Silent Girl

by Tricia Dower

  I liked having Joe as my secret, exploring the mystery of him without anyone knowing and warning me not to. I wrote question after question, amazed at each piece of himself he revealed, the intelligence and promise of him. I shared my vision of a color-unconscious world and he said they were trying it over there, a rainbow of guys eating out of the same pan. If we can believe in that world together, I wrote, we’ll be invincible. The closer he got to leaving, the more he worried about dying. How cruel it would be, he wrote, if one night was all we ever had. I said we can have every night from now on as far as I’m concerned and he wrote back, okay. You may wonder why I don’t sleep on the couch; those letters keep me next to him listening for the signs. I’m getting better at rolling off the bed in time.

  Been a month since he started the meetings in Newark, three nights a week. I wanted to go with him, but he says he can’t bring me there. Someone gave him a white shirt, black pants, and black tie to wear to meetings. You’ve turned in one uniform for another, I said, and he answered like a robot: it’s essential to the demonstration of self-respect.

  Nights he’s gone, I distract myself with housework. Sometimes I go to the library and read magazines. The latest issue of Ebony says that, at one time, it was an insult to call someone black, but now it’s in; colored and Negro are out.

  Darnell – I’ve agreed to call him that for Joe’s sake – brought a can of Folgers over last night; he can afford to be gracious now that he’s won. He brought it into the kitchen where I was clipping recipes from a magazine a customer left behind at the bank.

  Hmm, mountain grown, the richest kind, I said like the commercial, but he looked confused so I said, thanks, Joe’s at school.

  I know, he said and sat across from me, leaning into the table as though he had a confidence to share. I came to talk with you.

  Oh, yeah, what about?

  You living here, away from your own people. Must be hard.

  My, my, you actually care? I felt bad for a second when a ripple crossed his shiny, high forehead as though he were hurt.

  He stroked his chin and said, more like appreciate. Your letters got my brother Joseph through some ugly times. He was proud, a white chick writing him every day, didn’t know better then, thought he needed you to raise him up. Must make him sad, you here by yourself so much, looking like the loneliest woman on earth.

  Darnell likes to play the shrink, to pretend he knows you better than you know yourself. I don’t mind spending time with myself, I told him. It’s not the same as lonely. Besides, Joe’s my people now.

  That’s just it, he said. He can’t be. You haven’t earned him, got no right to share in his past, you know what I mean? Integration is a fraud.

  Want your own land, Darnell, I said, a reservation? It’s done wonders for the Indians.

  You’re trying to get my goat, he said, but I won’t let you. I came over to make peace, to tell you to quit your exile, stop punishing yourself, it won’t pay the debt.

  What’s that supposed to mean? I asked, and he said, loving one black man’s not enough to stamp Void on everything your people did to mine. Sharing your pay with Brother Joseph, sharing what you stole from us, is not enough. Over three hundred years we worked for nothing, yes-sirring and no-sirring our asses off, you dig? This country got rich on us.

  I didn’t do the stealing, I said.

  Don’t matter, he said. You gotta deal with the unfinished business. You wouldn’t have your job if we hadn’t worked for nothing. Think about that. If you love that man, be humble enough to admit the truth and stop tempting him away from it.

  I sat at the kitchen table long after Darnell left, letting his words soak into me, missing, of all things, my old room in my parents’ house, thinking that if Joe and I broke up, I’d be alone forever. I couldn’t lie and promise until death do us part to someone else.

  The wake of a slave ship has broken over my shore.

  I was still up last night, reading, when Joe slipped into our room so quietly I didn’t realize it until he was standing beside the bed holding a piece of paper out as if it were a present.

  I know why I didn’t die over there, he said, his voice sounding worn out, older.

  I took the paper from him, on it a drawing of a man on his knees, chained hands reaching up as if in prayer, bulging eyes pleading with someone unseen. I had to turn away from the cruelty of the image. This can’t be good for you, I said. What goes on at those meetings?

  He knelt beside the bed and held up his hands as though his wrists were bound. All of us men tonight, he said, we got down on our knees and let this man enter us, let ourselves feel his chains. We stayed that way for ten minutes, felt like hours, my neck hurt so bad from looking up, my eyes from not blinking lest I miss a signal from the brother playing the slave master. If I’d been allowed to speak, I wouldn’t have had enough air except to whine. I have never been so moved, felt such communion. He shuddered then smiled as if he’d won a prize.

  The thought of those people messing with his mind – practicing witchcraft, maybe, persuading him he could be possessed by a drawing – terrified me. I was furious at their irresponsibility. Get up, I said, pulling at Joe’s wrists. He yanked them back.

  Look at me, he said, tell me what you see.

  You’re exhausted, I said. Stop whatever this is and come to bed.

  Do you see the slave in me, do you see my blackness?

  You know I don’t, I said. To identify with that drawing is to be filled with shame.

  Whose shame?

  His, I said, and everyone else who was ever a slave. How could so many people have thought so little of themselves? I shut up then because something I didn’t know I believed until that moment wanted to spill out of my mouth: if I’m to blame for what was done hundreds of years ago, they’re to blame for letting it happen.

  Joe lowered his arms, sat back on his heels and closed his eyes. You think he should have chosen death over slavery?

  He could have fought back, I said, maybe he wouldn’t have died.

  Tears slipped from Joe’s closed eyes and into his nostrils. Some fought back, he said, and they were shot or beaten to death, lynched or torn apart by dogs, God save them. Not their blood in me. It’s his. I’m proud of that man. Because he chose life, I live, was spared in ’Nam so I could bear witness for him. Can you appreciate what he did for me?

  He curled into a ball on the floor and sobbed. I slipped out of bed and covered his body with mine, wiped his face with my nightgown. I can, I can, I said into his ear, not appreciating it at all but frantic to keep him from losing his mind. Am I the only one who can see his wounds?

  Forgive the wobbly writing, spaced out on Valium. Finagled sleeping pills, too. Had to book shrink date right there in Eversoll’s office, no intention keeping it. Stubbed toe today, maybe yesterday, doesn’t matter, pain so far away couldn’t be bothered reacting. How’s song go, oh me oh my, do I feel high? Not too high to think this through, be sure what I’ve written not in wrong hands. It’s out of hopeless chest now, in envelope with next month’s rent. When this note’s done, Mrs. Will, I’ll put everything in mail to you. Sorry for the burden, you’re the only one I can trust.

  Window closing on my opportunity. Joe like caged panther, looking for way out of me, wrong history on my skin. Never really had him, probably made us up. Don’t know what else to do but let him kill me; only way he’ll get help. Everyone will see how much he needs it. You’ll testify to that, come to his defense? Wish I’d invited you up for coffee, would you have come? Thanks for taking us in.

  Trick is dope myself enough to not struggle, not pull hands off neck. Take too much I ruin the plan. I’m ready, I think, maybe tonight, same dread and excitement as when first gave myself to Joe, a gift, not a sacrifice, please tell him it was that.

  Passing Through

  All that live
s must die / Passing through nature to eternity.

  —Gertrude in Hamlet

  “I’LL QUIT SCHOOL AND TAKE CARE OF YOU,” SPENCER SAID INTO the hollowness behind her.

  Trudy stood before the Christmas tree in the living room where, only twelve hours before, her brother-in-law, Jack, had staggered across the floor and eased her husband’s stiffening body onto the couch. Cradling it as you would a sleeping child.

  “We left the tree lights on all night,” she said.

  “You always said the place would be mine someday. I’m ready now.”

  She turned sharply and looked into his eyes. Pond blue like his father’s, but closer together and lacking the humour. “I haven’t died.” The property was in her name, had been in her family since 1906 when her great-grandfather homesteaded the land. “I expect you to finish school.” Spencer was a semester away from a degree in agricultural and bio-resource engineering. Fancy words for farming, but gone were the days when you could rely on hard work and the Farmer’s Almanac.

  “I don’t need a degree to run this place. I already know more than Dad ever did.”

  “You’ll never know that much,” she said, sorry when she saw his wounded face. Pictures of him as a child – laughing, acting the clown – hung on the walls. She still could summon the intensity she’d felt for him back then – like falling in love day after day. He’d grown up so serious. His sunny hair had darkened and begun to recede. He looked too old to be her son.

  “I can’t talk about this now,” she said.

  The wind up the valley stung her face as she rode out on horseback to the funeral, her head sludgy with sorrow, no hat on the frizzy red hair Dave had likened to a brush fire. The sound of hooves on crusty snow bit the air as Jack rode on one side of her, Spencer on the other. Wearing his father’s long, black outback coat and wide-brimmed black hat, Spencer held the reins of the riderless King trotting beside him.

  “A bit much, don’t you think?” Jack said. His voice was deep and sometimes so muffled you’d think he was talking to himself.

  “He wants to honour King,” Trudy said. “What’s the harm?” Felled by a stroke, Dave had one foot in the Palomino’s stirrups when Jack found him along the back fence line.

  As far as Jack could tell, King hadn’t moved. “Son of a gun looked like he was stuffed,” he’d said. “Never stood like that for me.” Jack was a farrier, used to horses that pulled and reared, but King confounded him.

  The small southern Alberta farming community would miss Dave – never too busy to pitch in at branding and herding time or when fields needed swathing. Nearly two hundred gathered on the frozen earth under a bleak sky, their faces registering the weather as well as the occasion. Those on horseback formed a circle around the ones who stood hugging themselves against the cold. Dave’s parents clutched each other as Spencer rode in straight-backed and brave. Trudy spotted colleagues from the branch where she’d been a teller for as long as she and Dave had been married. Twenty-four years of asking: “How do you want that – tens or twenties?”

  King snorted, dipped his head, and pawed the snowy ground Dave had been so thrilled to see. He’d hollered for her like a big kid: “It’s snowing, Red! Hear the ground sucking it in, the grass already growing?”

  Icy word clouds left the United Church minister’s mouth. For her in-laws’ sake, she’d arranged a traditional service, but not in a joyless church. On the rise, instead, where she and Dave would ride to study Old Chief Mountain’s face touching the sky.

  Later, bowls and platters materialized in the dining room: a whole ham, fried chicken, baked beans, scalloped potatoes, green beans, coleslaw, biscuits and honey, brownies, and rice pudding. The attention to detail moved her. Someone had thought of paper plates and napkins, someone else, mustard and mayonnaise. As most of the neighbours were Mormons, however, no one had brewed coffee. She made herself an instant and squeezed through the crowd spilling onto the unheated porch.

  “Not a sadder time for this to happen,” a woman from down the road said. “But look on the bright side. With so many around for the holidays, you got a good turnout.”

  Trudy was leaning against the side of the house looking at the bright side of the moon when Spencer found her. “You and Dad shouldn’t have dumped the sheep,” he said, rubbing his arms. He’d come looking for her in shirtsleeves. “They’re more adaptable to drought and hard winter. I’m gonna bring them back.”

  “Oh, sweetheart,” she said, opening her coat to him, “give it a rest.”

  It was two years since Jack showed up back in town, things having gone sour between him and a woman in Red Deer. Around that time, mad cow closed the U.S. border to live cattle and they could no longer afford to hire even the occasional hand. In exchange for labour evenings and weekends, Dave offered Jack the log cabin within eyeshot of their home, the one she’d grown up in – a ranch house with peeling yellow paint.

  “He’ll have weekdays to get a shoeing business going,” Dave said. “It’s always bothered me, the cabin standing empty.” Mostly, she suspected, because she retreated to it whenever he got too full of himself and talked down to her.

  “I can’t believe you gave it to him without asking me.”

  “I hate that cabin,” Spencer said, his voice a slap. “When I was little and you’d leave Dad and me to go there, it made me want to run away, too.” A picture he drew at school came back to her: the cabin with angry black crayon streaks over the windows and door. Not your usual careful work, the teacher had written.

  The cabin was her honeymoon home, a gift from her parents. She and Dave lived in it only a year before a tractor-trailer jack-knifed on an icy road in front of her folks’ pick-up. They’d taken over the business, keeping a hundred and fifty ewes and three hundred cows for close to twenty years until drought left much of the pasture scorched and useless. The sheep went first. After mad cow, all but seventy of the cows. Through it all, she kept the cabin like new, chasing spiders and mice away, laundering curtains and linens so they’d stay fresh.

  “He’s only gonna sleep there, for chrissakes,” Dave said.

  “He better clean up after himself.”

  Jack tanned darker than Dave and had eyes and hair the colour of crude – “our changeling,” his mother joked. Elbows on the table, he forked his food as if doing you a favour. When the rest of the family debated one thing or another, he’d lean back in his chair, silent and watchful. She caught him staring at her more than once.

  After moving into the cabin, he stopped in for breakfast a few times a week at Dave’s invitation – early, so Dave could see to the cows and she could get to the bank. One morning, Jack scooped up the plates from the table and filled the sink with soapy water.

  “What are you doing?” she said. “Don’t you have to hit the road?”

  “Hit the road, Jack,” he sang, flicking water at her with long, agile fingers. “First appointment isn’t ’til ten, a critter partial to foot massages with dishpan hands.”

  She hadn’t seen this side of Jack. She liked a sense of humour in a man.

  “Does this filly have a name?”

  “What makes you think it’s a she? Maybe I swing both ways.”

  “Ha!” She grabbed a towel to dry the dishes. “Why’d you take up shoeing?”

  “It’s honest work, important, too. A bad shoer can cripple a horse.”

  “You must have stories. How come you don’t say much?”

  “Conversation is an Olympic sport in our family, present company excluded. I’m better one-on-one.”

  She liked that he noticed she was different. Started listening for his 4x4 coming up the gravel road to their place, watching for him to go in and out the cabin’s red door.

  Spencer reluctantly returned to the University of Saskatoon the middle of January. Trudy walked him out to his metallic gray M
azda. He’d bought it at sixteen with money she and Dave had set aside for him from the sale of the sheep. The car had been nine years old even then. She worried about it breaking down on some lonely stretch of highway. “Call as soon as you get there. Call if you run into trouble.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t try this alone,” he said. “Makes me feel like shit.”

  “Your uncle’s still here. Besides, I worked the ranch in the past and I’ve always kept the books. I might have a few brain cells left.”

  He put a hand on her shoulder. Something Dave used to do. “’Course you do. It’s just that we’re running out of time. Maybe I’m mental, but I’ve felt Dad around ever since the funeral. I think he chose to die so I could rescue the business.”

  She didn’t know whether to laugh or stomp on his foot. “It’s good to have a sense of destiny. Your dad always said you had manure in your veins.”

  “If only he’d listened, I could have taught him so much.”

  She did laugh at that, and Spencer’s eyes narrowed the way they had when he was a child and got angry. A positively evil look that prompted Dave to joke that she’d given birth to the Devil’s Spawn. They knew he’d go off and break something for them to find later, something they cared about. Her grandmother’s teapot one time.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that he felt the same way about you.”

  After Spencer left, she waited on the cabin steps for Jack to get home. A Chinook had blown in that day. The warm, dry air left her longing for the purple and yellow prairie anemones that would decorate the grazing land in a few months. Life would return to normal. She’d wake up to Dave spooning her, his hard-on against her butt.