Egg stands beside him.
Her father holds the egg against his chest, as if feeling for any vibrations. He cups the cream-white shell in his hand, as if measuring its strength. He places his ear against the porous calcite. He nods and eases the orb into Egg’s hands. She feels the shell, that paradoxical mix of cool porcelain and warm interior. The weight calms her, she holds a thrill of anticipation, of something magical and alive. Egg can hear a faint chirp from the egg — the chick has pierced the air sac but still the surface of the egg is unbroken. If the chick does not break through, it will suffocate in its shell.
Egg feels a tremor, a peck, but the chick, still pipping, has not torn through the membrane.
She looks at Papa. “It’s still alive.”
Her father takes the egg and places it into the hatch box, his fingers grazing along the sides of the oval as the egg finds its balance. He pulls out the white bottle of rubbing alcohol and a pad of cotton batten from the box beside the hatch crate. From his tool box he takes the drill and drops the smallest bit into the chuck, tightens it, and gives it an exploratory whirl. He cups the egg and runs his thumb along the crown to the base, where the air sac would be. Cautiously, he lays the drill bit almost parallel to the hard surface, working a groove into the glossy shell. She knows he is too careful for a puncture. A fine dust clouds the air and tiny shards fly off, the grit of ceramic. At breaking point he puts down the drill and dabs his fingers onto the alcohol swabs, his fingertips stark against the chalk dust. He presses through the alabastrine cover with the tip of his index finger and gently peels back the opaque membrane.
Egg can see the slick, tiny head of the chick, the bulbous eyes.
The beak moves. Chirp.
Papa places the egg into the hatch box, beneath the strong heat of the overhead lamp. Egg knows that he will do no more. The chick must find its own way out of the vessel. As he gathers the fine china shards, Egg reflects on her father. The lines in his face have deepened, as if the years have cut sharp, almost to the bone. She knows that he could help the chick, he could, but he has told her that only the strong survive.
She cannot ask him to come back to the house (is that why her mother has sent her here?) for a wordless part of her knows that the barn is his test, his trial, his sacrifice. Egg has her questions but they shrivel and harden, as if into stone. Beside her father, she cannot ask the whys or the hows and so she swallows them. As they stand, her small fingers slip into his chalky hand. They watch the chick, its struggle, for it is the struggle that makes you stronger.
…
Later that night, when Egg creeps down the stairs in her slippery socks, she sees Mama in the living room, slumped in the big chair. The television is on the late night show of Onward Christian Soldiers. A pledge of ten dollars a month gets you a Bible with a golden pin. The choir, all dressed in white, sings with an unearthly fervour “Are You Washed in the Blood?” but Mama does not stir. The electronic glow of the screen bathes her in a ghastly pallor. Dead dead dead and Egg almost screams.
“Egg, go upstairs.” Kathy’s voice comes from behind her. Kathy’s hand is on her Mama’s shoulder, jostling her.
“She’s not dead, is she?”
“No,” Kathy says, with a glance at the bottle on the coffee table. “She just…here, could you turn off the television?”
Egg clicks off the set. She can smell the acrid liquor, like the clinging scent of gasoline.
“I want to help.”
“Go to bed, Egg. You’ll just be in the way.” Kathy leans forward. With a deep breath, she loops her mother’s arm around her shoulders and lifts her to her feet. Kathy eases her Mama up the stairs, the creak and stagger, the scrape along the wall, the groan of the mattress springs as Kathy rolls her mother into her bed.
As Egg hovers by Mama’s doorway, she realizes Kathy has done this all before. A queasiness shifts in the pit of her stomach.
Kathy pulls up the covers. Mama’s eyes flutter open.
Dark. Mama’s eyes are dark. “You’re such a good girl.” Her voice is whiskey gravel, so quiet, so heavy in the shadows of the room. “When I was your age —”
“Shh, Mama.”
Mama sighs, skipping stones through her memories. She swirls in a spiral of whiskey and mints. “What was that song? A Lullaby, a “Lullaby in Birdland.” He used to like that. American Jazz.”
But Albert liked Soul Train and American Bandstand.
“They take them away. They always take the good ones away.”
Egg backs out of the room, her legs rubbery. She runs down the hall and jumps into her bed, twisting the blankets around her. The good ones. The ones her Mama loves the best.
Egg burrows deeper.
Head tucked in, she hears the click of the lamp and even in the cocoon of blankets, the world glows golden.
Egg pops her head out.
“Hey.” Kathy sits at the edge of the bed. The crease between her eyebrows has deepened. “You all right?”
Egg nods.
“She’s going to be fine. She’s not going to die.”
“Everyone dies, you know.” Egg tries to make this a matter of fact.
Kathy tucks the blanket around her. “Do you remember when you were four years old, you started crying at the table, right out of nowhere, and when we asked you why, you said, ‘I’ll be lonely when everyone dies.’”
“But I am the youngest and I’m going to die last.”
Kathy opens her mouth but can only puff out her cheeks. “Why do you think of such big questions?”
“All the small ones lead to big ones.”
Kathy picks up Nekoneko who has fallen from the bed. “Do you want me to read a little bit of the book?” Kathy taps the paperback on the bedside table, a copy of Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl.
Egg nods again.
“Then scoot over.”
Kathy crawls into the cramped space beside her sister. Egg nestles in, closing her eyes, her head on Kathy’s shoulder. “Now let’s see,” Kathy says as she flips through the pages. Egg can hear the words, feel them, a rumble through Kathy’s chest.
Kathy begins:
“Dear Diary. It’s been a while since I’ve written but we’ve finally made the journey to America. So much has happened since our escape by train, since our long voyage across the ocean. Mother ate so much fish and cabbage on the ship that she threw up before we could dock. We’re settling in though. We’ve started school and Margot is surrounded by so many beaux. Peter is so behind in his studies and all he thinks about is the war but Father says there’s time enough for that. Father seems a little lost somehow, maybe because of all the changes. It is hard to be tossed from our cozy Secret Annex but what a relief it is to be out of that cage. Safe and without worry. I do wonder about the world though. What will happen? What will the future bring?”
Kathy shifts. Egg wills her breathing into an even flow, pretending to sleep. Kathy slowly eases her way out of the bed and clicks off the bedside lamp. In the dark, Egg measures the day. She tries to think of Elvis, of motorcycles, and melty mints. She knows that Good Mama is gone in a whiskey swirl, lost in the shuffle.
…
It is Sunday and from the pulpit Reverend Samuels crows about damnation and the everlasting love of the Prince of Peace. Egg perches on the edge of her seat and tries to make sense of it all. Jesus crucified on the hills of Calgary. But if God created the world in seven days, where did the Devil come from? She squirms on the hard wooden pew. Kathy, beside her, taps on the hymn book and hums “Born to be Wild.” Her mother nods and sways at every amen. The veins are popping out of Reverend Samuels’s forehead as he strains for the passion. He is going to pop a gasket.
Those are her Papa’s words — pop a gasket. He says might as well pray to a tube of toothpaste: cavities are the real evil.
It is like Papa has cut himself off from the world. If he doesn’t believe then he is going to Hell. And how can it be Heaven if all those you love aren’t there?
But here, in the brightly lit nave of Bittercreek United Church, Egg is surrounded by Hosannas and Hallelujahs, the gasps and sighs of the faithful. It is hard to figure everything out. She looks around her, at the good citizens of her small town. What do they believe in? That Goodness is rewarded and Badness is punished? And can you be Good but do Bad? What does that make you? Reverend Samuels says the Wages of Sin is Death but doesn’t everybody die anyway? And Mama, what is she looking for in the vaulted ceiling and stained glass? What does she pray for?
From her seat at the back, Egg can see a good chunk of Bittercreek, the thinning heads and comb-overs, home perms from Julie Duncan’s kitchen, the crewcuts from Nelson’s Barber Shop down on Maple. There are no long-haired hippies in Bittercreek, that is only on television, like on The Mod Squad. But as Egg looks up at the cross, she realizes that Jesus looks like a long-haired hippie.
In the basement of Bittercreek United Church, surrounded by a mural of Jesus healing the Leapers, in Mrs. MacDonnell’s Junior Sunday School class, Egg raises her hand.
Answers. She needs some answers.
Mrs. MacDonnell’s nose twitches.
“Yes, Egg?”
“If Jesus died so we can be saved…why did He have to die so we can be saved?”
“So His blood can wash away our sins.” Mrs. MacDonnell speaks slowly, each word a biting clip.
“But couldn’t He do that anyway, being God and all?”
Mrs. MacDonnell’s ears blush pink. “It was His plan. We cannot presume to know The Ways of God.”
Egg sits, stumped. The Ways of God argument. There is no way around that one.
“But if we were made in God’s image . . .” Egg thinks of Mama and her whiskey. “Why do we need to be saved?”
Mrs. MacDonnell twitches. Her eyes bulge like the classroom goldfish. “Sin entered the world when we ate of the Tree of Knowledge and for that all of mankind is tainted,” she says finally.
“But didn’t God put it there? I mean, it sounds like a trick to me, like the three wishes that make everything worse.”
Mrs. MacDonnell burns red. “Out!” she shouts, as if to expel Satan himself. Egg still has questions about Mama and the Wine in Cana, about Papa in the ostrich barn — she just wants to know how to save them, for they are lost, lost in their own desert, their own wandering wilderness. The Devil is out there, she knows it, but Mrs. MacDonnell’s finger calls down the Wrath of Righteousness and it is out the door for her.
Our Father, whose Art in Heaven,
hollow be thy name;
thy kingdom come,
thy will be done
on Earth as it is in Heaven.
Give us this day,
our daily bread
and forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us
and lead us not onto the Temptations
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
for power and for glory,
forever and never.
Amen.
And so Egg, banished from the doors of Mrs. MacDonnell’s Sunday school class, her head bowed against the heavy hand of God, whispers a prayer for the lost souls who have turned away from Jesus who loves the little children, all the children of the world. But then she thinks of all the little ones who have not heard the Word and she shivers. She knows that there are places without Jesus and radios and Gilligan’s Island. Hellfire burns hot and eternal and forever is a long, long time. Deep in the darkest depths of her soul, Egg knows that something is wrong, very wrong, wronger than all the burning barns and bloody lambs in all the Bibles, in all the world, so that when the church bell rings and Martin Fisken finally comes and hits her, she is almost happy.
…
In the kitchen, Egg opens the cupboards, peers into the corners, behind the boxes and bins. The days have tumbled by and Egg still does not have any answers. It seems like she can’t even get the questions right. If she were smarter, and older, she would know what to do. She needs the bigger picture, the Moral of the Story. Yesterday she found the magnifying glass in her father’s tool box along with a cat’s eye marble. She promises herself that she will put it back. It’s not stealing if you put it back.
If you hold a marble up in the air, you can see the world shift through different colours. Everything changes, Egg thinks. Newton will tell you that.
Mama’s Jack Daniel’s hides behind the flour bin. Egg sloshes the half-bottle in her hand. She knows that whiskey makes her Mama blurry. She holds up the bottle against the late afternoon light and peers into the liquid that looks like the last moment of sunset, a deep summer honey that has mellowed into autumn. Carefully, she tops it up with water. She stares at the bottle. This is what makes Mama Not-Mama. This grown-up stuff, like cigarettes, like S - E - X. Egg brings the bottle close and wrinkles her nose against the sour. Quickly, she takes a sip. Poison! She spits out the burn. Without a second thought, she dumps the bottle into the sink and watches the amber swirl away from her.
Now she’s done it.
The bottle is empty.
For a second she thinks of putting maple syrup into the bottle but Mama would know because of the taste. Then she thinks of her secret hiding place: the loft. Egg must get rid of the evidence. Bottle tucked under her armpit, she runs to the side of the barn, to the ladder by the side shed. Up she goes, to the creaking roof of the shed. The splinters prick against her knees and elbows as she makes her way across the slanting overhang, into the small window of the barn’s loft. She closes the shutter behind her.
She has stashed her comics here, in the darkness of the barn above the ostriches. Albert’s blanket, the one she has pinched from the boxes below, makes a cozy berth. A wooden crate holds her comics and clippings of her favourite TV shows, along with odds and ends: Botan candy toys from Nakashima’s in Lethbridge, a pin of the USS Uganda that she found on Centre Street in Calgary. Her Evel Knievel doll, the one she bought at the Stampede, sits coldly observing from his ledge. And here, a stack of her precious TV Guides, a rarity in Bittercreek — she can look up The Streets of San Francisco even if Kathy won’t let her watch it. She places Mama’s bottle beside the crate and jams her candle stub in the stopper. Here, above the restless ostriches, she flips through her superhero comics: secret identities and double lives. In the back pages of the comics there are miracles — Johnny Altas transformed from a ninety-pound weakling, Kung Fu Secrets Revealed, Learn Hypnotism, and Rubber Masks that are Amazingly Real! The X-ray glasses are the best — Egg wants them more than anything else in the world. X-ray, like a superhero. Egg knows that only a few letters set invisibility from invincibility: that must be a sign.
Her father scrapes the shovel in the pens below her, a syncopated shh-shh, shh-shh that is unexpectedly comforting. Egg presses her nose against the floorboards and peers through the gap in the slats. But he is only a sliver here, so she scoots near the crate, to the hole in the wood, her special eye-knot, spy-knot.
He is right below her. Egg thinks that he looks flat, like all the gravity has pressed him down but she knows the word for this — perspective. His hair falls, uneven, as if he had hacked blindly at his head. Egg remembers her Papa before he moved into the ostrich barn, his hair, so black, the cut, precise. Now, it’s like he is undone. Papa is unravelling.
Chirp chirp, from the crate. He has lengthened the run and there is new chicken wire along the bottom of the last pen. The hatchlings have grown into chicks, their dun-coloured feathers still short and stiff. Some chicks have twine looped around their splaying knees — her father’s own remedy for the ones who have trouble walking on the jute.
With a click of the gate latch, her father goes through the grill to the outside pens. Egg runs to the corner of the loft, to the creaking ladder that leads down to the boxes. Cautiously, with foot to foot and hand to hand, she descends. Ladders always feel like the edge of the world.
She rummages through Albert’s suitcase that holds his ties, his b
est shoes, and his jangles and jingles — pins, a watch, an old key chain of Tetsuwan Atom. She has his set of Disappearing Cups but she wants real magic, not some sleight of hand. Those are tricks and tricks are not fair.
She picks up Albert’s silver dollar and tries to do his knuckle roll but the silver glints and slips through her fingers. The coin rolls in a spiral loop, into the chick’s pen.
Damn, she swears in a grown-up way. Damn.
Her father is still raking the outside pens. If she cranes her neck far enough, she can see him through the grill.
Plan A, Egg thinks. She grabs a handful of feed pellets.
She slides to the door of the chick pen, making herself as small as possible. She opens the latch and squeezes herself inside. Quiet, quiet, she tells herself but it is too late — the chicks run towards her, cheeping, flapping, their excitement mounting. Egg will be overrun soon so she flings the feed pellets to the back of the pen and laughs as the chicks dart madly after the bait. She picks up Albert’s silver dollar and pockets it.
Pluck. She feels a pluck at her elbow. A chick, smaller than the rest of the brood, no more than a ball of fuzz and a twitchy head, topples at her side. Its feet scrabble against the jute. The head, held up by a noodle neck, bobs, insistent. Its beak opens with a squawk, calling the other fledglings who rush over, trampling it.
Egg reaches out for the fallen chick and remembers her father’s instruction — scoop from below, her arm to cradle, not to crush, her hand to support. The chick is the smallest, the slowest one, the one whose pipping had not broken through. A runt, like Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web, an underdog. Egg holds it loose yet not too loose. Like the Goldilocks story, she does it just right. She runs her fingers through the soft brown feathers, over its downy fuzz-covered head. Its eyes are luminous, magically liquid, magically light. Egg shivers at the chick’s fragility. Holding its skittery body, wiggling head, and jutting legs dangling ridiculously, she can feel its beating heart, right in the palm of her hand.
Prairie Ostrich Page 5
