“Doesn’t seem to me she’s likely to last long out here,” he said to Jonah. The same way he might have talked about a cow that wasn’t fat enough to produce milk.
Jonah’s father had taken off his hat when he knocked on the couple’s door, even though Jonah knew he had no mind to come inside. Now he hit the hat against his hand to indicate he’d said what he came to say, and a puff of dust was expelled into the air. He waved it away before he set the grubby old fedora back on his head. “Just see that she isn’t a burden to me and your mother. We’re too old to put up with trouble on account of someone who can’t pull her own weight.” At barely fifty, Jonah’s father wasn’t old enough to have been busy dying for so many years.
Hazel stood at the door for a moment longer before gently pushing it closed.
“We should have gone over to see them as soon as we got here,” Hazel said when she turned around and faced her husband. She was anxiously unknotting her blouse and tucking it into her waistband. Jonah watched for a sign that she was hurt, or disgusted, by his father’s behaviour. That she was angry at Jonah for not telling her before what kind of a miserable old bugger the man was.
“First they couldn’t make it out for our wedding and now this. Your parents must feel so left out. We should go over right away and apologize.” Hazel looked around her and picked up a basket of jams and crackers — a wedding gift from a favourite teacher — from the kitchen table and stepped towards the door.
“Apologize?” Jonah said. “He just insulted you. He should be the one to apologize.”
“Yes. But he won’t, will he?” Hazel said, surprising Jonah.
“There’s no point.”
“There is. Even if not for them.” It didn’t matter that Jonah didn’t understand, because in that moment he believed her. He would have believed her if she said pigs laid eggs. And two years later, he still believed her when they had Katie. Even after his father bent over her crib and shook his head. Nobody had asked him, he said, whether he wanted to be a grandfather.
“He’s sick in his heart. He can’t help himself,” Hazel said after Jonah’s father had left.
“I suppose.” Jonah lifted Katie from Hazel’s arms and looked into her sleepy face. “It doesn’t matter, though.”
When Katie was old enough, Jonah taught her how to take fresh eggs from under their hens, the way his Aunt Ardelle had taught him. He knew, and it pleased him, that sometimes his father would be out in his own yard and see them sneaking towards the henhouse first thing in the morning, pretending they were foxes. When they came back, Hazel would meet them at the door, ready to cook the eggs. Sunny-side-up for Jonah. Scrambled for herself and Katie.
At first when Jonah woke up and couldn’t hear out of his left ear, he thought he must have left it plugged with the cotton wool he used to protect it against the noise of farm machinery. Probably it had been a good joke between Hazel and Katie, and they might even have made a little bet — who would have to peel the apples for Sunday’s pie — about how long it would take him to notice. He laughed at himself and wondered whether either of them thought it would be morning before he noticed his mistake.
He couldn’t feel anything inside his ear, though. When he tried to peer into it using Hazel’s cosmetics mirrors, he saw nothing. Just a few more wiry hairs than he’d expected, and a rim of wax around the entrance to the canal. He had thought himself more meticulous.
He covered his good ear with his hand and slammed a cabinet door. No, he wasn’t deaf. Not completely. It was like listening through a pillow. Jonah slammed the door again, expecting a change, for something to shake loose and sound to rush back in. But it was the same.
In the kitchen, Jonah found Hazel busy over a pan of eggs, Katie colouring on his newspaper. The bacon grease crackled and spat, but sounded flat.
“Sunny side?” Hazel said.
Jonah realized he was staring at her, and that she’d noticed. He was often given to long, appreciative looks — sometimes he still couldn’t believe she was his — but this was different. Seeing her dressed in last night’s rumpled pyjamas, her hair twisted into a careless knot, his mouth dried up and his breath became shallow. What would she do if something were to happen to him now? How would she survive out here, living next to his parents? Or would she leave with Katie and never think of him again?
Jonah put his hand over his good ear as Hazel repeated her question, but all he heard was her muffled voice, with no words.
“Fine,” he said. He sat down at the table across from Katie and watched her darling face, the map of freckles sprayed across her nose.
Katie looked up at her father, and when he gazed into her eyes, she giggled. “Daddy, don’t look at me like that,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Like you love me.”
Jonah felt as though his chest had been caught in a fan belt.
“I’m not supposed to love you?” he said, his voice becoming sharp.
Katie knit her eyebrows together. “You’re funny today,” she said and looked back to the picture she was drawing.
“My newspapers aren’t for your colouring,” Jonah said. He snatched the paper from underneath her crayons, sending them flying. The one she’d been using left a mark on the table.
“What’s gotten into you this morning?” Hazel said. She set a plate with two eggs, a heap of bacon, and toast in front of him.
“Nothing. I’d just like to read the paper before it becomes a colouring book.”
Jonah lowered his head to look at his eggs and thought about how he and Hazel were spoiling Katie. He made up his mind right then to be more firm.
As April became May and the last days of cold gave way to spring weather, Jonah convinced himself he was fine. No need to worry.
He helped Hazel sweep out the front porch. It was Katie’s favourite place, where she had finally decided to crawl for the first time. She’d been determined to visit the row of Hazel’s colourful rubber boots lined up against the outside wall.
In May, Hazel always moved her sewing into the porch. Katie was kept busy sorting buttons and helping unspool colourful bolts of fabric to become slipcovers and pillowcases and pleated bed skirts. At six years old Katie wasn’t much of a help yet, but Hazel sometimes let her press the sewing machine pedal from under the table while Hazel guided the fabric under the racing needle.
This year the two of them were making new curtains, all in some shade of blue, for every room in the house. Hazel preferred pale, solid colours that let light in, rather than the heavy drapes Jonah’s mother favoured, or the traditional farmsy patterns often used by the local wives. Something Jonah discovered last year when he brought home a length of blue gingham from a yard sale. Hazel laughed, a sound that was light and watery, and said she’d use it to make tablecloths.
“I love you for trying,” she’d said.
“Then just wait a minute to see what else I have.” Jonah went back out to his truck and carried in a new sewing machine — the woman who sold him the gingham had decided she preferred her old manual Singer, a heavy black model that had to be pumped into action. She gave him a good price on the new one, but he would gladly have gone back and paid her twice when he saw the look on Hazel’s face.
“What am I going to do with the old one?” she said, already making room on her sewing table for the new machine.
“I’ll use it,” Jonah announced, pleased with himself.
“You?” Hazel crossed her arms loosely and laughed, a sound that made Jonah think of sun showers. “You’ve never made a stitch your whole life, let alone a straight row of them.”
“I can learn to mend my own overalls, and you can save the good machine for your fancy material. Really, if I can drive a combine, I think I can do this.”
The next day though, when he tried to make sense of the machine, he misthreaded the bobbin and forgot to lock down the presser foot. He stepped on the pedal as though he was starting a truck engine. When Hazel and Katie ran out into the porc
h to see why he had yelped, Jonah tried to keep them from seeing the mass of black thread that looked like a patch of crabgrass sewn into the seat of his pants. They all laughed until their sides hurt. Afterwards, they drove into Swift Current for ice cream. Katie’s favourite was pistachio. She liked that it was green.
It had been weeks since Jonah first noticed the quietness in his ear. For the most part, he learned to compensate. So when the phone rang in their kitchen, he put it to his good ear and heard his mother’s voice.
“Come over, will you,” she said. It wasn’t a question, and she hung up as soon as she said it.
“What’s wrong with your hearing?” Jonah’s mother took one look at him on the back doorstep and asked this, before he could even say hello.
“What do you mean?” Jonah said, feeling suddenly exposed.
“I’ve seen enough old people come towards me with just one ear or the other to know when they’ve gone deaf.”
“It’s nothing. Just some water from the shower.”
“If you say so.” She didn’t seem convinced but was unwilling to pursue the matter. “I heard Hazel’s up there making herself some new curtains, eh?”
“Blue,” he said, unable to think of something more interesting. He looked around, taking in the perpetual sameness of his parents’ house. Even though his mother had recently changed her own curtains, they weren’t much different from the heavy yellow panels he’d known his whole life.
The new curtains were from the house of an old farmer who had lately died. Jonah’s mother considered them her due for being enlisted, along with a few other church ladies, to help with the cleaning.
“Well, here, then. I owe her for the Saskatoons she picked for me last summer. I have no use for fruit, but I won’t have her thinking I forgot the favour.” She went into the pantry and with the inside of her foot shoved a box across the kitchen floor. The cardboard was waxy and its bottom peppered in grit. The sound it made on the floor scraped into Jonah’s good ear, which he couldn’t help but turn towards the noise. “They’re not blue, but I don’t see any good reason these won’t keep out the sun just as well. She can save her material and make something useful for her and the girl to wear to church. Noticed you weren’t there last Sunday.”
As he walked back up the hill to his own house, weighed down with his mother’s box, Jonah thought about Hazel and quickened his pace. Halfway home, he wondered why his mother had noticed his hearing and Hazel had not.
“What did Mom want?” Hazel said when Jonah let the porch’s storm door spring shut behind him. He dropped the box with the curtains into a corner and heard a one-dimensional thud.
“She thought you could use these,” he said, looking from the bile-coloured drapes in the box, to the length of watery blue fabric draped across Hazel’s lap. She was getting ready to sew. “Something about paying you back for some Saskatoons?”
“That’s nice.” Hazel glanced at the box and scrunched her nose. She seemed amused, the same way as when one of the old people from nearby pressed a greasy paper bag full of fried New Year’s cookies into her hands, a thank-you for a visit. She’d thank them as though the simple-minded gratitude of farm-folk was endearing. But who was she to think that? And now, Jonah thought, she was making the same face over his mother’s gift. His mother, who wasn’t grateful for the berries, just worried that anyone might think she owed them.
“Uh huh,” Jonah said. He paused, turning his next words over on his tongue. They didn’t taste right. He didn’t even mean them. After all, he intended to throw the box of curtains into the back of his truck and get rid of them the next time he went to the nuisance yard. He didn’t care about them. “What are you going to do with these?” he said.
“Salvation Army, I guess.”
“Really?”
“Sure, why?”
“She’s going to want to know what you did with them.”
“I don’t like them,” Hazel said simply. She was threading a needle and had a length of blue thread between her teeth, but stopped to give him her attention. Katie, who Jonah could just see under the sewing table, had stitched together two squares of fabric, with holes left open for the head and arms of her favourite doll to fit through. She was about to come out, would have stood up and leaned against his leg in the way she always did, but instead shrunk back farther under the table. She had dropped her needle. Jonah could see it, a thin silver splinter sticking out of the rug.
“Katie,” he said, crouching down to look her in the face. “Do you see that?” He pointed to the needle, a trail of red thread looped through its eye.
“I dropped it. Mommy’s teaching me.”
“Teaching you to drop needles where people can step on them?”
“No.” He could see she was confused. Unused to being scolded. Not with the way they always treated her, as though she was a treasure on loan to them from God. As Jonah looked at his daughter, he saw how little it would take to turn her confusion into crying. He tried to stop himself. After all, he was wearing boots, so the needle couldn’t have harmed him.
“What if Daddy stepped on that, got it stuck in his foot, right into the bone, and had to pull it out with the pliers?” he said, and watched as Katie’s eyes began to blur under a film of tears.
“Jonah!” Hazel hissed under her breath. “What are you doing?”
She squeezed his shoulder, hard, and he glanced up from where he crouched and saw Hazel looking at him as though he was the crazy man down the hill. Like he hadn’t just said something perfectly reasonable. Still, he considered apologizing to Katie, lifting her from under the table and saying he was sorry, that she just needed to be more careful. After that, once Katie’s quivering bottom lip was stilled, he’d take his mother’s curtains away, but not before he’d lean over Hazel, sweep her hair aside and kiss behind her ear. He’d whisper an apology to her, too, and she’d forgive him. Of course she’d forgive him.
As Jonah stood up, he knocked Hazel’s scissors off the table. The blades opened into straight-edged jaws, but he barely heard them hit the floor. He cringed at the lack of sound and instinctively put his hand up to his ear. For a moment, he allowed himself to believe, again, that there might be something very wrong with him. And neither Hazel nor Katie, so busy with their own small concerns, cared enough to notice.
“I expect to see my mother’s drapes up by tonight,” he said. He kicked the box and left for the barn. Hazel got up to go after him, but she was wearing slippers and stopped at the end of the walk. Jonah ignored her when she called after him.
When Jonah came home later that evening, it was almost dark, and he saw from the outside of the house that his mother’s old curtains were hung. Light from the kitchen spilled, jaundiced, between the seams, and the curtains themselves looked harsh and stiff, the fabric bristly with sun stains on the lining. He remembered that they always smelled harshly yellow in his parents’ house, like strong pollen. Now, when Jonah opened the door to his own house and stepped inside, he stood stiff as a switch. After a while, he managed to sit down, but for the rest of the evening didn’t say anything. He just stared at the drapes in silence, picking dead skin from his lips.
By the next morning, Hazel had removed the old curtains and Jonah didn’t ask what she did with them. In their place were the new blue panels she’d finished sewing the day before.
“I’m sorry,” Jonah whispered into Hazel’s hair. He had found her still in her pyjamas, her body soft with sleep, standing over a pot of oatmeal. She looked the way she used to when they were first married and he would wrap himself around her from behind while she stirred. “I’ll make it up to the two of you. I promise.” To Katie, waiting quietly at the table, he said, “How’d you and Mommy like to go for a drive today?”
With Katie in the backseat, Jonah reached beside him and squeezed Hazel’s hand. As much a reassurance for himself as her. She turned towards him and he saw a new uncertainty tugging at her eyes and mouth. She was entitled to it, he thought, after the wa
y he’d behaved over those damn curtains.
Jonah looked at Katie in the rear view mirror. “Guessed where we’re going yet?”
“Swift Current?” she said, unsure.
“Nope. Some place you’ve never been. Even Mom doesn’t know.” Jonah grinned and turned his attention back to the road. Though he still couldn’t hear out of the one ear, he felt a lightness returning to him. He had overcome his worry, and nothing could bring him down.
But Jonah hadn’t considered that the tourist amenities at Cypress Hills wouldn’t be open yet in the second week of May. The hut where visitors could rent paddleboats and canoes in the summer was boarded up. As were the hamburger and ice cream stands. It was cold, too, when they arrived, with sharp gusts of wind blowing off the lake.
“Damn it.” Jonah jolted the car into park and dropped his hands back onto the steering wheel as they rocked to a stop.
“What are we doing here?” Hazel said, reminding him that Katie was in the back seat.
“Well.” He looked around. “I guess we don’t need cheeseburgers and a paddleboat to have a good time. We’ll go for a walk around the lake and look at all the cabins.” He got out of the car and opened Katie’s door. “Isn’t this nice, sweetheart?” He took her hand and started to walk towards the lake.
“I’m cold. I want to go home,” Katie said. She was already shivering.
“Where’s your coat?”
“I didn’t bring it,” she said, looking up at him as though he’d know where to find a new one. Jonah pictured where her coat was at home, on a hook in the mudroom. It would have been so simple for her to take it. Why hadn’t she? He and Hazel had taught her better than to be so forgetful. For a moment he felt as though having identified the problem would make it go away. Katie would have her coat. And for God’s sake, maybe if a few businesses opened a little earlier, more people would come.
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