Vera got a job as a secretary in Dr. Holland’s office. She assured us it was temporary. She had worked as a librarian in Edmonton and she wanted to do that again. There was one small library in Sawmill Creek and apparently a lot of women who wanted to work there. I’m not sure why. By the time I was seventeen, Vera was still at Dr. Holland’s office. She hadn’t mentioned it being temporary for years. When I overheard her talk about it, she would say, “It’s comfortable,” or, “We have a good relationship. It’s been so long we’re almost like family.”
Vera, I realized as I got older, liked to think of other people as family. It seemed easier for her to think of them as closely related to her, rather than accepting them simply as friends, acquaintances, or colleagues. I remember Dr. and Mrs. Holland being invited to dinner, Nick and I fidgeting at the table in our church clothes while the forced geniality of the adults’ conversation lurched on. My mother and Dr. Holland were definitely not like family. By the time I was in high school, I only saw him when I stopped by the office, or the odd time when I was walking along the road and he drove by on his way to the golf course. He would honk his horn and acknowledge me with a quick, assured chop to the air, looking away before I could wave back.
When we first lived in Sawmill Creek, Nick and I both became aligned with a band of children that radiated from the cul-de-sac out, into the field behind our house and then into the bush behind the field. They came to us, and they were all boys. With these boys, we threw robins’ eggs from nests just to collect the shards of blue, which when ground and spread on the skin were a sure source of incredible strength and courage, or so we believed. We collected windfalls from the abandoned apple trees, twisted and dwarfed with lack of care, and launched apple wars across the field. The windfalls were in various stages of rotting and usually didn’t hurt when they hit, but they made a satisfying snap of apple skin breaking open and releasing juice as they did. With these boys, we crawled tunnels into the brush at the edge of the field, prodded at piles of rocks with sticks to taunt garter snakes, caught grasshoppers in our hands and stuffed them down each other’s shirts. There is no way to describe the feeling of a panicked insect’s fine, sharp legs against your skin, looking for a way out.
Dungeons and Dragons marked my exodus from the group. It was played with dice and glossy manuals, warlocks and dungeon masters dictating an entire afternoon’s activities. Play had moved inside, into the houses that circled the cul-de-sac and lined the neighbouring streets. It was in houses that my girlness became apparent. There were mothers who said, “Oh, look, you’ve brought your sister,” to Nick as though I was a novelty or a baby-sitter. And there were other sisters. Sisters were summoned from within the house, even from neighbouring houses. Sisters my age, or younger, or older, driving Barbie’s Star Trailer toward me or waving a life-sized bodiless plastic head with long blond hair. “Look, we can do her hair!” they would say, smiling in a calm and oddly convincing way. Boys had basements where they could play D & D or manoeuvre joysticks and buttons through games on Atari. Girls had bedrooms where we could pull clothes on and off dolls, seduce Ken with Skipper, and slam their hard plastic bodies together until Barbie raised her bent arm and slapped Ken, then changed into a new outfit.
The cul-de-sac is where we went between school and home. When we walked across the field to go home for dinner, we both knew not to tell Vera all the details of our day. Once, Vera, Nick, and I seemed to exist as a single entity. We had always been with Vera, sharing the front seat of the van while she drove, sharing a grocery cart while she shopped, or Nick propped on her hip, my hand in hers as she walked. She must’ve been happy to find a small house and a large yard. Somewhere she could put us down and let us run. I don’t know when it happened but by the time I was walking home with Nick across the back field, we had become three separate people.
The following Sunday began as Sundays usually did, with Nick’s voice calling, “Harper, Harper,” as he tugged at my arm.
“Go. Away.” Sunday was not my favourite day. Once, it may have been. I tried to remember a time before the valley, before the Friends of Christ Free Church, when my parents were still together. I couldn’t remember what we did on Sundays then but I was sure it involved getting into the van and driving. There was no seat-belt law then and my father, Jim, didn’t want us to feel confined. The back of the van was my territory. There was a bed back there, the floor carpeted, strewn with stuffed animals, plastic toys, and my parents’ clothes – Vera’s soft cotton skirts and blouses thin as webs, Jim’s shirts, flannel and thick. Nick would sit on Vera’s lap and sometimes she would strap him in the seat belt with her, despite Jim’s disapproval. My father would blow smoke rings over the seat to the back calling them fairy rings. I would catch them, then watch as they disappeared in my hands. There was always music playing on the tape deck. Crosby, Stills and Nash. Neil Young. Vera and Jim agreed that they liked them separate, Young on his own, warbling in that awful voice of his. I would sit on the floor, back against the bed frame, and focus on the ceiling or lie on the foam mattress and stare out the window. Most of my daydreams had the same theme. When I grew up, I would live in a van forever. I could go anywhere. Everywhere. Just like my father told me, I would never strap myself in.
“Har-per!” Nick pulled at me in bed again, his braced teeth clenched in a warning: Get out of bed now. The ritual of him waking me had begun after Vera had tried to pull me out of bed one Sunday. I had heard her voice as though from behind an escarpment of sleep and then felt her hand tight around my arm, towing me out. Get. Out. Of. Bed. You lazy little bitch. It had been that last word, the shock of it, that had propelled me out of the sheets and made me console my mother.
She was on the floor leaning against my bed and crying, mumbling, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I’m just so exhausted.” Parents are a reminder that nothing is as it seems. My mother was the kind of woman who made jam from scratch, who smiled as she handed it out to even the slightest acquaintance Mason jars with decorative fabric tied over the lids. She seemed harmless but she could wield the word bitch in a way that frightened me and had me comforting her at once. We said nothing that morning, the three of us, through breakfast and all the way to church. After that, it was Nick who was sent to wake me up on Sunday mornings.
My mother grew up in a farming community in northern Alberta where everyone was Ukrainian first, Catholic second. In the summer, I see fields waving with yellow wheat. In the winter, I see snow, flat under the force of wind. The priest in the village doesn’t know a word of English. I don’t know a word of Ukrainian. In that community, the Old Country is either a memory or a retold story, depending which side of the Atlantic you were born on.
Vera’s parents are both from the Old Country but they meet in Canada. Vera’s mom, my baba, travels alone by boat when she is seventeen, apples from her orchard back home folded between the clothes in her trunk. When she arrives in Edmonton by train, she is taken to the farm of friends of her family who had immigrated from her own village in Ukraine. On her first Sunday in the Ukrainian Catholic Church, Baba gives out the apples she brought from home, a rare treat in Northern Alberta then. She gives one to the priest, one to the father of each family, and two to the young man who smiled at her when she walked down the aisle to her seat. Baba is scolded later for being so brazen and uncouth. The next spring she marries this same young man and he becomes Vera’s father.
What happened between Vera’s mother’s generation and mine was hundreds of years of difference compressed into a few decades.
Vera’s parents are able to buy a small piece of land, but with no money left over, they have to clear it themselves, by saw, pickaxe, shovel, hand. They build a shack with a thatched roof and floorboards a couple of feet off the ground. A bigger house is eventually built with two bedrooms but no running water or electricity. I stared at my mother in disbelief the first time she told me. “Oh, by the time I left home, we had electricity, a telephone, even a TV,” Vera assured me. A generation
gap in her own generation. The television is used almost exclusively to watch Hockey Night in Canada, Vera’s older sisters coming home from Edmonton where they are working just to watch it with the whole family on Saturday nights.
I have heard a story, passed from grandmother through aunts and mother to me, of how back in the part of Ukraine where our blood was first mixed, they believe that children aren’t really ours until they make it past their first birthday. Before that they can simply be claimed. When they are taken in death, they may reappear somewhere else later – as a wolf pup, a soaring bird. If they’re lucky, they’ll be taken straight to Heaven and become angels.
Heaven keeps reversing its decisions, taking Kostak boys back before they can truly inhabit the farm in northern Alberta. This is a time when babies are both mistakes and blessings at once. Vera’s mother loses three sons, somehow, in between the successful births of four girls. The third boy in the Kostak family to die in infancy was born two years before Vera. He lived until he was almost a year old – old enough to be admired for how well he was developing, how robust his constitution. And then he too died for no reason that Vera can ever remember hearing. Her parents, in spirit, lived between Canada and the Old Country. The part of them that still lived in Ukraine didn’t question the wisdom that children can simply be reclaimed for better purposes.
And so, Vera becomes the youngest daughter in a farming family without boys. The older daughters become sons, clearing trees, manning ploughs dragged by horses. The eldest helps her father choose the first motorized tractor, drives it home, the gears rough on the road pitted with dried mud. I see her teaching him to shift on back roads, the grind and pull of gears. That daughter is still called Al – Alexandria abbreviated to the simplest form, easily yelled over fields. The next two, twins, Olga and Olesa, are identical in their enthusiasm for skinning animals, separating meat from bone. Sheep and rabbits slicked clean of fur, the twins chase each other out of their tiny, customized slaughterhouse with a heart or liver, their clothes spotted with blood. All three older sisters are good shots. In the fall, ducks and geese are strung by their necks and hang in slouching lines on the outside of sheds.
My mother, Vera, as the youngest, has to remain a daughter. She carries the eggs from the coop, ties the goats tight to a post, their necks strained and constricted, so that she can milk them. She churns butter, bakes bread every day, runs a rake through the garden to catch weeds and uproot them. When she has free time, Vera walks the fields and collects wildflowers, later flattening them in books. I can see her there, closing petals between pages. I want to warn her that she risks being trapped on that farm forever, a vestal virgin with broken English. But that’s not what happens.
Life isn’t easy farming in northern Alberta, but, as in the Old Country, people are true to their family, their faith. Eventually, Vera’s first mistake would be, according to her family, to marry a Protestant. Her second, according to herself, was to renounce even this slice of faith for the false sense of freedom that she sought in leaving everything behind. Her third, according to me, was to return to a religious community, hoping to fetter herself to something.
In the car on the way to service, I watched my mother’s hands clench and release the steering wheel. “Sylvia, I want you to try to sing today,” she said, eyes straight ahead, so intent on the road you would’ve thought animals leapt in front of cars from ditches at regular intervals.
I said nothing.
“Just try, not for me, not for Pastor John, but for God. Try not to let Krista pressure you not to. You used to have such a beautiful voice in church, both of you.” Pause while I remained silent. “Honey?”
I still didn’t answer.
“God won’t know what to make of your silences.”
God won’t know what to make of your church, I thought. If you believed Pastor John, the whole damn world would cease to be if the sixty members of the Friends of Christ Free Church in Sawmill Creek, British Columbia, stopped singing the Lord’s praises, talking in tongues, and having babies.
The Free Church was different when we first arrived in Sawmill Creek. At first, there were very few of us and we met in each other’s houses, or on warm days in the park by the Salmon River. We sat in a circle and talked or rose to sway and sing. I don’t remember the first Sunday we joined in at the park, but I can imagine it. My mother with long braids on either side of her clean, broad face, Nick and I barefoot. We all liked to sing then and had sung throughout the entire trip from Alberta to B.C. We must have fit right in.
As more people banded together with us, we moved into an abandoned hall north of town and put up a sign. Some of the men who worked at the mill had made a cross out of hemlock, large and unadorned. It remained unvarnished, and if you ran your hand down its grain you chanced a sliver. I remember children standing on chairs, toddlers crawling up the aisle, young braided women bobbing babies at their breasts, men stroking their beards. There were few sermons then. Pastor John, who at the time was called Brother John just as my mother was called Sister Vera, would say, “Let’s lift our eyes and hands and hearts up to Jesus! Make a joyful noise unto the Lord!” And we would.
Eventually, Brother John became Pastor, and with this change there seemed to come more and more sermons. We still sang and some raised their arms and shook in the aisles or spoke in tongues. It seemed to me like gradually it had been decided that some things were wrong – or perhaps they had been wrong all along and no one had bothered to tell me – things like birth control, cigarettes, divorce, sex, television.
Before the service that Sunday, the Friends were welcoming each other back after a week in the world, hugging each other and handing babies from arm to arm. The refrain God bless was given out like a handshake. Pastor John’s wife, Trudy, came at Krista and me, her face awash with good will. “So good to see you girls,” she told us through her teeth held in a smile, shaking her head from side to side as if in mild amazement. It was no surprise to us that we were there – we were every Sunday – but to the congregation of the Free Church, every teenager attending service was an act of God. We smiled back at Trudy, all that was really expected, and retreated, casting our eyes sidelong before slipping down the stairs to the basement.
We shared a cigarette in the basement, a ritual that had begun when Krista stole a pack of clove cigarettes from her mother after Mrs. Delaney had returned from a buying trip in Vancouver. The smell of cloves, some kind of strange, strong spice, hid the smell of smoke, or so we believed. In front of the mirror we practised French inhaling, pulling the smoke from mouths to nostrils in smooth clean lines. We were both getting better. When we were done, we sprayed the room with air freshener and braided each other’s hair, tight and smooth, creating a spine down our scalps to the nape of our necks.
“Okay,” Krista turned from the mirror in the bathroom, tucking her travel toothbrush into her pocket. “Can you smell any?” She exhaled.
“No. Me?” I breathed on her.
“Nope, you’re good. Let’s go sing the praises.”
We slipped into the back row of chairs. The congregation had already begun singing the first song. Spring up oh well – gush, gush, gush, gush – within my so-oul. Spring up oh well – gush gush gush gush – and make me whole-oh-ole. Spring up oh well – gush gush gush gus – and give to me your love, eter-nit-y. While we sang, some Friends made a motion, hands splayed out from their chests as though the spirit of God was gushing forth from them. I didn’t know why Krista kept coming with me. I suspected it upset her parents as much that she went to church as it would have upset Vera if I refused to go. I didn’t know why I still went, either, except that I hated to think of what would happen if I didn’t allow myself to be dragged from bed.
I watched Vera from where we stood. She was across the aisle and up a few rows. She didn’t flail her arms but kept them at her sides, her fingers lightly tapping out a rhythm above her knee, the fabric of her skirt moving as though caught by a slight draft of air. Sometimes she wo
uld stop singing for a verse and simply smile slightly, as though remembering something small, lovely. What, I couldn’t imagine. The sense of peace that seemed to overcome Vera at church made me uncomfortable, as though it threw into jeopardy my own relationship with her as my mother, all the tension and strife that relationship was supposed to bring.
Vera turned her head and looked at me in the back row. She lifted her songbook slightly and gestured to it, meaning sing, sing. I looked straight back at her and, without lowering my eyes to the page, began to move my lips, expressionless.
In that sermon, we were told once again that God must have lived in our valley. It was small and perfect. The seasons passed as seasons should. Winter, cold and sharp and covered in snow. Spring, wet and green, the sound of ponds thick with frogs. Summer drying everything out, releasing the scent of sap splitting the sunburned bark of ponderosa pines, fruit pulling branches to the ground. In the autumn, coyotes gathered on the hill at the end of the field behind our house and howled at the moon. No shit. God must have lived in our valley. It was narrow and closed. The musty smell of churches permeated the air. Helicopters sliced the sky, looking for pot crops, growers to bust. The valley was run on mill money and people thanked God that there were trees to cut down, that there would always be trees to cut down. The Friends of Christ Free Church was right there in the middle of the valley, holding it all in place.
GABE
Your first six years, before you moved to Arcana, California, were spent on what could loosely be called a commune in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Canada. Everyone has memories of childhood as a forest of legs, the faces of adults hovering somewhere far above. We have all clutched the wrong leg, thinking it our mother’s, only to discover that what descends is the face of a stranger, large as a moon. In your forest, the canopy was full of smoke, the faces bearded, and the legs of potential mothers were covered in fine hair.
The Sudden Weight of Snow Page 2