Reading by Lightning (12 page)

Your house looks
crooked,
he says.

It was built by an eight-year-old boy taking instructions from a blind man, I say.

He laughs. That's a lot of land for one family, he says.

We have a hired man sometimes, I say. Joe Pye.

Joe Pye, he says and laughs again. Joe Pye's a weed where I come from.

He is a weed, I say recklessly. In a way.

Who lives there? he asks, gesturing to the Parrot farm at the bottom of the rise.

Nobody, I say. It was the Parrots'. They went broke.

I went to an auction sale with my dad once, he says. A long time ago. The first summer I was out here. Well, actually I went to a few of them. My dad always had to have a stiff drink first. He was scared they'd have a go at him.

He shades his eyes with his hand and studies the Parrot farm. I think that's the farm, he says. It is, I remember that house. My dad made me play the piano. The auctioneer was going on about the piano, how it would be a family heirloom one day, and he kept calling for the lady who owned it to come and show us how it sounded before they sold it out from under her, and she wouldn't come and finally my dad made me get up and play.

The outer folds of my bathing suit are drying, cooked plums turning brown. My hands are brown in my lap. I look at him and remember the way he shrugged and backed away
from the keyboard at the end of the song, stumbled backwards onto an iron bedstead propped against a barrel, and stood working his fingers around its painted iron spokes while the last chord of “Country Gardens” hung in the air. They had a goat, I say, gathering up my wet hair in one hand and lifting it off the nape of my neck.

That's right, there was a goat, he says. He keeps his eyes on me while he pulls out his flask and has another drink. It's funny the farmers have never organized here, he says. The way they do farther west. In Saskatchewan the banks don't even try to foreclose. All the neighbours show up at the sale and then they won't bid more than a dollar for anything.

If people pull tricks like that the bank will just close up and leave town, I say, quoting my mother.

So much the better, he says. You could start your own credit union. Why should eastern banks be getting fat off prairie farmers?

I don't have an answer to this, especially as it's coming from the banker's son.

Will you look at that! he says suddenly. His eyes are on the rearview mirror. It's going to
rain,
he exclaims. I turn to look. The sky is still blue, but navy clouds are swelling in the west like bulbous balloons. The wind's come up, and along the road willows are turning their leaves to show their silver undersides. The astonishing prospect of rain fills the car with an eerie light, and I sit there galvanized by the thought that the same invisible shred of the past nestles in our two separate brains. Light shines off the chrome knobs on the dashboard of the blue sedan. I clasp my hands together (they're close to trembling with the glamour of it). A tiny bead of the past, but in both our memories: enough for Fate, like God's cousin in work clothes, to slide into the car and reach out his hands and draw the two of us together. The clouds mount as high as the sun and it's as though someone turns a lamp off, and the front
seat of the car becomes a little room, a private room at dusk. I cross my legs, and feel the sand coating them, and reach down to brush at it. I can't look at him — I don't need to look at him, I'm so aware of him sitting a few inches away from my bare leg that I can hardly breathe. He lifts the damp hair off my neck and slides his hand under my chin, nuzzling at my ear, his lips starting up a tingling all along my face and down my neck.
Sweet,
he says. He traces a line along my cheek with his tongue (he'll taste the river, I think), and his hand is on my thigh then, just below my bathing suit. Raindrops freckle the dusty windshield, and he runs his fingers along the fine skin at the cuff of my bathing suit.

Hell,
he says suddenly and sits up straight. There's a truck moving up the road towards us from the east. Our Ford. My chest squeezes fiercely at the thought of my father's face.

He'll never be able to get past us, Russell says. We'll have to go back the other way. He hands me the flask and starts the car. Before I know what he's planning to do, he's turned the wheel to angle the car around on the road. On his second try the right front wheel goes off the road. You have to go easy and rock it, I say, but he's floored the pedal and I can hear the wheel spinning and in a second the car has sunk into the sandy soil like a boat.

We climb out and stand in the rain and look. The wheel's buried up to its axle — the car's in sand up to the wide running board. The farms on the plain below have withdrawn behind a screen of rain. The whole sky is alive, immense clouds jostling across it. Wind flattens my bathing suit against my legs. The willows bend in our direction, confused sparrows tossed up and faltering and vanishing — none of us remember rain. I reach out one hand, I touch him shyly on the side, his fine white shirt plastered to his ribs by rain.

My mother is reduced to lying on her bed, apparently ill, and they can't banish me to my room because there are so many chores to do with her out of commission. The rain is a huge relief, but my father is silent, and it hurts me so that I can hardly breathe when I point something out, an early ripe tomato that I've brought in for supper, and he just nods shortly. Phillip stares at me across the table with what I first think is disgust, but then I see a sort of admiration in it.

It wasn't actually my dad who came up the road that day. It was the Tandys, a childless couple who live on the Bicknell road. Mr. Tandy could see there was trouble before he got to us, so he turned around in the Parrots' lane and backed up towards us. He got out and walked slowly over to the car without saying a word, the rain turning his grey work shirt black in big patches and his lips pursed as though he were a tradesman called in to do a job. He didn't ask who Russell was and how he ended up in this pickle. How he ended up there was evident by one look at him, by his linen shirt and polished shoes. Gonna have to jack her up, Mr. Tandy said when he'd had a good look. His wife stuck her head out the window of the truck and then pulled it back in.

There was a jack in the trunk of the blue sedan. Mr. Tandy found a plank in his truck to stand the jack on and set Russell to work pumping. Then he got out a chain. Slide over, I heard him say to his wife. That chap's in no condition to be driving. So she slid under the steering wheel of the truck and Mr. Tandy got into the car and they pulled the car off the jack and up onto the road while Russell and I stood in the weeds at the side, rain running off our hair and onto our shoulders.

Tell that girl we'll be taking her home, Mr. Tandy said to his wife as he walked back to the truck. I remember steam rising from our wet clothes and the cab of the truck filling
with the smell of whisky. Mrs. Tandy leaned forward to look at me while we rode, and the whole high swelling of her chest moved up and down with excitement. She was a little woman with a pigeon chest (it must have been shaped by antiquated undergarments because you don't see women with chests like that any more). I'm frightened you'll catch cold, she said, her eyes glittering.

Washing and scalding all the little discs and funnels of the cream separator every morning I think of all the things Russell Bates appeared to know, things I couldn't even guess at. He told me a long story about Steve, his brother, who was working for the summer in the accounting office of
KIWI
boot polish, and who was asked to pose for an illustration of a young soldier polishing his boots. Take a look at
Maclean's
in October, Russell said. You'll see my brother in a full-page
KIWI
advertisement. The artist gave Steve the original and they hung it in the front hall, and now their mother was afraid Steve would join up, just from the effect of seeing himself in uniform! I feel myself peering through a knothole into this alien household, with a
divorced woman
in it. I see her, straightening the picture in the hall, an older version of Charlotte's mother, with the same anxious eyes, as though she's taken worry on as her vocation.

He could have spent the afternoon at the fair with Charlotte and Kay and Laura (Kay, I think it was, who came out of the store holding the change from the ice cream loosely in her left hand and coolly dropped the money into his pocket, touching his hip, standing close to him but not meeting his eyes). He could have spent the afternoon with her. Had he spent it with me because there was something about me he liked or because he was amused to see such an ignorant country girl? I think of the way he said certain words,
Maclean's, university, history,
in a tone of studied casualness, but the idea that he might have felt the need to impress me is preposterous. I think about him
pulling out his flask, saying, This is whisky-flavoured cough syrup. Unknown in these parts but highly efficacious. Efficacious for your gout and your sciatica. Wonderful for your maidenly inhibitions (going to hand me the flask and then reaching around me to unscrew it himself and in the process circling me with both arms). The way we tussled around and he pressed the mouth of the flask to my mouth and I resisted or pretended to resist, whisky meanwhile sliding hotly in through my lips and dribbling down my chin and onto my bathing suit.

I force myself to haul the potato sack up from the cellar and spend the morning sprouting the potatoes, snapping off the lewd white tentacles reaching blindly through holes in the sack. Sinking into my penance, I carry a basin of warm water outside and scrub out the chicken coop, scraping at the dried white droppings with a knife, breathing in ammonia while the chickens peck at my toes. By rights a child should have drowned in the river that day because of my neglect, or Mr. Tandy should have contracted pneumonia from the drenching he got digging us out. But neither of these things happened. If I set aside the flask of whisky, my sin was my pleasure at Russell's hand on my leg and his nuzzling his face into my hair. My body is a danger, like a bomb wired up to a clock. My mother lies on her bed for most of three days, as an object lesson in how I can kill her if I keep this up.

Our horses both die of equine encephalitis in 1934. King dies first, unable to stand up one morning and dying the next. We have to use Dolly to drag his body out to the edge of the pasture where Dad and Phillip have dug a great hole, and there we bury him. People talk about the close bond between domestic animals, but she just puts her muscles into pulling the load in her usual willing way and doesn't seem to think anything of it. Then three days later she dies as well and we have no other horses to help so Uncle Jack comes over with the tractor to drag her away.

Something happens to my father again, this time away from the yard, and it's Mr. Feazel who brings him home in a wagon. Mr. Feazel helps him down from the wagon as though he's an old man, and he walks through the living room with a face the colour of porridge. After he's in the bedroom my mother follows Mr. Feazel into the yard and talks to him. I kneel on the chesterfield and look out at their two small figures under the cottonwoods, standing on a carpet of fallen yellow leaves. The sky is a delicate, perfect pale blue, like a ribbon. The yard is full of warblers that day, passing through on their way south. My mother's bun has begun to loosen and
her hair hangs in a low chignon above her collar. She turns to face Mr. Feazel and they talk for a long time. Her face is unusually animated and composed, as though she is explaining a procedure in which she has a particular expertise. In the other room my father lies face down on his bed, and I kneel at the window and watch this mute conversation that could give me words to explain everything.

That winter I walk alone to school, two miles each way, wool socks pulled over my shoes and then my feet shoved into galoshes, my scarf wrapped around my face turning wet from my breath and freezing into a pliable board, my lashes iced together at the corners. Going to school I lower my head and see only the ground at my feet. I walk bent into the wind, as if all of nature is trying to keep me from an education and I am determined to get one. By the time I get to school and stomp into the vestibule, the breath torn out of me, my face is frozen and I have to talk slowly as though I am thick in the head.