On her daughters’ wedding days, Grandma Andrews posed in front of the lilacs too. In both photos, she wore the same plain dress with buttons up the front, a thin belt, lisle stockings and black, laced-up shoes with a short heel. Her hair disappeared into her usual bun, above which perched a little black hat that looked like a conductor’s except for the veil that puffed from the back. I liked to think of her calling, “All aboard,” and I’d jump on the train beside her.
Grandma died three years after she and Winnie stopped renting our upstairs rooms. Mom said I was too young to attend her funeral. Pushing myself back and forth on the swing when all the adults were in church, I wondered if Winnie had brushed her mother’s hair and spread it on a satin pillow. I wished I could have placed her bobby pins in their small box beside her in the coffin and blessed her with a handful of lilacs. I’d have shaken a bouquet over her head and down the length of her, the way a priest shakes his censer to sprinkle holy water. She’d have carried the insistent fragrance and tiny black seeds with her no matter how far she had to travel. Around her sleeping body, they’d have cast their lilac spell in the darkest tunnels of the earth.
fox and
goose
IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG to get to the western outskirts of town and onto the road that led to my grandparents’ farm. We’d pass the two grain elevators, shoulders sloped, beside the railroad tracks; the John Deere dealership with its gleaming green machines that looked like giant mutant insects; the horse plant where Dad had worked one winter (I didn’t want to know what daily happened there); the stockyard with its nostril-burning stench, and finally, a long wooden shed fallen in on one side. It looked like a barn for pigs—I’d seen them in other places—but Dad said it had been a fox farm.
A farm for foxes! I imagined dozens of them like Grandpa’s cows lying peaceful in a pasture, walking in single file towards the water trough, or stretching and yawning like barn cats as they woke from a nap. I thought they must have been pets like Tiny, who resembled a fox with her pointed nose, perky upright ears and long red coat. No, Dad said, they were raised for their hides. To make coats and hats for fancy ladies.
I didn’t like to think of their fur being ripped from their flesh to make something else look sleek and plush and shiny. I was glad the shed that housed the animals had collapsed. Dad said that the owner, when he knew he couldn’t save his business, opened the pens and let the remaining foxes go. They’d been bred for beauty: he’d raised not only red but silver foxes and grey and blue and black ones. Farmers who owned land close by, Dad said, still talked of seeing them. Though they worried about their chickens, they were often startled into wonder by a slurry of blue against the bluer sky or a spill of silver rippling through the tall grasses. In the car, I closed my eyes and saw dusk-coloured foxes slip through the twilight, then disappear like smoke into the place of dreams I fell into every night. Even there, where they could settle softly inside my sleep, there was nothing I could do to keep them safe.
ONCE WINTER arrived, the backyard’s tall yellow grasses my father never scythed caught the snow and held it. On mornings when the flakes in their falling grew as big as the paper ones we stuck to classroom windows, the neighbourhood kids tumbled from doorways. One behind the other, we tromped a circle in the snow with our boots, turning the yard into a white meadow for geese to run in, flapping their blunt wings, a fox in hot pursuit.
The most important word in the game was home. Home was the centre of the circle, and when you landed there, after whipping down one of several spokes, you were safe. The fox couldn’t touch you. The problem was you were free from harm for only a moment: another goose fleeing for its life could force you out, back onto the dangerous circumference pocked with our tracks like the face of the moon.
Racing through the cold, parkas undone, faces flushed, my friends and I would have thrown off our scarves by now. They’d be scattered outside the circle like the skins of long improbable snakes, yellow, blue, green, white with wide red stripes. The spots where our mouths had soaked the wool hardened into disks of ice as the sun slid lower in the sky.
As we skittered and slipped and darted to the centre, we lost who we were, lost our names and the names of our mothers who had sent us out to play. We were legs and lungs and big hearts pumping. We were geese; one of us, a fox. No one in the game broke the rules. We never called “Time out!” We never stepped from the circle to catch our breath. How essential was that form we had drawn with our boots, how perfect and invariable, how charged with frenzy and delicious dread.
As geese, we shrieked with panic and joy and ran and ran—for our lives, we thought. But that wasn’t it. The fox mustn’t catch you not because he’ll eat you up but because he wants to change places. He wants to touch you, to lose his fur and teeth, to grow feathers, to flee with the others, the hot musty breath of the new fox beating on the back of his neck. And suddenly—sure-footed on your paws—that is you. Cunning and radiant against the snow, you feel a different blood burning bright inside you as you leap to catch a wing.
tasting
the air
AT RECESS the boys would go crazy. They’d push us off the swings or pelt us with snowballs with stones in the centre. Every winter, at least one boy would stick his tongue on the metal of the monkey bar at another boy’s dare, and a girl would run to get a teacher while tears and mucus froze on his face. It was common for the boys, like barbarian marauders, to invade our space near the girls’ entrance, grab a girl and pinch her or yank the barrettes from her hair. They’d grip your forearm just above your wrist and twist the skin. It was called a snakebite, and it hurt a lot. I felt safe around the roughest boys, though, because my brother protected me. His reputation for toughness was so ingrained that even when he’d left for high school on the other side of town, I just had to say, “I’m Barry Crozier’s sister,” and the bullies would leave me be.
The worst bully went to St. Pat’s, the Catholic school across the road. His name was Larry, and he lived down our alley in a big two-storey of red brick, which wasn’t really brick but sheets of tar siding with a red gritty surface and grey lines pressed in a grid to look like mortar. In the swimming pool he’d throw himself on top of me, push me under with his arms and chest till I thought I’d drown. My friend Lynda said it meant he liked me, but it didn’t feel that way.
There was something wrong with Larry. Adults noticed it too. He was sneaky, and he assumed he could get away with anything. He had red hair, which my mother said was a sign of temper. She thought his parents let him run wild. They went out a lot, she said, and left their kids to fend for themselves. Fend was a word I liked, though I wasn’t sure what it might mean.
Larry was tall and gangly, his bones seeming to grow more quickly than the rest of him, his skin stretched pale and thin and freckled. Maybe he wasn’t fending well, I thought, and he’d keep growing taller, his skin more transparent, until one day we’d see right through him, as if he wasn’t there. I wished for that. Some afternoons as I pumped myself higher and higher on our tall wooden swing, which my dad had salvaged from a city playground when they replaced it with a stunted metal version, Larry would steal up from behind and start to push. He’d clutch the chains to suspend me high in the air and slide one hand over my bare legs. I wiggled and tried to kick him, and finally he’d let me drop to where my feet could touch the ground. I knew what he did was wrong, but I didn’t tell anyone. I feared what he’d do to get even.
One Saturday morning I was walking down the alley to Lynda’s house, a chalk to draw a hopscotch in my jacket pocket along with a special stone to throw, when Larry came around the corner with one of his buddies from the Catholic school. In front of him, in both hands, Larry held a garter snake, green with a pale belly, a red stripe streaking down each side like threads of blood. It was too late for me to disappear. I raced towards my house, the boys chasing me, Larry’s friend yelling, “Drop it down her back!” I knew I’d up and die if the snake slid down my spine. When I stumbled, Larry g
rabbed me. One hand grasped my jacket by the back of the collar—how sick I felt—and the long slick belly sluiced across my neck. I twisted in his grip and screamed. Above the fear that roared in my head, I heard my brother’s voice: “Let her go.”
Like a hero in a cowboy movie, he walked from our yard into the alley. He must have been on his way to baseball practice; the glove on his hand made his fist look like Popeye’s. The boys stared at him. Larry pulled the snake away. I hadn’t noticed before that the boy I didn’t know held a hammer. My brother reached for me, turned his back on them and led me down our wooden walk, past the swing and into the back porch. “Mom’s home,” he said. “Go inside.” He went out again past the boys and up the alley towards the baseball diamond. “I’ll see you later,” he said to Larry, who didn’t talk back.
I waited a few minutes, then snuck out low and quiet and hunkered behind the woodpile at the back of our house. The boys had already forgotten about me. Larry handed the snake to his friend, who stretched it out to its full length—two feet or so—against a telephone pole. It glistened in the light like the new skin on my arms and shoulders when they peeled after a sunburn. Larry reached in his pocket, pulled out two nails and, with the hammer, pounded the snake into the wood. It twisted on those two metal spikes, unable to crawl out of its pain. Everything fell silent; even the wind lay down in the grass and held its breath. The boys stood not knowing what to do, their stupid hands dangling from their wrists, the beautiful green mouth opening, a terrible dark O no one could hear. I loved it then, that snake.
After that morning, my fear of snakes left for good. By the creek I would seek them out, watch them sip water among the stones with a delicacy that made me shiver. Their thin red tongues seemed to taste the air, the morning and the evening, the darkness at the heart of things.
spit
Spit, sb., a small, low tongue of land projecting onto water; a shuttle pin; a straight horizontal stroke used as a marking in books; the fluid secreted by the glands of the mouth. Orange Crush. I slid my dime across the counter at Bill Chew’s, and he pulled a pop wet from the cooler and put it in my hand. It made me greedy. I got maybe one a week, and I wanted it all. Even the bottle was beautiful—its long skinny neck, the raised green letters you couldn’t scrape away with your thumb—and worth two cents. The sun shone through the glass as I tilted the drink to my mouth. It tasted better than oranges, even the ones from Japan that came only at Christmas. There was always a kid who didn’t have a dime, who wanted a sip, so I spit in the bottle, watched the bubbles slide down the neck, float on the bright liquid surface before they dissolved, and no one would drink it then, no one but me.
spit, v. To eject saliva from the mouth by the special effect involved in expelling saliva. (1568, Ascham, Scholem. ii: Their whole knowledge… was tied onely to their tong & lips… and therefore was sone spitte out of the mouth againe.)
Five grade 1 girls played in the corner of the school grounds by the fence near the girls’ entrance, just past the wide granite steps. Away from the big kids, all in a row, we grasped the wire mesh with our mittened hands, spit on the snow and then slid our feet back and forth as fast as we could to make a patch of ice. If the teacher would let us in, we’d dash through the doors down the marble floor to the fountain and fill our mouths, then dart to the fence again and splat the water at our feet. Every recess with my friends I rode the ice, frenetic as a gerbil on a wheel, my caged body running nowhere on its own spit and me too young to know what that might mean.
spit, 1633 P. Fletcher. See how with streams of spit th’ art drencht.
“Come on,” she said, “do it!” I gathered the saliva above my tongue, pushed it to the front of my mouth, pursed my lips and forced it out. It fell in a long translucent string, dribbled down the cheek of the girl my friend held on the ground, though the girl squirmed and started to cry.
“Don’t be a baby,” my friend said to her. “Now you’re in the club, you’re one of us.”
spitter: One who spits. (1615, Crooke, Body of Man. Melancholy men are all of them… great spitters.)
My brother hawked on the ground when I walked with him—a shocking thing—that liquid, guttural sound, then a phhutt to the side, right where anyone could step in bare feet or fancy shoes. He was so proud to miss his chin and jacket, to leave his mark on the cement, a circle thin and shiny as a coin, and he wasn’t the only one. A chain of spit linked the squares of the sidewalk showing where the men had walked. My father and grandfather did it too, my grandfather’s saliva red from snoose. Mom told my brother it was disgusting, he had to stop. “What am I supposed to do?” he said. “Swallow it?”
spit, 1700, Floyer, Cold Baths. Temperate bathing… ripens the Spit and helps it up.
The kids on the block called him Drool Face. He was the older boy who lived in the house two doors down and who never went to school. We saw him only in the summer, when he sat by the back steps on a chrome kitchen chair, his mouth open, a thin stream from the corner of his lower lip running down his chin like it did in the dentist’s office until the assistant told you to spit into the bowl. Our mothers warned us to stay away from him, but one day, cutting across his yard, I came too close and he grabbed me, held me on his lap. I wasn’t scared, though I knew something wasn’t right. He didn’t try to rub me between the legs like the old man at the paddling pool who always brought his own towel and asked to dry us. He just held me on his lap, my back against his chest, my head tucked under his chin, my legs dangling. His pants were the thick green cotton grown men wore, and his shirt had metal snap buttons down the front. I could feel them press into my back. I was glad I was turned away, because his face was hard to look at—the slack mouth and wet chin, his eyes a soft hurt brown as if he knew what people said about him. I let myself go limp in his arms and listened to his breathing. It sounded like the panting of a sick cat who had crawled under the bed and wouldn’t come out. I wouldn’t tell anyone. “Wally,” I said, “you should let me go now,” then squirmed out of his hug and ran through his yard to my friends, the top of my head damp with drool.
spit: The act of spitting; an instance of this. 1658: Lovelace, Lucasta, Toad and Spider. The speckl’d Toad… Defies his foe with a fell Spit.
My friend’s brother, who was in grade 12 when I was in grade 10, took me aside at the Teen Town dance one Friday night. He was still as skinny as a little kid, and he wore a dumb-looking wool hat even though it was summer. There was something he had to tell me, but I had to promise not to get mad. It was a trick, he said, he and his friend Jimmy used to play on us. In winter they’d slobber on the branch of a tree. If it was cold enough, and they got the angle right, their saliva froze before it could hit the ground, forming a row of thin icicles. They’d wait for me and my friend to come up the alley on our way to school. “You were always giggling and chattering,” he said, “we could hear you half a block away.” He and Jimmy would act nice. They’d break the glass sticks from the branch and offer us the best ones, long and glittering in their hands. We’d lick the pointed ends and then put them in our mouths. Now I understood why the boys danced around us as we sucked the ice, why they laughed and punched each other in the arm, laughed so hard they doubled over and hugged themselves, hugged themselves to keep their secret from spilling out.
spit, sb., saliva, spittle; a clot of this. See also cuckoo-spit, frog spit.
The practical uses of human spit: To hold a kiss curl in place, to shine a shoe, to express disgust, to remove a smear of mascara, to lubricate, to seal an envelope, to slicken the lips for a photograph, to defog a scuba-diving mask, to test the hotness of an iron, to clear the throat, to turn a dull stone to jade, to determine the direction of the wind, to moisten a wad of gum or a plug of tobacco, to turn a page, to clean a face. “Wait,” she would say when I was halfway out the door. “Let me look at you.” Always she’d find something, lick her finger and rub at a spot on my cheek or chin. I’d wiggle free of her hands and walk from the house, marked with the snail-sli
de of my mother’s fingers, slick tattoos telling my tribe and lineage, my face shining with the signs she drew to place me in the world.
light years
THE SUMMER we were eleven, almost every evening after supper, Lynda and I would jive in her basement to Elvis’s “Don’t Be Cruel.” The glossy 45 spun on her portable record player, which you opened and closed with two brass snaps like the ones on a suitcase meant to travel far. When it was time to leave, I ran the four houses from Lynda’s place to mine, then paused, shaking, scared to go down the six steep steps that cut through the lilac bushes leaning in on either side, the brittle hands of branches reaching out. There were no streetlights, no porch light over the door, and the curtains were closed. If I shouted no one would hear.
Sometimes Lynda snuck out her back door, sprinted ahead of me, then leapt from behind the hollyhocks and caraganas just past her house to call out, “Scaredy-cat!” My mother thought my terror came from Lynda’s teasing or from the homeless men who lived in the Salvation Army house one block down, but none of them were out after the evening meal, and in the day they looked as harmless as old forgotten uncles who’d wandered off the farm and spent their hours looking for the road back to Cabri or Success or Antelope.
I didn’t tell anyone the fear had arrived the first time I saw the stars, really saw them, looking down hard-edged and blank. When I was little, I loved to hold their gaze. Every Sunday, on our drive home from my grandparents’ farm, I’d lie in the front seat with my head on Mom’s lap, my feet on Dad’s legs below the steering wheel. If it was winter it would be dark outside, the stars drilling their distance through the windshield and into the small place warmed by my parents and the heat blowing from the vents below the dashboard lights. One small star travelled with us in the car. It glowed round and red on the end of the lighter my dad pulled from its socket, then swept in an arc to the end of his cigarette, setting it aglow.
Small Beneath the Sky Page 6