It was so little. Nothing, really. But it was enough for you. You crawled out from between the bales and stood. You were about to go to her, but she stopped you.
“No, don’t come yet,” Mom said, starting back down the ladder. “Come when you’re ready. After I’m down.” You knew she was so afraid of that ladder, scared that you’d frighten her and she’d fall. Still you forgave her for it.
When she was at the bottom, you went over to the edge and looked down.
I couldn’t help it. I wanted to go to you. To step out from where I was hiding and tell you not to trust her. That she’d only disappoint you. I thought you heard me behind you. “Elsie,” I said, wanting to protect you. Tell you that it wasn’t you who needed to change.
“Elsie.” I startled you. I didn’t know you didn’t see me. When you turned to look I saw you lose your balance. I reached out to pull you back from the edge, grabbing onto the timber to hold us both. And for just a moment before you took my hand, you leaned towards Mom, as though you believed, this time, she would catch you.
MAGPIE
ALL DAY AT SCHOOL MAGDA HAD thought about the news. It crawled around in the front of her mind. Twitched and ate away at her concentration, distracting her from the problems on the chalkboard. Caused her to stare at her hands when she should have been thinking about math, current events, and whether to trade her ham sandwich for Karen Neufeldt’s egg salad at lunchtime.
At three o’clock Mr. Toews, her seventh-grade English teacher at the Wymark School, to which she and other village kids were bussed, had called her up to his desk after class to ask if something was wrong. She scowled and lied, saying that everything was “Just peachy, thanks”.
Now, standing at the edge of a lane of trees that leads to her grandparents’ farm, Magda looks through a screen of leaves at her mother’s car. The last time she saw it, or her mother for that matter, was three years ago after Magda’s father split and her mother brought her here. Since then, the home where her mother grew up has been Magda’s, where she’s done her best to forget she ever had parents. Magda feels like stomping in the front door and announcing to her mother that she isn’t a sack of laundry. Normal people don’t dump off a daughter and expect her to be fluffed and ready whenever they feel like coming back. Yet she can’t bring herself to go inside.
When Magda sees her grandfather come out of the house, shield his eyes from the sun with his hand, and squint in her direction, her heart floats into her throat. She swallows it back down and slips round to the other side of the house where there’s a carpet of tall grass next to a wooden double-bench swing that her grandfather built for her. She holds her breath and wades in as grasshoppers, hiding in the green coolness, lift up a collective, alarmed rustle with their scabby wings.
The sound would have stopped her once, but not since she was nine years old in Calgary, when her father had figured out that she was afraid of them. After that he took her into their backyard every day and caught the fattest one he could find, making her hold it in her hand until she could stop crying, stop squirming, and finally sit still while the huge insect stared up at her from her palm, daring her, it seemed, to flinch.
“Count as high as you need to,” her father would say when they were having one of their grasshopper sessions. “But soon you shouldn’t need to go higher than three.”
Even at the time Magda knew her father’s lessons were meant to toughen her so she wouldn’t grow up to be like her mother who, he said, was about as resilient as a bowl of pudding. Her father was more like the spoon, always stirring up the gunk on the bottom.
“I don’t know about you, Lizzy,” he’d say to Magda’s mother when she went to pieces over some small thing. Spilled milk. “You’d think, with what happened to your brother all those years ago, you’d have grown a thicker skin.” Her mother would come unglued. Later she’d try hard to put herself back together. And she’d be better for a while.
At the time, Magda didn’t know exactly what had happened to her mother’s brother, just that it was also why her mother never wanted them to visit the farm in Saskatchewan. Anywhere in Mennonite country was off limits, so Magda’s grandparents had always had to come to Calgary for visits.
“There are ghosts back there,” her mother said when Magda was still a little girl and asked why.
“Real ones?” Magda said, her eyes wide.
“Of course not. We’re still Mennonite, you and me, we don’t believe in ridiculous things.”
Still, when Magda first arrived on her grandparents’ farm she was afraid of what she might find. Even when the only thing was the grasshoppers.
Now, three years later, when they pop up like mustard seeds splashed into hot oil, Magda screws up her nerve and crouches down among them. She cups her hand over a fat yellow insect and carefully enfolds it in the cage of her fingers. She can feel it scrabbling against her skin, probing for a way out. She buries her face into the shelf of her knees, and begins to count.
“One, two, three — ”
By now, Magda knows her grandmother will have felt the need to call the school bus driver, who would have told her that Magda was dropped off at the corner of the Wiebes’ farm down the road, along with all the other village kids, just like every day. Her grandparents and her mother will know that she’s nearby. After all, it’s not as though she could hook up with a stranger and hitch a ride into town. There are no strangers here. And no one they know would give her a lift without dropping by and checking with her grandparents first. And that’s the other problem. There’s nowhere else Magda wants to be.
Above Magda, still holding the grasshopper as it probes against her skin, a canopy of fluttering leaves filters the afternoon sun. She relaxes a little under their shelter.
“Thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four — ” She looks up when a magpie settles on a telephone wire that intersects the trees, carrying the village’s party lines, which is how Mary Dyck, the school nosey-parker, knew Magda’s mother had called last night. The little twit had been listening in.
“So is she, like, gonna take you back to Calgary, or what?” Mary had said, giddy and flushed with mock concern, entertainment being otherwise hard to come by.
“I dunno, why don’t you tell me? You seem to know more than I do.” The truth was, the only thing any of them knew was that Magda’s mother was coming.
Magda stopped counting and thought of how her grandfather complained about the party lines that strung the whole village together, two by two, into one big grapevine. “As though anyone around here needs bigger ears.”
More than once, though, Magda’s grandmother had scolded him for listening. Sometimes he and Magda shared the stool that sat under the old, matte-black wall phone, each with one bum cheek on the seat, and listened together. Usually it was the same old stuff. Church rummage sales, the price of grain, how the prime minister’s free-trade deal was giving Canada away to the Americans. Every once in a while they’d get lucky and overhear the pastor of their country church talking to someone far away about his itchy feet, how when he preached on Sundays all he could think about was dropping down behind the pulpit, pulling off his shoes and socks and raking between his toes.
Without meaning to, Magda smiles. But then the smile fades as she thinks of her father. That once, he scolded her for picking up a tarnished ring with a piece of blue, cut glass that she found on the sidewalk in front of their house. He said she was behaving just like a filthy magpie, happy with bits of worthless bits of glitter.
When Magda came to live with her grandparents, her grandfather had called her his little magpie. Then it didn’t seem like a bad thing anymore.
“Little magpie,” Magda says, losing count. She slides the grasshopper under the toe of her shoe and listens for the popping sound it makes just before its insides squish out.
For nearly half a year after Magda’s father took off, she and her mother lived alone in Calgary. Winter came early that year, and by the beginning of November clenched like a fist
around their house. At times snowdrifts barricaded the front door so one of them, usually Magda, would have to climb out a window with the shovel and clear a path to the street. But there wasn’t much point. Especially when it snowed so much that the schools shut down for an entire week and the city hunkered, frozen and muffled under a thick blanket of snow that replaced itself within an hour of being cleared. During those days her mother couldn’t think of a reason to get out of bed.
What Magda remembers most about all that snow is how it dampened the noise of the city, except when someone brave enough to go out would crunch and squeak over it in a pair of winter Sorrels. The sound, which could be heard even inside the house, through the picture window, broke into the silence before it disappeared a little farther down the block.
Insulated as they were, any sounds Magda made seemed magnified. Small clatters bounced off the walls, making it too easy to get on her mother’s nerves. And although Magda practiced being silent as though it were a game and noise meant she’d lose points, sometimes she forgot. Or she couldn’t help herself. Like if they’d missed breakfast and lunch and it was now suppertime. Instead of swallowing her words to fill her empty stomach, she felt she would burst with them. When she finally spoke, her voice rang out like a dropped dish.
“Maybe we could order a pizza for supper. They deliver so you wouldn’t have to go to the store. Or I could go shopping. I could walk,” Magda said one evening.
“Oh, for crying out loud, Magda! Don’t bother me with that. Just go play in the yard.” But it was already after dark and Magda couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt like playing. She bundled up anyway and went to sit on the freshly shovelled front steps until her bum was as frozen as the concrete beneath her, and her fingers and toes were like small, frozen potatoes. She waited as long as she could stand to, and a little longer, before she quietly snuck back inside and peeled off her stiffened winter clothes and boots. From there she crept downstairs into the basement, avoiding the creaky fourth and seventh steps. Once at the bottom she opened the door to the cold-storage room which, because its walls were made of cement, stayed nearly as cold as the upstairs fridge. She’d hidden packages of cheese slices and Ritz crackers there, stolen from the last time her mother brought home groceries. And now she took them from the pantry into the warm space under the stairs and, using her old pink-and-white Easy Bake Oven that was a gift from her grandmother when she’d turned six, toasted cheese sandwiches, praying that the smell of hot cheese wouldn’t waft up the stairs to her mother.
As far back as she could remember Magda’s grandparents had come to visit them in Calgary about twice a year. Usually, just before they arrived was when her father decided he had to go away for work, or visit an old friend who he said needed help. He’d come back, often more than a week later, and act all sorry that he’d missed seeing them. Sometimes he missed them by only a few minutes.
Magda’s grandmother had never learned to drive. So whenever she came to the city on her own it was on the Greyhound bus. And for as long as she was there, there’d be lots of good food and the whole house would get cleaned from top to bottom and smell like bleach and baking. Her grandmother kept so busy it was as though she had no ‘off’ button and never needed to rest, which seemed to have the opposite effect of making her mother grow more and more tired.
“You can’t get tired from watching someone else work,” Magda had said, more than a little snippily. She was annoyed with her mother for being short with her grandmother who’d spent half the morning cleaning dust and grease from the tops of their kitchen cabinets.
“Wanna bet?” her mother said, looking up from a cup of cold coffee .
If it was a summer visit, and if Magda’s grandfather came too, he’d drive Magda to the Co-op a few blocks away. Together they’d thump on huge watermelons, looking for just the right one to go with her grandmother’s rollkuchen. Her grandmother made a slit in the centre of each rectangle of soft dough and pulled the ends through, so that after they’d fried and puffed up they looked like big doughy bows. Rollkuchen with thick, dripping triangles of watermelon was Magda’s favourite thing to eat. Especially when she and her grandfather sat outside on the front step and spit seeds onto the lawn.
“Now, don’t swallow those seeds, eh?” he’d say. “They’ll plant themselves in there and next you’ll have watermelons growing in your stomach.”
“Are you fooling me, Grandpa?” Magda said. At the time she was still young enough not to know for sure and her suspicion that he might be putting her on was even more delicious than the cold fruit and warm dough.
He laughed through his nose and patted her on her shoulder, said she was a good gurdie.
Things were always best when Magda’s grandparents were around. Even so, after it had been months since Magda’s father left them for that last time, her mother told them they shouldn’t visit for a while. And no, she didn’t know when would be a good time. Maybe next year. Maybe never.
“We’re fine here alone,” her mother said, her voice a wound-up spring. “There’s no reason I can’t take care of myself and my own daughter.”
“Why won’t you let them come?” Magda said afterwards, her fingers fisted together.
“What, and take care of us? Are we so helpless without your father? When did he ever do anything for us? Tell me that.”
“At least when he was here you tried to cook and keep things nice.” Magda looked around at the mess that had gradually begun to crowd in on them. “Well, I want Grandma and Grandpa to visit. Or doesn’t anything I want matter?”
“Yeah, well, maybe I should send you to live with them,” her mother said. She took a step forward and stood over Magda, but instead of looking larger as was the usual effect, her mother suddenly seemed smaller and far away.
“Great. When do I leave?”
From her hiding place in the tall grass Magda listens to her grandfather’s footsteps as he comes near. He’s looking for her and it takes all of Magda’s resolve to keep from revealing herself to him.
When she first came to live with them, Magda used to disappear for hours at a time. There were endless places to hide on the farm. After a while her grandfather would always come looking. He was good at knowing where she’d be and seemed able to see her through anything.
“Why don’t you just leave me alone?” she said whenever he found her and, with creaky knees, slid down to sit beside her on the ground against whatever outbuilding had been her shield.
“Why would I do that?”
“I dunno. Maybe because I don’t want to be found.” But as many times as she’d hidden and as many times as she said things to make him want her gone, her grandfather never stopped finding her. Eventually she had stopped trying to hide.
Even now, although she’s crouching as still as she can in the grass, she’s sure her grandfather can see her. Especially when that stupid magpie flies off the telephone line above them and lets out a shrill laugh as if to tattle on her. She’d like to throw a rock at it, strike it right out of the air, but she’d give herself away for sure.
Magda can hear her grandfather take a deep breath, like a slow drink, and let it out. She knows he’s looking at the sky, appreciating the beautiful day. He always does, even when it’s not.
“She’ll come home,” her grandfather says to himself, loud enough for Magda to hear. His voice is gentle and sure and Magda has never understood how he can be so calm when the sky is falling. Literally. Like when it hails and he doesn’t even get uptight about all the crops that are being ruined.
He waits there a few moments longer, just feet away, until Magda thinks he’s going to wade into the grass and crouch down with her. But he turns back towards the house and walks away, leaving Magda to decide whether to follow.
When her grandfather is gone, Magda gets up and goes round to the other side of the trees, her feet fat and numb from squatting so long. Soon, though, she feels the thousands of pinpricks of blood rushing back into her tissues, as though
she’s walking on a pair of her grandmother’s tomato-shaped pin cushions.
Behind the grass and trees, hidden from the house, is the garden. Really it’s two gardens. There used to be a fence between them but it was taken down when, a long time ago, her grandparents bought the house next door to theirs and used it to store old furniture, tools, and potatoes. It’s a rickety old building that wouldn’t be good for living in anymore, but Magda likes it, even though she knows, now, that the people who once lived there were responsible for what happened to her mother’s brother. He had brought a Bible over to talk to them and was shot dead for it later while he worked in the garden. Afterwards, her grandparents wanted to make sure they’d never have to worry about neighbours again.
“Your mamma was so broken-hearted,” Magda’s grandfather told her when she asked about that time. “It was as though we buried two children instead of only one.”
But Magda doesn’t care how her mother felt. She thinks she should’ve gotten over it by now.
As Magda stands in the garden she wonders if she’ll be here to help with the harvest this year when her grandfather turns over the potato mounds with a pitchfork. He always pays her a nickel for every ice cream pailfull she empties into a wheelbarrow, which he takes to the root cellar in the old house.
Although they’re not the prettiest plants in the garden, Magda likes the potatoes. Even when the prairie winds scrape over them, the plants are both sturdy and flexible enough that they’ll bend without snapping. It would take one storm after another to lay them down.
For a while, after threatening to send Magda away, her mother made an effort to improve things for the two of them. She filled the fridge and pantry with groceries and spent time every day in front of the stove, an open recipe book next to her on the counter. During the day she listened to gaggingly uplifting music and hummed as she tidied the house, scrubbing places she’d never scrubbed before, like under the fridge. She bought a cheery plant for the kitchen windowsill, an African violet that she watered every day. She fussed over Magda too, hovering to make sure she was keeping up with her homework, asking whether she was happy. Although Magda wanted to trust the change in her mother, she could practically feel the ground shifting beneath them.
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