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Excerpt From A Fine Daughter

Novel

Little Cypress

What begins as a question, as a distant roiling blister where two train rails converge and appear soldered together in the heat, turns eventually into the slow-paced rock-a-by-baby swagger of a pregnant girl. She walks one step at a time, as deliberate as a train.
            Chestnut hair and brown shoes – here she begins, here she ends. Whatever is between is lost to the shimmering prairie heat waves.
            As she walks closer, her dress, sleeveless and round at the neck, takes shape, billowing out in a pattern of balloons. Once the colors had been lush and lively. Turquoise and yellow. Blue, chartreuse and fuchsia. But this dress is faded as an old man’s eyes. The blues, now, are almost the same white as the sky.
            She carries nothing. Her thick hands are empty. She wears no rings. Hasn’t a pocket in which to place a note or piece of paper stating her name. When she later tells people she is Fran, Fran McLellan, there is no knowing whether this is truth or whim.
            She reaches the train station. Her belly is vast with the churning life within her.
            Just past the station, Fran McLellan swivels her body round and, despite her size, lifts her foot from the silver track with the grace of a dancer and sets it onto the dust of Main Street.

That very day, Gorkey hired the girl who called herself Fran McLellan. While the townsfolk discussed her shame and the glories of giving up a baby, Fran was already making the room above Gorkey’s General her own. While the talk continued, she plunked herself into a cool bath. Yes indeed. Her thick and swollen body cooling in a bath with the rinds of lemons Gorkey had peeled for her. While the men outside Frank’s Barbershop said how Gorkey’d be a damn fool to take her in, Fran was watching the cool water pool between her heavy breasts. While women tapped their daughters on the behind and whispered, "That’s what I’ve been warning you about," Fran plunged her head beneath the water and, tasting lemon, considered Gorkey’s curiously long and curled thumbnail which stripped the lemon of its skin.
            The townsfolk talked until finally the men who gossiped outside Frank’s and the women with their groceries in their arms looked up to see Fran’s only dress, washed and dripping wet, hanging from the open window. Wet, the balloons took on color, the intense fuchsia and yellow filled with the late afternoon breeze.
            Gorkey had made his decision.

A Fine Daughter, novel, Red Deer College Press, ed. Aritha van Herk, 1999.

Excerpt From Journal Entries

June 13, 2000

The up & down is indescribable. The sense of unreal. Of waiting. Of witnessing time moving forward to that terrifying moment on the phone, the voice on the other end uttering vowels whose meaning holds so much of my future. Woke up very angry this A.M. Went to sleep last night in the still-daylight, all the blinds open, exhausted to the core and shuddering, my body in my arms, wrapped tight, holding me. Me. After the needle biopsy. After the oh-my-god dry-mouthed & sweaty discussion with the Doctor.  I’m worried, he says. And he’s frank. There is no candy coating here. Just a terrifying normalcy. If it’s malignant, then this… as if to say, If it’s carrots, then you can boil them.
           All day, up & down. Laughing. The fear forgotten, briefly. Then again, the terror. Running over the hills. Up, down. The valley dank & rooty. Up top, blue sky & green grass  & smelling of just-after-rain.
            But I was down & angry this A.M. Maybe now I’ve been there I won’t go so ravingly there again. I doubt it though, if this is can no, say it – cancer – I’ll go there again. This morning, saying to M, I can’t stand the thought of him with another woman if I were to die; I’ve waited for the quiet of our older years to amble with him over green lawns. I should be kinder. Perhaps out of the rage & this writing, I have an image lasting & real to train my cells to. Green lawns, a river’s edge. With M.

June 15, 2000

This is what it is to be human. It means making these phone calls. It means facing the tough stuff head on. Alone. I am alone and I am going to make this call.
           May-Belle gave a gift – a purpose in life gift – “You uplifted us with A Fine Daughter. We need joy. We need people like you to give us joy. So keep doing it.”
           I will keep doing it. And I will be at the river’s edge with M, grey and laughing at Pookey 2. And I will watch S get married wearing her 2000 locket. I will see E strong and a man, kind and elegant and o-so-loving. I will do all of this. I am strong. So strong. And determined and spiritual. I lovelife I love me. Now. The call.
         20 to 3.
         Almost 10 to 3.
          How shakingly unbearable these minutes. The wind blows. My wind chimes  –
         She has to phone me back.

         Cancer  begin chemo first
                       multi-focal meaning different areas
                       usually total mastectomy

So how do I deal with this. Oh how? O.my.god.  O.my.god. Life. I am greedy for you. So greedy. I want you. So much. So much. Faith. And wisdom. Hope. My white bird.
            3:15. The wind chimes. Time.

June 16 . 2000

Much better today – last night’s horrors having subsided. The curling like a child, sobbing, hearing M call people is passed. But now, tonight. I am tired. So tired. This will wait.

June 20, 2000

The days go by in this strange unreal but very real way. Such a lovely weekend despite or perhaps because of the darkness. And moments too, of saying this darkness brings light. It makes us hold hands and laugh. Brings us to the table together, puts us in the same boat, all of us. And so we floated, so lazy lazy down the river. G & E in the half sunken raft of our early anniversary. S with M & me. Just drifting. The river which will wash away this cancer. Cleanse my blood. The river of my meditation.

June 21 . 2000

I’ve never experienced exhaustion like this – ever. The adrenalin sedative. Spent 3 or 4 hours at the Foothills yesterday. My oncologist, who originally said chemo – & I was psyched for this – said let’s do surgery first. It’s the latest thinking. And my breast. My breast. Oh such a change of thinking to consider in a week-or-less, having the breast that’s nourished my babies, that’s given me such sexual pleasure, that I’ve taken such giggling joy in flashing – gone. I will come to terms with this. I will. But I have this idea. I think I should go to the ashram [Yasodhara]first. I think I am meant to. And there I will become thoroughly prepared for all of it – & maybe even work a few miracles along the way… But I need to consider a lot.

Journals – unedited, unpublished.

Exerpt From Not by Bread Alone

Short Story

He opens the door; a yawn of sunlight floods the linoleum. And she is aware only of the sparkle on his thigh – blonde leg hairs tangled in light – and the pulse of music.
            "How many loaves, lady?" The door bangs behind him, swallowing the silver blaze, the pearly dust.
            She does not answer.
            "How many loaves, lady?"
            "You aren’t the bread man."
            "What?"
            "Take off your damned head phones."
            He looks right at her. Smiles as he yanks the thin loop of wire from his ears. For a second the rattle of sound intensifies. He clicks off his walkman. Then, in the silence, still smiling, he says, "How many loaves?"
            "You aren’t the bread man." She does not change her tone. But continues to stand, palms flat to the coolness of the counter top.
            "I’m here to tell you I am."
She stares hard at him, has to focus on his eyes, there is so much light behind him. "Listen. Bert’s the bread man. Has been for 20 years. A guy doesn’t just up and quit without saying a word after 20 years."
            He tappity-taps his toe on the linoleum. Looks at his watch. "Y’know, some people just move on. Really."

"Not by Bread Alone" short story, The Boreal Factor, Smoky Peace Press, ed. Elroy Deimert, 2003, 20 pgs.

Excerpt From falling angels/have this memory

Short Story

There is a lip. An edge. Threshold/precipice/fine line. Between the hard surface upon which I stand and   air. Air. A simple word, air. Monosyllabic simplicity a rush of the very thing spoken as it is said. Air. Say it out loud feel   air. And looking over the lip the edge the threshold, I see 7,115 feet of air. Matt black air. Matt black air, thick with stars, singed by the light of a quarter/rock-a-by-baby moon. Nighttime and I’m looking down. Looking into the jump target zone a ring of white light; a fairy circle.
            My jumpmaster breathes out words: Main parachute personally packed? I nod. Reserve parachute packed by certified parachute rigger? I nod. Even up here where we stand in the black wind with the door removed from this Fairchild 24, I hear   air as it rushes out of her lungs. Air giving me solace; her breath, a warm connection to something vitally human. To step over the lip is to step into solitude, an unequalled aloneness. It is to move through moments as uncomplicated as clean white sheets. A falling star, fast white arc of thought. There is nothing complex out there. It just is. And when I am out there, I am being perfectly selfish.

"falling angels/  have this memory" short story, Boundless Alberta – New Fiction, NeWest Press, Edmonton, Alberta, ed. Aritha van Herk, 1993, 22 pgs.

Excerpt From Eva and the Apple Tree

Short Story

He sat in his apple tree, knees pulled closely to his chest, watching the fierce roll of clouds and the blossoms which fluttered brilliant against the moving grey. Waldor, arms wrapped about his legs, squatting in the last moment of spring’s white light. The wind gusted, flipping up the leaves of his tree. Their undersides flapped silver. Then he heard the screen door slam.
            “Waldor. You’re a dink.”
            The wind carried white blossom petals across the sky, and swirling, they fell at his wife’s feet. Her hair rose in the storm’s energy.
            “You are, Waldor,” she yelled. “A big weiner, Waldor.”

"Eva and the Apple Tree" short story, Alberta Bound: Thirty Stories by Alberta Writers, NeWest Press, 1986, ed. Fred Stenson.

“For Brett's Sake” short story, published in blue buffalo, Fall 1990, Volume 8, Number 2, ed. a collective including Sarah Murphy and W. Mark Giles, 8 pgs, magazine format.

"A Man's Home Is" short story, The Dinosaur Review, Fall 1985, ed. Aritha van Herk, Robert Kroetsch and Monty Reid.