Reading by Lightning

by Joan Thomas

  When I came in towards tea time Nan would be up from her nap. You’re like a coiled spring, you, she’d say peevishly, You can’t sit still. Always out and about, every minute of the day. Some days she was too mournful to complain. Tears oozed from her as though her skin were permeable. Ignoring the dirty floor in the loo (which she was too short-sighted to see), I plunged into the jobs that signified good housekeeping on Stott Street: colouring the flagstones with the donkey stone, polishing the stove all over with black leading. Appeased, she asked me to pin up her hair, and I stood behind her coiling tin curlers into neat rows while she sat sipping milky tea at the table. I sponged scabs of dried pea soup off her blouse, I pinned a shawl around her shoulders. I was Alice, tending to the White Queen. Nothing would ever happen.

  Then something did, something arrived in the mail, a petition from my former life. The envelope was addressed in my father’s small, pointed writing:

  Dear Lily,

  When I picked up the mail in town this week, this letter was there for you. Your mother would be happier if I threw it in the fire. His family are city people and don’t know the Lord and there doesn’t seem to be any future in it.

  We were happy to hear from Lucy at Christmas.

  They are very fond of you. I hope Mother is in good health. Give her my best regards.

  Fondly,

  William Piper

  A sealed envelope was folded inside, addressed to me. Its return address was

  R. Bates

  27 Rue Argyle

  Montreal, Quebec

  Canada

  Inside was a single sheet, dated almost two months before:

  May 4, 1937

  Dear Lily,

  You’ll be surprised to get another letter from me after all this time. Especially since you didn’t answer the first one. Are you still in this earthly realm? I haven’t heard about a bunch of Christian farmers mysteriously disappearing from the prairies, so I guess you must be. I saw Charlotte last week and told her I was writing to you. She told me not to pester you. But she sends her regards. She’s almost a nurse, she’ll finish her training in June.

  You and I had fun, bringing rain down in the middle of a drought. Now that Dad’s back in Ontario counting his shekels I never go west. If I did I’d come and see you. I’d like to see first-hand what’s happening with the Farmers Unity League. I’m supposed to finish at McGill this year. I’m not working as hard as I should be (as you can tell, I’d rather write letters). Last Sunday I had a grand time at a mock convention at the Labour Temple. I played the part of Leon Blum, and others were Mussolini, etc. etc. There was a lot of shouting and too much beer consumed, and people wandered in from the street to watch.

  I’ll be looking for work in a few months. It’s not like it is on a farm, where sons follow fathers onto the soil. As hard as it was through the drought, at least it was an honest labour, each man working for his family and his community.

  Come the revolution!

  Russell Bates

  This letter was written in a bold hand in blue ink on lined white paper. I held it and could hardly credit the reality of it, having long ago shifted Russell Bates from my memory into my dreams. My own idiocy that day came back to me, my bare legs covered with sand, my ridiculous makeshift bathing suit. The watermark larger than me soaking into the car seat. Christian farmers mysteriously disappearing from the prairies. Heat collected around my eyes. Whatever was I thinking, telling him that? He’d said he was starting university in Montreal that fall, and I remembered asking, What will you be when you finish? and he said, What will I be? so I heard what a child’s question it was. Our conversation played out relent-lessly in my mind:

  How about you? You going to be a farmer when you grow up?

  Women don’t farm.

  No? What’s your mother do?

  She’s a farmer’s wife.

  Oh. Well, maybe that’s what you’ll be.

  I don’t think so. And that’s when I said, The Lord will probably come before then. I meant to say this tartly — I meant him to understand the way I both believed and didn’t believe it. But he turned his narrow eyes in my direction, he asked in that humorous way, Is that the same as hell freezing over? and I had nothing clever to say to that. In a breathless, anxious voice I launched into explaining it, the last terrible battle, the horses wading up to their bellies in blood. We were up on the Lookout at that point and he was looking down at the village below us and he asked me the name of it. When I told him, Nebo, he said, That means heaven in Ukrainian. So, hey — you’re living in heaven. You don’t have to wait for Jesus to come!

  I tucked the letter away. It was written to recall me to mortifications I’d put behind me. I was not going to answer. Anyway, in his own indirect way my dad had asked me not to. I did think about Russell Bates, though, the way he appeared every three or four years like a comet barrelling across the sky — or one of those birds that pop out of a clock, startling the heck out of you and making a racket before the door slams shut on it again. I thought about him, and one night I dreamt I was walking down the street and saw him walking towards me, his sturdy body all bundled up in a winter coat and scarf. I opened my eyes with a gasp. And then I lay furious that I’d yanked myself awake before I spoke to him, before I had the chance to ask, Why are you writing to me?

  On Sunday I took the letter to Oldham and showed the last part to Madeleine, fussily folding the top of the page over, which of course increased the intrigue. She read it curiously. Leon Blum. You should ask George who that is. He’s bound to know. She looked at me a minute with a smile, but she didn’t ask.

  And then something else happened, something for Nan. Edward VIII had gone away with his wretched bride and the coronation of the new king, King George VI, was set for May 12. There would be a parade with marching bands and tableaus wheeled down the street on wagons. The May Queen would be crowned the same day (as a local allegory, I assumed) and a tree planted in the common. A flushed old man from the Salford Lads Club, so bowlegged that he couldn’t stop a pig in an entry (this was what Nan said), took up money for fireworks and Nan gave him sixpence. He bought his Roman candles from Mrs. Baxter as he had the money and stored them in a leaky tent in the garden. Two days before the coronation they were all ruined by rain. Mrs. Baxter told us. Mrs. Baxter herself had ordered from the BBC a pictorial map of London and a tiny lead replica of the royal coach and horses, so that as you listened to the coronation on the wireless you could move the coach along the London streets.

  On May 11 Nan and I walked up to the precinct to see the decorations. A banner reading LONG MAY HE REIGN hung at the end of our street. After being knocked legless before Christmas by the abdication, Nan was well satisfied. There’d a been none of this bother for that gormless wonder, she said. It was Edward VIII she meant. We stood at the window of the post and telegraph office and admired a picture of the new King and his lovely wife and his two lovely daughters. Anyone could see it would be different with him.

  When I woke up on Coronation Day it was colder than usual, and I burrowed the icy toes of one foot into the warm bend of the other knee. Then I realized with a shock that it must be very late and that Nan had not started the stove. I got out of bed and pulled my skirt and sweater on and crept across the hall to her room. The door was open a foot and she was still lying in bed. The motionless ridge of her legs under the cotton bedspread filled me with foreboding and I was suddenly terrified of opening the door. Then I heard a breath and I gave the door a push.

  She was lying on her side, facing the doorway. The room was filled with the rough sound of her breath and then a silence, and then another — like the sound of someone breathing under water. Her lips had collapsed inward and her face leered against the pillowcase, where her drool had formed a dark circle. Her eyes were not quite closed. The space between the lids was blank, as if her pale irises had faded away altogether. But her vagueness was gone, she had been pulled into something that caught her attention. The expression on h
er face was of blunt surprise.

  Except in animals I had never seen death. The dread I felt was a dread I’d known only in dreams, and instinctively I stepped backwards into the hall. In the long silence after a breath I turned and ran, pounding down the stairs, shoving my feet into my shoes at the door. Mrs. Crisp was sweeping the walkway, and I saw her surprised face turn towards me. There was no telephone on the street and so I pelted all the way to Mosley Lane and burst into the shop, the bell clattering above me. Mrs. Baxter heard me and pushed aside the blanket hanging over the door to the back room. She was wearing a smock and her hair was in curlers.

  What’s the trouble? she cried when she saw my face.

  It’s my nana, I said. I can’t wake her.

  I’ll call the doctor, said Mrs. Baxter. She went into the back and I could hear her on the telephone, and when she came out she was tying a scarf over her curlers. He’s on his way, love, she said. You mustn’t go back on your own. I’ll come with you.

  When we got back to the house Mrs. Crisp was still in the street. I’ve shut the door, she said to me severely. You run off leaving it wide open. All sorts could of walked in.

  Thank you, Mary, said Mrs. Baxter tartly. She pulled me into the entrance. You wait here, love, she murmured. I couldn’t tell him the exact number. You wait right by the door where he can see you, and I’ll see to your nana.

  So I waited by the door, so frightened, so grateful, tears dripping down my cheeks, so relieved that I didn’t have to go in and hear those rough, laboured breaths, didn’t have to stand in that room in the terrible silence between breaths, avoiding those vacant eyes. Mrs. Crisp and I waited together. She bent down to pick up her milk, looking at me darkly, wiping the bottle elaborately with her handkerchief. The coal man came with his horse and cart and I shook my head at him and so did she and he moved on. Finally a hansom cab drove under the LONG MAY HE REIGN banner at the top of the street, and the wait was over.

  4

  Two days after King George VI glided out of Westminster Abbey with his scrawny neck in a spasm from the weight of his crown, my nana was buried from St. Ambrose Parish Church. Her coffin was carried into the church by neighbours wearing Great War uniforms, their bellies straining against the buttons of their jackets. Men who grew up with my dad on Stott Street (Robert Hodgkins, Basil Milgate and others whose names I didn’t know), wearing twenty-year-old infantry uniforms because that was all they had by way of dress clothes. I walked with my cousins behind the coffin. It was all achingly poignant. The organ music, the handful of white-haired neighbours singing, The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended, the darkness falls at thy behest. The sun falling through a ruby window onto the lily wreath Uncle Roland wired from Ireland. The vicar with his silver hair and gleaming white robe proclaiming in a cultivated voice, I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth… And then the line, And though after my skin, worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God, and in the turn of a sentence it all fell away and I was hurled forward into the endless pathways of eternity, where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched. I saw with a lurch of my stomach that it was all empty — the piety on the altar boy’s fre ckle d face manufactured, the robes and candles and coloured glass just a pageant to keep the truth at bay, and I bent my head and held hard to the varnished wood of the pew in front of me. Furious tears burned in my eyes. Nan was never saved! It would have been more honest to bury her under a tree in the common. Or in the market, under the brick walkway of the Flat Iron Market with a bit of bunting strung over her grave.

  I hadn’t been able to bring myself to ask whether Nan was already dead when Mrs. Baxter went up to her room on Coronation Day, or whether she died some short time later. I’d waited in the kitchen for a long time after the doctor arrived, listening to the murmur of their voices above me, and then Mrs. Baxter came down and put her hand on my arm and said, Let’s go back to the shop, love. You can telephone your auntie, you can tell her it’s over. All I’d felt was a huge relief that I’d escaped the moment of death. But by the afternoon of the funeral, terror and shame had overtaken me, and when I saw Aunt Lucy in the kitchen putting teacakes on plates I began to cry. Between sobs I blurted out an approximate sin: that I’d told Mrs. Baxter I couldn’t wake Nan when really, I’d been too frightened to try.

  Oh, my dear, she wouldn’t have woken, said Aunt Lucy, pulling me towards her soft shoulder. She’d had a stroke, lovie. You did just right to go for help. But the real dimension of things had been revealed to me, the meaning of the astonishment on Nan’s dying face, and my terror stayed with me, pressing down on me when I moved or spoke, the way the damp cold will batter at you if you dare to move in your bed. Nan had believed in God the way she believed in the King: that he obliged us all by existing and doing his bit to keep the sun rising in the east and the trams running up Liverpool Street, but his person had no real bearing on hers. And I’d never tried to witness to her, never once. I hadn’t mentioned the Lord except that one time at Christmas dinner when I’d alluded to one of his miracles, in a way that could have been dismissed as a joke. I’d spent the whole autumn focused on my own pleasures. So I let Aunt Lucy embrace me, and cried some more, but her comforting words did not touch me.

  After the burial there was a tea served in the parish hall for the neighbours in Salford, and then we came back to Oldham and poured tea again, for Aunt Lucy’s neighbours. Gradually they left, and Lois and Madeleine curled up on the sofa, silent and tired. They’d known Nan all their lives, but my own particular burden was of a sort not easily shared. I walked restlessly through the house. It was dawning on me why this had happened, that God was using this means to bring me back to him. Drastic, yes (I felt a wave of vertigo at the thought, a lick of the old despair), but it was always like that with God, things never were proportionate.

  A lantern burned in the potting shed window, and George’s head was bent over his workbench. I knocked, just twice, leaving off the last knock so he could ignore me if he wanted to. Without a word he reached over and opened the door from where he was sitting, as though he’d sent for me. I stepped across the sill into the yellow light of a kerosene lantern and smelled earth, rust, turpentine, bird nests.

  The workbench of the potting shed was high, for standing, and sitting in front of it, George looked like a gnome at work. He seemed to be making something of a lump of brown clay. Had enough of Anglo-Christian burial rituals, then? he said. The lamplight darkened the shadows under his eyes.

  Are you making another skull? I asked.

  Well, well, so cynical and so young, he said. He stood up and pulled an oilcloth over the clay before I could see what it was. My sisters’ influence, no doubt.

  I smiled awkwardly at him. How long are you staying home?

  I’m going back on the train tomorrow. I’ve got exams next week. I should be studying now, I suppose, but attention must be paid. In death if not in life.

  You don’t think we paid enough attention to Nan?

  Me, I meant, he said. Not you or the girls or Mother.

  Well, you’re not home very much, I said. Why don’t you go to university in Manchester?

  I didn’t get a scholarship to Manchester.

  You’re studying history?

  In a way. I’m hoping to go into paleontology.

  I lifted my chin, the way Lois always did. I wouldn’t ask. He offered me his stool, his shadow, broken against the shelves, gesturing hugely.

  No, that’s all right, I said. I stood hugging my arms. Do you care if I look at your things?

  Go ahead, he said. He held the lamp up for me.

  This was still a potting shed, with clay pots nested under the workbench, and trowels hanging from pegs on the centre beam. But new rough shelves had been put up with aluminum brackets, and they were crammed with the paraphernalia I’d seen when Lois unlocked the shed. Hanging right in front of me was a chart of the heavens with the familiar constellations. Beside it was a diagram ma
de up of circles, one inside the other. The planets were embedded in these discs like gems in a ring.

  They’re spheres, said George eagerly, following my eyes. Crystal spheres. As they revolve they put out music. Only the pure of heart can hear it. You must have studied Kepler?