House of Spells by Robert Pepper-Smith

mother was asleep and I watched him take short steps down the aisle, feeling his way in the blinding screen light, turning to look over us. He smelled of cedar sawdust, and the sawmill crew called out as he went past,
    Keep your head down, Guzzo, we can’t see!
    Where’s Rose?
    Is she here?
    He raised an embarrassed hand to brush away their laughter and to shield his eyes.
    Yes, she was here somewhere.
    They were showing North by Northwest and in the light of Mount Rushmore’s face and Cary Grant’s frantic running, I saw Rose reach up to take his hand and I heard her whisper:
    It’s you!
    She took his hand to draw him down, and he put an arm around her to muss her hair.
    I felt jealous then, watching how they sat so close together, and I wondered whether a boy would ever hold me like that.
    How did he go from her life?
    That winter he was only in town to earn money to travel. His uncle, almost blind and no longer able to work, had bought an interest in the Odin Mill. They had hired him as a family obligation, though he turned out to be a good worker, reliable, and even when they were cutting edge grain cedar for the Vancouver boatyards, he showed up for work, forearms bandaged because the oil in the dust raised welts on his skin.
    Rose told me that he’d left to travel in Central America before she even knew she was pregnant.
    The mill was going to shut down because of the coming snows, and he couldn’t see sitting out the winter idle. He promised her that he’d be back in the spring, when the boss said they’d be rehiring.
    Why are you going, Rose had asked him. They were sitting together on the narrow, cushioned seat by the linoleum table in his trailer on the Palliser, and she’d drawn away to look at him carefully.
    She could see that this wasn’t the whole truth. There was a sadness in him that she couldn’t touch or hold or lessen, and it confused her.
    He told her that he’d been drifting since his family had lost their land, their village, that he couldn’t find a place to settle down in.
    But you are coming back?
    Yes, he reassured her.
    There was a lake in Central America he wanted to see, in a volcanic crater where the Maya said clouds were born. Once in the Grizzly Bookstore he’d shown me a photo of it: there was a lone fisherman on a shore of pumice stones; bundles of sticks with ribbons tied to them showed against the water, and the sides of the crater, covered in pines, rose steeply all around. He had found this photo in a book at the back of the store, among the secondhand volumes he called train books.
    What’s so special about a lake? I asked him.
    He closed the book then, touched its cover, a childlike, fragile look in his eyes that I felt drawn to.
    Who knows what I’ll find there? he said with a smile.
    A sacred lake that he wanted to see. Have you ever felt that, amazed at what people do? That the wanting was enough for him to go? What are “wants”? And do they really matter that much, “I want this” and “I want that” and therefore I shall go? Doesn’t it get a bit tiring after a while, wanting things? Don’t you get worn out? What if you didn’t want anything at all, what would happen to you then?

14
    This morning I weeded the herb beds, painted the outhouse. I got a call from a lookout in the Asher Valley and went out on the catwalk to watch a narrow, boiling mass of clouds send bolts, some of them visible for seconds, into the ridge at my feet. I could hear the electricity zinging around the aluminum eavestroughs, crackling and sparking. Curtains of virga swept across Leon Creek.
    Because maybe the cabin would be hit by lightning I knelt trembling on a stool with glass insulators in the bottom of the legs. Helicopters were in the air to the south, tracking three fires that I’d spotted. Every time I finished taking a bearing from the fire finder I’d look up to see another tree explode into flames before I could finish filling out the last message.
    Later this