The Sudden Weight of Snow (34 page)

I had heard expressions about ashes settling but never realized that it did, in fact, take time. When we pulled into the farmyard, the air was grey, still mottled with ash, and each step we took unsettled it. Susan asked Gabe if she could speak to him. Telling me he’d be a minute, he followed her to the A-frame. I talked with a couple of people who were milling in the yard, looking at the place where the building had been. We crossed our hands over our chests and heaved sighs. I went to the shed alone, sat on the bed, the sheets and blankets still the mess I had left them, and felt my back rise and fall against the wall as I breathed in, out.

When Gabe returned, he sat down on the bed, reached out for one of my ankles, then held it, rubbing light circles around the bone.

“She okay?” I asked.

“All right. She’s just upset about the cookshack and everything.” Gabe dropped his head and, keeping one hand on my ankle, he rubbed the other across his forehead, again and again.

“I know. We all are, I guess.”

He stopped moving and looked at me. “Yeah, but we can’t understand what it’s like for them – for the people who’ve been here for years. I mean, my parents helped build the thing. I guess Thomas will be telling you all about how he’s feeling soon enough, though.”

“Is that what this is about?”

“You tell me, Harp.”

“Listen, I don’t know what happened between me and Thomas last night. Whatever it was, I was stoned and I can’t even remember. It was the first time I did mushrooms. You can’t hold that against me.”

“No, not this time.”

“There won’t be another time.” I paused to gauge his reaction, but Gabe was looking away. “I guess it would’ve made things a lot more comfortable for you if I’d never come, wouldn’t it?”

He groaned. “Harper, give it a rest,” he said and fell back against the mattress, covering his eyes with his hands. “What do you want me to say to that?”

“I don’t know.”

“No, it wouldn’t have,” he said to the ceiling.

“Look at me when you say that.”

Gabe sat up, then looked at me without wavering. “No.” In that moment, he seemed tired. Tired in a way that it didn’t seem sleep would be able to help. I knew we were leaving things unresolved, but I didn’t want to press either one of us then.

The entire cookshack had burned to the ground along with the sauna and the bathhouse. The fire made the front page of the
Sawmill Creek Chronicle
. In the photo, specks and clusters of newsprint grey conveyed a pile of ashes and charred wood. At the farm, the fire site didn’t seem as simple. Parts of the cookshack were completely gone, yet some pieces of furniture seemed
virtually untouched by the fire. They sat eerily, waterlogged and grey, where they had before. The deep freeze was there, streaked with black, with no pantry left standing around it.

In the article, Rob Hanshaw was named as a suspect who was being charged with arson but Mike was a young offender and couldn’t be identified. I would hear the story repeated and elaborated as it moved from newspaper to second-hand accounts in the high school hallways. Most versions had Mike and Rob going to a party in town and bragging about burning the commune down, expecting, it seemed, to be commended rather than arrested.

As I walked through the halls on Monday morning, people approached me with a mixture of sympathy and excitement but it was Krista I wanted to see. I had tried to call her repeatedly the day before, each time going to Brenda’s cabin instead of the cookshack as I once would’ve done. Each time not getting any answer.

I found her waiting at my locker. “Thank God. Where were you yesterday? I was calling all day,” I said.

“I didn’t feel like talking to anyone. I told Therese not to answer the phone.”

I put my bag in my locker and the bell rang. We waited until the hall cleared, then I slid to the floor, back against the lockers, and Krista followed my lead. We bent our legs off the floor.

“So,” I said.

“So,” Krista responded.

“I just wanted to know if you were okay.” I looked at the
side of her face while she stared ahead. “I mean, that was horrible what Mike did, the way he treated you and everything.”

“I’m fine, Harper,” she said and pulled her legs closer to her chest.

I dropped my knees and balanced a heel on the tip of the opposite shoe and transferred my weight from foot to foot. “Are you sure? I mean, it was a pretty crazy night. It’s okay if –”

“I said I was fine.”

“Oh,” I said, stopped moving my feet. “Okay.”

After we hadn’t said anything for a minute, I asked, “So, have – have you talked to Mike?”

“Of course not.” Krista got up from the floor quickly. “What kind of person do you think I am?”

I tried to tell her that I hadn’t meant anything by it, but Krista had picked up her bag and was already walking down the hall.

The old Kostak farmhouse, the one Vera grew up in, has been rented out since her father died. When she and Jim Harper return to Alberta, it is sitting empty, a neighbouring farmer using the fields for a small fee. It is Vera who comes up with the idea. She still can’t shake the feeling that the so-called
scene
in San Francisco was a sham. They had to go there and return to find out what they really want, where they belong. She wants to move back into the farmhouse, not as her old house but as her new home.

They move into the farmhouse, Vera’s brother-in-law charging them less than he would someone who wasn’t family. Jim Harper’s father hooks him up with some work for the district. Regional Works and Maintenance it’s called. Jim drives around in a truck all day, stopping every once in a while to fix things, as far as Vera can tell. She sees him off every morning, then sets to work, rids walls of yellowing wallpaper, heaves the linoleum off the floor – not easy as it is so old it has been worn right into the wood in places – sands every bit of wood down to the grain. When the entire interior of the house is stripped of what was there before, of even the lingering smell of her father’s pipe tobacco, Vera feels an incredible sense of peace. She doesn’t paint, paper, or furnish the house at once. She wants to remain in this space, wide-open and free, it seems, of everything that came before it, everything to come. Sometimes, when she sees Jim off to work, she stays out on the porch with a cup of tea. The fields are turning golden with the changing season, the air has an edge. Vera feels like she is a full season away from the girl that she was in this same place. The same person, but everything is different.

When she gets pregnant, her sisters assure her that she’ll be sick and tired most of the time but she surprises everyone, except herself, when she isn’t. She moves through the first trimester without morning sickness and in the fourth or fifth month, mania hits. Vera rolls paper onto the walls, using an intricate system of stepladders and chairs to reach every corner. She paints each frame, sill, and bit of trim with precision, after a while not even using tape to keep her edges straight. She goes to bed late, exhausted. She is relieved that Jim is usually already
asleep. She hasn’t wanted to have sex in weeks. There are bigger, more exciting things to think about.

By the time I am born, the farm house is a new world, brightly painted and sparkling, homemade baby preserves lined up in jars in the cellar. And then, something happens. It’s as though in pushing the baby out of her, Vera has pushed out her ability to desire anything. The house is finished and furnished, Jim has work, the baby, who at one time seemed as simple as a room she was thinking of redoing, is there. And the baby is much more complicated. She is a little human and Vera isn’t quite sure how she feels about her. Two years later when Nicholas is born, paint is already chipping, the walls need washing, and Vera sends Jim to the grocery store for a supply of Gerber food.

She has braced herself for another bout of post-partum depression and when it arrives Vera tries to tell Jim how she feels but he says, “It’s nothing to worry about. Lots of women get it. It’s natural.” For Jim, if something can be described as natural, then you shouldn’t try to change it. He kisses Vera on the forehead and goes back to Fly Hills in the evenings to meet the guys from work at the bar. He still stitches a fine story, attracts a following wherever he goes. Jim likes it in Fly Hills – the simple, honest work, the simple, honest friends. The farmhouse on a piece of land, a beautiful wife, two infants toddling around in various states of glee or torment. It’s all so natural, so easy.

Vera has got to get out. The wide-open peaceful space in the farmhouse has filled up with laundry, dishes, and toys. Few friends come out to visit her on the farm, and she has no vehicle
to get in or out of town. She spends most of her time with two people under the age of four and she is afraid that she will start to babble and wail along with them.

I don’t remember much from that time, though I can piece together a few uneven memories. We go for walks down back roads, Nick’s stroller rattling on the dirt or rough asphalt. Vera tells me things – the names of plants that grow in the ditch; how one day we’ll move to a place where there are other kids to play with; how to tell a girl bird from a boy bird. On one of these walks, Nick starts to cry and won’t stop. We walk for a while, Vera talking over his wail, then she leans down to the stroller and shakes it, saying to Nick, “What is it? What
is
it?” This scares me. They are both red faced, Nick with tears, Vera with an emotion I can’t identify. Then Vera stops shaking the stroller, takes Nick’s knotted face in both of her hands and her frustration dissolves. She picks him up and holds him. Nick doesn’t stop crying and Vera drops to the ground on the edge of the road, breath leaving her nostrils like blows to the air, then slowing. We all sit there for a long time. Eventually Nick stops crying and Vera’s breath lengthens and quietens. I stand at my mother’s side and pat her shoulder like I’ve seen people do. After what seems like hours, a car goes by and, as if this is our signal, we get up off the side of the road, keep walking.

It was Gabe who told me what the word equinox meant. The word did not refer to pagan ritual as I had been led to believe but something that happened in the sky. Things that lined up,
equi-distances, the equator. The days leading up to equinox felt like walking up the unsteady plank of a seesaw. In some ways, I must have never wanted to reach the middle, that place where things finally levelled out, only to slide down the other side. I never wanted to find out that there was no middle ground, no resting place.

In the aftermath of the fire the absence of the cookshack had become an entity itself. Something that demanded attention, like a hum or high-pitched buzz. When you looked for its source, you couldn’t find it, yet it was always there. The grey hollow place where the building had once stood couldn’t be overlooked and it set things off balance somehow, threw into relief what was left behind. We all tried to find our place at the farm again without the cookshack as a reference. It may have been easier for me. I had never quite found my place there.

For others, the absence of the building at the centre of the farm seemed to initially confuse them, then bring them together. I saw people in the farm yard between buildings more often, stopping when they walked by, sometimes carrying on conversations for up to half an hour while standing, shifting from foot to foot and rubbing their hands in the cold. People dropped in on others more often. Brenda even came over to the shed one night. It wasn’t the best space to receive visitors, but we did our best, Brenda and I sitting on the bed, Gabe on a chair, as we talked, tried to sort out what it all meant. Thomas kept to himself and I didn’t see much of him. Gabe and I went over to Susan’s for meals a couple of times, but although his mother could never be accused of being blatantly rude, I didn’t feel comfortable there.