She sat down in her one armchair, her feet off the cold floor on the footstool, pulled the quilt up around her, and tucked it around her feet, shoulders, and under her chin. The light from the heater cast glowing orange bars across the floor and she leaned back in her chair, watching them dance, and listening apprehensively to the wind on the roof, banging and tearing at the shingles. Its roar was so powerful she could almost believe it alive and a malevolent force out to destroy her house, the village, everyone in it. She was afraid, but she’d survived storms like this one the previous winter, she had shelter, she told herself, she would be all right, and the noise became, in a curious way, almost lulling, and she grew drowsy and soon slept.
She dreamt she was in the church with Pastor Vernon and his congregation. Candles burned at the end of every pew, dozens lit the altar, and torches hung at intervals down each side of the long, bare walls. There was an unrelenting noise, a high-pitched whine with a hint at back of it of something celestial—the singing of angels, perhaps. The pastor stood at the front of the church preaching. He was thin, almost skeletal, and his handsome face was oddly, startlingly paper-white as if he had already withdrawn to the next world and had sent back only his ghost. A woman screamed, a long high note, and fell forward over the pew in front of her, and a man stood, raising his arms to the ceiling and calling out in a voice that had a strange, non-human timbre and that rose to meld with the background wail. In the wide space between the pastor and the first row of pews lay a heap of children, their flaccid bodies piled crookedly on top of each other. Astrid saw clearly that their souls had departed. Then the church darkened ominously, the noise lifted to a deafening pitch and there was a loud crash.
She leaped from her chair, the quilt falling to the floor, and looked frantically around, remembering where she was and what was happening at the same time as she became aware of a freezing draft of wind and that the ill-fitting kitchen door was vibrating rapidly and noisily in its frame. And wasn’t there a faint pealing in the background, as if the phone had been ring ing all along? Trembling, she hurried to the door and pushed it open. Snow was piling up in the sink and spilling over onto the floor, and she realized that the crash she’d heard had been wind-hurled debris breaking her kitchen window. Snow-laden, icy wind swept in and she put up her hands to shield her face, edging first to the phone and lifting it to find that, of course, it was dead. Still fighting the last fragments of her dream, she understood, though, that she would have to block off the broken window or she really might freeze.
An old rag rug left by the owner lay in her tiny porch and, fear spurring her, she got it, rolled it into a ball, and shoved it into the snowy space left by the broken glass. Then she tacked up a blanket over the window with hands grown awkward and stiff with the cold. That done, she pushed the snow on the counter into the sink and added the snow from the floor to it.
Shaky from her scare, her exertions, and from the cold, she shut the kitchen door and hurried back to her chair. Glancing at the clock she was surprised to find that it was six in the morning, that she’d slept a couple of hours. Now she realized that the high-pitched scream in her dream had to have been the storm’s howl, and she remembered dismally her dream-self that had wanted it to be a choir of angels.
She thought of the schoolchildren who would have had ample time to get home before the storm had broken, and were surely safe. Anybody who wasn’t already in the church couldn’t get there now, though, and she imagined the pastor waiting out the end of the world all by himself. It was a scene that saddened her, and she thought it a shame that a man of such unusual charisma had chosen to apply it in so fraudulent and ultimately useless a way. His character must somehow be deeply flawed, she mused: excessive vanity, or laziness, or some profound fear of living a real life in the real world like everyone else.
She thought, too, of Mrs. Akinson and wondered what would make such a seemingly sensible person believe him, but found she couldn’t understand the reasons, other than that of spiritual desperation, which she recognized as a cliché, and mistrusted as such. Maybe it’s only that he catches people and holds onto them by sheer personal magnetism, not by wisdom or selflessness as true spiritual leaders do. A thief of souls, she thought, that’s what he is. Then she shivered and began to tremble through her whole body, and couldn’t stop for a long time, no matter how she snuggled into her quilt and pressed her back against the warmth of her chair.
She dreamt again unusually active, vivid dreams. In them she and Donald were meeting for the first time: he was smiling, then touching her forehead with his, so gently that she flushed with a heat both sexual and love-filled; they were at a party, he was telling a joke, then dancing with her; then they were in their own apartment eating breakfast at the small table in the kitchen. Donald seemed younger, softer than she remembered him being.
She woke a few hours later, looking around wonderingly, noticing that her heater had used up its fuel and gone out and that the room was so cold she could see her breath. She knew at once by the stillness that the storm was over, and then realized that someone was pounding on her door. Clutching her quilt around her shoulders, she went slowly to it and pushed it open. Sunlight striking the wind-sculptured banks and sheets of snow flooded in, so bright that she had to put a hand over her eyes, but the blessed post-storm peace and the wonder that always accompanied it touched her too, and she hesitated an instant before she backed away into the room’s relative darkness.
“You look all right,” a man boomed at her in that hearty way all the men here adopted for social exchanges. She recognized the district’s robust young reeve by his voice, and lowered her arm from her face, hearing the faint roar of a snowplough somewhere out in the village. “Power company says it’ll be at least tomorrow before the electricity comes on again. Storm took down a hundred poles and lines are down all over the place.” Before she could answer, he went on. “The dance hall’s got backup propane heat and we’re taking all you ladies over there.” He added quickly, “Need somebody able-bodied like you to make coffee and sandwiches for the boys on the ploughs.” Knowing she had no choice, she went to dress. Outside in the blazing light, male voices were shouting across the banks of snow, and behind them she heard the whine of motors she took to be snowmobiles.
“Men just love a good disaster,” one of the old ladies in the hall said to her, her dark eyes alight with humour and intelligence. The village’s handful of old women were wrapped in blankets and seated in comfortable chairs while they waited for the roads to open so their relatives could come for them. Children played board games at the tables, or ran about giggling and dodging each other, and the murmur of women’s voices came from the kitchen. At the far end of the hall a few men were setting up the last of the long wooden tables and placing wooden stacking chairs around them. Astrid suddenly realized that one of the men was Pastor Vernon, that the other men working with him, the children, and also the women in the kitchen must be his flock rescued from the church. Pastor Vernon lifted his head from his task; his eyes met hers, giving no glint of recognition; he went back to his work as if he hadn’t seen her. Steeling herself, Astrid went to the kitchen and pushed open the door.
For an instant every eye in the room was on her, a hush fell; just as suddenly the glances dropped, the women went back to the buttering of bread, to the rattling of plates and cups. She recognized the pastor’s wife and, across the central worktable facing her, Jody Akinson’s mother. That she’d been the object of censuring conversation among them was obvious. She felt her face growing hot and, without speaking, backed hastily out of the room, deciding that she would instead help by entertaining the children and chatting with the old people.
Astrid had been reading a story to three little girls at the end of a long table when one of the mothers came to take them to their makeshift beds on the stage. She watched them go, then continued her gaze around the hall, lit, now that evening had come, by a variety of kerosene and battery-powered camping lamps which, turned low s
o the children and old people might sleep, cast a comforting yellow-orange light edged by shadows. The women murmured softly to their children or each other, the men, exhausted from their long shifts in the snow and cold, dozed in chairs or stretched out on the floor, or sat playing cards at a table by the kitchen. She watched the pastor pacing alone with his Bible at the hall’s far end. A chair scraped the floor and she turned to it to find Mrs. Akinson sitting down across from her.
After a moment Astrid asked, “Is tonight …” Mrs. Akinson said, glancing down the hall toward him, “The pastor says he believes he misunderstood when he was in prayer, that he had the wrong date. It isn’t tonight.” She spoke quietly, but Astrid could feel a sadness wafting from her, or perhaps it was merely weariness, the same bone-deep weariness she felt herself.
“You mean,” she said, as the message with its implication of other dates began to sink in, “that you will go through this again and again?” She couldn’t keep the distaste out of her voice. Colour flooded Mrs. Akinson’s neck, then her cheeks and her forehead. She stared at Astrid, a depth appearing in her eyes, as if this meaning were just dawning on her, too.
“I think—” she began, then stopped, her face working as she struggled to maintain her composure.
Astrid leaned toward her. “Death is not so cheap,” she said. “I have suffered a great loss, and I can tell you that, for people like us”—she glanced around the hall, meaning more than these few people, but the dead in wars, of starvation, and disease all around the world—“I can tell you that death is not so easy. You have children—your children—” She shook her head, then sat back in her chair, staring at Mrs. Akinson.
The pastor’s voice suddenly rose out of the background murmur, his words not quite distinguishable, and both of them turned to glance at the far end of the hall where he was engaged in an intense conversation, perhaps even an argument, with some of his male parishioners. Embarrassed, the two women turned back to each other.
“We would all have died to eternal life,” Mrs. Akinson whispered to Astrid, much as the children in Astrid’s class would give a memorized answer that they didn’t understand, but knew was the right one, to a question she’d asked. Astrid didn’t reply, distracted as she was by some other emotion that was struggling to free itself. She wasn’t sure what it was, and would have gotten up now and gone away, except that suddenly she found herself too tired to move. She began to wish she had not been so hard on Mrs. Akinson who, despite her denial, she could see now, had suffered. I have been suffering too, she thought, but the worst is over now.
She found herself edging out her hand across the table until her fingers grazed Mrs. Akinson’s. Mrs. Akinson did not draw back her hand, but left it there, and they sat that way for a long time, in silence, never looking at each other, their fingers touching.
Saskatchewan
She doubts it’s a good title, imagines it in the ironic, wavering type of The New Yorker and then in the sterner, more assertive type of Saturday Night, and would go further, but her memory for the handful of top-flight magazines and their typefaces fails her. And anyway, marvel of marvels, they have once again achieved flight; below them Saskatchewan is at once shrinking and expanding as they rise.
She wonders what picture the word Saskatchewan might evoke in readers of The New Yorker, thinks hopefully: a wild, rugged country of raging rivers, impenetrable black forests, jagged snow-covered mountains, and canoes full of Indians. As it appeared, in fact, in that old bomb of a movie, Saskatchewan, with Alan Ladd and Shelley Winters, filmed, in fact, in Alberta. She knows a reader of Saturday Night would see a sort of impossibly extended, frozen dogpatch. But what does the word conjure for her, who has spent her life in Saskatchewan? It stretches below her, unfortunately flat all around its capital and, to complete the stereotype, newly snow-covered. She closes her eyes, mouths “Saskatchewan,” and swirling snow scuds across a field of wind-packed, glossy ice. Nothing moves, even the few bare trees look as if they’re about to shatter with cold. She sighs and opens her eyes.
It’s her familiar defensiveness, she knows it, taking hold as she flies off to the dreaded East. Maybe she should call the story she’s working on “Toronto,” she thinks, since so much of what she does is defined by the place, though she’s been there for maybe a total of two weeks in her life and knows nobody. Or almost nobody. She has one friend, Hannah, with whom she’ll be staying.
The man sitting beside her is studying the interior of his briefcase, a shabby leather satchel of the kind male students used to carry when she was still a city girl, and in university thirty years earlier. Therefore not a businessman, probably a professor. He has a pleasant face, dark wavy hair, long and unfashionable.
The flight attendant offers drinks which Jenna refuses. Her seatmate orders whisky, and catching its scent, her mouth waters. But no, she can’t tackle the Toronto airport drunk, she’d never be heard from again. Before she can stop herself she’s made a disparaging snort out loud. She should wear a sign: I am alone too much. I talk to myself
He turns out to be a composer. This is so surprising after years of sitting beside businessmen who ignore her or give her unasked-for paternal advice about flights and hotels that she’s silenced. When she tells him her name and that she’s a writer, and the name of her just-released, latest novel, she sees that neither means anything to him. Although she reminds herself that she’s never heard of him either, this still depresses her and she thinks woefully, as if she’s thinking about a good friend, of the ambition with which she feels herself saddled, a burden she has wearily to carry, barely manages to keep at a socially acceptable level.
And, once they start talking about the arts, she discovers glumly she doesn’t know any of the well-known writers who are apparently acquaintances of his. It’s because she doesn’t live in a city, doesn’t even live near one, and knows, too, that this is viewed as a personal failing by the people she has to deal with in cities, an inexplicable character flaw for which she’d be forgiven if she lived on a chic acreage on a city’s outskirts and had an artist husband. She imagines a sculptor working in iron high up a ladder, his head vanished inside a welder’s helmet, his torch hissing, then a potter squatting in front of the barn at a raku fire.
But she lives on a real working ranch, has a real cowboy for a husband who comes in with manure on his boots and hay stuck in his clothes and who, preoccupied with his own world, is rarely more than mildly curious about hers. People don’t ask about him, she doesn’t know why not, unless the apparent sheer improbability of their mating boggles them too much.
Jenna and the composer settle into a camaraderie based on the fact that they’re both artists. He lives in Victoria but he’s crossing the country to sit on an arts jury about which he’s discreetly silent. Jenna knows it’s bad form to talk about it, as she’s still suffering from the repercussions of sitting on a jury that gave the country’s top literary prize to the wrong person. She’s glad not to talk about it, tries not even to think about it.
They share a small bottle of wine, exchange addresses and phone numbers, though Jenna doubts they’ll ever meet again, and finally, after seeing the mass of people vying for taxis, share one downtown from the mouth of hell, otherwise known as the Toronto airport.
It’s raining gently when she says goodbye to the composer, gets out of the cab in front of a big brick house near Bloor Street, and takes her bag. As the taxi swishes away on the wet pavement, she pauses, lifts her face to the rain-dampened branches of the old trees that line Hannah’s street, and feels its soft patting on her face. How easily it rains here, she thinks, as if rain were nothing at all. The glimpses of sky she sees between the branches are luminescent but starless, the city itself glows, a star fallen to earth. She climbs the wooden steps, crosses the decaying porch, and before she can knock, Hannah appears in the square of light, holding the door open for her.
Although their friendship dates back to university days, they never talk about when they were students togeth
er in faraway Saskatoon, part of a group of women grad students whose allegiance to each other cut across colleges and departments, and survived through divorces, affairs, depressions, and heartbreak. Curled up on the sofa while Hannah’s cats walk across her lap, Jenna thinks how everything seemed to be falling apart in those days, hanging on was the best you could hope for, and she didn’t even manage that, got married instead and went off, while Hannah stayed until she had a doctorate, an achievement of which Jenna is in awe.
“I saw your name in the paper,” Hannah says. “Quite a few times, actually. It wasn’t all flattering.” Jenna can’t think of any reason for her name to have been in the paper. “About the Bella Griffin thing,” Hannah tells her, looking a little surprised. Bella Griffin is one of the country’s best-known, bestselling authors. Jenna moans and puts her face in her hands.
“This upsets you,” Hannah comments, an insight worthy of a doctor of psychology. For a second Jenna can’t believe Hannah doesn’t know anything about this. But then Hannah lives in a world of psychotherapy that Jenna finds mysterious and amazing: Adlerians, Jungians, Reichians—nobody in Hannah’s world seems to be a Freudian—psychotherapists who drum, who use hypnosis, Hannah herself is an expert on the tarot. Jenna begins to explain, and the story floods out of her, unstoppable.
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