by Donna Milner
Nettie
EVEN IN HER dreams the perfume haunts her; the heavy fragrance drifts into her sleep. Like smoke it seeps through her body. Her stomach – so used to the upheaval of nausea from failed chemotherapy – now lurches at the invasion.
Nettie’s eyes open. She turns to the bedroom window, but no lace curtains lift in a night breeze.
Her eyes search the darkened hospital room for the offending blossoms. Have they forgotten she does not want flowers in her room? Especially roses. And there are none now. Yet the pungent aroma that stole its way into her dreams was so real. The memory of it still lingers.
She cannot escape it. She cannot get up and leave her bed like she did on long-ago nights at home. Nights when she lay in the dark feeling empty and used, trying to quiet the voices dancing in her head. All those nights blend together in her memory. Except one. The memory of one June night remains clear.
Gus insisted they come home early. He feared the lightning might knock out the hydro as it often did in the heat of a summer storm. He needed to be there to start the gas generator for the cooler. So after their bridge game they left Dr Mumford’s before the usual midnight snack.
The storm’s fury was spent by the time they pulled into the yard. Nettie noticed the flicker of candlelight in the room above the dairy, but the yard light and kitchen lights in the farmhouse were on.
‘No power outage here,’ Gus said, relieved, as they made their way up to the house.
Nettie picked up a laundry basket beside the screen door. She smiled. She could always count on her daughter. She did not stop to wonder why the baskets had been left out on the enclosed porch, or why in the kitchen Natalie’s books were still spread out on the table.
Gus switched off lights as he followed her through the kitchen. ‘I don’t remember the last time the house was this empty on a Saturday night,’ he said. He took her hand before they reached the bedroom door, ‘While the mice are away, the cats can play,’ he whispered.
In the silence of their room, before their nightly prayers, he lifted the bedroom window. ‘Leave it closed,’ Nettie said.
‘It’s so stuffy in here,’ Gus told her, then slid the window halfway up in concession. But no breeze lifted the curtains to enter the room.
In their bed, in the darkness, his hands reached over and lifted Nettie’s cotton nightgown. In all the years of her marriage, she never refused her husband.
She lay there and waited for it to be over.
Later, a satisfied Gus patted her on the hip – as if she had enjoyed it as much as he – then rolled over. Nettie turned her face into her pillow. She tried to sleep. As the demons of the night overcame her, she rose. She pulled on her dressing gown in the darkness then left the room, quietly closing the door on her husband’s snores.
She slipped through the shadows of the silent house. Out on the porch the battered wicker chair creaked in protest as she sat down. Through the window screens she watched the last of the storm recede over the mountains.
Even on the porch Nettie’s sensitive nose detected the roses. But before long the odours of the farm took over. She inhaled the heady fragrances, separating them in her mind: the pungent smell of the barn radiating from the coats hanging by the door; the crisp scent of aspens, wet with rain; and her favourite, the sweet-smelling hay.
The warm scent always brought the memory of lying in a sea of loose hay, watching her young children bouncing in the spongy fullness of the loft, while barn swallows scolded and dove at them from the rafters.
These days the hay was stacked and stored in hard bales.
But it was not the aroma of the hay, or memories of lost summers that tugged at Nettie’s mind as she sat looking out across the farmyard. It was River.
It was the image of River climbing up to the loft earlier that day to throw bales down to the calving pen. He was halfway up the rungs on the side of the barn when she looked up from where she stood hanging the wash on the clothesline. Her hands stopped mid air as she spotted him. Except for leather gloves, he wore nothing from the waist up. His blond ponytail bounced on his tanned shoulders. When he reached the top, he swung around and glanced back. Even from across the yard she saw the melancholy look that had taken over his face since the news of the death of another Kennedy. She felt the heat on her own face rise as his eyes met hers. He waved and called, ‘Hey Nettie,’ as if it was perfectly natural for her to be standing there frozen, with a pair of longjohns dangling in front of her.
She willed herself out of the trance and finished pegging her husband’s wet underwear to the line. She half raised her hand to wave back then glanced around to see if anyone had caught her staring so brazenly.
As she finished hanging the wash she tried not to compare River’s tanned body to her husband’s red farmer’s tan, which ended at his elbows and at the V of his neck. She pushed away the betraying thoughts of the ‘chicken skin’ appearance of Gus’s torso under his longjohns and refused to let her eyes stray back to the loft.
But in the loneliness of night, in the darkness of the porch, Nettie allowed those visions to play out. She allowed herself to wonder what it would feel like to touch River’s bare skin, what it would feel like to have his touching hers.
From somewhere in the distance came the relaying echo of dogs barking in the valley. From under the washtubs, hiding from the storm, Buddy whimpered in his sleep, but did not wake. The border collie, getting too old to run except in his dreams, offered no company.
Nettie stared up at the window above the dairy. The flickering golden glow of candlelight was gone. Yellow light from the bathroom clicked on and River’s silhouette moved across the room. She felt less alone in the night knowing he too was awake. The light remained on. River reappeared and sat down at the table in front of the window.
Nettie pushed herself up. She moved across to the porch doorway, down the steps, and across to the yard gate as if sleepwalking. The last of the rainwater ran down the tin roofs, the heavy drops splashing in the mud puddles below, as she unlatched the gate. In the lean-to beside the barn, horses shifted in their stalls. From the rafters above a barn owl questioned Nettie’s passing. She barely heard. Her slippered feet carried her over the gravel path, past the rose garden, and across the farmyard to the bottom of the stairway at the side of the dairy.
As she placed her foot on the bottom step she realized her slippers were soaking wet. She hesitated. Suddenly, the door above opened. With her hand on the railing, her right foot in the air above the second tread, Nettie froze.
The sound of Natalie’s voice whispering, ‘Good night’ stunned her into movement. Nettie quickly backed away, then ducked into the shadows underneath the stairs.
Moments later she watched as her daughter, dressed only in her nightgown and what looked like one of her brothers’ shirts, came down the stairs. She passed so close that Nettie could have reached out and touched her through the wooden steps.
And as she passed, Nettie smelled it. Above the odours of the barn, the night storm, and the roses, wafted the unmistakable musk of sex.
Chapter Thirty-One
THE NEXT DAY, I woke to sunshine streaming in through my bedroom window. It was not morning light. I had slept in.
The house was silent, empty. The alarm clock on my night table read ten o’clock. Except during a few childhood illnesses, I never stayed in bed that late. It felt strange to be getting up at that hour. Stranger yet was the fact that my mother allowed it. I should have recognized this as the first warning sign that things had changed, and would never be the same again. But I didn’t see it then.
Downstairs, the breakfast dishes still sat on the kitchen table, along with my schoolbooks pushed to the side. I found a note on the counter from my mother telling me – as if I wouldn’t know where she would be on a Sunday morning – that she’d gone with Dad.
‘Natalie, please start lunch’ she wrote. ‘Your brothers should be back from Kelowna some time this morning’ My mother’s handwriting went on
to remind me Father Mac would be joining us for supper that evening. The Sunday roast, leaking red at the bottom of the brown paper wrapping, was defrosting in the sink.
After I washed up my parents’ breakfast dishes, I spent the rest of the morning pretending to focus on the war of 1812.
If my mother behaved differently, if she was quieter, more subdued when she and my father returned from town that day, I barely noticed. If she seemed distant while we set the table for the noon meal, like my father, I put it down to her worrying about my brothers on the road.
Right on time, as if they’d heard a dinner bell ring, Morgan and Carl blew in the door in a whirlwind of excitement and travel fatigue.
‘You can relax now, Nettie, your boys are home,’ Dad teased. But I was too lost in my own thoughts to wonder why she still seemed distracted. I was too wrapped up in reliving the images of the previous night, feeling the changes in my body, too certain that my delicious secret must be obvious to everyone. I was too busy looking into the faces of my family to see if they noticed any change in me, to be able to see a change in her.
As I watched the door, anxiously waiting for River to come through, I let the imagined promised conversation run through my mind. But lunch passed and no River.
Later, at Mom’s insistence, I reluctantly went with her to afternoon mass. I assumed she had gone to mass earlier. It never occurred to me that my mother had delivered the milk with Dad that morning.
In St Anthony’s I went through the service by rote. I knelt when Mom knelt, crossed myself when she did; I mouthed the responding chants, but my mind was elsewhere.
Following mass my mother went to confession. I sat out on the cold marble steps in front of the church and waited for her.
My mother went to confession once every week, sometimes twice. I often wondered what she – a woman whose most damning sin surely existed only in her mind – could possibly have to confess that would take the amount of time she spent kneeling in that little booth. When I was very young I thought she must make things up, like I did in my first confessional.
As a small child I wondered what lurked beyond the small oak door my mother disappeared behind each week. Once, when no one was looking, I peeked inside the forbidden box. What I believed I saw was a black abyss that would swallow me whole if I did not do things right. By the time I made my first communion, I shook at the thought of entering that suffocating place. My carefully memorized Act of Contrition, ‘Oh, my God I am heartily sorry for having offended thee and I detest my sins dissolved the moment I knelt in the shadows and heard the rough slide of the wooden slat. With the appearance of the priest’s silhouette behind the screen, I blurted out, ‘I didn’t eat my peas!’ and burst into tears.
At six, the concept of sin was too abstract. I am not sure it is any less confusing now, but as a teenager I was pretty certain I knew which acts the church considered sins.
After my mother emerged from the church doors she said to me, ‘Natalie, aren’t you going to confess?’
I was momentarily surprised by her words. I refused to meet her eyes. I stood and hurried down the steps saying, ‘Not today.’ I could not imagine what a priest, who would give a frightened six-year-old child five Hail Marys, and four Our Fathers, as penance for not cleaning her plate, would expect from a sixteen-year-old seductress.
We ate at the dining room table that night. We always did when Father Mackenzie joined us for dinner. The best china and silverware came out. It was the only time, except at Christmas, that we had wine, supplied by the priest, with our meal.
Neither River nor Boyer showed up for supper. Boyer had arrived home from Kelowna late in the afternoon and went straight to his cabin. I was not surprised by River’s absence. He never joined us when Father Mac visited. Perhaps it was simply because River was not Catholic, but I believed it was because he could not forget the priest who advised his friend to enlist. Whatever the reason, the only evening meal River did not share with us was on the Sundays when Father Mac came out.
I was anxious to see River, but a part of me was relieved he was not there. I was certain that even if no one else noticed the change in me, Father Mac would see the lust in my heart just by looking at my face.
Although everyone was on their best behaviour when the parish priest sat at the head of our table, Father Mac was not a stern man. I found it hard to imagine this flesh-and-blood being, who joked and gossiped with my family, as the same apparition that heard and knew all our sins, the one whose voice doled out penance without hesitation in the darkness. It was as if he left the judgments and the knowledge of our transgressions behind when he left the booth.
That night, after Father Mac said grace, Mom began passing the steaming platters around. As the priest forked up slices of meat he said, ‘Well, Nettie, I think you need to confess the real reason you left our bridge game early last night.’
Mom, usually so attentive to guests, had seemed distant, preoccupied. She looked as if she had not heard his words and was trying to catch up to what he had just said. His steel grey eyes held hers. When she seemed at a loss for a reply, he let her off the hook. ‘You were down two games,’ Father Mac said. ‘You escaped before we thoroughly trounced you.’
‘You caught me, Father,’ Mom replied.
‘Ha!’ Dad interjected. ‘We were just getting warmed up. If that storm hadn’t blown in, you wouldn’t have stood a chance.’ My father and the priest argued bridge while the rest of us pretended to listen.
As he helped himself to another slice of Yorkshire pudding, Father Mac said, ‘It looks certain that we will be closing down Our Lady next year, Nettie.’
That got Mom’s attention. ‘Closing it down?’ she asked, startled. ‘Whatever for?’
‘Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, there is less and less need for it,’ the priest answered between mouthfuls of mashed potatoes.
‘Less need?’ my mother said. ‘There will always be girls in need.’
‘The home has ten dorm rooms,’ Father Mac went on. ‘There has been as many as thirty girls staying there in the past. Lately there are fewer than ten. Right now we have only four girls with us.’
‘Well, I’m sure it’s no thanks to the church’s stance on the birth control pill.’
Movement at the table stopped, forks stayed in mid-air after my mother’s words. My father stared open-mouthed at her. I expected him, or the priest, to ask what got into her; it was so unlike Mom to question the church. But Father Mac sighed and said, ‘Now, Nettie, you know I spoke out in favour of liberalizing the church’s policy on contraceptives. But since the pope has reaffirmed the church’s traditional teachings in the papal encyclical, I have to respect that decision, even if I was disappointed in it.’
‘Of course,’ she murmured. ‘I’m sorry, Father.’ Then, as if she could not stop herself Mom added, ‘But obviously many Catholic girls are taking the pill anyway. I’m glad that it’s lessened the need for places like Our Lady, but now those same girls are condemned for committing a mortal sin just by putting that pill in their mouth.’
‘Well, as it is,’ the priest said, in a voice that clearly meant he was done with this discussion, ‘by this time next year, you and your “steam team” will never have to press another uniform again.’
After supper Father Mac took off his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves. My father protested, as he always did, that there was no need for the priest to help with the milking. And as always he followed my father out the door saying, ‘I can always carry a few buckets. A little physical work is good for the soul.’
I knew there would be no opportunity to see River that night.
The next day passed in a blur of exams and studying. Again River did not show up for meals on Monday. No one questioned his absence. Perhaps they thought he was still in mourning, or on one of his periodic cleansing fasts. I knew this was not one of those times. By that evening I was in a state of panic.
After supper, after everyone ha
d gone to the barn and Mom to the dairy, I hurried through the dishes and went upstairs to my bedroom. Instead of climbing out on the roof I stood at my window and watched. I watched as Morgan and Carl finished carrying the last milk containers to the dairy. I listened to the clanking of the stanchions as the cows were released, the stumbling of hooves on slippery concrete as they were herded out the back doors. I heard the blasting spray of hoses washing down the stalls. I watched as first the lights of the barn went out and then the dairy. From behind my window I saw Boyer get into his car and drive up the road to his cabin. Morgan and Carl made their way to the house, their steps subdued, displaying none of their usual jostling or rushing to get into town. Mom and Dad followed behind, looking relieved another workday was done. But still no sign of River.
I waited. I waited, while the surrounding hills lost the last of the orange rays. I waited, while the water pipes whined and complained as everyone took turns in the bathroom. I waited, while my brothers’ footsteps echoed down the stairway, while Morgan’s pickup truck started and rumbled down the road. I waited until the only sound in the house was the staccato canned laughter coming from the television set in the parlour. Then I crept downstairs, and out the kitchen door.
I hurried across the yard and ran up the dairy stairs. The rap of my knuckles on the wooden door sounded hollow. I opened the door and looked inside. My grandmother’s quilt still covered the bed; a lonely Curier and Ives calendar still hung on the wall. But there were no books on the nightstand or the grey chrome tabletop. No guitar leaned in the corner. His absence filled the room.
I ran over and pulled open the closet door. No green duffel bag waited inside, no clothes hung there smelling of him. I don’t know what I expected to see when I frantically threw open the bathroom door only to be greeted by the institutional cleanliness of the white fixtures, the sterile odour of Old Dutch still clinging to the air. What did I expect to find when I turned and knelt to look under the bed? There was no trace of life in this room, no trace of his presence. It was as if the two years he had spent here did not exist. I fled from the empty room, and ran down the steps and across the yard. I stopped at the gate. Up on the porch Mom stood in the shadowed doorway as if she was waiting for me. She was waiting for me. She knew!