Agassiz Stories

by Sandra Birdsell

  Mr. Pankratz removed his painter’s cap and ran his hand across his smooth bald head when my mother asked him why he chose to build his house on the outskirts of town. He took his pencil out from behind his ear, squinted and said, “The town is for families. What would an old bachelor like me want in town?”

  He’s worse than an old woman, my mother complained because Mr. Pankratz liked to tell stories while he built the cupboards. He liked his new house, he told us. Know what he liked about it the most? My brothers and sisters and I were sitting on the floor around galvanized wash tubs, washing mud from my mother’s canning sealers. I could see my mother’s shoulders bunch with irritation. “I wouldn’t know,” she said.

  “The indoor toilet,” he said and set aside the board he was about to cut, freeing his hands to illustrate some point in the story with a bunched fist or a sweeping motion. He had been thinking that morning when he got up, what a good thing it was that he no longer needed to worry about digging another pit for the outhouse. The indoor toilet in his new house was the best thing. When he’d lived on the farm, of all the chores, he’d hated moving the outhouse most. When the lime had been dumped into the pit too often the ground all around the outhouse became spongy. He was afraid that someday he would step off the narrow plank and sink up to his knees. Then it would be up to him to dig another hole, move the outhouse onto it and fill in the other.

  “The job came to me, everytime,” he complained. “I always did all the dirty work. Take David, for instance,” Mr. Pankratz said in a wounded voice to remind us of his sacrifice, how he had taken his sister’s boy so she could be free to marry and move away to British Columbia and not have to live with the tragedy of David, who had stopped growing the day they discovered him up-ended in a water-filled rain barrel. “My sister has written only twice this year,” he whined. “And I don’t think she will even come to the wedding.”

  Throughout all the hammering and the sporadic whine of the electric saw, David sat on a chair outside, leaning against the house, blond head bent over his lap as he chipped and coaxed oddly shaped animals from blocks of wood his uncle had discarded. All the while, he smiled at something we couldn’t see. When he walked, he seemed to feel his way along, as though he travelled through a dream.

  “The bride chose a waltz-length dress, featuring a cummerbund and a lace bolero,” Virginia read from the Agassiz Herald. What was waltz length? I wondered as I watched David’s intense carving and Mr. Pankratz’s struggle with a sheet of chalk board. Drywall, it is called now, but we called it chalk board because when it crumbled we salvaged pieces to draw our hopscotch on the sidewalks. Mr. Pankratz’s house was new, but looked old. The roof had come from many roofs, the windows from the old school. And the style of it was like all the other old houses in Agassiz, like the one I lived in, a tall, two-storey house, windows arranged unimaginatively, two up and two down.

  “You are welcome to come to the wedding of Lena Harms to David Pankratz, July 12, at 2 pm,” the note read. There was no posting an announcement in the Agassiz Herald for this wedding. The announcement came in the form of a note delivered by a small child, which we were instructed to pass on from door to door. When my mother finished laughing, she let me read it. “Feel free to invite a friend. Come and bring your own refreshments,” it said. The wording of the note had been the bride’s mother’s idea, Mr. Pankratz explained, his weathered cheeks flaring red. “She says in Paraguay, at a wedding, the whole village comes. For this reason, I thought it best we hold the affair at my place.”

  I had been inside the Harmses’ house with Virginia when she went to collect for the newspaper and I agreed. The family had come from Paraguay the previous year. There had been gossip about the father and the family having been sent from the Mennonite colony because of something he’d done. They lived in a bricksiding cottage which had been badly flooded. You can’t trust bricksiding, my father said. It doesn’t let moisture escape and a house can look perfectly sound from the outside but be rotten to the core. The Harmses’ house had three rooms for fourteen people. Along the walls, boxes filled with clothing were stacked one on top of another. The women of the town had collected the clothing when the family had disembarked at the train station in the dead of winter wearing only thin muslin. Each day, the children pulled what they would wear from the boxes. All around us in the cramped kitchen were children. They sat on the table, squatted on the floor, babies lay on a cot beside the stove, all dark-eyed, dark-skinned. One swung down from the top of the door and stared at us with lively eyes, eyes like the eldest, Lena’s, the colour of black walnut. Dirty faces peered in at us through the window. When we’d come into the yard, we’d noticed a gas-powered washing machine standing idle and Lena bending over a pile of clothing on the ground. A kettle boiled on a hot plate.

  No understand, no understand, the woman said in broken English. She pushed her feet into a pair of man’s plaid slippers and took the kettle from the hot plate. We followed her outside with most of the children. Lena stood beside the washing machine on one foot, scratching at the back of her leg with the other. She was taller than her mother, slender, a strong nose, not the fleshy little ball of a nose that her mother possessed. For two days she’d sat behind me in school in a desk that was too small for her so that she had to turn sideways in it and her tanned, sandalled foot bobbed up and down in the centre of the aisle. Turn around, the teacher warned me when I couldn’t stop staring. Lena’s heavy black braids trailed down from her shoulders and lay against her full breasts. At recess, the boys turned rope for her so she could jump and they could watch her breasts bouncing beneath the paisley print dress. But she never knew. She skipped and laughed and you could tell she thought she was one of us.

  Despite all the children, the jumble of clothing, I remember that the house was clean and the woman herself radiated the pleasant odour of oranges. Virginia and I explained why we had come. The woman and girl spoke to each other in Spanish. The mother frowned. No money, she explained. No money for anything. Not for gasoline. My husband, he take for his car, she said, ducking her head in a shy manner. She shouted to the children in Spanish and they came running with a pail. Gasoline, gasoline, they cried in high musical voices as they went from door to door.

  But if the wording of the wedding letter had been the mother’s idea, the marriage itself had been Mr. Pankratz’s. He’d been walking down in the second park on the west side of the bridge where the trees were dense and it was cooler, he said. He’d looked up and saw David and the girl walking along the bridge. Why did she come every evening to lean on his fence and call for David? he wondered and had followed them, he told my mother, because he worried about David getting lost. And as he saw how she held David’s hand, and how willingly he followed, the idea had come streaking down and “hit me like a bolt of lightning. Too soon oldt, too late schmart,” he said. “I’m not getting any younger,” he told my mother. “David needs someone to watch out for him.”

  “But is she able?” my mother asked. She shook her hands free of soap suds, slipped her wedding band back on and sat down for once, to listen. I wondered what her wedding dress had looked like. When I asked, she put me off, saying that it was not a regular dress, but pretty, and had buttons at the shoulder. There was no photograph of my parents’ wedding in the album, although all her relatives were there in their matrimonial finery. There was only one photograph of them together and it was a surprising picture. My mother sat on my father’s knee, bare legs exposed and on her feet, tiny pointed-toed shoes with bows. Her hair was longer than I ever remember her wearing it. She had swept it up behind one ear and the other side swung forward, a dark wedge against her white skin. A dark-haired Marlene Dietrich. She raised a glass to the person behind the camera. My father rested his chin on her shoulder and laughed. What was the occasion? I wondered. She didn’t remember. A party of some sort. It was before, she searched for the words, before, she said. Before the flooding of the river? No, no, long before that. It was before I became a bett
er person, she said without explaining.

  “The mother says that in Paraguay they teach girls in school all things a woman should know,” Mr. Pankratz said.

  “Be that as it may,” my mother said. “There’s more to it than cooking and cleaning. She looks so young. She doesn’t look any older than thirteen or fourteen.”

  “Sixteen,” Mr. Pankratz said. The air was thick with sawdust and the warm smell of wood. A two-by-four thundered to the floor. “It’s a good bargain for the girl to get her out of that place,” Mr. Pankratz said. “And the mother sees it as well. It’ll be one less mouth for her to feed.”

  My mother sighed. “Well, they will make a nice couple,” she said. “Lena is a good-looking girl.”

  “He only wants someone to wash his dirty socks,” she said when Mr. Pankratz had gone.

  Virginia folded the newspaper and held it against her chest. The sun transformed dry patches on her arms into silvery scales. Virginia and I were best friends. She had psoriasis and I, the Coke-bottle eye glasses. “Dolores uses Kotex now,” Virginia said. She scratched at her arms and blinked in the sunlight. Her eyes were always red-rimmed and sore-looking.

  I didn’t want to know what Kotex was but she took me inside the house which smelled sharply of aging varnish and cough medicine, a smell I thought came with their old house, but the odour had followed them here. Charlie Colpitts would walk a mile to get out of work, people said of Virginia’s father and I associated the smell of the house with sloth. Mrs. Colpitts was a nurse at the hospital. She had scooped babies up from between legs, washed backs and bottoms and poked into bed pans and so people knew enough to leave the Colpittses alone. Mrs. Colpitts, Verna, was a short, sharp-featured woman with hair as stiff and unmanageable as Virginia’s and Dolores’s. She was the possessor of special knowledge. When I told her what my mother had said about Mr. Pankratz wanting someone to wash his socks, her face snapped to attention. His socks worsht, she said. Huh. As long as that’s all he wants.

  Virginia and I stood in Dolores’s closet, examining a Kotex pad. “She puts it between her legs,” Virginia explained. I resisted the explanation. I did not want to envision anything blotted or stained beneath satin skirts. “No, no,” Virginia said. “They plan for that. They count the days so it won’t happen.”

  The day of the wedding my mother sent me to Mr. Pankratz’s house with a batch of buns. The sun had risen above the horizon which, beyond the shock of twisted oak trees in the park, was the stark horizontal line of St. Mary’s Road. Above Horseshoe Lake, a veil of mist would be lifting and in the shallow ditches, ivory clouds of yarrow bobbed in a green sea. The bittersweet scent of a prickly rose bush growing thickly among the rusting shell of a car made my throat ache. As I walked, I remembered the same road muddy and slick after the flood and the sudden sound of rushing water stopping me dead. There, inches before my feet, the road fell away into a large hole. I stood mesmerized, watching with horror the yellow water roaring and tumbling beneath the road, carrying rocks and debris along with it. A temporary underground stream, my father explained but it didn’t diminish the feeling I had of a world surging beneath my feet and I about to be swallowed and swept along underground with it.

  I pictured my destination. I imagined that Mr. Pankratz had knocked lightly on the groom’s door as he passed into the kitchen and heard the immediate, anxious reply of the bedsprings and then footsteps as David followed him into the kitchen. It was one of the “dirty jobs” Mr. Pankratz had explained to my mother, teaching David not to arise in the morning until he knocked. One winter David had wandered away from the house in his night clothes and suffered frost bite. I imagined the two men bent in silence over their breakfast plates, eating quickly, almost furtively, but as I entered the yard, I heard voices and came upon them behind the house on their hands and knees, weeding the garden.

  “Already, visitors,” Mr. Pankratz greeted me, scrambling to his feet. The glint of metal in the seat of his pants caught my eye. Once Mr. Pankratz had been crawling across a roof and split the seam in his trousers and he had used a length of stove-pipe wire to hold it together. Wired for sound, people joked. Old Pankratz doesn’t want to miss a thing. Would the bride be required to mend his pants? From the park came the sudden scolding of a squirrel. Startled upright by the sound, David listened, a weed still clenched in his fist.

  “Look who’s here,” Mr. Pankratz said to David, touching him to draw his attention. “Look what she brought.” But David never looked at any of us directly. He seemed to be in another place, the place where his animal carvings took shape. From a fir tree at the back of the yard came the coo of a mourning dove. The sound was right for that time of day while the air was still cool and the dew had not yet been burned off by the sun. The sound was like gently moving air, like my mother’s sigh.

  I wondered what the bride was doing at that very moment. Mr. Pankratz had given the mother money to buy a dress, he’d said, so she would look half-decent. Was she awaking, stretching and yawning and seeing the dress, did her heart beat faster?

  “Tell your Momma, thank you,” Mr. Pankratz said. As he took the buns from me, his cool hands brushed against mine and I stepped back quickly, feeling in my mind his sticky touch on my arm. “Hurry, hurry,” he said sharply to David as he carried the still-warm buns into the house. “They aren’t going to be able to make their bachelor jokes about my garden today.”

  From across the field came the sound of Virginia’s india rubber ball smacking against the cement and calling me to play.

  The sun was hot and high in the sky, casting short, sharp shadows in the dirt of the yard when Virginia, Mrs. Colpitts and I crossed the field to the wedding. Mrs. Colpitts had allowed us to paint our nails for the occasion and I admired the poppy-red splashes on my hands. My mother, several of my sisters and brothers, and a few other women were already there. My father would not close down his barber shop to come. The only time he had ever closed his shop was when my oldest sister insisted on getting married on a Saturday, and then it was only for half a day. Mr. Pankratz and David had changed from their work clothes into white shirts and black pants. They sat on a makeshift bench, leaning against the house, waiting. And then, as though people had agreed to arrive at the same time, a line of cars travelled down the dirt road, slowly and almost silently. The brittle call of a crow down in the park grated at our silent expectancy. People came walking, carrying dishes and pans of food. Mr. Pankratz nodded his greeting to each one. The women, with quiet efficiency, began setting the food out on the table which Mr. Pankratz had made of plyboard and sawhorses. We strolled about the yard waiting for the arrival of the bride. Mr. Pankratz mopped his ruddy face and squinted at us from behind his handkerchief. Sit still, my mother cautioned. I sat on a chair and thought the people were like chickens, the way they glanced at David from the sides of their faces, advancing towards him so far, as though they might peck him on the leg, and then veering away quickly at the last moment. The way they craned their necks to peer down the road to see if the bride was coming. David whittled at a piece of wood, seeming not to notice any of us.

  And then suddenly, everyone fell silent. Even the smallest ones paused in their restless games to see what was happening. My throat began to tighten. The crow flapped up from the trees in the park, laughing loudly as two smaller birds cried and darted about its head. At the top of the road, we could hear a flutter of sound, a light tinny clamour and then, growing louder, it became the voices of children singing. We all stood up. Down the road they came, the entire Harms family, barefoot children jumping around Lena in circles singing, “She’s a bride, she’s a bride. Lena is a bride.” The older ones carried smaller ones on their hips. The parents each carried a bundle. Closer and closer they came, dancing and laughing and shouting in Spanish. My dress stuck to my back. My heart twisted at the sight of the bride and the pink flowers in her arms. Everyone stood motionless, staring, as single file, the family crossed the plank that spanned the ditch. David pulled at Mr. Pankratz�
�s arm and smiled suddenly. “Lena,” he said. “It’s Lena.”

  “What the hell,” Mr. Pankratz swore softly. “She didn’t buy the girl a dress.”

  On Lena’s blue-black head, attached with many pins, was an ivory lace curtain. Her dress appeared to be a bedsheet gathered at the waist with a man’s necktie. The flowers were plastic and coated with dust. People moved aside to let the family pass through into the yard, carrying with them the smell of dust and heat and oranges. The mother stood before the groom, foxtail fur wound tightly about her neck. Above it, perspiration beaded her wide mottled face.

  “I bring her to you,” she said and dropped the bundle at his feet.

  Mr. Pankratz stepped forward, his white hands on Lena’s dark skin as he drew her towards him and led her over to David’s side.

  The father stood before them, grinning and nodding his approval. His dark hair, slicked straight back, shone with oil. “How you say. Good luck?” He looked to see if anyone appreciated his humour.

  Lena’s bold smile revealed large, straight teeth. She turned and spoke to two girls behind her who scrambled about arranging the curtain veil until it fanned out across the grass like a frayed fish tail.

  I heard a sharp intake of breath. “Pity the poor thing.” I thought I heard my mother’s voice.

  “Well, he’s a better person than I to take the both of them on,” a man said.

  About me, I saw the evidence of laughter withheld in the flickering of muscles around mouths. Tears welled and spurted behind my glasses. “She’s beautiful,” I heard myself say. “The bride is beautiful.”