Kathy is surrounded by Jonathan Heap, Doug Fisken, and some boy Egg doesn’t know. Pet and Stacey stand outside the circle.
Kathy is trying to talk to Stacey, but everyone is in the way, like some kind of Red Rover Red Rover I call Kathy over, except this is not a game. The air prickles Egg’s skin. Her chest tightens.
Egg doesn’t know what’s happening but it’s a mess. The boys are all around Kathy now, and Pet is stepping in front of Stacey. Why is snotty-nosed Petunia acting like she has to protect Stacey? Kathy would never hurt Stacey. The world is upside down. Stacey cries, her face crumbled like an old piece of newspaper. The air is cold and heavy and the boys are puffed up big and their words are nasty. Doug pushes Kathy and Egg knows she’ll push back and then it’ll be bad because she never backs down.
Time stretches, like an elastic just ready to snap.
“Kathy, I want some jujubes, do you have any money for jujubes?” Egg bursts into the circle and everybody’s all around her.
It is so quiet.
Egg looks around, to their faces, and she can see their surprise. She is so small and in the middle. She says to the boy she doesn’t know, “You got a jacket just like Evel Knievel. Do you know Evel Knievel? He tried to jump the Snake River Canyon. He would have made it too, but his parachute came out early, he would have.”
The light is so brittle and the quiet is unsettling. The stillness stretches, straining.
Jonathan shuffles, coughs into his hand. “Come on, let’s get going.”
Doug Fisken leans, over Egg toward Kathy. “Fucking dyke,” he spits through his teeth. His eyes glint with ice as he struts away.
Egg lets out her breath, feels the mist against her lips, her nose.
Kathy picks up Egg. She squeezes too hard and she doesn’t let Egg go until they get to the truck. Kathy’s shaking but Egg knows not to say anything. They drive out of Calgary, taking the Mill Road to the Badlands, past the hoodoos and the flat plain drop. On the radio Ground Control is calling Major Tom as the moon drifts over the prairie but Egg is thinking of the Rocket Man, burning up his fuel up there alone.
…
That night, out of her window, Egg looks over the long grass edged with frost. Brilliant in the moonlight, the blades are a crisp silver, sparkling like a field of perfect daggers. The crystalline pattern on her window makes her think of mountains and the Yeti, all alone in the Himalayas. Egg would like to know what makes the Yeti abominable. It’s hairy but then all mammals are hairy. Except for dolphins. And whales. And manatees. Manatees are gentle; they are the cows of the aquatic world. Floating cows. Not everyone knows that dolphins and whales and manatees are mammals.
The Yeti and the Abominable Snowman are the same thing but just different names. Abominations are serious things.
In the Bible there is no extinction, only smoting and stoning. Mrs. MacDonnell is strangely silent on the subject of dinosaurs. She says that God is all things but then if that is true that means God is evil too. Kathy does not believe in God. Kathy will not go to Heaven. Mrs. MacDonnell says that only those who have accepted Jesus in their hearts will be allowed entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven. There are gates and everything.
Egg wonders about that. She wonders about the cicadas in her Young Reader’s Guide to Science, the seventeen years burrowing in the dark, the cicadas, who were once mortals who became so enraptured that they sang until their bodies withered away, becoming what they loved — a song. You see, if you love it enough, it will happen. All you need is love.
She thinks of Raymond, of Leviticus and Romans. It gets all mixed up in her head, abdominal abominable and sasquatch Saskatchewan, all jumbled together like Indians and India. She knows that the world must make sense, that there’s a reason to it. Mrs. MacDonnell talks of God’s great plan. Egg wants to believe but she is not so sure anymore.
She thinks of that one time, at the drive-in, not Wizard of Oz, but before, when Egg was little, dressed in her pjs, bundled in the car for Where the Red Fern Grows. Mama and Papa in the front, and Kathy, Albert, and Egg in the back. Egg fell asleep before the end of the movie. She never did learn what happened to Billy and his two dogs.
The Moral of the Story, Egg thinks. Do lives have a moral? Or is it just an accident on the railway trestle over the slow flowing river?
Stacey is gone too. Is there a moral to that?
She pads to Kathy’s room in her slippery socks and opens the door a peek. The hall light slices into the darkness of Kathy’s room, over a corner of the bed, to the desk.
The picture of Noel MacDonald, ripped in two, lies on the floor. Kathy’s books are flung into the corners, strewn on the floor. Half of the map of the world has been torn. A pin holds a corner — not land but sea. The Siberian Sea. Egg didn’t know that there was a Siberian Sea.
“Kathy?”
The room is empty. Egg thinks of Raymond, chased off by Doug Fisken and his beer bottles on Main Street. Everybody knows and nobody says anything.
Moral is the meaning. The story tells you what is good and what is evil.
But Raymond, what harm did he ever do?
The night shadows dance across the ceiling as the wind howls the moon across the sky.
…
Egg lies in the field behind the barn, her snow pants bunching on her calves. Her legs stick straight up in the air, her body forming the letter L. Her hips are solid against the earth and she holds the claw bone in her hand, scratching at the snow.
It’s the flying ones she loves: Bellerophon, or Icarus who flew too close to the sun. Perseus, with his winged sandals of gold but what wrong did Medusa do?
It’s the uglies, Egg thinks, everyone hates the uglies.
She tries to blow her breath into a cloud but the air is mild, a snow-blindingly bright day. She unzips the front of her jacket.
Kathy walks up beside her. She looks up to the sky. Egg can see the bags under her sister’s eyes, the slump of her shoulders.
“Your pants are going to get soaked through,” Kathy says grudgingly.
“They’ll dry.”
Kathy nods. She lies down beside her. “What are you doing?” she asks.
“Holding up the sky.”
“Heavy work?”
“It’s air, silly.”
Kathy can’t find fault with that so she lifts her legs up as well.
Not a cloud.
Egg turns to her. “Is it true if you swallow chewing gum, does it get stuck in your butt and you explode?”
“Nah.”
“Martin says tapioca is full of boogers.”
“Martin’s full of boogers.”
Hawk. Or kestrel.
Egg curls up to her. “I got fifty-seven dollars in my piggy bank. You can have it.”
Kathy looks at her.
“Just so you know.”
“Thanks, Egg.”
“Could you tell me that story again, about the girl with the little wings on her feet —”
“On her ankles —”
“She tried to cut them off with nail clippers but they grew back, they kept on growing back.”
“Yeah.”
“And they came back on her shoulders, and she had to wrap them up, pin them down because when the wind blew they’d puff up like an umbrella an’ she’d fall over.”
“They were like bat’s wings, so she had to hide them.”
“But they were wings, Kathy.”
“They were ugly.”
“I’d want wings even if they were ugly.”
Kathy gives her a look, as if to say, of course you would. She reaches out and ruffles Egg’s hair. “Come on, you sack-a-potatoes.” She kicks off her shoes and lifts Egg onto her legs, an old game of airplane. Egg balances her belly on Kathy’s feet and her arms stretch out against the endless blue.
“Pegasus!” Egg shouts.
“Falkor!” Kathy adds.
They laugh as the Chinook wind stirs up the early spring sky in Bittercreek, Alberta.
April
<
br /> Mrs. Syms is grumpy because she is the lunch monitor now. Mrs. Ayslin is gone. She left Bittercreek and all her classes too. Egg overhears Mrs. Syms tell Vice Principal Geary that Mr. Ayslin is wearing a groove on a seat in Ol’ Jake’s Saloon and sucking soup out of all the cans in Gustaffson’s General Store.
Egg hopes he chokes on peas.
At recess Egg takes the long way around. Then she sees Kathy’s locker. Someone has scrawled jap dyke in black marker that you can’t get off.
Egg is afraid. Because Kathy is Popular, she’s on the basketball team and there are even pictures of her in the yearbook. The world does not make any sense. Albert is dead, Mama is drunk, and they are the only Japanese-Canadian family on the prairie. This is not fair and fair is fair, that’s what everyone says. And now Leviticus and Romans are against them. All the world’s a jumble and Egg can’t tell up from down.
At home, Egg sorts through the cupboard with the old ribbons and Christmas wrapping. She is looking for a shoebox to bury her Evel Knievel. Since his adventures on the railway track, Evel Knievel is half the man he used to be. He’s had his trials and tribulations. Egg is sure it has made him better than he was. That is the point of suffering, isn’t it?
But what if that isn’t it?
What if there isn’t a Moral, or a Meaning? What if Reverend Samuels is just another bully boy? What would he say about Raymond’s penguin walk?
What if God can’t do anything?
And what would He say about Kathy and Stacey?
No no no.
There is a plan and things will be perfect. There is a destiny. Good things come to those who wait.
If all of it’s a lie, then there is nothing. No. So many people can’t be wrong.
When she steps back, she knocks over the empty whiskey bottle. She freezes and listens for a sound from Mama’s room but no, Mama has not heard the thunk. As Egg places the bottle at the back of the cupboard, she sees the camera, tucked into the dark corner, almost hidden by the bag of tinsel. Gently, she pulls it up by the strap, holds it, feels the heft. She peers through the viewfinder, the little box that gives perspective.
Another clue from Albert.
…
Egg bursts off the porch, into the air. For a moment she eludes gravity as her arms reach out like hawk’s wings catching the late evening light. The sky is stretched thin, streaks of gold, streams of blue. The days draw longer now, a burst of yellow and orange buffalo beans break the muted earth behind the barn, though the slough is still capped with rubber ice (slide across and don’t break through!) and the melt trickles into the ditches alongside the road. Magpies strut on the matted straw mound by the barn, pecking at who-knows-what. Egg takes a running leap over the steps to the ground as budding stems of grass, stiff with frost, salute her. The field is a sea of purple crocuses. Her toe catches on a tuft without give and she plants headfirst into the grass.
Snow eyelashes.
But Egg bounces back and she’s off.
She checks her pocket: finders keepers. She takes out the camera, loops the strap around her neck. She runs to the barn and spins.
The camera swings on the strap and the weight pulls her wider. The sky tilts and she stops, her hand cradling the camera. Careful, she tells herself, as she scuttles up the ladder, across the side shed top, to the flat roof before the crawl space window. On the flat roof she turns and pauses before the width and breadth of her domain. She feels the weight of the camera in her hands, the pull of the strap against her neck. Click click, click click. She likes pressing the button and pulling the lever for advancing the film, that whirl-click sound — that is the best.
From the side roof she can see the distant Rockies, how the jagged mountain edge recedes and contracts, like a slumbering dragon caught in perpetual dreamtime. West to the foothills, the land of the giant vole-moles, with their starfish noses and ferocious claws.
Egg hisses at the air and claws, most vole-like.
“Egg!”
She starts, almost tumbles.
It is Kathy, calling from below. “Goddamnit Egg, you’re gonna break your neck!”
Egg’s arms fall to her sides. She watches Kathy get into the truck. The tires kick up gravel as Kathy pulls up and away. Kathy Grumpycakes Moodymug Murakami. Kathy, with her own secret life. Sometimes it seems like Kathy is trying to wriggle out of her own skin. Egg’s heart lurches as she gazes at her sister, the fishtail of the truck pulling out of the drive. She feels protective and so she throws out her arms for an abracadabra. Do abominations get blessings? There must be another word for that.
She ducks into the loft, her crawl space, into her secret niche above the pens. She blinks away the dust, her eyes growing used to the dark (always so dark in the ostrich barn) and glances past her clutter and her comic books.
She stops.
The ostriches are inside but there is no scratching, no chirps, no calls, only a strange kind of rasping. Egg feels the cold creep up her arms, like a draft. She freezes — that sound again, like something strangled. She stoops and peers through the eye-knot in the floor.
Her father draws the hush around him.
Egg feels the clutch in her lungs.
Beside him lies an ostrich, so still, too still. The bulk of feathers is a stark contrast to the bare thin flesh of the legs. It seems so wrong, those legs, stick-skinny and broken, like a toy smashed up and thrown away. Her father’s breath is harsh in such quiet, and Egg can see the ostrich, the limp, fragile neck and clouded liquid eyes. Goose pimples. Egg wants to pull away, out of the loft but her legs are so heavy, knees so weak, she’s pressed down to the floor. She thinks of the frozen figures of Pompeii, the petrified stumps outside the Badlands, Lot’s wife and all of Jericho trumpets blasting; did they kill the children too?
Her father is so still. Fumbling, Egg makes it to the ladder, down to the boxes. She stands by the chick pen. She is afraid to come closer.
“Papa,” Egg says. It is like dropping a stone down a chasm.
Her father does not turn. He kneels by the broken body, his hand stroking the feathered wing. He says, “Dog got in last night. Dog or coyote. Little bit of panic inside. This one got her head caught up in the bars. Snapped her neck.” Her father speaks in a voice so rough, as if torn out of a too-small space and caught on the jagged edges, twisting and pulling away.
“They’re stupid creatures. Jittery. They’re strong and fast, but they’re skittish. Gets them into trouble. She only had to pull her head up . . .”
He blinks, as if trying to make sense of it. He stares. He is lost in his own vision of the bars, the broken neck.
The elephants, Egg thinks. She gazes at his unruly hair, the wiry strength of his frame. She wants to help him, her Papa, but she is afraid.
He stands. “Go. Just go, Egg.”
She starts forward but he swings back, his hand raised, dismissive. His knuckles meet her chin, the click of her teeth knocking together, the shock of contact.
Egg falls back.
The shadows of the barn weave in and out, the bars and beams and the darkness of the loft. The ostriches shudder, their plume, a quivering dance, their long legs scratch at the straw in the pens, their necks bob and peck, a jerking motion. The ostriches scratch and flare, kicking at the barn gate, hissing at the bars.
Papa stands, frozen.
Egg feels the straw and grit beneath the palm of her hand, a numbness in her jaw. She runs, her hair clinging to the dampness of her forehead as she races to the house.
In her room she stomps on the Lego and dinky cars. Crash crash crash. It doesn’t matter anyway. Let it all fall down.
…
Her pictures are back, the film from Albert’s camera taken into Gustafsson’s General Store, sent on to Calgary, and now, in Egg’s hands, this tidy little package. She crawls beneath her bed and opens the flap of the envelope.
Egg likes packages.
In the first few shots of the barn, the ostriches are fuzzy, feathery lumps, and here, wha
t looks to be Egg’s thumb encroaching on the viewfinder. Behind the barn, the blank field races to the horizon. Egg has started reading about photography. In the Young Reader’s Guide to Science, there is a glass triangle that holds all the colour. If you shine a beam of light, the colours can all come out — presto magico! Egg thinks it would be neat if you could shine a light on people and all their stuff came out — all the happy and sad — like X-ray vision.
Egg would like a superpower. Just one.
Egg thinks her photographs are nice but things are more real in real life. In photographs everything looks far away. Sometimes it doesn’t even look like now. She peers closely at the photo of the barn, at the shadows of the wall. Her finger rubs a streak, a smudge; it looks like there’s a face — Albert’s face. She drops the envelope and goes screaming to Kathy.
Kathy takes a look at Egg’s pictures, at the ghosties in the dark wall of the barn. Then she clucks her tongue and says, “Double exposure.”
Egg bounces on one foot. “Are you sure? Albert’s not stuck in the camera, is he?”
“No. It’s old film. See, someone took a picture and you just took a picture on top of it, so that’s why it looks like that. Besides, there’s no such thing as ghosts.”
Kathy, who has an empirical method and everything.
Egg runs to her bedroom and slides under her bed. Her magnifying glass is there. She checks the darker objects in the photos, a bush, the side shed, the blackness of the slough. She shuffles through the photographs, searching — shadows are the key. Nekoneko on the drawer, the sparkle of the china bureau, the stubble field that retreats to the horizon. The last picture is of the barn in twilight. In that print, she sees it, an image; she can barely make it out. Her hand trembles; it is Evangeline.
…
Kathy finally relents and takes Egg into town for the grocery run. But Egg has other plans. With her magnifying glass snug in her pocket, she is on her own mission. There’s a mystery here, hidden in the photographs, the ghost images. It is like an Encyclopedia Brown Choose Your Own Adventure. They drive past the Dairy Dream, the rundown grounds of the old stockyard and park by Robertson’s Repair-All. Egg doesn’t say that there is a parking space in front of Heap’s Hardware, even if it is closer to Gustafsson’s General Store. The storefront of Robertson’s Repair-All is chock full of ancient televisions and radios. The light beams out of a dusty box against the glare of the afternoon sun.
Prairie Ostrich Page 14
