Leaning, Leaning Over Water

by Frances Itani

  Father had to wait three hours in X-ray and Emergency until one of the doctors had time to take him to the Plaster Room to do the cast. Even though the cast was wet, Duffy was the first to sign: Shame on you, you old screw. All New Year’s Day Father sat in his armchair in the living room, his leg elevated on the hassock. He’d had no sleep.

  More interesting to me was Canada’s first New Year’s baby, born at the same Ottawa hospital in which Father and Duffy had sat waiting most of the night, three floors below. They’d heard the news, Father said. It was like a zoo in there. Everyone except the mortally wounded had been celebrating.

  The last paper of the year had run a front-page spread of Father Time slipping past one side of the clockface, the Peace Tower clock of Parliament Hill. A cheery-looking toddler in diapers was emerging from the other side, the one o’clock side. I knew better but imagined this baby to be the newborn reported on the radio. There’d been an argument, the broadcast said, between Ottawa and Moose Jaw, over which baby took its first breath in the fraction of a second after midnight. Ottawa had been declared winner. Its baby girl would receive free diapers, a pink carriage and a year’s supply of baby food. From across the icy river, from the western fringes of Quebec, we felt that our baby had won.

  Granny Tracks and Mother were giving Father the cold shoulder, so the rest of us felt that we had to, as well. We did not speak to him directly or give any sign that we approved of his behaviour. This was not easy because a steady stream of visitors came through the door, all afternoon, paying homage, signing Father’s cast.

  Mother had heard “Lady of Spain” at Mona’s but it hadn’t been played until ten past one in the morning. Loyal to her children she’d sat with one ear to Mona’s kitchen radio in the noisiest room of the party, the bar.

  We were happy about our fame and bragged about it to everyone who visited: our names, even Georgie’s, had been broadcast for the world to hear throughout Ottawa and West Quebec.

  At dinner that night, Father stood at the end of the dining-room table, carving our second turkey in a week. Still rebuffed by the women, he dangled the bird’s rear in the air and said loudly, “Who wants the pope’s nose?”

  Granny Tracks, remembering her mixed Protestant-Catholic beginnings, did not acknowledge the insult. She gathered herself together and muttered in monotone to anyone who would hear, “One January first I nearly killed your grandfather Meagher. I fed him roast pork and he almost died. He chewed the meat too close to the bone and sucked the marrow. He threw up for two days and two nights and the cries that came from the sickroom drowned the noise of the trains.”

  We stared at our plates.

  I thought of Grampa’s ageless, earless face flattened into my bottom drawer, his graphed mouth coughing up chunks of roast pork.

  Georgie looked as if he might throw up. He also knew he’d be facing four more nights of turkey soup. At least he’d escaped the weekly winter walk. But that was not to be. Between turkey and plum pudding, Father banged his cast against the table leg and said to Lyd and Eddie, Georgie and me, “Get up, we’re going outside. Never mind your coats.”

  We preceded Father out the front door, which he left open wide behind him. The rapids snuffed all other sound. So accustomed were we to the roar, we only heard it when there was a visitor, opening our ears in politeness. In the moonlight, mist rose as if its shifting shroud concealed not a river but a vast and unbroken moor. Ice stretched out from the cove but every one of us knew that the current was black and swift beneath.

  “Out with the old!” Father broke all sound, shouting in ceremonial voice. He turned the corner of the house. He led our procession not the length of the shovelled path but past the raspberry bushes on the other, snowy side, the side that was never used in winter. As we followed, we tried to fit our feet into knee-deep holes his cast had punched through the snow.

  We rushed the storm door at the back of the house, trying to escape his town-crier behaviour.

  “In with the new!” he shouted.

  Georgie dragged himself in after us. His father might have chased his mother with a butcher knife but his father was not like ours.

  Cold air had swept through every room of the house. Mother had rushed from the table to close the front door behind us on our way out but she was too late; the heat had escaped. She sat back down and stared stonily ahead.

  From the dining room Granny Tracks looked from one to another as we swept snow from our shoes with the broom, as we hopped from one foot to the other in the kitchen, and blew on our hands. She grabbed the cardigan that hung from the back of her chair and draped it tightly around her.

  “Crazyman,” she said. She turned her back on us. “My daughter married a crazyman.”

  Hearing this, Georgie looked satisfied.

  In that instant, I wished to be distanced from my father. If I could have, I’d have exchanged my entire set of relatives, Granny Tracks and Georgie included, for some other reasonable, normal family.

  After Granny and Georgie had returned to Darley on the train and after we’d gone back to school, I saw a photograph taken the night of Mona’s New Year’s party. Black and white, it was the club of six with their husbands and Duffy. Granny Tracks was missing because she was behind the camera.

  I studied the twelve faces. Even though the photo was not in colour I could see the mauve of Mother’s taffeta and I could detect the wayward Spanish blood. I could smell the lavender perfume and the powder she’d patted over her cheeks to take away the shine. But her face seemed small, somehow. I worried when I thought about the photo, later.

  She had been leaning forward with some of the other women. The men were standing at the sides and behind and some of them looked roaring drunk. Most of them wore conical hats perched on their heads, an elastic under the chin. The women in their Vogue creations looked perky, strained, as if they’d turned up at the wrong party and were making the best of it. Mona had opted for a long dress, concealing her little feet. Mother was holding her lips together as if she were waiting for someone who had decided at the last minute not to come. Duffy held an enamel pee-pot, upside down, over my father’s head.

  MIRACLES

  1953

  On the last day of June, Mimi’s sister Pierrette got up in the night to use the pee-pot and looked out the upstairs window. A mile and a half across the river, she could see Ottawa lights twinkling like stars along the Richmond Road. There was a high mist at the end of the rapids below.

  She looked down then and saw a woman, upright between waves. The woman, facing her, did not tilt one way or another. She raised her left hand and moved it back and forth as if to say, Non! Non!

  Bee-Bee, the new stepfather, had just moved into the house and Pierrette took the sign to mean disapproval. Pierrette and Mimi’s own father had died in a logging accident only a year before. Pierrette had refused to attend her mother’s wedding.

  Mimi had told me all of this, but I learned about the woman in the rapids only on Saturday morning when I arrived to find everyone sitting around the breakfast table in their robes and pyjamas. Grand-mere, in the kitchen rocker, was pitching back and forth as if she were sailing a high sea. She was glad to see me.

  I never knew who belonged to whom, so many people lived in that house. Outside staircases threaded up and down the building but there were few territorial divisions inside. Two men lived there—Bee-Bee and Mimi’s uncle, Henri—but mostly there were women: sisters; and aunts old and young. “Mes tantes”“ Mimi called them. I thought of them as the aunts of the little bones.

  Not one woman in Mimi’s family had ever grown taller than the height of a twelve-year-old. Pierrette, the eldest of Mimi’s sisters and the last to be married except for Mimi, was also the most petite. Pierrette had a fiance, Ferdinand, a sixfoot bulk of a man who’d just opened a small grocery store in the village. He planned to move Pierrette away from the big house and the new stepfather, and into two rooms above the store—with plumbing.

  Bee-Bee, who clai
med to know only four words of French, three of them bad, was grilling Pierrette in English, trying to verify facts.

  “What was the woman wearing?” he said. “What colour were her clothes?”

  “There was no colour,” said Pierrette coolly. “Everything was misty.”

  “And she was standing in the middle of the rapids.”

  “Floating upright,” she said. “More like that.”

  “Was she on the Quebec side?”

  “Definitely.”

  Mimi’s mother was trying to keep the peace between Bee-Bee and her daughter. The aunts wrung their hands. “Un miracle, “ they murmured, and they looked away from one another.

  I ran home through the Pines and up the back steps. Mother was getting ready to take the eleven o’clock bus to Hull to order groceries from the A&P. I told her and Father about the miracle but they ignored that part. Mother had just pulled on her white gloves and was stepping into her spectator pumps at the kitchen door. She paused to look down. Her toes and heels looked as if they’d been dipped into a vat of old chocolate.

  “All those people in the one house,” she said. “And no indoor plumbing. I couldn’t do it. A pee-pot,” she said.

  “It’s a miracle anyone has a pot to pee in after this many years of Duplessis,” Father said.

  I saw that neither of them could be expected to understand.

  After Mother crossed the field, I went to my room and lifted my Bible cards from the bottom drawer. Every week after Sunday school in Hull, I brought a new card home and placed it next to the graphed and shaded drawing of dead Grandfather Meagher—signed by his widow, Granny Tracks. First I looked at Granny’s drawing. I stared at the glowering brows and studied the face. I erased the eyebrows and drew in thinner kinder ones and placed the picture back in the bottom drawer. Then I shuffled the Bible cards and arranged them clock-shape on my bedspread. Beneath a picture of the crumbling city of Jericho, a caption read: The people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat. I also owned, Christ sendeth out the twelve; Jairus’ daughter raised to life; The fish vomiteth out Jonah upon the dry land.

  My favourite was Christ feedeth the five thousand. I held it in my palm, wishing I’d been there. Jesus stood at the bottom of a crowded hill and behind Him was the shoving multitude that followed Him everywhere. Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, was gesturing towards the lad who was lucky enough to be holding five barley loaves and two fishes. Andrew was watching Jesus’ face to see what He would do. It was clear that Andrew was hoping for a miracle.

  There were many night trips to the pee-pot now, a steady parade of aunts taking turns and then pausing at the window on tiptoe to peer down at the waves. Grand-mere said she was glad she had a room downstairs on the far side of the house where she didn’t have to worry, at her age, about miracles and the river.

  Bee-Bee made fun of the aunts. He came into the kitchen with a bucket of water and lifted the lid of the reservoir that took up the whole side of the big stove.

  “Anybody for a miracle? Watch,” he said. “Empty!” He poured. “Full! It would be a miracle,” he said, “if anybody besides me ever carried a full pail into this house.”

  He reached into the reservoir and flicked a sprinkling of water at Mimi and me. He ducked out the door and Mimi’s mother shouted after him, “You know Henri can’t lug the buckets because of his leg in the war!” She turned to us. “Don’t play with water in the house,” she said, but we’d already chased out after him with a glass of water.

  Bee-Bee played with us like that. If we were finishing a game of hide-and-seek at dusk, and sneaking up to a corner of the house to see if home-free was safe, Bee-Bee would charge around the corner and shout, terrifying us as we screamed and ran. Because there was a big rain barrel filled with water at the back stoop, there seemed to be water fights, too, continuously, during the hot evenings of summer. The rainwater was collected by the aunts, who used it as rinse water to make their hair silky. If we were in a dry spell, they had to add vinegar to the rinse water, instead.

  Despite the lugging of every drop of water, even the aunts and the visiting sisters and their children sometimes joined in at the peak of the water wars, as Mimi and I called them. Someone would always take someone else by surprise and douse them with a full bucket of water. I had never known adults to play like that, everyone worked up to a high pitch, hurling threats, gasping and laughing and running back inside to sit around the kitchen table, and then jumping up and taking off again. There was always one last person soaked to the skin, seeking revenge, and that last person would never give up. When it was Bee-Bee, the water debts were carried over to the next night and even later into the week. When it became too dark to carry on, I was always glad that the time had come to tell Mimi I had to go home. It was a relief after running on the edge of that much excitement to be back in my own house and safe in my own bed.

  Mimi and I stayed outside and sat on the stoop. “Bee-Bee wants to build a bathroom,” she told me. “Last night he measured where to put the pipes. He wants to install a pump but he said the bathroom has to be on the bottom floor. He said, ‘Mes tantes can come downstairs to pee.’“ She paused. “Pierrette says our stepfather is taking over. She says our mother made a big mistake. Bee-Bee wouldn’t even let my mother cut her own hair for their wedding. He wants it long, he said.”

  We wondered if Mimi’s mother would attend Pierrette and Ferdinand’s wedding at the end of summer, since Pierrette had snubbed her own. We were pretty sure that Bee-Bee would have the final say.

  The caddis flies were plentiful this close to the river and we had to keep brushing them away from our faces. Uncle Henri came out to the stoop and limped down the path towards the outhouse. He had been wounded in the leg the last day of the war and wasn’t able to work because there were still pieces of metal lodged in his bones. Henri had come home with a damaged leg and a wife; he and his English bride lived in a tiny apartment at the back of the house. The Bride worked alongside one of the aunts at the Metropolitan five-and-dime, in Hull. They were both assigned to the candy counter, and they took turns bringing home banana-shaped candies with soft yellow insides, and licorice pipes with fiery red bowls.

  Just as Henri reached the outhouse at the end of the yard, the Bride came to the door and called, “Dah’ling! Dah’ling!” as if to urge him on. Mimi and I hooted with laughter and ran out of the yard. We never tired of listening to the English bride, especially when she talked about the war. During rationing, she’d told us once, a large cardboard box filled with tea had arrived in Bath from Canada. She pronounced the place “Bawth,” which we thought remarkable. She and her mother and two of their neighbours had sat at the kitchen table all of one afternoon, tearing tea bags and dumping raw tea leaves into tins. Why would the Canadians, they asked one another over and over again, why would the Canadians go to the bother of sewing tea into tiny bags only to take it out again when they wanted to drink? Henri, too, loved the stories of the Bride, even though he’d been married for eight years and had probably heard them all before.

  The sumac trees were high and full along the lower edge of the Pines, their tops linked in broad umbrellas. The birds were in there thickly, we could hear them. And the whisker grass had grown as tall as our knees. Mimi and I walked to the wall and dangled our feet over the rapids and threw in loose chunks of stone. We followed the bank upriver, towards my house. When we passed the last place of safety—or not—I pointed it out, although there was nothing to see. It was the place from which Father had drawn an invisible line that began at the chokecherry tree on shore. The line stretched first to the long and narrow Unreachable Island, surrounded by rapids at its lower end. After that, it extended several miles across water into infinity. For us, that was Britannia, in Ontario, on the other side.

  Any time we swam in our cove, we were allowed to float down on the current, feet first, but only until our toes crossed the imaginary line. Then we had to stand up, wade to shore and make our way upriver bef
ore wading in and floating down again.

  Mimi’s family lived well below the last place of safety, past the river’s curve, and past the end of the rapids. Our family lived above and always had to deal with the possibility of drifting into danger. “If you float past this line,” Father never tired of telling us, “you’ll never be able to get back.” I had tried my luck floating past the line a few times, but never when Father was around. I didn’t go too much farther but had never found it difficult to right myself and get back to shore.

  “Imagine,” said Mimi, “if we stood here and the water parted and we walked to Unreachable Island. The rapids would hang over our heads and wait for us to get through.”

  “Imagine,” I said, thinking of Christ walketh on the sea. “Imagine if we walked on top of the water. But if the miracle ended, we’d be surrounded by rapids and we’d die.”

  “Not if we had faith,” said Mimi. “My mother has faith. Mes tantes have faith. Not Bee-Bee, though. Bee-Bee doesn’t go to Mass.”

  We talked about Pierrette and Ferdinand, then, the future bride and groom. Did Pierrette have to stand on a chair to kiss her fiance? Their bodies were clearly mismatched. The subject of the bull came up—Ferdinand, who refused to butt his head like the other bulls. We both liked him, and we teased him, sometimes, about the story of the bull.