Agassiz Stories

by Sandra Birdsell

  I began to hum because I knew it annoyed Laurence. “Twit,” he said, not looking at me directly. He fell into step with Betty. “Wait until you see what I found,” he said to her.

  I wanted to fling mud at him. A solid blow to his shaggy head. Wham! It made me angry the way he followed Betty around when it was so obvious to me that I was better-looking. I watched as Laurence held open the paper bag and Betty looked inside it. Since Betty’s new breasts, Mother’s objections to their friendship had grown stronger. If I went to her and told her that they had met in the coulee, that would be that. But I wouldn’t do that because I was beginning to use Betty’s sins against her, to realize that there was something to my mother’s admonition that sisters should be friends.

  “What is it?” There was fear in Betty’s voice. “Where did you find that awful thing?”

  Laurence closed the bag quickly at the word “awful” and clutched it against his chest.

  “I found it where they’re digging,” he said. “It’s mine now. I’m going to keep it.”

  Betty looked frail and meek against the tall, sharp-bladed grasses. Her hair was wound about her head in a golden crown of tight braids which made her neck look thin, too thin to support so large a head. “But why would you want to?” she asked. “It looks real, like a real person’s —”

  “It is,” said Laurence. “It’s a human skull.”

  “But it must be wrong, you should get rid of it, bury it or something.”

  Let me look, I wanted to say, but they had joined themselves against me, turned their backs and were lost in their own conversation. I wanted to look inside the bag, force myself to touch, hold in my hands, whatever it was that frightened Betty, to show Laurence that he’d made a mistake in choosing Betty over me.

  Weeks later, the lilacs had finished blooming and were just rust-coloured flecks on the ground, and now there were seven buff-coloured, pumpkin-sized rocks on the ground beneath the maple tree. Truda had wised up by then, and decided that the rocks weren’t dinosaur eggs. “Maybe Mother laid them, like a chicken,” she said once. That morning, when another stone had been added by mysterious circumstances to the growing mound of them beneath the rope swing, Truda called me over to examine the new rock and said, “Look at that, she laid another egg.”

  Rudy was there too. He was pumping fruitlessly on the rope swing, trying to gain some height, but his feet kept glancing off the stones, making the swing careen wildly, bringing his shins too close to the rough bark of the maple tree. “Damn,” Rudy said. “I don’t think it’s fair that we can’t use the swing.”

  “Do something,” Truda pleaded, her heavy thick glasses slipping down her nose and her myopic grey eyes clouded and pleading.

  I decided to do something about the stones. I marched into the house and faced my father who had his day off from the barbershop and was sprawled in the maroon easy chair with his bare feet propped up on the hassock. He hid behind a magazine so he wouldn’t have to take note of the multicoloured and malodorous piles of dirty laundry Mother sorted in the living and dining room every Monday.

  Why do you have to do the laundry on my day off for God’s sake, he complained. And I agreed fully, it was inconsiderate.

  Because, she said. Just because I have to. Monday is wash-day. I can’t help it if it also happens to be your day off.

  Father looked at me overtop his Game and Fish magazine. “How should I know where the rocks came from? I’m not the chief cook and bottle-washer around here.” He tried to tease me from my seriousness. “Serious, serious,” he’d say. “That’s your mother’s department.” His small black eyes reflected light in a curious way, making him look as though he were about to burst into tears or laughter. I could never tell which.

  “Why don’t you ask your mother where the rocks came from? She should know.”

  Everything in the yard and the two-storey frame house belonged absolutely to us, the children. Mother had always arranged everything according to the patterns of our play. So the rocks were encroaching on our territory. I went to the kitchen where she folded diapers at the table. The washing machine sloshed and chugged another load clean in the back porch. There were two stacks of diapers, Peter’s and Sharon’s, white unspotted flannel, smelling of the reedy wind that blew in from the coulee.

  “What rocks?” Mother asked.

  “You know. Under the swing. Those rocks.”

  “They’re mine.” Her voice snapped the sentence shut the same way her strong white teeth nipped at knots in laces. You could ask Father anything and get an interesting, amusing answer, but not Mother. She was as serious as a mousetrap.

  “What are they for? We can’t use the swing anymore.”

  “Swing, fling. You’re too old anyway. And you don’t really care about the others, you just want to stir up trouble. I know you.” She flicked a diaper and folded it into the shape of a kite, triple folds for Peter, because a boy pees the front. “Anyway, you have the rest of the yard to do what you want.”

  “It’s our yard.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You should give us a reason, at least. You should tell us what the rocks are for.”

  “I don’t have to tell you anything, missy,” she said. “You only want reasons so that you can argue.”

  The sun moved behind the clouds for a moment and the yellow kitchen walls lost their sheen as the shadow came and fell on Mother’s face, making her deeply set hazel eyes sink even farther back into their bony sockets.

  “Oh Lord,” she said. “Please don’t let it rain today.”

  “Why not?” I asked, grateful that she had been diverted from the tone of ‘I beg your pardon.’

  “You think I like mud from one end of this house to the other?”

  The cloud passed and the room shone once again, but it seemed to me that pieces of the shadow lingered in her eyes. A creeping uneasiness made me close the screen door behind me gently.

  That same evening as the garden arose silently from the black earth behind the chicken wire fence, I awoke to the sound of the latch on the screen door. I thought it was Father coming home from the hotel. But instead of my father’s heavy step in the kitchen, there were light footsteps on the sidewalk at the side of the house and then silence. I looked out across the coulee and imagined Laurence crouching in the tall weeds, like a prairie chicken about to spring up. The moon was a silver disc, licked and pressed onto a black broadcloth sky. The night breezes fanned the tops of the grass in the coulee and sounded like the whispering of a single voice.

  Let me bite your neck.

  Mother stepped out from beneath the maple tree and crossed the yard to the driveway. She left the yard and walked down the centre of the road, head bent into the darkness. The moon revealed the fish-white muscles in her calves. Mother’s knotted tanned arms, her strong back, the muscles in her legs made her look chunky and shorter than she really was. She could carry a hundred-pound sack of flour in her arms. A dog barked in the distance and Mother vanished into the inky darkness. I knelt beside the window to wait.

  When I awoke, my knees were stiff from kneeling. The wind had fallen. From Main Street came the insistent toot of a car horn. At the end of the street there was another sound. The sound was a needle-thin one, yet musical, like a violin being plucked instead of bowed. A blotted figure emerged from the darkness and gradually came to the light. The plucking sound was Mother’s voice raised softly in a song. She came to the light. Her hair was unwound and flowed in a brown cascade of ripples across her shoulders. She carried a rock in her arms. She turned in at the driveway beneath the window. Still singing lightly, she strode across the yard and laid the stone gently down among the others.

  Weeks later, the sweet peas had climbed to their glory on the chicken wire fence surrounding the garden and the bees droned above the profusion of pea blossoms. I was behind the sweet peas, hoeing the potato patch. I was unhappy. Laurence had put his hand on Betty’s breast in the coulee. They thought I hadn’t seen. I
hadn’t told anyone although I was burning up with the desire to do so. I heard a noise and looked up. Laurence was there, behind the tree out of sight, should anyone look out the window. He played with his knife. He held the blade at the end and then flung it, making the blade turn once in mid-air before it cut into the tree.

  “That’s easy,” I said. “I can do that.” I’d dropped the hoe, come to watch.

  “You think you’re so tough,” Laurence said.

  “I don’t think. I know I am.”

  “God, you make me sick.” He bent to pick up the knife which had bounced off the bark and stuck into the ground.

  I beat him to it, grabbed the knife before he’d had the chance to reach for it.

  “Give it to me.”

  “Make me.”

  His hand was strong on my wrist, chapped and raw-looking like his mouth; it felt like sandpaper as he twisted my skin red. I felt tears forming. They were going to squirt forward onto my cheeks in a second and betray me if I didn’t do something. I made a fist with my free hand, punched him hard in the middle of his dirty T-shirt. Woof, he said, sounding like a dog, and let go of me.

  “Here’s your stupid knife.” I threw it onto the rock pile. My wrist ached. I walked away from him rapidly and entered the house. I could hear Mother moving about in the rooms upstairs.

  “If you’ve got nothing better to do, you could give me a hand,” she said.

  I sat cross-legged on the floor beside the bed as Mother changed the linens. I let my head drop so that my hair fell forward and hid my face. The effect I hoped to achieve was a look of despair or dejection.

  “What is it?”

  I sighed deeply.

  “Well, out with it.”

  “I don’t know — it’s just that he follows her around. As though she were a bitch in heat. We can never go anywhere without him.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said, I’m fed up. Everywhere we go, there he is. It’s like we’re Fair Game.”

  The colour fled from Mother’s cheeks. “Who’s following you around?”

  “Laurence. He’s here again. And yesterday, when I went to school I saw him and Betty. He — they were necking.”

  Mother’s shoulders sagged. She dropped a sheet and rushed over to the bedroom window. “Oh, this is no good,” she said. “I don’t like the sound of this at all.”

  She clattered down the stairs and then the front door rattled on its hinges. I got up from the floor and went over to the window and stood looking down at Laurence and Betty. I saw Mother run across the yard towards them. She hopped from foot to foot when she reached the pile of rocks.

  “But, Mother,” Betty protested. “He’s just fixing the swing. He’s moving the ropes up so the little ones can use it.”

  “I’ll fix him. Just you let him come around again and I’ll fix him.” Mother turned to Betty and shook her finger. “Really, you’d think you’d have more pride.” She sputtered and glanced up at the bedroom window where I watched. “Don’t you want more than that for yourself?”

  I parted the curtains and smiled at the sight of Laurence retreating, edging backwards from the yard.

  “Wait,” Mother said and held out her hand. “Give me your knife.”

  Laurence removed it from its leather sheath. The blade shone as it crossed the space between them. She grabbed it from him and, teetering up the stony mound of rocks beneath the tree, she cut through the ropes of the swing with saw-like motions. Betty ran into the house with her hands covering her face.

  I saw the tanned v at Mother’s throat rising and falling rapidly as she stood looking down the road where Laurence had gone and then back at the house. And then, as though she had come to some decision, she strode over to the icehouse and returned moments later pushing the wheelbarrow, which held a pail of whitewash and a paintbrush. Betty rushed into the bedroom and threw herself onto the bed, crying loudly.

  Mother stood beneath the maple tree with her hands on her hips. “All right,” she said loudly. “All right, okay. You can’t change a thing. No amount of harping will change anything. They’ll do what they want to do in the end anyway. I’m butting my head against a stone wall.” She pried open the pail of whitewash. “Don’t take my advice. See what you get in the end.” She stirred the thick paint and then dipped the brush into it. “Life is too short to butt your head against a stone wall.” She began to paint a large rock a brilliant white. “And what do you get for it? Let them learn the hard way.” She continued to complain bitterly as she finished painting the rock and set it aside. She rolled another stone down from the pile and began to paint it also.

  An hour passed. Betty came to the window to watch what was happening below. We heard Peter the baby down in the kitchen banging impatiently on the tray of the highchair and the clatter of pots as Sharon amused herself in the cupboards. Mother continued to paint rock after rock and to place them into a large circle. I sent Truda and Rudy outside to make polite restrained overtures at conversation in order to jar Mother from her strange behaviour, but her sour expression sent them scurrying back into the house.

  At a quarter to twelve, Father came walking up the sidewalk for his lunch. He stood waiting as Mother wheeled a load of dirt through the garden towards him.

  “It’s a funny time to start that job,” he said, glancing at his watch.

  “It’s now or never.”

  Father shrugged. “Suits me. But what’s for lunch?”

  Mother looked up angrily. “Why don’t you have a look?”

  He came back out minutes later. “There’s nothing prepared,” he said, sounding injured and puzzled.

  “I know.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” she said quietly and then once again, louder, “because. Just because. I don’t know why. I’m tired of answering stupid questions. Make your own lunch.”

  “Listen here,” Father said, his voice rising above its accustomed gentle tone. “The babies are in there alone. Their diapers are dripping.”

  “And does that bother you?”

  “Of course, what do you think? Something could happen to them.”

  Mother grunted as the wheelbarrow tilted suddenly from her grasp and fell onto its side. “Well, change them then,” she said. “They’re your babies too.”

  “What’s the matter?” he asked, lowering his voice. “Is it — are you in the family way?”

  Mother stopped shovelling and looked him straight in the eye. “Yes. I’m always in the family way. And I’m tired. I’m tired of being a mother.”

  What? Tired of being a mother? It was an astounding thought. In the same way I grew tired of playing 7-up against the house, or sick of my best friend, so that I picked a fight in order to cut myself off from her, Mother was tired of us, her children?

  Father turned from her in disgust. “Is that all?” he said. “Who doesn’t get tired? What if I should say the same thing, eh? Where would you be?”

  Absolutely, I agreed, where would you be without him? Where would any of us be?

  “I would change places with you in a flash. You stay home, I’ll go to work.”

  Father edged away from her. I had to do something. I knocked on the windowpane. “We’re hungry,” I said, reminding them both of their parental duties.

  He looked up, startled. “What do you expect me to do about it?”

  “Peter needs a bottle.”

  “I don’t know what’s going on here,” Father said. “But I do know that I’ve got five heads waiting to be cut. So I’m going to grab a bite to eat at the hotel and then I’m going to get back to work. Somebody’s got to work around here,” he said loudly, for Mother’s benefit.

  “Oh, you’re useless,” she said. “You can go to the hotel. You couldn’t look after a dog.”

  Father stared at her, shocked, and then retreated quickly.

  “That’s not fair,” I said to my sister, “she’s always so bloody unfair to him.” Father had all the money. In case of marit
al breakdown, I wanted to be where the money was. So my sympathies in any of their arguments rested with him.

  “I wouldn’t know what’s fair,” Betty said. “Someone has to look after the kids today and I guess that leaves me.” She went downstairs.

  The sun passed centre sky and the birds stopped singing. I nibbled at the sandwich Betty had brought to me, but my stomach was tight and the food tasted flat. So, Mother was tired of being a mother, eh? The idea was like a thunderstorm. I was unsettled by the sound of it. I didn’t know how she could be so selfish.

  Wet stains spread across my mother’s back and from beneath her armpits, as she began to form a smaller circle of rocks on top of the larger one. Her hair was pasted in strands against her white neck. She looked to me like a sweaty, irritable child. Back and forth she went, scooping up the black dirt, wheeling it across the yard to the tree, dumping it, shovelling it into place, raking it smooth, back and forth, with a bulldog determination. And then, on one of her trips, she stumbled, broke her stride and fell beneath the weight of the dirt in the wheelbarrow. She landed flat on her back. She looked like a beetle squirming to right itself. The more she floundered, the more exposed she became. Her blue cotton shift worked upwards, baring her thighs and then the white cotton v of her crotch.

  My breath caught in my throat at the sight of my mother sprawled on the ground, at the sight of her vulnerability, that cotton mound between her legs.

  She struggled upright, brushed dirt from her legs, her dress. I urged her to come inside. I wanted her to give up this silly project, wash her hands, or take up the broom and become a mother again. But she didn’t. When she’d finished brushing herself off, she took up the handles of the wheelbarrow and began to fill in the second circle with earth.

  She was forming the last, smallest circle when the sun began its falling behind the house, casting long pale shadows across the grass. Betty stood in the doorway of the bedroom with diaper pins in her mouth and a towel draped over her shoulder.