One day, you go with Anise to Berkeley to buy your first home-schooling books. The girls, as they’ve come to be called, as though they are one blond unit, stay in Arcana with a friend of Anise’s. Peter is running late on a contract so he can’t come. This is the first time that you can remember being alone with Anise. This is the first time that you realize that, although she looks like her, Anise is not like your mother, Susan. She sings, slides tapes in the cassette player, then out after a couple of songs. She talks a lot. Doesn’t ask you questions but talks on and on, interrupting herself with some lines from a song, then continuing. You nod. You realize that, although you used to ask Peter about Susan often – why she was so sad, when you would see her again – that you have forgotten to ask lately. You do the math. You haven’t seen your mother in more than four years. Suddenly you feel as though you should be home-schooled, as though you should be punished. Something has made you forget Susan, and you don’t know what. You watch as the redwood forest suddenly ends and you are driving through rolling farmland. You wonder how things can change so quickly like that, if it’s always been that way.
After we regained our balance and our bearings, brushing the snow from our clothing, Krista and I went with Gabe and Thomas back into the building they called the cookshack. It was a large wood structure with a porch wrapping around two sides of it. When we went inside, it reminded me of a small community hall, two doors on either side of the wood stove in the back providing a glimpse of the kitchen. We were met with the smells of woodsmoke, of things spicy and sweet. Men and women alike wore layers of body-obscuring clothing and hugged each other more often than I was used to. People smiled at Krista and me as if they were oddly charmed to see us.
Thomas led us to a place where we could sit down, like we were elderly, or drunk, although, granted, we were the latter. He and Gabe navigated through the crowd, appeared again palming hot mugs. Thomas was handsome in a way that I thought would remind older women of being young. A way that would remind most women of horseback riding, windswept days by the seaside. He looked as if he had spent his childhood on a farm, his young adulthood in earnest protest against social injustice, and his current middle age in a state of simple, healthy enjoyment of life. He looked as if he could be any age between thirty-five and fifty-five. Gabe couldn’t have been more than a couple years older than us. He was handsome in a strange, quiet way. I could still see the little boy in him, huge eyes blinking from behind strands of dark hair. He wasn’t boyish, though. When he looked at me, it was as though there were two expressions at odds with each other. His eyes seemed to be struggling to recognize me or to convey something important, while his mouth steeled him against words. It was a look that I would get used to.
It was nearly eleven-thirty and the cookshack appeared to be in a state of transition. People who had probably just come out for the craft fair and the potluck were beginning to leave, babies on hips, toddlers hanging on pant legs bemoaning their fate – stuck at an adult party too late, believing with surprising conviction that they were not tired. Other people were coming in – people with guitars and bongo drums, one with a stand-up bass. People with bottles of wine, cases of beer, and pouches of tobacco were looking around expectantly, wondering if they had missed anything yet. And dogs everywhere, lolling near the wood stove, sucking up bits of food from under the tables, burying their snouts in people’s crotches, or simply finding someone, looking up at them expectantly, tail in a slow, hopeful wag. Everything seemed slightly hazy and slow-moving, as though the smoke in the room were water. I narrowed my gaze and saw Gabe’s hand around his cup, his leg against mine, the wooden bench on which we were sitting. The floor beneath us was rough-hewn. That was what I said to myself, rough-hewn, liking the sound of it.
Krista and I were beginning to come down, rooted to the bench by a sense of awe, relief, disbelief.
“So,” Gabe started, then paused for what seemed like a moment too long. Long enough for me to notice his eyelashes, how they cast filaments of shadow on his cheek. “You from here?”
“Sawmill? Yeah.” I was most definitely from here. At one time, I tried to convince myself that, because I hadn’t moved to the town until I was six, I was from somewhere else. I had eventually resigned myself to being from here, the creek running in my veins, thick as the clogged water that flowed out of the booming ground at the far end of the lake.
“How do you like it? Living here, I mean,” Gabe asked, looking somehow too earnest.
“Here? I don’t know. I mean, I can’t say I love it.”
Krista leaned over from the other side of me, face red from the rising heat created by the wood stove, by more bodies crowding into the space. “Oh, come on! Are you asking how we like it here? We hate it. We fucking hate it here. How ’bout you?”
“Well.” Gabe’s word was cautious, a foot out onto a frozen lake, the weight shifted onto it slowly. “Well, I just got back. I don’t know yet. I don’t think I hate it here, though. It seems quite, um, beautiful actually.”
“Yeah, fucking paradise. Wait till you stay for a while – did you say ‘got back’? Are you from –” Krista’s attention was diverted, which was not difficult. “Hey, what’s that Thomas guy doing?”
Thomas was standing near the back of the hall, passing a cigarette around with other men with instruments. A saxophone hung, loosely and gracefully I thought, around one of his shoulders. “He’s getting ready to play the sax, I guess,” answered Gabe, looking slightly perplexed.
“No kidding,” said Krista, incredulous.
“Uh, yeah. I’m pretty sure.” Gabe suddenly grinned at me, a private joke, it seemed, that I was supposed to get.
“Hey, is he your dad?”
He laughed. “Thomas, no. Thomas isn’t my dad, although I did know him when I was a kid. My dad’s in California.”
“Oh yeah? Cool,” Krista remarked, attention then pulled in another direction again.
I had only the rudimentary threads of Gabe’s story. He had been here before. His father was in California. He had come to Sawmill from somewhere else. I started in. “So, you, uh, said you were here before. Did you use to live here?”
“Yeah, at Pilgrims, when I was a kid. I mean, a little kid. I haven’t lived here for, uh, twelve years? Thirteen? So, I thought it was time to move back.”
Move back. Move back. He was living here, in Sawmill. My stomach engaged in the proverbial somersault. “Oh, why?”
“I don’t know. My mom’s here. I remember it being, well, beautiful. I don’t know, I still think it is, beautiful.” He paused before saying that – beautiful – even though he had said it three times already. I was keeping count.
Here is Gabe from that night: his hands, surprisingly large and strong looking for what appeared to be a slight frame, passing his emptying cup of hot chocolate back and forth, left hand, then right, his eyes down, watching his boots scuff against the floor, his thigh against my leg, the play of fabric between. There is everything else: music erupting, retreating and weaving into itself until it becomes something animate in the room, a woman swirling in the middle of the dance floor, barefoot despite the constant drafts, a large man who hugs people off the ground, two pre-teens pilfering cigarettes out of coats that have been piled on tables, and the dogs retreating to the edges of the room, feigning boredom, waiting for the signs of people who are going out. When someone does, the dogs perk up and trot out alongside them.
That was all that happened. We sat against a wall and watched people playing instruments, other people dancing. We attempted conversation. Gabe was quiet, Krista couldn’t stay focused on any one thing long enough to talk. I felt as though words were difficult things, things that could become twisted and rearranged in my mouth, come out at odd angles and surprise people, so I was quiet as well. At one point, Gabe reached over and touched my hair, took a lock between finger and thumb as if testing it for something, then let it drop, grinned at me. Heat shot up that piece of hair, entered me at my scalp and travel
led down my spine. We left when Krista thought she was sober enough to drive and I felt tired enough to fall asleep there on the bench, my head on Gabe’s shoulder. We left in a shuffle of coat-gathering and goodbyes. Thomas waved and winked from across the room. Gabe walked us to the door and watched us leave.
When Vera was seventeen, her father was crushed under a tractor while helping with the harvest at a neighbouring farm. Too few years between horse-drawn ploughs and engines, they say. No one is clear about how it happened, least of all the man who was driving the tractor. The community is too small and too free from any significant feuds to place blame. The priest is summoned from Fly Hills and Vera’s father is buried at dusk, no one assuming that the surviving men will stop the harvesting for the day. Vera’s father wouldn’t have wanted that.
Vera is the only one left at home with her mother. It is clear that, even with some help, these two women, one young and one in mourning, will not be able to run a farm. Vera’s sisters have all married and moved to Edmonton. They each offer to take Mother in, assure Vera that she will be off to technical school or community college soon enough, but Vera’s mother doesn’t want to move to the city. Instead, Vera and her mother move into an apartment that the landlady calls an “efficiency,” above a grocery story in Fly Hills.
They have left all the furniture in the farmhouse. Vera’s sisters will go back with trucks and collect some of it, sell some of it, and leave some of it. The eldest daughter’s husband will rent the farm and the land. Vera isn’t sure why they just don’t put it on the market. That’s it, she thinks. That’s all. Nothing else can happen on that farm, nothing else will, at least not for them.
The efficiency apartment is furnished. “Everything is very clean and modern,” the landlady tells them. And she is telling the truth. There are matching avocado-coloured appliances in the kitchen, a shower stall in the bathroom – the first Vera has seen without a bathtub – and a TV in the living room. There is one bedroom with a queen-sized bed, a bedspread blooming with large flowers, and a long, dark bureau. Neither Vera nor her mother has ever slept on a queen-sized bed and now they will be sharing one.
Afternoons, when she returns from school, her mother has baked bread, made perogies and cabbage rolls as though there is an entire family to feed. Each day, the kitchen is full of steam and the smell of rising dough, onions, and garlic. She and her mother can’t possibly consume as much food as has been made but Vera doesn’t ask where the rest of it goes. Each night, they eat at the kitchen table and then go into the living room and watch the television. They watch young women writhe and scream and pull out their hair for love on the Ed Sullivan Show. They watch hockey games. They watch newscasts that tell them that America has gone to war for freedom. Vera senses something else going on under the surface of the Ed Sullivan Show and the newscasts, something that connects both of those programs but is unlike either. One night, she sees a beautiful man on the screen. A man with long hair and tight jeans who is holding a flower. Other young people run behind him, police form human walls in front of the cameras and soon he is gone.
Vera and her mother both watch the TV for hours, until they fall asleep and the whine when the station goes off air wakes them up.
The next day, we found out that a puck flew over the Plexiglas in the closing minutes of the third period and struck a boy named Billy dead. A puck to the head. Billy was from Manitoba, visiting his grandparents for Christmas. Krista and I felt the sadness and guilty excitement you feel when you slow to watch a roadside accident, or when you hear hollering and what could be furniture being thrown while walking by a house and wonder if you should call the RCMP. Wonder if what you hear is something you’ll learn the graphic consequences of later, on the radio while driving to church. The sense of being part of something larger than oneself. Not something larger and good, like a team or a church or even Pilgrims Art Farm, but something larger and not so much bad as unpredictable. Like the weather. We had been there moments before it happened, before death pinned a bull’s-eye on Billy and sent a hockey puck there to meet it.
It might have been when we took on air over the tracks that the puck hit his head, his soul lifting at the moment we were lifted off our seats. I decided it was a portent. I looked back to the previous night, looked for other signs. All I could think of was something about going to the bank naked.
I had been near death before, skimmed the edges of it because of a late-night trip to Dr. Holland’s office. In school then, I could still hand in almost all of my assignments in any class handwritten. My grade ten English teacher, Ms. Helanious, was straight out of university, however, and told us that we would be typing all our assignments soon enough and that we should get ahead of the game and become proficient at it. We had no computer at home and the typewriter in the basement had seized up since the last time anyone had used it, the keys locking in place once they were depressed.
I went to Dr. Holland’s office to use the electric typewriter that Vera used. Vera drove me there after dinner, told me she’d be back in a couple hours to pick me up. What she didn’t tell me was that the janitor would let himself in, that we would both shriek when confronted with each other in an office that we assumed we had all to ourselves. After we both explained our presence to calm the other, the janitor seemed kind and thoughtful. He told me he wouldn’t vacuum in the waiting room while I was there so as not to disturb my writing. He did, however, wash the windows and dust every surface in the small room, talking the entire time he worked.
“So, you doing some homework? They got you typing homework these days, eh? A good skill, I guess your mother’s told you that. A good skill.” I didn’t say anything, just looked up and nodded, but he continued. “Wish I could help my girls with their homework. They’re approaching your age – how old are you? Older, I suppose – the oldest of mine is nearly thirteen, nearly, well, a teenager. Yes, I guess she is a teenager. They’re growing up without me now.”
I knew with a pause like that, he wanted me to say something. I consented and asked, “Why’s that?”
“Oh, you know, me and their mother, we’re separated now, like everyone else, it seems. She’s got custody. I’m living in a basement suite. It’s not like I don’t see them, the girls. I do. Every weekend I take them out to lunch, you know, or to a movie. But, it’s not like seeing them day to day. It’s not like seeing them laugh milk out their noses or fight for the bathroom. I don’t know. You’ll never know the things you’re going to miss once you don’t have them any more.” He went into the other rooms – Dr. Holland’s office and the examination room – and cleaned there. I was soothed by continuous, repetitive sounds. My fingers typing out a rhythm, his vacuuming a whirl and hum in the background.
I would later find out that the janitor, whose name I can’t remember, didn’t go back to his basement suite that night. He went to his former house, the place where his wife and two daughters slept. He shot his wife and her new boyfriend dead in the bed, then, as they say, turned the gun on himself. How can I describe what I felt when I found out? Sadness, yes, even horror. And something else, that same kind of culpable thrill. I may have been the last person to talk to that janitor before he became known not as a janitor but as a double-murder-suicide and this notion brought with it a sense of distorted privilege.
Oddly enough, I didn’t feel as though I could have done anything differently. As though if I had said more than what I did – “Oh, you scared me,” “Why’s that?” and “Thanks, good night” – I could’ve altered his course. I felt sorry for his death more than his wife’s, more than her lover’s. I felt a kinship with his two daughters that was probably unwarranted. I imagined them sleeping in the same bed with long white nightgowns, long hair brushed out of braids – as though they were Laura and Mary Ingalls, or two of the Little Women. I imagined them clinging to each other when they heard the shots, wetting each other’s hair with tears. I imagined going to them some day, several years into the future, to tell them their father had loved
them very much.
The town was left reeling by the events. If we didn’t know how to feel, the Sawmill Creek Chronicle told us. We were told that we were, in turn and in rotation: “left reeling,” “in shock,” “mourning,” and “calling for answers.” Vera read the paper again and again, as though to justify her own feelings of grief, shaking her head slowly, sniffling. Dr. Holland gave her a day off work. I came home after school that day and saw my mother in the back field as I leaned over the sink, gulping down milk from the carton. I wiped my mouth and stood on my toes, bent toward the window. Vera was standing in the middle of the field, still, looking towards the mountains, not the house. It was the only time I remembered seeing her there, like that.
The afternoon I found out about the boy’s death, Vera was at the kitchen table, reading the paper when I came in the back door. She looked up and sighed, before saying, “A shame, hey, what happened to that boy at the game.”
“Yeah, everyone’s talking about it at school,” I said, hanging my jacket on the back of the door.
“You didn’t tell me that happened. You were working at the game last night, weren’t you?”
“We were, but,” I pulled out a chair and sat across from her, folding one leg under me so the other leg swung off the floor, “Krista and I left early. There weren’t a lot of people coming by.” My cold skin was beginning to burn from the warmth in the kitchen.
The Sudden Weight of Snow Page 9