The Sudden Weight of Snow (10 page)

“Come on, I’ll give you a ride home,” Rob Hanshaw repeated, his arm draped out the window, hand adjusting the
side mirror. He inched the truck at the speed of my stride. “Come on, no nonsense this time.” I turned to him and he winked. “I promise.”

It was his gall made me get back into the truck, the offer of a ride home enough of a truce. Later, when I thought about that afternoon, I tried to look for clues to my own lack of anger or indignation. My compliance seemed like something simple. I was hungry for dinner. He was offering me the fastest way home. I felt like larger things were holding me down.

The sky was glowing with impending snow when Rob Hanshaw dropped me off. Right before the first snowfall, the whole valley glows a washed-out, smoky red. I had noticed this every year since we arrived but had never bothered to ask anyone why this was or if they had noticed. I had read that in the Antarctic the sky flashes bright green the moment before the last slice of sun retreats into the horizon. That in Southeast Asia it rains at the same time every year. Even better, in a part of Mexico it rains at exactly the same time each day for exactly forty-seven minutes. I considered the red sky before snow in Sawmill our own climatic sign, something that linked us with the rest of the world, rain falling like clockwork, skies flashing and glowing in preparation for something else – a sunset, snow.

Peter insists it’s different in Arcana. You hear him say, “This is where it’s really happening,” and of the people you left behind, your mother, Susan, included, “They’re in denial up there. Think they’ve escaped but what they don’t know is you have to come back, we have to come back and resist from within now.” Of course you don’t remember these exact words but ones like them. You’ve pieced together your father’s tenets by what he’s said to others.

Peter gets a job building sets for a local theatre company. You and he sleep in the van behind the theatre, shower in a stall off the dressing room, eat in a place called the green room, which is, in fact, green, the shade of cut grass. The theatre supplies endless adventures. You crawl through the spaces under the seats as though burrowing a tunnel underground and discover that parts of the stage open up, an entire dusty mystery existing under there. You have a small red padded suitcase of Hot Wheels, each car with its own slot. You send the tiny cars down the slope from the back of the theatre to the front toward jumps made out the oddly shaped pieces of wood that Peter has given you. They rarely make the hurdles but you try again and again. You do what you have always done – keep yourself
occupied, keep out of trouble. You hear other people say to Peter, “Well, he’s the opposite of a handful, ain’t he?” and “Quiet little guy, hey?”

To you the adults here seem similar to the adults at the farm, except they speak differently, louder and with more enthusiasm. The other kids, well, “Kids are kids,” as you heard someone say. You don’t know how it could be any different and apply this saying to everything: milk is milk, dogs are dogs. Sometimes, you repeat this over and over throughout the day, naming everything you come into contact with. It fills something in you, some kind of space in your head, which you’ve recently begun to think of as the inside of a bubble of Bazooka Joe. You know other people do this too when you hear a woman say, “Let’s call a spade a spade.”

There is even a woman at the theatre who looks like your mother, small and blonde, soft and bony at the same time, the way birds are. Her name is Anise and soon you and Peter are living with her in the basement of an old house. The people who own the house are old and German and lure you upstairs with fat sausages and sauerkraut. The inside of their house is coated in plastic – plastic walkways down each hall, plastic on the couches, over each lamp, plastic hugging the top of the table. It smells sour and smoky, and even though you don’t like the odour you keep going back, because Mrs. Goebel has an endless supply of candy in a hallway cupboard. You sit and watch TV with her in the afternoon, curtains closed so slats of sunlight slice into the room like knives and seem equally dangerous. Fill your mouth with candy until your cheeks inside are as furry as small, unsuspecting animals.

Soon, it seems, Anise has a baby and you move out of the basement. You start going to school – a couple years too late, you find out from your second grade teacher – and this seems to bring on more babies. With each grade, Anise has another baby until you are in the fourth grade and have three sisters. You know how each of these sisters is born. Anise and Peter explain their births to you in graphic detail. You know there is blood and something that looks like snot, something else that isn’t pain but, as Anise puts it, “a very very intense feeling” that makes her scream every time. They both want you to be in the room when Anise gives birth, but you refuse. Anise’s body scares you, the way it expands and shrinks, expands and shrinks. The bodies of the baby girls are no less frightening – crying, pooping and burping as they do, contorting themselves into red, wrinkled creatures. It hasn’t been just you guys in a long time, but by the time you’re old enough to figure out how much has changed, it’s too late.

As with Susan, Peter didn’t have time to build Anise a house. The first baby came too suddenly, followed in quick succession by two more. Instead, you all move out of the Goebels’ basement and into a split-level on a cul-de-sac. You come to understand that this is not the house that Peter and Anise wanted to move into. Whenever they tell other adults about the house, they add, “Not quite our style but it does have cedar panelling and the cul-de-sac is out on the east side of town, backs right on to forest. We’ll make it our own, won’t we, hon?”

Other adults are oddly sympathetic, adding their own understanding nods and words of encouragement. “Yup, yup, I hear ya. We’d all like to get a bit farther out, I suppose, but,
hey, good solid build, lots of room. There’s so much you can do with the place. And the forest being so close, big yard. Anise can plant a garden. You really are lucky.” You have no idea why all these people are playing along, acting as though consolation is necessary. You think of the places you lived in Canada – the vans, the shack – it was your mother who complained about these places, your father who reassured her. You remember Peter speaking with pride about living so close, literally, to the land. He tutored you on the benefits of an uncluttered life on the drive south. “The less stuff you have the better, you know what I mean? The less to tie you down, keep you thinking you always need more. Look at how we’re living, hey? Like kings! We have everything we need and we can explore this whole continent if we want. Kings, that’s what we are, hey, us two guys?” Peter’s eyes would then slowly pan the landscape through the windshield. When he looked back at you, it was with an expression of curiosity, mild delight – as though he had just discovered something unexpected and beautiful in the passenger seat.

It’s been four years since you were on the road but Peter manages to bring it up every time you go out with him. You do things like pick up wood, nails, and files at the hardware store, drop things off – you’re never sure what exactly – at other people’s houses, go to McDonald’s to eat food that you know Anise would disapprove of. Peter jokes and says, “Here we are, us two guys on the road again,” even though you are just driving around town.

When your youngest half-sister is one and you are eleven, Peter and Anise get married in the back yard. Anise is barefoot
and wearing a large hat. Peter is wearing sandals and jeans with an untucked white shirt that reminds you of a pyjama top. The little angels are all in tiny flowing replicas of Anise’s dress. You are allowed to choose your own clothes for the day. Anise tells you, “This is a very, very special day for your father and me and I know it’s a special day for you too. I’m going to let you decide what to wear. I trust that you’ll know what’s right.” For the special day, you choose your favourite clothes – your old, comfy cords and your cowboy shirt, the one with silver snaps instead of buttons. You are allowed to wear the shirt but Peter sends you back to your room after Anise whispers something in his ear. “Perhaps you’d like to choose a newer pair of pants?” he cues you.

Later, when you look at the photographs of that day, you like the effect. Peter, Anise, and the girls do, in fact, look angelic. All that flowing white fabric, daisies stuck into hair and button holes. You, in plaid and brand new dark denim, eyes squinting against the sun and the camera, look like you have been superimposed from another place – a rougher, dustier place than that back lawn on that day.

T
he next morning, the snow had stopped falling and by the afternoon all that was left was a skiff marked with footprints, tire tracks, and reemerging vegetation in the places where the earth was inexplicably warm. I went over to Krista’s for dinner, craving the kind of food I couldn’t get at home. The Delaneys lived in a house that appeared to be built from a kit on a street lined with identical split-levels. Carports, swing sets, TV rooms, wall-to-wall carpeting. The kind of place where you could pretend you were average. Dinner was a fend-for-yourself affair. The freezer was stocked with TV dinners for Mr. Delaney who supplemented these with meat that he barbecued on a grill set immediately outside the patio door until it was much too cold for him to do so. We were in the season when he was still persisting, the barbecue on one side of the open sliding glass door, Mr. Delaney standing on the other in sweatpants, slippers, a jacket, and a hunting cap. There was a deep freeze downstairs with the limbs of several animals cross-hatched inside. Leg of deer, rack of sheep, salvaged part
of moose found on side of road. Mrs. Delaney ate saltines, Caesar salad from a bag with a packet of dressing, yogurt, veggies and dip, Ultra Slim-Fast, and strawberry ice cream. Not a lot and never two of these things at the same time. Krista ate what she could find – boiled hot dogs stuffed into starch white buns, ketchup and mustard congealed into a brown mass, microwaved pizza, boxes of frozen burritos warmed up one by one.

Mrs. Delaney came into the kitchen in tasselled boots, black jeans, and a black sweater with a large cat appliquéd on the front in metallic brass and silver stripes. She looked around her as though she was confused, then her eyes lit up when they landed on me. “Harper, heard you’ve been let out of house arrest. What was it you did?”

“I told you, Mom, she passed out in church.”

Mrs. Delaney snorted out a laugh, dabbed at false tears. “Oh yeah. Atta girl, Harper. Don’t they love that kind of stuff? Aren’t you supposed to roll down the aisles there? You weren’t hungover, were ya? You, my dear, are supposed to be a good influence on my daughter. Lord, I mean, sorry,
goodness
knows I’m not going to be that influence, eh, Krista?”

“Mom, shut up, will you?”

“Do you even know what respect is, Krista?”

“Song by Aretha Franklin.”

“Christ,” Mrs. Delaney declared, then, “Ah shit, sorry, Harper, hon,” as she left the kitchen.

Krista and I made Kraft Dinner, substituting extra butter and two spoonfuls of Coffeemate for milk, and stirred in sliced dill pickles and ketchup. We snapped open Diet Cokes and ate
in front of the TV in the room three steps down from the kitchen. When we had licked the dishes clean of ketchup and cheese product and rubbed water over the bowls with our fingers, we filled them back up with ice cream. I meant to tell Krista about what happened with Rob Hanshaw, but somehow I couldn’t find the right words. Instead I kept my eyes fixed on
Jeopardy
, tried to answer every question. “Where is Iceland,” I asked,
Jeopardy
-style, without inflection, then, “Who is Amelia Earhart.”

“Shut up, professor,” Krista said, flicked upwards till she reached
MuchMusic
, all sound and bytes of gyrating hip, guitar-flexed muscle. “Okay, Harp, you know what we need? We need a change of pace.”

“So, change the channel.”

“Not that kind of change of pace, smartass. A real change. You know what we’re going to do? We are going to go the Pilgrims Art Farm Solstice Fair.”

“You might be going, sister, but no Friend of Christ is going to let me go to anything with the word
solstice
in it.”

“Why not?”

“Do you know what the winter solstice is?”

“Darkest day of the year – don’t ask me why,
Jeopardy
girl, something to do with the sun and the earth’s rotation. If you get me a basketball, a ping-pong ball and a flashlight, I might be able to figure it out.”

“I’ll tell you. Jeopardy answer: solstice. Pastor John’s question: What is an excuse for an ancient pagan ritual performed by pre-Christian heathens locked in darkness without the guidance of Christ’s light.”

“Okay, so, we’ll say we’re going somewhere else.”

Mr. Delaney came in the door from the carport then, took one look at us and said, simply, “Trouble,” shaking his head in mock seriousness as he walked by. His role as a father had been to teach Krista how to tie a fly, hit a fastball, and play poker. He had given her a couple of spankings with the belt when she was a little girl, taught her to drive when she was sixteen, and now it seemed as though he thought his job had basically been completed. Mr. Delaney was like an amiable boarder in Krista and her mother’s house.

In the summer, he and other boys from the mill organized a series of backyard barbecues. It didn’t matter how old they were, if they worked at the mill, they were always
the boys
. The one thing Mr. Delaney insisted on was that Krista and her mother attend these barbecues. So, it seemed, did the other old boys: they brought wives and children ranging from toddlers to teenagers. These families were statements. Look how good we’re doing. We have good, solid work, families, barbecues in the backyard of what, everyone assured themselves after a couple of beers, could only be called paradise. God’s backyard, really. I came along as Krista’s moral support. The boys from the mill, true to their moniker, had not grown up. They slapped the backsides of their wives, the backs of their children’s heads – “Hey, I thought I told you to put that down. Didn’t I tell you to put that down? You better learn to listen, you understand?” – and leered at Krista and me while pulling in beer bellies, trying to convert them into abs, by then a distant memory. These men were who we would try to avoid, in no uncertain terms, until we left Sawmill Creek. When we did leave, we
would simply forget them, remembering nothing but the taste of tough, barbecued meat in our mouths from those evenings. Nothing else.