Leaning, Leaning Over Water

by Frances Itani

  Leaning, Leaning Over Water

  A Novel In Ten Stories

  Frances Itani

  For my brothers, Terry, Brian and David. And for our late, much-loved sister, Marilyn.

  Where are you going?

  …where else. To the part

  that must be found out, where one day

  you can return on your own.

  —Armand Ruffo, “Old Story”

  Opening In The Sky

  The only motion or sound is that of the river, and I do not understand that…the secret will have to be transformed into mystery before I can understand; know.

  —Rudy Wiebe,

  Playing Dead

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  MOVING IN

  A LONG NARROW BUNGALOW

  TRUDE

  NEW YEAR, 1953

  MIRACLES

  SISTERS

  SPIRIT SPIDERS

  BOLERO

  PLAY PIANO

  GO IN AND OUT THE WINDOW

  INTERPROVINCIAL

  MOVING ON

  LEANING, LEANING OVER WATER

  Acknowledgements

  More Praise for Leaning, Leaning Over Water

  Other Books By Frances Itani

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  MOVING IN

  A LONG NARROW BUNGALOW

  On Sunday, Maura rose an hour before she had to wake the children. She slipped through the house like a spirit, opened the front door; allowed the river breeze to filter past the screen. This was her treasured time—before she took over the grip of household affairs, before she became what she must be.

  Her first sip from her cup of tea was the best moment of all. She could stand at the window to drink. She could sit on a kitchen chair. She had choices. She could take a few moments to read—not poetry, as Jock liked to do, but thick books that took months to get through because she could give them only small portions of her time. She ran her fingers over the threading cover of Stories from Australia, a book she deliberately read slowly because it was about far away and she wanted it to last forever.

  Or she might choose not to read at all. She reached up to the shelf above the countertop and turned the knob of her radio, keeping the sound low, hoping a child would not wake and drift out of a bedroom to come and stand beside her.

  The clothes for Sunday school and church were washed and ironed, ready to slip on. Eddie had polished the Sunday shoes, now lined up outside the pantry. Jock’s one suit was always ready: for church, for weddings, for funerals. It hung from the coat tree behind the dining-room door. Jock’s few coins were spread over the doily on the right side of the buffet. The left side was Maura’s though she had nothing, really, to put there—her purse, a pair of mended gloves. This was her space—no one else’s. The children were not curious and left it alone, seeing nothing of interest. But like the early morning hour that belonged to Maura, so did the rectangle of space. It was her tiny area, invisibly fenced. Maura’s. Sometimes it helped her to remember who she was—

  Mother, everything contained in the word. Of three children: Lyd, the eldest, with her long legs and her mother’s dark hair, the one who liked to stay close to home; Trude, the watcher, neither all King nor all Meagher, the true child-between; Eddie, her only son, the earnest one who bore the curly hair of Jock’s side, like the men of the King family before him.

  Maura was: Daughter. Who’d once lived with her own widowed mother in the railroad town of Darley, Province of Ontario.

  Sister, to older brother Weylin, who married Arra.

  Aunt, to young Georgie, named Georgie-Porgie by her children.

  And herself: Once a young woman who’d watched troop trains, full-bellied with cheering young men, slide past on the tracks behind her mother’s house. Stood near the tracks and accepted armfuls of mail shoved at her from open windows of the trains as young men went off to war. Waited for mail of her own, mail that did not come.

  She’d stood, too, in a different patch of yard, as the young men returned. A different kind of cheering, then. Lists of names in the paper in small black print; lists she’d scanned while holding her breath. Looking for names, early casualties, one name: the one who would not be coming home on those trains.

  She’d met Jock during the early years of the war. Jock had stayed behind, to work in the munitions plant. He had not left; others had. Jock had not known about the other. Or the long months she’d been forced to stay inside, or the hidden loss at the end.

  Maura tried not to think, tried not to remember.

  She had become—

  Wife. Of Jock King, who several years after the war, when the converted plant was about to shut down, hauled an atlas from the shelf and was seduced by the horseshoe shape of the Canadian Shield. “The earth in its most solid state,” he told her. “Bare-bones Precambrian rock.” Maura was not so sure. The speck of village from which he’d returned and announced that he’d found a job was on the edge of a wide river. In the atlas, the speck was borderline, definitely borderline. “Wait till you see the view,” Jock had told her. “You could travel to Kingdom Come and back, and you’d never see a view like this.”

  And brought her, on a train, with three children. First to Ottawa, where they transferred to a streetcar that carried them across the river to Quebec. Then, a bus, the whole trip taking an hour and a half to reach—

  House. A long narrow bungalow in a tiny village at the end of a dirt road beside the swiftest portion of the Ottawa River. That first day when Maura had stood inside the closed front porch and looked out at heaving rapids through its many windows, Jock had come up behind her and said, “We’re on the edge but we made it. I think we’re okay.” He’d tapped a foot on the porch floor as if to let her know that the house itself might be constructed of Precambrian rock. Though Jock was inches away, he did not reach through the space between them. Maura looked down at the painted grey boards of the porch floor and out across the water towards Ontario. She thought of the darkness she’d left behind; she tried not to be pulled back by sorrow. But all she could say to herself was: He’s brought me to live beside a fast-flowing river, and I don’t know how to swim.

  Now, on this Sunday morning, moments before she tiptoed into the bedrooms to wake the children, she became aware of the lulling sound of choral music that drifted from the radio above her. She felt herself rise to meet it, an expanse of her that rushed through the house and out the door and into the world beyond.

  Jock lay in bed, listening for the all-clear. He pictured his wife and children running through the field to catch the bus out of the village and he murmured to himself, “The whole creation groaneth and travaileth.” He had no particular duties that day and did not have to join his family in Hull, later, for church. He would listen to “Sunday Chorale” on CBC, in the evening, instead. For now, he just wanted to lie there, thinking or not thinking. Sunday morning was the only time he ever got to be alone in his own home.

  He closed his eyes and waited for the silence to open. Heard the late summer call of the killdeer and was thankful for the mercy of Sundays. Thankful that he did not have to get up at daybreak and walk the length of the village, his soles grinding into cinder chips as he neared the factory. Thankful that he did not have to listen to the enduring drone and slap of machine, or fill orders in August for the Christmas market in Saskatchewan, windows propped open with sticks all around him, men working in their undershirts, no place to escape the heat; the long open room of stone as good as it was going to get. He did not have to lean into the wide sill where he stood to eat his lunch. Nor look through the open window, wondering at the ability of buttercup and th
istle to erupt through stone. No, he lay on his mattress and sank into his day of rest. Listened to the shore birds, and allowed words to ripple through his head. He reached for the book of poems on his bedside table, but before he opened the cover, his memory released part of its hoard—lines of a poet who once sat at a desk on this same continent and wrote:

  My lady’s hair the fond winds stir

  And all the birds make songs for her.

  Jock thought of how he had left Darley. Of jobs he’d had and jobs that were still to come. “Set me down anywhere and I can adapt,” he’d told Maura. “I can adapt to anything.” It was his picture of himself, meeting change and adversity. In his last job, before they’d moved, he’d known that the plant would close. Town going under, he’d told Maura. Through silent resistance, he’d said to himself: Dead-end town. He had a family to feed.

  On weekends he boarded buses, riding to nearby places to scout around for work, interesting work, not munitions work. The trips took him farther and farther. He quit the buses because choking dust rose up through the floors.

  He switched to trains, the longest journey taking him east, to Ottawa. Before he stepped down and into the grand spaces of Union Station, the train hauled him across a trestle spanning the Ottawa River. Past the E. B. Eddy mills and up over the old timber slides at the Chaudière Falls. Minutes later, after poking its engine into Hull, the train recrossed the river on a high soot-blackened bridge and chuffed back to Ottawa. Jock looked over his shoulder at pyramids of logs taller than the buildings of the mill itself. What he saw was Quebec.

  Any place that has this much timber has a job for me, he said. His footsteps echoed beneath the cavernous ceilings of the station, past rows of high wooden pews. He felt as if he were deep inside a Roman bath. He found himself in a tunnel under the street and surfaced at the side door of the Château Laurier. So far he had not even seen Confusion Square. Choosing the first in a line-up of grey buses, he hopped aboard and crossed the Ottawa River for the third time that day, continuing into the country to the end of the line. Once again he was beside the river, this time twenty miles upstream, in Quebec. He’d been following the Ottawa but hadn’t seen it because all those trees were in the way.

  The factory where he’d found work that day was the one he worked in now, set off in a field at the crossroads that led to the tiny French village of St. Pierre, population four hundred. Four-thirty Saturday afternoon he noticed a sign, walked in, and got himself a job. Not in timber, but etching aluminum trays with fleurs-de-lis. Reason to move his family. Hope.

  He thought of the small damp factory that would become his place of work, and of the large well-lit place he’d allowed himself to imagine. He became so depressed by his decision he continued along rue Principale to the one hotel, the St. Pierre, and asked for a beer. Again, he thought of his first look at the new place of work, all chimney and dark stone. He would carry the picture of it forever. What would Maura say, and where would he put her and the children? He drank three bottles of beer and turned to the man beside him at the bar, and with a clumsiness of hands and Ontario high-school French he asked when the next bus would leave the village. The man was English; his name was Duffy, and his wife had just run out on him. Duffy had lost out on life’s grab for happiness but he had a real deal for Jock. He had a house to sell.

  Jock had walked to the end of the village with Duffy and stood on the dirt road that overlooked river, rapids, pines. He’d allowed the view to enter him the way he had entered the view. He had not hesitated an instant before agreeing to take the bungalow off Duffy’s hands.

  Sunday noon, Trude fried cheese for her father. Oil burst through the Cheddar, oozing up from its own thick crust. She fried blood pudding in the same cast-iron pan. Sat at the kitchen table and ate the same meal. After Sunday school, it was the children’s job to fend for themselves while Maura prepared the weekly roast and peeled the turnip and potatoes for supper.

  Trude knew that Lyd would scoff at her cooking. Lyd kept telling her that blood pudding really was blood, congealed in animal intestine. As a matter of fact, it didn’t look much like pudding to Trude; when she sliced it with a knife it was a pasty dark maroon. Their father was noncommittal while the blood-pudding argument was batted back and forth above his head. “That’s enough,” he finally said in his tone-of-voice, and the two girls shut up.

  Aiming for his own bubble of peace, Jock began to chant, “Wee, sleeket, cowran tim’rous beastie, O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!”

  Trude glanced at her mother’s back, at her mother’s long dark hair swept into a roll, at the Sunday dress covered by an apron. She listened to her mother’s silence and her father’s poetry while she cleaned and scrubbed the cast-iron pan. It was her job to wash the Sunday midday dishes.

  It was Trude’s job, too, to write to Granny Tracks and let her know what the family was up to since Jock had moved them to Quebec. Granny Tracks was Maura’s mother; her real name was Mary Meagher. She lived in Ontario in the same house she’d always lived in before Grandfather Meagher had died, but because the Darley trains ran close behind it, the children called her Granny Tracks.

  Dear Granny Tracks,

  I have my first paying job. Father hired me to roll cigarettes. He pays twenty-five cents a week. My fingers smell like tobacco.

  Trude liked the job but it put her at her father’s beck and call. Responsibility goes with a salaried position, he’d told her. It didn’t seem to matter to him that she was next at bat or that he’d foiled a game of scrub. One pah-tata two pah-tata three pah-tata four. She could hear the others dividing into teams, outside in the sun.

  Trade created wondrous oversized cigarettes while seated at Jock’s desk in the living room. She faced a wooden frame and a flat piece of red rolling rubber controlled at each end by a silver wheel. She tucked tobacco into the trough and inserted a delicately long strip of Vogue paper. She wet the edge with a cotton tip, tugged the wheels forward and Voila! Into the trench fell a fifteen-inch cigarette.

  Father says I have the touch. I can make a cigarette that’s not scrawny with tobacco shreds sticking out of it, and not plump so it’s bursting at the seams.

  A half razor blade was stowed underneath, in a miniature compartment with a sliding cover. Trude sliced the giant cigarette into five reasonable ones and packed them into Father’s silver case. When the case was full she snapped it shut. Job done.

  Lyd’s job, as eldest, was to sweep the house. She swept right through the long narrow bungalow one door to the other. She swept carpets until clouds of dust encompassed entire rooms. She put a record on the record player in the living room and sang “Jezebel” and then “Cold, Cold Heart.” She twined her dark hair up to the top of her head and she kissed her own arm, pressing her lips to the softness of her skin. She whispered, “I love you,” because she was practising and had every intention of being ready, when the first kisser came along.

  After the sweeping was finished Lyd walked away from the job. She walked away leaving heaps of dust and broom straw in doorways between rooms, exactly where she’d swept.

  In winter, Eddie, the youngest, carried out the ashes and brought in the coal, but on hot days in summer it was his job to run up rue Principale between courses to buy a brick of ice cream for dessert. The others sat waiting, at the table. A long bar of sun lowered itself to the kitchen window and blazed into Trude’s eyes. When Eddie came back with the ice cream, he was out of breath, his hair damp, his curls stuck to his forehead.

  He set the brick beside the five stacked saucers in front of Maura, and he waited. The ice cream had to be eaten at one meal because the icebox in the summer kitchen could not keep it frozen.

  Maura’s job was to slice. She peeled back the cardboard until the sides flattened. She made four nicks across the surface, measuring for fairness. Each member of the family was served a band of pink, white and brown, the edges round with melting. Eddie, still panting from his run across the field, was permitted the scraping of the me
lted parts.

  Jock’s job, when he wasn’t at the factory etching fleurs-de-lis onto aluminum trays, was to ensure that his children grew up and that they grew up well. He wanted them to know about poetry and imagination. He wanted them to know about life and danger, the sure connection between the two. When he first moved them to the village he took them to the ruins of the old hydro wall and showed them how the wall was crumbling outward over rapids. He told them never to lean against it, never, if they wanted to stay alive.

  Later, binoculars around his neck, he stalked the river and paced the bank. He inspected cloud formations above the waves and recited, “For de win’ she blow lak hurricane, Bimeby she blow some more.” He called his children down to shore in front of the house and taught them to memorize west by a sun that was sinking below the trees across the cove. If they learned west, they’d know east—sun rising over rapids—and south, a quarter turn to the right. “You can see a storm coming a mile away,” he told them. “See those black clouds? In eight minutes, nine tops, they’ll be hanging over the roof.”

  He rode the bus to Hull and bought a barometer at Kelly-Leduc. He installed it on the porch wall near the grinning sturgeon that had been mounted over the doorway and hung there with its bony scutes and hoselike snout. After the barometer, life was never the same. Jock taught the children high pressure, low pressure, how the arrow fluctuated before a storm and how it stilled in periods of stagnant heat. “Stand with your back to the wind,” he told them. “Low pressure’s on your left, high on your right.” During summer storms they disappeared to the barn to play in the attic, but he came after them and shouted up from outside, “Barometer’s changing, watch for the clearing! You should be able to see the whole thing from up there. Watch for the clearing. It’s an amazing view.”