Contemplate the beauty around you, the poem suggested, and not your feet, a monk had once told Alvina. Unless, of course, you find your feet to be particularly inspiring. She’d approached the monastery from the creek side, and through a windbreak of saplings she had seen him tending bees on the far edge of a large garden. The next moment, his long shadow had moved towards her across an apron of mowed grass.
The monk had come to inquire about her reason for being there. She saw his looming shadow and looked up into what she thought might be the face of an angelic being, made indistinct by the veil of a beekeeper’s hat. A face darkened by the sun, she realized as he lifted it. His brows were white baby-bottle brushes that almost concealed his eyes. Have you lost something? he asked. The way Alvina kept her nose to the ground when she walked, he thought she must be looking for money. Lift your head, look around you, he said, and then recited the poem. Contemplate a thing of beauty. A joy forever. A quiet bower of sheep and daffodils. He had returned to the hives, leaving her to contemplate the rash of mosquito eggs clustered on the syrupy-looking creek, the dwarfed trees providing a hollow for a plaster figure of Christ. She had considered the silence gathering under the willows bending near the water.
The meadowlark was a blurred spot perched on the wire fence separating the outfield of the school baseball diamond from Zinn’s field. Earlier, she’d hoped to see Emilie coming on the run through that field, late as she sometimes was but at least present and accounted for. Emilie’s unexplained absence, Simon’s temper tantrum over two mistakes on an arithmetic test, Sara coming down with what was likely another shitty baby, no longer seemed relevant. The bodies in the pit were like sticks because they’d been starved. Shot by firing squads. Gassed.
She looked towards the highway, a buff ribbon of concrete that at the height of summer would shimmer in the heat. Sometimes she peered into the shimmer and saw people walking down the centre of it, watery ghosts colliding into one another, melding, coming apart and being made whole again. A mirage, Oliver had said. He’d once seen a herd of glass buffalo crossing the highway—he’d been able to see right through them. Alvina became aware now of the cars sporadically passing by. From the distance they appeared to be toy cars, determinedly going south to the U.S. border and north to Winnipeg. They didn’t even slow down when passing the access road to Union Plains.
Where the hell are you? the meadowlark gurgled, heralding the onset of summer’s heat. Superimposed on this day, on the birdsong, was a black-and-white image. A negative image of human beings heaped in a mass grave. The meadowlark’s question was pertinent. She’d been awakened this morning from a deep sleep. Left shuddering and chilled and wondering, what was the point? What was the point of the shorthand and typing exams? She only wanted to pass commercial in order to escape the putty knife. To gain her own space. A space about the size of a desk, its drawers repositories for the minutiae of her shitty life. A life that so far amounted to a denim drawstring bag bulging with metal hair rollers, a Chap Stick, a sanitary napkin, a Vicks medicated inhaler, a bottle of pearl-white nail polish and the little tin of get-happy pills.
Throughout the years—while Sara called out during the night, Alvinnnaa?, and Alvina trundled downstairs to make certain the locked door was really locked, while she made up the beds and scoured the scale from the piss-pot with a lava stone, buffed Bon Ami from windowpanes—she imagines that millions of people were being gassed, shot and starved to death. Men, women and children thrown into a pit, peering down and up through the strata of other deaths, staring with blackened eye sockets at the sky. Why were they so thin, like sticks? she asked, as the teacher took the magazine from her. Miss White folded the periodical with more energy than necessary and jammed it firmly under her arm, as though to prevent the images from sliding out onto the floor. They were starved. Hitler didn’t see any point in feeding people he planned to wipe from the face of the earth, she said.
There hadn’t been any pictures of starving people among the photographs in Katy’s trunk one summer long ago, when she had taken Alvina upstairs to see them. There were no fat people in those days of hunger, believe you me, Katy had said. We stopped taking pictures then because we didn’t like how we looked.
Alvina and Katy had been alone in the kitchen, elbow-deep in a tub of dishwater. Beyond the window, people sat out in the yard on chairs and benches, consuming a noon meal. Among them were Sara and Oliver, and a distant cousin who had motored from California in a large truck whose box was fitted with a canvas roof. The truck was used for hauling fruit and had been lent to the cousin by the owner of an orange grove. The cousin and his family had camped along the highway during their trip, like a pack of roaming gypsies, the man kept saying, until his listeners ceased to laugh. His presence had precipitated an unusual number of people attending the summer gathering, and so there was a need to eat in shifts.
Before the meal began, children were called to recite and sing for the visitors in German, which had Sara craning her neck in search of her own. The land sizzled with sound, clouds of grasshoppers rising to go on to another field and strip it clean. Oliver frowned and said, For God’s sake, Sara. Let the kids play. Alvina had stepped out of Sara’s line of vision. It appeared her brothers and sisters had done the same. And so she was just as surprised as her mother when, moments later, Annie came from the house trailing a quartet of Vandals. On cue, Simon, Manny, Emilie and Ida lined up and began singing.
Immediately the land grew quiet, and a crow calling from the elm beyond the dugout pond lifted up and flew away. The Vandals were singing in French, a round song that asked, Are you sleeping, brother John? Morning bells are ringing Annie hadn’t said they would sing in French. During the performance Oliver’s face grew swarthy with emotion as he stared at his hands, his brown fingers laced together over his paunch. The song ended in a soft echo of bells, ding, dong, ding. There was applause, the people around Oliver smiling and nodding, signalling their approval and pleasure. Oliver swiped at a wetness on his face and went over to a woodpile across the yard to have a smoke.
As he got up, the stricken Annie raised her hands. I thought he would like it, she said.
Well ding, dang, dong, you’re wrong, Emilie replied.
Sara rose from her chair, colour radiating in her cheeks. Shame on you, she called after Emilie, who had quickly run away. Emilie went across the farmyard and climbed up onto a threshing machine, where she could keep her eye on Oliver until he returned.
Alvina scrubbed dishes in the kitchen while Katy rinsed and dried, hurrying to prepare for the second shift of diners. Only then would the children be allowed to approach a table overburdened with roasted chickens, a shank of ham, a boiler swimming with chunks of farmer’s sausage. Alvina had helped carry the food, the pots of perogies awash in white gravy, platters of cheese and watermelon, a crock of plum soup. Still to come were trays of cream puffs, fruit pies and dessert squares.
I’m starving, Alvina had moaned as she washed dishes, and had quickly found herself being whisked upstairs to Katy’s bedroom, her aunt taking a key from a drawer and unlocking a huge trunk on the floor under a window. Her keepsake trunk, Alvina realized, which had come from the old country.
Moments later the lid rested on its hinges, and scattered in the lid were photographs Katy had taken from a wooden box inside the trunk. A box that had once belonged to her grandfather. Alvina’s great-grandfather, she explained, in a voice that had become less efficient in tone.
These are my parents, your grandparents. This picture was taken on their wedding day, Katy said. A woman stood beside a man sitting on a chair, her hand at rest on his shoulder. Her expression was one Alvina sometimes saw in Sara. A proud look, a lifted chin, and eyes saying that she wasn’t interested in what was going on around her. The man leaned forward, his large hands splayed across his knees. His expression was soft and almost sad.
This is your aunt Margareta. Greta, we called her. Katy pointed out a young woman among several others. The face leapt forwar
d. It was a face Alvina might have recognized, if not for the fact that she’d been told she resembled her father. And that’s your aunt Annie, see? Annie was a baby in a flowing white dress, held in her father’s arms, the only recognizable features being the pale blue eyes and frizzy cloud of blonde curls. Alvina’s eyes were drawn to a small girl standing beside Annie’s father, her chin tucked into her chest. She has Emilie’s smile, Alvina thought, self-conscious, shy. Could this be Sara?
And those are my brothers, Katy said, before Alvina could ask. Her aunt’s voice broke, and her finger trembled as she pointed out four blond boys of various heights. Two stood at their father’s knees while another two stood behind him. Alvina barely had a moment to take them in before Katy put the photo away. She gathered up the remaining photographs in the trunk lid and stacked them in a pile.
Who were the others? Alvina had caught glimpses of groups of people, couples, people lined up in front of houses. There was a picture of people lying in what looked to be narrow coffins, their hands folded across their chests.
What happened to your brothers? Alvina wanted to know.
They’re gone. There was a war and bad times. What’s important to remember is that they’re with God, Katy replied. She knew exactly what had happened. But she believed there was nothing to be gained by dwelling on the past.
I was a little girl when they died, and I hardly remember them, Sara would tell Alvina when she asked. They were all taken on the same day. By bad men. Killed. Don’t ask me how or why, because I don’t know. They’re safe in the arms of Jesus, Sara said, and Alvina recognized the words of a hymn.
Katy put the wooden box of photographs back into the trunk and locked it. She slipped the key into an apron pocket. She went over to a window and looked down at the people gathered in a circle, eating what she and the other women had prepared. There came a time when everyone was hungry. At least those little boys were spared that, she said to Alvina. We stopped taking pictures because we didn’t like how we looked, she continued, after pausing to dab at her eyes with a corner of her apron. There weren’t any chemicals to develop them, anyway. They were used up in the war.
She beckoned to Alvina to join her at the window. She pointed to the cousin who’d driven from California, a stub of a man whose face shone with perspiration. He had buried twin boys just before he left Russia. The babies had died of malnutrition. That woman over there? Katy indicated a nervous-looking woman who might have been Sara’s age, except that her hair was stark white. Katy said, She was your age when she saw her father being killed. Then her entire family died of typhus. The people in the yard eating so much food with apparent relish knew first-hand the meaning of the word starving. The words hate, murder, maim. I never want to hear you say starving, because you don’t know what it means, Katy said.
Well excuse me, what are you, a cop? Alvina thought, being only fourteen years old, and immune to the implications of her aunt’s stories.
According to Miss White, the deaths of the people in the open grave had been planned. Someone had penned or typed the dictate that they should die. Alvina imagined the word extinguish imprinted on a typewriter ribbon. She’d thought of that word because of the sudden depth of darkness in a room when a candle’s flame was quenched. What happened when people died? What happened to their memories, all the thoughts they’d ever had? She couldn’t fathom all that being frozen inside their stopped brains, the thundering, calcifying silence of everything they had felt, dreamt and hoped for.
Then she thought about Sara’s parents, a sister and four brothers, all killed. She didn’t take into account that they had died in a different time, in a different kind of war from the one she had happened upon in the magazine. She only thought that they’d been killed during the violence of a war, and her mind logically placed them in the pit among the corpses. Holy. Now she understood. She would not be able to say kill, murder, maim, without thinking about them.
Dust rose along the access road, the water truck churning it up as it went towards the municipal compound. Stevenson was likely returning from filling the cistern, she thought. When she got home she needed to take the key from the hook and put it back on a top cupboard shelf, where the little kids couldn’t reach it, on the chance that one of them might figure out how to undo the padlock, unthread the chain from the cistern lid handle and lift aside the iron cover. She must remember to sprinkle and roll up the clothes that needed ironing and put them in the refrigerator. Her thoughts slid to one side of her head and then to the other. She grabbed on to the railing to keep from keeling over. Nausea whelmed up from her stomach and, with it, a gush of salty-tasting water that filled her mouth. Her ears began to ring and her face ran with perspiration. She should not have taken the second pill. One a day, Florence had cautioned. Never take more than one.
Where the hell are you? the meadowlark piped again. As far back as Alvina could remember, she’d always been surrounded by voices. A house filled with voices, as when, before supper, she would sneak away for a nap. She would creep upstairs hoping Sara wouldn’t miss her, up to her bunk bed, and immediately pass out to the sound of muffled voices downstairs. A cotton comforter of sounds that would still be there when she was roused by someone sent to fetch her. Voices were a buffer against oblivion, against the silence embraced by the willows bending near the creek. Now the silence she sometimes craved was a wall of darkness rushing towards her. Was this what it was like to die? A wooziness, a retraction of reality, the world as though viewed through wavy lead-coloured glass? Was this the Lord taking away?
Her legs trembled with weakness and she was unable to will them to carry her downstairs to a classroom, where she would be safe among the children. She wanted to go home, to enter the house to the sound of her sisters’ shitty little voices. Alvina! If this is going to be your last thought, it should not contain the word shitty. From now on, let shit be shit, and not an adjective or a verb smelling up the air and your mind. She vowed never to use the word that way again. Just please, please, please. Save me. She was thinking that she would slide backwards into the darkness, when someone called her name.
The world swivelled back into focus as she saw Emilie coming through Zinn’s field, arms flailing in a butterfly stroke, her hair streaming out behind her. Then Alvina saw Manny on his knees at the fence, crouching over a pile of dry leaves heaped against it. He leapt up, then stood staring, entranced by the yellow lick of flame consuming the edges of several leaves, a tendril of smoke.
Manny! Jesus Bloody Murphy! Alvina yelled, and he turned, spotted her on the fire escape and stomped out the beginnings of his bonfire, while stuffing Oliver’s loupe into his pocket.
You’re going to get your ass tanned, Alvina shouted—an empty threat, she knew. A fire lit against the backyard shed, in the garbage barrel, hadn’t resulted in a tanning. While Sara believed in spanking, she didn’t think it was right for her to spank the boys, and left that to Oliver, who objected to having to carry through on her threats. What kind of a homecoming is that? he asked. The kids scared out of their wits for me to step in the door? Do your own dirty work.
You get back inside before someone catches you, Alvina called, and Manny took off at a run. Just then Emilie vaulted the wire fence, and there was an attending flash of yellow as the meadowlark lifted from the fence post and flew away. Emilie sprinted across the baseball diamond, and Alvina became aware of the cool metal of the fire escape against her hands and stomach. Sonny Boy, George, Ida, Emilie, Manny, Simon, Ruby, Sharon, Patsy Anne. Ten little, nine little, eight little Indians, seven little, six little, five little Indians. She couldn’t sing, and so she chanted the counting verse to her sisters and brothers while she put them to bed, making them hold up the appropriate number of fingers. She required them to say their prayers—Now I lay me down to sleep. Our Father who art in heaven. Forgive us our debits. She remembered the polio warning on the radio this morning—Do not get overheated, do not perspire.
Stop running! Stop! You’re supposed to wa
lk, only, Alvina called to Emilie. But would Emilie listen? Of course not. Thank God the nausea had passed, Emilie had returned, the world remained the same.
At last Emilie had reached the fire escape and stood on the bottom step looking up at Alvina, her ribs heaving, the fringe of white bangs pasted against her forehead. For all the rush, she seemed at a loss for words. Why had she bothered to show up when the day was nearly half over? She’s so fragile, Alvina thought. Pale skin stretched over tiny sharp bones, and a smile that was too wide for her narrow face, and never reached her eyes. Emilie looked hungry. Alvina wanted to gather her in an embrace, but she knew Emilie would only strain against it, as she had never been one to cuddle.
We’re going home, she said, her footsteps rattling the fire escape as she quickly descended. Relief made her light-footed. One a day, she vowed silently. She paused on the bottom step and looked down at Emilie, who seemed confused. Her nervous smile had faded, and her brow had wrinkled with puzzlement. Her thin arms came up to hug her body, and to conceal a smudge of dirt on her shirt.
I’ll do her hair, Alvina thought. I’ll wind it up in rollers and see if I can coax it into a pageboy.
It’s not time to go home, Emilie said.
It doesn’t matter, Alvina replied, propelled by the urgent need to get there.
FOURTEEN
Seeing about a dog
LIVER WAITED as the ferry unravelled the water between him and Ulysse, thinking that he would ride until as late as noon, when his uncle, unmindful of vehicles waiting to cross, would open a can of creamed corn or herring, maybe both, although that would mean he’d need to go into town earlier to replenish his larder. They would eat in silence, their communion punctuated by an otter sliding down the bank and splashing into the water, a fish tail smacking the surface of their thoughts.
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