by Joan Thomas
When Joe and the others were told to get off the train in Saskatchewan, they still didn’t quite get the picture. It took a while to dawn on them that if there was no railway line west from Saskatoon, there was likely no settlement either. Most of them (although not Joe Pye) had given Isaac Barr six pounds for a tent and groundsheet, but the tents were apparently in the train carrying their excess luggage — and that train had vanished. The Dominion Immigration Department set to work pitching a village of army tents for them, but they resisted settling in, they resisted being obliged to Canada in any way.
I’d always felt I understood Isaac Barr — how fascinated he was by his own notions, to the point that he lost track of whether he had done the work of making things happen. If I were making this story up from scratch, though, I would not have him carry on all the way to Saskatoon. I’d have him pretend to be called away on some important errand when they crossed the border out of Manitoba (called to Regina, to discuss settlement affairs with the governor). I see him galloping south on a tall black horse, glee on his face and a leather satchel over his shoulder stuffed with banknotes.
But that’s not what happened. According to Joe, Barr stayed with them all the way, sitting among the eager colonists, riding towards his downfall. Was he completely crazy? Maybe he wanted to see the whole thing collapse into rubble. Maybe he wanted to be tested, to find out just how special he was, to see for himself what he would come up with next. What he did come up with, Joe said, was a fine duck tent with rooms, in which he lay day and night with a revolver under his pillow while outside the colonists milled around and planned the suits they would file against him as soon as a proper King’s judiciary was set up in the North-West.
They made it to their claims eventually. Joe Pye got his stony field, others ended up with land so light it would blow away overnight if they had a dry spell. But they broke it anyway, and there was a drought, and now most of Saskatchewan looks like the wilderness where the Children of Israel wandered. When I was little it made me proud to know how much worse things were in Saskatchewan and that my father had been clever enough not to go there. We and most of our neighbours ended up having to help Saskatchewan out, feeding cattle and horses that came east in a boxcar. We agreed to board them because their owners had no feed and they’d die of starvation in Saskatchewan. We never knew the names of their owners — the elevator agent arranged it all, and one day the cattle were delivered in a truck.
Keeping livestock is not as much work as people think. In summer the cattle feed in the pasture, and in winter we put hay out on the river. The spring morning the ice goes out, all those smeared cow pies thawing and starting to stink, all that wallowing mess with the hoofprints of the cattle frozen into it, slides silently away down the river, and a few days later (close to Picou maybe, where the French farms are) it finds a home at the foot of someone else’s yard.
One day in the fall I walk with my father all the way down to a field in the southeast quarter to fetch those cattle. He’s put them out to graze in a wheat field that wasn’t worth harvesting. My father strides along, his head bent into the wind. There are no earflaps to his cap, and he’s pulled it down over his ears so that he seems to have no forehead at all — his face is just bony nose and jaw. I run along beside him, saying things to try to get him talking. Hmm, he says. Or, I s’pose.
When we reach the wheat field there are no cattle to be seen, and we cut across to the south side. Three rotten fence posts hang at crazy angles, and the barbed wire is trampled down. The cattle will be down at the river.
Stay here, Dad says. I’ll drive them back towards you. He whistles for Chummy. In a minute he is behind the bluff on the other side of the fence and I can’t see him.
I walk over the broken fence and a little ways into the bluff and then I stand and wait. Poplar leaves lie rotting under my feet. The willows in the bluff are bare wands a colour between green and orange that no one can name. The birds are gone. I stand alone under the low sky, a dull sky slung like a wool blanket over the earth. Nothing except me seems to be breathing. Just before the sun sets, it breaks through a rip in the grey blanket and picks out the seed ends of scrub maple in the bluff and the tufts of Russian thistle in the field and touches them with yellow light. Then they fade to grey again and the colour leaches out of everything. But still he doesn’t come back, and I begin to get cold. I start to think about the lynx he saw down by the river, not here but on the other bend. I stand trying to recall a memory that was never mine in the first place, the way the lynx lay along a spruce branch, its fur the very colour of the prairie before it is broken, the way my father looked right at it without knowing what it was.
And I think, He never talks to me. There is the little laugh he always gives, as though any question you ask is just to hear the sound of your own voice. There is the way his eyes dart away to the side when you try to catch them. He’s never once told me anything about himself. But I will ask. What’s wrong with you? I whisper and feel how indecent the words are, hear them coming out and tearing the air, going through him like an electric shock. I’ll ask, I tell myself, and I stand at the edge of the bluff until the sky turns to navy and he doesn’t come and I begin to truly understand what it will be like when the Lord comes, an ordinary day when you least expect it, and my father scooped up with all the others, Mr. Dalrymple and Mrs. Feazel and my mother, the outhouse door swinging open, the chickens unfed. I see then what it will really mean to be left on the edge of a dark woods, just me with my insolent heart, a girl who thinks she knows better than her mother. I pace along the broken fence, dread growing in my stomach. Then I know he’s not in heaven at all but is lying on the cold earth staring at the sky, not dead and not asleep. Dad, Dad, I hear myself screaming, hating my cowardly voice. I start to run farther into the bush. As soon as I do I hear the lowing of cattle and see them coming in single file. I can see the broad white face of the first heifer and the narrow white face of Chummy running low alongside. Dad will be behind. I run back to the fence and stand with my feet planted on the barbed wire so the cattle won’t get tangled in it, and the huge dark frame of the lead cow lumbers by me.
That heifer with the dark face, Dad says when he catches up to me. What d’you call her, she was halfway to Burnley. I thought I was never going to find her.
Tears bulge under my eyelids, stinging, and I turn my face so he won’t see me knocking them off my cheeks. Now it is really dark, and we make our way by following the shape of the last cow. My father is breathing hard. We cross the wheat field and then a fallow field, stumbling over the stubble, dodging stalks of Russian thistle the plow has broken and folded into the furrows.
Another month and we’ll be feeding them in the yard, my dad says. Just hope the hay lasts the winter.
Then we are at the pasture and walking along the wagon trail, feeling its grooves with our feet. If we had rain I’d get out of cattle altogether, he says at the gate to the yard.
It won’t always be like this, he’s trying to say to me. But my heart hurts and I can’t respond.
What difference would it have made if he had talked to me? If I’d been able to ask him and he’d been willing to tell me? The way he learned to put it to himself, that’s what he would have given me. And I would have taken what he said and made something else of it anyway, the way we do.
And of course no one talked back then, except about things that happened a long time ago. When I try to tell about our life I’m struck by how thin and poor my words are. The dog’s dish, with its chipped enamel rim, battered by being driven over when I left it out in the yard. The chair with the broken back. The clock, our clock, with the hand that struggled to cross over the top of the hour. The goat. Things have just one word for them — dish, chair, clock, goat. The biggest crime you could commit against your neighbour was aspiring to anything fancier, especially words. The Parrots’ goat might have been made especially to show how poor and mean words are.
But what if I’d known through all of tho
se years that I would go away: that my silent childhood would be a preface to something else? What if I’d known that I’d be scooped up and carried across the sea to a red-brick city where people were profligate with words, squandered them without a thought on teasing and silly sayings and stories told over and over like singing a favourite song. Would knowing that have made a difference? Yes, it would have.
On a hot July day I lie on my back in the river and turn my face up to the sky and let the current carry me away. The sun is hot on my face, and the water is a fresh, cold band around my hairline. It’s the day of the fair, but we’re not going. We’ve been allowed to go before, but this year some old lady in the church caught the smell of sin on the air and managed to dig up a verse from Leviticus, something forbidding wheels fixed in the air, maybe, or calves and pigs feeding from the same trough. We’ve been sent instead to swim in the river, to Lynch’s Bend, where the Nebo Gospel Chapel holds its baptisms, sent to the river to take our minds off the fair, my cousin Gracie and me and a lot of smaller children from the church. Joe Pye hitched up the hayrack and drove us there and let us off on the road, and we fought our way into private dens deep in the willows and there we changed into our bathing suits. My bathing suit is made from a dress from my mother’s girlhood, plum-coloured.
I stay with the kids until the boys start pulling clots of clay up from the bottom and chucking them around, and then I float away on my own. The splashing and yelling of the others fades to nothing. I can smell salt on the air, and gasoline fumes — my sharp longing for the fair brings its smells to me. I lie in the water and the pantaloon bottoms of my bathing suit puff up like flotation devices strapped to my waist, and I think about meeting Russell Bates outside the general store that morning. I go over everything, how he showed in every detail and gesture that he was from somewhere else, just as he had when he came to the auction sale. Want to go for a drive in the country? he asked, and Charlotte said, Lily’s from the country. And I thought how obvious that was, if you compared me to the two girls who sauntered in their careless town way out of the store just then, eating ice cream, both of them wearing slacks. How obvious in the way they put their tongues to their ice cream when Charlotte introduced us (Kay and Laura, they were called), in their insulting lack of curiosity and in the awkward way I turned in my cotton dress and tieup shoes to follow my mother. I let myself float, I will myself to drown, I spread my arms and legs and let my body rise up into the blue sky, where a hot wind has blown off any wisp of cloud. And then I’m suddenly afraid I’ve drifted out over my head (I will drown, I think), and I put one leg under me and feel the mucky bottom and stand up to see Gracie motionless on a sandbar gazing up at the bank, where a figure is silhouetted against the sky. And I am presented then with astounding proof of the power of my imagination: it is Russell Bates standing on the riverbank watching us.
Hey! he calls. Lily!
Gracie raises an arm and waves up at him. She’s smiling vacantly, a half-inch of pink gum gleaming at the top of her teeth.
How’s the water?
Who is that? Gracie says.
It’s Charlotte Bates’s brother, I say, wading dripping towards the bank. I’m just going to talk to him for a minute. You stay here with the kids.
I scramble through the wolf willow on the edge of the water. Gracie is following me. Stay, I say sharply in the voice I use with Chummy. I start to climb, digging my toes into the soft sand. He’s leaning against the passenger door of his father’s car with his hands in the pockets of city trousers, watching as I scramble awkwardly up over the turf at the top of the bank, sand clinging to my wet feet and legs like high brown boots.
You’re not at the fair? he asks. When I don’t answer he opens the car door and says, In that case, how about a ride? Out of the corner of my eye I see Gracie’s head rising over the edge of the riverbank like a sentinel gopher. I climb into the car, swiping at the sand on each calf with the opposite foot. Oh, don’t worry about that, he says. I’ll sweep it out. Give me something to do. He talks like his father and like announcers on the radio: in a knowing way. Worldly, confident, eastern.
He starts the car and puts it into gear and drives out onto the river road. I studiously do not turn my head to look back at Gracie. Water drips from my hair onto my shoulders.
Well, I’ve been! he says. I’ve done the Burnley Agricultural Exhibition, the whole shebang. The Ferris wheel, the barns, the ladies’ pavilion. Checked out all the pies and quilts. What else is there? Oh, there’s the merry-go-round. I tried to ride the merry-go-round, but the bastards threw me off.
We follow the curving river road, with bush on the left side and scorched fields on our right. He talks all the way up to the Lookout. About going through the barns at the fair, looking for the two-headed calf Charlotte promised him, about the Exhibition in Toronto, the way their dad came into town and took them on a streetcar when they were little. This somehow takes him to working for a man who owns a moving van, and the rich in Toronto with their glass cabinets of ornaments, antique birdcages with finches in them, and then to stray cats, to him and his brother putting sardines down in the alley for the cats. He talks as though we’re in a two-way conversation and he, just for the moment, happens to be carrying more than his share of it. In profile his face looks a bit humourless, like a man’s, like a head on a coin, but then he turns to look at me and it’s a different face, younger, with bent dark brows and a smile so open and friendly that I can hardly look at him. He takes a hand off the steering wheel and leans forward and pulls a metal flask out from under the seat. Undo this for me? he says. I unscrew the cap and a medicinal smell wafts out of the flask and stings my nostrils.
Just a bit of cough medicine, he says, making his lips flat and pressing the mouth of the flask to them. You’ve got a cough, I noticed.
No, I’m fine, I say.
Whatever you say. He smiles and winks at me and then he points the flask in my direction and I screw the cap back on. I love driving, he says. I’d like to drive out here from home. I’d take the north route, around Lake Superior.
How did you come? I ask.
Train, he says. If Steve comes next time maybe we’ll drive. That’s if my dad’s still here by next year. If the pinko bastards don’t get to him.
I’ve got no idea what he means. We’ve reached the Lookout and he pulls over onto the edge of the road and stops. You can see for six or seven miles, the whole district sagging below us and then lifting at the horizon, as though it’s tacked to the sky. You can see both the Burnley and the Nebo elevators. Our place in the middle distance, a farm belonging to shiftless strangers. Our barn, an ordinary barn now, and the bunkhouse and six-sided silo and the leaning, unpainted house. I point our section out to Russell and I mention the six-sided silo because no one else in the district has one. I’m finding a way to talk. I can be a simple country girl, a Hutterite girl, maybe, with a high white forehead and my hair in plaits.
Your house looks crooked, he says.
It was built by an eight-year-old boy taking instructions from a blind man, I say.
He laughs. That’s a lot of land for one family, he says.
We have a hired man sometimes, I say. Joe Pye.
Joe Pye, he says and laughs again. Joe Pye’s a weed where I come from.
He is a weed, I say recklessly. In a way.
Who lives there? he asks, gesturing to the Parrot farm at the bottom of the rise.
Nobody, I say. It was the Parrots’. They went broke.
I went to an auction sale with my dad once, he says. A long time ago. The first summer I was out here. Well, actually I went to a few of them. My dad always had to have a stiff drink first. He was scared they’d have a go at him.
He shades his eyes with his hand and studies the Parrot farm. I think that’s the farm, he says. It is, I remember that house. My dad made me play the piano. The auctioneer was going on about the piano, how it would be a family heirloom one day, and he kept calling for the lady who owned it to come
and show us how it sounded before they sold it out from under her, and she wouldn’t come and finally my dad made me get up and play.
The outer folds of my bathing suit are drying, cooked plums turning brown. My hands are brown in my lap. I look at him and remember the way he shrugged and backed away from the keyboard at the end of the song, stumbled backwards onto an iron bedstead propped against a barrel, and stood working his fingers around its painted iron spokes while the last chord of “Country Gardens” hung in the air. They had a goat, I say, gathering up my wet hair in one hand and lifting it off the nape of my neck.
That’s right, there was a goat, he says. He keeps his eyes on me while he pulls out his flask and has another drink. It’s funny the farmers have never organized here, he says. The way they do farther west. In Saskatchewan the banks don’t even try to foreclose. All the neighbours show up at the sale and then they won’t bid more than a dollar for anything.
If people pull tricks like that the bank will just close up and leave town, I say, quoting my mother.
So much the better, he says. You could start your own credit union. Why should eastern banks be getting fat off prairie farmers?