by Joan Thomas
I don’t have an answer to this, especially as it’s coming from the banker’s son.
Will you look at that! he says suddenly. His eyes are on the rearview mirror. It’s going to rain, he exclaims. I turn to look. The sky is still blue, but navy clouds are swelling in the west like bulbous balloons. The wind’s come up, and along the road willows are turning their leaves to show their silver undersides. The astonishing prospect of rain fills the car with an eerie light, and I sit there galvanized by the thought that the same invisible shred of the past nestles in our two separate brains. Light shines off the chrome knobs on the dashboard of the blue sedan. I clasp my hands together (they’re close to trembling with the glamour of it). A tiny bead of the past, but in both our memories: enough for Fate, like God’s cousin in work clothes, to slide into the car and reach out his hands and draw the two of us together. The clouds mount as high as the sun and it’s as though someone turns a lamp off, and the front seat of the car becomes a little room, a private room at dusk. I cross my legs, and feel the sand coating them, and reach down to brush at it. I can’t look at him — I don’t need to look at him, I’m so aware of him sitting a few inches away from my bare leg that I can hardly breathe. He lifts the damp hair off my neck and slides his hand under my chin, nuzzling at my ear, his lips starting up a tingling all along my face and down my neck. Sweet, he says. He traces a line along my cheek with his tongue (he’ll taste the river, I think), and his hand is on my thigh then, just below my bathing suit. Raindrops freckle the dusty windshield, and he runs his fingers along the fine skin at the cuff of my bathing suit.
Hell, he says suddenly and sits up straight. There’s a truck moving up the road towards us from the east. Our Ford. My chest squeezes fiercely at the thought of my father’s face.
He’ll never be able to get past us, Russell says. We’ll have to go back the other way. He hands me the flask and starts the car. Before I know what he’s planning to do, he’s turned the wheel to angle the car around on the road. On his second try the right front wheel goes off the road. You have to go easy and rock it, I say, but he’s floored the pedal and I can hear the wheel spinning and in a second the car has sunk into the sandy soil like a boat.
We climb out and stand in the rain and look. The wheel’s buried up to its axle — the car’s in sand up to the wide running board. The farms on the plain below have withdrawn behind a screen of rain. The whole sky is alive, immense clouds jostling across it. Wind flattens my bathing suit against my legs. The willows bend in our direction, confused sparrows tossed up and faltering and vanishing — none of us remember rain. I reach out one hand, I touch him shyly on the side, his fine white shirt plastered to his ribs by rain.
My mother is reduced to lying on her bed, apparently ill, and they can’t banish me to my room because there are so many chores to do with her out of commission. The rain is a huge relief, but my father is silent, and it hurts me so that I can hardly breathe when I point something out, an early ripe tomato that I’ve brought in for supper, and he just nods shortly. Phillip stares at me across the table with what I first think is disgust, but then I see a sort of admiration in it.
It wasn’t actually my dad who came up the road that day. It was the Tandys, a childless couple who live on the Bicknell road. Mr. Tandy could see there was trouble before he got to us, so he turned around in the Parrots’ lane and backed up towards us. He got out and walked slowly over to the car without saying a word, the rain turning his grey work shirt black in big patches and his lips pursed as though he were a tradesman called in to do a job. He didn’t ask who Russell was and how he ended up in this pickle. How he ended up there was evident by one look at him, by his linen shirt and polished shoes. Gonna have to jack her up, Mr. Tandy said when he’d had a good look. His wife stuck her head out the window of the truck and then pulled it back in.
There was a jack in the trunk of the blue sedan. Mr. Tandy found a plank in his truck to stand the jack on and set Russell to work pumping. Then he got out a chain. Slide over, I heard him say to his wife. That chap’s in no condition to be driving. So she slid under the steering wheel of the truck and Mr. Tandy got into the car and they pulled the car off the jack and up onto the road while Russell and I stood in the weeds at the side, rain running off our hair and onto our shoulders.
Tell that girl we’ll be taking her home, Mr. Tandy said to his wife as he walked back to the truck. I remember steam rising from our wet clothes and the cab of the truck filling with the smell of whisky. Mrs. Tandy leaned forward to look at me while we rode, and the whole high swelling of her chest moved up and down with excitement. She was a little woman with a pigeon chest (it must have been shaped by antiquated undergarments because you don’t see women with chests like that any more). I’m frightened you’ll catch cold, she said, her eyes glittering.
Washing and scalding all the little discs and funnels of the cream separator every morning I think of all the things Russell Bates appeared to know, things I couldn’t even guess at. He told me a long story about Steve, his brother, who was working for the summer in the accounting office of KIWI boot polish, and who was asked to pose for an illustration of a young soldier polishing his boots. Take a look at Maclean’s in October, Russell said. You’ll see my brother in a full-page KIWI advertisement. The artist gave Steve the original and they hung it in the front hall, and now their mother was afraid Steve would join up, just from the effect of seeing himself in uniform! I feel myself peering through a knothole into this alien household, with a divorced woman in it. I see her, straightening the picture in the hall, an older version of Charlotte’s mother, with the same anxious eyes, as though she’s taken worry on as her vocation.
He could have spent the afternoon at the fair with Charlotte and Kay and Laura (Kay, I think it was, who came out of the store holding the change from the ice cream loosely in her left hand and coolly dropped the money into his pocket, touching his hip, standing close to him but not meeting his eyes). He could have spent the afternoon with her. Had he spent it with me because there was something about me he liked or because he was amused to see such an ignorant country girl? I think of the way he said certain words, Maclean’s, university, history, in a tone of studied casualness, but the idea that he might have felt the need to impress me is preposterous. I think about him pulling out his flask, saying, This is whisky-flavoured cough syrup. Unknown in these parts but highly efficacious. Efficacious for your gout and your sciatica. Wonderful for your maidenly inhibitions (going to hand me the flask and then reaching around me to unscrew it himself and in the process circling me with both arms). The way we tussled around and he pressed the mouth of the flask to my mouth and I resisted or pretended to resist, whisky meanwhile sliding hotly in through my lips and dribbling down my chin and onto my bathing suit.
I force myself to haul the potato sack up from the cellar and spend the morning sprouting the potatoes, snapping off the lewd white tentacles reaching blindly through holes in the sack. Sinking into my penance, I carry a basin of warm water outside and scrub out the chicken coop, scraping at the dried white droppings with a knife, breathing in ammonia while the chickens peck at my toes. By rights a child should have drowned in the river that day because of my neglect, or Mr. Tandy should have contracted pneumonia from the drenching he got digging us out. But neither of these things happened. If I set aside the flask of whisky, my sin was my pleasure at Russell’s hand on my leg and his nuzzling his face into my hair. My body is a danger, like a bomb wired up to a clock. My mother lies on her bed for most of three days, as an object lesson in how I can kill her if I keep this up.
5
Our horses both die of equine encephalitis in 1934. King dies first, unable to stand up one morning and dying the next. We have to use Dolly to drag his body out to the edge of the pasture where Dad and Phillip have dug a great hole, and there we bury him. People talk about the close bond between domestic animals, but she just puts her muscles into pulling the load in her usual willing way and doesn’
t seem to think anything of it. Then three days later she dies as well and we have no other horses to help so Uncle Jack comes over with the tractor to drag her away.
Something happens to my father again, this time away from the yard, and it’s Mr. Feazel who brings him home in a wagon. Mr. Feazel helps him down from the wagon as though he’s an old man, and he walks through the living room with a face the colour of porridge. After he’s in the bedroom my mother follows Mr. Feazel into the yard and talks to him. I kneel on the chesterfield and look out at their two small figures under the cottonwoods, standing on a carpet of fallen yellow leaves. The sky is a delicate, perfect pale blue, like a ribbon. The yard is full of warblers that day, passing through on their way south. My mother’s bun has begun to loosen and her hair hangs in a low chignon above her collar. She turns to face Mr. Feazel and they talk for a long time. Her face is unusually animated and composed, as though she is explaining a procedure in which she has a particular expertise. In the other room my father lies face down on his bed, and I kneel at the window and watch this mute conversation that could give me words to explain everything.
That winter I walk alone to school, two miles each way, wool socks pulled over my shoes and then my feet shoved into galoshes, my scarf wrapped around my face turning wet from my breath and freezing into a pliable board, my lashes iced together at the corners. Going to school I lower my head and see only the ground at my feet. I walk bent into the wind, as if all of nature is trying to keep me from an education and I am determined to get one. By the time I get to school and stomp into the vestibule, the breath torn out of me, my face is frozen and I have to talk slowly as though I am thick in the head.
The school goes only to Grade Nine, so this will be my last year. Gracie finished the year before and Phillip the year before that. I’m the only student older than twelve. I’ve read every book within the four walls of the school, most of them five or six times. One day Miss Fielding brings me a hair wreath she is working on, lying in a hat box. You might want to learn this, she says as I stare at the revolting little flowers in shades of mouse brown and grey. It’s one of the handicrafts from my grandmother’s day. It’s not that hard to get hair. Miss Fielding and I want something from each other we are not going to get.
I last in school through most of the cold weather, until a cold snap in early March. At recess Betty Stalling and Mabel Feazel and I put on our coats and go out to the pony shed, a couple of the younger girls following us if we let them. This is the winter after rumours went around about my being drunk and half dressed in a car with a boy from the east. Sometimes they ask me dutifully about him, sometimes I just work him into the conversation, although we’ve worn out all the details about him, some of which were invented in the first place. Words rattle around in my head, but when they come out they are thin and feeble from overuse and fall into the silence around me with no effect. October has come and gone, the month when Russell’s picture was to be in Maclean’s magazine (his picture, it has become in my telling and almost in my mind), and by now the wealthy people in cities in the east will have tossed it into the kindling bin and their servants will have twisted its pages into tapers to start the fire.
If it’s very cold and my dad has to start the Ford up anyway he drives me to school, but he’s trying to make one tank of gas last through the winter, so this is rare. One day when we’re bundling up we see his truck through the window of the school and everyone who lives out in our direction gives a cheer. We cram four of the Stalling girls into the cab, and the rest of the kids ride in the back, sitting up against the cab with their faces buried in their arms because the wind is so bitter you could freeze your nose off even with a scarf.
My dad drops the Stallings and the Pylandes at the end of their lanes. Long, pointed tongues of drifting snow lie across the road even though my dad drove that way just an hour before.
It’s drifting fast, eh? I say.
He doesn’t answer. He seems preoccupied, staring straight ahead. Then, as though the Ford is encouraged in its own purposes by his failure of attention, it leaves the snowy tracks and drives straight into the ditch. The ditch is shallow, and the truck tries to mount the little rise into the field and founders in the snow. My father seems powerless to stop it, so in a panic I reach my leg across the seat and hit the brake with my left foot. The truck lurches to a stop and stalls. And now my father is banging himself against the steering wheel. I grab his shoulder and cry, What are you doing? but he pays no attention. His body trembles and thrashes, back and forth, back and forth in an ecstasy of concentration. His eyes are open and a grin is on his face like the grin on the face of a dog, a mindless sound being forced out of him. His hand jerks in my face, protesting senselessly, and I sink back to avoid being hit. Finally the sound stops and his moving slows and he sags forward and lies with his head on the wheel.
We sit in silence. That animal sound sorrows on in my head, but in the truck cab and in the field around us is silence. The headlights poke into the darkness, lay their yellow shafts over the gentle low waves of drifts. The snow isn’t deep, but under it is sand. We’ll never get the truck out on our own. I reach over and turn the lights off to save the battery. Then there is nothing but the windshield and the white clouds of our breath. It takes a few minutes for light from the sky to seep back. But gradually the stars drill through the frost and grow brighter and brighter until the hood of the Ford and the field before us are bathed in silver. I risk a glance at my father. His face is shadowed by his hat, expressionless, lying against the wheel like on a sickbed. His mouth and eyes are closed. He’s shared his secret with me; this is the private moment I longed for. But he did not choose to share it. It chose him. His body acted alone, took him over for its own rude, ridiculous purposes.
I know now, in fact I know more than he does because he went away and I stayed watching. It’s mine to enter and understand. He still doesn’t speak, doesn’t ask me what I saw. Why should he ever talk about anything? My love for him wells up and I take his hand where it lies in his mitt on the seat and he squeezes my mitten. I’ll get the shovel, he says then in a tired voice. There’s relief in the sag of his shoulders and along with everything else I feel relief too, that it’s over and he is still himself.
But he doesn’t move, he lies there with his head against the wheel. We sit for another long time without talking. Then truck lights come along the road towards us. There’s room for the truck to pass, but I know they’ll see us and stop. I step out of the cab and walk with my mammoth shadow through the headlights and around to the driver’s door. It’s Mr. Stalling, Betty’s dad, rolling down his window, turning his shy smile to the cold night.
That’s us in the ditch, I say before he can speak. Can you run us home? My voice is ordinary, cheerful. I jump a bit to warm myself. Dad’ll bring the tractor out tomorrow to get the Ford, I say. Then I go back to help Dad.
How’d you manage that? Mr. Stalling asks as I climb into his truck and slide across the seat. Driving off the road is what he means.
I guess he fainted, I say. My dad is climbing slowly into the truck after me and I reach across to help him close the door. As I lean over him I smell pee.
Everybody at our place is getting the flu, I add.
The week after my dad drives into the ditch I don’t go to school because there is no let-up from the cold. In the dark of morning and early evening we trudge out to the barn carrying a lantern. It’s so cold that the snowdrifts sound hollow. I haul the slop pail out to the pigs (who winter in the barn) and then I tramp to the henhouse and feed and water the chickens. The chickens despise one another in ordinary weather but are persuaded by the cold to sit in a tight row in the coop, warming the air around them with their chicken-smelling heat. They’ve stopped laying months ago.
In between chores, in that short winter day with the frost so thick on the windows that the house is dark, we all sit around the stove in the living room, the wind a constant electric whine. My mother puts me to ripping old clot
hes from the rag box into strips, Phillip’s woollen trousers worn so thin they won’t hold a patch and my skirt that was Mother’s and then Gracie’s and then mine. These I braid into a long serpent that coils into a pile as high as my chair, and my mother winds it into a rug and sews the coils together flat. Then I am put to work unravelling sweaters, amazed at how eager the wool is to slip out of its rows and turn itself back into yarn again, although it still keeps the memory of what it was, the way my mother’s hair does when it is unbraided. I unravel Dad’s navy sweater, Mother’s light blue sweater, and a red sweater my nana in England sent for me when I was little, collecting the short broken pieces from the worn elbows into a nest to be used for stuffing pillows and winding the long pieces of yarn into big balls. There is a sombre companionship to our days: our silence has a joint knowing within it. Mother says she will teach me to knit, but before she can, we all fall sick with a cold and flu. When I am better three weeks have gone by and I have lost the will to go back to school and no one makes me.
What I had to consider was the possibility that he was like this all along. That was why they sent my father to Canada, that was the missing piece in the jigsaw. It was the right shape, it snapped into place. But the colour was wrong. It was a sinister patch in the story of the kindly grandparents, did not fit with my father as a young man in England getting out of bed in the morning with unthinking confidence in what the day will bring him, knowing that he’ll groom the carter’s shaggy horses and take pleasure in it, that he’ll bend effortlessly into lifting crates and rolling barrels, that there might be shepherd’s pie for tea and a pint of cider after, and larks reeling in the sky in their evening roost when he walks out to Kersal Moor with his mates.
I did not invent this version of my father’s life. I picked it up the way you pick a shell up off a beach. Polished, shapely, unlike anything you’ve seen or thought of before. Sui generis. When I learned this Latin term in school in Oldham I understood it immediately. There are things that are not cobbled together from something else, that have the authority of their own existence. Like the times tables that came to me intact in Grade Three, the numbers with their ready-made personalities, Nine a tall, responsible boy with thick brown hair, standing at a corner (at Sixty-three), waiting for Seven to ride eagerly up on his bicycle. No arguing with these stories.