Leaning, Leaning Over Water

by Frances Itani

  —Maura, beneath those waves.

  —Maura, beneath that terror.

  Woke and remembered that it was summer, not spring, when Maura drowned.

  Terror, nonetheless.

  In the evening, Father went to the river for his walk and I watched from the porch window. He stepped into our old rowboat, manoeuvred around some stray logs jammed in shallow water, and rowed upriver to the end of the cove. Then he turned around and rowed right back. He stood on shore looking through binoculars. I gave up and went back to my books. I did not have one speck of brain space to spare. But after school the next day, I read:

  Stood on shore so I could pay attention to the view—the one I’ll always call up behind my eyes. Daylight fading, checked the sky, east towards rapids, then west. Stars becoming visible. Lowered binoculars but something made me raise them again. It was early evening dusk. Have to get this down—though I don’t expect to understand. Crazyman. What Maura’s mother used to call me. Crazyman. Probably still does, behind my back. Lost. I lost her daughter. Who had a darkness of her own. She would never tell me what it was but she brought it to the marriage and there was darkness between us.

  This is what I saw and I will write this down. Stood on shore and found myself separate from and facing my own planet. Crazy is right. It happened so fast, I remember only the loudness of my voice as I called out to the curve of Earth.

  Shouted when I recognized the outline of continents. Cried out for South America and its perfect shape. All around me, stars drifted close. Unfamiliar constellations so brilliant I couldn’t have imagined. Heavens full of movement and light. One constellation stretched out, another pulled in close, shimmering with light. Tried to store what my eyes were seeing. Afraid I would not be able to recall.

  Then.

  Had to be asleep to see such a thing.

  Above—in the sky—an egg. A giant egg, vast and luminous, tilted above Earth.

  An EGG.

  Must have fallen asleep.

  The egg began to fade. When it shifted, I saw what it really was. A skull in the sky—an immense fleshless skull. The skull dissolved upward into the background of stars. As it disappeared—I heard Maura. As soon as I heard her voice, I knew it had always been there.

  —Protects. The caul. Protects. The caul protects.

  I called out to prove that I was awake. I WAS NOT LYING ON THE BANK. Looked down at my feet to see where I was. I was in the same spot, standing at the edge of my own river.

  Feet were on shale.

  Shale is not Shield.

  Whatever I heard and saw, I’ll never speak of again. Walked back to the house and felt like an old old man.

  It was too much. It was my turn to cook supper and I was banging things around when Father came in. I didn’t care if he was crazy or not and I didn’t care if he’d gone to work. Eddie came in, and then Lyd. Lyd hadn’t read the latest. They were all in the kitchen.

  “What are we having?” Lyd said.

  “Egg,” I said. “We’re having E - G - G.”

  Father looked startled, then bewildered.

  “And potatoes and a can of peas. The eggs are scrambled. And hurry up, because after supper I have to keep on studying.”

  Lyd came to the porch where I was working. Father was at the river. We could see him sitting on shore.

  “I found out what was on the yellow foolscap,” she said. “Look. This is disaster. I think he’s trying to advertise for a woman. He’s really upset. Everything is going wrong.” She set a double sheet from a tabloid in front of me. Clipped to it was the yellow page in Father’s printing. At the top, he’d made rambling notes to himself:

  Used to ignore these. Thought they were for the insane, the syphilitic and the needy. Now I’ve read column after column, and I wonder. Ads full of pleas. I’m alone, yes, but have I ever used the word lonely} No one else does, either. Who are the men in Partners Wanted? Do they sit in rooms by themselves and fill in their own descriptions? Makes me want to rage and weep at the same time. Everyone’s attractive and interesting; everyone has a sense of humour, wants long walks or quiet talks or fast dancing. Or more. No matter who sends the SOS, the words are the same.

  What would I write if I composed a reply, mailed it to a box number? Have never tendered an anonymous version of myself.

  Widower: Loved his wife. Thinks she loved him though they hardly spoke of this to each other. (She drowned, centuries ago. Dropped off a cliff before they could get safely past middle age—Why?) Left to make decisions right or wrong, raised three children, two of them nearly grown. Wakes in a sweat at night wondering if they’ll survive. Has never travelled out of the two provinces bordering the Ottawa River. Not for lack of adventure; duties more pressing. Worked in munitions, aluminum trays and cars—blundered into all three. With eyes closed, knows how to create the perfect fleur-de-lis. Sometimes dreams long pale limbs of women twined round him in the dark. As a child, memorized every poem in the Ontario red readers. Can recall and recite any stanza of “Snow Bound,” not necessarily in winter. Feels like throwing in the noodle half the time. Heard wife’s voice coming out of the sky one night. Did not mention this or would have been committed. Sometimes we miss the message.

  “It’s sex,” Lyd said. “It’s just damned-well sex.” Sex was something she and I talked a lot about, these days. Every party we went to had “dancing in the dark,” with the lights turned out. Even at the church dances, everyone seemed to be groping. Several of the girls on the basketball team at school had given photos of themselves, in skimpy nylon pyjamas, to their boyfriends. It had become a sort of secret fad.

  “I don’t care if it’s sex or what it is,” I said. “I think Father’s incurable.”

  I was working on Le Petit Chèvre de Monsieur Seguin, for Oral French. After that, there was only an English exam left. I thought of using Father as the subject for my exam composition. Our teacher had told us we’d be allowed to write on any topic. I could change the names and call it fantasy. I’d already memorized the poems we’d covered during the term. With Father around I had never been unprepared for any poem thrown my way by any teacher.

  Later, I told myself, later—after the exams are over—I’ll sit down with Lyd and we’ll figure out a plan. We’ll tell Father we’ve read everything. We’ll come clean. Then I’ll leave home. He can be mad if he wants. Duffy will help him. We’ll talk to Duffy and Rebecque.

  Exams were finished. I had put my name in at the hospital in Ottawa and had a summer job as an assistant ward aide in the Outpatient Clinic. I was to start at the beginning of July. Lyd and Eddie and I were in the porch, feet up, telling stories. Eddie had just told us about a cave under the cliffs that he used to scrunch into when he was small enough to fit inside. Lyd and I were appalled.

  “You could have fallen in,” I told him. “The top of the cliff could have crumbled.” I thought of him curled up in some tight spot, staring down on dark waters below. Eddie’s secret.

  “You sound like Father,” said Eddie. “Exactly like Father.”

  “What would you have done if you’d fallen in?” I said. “You’d have gone right through the rapids.” I didn’t add that it was the very spot Mother had gone over. I didn’t have to.

  Father had walked to the hotel on rue Principale. He’d told us he’d check to see if Duffy was around, and he’d stay for one beer. It was almost dark and he hadn’t returned. A wind was coming up across the river and from where I sat I could see clouds banked on the other side. A half-moon was barely visible in the sky. Despite the wind, the evening air was soft and warm. I felt the summer stretching out before me.

  Lyd had been hired to work for the summer at Woolworth’s lunch counter on Sparks Street in Ottawa. She was to start her job the following week. She still didn’t know if she’d be working upstairs or down. Down was where invisible hands sent up stainless-steel bowls of egg salad, chicken salad, soft butter and cream. The bowls rose and fell on the shelves of a dumb waiter. We’d been watching them
for years from twirling stools before the counter. I imagined rows of women in hairnets, working beneath the pipes below, whipping things up for customers who ate club sandwiches and topped them off with banana splits, for dessert.

  There was a commotion at the curve of our road and I stood to watch as three cars swerved past the house and turned down to the river. The cars rattled over loose stones and screeched to a halt. Someone was shouting and I looked at Lyd’s face and saw that she, too, had recognized the voice of our father. The three of us tore out the screen door and down the front steps just as I saw him enter the river.

  Father was fully dressed and was wading towards a snarl of logs in the cove. Never once did he glance at the main current, a few feet away. His legs seemed unsteady as his shoes stumbled from rock to rock beneath the water. I couldn’t see Duffy anywhere.

  Father lunged with each step and thrashed out into deeper water, always making his way upriver. I knew the bottom there, what the waters opposing him would feel like against his chest as he leaned against the force of the river. The three of us were running down to the bank but by the time we got there Father was no more than a silhouette in the dark.

  He had waded to his waist and stood in one spot, now, and pulled his belt from the loops of his trousers. He snapped the belt in the air and held it taut between his hands. He leaned forward clumsily and strapped the belt to the log he’d freed from the underwater tangle. I saw him wrap his arms around the long dark shape.

  “Dad!” I shouted. “Dad!”

  We were yelling from shore, though the men from the cars hung back.

  “Tabernac,” I heard one of them say. “He took the bet, but he doesn’t think about his children.”

  Father turned his face towards shore momentarily, but he was so far out I couldn’t tell if he knew we were there or not. He shouted, but his words were lost in the wind.

  The current was whipping at his waist and his body seemed to be learning the balance of the log as it tilted into deeper water. He stretched lengthwise, bobbed under with the log and up again in a single splash. The two shapes merged as one and floated out into the current, vanishing towards the roar. The rapids he was heading into were more than eight feet high; he was the one who knew—he’d been teaching us about them for years. Already beyond the last place of safety, he had no choice but to go straight through before he would end up down below.

  The men on shore took to their cars on the run and headed for the split in the dirt road that would lead to the dead end below the rapids. Lyd and Eddie and I followed the short cut and raced through the Pines. I tried to glance at the river as we ran but all I could see in the dark and the moonlight were tips of white waves.

  We reached the end of the old hydro wall just after the men pulled up in their cars. There was shouting as they lined up the cars, headlights beaming over water. I thought of Mimi’s sister Pierrette, who’d once seen a miracle woman at the end of these rapids. I thought of Mimi and her entire family behind us and wondered if they were at the windows, staring at the commotion below.

  “Damned fool,” I heard.

  “Maudit. He’ll come out on wings, that one.”

  “Don’t count on it. This English knows the water.”

  I saw a log toss straight up out of the whitecaps. Then another. Eddie was between Lyd and me and I caught a glimpse of his face, tight-lipped and silent.

  In the headlights, shadows darted up from the waves and flicked along the surface of the river. Every one of us knew that Father had to be through the rapids by now. He would have been through before we’d reached the Pines. Even so, we stood there waiting.

  And then, I thought of something else. How the water swirled to shore and even seemed to change direction farther down, close to the edge of another protected cove. Bodies were found in the bottomless place beneath the booms between here and there, but what about someone who’d gone past, someone who’d survived?

  I made a dash for the path and ran farther down. And heard the rasp of my father, a soaked wet rasp to my right. He was striding through the waves, shedding sheets of water as he crossed the width of the lower cove and made his way back upriver. His belt was gone and his trousers torn. He staggered in the shallow water—and he fell. I thought I heard him curse as he went down but I wasn’t sure. I was in the river, shouting, when he hit the rocks, in water not even as high as his ankles.

  I tried to drag him to shore but he shook me off, saying there wasn’t a thing wrong with him. He’d shot the rapids on a log and had come through alive. But he’d cracked his knee against a sharp rock when he’d fallen, and now he couldn’t get up.

  “Damn you—damn you!” I yelled. “What are you trying to do? We were so scared. You should see Eddie’s face. He’s terrified. What’s the matter with you? Are you crazy? Don’t you know Mother drowned? Why are you trying to kill yourself?”

  He looked up for a moment as if he couldn’t think what to reply. And then, to my surprise, he rested his cheek back in the water as if he might stay there and sleep.

  “I’m not trying to kill myself,” he said out of the side of his mouth. “I’m not. I had to know if it was the fear.”

  I was soaked now, too, but refused to get into the car when a man on each side helped Father limp over so they could drive him home. Lyd sat with him on the back seat. Eddie and I ran home the same way we’d come, through the Pines. I kept thinking of Lyd’s face when she’d climbed in beside Father. She had looked as old as Granny Tracks.

  I wanted to reach home at the same time as the cars but when we got to the cliff Eddie began to cry. He slowed down and sobbed and sobbed as I’d never heard anyone sob, and he would not, or could not, stop.

  “Please, Eddie,” I said. “Stop crying. He didn’t drown. It was a stupid thing, that’s all. He was proving something to himself. Something about Mother. He didn’t drown, Eddie. He didn’t drown.”

  “He couldn’t drown!” Eddie yelled at me. He was mad and he was crying so hard his chest was heaving with hiccups. “He couldn’t drown, because of the caul!” he shouted. “It’s in the name book. If you’re born with the caul, you can’t drown. Didn’t you see what was written in the Bible Uncle Ewart gave us?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He wouldn’t stop crying and kept spluttering between sobs. “It’s in the name book. Mother’s old name book. I looked up caul at the beginning to see what it means.”

  But he would not stop crying.

  Father was dragging his leg across the living room when we returned to the house. The men were gone; the cars had roared back to the hotel. Lyd was behind Father, two feet behind, her arms stretched out towards him. And he fell a second time, just as Eddie and I entered the room. He collapsed in front of the long mirror, his face holding surprise, as if it had not known the presence of his legs when his body went down. The three of us leaned towards him, Eddie crying so hard the sound filled the entire house. Father tried to straighten but could only push himself as far as his hands and knees. He stayed that way, staring into the mirror that had once belonged to Duffy’s runaway wife.

  He seemed astonished to see his own white face at knee level. Eye stared into eye. Ignoring the reflection of the three of us behind, Father spoke—it was impossible to say whether to us or to himself. “This…” he said, and I remembered later that his voice had held not a trace of self-pity.

  “This…is the suffering part.”

  MOVING ON

  LEANING, LEANING OVER WATER

  1959

  Father’s knee had to be repaired in two stages and between operations he moved us out of Quebec. Most of his English friends had already left. Only Duffy remained. He would stick it out, he told Father, even though prosperity was across the river.

  I had taken my driver’s test and did most of the driving now, because Father was in an above-the-knee cast. It wasn’t the first time he’d been in a cast and he was able to get around, but driving he could not do. Duffy and Rebecque helpe
d us with the many trips to move the small things and after that we hired a man with a truck. Father had found a house in Ottawa South. From our windows there was no view of a river.

  We left the piano behind for Rebecque. She and Duffy were moving into our house, which Duffy was buying back from Father. Rebecque had begun to take piano lessons and loved to sit grandly before the old Heintzman, her hands sweeping the keys, searching out their deep rich tones.

  Before we left, Father stood in the empty living room and looked at me. “You’ve missed your calling,” he said, and closed the lid over the keyboard of my piano. I thought of him standing behind me, bleating out “The Whiffenpoof,” and I was not sorry. I had not missed my calling; I did not know what my calling was.

  When I went to Mimi’s house to say goodbye, Mimi was filled with an excitement of her own. The bus she took from work every day to get home to St. Pierre had added a new route, a diversion down a long treed road that led to the Hull jail. She had peered into the barred windows, she said, every time the bus turned into the loop, trying to get a look at a prisoner, even though she knew now that the cells were at the back. The guards who worked at the jail took the bus at their change of shift. Several months ago, one of them, Rosaire, had begun to sit with her at the back of the bus. They’d been going out ever since. This weekend they were going to a club in Gatineau to hear western music.

  We hugged and I wondered if we’d see each other after I moved away. I rarely bumped into her now.

  Mimi shrugged. “Us,” she said, “we’ll never move.” She swept her hands up and out, to encompass the whole big family house.

  I had started my own work at the Ottawa hospital, where Father’s second knee operation was scheduled. I had not told Father I was leaving. I was tempted to go back to school because, in Ontario, I would be placed in grade thirteen, skipping a whole year. But I had finished high school in Quebec, and had made up my mind. Eddie would be entering grade seven, the same as if he’d stayed in Quebec. Already, he had met a boy his age on our street. Lyd had the summer to work at Woolworth’s before she returned for her second year at the business school.