A Bird in the House

by Margaret Laurence

  “Before I forget,” my mother said, “how’s your mother and the family keeping?”

  “They’re okay,” Chris said in a restrained voice. “They’re not short of hands, if that’s what you mean, Beth. My sisters have their husbands there.”

  Then he grinned, casting away the previous moment, and dug into his suitcase.

  “Hey, I haven’t shown you – these are for you, Vanessa, and this pair is for Roddie.”

  My socks were cherry-coloured. The very small ones for my brother were turquoise.

  Chris only stayed until after dinner, and then he went away again.

  After my father died, the whole order of life was torn. Nothing was known or predictable any longer. For months I lived almost entirely within myself, so when my mother told me one day that Chris couldn’t find any work at all, because there were no jobs and so he had gone back to Shallow Creek to stay, it made scarcely any impression on me. But that summer, my mother decided I ought to go away for a holiday. She hoped it might take my mind off my father’s death. What, if anything, was going to take her mind off his death, she did not say.

  “Would you like to go to Shallow Creek for a week or so?” she asked me. “I could write to Chris’s mother.”

  Then I remembered, all in a torrent, the way I had imagined it once, when he used to tell me about it – the house fashioned of living trees, the lake like a sea where monsters had dwelt, the grass that shone like green wavering light while the horses flew in the splendour of their pride.

  “Yes,” I said. “Write to her.”

  The railway did not go through Shallow Creek, but Chris met me at Challonet’s Crossing. He looked different, not only thinner, but – what was it? Then I saw that it was the fact that his face and neck were tanned red-brown, and he was wearing denims, farm pants, and a blue plaid shirt open at the neck. I liked him like this. Perhaps the change was not so much in him as in myself, now that I was thirteen. He looked masculine in a way I had not been aware of, before.

  “C’mon, kid,” he said. “The limousine’s over here.”

  It was a wagon and two horses, which was what I had expected, but the nature of each was not what I had expected. The wagon was a long and clumsy one, made of heavy planking, and the horses were both plough horses, thick in the legs, and badly matched as a team. The mare was short and stout, matronly. The gelding was very tall and gaunt, and he limped.

  “Allow me to introduce you,” Chris said. “Floss – Trooper – this is Vanessa.”

  He did not mention the other horses, Duchess and Firefly, and neither did I, not all the fortnight I was there. I guess I had known for some years now, without realising it, that the pair had only ever existed in some other dimension.

  Shallow Creek wasn’t a town. It was merely a name on a map. There was a grade school a few miles away, but that was all. They had to go to Challoner’s Crossing for their groceries. We reached the farm, and Chris steered me through the crowd of aimless cows and wolfish dogs in the yard, while I flinched with panic.

  It was perfectly true that the house was made out of trees. It was a fair-sized but elderly shack, made out of poplar poles and chinked with mud. There was an upstairs, which was not so usual around here, with three bedrooms, one of which I was to share with Chris’s sister, Jeannie, who was slightly younger than I, a pallid-eyed girl who was either too shy to talk or who had nothing to say. I never discovered which, because I was so reticent with her myself, wanting to push her away, not to recognise her, and at the same time experiencing a shocked remorse at my own unacceptable feelings.

  Aunt Tess, Chris’s mother, was severe in manner and yet wanting to be kind, worrying over it, making tentative overtures which were either ignored or repelled by her older daughters and their monosyllabic husbands. Youngsters swam in and out of the house like shoals of nameless fishes. I could not see how so many people could live here, under the one roof, but then I learned they didn’t. The married daughters had their own dwelling places, nearby, but some kind of communal life was maintained. They wrangled endlessly but they never left one another alone, not even for a day.

  Chris took no part at all, none. When he spoke, it was usually to the children, and they would often follow him around the yard or to the barn, not pestering but just trailing along in clusters of three or four. He never told them to go away. I liked him for this, but it bothered me, too. I wished he would return his sisters’ bickering for once, or tell them to clear out, or even yell at one of the kids. But he never did. He closed himself off from squabbling voices just as he used to do with Grandfather Connor’s spearing words.

  The house had no screens on the doors or windows, and at meal times the flies were so numerous you could hardly see the food for the iridescent-winged blue-black bodies squirming all over it. Nobody noticed my squeamishness except Chris, and he was the only one from whom I really wanted to conceal it.

  “Fan with your hand,” he murmured.

  “It’s okay,” I said quickly.

  For the first time in all the years we had known each other, we could not look the other in the eye. Around the table, the children stabbed and snivelled, until Chris’s older sister, driven frantic, shrieked, Shut up shut up shut up. Chris began asking me about Manawaka then, as though nothing were going on around him.

  They were due to begin haying, and Chris announced that he was going to camp out in the bluff near the hayfields. To save himself the long drive in the wagon each morning, he explained, but I felt this wasn’t the real reason.

  “Can I go, too?” I begged. I could not bear the thought of living in the house with all the others who were not known to me, and Chris not here.

  “Well, I don’t know –”

  “Please. Please, Chris. I won’t be any trouble. I promise.”

  Finally he agreed. We drove out in the big hayrack, its slatted sides rattling, its old wheels jolting metallically. The road was narrow and dirt, and around it the low bushes grew, wild rose and blueberry and wolf willow with silver leaves. Sometimes we would come to a bluff of pate-leaved poplar trees, and once a red-winged blackbird flew up out of the branches and into the hot dusty blue of the sky.

  Then we were there. The hayfields lay beside the lake. It was my first view of the water which had spawned saurian giants so long ago. Chris drove the hayrack through the fields of high coarse grass and on down almost to the lake’s edge, where there was no shore but only the green rushes like floating meadows in which the open lake stretched, deep, green-grey, out and out, beyond sight.

  No human word could be applied. The lake was not lonely or untamed. These words relate to people, and there was nothing of people here. There was no feeling about the place. It existed in some world in which man was not yet born. I looked at the grey reaches of it and felt threatened. It was like the view of God which I had held since my father’s death. Distant, indestructible, totally indifferent.

  Chris had jumped down off the hayrack.

  “We’re not going to camp here, are we?” I asked and pleaded.

  “No. I just want to let the horses drink. We’ll camp up there in the bluff.”

  I looked. “It’s still pretty close to the lake, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t worry,” Chris said, laughing. “You won’t get your feet wet.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  Chris looked at me.

  “I know you didn’t,” he said. “But let’s learn to be a little tougher, and not let on, eh? It’s necessary.”

  Chris worked through the hours of sun, while I lay on the half-formed stack of hay and looked up at the sky. The blue air trembled and spun with the heat haze, and the hay on which I was lying held the scents of grass and dust and wild mint.

  In the evening, Chris took the horses to the lake again, and then he drove the hayrack to the edge of the bluff and we spread out our blankets underneath it. He made a fire and we had coffee and a tin of stew, and then we went to bed. We did not wash, and we slept in our clothes. It w
as only when I was curled up uncomfortably with the itching blanket around me that I felt a sense of unfamiliarity at being here, with Chris only three feet away, a self-consciousness I would not have felt even the year before. I do not think he felt this sexual strangeness. If he wanted me not to be a child – and he did – it was not with the wish that I would be a woman. It was something else.

  “Are you asleep, Vanessa?” he asked.

  “No. I think I’m lying on a tree root.”

  “Well, shift yourself, then,” he said. “Listen, kid, I never said anything before, because I didn’t really know what to say, but – you know how I felt about your dad dying, and that, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said chokingly. “It’s okay. I know.”

  “I used to talk with Ewen sometimes. He didn’t see what I was driving at, mostly, but he’d always listen, you know? You don’t find many guys like that.”

  We were both silent for a while.

  “Look,” Chris said finally. “Ever noticed how much brighter the stars are when you’re completely away from any houses? Even the lamps up at the farm, there, make enough of a glow to keep you from seeing properly like you can out here. What do they make you think about, Vanessa?”

  “Well –”

  “I guess most people don’t give them much thought at all, except maybe to say – very pretty – or like that. But the point is, they aren’t like that. The stars and planets, in themselves, are just not like that, not pretty, for heaven’s sake. They’re gigantic – some of them burning – imagine those worlds tearing through space and made of pure fire. Or the ones that are absolutely dead – just rock or ice and no warmth in them. There must be some, though, that have living creatures. You wonder what they could look like, and what they feel. We won’t ever get to know. But somebody will know, someday. I really believe that. Do you ever think about this kind of thing at all?”

  He was twenty-one. The distance between us was still too great. For years I had wanted to be older so I might talk with him, but now I felt unready.

  “Sometimes,” I said, hesitantly, making it sound like Never.

  “People usually say there must be a God,” Chris went on, “because otherwise how did the universe get here? But that’s ridiculous. If the stars and planets go on to infinity, they could have existed forever, for no reason at all. Maybe they weren’t ever created. Look – what’s the alternative? To believe in a God who is brutal. What else could He be? You’ve only got to look anywhere around you. It would be an insult to Him to believe in a God like that. Most people don’t like talking about this kind of thing – it embarrasses them, you know? Or else they’re not interested. I don’t mind. I can always think about things myself. You don’t actually need anyone to talk to. But about God, though – if there’s a war, like it looks there will be, would people claim that was planned? What kind of a God would pull a trick like that? And yet, you know, plenty of guys would think it was a godsend, and who’s to say they’re wrong? It would be a job, and you’d get around and see places.”

  He paused, as though waiting for me to say something. When I did not, he resumed.

  “Ewen told me about the last war, once. He hardly ever talked about it, but this once he told me about seeing the horses in the mud, actually going under, you know? And the way their eyes looked when they realised they weren’t going to get out. Ever seen horses’ eyes when they’re afraid, I mean really berserk with fear, like in a bush-fire? Ewen said a guy tended to concentrate on the horses because he didn’t dare think what was happening to the men. Including himself. Do you ever listen to the news at all, Vanessa?”

  “I –”

  I could only feel how foolish I must sound, still unable to reply as I would have wanted, comprehendingly. I felt I had failed myself utterly. I could not speak even the things I knew. As for the other things, the things I did not know, I resented Chris’s facing me with them. I took refuge in pretending to be asleep, and after a while Chris stopped talking.

  Chris left Shallow Creek some months after the war began, and joined the Army. After his basic training he was sent to England. We did not hear from him until about a year later, when a letter arrived for me.

  “Vanessa – what’s wrong?” my mother asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t fib,” she said firmly. “What did Chris say in his letter, honey?”

  “Oh – not much.”

  She gave me a curious look and then she went away. She would never have demanded to see the letter. I did not show it to her and she did not ask about it again.

  Six months later my mother heard from Aunt Tess. Chris had been sent home from England and discharged from the Army because of a mental breakdown. He was now in the provincial mental hospital and they did not know how long he would have to remain there. He had been violent, before, but now he was not violent. He was, the doctors had told his mother, passive.

  Violent. I could not associate the word with Chris, who had been so much the reverse. I could not bear to consider what anguish must have catapulted him into that even greater anguish. But the way he was now seemed almost worse. How might he be? Sitting quite still, wearing the hospital’s grey dressing-gown, the animation gone from his face?

  My mother cared about him a great deal, but her immediate thought was not for him.

  “When I think of you, going up to Shallow Creek that time,” she said, “and going out camping with him, and what might have happened –”

  I, also, was thinking of what might have happened. But we were not thinking of the same thing. For the first time I recognised, at least a little, the dimensions of his need to talk that night. He must have understood perfectly well how impossible it would be, with a thirteen-year-old. But there was no one else. All his life’s choices had grown narrower and narrower. He had been forced to return to the alien lake of home, and when finally he saw a means of getting away, it could only be into a turmoil which appalled him and which he dreaded even more than he knew. I had listened to his words, but I had not really heard them, not until now. It would not have made much difference to what happened, but I wished it were not too late to let him know.

  Once when I was on holiday from college, my mother got me to help her clean out the attic. We sifted through boxes full of junk, old clothes, school-books, bric-a-brac that once had been treasures. In one of the boxes I found the miniature saddle that Chris had made for me a long time ago.

  “Have you heard anything recently?” I asked, ashamed that I had not asked sooner.

  She glanced up at me. “Just the same. It’s always the same. They don’t think there will be much improvement.”

  Then she turned away.

  “He always used to seem so – hopeful. Even when there was really nothing to be hopeful about. That’s what I find so strange. He seemed hopeful, didn’t you think?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t hope,” I said.

  “How do you mean?”

  I wasn’t certain myself. I was thinking of all the schemes he’d had, the ones that couldn’t possibly have worked, the unreal solutions to which he’d clung because there were no others, the brave and useless strokes of fantasy against a depression that was both the world’s and his own.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I just think things were always more difficult for him than he let on, that’s all. Remember the letter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well – what it said was that they could force his body to march and even to kill, but what they didn’t know was that he’d fooled them. He didn’t live inside it any more.”

  “Oh Vanessa –” my mother said. “You must have suspected right then.”

  “Yes, but –”

  I could not go on, could not say that the letter seemed only the final heartbreaking extension of that way he’d always had of distancing himself from the absolute unbearability of battle.

  I picked up the tiny saddle and turned it over in my hand.

  “Look. His brand, the name of h
is ranch. The Criss-Cross.”

  “What ranch?” my mother said, bewildered.

  “The one where he kept his racing horses. Duchess and Firefly.”

  Some words came into my head, a single line from a poem I had once heard. I knew it referred to a lover who did not want the morning to come, but to me it had another meaning, a different relevance.

  Slowly, slowly, horses of the night –

  The night must move like this for him, slowly, all through the days and nights. I could not know whether the land he journeyed through was inhabited by terrors, the old monster-kings of the lake, or whether he had discovered at last a way for himself to make the necessary dream perpetual.

  I put the saddle away once more, gently and ruthlessly, back into the cardboard box.

  THE HALF-HUSKY

  When Peter Chorniuk’s wagon clanked slowly into our back yard that September, it never occurred to me that this visit would be different from any other. Peter Chorniuk lived at Galloping Mountain, a hundred miles north of Manawaka, and he was one of the few men from whom it was still possible to buy birch, for the trees were getting scarce. Every autumn he came down to Manawaka and brought a load of birch for our furnace. Birch held the fire better than poplar, but it was expensive and we could afford only the one load, so my grandfather burned a mixture. I watched the man whoa the team and then climb into the back of the wagon and begin throwing down the cordwood sticks. The powdery white bark was still on and in places had been torn, exposing the pale rust colour of the inner bark. The logs thudded dryly as he flung them down. Later my grandfather and I would have to carry them inside. The plebeian poplar was kept outside, but the birch was stacked in the basement.

  I was lying on the roof of the tool-shed, reading. An enormous spruce tree grew beside the shed, and the branches feathered out across the roof, concealing anyone who was perched there. I was fifteen, and getting too old to be climbing on roofs, my mother said.