A Song for Nettie Johnson

by Gloria Sawai

  I looked up at the black sky and the stars. The air was cold on my face. And, oh, the beauty! I could hardly breathe.

  ~

  The Ground You Stand On

  One Saturday in spring, when the brother was twelve and the sister was nine, they climbed the ladder in the church tower to the belfry. The tower was dim except for a yellow square of sunlight far above where the tunnel opened onto the bell deck. It was dusty, smelling of old feathers and bird droppings.

  The sister was first. The brother followed below. She knew, climbing in her pink and flaring skirt, why he wanted to be second, and soft slender pleasures curled about in the centre of her stomach. But as she stepped up on the wooden rungs, clinging with stiff hands to the bars, she scraped her feet against each rung, sending bits of dust and shrivelled bird droppings down on her brother’s face, his upturned nose.

  When they reached the top he shoved her with one free hand through the opening into the belfry and followed close behind. They lay on their stomachs, clutching with arms and thighs at the safety of the deck. Their heads leaned over the edge, their feet rested under the great iron bell suspended above, there was no railing, the height made them dizzy.

  They looked down on the churchyard: the brown wet earth, the caragana hedge sprouting bits of green, a few old graves beyond the hedge, shabby in spring mud and winter’s limp weeds.

  From here they saw everything: the hotel on Main Street, Louie’s place, the Chinese café, the vacant lot between the church and the café. Then they saw their father in the vacant lot, walking through straggling weeds toward Main Street. He was wearing a sagging grey sweater. “Why doesn’t he get rid of that old thing?” the brother said, crouching lower on the belfry floor. When he lifted his head again, his father was gone.

  They crawled closer to the edge and looked out beyond Main Street. They saw the school and the onion dome of the Russian church, and south of the church, the small Ukrainian houses in yards that would soon be filled with green vegetables and tall yellow sunflowers.

  “When I’m seventeen I’m going to leave this dump.”

  “Why?” the sister asked.

  “Why! Who wants to rot in this dump?”

  “It’s nicer than Graveltown. I heard some people from Graveltown are moving here next month.”

  “They can have it,” he said. “It’s a dump.”

  They heard an airplane somewhere to the north, saw its distant curve approach, watched it roar over Main Street.

  “Take me to United States!” the sister shouted, aiming her voice with her cupped hands.

  “Take me to United States!” she yelled again, louder.

  “United States! Who wants to go to United States?” the brother said.

  “Where do you want to go?” she asked.

  “Halifax,” he said, “to join the navy and see the world.

  If they ask us who we are

  We’re the rcnvr.

  Roll along, wavy navy, roll along.”

  His voice bounced off the iron bell, filling the tower and spilling out into the yard below.

  When he was thirteen, he got a job cleaning the church. Each Saturday he was paid fifty cents to straighten hymnals, dust pews, change numbers on the little wooden board above the pulpit that told what pages the hymns were on. The job didn’t include the altar, however. He didn’t wash the starched white cloth or polish the sacramental vessels. Only the women did that. A few complained. Mrs. Carlson said that just because he was the preacher’s son he shouldn’t get special privileges. “It doesn’t look right,” she told Eva Skretting in the Red and White. Eva said that Peter was a wild one and needed watching. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he wasn’t in on that Gussie Skogland business, and didn’t Gussie get two months in Reform School?”

  But he kept the job for one whole summer, every Saturday flicking a limp cloth smelling of lemons over the dusty pews. Each time he finished, he’d stand in his father’s pulpit, observing his handiwork.

  The morning Louie hauled Frank Schultz to St. John’s, the two children stood on the church steps and held the door for him. Louie and Zig Karetsky lugged the casket out of their truck, each hugging an end. They lifted it up the steps, Zig first, backing through the lobby, past swinging doors, down the nave’s long aisle. Louie told him, bumping against the pews, to watch his step. Zig said how could he with this thing right under his nose. The two men set the grey box on metal stands in the chancel of St. John’s, a few feet in front of the altar.

  The news spread to the edges of town like spokes in the wheel of a bike. “They’ve got Frank Schultz down at St. John’s.” By 10 o’clock they’d gathered: Joe, Douglas, Ivan, Andy, Abie, Mary. The brother stood beside the swinging doors in the entrance, holding an offering plate.

  “If you want to see him, it’ll cost you a nickel,” he said.

  “Highway robbery,” Ivan said.

  “Can you go in with someone?” Andy asked.

  “With someone it will cost a nickel extra. A nickel apiece plus one if you go in by twos.”

  The sister leaned back against the varnished wall. “I know a certain person who wouldn’t think too much of this idea of yours.”

  “So are you going to tell?” her brother said.

  “Yea, you better tell, Elizabeth,” Joe said.

  “Who’s first?” the brother said.

  “You be first.”

  “No, you go.”

  “I’ll go next after you.”

  “Hell,” Joe said. “I’ll go.” He threw a nickel into the brass plate and disappeared through the swinging doors. He was back almost immediately. “It’s Schultz all right, and is he dead.” Abie and Ivan went in together. Three nickels clanged into the plate. Their stay was only a little longer.

  “Did you see his hands?” Andy asked, standing under the bell rope, his hair the colour of the rope. “They were folded, like he was praying.”

  The brother scoffed. “Louie just gets them to look like that. He’s the one who finally gets them looking good.”

  “He didn’t get the thumb right,” Abie said. “It was sticking straight up. Louie should have tried to get the thumb right.”

  When the sister went in with Mary Sorenson, she saw only the face, bluish white like skim milk, shiny as mucilage.

  In the afternoon during the service, they sat by the hedge, snapping beetles between rocks and making whistles out of caragana pods. The sun was shining, warm and orange. The air smelled of upturned soil, crushed pods, the cracked shells of beetles.

  Ivan said, “Soon old Schultz will be galloping his way to glory. Flying through the sky to the sweet by and by.” Ivan lived south of Main Street with his grandfather who spoke mostly Russian. Then he sang, “I don’t care if it rains or freezes, I am safe in the arms of Jesus.”

  “Okay, Lippoway, you can shut your mouth right about now,” the brother said. Certain irreverences he would not allow.

  “Yea, Lippoway, zip your lip.” Abie said.

  “I understand the Communists in Russia hardly believe in anything any more,” the sister said, her neck stiff against a branch.

  Later, at the cemetery, the small group watched from behind a clump of honeysuckle bushes. They saw the mourners on one side of the grave, huddled together beside a pile of dirt. The preacher stood on the other side, holding a shovel. With three ropes, the six men, three on each side of the grave, lowered the box into the hole. Then the preacher spoke. His voice was thin, like a wisp of smoke. “From dust thou came, to dust thou shalt return, from dust shalt thou arise again.” He shovelled clumps of earth down on the box below.

  When she heard her father’s words, the sister crumbled a small lump of dirt between her fingers and wondered why Frank Schultz had suddenly become a thou. Up until now he’d only been Frank, a farmer six miles south of Stone Creek. When Ivan heard them, he flapped his arms like a bird flying. Abie heard a different voice, an old voice from an ancient flame: “Take off your shoes, Moses. The ground you stand on is
holy ground.”

  One afternoon in fall she caught him smoking. He was sitting on the ground behind the garage, nearly hidden by Russian thistles. First she saw the wisps of grey rising from the thistles and the red spark of his cigarette. Then she saw him sitting there, leaning against a rock. She stood and watched, strong in the righteousness of her sex.

  ”So. Here’s where you keep yourself,” she finally said. He jerked the cigarette out of his mouth. “I didn’t know you smoked.” He held the glowing object down by his knee.

  “So? Now you do.”

  “Well, isn’t this interesting. I guess Dad would find it interesting too if he knew about it.”

  “Make sure you let him know then,” he said, holding up the cigarette with a flourish.

  “I didn’t say I was going to tell him. I only said that if he knew he’d find it interesting. That’s all I said.”

  “Well, if he’d find it so interesting I think you should tell him. I think you should go right now and tell him.” He rubbed the cigarette into the dirt, snuffing it out, then covered it with stones and grass. He picked up a thin stick, placed it on the end of his nose, the tip resting on his forehead. This was a favourite trick of his. Only he could do it because of his odd-shaped nose.

  “You think that’s quite clever, don’t you, balancing things on your nose like that. I suppose you think the girls at school consider you very smart and clever when you balance pencils on your nose like that and get them to laughing.”

  “Do you know anyone else who can do it?”

  “I should hope not.”

  “It might interest you to know I’ve made fifty cents doing this, for people who appreciate it.”

  “Oh, really,” the sister said and walked away.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” he shouted after her. “Have you ever heard this song before?”

  She stopped, stood there among the swaying weeds and listened to her brother sing in that curious new voice of his that she detested.

  Hang out your washing on the Siegfried Line

  If the Siegfried Line’s still there.

  “Certainly I’ve heard it. Mr. Nelson sings that when he’s mowing the grass.”

  “Do you know what it means?”

  “How should I know what it means?”

  “Well, I guess you haven’t heard what that song’s all about, have you. That,” he lowered his voice significantly, “is the dirtiest song in the English language. A very obscene song.”

  “What’s dirty about it?”

  “I’d never tell.” He leaned back against the rock and slipped another Sweet Caporal out of its cellophaned package.

  “What can be dirty about hanging out your wash on the Siegfried Line?”

  “O. You said it.”

  “Said what?”

  “The dirty words.”

  “You mean those are the dirty words?”

  “That’s what I said.” He flicked a match against a rock, bent his head into the weeds, out of the wind, and lit the cigarette, inhaling deeply.

  “What part is dirty – hanging out the wash? or the Siegfried Line?”

  “O. You said it again.”

  “But you said it first.”

  “I sang it. Singing’s different. It’s like quoting.”

  “Well, tell me what it means then.”

  “Me? Never.”

  “Does it mean the same as what Gussie Skogland did to Rattray’s cow?”

  “I’d never say. You wouldn’t get me to talk about anything like that.”

  She stood in a patch of dandelions and looked at him.

  “So. You said the words, didn’t you.” He raised his head smoothly, easily, sending a delicate ribbon of smoke curling into the prairie sky.

  He didn’t forget. When she stood by the kitchen sink in a white apron, washing the supper dishes, he crept up behind her, nudged her with his shoulder, and whispered the song in her ear. When she climbed down the basement stairs to use the toilet behind the furnace, he followed her halfway down the steps, then stopped, and sang between closed teeth.

  Hang out your washing on the Siegfried Line

  If the Siegfried Line’s still there.

  Once in the living room, where their father was kneeling at the front door, working with a screwdriver to fasten a broken hinge, her brother sprawled on the brown sofa and hummed the song under his breath. She left the room, her heart pounding, and asked her mother in the kitchen if there was anything she could do to help.

  Later he told her. “You really thought that was a dirty song, didn’t you. You were scared I was going to tell. Ha.”

  “Oh, really. Wasn’t that a smart thing to do. Weren’t you smart and clever to think of something like that.” She ran, furious, down the street to Sorensons’.

  When he was fifteen, he got Zig Karetsky’s old job working for Louie in the undertaking parlour.

  “Do you think it looks right?” Mrs. Carlson asked Eva Skretting in the Red and White. They were standing next to the bread shelf. “The preacher’s son working for Louie like that? Won’t people think it’s kind of fishy? It could cause talk.”

  “What’s a mystery to me is why Louie would hire him. He’s one who needs watching,” Eva said, fitting a loaf snugly into the row of other loaves.

  But he went to work every Saturday, leaving the house at nine, whistling down the driveway.

  One morning in June he forgot his lunch. His mother picked up the brown bag from the kitchen counter and told his sister to take it to him. She combed her hair, preened in front of the hall mirror until her mother called her to stop fussing and get started. She slipped on her new blue sweater and examined herself again from different angles in the hall mirror. She was going downtown to bring her brother his lunch.

  Outside, the sun was pouring down, shining on the purple blooms of lilacs, stippling the young leaves of caraganas. It flecked the wings of a meadowlark perched on a fence post and spread over weeds and grass onto the gravelled driveway. It soaked into the little crevices between the stones, warming the sleek backs of ants and beetles. There was no space anywhere without the light.

  At the end of the driveway her father was kneeling beside the car, fiddling with his tool box. The sun spilled out over the car’s slick top and down on his greasy tools. It shone warm on his curved shoulders and smooth grey back.

  She walked past the lilacs to where her father knelt by the blue car. He looked up. “My, aren’t you spiffed up this morning,” he said. “Are you going to a wedding?”

  She held the brown bag out in front of her. “He forgot his lunch. I have to bring him his lunch.”

  She opened the gate and walked down the sidewalk to Sorensons’. She stopped to watch her friend Mary do a back bend under the clothesline, her body curved against the earth, her hair streaming.

  “Where are you off to?” Mary asked, upside down.

  “To Louie’s. I’m bringing my brother his lunch. You knew he was working for Louie, didn’t you?”

  “Well, I guess,” Mary said, her back circling the grass.

  She turned at Sorensons’ corner and walked over to Main Street. She stopped in front of Cutler’s Dry Goods, where Label was sweeping the sidewalk. The straw of his broom gathered dust, gravel, crushed candy wrappers, guiding them over the sun-warmed cement into the narrow ditch at the curb’s edge.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” he asked.

  “Me? Oh, nowhere special. My dumb brother forgot his lunch and I have to bring it to him. You knew he was working for Louie, didn’t you?”

  “Of course.” He continued sweeping, tufts of yellow straw swirling over the concrete.

  At Louie’s she walked across the oiled floor, past lamps and sofas, to the office at the far end. She opened the door. Her brother was sitting on a wooden chair, his feet up on the desk, staring at the ceiling.

  “Is this all you have to do?” she asked.

  He jerked his feet off the desk and sat up straight. “All! Don’t you k
now Louie’s away? Who’d answer the phone if I wasn’t here? Who’d take care of things?” He picked up a yellow pencil, held it by his ear, ready for any important message.

  “It doesn’t look like much of a job to me,” the sister said.

  “Some jobs take muscles. Some take brains.” He laid the pencil on the desk blotter and fussed about in the drawer with a box of paper clips. She looked at a closed door across the room.

  “Is that where you keep them?”

  “When we’ve got them.”

  “You don’t have any today?”

  “Not in there.”

  “Well, here’s the lunch you forgot.” She set the bag on the desk and turned to leave.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” he said. “You might be interested in that shoebox.” He pointed to the shelf beside the desk. The shelf was littered with old magazines, an ashtray, and a white shoebox with 5.98 written in black on one end.

  “Why?”

  “Oh, no special reason. I just thought you might like to know what’s in that box. But I guess you wouldn’t be interested after all.”

  She walked over to the shelf and grabbed the box. She opened the lid, lifted up a gauzy sheet of tissue paper. She saw it for less than a second, smaller than her hand, tiny fingers curled tightly like the claws of a kitten, eyes shut tight. She felt a ragged lump in the centre of her stomach, and shoved the box back on the shelf.

  “Why did you do that?” she shouted. “Why did you do such a stupid thing as that? What a stupid thing to do!”