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Prologue
Your mother does not want to move to The Pump. Her father’s shoe store chain is based in the city, but when he knocks up his college sophomore cashier, the two of them sell the stores and take all the money with them to the States, to picnic with their kid and let him climb up the back of Confederate statues and ride them like ponies. Your grandfather leaves your mother and uncle nothing but two thousand dollars and an old fur hat.
Your mother and her brother play house in their apartment downtown. Thick walls muffle his screaming at her that she’s not the Queen of Sheba and that she can reorder his National Geographic hardcover books correctly or they’re gonna get shoved up her ass. She says she doesn’t know the order because she can’t fucking read minds, and she rips the books apart, sheet by sheet, crimson-faced and frothing at the mouth, until a pile of hardback shells covers the mouldy carpet like a deck of playing cards.
Your uncle gets tired of playing house. He plays doctor with your mother while she sleeps. Her nails dig deep into the bed frame. She prays to a God that she does not know while the doctor cures her.
In the freezing rain of a March night, your pregnant mother packs her brother’s Mercury Villager and drives south. The car reeks of stale apple juice. She leaves the fur hat.
She enters the Greenbelt. The words JENNY IS A HOTTIE DANNY IS GAY are spray-painted in bright blue on the rock walls that sandwich the highway.
The first thing she notices about The Pump is the water. It gushes thick out of bathroom taps darker than dirt. It fills lemonade glasses and kiddie pools and toilet bowls and rec centre fountains. It sits full and dirty in the stomachs and lungs of stillborn bodies buried beneath the ground. The town’s water filtration system is in a perpetual state of disrepair. There is an empty pumphouse at the edge of an old soccer field, used for summer camps and Scouts.
Sewage seeps through the mud up into the grass. Moon-crater sores run up your mother’s arms and legs until she turns off the plumbing altogether.
Three months later, you are born in The Pump. Your first breath drips with the scent of the lake. The nurse washes you with bottled water. Your mother takes a drag from a hand-rolled cigarette and blows the smoke out like a geyser.
To the nurse’s surprise, you are born alive. The other babies are born blue, mouths open in shock.
Condensation streaks the windows of the hospital room. You are named after your late grandmother Joanne. Your mother does not give you a middle name. She thinks that middle names are for princes and pedophiles.
Outside, the beavers cry like wolves.