“What a loser. We’re lucky he didn’t get us all killed,” says Sarah.
“Whose idea was it to go anywhere with that peckerhead?” Addie asks, digging out her algebra text from a tumbled pile. “If we would’ve slammed into the back of that grain truck, we’d all be toast.”
“The guy driving the grain truck, who was he anyway?” Sarah tries to keep the tremor out of her voice and act as if she’s just curious and not dying to know.
“Oh, him?” There’s a small mirror hanging on Addie’s swung-open door and Becca leans in, dabbing her lips with gloss. “He’s my neighbour, Jack. I rode with him on the bus for years.”
“I thought he was going to drift Eddie. He should have. One punch and he would’ve sent Pecker flying all the way back to town,” Addie says.
Becca pats the excess gloss from her finger onto her cheeks and blends it in with her fingertip, making her whole face shimmer. “He’s changed a lot since I last saw him. He used to be skinny but, wow, did you see those shoulders?”
“You mean Jack Bilyk? From the farm next to yours?” Sarah remembers something about him, something he once did and what Becca’s mother said afterward.
They were down by the river behind the Webbs’ farm. The water had dried up to a trickle that summer and they had taken their sandals off and were having a contest, jumping from stone to stone, trying to make it across without stepping into the shallow water. Some of the stones were slippery with green slime and once, Sarah almost went in. From the bank on the other side, they heard a low rumble, like a log being rolled, and then the sound of splintering twigs, as though some enormous creature might be ploughing through the underbrush and deadfall. Sarah stopped where she was, one foot raised in the air. A thunderous roar cut through the air; Becca screamed and leaped off her stone. She thrashed through the water back toward the bank. Sarah followed, stumbling over loose stones, splashing muddy water as high as her back.
When they were safely across they heard the sound of laughter. Two teenage boys emerged from the stand of poplars on the other side of the river, one as tall and scrawny as the other was short and round, chuckling and pointing at them.
“You assholes!” Becca shouted, reaching for a small rock and hurling it at them. It landed in the water with a feeble plop. “I’m gonna tell my dad!”
“You just go ahead and do that!” yelled the tall boy. “I’m not scared of your old man!”
When they got back to the house, Becca told her mother how Jack Bilyk and Shorty Cornforth had tried to scare them. “And I’m telling Dad just because he dared me not to,” she said indignantly.
Mrs. Webb nervously straightened the gathers in her apron, plucking at each little pleat. “They’re just teenage boys, having a little fun with you. There’s no need to stir your father up over such a harmless prank. You know how he can be when it comes to those Bilyks. He’s apt to storm over there and start something. You just stay away from Jack Bilyk.”
Afterward, Becca told Sarah there was a feud going on between her father and Jack’s, something from long ago regarding a dead dog. There was more to it than that, she said, but her mother wouldn’t talk about it and her father only swore under his breath whenever the Bilyk name came up.
Becca screws the lid onto her lip gloss and shoves it in the back pocket of her jeans. “Yep. He’s lived right next door all my life and I barely know him. He’s cute, though, don’t you think?”
The bell rings and the girls fall into step behind a moving throng of students. He’s more than cute, Sarah thinks, following along. He’s the most handsome boy in the world and she thinks she might be in love with him.
Sarah’s basket is nearly full — they’ve been at this for nearly two hours — skirting the woodlands, wandering trails, and even searching along the gravel road. Baba seems to know every tree, every blade of grass and wildflower, every wild rose growing on her land, and her first basket is already full, waiting to be picked up later along a path they’ll pass over on the way back to her house. She is stooped to her work, fingers thick as sausages, skillfully plucking red rosehips the size of fat peas from the tips of the prickly branches. One of her wool socks has slipped down and is pooled at her ankle while the other, secured with a red rubber ring, sits tight at her knee. She’s wearing a green flowered babushka with a nearly identical skirt and a bright yellow blouse, so the bears will be sure to see them, she jokes. Sarah’s always on the lookout, jumping at every cracking twig and rustle she hears in the bushes, but Baba just laughs. She isn’t scared of anything. The bears are after the berries, same as we are, she says. There are lots to go around.
“How you doing?” Baba comes over and looks in Sarah’s basket. “Good,” she says, and Sarah smiles; good rhymes with food when Baba says it. “You finish that basket, we go back after that.”
When they return to the house, they wash the rosehips and sort through them, throwing out the blemished ones and picking the brown sepals and stems off the others. The rosehips will dry on white tea towels spread on Baba’s kitchen table and she will gather them up later and store them in glass jars, where they’ll glow like precious rubies.
Baba settles in on her rocking chair beside the wood stove with a cup of tea when they’re done, sighing deeply and lifting one leg then the other with great effort onto a footstool. “You want something to eat?”
There are cinnamon buns, freshly baked this morning, sitting on the table, and Sarah tears one apart and devours a gooey bite.
Baba’s house has four rooms: a small closet off the kitchen large enough for a washstand and a galvanized tub that she drags into the kitchen each Saturday, a tiny bedroom and living room, and a large kitchen with two stoves. Above, there is a half-storey, where Sarah sleeps when she stays over. There’s an outhouse out back and a commode in the basement. She finally gave in and let Sarah’s father move an electric stove in about five years ago, but she insisted on keeping the wood stove in the corner. She still uses it to bake bread and brew her tinctures and teas. An unlit candle and an icon of the Holy Mother, draped with a cross-stitched cloth, sit on a small table next to her bedroom door. She lights the candle each night before bed and sits in her rocking chair to recite her rosary, the beads sliding through her gnarled fingers, one at a time.
Baba Petrenko was there for them after Sarah’s mother left. It shamed her that her own daughter would do something like that — Sarah was sure of it — but she never spoke a harsh word about her youngest daughter. Olivia couldn’t be tamed, Baba said, and was born with the same restless nature as her father. He had up and left them all for Alberta after the war, saying he wasn’t cut out to be a farmer. Baba helped as much as she could, bringing over roasters of peroheh and holoptsi whenever some neighbour drove her to town. She gave them sacks of potatoes and tubs full of carrots, jars of fruit and pickles and jam. Sarah, especially, spent as much time as she could with her grandmother even when they were older and the boys no longer wanted to come.
“Baba? Do you remember how you felt when you fell in love?” Sarah asks, taking another bite of her bun.
“Ya. My head feels like full of sawdust and I would do stupid things. He was all I could think about. And my stomach, too. Like bird wings flapping in there when I see him.” She clasps the arms of her chair and shifts her swollen legs, wincing in pain. “Why you want to know?”
“Just curious, I guess,” Sarah says. “I’ve been thinking about what it might be like.”
“Oy,” Baba says, taking a sip of tea and smiling. “So there’s a boy. You want to tell me about him?”
Sarah finds herself opening up and telling Baba about Jack and the near-accident and the way she felt when she first saw him.
“Bilyk, you say?” Baba puts one finger up to her lips and furrows her brow. “How old he is? Twenty, something like that?”
“Maybe a little older. Why?”
“His mother, she brought him to me. Was raining hard that night, I remember.”
Sarah sits up st
raight in her chair. “Do you remember what was wrong with him?”
“Couldn’t sleep. Bad dreams. Scared to go to bed at night.” She pauses then glances at the blessed icon on the small table. “Is God’s will, what the wax shows, but that night, I don’t know.” She shakes her head and makes the sign of the cross.
“Why? What was it?” Sarah pictures Jack, a scared and helpless little boy, sitting in this very room, maybe in the exact same spot she’s sitting right now.
“Most times, I see one thing in wax, only one, and I know right away what it is, but that time, I see two. The one, I knew right away it was fire. Flames, like little tongues across the water; easy to see. But then I see something else in water, a string curls out, reaches up to ceiling. Up, up. Maybe six inches. How wax can do that?”
“What did it mean?” Sarah is on the edge of her chair.
“I explain about fire and his mother, right away she says there was grass fire on farm, the boy, he had to run for help. Can hardly reach crank from chair. But he rings. Someone answers and neighbours, they come and help put out fire before barn burns down. But that wax standing up like that? I say nothing.” She raises one arm and pushes the air with her upturned palm. “So I chase away boy’s fear, the way my mother show me.”
“Holy,” Sarah breathes. This story about Jack is something special she’ll keep. She feels closer to him somehow, just knowing it.
“First and last time I see him. They never come back.” Baba is looking at Sarah, her eyes narrowed. “I remember something else. You were here, upstairs sleeping. Maybe that’s why wax point like that to ceiling?” She nods her head. “Ya, that’s why.” She pauses, nodding her head with more certainty. “You know how I say everything happens, happens for reason? This boy, this Jack Bilyk, it was God put him on that road in that truck. To protect you. Someday, he will be yours.”
OCTOBER
Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. Sarah and Addie used to play that game. The sidewalk at school had hundreds of cracks, some shoestring-thin and some wide as their arms. They would leap and hop along the sidewalk, avoiding the cracks, seeing who could make it the farthest. What Addie didn’t know was that Sarah came back after school and played a different game, twisting it around to suit herself. It was her secret. She aimed for the cracks, reciting a revised chant in her mind. Step on a crack, bring your mother back. Sometimes she hopped for hours; the more cracks she laid her foot across the better the chances of her mother’s return. She longed for a mother, someone to sit in the audience during Christmas concerts or visit with her teachers on parents’ day, all dressed up in a swishy skirt, ironed blouse, and bright, shiny shoes. She would be so proud of Sarah’s neat scribblers and all those pointy A’s on her report card. Her father came as often as he could, but there always seemed to be a farmer with something to fix at the last minute before the shop closed, and he was usually late or didn’t come at all. When he did show up at school for the concert, he wore his grimy coveralls and stood at the back of the gym, leaning against the wall.
Sarah remembers this as she sits at the dining-room table with Becca, watching Caroline in the kitchen. A few years ago, Caroline insisted Sarah start calling her by her name. “It seems so odd, you calling me Mrs. Webb,” she had said. “Especially since we’ve come to be such good friends.”
Caroline is baking pies for Thanksgiving. There’s a heavenly smell — pumpkin, cinnamon, and nutmeg — and she’s working on the pastry, rolling it gently, back and forth, back and forth, then flipping it with one hand like it’s a rare and delicate parchment. A scarf is knotted on top of her head and she’s wearing an apron over her pale pink button-front dress. It looks as though she’s stepped back in time — she could be Richie and Joanie’s mother from Happy Days — in the old-fashioned kitchen with its sturdy chrome table and bright yellow chairs.
“Are you ready to take a break yet?” Becca pushes aside the encyclopedia she’s copying notes from and sticks a pencil inside to mark her place. They’re working on essays for English class, researching William Shakespeare’s life and trying to relate it to one of his works. “Like it’s going to say anything in here about whether or not he was feuding with some other family. Romeo and Juliet didn’t even live in England.”
“I think we’re supposed to think about the social context of the time and see how that may have influenced his work.” Sarah closes the biography she borrowed from the school library and looks down at her notes. “I don’t think we’ll find answers in these books. Miss Fletcher wants us to come up with our own theories.”
“My theory is I never should have taken university-entrance English.” Becca is drawing hearts with a red pen on a loose leaf. “I wouldn’t have, if I were you.”
Sarah is not going to university after graduation like Becca. She’s going to get a job, maybe stay on full-time at Pipers’, and wait until Charlie graduates. Even then, if she goes to school, it’ll likely be community college for some sort of diploma. She’s taken all the UE courses at high school, though, to prove she can do it.
Caroline comes into the dining room and sets down a plate of cookies. “Looks like you girls are ready for a snack. Would you like some milk?”
Becca rolls her eyes. “Really, Mom? Cookies and milk?” She pushes away from the table and goes to the kitchen. Sometimes she’s so mean to her mother. Caroline looks embarrassed, and Sarah thinks Becca’s a jerk for treating her like that. If Caroline were her mother, she’d never act that way.
“Romeo and Juliet?” Caroline sits on one of the chairs next to Sarah and picks up her book. “This was always my favourite. Two star-crossed lovers. Such a tragic end.”
“I like the tragedies, too. I don’t find his comedies funny at all.”
“I agree, they’re rather silly, aren’t they? Of course, we have to remember we’re reading them in 1975, or in my case, nineteen fifty-whatever-it-was. But the themes, comedy or tragedy, are universal and they stand the test of time. You know what they say, the more things change, the more they stay the same.”
Becca hands Sarah a glass of Pepsi and sits down. “You can say that again.” She props her feet on one of the dining-room chairs. “Take that stupid feud between us and the Bilyks. I bet no one even remembers what it’s all about.”
A few stray hairs have fallen onto Caroline’s forehead and she tucks them back up under her scarf. “I’m sure your father does, and he has his reasons; it’s not up to us to question him about them.”
“Well, it’s just stupid. To live your entire life beside someone and not know anything about him?”
There’s a visible jerk of Caroline’s head. “Him?” Her voice sounds tight, strangled, as though something’s pressing on her windpipe. “What do you mean by that?”
“Oh, nothing,” Becca says, picking up her glass and one of the cookies. “C’mon, Sarah, let’s go up to my room and hang out for a while. Shakespeare can wait.”
Later, while they’re lying on Becca’s bed listening to the Eagles, Sarah thinks about the way Caroline reacted when Becca referred to Jack. Her own heart jumped, too, the way it always does when the thought of him comes to mind. She’s kept her secret crush to herself, savouring the taste of Jack’s name on her tongue. She’s been meaning to tell Becca and Addie how she feels about him but she’s afraid. She’s not sure if Jack would ever consider dating a girl like her. But if she doesn’t tell, how will she ever know?
“Bec?”
“Yeah?” Becca is on her back, feet in the air, toes tapping to the bass from her stereo.
“Do you ever run into Jack? See him around anywhere?”
Becca’s toes stop moving. “Why?”
The only way to do this is to just come right out and admit it, get it over with quickly, like ripping off a Band-Aid. “Because I sorta like him.” Sarah feels herself blush, a wave of heat laps over her face from her roots to the base of her chin. “I mean … I think he’s cute and I wish I could get to know him. Meet him sometime, you know
?”
Becca sits up. “Seriously?”
Sarah sits up, too. “I mean … you know him, at least. I wondered if you could introduce me to him or something. Sometime.”
“I don’t see how I can.” Becca gets up and goes over to the record player, flips over the LP, and sets the needle down again. “I mean, when would I introduce you? He doesn’t come to any of our lame high-school parties and my dad sure doesn’t want him coming around here.”
“I know,” Sarah says, flopping her head back down on the bed. “It was a dumb idea.”
“Seriously,” Becca says again, “you really like him?”
“Forget I ever said anything,” Sarah says, covering her face with her hands. “I only saw him that one time. And he’s way too old for me and probably has a girlfriend, anyway.”
“I’ve been wondering about that myself,” Becca says quietly.
“You’d get into trouble with your dad if he found out you were talking to him. He likely wouldn’t be interested in me, anyway.”
“He would so.” Becca’s mouth curls up at the corners but her eyes aren’t smiling. “It’s just impossible, you know? For me to help you.”
“That’s okay,” Sarah says. “If it’s meant to happen, it will. That’s what my baba always says.”
Becca nods and there’s a distant kind of look in her eyes like she knows something she’s not telling. Like maybe she, too, thinks Sarah doesn’t stand a chance with a guy like Jack.
The kitchen table is covered with newspaper and the stringy innards of a pumpkin. The pumpkin itself, now a one-eyed jack-o’-lantern with a lopsided grin, is perched at the edge of the table. A tower of dishes is stacked in the sink and the milk jug is sitting out on the counter. There’s no sign of Charlie or Brian, but the TV’s blaring from the other room.
“Guys!” Sarah shouts, poking her head into the living room. “When will you learn to put the milk back in the fridge when you’re done with it? And turn that down!”
A Strange Kind of Comfort Page 20