The Sudden Weight of Snow (23 page)

You don’t know what possessed Gord to prop his feet up and tell you that but you soon find out that you have no way of thanking him enough. The next time you lead a girl into a guest room, you share a joint – rolled with a bit of tobacco like you’ve heard they like it. You play with her hair and trace a path around her lips slowly, barely touching, and soon enough she has thrown a leg astride yours so she can straddle you. Soon enough she is popping open your jeans, each button releasing like a sigh. If the other guys, the ones your age, have taught you anything, it’s to think of the table of elements or the Dewey decimal system while you’re doing it. You make it all the way to Mercury and explode.

By September of the year that you would’ve been a senior, you have already acquired all that the school board authorities expect you to have learned in high school and you have nine months to study for the state exams on your own. You know you will do well. You have been a success in this experiment. Anise didn’t have quite the same results with the girls, although she did her best – Peter assures her of this on a daily basis. With the oldest girl it’s a power struggle. The middle girl is always daydreaming and can’t focus. The youngest, still your favourite, continually calls attention to herself. When she isn’t singing and dancing, she is running away, setting things on fire in the yard, balancing on wobbling banisters and breaking small bones in her body – clavicle, wrist. Anise reads books on
the psychology of first, second, and third children. She reads books on home-schooling the wilful child, the artistic child, the performative child. She reads books on holistic parenting, on parenting with love, on adaptive parenting. Eventually, she and Peter decide it will be best for all of you to send the girls to school for a year or so. It will be something new, a growing experience for everyone.

For the first two months that the girls are in school, Anise sleeps through most of the day, reads self-help books, and eats in bed. When she stops making any meals, you pack the girls lunches and Peter makes rudimentary dinners, suggests counselling. Anise looks for a job instead. She goes back to the small theatre company where you and Peter met her years before and gets a part-time job at the box office. When she isn’t working she volunteers at the theatre, designing sets like she used to. You hear her saying on the phone, “It was my one true love – getting lost in those worlds I could create with paint and wood. Once I always had that and now, well, now I guess I have five true loves and no way of getting lost anywhere, no matter how hard I try.”

Your family – you have come to know these people as that – seems all right for a while, you might even say stable. Peter has work at another hardware store, one that truly values him. Anise throws dinner parties for “theatre people.” The girls bring reports home that say they are adjusting well. Then Peter’s grow operation is busted. You must have known all along that “the conservatory” was a marijuana crop. You’ve taught yourself Economics 11, calculated your family’s net yearly income, their expenses and taxes, and have always ended
up with the wrong numbers. Thankfully, the conservatory was cultivated in a basement, behind false walls, in someone else’s house. It is Gord that is busted with the intent to traffic, but they know there is more than one person involved. They are questioning him and you hear Peter tell Anise again and again, “I just hope the kid doesn’t crack.”

M
aybe Vera was right, I didn’t know what I was looking for, but there was one thing that I was certain about: the farm would be different than the place I was coming from. I wasn’t seeking a place I could belong. If anything, I was seeking a place where I could feel comfortable not belonging. A place where I could take a couple of steps back, and rest there.

I couldn’t figure out exactly how many people lived on the farm during the winter. There was Gabe’s mother, Susan, who spun wool on a wheel to make sweaters. She also hooked rugs, the kind you would imagine you’d see in farmhouses, oval, made of concentric loops of an unknown and sturdy fabric. Another woman, Brenda, was a potter. What she liked to make were oddly shaped vases – vessels, she called them – and teacups shaped like squat, full-breasted women. What made money, however, were uniformly shaped soup bowls, cups, and saucers, all with the same pattern and glaze – a blooming dogwood twig, the trim a wave of green and blue. These sold in several gift shops between Sawmill Creek and the coast.
Thomas was a musician, his loft full of instruments – the sax in a stand, an old piano, several guitars in various states of repair leaning against walls. They were artists, but made money other ways. Brenda left early each morning to work at an answering service in Vernon. Susan worked in the fall and spring at a tree nursery, pulling uniform bundles of tree roots from rows in the ground, later sorting them off a conveyer belt, each pile of tiny trees representing a bigger paycheque. These same bundles were collected in boxes by Thomas in the late spring. A tree-planting foreman for five months of the year, he would tell his crew where to plant them, how deep and how quick.

There were children on the farm, their lineage all uncertain to me. Children lived with two parents, or one parent, or a parent and a friend, or the person who was the most like a parent to them. There were children who came to the farm only on weekends or holidays. Gabe told me that there were more children like him, who had one parent or two return to the States after the Vietnam War, for whom Pilgrims Art Farm was a strange memory, quaint and Canadian.

Before moving there that winter, Gabe had visited Pilgrims only during the summer. Summer on the farm, he told me, was four months of people speaking about sucking the marrow out of life, of seizing the day, living for the moment. Young men and women would arrive in small packs of volunteers to learn to garden organically, companion-plant, and farm with horses. They spread themselves around the property in vans and tents, under tarps. Young artists arrived individually to apprentice with Pilgrims residents – a woodworker, a potter, a playwright, several musicians – and they were the ones who most often
ended up staying for more than one season. The farm was transformed into a kind of adult summer camp. Those young women we saw in town in the summer, bells on their ankles, thin cotton revealing the shadows of legs thin as twigs, those men with dirt under their nails and hair gnarled into dreadlocks, they were the transient members of the farm. They came in vans or station wagons stickered with slogans, wanting to get out of cities or take a break from cross-continent road trips. Young and vibrant, they would stay for a month or two, seeking unconventional romance and clean air, collecting welfare cheques so they could pursue these through volunteer work and shared meals. They would leave, Gabe told me, after they found someone else sneaking into their lover’s tent, or got drunk around the firepit and threatened to kick the shit out of someone, or when they simply grew bored with the feeling of moist clay spun between hands, loamy soil.

When I asked Gabe what they expected, he said, “I don’t know. Everything to be sweetness and light, something like that.” What did they get? “Same shit as everywhere else, different pile, I guess.”

Gabe told me that in the summer when the volunteers came, there were regular meals in the cookshack, food in exchange for labour. In the down times, like it was in the winter when we were there, it became the place where people without adequate kitchens came to cook. Gabe and I were two of those people. I wasn’t entirely clear on how the division of food worked. Farm food was marked with a
P
for Pilgrims. Common food was marked with a
C
. There was food belonging to individuals marked with initials, and then there was unmarked
food. There was no food marked with Gabe’s initials or, for that matter, my own. Gabe told me to help myself to anything unmarked or marked Common. I couldn’t get over the feeling that I was stealing.

Sunday was the first day I was feeling reasonably well. Mid-morning, and the kitchen was empty. I found a loaf of bread with a C on the bag, a jar of unmarked peanut butter and set to work. It would be my first solid food in three days. While I was forcing the thick peanut butter across unbuttered bread, Thomas came in without me hearing him. When he cleared his throat, I jumped and sent the knife across the counter.

Thomas laughed. “I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.”

“It’s okay.”

“So, you’re staying at the farm.”

“Yes, I guess I am.” I battled with the bread as it caught on the dry peanut butter, rolling away from the crust.

“Great, great.” Thomas broke his gaze and began moving around me in the kitchen. He plugged in a kettle, pulled a paper bag out of the freezer, spilled coffee beans into a grinder. When the whirring sound started, I left the kitchen, bread in hand. During the day, the cookshack was a different place than at night, bleaker. The sun came in the front windows in patches of dust motes. Things seemed dirty – the kindling, paper, and ashes around the wood stove, the dried herbs hanging from the ceiling, the old couches slouched against the wall. I ate the bread and felt small in the room.

The grinding, whirring, and hissing ceased in the kitchen. Thomas came out and put a mug of coffee in front of me and one across the table, then he poked at the fire. He threw on two more logs and blew. I had finished the toast and was staring at the mug.

“That’s for you,” Thomas said when he sat down. “Cream and brown sugar.”

“What makes you think I want that?”

“Young women. They – you – usually like cream and sugar.” He paused. “Uh, we have a lot of young women through here, volunteering. A lot of kids out of high school or college who want to dig around in the dirt, or drive nails into outbuildings, you know?”

I hadn’t touched the coffee yet. “Actually,” I stated, “I take mine black.” I had just made that decision.

“Well, then,” Thomas said and, smiling, exchanged my cup for his. “I like your haircut.”

I instinctively reached my hand to my scalp and tried not to smile. I took the coffee into my mouth and willed my face blank as it scalded my tongue and seemed to coat the inside of my mouth with a bitter film.

“So, where’ve you come to us from?” He asked.

“Just my mom’s place in Sawmill.”

Thomas took a sip of his coffee and shook his head. “Whoa, that’s some sweet brew. Okay, so, you’ve left your mom’s place. You going to stay here then?”

“I can’t say I know. I mean not for good, but maybe for a while.”

“No, no one really stays here for good.”

“Don’t you?”

“Me? Yeah, well, it must look that way, but no. I’ve been back and forth for the last – man, what is it – twenty years? But I don’t stay. Got a few other places I go to. A person couldn’t always stay here, it’d drive you mad.”

“Why’s that? Seems pretty relaxed here to me.”

“Oh yeah, it is for the most part, but, you know, every group has its own politics. You’ll probably see that eventually.” I was beginning to enjoy the taste of the coffee. It made me feel sharp, bold. Before I could think of anything else to say, Thomas continued, “It’s just close quarters for a lot of people. A lot of decidedly eccentric people. I don’t mean to scare you or anything. It’s not that. The farm’s a great place. The people here, great. It’s just well, yeah, close quarters.”

After not going to classes the entire first week after the holidays, I decided to return. I called and woke Krista up that morning to make sure she would meet me in front of the school. I had left home, missed a week of school, lost a head of hair. I felt that I needed to know she would be there. Gabe drove me to SCSS. I had rarely been dropped off at school before. It was something that rich girls had done for them, or girls with tight jeans, too much makeup, and older boyfriends in Camaros and Firebirds. I had always noticed those girls, the ones who were dropped off by men, just as I knew I would be noticed.

Krista was waiting outside the front doors, hands tucked under her armpits, blowing her breath into the air in disappearing currents of steam. She looked at my hair, smiled, shook her head and didn’t comment. I smiled back and she hugged me in a kind of urgent, jerky movement, then released me and rubbed my short hair. “Shit, I’ve missed you.”