Small Beneath the Sky

by Lorna Crozier

  small

  beneath

  the

  sky

  ( a prairie memoir )

  LORNA CROZIER

  small

  beneath

  the

  sky

  D&M PUBLISHERS INC.

  Vancouver/Toronto/Berkeley

  Copyright © 2009 by Lorna Crozier

  09 10 11 12 13 5 4 3 2 1

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Greystone Books

  A division of D&M Publishers Inc.

  2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201

  Vancouver BC Canada V5T 4S7

  www.greystonebooks.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Crozier, Lorna

  Small beneath the sky : a prairie memoir / Lorna Crozier.

  ISBN-hardcover: 978-1-55365-343-1

  ISBN-ebook: 978-1-926812-27-4

  1. Crozier, Lorna. 2. Poets, Canadian (English)—20th century—

  Biography. 3. Swift Current (Sask.)—Biography. I. Title.

  PS8555.R72 Z476 2009 C811’.54 C2009-900943-9

  Editing by Barbara Pulling

  Jacket design by Peter Cocking

  Jacket photo illustration by Peter Cocking;

  original photos © Momatiuk-Eastcott/CORBIS (sky);

  Dave Reede/First Light (landscape)

  Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West

  We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.

  For Barry and Linda Crozier

  and for Lynda H.

  And the land around us green and happy,

  waiting as you wait for a killer to spring,

  a full-sized blur,

  waiting like a tree in southern Saskatchewan,

  cremarked on, lonely and famous as a saint.

  JOHN NEWLOVE, The Green Plain

  IN WRITING THIS BOOK, I am indebted to

  Aristotle, who hypothesized that there must

  be something beyond the chain of cause

  and effect, something that started it all. He

  called this immovable force the first cause.

  Contents

  First Cause: Light

  First Cause: Dust

  First Cause: Wind

  Common Birds of Canada

  By and by

  The Drunken Horse

  Milk Leg

  First Cause: Mom and Dad

  Spoilt

  Familiar as Salt

  My Soul to Keep

  Crazy City Kid

  First Cause: Rain

  First Cause: Snow

  First Cause: Sky

  A Spell of Lilacs

  Fox and Goose

  Tasting the Air

  Spit

  Light Years

  The Only Swimmer in the World

  As Good as Anyone

  Lonely as a Tree

  First Cause: Insects

  A Very Personal Thing

  Perfect Time

  Dark Water

  First Cause: Grass

  First Cause: Gravel

  First Cause: Horizon

  The Diamond Ring

  Till Death Do Us Part

  My Mother for a Long Time

  Not Waving but Drowning

  First Cause: Story

  Acknowledgements

  first cause: light

  YOU DON’T KNOW what light feels or how its thinking goes. You do know this is where it’s most at home. On the plains where you were born, there are no mountains to turn it back, no forest for it to shoulder through. A solitary tree marks its comings and goings like a pole sunk in the shore of the ocean to measure the tides. Here, light seems like another form of water, as clear but thinner, and it cannot be contained. When you touch it, it resists a little and leaves something like dampness on your skin. You feel it the way you feel a dog’s tongue lick your cheek in the early morning. After an hour or two of walking, you are soaked in brightness. When you shake your head and shoulders, you see the spray. If you stay too long in the open, you could drown, its currents carrying you to its source, your body bobbing, then going under, your lungs full of lustre. Nowhere else in your travels will you see light so palpable and fierce. It is too huge for dreams, too persistent for solitude. All day long it touches you with the smallest of its million watery wings.

  first cause: dust

  IN SUCH clarity of light there has to be its opposite. Something that smears, stains, drops a shroud and forms a film across the eye. When the wind is up, the season dry, the world turns upside down: the sky becomes the earth, particular and grey, and you breathe it in. You can get lost in dust as in a blizzard. You need a rope to make it from the house to the barn and back again. Dust settles on dugouts and sloughs, on drifts of snow, on the yellow of canola, on the siding of houses, on washing hung on the line. It rises in small asthmatic clouds as your feet hit the ground. It insinuates itself under the thickest hair, forms a thin cap that hugs your skull, a caul for the dying. It thickens your spit, it tucks between your fingers and toes, it sifts through the shell of an egg. Here’s dust in your eye and ashes to ashes. It is the bride’s veil and the widow’s, the skin between this world and the next. It is the smell you love most, the one that means home to you, dust on the grass as it meets the first drops of summer rain.

  first cause: wind

  WHAT LOVES the wind in this spare land? Of the trees it is the aspens, their leaves long-stemmed so they flutter in the slightest breeze. If you were led blindfolded to a grove of them, you’d step back, sure you stood on the brink of Niagara. The mist the wind sprays is gritty on your cheeks, but it doesn’t dull these leaves. Wind flips them and wins the toss; it frisks them from stem to tip and shakes them insensible. When they soar, then fall, the leaves forget they cannot rise again.

  Of the unwanted, it is the tumbleweeds, cursèd, straw-coloured candelabras of brittle stems and thorns. Shallowly rooted, they leave their rainless gardens of neglect and somersault like ribs of acrobats across the fallow fields. At lines of barbed wire stretching from post to post, with the surety of stone, they build a border, a wailing wall, the wind hauling sifts of clay and packing them in, so the wind itself cannot pass through.

  Of the grasses, it is the wheat. At dusk, the golden heads ripe with seeds nod and dream they are that ancient glacial ocean, swelling and breaking, moon-pulled: you feel an undertow at the edges of the fields and want to go under. Seagulls drift above you, forever it seems, as if they’d been sent from the ark, and they’re riding hunger and belief on currents of air. It’s easy to imagine you could push off in a boat, wind at your back, going home by a sea that tosses and heaves, without a light to guide you.

  Of the animals, it is the badger and the wolverine. They have met their match. They bare their teeth and the wind does not weaken or retreat. They dig in the earth and the wind dives in ahead of them. They bite and won’t let go, but the wind can hang on longer. They know wind is the better hunter though they’ve never seen what it catches, what makes it thrive.

  Of the human, it is a woman, though most of her kind hate it, will tell you how it drives them crazy on the farms. This one walks right into it, head lowered, thighs and calves working hard as
if she’s climbing, pushing the boulder of the wind with her shoulders and chest. There’s an energy that gusts inside her; wind steals her soul, adds distance and desire, then gives it back. One woman bent into it, a flat country’s Sisyphus, the wind rising. What lungs are capable of punching out such an exhalation, inexhaustible and lowly, blowing farther than any prairie eye can see?

  common birds

  of canada

  THE MORNING sun hammered the roofs of the stores along Central Avenue. I could smell the tar in the black–top, and my skin burned as if I stood too close to a stove with a roast in the oven. In spite of the heat, the two RCMP officers who led the Dominion Day parade wore their dress regalia, tan stetsons, black breeches and red serge jackets with tight collars that grazed their chins. The glare on their brass buttons made me blink.

  Behind the Mounties on their regulation black mares rode a posse of local politicians and businessmen. They were decked out in cowboy boots and cowboy hats, some sitting as comfortably as Gene Autry about to burst into song, others slippery in the saddle, reins gripped so hard you could see their hands turning white. If we got lucky, this year’s cavalcade would include a hockey player who’d gone on from the Swift Current Indians to an NHL farm camp. He’d be waving from a red convertible with a big Ham Motors banner covering each side.

  Some distance behind the riders, so that the horses wouldn’t spook, lumbered a life-sized black-and-white pinto made of steel. He clanked stiff-kneed between the float carrying the Ladies of the Nile and the flatbed truck of old-time fiddlers, who broke into the Red River Reel whenever the parade paused to let the entries in the rear catch up. As famous in our town as Trigger, the pinto was named Blow Torch. His mane of real horsehair gleamed. Smoke puffed from his nostrils every five minutes or so, and he let out a roar that came nowhere close to a whinny or a neigh. Everyone laughed and clapped as he clomped by. The clamour he made was like a grain bin collapsing in on itself in a high wind.

  People referred to Blow Torch’s creator, Mr. McIntyre Jr., as an inventor. He’d inherited McIntyre’s Foundry from his father, and though some considered him eccentric, his construction of the mechanical horse made him even more of a celebrity than the mayor or the skip who’d almost won the Brier. Mr. McIntyre rarely accompanied Blow Torch in the parade, though. Usually it was a clown, maybe one of the bull wranglers from the rodeo, who held the reins to make sure the steel pinto didn’t veer into the crowd.

  My family could have walked the four blocks from our house on Fourth West to Central Avenue, but Dad didn’t walk anywhere he could drive. He’d herded my mom, my brother and me into the car and parked as close as he could get. To watch the parade, we always stood in front of the Lyric Theatre near the middle of the route that passed rows of houses before the stores began. Swift Current’s downtown was only three blocks long, but it boasted a second theatre, the Eagle, and three department stores: the Metropolitan, Christie Grant’s and Cooper’s. Cooper’s was the only store that sold merchandise on two levels. Mom took me there once a year, and we climbed to the second floor to buy me a new pair of shoes. There were three cafés strung along the avenue, the Modern, the Venice and the Paris, and at the end of the street stood two hotels—the York and the Imperial. The third hotel, the Healy, was one block east.

  The parade started on top of the hill by the elementary school, where the marshalls lined up the horses, the marching bands, the fire truck, the floats, the Shriners with their red scooters and toy train built out of tin and plywood, the waxed and polished police car, and the big new farm machinery from John Deere and International Harvester. If you looked down the six blocks of Central Avenue from that height, you could see all the way to the CPR station house at the end.

  As people stood at the curb, alert for the police siren that would launch the spectacle, they dabbed sweat from their foreheads, sipped from Thermoses of coffee or bottles of pop and chatted about the weather, wondering if those black clouds rolling in from the west meant rain or if that was dust darkening the sky. Should the women make a quick trip home to close the windows and take down the washing from the line? Lots of farmers had driven in for the day, and Mom and Dad would always ask those nearby how many bushels to the acre they expected this year and how many weeks till harvest. Had anyone got hail out their way? Were the dugouts filling up after last week’s rain? Impatient with the wait, kids and some adults would step into the street and peer up the hill to see if anything was moving. For the parade and the rodeo we’d go to later, I always wore my red felt cowboy hat with the wooden toggle that made the rope short enough to snug under my chin.

  Tommy Ham, the father of my best friend, Lynda, owned the Chrysler dealership in town. I looked forward to waving at him as he trotted by on his big palomino. When he spotted me and my parents, I hoped he’d doff his white cowboy hat and sweep it high above his head. For the first few years, I couldn’t understand why my father wasn’t on a horse alongside him. After all, when my dad was a kid, he’d raced a gelding named Tony in all the local fairs and won cash prizes he’d taken home to his father. I was impressed when he told me he got to keep some of the money for himself.

  DURING THE WEEK, my father drove a green, snub-nosed oil delivery truck with the words Emerson Crozier painted in white letters on the driver’s door. The Pioneer Co-op paid him a wage to fill the tanks for the growing number of residents who had switched from coal to oil. We were the only family on our block who rented; our neighbours owned their houses. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I knew the distinction was important, especially to my mother, though she fancied up the inside of our house as best she could. Three pictures hung on the walls of our living room. Two were copper bas-reliefs Dad had won curling. One depicted a parrot in a palm tree and the other a covered wagon pulled by horses. The third picture, of a deer beside a lake with a mountain backdrop, was frame–less, painted on a piece of particleboard by a man who’d crossed the prairies in the early 1940s and set up his easel in the streets. Dad had bought it for two dollars outside the bar at the York Hotel.

  The kids my age in the neighbourhood, including Lynda, went to kindergarten in the mornings. I didn’t. In those days, you had to pay for it. My other best friend, Ona, who lived next door, was one year younger. Maybe because she and I still hung around together in the mornings, the absence of my other playmates didn’t bother me much. The difference between us didn’t show up until the first week of Miss Bee’s grade 1 class at Central School. They could read the words our teacher wrote on the board and say them out loud. I could not.

  I hadn’t known I had a shortcoming in the area of books and letters. Along with a few pocket books with yellowed pages and the black Bible my mom received from the Anglican church when she first took communion, there were three hardcovers in the house—an ancient Book of Knowledge, its pages as durable and thick as the cardboard inside a newly purchased shirt; Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor, its corners chewed by mice; and the spine and covers, back and front, of Zane Grey’s The Code of the West. No one ever said what had happened to the rest of the book. The family library fit easily into a wooden apple crate turned to stand on end in the front hall. Inside it, Dad had nailed a shelf. The bottom level and three cardboard boxes along the wall were heaped with comic books. My brother, Barry, had the best collection of any of his friends. At the end of each month, he spent all his newspaper deliv–ery earnings at Bill Chew’s on Central Avenue. It was every kid’s dream of a corner store, stocked to the ceiling with racks of pocket books, magazines and comics. On the glass counter sat big-bellied jars of caramel milk bottles and hard globes of gum, strawberries with marshmallow centres and licorice cigars that blackened your teeth and tongue.

  On Saturday mornings my brother’s friends traded comics in our front hall. For that hour or two, the wide passageway filled with the smell of grubby eleven-year-old boys who’d come in from playing Dinky Toys in the dirt, bubblegum wadded in their cheeks like chewing tobacco. Their sales pitches and ch
atter were punctuated by pauses and pops as the bubbles expanded, then burst, a transparent pink skin covering their mouths and chins. As long as I was quiet, my brother let me watch as he and his buddies spread their treasures in front of them, the titles blaring from the boldly coloured covers. The best bargainer of them all, Barry would get three comics for every one he gave away.

  Although he was seven years older and loved to tease, calling me “Turkey Dirt” in front of his haggling friends because of the freckles that dotted my face, my brother never denied me access to his stash of comics. Everything was there, from Superman and Archie to the Classics, which retold the great novels and myths on cheap paper in comic-book style. In those vibrant pages my poetry education began. Evident even to the youngest purveyor was the value of the succinct, densely packed narratives charged with words like POW! SHEBANG! BAM! When my brother shouted them out and pointed to them on the page, they detonated like the circles on the red narrow scroll I stole from him and pounded on the sidewalk with a stone; I dared not borrow his cap gun, even for the shortest time. The stories unrolled so effortlessly in sounds and pictures, I didn’t miss not knowing the meaning of the other words on the page.

  After the first few days of observing her new students, Miss Bee divided our class into four groups of readers: bluebirds, meadowlarks, sparrows and crows. I was placed in the last group, and Lynda became a bluebird. It didn’t take a genius to figure out the difference. Bluebirds were so special that farmers like my uncles and grandfather built houses for them, nailing the small boxes to the fence posts along the fields. When a bluebird took flight, you’d have sworn a scrap of sky had grown wings, and they and the yellow-throated meadowlarks sang so beautifully it was as if someone had tossed a dipper of well water into the air, each drop a clear, bright sound. Even tough men like my dad and grandfather had to stop in their tracks to listen. Crows couldn’t carry a tune. They cawed and cawed; something stuck in their throats, and they had to cough it up. They flapped through the air like tar shingles torn loose by the wind. On the ground they walked stiffly, as if they’d had polio like Jimmy Coglin up the street and their legs were caged in metal braces. If too many of them gathered in town, the city sent out a man to shoot them.