Leaning, Leaning Over Water

by Frances Itani

  “Come on, Mary Meagher,” he said. “Get up out of that bed and tell me what’s wrong.”

  “Mind your p’s and q’s, Randall Church,” Granny told him. “It’s time for me to die. Can’t you tell when a woman’s finished living her life?” She scrunched into her pillow as if that might help her disappear.

  “You’re about as ready to die as I am, Mary Meagher,” Dr. Church said. He seemed peeved and irritated, as if they’d done battle before and he’d remembered that he always lost. He stuck his thermometer under her tongue but Granny pulled it out when she saw Lyd and me in the doorway. She held it as though it might get away from her and fly through the air.

  “What are you two gawking at?” she said. “Cover that mirror unless you want me staring back at you after I’m dead.” She added, almost petulantly, “My spirit will get tangled up when it tries to leave the room.” She sounded sick of the whole business, and turned her face to the wall.

  Dr. Church spoke to Mother downstairs. Granny did have a fever but he wasn’t sure what was wrong. He’d listened to her chest and thought she might be getting pneumonia. Summer pneumonia. Mother was to coax fluids into her, as much as Granny would drink. Dr. Church stopped at the sink on his way through the kitchen and ran his own drink of tap water before he squeezed back through the doorway.

  In Granny’s room that night I listened as a train chugged past. Vibrations trembled through the metal of our grandparents’ bed. After that, silence.

  “There’s one in here,” Lyd sang out in a half-whisper.

  “Cut it out, Lyd. I’m trying to sleep. You’re making it up, anyway. The whole thing is a joke.”

  “It’s a spirit spider,” she said. Her voice was enormously calm.

  I didn’t respond. But I lay on my back with my eyes open and tried to peer at the corners of the ceiling through the dark.

  “It’s probably Grandfather Meagher.”

  “You’re going to get it,” I said. It was the worst threat I could think of. It was our last-resort threat, though it was meaningless.

  “I’ll bet fifty dollars there’s one in here,” Lyd said.

  “I don’t have fifty dollars and neither do you.” Lyd didn’t have thirty-nine cents, the price of a Tangee lipstick she’d hoped to buy and secret away that afternoon. We’d walked down Main Street to the Metropolitan and had slashed samples across the inside of our wrists. Lyd liked Tangee because it was what Mother wore; it was supposed to take on the colour of your lips—one colour suits all.

  “I’ll bet you five cents then,” Lyd said. “I know there’s a spider; I can hear it in the windowsill.”

  “Okay. Five cents. If you swear you didn’t see one before we went to bed.”

  “Cross my heart and spit. Listen! I hear it now, crawling up from the dead.”

  I slipped barefoot to the floor and tiptoed to the window. Lyd stood at the light switch, ready to flick it on and off.

  As soon as the room flashed to brightness, I shifted the blind. A tiny metallic-looking spider darted under the sash. The light went out.

  “Well?”

  “That little thing wasn’t Grandfather Meagher.”

  “He probably surfaced from the grave to see how Granny’s doing.” She turned her back to me and taunted: “You owe me five cents.”

  Granny Tracks was delirious the next day. Uncle Weylin and Aunt Arra drove over from their home to see what they could do. Dr. Church came back and there was consultation about moving Granny to hospital. For now, everyone agreed, she’d be kept at home until she was free of the fever. But Mother, who’d been up all night, was tired and worried.

  We sat with Granny part of the morning while Mother tried to sleep.

  “The bricks, the bricks,” Granny called out. She was looking our way but didn’t seem to see us. “Stack them on the road.” Her voice cracked. “Can’t you hear what I’m telling you?” Clumps of grey hair had become matted and were sticking straight out, revealing bare patches on a scalp spun with arteries.

  She was calm in the evening and Mother persuaded her to take some chicken broth through a straw. But that night and all the next day she was back into delirium.

  The entire hollyhock house reeked of onion plaster and camphorated oil. There was no escaping it. Layers of odour rose and sank, clinging to our bodies, upstairs and down. Mother had been weeping in the kitchen over onions that she’d sliced and sautéed and mixed with vinegar and hot mustard. While I watched, she warmed the camphorated oil and spread the mixture across large squares of torn sheet. As she worked, she kept on crying. When the onions were spread evenly, she darned the squares of sheet together with yarn. The finished remedy looked like soggy cloth sandwiches. Two of these were flattened across and then peeled away from Granny’s chest and back, every twelve hours.

  We tried to get Granny to suck ice chips and we rolled her over and put a strip of rubber sheet under the onion plasters and rolled her back again.

  I was trying to help Mother as much as I could but she seemed distant. Filled with a sorrow that could not be reached. We were all worried about Granny but there was sorrow in the house, too. A heaviness all around. I asked Lyd if she’d noticed and she said, “It’s the grief. It’s probably because Grandfather Meagher died in this house. Mother loved her father, didn’t she?” There was one framed photograph of Grandfather Meagher that hung on the dining-room wall. No matter where we moved in the room, his eyes stared at us under heavy brows.

  The next night there was no thought of anyone sleeping. Granny’s fever had not broken. Mother insisted that the onions had never failed and, grimly, kept on. Granny was wet with perspiration and again we changed her linen. We were in a state between wakefulness and sleep; heavy fatigue had slipped over us all. The three of us dozed uncomfortably in armchairs we’d squeezed around the two narrow beds in the sickroom. My joints were stiff and aching. In the middle of the night Granny hauled herself to a sitting position, bolt upright, and shouted, “What’s the news, good or bad?” The onion plasters peeled off her as she rose.

  We were so startled and so fatigued Mother and Lyd and I looked at one another and began to laugh—huge guffawing laughs—until tears rolled down our cheeks. Mother laughed the loudest. Granny Tracks held her tongue while she watched the three of us and then said disgustedly, “Damned fools,” which set us off again. She lowered herself onto the sheet and dropped into a deep and prolonged sleep. The next day she began to get better. She refused to talk about her illness; it was as if it hadn’t been.

  I’d begun to get used to the trains next to Granny’s. It was comforting to lie there and listen as they pulled out of Darley, their thin mournful wails trailing through the night. What I did not like was the sound of footsteps crossing the veranda when someone passed by outside in the dark. Lyd and I lay in the double bed staring at the ceiling. Heavy footsteps walked across the room. Our room, the front bedroom, was directly over the street.

  “This place is starting to give me the creeps,” Lyd said.

  I tried to will myself to sleep. Footsteps crossed the room again. I felt Lyd’s body tense beside me. Moments later—it seemed like moments later—I opened my eyes.

  Lyd was sitting up staring at what I now saw at the foot of the bed. A greenish glow surrounded the figure of a man I did not know. He seemed edgeless, somehow, but no part of him moved. His eyes glowered from under heavy brows. Though he hadn’t spoken, I knew he wanted us out of Granny’s bed. He wanted Granny back in her own room.

  I heard my voice give up a shout. The green glow faded and he was gone. Lyd ran to the light switch and turned it on. It was ten past four in the morning. We’d been asleep for hours. My heart was beating so quickly, my mouth so dry, I wasn’t able to speak.

  “We have to get out of Granny’s bed,” Lyd said.

  We didn’t talk about how we both knew this. Maybe, I told myself, maybe we shared the same bad dream. I tried to push the dream out of my mind. But there was something else, something about the heavy
brows, that I couldn’t forget. We didn’t want to stay in the room any longer so we dragged the blankets down the tower stairs and spent the hours until daybreak huddled together on the couch.

  Lorne was at the curb, in the Ford, waiting for us before breakfast. He’d brought Granny Tracks some tea from legumes he’d grown himself. He’d roasted the leaves and pods on cookie sheets in the farm-oven and packed them into a biscuit tin. Mother tried to persuade him to have eggs and bacon with us but he refused. He handed over the tea and stared at a patch in the linoleum.

  Mother took advantage of Lome’s unannounced visit to send Lyd and me back to the farm. She was going to stay until Granny could manage the stairs and, after that, Aunt Arra would take over.

  “Tell your father I’ll get to the farm when I can,” she said. “You two help Aunt Lucy with the meals, and keep an eye on Eddie.” I knew she would stay until she was no longer needed. But when I looked at the dark shadows around her eyes, I knew she had fallen into the heaviness of that house and would have no chance to escape, or to get away.

  Lyd and I gathered our clothes and changed the sheets and helped Granny back to her own big room. Sitting in bed in a knitted shrug, drinking Lome’s tea, she didn’t look at all like delirious Granny Tracks smothered under onion plasters. Lome would not come upstairs but Granny sent him a message. “If a person can get over the dog, he can get over the tail,” she said. Lome nodded at this when we went down and told him. I guess Granny Tracks had decided she wasn’t finished with living after all.

  Lyd sat by the window; I was in the middle between her and Lome. I was watching Lome’s hands and feet because I half expected him to stop the car and start swearing. I was afraid he’d order me to take the wheel and drive through town. I didn’t want to drive but I needn’t have worried. Once we were out of town and on the Fifth Line, Lome turned to Lyd and said, “The spider weaves its own web without the help of passers-by.” He did not say this unkindly and I was afraid that Lyd would demand, “What, Lome, what! For Cripes’ sake, say what you mean.”

  But she did not. She stared out her window, and I stared straight ahead. Lome had nothing to say to me. No grudge and no unfinished business. He drove along the gravel road, and calm descended beneath the blanket of his silence.

  I began to wish that we would never get to the farm; that we could suspend ourselves between the homes of our separate grandparents and go on driving like this without ever stopping. Squeezed as I was between Lome and Lyd, I felt the warming sun through the windshield and I smelled country: the scent of drying hay, cow manure, the mixture of weeds and crops and long grasses drifting through the open window. I pressed my back into the seat and closed my eyes.

  I began to think of our river at home in Quebec; the way I walked to the cliff and stood looking down over rapids. I thought about how I sometimes chose one spot on a single wave and how I tried to hold that spot. No matter how hard I tried or how many times, my eyes shifted in the direction of current. Against my will, beyond my will, I could not focus on that single spot. I couldn’t stop the perpetual motion, not for a fragment of a second. I knew that despite all of this, as soon as we left Darley and returned home, I’d go back and stand on that cliff and I’d try once more to seize the imaginary spot. To slow it down, even if it were only long enough for me to believe that this might be possible.

  BOLERO

  1955

  The following spring, after break-up, the logs came down, the river dark with timber. Lyd and I went to bed on a Friday night and when we awoke the next morning there was a hush over the river, logs coming and coming in that steady inevitable flow. After breakfast I followed the shore away from the house and up towards higher ground. I stood on the cliff watching. The river narrowed at the beginning of the rapids and the mass dipped like a broad dark raft heading into fast water, whitecaps tossing the logs singly into the air and then catching and concealing them again.

  As always, strays drifted to shore in front of the house. Most logs were round and smooth and stamped with the company brand but some still had bark attached, reminding that these were trees after all. We left the strays to sit in the sun and later went back to peel and crack the bark. During the following weeks, right into early summer, we collected insects with latticed wings folded flat the lengths of their backs, and used them as bait for bass.

  The place we fished bass was below the rapids. Past morning glory and blunt-petalled wild rose. Past the cliff and the long meandering ruins of the old hydro wall, the crumbling prop that hemmed the point of land where the river curved at the fiercest part of the rapids. The first day we’d moved to Quebec, Father had taken us to see the wall. “Someone had the vision and imagination to harness this energy,” he said. “But that was last century, not this. And I’m going to tell you right now. Don’t lean on the wall, because it’s old and cracked and someone’s going to go with it.”

  Nothing could keep us away. We climbed the wall, straddled it, dug at it, pushed it, and when the water was not too high, walked it. We also feared it.

  After the wall, the river calmed again and booms were strung out, chained end to end. We were not fooled by the calm. Down below was a bottomless place with tough roots twining through mud. Where weeds and bushes snared logs and where bodies drifted after they’d been tossed through rapids. Our paperboy had drowned in these rapids. Two winters ago, one of the girls who lived in the rooms behind Le Loup’s store had also drowned. Both bodies had been found down below, stuffed under the booms.

  It was Lyd who’d spied the hooks on a rainy day when we were taking turns with our friends climbing the ladder rungs and jumping from the attic platform to the barn floor below. It was shortly after we’d moved—after Father had bought the house from Duffy. Lyd had found the hooks buried in dust behind an old storm door. Bulging pieces of iron with three great curves attached to a braided rope.

  “Bodies!” Lyd was the one who dared the rest of us to do what she would not do herself but she commanded our attention because she was the eldest. I had just jumped to the boards and my leg-bones were wobbling from the impact. I climbed back up and heard her drop into her scaring voice. “Grappling hooks for bodies,” she said quickly. “Bodies all stiff and water-bloated. The men drag the bottom to hook a shoulder or a leg. They lower the hooks from rowboats and make a huge splash.” Her arms dropped iron through a black surface of river we all knew and imagined. “One man rows, two at the end of the boat drag.”

  How did she know this? Father hadn’t told her because, later, he refused to talk about the hooks when we asked. But he set his mouth grimly and went with the men when they came to the back door after break-up, in the spring. It turned out that everyone in St. Pierre knew that the village grappling hooks were kept in Duffy’s old barn.

  After that, one of our summer games while swimming in the river with our friends became “Dead Body.” Someone would dip beneath the surface and remember. Would rise with cheeks puffed and shriek, “Dead body below! Dead body!” Our legs ran thickly through water and we scraped knees and feet in the race for shore. Each of us had seen the bloated features of the waterlogged, had felt the hand of the drowned tighten around an ankle; each of us knew that wherever we might place a foot we would step on a body with swollen sealed eyes.

  In fact, we never swam down below, by the booms. Our only swimming was in the cove in front of the house, shallow and quiet with its own current but safely above the rapids. It was where we had learned to dog-paddle. It was where Mother viewed the river as a danger that could sweep away her children’s limp rag bodies into its current. She had never learned to swim and sat on shore on a towel, wearing shorts, a blouse buttoned down the front, the tails of it tied in a knot at her waist. She stayed there, sunning her legs, crooking a finger at us when we waded out too far. Standing up and hollering when we pretended not to see.

  It was the first week of July and our parents announced that they were having a corn roast. Not at the usual site on broad shale in front o
f the house but following the bank up onto the high flat part of the cliff where there were twelve white pines, grown tall and full with their bundles of soft needles. Quite naturally, we’d always called the place the Pines. It was halfway to the wall. Below the cliff were the first whitecaps, the place where true fast water began. The river was still high from spring run-off but the change of current could be seen from this very spot.

  Eddie had left for Ontario as soon as school was out, and was now at Grampa King’s farm. Lyd and I had been helping Father and Duffy and Roy, from the club, collect driftwood and the smallest stray logs along shore. We pretended to find logs that were not branded, and dragged them onto the rocks to dry.

  The men did not have their own club; it was the second annual party of the sewing club of their wives—and Rebecque, Duffy’s girlfriend. It was the summer the women made cotton sundresses with bolero tops that came halfway down their backs, with close-fitting sleeves ending just above the elbow. Clever cover-ups with a classic look was printed on the pattern.

  Recently, on a scorching day, Roy’s wife, Mona, of the little feet, had been shopping in Hull when a policeman approached and advised her that she must put on her jacket. She was carrying her new cotton bolero over her arm. Her shoulders should not be bare, said the policeman, even though he could see that the sundress was held up by a two-inch width of straps. She could be fined fifty dollars or spend a month in jail.

  The women of the club were buzzing with this story.