by Joan Thomas
My mother has only Phillip and me to think about. All around us are families with gangs of children, like the Stallings and the Abernathys. On Sunday mornings they ride into the yard on a hayrack pulled by plow horses, or, if there’s a car and the gas to run it, they’re crammed into the back seat and clinging to the running boards. Our family, the object of pity and envy, begins with Phillip and ends with me (because of me, because of what I did to be born). But it’s our yard they come to, our barn, which had a church in the loft when we bought it.
When I was a baby we lived in a rented house in Burnley. Then my dad bought this farm. I remember riding out in a truck with all our things in the back, sitting squeezed against Phillip, riding out of the rust-coloured mist of babyhood (where all that I knew of myself was told to me by other people) and into the brown and grey world of my dusty childhood. A man with a shy, lashless face (a rabbit’s face) is standing by the house. It’s Mr. Pangbourne. His wife has just died, his second wife, and he’s buried her by the first in the plot intended for himself, and is going back to the old country. The barn smells of freshly sawn wood. He built this barn because his old one fell down. He never used it for animals. While his wife was sick, he offered it to Mr. Dalrymple to use for a church.
The house is old and has a summer kitchen tacked to the back of it. Its unpainted boards are silvered with age and shrunk down from the size they used to be. The minute Mr. Pangbourne drives out of the yard, my mother finds a book on a shelf in the pantry, The Pilgrim’s Progress. It’s just a stack of soft, thick pages tied up with string because the spine and covers have come off. In our new house in the evening she reads the story to us, about a man named Christian who has a heavy burden on his back that he can’t lay down, and so sets off on a long journey to the Celestial City, where he will be free of it. Crouching in the living room while my mother reads aloud to us, I peer through a crack below the windowsill and see a chicken walk by outside.
When my mother finally puts the book down I tell them about seeing a chicken through the wall. This house was built by an eight-year-old boy taking instructions from a blind man, says Joe Pye, who that very afternoon walked up the lane from nowhere and sits now at the kitchen table chewing on a matchstick.
When winter comes my dad and Joe haul the stove in from the lean-to kitchen and install it in the living room. Dad pulls off the pie plate that was nailed over the chimney hole to keep mosquitoes out of the house. They keep a miniature inferno going in that stove, my dad and Joe, burning wood cut down by the river. They nail shingles over the cracks in the walls, but the wind finds new cracks every day.
In the barn our new cows sleep standing up. Down the road the Stalling girls sleep three to a bed and two beds to a room. I sleep in my own bed in my own room in our leaky house. All night I revolve over the mattress, dreams peeling off me. It’s dark when I wake up to the cows moaning about the painful weight of their udders. My mother comes in and pries me out into air as cold as knives. Last year a house up the road burned down, killing four sleeping children while their parents did chores in the barn. Would you leave children alone in a house with a fire burning in the stove? people asked one another in low voices. Every dark morning my mother drags me and Phillip whimpering to the barn to be sure no neighbour will ever have cause to say such a thing about her.
When I turn six it’s Phillip who takes me down the long dirt road to school. I wear a blue dress and bloomers made from a flour sack. We stop and examine a massive badger hole at the first corner. Goldenrod blooms among the thistles in the ditch. I manage to break off a tough stem of it and hold it up to my blue dress. I wish I had a pin, I say. Phillip walks backwards, watching with delight while I pull up the bodice of my dress and gnaw a little hole in the fabric to stick the stem through. You will get such a licking, he says.
At school I copy mottoes written on the chalkboard in Miss Fielding’s large, childish hand while Miss Fielding stands against the windows with a burn mark in the shape of an iron on her skirt, placidly watching. I learn the times tables, and every morning we recite them, standing in a wavering row across the front of the schoolroom, breathing in the smell of wet mittens baking on the stove. Two is pale and silver-haired, overworked but willing. Five is a domineering, round-faced girl, her hair cut severely into a black fringe. When it’s Five’s turn she hauls the other numbers with her to Fifteen, Twenty, Twenty-five, Thirty, she puts up with no argument. (At Twenty-five, she gazes in delight at her twin and they drink tea together.) I stand between Betty Stalling and my cousin Gracie, chanting along with them, stories flickering through my brain. Stand up straight, Lily, says the teacher, but I slump against the blackboard, exhausted by the affairs of generations of numbers.
We have no chalk, there’s no money to buy chalk, but there’s a fancy table map donated by a rich lady named Mrs. Alexander. Its mountains are built up in plaster. The peaks of the Andes and the Alps are all chipped off — the exposed plaster is flat, but it could be snow. The Rockies are intact but black from children rubbing at them. England is a little island like a misshapen cucumber. The old country. I have cousins there: Lois and Madeleine and George (although George is not quite my cousin. He’s not really their boy, my mother says in the disgruntled voice she uses for people she knows nothing about. He’s an orphan they took in).
In England my father lived in a house made of brick, Joe Pye in a house made of stones. Here, in Nebo, Manitoba, everything is made of wood, and flimsy. This world is not our home. We’ll be leaving any minute — nothing the drought can do to us matters, the cracks it’s opening up in the fields (so wide and deep that Joe Pye loses his wrench down one of them), the Russian thistle taking over a corner of the prairie that should never have been broken. These are signs, they mean Jesus is coming soon. They’re intended to fire up our faith, like a girl seeing a dust cloud on the horizon and knowing it means her boyfriend is driving up the road. Even so, come, Lord Jesus, Mr. Dalrymple cries in the loft, lifting his arms. I sit on the bench between my parents and reach inside and touch my memory of what he shouted that day (about Satan, about me), touch it delicately to see if it still throbs, and it does. I turn my eyes up to the rafters. I can see the frail stretched necks of the swallow chicks, their wide beaks reaching up, up from the mud nest towards something none of us sitting below can see.
I have inside me my own private picture of what lies ahead, the other world. I come across it sometimes when I’m lying in bed, halfway to sleep. I come across it in the dark, in a dark alcove of my mind, like a shrine lit up with guttering candles. It’s from a place too far back for memory. I’m in the middle of the yard. Orange light blazes in the sky, flames fill the windows of the barn. The barn door is wide open and men come out, carrying something heavy, a body, sagging like a grain sack. They’re stooped, they’re trying to be gentle, carrying him. His head lolls. One limp arm drags on the ground, like when they took Jesus down from the cross, and a man scoops it up and drapes it across his chest. They prop him against the side of the barn and bend over him. I can see his white shirt, his body drooping back against the barn. I’m very small, just eyes and exhausted, shallow sobs that batter my chest like hiccups.
While everyone waits for Jesus, I persist in growing. My mother’s cutting an old dress of hers down for me. I stand by the chesterfield in bare feet on the cold floor and she tucks and pins the bodice. I am ten or eleven, much smaller than she is. There will be fabric left over, and she’ll stitch it into squares for potholders.
I shrink from her touch, from the prickling touch of the wool, clench my stomach and arms. Being close like this draws confidences from her. She tells me the story of her school friend who died after she breathed in a popcorn kernel and it festered in her lung. And about Felix Macdonald, the villainous farmer she worked for on the Bicknell road. And the harrowing story of my birth, when she first saw me folded and slimy like a calf, so small they pulled a mitten over my head to keep me warm. She winds backwards into this story — soon she’ll get
to placenta, a word she has a special, privileged knowledge of. Afterbirth, other people say, but my mother has reason to know better. She crouches, reaching blindly for the pins, her eyes half closed with the largeness of it, the way she was led down, down, into the Valley of Death. Five more minutes and they would have lost me, she says.
While my mother bends over the hem, my father comes in and stands in the kitchen doorway drinking water from the dipper. A new frock! he says. You’ll be fending off the lads in that. He has his cap on. I can’t see his eyes, but I know he’s looking at me.
The screen door slams behind my father. I feel warm where his eyes touched me, hope blooming in patches on my arm and shoulder. Sudden hope for this dress, which is brown wool, with deep notches in its too-big lapels and cuffs, different from the dresses other girls have. The lads, he says, because he’s English. Jimmy Thrasher, he must mean, at the blacksmith shop. One day I was outside by the wagon, measuring the space between the spokes of the wheel with my bare foot, when Jimmy Thrasher came out and dumped a shaft in the wagon and reached over to pull on a string of my hair. You got a sweet box there. Any chance me getting into it? he said. I gave a little laugh. You never know, I said cluelessly. You never know, eh? he said. Well, I’m always here. My father came out then and we climbed onto the wagon and set off for home, and when I looked back over my shoulder Jimmy Thrasher was still standing there watching us.
Hand me the pincushion, my mother says. She’s behind me now, tugging on the skirt. Even Dr. Ross was scared, she says. He came out to the waiting room when your father got to the hospital, and he told Dad it looked pretty bad. I doubt I’ll be able to save the both of them, he said. Short of a miracle. She’s nudging me to turn around so she can pin the front, but I stand stubbornly away from her, resisting the story. It was going to be one or the other of us, she says. That’s what he figured. Finally she takes me by the elbows and cranks me round to face her. She’s crouched in front of me, her head bent, her part a path worn down the middle of her orange hair. She doesn’t look at me while she talks. She believes in a world that existed without me. Everything in it is shrunken down to the way she sees things.
I look over her head at the back wall of the living room where light from the kitchen window wavers. I’m immune to this story. She thinks this story is hers, but it’s mine. I’ve seen the inside of it, its true meaning: the way I came to myself on that fateful morning, my face squashed and my arms and legs folded like a lizard’s. It’s a cave I’m in, like the inside of a pumpkin (although it’s filled with water), and I am very small, only the thought of a nail at the ends of my tiny fingers. Nevertheless I dig and gouge, I locate a flap in the fretted walls and work my fingers under it. Membranes rip in a pleasing way as I pull, and blood swirls into the sea water around me, turning it the watery red of fish blood. And so I chose the day of my own birth, two months before my mother had in mind to bear me. And this is not something that ever occurs to my mother at all.
The threshing gang is finishing up at our place. In the middle of the afternoon my mother and I walk out to the field with a pail of lemonade and plates of bread and butter. There is just one stack left, and Chummy’s in a barking frenzy, ferreting under it with her brown muzzle. My father is nowhere to be seen. Where’s Will? my mother asks, but nobody knows where he’s disappeared to. Back at the house we find he’s somehow come in ahead of us — we can see his legs and feet through the bedroom door. He’s lying face down on the bed with his boots on. My mother pushes me back and goes in and pulls the curtain across. I sit down on the step between the kitchen and living room. I can hear her talking to him in a low, urgent voice.
My dad was thirty-one when he met my mother. He lived all those years without knowing anything about her. It was her red hair that drew him to her, no doubt, the hair she’s cut only once, after a boy at school poured rubber cement into it. In my mind I see my younger parents walking down a cow path in the pasture, both in their Sunday clothes. My dad is following my mother; he can’t take his eyes off the bun peeping out from under her straw hat, like an animal emerging from its burrow. They come to a barbed-wire fence. But before they can stoop to crawl through it, I see her reaching for him, lifting her face to his, her eyes eager and determined. This is what’s done, she’s saying to herself. Or, Begin as you mean to go on.
I picture my parents out walking and the next thing I see my mother’s a married woman standing in her own kitchen, the kitchen of a little house near the railroad tracks in Burnley. She’s done what she was supposed to do: Phillip is a big-headed little boy at her feet, and a version of me is inside her. A preposterous predicament for both of us, but as I listen to the murmur of her voice in the bedroom I see this part perfectly. She’s just as I know her now, perils snatching at her at every turn. Don’t move too fast, don’t reach above your head, don’t drink too-hot liquids, don’t breathe in fumes from the stove.
The thing is, when I announced myself with a show of glistening blood and water, there’s nothing she was doing wrong. She still had two months to go, and it was an ordinary morning. She was standing in front of the wardrobe in the bedroom when she felt something letting go inside her and saw a scarlet stream sluice down the inside of her leg. They were living in town then, my father still working at the store, and in those days there was no such thing as a telephone or a car. She ran to the linen chest and reached with shaking fingers for a towel, plowing through the pile for something dark that wouldn’t show the stain afterwards. She used it to wipe her leg and then she slid it into her underpants.
She had plunked Phillip into the sandbox just a few minutes before and told him not to move until she came for him. Not because she had any sense of what was coming, but because she wanted to start the laundry. It was a cloudless day,
and outside her neighbour Mrs. Dempsey knelt by a flower bed in a little bubble of ordinariness, transplanting petunias from a plum case. Mother turned towards her and then turned back because she would have had to tell her why. The doctor’s office was just two streets over. She would walk there. On the edge of her vision she saw Phillip playing in the sandbox, as if in the distance, as if he were someone else’s responsibility. She walked quickly, although her knees had begun to shake. By the time she reached the corner she’d lost her grasp of where she was going. Then I picture darkness coming from the sides of her vision, closing off the light the way a camera lens closes. No one thought about Phillip sitting in the sandbox until hours later when Mrs. Dempsey found him, his little face swollen from crying and pee-soaked sand moulded under his backside. There is no end of children I can be compared to, quiet children, children who wait.
Because of me, because of the trouble I caused in church, our neighbour Mrs. Weedon becomes a Sunday-school teacher and leads the children out under the trees during the sermon, stopping at their truck and taking out a grey wool blanket for us to sit on. We’ll sit in the shade, she says. But crossing the yard with all of us trailing after her she spies Joe Pye sleeping under the trees and she veers off in another direction, leading us to a patch of worn grass and weeds in the shade of the house. We sit in a circle and sing a song about a fountain flowing with blood. Flies bite at our ankles. Mrs. Weedon takes up a stick and shows us how they pounded the spike into Jesus’ hands because of our sins: she shows us the place below the third knuckle where it went through.
I squirm off the blanket and thistles touch my legs and I begin to rub them and fuss. Mrs. Weedon reaches over and hauls me back onto the blanket. What about you, Lily? she says. She has dark tangled eyebrows and a shot of white across the iris of one eye. Have you asked Jesus to come into your heart and take away your sins?
I feel a lurch of fear that I’ve so successfully distinguished myself. Yes, I whisper.
In the dead of winter it’s dark in the house all day from the thick frost coating the inside of the windows. One day it’s too cold for Phillip and me to go to school. My father sits with his jacket and cap on and his boots up on the fender o
f the stove. Joe Pye’s got a blanket over his shoulders. Joe’s pounded a nail into the door frame and he’s braiding string from it to make bootlaces. He has a piece of copper wire wound around his wrist to draw the arthritis out of his body. There are white beans boiling on the stove, their skins peeling off into the froth rising in the pot.
My mother sits on the chesterfield, turning the pages of Pilgrim’s Progress over like cards in a deck. We’ve read the first part more than once, but we don’t always make it to the end. We’re near the beginning now, where Christian meets a man named Worldly Wiseman, who tries to warn him against the journey. You are likely to meet with weariness, painfulness, hunger, perils, nakedness, sword, lions, dragons, darkness, and in a word, death, Worldly Wiseman says. Why, sir, Christian answers. This burden on my back is more terrible to me than all these things which you have mentioned.
The beans start to boil over and my mother gets up to move the pot to the edge of the stove. I kneel against the back of the chesterfield and scratch at the frost on the window. My dreams in the night left a murky feeling in my chest, and Christian is making it worse, with his haunting dreams of his wife and children being burned up by fire from heaven and his constant blurting out his misery to anyone who comes along. I pick at the frost with my fingernail and listen to a familiar scratching sound behind me. It sounds like a mouse in the walls but it’s not. It’s the clock, scratching its own yellowed face with a bent hand. Then I hear my mother sliding the globe off the kerosene lantern to light the wick.
