Crow
“Tender, raw, and compassionate, Crow tackles the life-changing events thrown at her and muscles them down to her control, leaving her readers breathless in the face of her honesty and hard-earned truths.” — Donna Morrissey
“Amy Spurway comes out swinging with this raw, unflinching, and emotionally urgent debut novel. Be forewarned, Crow is as empowering and comic as it is unsettling and disarming. I love it.” — Joel Thomas Hynes
“I think Crow is great. It depicts a side of Cape Breton populated by characters that are flawed and achingly real. It's poignant and funny.” — Lesley Crewe
“Amy Spurway catches perfectly the enigma that is Cape Breton Island. Her cast of divine lunatics, pogey-scammers, gossips, and big-hearted rebels, revealed through Spurway’s lively and lucid prose, proves that Cape Breton is still the thought-control centre of Canada.” — Wayne Grady
CROW
a novel
AMY SPURWAY
Copyright © 2019 by Amy Spurway.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.
Edited by Bethany Gibson.
Cover and page design by Julie Scriver.
Cover illustration by Julie Scriver, based on a work by Potapov Alexander, Shutterstock.
Printed in Canada.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Spurway, Amy, 1976-, author
Crow / Amy Spurway.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77310-023-4 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77310-024-1 (Kindle).--
ISBN 978-1-77310-025-8 (EPUB)
I. Title.
PS8637.P88C76 2019 C813’.6 C2018-904590-6
C2018-904591-4
Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the generous financial support of the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of New Brunswick.
Goose Lane Editions
500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330
Fredericton, New Brunswick
CANADA E3B 5X4
www.gooselane.com
To the people who are my roots and wings.
A.S.
CONTENTS
- 1 The Dirt
- 2 The Dust
- 3 The Weight of the Earth
- 4 If You Can’t Take the Heat, Get Out of the Kitchen Party
- 5 You’ll Wish Your Cake, Dough, Baby
- 6 Blood and Water
- 7 In Living and Dying Colour
- 8 Down Around the Roots
- 9 Look at That One, Making a Scene
- Epilogue
- Acknowledgements
1 THE DIRT
I come from a long line of lunatics and criminals. Crazies on one side of the family tree, crooks on the other, although the odd crazy has a touch of crook, and vice versa. I am the weary, bitter fruit — or perhaps the last nut — of this rotten old hybrid, with its twisted roots sunk deep in dysfunctional soil. Some even call it cursed, this family tree of mine. But if you ask me, that’s all a pile of superstitious bullshit. Like I said, we’re just a bunch of lunatics and criminals.
“Get your bony arse out of bed before I kick it out.” Mama clomps into my room at the crack of dawn, thumping a laundry basket full of wet clothes down at the foot of my bed and flinging the window wide open, like some kind of sunrise-loving lunatic. Threatening to kick my arse, like a criminal alarm clock with big, flat feet.
My mother, Effie Fortune, is the sanest, straightest one of the bunch. After all these years, I realize that threatening to kick my bony arse out of bed is her way of saying I love you. Mama’s the reason I came back to Cape Breton. Not that I had much choice.
I want to tell her that I had that same nightmare again. The one with the flock of birds that laugh at me and the tree that uproots itself to chase me across a swath of black and barren land. The monster branches grab me when I stumble, and squeeze the life out of me, while the birds all fly around cackling. The first time I had that bad dream was one week ago, when I still lived in Toronto. I woke up gasping and retching, and then I vomited all over my bed. Both of my arms dead as doorknobs, my head pounding, and my eyes unable to focus, it took me almost an hour to pull myself together enough to clean up the mess. In the end, I biffed the creamy satin bedding in the dumpster out behind my condo because I couldn’t stomach trying to wash it. Puke-covered designer sheets chucked in a dumpster. Of all the genuinely sad and jarring circumstances of late, that one foolish detail was somehow the final straw. I called Mama that night to say I was coming home.
So here I am.
When I try to speak now, all that comes out is a low groan, which Mama takes as the kind of willfully inarticulate protest she would’ve got from me when I last lived here as a lazy, melodramatic eighteen-year-old.
“You’ve been laying in that bed since you got here. Damn near a day and a half. It’s no good for you. And that laundry won’t hang itself.” She shoves the basket closer to my bed with her size-nine clodhopper.
Again, I open my mouth to say something, but Mama’s already hustling out the door and down the hall before any words make it out. But that’s all right. I didn’t come here to argue with my mother, even though a vestige of my saucy teenage self is alive and well, and on familiar turf. I came here so Mama could take care of me. So I could gather the strands of my life together and weave them into some kind of coherent story about who I was and where I came from, before it’s too late. Before I forget. Before I’m just a memory here.
See, I’m dying.
But where are my manners? We haven’t even been properly introduced! Just let me pull on my fancy pants, flatten my hair, and slide into my smooth, persuasive Multi-Level Marketing expert voice.
Good day. I’m Stacey Fortune, former manager of marketing communications for the Canadian division of Viva Rica! The Essence of Inspiration!
What’s that, you ask?
Viva Rica is a carefully crafted and ludicrously expensive blend of eighteen essential superfood extracts that supports and stimulates the flow of health and wealth to a handful of folks at the top of the company pyramid, by pushing highly sophisticated twenty-first-century brainwashing sales and recruitment bullshit through a dedicated network of wishful-thinking super juice junkies. We’d be proud to have you and your twenty closest friends join our rapidly growing global distribution family! The greatest journey starts with one small sip!
That’s the kind of marketing prowess that could have earned me the prestigious Viva Rica Juicy Details Award, which recognizes excellence in convincing desperate people that pawning off crates of fifty-dollars-a-bottle blueberry juice on their friends and family is their ticket to entrepreneurial bliss. Unfortunately, I lacked the kind of bubbly ambition that would have helped me float all the way to the top of the Viva Rica pyramid. Probably because I didn’t drink enough super juice. It gave me gut rot.
How about an introduction that’s a little more down to Earth? One where my pants are clean but not fancy, my hair is only a tad ratty, and my voice has just the faintest hint of a charming yet ambiguous East Coast accent.
Hihowareyataday, I’m Stacey Fortune. Up until two weeks ago, I was the picture of a strong, successful, independent urbanite woman. I had a mediocre career, an overpriced condo in downtown Toronto, and a hilarious story about how I empowered myself to blow gobs of money on stupid shit in the name of retail therapy after I gave my cheating fiancé the boot. Then I got diagnosed with three highly unpredictable — and certainly inoperable — brain tumours, which sporadically turn my limbs to Jell-O, my eyes to kaleidoscopes, and my head into a world of hurt. Now, I’m holed up in my mother’s small and scruffy trailer on small and scruffy Cape Breton Island, holding out little hope that the doctors in this Have-Not Hellhole can do much to stop me from morphing into a paralyzed bag of piss, drool, and babble before I unceremoniously croak.
Hair, pants, and tone be damned, let’s just cut to the chase.
Hi. I’m Stacey. But you can call me Crow. How ’bout bein’ nice to me. I’ll be dead soon.
A few pages in, and I just blew the ending of this story. That’s all right. It’s painfully predictable anyway. I really should have just written Girl gets tumours, girl loses mind, girl dies, the end on a sheet of loose-leaf, slapped it in a damn Duo-Tang folder and been done with it. But that is not the style of a masochistic narcissistic drama queen such as myself. Get comfy and get the tissues, dear. This here is a proper Cape Breton tale of shame and woe. Grabs at the heart strings and tugs.
All the old dolls will click their tongues and say, “Yes, poor Crow Fortune. Deathly ill with the tumours smack dab in the middle of her brains. What a sin. So young. What, thirty-something was she? Makes ya wonder, don’t it. About them Fortunes and the . . . you know.”
Because nobody will come right out and say it. It’s always whispered every time something terrible happens to one of us. The . . . you know. The thing that makes us lunatics, or criminals, or both. The thing that cuts us down in the prime of our lives. The curse of the Poor Unfortunate Fortunes. They say it goes back generations. I say it’s a convenient cover for people who are prone to poor life choices, bad luck, and bouts of lunacy. Either way there’s a story here about me, about my people, about this place, and I need to be the one to tell it. If only to myself. Get this life of mine down on paper while I still can. That’s item number one on my bucket list. Or, my Fuck It List. Because fuck it, I’m dying, so I’ll say and do whatever I want now. But first, I better get those towels out on the clothesline before Mama has a conniption fit.
My feet are barely planted on the worn vinyl of my bedroom floor when my phone buzzes. A text message from my best friend, Allie, reads simply: Mom’s gone.
Allie’s mother, Reenie, is dead.
Reenie Walker had been dying in fits and starts ever since she was diagnosed with ALS when Allie was in tenth grade. One year later, the woman who built her family’s log cabin home with her own two hands couldn’t hold a teacup. Allie sold her beloved Shaggin’ Wagon to buy her mother a wheelchair van just before graduation. And while I was gallivanting around Toronto, pissing away my blueberry juice money on napkin rings to match the seasonal centrepieces on my dining-room table, Allie was a decade deep into being her mother’s full-time caregiver in a tiny Halifax apartment decorated with tubes, monitors, and forgotten dreams. Reenie lived far longer than anyone expected. I can’t tell if that was a blessing or a curse.
Oh honey. I’m so sorry. R U ok? I text back.
Which is stupid. Of course she’s okay. Allie Walker is always okay. She’s been preparing for her mother’s passing for years. Talking about it openly. Looking forward to the kind of freedom that would inevitably come once this hard, sad chapter of her life closed. Of course there will be grief. Guilt, too. It so happened that Reenie died on the only night in ten years Allie was away from her bedside. It was a quick jaunt to Boston, for her first real job interview since her mother got sick. A big medical research company was looking to hire a patient and family coordinator for a project in Nova Scotia. Allie applied on a whim and was shocked when they called her back. Even more shocked that the position came with flexibility, benefits, training, and a paycheque well beyond the pittance of her mother’s disability pension. So, Allie missed out on the last act of unflinching love that she’d been dutifully rehearsing in her head for years. The moment where she would hold her mother’s hand, kiss her on the forehead, and whisper, “I love you, Mom. You can let go now.” Instead, it was a home care nurse who didn’t know that everyone called her Reenie, and not Irene. But Allie is and will be okay. The woman’s a rock.
I’d be lying if I said I’m not relieved as Allie details her return and her plans to be back in Cape Breton for the foreseeable future. If there’s one person besides Mama I’d want by my side to hold my hand, kiss my forehead, and tell me it’s okay to let go, it is Allie. Allie understands the slow-motion betrayals of a sick body. Allie can stomach suffering. Allie will help me die.
My phone slips from my increasingly clumsy hand and into the pile of dank, dusty stuffed animals I shoved to the floor when I arrived thirty-six hours ago. I can’t be bothered to dig for it now because the morning cacophony of physical and sensory chaos has begun. The faded collage of magazine ads and rock god posters plastered on my bedroom wall becomes an amorphous blur. A jackhammer headache ramps up in jig time, and my stomach clenches into a wretched knot of nausea. I try to stand up in the beats between my head’s pounding and my gut’s lurching. With a spinning head and ringing ears, the first two tries don’t pan out so well, but the third time’s the charm. I’m on my unsteady pegs. Upright. Feeling like I might barf. Sorry Mama. That laundry is going to have to hang itself.
I teeter down the hall and into the kitchen, focusing on the repeating pattern of wheat sheaves and horseshoes on the linoleum floor to steady my balance. Through half-squinted eyes, I watch in the wobbling shadows as Mama’s thick, sturdy legs stride toward the phone mounted on the wall by the kitchen table, and it takes me a minute to realize that the phone has been ringing. Which goes to show how screwy my brain’s processing is and how loud my tinnitus gets, because Mama’s got the phone ringer volume set on stun. I see Mama’s lips move, but struggle to sync up her mouth with the words because of the lime-green squiggles and blushes of dusky red moving in sweeping circles around her head. More delightful distractions courtesy of the foreign invader in my sensory cortex. Another reminder that this body, this brain, these perceptions of mine are not to be trusted.
Speaking of things not to be trusted, it is Aunt Peggy on the phone. There is only one reason Peggy ever calls Mama. Probably the only reason Peggy ever calls anyone. She must have dirt. Peggy isn’t smart enough to be a real criminal, and she’s too lazy to be a proper lunatic. To compensate for those failures, she puts all she’s got into being a pogey-scammer, as well as a nasty, gossipy big mouth.
Mama fields Peg’s urgent dirt calls at all hours of the day and night. There was the three a.m., “Effie! They just arrested Boots Johnson on the DUI. Drunk as a skunk, down past the gas station in The Mines. He never was any good. I could tell by the smell of him!” And the crack of dawn, “Effie! Milly Pike’s house got broken into. Made off with all her OxyContin.” Then twenty minutes later, “Effie! Update! They found that little MacKeigan one, not Squirrel’s daughter, the other one. The one who don’t wear bras and always has her arse crack hanging out the back of her drawers. Face down in the field down behind that skater park with B&E gloves and an empty pill bottle. Tsk tsk tsk.”