Girl Runner

by Carrie Snyder

Each section of the house has its own season.

  The sun’s heat beats on the board-and-batten summer kitchen, on my mother’s flourishing herb garden.

  But already it is shadier as I pass the dining room. Sunlight never penetrates this far, and I shiver, an absence of grass beneath heavy pines, a soft carpet of fallen brown needles under my bare feet.

  Here is the Granny Room with its peaked tin roof, a den or nest, sheltered by banks of blown snow.

  It is spring the moment I come to the back of the house. I hurry through a grove of fragrant lilacs, the path to the vegetable garden beaten down in fresh, muddy grass. Oh, I am restless. Just past the laundry line is an orchard of pear trees and apple trees in fragile bloom, and beyond that, a lane that leads to the field on the western side of our land. I am leaving the house behind, cutting through the orchard to the wide back lane, which slopes toward the western field. Black walnut trees on either side. I pass like the ghost I am, unnoticed.

  Here is the field’s edge.

  I can see Edith and Carson’s back lane, although theirs is exposed to the sun, parched and bare, and leads to the stinking manure pile behind their barn. I might cross the field to visit. Or I might not.

  If I am eleven, Little Robbie must be five, and his affection grows wilder, more demanding with each passing year. He leaps on me, wraps his arms and legs around me, squeezes my cheeks with his hands, with a frantic need to touch and be touched. I can see him now. I am leaning down so that our faces are very near, and he is pressing my cheeks between his hands, hard.

  Stop! Little Robbie, I don’t like that, it hurts!

  But he can’t stop. He can’t let go, when he’s got something to hold. His eyes are shining, fanatical, and he’s making a strange noise in his throat, almost a growl.

  So I don’t cross the field to visit Little Robbie.

  Instead, I continue on to the backwoods, stepping off the dusky trail to push a path through tangled undergrowth. I play that I am lost; why does this please me so, to imagine slipping out of reach? I am startled, then, to hear footsteps scuffing along the trail I consider all mine.

  I dart farther into the brush, but I stop, hold my breath and crouch down, wait to see who is coming.

  Edith?

  She hurries with her head tilted at an angle. No, her gait is quicker than hurry. Edith is running, her skirt lifted, her breath harsh. I follow, but she stops where the trail ends at the edge of our back field, out behind the barn. I wait while she waits, wondering if she will see me or hear me, holding my breath, watching her. But the only disturbance is in her mind and she turns, her face blank, eyes stark and inward. She retraces her steps away from my hiding place.

  I listen for the dull sound of her feet in their laced black boots coming this way again, but she is gone to wherever she is going.

  This could belong to a dream, or it could be a story I’ve made up to tell myself, though I can’t think why it should be. Why shouldn’t it be true? Why shouldn’t Edith run, even if she only travels home the way she came, her hair damp and stuck to the nape of her neck.

  My mother’s cures aren’t working. Edith has only Little Robbie, and what will become of him, his clawing grip, the way he pushes on me even while squeezing, like he wants to break us both? What of him, grown to the size of a man, with that growl in his throat, those shining eyes? He will make a fine killer, fighting for his country in another war.

  And what of her, Edith, aimless, fasting and counting days and swallowing tinctures, bounded by these trees and fields? And what of me? And what of this house? Of all we can’t hold, and won’t, and didn’t, and couldn’t. In my dreams, I am walking around the house, through its seasons and weathers and magnificence. I walk until I’m out of sight. And then the house is gone.

  MILLER, ROBERT C. Born January 7, 1915, New Arran, Ontario, died June 3, 1943, in Italy, aged 28 years. The son of Edith and Carson Miller, Corporal Miller served with the Ontario Regiment. “Little” Robbie’s outstanding bravery in battle was remarked upon by his fellow servicemen and this gives comfort to his parents, sister, and extended family, who survive him.

  I SEE THE HOUSE: alight and disintegrating, its shape visible as a darkness behind the flame. It looks like a model cut from cardboard and set aflame. A paper house—stone and masonry and plaster and lathe turned to paper. Crumpling.

  I should be watching Cora, so clumsy, so stiffened with arthritis I have to carry her to the toilet, though her weight is almost too heavy for my own weakened arms, her legs dragging on the floor; so cruel too. We hardly speak without visiting her litany of accusations, which I will not repeat. She tells the truth, does Cora, but it isn’t a truth we need to drag between us till death do us part.

  I don’t know who is to blame. It tires me to consider it. What does it matter?

  I say to her, I’ll be off for my run, then, and she says, Go on, begone with ye, and I say, You’re tucked and cozy, so you are, and she says, Like a baby, poor baby, poor soul, and I say, I’ll be back, and she says, Don’t leave me, and I say, I’m sorry, and she says, You should be, and I say, Here’s your tea then, and she says, You should be sorry shouldn’t you shouldn’t you, and I bend to tie my shoelaces. I want to go and I will go even knowing I should stay here with her, so clumsy, so angry, so stuck.

  Cora, everything that has happened in your life up to this moment has been of your own damn choosing.

  But I don’t say it. I’ll not say it. Is it kindness or cowardice? Am I a good woman, or do I fear confrontation? (No, I don’t fear it. I dislike it. I find it distasteful. I’ve seen its harm and how its harm can’t be undone.) I don’t say what I’m thinking, not to Cora, not to most, not to anyone. On this morning, I dress myself in jogging trousers worn thin with use, and cap my head with a woollen toque, turning away from my sister, grateful that I can remove myself from the stale warmth of our shared room, with its patched and greasy walls, its blackened ceiling, its blankets and slippers and cups stained with half-drunk tea.

  The air outdoors will be clean, it will wash me clean. If only I could drag Cora outside from time to time. It’s like she’s nesting in her chair in a ragged heap of blankets that she picks at and plucks at with her bird claws. She needs to breathe. She can’t think straight in our smothering room—I can’t think straight in here either, my thoughts scrambling, racing to escape.

  I’ve been seeing a lot of Fannie in the walls, but when I report this fact to Cora, she tells me I’m a crazy old lady. Yes, I agree, we’re two crazy old ladies. But Fannie’s still a girl, and she’ll watch over you while I’m out. Just look for her, Cora, do it for me. If you need anything, just tell Fannie.

  Cora doesn’t like to hear of Fannie.

  I heard Fannie was a bad woman, says Cora. Now, now. Don’t go repeating gossip, I say, and Cora says, I’m glad she’s gone. But that last is the sickness talking. Cora is losing herself, moment by moment, in each breath that much less herself than in the breath before. I wonder sometimes whether the sickness is stripping away a veneer to reveal her true and exposed under-self, that voice in the head that all of us have, that we none of us would want to share. Is that the true self?

  I told Carson it wasn’t me, but Edith won’t believe it, she declares. I’m not someone who speaks ill of her own kin. I’ll tell him again, next time I see him. I’ll go over there on purpose just to tell him.

  That is when I crouch, creaking and aching, and tie my laces with fingers too stiff, knuckles too swollen to bend. It takes me a good long while to pull and push the soft laces into tidy bows, my head pounding as the blood rushes to it, and Cora on and on all the while. It wasn’t me, you know. Everyone’s speaking of it in the town. And Edith blames me. Mother blames me too. So do you.

  I don’t, I say. Nobody blames you for anything, Cora.

  It was all your fault. We were happy till—

  Cora, I say, everyone’s dead. Mother’s dead. Edith’s dead. Carson’s dead.

  I can be cruel too.

&nb
sp; She bursts out it was Fannie killed Carson, and I say no, and she says then it was Edith, but no, I remind her, it was Carson’s own bloody heart. Blocked-up arteries, years of bacon and butter sandwiches, stopped up and keeled over, gone. And Edith outlived him by two decades, sickly through the years and plagued with miseries till the very end, when some ailment finally did as promised and killed her.

  Remember? I tell Cora, knowing she doesn’t. I suppose it comes as a shock every time. I suppose that should make me kinder in the telling. I suppose I could spare her, rather than breaking the bad news over and over again.

  I embroider the stories, each time told with different details. We didn’t go to Carson’s funeral, out of respect for Edith’s wishes. She didn’t want us there, she sent one of Carson’s cousins to take Father to the service. I came home to stay that weekend—remember? We never had such fun—we played cards, and Father joined in when the cousin brought him home again. He remembered the rules to “Pit.” He couldn’t tell us one useful detail from the afternoon, except he hadn’t liked the pickle sandwiches. “Pickle sandwiches?” We laughed, you and I. “What on God’s green earth is a pickle sandwich?”

  I don’t add that the news of Carson’s death did not affect me greatly at the time. It does not affect me greatly now. I was never enamoured of the man. He had a soft face, pouting lips, a man who thought highly of himself in the mirror, and honed his skills as a flirt, even practicing on a young girl like me: “Aggie, those big blue eyes could send a fellow the wrong message.” A man likely to suffer when his hair began falling out. No, I was not an admirer.

  Edith’s funeral, now that was different. I stop.

  That was different, yes, agrees Cora.

  Do you remember? I ask her.

  Don’t I?

  The way she says it, so hesitantly, like she’s touching her tongue to a sensitive tooth, testing it for pain, assures me she’s lost track of the memory just as soon as it was found.

  Well it wasn’t much of a funeral, I say, although I wasn’t there to see it. Maybe Cora doesn’t remember that, either. She was an old woman. She kept to herself. She had few friends.

  Like us, says Cora.

  Just when I think nothing stays in that head of hers, she goes and surprises me.

  And then she’s lost again, looking me up and down like she’s seeing me brand-new all over again. What are you dressed up like that for? Leaving me again? Run, run, as fast as you can, you can’t catch me, I’m Aganetha Smart.

  I laugh. I’m wrestling with the laces and my back is pinched with pain.

  She is like Father was, at the end, emptied of all but the most persistent fragments of original self. Like I may be too, losing myself without even knowing it. I wonder: What is the meaning of what’s left behind? I don’t think, not really, that what’s left behind is the true self revealed. I am not that cruel. It seems instead an accidental picture of a life, and true to the way life is lived—not as we may wish it to be lived, but as it insists on being lived.

  A man like my father can vanish almost entirely while he wanders the house and the fields, handling objects as if they are artifacts from an impenetrably foreign world, stumbling, searching for what’s been taken from him. I remember that Cora told me it was a relief when Father fell and broke his hip, and could no longer stray. I was living in the city and I thought her cruel beyond all measure. I stayed away, myself. And now I wonder how she managed, the two of them, alone here. The simplest actions painful, laboured rituals of baroque effort. To eat. To toilet. To bathe.

  To sleep. No peace.

  The shoes are laced, at last. I have a dozen pairs, all as worn as me, simple rubber soles and canvas uppers, splitting along the seams. But when could I get to the city to buy another pair—and how? Our groceries come delivered from the store in town. We have no telephone, so I run to the store to put in our order and run home again, every other week, more or less the same items. Not on this day. On this day, I will travel the woods and the fields. I’ve seen children playing in the woods, and it cheers me. I’ve been hearing their shouts, seeing evidence of forts built and wrecked and rebuilt just off the path, jumbles of sticks and rotten leaves pushed into piles that make sense, if you recognize in them a plan larger and more elaborate than can be seen by the eye alone.

  Someone’s living in Edith’s house these past few years. I saw a large metal rubbish bin out back for a while, and thought maybe they’d tear the place down, but that never happened. It must have been three summers ago, a woman brought over a coffee cake, but Cora sent her packing, so she said; I was off running at the time, and have no evidence whatsoever of the exchange. I’ve seen a grey car in the drive, and lights shining out of the windows after dusk, shedding puddles of orange and blue light. We don’t need anyone’s coffee cake. Cora and I have got a recipe we favour, old as the hills, to make for ourselves, if we care to. I leave the neighbours be, whoever they are. None of my business, not anymore.

  Go ahead, go on, leave me like always, here, alone!

  Do I answer my sister? I wish it so. I may, instead, go quietly, part without a word, without protest, in silence, as is my habit—only afterward wishing a kindness from my mouth.

  I’m away.

  Breathing in, breathing out. Ninety-five years of age and running yet. I call it running—it is what’s left of running. My pace shuffles, my gait as stiff as my joints, my breath thin, whispered. Yet I run and run until my chest warms and my lungs warm and I can feel my lips peeling into a smile. The ground is not yet hard.

  I hear the crunch of leaves on the path. I see fallen colour over a darker mulch, a light wind picking up and moving the tops of the trees. I am running. I remember this.

  How can I forget? I will not run again.

  On this last run, this last day of this life that feels like it might go on and on forever, I smell smoke from an autumn fire. I tell myself it is the good scent of humble chimney smoke, or that it arises from a burning leaf pile, but I think perhaps I am worried, just a little bit, that the scent is too pungent for either of these.

  I run out of the woods and past the row of pines along our back field, their branches thinned by age. I run past the empty lighthouse that towers over the pond, and I avert my eyes, as I always do. The scent of smoke comes sharp and acrid, it flowers in the crispness of rattling weeds. Still, I can see nothing until coming around to where the barn used to stand whole and tall, like a ship in the great wide field. Parts of the barn remain. Skeleton. Bones. Cavernous underbelly.

  And I see as if I’ve seen it already, as if it is a dream I’ve dreamed before, the mind striving to make sense of the insensible.

  There is the great house, down the little slope: black plumes of smoke rising, choking. I am running. “Cora, Cora, Cora!” I am inside the smoke, throwing open the side door, stumbling into the kitchen where I am blasted backward by a wall of heat. I am staggered, staggering. I cannot believe what is happening, nor what I’m losing, I can’t believe that our lives together are coming to a close, and in this way. I can’t believe the evidence of my blistered palms.

  I am turning circles in the lane, making a noise in my throat that hurts, later.

  I am running the shorn front field to Edith and Carson’s, searching for their names, struggling to call for them, confused now. Time telescopes. Where has everyone gone?

  Near Edith and Carson’s bare lane, a big black farm dog lopes up to me, challenges me at field’s edge, barking and barking, hackles high, head angled oddly over outstretched paws, as if prepared to leap for my throat.

  I lose the ability to calculate my own age. Suddenly, I become so very old, as if age is an extremity I’ve been searching for, as if I’ve scaled its heights, stumbled upon its limits. I stare down at the dog, down at my soft pants and sweatshirt hanging loose around scaly, shrinking limbs, rickety and frail.

  I don’t know the woman who opens Edith’s door.

  She hollers to call off the dog. I try to explain, to ask for help, b
ut my throat is raw and I can find no words. The woman sees the rolling smoke behind me, rolling into the thin blue sky, blackening and spreading across the afternoon.

  She waves me closer, frantically, to come, come into her house. The yard is little changed and now is not the moment to express curiosity, but I can’t help looking. A child’s plastic picnic table is tipped over in the wind, a scattering of scraggly spruce bushes sprouts around the cracked stone foundation where nothing ever agreed to grow without complaint. Maybe it was always in the soil, this infertility, this refusal to thrive; maybe it was nothing to do with poor Edith after all.

  I am not to call her poor Edith, not ever. I hear my mother’s mighty tone.

  “Come in, please,” the woman calls me, the stranger on Edith’s doorstep.

  I’m chilled, shaking, but I refuse to enter. I haven’t stepped inside that house since Edith carried her lovely daughter—such a big, bonnie girl, already talking—through the door, and left me standing in the yard, as I stand now, feeling then as now frail and spent and bewildered, calling after them.

  Am I never to visit, then? Am I never to say hello, never to talk, never to love you and yours, Edith? Never?

  I turn away.

  Against the wind, now, fighting, I move out of the yard and across the field, dragging a terrible weight behind me, so heavy I pause and look around to see what’s there, but it’s nothing that can be seen. I’m chilled through. I drag myself all the way across the field, up the lane, stopped by the heat. This is where I stand to watch the burning of my family’s house. This is where I hear the smash of windows breaking, witness the sudden caving of the roof, the retreat of the men who have arrived with hoses hooked to a tanker truck, sparks cascading. Heat like a vicious sun, like my face might suffer a sunburn. A crinkling silver emergency blanket thrown over my shoulders. A ride to the hospital rocking in the rear of an ambulance. My sister’s name, saying it.

  Can we notify your next of kin?

  There is no one, just her. We lived alone. She died alone. I should have cleaned the chimney. I should have blown out the candles and the lamps. No, the house was never wired for electricity. No, we have no telephone. I left a pot of soup simmering on the stove for our suppers, nine days old, pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold.