A Song for Nettie Johnson

by Gloria Sawai

  He walks to the table, looks first at Hilda, who’s staring at the butterflies on the wall opposite her. Then he looks around at the others. Leif is gazing down at some papers in front of him on the table, Olga is rubbing her chin with her thumb, playing with a tuft of coarse hair growing there. Grace Olson sits with her eyes closed.

  “So here we are,” Jonathan booms, too loudly. “Who would like to begin?”

  Hilda looks at Leif. He’s the only man on the committee, the preacher will listen to him. Olga and Grace would never speak up, especially Grace, scared of her own shadow. Why she gets the best solo every year with that tinny voice of hers no one knows.

  “Well, then,” Jonathan says, “maybe I could share some of my own thoughts.”

  Hilda leans forward in her chair. “I think Leif might have something to say.”

  But Leif says, “Let the preacher begin. I’ll add my two cents’ worth later.”

  Hilda sits back in her chair. Jonathan speaks.

  “All of us are aware of the problem we’ve had with the Messiah. With Eli in particular. We’ve known of his weaknesses when it comes to drink. Now we know of his other weakness.” He pauses, clears his throat, looks at the wall across from him. “I’m referring, of course, to his...new life out at the quarry.”

  Hilda glowers at Leif, Leif looks at Grace, Grace stares at the door, Olga examines her cheekbone with one finger.

  “But I think we need to consider something else here,” Jonathan continues. “We’ve been at this thing for five years now. We’ve struggled through all those notes, and now we’re close to getting the whole thing together for the first time, and doing a good job of it. Maybe it’s not such a good idea to quit right now.”

  He coughs, feels a tickling sensation in his neck.

  “Let’s think about Eli as well,” he says, his voice higher now and tighter. “None of us approves of the situation out at the quarry, but let’s try, just for now, to look at it from another angle. If Eli does continue directing the Messiah, the message of the music itself could work a change in his life, a repentance if you will. And who among us would want to deny him that?”

  Again, Hilda waits for Leif to speak, but he doesn’t. No one does. They’re sheep, Hilda thinks. All of them. So it’s up to her then. She’s no sheep.

  “Pastor. Of course we believe that the Messiah is good. I don’t think any of us have a problem with that. Or with repentance either, for that matter. But what we’re concerned with here is something else. We’re thinking about the community, about...” She stutters, stumbles for words. Finally Leif comes to the rescue.

  “What I think Hilda is trying to say is we’re worried about the influence Eli has on young people. On children....”

  “Yes,” Hilda continues. And she tells Jonathan how the children of the town sneak out to the quarry to watch the goings-on out there, even those from good families, and then try to copy what they see. She doesn’t mention the Lund children by name, but Jonathan suspects she’s including them. Later, when he questions the children at the supper table, he knows for sure. And he knows what he must do.

  Jonathan drives his maroon-coloured Plymouth down the creamery road and past Jacobson’s pasture. When he reaches the quarry hill, he parks, gets out, and slams the door shut. He stumbles across the ditch to the foot of the hill. Anger is surging up inside him: anger at Hilda, at Peter, at Eli, and especially at Christine. “Peter needs more guidance,” his wife said, “but you’re never here to give it, he runs wild. Imagine, taking Elizabeth out to the quarry to spy.” And Christine didn’t stop there. “And what about Eli? First he’s on as music director, then he’s off, then he’s on again, then off. I wish you’d stop being so wishy-washy. You’re always so wishy-washy.”

  Those were her words. Wishy-washy. So he changed his mind about Eli. What was wrong with that? Was it better to be rigid? That’s what he should have said to her. Better to be wishy-washy than so rigid.

  When he started out on this journey, the sun was bright, the air still. Now a grey-white cloud hovers above him and the wind is sharper. He pulls his sweater up against his neck and steps forward. His feet unsettle small pebbles that tumble down the slope to be stopped finally by rocks and cactus.

  Well, Christine couldn’t complain about his being wishy-washy now. He’d been firm with the children. From now on you’ll stay home, he told them. Nothing to do, you say? Then clean the garage, rake the yard. When you’re done, you can count the sparrows.

  At the top of the hill he stops, looks over at the trailer. And suddenly he feels a weight in his stomach, a pulling in his chest. How will he tell Eli this news? True, he didn’t promise him the Messiah; nevertheless, he’s well aware of Eli’s commitment and his longing. His own longing as well, if the truth be told. Standing there quietly, he hears the singing, feels the excitement. Sees his church packed, a community come together.

  He edges his way around the quarry, past the empty chair, and up the short path to the trailer. He stands on the step and knocks.

  Inside, Nettie hears the knock and jerks up from the chair. Her chin juts out in the direction of the door.

  “They’ve come,” she says.

  “Who?” Eli says.

  “The men. They’ve come to get you.”

  Eli stands up. “Don’t be silly. Nobody’s coming to get me.”

  “Don’t,” she says, unclenching her hand and reaching out to him.

  But Eli has already gone to the door and opened it. He sees Jonathan and welcomes him.

  “Come in,” he says. “Have a chair. The hill’s a steep climb.”

  “It is that,” Jonathan says, and sits down at the table.

  Eli turns to Nettie. “Why don’t you get something for the preacher? Is the coffee still hot?”

  “That’s the new preacher?” Nettie asks, suspicious.

  “He’d like some coffee,” Eli explains.

  “None for me,” Jonathan says. “I wouldn’t mind some water though.”

  Nettie doesn’t move.

  “The old Swede knew my name,” she says.

  “Never mind,” Eli says, and goes to the cupboard for a clean cup.

  Nettie slides around the table and heads for the barrel standing near the door, the water hauled in once a week by the men who drive the town truck.

  “I guess I know how to get someone a glass of water,” she says. She lifts the tin ladle from its hook on the wall and dips it into the barrel.

  Eli brings the cup to her and she fills it. Then he carries the glass to Jonathan.

  After Jonathan has drunk the entire glassful, he lays the cup down and wipes his lips with the back of his hand. Eli watches him, waiting.

  “Well,” Jonathan says. “I’m afraid...” He clears his throat, three small grunts, and tries again. “I’m afraid...”

  “I see,” Eli says.

  Nettie watches the two men step outside. Then she sits down at the table and waits for Eli’s return. Her lips are pursed shut. Her fingers drum the tabletop.

  When he doesn’t come back she goes outside to look for him. But he is nowhere to be seen. She walks the short path to the quarry and gazes across it to the pasture beyond. He’s not there. She calls out, her voice wheeling into the sky. Silence. She runs around the quarry to the rim of the hill, stops, and calls again. Her voice echoes across the prairie.

  “Eli.”

  “Eli.”

  “Eli.”

  “Eli.”

  “Eli.”

  “Eli Eli Eli Eli...”

  There is no sign of him.

  He’s not far away, however. Below the hill, on the east side, he is kneeling on the ground, digging with both hands into a pile of rocks. There is an urgency about him.

  He lifts a rock from the pile and heaves it aside, then another, and another. He stops to breathe, to rest his heart, to think. Above him, the clouds have dissipated and the sky is clear blue, as if it were spring, as if the robins were returning, as if this were a new d
ay, a fresh beginning. He digs again. It can’t be that deep in the pile. Where has he hidden it? He did hide it, didn’t he? He threw out four or five empties and a couple of nearly empties, but the full one, the one unopened, he wouldn’t have thrown that one out. He’d wrapped it in a scrap of old blanket and hidden it. But where? Wasn’t it here, among these stones?

  He pulls at the rocks, dislodging one, then another, digging deeper into the pile. And then he sees the fragment of grey blanket snuggled in a small opening in the rocks, a dark and private cave among the stones. He pushes his hand into the opening, touches the blanket, feels the bottle underneath, curls his fingers around it, and tugs at it gently. “Hey, don’t break on me,” he says. And he slides the bottle and the blanket out of their hiding place and heads back to the trailer.

  When Nettie sees him appear on the crest of the hill, when she sees first his head, then his chest and arms, then his legs emerge from the earth, she yells out.

  “So the prairie chicken’s come home to roost. It’s about time.”

  She watches him approach, sees the lump of grey under his arm.

  “What have you got there?” she asks.

  Eli slowly unwraps the bottle.

  “I thought so,” Nettie says, and goes to the edge of the pit.

  Eli sits down in the rocker. He lays the bottle on his lap, the blanket on top of it, and caresses the grey mound with his fingers.

  Nettie lies on her stomach at the edge of the quarry and gazes down on the rocks and stones twenty feet below.

  “Watch out,” Eli says, “you could have a tumble.”

  “I’m looking for my old pals,” Nettie says. She hollers into the pit, “Hey, you bugs, come on out and play.”

  “Forget your pals,” Eli says. “Come here. Bring me some comfort.”

  She sits up and faces Eli.

  “So you didn’t get your da da da da.” She sings, directs herself with one finger, small triangles in the air. “They’re mean over there. It’s a mean place.”

  And as if it were yesterday, Nettie sees them standing on the church steps. Alice, Grace, and someone in a skirt with blue flowers. They huddle close to each other, giggling, whispering. Leaving her out. She sees the wooden church door behind them, thick and heavy, with huge iron handles, and beside the steps the single caragana bush. And then Alice says, “That’s a very fine skirt you’re wearing, Nettie. I wonder where your mother found a skirt like that. I guess not in Stone Creek.” And Grace says, “She must have got it in Regina. At Eatons. Did it come from Eatons?” And the other girl says, “Maybe she sent to New York for it. It looks to me like it came from New York.” And Nettie sees herself in the grey skirt that’s too big for her and has to be folded at the waist and pinned so it won’t fall down. “Or did you go to Paris, France?” Alice says.

  “Come here,” Eli says. “Tell me about that Swede.”

  Nettie shakes her head.

  “Tell me,” he says.

  “It’s not a made-up story, you know.”

  “I know. Tell me anyway.”

  She sits cross-legged, rests her elbows on her knees, her face in her hands. The air is still. The October sunlight seeps through the cold and warms the ground around her and the dry gravel and the dry and rusty grasses that grow in thin clumps here and there.

  She begins slowly. “Long long ago a little girl had a beautiful mother, and the mother was alive and lived in a trailer beside a big hole in the ground.”

  “Little girl?” Eli asks.

  “That would be me,” Nettie says.

  “And this beautiful mother wanted her girl to be strong and good when she grew up, so every Saturday she sent her to church to learn from the brown book. Each page had questions, and the answers were underneath. Everything was in a straight line. And on Saturday morning the mother would say, ‘Nettie, get going. The preacher always starts on time.’ He was real old, skinny like you, and his eyes watered, old watery eyes, and he smelled sour.”

  Nettie stretches her legs out in front of her.

  “It was cold in that church,” she says, “even when the stove was going. The ceiling was high, and the benches were hard, and we all sat on a bench except for the preacher. He stood in front and looked at everybody.”

  “Who’s everybody?” Eli asks.

  “Oh, Martin and Grace – your Grace.”

  “She’s not my Grace. She just sings a solo in the Messiah. ‘He Shall Feed His Flock.’”

  Nettie pushes herself up. “Well, isn’t that just dandy. She gets to sing the important song.”

  “Tell the story,” Eli says.

  Nettie pouts for a moment, then continues. “Well, that old Swede would stand in front of the bench and put his head down like this.” She moves closer to Eli, stretches her neck out, and stares into his face. “He’d talk half in Swede and his voice would go up and down and he’d say, ‘Vy did God create man?’ He’d say the same thing in front of each person, ‘Vy did God create man?’ His breath would come out in puffs. And everyone was supposed to say the answer without looking in the book. Only I never could. So he’d ask Alice or Grace or Martin to say it over, so I could learn it real quick. Then he’d come back to me. ‘Nettie?’ he’d say. ‘Now do you know vy God created man?’ But the right words never came to me.”

  She turns to the quarry and leans over its edge. “Hey you down there, vy did God create man?”

  She waits.

  “No answer,” she says.

  She calls again. “Stones and bugs and snakes and toads, wake up!” She looks out across the pit. “Magpies and ugly buzzards, do you know the answer?” She stretches her neck back and looks straight up. “Hey, wind and clouds, and all you angels on top of the sky. Doesn’t anybody know the answer?”

  “The Swede knew,” Eli says.

  “He made it up,” she says.

  “So what was his answer?”

  She raises her right hand in front of her, and with her finger, slices through the air in one long horizontal line. “Question! Vy did God create man?”

  She waits, then cuts the air again with her finger. “Answer! God created man to be...” She stops.

  “This is so scary,” she says.

  “Try again,” Eli says.

  She draws the line once more, faster. “Answer! God created man to be...” She drops her hand.

  “Try blessed,” Eli says.

  “How did you know that?”

  “I must have read it someplace.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Good. Happy. Something you’d say thank you for.”

  “You’re lying,” Nettie says.

  “No,” Eli says.

  “Then it’s true,” she says, and runs to the pit and yells down into it.

  “Good! Happy! Thank you! There’s your answer.”

  Her face darkens. “And that’s where he did it. That’s where my daddy always did it to me after Mama died. Down there on the stones. And one day the men came. They saw my daddy and me, and they crawled down into the hole and got a hold of him, and pulled him off of me and dragged him into a car and they drove away. And my daddy never came back.”

  Eli gets up, holding the blanket in his hand. The bottle drops to the ground and lodges in a clump of weeds at the edge of the pit. He goes to Nettie, puts his hand on her shoulder, and leads her back to the chair. He sits down, pulls her onto his lap, and covers her knees with the grey cloth.

  Peter, Andrew, and Elizabeth are in the front yard. They’ve cleaned the garage, straightened the pile of newspapers on the back porch, and walked the perimeter of the yard in single file, seeing who could come closest to the fence without touching it. Now they’re sitting on the porch steps watching a flock of sparrows perched in a straight line on the telephone wire across the street.

  Suddenly the birds swoop down into the branches of the maple tree beside the gate. With thin claws they rustle the dry twigs; then off they go as quickly as they came.

  “Where do sparrows live
anyway?” Elizabeth asks.

  “Nowhere,” Peter says.

  “But where do they sleep at night?”

  “Anywhere. They’re wild.”

  “But they’d want to come back to the same place to sleep. They’d want to come home.”

  “Why? What’s so great about that?” Peter says.

  “Everything wants to come back to their own place. They may fly around a lot, but they always want to come home.”

  “Not sparrows,” Peter says.

  “You don’t know that for sure,” Elizabeth says. “It’s not a proven fact.”

  The late afternoon sunlight spreads over the prairie in curious slants of light, glowing copper on the burnished stems of thistles, yellow white on the dying grass, a deep grey purple in rocky crevices in fields and ditches. At the quarry it spreads over house and pit and chair, leans against the rocks, forms small shadows among the stones.

  Eli and Nettie are still sitting in the chair. They’re watching a flock of waxwings play with the sky and with the top branches of the willow tree. The birds dip, turn, swoop up, then down again into the branches of the tree.

  “Look at them,” Nettie says. “They don’t know if they’re coming or going.”

  “Going,” Eli says. “Getting out of here. Flying south. To Montana.”

  Nettie’s heart thumps faster. “That’s no place to go.”

  “This place isn’t so hot,” Eli says.

  Nettie points to the town. “Well, if you stayed away from there,” she says. “They’re mean over there. Over there they do not have a heart.” She taps Eli’s chest with the tips of her fingers. “Do you know what they’ve got right there where the heart’s supposed to go?” Eli shakes his head. “Well, they don’t have a heart there, I can tell you that.” She knocks against him with her knuckles. “Do you know what they’ve got there?”

  “No,” he says.

  “A hole,” she says.

  “Well, so what?” Eli says. “Everybody’s got a hole somewhere inside of them. And everybody fills it up the best way they know how.”

  And from somewhere deep in the recesses of his memory, a picture surfaces, faded at first, but gradually becoming clearer, more focused. He’s nineteen years old. His father has died. He and his mother are poor. But his dad’s friend has given him money so he can go to the university in Saskatoon, to study music.