Small Beneath the Sky (21 page)

“Mom, you've come all the way from wherever you are to tell me to watch Dr. Phil? There's so much I want you to tell me.” She started to blur, the edges of her watery, like heat waves rising from asphalt on the highway. “Okay, okay, don't go! I'm sorry. I'll watch Dr. Phil.”

“Anyway, I'm not supposed to tell you much. I promised,” she said.

Promised? Promised who? I didn't ask. On all sides the wheat was so lush and thick you couldn't see past it; it was a jungle of stalk after golden stalk you'd need machetes to break through. I could see the sky only when I tipped my head, but my hearing seemed sharper, finely tuned like a cat's. Whispers rippled through the field. It was just the wind, I said to myself, the wind catching up on gossip with the ripening grasses.

“Mom, what's it like there? Do you see Dad? Is it like being back on the farm?”

“There ain't no raisins in my rice pudding,” she said, looking right at me. Her eyes were the clear, almost indigo blue I'd found so beautiful before they'd clouded over in the last weeks of her life.

“That sounds like the start of a blues song, Mom.”

“Well, you sing it, sweetie pie. I don't have a voice.”

“What do you mean? You're talking to me now.” A tractor started up in the distance. It was the sound a ruffed grouse makes when he's mating, but this was the wrong season for that. I tried another tack. “Where you are—are you dancing?”

“How could you not dance with the angels?” she said, grinning. “On the end of a hatpin. A pearl one, the smoothest, whitest floor you could ever glide across. Like a sheet of ice. Imagine that!”

“Mom,” I said, “get serious.” She'd never talked like this before. “Are you happy? What's it like? Is Dad there with you?”

“What's the name of this wheat?” she asked. “I used to know that when I was young. Now it's all just wheat, wheat, wheat. Let me tell you, when you're dead, what you've forgotten doesn't come back. Keep remembering,” she said. “You don't get another chance.” She rubbed her eyes, as if she were tired. “I cry a lot now, can you believe that? All the tears the dead don't shed on earth, they do after. I don't know why. I should've cried when I saw you meet the Queen. What was it she said to you again when she shook your hand?”

A year before her death I'd recited a poem at the gala performance for the Queen during Saskatchewan's centennial. It was at the command of the lieutenant governor, who was my childhood friend Lynda. Sometimes, on a television news clip, Mom and I would catch a glimpse of her handing out medals or giving a speech. “Didn't she turn out wonderful?” my mother always said. “She looks so tall and elegant.”

Once Lynda had finished high school, with her baby and a new husband, she went on to university in Saskatoon. She'd become a specialist on learning disabilities, later a psychologist, then leader of the Saskatchewan Liberal Party. Now she was lieutenant governor of the province.

After the gala's curtain call, the performers had lined up on stage. The Queen and Prince Philip walked through the line, pausing before a couple of us to say a word or two. My mother had been in the audience. The evening, May 19, had coincided with her eighty-seventh birthday.

“She said I was a great duster.”

Mom laughed, remembering my childhood fantasy. Her laugh was robust, not the nervous one that used to punctuate much of what she said, funny or not. The hardest I'd ever heard her laugh was the day she had told Patrick and me about putting Dad's hearing aid through the wash by mistake. Since then, he'd complained about it making a racket. It had screeched so much he didn't want to wear it. “I haven't told him,” she'd said. “He'd be so disgusted with me.” She'd laughed so outrageously that tears had run down her face and her belly jiggled.

“C'mon now,” she said. “Tell me about the Queen.”

“She said wasn't it wonderful that Lynda and I had been friends since we were children.” Lynda, who'd sat beside the Queen during the gala, must have told her about us growing up together.

“Lynda was so much bigger than you,” Mom said. “She used to twirl you around and let you drop as if you didn't have any bones. I was afraid you'd get hurt.”

“Remember when she got mad at you,” I said—neither Lynda nor I could remember why—“and threw dirt on the sheets you'd just hung on the line? She still feels guilty about that.”

Clouds gathered on the horizon and began dragging their shadows over the far end of the field. They glided towards us like barges carrying a heavy freight. Everyone would be praying their cargo was rain.

“Mom,” I said, “I have so many questions I wish I'd asked you.”

“That's the way it goes,” she said.

“Not even big ones, but little things. Like what year did Dad work at the horse plant, and what did he do there? Did he kill horses?”

“So many things I wanted to ask my own mother,” she said. “Most of them amounted to nothing—recipes, how to sew in a zipper so it wouldn't look puckery, the words to the song she used to sing when she was ironing with that old flat iron that burnt your hand so easily. The most important one I couldn't ask: why she didn't love me?”

“Mom, are you coming back? Can we talk some more?”

A silence fell between us. It was like the one I'd felt every Sunday morning since her death, when I wanted to pick up the phone and punch in our old number, the one I'd memorized as a kid before I could even dial. I could hear the phone ringing and ringing in the house that existed now only in my mind. She wasn't there to answer. But still I'd think: she must be out in the garden in her old shoes; she must be walking to the credit union to pay her bills or to the post office with a letter, my address in her familiar handwriting on the envelope. If it was a week before my birthday, there'd be $50 inside it, money she'd saved from her pension. The phone kept ringing. Surely someone would answer if I didn't hang up.

“Just one question, Mom. Please, before you go. Will I get to be with you in heaven when I die?”

“What makes you think I know about heaven?” she said.

And with that, she was gone. I stood at the end of the path I'd made to my mother, the wheat field spinning its gold around me. I raised my arms above my head and gestured wildly, but no one that I could see was waving back.

first cause:
story

OVER WHIST
and gin rummy, during chicken plucking and berry picking, after baseball games in the pasture among cow pies, the stories come as talk and chatter. Your parents were only children during the Dirty Thirties, but you could swear you lived through that time with them. “You'll never know what it was like,” your mother says, but you do, you do. Her words recast the light, spin the earth into dust the wind never stops turning over and over in its restless hands.

Not yet born, invisible, you stand beside your mother as she slips into the flour-sack pyjamas her mother stitched by hand. You feel the coarseness of the cotton on your skin. You squish your toes inside the shoes that never fit. At Christmas, you breathe in the rare citrus smell of the orange that must be shared among seven children, the youngest sister getting a whole one to herself because she was ill as a baby and has curly hair. By the barn, you watch your grandfather hitch his horses to the wagon and drive to town to wait in line for the train from the East. He hates being there, but he doesn't let it show. He uses the time to visit with his neighbours, though he keeps his back straight and looks down the tracks with blue eyes leached a paler blue by the sky's cloudless stare.

The train at last arrives with apples and hay from Ontario, smoked cod from Newfoundland, turnips that taste sweet—the few grown at home are bitter—clothes that carry the smell and grime of those who've outgrown them. Sometimes, mixed in with the fraying wool sweaters and pants with see-through knees, there are books with brittle yellow pages. To your delight, a few have pages missing. You claim one as your own, fill in where the story pauses before it picks up again. You change the setting, using the names of your birthplace. You call up the sere images you've inherited as you have your freckled skin and your mother's fretting, her capacity for worry and hard work. This ache, this country of wind and dust and sky, is your starting point, the way you understand yourself, the place you return to when there's nowhere else to go. It is the pared-down language of your blood and bones.

Your words go deeper, darkened by drought's long shadow. It sweeps across the fields and towns and everything that lives here, even in the cities with their glass and concrete and watered greens. Wherever you go, you speak with the earth on your tongue, in the accent passed down for generations. It's a lengthening of vowels, a dusty drawl thin enough to be carried some distance by the wind.

acknowledgements

M
Y DEEPEST APPRECIATION
goes to Patrick Lane, for his love and belief in me. I also want to thank Rob Sanders, who encouraged me to write this book, and Barbara Pulling, who did more than her usual inspired line-by-line editing. She helped me find the shape of the book and gave me the perspective I needed to complete it. There is no editor like her. My thanks also go to the Swift Current Museum for assisting me with my research. Finally, my thanks to the University of Victoria for its support of my research and to the Saskatchewan Writers/ Artists Colony at St. Peter's Abbey, where I wrote the early drafts of this book. To my brother, Barry, to Ona and to Lynda, apologies for any factual errors I might have made, and a warm thank you for letting me tell our stories and use your real names. In several other cases, I have changed people's names.

The book's epigraph comes from
Apology for Absence: Selected Poems 1962–1992
by John Newlove (Porcupine's Quill, 1993). John Berger's
Here Is Where We Meet
(Blooms
–
bury, 2005) inspired the last chapter. Its title, “Not Waving but Drowning,” comes from Stevie Smith; it is the title of her poetry collection published in 1957 by Andre Deutsch. The quote from the Talmud, along with the description of the Mycenaean Greek afterlife and their name for the dead referred to in “My Mother for a Long Time,” come from Annie Dillard's
For the Time Being
(Vintage, 2000).

Earlier versions of some of these stories appeared in
Geist, Focus, Perfectly Secret: The Hidden Lives of Seven Teen
Girls, Dropped Threads
and
Dropped Threads 3.