Snow Apples (14 page)

I was halfway home on Friday when Nels' truck did come along the road and parked a few yards ahead of me. I ran to catch up to it. I was almost crying with relief to see him at last.

It wasn't Nels. It was Walter Bergstrom, his stepfather, who opened the truck door to greet me.

I turned away. I didn't want to talk to him. But then, maybe he had a message from Nels.

He got out of the truck slowly, and we stood looking at each other.

“Where's Nels?” I asked, my voice unsteady.

“Come on and sit down,” he said, and we sat on the bank at the side of the road. The drainage ditch in front of us sparkled in the sunlight. I could see the speckled gray and white mountain stones that lay beneath its surface.

“You know,” he began, “when your mother came to the house—” He hesitated. “You mustn't blame her for what happened. She's got an awful load for any woman to carry. She's worried. Naturally.”

“What exactly did happen?” I had trouble getting my breath.

“She hasn't told you?”

“No.” Oh, God, don't let it be too bad. I knew what my mother was like when she was angry. She was capable of saying anything.

“Are you sure you want me to tell you?”

“I was hoping Nels would.”

“You haven't seen him, then, at all?”

“No. I thought maybe he'd been busy. We're supposed to go to the movies tonight. I'll see him then.”

“Oh, Lord,” he said. “It's just too bad.”

Mr. Bergstrom patted my shoulder awkwardly and handed me a none-too-clean handkerchief for the tears I couldn't hold back.

“Your mother made it pretty clear that...I don't think Nels wants to stand in the way of your finishing school.”

“She made what clear?”

“That that's what you wanted to do.”

“What did she say exactly?” Yes, if it suited her, she would say that about school.

“That you were to finish school. And she said Nels is not to see you again.”

“She said what?”

“Nels is not to see you again. She really caused a storm at our place. She was...uh...pretty mad, all right. Said some unforgivable things to Nels. To my wife. And for over an hour she acted almost...crazy, in a way. I hate to say that.”

“Oh,” I managed. I hurt in a way I had never hurt before.

He went on. “Actually, we had a pretty hard time quieting her down, getting her to leave.” Oh, Nels.

It was all over. All around me were signs of summer coming—lush green, squirrels racing along the moss-covered logs, the water in the Sound showing blue and calm. A hawk circled overhead, and crows rose in a black cloud, protesting.

“Would you tell Nels I have to talk to him?”

“I'll tell him. Just don't get your hopes up. He can be pretty stubborn. Pretty girl like you—you can have your pick. Don't waste your time being unhappy about this. Finish school. And try not to hold this against your mother.”

The words, spoken aloud, made it final. It was all over.

I heard the truck long after it disappeared around the bend of the road.

I wasn't surprised, when I got home, that my mother continued to ignore me. She looked up from the stove
where she was browning meat for a stew and then stared back down again at the pan. Neither of us spoke. We had hardly spoken to each other all week.

I put away my books and began to set the table for supper. We were enemies, my mother and I, and the kitchen was startled and sharpened by our hostility. The knives glittered on the table. The shining steel of the warming closet over the stove reflected and distorted my mother's face, turning it into a leer. In the stove, the wood spat and hissed. The meat seared, smoked blue.

At supper I pushed the meat around my plate, drank a little milk and was glad when the meal was over. I couldn't bear the sight of everyone opening their mouths and filling them with food—chewing, swallowing.

After the dishes were done I decided that if Nels didn't come, I'd go to the movies on my own. I could sit with the girls from school.

I dressed carefully, choosing a soft blue sweater that Nels liked. Seven o'clock. Seven-thirty. My mother was watching out of the corner of her eye. Seven-thirty-five. My knees were trembling. Seven-forty-five. It was too late for me to walk to the movies in time to see the beginning of the feature. I waited until eight, then left anyway. My mother's face burned accusingly before me as I went up our trail.

Nels wasn't at the movies. I slipped in beside Jean from school. Her big eyes turned to me.

“Why aren't you with Nels?” she asked in a loud whisper.

The girls in the row in front of us turned around in disapproval.

“Shhh,” said one.

On the screen, Edward G. Robinson was wounded and dying. I sat on the folding chair in the darkened community hall at Gibson's Landing and knew exactly how he felt.

The movie seemed to go on and on, none of it making any sense. When the projector broke later, I used that as an excuse to leave, then ran down the school hill to Nels' house.

Rocks rolled under my feet. Once I fell. The air was cool on my burning skin. I only wanted to be near Nels.

At the Bergstroms' the lights were on in the living room and kitchen. I sat down on the steps of the post office across from the house and watched.

His truck was there, parked along the side of the house. I saw a movement in the kitchen.

It was Nels. I saw him take a cup to the stove, pour from a pot, sit at the table before the window.

Could he see me? I moved farther back into the shadows. It looked as if he were reading.

I sat there until I went numb. The lights were finally turned off, except on the sun porch where Nels slept. Then that light, too, went out. The house was dark.

I pictured him lying in bed, his arms under his head, his long legs stretched out, the sheets rising a little, over him, there.

It was over. He didn't love me. How could he not love me?

A
LETTER
from the law firm of Starr, Nicols and Swan came addressed to my mother.

Dear Madam:

This is to inform you that your husband, Francis Xavier Brary, of Room 202, King George Hotel, Granville Street, Vancouver, B.C., has instructed us to proceed against you in the matter of his lawful rights pertaining to the property and dwelling of Lots 9 and 10...

Yours very truly,

E.B. Starr

“He wants it for that woman,” my mother declared. “Well, over my dead body.”

She brooded over the lawyer's letter. Finally she got in touch with Miss Gamon at the Welfare Office.

“To think,” she said to us after she'd made the phone call from Mr. Percy's, “that he would do such a thing. That's what's galling. And after all I've done for that man. Scrimped and saved. Done without.”

She went on all that evening until we went to bed. How poorly he had treated her, the shame of it all, how he would be punished—if not in this world, then in the next.

The next day was more of the same, only by now my brothers were getting tired of it. The same grievances were gone over again and again, almost as if she were saying her rosary. The women he'd had, the poverty, the cruelty.

Jim was the first to tire of it and leave. Then I saw Mike slip out the back door, followed soon after by Tom.

I was in my room reviewing my science notes when my mother came to the door. I looked up from my books.

“And you're just like him.” Her voice lashed out at me without warning. “Look at you!”

My mother was working herself into one of her rages, when she could say or do anything. Her rages had always frightened me, and I knew that whatever I said or did would only make it worse.

“Selfish,” she went on. By now she was shouting. “The very same make-up, the two of you. And,” she paused—but only, it seemed to me, for effect— “moping around because of Nels. The long face on you. Now you know what it's like.” A note of what sounded like triumph in her voice. “It hurts, doesn't it?”

She always went on like this. I had to let her vent it all on me. But this time it seemed endless.

“You always get what you want.” She spoke as if she hated me. “Don't you? In spite of everything. Oh, the selfishness of you both!”

I went to sleep that night with her words chasing each other in my mind and woke with a headache. She started in on me as soon as I appeared in the kitchen for breakfast.

“Why weren't you up helping me? I suppose you think you're too good for that.” She was still shouting at me when I ran to catch the school bus. Her words followed me up the trail. “Haven't I worked and slaved for this home?” And then, just before I reached the road, the refrain, “Why do you get what you want, and I don't?”

My stomach churned. I felt sick. But although I knelt and gagged at the side of the road, nothing came up.

All morning I was ill. No one spoke to me. I was on the outside at school now, too. I was no longer Nels' girl.

I was in the cloakroom, putting away my sweater and lunch bag, when Arnie Olsen came pushing in behind me. He stared at me—there—his eyes mocking.

Lolling against the wall, he said in a lazy drawl, “You giving away tail, Sheila?” I could hardly believe he'd said it. “Can I have a piece?”

I stared at him until his eyes finally dropped, and he turned away.

All the rest of that day I kept hearing the way he had snickered.

Did everyone know? Did every whisper or look in my direction have to do with what had happened between Nels and me?

I couldn't bear to think that Nels had told, even though I knew that boys did tell each other. Somehow I thought that loving Nels and having him love me would make it different for us.

I couldn't keep my mind on what the teachers were saying and my head ached all the time.

But it was the rage my mother directed toward me each day that was the hardest to bear. It was as if I was being pounded by her words, and it got so bad that I couldn't think, couldn't do anything except wish desperately that she would stop.

The school principal stopped me one morning in the hall. “Is there anything, Sheila...any way at all I can help you?”

“No,” I answered, unable to say more. How could I tell him I was afraid my mother was crazy and that I was going crazy, too?

Then one day I came home from school to find that a letter had come from Miss Gamon. In a neat, cramped script she wrote that there was nothing to worry about, that my father had no claims on the property. She wrote that my mother was to ignore the lawyer's letter and, above all, not to sign anything.

My mother was working among the strawberry plants. I could see her through the kitchen window. Gone were the
rigid, high shoulders, the thrust-forward head. Instead she moved in a quiet, relaxed way.

And when she came into the house, a small bowl of ripe berries in her hand, she offered me some.

My mother was back to normal.

But as the days passed, I had a new worry. The nausea continued.

“Oh, God,” I thought, panic-stricken. “Let my period be early this month. Don't let it be late. Please don't let me be pregnant.”

Every time I went to the bathroom, I checked, hoping there would be a slight tinge of pink. Whenever I had a heavy, dragging sensation in my stomach, I had a great sense of relief. It was going to be all right. I was going to have my period after all.

But day after day passed. The time for my period came and went. Nothing happened. I was a week overdue.

Pregnant. In the morning it was the first thing I thought of. At night it was the last thought before I went to sleep. Once I even dreamed about it. The thing inside me was growing, growing bigger, and I was being swallowed. Just when the moment came for me to disappear, I woke up.

This thing was already taking over my body. It was taking over my whole life. I had to do something.

*  *  *

The ocean was icy cold, my legs numb. They had tingled briefly when I had started the swim twenty minutes earlier,
but now I couldn't feel them. There was the shape of Keats Island, its dark evergreen tips needling the sky. Behind me was the beach, deserted now at the beginning of June. The summer cottagers had yet to come.

Every day for the past two weeks I'd made myself go swimming in the cold water, hoping that it might bring on my period. That day I swam as far as I could, my heart aching in my chest, my wind gone.

It would have been so easy to become exhausted, to let myself go. To sink below the surface. Yet even as my mind pictured this, my body refused to let it happen. I found myself floating on my back. My heart gradually slowed its rapid tripping. I gulped great, belly-deep breaths of air.

The sky above me was a pure blue, the cirrus clouds virgin white. Gulls with spotless snow breasts flew over me; even the gray of their backs seemed innocent. Their cries were the only sounds I heard. The water rocked and soothed.