Algoma Read online

  There was a trick to entering Josie’s driveway, a long, narrow gravel road that suddenly opened up into a large space the size of a grocery-store parking lot. In the past, the lot had been used to park farm equipment, but now it was mostly empty except for her pick-up truck. The entrance to the driveway was flanked by two deep ditches that visitors drove into from time to time, despite the reflectors she’d posted on each side. The front ends of their cars smashed, foreheads bleeding, tow-trucks called. Inspired, Josie had come up with a simple solution: she’d painted two antique milk canisters bright orange and posted them on either side of the entrance. Visitors were so scared about scratching their cars on the cans, they took their time coming in. No one had landed in the ditch in months.

  The house was large and old, but well cared for. Even if there wasn’t a new coat of paint on the wood siding—ancient white paint curling up to reveal a dark green past—the porch was swept clean and the sidewalks shovelled. The focal point of the backyard was a huge bonfire pit that was surrounded by a triangle of church pews Josie had scored a few years back when a church two towns over had been decommissioned. Once a summer, everyone from The Shop and a few of Josie’s best customers and traders came over for an all night bonfire. They’d arrive early and put their tents up on the lawn, break out the coolers of beer and wine, and not leave until the following evening. Breakfast would be made in huge cast-iron pans over the remaining embers. For those who were invited, it was one of the highlights of the year.

  Josie took a small key out of her pocket and unlocked the padlock on the barn door that led to her workshop. She’d purchased the property because of the barn, so she could store all her larger barters, the things she didn’t take directly to the shop for Algoma to sort through and clean. Things she knew would be worth something to someone someday. Today it was worth something to her. Just as she walked inside, she heard someone coming up the driveway, the pop and crunch of gravel beneath car tires.

  Algoma.

  Josie and Algoma manoeuvred their way past the antique furniture and mysterious shapes that were covered in faded moving blankets and old quilts.

  “I didn’t think I’d be having any more kids, so I donated all of their baby furniture.” While her mouth was upturned in a smile, her eyes were flat and expressionless. She peeked under one of the blankets and quickly dropped the corner of the blanket back down again, a cloud of dust colouring her jacket.

  Josie tried to think of something to say. “Well, there’s enough stuff here that you’re set even if you have quintuplets.”

  Algoma laughed sincerely. “I’m not a cat, Jo.”

  “We’ll it’s a good thing because a litter of kittens can have more than one father,” Josie said, proud as ever of her random trivia. “More than two and I’d be suspicious.”

  “You’re so full of it.”

  “I’m serious. You come take a look at my two cats and tell me they came from the same father. I’m thinking of hitting up one of the barn cats for child support.”

  By the time they left the barn, Algoma had settled on a set of matching white baby furniture that had been stored in an old goat pen. Josie carefully loaded up the pieces into her truck and followed Algoma home where she unloaded the pieces and then said she was off to check on how construction on The Shop was coming along.

  After Josie left, honking her horn as she turned the corner, Algoma and Ferd set about wiping down the furniture with a mixture of white vinegar and water.

  Since Ferd had slept on the pullout couch in the basement for the past year, his and Leo’s old room had remained relatively untouched except for when Algoma slept in it. When the boys were born, Gaetan had painted the walls dark yellow, the colour of late season corn left to stand against grey winter. Algoma had asked for something brighter, but Gaetan had insisted they’d grow into it.

  In the room were two single beds separated by a large wooden dresser pushed up against the wall opposite the door. Above the dresser was an antique, oval mirror Algoma had rescued from a neighbour’s trash bin. Any image reflected in the middle of the mirror warped, so the boys had only been able to see their reflection along the beveled edge, a sliver at a time. Along the inside of the door frame were two lengths of masking tape. Once a month, Algoma had asked her sons to stand up straight and put their heads back against the tape where she measured their heights and wrote it down. Most times, the lines she drew for the two boys overlapped one another. She had stopped the ritual after Leo died. The twins’ heights remained a matching three feet and four inches tall. Drunk one night, Gaetan had used a black marker to measure his slumped height, a man reduced.

  Algoma retrieved the empty cardboard boxes she had picked up from the grocery store and brought them into the room. Together, she and Ferd packed up everything and stored the boxes beside the holiday decorations in the basement. Snakes of Christmas lights and stacked foam snowmen. And now most of the boys’ belongings. Once the room was emptied, the beds dismantled, and the dresser pushed into the hallway, they opened the windows and brought in the brushes and paint cans.

  Years later, it would be easy to spot who had painted what part of the room. Algoma’s sections were precise, coated evenly in robin’s egg blue paint. Ferd had painted quickly and with an overloaded brush. His sections of the wall appeared veined.

  By the end of the weekend the room was complete, the new furniture arranged and waiting for the baby. While Algoma made Sunday dinner, Ferd went into the basement and cut open one of Leo’s boxes. He dug through the newspaper packing and grabbed a handful of things: a T-shirt, an old shotgun shell, and curl of birch bark Leo had torn from the neighbour’s tree. He stuffed his brother’s things into an empty pillowcase he’d brought downstairs and took them up to the baby’s room. He wanted Leo to be comfortable when he arrived, surrounded by familiar things.

  As Ferd rummaged around the house, Algoma took a moment to look out at the empty street. She picked up Gaetan’s weather journal from the window sill and recorded the details of the day: 5:14 p.m. 11°C. Wind unknown. Sore back. Empty cupboards. You’re still not home.

  She recorded the weather every day so there would not be a gap in Gaetan’s journal when he returned. So he would know what snow had fallen while he was gone, how the temperature had risen and fallen like the peaks and valleys of a heart monitor. He would not have missed a single day.

  His cursive sat above hers on the page like oil over water. Her words looked like small, squat buildings, each word carefully printed out in block letters, while his blue ink was a fine yarn that held everything together until it was abruptly severed the day he’d left.

  ______________

  2:14 p.m. 4°C. Wind W, strong.

  Tin roof of the barn rumbling like thunder.

  En route home from the grocery store, Josie drove straight past The Shop, not even so much as glancing in the direction of the construction. There was enough to do at home to keep her from staring at what wasn’t yet finished, but The Shop had become an easy excuse of late. Any time she didn’t want to do something, or wanted to be alone, she said she was going to look in on The Shop. Her trump card, whatever the real reason.

  She pulled her truck into the driveway and drove past the house, parking beside the barn. Drops of rain hit the windshield. The temperature was rising, a couple more degrees and all the snow would melt. When the temperature dropped again, everything would be covered in ice. She got out of her truck and unlocked the padlock on the side door of the barn. Inside, it was cold and dark. Even with the light switched on, only a small area was lit up, the corners still black and shapeless. Josie grabbed her flashlight and walked up to what used to be the hay loft. She couldn’t have imagined what farmer would have made a go of it this far north, or what he would have farmed. She was just grateful to have the storage space, and she was always finding things tucked away under stairs and floorboards. The barn was a treasur
y of rusted parts and machinery that was either half taken apart, or half put together. She couldn’t tell which.

  Even if The Shop was not up and running, Josie had not stopped collecting or sorting what she already had. If anything, her accumulation had increased, so that she could replace what she’d lost in the fire, and the barn was her warehouse. Upstairs, she’d fashioned herself a temporary sorting area; downstairs, she’d set up a washing machine and dryer to clean any clothing that came in. That was the secret to the success of The Shop: everything was clean. The store never smelled like the others in town, a sickeningly sweet mixture of ancient sweat and must. Every piece of clothing that Josie sold had been cleaned and pressed. The furniture she collected was stored in the west side of the main floor of the barn—like with like, and all diligently cleaned, some refinished. Everything left the barn in better condition than it had arrived in.

  Josie switched on her small, silver radio to the only station that would come in. She reached for one of the black plastic bags of clothing and gutted it with her thumb, clothing and a handful of costume jewellery spilling out onto the floor. From the pile, she pulled out a black and white striped dress. She unzipped the front pockets and reached in to look for anything that would bleed in the wash or tear the fabric and narrow her margins—packets of gum, tissues, pens, or pins—and instead found a puzzle ring.

  She held the six interlinked bands in the palm of her hand and tried to picture their undoing. The owner of the dress had gone out, drunk too much, shown her ring to a friend, how she could easily put it back together, but couldn’t. Drunk fingers fumbling unsuccessfully to reassemble the silver bands, the knots and curves, until she’d given up and tucked it into her pocket and never thought about it again. That, or it had been an unwanted gift that she’d “lost.”

  Sometimes working at The Shop was like working in a Cracker Jack box. There was a prize in every pocket, purse, and locket. In her bedroom, Josie had an antique jewellery box where she kept all the treasures she found. There were silver dollars and old coins tucked into the velvet folds of the ring holder, charm bracelet charms hanging from the necklace hooks, wallet-sized photos of strangers’ girlfriends, children and parents taped onto the doors. It was her personal lost and found box.

  Josie looked at the ring in her hand. She was good at puzzles, at putting things back together again. Maybe she could fix this. If she could, she would give it to Algoma. A bonus for her hard work, she thought, like those years of service pins and watches that big companies gave out. A reward.

  Algoma had been wearing Edith Renaud’s clothing the first time Josie saw her. Josie immediately recognized the turquoise and white pinstriped jumper with matching white shoes, but said nothing. It was like meeting an old friend even if Josie hadn’t known Edith personally—she’d been dead when Josie was introduced to her wardrobe.

  In the days after Edith’s untimely death—a fall down her front steps that should have resulted in a few scrapes and bruises had killed her—Josie had come to know her closets and wardrobe boxes intimately. She’d been called in by Victor, Edith’s husband. “Please just come and take it away,” he’d asked. “It’s too much, too much.”

  Josie arrived within the hour and began the tedious task of sorting through eras of clothing—eighty-seven years of seasonal wear. Apparently, Edith had never settled on one style and stuck with it as so many other people did. There were denim bell bottoms and red polyester pants, full-length gowns and a carton of jeans.

  Like paramedics or the coroner, Josie was often one of the first people to know about a death. She was a first responder, her name synonymous with someone who could take away the things that pained those who had been left behind. Closets stuffed like Christmas turkeys with once-worn holiday clothes. Shoe boxes full of overexposed photographs, 1-2-3-cheese smiling faces, most of the names already forgotten. Entire collections of cast-iron frying pans with fifty years of meal memory hardened like thin layers of coal over iron. To call Josie in was civilized. Loved ones’ belongings would not end up destined for the local landfill for a half century of slow rot; instead, they would be cared for, washed, folded, and given new homes. Some widows and widowers called Josie before they called anyone else, wanting to avoid earth-shattering fights over who got what hutch, candle holder or scarf. They gave or sold everything to Josie who saved them from the embarrassments of their own families.

  Algoma had come into the store for a job. She’d nervously twirled one strand of her hair around a finger as she handed over her woefully brief résumé. Josie hated nervous tics, but immediately forgave Algoma hers.

  Josie scanned the résumé. Among her qualifications, Algoma had listed “mother to two boys and sister to six.” Within ten minutes Algoma was hired and scheduled for her first shift the following day.

  “What should I wear?” Algoma asked.

  Josie nervously fiddled with some receipts. “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,” she said.

  The next day, Algoma arrived at The Shop ten minutes before nine o’clock dressed in the same turquoise jumper (cleaned and pressed overnight), yellow plastic sandals that Josie recognized from the dollar store, a blue patent leather belt wrapped around her thin waist, and thick black eyeliner. “I’m ready, boss.”

  During her first week at The Shop, Algoma named the mannequins in the front window: Esmeralda, Eleanor, and Eloise. “They’ll work harder for us if we name them,” she told Josie after adding their names to the schedule. Their hours were listed from 12:00 a.m. to 12:00 a.m. every day of the year. When the store burnt down, everyone mourned the loss of the girls.

  Josie hadn’t minded when Algoma had taken to decorating the wall above the sorting table like it was her home or locker—everything important to her on display so there was no question about her priorities. Photos of her family were tacked front and centre and beside it a perfume advertisement ripped out of a magazine. The model in the ad had Algoma’s long neck, high, flat cheekbones, and thin hair. When Algoma stood in front of the paper, it turned into a mirror.

  For the first month of her employment, Algoma mostly worked for things in trade with which to fill her home. Every hour she spent at the cash register, she earned what she needed to make a life for her and her family. By the end of her first week, she had filled an entire sheet on the debit board. Her shelves were filled with strangers’ knickknacks, a pair of silver candelabras from someone’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary celebrated thirty years earlier, a plush reclining chair that no longer reclined, and a pine coffee table that was high enough to eat at comfortably. She also ensured that she had sufficiently filled her closet with enough clothes to see her through two solid weeks of work—a franken-closet pieced together from more than a dozen women’s wardrobes.

  By the end of her first year at The Shop, Algoma’s home looked like an antique shop, old farm tools displayed with as much pride as collectible plates. In a pinch, she could stretch a fence, saw barn boards, or curry a horse. Once a month, she oiled the metal on each of the tools and polished the wooden handles until they shone. Any time Josie went over, she felt instantly and completely at home, Algoma’s home having become a simple extension of The Shop.

  Josie polished the ring bands with the bottom of a concert T-shirt of some metal band she’d never heard of. Her sorting abandoned, she was now sitting on the floor completely focused on the ring and putting it back together again. She turned the bands around and around trying to figure out their secret. When she tried to force two of the bands to interlock, she bent the metal ensuring the ring would never go back together again.

  ______________

  7:29 a.m. 7°C. Wind NW, light.

  Thin curls of smoke coming out of the toaster.

  Ferd stood on his tiptoes and reached for his toast. He grabbed both slices with one hand and quickly dropped them onto his plate. The toast was charred black. If his fathe
r were here, Ferd could have turned the darkness dial down a couple shades and popped in two more slices of bread. Gaetan liked cold, burnt toast and tea, but he was not here. He was eating cold, burnt toast somewhere else.

  Ferd opened the cutlery drawer and grabbed a butter knife. He stared at a smudge of jam hardened onto the dull blade. This kind of thing had been happening more and more lately. Whenever his mother did the dishes, he found greasy thumbprints on the plates, lip marks on the glasses, bits of food on the cutlery, but he didn’t say anything to her. Instead, he rewashed the dishes, dried them, and put them back in the cupboards, so she wouldn’t notice. He flicked the jam spot off the knife with his thumbnail and scraped the burnt parts of the toast into the garbage. Black snow on hills of crumpled tissues.

  Aside from what his first note of the day to Leo would say, the biggest decision Ferd made every morning was what to put on his toast. There was less choice these days, but still enough to allow him pause. Strawberry jam or Cheez Whiz. They’d run out of peanut butter, his favourite, a month ago, but his mother had never replaced it. He walked over to the fridge for the ancient oversized jar of spreadable cheese that lived on the bottom shelf. He made to open the door, but stalled. There was something new on the fridge. An ultrasound photo.

  Ferd slid the magnet over, pulled the photo off the fridge, and flipped it over. A date from last week was penned onto the back. He turned it back over again. Leo. It was the first time he’d seen him in over a year. His heart ached as much as it was overjoyed. He was sure his mother had left the photo there for him to discover. She’d known he’d find it. A truce. He carefully studied the black and white photo. It looked like the maps of northern Canada that were posted in the halls at school; thousands of kilometres—every tree, person, animal, and road—reduced to water or land.