Excerpted: Felt by Mark Blagrave

When she reaches the top of the mountain she finds she cannot recall getting there. Obviously, she has parked by the inn (must have parked, must have driven, though she remembers doing neither). And she would have swished through the long grasses past the peeling carriage house before beginning the actual ascent. The trail — cut for horse-drawn picnic wagons a century before and
rimmed with massive, reassuring retaining walls of quarried granite — would have crunched and crackled under foot. It is autumn and most of the leaves are down. She would have paused at the lookout point a little more than halfway up, what was left of her breath taken away momentarily by the view across Chamcook Harbour to Ministers Island. The final scramble over the grey skull of rock to the summit would have set her hips complaining. All of this she can conjure up from the scores of times she has made the climb. But she cannot swear that any of it happened today.

She knows this is not necessarily uncommon, reminds herself it is not. How often, driving along a highway, do you suddenly focus on a feature of the landscape and then realize you can’t recall anything about travelling the past twenty miles? Or fail to be sure you have locked the door or run the dishwasher? But this is different. She knows it is, at the same time that she knows there is not a thing she can do about it.

The air is crisp — an odd expression, she thinks. Perhaps that is not the right word. A better word for bedsheets. Or people. Or the leaves she cannot recall tromping over to get here. The air doesn’t need a word, she decides, any more than does the colour of the sky, which is the colour of the water anyway. Or is it the other way around?

She sits on the rock, checking first that it has been warmed by the sun, runs her fingers over the initials carved into it. These are recent inscriptions; she knows that. The really old ones — some of them well over a hundred — were sandblasted away by one of the fools who has owned the inn in more recent years. Hers are gone along with them. That used to upset her. Now she finds she no longer minds. You have to pick your battles. That much she has learned. And can still remember, she thinks ruefully. She wonders whether her mother ever carved her initials on the rock — her mother and who, she wonders, wishes she had asked her, and then is glad she didn’t. Less to regret losing. If she were inclined to regret. Matt has admitted lately to having brought girls up here, times when he had begged her to borrow the car to drive to St. Stephen or St. George, not willing to divulge his real purpose of getting to whatever base it was with whichever young woman of the moment. She has scanned the rock in vain for his initials, supposes he was wary of leaving any trace.

When she feels in her coat pocket for the sandwich she planned to eat, there is only a forlorn tissue — crusty, but no substitute for a crust of bread. The sandwich will have been put somewhere odd. She knows that much still, and can still be amused by the behaviour. She will find it later in a sweater drawer or in the microwave. If she made it. If that wasn’t some other day.

“Fuck,” Penelope whispers. Then louder: “Fuck!” There is nobody around to offend. Not that she has ever understood why people get offended by some words and not by others. Or why some words that are acceptable for use by men are apparently not for women. In her mother’s house there were no such prejudices, of course, but a person had to live in the world too. And the world had problems with certain words. Especially, it seemed sometimes, the world of Charlotte County. She taught Matt her entire expressive vocabulary, encouraged him to use it with gusto, and then sent him away to school, to protect him from the pettier attitudes of the town. She wonders how Matt is doing at that school, thinks she must write him a letter, then remembers that he is a grown man — a fully grown man, nearer retirement than graduation. She could still write him a letter.

Perhaps her mother will have packed a lunch, she thinks. It won’t be fish. Thora hates fish. Not all fish. Just proper fish, not shellfish. As a small child, Penelope ate lobster and scallops for years before she even knew mackerel and herring existed. She realizes that to some this might look like privilege. In fact, it was only her mother’s history.

Looking down at her hands, stubbier than Thora’s and broader — her father’s hands, George Arnold’s hands, she has been told — she is appalled by the liver spots, the ropey blue veins. They are the hands of a very old woman. What does that make her mother? Dead, of course. Penelope laughs. Laughing is what she does when she has these sudden and increasingly frequent epiphanies that people have died, many of them years ago. She’s not laughing at them being dead — what would be funny about that? — just at herself for mixing things up.

Giving up hope of food, she stands and makes her way to the south slope, pausing to read strangers’ initials on the way, plotting each step carefully so as not to get her foot caught in a crevice and twist an ankle. Who would give little Matt his supper?

Coming around a contorted cedar, she encounters the skunky smell that her neighbour has told her is marijuana, wonders why anyone would want to inhale that stink right into their lungs. Before she can see the source of the odour she hears a scrabble of small stones and a rustling of branches that means somebody has retreated into the scrubby spruces that fringe the mountain. Giggling. Two people. She imagines the man in uniform, the woman with her stockings rolled down, then realizes that is not right. The smell would be rum or whiskey, not this wretched skunk. And she would not be the wizened old hag she once again realizes that she is.

Leave them be. That is what she will do. Just drink in the view she came for. The harbour, the town, the bay, the island, and the coast of Maine all lie below, exactly as she has captured them again and again in her work — a scene you couldn’t design if you tried, but once having seen could never forget. She gazes on it for a full two minutes, stores it up, and then shuts her eyes and imagines that couple in the trees, allowing the two forms of desire to become for a moment one.

When she reaches the inn at the bottom of the mountain her car is nowhere to be seen. She must have walked. It is quite a long way back to town but she knows the route like…what is it? She knows the route.

* * *

About the book

In Felt, a small maritime town provides the locale and the loom on which the shared and contested memories of three generations of a family are woven, unraveled, and rewoven.

Matt, a Toronto museum curator, returns home to New Brunswick to help his mother, who is wrestling with the challenges of living alone at age ninety-six. As mother and son face the prognosis of her developing Alzheimer’s disease, the pair begin to unfold a family saga marked by ingenuity, creativity, and resilience. Matt pieces together the untold story — spanning three
generations and two World Wars — of a Norwegian sardine-packer — his grandmother — who founded a handicraft empire in Loyalist territory. At the same time, his mother rearranges her past, spinning and embroidering family history to suit her uncertain present.

Felt draws on theories about the interdependence of memory and place, and explores topics such as how the arts can act as a catalyst for memory, all while prevailing as a love letter to the Maritimes, the author’s home.