Leaning, Leaning Over Water

by Frances Itani

  Whether there was wind or hail or thunder, and though he wanted her to see the turbulence outside, Jock knew that he could not convince Maura to leave the kitchen. She refused to look through any window as she outwaited every storm.

  On Fridays, Maura cooked liver and onions for Jock though she did not eat these herself. She knew that, back from the river, streets and streets of the Catholic neighbours she did not know were inside their houses eating tinned sardines. She knew, too, that in the summer they ate pickerel or bass from the river, sometimes even catfish, barbotte. Her own family caught and ate catfish, too. Jock cut off the heads on shore so she wouldn’t have to look at their barbels and their rubbery snouts before she threw them, skinless, into the pan.

  Maura had other jobs. Mondays, the wringer washer was pushed from the summer kitchen to the main kitchen, and two galvanized tubs for the rinse were set on kitchen chairs. The wringers swung back and forth over the tubs. When Lyd had been a toddler she’d climbed up and caught her hand between wringers. Whenever the story was told by Maura’s mother in Darley, it always had the same ending: Lydia, God-luv-’er, was lucky her entire arm wasn’t mutilated.

  Trude had written to Granny Tracks to find out for herself:

  Is the story true? You were right there in the same town before we moved. Did you see Lyd’s baby bones after they got whipped through the wringer? There’s no scar. Mother says she slammed the quick release in the nick of time.

  Trude wanted to check the facts because Lyd had begun to pull the story out of her past to flaunt it, even though she had no memory of the event. When Trude got sick and tired hearing about it she went down to the riverbank and ran back and forth across the stones to toughen up the soles of her feet. It was she who organized the bare foot race at the end of every summer.

  On Tuesdays, Maura dipped the Monday-washed clothes into a bucket of starch and ironed while she listened to “Pepper Young’s Family.” Wednesdays, the sewing machine was set up between dining room and kitchen because that was the only place the cord could be plugged in.

  Mother does everything in the kitchen. She drags the sewing machine in here even though it blocks the doorway and we have to squeeze past. She listens to the words of the radio songs and when she learns them, she sings them to us. She cuts up the material with pinking shears, and the leftover shapes get scattered around the linoleum. If we run out of toilet paper and someone uses a piece of pattern, Mother has to invent the missing shape. This makes her very mad. I am never going to be a housewife and I will never learn to sew. Mother made me sit in front of the Singer so she could teach me how to thread. I sat there for an hour before she let me go. I told her I’d never learn and I meant it. When she was a little child, did you force her to sew?

  Maura listened as Lyd and Trude sang the French songs they’d learned the past year in their one-room school. Though Maura herself had managed not to learn a single word of French, she turned off her radio songs when the girls were singing. She caught the rhythm and hummed along beside her daughters and mouthed the strange and unfamiliar syllables into the vibrating air above their heads.

  At the end of summer, the job of cleaning windows was assigned to Eddie and Trade, all windows, the entire house. Eddie was to use the ladder on the outside; Trude, the stepstool on the inside, starting with the room that was all windows, the porch.

  “Work as a pair so you can get the streaks,” Maura said. She handed each of them a bar of Bon-Ami, which they began to smooth down, rubbing at the whiteness of the bars with a wet cloth. Maura called the bars “Bawn-Ammy.”

  Trude and Eddie rubbed white all over the porch windows and circled out each other’s faces and Trude printed S-H-I-T backwards across an inside pane and Eddie looked startled and then printed on the outside, P-I-S-, but not in mirror writing. Both words were shined off before Maura came to inspect for spots, but they kept it up all afternoon.

  While they were thinking up obscenities to stretch all the way around the house, Lyd was told to polish the dining-room suite, Jock’s smoker with its spool legs, and strips of wood that showed on the Queen Anne chairs. This was part of the furniture left behind by Duffy’s runaway wife and after that by Duffy when he sold the house to Jock—lock, stock and barrel. Duffy’s wife had run off with his best friend and Duffy had been too heartsick to carry so much as a tie-rack out the front door. After he’d clinched the deal, Jock had gone back to Darley to get Maura and the children and he’d listed off the contents, ending with the piano and the two Queen Anne chairs. Real ones. As if the chairs had been the deciding factor. Duffy had walked away from the treachery of woman and had taken a room in the village. Now, he was able to come right back into the house as Jock’s friend and sit on his own chairs and switch on the pair of Tiffany lamps in the porch and look at himself in the long mirror that had held the image of his runaway wife. It didn’t seem to bother him at all.

  Lyd and Trude had been dragging an old argument forward since early morning. The argument was about whose turn it was to use the top drawer of their shared dresser, the one that had the extra space. Lyd thought she should have it because she was older and needed more things.

  It hadn’t been necessary to be in the same room until Trude had finally worked her way along the inside windows as far as the dining room. Lyd was already there, pouring a bubble of lemon oil onto the tabletop. She soaked the oil into the cloth and held the cloth away from her as the scent rose and hung before her face like a suffocating veil.

  First she rubbed the wood, then she began to polish. Separate cloth. By the time she got to the rung of the first chair, she was bored. Trude was at the window trying to spell diarrhea backwards into the Bon-Ami-coated glass. She wasn’t sure if the word had one r or two, and she didn’t know about the h. Trude had won every spelling bee in her class but Mrs. Perry had never tested her limits with diarrhea.

  D-I-A-R she printed. Lyd came up behind her and flicked the polishing cloth close to her ear. Trude turned and snapped the window cloth at Lyd. Their mother walked into the room.

  “Cut it out,” she said.

  Maura had just washed her hair and was fastening a turban around her head. She held a hairbrush in her left hand.

  “Lyd took a swipe at me first,” said Trude. She added a Y to D-I-A-R and from outside Eddie pointed and shook the ladder, laughing.

  “They’re writing dirty words on the windows,” Lyd said. “They’re so juvenile.” She flicked her cloth at Trude again, catching her on the shoulder.

  “D-I-A-R-Y,” Trude spelled. “What’s dirty about that? Dear Dirty Diary.”

  “Cut it out,” said Maura. “I’ve already told you once.”

  Trude flicked her cloth back at Lyd when she believed her mother was leaving the room. Maura’s body turned and the hairbrush left her open palm. It flew across the room and struck the wall between chair and window, between Lyd and Trude. The three of them heard the crack as the brush broke in two, missing the girls by inches.

  Maura returned to pick up the pieces and walked out of the room. She did not apologize and she did not excuse herself in any way.

  Trude watched her mother’s back tighten as she left the room. Because the broken pieces were gone, Trude was not certain, now, that Maura had thrown the brush.

  Lyd’s face had whitened but there were red patches on her cheeks. She looked at Trude and pushed a chair in front of the mark on the wall. “Damn you and damn Mother, both,” said Lyd, under her breath. “I’m staying on this side of the room and you stay on that one.”

  Trude glanced again towards the empty doorway, and felt a quickening in her chest. She climbed down from the stepstool and stood there, not knowing what to do. She set her cloth on the floor and waited, and as there was no other noise in the house, she went to find the dictionary so she could learn to spell the word diarrhea.

  When Eddie had finished his part of the job, he walked to the Pines, between cove and rapids. He lay on his belly at the edge of the cliff and stared at the w
ater. He clung to the roots of some tangled bushes, peered over and, without thinking, began to climb down. The roots were above his head as he tested with one foot, for a ledge. He let go when he felt something solid, crouched as he dropped, his back to the river, and landed facing a small cave. To his surprise he could turn his body around and fit inside.

  The cave was lined with layers of horizontal rock. At first, Eddie sat with his chin on his knees and wondered about the place. His sisters would want to know. But if he were to tell them, it wouldn’t belong to him.

  He thought of his mother’s face as he’d watched her through the window from the ladder, outside. He did not know what was wrong but he’d seen her throw the brush at Lyd and Trude. He broke off pieces of rock and threw them into fast water below.

  If his father found out about the cave he would say, Stay away. The cave will crumble. Jock was always threatening about the wall, too, the wall that tilted over rapids. Eddie looked towards the ruins, far to his left, and tried to imagine the wall crumpling like caved-in knees. So far, the wall had not begun to fall.

  Swallows had gathered and now swooped and glided above the river. Eddie broke off a large piece of rock and tossed it hard into their midst. Though he did not intend to hit a bird, though he did not hear the thunk, he felt it, as a swallow disappeared. Its wings folded as it entered the blue-black swirl of river. Eddie’s breath stopped. He had not meant to kill a bird. He should not even be in the cave. He did not move for a long time, frozen by the fear that if he moved, he, too, would thud into dark water.

  Dear Granny Tracks,

  We will soon be back in school. We went to the Ottawa Ex and saw Elsie the Borden Cow and got a bag of free samples from the Pure Food Building. Lyd won a lamp in bingo and had to carry it all the way home on the bus.

  Father fired me from my cigarette-rolling job. He was in the St. Pierre Hotel all ready to clinch a deal on a secondhand Hoover. He offered cigarettes to the men around him and he held up the flame but the cigarettes fell apart when the men sucked in. I think I put too much water on the sticky edge. Father came home roaring mad but I don’t care. The men laughed hard but Father got the Hoover. He says we’re bloody lucky he doesn’t have to kick Lyd’s dust piles around the house any more. When he came back he grabbed his binoculars and went down to the river to look at the view but I don’t know what he could see, it was so dark.

  I found out that Mrs. Perry is going to be my teacher again. She thinks the St. Lawrence River runs downhill. I keep showing her on the map that it runs up. We still have to take the bus out of the village with all the other Protestants, to our one-room school called “Stone.” Geoffrey Babble will have a fit the first week of September. The last day of school in June, he was sitting in front of me and banged his head on my desk when he fell over.

  Love, Trude

  P.S. Today the river is the colour of dark green bottles, with raging rippling current. Mrs. Perry likes scenery and adjectives so I am getting some ready. There was a portage near our place, she said, because of the rapids. The Indians carried their canoes on their heads, or like that.

  P.P.S. I won the bare foot race again this year.

  Sunday morning, Jock was savouring the warmth of his bed, drifting in and out of sleep. There was a beat in his head, something endless and pulsing. He tried to recover it as he would a lost dream.

  He thought of the factory. He’d etched so many fleurs-delis onto aluminum, he’d lost count. He felt the instrument in his hand, smelled the harshness of acid, wondered irrationally how many fleurs-de-lis it would take to feed his children until they grew up. He pushed this from his mind and flexed his hands under the sheet.

  From factory rooms of dank dark stone he’d disseminated the French lily across the living breadth of Canada. There were some who thought the lily resembled the top of a battleaxe but he, Jock, held in his mind the picture of its threefold beauty and its tight encircling ring. In his own home he was running out of space to stack the culls the factory could not sell. Maura had never complained. The workers had been asked to cart the seconds away, and Jock had carted away his share. From the stacks, only he could withdraw a tray and locate the imperfection that prevented it from being sent out, a shining harbinger to the territories and provinces. He saw each failed tray as a kind of rare stamp. He’d been bestowing trays on friends and relatives for Christmas, birthdays and anniversaries but, despite this, in all the corners of the house there was a rising tide of fleurs-de-lis.

  Jock drifted again and woke as if someone had pinned his arms to his sides. The beat came back to his head. He was surrounded by shifting shadows of rock. Again he thought of the factory, saw the roar of furnace, heard the pounding of machine that flattened the trays before they glided towards him on the ever-moving belt.

  He thought of Maura, and felt the picture of silence. He realized that he’d never known what Maura thought of the job he’d found after all that searching; what she thought of the hiring of the truck to transport their few belongings; of moving her and the children, on the train, away from Darley, Ontario, and into Quebec. It was what he’d had to do. A man had to feed his family. He’d lifted the atlas down from the shelf and had felt the silence of his wife. It was as if he’d been pulling her body away as his thumb traced its way down and back up the splendid solid curve of the grey and shadowy Shield.

  Jock closed his eyes, tugged at the blanket, wrapped it tightly around him. The beat was still there, in his head. Cannon to right of them, he thought. Cannon to left of them. And then, without effort, his head recited:

  Cannon in front of them

  Volleyed and thundered;

  Stormed at with shot and shell,

  Boldly they rode and well,

  Into the jaws of Death,

  Into the mouth of Hell

  Rode the six hundred.

  Maura had been having dreams about the Queen Anne chairs. The ones left behind by Duffy’s runaway wife. Maura had begun to hate the Queen Anne chairs. It was not the chairs so much as what they stood for. Maura, surrounded by someone else’s furniture, wanted something of her own, not secondhand or antique or left behind by someone’s runaway wife.

  She’d often thought about the runaway wife. What it would take to walk through summer kitchen and kitchen, dining room, living room and porch, out the front door and down the steps. Never look back, Maura said to herself while she scrubbed stains out of collars, while she baked macaroni and cheese and sponged feverish torsos and counted out money for Paris-Patty sandwiches the children carried to school. Never look back. She thought of Lot’s wife but Lot’s wife had turned. Duffy’s runaway wife had kept on going. Maura imagined this predecessor of her own kitchen and bedroom wearing red the day she left. It never occurred to her that Duffy’s wife might have sneaked out the back door

  Maura walked the length of the house, from summer kitchen to glassed-in porch. Each room held its own silence as she passed. She stifled a whiff of anger as her fingertips brushed the backs of the Queen Anne chairs. She stood at the front screen and listened to the roar of rapids. She recognized the sound of sorrow.

  Jock was at the tray factory; the children, eight miles away, in their one-room school. A breeze was puffing in off the river and the leaves of the tallest poplar were spinning. The maples across the cove flared in crimson patches. Maura loved the fall so much she could hardly bear it, each year, when the season began. She knew the day of its beginning, always in late August when the air changed. She could smell the fall the moment it arrived, the promise of a long season of wondrous colour and sad warmth. She wanted to run in the fall, run through the fields and towards the trees and along the river. Run, Maura, Run, she said, standing at the screen. She breathed fall-tipped air deep into her lungs.

  She walked back through the house and started in the kitchen. She pushed the warped and wooden table to the back door, bumped it around the side of the house and dragged it down to the river. She returned for the kitchen chairs, the pair of Tiffany lamps
from the porch and the tea wagon she never used except to park the plaster lamp encircled by Spanish dancers that Lyd had won in bingo at the Ottawa Ex. Maura rolled the tea wagon over the rocks. Every time she took out a piece of furniture, she exposed another stack of Jock’s imperfect trays. The last two items she dragged out were the Queen Anne chairs.

  Next, she went to the barn and picked up the long-handled axe. Collected paper from the top of the woodbin and stuffed three wooden matches into her pocket. She returned to the river, pushed furniture and lamps close together, and chopped randomly and with joy. She built her fire, wedged paper between splinters, threw in a match and sat a few feet back on layered shale. She thought of nothing but the flames. Listened to the crackling of the dismembered armrests of the Queen Anne chairs. Watched with light-headedness as they burned.

  When there was nothing left but smouldering ashes and hot nails and melted parts, Maura returned to her empty kitchen. Sat on the floor and opened the Eaton’s catalogue. Reached for the phone and dialled the number. Took a deep breath and heard her own voice order a brand-new shining seven-piece chrome suite.

  Dear Granny Tracks,

  This week Mother chopped some of the furniture while we were at school. I am not supposed to put this in the letter. She dragged the furniture down to the river and made a bonfire. Father was very mad but Mother was mad, too. Eaton’s truck came and now we have a new table-and-chair set in the kitchen.

  I have a best friend, now. Her name is Mimi. She is Catholic so she gets to stay in the village to go to the French school and the Catholic church. Everyone in Mimi’s family is short. Mimi’s feet are only size four. Mother says Lyd’s feet grow longer every time the clock ticks.