Real Life
Page 18
Ross had to shove hard to get the back door opened, ice crackling away from it and falling to shatter on the packed snow on the cement steps. He slammed the door shut, leaving her standing alone in the kitchen. Once again she listened to him scurrying across the yard. She could hear the truck door creak open, then slam shut, in the icy morning silence she could even hear the ignition grinding as he tried to get the truck started. Finally, the motor came to life and he began to back the truck out of the yard, stalling it, he hadn’t let the motor warm up long enough, and starting it again. Then she heard him drive away.
Despite his hard slam, the door hadn’t closed. Feeling the draft of cold air seep in, she tried to shut it properly She bent to shove away the broken stalactites of ice that burned when her fingers touched them, and the rigid ice frame that had been dislodged when he forced the door open now fell partly into the kitchen, preventing the door from closing. The tips of her fingers ached with the cold and began to turn blue. Out of habit she glanced at the outdoor thermometer that was fixed to the wall and saw that during the night it had grown even colder; this morning it was fifty below. At last she was able to shut the door tightly. She backed away from the rush of billowing white condensation that hung around the closed door.
She picked up the chairs that Ross had thrown and set them back in their places at the table. Then she sat down on one of them and stared out the window into the darkness. It wouldn’t be daylight for at least another hour and when the sun rose, gleaming, palely-tinted mirages of fields of snow and distant, ephemeral villages would hover above the horizon all the way into town.
How cold it was, nothing moved out there, even the deer would freeze, and the cruelty of this for a moment made her mind go blank. She thought of the aboriginal men who had frozen to death on that country road in view of the lights of the city. In her mind she saw one of them as he began to walk. He would know he couldn’t make it back to town before the cold killed him, and that on a night like this, no one would be driving down this isolated road and rescue him.
His teeth would begin to chatter, maybe he would run anyway, trying to keep his blood flowing, but then his lungs would burn from the frigid, ice-crystal-laden air and the pain would force him to stop. He would fling his arms around himself, hug himself tightly trying to keep his chest and vital organs warm, maybe jump up and down as his toes began to burn, then to ache, and then grow numb. That he had no coat—did he have a shirt on at least?—she could not quite imagine. All she knew for sure was that at forty below his nose and cheeks and fingers would be frozen in two or three minutes. And his shoulders. His back.
For a while he would cling to the hope that this was just a terrifying practical joke, a stunt designed to frighten him, that those who had abandoned him there would return for him, and he would be saved. But as the moments passed and the pain began to die away as his body slowly froze, he would know he was about to die.
Would he scream then to the animals hibernating in the ground under the bush along the road? To the stars so cold and far away? To his Creator to help him? Soon, though, his frozen legs would no longer hold him upright and he would fall. Or maybe he would lie down quietly, curl into a ball, and wait for death to come to him.
They say at the end, finally, you just go to sleep, she thought. Slowly, as the night wore on, the warmth from his body meeting the freezing air would form a coating of frost on his body. How the crystal covering would sparkle in the starlight.
She put her face in her hands. Already she knew that the forces that run the world would not care about the deaths of two more aboriginal men, that in this too, there would be no justice, at least none worthy of the name.
Bonny woke in the night. Ross lay beside her on his stomach, his face turned away from her, one leg trailing over the side of the bed, the other bent at the knee, forcing her to the far edge of the mattress. She had thought she might soothe him with sex, but he had pushed her away angrily, as if the very idea sickened him, and she wondered, too disconsolate even to cry, where he thought he might find solace, if not with her, his wife, the mother of his children. He’d gone to sleep finally, well after midnight, and now he was snoring loudly while she lay rigid beside him. With so little room she couldn’t even put her arms down by her sides, she got up, put on her dressing gown, and taking the tangled quilt from the floor where Ross had kicked it, went to the living room to sleep on the sofa.
For a long time she lay awake staring at the ceiling, shivering with the chill that had invaded the house, despite the quilt tucked tightly under her feet and pulled up under her chin. Ross wouldn’t leave the farm until every last shred of hope had been dissolved. He would make their departure as long and painful as it could possibly be. Their marriage might even break up over it. She could foresee the long arguments into the night, Jason growing defiant and belligerent, Pammy silent and thin, her very thinness a steady threat.
The house was old, and the living-room window’s seal had broken, leaking moisture at the bottom, and there was a diagonal crack across it. The moonlight had turned the crack into a meandering silver filament; along the window’s bottom a crystal forest of frost ferns glittered. For some reason, Denise McKenzie came into her mind. She had thought the one good thing was that Denise didn’t know that the women gossiped about her. But it seemed to her now that Denise did know—otherwise, she would have come to sit with them instead of standing alone on the far side of the rink, not even looking at them. How unhappy it must make her, Bonny thought, the women do it deliberately to make her unhappy, and she thought about the men at work who teased the retarded man until he cried, and about the women of Ross’s family who did not, who never would welcome her into their family even though her children’s blood was their blood. She thought of the bankers and investors who had never even seen the West, never met one of the people whose lives they were destroying, never would meet them. She thought of the aboriginal men frozen to death on a country road. Because they were troublesome, and they were only Indians.
It came to her then, as she lay there gazing at the way the moon filtered through the frosted glass, that all of these things belonged together, were part of the same thing. And what that thing was, it seemed to her now, as she lay alone shivering in the silence of the house, was a dark stain that spread everywhere, reaching to touch them all. She could see it: thick, black, and tar-like, oozing slowly, remorselessly. Some people built the simplest, homeliest dikes against it, holding it out, but most people were careless and its vileness touched them, here and there, every now and then. She could feel the sticky, black weight of it on all sides and she wanted to hold it off, but she wasn’t sure she knew how. She wasn’t sure she was strong enough.
In a while she heard Ross getting up and going into the bathroom and then the kitchen. She could tell he was trying to be quiet so as not to wake anyone, and finally she got up and in mutual, not-uncomfortable silence, cooked him breakfast, and sat with him as he ate it and talked softly to her about the things he needed her to do this week while he was in the city, and about the needs of the children—new boots, a book for school—and how they would pay for them.
As he was leaving, she went with him to the door and lifted her face to kiss him. He bent to meet her lips, even as his eyes avoided hers. She listened to the crunch of his boots crossing the frozen yard in the absolute stillness and darkness of the early morning, to the truck start, rumble for a while, and then roll away out of the yard. Because it was too early to wake the children for school, she went back to lie on the sofa, and soon drifted into a troubled sleep.
She was in a forest—she recognized it as the temperate rain forest of the West Coast where she had been once, as a child, on a family holiday. She walked on a carpet of needles, spongy and moist under her feet, the air was humid, filled with the scent of rain, and of the fir and spruce trees, and some other fragrance she couldn’t identify. But these massive tree trunks with the shredding, reddish bark were cedars—it was cedar that she smelled.
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The trees soared above her into darkness, and she saw that at all their bases ferns of every kind and size grew: some had fringe so delicate it looked as if green clouds had settled on their stems; some were wider and taller than she was, and on these she could see clearly the intricate symmetrical patterns of their edges as the fronds rose in widening bouquets from the damp, rusted earth. The ferns rustled, whispering softly to her as she passed.
After a while she came to a clearing in the centre of which stood a palm tree. She walked closer to it, and then she understood that it was not a palm tree at all: it was a fern tree. She had not known until now that there was such a thing as a fern tree and the discovery shocked and pleased her; its existence seemed to her grave and important, and she walked around it, gazing at it in wonder and enjoying its beauty.
She fell into a deeper, dreamless sleep. When she woke sometime later with a start, it was still dark, and the furnace was stirring the window drapes. She saw that the frost on the glass had begun to melt. In excitement, she thought, It’s a chinook! and listened for its hollow roar. But the only sound was the whirr of the furnace and the soft brushing of the curtains against the wall. The warm air rising through the floor vent below the window was melting the frost.
Still, she felt better, as if there really were a chinook sweeping over the plains, eating the snow and ice, warming the frigid air. She saw the countryside green again, birds enlivening the sweet spring air, and green buds opening on the trees in farmyards. It would come eventually, if she could just hold out, not give in, nor give up. The fern tree came back into her mind’s eye and she held it there, as she lay on the sofa waiting for the children to begin to stir.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my now-retired agent, Jan Whitford, who stuck by me through all the vicissitudes of a writer’s life, always encouraging me, and doing her formidable best for my work. Thanks, of course, to Phyllis Bruce, my editor and publisher, whose “eye” is unmatched in my experience, and who sees what I don’t see. To Jackie Kaiser, my new agent, and, as always, to my husband, Peter, without whom there would be no books.
Books by Sharon Butala
Country of the Heart
Queen of the Headaches
The Gates of the Sun
Luna
Fever
Upstream
The Fourth Archangel
The Perfection of the Morning
Coyote’s Morning Cry
The Garden of Eden
Wild Stone Heart
Old Man On His Back
Real Life: Short Stories
Copyright © 2002 by Sharon Butala.
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EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2010 ISBN: 978-1-443-40213-2
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“Postmodernism” appeared in Prairie Schooner, vol. 67, no. 4, winter 1993. “Saskatchewan” appeared in a different form in Canadian Fiction magazine, no. 80, 1992. “Random Acts” first appeared as “Acts of Love” in Story magazine, spring 1995; The Penguin Anthology of Stories by Canadian Women, Viking, 1997; and in Due West: Thirty Great Stories from Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, Coteau Books, 1996.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Butala, Sharon, 1940-
Real life: short stories / Sharon Butala.
“A Phyllis Bruce Book”
ISBN 0-00-639234-2
I. Title.
PS8553.U6967R42 2003 C813’.
54 C2002-904694-7
PR9199.3.B798R4 2003
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IMS 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
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