Trulie, Toronto, and the Southwest Swale
by Nat Kishchuk
Trulie felt the bracelet break, its relinquishment, pale pink beads dropping from her wrist onto the flannels she had piled as a pillow, pooling into the hollow made by the weight of her head. She wasn't quite awake, but bird noises were beginning to fill the absence of rustle as the wind stilled for sunrise, and light was pearling her shelter’s roof. Before lifting her head, she tapped all about her cheek, trying to recapture every bead.
Rose granite, Toronto had called the beads, then informed her all about biodiversity loss from quarrying, then about unjust conditions of quarry workers. Toronto was trying to organize the rewilders of the southwest swale as they worked the razed hospital grounds. Many of the others were disinterested in or distrustful of him. Trulie was both, but Toronto had seemed to single her out as someone he could tell things to, long rambling explanations starting in one pile of rubble and ending up somewhere else, that Trulie just listened to, let run off her like rain.
Trulie lived a narrow life but wouldn’t have said a small one, foraging mornings along her western edge of the river, first northward toward the buckled knees of the train bridge, along the lower path next to the river's edge, then back upstream along the higher path of the former road, but always stopping before the cursive remnants of the middle bridge. She told others she didn't go farther because she was afraid of the upstreamers who sometimes, when their food ran out, poled their rafts northward, following the pelicans. But really, she was afraid of the river there, of its power as it turned the bend, carving the land, slumping the bluffs.
The bracelet’s absence tainted her morning. She had found it as an untied strand, a rosy peep from a patch pocket in a blackening tangle of blue hospital gowns. After knotting and slipping it on, she wore it under the sleeve of her faded cotton shirt so as not to lose it. Or not let it be seen, which was maybe really the same thing. Joining the ends had made an intimate circle around her wrist, bone cold to blush warmth in an instant.
Mid-morning, she paused at the old weir to eat some of what she had foraged so far, first sprawling on the flattest part of the broken cement slab to soak in its warmth, dispel her chill. The nights were still cool, morning clothes damp and draggy, and today the exertion of walking, climbing, bending, picking, hadn’t reached her bones. Cross-legged, she then set aside the roots she would later add to the communal pot, while snacking absently on the shoots—burdock, chickweed, chicory—she'd collected, along with a few of the first tart gooseberries. Last to be savoured were a few desiccated berries the birds had left last summer: a couple of tiny raspberry jewels, some purple saskatoons, mainly puckery rosehips. She could have kept those berries for a betty, but felt a need for sweetness. As she ate, she watched, as always, the river. Trulie liked the river least in this season. It was too eager, too boisterous, barely hiding the emotion churning its undertow. It was better as lazy summer water, sandbar becoming grassed then shrubbed, the river silking around it. This spring, though, the water level was low and the river seemed to stagger, enfeebled. Trulie’s shelter neighbours debated whether it was because gangs had rebuilt the dam upstream, or because its source mountains had collapsed in another quake, or because this was the start of another seven-year drought. She didn’t know what was true, and the low water made her uneasy.
In the afternoon, Trulie joined Toronto and the other rewilders in the swale up the riverbank, scouting and scavenging for hospital pieces they could sell. Trulie had her own method of finding bits to bring to the sell piles. It was how she had found the bracelet, walking slowly, watching in front of her feet, looking for roundness. In the wild world, perfect circles and spheres were always impermanent, something in the process of becoming something else. Rings from a stone cast in still water. The full moon, always waning. The invisible years inside a tree: if seen, then dying. Underfoot among the shatter, any intact circularity was people-made, could be re-valued. She looked for piping and tubing, wheels and sockets. She stayed away from colours; when the hospital had been standing, when she was a cleaner there, colourful meant dangerous—slippery, sharp, searing, or toxic. The safe parts of the hospital had been blue or beige or gray, and those were the colours she looked for.
She understood that the river, too, was a circle, and changeful: that its waters came to flow past her from the mountains far to the west, urging other waters to enjoin until they all splayed into the great northern ocean. Until then, in Trulie’s mind, the river was steady and constant, confident in its journey. But then it dissipated, thinning like the thread of her bracelet, becoming rain wandering windblown and unsure until years later, some of it, surely most of it, swept up as snow, nestled on the mountains’ shoulders, then tumbled back down to her.
The afternoon of the broken bracelet, she waited with the other rewilders for Toronto’s instructions and warnings. As usual, he wanted everyone to pile like materials together, arguing it would help attract the buyers if they had bigger piles and arranged them favourably. He was again insisting that some volunteer to work in the big pile of stuff made from more than one material: plastic floor signs with metal hinges, metal commode chairs with plastic potties, and so very many syringes. The buyers paid more for loads made of just one thing, so Toronto wanted people to take these objects apart, prying them into pieces with knives and pliers. As usual, he kept telling them it was for their common good.
Despite Toronto’s urgings, no one wanted to be stuck in one place when they could be out scouring for good stuff. Trulie was nearby once when someone found an intact medication cart, hidden in a pocket under the fallen stairway number five. It was shortly swarmed by brandishers of picks and cattle prods, yells and then howls scattering the gulls and buzzards. The viciousness had scared her, but then so did Toronto, so she didn't volunteer.
As she turned away from the group, Toronto caught up with her, touched her wrist.
“Hey, Trulie, what happened to that bracelet? Did you finally put it in the right pile?”
“Hi, Toronto,” she said, turning toward him, stepping back.
“My name is not Toronto," he said. “I already told you. It's Jason. I’m just from there. I don't get why everyone calls me that.”
“Hi, Jason,” she said. ”It's just a thing we do here. If you were from Regina, we'd say ‘Hi, Regina.’”
“The bracelet? Because it belongs to all of us, you know. That quartz is worth a lot.” He had told her it had healing powers, the capacity to restore love and harmony. She wanted this to be true, though knew it was stupid to believe only one of the things he said.
She knew that Toronto knew very well, as did everyone, that the rewilders were only half there for the common profit; everyone was secretly collecting and hoarding for themselves, maybe to buy in on a gopher snare line, maybe to trade up for a better tarp. She wondered if Toronto did this, too. It wouldn't surprise her; everyone had learned by now not to trust anyone else. She could tell he watched her especially because he was hoping she would like him in a romantic way and also that he was angry with himself for it—a stain of the old ways—so she felt sorry for him, but not less scared.
She didn't answer about the bracelet, just got on with her picking, the beads safe in her pocket, working as she had been for the last weeks in a hollow that may have been the basement under the downstairs cafeteria. When Trulie had started scavenging this part of the swale, the surrounding ground had been spongy with a shy greening: the true rewilding. Now, summer’s dust and prickles were already taking over, duning the spots where she hoped to find useful things to cook with. Last week, she had found a pipe fitting, which she had put in the pile but would have kept if it were longer, to set under a pot in the cooking embers. Today she found nothing of value either for her or the commons. The debris the hospital had become was, with the passage of winters and megagraders, degrading into ever smaller bits, harder for her to distinguish from one another, to fathom their places in the former world, to see any use or beauty in them.
In the evening, after her share of the evening soup and helping with the bowls and firewood, Trulie went down to watch the river. She sat below the huddle of her shelter on the band of grass-patched silt on one of the scattered river rocks, smooth tan humps, some in, some out of the water, some at its edge. Tonight she had chosen a low flat favourite, not in the water but close enough to see the bands of ochre and moss shading to brown at the silt shelf, then to the reflected sky; a river rainbow. She gazed at it until the shore trees' lengthening shadows mottled then veiled it, then listened to the orderly cacophony of the sandbank’s birds—gulls, geese, ducks, pelicans—settling for the night.
To her right and left, upstream and down, other people sat alone or in groups in the curves of the river’s edge, watching, chatting, laughing softly. The river seemed milder now, like it was listening too, smiling in its secret river way.
Trulie never went into the river to swim or wash until later in the year, when the days were shorter and the river at its slowest. Tonight, she took off her boots and put her feet close to the water. The air was cool on their tops. Underfoot was coarse, gravelly, in contrast to how smooth she imagined the water would feel. She bumped forward on her bottom so her chin was over her knees, then inched her toes to the water’s edge, touched the water, first with the right, then the left, then pushed them forward until her toenails were under, all the way up to the joints.
Her toes bent, disappeared, reappeared, reshaped, disappeared again. From afar, the water had looked brown, but up close it was a pale yellow, and once her toes were in, of no colour at all. She watched the water, wondering if it was angry for the interruption or glad of a new dance. Then, one of her toes, her right big toe, disappeared again, not just from view but, she felt, from her foot. She pulled her foot back up onto her rock, alarmed—but her toe was there. When she grabbed it with both hands, it was solid but cold. She thought then maybe a shadow had just passed over it, or a shard of clear ice; a trick of the light had made it seem to vanish.
The next afternoon at the rewilding, Toronto was angry. He said people had been stealing from the sell piles and from now on he would be posting guards. There were already a few people who hung around him, taking on a kind of importance, and now these people slouched forward and stood next to Toronto, like they were already going to be in charge of the guarding. Then Toronto asked for volunteer guards, which Trulie thought was doubly silly, since first of all, if people stole stuff, they needed it or needed the money from selling it to the touring buyers—their need wouldn’t change by putting guards; and also silly because anyone who needed to steal things would obviously volunteer to be a guard, that was just survivor logic. A couple of people volunteered, not Trulie. She felt she was getting by okay and even lucky because her memory of the hospital was different from others’ who had only been patients or doctors: cleaners saw all around, the sides, the behinds and underneaths. She knew one of the volunteers, a woman whose shelter was not far from Trulie’s, who looked after three small children and had a big dog with her. The dog, a shaggy brown mutt with a scar across its muzzle, protected the children when the woman was foraging or rewilding but also had to be fed. Trulie smiled at her and thought she would offer to sit with the children and help with the dog when the woman was guarding.
That evening, as she watched the sun angle shadow across the water, she went past her rock, right down the edge, and put her hands in the river to see if she could read its pull, know whether it was really leaving. Haunch-squatted, she splayed her fingers under the water. They were wavery and cold, but she felt no tug: the water seemed content to stay with her, play with her. She leaned forward until her hands were on the river bed, her weight forward, water up to her wrists. Her hands sunk in soft silt halfway to her elbows. The water lipped her arms, encircling them sweetly. Lifting strands from her nape, the breeze whispered to her neck.
From up the hill behind her, across the road in the swale, she heard shouting. Smoke was drifting, low and dark, from across the road—not the lilt of scrub and sage, but malevolent, toxic. Trulie pulled her arms out of the river and went up the hill to see what was going on. Others from her camp were slowly starting to go too, cautious heads pausing at the top of the riverbank.
Toronto was pacing and yelling in front of a burning pile of scavenged stuff. It looked and smelled like the clear plastics heap: drinking glasses, sanitizer bottles, balled-up instrument wrappings, crazed plexiglass. The flames were mean and dark and the smell, aggressive. Behind them, the sky was purpling, bruising the day. Trulie couldn’t tell whether Toronto had set this fire to keep thieves away, or whether someone else had started it to distract him. Some rewilders were in huddles, murmuring among themselves, occasionally pointing at the flames. Furtive shadows were slinking among the other piles. Trulie thought she recognized the volunteer woman among them. Some of Trulie’s neighbours, the ones she usually cooked with, just shrugged and left.
Five or six of Toronto’s squad rushed up from the old fishing platform near the train bridge and across the road, splashy pails swinging. They hurled river water on the burning pile; it hissed explosively and the smell was suddenly denser. Eventually, the flames faltered, weakened, and Toronto’s gang started hucking sandy swale soil on it, using whatever relics came to hand: a mixer paddle, a dustpan, half a cafeteria tray. Watching this, Trulie thought those flat pieces might also be good to use for a raft, if she ever had to get away. The wind came up, as it often did as the sun set: poplars moaning, bats swerving overheard.
The dog, barking crazily, shot past Trulie, streaking toward the piles behind the smouldering plastics. Running after him, screaming, came the volunteer woman. People watched, diffidently at first, then realized one of the children was missing. The woman’s terror clawed at Trulie and she started to run too, toward the piles, tripping on the uneven ground, looking for a perfect round head, hidden in the grass or under a nest of wires. Then the dog's barking changed: it had found the kid. Trulie and most of the others went back to their shelters, to bed.
In the morning, as Trulie was getting ready to head downstream to forage, three of Toronto’s people crashed through the bush, stomping into the clearing where she had built her shelter.
“You there, you’re the one with the quartz. He told us to find you,” one of them said. He turned uphill, calling, “She’s here, we got her.”
In a few minutes, Toronto appeared, sliding down the bank, grabbing at bushes to break his fall, tearing roots and branches.
“Well, Trulie?” he said, panting. “Let’s have it.”
“Why do you keep coming back to this?" she asked. “Why don’t you leave me alone?”
“Give it over and I’ll let you keep one of the beads. They’re worth a lot, you know. I got a buyer from Yellowknife that’s coming for them and gonna look at other stuff too.”
The others, in a half circle around her, stepped in closer. She was aware of the river behind her, glinting.
“It broke,” she said. “I lost it.”
“Where?” he demanded. “Show me.”
She gestured upstream. “Past the middle bridge. I slipped on a rock.”
“You lost all of them?
“The string broke, I didn't notice.”
“You just left them there?”
Angry shouts, swearing and rage, reached them. Fires were being set along the river edge camps, sparks and crackles swirling to the harsh yellow sky. Toronto's people were ransacking shelters for things they said were stolen, burning people’s stuff.
“Tomorrow,” Toronto said, “you’re gonna take me there and show me. Because I need those stones, they’re not yours.” They scrabbled partway up the bank, then headed upstream, toward her neighbours’ camp. Trulie watched them go, then started off the other way, on her usual foraging path.
When the sun was at its height, she went to the old weir, first descending to look along the riverbank. The fires Toronto’s people had lit were out, dark acrid scars along the shoreline. She clambered back up a bit, opened her collecting bag, cleaned the twigs and dirt from her findings, and put them back. Then, hugging her knees, she watched the river. Below the crest of the weir, at its western edge, a pelican held steady against the gush, watching, waiting, diving, then surfacing, beak empty. It let the current sluice it back to the middle of the river where the current was strong and silent, then paddled back to the weir’s flume to try again.
She turned at a rustle up and behind her. The dog was there, watching. It barked once, tossing its head: a question. Trulie called it down to her and stroked its ears as they watched the river together. Then, she tore a strip from the bottom of her shirt, took most of the rose granite beads from her pocket, and twisted them into a neatly knotted package. She tied the package and her collecting bag around the dog’s neck, held its face and told it to go home.
On hands and knees, she crawled down and into the river, giving herself to it. Once all the way in, she pulled the rest of the beads out of her pocket, and, palm open in the current, let them lead her circle journey.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Nat Kishchuk’s stories, mainly speculative fiction and creative non-fiction, have appeared in Pulp Literature, Femspec, Luna Station Quarterly, carte blanche Issue 43 and yolk literary, among others. Originally from what is now called Saskatchewan, she is grateful to live and work in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal: unceded territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka).
Instagram: @nat.kish