Back in the kitchen, Alec lifts a blackened pot from the sink. The oats he left in it from breakfast have bloated and the pot is beginning to gather frost around its edges, like the pond outside would have done sometime back in October. The same pond Alec and Cassie used to float waxed-paper boats on after the summer rains, when there were any. And where in a different November, they watched a flock of late-migrating Canada geese land, skidding on unexpected ice before their bodies splashed down into the unfrozen centre.
By morning the geese were all on the shore of the pond, eating their fill of wilted greens. All but one. An albino goose, eerily white, was frozen in the centre of the pond, its pink eyes wild with panic and wings beating the ice.
Alec and Cassie, who always woke early to fresh snow, had spilled outside, unable to delay their play another moment. But then they’d heard the terrible honking and arrived at the pond to find the goose there, its flock unconcerned and eating.
Seeing the children, the white goose hissed and flapped its wings to reveal a hem of bloody feathers where the ice had cut into its legs. A moment later it slumped onto the ice and was still.
Cassie grabbed Alec’s arm and shook it. “Do something!”
When he tested the ice, it was too thin to walk on or even to crawl on for very far. Cassie was frantic, always soft when it came to the suffering of animals. So Alec ran and pulled his toboggan out of the shed, tied a rope to the curl of wood in front and pushed himself out towards the bird while his sister held limply to his lifeline and sobbed into her scarf.
Alec inched towards the goose, moving himself and the sled by pulling and pushing against the ice with his gloved fingers and toes of his boots.
The ice creaked and groaned under his weight and Alec closed his eyes as he struggled forward. When he opened his eyes again, he had covered most of the distance and was nearly knocked unconscious as the goose reared back and flapped its wings against his head. Although his heart pounded against the make-do raft, Alec’s hands were steady as he retrieved from his pocket a hammer that he’d thought to grab from the shed. He began, delicately, to knock the ice from around the bird’s imprisoned legs. As he did, water soaked through his gloves and the sleeves of his coat, but he kept working, wet and freezing, all the time wondering how a coyote or badger hadn’t already had its way with this creature during the night. There should have been nothing left for him and Cassie to find but a mess of guts and bloody feathers and two gnawed legs trapped in the ice.
“Be careful, Alec.” Cassie sniffled and sobbed at the edge of the pond, where she stood rooted, still loosely holding onto the end of the rope.
“Get ready to pull!” Alec shouted, his voice shuddering with cold as his muscles began to lose control. “I need you to help.” And with that he tapped the ice one last time and braced himself for it to fracture and for the goose to whack him senseless as it took off into the air.
The ice merely collapsed in a sheet under Alec’s weight. Water rushed over the toboggan and soaked his chest and legs. The goose crumpled, wings open on the water, too exhausted to act on its unexpected freedom. Alec dragged the goose up next to him on the toboggan, and with the last of his strength turned them around and tugged on the rope that connected him to the shore.
Cassie was still blubbering as she turned away from the pond and put the rope over her shoulder, letting Alec pull against her until he was close enough to shore to crawl, dragging the goose the rest of the way. Cassie left him there, dripping, and ran home to wake their mother.
“There they are! It’s not my fault; I didn’t make him do it!”
Mom was furious with both of them. Years later, Alec would understand that her anger was mostly fear. At the time he was simply relieved to let her wrap him in a blanket and help him to the house, drops of goose blood forming a trail behind him.
“Do you know what could’ve happened?” she said. “What would we do without you?”
“I had to get the goose,” was all he said. And without scolding him again his mother lifted the large bird from his arms, its head dangling at the bottom of its neck, and carried it into the house with them. She sent Alec upstairs to a warm bath and busied herself, with Cassie’s now-cheerful help, reconstructing their old playpen from the attic, where it had been since they were babies. She smeared ointment on the goose’s wounds and set it inside the pen on top of an electric blanket. She lit a fire and pushed the goose close enough to catch the heat.
“Remember that goose?” Alec asks his father, emerging from the kitchen with a mug of black coffee. He sets it on a television tray for his father if he feels up to it.
“Would’ve been a fine feast if all of you hadn’t blubbered over it the way you did.”
“After everything we did to save that thing, I couldn’t believe you wanted to cook it.”
“Bird was half dead when you brought it in. A mercy to finish it off instead of letting it go on suffering like that.”
“Probably.”
That night Cassie had announced her plans to keep the goose as a pet and walk it on a leash. She went off to bed happy while Alec carried a blanket downstairs and was kept awake worrying over the way it didn’t seem to care about being caged.
“Your mother was as soft as the both of you,” Alec’s father says. “Three peas, the three of you.”
“Three peas,” Alec says, a smile fleeting across his face for the only time since the hospital called. “Have you taken your pills today?” he asks, reaching for the box of bottles, knowing the answer is no.
“Don’t need that poison,” his father says, gumming the insides of his cheeks without the teeth he says were stolen in the hospital. “Doctor’s trying to kill me with those. Ask your mother. She knows the truth.”
“Mom’s not here, Dad. She’s gone,” Alec says. His father nods as the truth sinks back in.
In the night, Alec slips downstairs from his old room, where a plug-in oil heater has created a capsule of warmth around his bed, and adds a log to the fire next to where his father sleeps in his chair. Later, Alec allows him the dignity of finding the bathroom by himself, although this time Alec hears what a struggle it is for the man who has always prided himself on stubborn strength above everything else. When he comes out of the bathroom, Alec is outside the door and helps him back to the living room where he collapses in his chair and pats Alec’s hand before letting go. After sitting with him through the rest of the night, Alec is ready with breakfast before his father wakes.
“I’ve had oatmeal every morning my whole life,” his father says. “That stuff’ll keep you alive forever.”
Alec snorts. His father’s smoked for more than fifty years. He replaced Bible reading with drinking when he was widowed. Now his liver is soaked in alcohol, his lungs are coals. But the oatmeal. Yes, the oatmeal will save him.
The goose rallied in the night, thumping its wings on the floor of the playpen until it got to its feet. After that Alec was able to sleep. By morning the bird was dead.
“We’re lucky to have such a strong father,” Alec said to Cassie when she was fourteen and said she was going to leave. Their mother’s sister had agreed to give her a room in exchange for help around the house.
“He’s strong, all right,” she said, her hand covering a bruise on her arm where Dad had grabbed her to make her listen to one of his speeches.
“He’s sorry. I can tell. He won’t do it again.”
As Alec considers the man who has been reduced to his chair, he wishes he had never tried to apologize for him. It wasn’t the first time he was rough with Cassie. Just the first time Alec let himself see it.
Alec gently wraps a scarf around his father’s neck and listens to him breathe. The gas company was supposed to be by to turn the heat back on yesterday, but so far they haven’t arrived, just cashed the cheque he gave them to cover the arrears and a month in advance.
“Do you want a Christmas tree, Dad?” Alec asks. He’s been thinking that it might be nice to have the light
s to look at at night.
“It’s barely the middle of November. What do you think, I’m gonna die before it’s even Christmas?” Alec’s father looks at him, then away. “Don’t need no damn tree in here, but you do what you want.”
“Okay, Dad. I’ll see what I can find.”
By noon, the gas company has come through the storm, the pilot on the furnace has been relit and the smell of its first breath of fuel is a not-unpleasant, sleepy smell in the house. By three o’clock, drips of water fall from the ceiling, raining onto the furniture and floor. Alec’s father lets him move him a few feet farther from the fire where it’s dry. Alec sits down on the floor by his father’s feet and rests a hand on his hospital slipper.
“Your sister,” his father says. “Cass — ”
“Cassandra, Dad,” Alec says.
“Your sister always liked Christmas. Too much. Always wanted more presents. A father shouldn’t have to be Santa Claus, you know. There’s other things a father needs to be.”
“Like what?” Alec asks, leaning forward to make his father face him. “Like what, Dad?”
YEAR OF THE GRASSHOPPER
SO MANY GRASSHOPPERS THAT YEAR, ENOUGH that two or three were found clinging to the head of each stalk of wheat in the fields. And not enough poison in the country for even Saskatchewan to be rid of them. A farmer might as well have fired birdshot into his crops for all the good it would do to spray. Or sent my brothers to pull the insects’ legs off, crippling them, so when they snapped their wings they’d fall back to the ground, unable to achieve flight without the advantage of hop.
There was a time when I was very young that I might have thought this cruel, but I came to hate the insects so feverishly that, years later, when there were only a few, I’d cross the street to avoid a grasshopper on the sidewalk.
That year the country was choked with them, their smell like burnt hair. Sunsets were blacked out, voices of birds swallowed by the noise of a swarm that single-mindedly ate as one.
I was an ignorant child and didn’t understand why my grandpa and uncles stood clench-fisted as their work was devoured, when they prayed for relief, and when it didn’t come, for faith.
I didn’t need to visit the farm; I might have stayed in town with my mom and played inside the house. But I’d have missed petting the friendly barn cats as they sunned their fur and lazily swatted the occasional grasshopper out of the air. And I wouldn’t have been able to help my grandpa with his chores or go with him in his big Ford truck that smelled sweetly of manure and hay, to count cows in the summer pasture. Whenever I walked with my grandpa, the grasshoppers would jump out of the way in front of us, as though the path was being peeled.
I rode in the grain trucks and combine too, during the harvest of what was left, and held my breath to keep from panicking whenever a grasshopper flung itself through an open window and pivoted to look at me with its black-bead eyes. My grandpa grinned — his face wrinkled and bristly with white whiskers — as he reached over to pinch it dead and pop it back outside.
After what little grain there was was spilled into the auger — a dangerous machine that I was never allowed near — I rode an old-fashioned bicycle up and down the gravel road through Schoenfeld, my grandparents’ village. I spread my arms and legs, pretending they were wings, and laughed when the grasshoppers parted in front of the wheels.
This was the first summer I went to visit my other grandparents who lived a hundred miles away in Fox Valley, where there was no valley and I didn’t see any foxes.
Some things — the grasshoppers, the stunted quilts of wheat they fed on — appeared the same, but everything that mattered was different. My new grandparents had ways of doing things that made me feel small and underfoot. They didn’t need my help.
One morning, I followed my new grandfather, expecting to go with him out to the fields, but he left me on the porch and drove away. I noticed that the grasshoppers didn’t part for him, but were crushed under his boots when he walked. And when he drove his truck through them, they stirred up into a storm.
As I stood on the cement steps the grasshoppers began to settle. The insects he’d trampled twitched, their legs stirring through their yellow eggs and entrails. My feet felt glued to the porch. I pictured myself taking a step, pulling away from the imaginary adhesive, which would stretch like gum between my shoe and the cement. Then down the three stairs, while the bones in my legs jellied.
I closed my eyes and tried to make the scene turn out differently, the way my first grandpa seemed able to make the grasshoppers move aside, the way they parted in front of my bike. With my fingers rolled up into fists I took one step, another, and another.
The nearest grasshoppers tensed, squat with readiness to jump. But instead of letting me through they sprung up and snapped their wings, thousands in every direction, dipping and swerving erratically with each stroke. The nearest ones pitched themselves against my legs and scrabbled to cling to my bare skin with their spiny elbows. More grasshoppers replaced them as they fell away. Others latched onto my socks and the hem of my shorts, shuffling their wings closed under their scabby backs. They stared up at me, their eyes hard, mouths miming the action of devouring. I took another step and, trying to brush the insects away, only excited more of them to spatter against me, land higher and higher against my waist, my back, my chest. They grasped and scraped their way over my arms and shirt, into my shorts, under my shirt and into my hair. I looked in the direction my grandfather had gone but knew, in this place, I was alone.
POOR NELLA PEA
MY MOTHER’S HOUSE IN SWIFT CURRENT has belonged to me for six months. This is the first time I’ve been home since she died.
In January, rather than sort and box all the memories that exist as shelves of chipped curios, antique linens and decades of clothes, I simply locked up and left. The only thing I took was my mother’s childhood diary, my other inheritance. It’s paperboard cover is swollen and tattered now, from being read while I washed dishes, and being dropped in the rain.
The house too, has deteriorated. The original wooden front steps have bowed even deeper for not being shovelled all winter. And the whole structure leans more to the left, away from the prairie wind.
I climb the worn, arthritic steps up to the porch and discover that one of the front windows is broken, probably by a neighbourhood boy throwing stones. I pick up the larger pieces of glass that have sheared from the rotted frame and set them on the porch rail.
There are other small vandalisms, too. A pair of lover’s initials carved into the crumbling paint behind a plastic loveseat — an addition of my father’s that never sat well with my mother. And hanging from her unpruned rosebushes, which stubbornly insist on blooming year after year, are banners of toilet paper which, having been rained on and dried in the sun, drape like papier mâché ghosts across the thorny branches.
The front lock still requires some finesse, calculated jiggling and a specific click like a password for gaining access to a club. Once the door is open I step over the splintered threshold and instinctively turn out the porch light, left burning all this time. Even though everyone in the neighbourhood knows that the old yellow house bordering the CPR line has been empty these months, leaving a light on at night is still what people around here do to let everyone know someone’s home, whether they are or not.
I expect to find that the mice have moved back in. All through my childhood they’d always found ways, no matter how many holes were boarded up on the outside. And now, judging by the trail of droppings along the floorboards, they’ve made themselves at home.
Except for a thick film of dust, everything else is as it was. Heavy drapes are drawn across the windows, the furniture arranged not for comfort, but as props. The thirty-year-old lampshades still wrapped in their original cellophane.
After a walk-through of the main floor, trying to appraise it as a buyer might, I take the staircase to the second storey. The banister is so thickly waxed it feels like a candle, an
d when I touch it, dust sifts down around the spindles like silt settling in a pond after it’s been churned up. It’s going to take a lot of work to scrape away all the evidence of the lives lived here. Much more though, my realtor says, if I want to sell the house rather than pay someone to push it over.
Upstairs in my parents’ bedroom, there is more damage. Beads of moisture have collected under the windowsill, some calcifying over the years into little, rounded stalactites which, when I touch them, feel like calluses. Early last spring, when Mom complained of a draft — there had always been drafts — my father carefully caulked all the seams. But no amount of sealing was enough to keep the house from losing what little heat the ancient furnace in the basement was still able to breathe out. Cold has always seeped in through the single-paned windows. And now that my father has gone willingly, maybe even gratefully, into a retirement home, there’s no one left to care for the house but me.
This room never suited my mother. The walls and switch plates are papered with an insistently cheerful, thornless, yellow-rose pattern chosen by my grandmother when the house belonged to her. Mom inherited the wallpaper more than fifty years ago, along with the heavy dressers which, if moved, would reveal dents in the floorboards under each of their feet. My grandmother died when my mother was still a young girl and, since then, only one thing in this room has ever changed. On the floor, at the side of the bed, there’s an oval of darker wood where, until I was a thirteen, a rag rug was always placed just so. When I kneel down and touch the floor there, I remember how it was like so many other things that once belonged to my grandmother. For reasons I didn’t understand, it was sacred.
One day the only cat my mother ever let me have became trapped in that bedroom and vomited on her precious rug. Rather than toss it out as a ruined bit of otherwise worthless nostalgia, or throw it in the wash with the rest of the rags, Mom carefully bathed it in the tub, easing away the crust of digestive fluid with my old baby brush.
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