by Connie Gault
I suppose if I had spoken up, what I had to say wouldn’t have mattered to either of them. It wouldn’t have meant anything. To my mother’s mind it would have been only another instance of me thinking I was important. But it was what Elena Huhtala had left behind for me, whether she’d wanted to or not.
She’d stopped the car and got out and come to Gilroy because she’d seen me. And something about me, I suppose the way I was trudging along the tracks, alone, reminded her of herself. I was right from the start. Even though she’d tried to deny it, even though she wouldn’t admit we had anything in common and had tried to ignore me. She’d seen herself like me. She was riding in that open car, dreaming an open kind of dreaming, oh yes, imagining that the world was like the view from the passenger seat – endless, lying all before her. Until she saw me. A girl. And she’d lost her girlhood. I don’t mean she thought she could get it back, not at all, in any way, but maybe she was reaching for some bit of herself she didn’t want to travel on without.
My father once told me the stars had crossed my eyes. It was only to get me to wear my eye patch; I knew that at the time. He liked being fanciful. But I never forgot it, how he called me to sit on his knee, how I felt too big – my arms and legs draped over him – yet privileged. His favourite; I always thought so. My brother and sisters watched with their mouths hanging open, and my mother clattered the dishes to register her disapproval. He picked it up from the table and tied the hated thing around my head, and all the while he was telling me I had a special vision. A gift that I must develop.
I’d already suffered a little, knowing I was different from other children, and I took to the idea of specialness with fervour. I wore the patch. It didn’t make much difference, otherwise, in my life; it didn’t incite any worse teasing than my wonky eye had. But the idea that I was important, not because the stars thought so, but because he did – a lot depended on that.
I believed that because of watching so much, I saw more than other people saw. I thought Mr Huhtala recognized that, even though his daughter hadn’t. I thought that was the reason he talked to me when my mother took Louisa to the bedroom to change her. But it might have been just that he’d got started talking and then he couldn’t stop.
Mr. Huhtala told me that Finnish people are supposed to be good at finding lost things and lost people. Finns pride themselves on seeing, he said. They think they have a special sense that enables them to find what they’ve lost, and also to know the future. “Especially when it concerns a death,” he said. “They can predict their own demise, you know, sometimes so far in advance you have to think it’s more inevitable than clairvoyant.” He stopped there and smiled, I think the only time I saw him smile. I remember how I felt when he said that, with that melancholy smile, how strangely rewarded I felt, as if I had been admitted to a secret and incredibly select society. And so I told him about the picture I kept in my mind, of his daughter walking that first night through the streets of Gilroy, carrying her shoes full of dimes. And he told me the Finnish people did that at their wedding dances. The bride took off her shoes at the close of the evening and they were passed around so everyone could fill them with silver coins for good luck.
I didn’t tell him I had one of her dimes, one she’d dropped, pasted into my scrapbook under the heading: “What a fortune costs.” I didn’t tell him I’d written down the things he’d told us earlier about Bill Longmore and the gold roadster he was driving and that he was from Calgary. I didn’t tell him my father had once said I possessed a special vision. Speak a little, hear a lot, that’s a Finnish proverb I would learn years later, but my mother had already taught me the concept.
Mr. Huhtala rose from our table and thanked my mother, standing over her.
“Wait,” she said. She took up a pencil and opened her bible to the back page. “Give me your address, and if I hear I’ll let you know.”
So she wrote “Matti Huhtala, Trevna, Sask.” into her bible, and I surreptitiously noted it down in my scrapbook, in case the bible was ever lost.
I know that I, in the last stage of my childhood, reminded Mr. Huhtala of his daughter. I expect that’s really why he talked to me and told me things he didn’t tell my mother. I had the same sturdiness Elena had at that age, before she grew taller and more slender, the better to slip away from him. He told me more about being Finnish than he’d ever told her; why he did that was a mystery to him, I’m sure. My fanciful picture of those shoes full of dimes provoked it, perhaps. It was a long time since he’d thought of weddings in the old country.
Those days when Elena had been her more solid self, before privacy had become important to her – and naturally so; all adolescents must be reticent in order to protect themselves, he knew that – those were good times for the two of them. And when she changed, she still played cribbage with him, she still listened to the radio with him, maybe, curling up in her chair, next to his, in the living room. She did her homework at the kitchen table while he read the newspaper or pored over his bank statements or filled out government farm reports. They had learned English together at that table, he told me, studying her elementary readers. As she grew older, she took on more of the cleaning and cooking and gardening. The chickens became her job, the only animals they kept besides a dog to bark at foxes. He stayed away from everyone, and didn’t think it harmed her.
From time to time during her last year of school, he worried about her future, but he didn’t speak of it and she didn’t, either. He didn’t talk to her about the failure of the farm; it wasn’t necessary; she had eyes to see. He didn’t put a crop in that spring. She finished school and continued with her daily chores, which were not many since they had no animals anymore. She read all his books again, sat motionless on the swing he’d put up in the yard for her years before. He thought she was waiting for him to say what he was going to do for her, while every day went on like the day before.
He’d had to leave, he told me. The farm had failed. He couldn’t provide for his daughter. All he could do for her was set her free. He was talking to himself, really, more than to me, telling himself again how it had been, the way you do when you think going over the steps you took will tell you why you made a decision. He’d left her some money, all the money he had in the world; he wanted me to know that. It wasn’t much, he said, but it would have been enough to keep her until she could find a job. I didn’t say she’d landed in town penniless; I opened my mouth to tell him and then the look on his face scared me. I don’t know how to describe it. Like he was ready to do something desperate if he couldn’t hold on to knowing he’d done that. He knew he’d frightened me and settled his features. I watched him do it. Then he told me some more about Finland. Maybe that was when he told me about Finnish people being good at finding lost things and lost people. So I wouldn’t worry.
He went back to his farm when he left Gilroy. He didn’t know what else to do. He had no money and no hope.
I don’t know what it would be like to lose your daughter. Losing your father is like losing your footing. Your vision tilts. You say to yourself: Things are not what they seemed to be. And they never will again be what they seemed to be.
My father called me to come sit on his knee. “Come here, Ruthie,” he said, and patted his knee. We were at the table, finishing our supper. My little brother and my little sisters set their forks down to watch and I slid off my chair. I slid around the table, too, so as not to create too much fuss, and climbed up on his knee. My mother rose from her place and started gathering the dirty dishes, clattering. I giggled and clapped my hand over my mouth. Then I couldn’t stop laughing even though it felt as if I’d grown extra arms and legs that hung too far over my father, and I pulled myself in as small as I could when my mother passed by.
My father was a man who did everything easily. He did everything as if he’d already half-forgotten what he’d intended to do, and it wouldn’t matter much if he did forget, but after all, here he was, in this dinky little rented house, at this child-crow
ded table, with this what’s-a-great-big-girl-like-you daughter on his knee, so he finished what he’d started; he reached over the mashed potatoes bowl and picked up my eye patch from the tablecloth where I’d thrown it down beside my plate. The hateful, homemade, black thing. I closed both eyes when I saw what he was going to do. His fingers fumbled with the strings at the back of my head, and some of my hair got caught in the knot and pulled. I opened my mouth to squawk. Too late. He was speaking. He was telling me the stars had crossed the sky the night I was born.
Every night in a small town that did not have electricity the sky was crammed with stars, banks of stars diminishing in size as they multiplied in numbers – presumably to infinity – but none of us had ever seen them move. The interest on my siblings’ faces turned to awe. The baby drooled. My mother clacked plates and banged pots a few steps away in the kitchen. My father, who appreciated opposition, went on with pleasure lifting little eyebrows in his voice. His method was to toss out details as he would have tossed scraps to a dog too disciplined to beg at the table, if we’d had a dog, which we didn’t because our mother said we needed to eat our scraps ourselves. In spite of the nonchalance, my dad couldn’t hide the fact that he liked to tell a story. And he was apt to let it carry him away. In this case, not only had the stars swept from their usual, seemingly fixed spots in the firmament on the night of my birth, but their doing so had given me a special gift of seeing, which it was up to me to develop.
My father by now had spent enough time on me. Someone had asked to see him after supper. That meant a poker game and only the baby didn’t know it. He stood up and I slipped off his lap as effortlessly as a crumb, just brushing my cheek against his cotton shirt before I lost contact. I adjusted the black patch more firmly over my eye, but I think he didn’t notice. Maybe he was already out the door before I drifted around the table, picking up cutlery and stares and a noodle of warm saliva from the baby as I pried the spoon from his strangely appealing fingers. But it didn’t matter that my father had left, or that my mother continued to slam things in the kitchen. Children will believe many things if you let them. Sometimes they will even believe that they are important, that you are important, that we’re all so important something in the universe cares what we do. Just thinking about it, I gave the baby my little finger in place of the spoon. Neil was the baby then. His warm, wet fingers gripped my finger and tethered me.
“Ruth,” my mother said. “You’re daydreaming.” She pulled Neil out of the high chair. He tried not to let go of my finger, but the suction was broken. I took the cutlery into the kitchen and began drying the dishes that lay piled on the wet tea towel. Although he was already gone, I pretended my father went by and tapped my nose on his way out for the evening. I vowed, as I watched him walk out the door (stooping as he went through, because he was always taller in my imagination), to wear my eye patch every waking hour of the day, to go around town with one eye covered and the other wandering until the bad eye learned to focus better and see further than the good eye ever had.
That night I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t even lie down. I sat straight up in the bed I shared with my sisters until every single soul in the house except for me had fallen sleep, and then I slipped out of bed.
A clear night was waiting for me out in our yard. The stars were glinting like a million bucks. I lay down flat on my back on the damp grass and stared at them. I recalled the grand sweeping motion of my father’s arm, as he’d indicated how they’d looked sweeping across the sky. I heard his voice again, and the background clashing of pots and pans. I lay there feeling the dew rise through my nightgown, and I thought about the stars falling, at the bottom of their arc, all of them plummeting down at once and landing on me like hoar frost, like a fairy-tale quilt, like a shroud fit for an important, astral kind of person. I thought it would be perfect to die right then.
3
GILROY
When the past returns, it doesn’t give warning. It happens suddenly, like this: I didn’t think I’d ever see her again, and then one morning, late in August, she drove into our yard. I know it was late in August, nearly September, because we’d started combining. Com-bining, we said. I don’t know why we gave it that pronunciation, maybe to distinguish it from combine, although the term must be derived from that verb, since a com-bine performs three harvesting activities at once: reaping, threshing, and winnowing. Yes, the combine is a wonderful machine; it cuts the grain, it separates the grain from the chaff, and it spews the chaff out the back. It’s modelled on any animal eating, digesting the nutrients, and excreting the waste, but being a machine, it’s noisier in the execution of its business than any animal would be, and lumbers and lurches over the land, and kills things unlucky enough to be living in its path.
Most of the time in the early years of our marriage I drove the grain truck, but once in a while Leonard let me take the combine, although never near the road where neighbours could see the shaky rows or the skips I left behind. And that was a shaky kind of happiness, sitting where he usually sat, vibrating on the loose seat, gripping the steering wheel, mesmerized by the whine of the auger and the clatter of the header, my eyes on the restless wheat ahead of me and the stalks flipping through the blades. The sun bore down on me, the wind whipped my hair, dust and fumes went up my nose, but it was glorious, driving the monster, gobbling up the wheat and the sky in front of me. All was gold and blue, like a Roman Catholic’s idea of penitence (this a concept inherited from my Presbyterian mother) until I turned into the sun and saw what dust could do to it, transforming it to a fireball in front of my eyes.
But most of the time I drove the truck, rumbling over the field at the exact speed of the combine, while the grain poured out of the chute and the dust roiled over the cab, and the pile of wheat grew in the back, and I’d be sweaty and filthy and itchy by the end of the day, and I’d climb up the back of the truck and run my hands in the cool grain, cool as water to the hands.
This fall that I’m remembering, I wasn’t needed much in the fields; our sons were old enough to drive, and it was left to me to provide the hefty meals they had to have, and I was grateful, or so I told myself. I had much to be grateful for.
My daughter saw her first and came slamming into the kitchen. “Mum, there’s a lady in the driveway.” A lady, I thought. I went to the door in time to see her getting out of her car. She did look like a lady, like a city woman, a fish out of water, a bit stunned by all the sudden oxygen. I knew it was her right away, though – she couldn’t have been anyone else. Valerie stuck close to me. She was our youngest, thirteen that summer.
Elena Huhtala stood by her car in our typical bare prairie farmyard (one tractor tire filled with earth and spouting marigolds; otherwise no colour, anywhere), her hand still on the open car door, and with that vague, quizzical, city look on her face, she said, “I’m looking for Gilroy.” As if there must be some joke, right? Because a whole town couldn’t just vanish, could it?
“Elena Huhtala,” I said.
“Yes?”
Valerie slid up against me so our sides were touching. I put my arm around her. I didn’t speak right away, too much oxygen in the air for me, too, just then. But there was plenty of time, and I remembered that about Elena, how she always gave the impression she had plenty of time, and you had plenty of time, and even that the whole world was somehow timeless. She just waited, one hand on the top of the open car door. And what was it that hooked you into waiting with her? Her motionlessness, her silence? The fact that she would wait? Or was it just that she was so attractive, so appealingly symmetrical and slenderly graceful, so watchable. You would not be able to help yourself. Standing with your arms crossed (barricading that organ we consider tender), you’d be drawn to her.
“I like your dress,” Valerie said, out of nowhere.
She was wearing a sleeveless shift dress with many colours in an unusual geometrical flower pattern. Her arms and legs were tanned.
“Come in,” I said, and turned back to
the kitchen. I threw some coffee into the percolator and she and Valerie sat down at the table. I kept my back turned towards them until my hands were as calm and still as hers were. When I joined them, I said, “I’m Ruth.”
“Davy’s girl,” she said, nodding as if she’d already figured it out. I thought maybe she had. I still had to wear the thick-lensed glasses not too many have to wear.
“Girl,” I said. I’d turned that perennial age: thirty-nine. Then I remembered that she was older.
She almost smiled that almost-smile that made her famous in Gilroy long ago, that sad-edged smile.
“So you didn’t find the town.”
“It can not have disappeared?” she asked in her slow way, separating the words so they had a strange, melodramatic weight.
“Off the face of the earth.”
“There isn’t a sign. Not even a sign.”
“That’s right. Nor a stick nor a stone. Anything that had any value got carted away, and everything else they burned to the ground.” I looked into her face, trying to see more than the perfect bone structure, trying to see what it was that was different about her, besides the fact that she was older, and wondering if she was seeing the question I wasn’t asking, the one about my father. If she saw it, she ignored it.
“The store,” she said.
“Yeah, the store. Gone.”
“Where did they go? The Dobies?”
“You remember the name.” (And my father? I suppose you remember him?) But Valerie was squirming in her chair. She looked about to pump her hand in the air the way kids do in school to get the teacher’s attention, and it occurred to me there would be parts of this conversation that would surprise her; she was still an age she could be surprised by adult behaviour. “I married Leonard,” I said. I don’t think I’d ever said that out loud before. I hadn’t needed to say it; we lived in a place where everyone knew us. “This is our daughter, Valerie.”