Agassiz Stories

by Sandra Birdsell

  “I need a hand,” she said.

  “It’s not our job,” I said. “It’s her job. Let her come and do it. She doesn’t care if we starve, she only cares about herself.” But my heart wasn’t in it.

  Betty threw the towel at me. “There’s enough babies around here already without you becoming one too. Help me get them washed and into bed.”

  Together we bathed the children and put them into bed. We took turns reading stories to them to take their minds off their mother who wouldn’t come inside and be a mother.

  I listened to Betty’s flat monotone voice reading, wooing the babies to sleep. Part of what happened was my fault. If I hadn’t told on my sister, none of this would have happened. I would make tea, arrange a tray of food and lure her back inside. I might even begin to help around the house. Maybe finish changing the linens on the bed. Might not complain when asked to wipe the dishes.

  I heard the door of the icehouse being closed. I crept to the window, looked down to see Mother scraping her shoes on the foot-scraper. I beckoned Truda and Rudy from the bed. They tiptoed to the window. I instructed them to say goodnight. I arranged them side by side. They cleared their throats. One, two, three — now.

  “Goodnight, Mother.”

  She’d have to answer. She’d say, “Don’t let the bed bugs bite.” And then they would reply, “Oh no, we’ll hit them black and blue with our shoes.” We waited. No answer. I nudged them again. “Goodnight,” they called once more. Their voices, clear in the moisture-laden air, were fruity and sweet.

  Still no answer.

  The screen door flapped shut. There was a long silent time. Then we heard the kitchen chair creaking beneath her weight and then the sound of her shoes dropping one after the other to the floor.

  I’ll memorize Bible verses, I vowed silently. I’ll follow Betty’s example. Then I stopped breathing, listened, as there came another sound from below. It was the dry swishing sound of the broom being swept briskly across the kitchen floor.

  I began to breathe once again. “She’s back. Listen, she’s sweeping the floor.” I sat down beside Betty who had gathered her knees up and rocked back and forth in the centre of the bed.

  My body felt weak, overpowered by the flooding of relief. The crisis was over. “I’ll make tea,” I said, “if you help me get together a plate of food for her.”

  “Are you crazy?” Betty said. “After what she did to Laurence? You go ahead and do that if you want to, but I couldn’t care less.”

  I went back to the window to think about this new development. The rock garden glowed strangely in the falling light. Beside it on the ground were the ropes from our swing, curled like two large question marks. The rocks’ pink glow dimmed slowly to a violet and then at last, a dull grey. My resolutions faded gently. Oh well, I told myself, she’s used to making her own tea anyway. If I offered to make it, the shock would kill her.

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “What she did to Laurence was awful. I almost died. And it wasn’t fair, either. He was only trying to help. She’s so unfair.”

  “She’s a witch,” Betty, my example, said, “a frigging witch.”

  The first of the whispering sounds swept in from the coulee, gently puffing the curtains in and out like a frog’s throat. I felt a slight chill. The sounds brought with them mystery, uncertainty.

  Let me bite your neck.

  I knew my mother had some of the answers to the mysteries. But the pull of an alliance between sisters was stronger. It was better than being on your own with a person who could suddenly grow tired of being your mother.

  “Piss, shit and God,” I said. “A mean witch.” I stepped out and away from my mother. Suddenly, I was afraid.

  NIGHT TRAVELLERS

  hen a woman has intercourse,” Mika told herself, “she thinks of what might happen.” She climbed in the night the hill that led away from the river and James. She travelled in a black and white landscape because it was void of details that would have demanded her attention. And the night was also a cover. Above, the starlit summer sky served only to make God seem more remote, withdrawn. As she walked, she took comfort in the sound of the frogs in the moist ditches on either side of the road, the call of an owl hunting in the park below.

  Men, she was certain, thinking of both James and Maurice, didn’t think of such things as a seed piercing another seed and a baby growing instantly, latching itself fast to the sides of her life. Men were inside themselves when they shot their juices. It was just another trick that God played, to keep the babies coming. Replenish the earth. Well — she was doing her job.

  She reached the top of the hill and then she stooped slightly, giving in to the weight of a stone which she cradled close to her breasts. If Maurice should ever think to ask, she would be able to say, “I was out gathering rocks for my rock garden. It’s the only time I can go, when the children are sleeping.” And she would still be telling the truth.

  She stopped to catch her breath and turned to look back at the park beside the river. Lot’s wife looking back with longing towards a forbidden city. But unlike Lot’s wife, she did not become a pillar of salt. From among the trees in the park, light shone out from the tiny window in James’s bunkhouse. He had turned on the lantern. Pride made her wish that he would have stood for a few decent moments and watched while she climbed the hill. For this reason she’d kept her back straight until she was certain he couldn’t see her anymore. But already, he was stretched out, lost in one of the many books he kept on the floor beside the cot. What did she expect? That had been their agreement, not to look for anything from each other. She had Maurice and the children. He had his dream of voyages in a sailboat.

  At the top of the hill, the road stretched broad and straight, one half mile to the centre of town. She could see lights as cars on Main Street headed in and swiftly out of town. She passed by the grove of fruit trees that surrounded her parents’ garden. The scent of ripe fruit carried across the road and she thought of the apples her mother had given to her, baskets of them, in the bottom of the cupboard. Her parents’ white cottage stood beyond the garden in the darkness. I’m sorry, she said. I forgot about the apples. But with the children my hands are already frill. She thought of the children, round cheeked and flushed with their dreams and her step quickened.

  Beyond the ditch, there was a sudden rustling sound, like an animal rising up quickly. Mika, startled, stood still and listened. A dark figure stepped from the cover of the fruit trees onto the path that joined the cottage to the road.

  “Who’s there?” She heard movement, fabric rubbing against fabric. A dry cough. “Papa, is that you?”

  Her father came forward in the darkness. Relief made her knees weak.

  “Liebe, Mika. I was hoping, but I knew in my heart it was you.”

  Knew it was me, what? What did he know? “What are you doing up so late?” she asked instead. “The night air isn’t good for your lungs.”

  “When one of my children is in trouble, I don’t worry about such things.”

  “What’s this, trouble?” she asked. She felt her heart jump against the stone she clutched tightly to her breast. As he turned towards her, he was illuminated by the moon and she saw that he’d pulled his pants on over his night clothes. His shirt lay open, exposing the onion-like skin on his chest to the cool breeze. She saw concern for her in the deep lines in his face. If only he would use anger, it would be easier to oppose him.

  “Nah, you know of what I speak. I’ve seen your coming and going. I’ve seen him. I’m ashamed for you.”

  “What you’ve seen is me gathering rocks for a rock garden.” She held up the stone. “I gather them from beneath the bridge.”

  “Mika.” There was sorrow in his voice.

  It was the same tone of voice he’d used on her all her life. It made her change her course of action because she didn’t want to be responsible for his sorrow. It was the same thing with Maurice. Peace at all costs. Maurice had forced himself on her and she�
�d forgiven him because of an offer to build a new window in the kitchen. She hated that about herself.

  “So, you’ve seen my coming and going and you’re ashamed for me. I’m not.”

  He blocked her path. “Come to the house. We should talk and —”

  She pushed around him and began to walk away. Talk? Talk about Maurice and his black night moods? About another baby coming in a house full of babies? No, we will talk about my responsibilities instead.

  “Have you travelled that far then,” she heard him call after her, “that you can now make excuses for your behaviour? What am I to tell the elders at church?”

  Before her, silhouetted against the sky, the flutter of wedge-shaped wings, two bats feeding on insects. They would become entangled in her hair. She heard his light step on the road and then he walked beside her. “Why should you tell them anything?” she asked. “It’s none of their concern. What I do is my own business.”

  “We’re a community,” he said. “People united by our belief, like a family. When one member hurts, the whole family suffers.”

  “A family. I’m not part of that family,” Mika said. “I don’t belong anywhere.”

  “How can you say that? The women welcome you into their homes. They pray for you.”

  “Oh, they welcome me, all right. I’m to be pitied, prayed for. It gives them something to do.”

  They walked for a few moments without speaking. He pulled at his thick white moustache, the way he did when he was deep in thought. She stopped, turned to him. “Look, Papa. You know they don’t accept Maurice. Even if he wanted to go, they don’t invite him into their homes. They don’t really accept me, either. So, if you feel it’s important to tell the elders, tell them. I don’t care.”

  The bats — their flight was a dance, a sudden dipping, a flutter, a smooth glide and they swerved back in among the trees. Gone. She walked faster. “The children are alone,” she said.

  “Oh, so you think of the children at least?” he said.

  “Of course I think of them. But I need something for myself too.”

  He put his large cool hand on her arm and drew her to the side of the road. His sun-tinged complexion had paled and there was fear in his eyes. “But not this,” he said. “Not this. What are you saying? You need to ask God to forgive you. The wages of sin is death.”

  Always, Bible verses, given in love but becoming brick walls, erected swiftly in her path. The hair on her arms and neck prickled. “Papa,” she said. “It’s my sin and it’s my death. Leave me be.” She lifted the stone up and away from her breast and slammed it into the ground. She turned from him quickly and ran with her hands pressed against her stomach.

  She undressed quickly, her heart still pounding, and listened to their sounds, the children, breathing all through the house. She’d stood first in one doorway, listening for them, then in another, and finally she’d bent over the baby in the crib at the foot of her bed. She’d felt for him in the dark, found a moist lump beneath the blankets. She’d changed his diaper without awaking him. Maurice was not home. He was still at the hotel. She waited for her heart to be still so that she could sleep. She rubbed her stomach gently. What would it be, she wondered, this one that she carried with her to James? Would it be touched or bent in any way by her anger? Below, a door opened. She stiffened, then rolled over and faced the wall as Maurice came up the stairs.

  “What are you thinking?” James asked.

  Mika swung her legs over the side of the cot and sat up. Her feet rested in a trapezoid of moonlight which shone through the small window of the bunkhouse. She’d been half-listening to James telling her about some one person he knew who had never let him down. His voice rose and fell in its strange British accent and she was able to think above it. Through the other small window at the end of the bunkhouse, she could see her parents’ cottage, a white sentinel on a hill. It was in darkness once again, but she was certain her father’s white face looked out from behind the lace curtains.

  “Oh, I’m not thinking about any one thing in particular.” But all day she’d been wondering, how could you be forgiven by God for something you’d done if you weren’t sorry you’d done it?

  He rose up on his elbow and ran his hand along her arm. The smell of the bunkhouse was his smell, faintly like nutmeg, the warmth of sun trapped in weathered grey planks and it was also the smell of the other men who had slept there; the men who had come to town as James had after the flood to help clean and rebuild it. She put her hand overtop his.

  “God, you’re beautiful,” he said.

  “Don’t say that.”

  “What, not say you’re beautiful?” He laughed and sat up beside her. He reached for his cigarettes on the windowsill. “You’re a strange one.”

  He was tired of listening to himself talk and had drawn her in by saying, “You’re beautiful.” In the beginning, he’d pranced around her, so obviously delighted that he’d charmed her into coming away from the river bank with him, through the park to this bunkhouse. He’d followed her about, picking up the clothing she’d shed, hanging it over a chair so she wouldn’t look rumpled when she left. He was a meticulous love-maker. He began by kissing the bottoms of her feet, the backs of her knees, her belly, causing the swing of the pendulum inside her to pause for several seconds at midpoint, so that she was neither being repelled nor attracted but suspended and still.

  “Why don’t you want me to tell you that you’re beautiful?” James asked.

  Because she didn’t think she was beautiful. There was nothing beautiful about a person who would come home swollen and moist from love-making into the bed of another man. But what Maurice had done was not beautiful either. Two wrongs don’t make a right, she’d instruct her own children.

  “No, what I meant was, don’t say God. Don’t bring God into this.”

  Their thighs touched as they sat on the edge of the cot and she was amazed at how quickly she had become accustomed to the touch and smell of another man. The flare of his match revealed his exquisitely ugly nose. It was a fleshy hook pitted with blackheads. His chin and the skin around his mouth were deeply scarred by acne. You’re so ugly, she’d once told him. She’d watched for evidence of injury, a faltering of his tremendous self-confidence. He’d laughed at her attempt, seen through it. She saw him daily as he walked past the house and he was always in a hurry, loose-jointed and thin, moving towards some vision he had of himself and his future.

  He held the lit cigarette up to his watch. “Shouldn’t you think about heading back? It’s almost twelve.”

  “I’ve still got time.”

  He got up from the cot and his tanned chest moved into the trapezoid of light and then his buttocks, pinched together, muscular as he walked to the table beneath the window. He gathered up her hairpins and dropped them into her lap. He never forgot. He made certain each time that she left exactly as she’d come. She scooped the pins up and put them into the pocket of her dress.

  “Don’t you think you should fix your hair?”

  “It’s all right. Maurice is never home before I am.”

  He leaned over her, kissed her forehead. He slipped his hand inside her unbuttoned dress and fondled her. “I love your breasts. I think that’s what I’ll miss the most about Canada, your beautiful sexy breasts.”

  She put her arms about his neck and drew him down on top of her. “Once I’m gone,” he said into her neck, “if we ever meet again, it will be chance. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” In another month he wouldn’t want her anyway. Already she could feel the baby between them. She listened to the sound of his heart pushing against her chest. The wind had fallen and the silence in the park was complete, the river still. The moment passed. She fingered the hairpins in her pocket. She pulled them loose and scattered them into the folds of his blanket. He’d find them tomorrow. When he was making his bed, tight corners, planning his day, his mind leaping forward to the next event, he’d find her pins and he’d think of her for o
ne second. She knew he wouldn’t think of her longer than that, or wonder what she might be doing at that moment or try and recall her features as she did his; she even longed for the sight of his lanky body, his brown trousers flapping loosely about his ankles, the funny way he walked, arms swinging, leading with his ugly nose. I thought of you today, he’d said once. And I got this enormous stiff prick. I think of you too. She couldn’t say, I love you.

  “You’d better go,” he said. “Before I change my mind and keep you here with me all night.”

  She pushed him from her, sat up and buttoned her dress. She used his comb and began combing her hair which was tangled and damp with sweat. The comb seemed to contain some residue of his energy, a reminder of the range of feelings she’d experienced only thirty minutes before. James got up, walked to the door and she followed him. He stood naked on the step. She gave him the comb. He plucked her dark hairs from its teeth and let the breeze catch them away. Above them, the stars were brilliant and clear. “Will you come tomorrow?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. If I can, I will.”

  “Try.” He took her hand in his. He pressed the hairpins into her hand. “You’ve forgotten these.”

  Mika walked up the hill away from the park, the river, James. She heard nothing of the sounds of the night, the singing of insects, the owl hunting, nor did she see the phosphorous glow of fireflies among the tall grasses in the ditch. She was listening to the sound of her feet on the road, her heart beating, her breath labouring slightly as she climbed the hill and her thoughts. How could she be forgiven by God and brought to a state of serenity and continue to see James at the same time?

  When she reached the top of the hill, her father waited on the path, pacing back and forth, swishing mosquitoes from his arms with a switch of leaves. Mika walked faster so that he would know she had no intention of stopping. He ceased pacing. She lifted her head and strode by him. She felt the sting of leaves on her legs. She stopped suddenly, her breath caught in her throat, and fought back anger. He threw the switch aside.