A Song for Nettie Johnson

by Gloria Sawai

  “But the pain,” Ross persisted.

  “Try bland food, warm milk, mild exercise. There may be an intermittent blockage somewhere. Is she anxious? Nervous?”

  “She’s quiet, doesn’t like going out, can’t take a whole day at school.”

  “Does she have friends?”

  “Occasionally a student comes to visit.”

  “She should mix more. It would relax her. And try the diet and exercise. Keep the passages clear.”

  Back in Stone Creek they had followed the specialist’s directions. But she was weak and always tired. Raising her arms and bending down to touch her toes wore her out. After two or three efforts she’d fall on the davenport, exhausted.

  So early one evening Jacob Ross walked the narrow road to Long’s house at the west end of town.

  In the front yard Nora was on her hands and knees beside a flower bed, digging out the baby weeds with her trowel: quack grass, thistle, dandelion. He told the woman in coveralls that he wanted to see the doctor, an illness in the family. Nora explained, as she’d done so often, that the doctor no longer practised – he’d stopped five years ago. Jacob told her that he knew that, but this was an emergency, his daughter Beverley, only thirteen years old. Even for emergencies, Nora said, people drove to Shaunavon now, only thirty minutes away. She stood up, holding the trowel.

  “Just this once,” Jacob said.

  “He has no license.”

  “She’s in pain.”

  “Well, go inside then, Jacob,” the woman said. Her voice was gentle.

  The living room was dim. Thick vines of ivy covered the windows outside. Only small flecks of sunlight crept in, patterning the walls and ceiling with pieces of amber light. The doctor was sitting in a leather armchair, his head resting against the chair’s tall back. The thickness of the chair, the size of its back and arms made the man appear even thinner than he was, a wraith of a man with white hair and beard, white shirt, tweed pants. Nora kept him tidy as much as she could. When he saw Ross he leaned forward to get up, but Jacob stopped him and sat down in the chair opposite. Then he told the doctor everything he could about his daughter.

  That evening Mr. Ross and Doctor Long walked together on the road to Ross’s house, the shadows of their bodies stretching out behind them like tall trees.

  The doctor looked at her face, her skin. He examined her mouth, touched her hard tight stomach with his fingers. She cried out. He agreed with the specialist – she needed exercise. But she’s sick, she can hardly bend, Jacob explained. Then you’ll have to help her, the doctor said. He asked for a blanket or quilt, something soft to put on the floor. Mrs. Ross laid a yellow comforter on the linoleum, covering the roses.

  He told Beverley to lie on her back and raise her legs in the air. He helped her, holding her thin legs in his hands and pushing them over her head to touch the floor on the other side. Then he told her to turn a somersault. She didn’t know how. She couldn’t. “Like this,” he said and knelt on the quilt beside her. He put his head down, ready to turn over. His legs creaked. “Well? Give me a hand,” he said to Ross. And Jacob held the doctor’s feet and rolled him over.

  “See?” the doctor said, rubbing his neck. “It’s not so bad. I’ll help you.”

  Beverley tucked her pyjama top inside the bottoms so no part of her would show and kneeled on the quilt with her head down. Then Doctor Long lifted her legs with one hand, supported her back with the other, and turned her over. He did this again and again until she cried, exhausted.

  Then it came. Streams of sour air from her body. Puffs of stagnant gas, coming and coming, filling the room with pungent vapours. Beverley sat up. She stopped crying, touched her stomach, and smiled. “Good girl,” the doctor said. “You did just fine.”

  The congregation sang, holding firmly to the small black books in their hands. When other helpers fail and comforts flee...

  Freddie Wong awakens to glass shattering, a woman screaming. It’s the middle of the night; the café is closed. Robbers, he thinks, and sits up in bed.

  Then silence.

  Then his mother’s long, shrill wailing. And his father, pleading.

  Then his name cutting through the darkness, his father’s call to come.

  He stumbles through the room, across the hallway, down the back stairs to the café. His father is holding her in his arms. She’s twisting and crying. The mirror beside the freezer is shattered. An iron pot lies on the floor among shards of glass. He has seen his mother dark and sad before, but not like this.

  “The doctor,” his father says in Chinese. “Get him.”

  Freddie runs to the door, then remembering, rushes back upstairs, pulls on his pants and shirt, then down the stairs again, through the café, and out the front door.

  Across the road to the town hall, down the sidewalk past the drug store, turn at the United Church, up the narrow road to the doctor’s house. His purpose and his fear are one: a ball of steel in the centre of his stomach.

  He opens Longs’ gate, runs across the yard to the front step. He rings the bell. Again. Once again, until Mrs. Long appears. When she sees the Chinese boy on the step at midnight, she turns swiftly and goes inside to get the doctor.

  Now the boy must walk slowly. Old man and young boy walking together on Main Street, narrow shadows under the street light.

  Inside the café his mother is leaning over the table. It looks as if she’s vomiting, bent over and jerking her head. Her nightdress is ripped below the waist, a thin leg shows through the tear. His father stands beside her, his face shiny with sweat, his eyes wet and shiny. Neither son nor father speak. They turn to the doctor and look at him.

  The doctor moves slowly toward the table where the mother stands. He pulls out a chair, sits down, rests his creased hands on the pink oilcloth. He looks up at the woman, at her eyes filled with some nameless horror. He looks long and carefully. He lifts an empty glass from the table and holds it out to her. Perhaps she will take it, fill it with water, and serve him. Perhaps some sane and homely task will reach her. She takes the glass. She holds it in her hand, examines it, then turns toward the kitchen. Before she reaches the doorway, she sees herself in the cracked and shattered mirror beside the freezer. She sees herself in broken pieces moving toward the kitchen. She lifts the glass in the air and hurls it against the face in the mirror, screaming.

  The doctor is up and at her side. He locks her in his arms. He holds her tight, doesn’t let go. Screams turn to cries, to sobs, to whimpers. He tells the boy to bring him a glass of water.

  Now she calls out words in jerky, muffled Chinese. The strange words sink into the doctor’s chest. The father speaks to the doctor for the first time.

  “She is saying names of people still in China: mother, father, brother. She is saying names of people who are dead: grandmother, sister, friend.”

  When Freddie comes with the water, the doctor frees one hand and digs into his pocket. He pulls out a small vial. “Give her one of these with water.” The boy coaxes his mother to swallow the pill.

  “She wakes in the night,” the father says. “Sees wild dogs with tails of dragons, worms as big as snakes with small black eyes. Every night she cries, but tonight she goes crazy.”

  The doctor covers her head with his hand, feels the coarse black hair, the round bone under the hair. So small a room inside, such little space to hold the terror. He tries to explain to the father: the medicine will not make her well. It will dilute the fear for a time, soften the sharp edge of her despair.

  The woman becomes quiet. Dogs stop yelping. The worms close their beady eyes and go to sleep.

  The congregation has finished the hymn. They’ve closed their hymnals and sat down. Help of the helpless, oh, abide with me.

  Last year the Explorers held their Halloween party in the United Church basement. Members could bring friends, so everyone in school was there: Pentecostals, Jews, Lutherans, Ukrainians, even Ivan Lippoway, whose grandfather was a Communist. They’d decorated the ba
sement after school: covered light bulbs with orange and black crepe paper, pasted black cats and white skulls to the walls, hung apples from the ceiling with a string. The church kitchen was transformed into a haunted house. Blindfolded, the visitors were led through mazes, made to touch the bones and hair, the flesh and blood of the dead – soup bones from the Red and White, brushed twine, tapioca, ketchup. At the refreshment table a witch served poison brew from an iron pot, ladling the purple liquid into thick white cups. The party was a big success.

  Vera Campbell was on the cleanup committee and had to stay to the very end. She would take a shortcut home: past the hotel, down the road to the Russian church, and through the churchyard to her own house south of town. She’d avoid the little cemetery on the other side of the church.

  It was dark, but just beyond the churchyard was a street light. And above her, a rim of moon hung below the clouds. And it was cold. The frozen ground formed hard ruts and unexpected mounds beneath her. Dead weeds cracked and whined in the wind.

  In the centre of the yard she looked up toward the light ahead. And she saw him, walking through the tall grass in her direction. If they both kept walking, their paths would soon meet. She stopped, turned back, stepped into the ditch beside the yard, and crouched down among the frozen weeds, watching.

  He was walking slowly, taking tiny steps, swaying out to one side, then the other, lifting one foot and setting it down, and slowly lifting the other. His arm would rise, then fall at his side, then rise again, balancing him through the ruts. Would he keep on coming? Would he see her in the ditch? Or would he walk straight on, not looking left nor right? He must be on his way home from Sigurd Anderson’s shack. He must be drunk. She crouched closer to the ground, felt stones and frozen dirt against her hands. She’d heard what drunk men did to girls in ditches.

  When she looked up again, he’d stopped. He was standing still under the narrow moon. Then she saw a shiny arc in front of him, a glowing liquid rim shimmering in the moonlight. It came and came, splashing down on stiff weeds and frozen earth. Doctor Long peeing in the churchyard. Old Doctor Long holding his small flesh in his hand and peeing. Vera could smell the sharp earth wetness.

  “Thatta girl, Lindy Lou,” he said.

  He aimed the stream in a straight line, then in a small circle, then a bigger one, and bigger still, and the golden yellow hoops coiled out in front of him. And he began to sing in a thin, wavering voice.

  Will the cir-cle be un-brok-en

  By and by-y...by and by-y?

  Will the cir-cle be un-brok-en

  In the sky-y-y...in the sky.

  And then the circle did break. All the shining circles. And the night was still again. The old man wiggled his pants shut, leaned into the night, and moved on.

  Vera took a deep breath, stood up and rubbed the grass and dirt from her hands. She looked down the road to see if she could still see him. But he’d disappeared. And she turned and walked home.

  The service was over: songs, readings, obituary, sermon. And everyone was standing up. “Thy kingdom come,” they said, and Jacob Ross and his pupils slipped out quietly through the swinging doors.

  The funeral procession, with Louie’s new hearse in the lead, began in front of the church. It moved slowly down the road, past Kvemshagens’, past Olsons’, past Longs’ own house, to the school. And in front of the school, the people in their cars looked out at the school steps. And they saw the memorial for Doctor Long. The grade five pupils were holding it up like a banner.

  Vera and Mary, in Explorer uniforms, red kerchiefs at their necks, stood on the top step and held the two top ends of the burlap. Label and Freddie, three steps down, held the bottom ends. Beside Vera stood Elizabeth. Beside Mary stood Annie. Beside Label stood Mike. Beside Freddie stood Douglas. Mr. Ross had picked up Beverley after the funeral and she stood beside Annie. Students who hadn’t helped at all were allowed in, but only on the edges.

  And the people in their cars saw the memorial. From the road it looked like a small faded rug, but with something purple shining in the centre, a design they couldn’t quite make out.

  Then the procession moved on – past the school, past Majeski’s field, past the small clump of poplars a mile down the road, to the town cemetery. And Doctor Long was buried.

  Each spring the cemetery in Stone Creek is cleaned up. The hedges are clipped, the grass cut. After that it’s left alone for the most part. Weeds grow tall beside the graves.

  ~

  Haircut

  The lamp by her bed is turned off. A yellow blind covers the top half of the room’s only window. From somewhere outside, a shaft of light has entered through the uncovered portion of glass, crossed the room in a long beam, and met the wall opposite, in a precise rectangle over some violets.

  Ingrid lies on her side in the narrow bed and looks at that piece of light. She can see nothing else in the darkened room, not even Jesus in a wooden frame, hanging just beyond the light. Then she closes her eyes and opens them again slightly, lashes thin over her eyeballs. And the violets begin to move, to sway gently in a pale breeze.

  She lifts her hands from the blanket, curls her fingers into fists, and presses the fists against her closed eyes, knuckles hard against the skin. And from the shapeless dark a single black ball emerges. The ball splits into lines of dark and light, thin rods that flash under her eyelids. She presses harder and the rods bend into curves and circles, into tiny purple stars shooting out from the eye’s centre, to where she wonders, who knows where?

  She uncurls her fists and rests her hands on top of the blanket. She’s only eight years old, and her mother has told her to stop doing this, she could harm her eyes, but she’s curious about the changing shapes of light.

  She remembers tomorrow, moves one hand to her head, and rubs her fingers against her hair. Ragged hair that won’t stay in place, yellow tufts that grow in clumps this way and that, hair her mother brushes every day, wets down, combs, puts in place, sometimes with bobby pins, sometimes with gobs of thick gel waved into stiff ridges.

  “What can we do about this hair?” her mother says. “There must be something we can do.”

  “Norwegian hair,” her father says. “Skrukerud hair.”

  Her mother says, “But look at Freda Jacobson’s, very soft. And Anna Peterson’s, so pretty the way her mother fixes it, always smooth and even.”

  “Let it be,” her father says.

  “Like that?” says her mother.

  Ingrid turns in her bed, lies on her back. “But tomorrow things will be different,” she murmurs to the empty air above her. “Something’s not going to be the same again,” she whispers to the ceiling.

  Tonight the ceiling is still. Not like some nights when, lying there silent and waiting, fists released from their pressure, she would look up and see it begin to move slightly, to turn and sway above her like a narrow path curving around a low hill in a dusky evening. And sometimes, when she was very patient in her waiting and so still she couldn’t feel her breathing, a little tree would grow beside the path, and flowers. Once, when she had waited a long, long time, a child appeared and sat down in a patch of yellow buttercups beside the tree. A rosy light swirled above her in gentle circles, in soft waves around her head, lifting and turning delicately. But that child didn’t come back.

  In the morning she dresses quickly. She had laid her clothes out the evening before on a wooden chair beside the bed – the new blue skirt and white sweater she got for Christmas, blue leggings that matched the skirt, clean underwear folded neatly beside the leggings. Then she hurries down the hall to the bathroom, to wash her face and to comb out the snarls in her Norwegian hair.

  In the kitchen, her mother is standing at the counter buttering toast. Her father is sitting at the table, sipping coffee from a thick mug. When he sees Ingrid, he puts the mug down and smiles.

  “Well,” he says. “Well, well. Don’t we look like a million dollars.”

  His wife carries the plate of toast to the t
able and sits opposite him. “Come,” she says to her daughter, lingering near the table. “We’ll have a good breakfast before we go.”

  “So, Ingrid, are you working for Mr. Rockefeller today?” Her father’s voice is loud, jovial.

  “No,” she says and sits down.

  “Mr. Rockefeller’s private secretary, is that it?”

  “I’m not going to work.”

  “That’s something, to work for Mr.Rockefeller.”

  “I’m only eight, how could I be going to work?”

  “You’re so spiffed up, I thought you must be working for Mr. Rockefeller.”

  “We’re going to Travises’,” her mother says. “You shouldn’t tease like that.”

  “Travises’,” her father says.

  “Ed says if we take it all off, it will come out even, more healthy.”

  “Ed says? Ed fixes machines.”

  “And Ellen agrees. She and Ed agree. Both of them. This will do the trick, they say. Clara Peterson thinks so too.”

  Her father is quiet. Then he says, “Well, have more toast then.” He passes the plate to Ingrid, who picks up a slice, and eats.

  “But not all of it,” she says.

  After breakfast she stands in the back porch and waits for her mother. The porch is cold, the linoleum gritty under her shoes. The rug in front of the door is matted, caked with hard dirt. It hasn’t been shaken today.

  Her mother comes out of the kitchen into the porch. She’s wearing a dress with pink and mauve flowers, and over the dress her husband’s thick grey curling sweater. Two green ducks have been knitted into the front of the sweater. They face each other, one on either side of the zipper. At the bottom of each sleeve, little ducks swim, all in the same direction.

  “Button up your coat,” she says, “the wind is nasty. And don’t forget your cap, it’s on the hook.”

  She follows her mother out the door, down the front steps to the gate. She stops and fumbles at the top button of her coat. The wind blows through the caraganas, branches click and rattle, dry leaves flutter on thin twigs. It’s the first day of Lent.