Patterns of Swallows
Read Patterns of Swallows Online
Authors: Connie Cook
| Patterns of Swallows |
| Connie Cook |
| (2012) |
Set in the 1950s in rural British Columbia, Patterns of Swallows follows the fictional life of Ruth Chavinski. Ruth's father deserted her and her mother when Ruth was scarcely old enough to remember him. That event set the pattern for a life of loss and seeming-tragedy. Yet, on a deeper level, her life's pattern was woven on a loom of unfailing love and grace, the threads held firmly in the hands of One who makes no mistakes.
Patterns of Swallows is a story of the grace and redemption offered to every person and of the healing this grace and redemption can bring to broken lives.
Patterns of
Swallows
Connie
Cook
Copyright ©
Connie Cook 2012
All rights reserved.
All events and
characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real
events or living persons is coincidental.
The town of
“Arrowhead” has a basis in reality, but its people are
entirely fictional.
All Scriptures
quoted are taken from the King James Version of the Bible.
“
Jesus,
Lover of My Soul” written by Charles Wesley (1707-1788).
“
O
Little Town of Bethlehem” written by Phillips Brooks
(1835-1893).
To all the
“Ruths” in my life; strong, godly women of unfaltering
integrity and kindness. Who still manage to be very human.
You are my
heroines.
Contents
1
I was born at the right time.
But then, I suppose that's when
everyone is born.
And I was born beautiful.
That's what my mother tells me.
But then, she still thinks I'm
beautiful.
And perhaps I am.
Perhaps everyone is beautiful.
If beauty is in the eye of the
beholder, surely every person alive has one beholder who beholds her
as beautiful.
I have my mother, so I am
beautiful.
* * *
The unwritten, unspoken rules
for stories dictate that true stories must begin by telling when the
main character was born. Untrue stories must begin by telling
whether the main character is beautiful (and, of course, she must
be).
This story will be a mixture of
both truth and untruth. My purpose in writing this account will be
to tell the truth as I see it, and your purpose in reading this
account must be to peel back the layers of untruths to expose the
kernels of truth hidden at their core.
And now,
according to the unwritten, unspoken rules for stories, you know
enough about me to do for a start. I was born at the right time, and
I am beautiful.
And I am my main character.
So
presumably, you want to know about
me
.
Although I am my own main
character, I don't think I will tell you more about me. Not just
yet.
I'd rather tell you about Ruth.
* * *
One of Ruth's only memories of
her father was of him throwing rocks at the barn swallows' nest to
knock it down. A baby swallow came tumbling out. It was the ugliest
thing Ruth had ever seen with its scrawny neck and its pink
nakedness. She cried and pleaded for her father to stop, but he only
said, "They make such a mess if you leave 'em. They gotta come
down."
After he'd gone, she took the
baby swallow and wrapped it in a rag for warmth and kept in a box and
tried to feed it on bread crumbs and milk, but of course, it died.
She didn't know the fact then,
but if she'd had more experience with barn swallows, she could have
told her father that bringing down their nests did no good.
Swallows are creatures of
persistent, stubborn, unstoppable habit. Perhaps they fear change.
Or perhaps they're just persistently, stubbornly unstoppable. But
swallows always manage to get their own way in the end.
Her father knocked down the nest
and killed the babies. But the swallows rebuilt their nest, right in
the same spot. And they came the next year and rebuilt it again.
Ruth wasn't sure why, of all the
things she could have chosen to remember about her father, that was
the one thing that stuck. But then, memories always manage to get
their own way in the end, no matter how many times a body tries to
knock them down.
Ruth sometimes sat for hours
under the wind-wracked, giant firs up in the back pasture where no
one ever thought to look for her, just thinking. She'd think about
things like that. Like memories, I mean. Like, why we remember what
we remember and not other things that we should be able to remember.
Like, why she could remember the barn swallows but not what seven
times eight is.
It's a statement of the obvious,
perhaps, to say that we remember what's important to us or what
leaves a strong impression on us. Maybe what we associate with
pleasure or pain. But why should the things that leave strong
impressions on us leave the impressions they do when they often seem
so insignificant? Why the barn swallows for Ruth?
Could it be that we remember
what we attach meaning to – memories that become symbols?
In later years, Ruth couldn't
have explained why the swallows had become a symbol. But she was
afraid that the moment her father knocked down their nest, leaving
one baby bird at the bottom, that act had become her symbol in her
mind for her father.
* * *
In our small, God-fearing town
back then, divorce wasn't mentioned. Not because it didn't happen,
but because it was an unmentionable. When it happened, people used
euphemisms. "Living apart, separated, gone back to her mother."
But her parents weren't
divorced, after all.
"Desertion." Maybe
that was the technical name. The technical euphemism. Her mother
continued to hold her head high by pretending that her father had
only gone away for work. It was the same thing her father had
pretended. It was the polite pretence between them that did away
with the need for an emotional scene. But all jobs must end
sometime. And he'd never come back.
At first, the money kept coming
in regularly. It wasn't that he was a bad man or that he didn't care
about them at all, surely.
Even Ruth had to admit to
herself that she could imagine her mother to be a trial for a man to
live with. She couldn't entirely blame her father for not being able
to tough it out.
But she could tough it out. She
had to. Mother needed her; she knew that. She'd always known that.
She was all Mother had. Besides pride. And Ruth knew, in her way of
knowing things without having to be told, that pride was more
important to Mother than any other thing. If Mother had ever lost
her ability to hold her head high, there would have been nothing at
all left for her. If her pride had ever been crushed, her spirit
would have been crushed along with it.
There were vast stretches of
unbroken expanse between Ruth Chavinski's character and her mother's.
Yet there were times when I realized that Ruth's character was not
formed in a vacuum. There was common ground as well as yawning
chasms between Ruth and her mother.
* * *
Along with the rest of Ruth's
grade four class, I was witness to a historic battle (it went down in
the unwritten annals of our small town's history, I mean) in which
her mother played one of the main roles. I'll record it here for you
as a small glimpse into the person of Beatrice Chavinski. And then
you can make of her what you will.
We
had all been invited to Ruth's tenth birthday party. Ruth had never
had a real birthday party with friends and classmates invited before.
She'd been promised that on her tenth birthday she should have a
real
party.
It had been an event she'd lived over and over in her imagination
for years before its realization.
But when that date neared, the
occasion was dampened for Ruth by her mother's insistence that her
entire class be invited.
That part hadn't been Ruth's
idea. She'd wanted to invite only the handful of classmates she
considered friends, but it wasn't fair to play favourites, Mrs.
Chavinski said. Someone would feel left out and have hurt feelings,
she said. Ruth didn't bother to explain that the ones she would have
invited were the ones who were left out ordinarily. The rest
wouldn't have harboured hurt feelings to be left out of a party
exclusively for the lowest caste. Nevertheless, despite Ruth's
wishes, every member of Arrowhead Elementary's grade four class
received an invitation to Ruth's tenth birthday party.
On the appointed historic day
and time, Philippa Handy and her mother were the first to arrive for
the party. Philippa was one of those Ruth would have invited to her
party if she was allowed to choose.
There was something different
about Philippa. She was, what people in our town called, "not
quite right."
She was tall and weighty for her
age. Not really heavy. Just carrying a little extra bulk. And she
carried that extra clumsily. A large, clumsy girl with large, clumsy
hands and feet. She hid in the shadows as much as her height and
clumsiness would allow. In public, she rarely spoke unless spoken to
and then usually only in monosyllables with a slight, mostly
imperceptible stammer.
Most people called her, "that
simple girl of Mrs. Handy's." Her mother called her Philippa,
but Ruth called her Phil. Ruth was her only friend.
Joshua Bella walked over to the
party alone. It was the way he did most things.
Poor, little, ugly Joshua Bella.
The shortest boy in class. The shortest kid in class, shorter even
than all the girls. The one who wore the same clothes the most days
in a row. And undoubtedly the ugliest. Ruth was quite sure Joshua
was worse to look at than she was, even if she wasn't quite sure how
plain she was herself. She must have been easier on the eyes than
Joshua. There was something about his face and body that made you
think he was disfigured or deformed until you looked again, and then
you could see it was just an impression. But he did give that
impression. And besides his looks, there was something else about
him, something indefinable – his mannerisms perhaps or the
way he talked, the things he said – that made him the butt of
every joke. He had no other friends. So naturally, Ruth claimed him
as a friend.
Bo Weaver came with his mother.
She wouldn't stay for the party; that was a given. One of the men
had given them a ride out to the Chavinski farm and was waiting at
the end of the driveway with the car idling while Bo and his mother
walked the rest of the way to the farmhouse.
The strategy for dealing with
Bo's mother was that one didn't see her if one saw her on the street
or in the store. One looked not at her but through her. One
pretended that women like Bo's mother and their ways of earning
livings didn't exist at all. Not in small, God-fearing towns like
ours. We learned the town strategy young without even knowing the
reason for it.