The First Day

You can’t lie to me. Oh, people have tried. All the usual prevarications, and some they make up just for me. Take a picture and there’s a chance you’ll get away with it. But even then, more often than not, I’ll feel that flutter in my gut, that shiver behind my eyelids when I spot a lie pencilled on a face, and the words will come spilling out of my mouth before I have a chance to think them: That’s not the truth.

Not that it’s ever done me much good. What’s the point of knowing every time someone is trying to put one over on you? It’s like having the gift of seeing flatulence. It shows you something you already suspect, something you don’t want to know too much about.

That’s what I’m thinking as I sit here in the verandah of my cabin, watching the girl row across the narrow moat of water that separates my small island from the farm where I was born. A grey moth with a smudge of rust on its nether parts moves slowly across the sagging screen in the opposite direction. I squint past it into the distance and wonder just what kind of lies this young woman will try on me. Because if I am sure of one thing after ninety-six years, it is that I have pretty much heard them all.

The only one who can lie to me is me.

~

Her first email caught me off guard.

From: nang@aol.com

Subject: Please help

Date: 19 April 2001 22:01:28 MDT (CA)

To: cmaccallum@xplornet.ca

I am Miss Nang Aung Myaing, I am age 23. My country Burma. My grand father is A Pho Charlie O’Brien. His country Canada.

Please I have very suffered to come your country. I contact now to prove my blood.

Please you help.

I get a lot of these. Please, I am stranded in London. Please, I am a poor farmer in Nigeria. Please. So polite. I like that. And personal. That’s the trick. I always read them, sometimes more than once. It passes the time.

But this one was different. I circled the cursor around the name. His name. How could they know?

Of course they know. Nothing is held close anymore. Everybody knows everything. Or they think they do. There must be a thousand Charlie O’Briens alive in the world. More, laid in the ground.

Miss. Ha! More likely a hairy man smoking cheroots, spitting as he pecked away in some basement, setting traps for old women.

Well, let him try. I clicked the little trash can, and with a whoosh the email was sucked into oblivion.

But she didn’t give up.

From: nang@aol.com

Subject: Help me please

Date: 25 April 2001 23:05:18 MDT (CA)

To: cmaccallum@xplornet.ca

You receive email I send?

I find you name on website Galería Imago. Photograph little boy is grand father. You make photograph. You mother, yes?

Urgent I visit. Go back, I die.

Please. I have present you from A Pho Charlie.

Miss Nang Aung Myaing

For the better part of a week, I argued with myself, until my need to know won out over my better judgment.

From: cmaccallum@xplornet.ca

Subject: Re: Help me please

Date: 30 April 2001 06:47:05 MDT (CA)

To: nang@aol.com

What do you have?

From: nang@aol.com

Subject: Re: Re: Help me please

Date: 30 April 2001 6:49:01 MDT (CA)

To: cmaccallum@xplornet.ca

I come show.

Where you stay?

Miss Nang Aung Myaing

A moment of weakness made me spell out the directions to the island. Loneliness, the old woman’s curse. Well, I may be old and weak, but I’m not entirely stupid. Not yet.

Curious. I’ll admit to that.

~

The girl looks ordinary enough. Not like a real estate agent or a social worker or a thug. That’s one good thing. Or three, depending how you count.

And she’s tidy. She’s pulling the old rowboat up on the rocks pretty much where I like it.

Scrawny, though. Doesn’t block much of the view. She’s got her hair pulled up into a ponytail, like I used to wear in the fifties. Looks like a boy in those blue jeans. No hips, but the shirt is so tight I can see her little breasts, round and high as suction cups.

She takes nothing from the boat — no suitcase. So she doesn’t mean to stay. Another good thing.

Ah. That hump on her back is a daypack. Whatever she has for me is tucked inside.

Smaller than an iron lung. Bigger than a tin of salve. A game we used to play.

I shuffle my chair back into the shadows. The verandah is screened in and heaped with junk: oars, tripods, winter boots and coats, things I’ve been meaning to get rid of. Nowhere to sit, but that doesn’t matter as long as I can wheel myself through breaks in the debris to my favourite lookouts. One at the far end with a view of the lake. This one, by the screen door, where I can see the woods that shield the lake from the farmhouse. Where I watch for strangers coming up the path.

Halfway along, she stops, shifts the daypack to her other shoulder, and carries on.

So. Small but heavy.

Heavy as the weight of memory that holds me here.