Leaning, Leaning Over Water

by Frances Itani

  “I ran away so I could meet you,” I’d said into the phone. I thought I was going to cry. “I’m in a lot of trouble.”

  “I didn’t ask you to run away,” he said. He definitely sounded chilly.

  “What about Lyd’s date? Where’s he?”

  “He’s with someone else. I don’t think he’ll want to leave now.”

  “You’d better bring someone,” I shouted. “We’re at Herbie’s and we’re going to wait fifteen minutes and after that, the hell with you!” I slammed down the phone and went back inside.

  Leo screeched into Herbie’s parking lot and spun the wheels. There was someone in the back of the car and as soon as Lyd and I saw his head we knew he was going to be short.

  “Jesus Poêle!” Lyd said. “Who’s that?”

  His name was Willard and he was five inches shorter than Lyd. This didn’t seem to bother him at all and he grinned as he jumped out and opened the back door.

  Halfway in, I smelled something as I slid across the front seat. The radio was tuned to the cowboy station, pounding at top volume. Leo was staring straight ahead. There was a brown bag on the floor, at his feet. As soon as we shut the doors he swerved onto the road and hit the gas pedal. Right away Lyd said, “Don’t go so fast.”

  I turned around and saw her at one end of the seat, Willard at the other, the winter coat between them. Leo leaned forward and then handed the brown bag over the back of the seat.

  “You guys aren’t supposed to be drinking in the car,” Lyd said. “If you’re going to drink, let me out.”

  We were on country road now, a long dark stretch between farms. It was a road we knew well because for years we’d been bussed this way to one-room schools during our elementary grades. The dance hall was still a couple of miles away.

  “Slow down,” Lyd said. “I told you I want out. Tell him to slow down,” she said to me.

  Leo reached back for the brown bag and steered with one hand. I’d never noticed before how thick his neck was, how square his jaw. Wills, I thought. Now it’s Leo’s will, set against the rest of us. The words cradle robber jumped into my head and I stared at him as if he’d just swooped down to Earth to scoop me up. I had a sudden urge to tell Lyd about the box of cups and saucers multiplying in the trunk but I didn’t dare turn around. I wanted Lyd to shut up because she was making matters worse. I wanted to get to the dance hall, have our two dances and leave, though I had no idea where we’d go after that.

  A momentary image of Father tracking us flitted through my mind. Maybe he’d gone past while we were at Herbie’s and he was already at the dance. Maybe he’d alerted the village policeman, old Rouge Gorge with the tin star. Maybe he was just waking up now, in the maroon chair. But somehow, I couldn’t put him through the next moves. I could not create a picture of him opening our bedroom door, pushing at the lumps under the covers, suspicious because Lyd and I had gone to bed early. I could not put a face or an expression to these acts. I could only see the back of his head, hear his knuckles tapping at our bedroom door.

  We were coming to the one long curve on Skinner’s Road. There was a black barn on the left, a dairy farm at the end of a lane on the right.

  “Don’t be a jerk!” Lyd shouted from behind. “You’re going too fast. Stop the damn car!”

  Leo pressed his foot to the gas pedal in response, and passed the brown bag to Willard just as we entered the curve. And lost control. We went into a long skid on the wrong side of the road and sudden startling headlights exploded in our faces. Leo jammed the brakes and my body lifted forward. As I bumped the mirror I felt his hand reach out and grab my head from behind. I flew back against the seat and stayed there.

  We were tilted in the ditch, and though the car was terrifyingly still I could hear sounds of shifting gravel. The other car had landed in the opposite ditch, each car having displaced the other without touching. A man and woman Father’s age were coming towards us. They were holding on to each other and seemed to be walking and walking but never reaching our side of the road. I looked to my left and saw Lyd outside the car holding her coat and one yellow shoe. Her mouth was open and she was banging the shoe against the window on Leo’s side as if she were going to use it to kill him. She hurled it over the top of the car and it disappeared into the night. My head moved towards Leo then, and I saw him staring down into his right hand. He was holding something that looked like black fur and he was clearly astonished and horrified by what he saw. I couldn’t make out what it was but some part of me recognized my ponytail just as he began to shout. He was shaking his hand as if the thing were alive, and he dropped the fistful of hair to the floor. Willard was at the side window, peering back into the car. I hadn’t heard either him or Lyd get out. We were alive, all of us. The man and woman were still walking towards us, even though their car wasn’t more than thirty feet away. I couldn’t stop seeing events as unconnected parts. Sounds were tunnelled and delayed. Anything I might have known before this moment seemed far away and lost.

  And then, everything speeded up. Leo was out of the car. I slid under the steering wheel and he pulled me up to the rim of the ditch. My head felt lighter. I kept rubbing my fingers against the bump on my forehead. Voices were shouting. Willard was pounding his fist against the rear fender. Threats and accusations were hurled. Lyd was begging the man and woman to drive us home. Leo fell silent and stared off into space.

  “He’s in shock,” the woman said. “He’s all right. Let someone else come and pull him out of the ditch.” She was furious. Her husband went back across the road and managed to back his own car out with ease. It didn’t seem to be damaged, although there was dust on the doors and windshield. He rolled down the window and called out, “I’ve got your licence, buddy. You were doing double speed. You’ll be lucky I don’t report you to the police. It’s a miracle we’re alive, every one of us.”

  His wife said, “Come on, girls, get in the back. What on earth are you doing with someone who drives like that, and at this time of night? Your mothers would have a fit. Do they know where you are? Tell us where you live and we’ll take you home.”

  “Our mother is dead,” Lyd said. She said it just like that. “We live with our father. We’re sisters and we live in the same house.”

  I could not think where that might be.

  Lyd gave directions from the back seat and spread the winter coat over the two of us, tucking in the edges. As we drove away, I turned. I saw Leo looking down at Willard and Willard looking up at Leo as if they’d never before seen each other, as if they’d found themselves together in a ditch on a new planet, a place they were visiting for the first time.

  “Awwh, for God’s sake, these girls don’t have a mother,” the woman said. Her hand reached towards and then pulled away from her husband’s shoulder. He was holding the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles shone white, even in the interior darkness of the car. There was silence and then she said, between her teeth, “No wonder. But if those two young men had been sons of mine, I’d have knocked their blocks off. I smelled liquor, too. Did you smell liquor?” But her husband didn’t answer.

  When we reached our dirt road by the river, it occurred to me to remember that we were fugitives returned. A long time ago, we’d been ordinary sisters living in this house. The man insisted on driving us to the door and even offered to speak to Father, but we persuaded him that we weren’t hurt at all. I looked boldly at him as if daring him to get out of the car. “Our father goes to bed early,” I said. “He doesn’t like us to wake him.” I could see a lamp shining from the living room as I spoke. “Thanks for driving us home.”

  The porch was silent. The front of the house looked the same as always. Lyd and I stood still, expecting Father to burst through the door and come roaring down the steps. Nothing happened. We waited a few more seconds and then, instinctively, we crouched down and ran along the side of the house. We’d left the window open and now Lyd shoved the blue coat at me and climbed. Inside, she listened, put a finger to he
r lips and reached down to haul me up. When I got over the sill I saw that she was wearing only one shoe. She took it off and lowered it to the wastebasket.

  Something was lifting. I dared to feel safety, mercy, acquittal, release. We stripped off our clothes and dropped them to the floor and slipped into our big double bed. As if the moment had been choreographed, we heard Father stir in his chair and walk through the front of the house as he turned out the lights and went to his room.

  “You didn’t get your other shoe,” I whispered. “It landed in the field.”

  “I don’t care,” said Lyd. “I hate the damn shoes anyway.”

  “We could find it if we went back,” I said. “It would glow in the dark.”

  We tried to laugh but we couldn’t.

  “We’ll have to go back to the Curtain of Dread,” Lyd said. “When I save enough money. You’re coming with me.”

  “I know,” I said.

  It was only when I started to tell her about Leo staring into the fistful of black hair that we began to let go. We shook with hysteria and mourned the ponytail, and Lyd made me describe, over and over, the look on Leo’s face as he dropped what he must have believed was my scalp, which lay curled like a dead animal on the car floor. We laughed about Willard coming up to Lyd’s armpit, and how it was a good thing she hadn’t had to lead him around the dance floor. We laughed about plates being the next bonus at the drive-in, how Leo would soon have a set of four to place before his square-jawed children who would never look like me. But even while we laughed, we did not gloat. We did not once mention the rules of the house, and we did not mention running away. We had got away with something very big and we knew this. And we knew, as we fell into silence, that what we had got away with had nothing to do with the way we had deceived our father.

  INTERPROVINCIAL

  1959

  The wind roared in our ears all the way home from Darley. Father refused to shut his window and said he had to have air. Eddie was riding shotgun. The window on his side was down, too. Lyd and I tried to lip-read in the back; we couldn’t hear a thing over the wind.

  “It’s no use,” her lips exaggerated. She had to form the words three times before I understood. Then we got into it.

  “He’s upset,” I mouthed. “The funeral.”

  “He’s always upset these days,” said Lyd’s lips. “Weird.” She jabbed a finger into the back of the driver’s seat and made twirling motions. The inside of our Chevy was turquoise, even the back of the seats. It was our first car. It was one year old and it had fins.

  “I felt that,” said Father. “Cut it out, whatever you’re doing back there.”

  “Did he cry?” I asked Lyd. I dragged two fingers down my cheeks.

  “Don’t think so,” said the lips.

  The call had come while we were at supper. The Giant Ant in tears; Grampa King, dead. We sat in silence and listened to Father’s side of the conversation.

  Grampa’s heart had stopped after he’d done a day’s work. He’d eaten his supper and was sitting in his chair about to darn a pair of wool socks. He’d put the darning egg inside the sock and dropped the sock to the floor. When Uncle Ewart heard the crack he looked up. Grampa King had leaned into his chair, dead.

  “Egg?” Father said into the phone. “Darning egg?”

  At the funeral parlour, Father and Uncle Ewart, the Giant Ant and Uncle Wash, were directed to an alcove that faced the coffin; their grief was meant to be separate. The rest of us sat in pews in the main room, also facing the coffin. Granny Tracks had come, “Out of respect,” she told us, and sat beside me, scrunching my right hand between both of hers. Lorne, the hired hand, was in the pew behind. The room was filled with people I didn’t know; there were men standing at the back. Grampa King had been dressed in a navy-blue suit and there was a red splotch over one eyebrow. His hair was neat and I thought he’d been made to look like an imposter. For one thing, he’d never worn anything but overalls. I was pleased to see that beneath his top shirt button, a safety pin was holding him together.

  When it was time to close the coffin just before the service began, a curtain was pulled across the alcove so the eyes of Father and Uncle Ewart and the Giant Ant would not see the lid coming down on their father. Granny Tracks had taken a dizzy spell at that very moment and I had to help her outside so she could breathe. Lorne followed us out. The three of us sat on the steps and missed most of my grandfather’s funeral. We got to hear the last hymn when Lorne propped a stone to hold the door ajar. Everyone inside was singing “How sweet the hour of closing day.” Lome and Granny hummed in harmony until the Amen.

  I’d been to one funeral before, and that was Mother’s. The memory I held of that was of Rebecque’s voice overhead, telling me what to do. The kindness of her had kept us all moving. We’d had to drive through Hull in a long black car, following the hearse from the church to the graveyard, up the hill. The car had moved so slowly and smoothly I kept thinking we weren’t moving. My entire Sunday school class had been at the service, and most of my classmates from St. Pierre, too. There had been no place to get away; we just had to keep moving.

  “The head has many aches,” Granny Tracks said, and she pulled herself up from the top step and brushed her dress. Her face looked as if it had been chalked. Lome nodded in gloom. We went back into the funeral parlour, past the door with the removable sign that said Whitley King. I did not believe that that Whitley King was my grandfather.

  When we returned to the farm to eat and drink, Uncle Ewart called Lyd and me and Eddie upstairs to Grampa’s room. He raised the lid of the trunk at the foot of Grampa’s bed and lifted out a heavy Bible.

  “This was your grandmother’s,” he said. “It’s been in the trunk all these years. I don’t think your Grampa ever took it out. There isn’t anyone here who walks through a church door more than twice a year, Christmas and Easter, sometimes not even Easter, so you’d better take it home with you.”

  He handed the Bible to Lyd because she was the eldest. It was worn along the edges and had a pebbled black cover. I looked at Uncle Ewart, who seemed big and uncomforted, and I thought of how he listened to “01’ Man River” on Grampa’s wind-up gramophone, and how every night after supper he washed down his food with a glass of milk from his own cow.

  Lyd had the Bible open in the back seat while Father raced through one Ontario town after another, heading for Quebec. He wanted to get home before dark. He’d missed two days’ work but could not take a third because of his new job. “Can’t take the chance,” he said. “I’ve been at it less than a year. Those people in Ottawa want to know that I’ll show up.”

  Father now worked in a glass tower at a big General Motors car dealer across the Interprovincial Bridge, in downtown Ottawa. He told us that bookkeeping was better than munitions and trays any day.

  “My intimate relations with the fleurs-de-lis have ended,” he announced, the day the factory closed in the village. “The postwar prosperity I’ve been reading about all these years has not dipped down to the bottom of Quebec. Darkness encroaching,” he added. “Tunnel narrowing, ahead.” Then he and Duffy disappeared to the hotel and stayed out half the night.

  Father was without work only four days. The car dealer needed a bookkeeper to replace the one they’d just fired because the accounts had been jimmied. Father heard about the job on a Saturday, when he was riding the bus.

  He needed a car to get back and forth to Ottawa because he said he couldn’t breathe through the dust that rose up through the bus floors. The past winter, he’d bought a ‘57 Chevy off the used-car lot; the used-car manager told him that in its first year and a half it had been owned by two nuns. I had my learner’s permit now but I could already drive. I was just waiting for my birthday so I could get my licence in the summer. Lyd said she didn’t want a licence. She didn’t care if she ever drove.

  She knocked me in the ribs and pointed to the King Bible. “Look,” said her lips. “Read.”

  In the centre were two
pages marked Family Register. On the left someone had filled in the birthdates of Aunt Lucy, Uncle Ewart and Father. It was not easy to imagine the event of Father’s birth. Beside Father’s date, a note had been added: Born with a caul.

  Lyd raised her eyebrows and mouthed, “What?”

  I read the entry again and shrugged. She put her finger to her lips and rolled her eyes in Father’s direction. “Don’t even ask,” said the silent voice.

  Born with a caul. I said it over and over to myself but could not make sense of it. I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to read Lyd’s lips any more. Instead, I thought of Grampa King in his navy suit. I tried to think back and remember him the way he’d been, a long time ago, when we’d moved away from Darley.

  We had stood on the platform at the station, the train puffing beside us. Both sides of the family had been there to see us off. Granny Tracks had clutched Mother as if we were moving two thousand and not two hundred miles away.

  “Can you say any French words?” Grampa King had asked. “You’ll have to learn oui and non.”

  “I know more complicated words than that,” I told him. “I’ve been practising. No one in Darley knows one word of French so I’ve been teaching it to myself. You run the words together fast until they sound like this: Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.”

  “I know ooo la la,” said Grampa King, over my head. He was staring into the vanishing point in the tracks. “I learned it in the First Great War. That is also the place I learned the gesture of hands.” He looked down at his own.

  The train was making jerking noises and we raised our feet to the steps and climbed aboard. When we were all inside I lowered my window and stuck out an arm, ready to wave. We were so high up, Granny Tracks looked small standing on the platform below. She glared meaningfully at me. “You and your sister prepare yourselves to mind your p’s and q’s when you grow up,” she said.