A Song for Nettie Johnson

by Gloria Sawai

  “What did I do? I didn’t make you open the box.”

  “Why is it in a shoebox?”

  “Because they’re going to bury it. Any smaller they’d flush it down the toilet.”

  “Oh, you’re really something, aren’t you? You really think of marvellous things, don’t you? Brilliant and marvellous. It must make you very proud to think of such marvellous things. Well, have a nice time eating your lunch, that’s all I have to say.”

  She fled from the room, past the sofas, lamps, and cane-back chairs, out the front door. She ran past Cutler’s, cut across the back alley to Sorensons’. She didn’t stop running until she reached her own yard and leaned against the gate, her heart pounding.

  Her father was still working on the car. He was lying under it on the gravel, hammering away at something. She saw only his feet twisting under the bumper.

  She ran into the house, hurried through the kitchen where her mother was chopping walnuts, into the living room.

  She sat down in front of the piano and paged through ragged song books. She looked up at the photographs sitting on top of the piano. A picture of her grandparents on their Golden Wedding Anniversary, standing in front of a poplar tree, holding a cake. One of her cousin Wesley on his Confirmation Day, standing on the church step, holding a scroll. One of her and her brother, when he was six and she was three, sitting in a chair together, holding a ball.

  “Ketchens,” she said.

  “Ketchens?”

  “The chickens in the kitchen at Ketchens’. Don’t you remember? We made up a song about them. They’d walk in through the screen door that had no screen and wander all over the house.”

  She was lying on a narrow bed in a Toronto hospital. The head of the bed was raised, making it look like a chaise lounge. She was wearing a green hospital gown. Her brother, in a tweed jacket, was sitting on a chrome chair beside her, holding a pair of sunglasses by one stem and swinging it in little half-circles in front of him. A huge bouquet of yellow roses rested on the windowsill behind him.

  He stopped twirling the glasses. “I remember now. The place with the flies. Everywhere you looked, flies.”

  “Well, the door had no screen,” she said. “Just a big hole where the screen was supposed to be. And it was summer.”

  “And hot,” he said.

  “And there was no screen, and the chickens just wandered in and out.”

  “And the buzzing flies.”

  “Mrs. Ketchen asked us to stay for lunch and Dad said yes, and she served canned peaches on a flat dinner plate. You couldn’t manage them with your spoon and started laughing, so Dad told you to use your knife and fork.”

  He uncrossed his legs and leaned back in the chair. September sunlight streamed through the window onto his back, his shoulders and his greying hair.

  “Why would he take us to a place like that anyway?” he asked.

  “He wanted us with him sometimes, when he made his calls.”

  He leaned forward. “And why does he choose to stay in that God-forsaken town?”

  A nurse, plump and middle-aged, her clipped hair tidy under a white cap, walked into the room, carrying a trayful of tiny paper cups.

  “For your bowels,” she said and set a cup on the bedside table. “I’ll bring the baby in later for her snack.” She turned and walked out of the room. They heard her footsteps clicking down the corridor.

  “In the final analysis, it’s the bowels that count. It’s all they care about now,” the sister said. She sat up higher against the pillows. “It was good of you to come. Toronto’s a long way from San Francisco.”

  “It was time for a visit. How long has it been anyway?”

  “Too long,” she said.

  “So how was it?” he asked. “The birth I mean. The baby looks healthy.”

  She lay back against the pillow and yawned. “Remember the summer I worked at the new hospital? You were still working for Louie, I think. Well, one morning I was picking peas in the hospital garden. I was on my hands and knees in the dirt when I heard a woman screaming. And I remember thinking that when I grew up and had babies I wasn’t going to do that. I was going to be poised the whole time, make a few jokes, ask the doctor if he’d like a cup of tea. I’d be real cute.”

  “And were you?”

  “Are you crazy? I roared, I yelled at them to stop, stop the whole business, I’d changed my mind. But when it was over. Lord. It was lovely. The doctor held her in the palm of his hand. She was all bloody red, sleek and shiny. And I shouted hallelujah like a Holy Roller.”

  When her brother got up to leave, he leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead.

  “Goodbye, Elizabeth,” he said.

  “Goodbye, Peter.”

  After he’d gone, she turned over on her side, closed her eyes, and sank her head into the green pillow. Everything’s so green here, she thought.

  She’s sitting on a wooden bench in a narrow boat. The bench is pressing hard against her legs and against the dark sore between her legs. She tries to move, to lift the aching from the wood’s hardness, but she can’t budge. The baby is tucked under her blouse out of the wind. She hears its sucking noises. The boat glides silently over the blue green water.

  She looks up and sees her brother. He’s leaning over the side of the vessel, observing the waves. He’s wearing sunglasses and he’s alone. Where are the others? Andy and Joe and Ivan, and the rest who gathered on summer nights under the lamppost?

  Her father is kneeling at the forward end of the boat. He’s fastening a loose piece of tin to the prow. He clutches the tin with one hand. With the other he rummages through his tool box, searching for the right tool to do the job. The tin rattles in the wind like the old Imperial Oil sign on Main Street, on a dusty spring night on the prairie.

  Her brother lifts his head and looks out on the passing islands. He’s enjoying the scenery, she thinks, but doesn’t see his father kneeling there, fastening the tin. She wants to tell her brother, turn around now and look at your father, see what he’s doing, observe how he fixes things. She wants to tell everyone: That’s what my dad does. He mends things. Doors and carburetors, people’s sorrows. But the words stick in her bowels. Her father bends over the tool box. His thin hair rises and curves like threads of smoke in the wind. Her brother gazes out to the edge of the sea.

  In October it happened.

  In Toronto, she stood in her large kitchen, staring at the telephone on the counter in front of her. Her right hand lay on the black receiver.

  In San Francisco, in his twenty-fifth floor office, her brother looked up from a yellow legal pad on the walnut desk in front of him and gazed out a wall-sized window to the ocean. He stared at the ships in the harbour, from Rio de Janeiro, Yokohama, Hong Kong, and at the sun’s brightness on the water. He was thinking of Manchuria.

  When he finally picked up the phone he heard his sister’s voice. “Dad just died. He was knocked down by a car in Regina. He’s dead.”

  In Manchuria it was 8 p.m. Outside of Mukden, some old Chinese farmers were squatting in a barley field. After a long day of work they were smoking their pipes under a darkening sky, the smoke rising silently above the barley as they emptied their bowels into the field.

  “No,” her brother said. That’s all he said. For a long while he sat in the leather chair in San Francisco, his hand on the telephone.

  But he didn’t see the telephone or his hand resting on it. He didn’t see the wall-sized window or the ocean or the sunlight on the water. He didn’t notice the light pouring in through the window. Moving over the desk and the chair and himself sitting in the chair. Over his arm, his hand.

  Then he saw it.

  He saw the remarkable brightness of it.

  And the light rolled off the iron bell and spread out over the town. It spilled down on Main Street, on the café and the hotel and on Louie’s place, where he sat in a wooden chair holding a pencil near his ear. It poured down on the vacant lot, on weeds and dead grass, and on h
is father walking through the grass.

  Then it drifted into the street, mingled with the dust along the curbs, rose in swirls above the town, and lost itself in glimmering waves over the prairie.

  ~

  Hosea’s Children

  When Hosea drove up from Medicine Hat to look for Gordon in Edmonton, she brought her two youngest children to her sister in Rocky Mountain House. The girl, Doloros, was seven and Bittern, her son, was ten. Her oldest child had already left home and the last Hosea heard was living somewhere in British Columbia. She moved from place to place and didn’t keep in touch with her mother. She’d left the Hat with a man named Joe, who worked the rigs, and who called her Ann.

  Hosea had thought about Edmonton on and off all spring. She still knew a couple of people in the city from the time she and Gordon lived there – she could stay with them for awhile. She also thought that besides locating her husband, she might find work and move to the city permanently. So on April 11 she packed the children and an old suitcase of clothes and a few toys into her green Chev and headed north. It was the day the story came out about a seven-year-old girl, with her father and flight instructor, dying in an airplane crash in the United States. The girl had wanted to be the youngest pilot ever to fly across the country, but the plane, which had taken off in California, crashed somewhere in Wyoming.

  Hosea listened to all this on the car radio as she drove north on Highway 2, then west on Number 11 into Rocky Mountain House. The girl, the pilot, was the same age as Doloros.

  On the drive west a snowy drizzle came down, wet and slushy against the windshield, and she had to lean close to the steering wheel and peer out past the clicking wipers in order to see the road ahead. She told Doloros, sitting beside her, to please be still, and Bittern, in the back seat, to stop asking questions. But the boy wouldn’t quit talking about the plane crash.

  “Would you let Doloros drive an airplane in a snowstorm?” he asked. “If she wanted to?”

  “Think, Bittern,” Hosea said. “Just be quiet and think about it.” She clutched more tightly at the steering wheel.

  “I am thinking,” Bittern said. “I’m thinking what if she wanted to do that.”

  “I do want to,” Doloros said, snuggling into her small frayed blanket. “I want to drive an airplane in a snowstorm.”

  Right, Hosea thought. As if you won’t have danger and treachery enough on the small path you’ll walk here on earth.

  The snow stopped before they reached Rocky Mountain House, and when they drove into town the sun was out and the western sky was a deep purplish blue. The mountain range on the far horizon shone silver.

  Judith was waiting for them on her porch. She was sitting on a white plastic chair in a patch of sunlight, wearing her husband’s curling sweater and drinking coffee from a yellow mug. The children saw her even before the car slowed down, and they waved and pounded the windows and shouted, “Judith. Judith. There she is. Judith.”

  When the car stopped at the curb, they scrambled out and ran into the yard and up the porch steps to their aunt. They threw themselves at her, the three of them a tangled bundle in the sunlight.

  “Well, you,” Judith said. “If it isn’t you and you. Right here on my porch. Isn’t that something. Isn’t that just lovely.”

  “Me and her and you,” Bittern said.

  And Hosea, climbing the stairs, suitcase in hand, said, “Don’t forget me.”

  Judith turned to her sister and reached out her arms.

  Bittern said, “Do you know what Mom is going to let Doloros do? Drive an airplane in a snowstorm. Even in a raging blizzard.”

  “So you heard about that crash,” Judith said.

  “We get to skip school,” Bittern said.

  “I’m a very good reader,” Doloros said.

  “Do you still have the rabbits?” Bittern asked.

  “We certainly do,” Judith said.

  Bittern jumped down the steps and ran around the house to the backyard; his sister followed.

  Judith went into the house and returned with a fresh cup of coffee for Hosea and a refill for herself. The women sat down in the white chairs – Judith, her body softly round, brown hair curling about her face, Hosea, thin, almost gaunt, sandy hair tied at the back of her neck in a tight ponytail.

  Judith had been thinking about Hosea and her children all morning. Particularly about Ann. She wondered if she should tell her sister what she knew, but Ann had asked that her mother not find out yet. So as Judith was making up the cot for Doloros in her daughter Carly’s room and the sofa bed for Bittern in the small study across from it, she decided that today she would try just to listen to Hosea without offering opinions or advice. She’d try.

  The last time the two sisters were together, Hosea had lamented again the disappearance of Gordon. And Judith’s reply again was, “But he always leaves. You know that. He’s a jerk. He thinks if you’re a bigshot writer, which he isn’t – how many books has he actually finished and published? Zero – but he thinks he is and therefore he’s not required like ordinary human beings to be responsible. He can do anything he pleases. He can leave his own children....”

  “Stop it, Judith, you don’t know the whole story so just stop talking.” And she told Judith (again) in her strained voice that Gordon had signed a certificate with a gold seal on it, on July 8, 1980, in a church lit with white candles and decorated with pink carnations, and that he’d pledged his vows before God and Rev. Hunter (you remember Norman), and before Thelma, their mother, who died six months later, and all the other relatives and Gordon’s folks as well. And she just wanted to remind Gordon of these facts.

  The two women sat, quiet in the sunlight, sipping their coffee.

  “You’ve heard from Anxiety, haven’t you,” Hosea said finally.

  Judith waited a moment to answer.

  “Why do you keep calling her that?” she finally said.

  “It’s the name I gave her,” Hosea said.

  “She wants to be called Ann. You of all people should know that. Hosea. Some old prophet married to a hooker that he had to keep tracking down.”

  “You’ve heard from her, haven’t you.”

  Judith sighed. “She wrote to Carly, not me.” Carly was the same age as Anxiety.

  “It’s funny,” Hosea said. “It’s her dad who left her, but it’s me she can’t stand. She has no respect for me.”

  “She’s doing all right,” Judith said. “Joe seems like a good person.”

  “Running off with a fifteen-year-old?”

  “Sixteen now,” Judith said. “You were only seventeen the first time you took up with Gordon. Remember?”

  “Are they in BC?” Hosea asked.

  “Revelstoke, but they’re moving, she didn’t say where.” She stood up. “I’ve made sandwiches,” she said. “Let’s call the children and have some lunch before you go.”

  Hosea drove out of town under a dark sky. Leaving Rocky Mountain House, she’d felt warm and safe. The children were with Judith, who enfolded them in her arms and cared for them with an easy confidence. But now, as she drove north toward Edmonton, the peace she’d felt began to unravel. Why was she doing this? Looking for Gordon like this? Every woman she’d talked to on this subject had said the same thing: dump him, he’s a loser.

  And then there was Anxiety. Where was the balm to heal the wound of a child gone?

  It started to snow again. Wet flakes splashed against the glass. Hosea stared at the road ahead, kept her eyes on the yellow line.

  She’d lain in bed that night, awake and restless. Then she’d gotten up and gone into the kitchen for a glass of milk. She paced the living-room floor, turned on the TV, checked on Doloros and Bittern, safe and sleeping soundly. Then she went back to her own bed, and stared up at the darkness.

  At 3 a.m. she heard the door opening and closing and footsteps creaking on the hall floor. What relief. Everyone was in; she could go back to sleep. But instead, she got out of bed and met her daughter in the
hallway.

  “Where were you?” she said and heard her own voice, hard, accusing.

  “Who needs to know?” Anxiety muttered.

  “Don’t talk to me like that.”

  “Like what?” Her voice was slurred.

  “You’ve been drinking again.”

  Anxiety walked, straight and deliberate, past her mother toward her own room.

  Hosea yelled, “Why are you so hateful?”

  Anxiety swayed toward the wall.

  “Why not, Mama?”

  Hosea was forty.

  Anxiety was thirteen.

  At the Lacombe turnoff she started to cry. Tears ran down her face and dripped off her chin onto her lap. Visibility was bad enough as it was, but she couldn’t stop. She took her right hand off the steering wheel and wiped her eyes. She turned on the car radio. Heard only static.

  The snow stopped before she reached Leduc, and when she arrived at the southern outskirts of Edmonton a dry wind was blowing. She drove into a Husky station to use the washroom and make a phone call.

  In the ladies’ room, a large woman with pale white skin and a black patch over one eye was trying to get her little girl to reach up to the sink to wash. Her small fingers could barely reach the stream of water pouring from the tap. The mother rubbed soap on the child’s hands, lathering her palms, her wrists, and in between each finger. Then she lifted her up closer to the tap so she could rinse.

  “You never know, do you,” the woman said to Hosea. “You just never know.” Water splashed over the girl’s skin and into the porcelain bowl. Hosea didn’t answer. She examined her own splotchy face in the mirror above the sink.

  “There’s so much stuff out there,” the woman continued. “It’s all over...you can’t get away from it...it gets on your skin and sticks there...then your pores soak it up...all that crud...and what happens next?....gets into the internal organs...and then...the blood!... Have you thought about this? Don’t you wonder about it?”

  She turned to the girl, pretty, curly haired, her blue eyes bright and curious. “Are you finished, Junie? Are you nice and clean? Let’s dry your hands now.” She rubbed the girl’s hands with a paper towel, threw the towel into the wastebasket and headed for the exit. She bent forward, pushed the door open with her forehead, and the two disappeared.