Agassiz Stories

by Sandra Birdsell

  Betty can hear the wind. It has always been there, but as she thinks about what he’s just said, she becomes aware of the wind in the rafters, swaying the whole building so that it cracks and snaps above and below, all around them. It’s as though they are moving with it across some ocean in the middle of the prairie. Grain elevators, the sailing ships of Lake Agassiz. The idea intrigues her. Or, it’s the ghostly sound of the carts, she imagines, the historic freighters of the prairies that echoes in the rafters of the elevators.

  She hears another sound. It comes from beneath them.

  “What’s that?”

  “Rodents.”

  “Rodents. You mean mice?”

  “Rats.”

  “So. What do you do then?” Del asks quickly, seeming not to want to think: rats. She forms the question that Betty has wanted to form, has thrown away instead to the listening of the wind and imaginings.

  “What can I do? I leave him here.”

  Betty gets up, showing disgust and impatience. “What can you do? Quit working. Collect unemployment insurance. Go on welfare. Something.”

  “Hah. Very funny. Think I haven’t thought of that? They don’t give men welfare so they can stay home with their kids.”

  Betty wants to reach up and tear the burlap from the tiny window, to feel the fresh air. Dave pushes past her. He gets another warm beer from the box beneath the cot and comes back to sit beside Del. He searches about in his hip pocket, slips a snapshot from his wallet. He holds it up to Betty first. It’s a picture of a young girl who squints into the sun, holding a bundle of blankets in her arms. Betty sees herself in the picture. They have both abandoned their sons; the fate of her own child is less clear, perhaps he is the child of a mother who bangs his head against the stroller when walking gravel paths in the park. To a baby, what mother it has doesn’t matter as long as someone feeds it and holds it close. It’s later that it matters.

  “We went steady for a year before she got pregnant.”

  Del refuses to look. “What does Rocky do? When you’re at work, what does he do?”

  “He sleeps most of the time. That’s why I keep him up late. Then I come by and see him at noon. Change his diapers. The longest part is the afternoon. He’s not tired then. It gets hot.”

  Del looks frightened. She stares at the sleeping child. “That’s awful. I think that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “I just don’t know what else to do. We won’t be able to stay here in winter. We’ll freeze,” Dave says.

  “Well, you’re going to have to think of something,” Betty says, making it clear that she thinks it’s his problem.

  “Are either one of you interested in babysitting for free?”

  Del and Betty are silent. They don’t speak of Rocky again and when the three of them leave, Betty hears the child breathing gently and sees the rising and falling of the grey sleeping bag against his chest. She feels stricken. As though she personally is abandoning him, setting him adrift in the bowels of the creaking ship, and there is no shoreline.

  The following day, Del comes to work with Betty and sits at the coffee bar chatting with Rose whom she adores. Each time someone comes into the drugstore she turns to look and so when Dave and Rocky arrive, Betty isn’t surprised. Del leaves the drugstore with them and Betty doesn’t see them again until she’s finished work and walks into her room. They are there, the three of them, wrestling on her bed.

  Dave gets up immediately, swooping Rocky from Del’s stomach where he has been bouncing against her knees. They are playacting, Betty realizes. They are engrossed in each others’ giggles and stupid horseplay. They think they’re a happy family. As though a family is just that: play slaps and tickles to make one feel happy.

  Dave and Rocky leave quickly. Del leans against the bureau looking guilty. “We had no place to go,” she says.

  Betty straightens the spread on the bed and hates herself for doing so. She’s becoming old, tidy, like her mother. She is becoming what she is. “You might have asked.”

  “I will next time. Sorry.”

  Betty is irritated that they’ve seen her strewn clothing and begins to fold things. She pulls open her bottom drawer on the pretense of putting the clothing into it so that she can check the metal tea can without being conspicuous. It appears to be untouched. She will open an account in the bank. No sense taking chances with her future.

  Del winds and unwinds a strand of golden hair that has pulled loose from her ponytail. “I’m moving in with Dave,” she says with unaccustomed shyness.

  “Congrats. Dave has his instant mother.”

  “So? So, what’s wrong with that?”

  “You want that? Don’t you know that’s what he’s been looking for, for someone to come and be a free babysitter? Someone who will care for him and his kid?”

  “He’s no different than any other man,” Del says. “It’s just that the kid is born already. That’s the only difference. Anyway, what’s wrong with wanting to look after a man and kids?”

  Nothing. Betty has to admit that. Nothing. Someone at this moment is looking after her own child. She wants to cry.

  “We were wondering. All we need is a little money. Enough for the first month’s rent and groceries. We could swing it then. Do you think you could?” Her gaze strays to the bottom drawer.

  Betty freezes. “No bloody way. Forget it.”

  “It’s okay. I have other options.”

  But Betty knows she doesn’t.

  The matter of the money becomes a point of tension between them. But even though Del sees Dave often, she still comes occasionally to talk to Betty. She sits with one leg slung over the railing of the veranda or in the park with her knees gathered to her chin, breaking smoke rings with her slender fingers. But their friendship is not the same. Betty has decided to move to Vancouver. She feels guilty though, for being the cause of the friction, and so when Del comes over one evening and asks to borrow a sundress, she complies with too much eagerness, lavishing accessories unasked upon Del. She is inside dressing when Dave comes to pick her up. Instead of waiting in the car as he usually does, he comes to the house and leans against the railing of the veranda where Betty sits on the steps. As though he’s just remembered something important, he pulls an envelope from his shirt pocket and hands it up to Betty.

  “It’s Rocky’s birthday card.”

  Betty opens it. Happy Birthday Rocky, written in a spread, breathless sort of handwriting. There are x’s and o’s at the bottom of it. Paper-kissed kid. Painless mothering, she thinks, and then flinches slightly.

  “I think it means something,” he says, “don’t you? I mean, would she have bothered to send it if she didn’t care?”

  It didn’t cost anything to agree. “Probably not,” Betty says and hands him back the card.

  Rocky toots the car horn and Dave shakes his fist. “Kids,” he says, as though she should know what it means to say, kids.

  “I don’t know,” Dave says. “Sometimes I think that if she saw him, she’d want to come back. It’s the only reason I’ve kept him. What do you think?”

  Del comes across the veranda and the question goes unanswered. She looks beautiful, her tanned shoulders framed by the straps of the white sundress, her gold earhoops bobbing as she walks, accentuating her square jaw. She sees Rocky in the car and her wide smile vanishes.

  “I thought you were getting a sitter?”

  Dave shrugs, holds his hands up to indicate his helplessness. “I tried but I just couldn’t get anyone.”

  “But we’ve never been anywhere without him.”

  Betty wants to laugh. She wants to say, see? But then she thinks of Frank. Frank who knows all about her and still persists. This could be them, wanting to go out, needing a babysitter. She feels guilty for wanting to laugh. “You wanted to go out? I’ll babysit Rocky,” she says.

  Dave drops them off at the elevator. Betty waits for him to leave and then tears the burlap from the window. She holds Rocky up to it
. Together they watch a man peeing in the Red River. Children, she supposes they’re his, play at the river’s edge. They wave willow branches in the air, dip them into the water. She becomes heartsick suddenly; it’s like a gush of salt water in the back of the throat, for her brothers and sisters.

  “I’ve done the sensible thing,” she’d said. “It’s over. You can send Dad in to get me. I’m calling from a drugstore on Arlington Street.”

  “The sensible thing would have been not to get pregnant in the first place,” Mika said. “Now what?”

  “I could always go back to school.” Rose was listening in, wiping the counter top carefully, staying in one spot too long. Betty turned her back to the counter.

  “You wouldn’t fit in. You’d be the butt of every joke.”

  “I could get a job.”

  “There aren’t any jobs in Agassiz.”

  “What do you want me to do then?” Her sweater was damp, her breasts were oozing milk.

  “The sensible thing to do would be to stay in the city and get yourself a job. Start over again. But you’re welcome to come home on weekends, if you like.”

  The man zips up and continues to walk along the river bank. The children follow like birds lifting and swarming and settling back down over some muddied object left lying. Across the river, water sprinklers swish dust from the sidewalks and cool dark stains spread out beneath the trees. The odour of exhaust from the traffic is trapped by the thick foliage along the river bank. Above the city, neon lights colour the sky pink. Betty has never felt violence in the streets of the city. But she knows that it’s there. It’s there in the houses and apartments on Arlington Street, where everything is carefully laid down behind clearly defined borders of picket fences and hedges and the panes of glass in the windows. She holds Rocky and makes another vow. Not in my house, she says, never in my house.

  She rummages through the box of toys and finds a tattered Golden Book. She attempts to read to the child, but he keeps sliding from her lap, wants once again to be lifted to the window to watch the children play.

  She blows up a beach ball and for a time he is happy. She waits for him to become tired and when his eyes grow heavy and his coordination sluggish, she’s relieved.

  She sits beneath the open window on the cushions in the gathering darkness and waits for Dave to return. She has the flashlight by her side should Rocky awaken. She listens to the sounds of the building. She feels the building sway. She puts her hands to its floorboards. She feels the vibration. Wood snaps. Overhead, rafters groan as dry wood rubs against dry wood. She imagines wind filling a canvas sail. Then the hair on her arms rises. The other sound. She reaches for the flashlight, flicks the switch with trembling fingers, sweeps the light across the floor in the direction of the scuffling sound. She sees the thick grey tail disappear into the shadows.

  She leaps from the cushions. She shines the light across Rocky. There’s another swift shadowy movement from beneath his bed towards her feet. She screams and kicks out at it. It swerves and scurries behind the cushions where she has been sitting.

  Rocky begins to cry. He sits up in bed. He wraps both hands around the rope that holds him there. He rocks back and forth, his voice is a monotone wailing, an eerie chanting that she knows is not right for a child. The sound of it is worse than the sight of the rats. She pushes aside her own terror. She gathers the child to her. She places the flashlight on the cot to chase away the shadows and she sings to him lullabies that have sprung up from some deep underground stream.

  The following day she gives all her money to Dave.

  “Thanks,” he says, “I’ll never forget this.”

  The next day he is gone. He takes the money and Rocky and vanishes. Del waits several days and then joins her parents in Toronto. Betty never sees any of them again.

  “What, not finished packing yet?”

  It’s a question put to Betty by the youngest child. The one she’s packing for, the one she’s played Brahms and Bach to and hung delicate-sounding chimes above the crib for; the youngest is leaving home. She stands on the braided oval mat with two large parcels clutched against her small breasts. Her questioning eyes are Frank’s brown eyes, surprised, but good-naturedly puzzled by her mother’s dreaming. Frank calls Betty a rare bird and has given her what she’s needed. All Betty had when she married Frank was the new red shoes. He makes jokes about that now.

  Somewhere, a child grew up without me, she wishes to tell the youngest. He has as much to do with shaping your existence here as have the first settlers, the women who cranked out their years in a one-room sod house, the Indians who hunted these plains for buffalo, or the Mennonite farmers. But she won’t say it. She will, instead, move the memory out across an ancient lake and leave it there to find its rest among the glaciers.

  LADIES OF THE HOUSE

  For Ralph Friesen and Patricia Sanders

  THE BRIDE DOLL

  pretty wedding was solemnized,” Virginia Colpitts read. “Pink and white peonies and blue delphinium in white baskets were placed on the altar and satin bows designated pews reserved for the guests.”

  Virginia and I lay out on a blanket in her back yard. We had always lived on the same street. First she had lived at the top of the street in an unpainted, unsteady house which had not survived the last flooding of the river, and then at the bottom of the street, in a bright new bungalow.

  We lay in the shadow of a red barn, seeking shelter from the hot dry wind, and read accounts of weddings, placing ourselves inside the church as honoured guests. I was smitten by the descriptions of veils, seed pearls and lily-point sleeves. I imagined satin to be as iridescent as moths’ wings, shiny and silvery. I gleaned notices of weddings from the columns in the Agassiz Herald and then on Saturdays, Virginia and I waited outside to catch a glimpse of the newly married couple as they came from the church, looking over-starched with self-consciousness. Where once the couple had been as close as Siamese twins, they stood apart, awkward in their new state. I imagined doves fluttering above their heads.

  Even though I had been taught not to pray for tangible things as that was a mark of selfishness (a waste of God’s valuable time when one considered the numberless starving children), I prayed fervently for a bride doll.

  “Why do you want one?” my mother asked.

  “Because,” was all I could say as I lay in the gutted bedroom where wall boards had been pulled loose and moist wood shavings tumbled free in order to dry. Wet shavings would swell and cause a fire, my father said.

  Instead of praying for bride dolls, it was better to confess sins, my mother said, and then to try to make right the wrongs we did. And what about the crusts of bread I’d hidden behind furniture because I didn’t want to eat them? I was told to think of those poor starving children and so that night I crawled beneath the bed and fished a crust of bread out from a corner and late it. Stinging pain sent me into my parents’ room where, to their horror, my mouth lit up with the phosphorus glow of rat poison.

  When I imagine myself as I was then, I see a slightly chubby person with legs as stocky as tree trunks, standing solidly in the middle of a tangled, confused yard. About me, in the ruined furniture and rotting lumber, is the reminder of chaos, an event which had turned our lives topsy-turvy. But I can’t remember the actual flooding of the river, I can only recall the immediate years after it, being warned not to touch any of the debris, to wash my hands thoroughly before meals, of things like diphtheria and having one’s jaw locked shut. But the worst was the tearing down and rebuilding of our house.

  When I look at photographs from around that time, I am usually wearing a white dress. The thick lenses of my glasses are heavy and they slide down my nose as I frown to keep them in place while I am forever peering out through the heavy blonde bangs of my overgrown butch cut. A shoemaker’s children need shoes, my mother said, a butcher’s, meat. And we were always in need of a hair cut. In most group photographs, I am either turned right around or looking off at something to th
e side of me. I was a sheet of jelly then, a hectograph, the old copier teachers used to prepare our work. They wrote on the gelatin with an indelible pencil (it was poison, we were warned not to chew on it). As the year progressed, the faint ghosts of past tests, the damp outlines of artwork, criss-crossed, becoming a road map of the whole year.

  Virginia never tanned or was affected by the sun in any way but my legs and face grew prickly and red in the hot wind. While we lay out there on the blanket, I wished I could climb above it, up where the vapour trails of jet planes arched into the sun, away from the whining of the electric saw and the hollow thud of a hammer echoing in the trees in the park as across a field, Mr. Pankratz finished building his new house.

  Pankratz, the packrat, we’d named him because he’d built the house almost entirely from scrap. He’d paid little for the land because it bordered the edge of town and would be on the wrong side of the dike once it was in place. My father had branded him a “plain damned fool,” but I didn’t think he was that harmless. I walked in wide circles around the man to escape his clammy, pale hands which were forever reaching to pat my arm or the top of my head. In spring, my father said, water would back up from the river into the first and then the second park, flow across the road and completely surround Mr. Pankratz’s house. So the man had built it up, had hauled in fill to raise the foundation as high as the level of the last flood. As a result, the house looked down over the whole town, the park, the bridge which spanned the Red River and the highway climbing to meet St. Mary’s Road as it wound past Horseshoe Lake.

  When Mr. Pankratz came to build our kitchen cupboards, my mother asked him why he had chosen to live there. “It must be terrible for mosquitoes,” she said. And the park was a strange place in spring with oak trees standing in water, reflected back over and over. Once the water subsided, the ground remained soft and overnight, flesh-white toadstools, spongy and tall, sprung up from dampness. Virginia and I played down there. We told no one. The park floor was littered with flood-contaminated stock from the drugstore and off-limits. We played wedding. We collected toadstools and laid them out on wild rhubarb leaves for the wedding feast. Do you take this man as your lawful wedded husband? I asked. Do you take this woman to be your awful wife? Virginia would say, laughing, spoiling the ceremony. To her it was a game, the same as playing Dale Evans and Roy Rogers.