A Song for Nettie Johnson

by Gloria Sawai

  © Gloria Sawai, 2001. First us edition, 2002.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Edited by Edna Alford.

  Book and cover design by Duncan Campbell.

  Cover image, “Woman Dancing in Meadow” by Gary Isaacs / Photonica.

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Sawai, Gloria, date-

  A song for Nettie Johnson

  ISBN 978-1-55050-223-9

  eISBN 978-155050-713-3

  i. Title.

  ps8587.a3894s66 2001c813'.54c2001-911221-1

  pr9199.3.s392s66 2001

  Available in Canada from:

  Coteau Books

  2517 Victoria Avenue

  Regina, Saskatchewan

  Canada S4P 0T2

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Saskatchewan Arts Board, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp), and the City of Regina Arts Commission, for its publishing program.

  For my parents, Gustav and Ragnhild,

  my brothers, Donald and Robert,

  my children, Naomi and Kenji

  “Look to the rock from which you were hewn,

  the quarry from which you were dug.”

  – Isaiah 51:1

  “Grace is everywhere.”

  – Georges Bernanos

  A Song for Nettie Johnson

  From her chair at the edge of the quarry she looks down at the bottom of the pit – as wide and long as a garden, as big as a front yard with grass, or the sunny porch of a white mansion somewhere far away.

  She looks. But she doesn’t climb down anymore. Doesn’t slip on loose gravel and cascading sand or, reaching the dry floor of the pit, kneel on pebbles to see the beetles scramble to their little houses under the stones. She could, she’s not old, not yet fifty, but she doesn’t. Nevertheless, she remembers: stones and beetles, and the lonely space below the wind.

  She feels for the buttonhole on her sweater, searches for a button to secure the garment more tightly against her chest. But the button isn’t there, hasn’t been there for as long as she can remember, wasn’t there even when her mother was alive a long, long time ago.

  Her mother is an angel of light. She is slim and golden and wears a pale blue dress and plays a harp. She holds the silver harp on her lap, and her thin fingers slide over the strings, and the music lifts the stars.

  But her mother isn’t here, the small black harp she used to play on winter nights inside the trailer is in a box at the back of the closet, and the sweater has no buttons, not one. Tomorrow she will look for a pin. Somewhere in the trailer there is a safety pin. She will find it tomorrow.

  She glances at the blue book lying on her lap, strokes the cover with her fingers, and rocks in the chair, back and forth slowly. The chair’s rungs move easily in the deep grooves they’ve made among the stones. In the sky above the quarry a magpie squawks.

  She opens the book and examines the words. They are printed in two straight columns down the page, but the print is faint, the paper smudged, some of the letters gone entirely. She presses her finger on the top word in the first column.

  “Stone,” she says softly to the word under her finger.

  “Stone,” she says again, loudly, as if it were a cry to someone she can’t see, someone beyond the quarry.

  “Stone,” she calls, and her voice echoes above the prairie.

  “S-t-o-n-e.” She spells the word slowly, each letter distinct, melodic. She lifts her finger from the page and looks closely at the printed word.

  “That is correct,” she says.

  She places her finger on the second word.

  “Dust,” she calls. And the magpie swoops down from the sky into the branches of the willow tree.

  “D-u-s-t,” she spells. She removes her finger and examines the spelling.

  “Ha,” she says. “Right again.”

  She closes the book, rests her hands on it, and rocks gently in the chair. Dry wind blows against her face, against her skin, tight and hard and darkened by the sun. It lifts her hair, the colour of ripe wheat, swirls it in front of her, pressing the strands against her cheeks, her chin, her bare neck. She loops her finger into the buttonhole of the sweater, looks up, and says quietly, “Sometimes it helps, sometimes it does help, just to spell.”

  Behind her, in the tiny bedroom of the trailer, he is sleeping, his lean body curved under the blanket, his weathered face sunk into the pillow. He’s dreaming of rain, of the creek bed below the quarry hill once more filled with water, of robins splashing, sparrows drinking. He sighs in his sleep, and a long procession of people march across the prairie to the creek. One by one they step into the stream, splashing their feet and singing, Oh thou that tellest good tidings to Zion.... The room’s one small window lets in a rectangle of light that rests on the grey blanket covering him.

  He awakens, blinks his eyes against the light, and sings, mumbling, the rest of the line, get thee up into a high mountain. He raises one hand above the covers, moves the melody through the air with his fingers. He stops. Can’t remember the rest of the song. How could he forget something he’s known so long? Since university days? And heard so often? “Get thee up into a high mountain,” he says, his voice scolding. “Get thee up,” he repeats, more firmly. “Get thee up right now, Eli, and get moving.”

  But first, he turns on his side, reaches under the bed with his long arm, scrunches his body closer to the edge, stretches his arm farther under the springs, and farther still, circling his thin arm over the dusty linoleum, his fingers searching. Then he remembers. It’s not there. He’s thrown it out. Thrown them all out. Every bottle. He’s not drinking any more. He’s sober. The realization comes as a shock so early in the morning and just awakened from a gentle dream.

  He retrieves his arm, swings it across the bed to the empty space beside him. She’s gone too, her pillow cold. He lies back, thin and chilly under the blanket. It’s not fair, having to start the day with two such losses.

  Outside, the wind rolls and dips and touches the land, bending the stems of thistles, pushing their brittle leaves to click against each other, moving the little stones and hard kernels of sand to sift and scrape and clatter softly in their tiny houses in the pockets of the earth.

  He opens the trailer door. Fully dressed now, he stands on the steps and watches her for a moment.

  “My Lady of the Quarry,” he says – to the back of her head, to the back of the rocking chair that faces the quarry, to the back of her, Nettie, rocking.

  “Eli,” she says. “You’re up.” She does not turn to him.

  “My Lady of the Word,” he says.

  “Oh stop that,” she says.

  “I’m going now,” he says.

  “Oh?”

  “To town. I’ve got an important errand.”

  “Oh sure.”

  “It’s October. It’s time.”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “I’ll be back,” he says.

  “Ha.”

  “I said I would and I will.”

  “Tell me another one.”

  “This afternoon when
I’m finished.”

  “Finished at the Golden West?”

  “I’m not going to the Golden West.”

  “Oh sure.”

  He walks the few steps from the trailer to her chair, stops behind her and touches her hair with his fingers.

  “I always come back, Nettie.”

  Her face listens. Eyes narrow, lips tighten. Her gaze moves from the book on her lap to the ground at her feet, to the quarry in front of her, to the pasture beyond the quarry, to the horizon’s edge and up, more, still more, neck stretching, to the blue dome directly above her. She’s measuring his words.

  “That’s what you say.” She opens the book again, face sour.

  “Come with me,” he says.

  “Never.”

  “Leave the damn pit for awhile.” He slides his hand across her slim back, feels its firmness. “And come.”

  “Don’t try any of your tricks,” she says. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  He walks away from her, around the quarry to the hill’s edge, where he turns, facing her, and says, “I’ll wave to you below the hill, beside the willow tree. Will you watch for me?”

  “You mean look at you?”

  “Something like that.”

  “It’s tiring to do that all the time,” she says.

  He stands there for a moment. And she sees his body tall against the sky. Then he turns and steps over the hill’s rim and down through gravel and small rocks to the bottom. Here he walks into the dry creek bed, the soles of his shoes slippery against the dusty pebbles, and crosses to the other side.

  By the willow tree he stops, turns, looks up, waits for her to appear at the hill’s edge. He wants to wave to her. He wants her to wave back. He waits for this desire to manifest itself in the air above him, to change the nature of the space between them, two simple movements, his wave, her response. But she doesn’t appear, so he turns his face toward town and steps out into the broad pasture that lies before him.

  When she knows he’s gone – across the creek and into Jacobson’s pasture – she drops the book, stands up, and goes to the ridge of the hill.

  “Well, be careful then,” she calls. “Watch out for cactus.”

  The tiny particles of her voice flow over the hillside, over the creek bed and the willow tree, and into the pasture.

  She calls louder. “Keep your eyes open. Don’t step in a gopher hole.” And the little pieces of sound speed through the air and almost touch him.

  She sees him in the pasture leaning forward as if pressing against a strong wind, his steps slow. “You’re not that old,” she says, “so stop pretending.” She leans her own thin body out toward him. A breeze blows against her, moving the cloth of her long skirt, the colour of fallen leaves, against her legs, and pressing against the faded green sweater that has no buttons.

  “Look at him,” she says finally. “Away he goes. So far. Thousands of miles. He’ll never come back, I can count on that, that’s one thing I can count on.”

  She kneels beside the quarry, digs among the stones with her fingers, and picks up a smooth grey pebble. She lays it in the palm of her hand and curls her fingers over it. Small and snug, it fits in her palm like a baby in its basket.

  “Would you like to go for a little walk?” she asks.

  “Yes, I would,” she answers.

  She takes the long way around the quarry, holding the pebble. She stops, looks down at some wild oats, creamy yellow, swaying a little at her feet, and a single purple vetch beside a rock. She sees a grasshopper crouched on the ground, wings folded, then sees it leap up into the small circle of light around it. “Ho,” she says and moves on. When she gets to the chair, she sits down and puts the stone on her lap, the small blue book beside it. And she says to the dry and moving air in front of her, and to the clouds and the one beyond the clouds, “I can do something too, you know. I can spell.”

  In the golden chair above the sky, her angel mother in a pale blue dress moves her fingers over the harp strings, and the melody falls down like rain.

  And Nettie gathers the song in her arms and folds it against her heart and holds it there. She rocks back and forth in the chair. And her voice when she sings is full of longing.

  My bonnie lies over the ocean,

  My bonnie lies over the sea,

  My bonnie lies over the ocean,

  Oh, bring back my bonnie to me.

  If you were a farmer or rancher or one of the town men who drank at the Golden West, and if you were taking a shortcut from Nettie’s place, through the pasture and into the town of Stone Creek, you would, just south of the creamery, cross a shallow ditch lined with thorny clumps of thistle, and step onto the narrow road running north and south. Walking north on this road you would pass the creamery, once alive and smelling thick of milk and butter, once noisy and wet, water running from hoses and taps, splashing over the concrete floor, gurgling into drains, down pipes, and into sour sloughs behind the building, once busy with men come to deliver battered cans of cream, come to talk awhile with Eric Sorenson in white smock and black boots, the town’s only Dane, who tasted of every can, spitting the white liquid onto the wet floor where it flowed in creamy rivulets over the concrete.

  But it hasn’t rained for several months. The fields are bare, pastures dry, the creamery closed. And Eric has retired to his large brick house in town.

  If you were to continue a short distance past the creamery, you would come to the big hill, its incline long and steady, packed with dirt, sprinkled with dusty gravel. Eli stands at the foot of this hill and looks up. Then down at his feet. His shoes are old, the soles thin; he feels the rigid thrusts of earth through the leather. He waits a moment, takes a deep breath, moves one foot forward, then the other.

  Halfway up he stops, gazes at the hill’s crest; the hardest part is left, but he can’t quit now. He hunches his shoulders and steps forward, watching his feet as he climbs, observing their slow and careful movements on the road, how, at each step, at each small resting place, they make a niche for themselves in the dust.

  If you were an insect, a beetle perhaps, or a black ant, and if you’d stopped on this road to rest awhile, to sit at the road’s edge to catch your breath, you would see, with your bulging insect eyes, huge whorls of dust approaching, and emerging from dust like ships in fog, the shoes of Eli Nelson, up, down, up, down. And you would feel the movement of his steps on the ground beneath you, the heaviness pressing on the earth around you, the sharp weight of his sorrows piercing the earth’s crust and moving slowly in long thin streams toward the world’s centre.

  Then the shoes disappear and he’s gone. He has reached the top, has already passed the elevators and crossed the railway tracks, and is standing at an intersection of roads, one road going east to Regina and west to Alberta, and the other, the one just travelled, leading north and becoming the main street of town.

  If you were a bird, a large bird say, or better yet an angel, a young angel sent from the north of heaven, and if you were flying south this day, over the town of Stone Creek, and if your muscles were strong and the sinews of your wings sturdy so you could balance above the town, resisting winds that could blow you past Regina and into Manitoba, and if you were looking down as you paused in your flight, you would see below you a huddle of ragged buildings beside thin and dusty roads.

  In the northwest corner, the two-storied school; in its treeless yard, a metal swing creaking; and nearby, attached by ropes to a long pole, a torn flag whipped and flapping. In the southwest corner, the yellow Russian church, its roof a silver onion glittering in the sun. In the southeast, Sorensons’ house, with leafless vines climbing the brick walls and hanging, coarse and tough, over the windows. And up from Sorensons’, past Gilmans’ and Munsons’, past the tin-roofed warehouse, the parsonage of St. John’s Lutheran Church, where at this moment Christine Lund in a blue apron is stirring leftover potatoes in a black skillet. Then next to the parsonage, at the northeast corner of town, the church itself, silent no
w and empty, except for many sparrows swooping in and out of their home in the belfry.

  And in the middle of town, Main Street.

  At noon the siren whistles from the town hall at the north end of the street, and Morris Gilman, in the back room of his drugstore next to the hall, splashes water on his hands and scrubs them with soap that smells faintly of iodine. Across the street Tom Wong gazes over the oilcloth-covered tables in the café – the pink cloth faded, edges frayed – and waits for his noon customers: Louie from the furniture store and funeral parlour three shops down, who prefers the company of the restaurant to a silent lunch by himself in his room above the store; Steve Boychuck from Imperial Oil; Sam Munson, who prefers nearly any place to that of his own home next to Sorensons’, where his wife Hilda at this moment is fluttering the lace curtains of her front window, looking out, waiting, her arthritic fingers nervous on the lace. Maybe he’ll want lunch with her today after all, it could be. At the centre of Main Street, three women in hats stand on the steps of the United Church of Canada, considering the sky. Down from the church, past the post office and Cutler’s Dry Goods, in the Golden West Hotel, Doctor Long lifts a glass with Sigurd Anderson, forgetting for awhile his wife Nora, who’s raking brown and yellow poplar leaves in their yard across from the school.

  Then, just as Gilman turns the key to lock the door of the drugstore, and Sam Munson steps into Wong’s Café, and Mrs. Long leans her rake against the garage door, and just as the old doctor gurgles over his glass, “You are a very very good friend, Sigurd,” just then, Jacob Ross, principal, standing in the doorway of the Stone Creek School, makes an extraordinary announcement to the children lined up in stiff rows in the dark and musty hall: “There will be no classes this afternoon,” he says. “I will be in Swift Current at the doctor’s.”

  Down the steps they go, past swing and flagpole, feet crunching gravel, across the road, into the alley behind Longs’, around the corner, speeding past Grace Olson’s, hollering, no school, not now, not ever, barely hearing the music seep out of the window of Grace’s little house sunk in a dip of land among lilac bushes, now bare, and stiff hollyhocks, where Grace is sitting in front of the varnished piano, her thin foot pressing the silver pedal, her thin body leaning forward toward a faded sheet of music, playing and singing tenderly, Last night I lay asleeping, there came a dream so fair, I stood in old Jerusalem beside the temple there. And the dry stems of the hollyhocks under the half-opened window click and rustle against the house. I heard the children singing.... Grace, with no children, no husband, not now or ever.