The Boys in the Trees (5 page)

It was strange to hear my father talk that way. In the cities we had lived in people on the same stair knew us a little but mostly, as he used to say, we could keep ourselves to ourselves. In Toronto each time the fat woman came with her basket he brushed by her in the doorway, even when she asked him to stay. Leaving my mother to thank her for the things she brought, to answer the questions, all the questions. The fat woman wanted to know all our business, writing in her little book. She spoke kind words but her lips had a way of folding, her eyes looking everywhere. She told my mother about other families she visited, where the husband was ill or paralyzed, or just gone. She said that my mother was lucky, that her man was perfectly healthy, that there must be something he could do. Buildings to be built, streetcar tracks to be laid. As if it were all his fault. Still, she was the one who read Mr. Marl’s advertisement, who learned that his bookkeeper had recently died. My father polished his boots and walked to the station; he was gone two days and when he came back he brought a posy of white flowers for my mother, a piece of beef, wrapped in greased paper. He said all our troubles were over.

Something happened in Halifax, something happened in Montreal, and maybe in England before. My father knows; my mother may. In Toronto he lost his job, though at first he didn’t say. One morning he forgot to take his bread and my mother fretted, saying she knew he wouldn’t spend money for something from a stall, and she took it to the factory for him. We went early to bed that night while they spoke in the other room, and Rachel whispered that she’d already known, that she’d seen him one day when she took a different way home from school, sitting on a bench, staring down at his hands. Terrible days came after.

Rachel recites the kings and wars of England, she knows
amo amas amat
, and all the capitals of Europe. Perhaps if I’d gone to school. My mother saying no to my father, in a hard voice. Saying,
You
know
why
. She taught me to read from the Bible, her own mother’s name written inside in faint, spiked letters, and from the newspaper when we had one. That was easier, the letters larger, the words more familiar. But not as beautiful as the Bible, as the words in the Bible. When my mother read from the Bible I felt as if I were in a green field, with sun on my face, or sitting by a stream, hearing water over smooth stones. Though I hadn’t done either of those things. It wasn’t like in church, not like hearing Reverend Toller; he read different parts.
Darkness and screaming, the plagues of Egypt, the sufferings of Job. Reverend Toller’s Bible was filled with terrible tests. Abraham on the mountain with his knife raised, and Isaac bound tight, looking into his eyes.

My father said it wasn’t enough to be able to read, to write my name. In Toronto, before the men took our furniture, Mr. Envers used to come, already unwinding his long, greasy scarf when my mother opened the door. He was no taller than she was, his hair stuck flat to his head and his beard stained yellow, tumbling down his front. The little bundle of books, tied with a bit of rope. One of the books had maps and he opened it to the middle and touched the page, his fingers yellowed like his beard, the nails almost as long as my father’s.
This is England
, he said,
where you are from, the Atlantic Ocean your parents crossed. This is Halifax, where you were born, and Montreal. Toronto, where we sit now
.

And all the words brought pictures, a forest and a vast stretch of ruffled water, gulls wheeling and dancing, a cobbled street slick with rain. I couldn’t see how that happened, as if the pictures were somehow folded into a dot on a page, like a bud that’s waiting, that looks like nothing until it opens. There was something I almost understood then, understood in the same way I see the leaping boy, from the corner of my eye. There was something I almost had, but Mr. Envers didn’t notice. Instead he picked up Rachel’s ball from the floor and said,
This is the Earth, the North Pole and the South. This is England, here, and Canada, America. And this round Earth spins and spins, so quickly we cannot feel it
. Then my mind slid away, for that I couldn’t grasp at all.

Mr. Envers came through the winter and the spring and his voice was hoarse, not much above a whisper, and sometimes he
coughed until tears ran down his cheeks. Then my mother would make him a cup of tea if she had any leaves, and he would tell her about boys he had taught, now doctors and lawyers and one in the government. How they’d never forgotten him. The lessons got shorter and shorter, the time with the cup longer. Once he asked my mother if I was good with a needle.

This is the first real house we’ve lived in, all the rooms just ours. The kitchen and the three bedrooms. The front room with its heavy brown furniture, the privy in the back. When my father brought us to it, helped my mother down from the wagon that had carried us from the station, she clasped her hands together, rested her chin on them like someone praying, and smiled and smiled. Not her sad smile, but a different one. Inside my father wound the clock on the wall, and when it started to tick he put a hand on her shoulder and said that this was our real beginning. She took his hand and lifted it to her lips, and Rachel ran upstairs and down, through the front door and out the back, and came in again, saying,
There’s a yard, is it ours? And a little tree right in the middle
.

The yard is ours, with a fence along one side, and along the back where the laneway runs. On the other side a mass of
bushes, covered with red berries at the end of summer. A tree that’s not much taller than Rachel, and a little shed that my father said was for chickens. He came home one day with three in a wicker basket, and a small rooster with a drooping comb that Rachel named Simon Peter.

The chickens were for me, my father said, for me to take care of. I never said, but I didn’t like anything about them. The greedy way they went after the food I scattered, and they pecked at me, at each other, and squawked and chased Simon Peter away when he came too close. Some days there were no eggs at all and my father went back to the market, thinking he’d been cheated. He came home with another rooster, a big, strutting fellow he called Lord Bray, and the hens didn’t peck at him, didn’t flap him away, they all lay down for him. Simon Peter was for the pot but Rachel cried and pleaded and we kept him too, until one morning I found him in a little ruffled heap by the canes, Lord Bray with blood on his beak. Simon Peter’s feathers swirled all around the back step where my mother and I plucked him, and we tried to gather them all up again. When asked, my mother said that he had flown away over the high fence, and I could tell that it pained her, watching Rachel lift the fork to her mouth.

My mother thought we should grow our own vegetables, now that we had a yard, and my father turned over a square of earth, held up his own red hands at the end of the day and said he’d been too long in an office. He made a low fence around our garden, to keep the chickens out, and we planted potatoes and carrots, a few sweet peas. When the work was done Rachel made a sign for each row, and we all stood together in our own yard. The light was thick and golden, the sun moving down; we looked back to the house that was all ours, the brown door and the step where my mother and I sometimes sat, and that moment went on and on.

We checked every day, watched the green shoots push through the soil, more and more of them, and when we thought it was time my mother and I went out with a bowl to pull some carrots for our dinner. But the carrots we pulled were tiny, stunted things, some just a tangle of roots; my mother pulled more and more, all the same, and she put her hand to her cheek, leaving a muddy print, saying,
What did I do? What did I do wrong?

The green-eyed woman who looked after Mr. Cowan next door was hanging out clothes; she must have heard us for she pushed through the bushes and came to look.
Didn’t you thin them at all?
she said, and she told my mother that she should have pulled the seedlings, many of them, told her that was the only way the others could grow straight and strong.
Have you never grown a carrot before?
she said, and my mother said no, that she’d never had a bit of earth before. Her cheeks red, as if she’d said a shameful thing.
Never mind
, the woman said.
You
can try again next year; next year you’ll know
. And she said that Mr. Allen had a few nice carrots left to sell, that no one would have to know. But my mother said that wouldn’t be honest, and the woman gave a little shrug, a smile. All we’d gathered just made one small serving on my father’s plate, but he said they were the best he’d ever tasted.

Days I stay in bed Rachel often sits with me, not asking me to talk but just keeping me company, telling me things. Jokes and stories, what she learned at school, things she thought about. Like the days we used to share a bed, when she was two and I was seven, how she curled up against me, how she chattered and patted my face until one of us slept. Not long ago, sitting on the edge of my bed, her face hard to make out in the rain-colored room, she told me that Miss Alice had read a poem by Mr. Tennyson, that all the girls had tears in their eyes. And then she said wasn’t it a strange thing to cry? The way it sneaks up, the way you know it’s coming but you can hardly ever stop it. The way your throat goes thick, something happens in your stomach. I
didn’t say, but I realized that’s the way I feel. Almost all of the time.

One Sunday after church my father said,
Let’s walk a little; it’s such a beautiful day
. He held out his arm to my mother, and after a moment she took it. We were always near the last to leave, not liking the crush at the door, so the footbridge was empty when my father led us there. And it was a beautiful day, patches of snow still on the ground, especially beneath the trees at the edge of the river, but the sun was high and the air was soft, our coats unbuttoned. Rachel skipped ahead, her long hair lifting and floating, until my mother called her back, her voice a little sharp. Perhaps because she had to speak loudly to be heard over the tumbling water. It had been a sudden thaw, the river running high and fast, and already two boys had been lost. We didn’t know them, we hardly knew anyone, but my mother wept for them all the same.

There came a point, near the middle of the bridge, when my heart began to race. The way the boards moved, just a little, beneath our feet, and I wasn’t sure that I could carry on. But the way back was just as far; my feet slowed and I could no longer hear the rushing river, my heart thumping and thumping in my ears, in every part of my body. My parents walking slowly ahead, and Rachel just ahead of them, and I felt so strange that I
wondered if I was dying, wondered if this was what it was like, if this was the moment when it was done. But I wasn’t ready, and I had always believed I would be ready. It was a mistake and I had to move, before they were lost to me.