This is My Song

by Richard Yaxley

  At the end of that season she slipped back into a more public mode and returned to the Academy, a self-important group of brick buildings that was replete with Nancys, Margarets, Geralds and Earles. The classes were streamed: at the beginning of the first year Annie had been surprised and quietly thrilled to find herself in the top group. Nancy Jefferson was placed mid-stream, a dustier noisier zone from where she regularly relayed her father’s judgment that this was no doubt a mistake, either that or a clear indicator as to the inadequate nature of the Academy’s testing procedures. Of course, she sniffed, Daddy will see it right, but Daddy never did and Nancy remained in Class 7D (Shaughnessy), 8D (DeLuise), 9D (Cantell-O’Brien) and 10D (Shaughnessy), where she served a lengthy term as the Monitor for Everything.

  The two girls maintained a truce, uneasy at first until time’s endless massage ensured that the events of the past decreased in significance. Way back Annie had apologised and Nancy had accepted her apology, if an elaborate eye-roll and muttered aside about common thuggery could be deemed acceptance. The evidence had long departed, Nancy needing little more than ice, a dab of gel and the promise of a bar of chocolate upon healing, certainly no hospital or dental work. As their destinies were dragged further and further into the less pliable structures of Junior High, they even managed to spend some non-abrasive moments together. Once, during Grade Nine, Nancy, who was much stouter and plainer these days, actually laughed about that old thing, telling the group that they must watch out for Annie – she could be feisty, hunt you down like a hawk. She flapped her arms and cawed when she said hawk. Annie blushed, everyone laughed and the road out suddenly became smoother.

  For all that there was a change in Nancy Jefferson that saddened Annie. Her blustering self-confidence, always a natural wellspring, now seemed to be derived from the affirmation of others. As well as being jam-jar solid, Nancy owned a pair of breasts that could be kindly denoted as healthy, less kindly as outsized. Whatever the judgment, Nancy’s chest soon became her chief feature, gaining the lip-licking attention of the Geralds and Earles who were, Annie noted, remarkably shrewd and speedy in their observation of changes to the female form. Thus, no one was too surprised when Nancy secured a sort-of boyfriend by the name of Watson Peebles; his family was also of the land, she said loudly, but more importantly Watson had unruly hair, John Lennon spectacles and a book of rude poems by Leonard Cohen that he knew off by heart. The affair quickly reached its potential, Nancy ensuring that she was seen perambulating laps of the Academy grounds, finger-touching with Watson Peebles. She told the other girls, Annie included, that her boyfriend was enigmatic, though not so much that he might access her mighty breasts with his clammy hands.

  Game-playing, all of it, but sad nevertheless that Nancy needed someone – something like Watson Peebles. Annie read and studied, remained on the edge as she brushed aside gossip and allegedly torn hearts, contemplated other more kaleidoscopic worlds as deeply as she dared – but her actions too were fill-in. What she most wanted was the season of winter, and the song of the goshawk.

  Each year in late November the bird came to the tree. It looked no different. Do birds visibly age, she wondered? Does their flesh crinkle, their feathers fall out, their hues fade?

  No matter. Weather permitting, she stood like a harbour sentinel in the cold white sea and raised her arms. The goshawk screamed with pleasure and began their old trick, the climb into the drab anti-sky, the quavering rest on the top rim of the cloud bank – she thought of a cyclist pausing at the highest point of the velodrome before the final plunge and sprint to the line – and the subsequent dive, velocity tucking the bird’s wings hard to its breast as its fuselage hurtled with enormous pace towards the vee. These days she didn’t bother to photograph the goshawk – her Kodak Instamatic had long ago stopped working and she couldn’t afford to replace it – but she did continue to watch the bird and well knew its habits: brilliant navigation of the forest and grassland perimeters, the long low-slung glide that signalled a search for food, the way it stood triumphantly over a new kill and raised its head like a gladiator awaiting applause and, most rewardingly, the varying tones and cadences of the kak-kak, one of which – she was certain – was for her ears only: a milder, more musical meld that signalled acknowledgement and, she hoped, affection.

  Throughout winter, whenever Annie returned to the cabin the goshawk followed her, perching close to her bedroom window and remaining overnight. Much later in her life, she would think that she had never since felt safer, or happier, than when the bird was there. All those difficult events of the future – the agonies of various departures, the accumulation of losses and gains, the trembling uncertainties that accompanied the gathering of self-knowledge – none of these erased the truth that the goshawk provided: that there was a great and noble worthwhileness waiting within the cradle of the universe, if only you were prepared to firstly see it, and secondly, let it in.

  It began that autumn as a cough.

  Her mother had never been ill. Never noticeably aged or changed either; Annie could only ever recall her mother bringing forth, each morning, the same lean body, firm-legged stance, thick powerful fingers that could knead dough as easily and gently as comb hair. She’d been as constant and light-giving as the day, but now a bad cough rattled within her. In just a few hours, it seemed, her skin colour faded to wax and she began to spit out horrible grey contagions with such violence that Annie had to steady her head over the bowl.

  On the cusp of her sixteenth year, Annie was taller and stronger. When she looked in a mirror or lay in her bed she felt that parts of her mother had started to grow inside her: like clay, they’d merge eventually with her own pieces and create the final version.

  She looked up from the spit bowl and said to her father, ‘She needs a doctor,’ and for once he did not consider, picking up the telephone immediately.

  Dr Newbery swept in with the wind. He checked Helen’s throat and heart, clicked his tongue when he took her temperature and gauged her blood pressure, then peered into the spit bowl and said, ‘How long has she been this way?’

  ‘Just a few hours. Is it –’

  ‘Pneumonia,’ said the doctor briskly. ‘Hospital, now.’

  They went, and later that same day Annie’s mother nearly died, each breath struggling more than the last to squeeze through a narrowing fissure. Even clean oxygen from a bottle seemed to strangle her. At one point, when several nurses and a doctor rushed in to stem a coughing episode that had switch-kicked to a fit, Annie thought to pray. In light of the circumstances it didn’t seem so wrong to bend her head and talk to this long-neglected God – who might well have said Now you want me! or Had your chance! – but of course He was not human and therefore not at that level of churlishness.

  ‘Lord,’ she whispered, ‘please save my mother. I – we love her. She’s,’ – the word struggling to pull away from the ordinary and fly – ‘true.’

  When the danger finally passed, Annie, who’d been frightened to an acuteness that had made her interpret every cough or gasp as final, sat with her mother for a long time. In doing so she began to experience her own milder version of the disease: her body temperature rose to a flush, she felt a broad pressing ache in her chest, felt tiredness and deflation, even a lessening of breath, particularly as daylight disappeared. Her mother’s occasional onsets of delirium became her delirium also. Her sleep was broken apart, spent with snippets and grabs of her past. She was bewildered to see a parade of lost faces and unknown faces, and see people who didn’t belong go into those places – Watson Peebles building a kite inside their kitchen? – and finally be woken by unexplained pictures, all of which seemed to be connected with blueness and drowning.

  Her father said, ‘What about school?’

  Annie’s response, perhaps too curt, was, ‘What about Mum?’

  When Helen’s recovery was confirmed as under way he returned to his Jefferson ranch work, only breaking to drive Annie to and from the hospital. Most mornings
he came with her to the ward but only briefly, time enough for a measured glance at his wife, touch her shoulder, maybe straighten a chair before leaving.

  ‘He’s scared,’ said the nurse. ‘Men are like that. Disease scares them.’

  ‘He should be here,’ Annie retorted.

  ‘He probably should,’ said the nurse, ‘but he’s not.’ She gripped Annie’s arm and said, ‘When Grandma was diagnosed, my grandpa never came in till she was healed because he thought that it would mean the worst. She’d see him by the side of the bed, think it was all over and let go. That’s a man’s way of thinking.’

  ‘Dumb,’ said Annie.

  ‘Maybe so,’ said the nurse. ‘Still needs to be understood.’

  Her father asked about school again and, for the first time that she could remember, they argued.

  ‘No,’ she insisted, ‘school doesn’t matter –’

  ‘Annika –’

  ‘This is what matters, Pappa, this!’ – because her mother’s struggle towards wellness was real, as real as any of the big parts of living, whereas school was artificial, in many ways pointless.

  Her father, ever obstinate.

  ‘Your mother is recovering. What matters now is opportunity. You are intelligent – you must study hard, make your future. I will –’

  ‘Pappa, no. My mother needs me.’

  ‘She is recovering –’

  ‘She needs me!’ Deep breath before she retorted, ‘Anyway, I don’t have to endure that stupid Academy to find opportunity.’

  ‘That is ridiculous. You must understand that an education is –’

  ‘No, you must understand. Pappa, I hate it. Hate it!’

  ‘Annika, I work hard to keep you in school. Your place is there.’

  ‘My place is here, with my mother!’

  Dark fury, his voice like a whip: ‘I am instructing you to go to school!’ But Annie did not let him stare her down and her own voice was cold and measured as she said, ‘I am looking after my sick mother. That is all.’

  ‘Annika –’

  ‘No, Pappa. No.’

  The season had edged into winter before her mother’s skin regained its customary sheen. The mustard cleared from her eyes and her coughing weakened to a polite bark. She was weak but glad to leave hospital and gaze through the truck windows at the stark grandeur of an iced-over prairie. The cabin was a dusty museum piece, but there was at least dry wood in the grate and fresh food in the safe. Annie cooked and cleaned in a frenzy and continued to sit alongside her mother, who needed not just to mend but also grow back her reserves of life, she’d been so depleted. Annie gave her soup and company but this healing was a slow process, like giving water and sunshine to a broken-down plant and waiting for the new green tendrils. As snow drifted unseen from the sky, time became measurable not by light and dark but by evidence of her mother’s progress: more or less burn in the cheek, her capacity to eat solids, the energy that occasionally shone through like torchlight before weakening to a thin yellow line.

  One morning, in that semi-quaver between the end of sleep and the beginning of waking, Annie registered a sound, high-pitched, confident, kind of familiar – was it the goshawk? She opened her eyes to nothingness, waited a moment longer then struggled out of bed. She felt guilty because the bird, which had so consumed her recent winters, had been forgotten this past month.

  When she looked out her bedroom window to the usual branch the hawk wasn’t there. She was disappointed but knew that she could not dwell, there was work to be done. She boiled the kettle and sliced bread and wondered, had she even heard the call? Something else, or her imagination perhaps? Anyway, it didn’t matter too much. Neglected, the photos of the goshawk had fallen off her bedroom wall and she hadn’t bothered to restore them. All bar one sat in a stack, faded now, like her childhood.

  The letter, which carried the crest of the Honey Academy, was also a reminder of another existence – so far away, barely known! Her father was adrift somewhere within the landscape so she opened the letter alone and found, without great surprise, that she cared little for the contents.

  Difficult circumstances … absence … options … support … enrolment … contact.

  Annie refolded the letter and shoved it beneath a crooked pile of books. She grabbed the book at the top, went to her mother’s room, sat her up, smiled as she puffed her pillows and showed her photographs of the Mekong River.

  When spring came her mother was well again. Their lives began to retrace a more usual pattern, although Annie had still not returned to the Academy. Her father, either silent or absent, had said nothing, nor had she raised the topic with him. It remained, in her mind, completely unimportant.

  But her mother’s return to health did rob her of purpose. Annie read and wandered and found activity where she could but in comparison with previous months there was little to do. She tried to write poetry but the words stalled then dried. She borrowed her mother’s paints but couldn’t finish her art because of a nagging feeling that it was unbalanced. She walked into the spaces that had always gladdened her but the wildflowers were weeds, the forest was regulation and the sky was mild and vacant.

  Keira Krug dropped by and asked her to come to a party. Annie said without interest, ‘Who for, what for?’ and Keira told her, ‘Nancy, she’s leaving.’

  Annie straightened.

  ‘Leaving?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Keira grinned at her own wicked joke. The kiss curl was gone, replaced by a full dye of bright copper. She lowered her voice. ‘There was a boy.’

  ‘A boy?’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Keira again.

  ‘Not Watson Peebles?’

  ‘Lord, no! Another boy. Older.’

  The word seemed shivery, forbidden. Annie asked, ‘What happened?’

  ‘Everything you might think,’ said Keira with relish, ‘and a whole lot more besides. Upshot is, her dad-dy pulled her out of the Ac-ad-emy.’

  ‘Where’s she going?’

  ‘Calgary, live with her aunt. Her cousin operates a theatre, you know, plays and shows. Seems that Nancy’s got a job pinning costumes.’

  They murmured some more before Keira waved and left. Annie sat alone in the warm sun. She remembered her long-ago view of herself as a rock, and she thought how strange it was that the accuracy of this view had never diminished.

  Having been woken by a single crow mourning its own lack of joy, Annie rose into a bright day. Outside her father was angling wood onto a block for chopping. He glanced into the sun, left the wood and stepped towards her, but Annie did not want that. She avoided him by walking quickly past the open gate onto the track that led to the spruce forest. As she paddled along she looked to the sky, which seemed close enough to grab. She thought, maybe I could find a handhold and swing in the breeze, clamber beyond the blue.

  When she reached the perimeter of the forest the track became a line, then space between the trees, skinny and irregular but available. She scrambled into heavier shadows, treading on mystery and decay. The sounds of the forest were cushioned by the gloom, so she heard traces only – whistles and slithers, a cry and echo that might have been one, creaks and cracks and groans that made her think she was stepping on old bones, waking the giants of the past.

  It was daunting but she persisted. As the slope of the land gradually increased the trees thinned, marching with greater regularity amid golden-green rays of light. Annie picked a new route that curved vaguely past the rocky overhangs and ferny cavities. She balanced herself with one outstretched arm as she scrambled onto boulders and around hollows. It was hard work, but each time she lifted her eyes she was rewarded with luminous sunshine and knew that she was nearly through the forest and therefore close to the upside of the mountain.

  She pushed and climbed and her muscles ached but eventually she came to an open area, a flatter pillow that lay below a ragged escarpment. As she regained her breath and looked out she realised that this was much higher than she had ever been before, the vie
w skimming effortlessly over the tops of the trees.

  Annie saw the vast, biscuity expanse of the prairie then a different horizon with unfamiliar towns and hues. Over there were the lakes that she had heard about but never visited, beyond was the origin of a river valley, said to be deep and beautiful.

  A blue and abiding holiness. When she heard the cry of a bird, Annie raised her eyes to the sky. The creature was a speck, a long way above the crown of the mountain. She didn’t know if it was the goshawk but she watched anyway as the tiny figure dipped and circled and sang a tune of its own making.

  Nancy’s party was held on the cusp of summer, 1979, in a semi-lit back garden. Coloured lights had been draped through the lower networks of the maples and beeches and paper streamers tied in festoons and attractive scallops. The music was continuous but soft, suggesting that the party was being pitched low key, Annie sensing a farewell that was reluctant but necessary.

  They drank cups of ritzy fruit punch, sat in a large circle that was, for Annie anyway, surprisingly companionable, and chatted. As the evening drew on she even danced with a serious, polite boy named Bryan Giotto. They’d sat next to each other occasionally in Literature class at the Academy, Bryan being mocked by others as an unwavering advocate of the European writers. As Tonight’s the Night drifted into the evening it seemed natural for them to slip into a waltz, and Bryan, who smelled pleasantly musky, told Annie that he’d been disappointed when she hadn’t come back to school.

  ‘Disappointed?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘I just thought –’ He blushed, looked to the radiant trees.