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Chartreuse
by ElJean Dodge Wilson
an excerpt from Cloud Shadow, a novel
They hadn’t yet seen the herons. Abby might never have spotted them that March afternoon had she not been drawn to chartreuse.
All the drains of the house ran, noisy with water. Water sluiced down the steep, cedar-shake roof and the skylights, into the gutters, into the downspouts, then below ground, where it gurgled through hollow clay tiles. Water pooled in an underground concrete sump fed by the drain tiles, overflowed into a pipe buried alongside the driveway, and streamed downhill to the roadside ditch.
Above, the house stood on a ledge blasted out of the hillside. It was a multi-floored barnlike building of rough-sawn wood and glass, pinned to the granite outcrop by rebar, concrete, posts, and bolts. Dreamed by a young family and their younger architects, it was not finished, was still moving from idea to sheltering home. But finished enough for a final inspection. The permanent occupancy permit was tacked lightly––proudly––to a fir post in the kitchen. They could move in on Saturday.
Abby and her little boy Joel came out the front door, both wearing blue nylon rain jackets, jeans, and gum boots. As she pulled the door shut, their dog barked and began to scratch the inside of the door.
“No!” Abby yelled. “Quiet,” she said more gently.
The barking and scratching stopped.
Abby stood very still and listened to the music of water in the downspout beside her. She smiled. Good. It bucketed rain today. No new leaks and we fixed all the others.
“Stay, Taffy girl,” Joel commanded. “Take care of the house. Daddy’ll come up later and take you for a W-A-L-K.
Now the dog’s tail whacked against the door. She whined.
“She still knows what you’re saying, even if you spell it. She thinks you mean now.”
“But Tess and Steven always spell it. They just spell the first two letters and Taffy knows. I want to spell too.”
“Taffy, no,” Abby said. “Stop scratching.”
“Grandma Rore helps me spell before bedtime.”
“I know. She loves to help you. Once we move in, Daddy and I’ll be home after dinner too. We won’t have to go back to the house to work.”
“That’s ’cause you’ll be in the house, silly,” he said, laughing.
“Right. Then we can help you too. Grandma Rore has to go back home to the states in a couple of weeks.”
“Yeah, I know. I wish she didn’t have to.”
“Me too. I’m just glad she’s feeling better. We can still have lots of fun with her before she goes.”
“I didn’t like when she was so sick. She couldn’t breathe and stuff. It scared me.”
She leaned down to hug him.
He giggled. “Your hair tickles my nose.”
Taffy barked and scratched on the door again.
“Taffy, go lie down,” she said. “Go. Lie. Down.”
Silence, then heavy dog steps up the six hardwood stairs from entry to main floor. Her large dog body flopped down.
“Shh,” Abby whispered.
They turned and walked quietly down the outside steps. It had finally stopped raining. The air was cool and felt clean after the fumes inside from the newly painted kitchen. Joel started to run as soon as his feet hit the paved surface, zigzagging down the steepest part of the driveway, his arms out, his jacket billowing around and behind him like the wings of an exotic moth blown off course to this flowing, cool grey coast of the north Pacific.
“Joel, watch the road, sweetie,” Abby called as he reached the curve in the driveway. Below that was forest, then the short flat road that would be their street.
“Watch me, Mommy. I’m flying!”
“I see you. You are flying. Don’t go too high.”
She walked behind at a slower, almost dreamy pace, a slight woman with dots of white paint among the freckles on her face and a splotch of paint on the bangs sticking out from the blue hood of her jacket. She was a pretty woman with her father’s blue eyes to go with her dark red hair, but pretty, she knew, only in a smallish, quiet way. People were always saying she reminded them of someone, often adding that it was someone they liked a great deal.
She rubbed her eyes, which had already looked bloodshot and tired at 6:30 that morning when she was brushing her teeth. She raised her arms above her head, wrapping her left hand around her right wrist, and pulled straight up in a long stretch that raised her shoulders up to her ears. She closed her eyes and sighed.
“Mommy, are you coming? You have to come see.”
“In a minute, Joel. I’m resting, just for a minute.”
She lowered her arms and looked down at her hands, which were covered with scratches and scabs. Her new thumbnail was growing in, pushing the blackened nail out toward the end of the left thumb. I would have to hit it now, when we’re almost done, after a whole year of hammering. She smiled as she remembered the night it happened, how she’d cried from anger and exhaustion, how tenderly Ben had kissed it, then kissed her mouth, kept kissing her. He’d called it her badge of courage.
“My purple-black badge of courage,” she said.
West, between the sinuous trunks of arbutus trees reaching for light and the massive trunks of firs, she could see the grey-blue water of Howe Sound, two streets below them, and Bowen Island, where clouds slumped over the tops of the hillsides. The Sunshine Coast, which lay beyond the island, was completely obscured by weather.
Further down the driveway, the view disappeared and water dripped from branches onto the hood of her jacket. Her right foot slipped on the wet cedar and fir needles that had fallen in last night’s wind.
“Damn,” she said as she recovered her footing. She’d have to sweep this again tomorrow. She raised her voice. “What do you want to show me?”
“Boats,” he yelled.
At the road, water gushed out from the bottom of the drainpipe into a small ditch, where Joel was setting twigs adrift, then running along the side of the road to watch them disappear into a small culvert. He came back to her.
“Watch this, Mommy.” He dropped another stick into the water. They went alongside it, then squatted together beside the ditch and watched as it was sucked into the whirlpool.
Joel said, “You took so long now I have to pee.”
“Joel, you always have to pee. I swear your bladder’s the size of a pea.”
“What’s my bladder?”
“It’s a place inside you,” she said, patting his belly, “where your pee gets stored. When your bladder gets full, then you go.”
“Well, I have to go now. I’m not kidding.”
“I know I’ve been telling you guys to stop using the yard as a urinal, but I’m not walking up that driveway again today. You’ll just have to go here.”
Joel looked around, then pulled his jeans and underpants down partway, so that his penis was propped on the elastic top of his underwear. He thrust his knees forward, his torso back, and his head forward so he could watch his performance. A perfect arc of urine squirted out and landed in the water of the ditch.
“Bull’s-eye!” he shouted.
“Bull’s-eye, indeed,” she laughed. My son the cherub.
Hoo-hoo––Hoo-hoo. An owl called, and Abby looked up, hoping to glimpse it.
“Hoo-hoo––Hoo-hoo,” Joel answered.
On the bare branches of the big leaf maple tree that dominated the entry to their street, bright bursts of chartreuse catkins were just beginning to show, the first half-inch emerging.
Even this small paleness lit up the dark woods: Douglas fir and shaggy cedar.
Author Bio
ElJean Dodge Wilson (TWS 2004) has published poems in Canada and the U.S. She has twice read excerpts from her novel, Cloud Shadow, on Co-op Radio. In 2004 she was part of Caroline Adderson’s fiction mentor group and continues to meet monthly with members of that group. A 2008 poetry adjunct student with Rachel Rose, ElJean co-facilitates an ongoing creative writing class with Elee Kraljii Gardner (TWS 2006) at Carnegie Centre. She is married to Bob Wilson, a psychologist, and has three children and five grandchildren. She grew up in northern New Mexico and immigrated to Canada in 1964.
