by Patricia Young

From the top of Beacon Hill my husband and I look down on the meadow stretching to the sea. He’s wearing the alpaca coat my father bought in England because he was immigrating to Canada, true north cold and free. We came up here to look at the geographical marker: 38 lines pointing in 38 directions. In 1954 my father paid £47 for the coat, the price of a half-decent second-hand car. Of this my mother never failed to remind him. Walking around the circle, I keep the Olympic Peninsula in sight. Mt. Rainier: 75 miles distant. Mt. Baker: shimmering in my sweet spot. Everything else I keep up my sleeve. Rain drumming on a tin roof sounds nothing like an alpaca kicking its softly padded feet in high thin air. Since the marker’s installation in 1950 a few notable buildings have been torn down. Time, my husband says, ain’t she a wrecking ball. What was my father, son of an East Yorkshire farmer, doing in an import clothing shop in London? Even the hyper-allergic can wear alpaca wool, which comes in 22 natural colours. After his death in 1987 my mother gave the coat to my husband. At 6’2″ he’s the same height as my father was. Some articles of clothingare so beautifully tailored they transcend the whims of fashion. Alpaca farmers love their animals and claim their animals love them back. Descended from the wild vicuna, they make a humming sound when happy, like a swarm of bees. My father arrived on the west coast of the continent in a heatwave, with $300.00 of borrowed money in his pocket. The centre arrow, pointing to True North, is as accurate today as it was the day my father stepped off a train in Vancouver, wearing a calf-length, satin-lined coat made of a luxurious grey fibre. On my husband it is a regal looking garment. Tribes in the Andes once practiced rituals around the alpaca’s death: a person of honour would plunge his hands into the animal’s chest cavity and rip out its heart. For a while it felt like my father had just gone away. The night I knew he wasn’t coming back I sat up in bed and howled. I was 33. Alpaca facts: strong, resilient, warm, light, soft. Knowing nothing of the Mediterranean climate, or flora and fauna, my parents pinpointed the southern tip of this island, then made it their home. This morning my father’s passport photograph appeared on my desk. His eyes seem to say: this is my location: 48 degrees North Latitude, 123 degrees West Longitude. He once told my mother he felt like a “right dafty” wearing the coat. So didn’t. Talk of cross-breeding gets you thinking, doesn’t it? Alpaca and bee? Striped wool, silken hum, 22 shades of honeycomb? Memory is full of microscopic air pockets whereas my father’s eyes in the photo are piercingly exact. The arrow pointing to the North Magnetic Pole,on the other hand, hasn’t been accurate since the middle of the last century. Once, in a dream, I walked into the strange and bloody waters of sacrifice and realized I’d been there before. In 1950, City Hall paid $557.00 for this bronze circle installed on a chest-high concrete cylinder. Some breeds of alpaca cluck. Others warble like songbirds. According to the farmers, the love is in the fleece. Forty-seven pounds was a small fortune back then, my mother said the morning she draped the coat over my husband’s shoulders.For that you could buy a half-decent, second-hand car.

Patricia Young has published eight collections of poetry and one collection of short fiction, Airstream, which was shortlisted for the Butler Prize. She is presently the writer-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick. A new collection of poetry, Here Come the Moonbathers, will be published in the spring of 2008 with Biblioasis.