The Sudden Weight of Snow (4 page)

I watched Vera from where we stood. She was across the aisle and up a few rows. She didn’t flail her arms but kept them at her sides, her fingers lightly tapping out a rhythm above her knee, the fabric of her skirt moving as though caught by a slight draft of air. Sometimes she would stop singing for a verse and simply smile slightly, as though remembering something small, lovely. What, I couldn’t imagine. The sense of peace that seemed to overcome Vera at church made me uncomfortable, as though it threw into jeopardy my own relationship with her
as my mother, all the tension and strife that relationship was supposed to bring.

Vera turned her head and looked at me in the back row. She lifted her songbook slightly and gestured to it, meaning
sing, sing
. I looked straight back at her and, without lowering my eyes to the page, began to move my lips, expressionless.

In that sermon, we were told once again that God must have lived in our valley. It was small and perfect. The seasons passed as seasons should. Winter, cold and sharp and covered in snow. Spring, wet and green, the sound of ponds thick with frogs. Summer drying everything out, releasing the scent of sap splitting the sunburned bark of ponderosa pines, fruit pulling branches to the ground. In the autumn, coyotes gathered on the hill at the end of the field behind our house and howled at the moon. No shit. God must have lived in our valley. It was narrow and closed. The musty smell of churches permeated the air. Helicopters sliced the sky, looking for pot crops, growers to bust. The valley was run on mill money and people thanked God that there were trees to cut down, that there would always be trees to cut down. The Friends of Christ Free Church was right there in the middle of the valley, holding it all in place.

Your first six years, before you moved to Arcana, California, were spent on what could loosely be called a commune in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Canada. Everyone has memories of childhood as a forest of legs, the faces of adults hovering somewhere far above. We have all clutched the wrong leg, thinking it our mother’s, only to discover that what descends is the face of a stranger, large as a moon. In your forest, the canopy was full of smoke, the faces bearded, and the legs of potential mothers were covered in fine hair.

When your memories begin, you live between two vans. One is where your parents, Peter and Susan, sleep. The other is both where your bed is and part of the kitchen. The rest of the kitchen is between the vans, under a tarp. This tarp is enormous, stretched taut, and shelters a makeshift living room, complete with a carpet and a couch that are often slightly damp. Peter is building an A-frame cabin to Susan’s specifications and there are already some other buildings on the property – a barn, sheds, sagging outhouses. Peter and the other dads are constructing a large building for all of you to gather in, and something called a sauna.

There are lots of children there. You are a barefoot, snotnosed gang who are encouraged to speak your budding genius minds and finger paint on every available surface. Peter takes you and the other boys into the fields on Clydesdale-pulled ploughs and explains the finer points of horse farming, although it won’t become clear to you until several years later that he probably doesn’t know what he is talking about.

You live on what used to be a farm, and that’s what your parents still call it, although it isn’t like any of the farms in the books that you look at. Those farms have animals and, perhaps more importantly, farmers on them. Your farm has Clydesdale horses that the men fight about, a few scrappy chickens that continually die and are replaced, and a goat that rears its stunted horns and terrifies you. Your mother gardens in her bare feet and your father does something in the fields but there is no rooster and things aren’t as shiny and red as they are on the farms in your books. There is no tractor.

The first winter in your memory, you move out of the vans and into a shack. Peter hasn’t finished the A-frame. You know it’s a shack because your mother calls it that. Peter does things to the tiny building – nails cedar shakes to the roof, hauls in a wood stove and cuts a hole in the ceiling for the stack. He attaches pink insulation to the inside and covers it with prefabricated walls that come straight from the store. Your mother cries a lot, and smokes. You like the smell of her hair when you crawl onto her lap. It reminds you of fires, warmth. When it gets too cold and snow falls through the cracks around the chimney, you and Susan move into someone else’s finished cabin and Peter stays in the shack. The someone else is a friend
of both of your parents, a man. Sometimes, all of you have dinner together and the adults stay up late, smoking and drinking, their teeth pink with wine by the time they kiss you goodnight. You keep yourself awake in the other man’s loft until you hear your father leave and your mother and the friend laughing. When it warms up, you and Susan move back into the shack with Peter. By the summer, you are living between two vans again.

In the second fall of your memory, Peter still hasn’t completed the A-frame. The big building is finished and is called the cookshack, though you know it isn’t a shack like the one your mother complained about. Other fathers have finished building cabins and kids are showing off the places where they sleep. No one has an actual bedroom. There are lofts with ladders to them, beds built into the wall, hammocks in the corners of living rooms. Their beds are like forts, but you still have the best one – a whole van to yourself. You tell the other kids that you could drive away if you wanted to.

And one day you do, only Peter is driving. You know it was something about the unfinished A-frame. You know your mother was upset; she was smoking and crying a lot before you left, like she did the winter before. Susan must be too upset to take care of you so you go away with Peter in one of the vans, the one that was your bedroom. Now it is just you two guys, Peter tells you, free and on the road. You miss your mom.

Since then, the smell of sawdust has always reminded you of that place. There was a lot of wood there, on the farm and in the town. You took trips to town with Peter and the other men to pick up wood at a place where lumber was stacked as high as
the walls of a battle fort. There was wood piled everywhere at the farm, shavings all over the ground – soggy in the spring and fall, concealed under mountains of snow in the winter, so hot in the summer that if you sank your arm into a pile of it you could burn your hand. Peter tells you that you are both going home, to the States. That where you are going there are even bigger trees. When you get there, though, you miss the wood stacked up everywhere around you. The sawdust doesn’t smell the same.

E
very year when the snow melted, I heard the clatter of trucks driven up the switchbacks behind our house and the sounds of teenagers – car radios pumped out of open doors, the clink of beer bottle – in the place where coyotes sometimes yelled at the moon. Waking to the coyotes had always scared me. At first, their wails were like children laughing, rising to hysteria. Then what I heard shifted, so it sounded like children shrieking in pain, and I would have to reassure myself that it was only the sounds of animals. Except when it wasn’t. To a child’s ears, teenagers on a hill could sound uncannily similar to coyotes, and that was equally disturbing.

As I got older, parties became my own lifeblood. They came in two basic varieties – house and bush. House parties spilled out onto lawns and driveways, and streamed through neighbourhoods, but there was always a house to return to, a toilet to bend over, a guest bed to pass out on. Parties outside were in a field, a clearing in the forest, or a wide spot on a dirt road that led up to the hills – all collectively know as
the bush
. In the
summer, the bush was a clearing near the lake where there was no sand and no gradual slope into the water, but instead the danger of falling into a mess of weeds and sinking mud. There were no bathrooms in the bush, just places to squat and pee. I have scars on my legs from making my way through thick brambles in a miniskirt. Yes, we wore those even in the bush.

The notion of celebration was irrevocably linked to the forest in Sawmill Creek. We were taught early that the forest was something to extol, something that sustained us all in different ways. Every summer during Sawmill Days men raced up trees, a blur of spiked boots and leather straps slapping against trunks propelling them at dizzying speeds. They rolled logs along the river, the cords of muscles in their legs holding a fine balance of wet bark and moving water, until all fell in but one man, triumphant. There were contests in which chainsaws were twirled and pieces of wood were thrashed into sawdust in record time. Other men rendered wood into art, grizzlies on their hind legs and broad-shouldered lumberjacks hulking above them when they were done. During Sawmill Days, the word
lumberjack
was still used and the images of fairy-tale woodcutters and the beer-bellied, chainsaw-wielding mill boys were somehow wed.

On Friday afternoon, Krista told me about a house party on the hill the following Saturday night. We were in biology class, splitting hydras into multiheaded creatures in Petri dishes. “We
have
to go. The only thing is,” she said, “we can’t go back
to my place. My mother has declared it a No Kid Zone for the weekend. I think she’s also declared it a No Husband Zone, but that’s not my problem.”

“What’s she going to do?” I placed a drip of water on a glass disc and set my eye to the microscope. Tunnel vision.

“Fuck if I know.”

I looked down the tube to where everything loomed large, bigger than I thought things could be, yet thinner, closer to disappearing. “Well, it doesn’t matter, anyways. You can come to my place. The party won’t start till late. We’ll leave after ten. You know my mother. She’d sleep through a train wreck. Hey, you get anything?”

“Absolutely, darling,” Krista said, winking. This meant that she had pilfered a two-sixer of Absolut vodka from one of the neighbours she baby-sat for, neighbours who bought liquor in cases, stored it in a stocked cellar. She had begun stealing alcohol a year before. I was fine with that. It was going to a good cause – our liberation.

“Rob and Mike’ll probably be there,” Krista whispered out of the corner of her mouth, her eye now on the microscope.

“So?” Rob and Mike. Interchangeable with any Matt, Jeff, or Jason at Sawmill Creek Secondary. Baseball-cap-wearing, chewing-tobacco-spitting, sport-bike-riding sons of mill executives. And that is exactly what Krista wanted. She wanted to ride hard and fast on the back of one of those sport bikes, wanted to feel her red hair tear away from her face, her screams trailing behind her. That’s what I imagined. Krista was fair to my dark, at least in appearance. She had red hair, skin so pale and thin you could make out the faint lines of blood, blue
beneath it. She had breasts, the promise of fleshy, milk-white breasts under all of her shirts. That holy land tempted even me.

“Oh, right. So sorry. I forgot you were above all that,” she said. The bell rang. “I’ll be at your place tomorrow night at eight,” Krista tossed over her shoulder as she left class.

The next night Krista and I sang along to the radio, yelping as we tried to dance in the small space, knocking hipbones and shins into pieces of furniture. Krista had brought along a backpack full of possible outfits and started to pull on a pair of tight jeans. She jumped around the room, red-faced with the exertion of trying to pull the zipper up, until I said, “Lie on the bed, I’ll zip you up.” I could hear water in the pipes which meant Vera was getting ready for bed. Soon we’d be able to go out. “Okay, hold,” I instructed Krista. She inhaled and held the air in her throat while I zipped. “Ah shit, you aren’t going to be able to move in those, Kris. What’s the use?”

“What’s the use? What’s the
use
? Granted, walking is a little difficult but they’ll stretch. Besides, look at this ass!” Krista got up and pointed to herself in the mirror. “There’s nothing better than a heart-shaped ass, isn’t that what Mickey Rourke says in that movie? Nothing better than a heart-shaped ass.” That movie was
9½ Weeks
. Mrs. Delaney had a copy. We watched it at Krista’s after school one afternoon just as we had read bits of
Fear of Flying
and
Kama Sutra
to each other, doubling over in laughter when we tried to imagine Mr. and Mrs. Delaney churning curds, as one of the positions was called. “I
have a feeling my mom’s churning curds with someone else,” Krista had said. Unlike Vera, she was at least churning curds with
someone
.