Agassiz Stories

by Sandra Birdsell

  There were pouches of colour beneath her hazel eyes, like two bruises, but her face was calm. “On Saturday,” she said, “the children are going to begin German lessons.” She jostled the baby lightly.

  German lessons? What now? “Is that so?”

  “Yes. So, you don’t mind, then? My father said he would take them on if I wanted. But he thought I should ask you first.”

  “Suit yourself.” He was relieved. They were going to pretend it hadn’t happened. “But what’s the reasoning? I can count on one hand the number of people who speak German in this town.”

  She licked her fingers and began making a curl stand up on the baby’s head. He saw a certain cunning in her expression. “It’s not that. It’s part of their background. I think they should have it while my father is still able to do it.”

  And suddenly he was angry. She’d denied him the presence of his brothers in his own home. She was going to teach the children to speak German. “Fine. And what should we teach them of my background?”

  Her tightly contained anger broke loose. Her eyes became pinpoints of hostility. “What would you teach them?” she asked, spitting the words at him overtop the baby’s head. “How to drink?”

  “Listen here, my grandfather was a river man.”

  “I thought you said he came from Quebec.”

  “On my mother’s side, I mean.”

  “That must have been before I came,” she said. She dismissed anything that had happened before she’d come to Canada as being unimportant, not affecting her in any way. She shifted the baby to the other hip and brushed hair from her face. “Anyway,” she said, ending their conversation, “anyway, it was the wrong time. It was the wrong time for you to forget yourself. I could get pregnant.”

  He was momentarily stunned. She always surprised him like this. She was more concerned about being pregnant than by what he’d done. He thought about the possibility. Seven kids. That would be embarrassing. People were beginning to make crude jokes about Mika’s yearly swelling and popping of babies. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry,” he said.

  “That won’t do any good,” she said.

  He’d offered his hand and been bitten. “Don’t bother with my breakfast,” he said. “I can always get a bite to eat at the hotel.” He had always been able to use Mika’s strong jealousy as an effective means of retaliation. Johanna cooked at the hotel.

  He thought she was going to throw the baby at him. “So go and eat, I don’t care.”

  But he saw the fear in her eyes. He was not a heartless man. “By the way,” he said, as he buttoned up his sweater, “send one of the girls to the shop after school. I’m going to need a hand carrying the lumber home.” This talk of land, this mooning over old bones. Desmarais was far away and should stay there. You live what you know, he told himself, and what you don’t, well, you can’t be held accountable for that. He could feel Mika’s attitude towards him change. Her features softened. She set the baby into the highchair.

  “What for?” she asked. “Lumber for what?”

  He told her what she wanted to hear. “For the window. I’ve been meaning to get at it for some time now.”

  She looked up at the clock above the sink. “There’s still time,” she said. “Let me poach you an egg.”

  He smiled and reached for her. He put his face into her soft hair. “If it’s a girl,” he said, “we’ll name her Tina, after your aunt.”

  She struggled free. “Heaven forbid,” she said. “If it’s a baby, I’ll jump off the roof.” But she wasn’t angry anymore. She drew in her bottom lip, sucked at it, as though she’d only just remembered. “Did you telephone your brothers yet?”

  “No, but I will today.”

  “What will you tell them?” she asked.

  “I’ll tell them there’s a fly in the ointment.”

  She looked at him, puzzled. “I’ll think of something,” he said.

  He watched as she prepared his food. She was strong and efficient and moved incredibly fast as she worked, and still she appeared to be small and often had the appearance of being lost, defenceless. It had taken him only one month to realize that she was as defenceless as a badger. His brothers had their wives and he had his and that was all any of them really had. He was joined together with her in the present. She was what he could put his hands on and touch. But he knew, for some reason, it would never be enough.

  TRUDA

  t’s time to do something about all your drawings,” Mika said to Truda. She knelt on the floor searching the bottom of the bedroom closet for plastic raincoats and hats. “Cloudy, possible showers this morning, some sunny patches in the southern regions, above normal temperatures,” the announcer said. The radio in Mika’s bedroom was turned up loud. Mika backed from the closet with a roll of Truda’s drawings in her hand.

  “Look at this mess, will you? You can’t keep these drawings forever. The wax in the crayons will attract mice.”

  Mice had moved into the house during the flood, taking over the top floor, eating all of Mika’s plants down to the earth in the pots and burrowing inside to get at the roots. Mice had chewed holes in their curtains, pulled strips of wallpaper loose from around the baseboards, gnawed at the plaster beneath, leaving behind hollows lined with delicate grooves like veins in a leaf. The mice had also left behind a furry smell, a grey mouldy odour that Mika scrubbed free with Lysol. Mika had worked diligently, had reclaimed the house from the flood waters, and the mice had been banished, nothing of them remained except for the imagined fine whiskers twitching in the corners, the soft scurrying in the dust beneath the bed at night.

  “I don’t think mice like wax,” Truda said.

  “Mice or no mice, you can’t keep all these drawings. It’s getting out of hand. That’s all you do, day and night, and it’s not good for your eyes.”

  Truda was the only Lafrenière to wear glasses. Her mother couldn’t understand it. Lack of carrots, her father said. Not only do carrots give you good eyesight, they also give you hair on your chest. Look at me, Maurice said, living proof. Swallow a fruit pit and a tree will grow inside, bee stings are really smooches for sweet children. Truda doubted it. She knew the reason for her poor eyesight. At one time, she’d cried too much.

  Mika unrolled the drawings and spread them across the floor. “Where did you ever get all the paper?” she asked. She was practical, wondered more about the gathering of paper rather than why or what was in the drawings.

  Truda couldn’t decide whether or not to answer. She ran her tongue across her top teeth to keep the words inside. It was still easier for her to remain silent than it was to speak. When she sat at the washstand on her stool facing the window drawing pictures, she could go the whole day without speaking to anyone.

  “From the bakeshop. The girl gave it to me.”

  “You crossed the highway alone?”

  Caught. Truda felt sweat on her palms. Words were traps. “Betty came with me.”

  “That’s neither here nor there. You can’t keep every single drawing. Pick out the best ones and throw the rest out.”

  “I can’t.”

  “There’s no such word as can’t.”

  Then why did you just use it yourself, Truda wondered.

  “I didn’t say to get rid of all of them. Just some, okay? Where would I be if everyone collected junk? Snowed under.” Mika began shuffling through the drawings as though looking for some redeemable quality that might justify keeping them. She looked for genius and saw crude shapes of houses, barns, farm machinery, gardens, chickens. She picked out a drawing, pointed to the figure of a young girl. “Is this you?” she asked. “Have you drawn yourself into the pictures? Is that why you want to keep them?”

  Of course it’s not me. How could she be so ridiculous? The girl had black curly hair, she didn’t wear glasses. “No, that’s not me.”

  The pictures were drawings of the farm where she’d stayed during the flood. The girl was the one who’d been in the photograph on the piano with
her eyes closed, a circle of flowers in her hair. Truda gathered the drawings together quickly. But Mika’s attention had already begun to wander. “Where did I put those raincoats?” she asked herself. She got up from the floor and stepped over Truda. “Well, do what you want. But if you spent as much energy running and playing as you do on these drawings, then you wouldn’t be so fat.”

  Truda didn’t mind. She knew her mother’s comment was punishment for not being agreeable, but she was able to keep the drawings. She listened as Mika went downstairs. She heard Lureen talking in the kitchen below. That was the way she liked the house to be. She preferred to be alone and still have people moving about, talking to each other. If she stayed in her room drawing and suddenly it grew silent beneath her, she went looking until she found them. She rolled up the drawings. She would need to find a safe place for them somewhere against any tampering that could later be blamed on a mouse, in the same way silence could be blamed on a cat.

  “Oh good, you’re here, finally,” Mika said as Truda entered the kitchen. “Have some cereal.”

  Truda ate the cold breakfast cereal without tasting the blue-tinged powdered milk or the dry papery flavour of the puffed wheat kernels. She closed out the voices of her brothers and sisters and planned her next drawing. Everything about the farm had been backwards. When you came in the door there were latches on the wall in the porch. Latches that held brooms and mops firmly snapped into place. In one corner had been the cream separator with a checkered cloth draped over the bowl and in the other corner, a blue metal pie plate on the floor and cats feeding around it, wild frightened cats that zigzagged out of her path when she entered the porch.

  “I’ve got a job for you to do today,” Mika said to Truda.

  “I was going to ask if Truda could come with me after school when I go for the eggs,” Betty said.

  “Afraid to go alone?” Lureen’s voice was strident. “What a suck.”

  “Well, sorry, but Truda can’t go with you. I need her to pull weeds in the garden.”

  “How come?” Lureen asked. “Why do I have to stay in after school and wash sealers in the basement while Truda gets to do the garden? It’s not fair. I always do the garden.”

  Their voices jabbed against Truda like a fork stabbing peas on a plate. There had been a window above the cats’ feeding dish. And dried-up flies cradled in a spider’s web. When you entered the farmhouse, instead of the kitchen there was a large dining room filled with dark furniture. Then to the left, sliding doors, a cramped parlour, a piano with a photograph of a young girl in a coffin. Stop: before that, the yard. She needed to remember the yard. She needed to reconstruct all parts of the farm because although she’d lived there almost six months, it was as though it had been a dream. She looked up at the refrigerator where she kept the bucket of crayons, out of reach of the little ones who would colour the walls or eat the crayons, Mika said. They were gone.

  “My crayons,” Truda said. Had Mika discovered the way to stop the drawings?

  “Look here,” Mika said to Lureen. “If you’d done a better job weeding the garden last time, you’d be doing it now. Besides, it won’t hurt Truda to get some fresh air.”

  “My crayons are missing.”

  “If Truda can come with me to get the eggs, I’ll help her do the garden,” Betty said.

  “Well, I’m not sitting in this dumb house all day washing jars. What about my fresh air, eh? I could die down there. Why is it only Truda who needs fresh air?”

  “You’ll do as I tell you.”

  A spoon clattered to the floor. “And where are you off to?” Mika asked Truda. Truda was halfway across the kitchen.

  “To look for my crayons. They’re gone. Someone took them.”

  “Who would take them, a mouse?” Mika asked. “You don’t need your crayons this very minute. Come and sit down. Don’t slow things down; I’ve got so much to do.” She turned to Betty. “All right, I don’t care. Truda can go with you just as long as everything gets done.”

  My crayons, my crayons, Truda thought. She’s taken them. Mika reached for the Bible resting on top of the radio. She set the Bible down on the table with a thump and opened it to the place where a bay leaf had been stuck between the pages as a marker.

  Thou shalt not steal, Truda thought. The delicate scent of the bay leaf was released as Mika began to read.

  After school Truda and Betty walked along the highway to the small yellow cottage where Betty would pick up three dozen eggs. “I know it was her,” Truda said. “I know she took my crayons.” They had walked two blocks and then the houses dwindled and gave way to open fields. Their running shoes and legs were covered in a yellow dust from the fresh gravel on the shoulder of the road. Truda walked with her head down. She’d once seen a boy at school catch the sun in a glass and beneath the glass, paper smouldered and burned. The same thing would happen to her eyes if she looked at the sun. She disliked the clicking sounds that the grasshoppers made in the ditch along the highway. At the farm, she’d had an insect jump down the front of her dress. They’d laughed, teased her, took her dress off in the middle of the field. It wasn’t pleasant laughter, but nevertheless it had been laughter which was scarce on the farm where everyone had their job to do and did it as though tomorrow wouldn’t come if they didn’t. In the small cramped parlour, the photograph of the little girl, and also on top of the piano, the mantle clock, striking the hour as she entered the house. Each time it bonged, the sound froze her mind. The sound of it was an old yellowing wooden sound and a lemon polish, warm milk and silverware cleaner sound. Beyond the kitchen, stairs to the attic had black rubber treads with grooves in them that made her think, black licorice; but they weren’t that, they tasted bitter when she put her tongue on them.

  I’m coming up one step — dropping buns

  I’m coming up two steps — dropping buns

  I’m coming up three steps — dropping buns

  I’m coming up fourteen steps — dropping buns

  And there I met a horse who was — dropping buns.

  The attic: along one wall, a chest with an embroidered cloth on top of it. A fold-down cot with a crochet spread beside a mangle iron.

  “She doesn’t want me to draw and so she took away my crayons,” Truda said.

  Betty squeezed Truda’s hand. “She only put them away for the summer. Wait and see.”

  “I want to go home.” And look for them.

  “Well you can’t. And there’s a lot to see outside of your room if you’d only look.” Betty nudged Truda’s chin upwards.

  “Look, what do you see?”

  She saw nothing. Fields, the sky. At the farm, a strange humming sound had risen up out of the fields and the people on the fields were like specks of dust moving across the horizon into the midst of the humming. And then she saw something else, like water, running overtop the highway. It sparkled and jumped beneath the sun. It was glassy blue and spilled off the highway into the fields. “A lake,” she said. “I see a lake.”

  Betty laughed. “That’s what I thought too when I first saw it. But it isn’t a lake. I’ve been out there and you know, it gets further away, you can never reach it.”

  “I see waves,” Truda said. She was excited. They thought she was still blind. They forgot, she could see now, even the leaves on the trees. And she could see the lake. It wasn’t the yellowish brown of the river either, creeping up step by step until they’d had to climb into a boat and paddle away from town. The lake was like Betty’s eyes, it was glassy blue.

  “What you see are heat waves rising off the highway. I don’t know how it happens. It just does.” They crossed the highway and approached the cottage where Betty would get the eggs.

  “But it looks real, like a lake.”

  Betty led Truda down into the shallow ditch beside the highway. A car shot past and Truda watched as the car met the lake on the highway, cut through and vanished. “Come,” Betty said. “We’ll sit for a while and rest our legs.” She set the cartons do
wn and flopped back into the grass. Truda lay down beside her. She heard the humming sound coming up from the fields. She heard the cry of the Franklin gulls and shaded her eyes to find them.

  She had sat on the cot in the attic room at the farm and listened to the birds circling above the fields. The farm woman was awkward, thought Truda couldn’t dress herself and complained as she forced Truda’s arms into the armholes of a cotton blouse she’d ironed on the mangle. The cotton squeaked as the buttons were pushed through holes which were too small. The blouse was the colour of goldenrod. It belonged to the dead girl on the piano. Draw: birds, grey with some blue shining in the grey wings. Their beaks made funny kapoka sounds on the gravel. They muttered and complained and once she thought she’d heard her name mentioned. She stood still, heart pumping blood wildly, fearful that they would smell her and fly away. The people were all on the fields. They were the specks in the dust coming to the house when they had breakdowns or for the prepared food. It made it easier to keep her vow not to speak when there was no one to talk to, except for the birds. She scooped chicken feed from the sack and scattered it around the yard. She moved among the birds slowly, speaking the sad soft cooing call of the male, and they rose up quickly, their wings fanning the air. She followed them, wheeling over the blue spruce, the willows at the far end of the pond, across the fields spread out below, golden patches on a huge quilt of green and blue, to Agassiz. To her home and her family.

  Truda raised her arm and followed a single bird’s flight with a finger, guided it down towards the lake but at the last moment, it veered away. She thought she could hear waves and the sound of it reminded her of the flood. She felt as though she carried her own Franklin gull sound inside her chest, overwhelming her with its terrible lonely cry. It was how she’d felt when she’d been at the farm, awake in the attic, waiting and waiting for the flood to be finished.