by Exile
When I went to put the nursery book back in the box, it slipped from my hand and fell; its pages flipping till it opened to a colourful lithograph of a piper. How did I recite granny’s strange rhymes when I was a girl? Closing my eyes, I remembered the first time she showed me her book.
“If you clap and dance widdershins the rhyme can come true,” Granny had teased.
“What’s widdershins?” I’d asked in my squeaky little-girl voice.
“Backwards, my luv, skip backwards and the fairies can hear you.” She’d winked but sounded so serious when she said, “So be careful what you sing.”
I recalled singing and skipping backwards, chanting, “Rain, rain, go away,” but it never worked. In my make-believe world I needed Granny’s rhyme book for fairy wishes.
I clapped in meter. “Tom with his pipe did play with such skill that those who heard him could never keep still.” My lips twitched into an almost-smile, and I felt a sense of purpose for the first time since Jake Carringer had hovered at our door.
Don’t keep still. That was good advice. I decided to vent my rage. I grabbed garden tools from the garage and stuck the pitchfork in the sewing dummy. “To hell with you, Carringer,” then went outside and attacked the tangle of blackberry canes, grabbing and ripping until the thorns pressed through my cheap gloves and gouged tiny chunks of flesh.
“And when your heart begins to bleed, you’re dead, and dead, and dead indeed.”
Late in the afternoon, I fetched a handsaw from the garage and began breaking off the slender branches and trunks of the young rowan trees. The birds that had chirped up a huge fuss at my gardening endeavours suddenly became silent. All I could hear was the steady thrum of the saw and snap of branches. By early evening I was digging up the roots. “Rowan protects against magic. Hawthorn is most holy,” my granny would say when I worked with her in the garden.
“Sorry, Granny, but those berries are a disgusting mess.” I piled the carcasses in a burial mound. The next day I slogged on, attacking the hawthorn bushes. By early evening, as the sky faded to turquoise, I lit the mound of tree corpses.
I surveyed the expansive yard. Without the bushes, the oaks imposed: darker, taller, more twisted. If we stayed here, I’d call an arborist to cut them down; plant fragrant witch hazel and lavender. Mary, Mary, quite contrary how does your garden grow? With silver bells and cockleshells and pretty maids all in a row.
The woods of silver birch behind us would still give the yard summer shade. “Birch divides our realm from the otherworld,” I whispered, stepping back from the fire. I inhaled scented smoke, giving in to its soporific fumes.
Without the clutter of bushes, this would have been a great yard for children to play…my contentedness evaporated. We get one life and I’d spend mine settling for what I couldn’t have. She has no family, she’s always outside alone, and she hides among the shadows, gnawing on a bone…
Nursery rhymes kept rattling in my head. What was the name of the lady who lived in a vinegar jar? As a kid, I remembered liking that idea, of living in a big brown jug. It would be like swimming in a butterscotch sea as light streamed through the amber glass. There was an old lady who lived in a shoe. She had so many chil… I went and grabbed the rhyme book and returned to the fire with it tucked under my arm.
Heat seared my face, the smoke catching my breath. Then as if I was eight again, I clapped my hands and skipped backwards around the bonfire.
“See Saw Margery Daw, Kyle shall have a new master.”
That evening when Kyle wove down the lane, I waited for him on the front porch. He rubbed his eyes, amazed at the changes in the yard. He staggered up our steps without a word, but the next morning he joined me outside and helped with the rest of the cleanup. He didn’t leave that afternoon, or the next day either, staying sober while he worked on the yard.
The next weekend I helped unload crates out of the truck. “What’s this stuff?”
Kyle smiled and watched as I tore into the boxes like a kid at Christmas. It was an old-fashioned pedestal sink, its milk white porcelain winking in the afternoon light. I ran my hand down the smooth indented columns. A bevelled mirror with a half-sun etched on each corner was in a smaller box.
“Art Deco, right?” I asked, puzzled. “What happened to the country style you had in mind? What happened to Jake Carringer foreclosing on us?”
Kyle shrugged. “I checked at the bank. He didn’t pursue it. No papers were filed and the deadline is up. I guess his better offer fell through.”
Mr. and Mrs. Vinegar could stay in their brown jug after all. I grinned.
Antique shops littered the town, and Kyle and I actively searched for any Depression-era furniture, piled up on carnival glass, plastic streamliner and patriot radios, pewter candle-sticks and even an old phonograph complete with records. Every day we’d work on the house past dinner and then after a shower, just for fun, I’d change into a frothy open back dress I’d discovered in one of the shops, and Kyle would put on a satin dinner jacket and cravat. We’d dance to “Moonlight Serenade,” the old record’s scratchy sounds cranking out of the phonograph and filling up the front parlour.
While we worked I always stopped for a tea break, and flipped through pages of rhymes as if seeking an intangible memory. One rainy afternoon as I looked out the kitchen window, a crow landed on the railing. “One for sorrow,” I recited. Then another crow flew on the step. “Two for joy.” When a third crow landed on the porch I clapped and traced my finger counter-clockwise on the fogged windowpane chanting, “Three for a girl and four for a…”
I stopped. Why did I do that? It was like poking my tongue against a sore tooth.
As the days passed, never once did I smell alcohol on Kyle’s breath. Another sure sign Kyle hadn’t been drinking, night after night he’d pull me to him. After one of those languid evenings, feeling indolent and boneless as I lay tangled in his arms, Kyle turned to me, whispering he had a surprise. Curious, but reluctant to leave our warm bed, I tugged on a silk kimono and followed him up the narrow stairs to the attic. He pulled the link chain on a light bulb. Rays of light shot around the attic, illuminating half a dozen paintings.
Over the weeks, every night while I’d been deep in sleep, Kyle had started painting again. Instead of the oil landscapes that had gained him little recognition, he’d rendered India ink drawn scenes of utter enchantment. Intense colours contained within borders of finely engraved lines displayed strange flowering trees, exotically plumaged birds, and subtle, almost perverse-looking Brunelleschi women in otherworldly backgrounds. The paintings had a disturbing familiarity, as if the characters in Granny’s book had all grown up and were showing their dark sides.
“The gallery next to the antique shop says Toronto hasn’t stopped calling.” Kyle’s brown eyes drew me in until I floated in their excitement.
Was I worried about Kyle working day and night, obsessed with our period house and his Deco style art? Each morning I’d begin my day skipping backwards and clapping my hands.
“I had a little husband, no bigger than my thumb, I put him in a pint-pot, and there I bade him drum.”
There were unsettling moments. Kyle had hung two heavy pewter-framed mirrors on opposite walls in our hallway, and sometimes when I walked by I’d catch the movements of my infinite reflections and think someone else was with me. Hold your breath, sweet children, be as quiet as a mouse, listen in case he’s creeping there inside your house.
Late at night I’d wake up alone after dreaming about bells clanging out a dirge. Oranges and lemons say the bells of St. Clemens… I’d open the window and peer past the twisted dark oaks into the silver woods. I took to lighting a candle on our nightstand until Kyle finished painting and crawled back under our covers.
Here comes a candle to light up your bed. Here comes a chopper to chop off your head. Chip chop, chip chop, the last man’s dead.
Kyle looked for new areas to conquer. “Let’s get going on the exterior.” I, on the other hand, ach
ed from my feet to the tips of my hair. But I wasn’t about to slow him down.
I rubbed my lower back. “I’m going into town to get some muscle relaxants, the strong not-over-the-counter kind. I’ll check the paint store and bring back colour swatches.” Before I’d left the porch, I could hear Kyle hoisting the ladder against the house.
In town, I went to the doctor’s first, but she wouldn’t hand me the muscle relaxant prescription I’d asked for. “Given your symptoms, I just want to send you for a couple of blood tests first. It’s nothing, I’m sure.” She patted my arm. “It’s routine.”
There was a long wait in the lab, and I raced to the paint store for the colour swatches. Looking at my watch, I asked the cashier if there was a short cut back to our property. The store would close soon, and I told myself Kyle wanted us deciding and buying paint so he could get an early start. If I was being honest with myself, the real reason was that even though Kyle and I had been living an idyllic existence, I still didn’t like leaving him alone for long.
“There’s an old logging road through the woods, but not many folks around here use it,” said the young cashier, a girl not more than seventeen.
Why, I wondered but didn’t ask. Was that where the murders had been years ago? Or the bodies found? Had the bodies been found? I shook it off. Five minutes later I raced my truck along the logging road through the birch woods, the tires crunching and spitting gravel.
My mother said I never should play with gypsies in the wood; if I did, she would say, naughty girl to disobey.
When I heard the bells, I slammed the brakes. The tires spun in the dirt as I gripped the steering wheel. When the truck lurched to a stop, I stumbled out and stood listening. It couldn’t be…it was a trick of childhood memory.
Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home, the fairy bells tinkle afar, make haste or they’ll catch you and harness you fast with a cobweb to Oberon’s star. The rhyme hummed in my ears like a persistent wasp.
“No. No. No.” Yet, I couldn’t convince myself that the trill floating like a deranged calliope through the silver birch woods wasn’t the same music I’d heard the night of that terrible summer when I was ten.
Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home, your house is on fire, your children will burn. Except for the little one whose name is Ann. Who hid away in a frying pan.
Dank earth and wood rot clogged my nostrils, but I smelled other, secret things. Scurrying sounds rattled in the brush. Light breaking through the leafy canopy cast an eerie illusion, as if the bracken and ivy and stone had been carefully laid in intricate patterns. Granny once told me brooks, trees, even rocks, were animate, and I almost believed it as I approached the moss-covered mound that I’d first taken to be a log.
On looking up, on looking down, she saw a dead man in the ground; and from his nose onto his chin, the worms crawled out, the worms crawled in.
Jake Carringer – his rotting arm still clutching at the axe blade in his chest.
I ran. I didn’t stop or look back until I drove out of the woods and our house was in sight. Chiming bells hurt my ears, making it hard to think. I’d been desperate to keep Kyle sober and our marriage together. I’d overlooked the small fact that those people in the happy house weren’t really us. How long could Kyle work day and night until he collapsed?
My mother had never indulged in Granny’s superstitions or what she’d called hokery-pokery. Like my mother before me, I’d discarded her preternatural musings and happily cleared away the rowan and hawthorn.
Once again I’d opened up her grimoire and let the magic flood in from the woods. Had I forgotten? Or had I wanted this to happen, to get my wish just like before…
Granny had been angry.
“Annie, I told you not to play with that book! Unlatch the door and let me in,” she’d shouted crossly.
I remember being scared, of skipping backward in the root cellar and repeating the rhyme over and over. When smoke billowed under the door it was too late to stop; all I could do was hide under the cast iron tub and scream, “Except for Ann, except for Ann!”
Of course I had only wanted Granny to go away.
I wasn’t a little girl anymore. I understood consequences and I knew what I had to do. Rowan protects against magic. Hawthorn is most holy.
Arriving back from the tree nursery, the truck loaded with saplings and shrubs, I asked Kyle to help me plant. Poor Kyle. I think he tried, but he was always forgetting something in the house, or the phone was ringing. I unloaded the trees myself while watching the front door in case Kyle became more aggressive in trying to stop me. There was a man, he went mad. I locked the axe and hacksaw in the garage when I grabbed the shovel. I didn’t want to end up a bloody smear on our polished oak floor.
By dinnertime, I’d only managed a few holes. The trees and bushes, still unplanted, lay strewn across the yard in a protective ring. I clutched the shovel and kept digging, ignoring the biting blisters rising on my palms.
“Annie, phone call for you,” Kyle called from the porch.
“Take a message.” My back screamed as I lifted another shovel full of dirt.
“Annie,” Kyle insisted. “The doctor needs to speak with you.” Kyle’s tone quickened my breath. I put the shovel down, and went into the house.
The next morning, I sat on the porch under the butter-yellow sun flipping the pages in my book of rhymes. Kyle insisted that I keep my feet up; he propped my back with pillows as I reclined in the new rocking chair he’d built through the night.
A soft wind rustled through the birches and whispered to me. Rock a bye baby, on the treetop, when the wind blows, the cradle will rock. Would those who shimmer and lurk in those silver shadows bring me a girl?
I placed my hands on my belly and hummed the lullaby that flowed through my blood to the rhythm of my heartbeat. A murder of crows landed on the grass. Standing up, I slowly stepped backwards. “Five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told.”
The scattered rowan trees withered in the sun.
And they all lived together in their crooked little house.
BALERO
Kevin Cockle
Can’t sleep, so I’m playing with the balero.
My dad brought it back for me from Mexico when I was a kid – seven or eight or so. He was a consulting petroleum engineer and travelled all over – my room was like a little global trading post as a result. Toys and souvenirs from Latin America, Mongolia, Borneo, Nigeria, Kuwait. All those places.
Lost most of that stuff over the years, but I’ve still got the balero. Found it again, or rather, sometimes it almost feels like it found me. Little wooden dowel attached by a length of string to a rounded wooden block with a hole drilled in to fit the dowel. Holding the dowel, you jerk up on the string, trying to get the block to drop onto the end of the stick. Super difficult, but I’m like a Mexican kid doing it now, after all these years. Like it’s part of my nervous system.
It centres me. You can’t get the balero to fit together unless your mind and body are in sync. Playing makes you breathe deep and slow, makes you relax.
Makes your body feel as though you have nothing to worry about.
“Stop that,” Mr. Davis said to me the other morning, and it startled me, because Mr. Davis had never said anything in the week I’d been walking him. I had been pushing Mrs. Kwan in her old-style wheelchair, feeling the weight of inertia against my palms. I had been listening to the autumn leaves – blown by a warm Chinook breeze – rush across the wide expanse of the Prince’s Island promenade. The leaves made a collective clicking noise as they tumbled along – shades of umber, and yellow, and rust, and all along the promenade, new leaves were dropping out of the trees like snow.
“What?” I asked, coming back to myself. A little farther on, Mr. Tychonich was wandering along and muttering to himself, his cane tapping time with his stride. Mrs. Bailey scuffed her feet through dead leaves in the grass, her fine silver hair and fragile features out of sync with her childlike blue
eyes.
“You know what,” Mr. Davis muttered, glaring at me. “That…mindfulness. That self-abnegation.”
“Meditation?”
“Yes. That. Don’t do it.”
“Why?”
But that was it – that was all he was going to say that day. We completed our circuit of the park and I bought them all ice cream and coffee with their allowances. Even Mr. Davis took ice cream, which struck me as funny. Him licking at a cone, while frowning in silent fury the whole time. Mrs. Kwan kept up a steady chatter of Cantonese with Mrs. Bailey, who nodded throughout and even clicked her tongue in mindless support at times. Mrs. Bailey’s face reminded me of the look dogs get when they go to shake a paw; that same solemn expression of concentration. To us, it’s a trick: to them, a sacred ritual.
I remember yellow leaves floating on the glassy surface of the river that day, allowing for a heightened perception of depth. I remember thinking the leaves were like clouds as seen from an airplane. It’s funny, the details that leap out at you, stay with you over time.
When you play balero, that’s what happens – your mind wanders, and you recall your past really vividly. It’s sort of like a meditation, which is probably why I’m remembering that bit with Mr. Davis. Old people don’t get it: everyone meditates now. You have to. Only way you can cope with volatility, personal transparency, complexity. You want to stay sane, you’ll practice some kind of mindfulness routine. Balero’s one of mine.
After the park, I summoned a Go-Van on my phone and it took us back to my place. Nothing fancy, I assure you – an old townhouse condo by the river. Lots of empty units now, lots of renters or even squatters. It’s too dangerous at night to have the old folks here full time, so that limits my clientele. Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays though, I look after my regulars and now Mr. Davis, as well, from six a.m. to six p.m. I get them some fresh air, take them for walks down at Prince’s Island. I make lunch for them, see to their bathroom needs. I’m not a licensed nurse so it’s not a medical service I offer. It’s really just daycare.