The Sudden Weight of Snow (7 page)

“I’m so stupid, Harper.” I rubbed her back as she leaned over and vomited again. I had to close my eyes and concentrate on not getting sick myself. I would not leave Krista alone in the stall. She was the one strong enough to meet boys in fields and vomit up the evidence in a church basement the next day. Next to her, I was an observer, sitting on concrete steps in the cold. Krista coughed up again, then closed the lid of the toilet and rested her forehead against it. I braided her hair and hummed under my breath. When I finished, Krista got up, rinsed her mouth in the sink, and we both splashed our faces with cold water. Slapped our cheeks until they shone like ripe apples.

As Pastor John began his sermon that Sunday, I wrapped my arms around my stomach and gripped my waist with my hands to try to keep my head upright on my shoulders. Part way through the sermon, Amens and Hallelujahs rose up to a pitch around us. Vera had her head down, eyes toward the Bible open on her lap. I thought that she had been watching me and, as if sensing my thought, she looked up and in that moment her expression seemed to me distant, regretful.

I steadied myself, my spinning head and lurching stomach, until we rose for communion. We went to the front of the church and lined up. There were three men up there – a councillor who put wafers on our outstretched tongues, Pastor John who held out the communal cup for us to drink from, and another councillor who stood ready to refill it, a white cloth
wrapped around the bottle soaking up spilled wine. The wine was cheap and smelled like composting grapes and vinegar. I knew it was bad even before I’d had a drop of anything better. Twelve of us lined up at a time and Pastor John said, “And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them.” The councillor placed fine wafers on our tongues. “This is my body which is given for you: Do this in remembrance of me.” I saw Krista’s body, spread out on the field, her hair bright red against the ground, stars reflected in her pale skin. I pushed the wafer against the roof of my mouth until it dissolved. I could smell the wine coming closer. A shadow came over Krista, wiped out the stars. “This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for the remission of your sins.” The cup was at my lips, the bitter taste of metal. I let the wine touch my mouth then backed away. “Drink of me and you shall have everlasting life.” I held the wine in my mouth and felt my throat constrict. Krista was on the ground, blood bright and rising between her legs. I struggled to swallow.

“Sylvia?” I could hear Vera’s voice from somewhere. I turned with the wine still held in my mouth, looking for Krista. If I could just see her, everything would be all right. I swallowed the wine, imagining the Lord travelling down my throat in wine and wafers. I felt the dark cold of the schoolyard close around me and the floor rise, hit me in the back of my legs.

On the way to a place your father keeps calling home, you stop outside Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to visit your grandparents. Your grandfather can spit, a watery shot, out of the corner of his mouth and calls your dad not Peter but the Ungrateful Little Asshole. “Well, if the Ungrateful Little Asshole isn’t back again,” he says with a mock punch at Peter’s arm that has him wincing even though it can’t have hurt. Your grandfather seems rough but he isn’t cruel, kinder than your grandmother who stares at you and tugs at your clothing. She spits as well, onto her own sleeve and then grinds the wet fabric into your face. She tells you that you are too skinny, you don’t drink enough milk. She tells you that your mother, Whatshername, was an ungrateful selfish little girl, who did she think she was, and where was she, anyway? Both of your parents are little and ungrateful, for what, you don’t know. Later, when you remember all this, your grandparents seem implausible, as though they couldn’t possibly have been that unkind. You can’t tell, though, because you have no other memories of them to compare these with.

These people are not like the adults you left behind on the communal farm in Canada. Despite their age, they move a lot
faster, all jerking movements like they are constantly flinching from flies. They seem to have a lot of things to do. Your grandmother slams things into the kitchen counter. Your grandfather is outside, throwing open the shed doors.

“Get that boy out here!” he yells through the kitchen window. You don’t know
that boy
means you. You think it might mean Peter. After all, your grandfather seems to think he is still a boy.

“Go,” your grandmother jerks her chin toward the back door, frowning. As you leave the room, you hear her say, “Just like his father, slower than molasses on a frozen lake.”

What your grandfather wants to show you is a gun. You have seen guns before, toys, but never handled with pride. Plastic guns could be found everywhere – in the bush around the farm left by some long-gone kid, on the edges of parking lots when you went to town. At the beach in the summer they sold water guns, hung behind the counter in a plastic rainbow of colour. You and the other boys at the farm could spot them like some people have an eye for four-leaf clovers or wild asparagus growing in a ditch. Whenever you brought them back to the farm, though, a fight would rise between someone and someone else.
We shouldn’t let them believe weapons are toys
.

Play is a healthy way for them to express a natural instinct towards aggression
.

They’re pretending to kill each other. How can that be healthy?

If we forbid gun play, that will only make guns more fascinating
. You learned what opinions were at the farm. You soon learn that your grandfather has a different opinion about guns than your father does.

Your grandfather names all the parts to the pistol and makes you repeat them. He is about to let you hold it in your own hand, on its side against your palm, to feel the weight of it, the power. He tells you it is so heavy it will pull your arm toward the floor. Your stomach is tickling with excitement. And that place below your stomach. That’s when Peter comes into the shed, yells at your grandfather, and pushes you out. You stand between shed and house, waiting for someone to call for you. A dog from the other side of the fence barks and throws its presumably tiny body against the fence again and again. You don’t know what you are supposed to do, where you are supposed to go. You hear your grandfather. “You’re still a goddamn sissy.”

Then your father. “You have learned nothing from that war, our country’s failure, nothing. Don’t you know what we were trying to tell you when we left, when we refused to take part in such –”

“Refused to defend your country, to defend our way of life - a decent, civilized way of life – against those goddamn Commie bastards.”

“Listen to you, Dad. Just listen to yourself –”

“No, you listen to me. You left, deserted, tail between your legs, and now you’ve come waltzing back in, with a ponytail and a little boy that I have no idea how you’ll raise. What the hell happened to Susie? She finally had enough?”

By this time, your grandmother has come to the back door and reaches her arm right out to the middle of the yard, it seems, to pull you back into the kitchen, push you into a chair and slam a glass down in front of you. She fills it, not with milk
but with lemonade, and for a moment, you think you could love her.

“Always been like that, Peter and Wilf.” Wilf, you guess, is your grandfather. Sounds like Peter and the Wolf. She shakes her head, then gets up and snaps on the radio. The news comes through the kitchen in static. You want to say something then. Maybe tell her about the drive down, about all the fun you are having, just you two guys. You are going to tell her your mother is fine but Peter comes into the kitchen then, red-faced, and looks at you in a way that makes you stand up.

“Well, he’s done it again,” he says. “We’re leaving now, Mom.” It is the first time you hear Peter say this. When you came in, he called her “your grandmother.” This is your father’s mom.

“I know,” your father’s mom says back, moving toward the table in the middle of the room. When she meets it, she grips, ungrips the edge. “I know,” she repeats. That was the last time you saw those two people. You don’t know how much of any of that you made up.

You leave your grandparents and keep driving. When the van stops in Arcana, California, you and Peter have decided that you might stay a while. He has included you in this choice with statements like questions – “What do you think, huh?” and “We’ll like it here, hey?” – to which you nod. Peter makes friends with other adults in a loud, joking way that you later realize makes people like him at first, avoid him later. You hear him tell people, “Don’t have a lot of material wealth but I’m good with my hands, can do just about anything.” This is how you and Peter find places to stay. He helps people with things –
greenhouses, staircases, stone fireplaces – and you both stay in their houses while he does. You eat cereal with whichever kids live at the house you’re at, liking the places where they serve what Susan called
sugar bombs
, loathing the places where they feed you granola stirred into bitter yogurt. You and your instant friends – whichever children are there – read comics, build forts, and are sent outside where you run from object to object, climb things, and yell for very little reason.

You know, although Peter has never told you, not to mention the unfinished A-frame in Canada. Later, you will also know that it was more than an unfinished A-frame that came between your parents, but as a child you will attribute everything to this – Susan’s crying, Peter’s indifference, how you left, quickly and with so few words.

F
riends could heal with well-chosen verses, circles of prayer. Could wipe sin clean away within the length of a song. Pastor John came over the evening after I had fainted at church.

“Come in, Pastor John, God bless!” Vera chimed like a bell when she opened the door. I was in the living room waiting and could only hear them.

“God bless, Vera,” he said, his tone sounding more serious. They spoke quietly and I couldn’t make out what they were saying until they were standing outside the living-room door. Then, I heard Pastor John say, “It must be hard for you on your own, Vera. You know, I do believe that God meant for children to be raised by both a man and a woman, but we can’t always know his plans for us, can we?”

They were coming into the room. “Oh, no. No we can’t,” my mother laughed nervously and stopped in the doorway, her hand reflexively to the nape of her neck, pulling at the fine
hairs there. “Well, it is difficult sometimes, as you know, but we do try.”

I thought their voices skated on the surface, thin and sharp and insincere. I greeted them with a forced smile. Vera stood in the door for a moment until Pastor John asked her to give us some time alone.

I had never seen Pastor John uncomfortable and he wasn’t then. He pulled at the legs of his pants as all tall men do, making room for his knees, and set a Bible in front of him on the coffee table. “Have you been praying, Sylvia?”

“Yes.” Not exactly a lie. I didn’t so much pray as ask for signs.

“You will be easily deceived, Sylvia – you are young and impressionable – we understand this. I understand this, your Friends in Christ understand this, and we are here for you. But it takes more than you, it takes more than our entire congregation. No one knows you – your temptations, your weakness – better than your personal saviour, Jesus Christ.” I nodded, kept a straight face. Pastor John had his hands on his knees, his eyes at some place above my head. “And no one but our true Friend, Jesus Christ, can guide you on the right path. If you ask for forgiveness with a clean heart, He
will
guide you. You must be ready, though. He’ll know if you’re not. Will you read Proverbs 20:1 with me, Sylvia?”

We said together, “Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging; and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise.” The last part referred to me, I knew, the one who was deceived. There was a cure, however. I read Ephesians 5 out loud at Pastor John’s
prompting. “And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit; Speaking to yourselves in Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.” The Friends of Christ were doing the right thing, singing down the chosen path. A path that ended, “Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God.”

Pastor John had me stop reading there, though the rest of the chapter was already committed to memory. Pastor John quoted it again and again to explain the hierarchy of the Free Church. Wives submitting themselves to the will of their husbands, husbands loving their wives like their own bodies, like temples. All of us flesh, bones, and blood of a greater body, submitting ourselves to Christ.

Sometimes I felt estranged from my own body, as though it were a symbol of something else. Once, it was something I didn’t think of often. Something to get me up trees and onto every potentially dangerous thing at the playground, teetering on metal, standing on slides. Something that got restless in vans and cars or itchy after being in bays coated with duck crap like the ones at Sunny Bay Bible Camp. The Friends of Christ Free Church had no summer camp of our own so we were sent to camp with the lesser of evil denominations, the Baptists. We met a bus in the mall parking lot, clutched duffle bags, sleeping rolls, and pillows in quiet horror as the bus opened up, took our belongings into the bottom of it, while we climbed aboard, sandwiched into seats between strangers.