Agassiz Stories

by Sandra Birdsell

  “Where is the stone you’ve been searching for tonight?” he asked.

  “I have nothing to say. You can’t make me argue with you. If you want to argue, then do it with yourself.” Her voice did not betray her anger. She still felt the biting edge of the leaves on her skin. She walked away swiftly, and then faster until she was running from him. Her breath became tight and then a spot of fire burned in her centre. But she wouldn’t stop running until she was home, safe, behind the door.

  She sat at the kitchen table and pressed her face against the cool arborite. To be alone for once, just to be left alone. She listened to a fly buzzing against a window. The wind in the kitchen curtain swept against the potted plant. Water dripped into the sink. Something sticky against her arms — she sat up and frowned as her hand met toast crumbs and smears of jam left behind by one of the children. Her legs felt weak as she went over to the sink to stop the dripping of water and to get a cloth to wash the table. She reached to turn the light on above the sink and saw through the window her father entering the yard. She stood with her hands pressed to her face and waited. She wouldn’t answer the door and he might think that she was upstairs, sleeping.

  His light touch on the door, a gentle knock and — silence. Above her, the sound of electricity in the clock. He coughed twice. She could see him fumbling for his pocket, to spit his blood-flecked mucus into a handkerchief.

  “Mika, I know you’re there. Mika, open the door.”

  It wasn’t locked, but she knew he wouldn’t come in unless she opened it.

  “You’re causing much sorrow,” he said. “Your mother has been crying most of the day.”

  Crying over children is a waste of time, Mika thought. In the end, they do what they want.

  “She says for me to tell you, think of eternity.”

  The anger erupted. She stepped towards the closed door. “Eternity? Eternity? Papa, I’ve spent all my life preparing for eternity. No one tells me how to live each day. Right here, where I am.”

  She heard him sigh. “But when you think of it, we’re here for such a little time when you consider all of eternity,” he said.

  “Yes, and it’s my little time. Mine. Not yours.”

  He didn’t speak for a few moments. She held her breath. She waited for him to leave. She sensed his wretched disappointment in her, his fading spirit. I can’t help that, she told herself.

  “Mika, one thing,” he said. His voice was barely more than a whisper. “There’s something wrong with your thinking. If we could just talk. I’m not well. I need to know before I —” He broke off and began to cough.

  Before I die. She finished the sentence for him. She turned her back to the door and pressed her knuckles into her teeth and bit into them. Anger rose and grew until her fists were free and raised up. That he would try to use his illness against her. It’s my life, she told herself. It’s my life.

  “Go away,” she cried. She faced the door once again and stamped her foot. “Go away.” She would tear the curtains from the windows, upset chairs, bring all the children running to stare at her anger. She would let them see what had been done to her, she would tell them, it’s my life. She would — she gasped. A sharp kick in her belly, then a fluttering of a limb against her walls. Another movement, a sliding downward, a memory drawing her inside instantly like a flick of a knuckle against her temple. The baby. Like all the others asleep in the rooms upstairs, it travelled with her.

  “Mika, please. I care for you.”

  She opened the door and stood before him, head bent and arms hanging by her sides. They faced each other. His shoulders sagged beneath his thin shirt. “Come in,” she said. “I’ll lend you one of Maurice’s sweaters.” She began to cry.

  He stepped inside quickly and put his hand on her shoulder. “Yes, yes,” he said. “That’s it. You must cry over what you’ve done. It’s the beginning of healing. God loves a meek and contrite heart.”

  She leaned into him, felt the sharpness of his rib cage beneath her arms. I cry because I can’t have what I want. He’s going away soon. I am meek and contrite because he doesn’t want anything more than just a fleeting small part of what I am. I am filled with sorrow because I know myself too well. If I could have him, I wouldn’t want him.

  “It’s over,” he said. “You won’t go and see that man again.”

  She heard the rasping sound of fluids in his chest. She loved him.

  “No, I won’t see him anymore.”

  She turned her face against his chest and stared into the night beyond him. She felt empty, barren, but at peace. In the garden, a bright glow flared suddenly and she thought, it’s a cigarette. But the glow rose and fell among the vegetation and then became bead-shaped, blue, brighter, her desire riding the night up and up in a wide arc, soaring across the garden into the branches of thick trees. A firefly, Mika thought. And she watched it until it vanished.

  FLOWERS FOR WEDDINGS AND FUNERALS

  y Omah supplies flowers for weddings and funerals. In winter, the flowers come from the greenhouse she keeps warm with a woodstove as long as she can; and then the potted begonias and asters are moved to the house and line the shelves in front of the large triple-pane window she had installed when Opah died so that she could carry on the tradition of flowers for weddings and for funerals. She has no telephone. Telephones are the devil’s temptation to gossip and God admonishes widows to beware of that exact thing.

  And so I am the messenger. I bring requests to her, riding my bicycle along the dirt road to her cottage that stands watermarked beneath its whitewash because it so foolishly nestles too close to the Red River.

  A dozen or two glads please, the note says. The bride has chosen coral for the colour of her wedding and Omah adds a few white ones because she says that white is important at a wedding. She does not charge for this service. It is unthinkable to her to ask for money to do this thing which she loves.

  She has studied carefully the long rows of blossoms to find perfect ones with just the correct number of buds near the top, and laid them gently on newspaper. She straightens and absently brushes perspiration from her brow. She frowns at the plum tree in the corner of the garden where the flies hover in the heat waves. Their buzzing sounds and the thick humid air make me feel lazy. But she never seems to notice the heat, and works tirelessly.

  “In Russia,” she says as she once more bends to her task, “we made jam. Wild plum jam to put into fruit pockets and platz.” Her hands, brown and earth-stained, feel for the proper place to cut into the last gladiolus stalk.

  She gathers the stalks into the crook of her arm, coral and white gladiola, large icy-looking petals that are beaded with tears. Babies’ tears, she told me long ago. Each convex drop holds a perfectly shaped baby. The children of the world who cry out to be born are the dew of the earth.

  For a long time afterward, I imagined I could hear the garden crying and when I told her this, she said it was true. All of creation cries and groans, you just cannot hear it. But God does.

  Poor God. I squint at the sun because she has also said He is Light and I have grown accustomed to the thought that the sun is His eye. To have to face that every day. To have to look down and see a perpetually twisting, writhing, crying creation. The trees have arms uplifted, beseeching. Today I am not sure I can believe it, the way everything hangs limp and silent in the heat.

  I follow her back to the house, thinking that perhaps tonight, after the wedding, there will be one less dewdrop in the morning.

  “What now is a plum tree but a blessing to the red ants and flies only?” She mutters to herself and shakes dust from her feet before she enters the house. When she speaks her own language, her voice rises and falls like a butterfly on the wind as she smoothes over the guttural sounds. Unlike my mother, who does not grow gladiola or speak the language of her youth freely, but with square, harsh sounds, Omah makes a sonatina.

  While I wait for her to come from the house, I search the ground beneath the tree to try to f
ind out what offends her so greatly. I can see red ants crawling over sticky, pink pulp, studying the dynamics of moving one rotting plum.

  “In Russia, we ate gophers and some people ate babies.” I recall her words as I pedal back towards the town. The glads are in a pail of water inside my wire basket. Cool spikelets of flowers seemingly spread across my chest. Here I come. Here comes the bride, big, fat and wide. Where is the groom? Home washing diapers because the baby came too soon.

  Laurence’s version of that song reminds me that he is waiting for me at the river.

  “Jesus Christ, wild plums, that’s just what I need,” Laurence says and begins pacing up and down across the baked river bank. His feet lift clay tiles as he paces and I squat waiting, feeling the nylon line between my fingers, waiting for something other than the river’s current to tug there at the end of it.

  I am intrigued by the patterns the sun has baked into the river bank. Octagonal shapes spread down to the willows. How this happens, I don’t know. But it reminds me of a picture I have seen in Omah’s Bible or geography book, something old and ancient like the tile floor in a pharaoh’s garden. It is recreated here by the sun on the banks of the Red River.

  “What do you need plums for?”

  “Can’t you see,” he says. “Wild plums are perfect to make wine.”

  I wonder at the tone of his voice when it is just the two of us fishing. He has told me two bobbers today instead of one and the depth of the stick must be screwed down into the muck just so. Only he can do it. And I never question as I would want to because I am grateful to him for the world he has opened up to me. If anyone should come and join us here, Laurence would silently gather his line in, wind it around the stick with precise movements that are meant to show his annoyance, but really are a cover for his sense of not belonging. He would move farther down the bank or walk up the hill to the road and his bike. He would turn his back on me, the only friend he has.

  I have loved you since grade three, my eyes keep telling him. You, with your lice crawling about your thickly matted hair. My father, being the town’s barber, would know, Laurence. But I defied him and played with you anyway.

  It is of no consequence to Laurence that daily our friendship drives wedges into my life. He stops pacing and stands in front of me, hands raised up like a preacher’s hands.

  “Wild plums make damned good wine. My old man has a recipe.”

  I turn over a clay tile and watch an earthworm scramble to bury itself, so that my smile will not show and twist down inside him.

  Laurence’s father works up north cutting timber. He would know about wild plum wine. Laurence’s mother cooks at the hotel because his father seldom sends money home. Laurence’s brother is in the navy and has a tattoo on his arm. I envy Laurence for the way he can take his time rolling cigarettes, never having to worry about someone who might sneak up and look over his shoulder. I find it hard to understand his kind of freedom. He will have the space and time to make his wine at leisure.

  “Come with me.” I give him my hand.

  Omah bends over in the garden. Her only concession to the summer’s heat has been to roll her nylon stockings to her ankles. They circle her legs in neat coils. Her instep is swollen, mottled blue with broken blood vessels. She gathers tomatoes in her apron.

  Laurence hesitates. He stands away from us with his arms folded across his chest as though he were bracing himself against extreme cold.

  “His mother could use the plums,” I tell Omah. Her eyes brighten and her tanned wrinkles spread outwards from her smile. She half-runs like a goose to her house with her apron bulging red fruit.

  “See,” I say to Laurence, “I told you she wouldn’t mind.”

  When Omah returns with pails for picking, Laurence’s arms hang down by his sides.

  “You tell your Mama,” she says to Laurence, “that it takes one cup of sugar to one cup of juice for the jelly.” Her English is broken and she looks like any peasant standing in her bedroom slippers. She has hidden her beautiful white hair beneath a kerchief.

  She’s not what you think, I want to tell Laurence and erase that slight bit of derision from his mouth. Did you know that in their village they were once very wealthy? My grandfather was a teacher. Not just a teacher, but he could have been a professor here at a university.

  But our heads are different. Laurence would not be impressed. He has never asked me about myself. We are friends on his territory only.

  I beg Laurence silently not to swear in front of her. Her freckled hands pluck fruit joyfully.

  “In the old country, we didn’t waste fruit. Not like here where people let it fall to the ground and then go to the store and buy what they could have made for themselves. And much better too.”

  Laurence has sniffed out my uneasiness. “I like homemade jelly,” he says. “My mother makes good crabapple jelly.”

  She studies him with renewed interest. When we each have a pail fall of the dust-covered fruit, she tops it with a cabbage and several of the largest unblemished tomatoes I have ever seen.

  “Give my regards to your Mama,” she says, as though some bond has been established because this woman makes her own jelly.

  We leave her standing at the edge of the road shielding her eyes against the setting sun. She waves and I am so proud that I want to tell Laurence about the apple that is named for her. She had experimented with crabapple trees for years and in recognition of her work, the experimental farm has given a new apple tree her name.

  “What does she mean, give her regards?” Laurence asks and my intentions are lost in the explanation.

  When we are well down the road and the pails begin to get heavy, we stop to rest. I sit beside the road and chew the tender end of a foxtail.

  Laurence chooses the largest of the tomatoes carefully, and then, his arm a wide arc, he smashes it against a telephone pole.

  I watch red juice dripping against the splintered grey wood. The sun is dying. It paints the water tower shades of gold. The killdeers call to each other as they pass as silhouettes above the road. The crickets in the ditch speak to me of Omah’s greenhouse where they hide behind earthenware pots.

  What does Laurence know of hauling pails of water from the river, bending and trailing moisture, row upon row? What does he know of coaxing seedlings to grow or babies crying from dewdrops beneath the eye of God?

  I turn from him and walk with my face reflecting the fired sky and my dust-coated bare feet raising puffs of anger in the fine warm silt.

  “Hey, where are you going?” Laurence calls to my retreating back. “Wait a minute. What did I do?”

  The fleeing birds fill the silence with their cries and the night breezes begin to swoop down onto our heads.

  She sits across from me, Bible open on the grey Arborite, cleaning her wire-framed glasses with a tiny linen handkerchief that she has prettied with blue cross-stitch flowers. She places them back on her nose and continues to read while I dunk pastry in tea and suck noisily to keep from concentrating.

  “And so,” she concludes, “God called His people to be separated from the heathen.”

  I can see children from the window, three of them, scooting down the hill to the river and I try not to think of Laurence. I haven’t been with him since the day on the road, but I’ve seen him. He is not alone anymore. He has friends now, kids who are strange to me. They are the same ones who make me feel stupid about the way I run at recess so that I can be pitcher when we play scrub. I envy the easy way they can laugh at everything.

  “Well, if it isn’t Sparky,” he said, giving me a new name and I liked it. Then he also gave me a showy kiss for them to see and laugh. I pushed against his chest and smelled something sticky like jam, but faintly sour at the same time. He was wearing a new jacket and had hammered silver studs into the back of it that spelled his name out across his shoulders. Gone is the mousy step of my Laurence.

  Omah closes the book. The sun reflects off her glasses into my eyes. “And so,�
�� she says, “it is very clear. When God calls us to be separate, we must respond. With adulthood comes a responsibility.”

  There is so much blood and death in what she says that I feel as though I am choking. I can smell sulphur from smoking mountains and dust rising from feet that circle a golden calf. With the teaching of these stories, changing from pleasant fairy tales of faraway lands to this joyless search for meaning, her house has become a snare.

  She pushes sugar cubes into my pocket. “You are a fine child,” she says, “to visit your Omah. God will reward you in heaven.”

  The following Saturday, I walk a different way to her house, the way that brings me past the hotel, and I can see them as I pass by the window, pressed together all in one booth. They greet me as though they knew I would come. I squeeze in beside Laurence and listen with amazement to their fast-moving conversation. The jukebox swells with forbidden music. I can feel its beat in Laurence’s thigh.

  I laugh at things I don’t understand and try not to think of my Omah who will have weak tea and sugar cookies set out on her white cloth. Her stained fingers will turn pages, contemplating what lesson to point out.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Laurence says, his lips speaking the old way to me. When he joins the conversation that leaps and jumps without direction from one person to another, his voice is changed. But he has taken my hand in his and covered it beneath the table. He laughs and spreads his plum breath across my face.

  I can see Omah bending in the garden cutting flowers for weddings and funerals. I can see her rising to search the way I take and she will not find me there.

  JUDGEMENT

  t was early morning when Mr. Thiessen died, and wreaths of mist still hovered above the river in pockets, trapped by the shadows of overhanging willow branches. His corpse lay in the porch of a small white cottage. The cottage sat on the edge of a town beside a road that led over a hill and down the other side of it and came to an end in the river.