Two

A large housefly came to life and rammed the front window. The repeated impact of insect body against glass made Beck wince. The fly seemed to be the cabin’s only other occupant, though there were sure to be spiders lurking in the corners. Flimsy walls and duct-taped screens answered none of Beck’s whispered questions. Signs of the cabin’s other occasional inhabitants were forsaken and dated; a shrivelled tea bag in a tarnished tablespoon beside the sink smelled of mint, his mother’s favourite; on the bricks-and-boards shelf, an Ursula K. LeGuin paperback, spine cracked and cover faded, had evidently been abandoned by his father mid-read.

Beck’s ma and pa rose like monoliths in his mind.

In day-to-day life Beck’s mother, Eurydice de Famosa, was intense but taciturn; her large brown eyes could deliver searing, scathing disapproval in a brief glare, or melt into chocolate pools of compassionate love. Eurydice, farmer and mother, was also santera, a high priestess of Santeria. In Canada she kept this esoteric vocation mostly veiled, but in Cuba, she was a front-line responder to urgent matters of the spirit. Neighbours would call her in an hour of need – cancer, gambling debt, unwanted pregnancy – and Ma would hurry to gather sticks, bones, shells and oils, and set off to intervene. Whatever the problem, it was sure to be more manageable after a visit from Eurydice de Famosa; her instincts were uncanny and her intuition bordered on clairvoyance.

Those who witnessed Beck’s mother as santera, a medium between the mortal and the sacred, never forgot the experience. Beck’s Cuban peers kept him outside their inner circle, a social avoidance that bordered on fear, as if his mother’s ability to penetrate to the core of predicaments encompassed him. One time Jorge Torrenos, the best forward in the empty-lot pickup football gang, witnessed Beck’s mother channel the Orishas in his aunt’s kitchen, and for a week afterwards, until his shock dimmed, Jorge wouldn’t pass Beck the ball with its scuffed pentagonal pattern, even when Beck signalled madly that he had a clean shot on goal.

Passive and slow to anger, Beck’s pa had his own brand of intensity, a slow-boil stubbornness he employed to outlast his wife’s more volatile moods. Matthew Wise was a professional photographer, a man preoccupied with minutiae, the details of capturing images, light and shadow, composition and frame. During Hurricane Ernesto, while the neighbours shrieked and ran around flapping like chased chickens, Beck’s father had wandered outside with a waterproof telephoto lens and snapped pictures of airborne laundry, flooding streets, crumbling plaster and arcs of electricity where exposed wires had fallen into pond-sized puddles. Peering from between drenched curtains slapping at the walls, Beck had admired his father’s soft yellow aura, th