood on the shore, then horribly plunged under the water as if she could find it down there.

I screamed and ran to the lake’s edge. The most awful minute passed before she surfaced again as if she was being lifted out of the water on a hook. Her hair hung over her face in wet ropes. Next there were torches and people, Mrs. Muderick in front. She ran forward and began dragging me away from the shore. I thumped at her chest trying to turn around. When I was finally able to do so my mother was gone.

Stories went around later that my mother was never at the Bluffs, that I’d gone down on my own. I can’t believe that’s true. Nor will I believe Mrs. Muderick’s tale about it being me who’d said that I’d been locked out of Peggy’s apartment – me who was crying in the shop about being hungry. How she’d taken me back to the flat and used her master key to get in.

“The rubbish bin hadn’t been cleared out in weeks! She shook my shoulders willing me to remember. “The place was crawling with ants. And the whisky bottles. Don’t you remember when I opened the door? There were men, your mother and Peggy. Oh, the shame of it.”

But this can’t be true. I would never have betrayed my mother. I will never confess to that, only that perhaps I’d imagined the hook dragging her out of the water. I think she just saw the people coming and ran away.

 

I stayed with Mrs. Muderick all the way to grade nine before I ran away too. In between she kept coaching me with my homework, telling me I could have a better life. She bought flashcards so I could learn my multiplication tables, but I never did. And every so often she’d would beg me to remember what a sad little girl I had been, how hungry and scared. I always stared up at her with what she called my awful, speared eyes until she promised never to ask me again. But she would. It was torture and it went on and on. Peggy always said Mrs. Muderick was a Nazi and once I did catch a glimpse of a tattoo, not underneath her armpit but a row of numbers on her forearm.

When I finally broke free of Mrs. Muderick I hit the road and began searching for my mother. It was almost as if the stone hookers got hold of me too and began dragging me from one end of Canada to the other and back again. A truck driver I hitched a ride with suggested I go looking in America, but I couldn’t imagine my mother getting there. She would have needed Howard, and if she found Howard then surely, they would have come back for me.

No, my mother would never have gone to America. It was too fantastical a dream to go there alone. And as the years went by, I found it harder and harder to remember her face. I would lie on my back in some flop house trying to get a sense of the shape of her, of the comfort of her, and my teeth would clench as I tried to remember what happened on the day she left. But all that would come to mind was the map on Miss Benson’s wall and those dark bodies of water on the eastern side.

Lakes Huron and Michigan became my mother’s stomach and kidneys. Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, her feet. Lake Superior was a gigantic bird wing flapping blue and silvery from her shoulders all the way down to her waist.

 

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