A Hard Witching

by Jacqueline Baker

  Her mother smoothed her skirt, checked the hem. “Does she need it right now? I suppose so. Or she wouldn’t have sent Owen.”

  “So he says.” Lucy turned back to the window, looked down at Owen. What was he staring at? “Is he sick?” she asked.

  “Who?”

  “Owen Gower.”

  “Is he?” Her mother misted her throat with a spray bottle from the dresser. “Not that I know of. Why do you ask?”

  “Just wondering.” Lucy leaned on the window ledge, stared down at her legs. She did have grass on her feet. She brushed it off against the carpet. “He says”—she drew the word out—“he says he’s got skin cancer.”

  Lucy’s mother laughed. “I don’t think Owen Gower has skin cancer.”

  Below them, Owen had not moved. Geez, that kid was patient. Lucy put a finger up on the glass, right over his small body. She could block him out completely if she wanted to.

  “Don’t smear that, Lucy,” her mother said.

  Lucy moved her finger, looked down at Owen, at his small, pale face turned up to the sky. She shouldn’t have flashed him like that. She picked up the empty glass on the table, watched her mother slip into a pair of sandals.

  “Where you going?”

  “To take the cake pan back.”

  Lucy put the glass down, stared at her mother. “That’s what he’s here for,” she said. “He’s down there waiting. You can’t just send him home, after he’s been waiting like that.”

  “Oh, I should probably stop by and see that baby.”

  “What for?” Lucy said. She wasn’t chilly anymore, she felt her body flush, from the stomach upward. Her head began to ache. “You don’t even know her.” Maybe she’d stayed out in the sun too long. “Send it back with him.”

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  Lucy turned toward the window.

  “You don’t even know her,” she said. She closed her eyes, rubbed her temples. Thought of Owen sitting below her on the grass. Of Lillie, her face so round and soft under the yellow light. She wasn’t anybody to be afraid of. She was just Lillie Gower. A cocktail waitress. A barmaid. She was trash.

  “Lucy,” her mother said, stepping toward her in a hot cloud of lilac perfume, “what in the world are you crying about?”

  Redberry, Ministikwan, Buffalo Pound

  For the second time that morning, Lavinia left her spade and the pails of potatoes she’d been digging to slip between the tight rows of corn standing blue and hard in the early light. She pulled off her coat—one of Jack’s old flannel ones, far too large—and wiped sweat from her forehead and upper lip with the hem of her shirt. She leaned back, resting her forehead against her arms, and tried to take long, slow breaths, tried to pull the air through her, clear and cold and still-dark, like water from the rain barrel when the ice was chipped open. It would be good to go there now, to where it stood under the shadows of the eaves on the north side of the house, hack off a big chunk to hold between her lips. But Jack would think she was slacking. So she crouched between the rows of corn, smelling the rich root-cellar smell of dug potatoes and rolling her forehead against the skin of her arms.

  From where she crouched, she could see Jack through the browning leaves, hammering against the truck engine by the barn, each blow ringing across the yard like the clipped pealing of a bell. It was a strange sound, one that did not travel up, toward the slowly lightening sky, but only outward, across the fields—still dark and rimy—as though it too stuck fast to the earth. Each blow running in ripples beneath her boots, shivering up through her bones, her stomach—a small, wayward earthquake.

  That shivering made her think of those snake pits where she’d stopped once with her parents, on the only family holiday they’d ever taken—south, to Cypress Hills. They’d stood, the three of them, looking down at what appeared at first not to be snakes at all, but simply a shifting mass that rippled as though beneath one skin.

  But once she’d been able to distinguish the individual bodies on the rocks, Lavinia could not look at them without a queasy, dizzy, skin-crawling feeling, as if she could sense their movements coming up through the earth to her feet. And so she’d tried to pretend she was somewhere else, staring instead at the sunlight beating off a tin sign she could not read in the distance, until her mother finally sighed, “We should get a move on, I guess,” and her father said, “Road’s not getting any shorter,” and they’d piled into the car, Lavinia in the back, wedged in on one side by suitcases and a plastic cooler, panting and sick, forehead up against the hot window, unable, for some reason, to roll it down, to touch anything with her hands.

  Just thinking of those snakes made her feel ill again, so she thought instead about earthquakes, about how the ground could split open in a second, swallowing everything. Not here, though. That kind of thing didn’t happen here. No natural disasters, nothing quick and awful and spectacular. Just drought. Just slow death.

  For two weeks now, she’d been feeling weak, tired—no, exhausted. “Strong as a horse,” Jack used to boast when they were first married, “and twice as hungry.” It was a stupid thing to say, but she’d liked it, heaping another helping onto her plate as if to say, He’s right, you see? I never fill up, I never do. As if it united them somehow.

  Now she could eat almost nothing; at times, she thought she could even feel something there in the pit of her stomach, something hard and foreign. Lump, she thought, and clenched her hands into cold fists against her belly. But there was no real pain. Not yet, anyway. Just a terrible sense of something gone wrong.

  When Lavinia met Jack, she’d already lived in Medicine Hat a few years, city girl, sworn off ever returning to the dust hole where her parents still farmed. “A desert,” she told the girls at the all-night pancake house where she worked, “right down to the damn dunes.” And she’d describe the hills where her father grazed his cattle, the parched scrub, the hot smell of stinkweed and sage, the sandfly bites that would swell instantly to the size of quarters. She’d tell all the jokes she knew—Hear about the hooker who entertained a farmer from Saskatchewan? How did she know he was from Saskatchewan? First it was too dry, then it was too wet, then he asked if he could pay her in fall. She’d shake her head and say, “Wild horses.”

  Then Jack turned up. He came in one night with some friends, drunk, all of them, and rude. She’d cried afterwards, when she was alone in the staff bathroom. She wasn’t sure why; she’d had worse customers. When he came back the next morning to apologize, she agreed—maybe because of the way he stood awkwardly at the till, waiting for her to finish her table, his plaid shirt so new she could still see the creases from the package; maybe because he used her name without checking the tag on her shoulder; or maybe just because, after all, he seemed awfully sincere—to go on a date with him.

  She wasn’t surprised to discover he was from the Sand Hills, too. Lots of people around town were, younger people, unwilling or unable to continue battling the land for a living. The struggle wasn’t worth it. Farming wasn’t about pride anymore, or love, and certainly not about money. Besides, there was plenty of work to be had in the oil patch. Big money. And you could travel. Will the last person to leave Saskatchewan please turn out the lights? That was the running joke. Lavinia never said it, though; that one she didn’t find particularly funny.

  Neither did Jack. “Ingrates,” he said that first night as they sat over beers in the Westlander. “And smartasses. Not a clue what it took to get those farms started. What their grandparents went through. Great-grandparents. Stuck it out through the thirties and God knows what all kinds of hell.” He shook his head. “Now? Too goddamn lazy. Spoiled. Got the world figured out.”

  He pulled a cigarette from the pack on the table, tapped it. Lavinia sipped her beer, thinking, He has the bluest eyes, blue like the lakes in the Wheat Pool calendars—photographs she’d clipped and Scotch-taped to the walls and ceiling of her bedroom when she was a girl, loving both the scenery and the names: Jackfish, Witchekan, Bi
g Quill. She’d lie across her bed on hot summer afternoons and stare into all that blue, running the names cooly through her head, like a chant. Pelletier, Candle, Old Wives.

  “Tell me,” he said, pointing his cigarette at her, “tell me you don’t miss it. All that open space. Those fields. The light there. Some days you can see ten, twelve miles.”

  That reminded Lavinia, briefly, of another joke, something about watching your dog run away for three days. But she did not tell it. She was listening to Jack, thinking, Maybe I wasn’t looking, all those years. Maybe it was there. All that time. Maybe it was me.

  Thinking, Bigstick, Manito, Willow Bunch.

  Jack leaned toward her across the table, so close she could see those lakes had little yellowish pockets of light, shifting like water lilies. Like trout. “Tell me,” he said again, “tell me you don’t miss it.”

  Two weeks after the wedding, she packed up the few dishes and odd bits of furniture she’d collected, helped Jack load it all into his truck and they headed east, making a quick stop at the pancake house so Lavinia could drop off her uniform and pick up her final cheque.

  “Never thought I’d see the day,” one of the girls said.

  “Yeah,” Lavinia said. “Well.”

  She spent the first few months setting the old farmhouse in order—rearranging kitchen cupboards, sweeping out closets, even putting a row of petunias and marigolds in the freshly weeded patch beneath the south kitchen windows, carrying water to them in an old ice cream pail every evening.

  Her mother was thrilled. “My daughter,” she said, “come back to the fold.”

  Her father simply gloated. “Got yourself a nice place here,” he’d say, looking around. “View of the Sand Hills.” He’d say it each time they came.

  And at first she kind of thought so, too. It was a nice place. The red-painted outbuildings, the neat white farmhouse which, though small, was bright and had a tiny veranda round the back where she could imagine them sitting on rare windless evenings, sipping coffee, listening to the crickets and watching the light slip off the land.

  Now, a little more than a year later, they had yet to sit there in the companionable silence she had imagined. Jack, she realized, never sat. He just moved from one task to the next, evenly. When he stopped, he slept. Determined to make the best of it and to entice him, too, she’d tried sitting there one evening on her own, pulling out two kitchen chairs. But she felt guilty and then angry, watching him cross and re-cross the yard well into dusk. Ignoring her. Making his point. And so she’d dragged the chairs back inside, sat instead looking out the kitchen window where at least he could not see her. Sat looking at those red buildings slowly darken and sag. Wondering why she hadn’t noticed before how they all seemed to tilt slightly in one direction from the constant assault of wind.

  Homestead, he’d called the farm when they first met, a place he could not possibly leave. “They can put me six-feet-under right back by the barn. Suit me fine.”

  Homestead.

  At the time, it had made sense to her. Such a beautiful word. Endearing. And she’d thought, quite stupidly, He could make me love it.

  The ringing of the hammer against the truck engine stopped, and in a moment Lavinia heard Jack’s heavy bootfalls coming across the yard. She wiped her face again, pulled on her coat and quickly slipped back through the leaves. But he was already standing there, her spade held loosely in his fingertips.

  “I had to pee,” she said, though there was no real reason why she should explain. He looked down at the near-empty bucket. “Ground’s hard,” she added. “On account of the frost.”

  She held out her hand for the spade, thinking he might drop it there in the dirt. It was hard to tell with Jack. Moody. But he just nudged the bucket with the toe of his boot and handed her the spade.

  “Going to Schecters’,” he said.

  Lavinia had not been to Ray Schecter’s place since that once before she and Jack were married, not long after Ray’s wife had been taken back to the hospital in North Battleford for the third and possibly final time. Lavinia had never met her.

  “She’s a schizo,” Jack had explained amiably as they rode over in the truck. “You know what that is, a schizo?” Before she could answer, he reached across and squeezed her thigh. “That’s a schizophreniac.” He tapped his forehead beneath his cap. “She’s not right.”

  Lavinia plucked gently at the dark hairs on the back of his hand and he pulled it away. “What do you mean,” she asked, “not right?”

  He rolled the window down and adjusted the rear-view mirror, though there was nothing to see behind the truck but a cloud of dust. She turned anyway, just to check.

  “She’s mental. What more do you want to know?”

  “I mean,” she said, “how did it happen?”

  “How should I know? She’s a schizo. They’re probably born that way.”

  Lavinia frowned and looked out the window, out over the brown furrows of fallow fields that looked as if they’d been raked by enormous fingers in smooth and continuous patterns. The familiar monotony of colour, the unvarying shape of the land. The way you could never get out of that sun, or that wind. It could make anyone crazy.

  “What’s the matter now?” Jack said.

  “Nothing,” she said carefully. “It’s just, that doesn’t sound nice, calling her that. A schizo. It sounds … disrespectful.” But disrespectful was not what she meant. She did not know exactly what she meant, only that the word grated on her. Schizo.

  “Oh, for Christ sakes.” Jack shook his head, tipped the brim of his cap lower. They hit a particularly hard ridge on the dirt road (on purpose, Lavinia thought) and the truck jumped, jolting her on the seat so hard, her teeth clacked together.

  Up ahead, Schecters’ place sat neatly on a small rise, the house at the highest point, the outbuildings sloping gradually away, as if sliding almost imperceptibly downhill, though the word downhill was in itself a gross exaggeration.

  “Anyway,” Lavinia said, “it doesn’t matter.” She rested her hand on his arm.

  “Okay,” Jack said. “Okay. Forget it.”

  They rolled past the house, and Jack pulled the truck to a stop outside the hog pens. Ray was already there, leaning across the railings. Lavinia reached for the handle, but Jack said, “Won’t be long,” and slammed the door, crossing the yard in long strides.

  Lavinia sat in the hot cab, feeling close to tears, Ray’s presence a few yards away the only thing keeping them in check. Over nothing, she thought. That was the worst part.

  She watched Ray look up as Jack approached, lift one hand in a half-greeting and lean back away from the pens, his T-shirt pushed up a little over his belly. He shook his head at Jack, jerked a thumb toward the pens. “Sonofabitch,” he said, and shook his head again. She watched as Jack hooked his long body across the rails, then leaned back, too, tipping his cap away from his forehead. “I’ll be goddamned,” he said. Then he turned suddenly and waved to Lavinia. “Come on,” he called.

  Ray nodded at her as she stepped up to the pen.

  “See that?” Jack said, pulling her close by the sleeve of her shirt.

  At first she saw nothing but a large, spotted sow, curled sideways in the mud.

  “What?” she said.

  “There,” Jack said, pulling her closer.

  She leaned across the rails, peering over to where Jack pointed.

  “Only one left,” Jack said. “Christ, Ray, that’s a goddamn shame.”

  It was the blood she noticed first, a rusty brown colour smeared across the sow’s muzzle, then the one piglet squirming between its mother’s speckled hind end and the pen boards.

  “What?” she was about to say again, but Jack said, “Nature’s way, I guess. It’s a Christly shame, but there ain’t much you can do about it.”

  “Nature’s way,” Ray said. “Shit.”

  Lavinia looked up at Jack, and as she did, realized with a terrible, heavy feeling in her stomach what they were talking
about. She stepped back from the pen—lurched back, she knew, though neither Jack nor Ray seemed to notice. It was one of the things she found hardest of all, living there on the farm with Jack—getting used to the ugliness all over again, the blood and sudden deaths, the way a headless body could race oblivious, as if fleeing for its life. The smell of it all.

  Ray took off his cap, slapped it against the rails. “Guess I should try and get that last one.”

  Jack shook his head. “Be a cold day in hell before you’d catch me in there. She’ll chew your nuts off.”

  Ray put his cap back on and kicked a clump of mud from the rails. “Yeah,” Lavinia heard him say as she walked quickly back to the truck, “guess you’re right.”

  She slammed the door and sat there in the cab, hot, thinking, You bastard. Why would you show me that? But she already knew.

  Toughen her up. City girl.

  She jammed her spade now into the dirt and rubbed her shirt between her breasts where a line of sweat trickled toward her belly. Her armpits were wet and itchy and had a rank, oniony smell, although she’d bathed the night before and dusted on talcum. She thought, with disgust, I am rotting from the inside out. Jack had noticed, too, rolling away from her last night and twitching into sleep. She’d lain there in the darkness, pressing the palms of her hands into her belly, willing the sickness away. She’d prayed a bit, too, a kind of Hail Mary, what she could remember of it. But she must have fallen asleep partway through because she didn’t remember getting to the end. When she’d awoken, she’d thought, That’s a sin. It must be. It must be worse to start a prayer and not finish than to never pray at all.

  By the time Lavinia had filled a bucket, the sun was high and the frost had turned wet on the earth. Mud had caked to the spade and to her rubber boots. She was so thirsty, her tongue felt swollen and heavy in her mouth. When Jack left her standing in the corn, she’d watched for a while as his truck disappeared down the road. Then she removed her coat and shirt and worked in her bra. Though the air was still cold, sweat collected beneath her armpits, and even working slowly as she was, she was forced to sit frequently on an upturned bucket to rest. The surface of the earth was damp and soft, but underneath it was still clenched with frost and she had to stomp hard on the spade to gain even a couple inches of depth. She thought she might go back to the house, rest a while and then come out again when the earth had warmed. Jack would likely be at Schecters’ all day, maybe that night as well. And she could always hear the truck coming anyway. She planted the spade into a mound of dirt and lugged the full pail to the house, stopping every few feet to rest.