A Hard Witching

by Jacqueline Baker

  “Where do you live now? Brandon?”

  “Nipawin.”

  “Where?”

  Myra raised her voice. “Nipawin. I teach there. Two and three.”

  Perpetua nodded. She watched Myra pick up pictures, set them back down, the same ones she’d already looked at.

  “What, are you on a holiday?”

  “Yes. Sort of. It’s summer vacation.” She smiled a little. “I guess that’s my holiday.”

  “Out here?”

  Myra turned away.

  Perpetua straightened a couple of the frames. “You picked the worst time, July. You have air conditioning in your car?”

  “Yes,” Myra said without turning back. “It’s hot, all right.”

  “I was never one for the heat,” Perpetua said. “Everyone complains about winter. Not me. Joe neither. Nothing bothers him.”

  Then, finally, she asked, “Are you married?”

  “Yes,” Myra said, replacing the photograph she was looking at. “Robert Russell. We met at the university. His family is from around Kindersley. The Malcolm Russells. His grandparents are Aida and Clemens Russell …?”

  She trailed off.

  Perpetua frowned. “Where is he? Working?”

  “Yes,” she said, “he had to work.”

  “You have children?”

  “No.”

  Perpetua gave Myra’s wrist a little squeeze and, though she was reluctant to let go, went slowly to sit in the armchair by the window. She made a motion for Myra to take a seat on the chesterfield.

  “You want coffee?” she asked.

  “No. Thank you.”

  “Juice? Water?”

  “No, I’m good, thanks.”

  Perpetua folded her hands in her lap. The clock ticked out from the mantel, softly. Beyond the yellowed blinds, a car rolled past on the gravel road. She tried not to stare at Myra, though she felt as if she could swallow her whole with her eyes. That face. When she thought of it, her throat ached, and so she thought instead about Joe, working steadily out in the shop, listened for the sound of his radio or the high whine of the saw. But all was quiet.

  “I guess,” Myra said finally, fiddling with the hem of her white skirt, her eyes glistening in the yellow light, “I guess you and mother were pretty close.”

  Oh, Perpetua thought, oh, my dear child. And she wanted more than anything to pull that sad body to her, hold her close against her chest. Poor unlovely child. Child of my heart. My sister’s child. Perpetua hid her hands beneath her apron.

  “Yes,” she said slowly, “there was just the three of us. We had no close neighbours. Just us.”

  Myra nodded. She wiped the tip of her awkward nose, stared up at a basket of silk flowers, then a brass cat, then a framed sampler Perpetua had been given years ago, decades, as a gift: Act and suffer in silence. She couldn’t remember now who had given it to her, only that she had hated it always. She watched as Myra looked about the room. Finally, she could stand it no longer.

  “You want to know about your mother?” she asked. “What do you want to know?”

  Myra stared back at her.

  “She was a good singer,” Perpetua began. “She liked all animals. On the farm, she liked to be with the animals. Except mice, which she was afraid of. I don’t know why; she wasn’t afraid of anything else. She liked the horses, her and Martin both. I was always too scared. She liked the garden. She worked hard. We all did. She wasn’t much of a one for housework.” She smiled. “She got in trouble with Mum all the time for not doing this right, not doing that right. She baked an apple pie once, Mum left all the directions, but Magda used salt instead of sugar. Martin tried to feed it to the dogs so Mum wouldn’t find out, but they wouldn’t eat it. She got in trouble for that. She liked to sing.” She lifted her hands. “I don’t know. My memory is getting worse. If you ask questions, maybe I’ll remember.”

  But Perpetua felt like a fraud, looking across at that unhappy face. This was not what Myra wanted to know. Not really. She leaned forward over her knees, as close as she could get without rising, and said slowly, clearly, “She was my sister. And I loved her. Just as I loved Martin. And my mother and my father. It was all we had. Do you understand? We didn’t know anything but each other.” She stopped here, hoping Myra would understand. “Our family, it was everything. More than that, I can’t tell you.”

  Myra stared at the carpet, unblinking.

  Perpetua rose and seated herself on the chesterfield next to her. She put one arm around her shoulders and thought, This is what we’ve all come to, then, all that love. How could she explain it?

  “The truth is …” she began.

  She looked up then to see Joe standing in the doorway, holding a small carved horse, a red one, gleaming with all the light of new marble. She could tell by the way he turned the figure slowly in his hands that he’d been standing there for some time. The horse, she knew, was for Myra. Though his carvings fetched quite a price in the city, he’d always given away far more than he’d sold. It was his way. He lifted the horse slightly, as if he would say something. But he did not. She stared back at him, with Myra between them, her face in her hands. They listened to the clock tick. And then, still looking at Joe, Perpetua said, “That’s enough now.” And she smoothed a hand across the back of Myra’s hair. “That’s enough.”

  Sand Hills

  It wasn’t that she lied. At least, I don’t think she did—not what she would have considered lying, anyway. The thing about my mother was that she always loved a good story, right up until the day she died, tucked under my grandmother’s wedding quilt on the chesterfield in the airless and darkened front room. She simply believed in a little embellishment, a little bending of the rules. She believed in constant and impromptu revision to keep things interesting.

  It was a family trait that ended, apparently, with her. I would try sometimes, at her urging, to produce an adequately dramatized version of some dry bit of information I’d learned at school, something from history or science class, even bits of gossip I was privy to in the girls’ washroom. I tried to recreate these stories the way my mother did, vividly, punching life and colour into everything; but I always ended up losing my place, confusing details, forgetting that I should have provided a vital fact sooner—No, wait a minute, there were actually two Indians waiting around the bend, and one was really tired, or, no, he was sick, really really sick, and it was dark out, I should of said it was dark, and one of the Indians, well, no, let me go back a bit.

  This failure in me was a flaw my mother could never accept, as if I had been born of alien and uncultivable flesh.

  “That’s all right, dear,” she’d sigh, patting my leg halfway through some dull and tortured tale, perhaps sensing my misery or simply no longer able to listen. Releasing us both from my inadequacies. She would smile a little to keep me from feeling discouraged, scanning my face in a way that made me feel she was still trying to decide whether or not we might come to like one another.

  Once she said abruptly, “I never told you enough,” and I’d thought at first she meant stories, that she was excusing me, taking responsibility for my failure. But then she closed her eyes and shook her head, patted my leg again, and said nothing more. Her silence was my cue to read from one of the books we were studying in school, A Tale of Two Cities or The Old Man and the Sea. She liked best those set somewhere else, somewhere other than the prairies, somewhere exotic, tropical, unleashing the possibilities in a shell, a vine, a fish. She had me read The Pearl twice during her illness and once more toward the end. She was so small by then that I would tiptoe in quietly some afternoons when the blinds were drawn and the winter light was a dull, dusty gold, and think for a moment that she had disappeared, simply evaporated from beneath the smooth blue of the quilt, that it was her dust that floated all around me, turned and glowed in the heavy light cracking from the edges of windows where the blinds did not quite meet. Once I thought, I could breathe her in now, her body like this, in such fine
particles. I could take all of her in. And I stood there enchanted by the thought, both desperate and afraid to breathe, caught in that one moment of pure, terrified longing.

  “Mom?” she said then, and for a second I thought I’d spoken out loud, felt my heart thudding against the back of my throat. But the quilt rustled and her still-dark head turned on the pillow.

  “Oh, Del,” she said, half-apologetic, half-disappointed, “I thought it was Grandma.”

  By the time my mother’s illness transformed the front room into a sickroom, my grandmother had been dead nearly a decade, following fast on the heels of my grandfather. Everyone knew the two of them would go that way, so close together. After her funeral, people stood around at the fenced edge of the cemetery on the outskirts of town, smoking or dabbing at lipstick or simply leaning their bodies into the wind, agreeing on the inevitability of such near departures.

  “A testament to their bond,” the priest had said, the very words that seemed to be on everyone’s mind. “A testament to God’s will,” he’d gone on to say at length, encouraged by the nods he’d received, “a testament to the glory of God and to the bond of man and wife, for each one of us, sinners all, each one of us, lambs and sinners all, which no thing, not even the cold hand of death, can put asunder.”

  Many thought he was going too far, though they agreed that his theory applied well to my grandparents.

  “It’s a fitting thing, Rose and Herb,” they said, grinding the heels of their shoes in the patched grass.

  “It’s only right.”

  “We should all be so lucky.”

  The occasion of her death may, in fact, have been the only time my grandmother had been considered lucky. Rose Correy came from hard-on-their-luck people, the Sand Hill Mayhews (to distinguish them from the Town Mayhews, who owned the grocery store and were known to be fine, hard-working people despite the shocking markup on produce and perishables). Her father, Philip Mayhew, was seen as largely to blame for the family’s misfortunes.

  “Any fool can see that land over there isn’t worth a rat’s ass,” they’d say around the coffee shop. “Can’t grow nothing. Run some cattle, sure, but if you can’t grow nothing …” And they would shake their heads and tip back their caps.

  No one knew what made Philip Mayhew select for his homestead a wretched few acres on the edge of the Great Sand Hills—the worst possible tract of land in all Saskatchewan. We knew only that, on the long trip back to town after staking his claim, he’d stopped to drink from a slough, fell into a fever and died eight days later in a rooming house in Maple Creek, leaving his teenaged sons—dazed and stupid with grief—to break the land as best they could. Some said it was the lack of a father figure that made the Mayhews run wild, that their mother, left alone with five children on a farm where nothing grew but sagebrush, kocia weed and thistle, just gave up, let those kids do as they pleased.

  “Drinkers and fighters,” they said in town. “Four boys and no father—well, it’s no wonder.”

  My grandmother, the youngest and the only girl, was tagged as guilty by association, though she herself had never been known to take a drink, not even a sip from the proffered bottles of her brothers’ friends, and she was too small to be much of a fighter. I’ve seen pictures of her in my mother’s album, a skinny child swathed in hand-me-down boys’ sweaters or roughly made-over grown-up dresses (donated by town ladies to the needy, a word basically synonymous with Mayhew) that somehow gave her a disturbing air of unwholesomeness, the way the too-shiny fabric gleamed in the light and flapped low across the narrow bones of her chest. From the pictures, it’s hard to tell what my grandfather saw in her, unless it was a certain waifishness, a vulnerability that appealed to his less noble instincts. In truth, the Correys weren’t a far cry from the Mayhews, either in habit or spirit. The only difference was the family patriarch, Ted Correy, whose existence well into his nineties lent the illusion of family stability and discipline.

  When Rose Mayhew married into the Correys, few would have claimed she was lucky, though some may have gone so far as to say she wasn’t likely to do much better. But to the surprise of most, Herb and Rose seemed to fare well in married life. Rose grew plump and pinkish, could not, from the way she looked in those later years, possibly have been named anything but Rose. I’ve often wondered how her parents chose so accurately, why they had not selected the more popular Rosemary or Constance or even Violet. It has become a strange source of pride for me, the selection of that name, as though it spoke of a greater understanding and insight than the Mayhews were generally given credit for.

  I suppose that the fibbing distinguished the Mayhews from the Correys as well. My grandmother, using what I came in later years to recognize as a considerable degree of creative licence, called it storytelling.

  “We come from a long line of storytellers,” she’d say to me sometimes when the Mayhew reputation around town (kept alive largely by the doings of her two youngest brothers, who still resided together on the family farm) came once more to my attention. “Mayhews always were fine storytellers,” she’d say, pointing her little chin. “That’s a thing to be proud of.”

  My grandfather, on the other hand, was known to remark that he’d never seen such a pack of BSers in all his born days.

  “The whole bunch of ‘em,” he’d mutter, knifing into a pork chop, “talk you senseless. And what have they got to say for themselves? Not a goddamn thing.”

  My grandmother would murmur, “Herb,” in that way she had and then lift her eyebrows toward where I sat at the end of the table, pretending not to listen.

  “What?” he’d bark. “It’s the God’s truth.” Then he’d wink and say, “I got myself the best thing that ever come from them hills.”

  And my grandmother, I swear to this day, would duck her head and blush clear up to the roots of her hair, saying, “Herb,” again, but not in the same way. And sometimes, seizing the moment, she’d add, “I wonder how Bob and Carl are doing.” If my grandfather didn’t respond, it was as good an answer as she could hope for. She’d sweep crumbs from the table into the palm of her hand and say, “About time we made a trip out there.” Then smile over at me and add, “Make sure the old place hasn’t blown away.”

  I’d been out to the Sand Hills frequently as a child, usually with my mother and my grandmother, sometimes with my grandfather in reluctant tow. When he did join us, he’d stay in the truck and smoke while my mother, grandmother and I went inside the unpainted farmhouse to visit with Great-Uncle Bob and Great-Uncle Carl. At first, I enjoyed those visits, sitting at the sagging kitchen table, sucking on a warm, dusty bottle of Dr. Pepper from the crate by the fridge, kept there solely for the purpose of mix. The two women cleaned and cooked, and the two men creaked back in their chairs, feet up against the edge of the table, drinking. And all four of them talked. It was dizzying, really, that chatter, and I found it intoxicating to sit there all but ignored, with my pop bottle wedged between knees drawn up to my chest, just listening.

  “People can laugh all they want, but I’m telling you I seen it with my own eyes, that light, it was ghostly blue and it came each night and skittered over the same spot on the floor, till one night we pried up the boards with a shovel and there it was, a tin box stuffed to bursting with dollar bills, two hundred and twenty-seven of them, to be exact. Old Man Dubyk had come back for his money, sure as I’m sitting here today.”

  “What, Dubyk? Never had a penny to his name.”

  “Well, now you know why. Ha ha.”

  “That was the summer Forsby tried to swim his horse across the river.”

  “You were all down there drinking after Tom Fidder’s branding.”

  “No, that was later, years later. You’re losing your memory.”

  “It was a dare, wasn’t it?”

  “Emil Schlacht dared him.”

  “No, it was a bet.”

  “No, it wasn’t, it was just Forsby. He was on his horse and halfway across before anybody realized.”


  “Well, it was in the spring. I know that because there was ice yet on the river and Mazey Cross was still alive.”

  “Mazey Cross! There’s a name I haven’t heard in years.”

  “That’s where we carried the body, through the moonlight, I remember it was a full moon or near about, and she opened the door, all white-haired and holding up that candle just like an angel, you remember? And the light fell on poor Forsby and she looked at us all and then led us inside, where we laid poor Forsby on the kitchen table and all of us dripping wet and shivering like anything, and Foxy Eavell, who’d got to him first, crying and shaking like he might bust apart and Forsby so still it didn’t seem possible. And then she covered him over with her good tablecloth and we knew it was done, and Mazey said so softly, ‘You’re through now, boys. Go on home. I think you’re about through.’”

  “Poor old Forsby.”

  “Poor old Mazey Cross. It was her heart got her in the end.”

  I sat quietly and listened and hoped my grandfather had dozed off in the truck outside, as he sometimes did. We all knew that when he leaned on the horn, it was time to go.

  As I got older, I began to suspect my presence in the kitchen wasn’t forgotten but rather indulged, that I was undergoing some rite of passage. Bob began to glance at me frequently, gauging my reaction to different stories. Did I laugh, was I embarrassed? Did I understand? Carl, on the other hand, continued to ignore me until one day late in the summer before my tenth birthday, when he turned to me abruptly and asked, loudly enough to make me start, “And what have you got to say for yourself?”

  I froze, hands pressed to my kneecaps, toes curled over the edge of the chair.

  “Well,” Carl prompted, louder, “what can you tell me, Delly Mayhew?” He said it with an odd and inexplicable sneer, drawing it out in an ugly way—Maaay-hew.

  Until that precise moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that I was one of them, a Mayhew. My last name was Correy, of course, the same as my mother’s, my grandmother’s. But they were Mayhews, too. I was amazed that I had never included myself in their number, not consciously.