Reading by Lightning

by Joan Thomas

  I run to the window. The sky is an eerie brown. But the Ford is gone! They have left by natural means, this is proof of it. My chest contracts in a sob of relief. I turn to talk to Phillip, but the porch door slams, and I’m left alone in the cold and watchful house. Over the sideboard hangs a flour sack of raspberries, luridly stained. It hangs by a cord from a hook in the ceiling, dripping methodically into a crock for jelly. Letting fall the evidence of the truck, I sink into the scene: They are gone forever and I am left. Left with the dripping jelly bag and the clock running down with no one ever again to wind it up. The oatmeal on the table abandoned to the mice. Empty jelly jars in a row on the sideboard. And the Bible. I reach for the Bible and open it to the inside back cover. The three words faintly pencilled there in my father’s handwriting are stranger than ever:

  Nitawagami

  Missinabi

  Nipigon

  I steal into their bedroom and sit on the edge of their bed. The window is open, but the animal smell of their sleeping breath still hangs in the air. In her haste to leave, my mother didn’t take time to make the bed, and the bottom sheet has worked its way off the mattress. All their secrets are there, and all their ordinary things, looking shabby and secret now too, the stains on the mattress exposed and the enamel rim of the bedpan peeping out at the end of the bed, my mother’s flannel nightgown drooping from the chair, her panties on the floor. My face in the mirror, my hair uncombed and my eyes knowing. I draw in my breath and look dartingly to the side, trying to catch a glimpse of myself not looking at myself.

  After I’ve dressed and driven the cat from the living room, I drag the slop pail outside. At the pigpen I stand watching the pigs grubbing with their faces in the slop, lifting up their snouts with potato peel hanging from them. Most of the pen is dry. He would have to have rolled in the wallow the night before to be that covered with muck. I picture my parents in the wan light of dawn, hurrying to the truck, my mother’s hair streaming down from under her hat. But where were they going, what drove them away? Above me the cottonwoods sway hugely against the sky, and the sense of some despairing act, brave and futile, hangs over the yard. The pigs crowd up to the rail fence, turning their rubber noses up to see what else I have for them, but their small, red eyes give nothing away.

  Back in the house I run out to the kitchen when the porch door slams. What’s going on? I cry before Phillip can step inside.

  How would I know? he says. He slides the milk pails into the separating room and then comes back to the washstand and pours cold water into the basin. He washes his hands and drops his sullen face into the water.

  When you found him, I say when Phillip has dried his face, what was he doing?

  Just laying there.

  Were his eyes open?

  I don’t know. He tosses the towel expertly at the nail and it catches.

  Wasn’t he trying to get up?

  No. I told you. He was just laying there.

  Well, why didn’t you climb in and help him up?

  Phillip’s voice seesaws between a girl’s and a man’s, and he hates anyone who makes him use it. He grabs my forearm and twists the skin hard. Blah, blah, blah, blah, he shouts. Shut your blabbing mouth! Tears burn my eyes. I swat at him but don’t dare to really provoke him. A pit of fury yawns between us — if we fall into it, there is no one around to pull us out.

  We don’t bother making a fire for porridge but smear twoday-old bread with butter and brown sugar and sit eating while the wind rattles the chimney cap and dried-up hollyhocks scratch against the window. With every glance I steal at Phillip my loathing grows. After a minute I get up and drag the stool in from the separating room and move over to sit at the sideboard beside the scarlet jelly bag. But when he has worked his way through six slices of bread he suddenly turns talkative. If you must know, they went to Winnipeg, he says. To see a doctor. Mother wouldn’t wake you up. She didn’t want to have to listen to all your nosy questions.

  To see a doctor? I cry, breaking my vow of silence. Why didn’t they go to Dr. Ross?

  They don’t want him to know.

  To know what?

  What do you think? Phillip’s face turns crafty. He was drunk, he says.

  Dad? I say, Drunk? Drunk?

  Phillip’s eyes dart to my face and then away.

  What makes you think he was drunk? I could tell.

  Did he have a bottle with him? Embarrassment slides down over Phillip’s face like a transparent eyelid.

  No, he says belligerently. Not with him.

  So why did you think he was drunk?

  I could just tell, nincompoop, he says.

  It’s clear to me then that he’s making it up. He gets up and at the door he says, Get the separator started. Somebody’s got to take the cream can to town. And then the screen door slams.

  It was on the Sunday-school blanket that I heard the story of the man who was suddenly taken away in a whirlwind while he was just walking along a road minding his own business. I listened intently because I immediately recognized my father in this story, but in fact on the day my parents vanish, I learn for myself that the world is as flimsy as tarpaper nailed over a window, that you can slip through a crack in it and find yourself somewhere else.

  In what feels like late afternoon, I find myself alone on a road on the north side of Burnley, near the blacksmith shop. The wind’s pulling earth layer by layer up into the air, and the trees that border the blacksmith’s yard are black lines etched onto a brown sky. It’s like being on the bottom of a pond looking up through dirty water. With every step I stir up silt. Off to the side Jimmy Thrasher, the blacksmith’s son, is splitting wood, and at the edge of the road lies a dead raccoon, meticulously coated in dust, its long, curious nose pointing to the road.

  Hey, I call. Jimmy Thrasher looks up.

  I found a raccoon.

  He comes walking out to the road. He doesn’t say hello to me or acknowledge that he knows who I am. He goes up to the raccoon and turns it over with the toe of his boot. Its little human hands are folded as though someone laid it out for burial, and its eyes are open and coated with dust like two grey-brown buttons chosen to match its coat. That’s a big bugger, he says. Then he walks back to his shed, and I think he’s not coming back. But in a minute he does, carrying a couple of sacks and a long, curved knife. He kneels beside the raccoon and slips the point of his knife under its chin. Its neat coat parts to show a glistening red body. I’ve often watched chickens and pigs being gutted, but I have to turn away. I glance back just once to see him shoving the carcass like a naked baby into one sack and sliding the bloody skin into the other.

  What’re you gonna do with it? I ask, meaning the carcass.

  Give it to the dogs, he says.

  Are you gonna sell the skin?

  Might. Might make myself a hat. He wipes his hands on the sack and then he stands up and grins at me. His skin is the colour of toast and blackheads are bedded like polka dots around his nose. My old man’s off drinking at Kulyk’s, he says. I’m going to the show when I’ve split this cord. It’s Tarzan.

  I wish I could go.

  What’s stopping ya?

  After he’s tossed the sacks into the shed he picks up his axe and goes back to his chopping. I trail after him into the yard and stand against the side of the house, gradually edging along to the curtainless window, and peer inside. The glass is filthy, and a piece of furniture with a rough, unvarnished back is pushed up against the window. I turn back to watch Jimmy Thrasher. No one knows where I am. Perhaps I’m a different girl entirely, perhaps I can do what I want. When Jimmy Thrasher finishes splitting his cord he sinks the axe into the chopping block with a grunt and turns towards the road, jerking his chin at me to follow.

  Don’t you want to wash your hands? I ask.

  Don’t you want to mind your own business? he says, not unpleasantly. He pulls a handkerchief out of his pocket and blows his nose, and with a quick, impudent gesture he shows me the black dirt that came out of
it. Then he starts up the road towards town and I follow him.

  That’s my first movie, and I don’t come back to earth, really, until I’m a good mile from town, until I find myself out on the section road, with the prairie dark all around me, its edges marked with yellow light. I come back with a lurch at the thought of my dad. The events of the morning have been ripped away from this dark night — there is no stitching morning and evening together into the same day. I’m seized by the terrible realization that my father and I are not at this moment in the same world.

  Dust clots my nostrils so I can hardly breathe, but I begin to run, feeling under my shoes the soft dust that drifted across the road in the storm. A row of trees, the shelter belt from someone’s farm, drops behind me. And suddenly in front of me is the sun, a changed sun, full of blood, a huge, crimson globe squatting on the edge of the field to the west as though the sky and the earth are being pried apart to reveal the fire of the firmament. As I watch it wobbles free of the horizon — it has reversed direction, it’s rising, lifting itself ponderously into the black sky. I stand transfixed for one wild moment and then, with a lurch of sorrow and relief, I know that it’s not the sun at all. It’s the moon, the ordinary rising of a moon stained red by the dust in the air. To the north is a tiny square of bleary yellow light. I must already be at the Feazels’ — that will be their window, the lantern burning on their kitchen table.

  Phillip sits in the yellow cave of our kitchen with a lamp on the table and his gopher tails spread out in lots of ten. What do you think you’re doing, taking off like that for hours? he says in his ugliest voice, and I know it’s a miracle he hasn’t gone to Aunt Eva’s to tell them. Just as I’m floating off into sleep I hear the truck drive into the yard. Phillip won’t tell — he’d be blamed too. My mother’s everyday voice drifts down the hall and I hear the iron scrape of the stove door. My father is there, he’s starting a fire to make tea. Tomorrow Mother and I are going to the Feazels’ to pick and can peas. I remember this, and the weight of the commonplace world settles down on me.

  The next day the wind has dropped — it would be a sunny day but dust the grey-brown of an old bruise still hangs in the air. Walking to the Feazels’ I try to find out from my mother where they went, but she won’t say. In any case the whole business of my father is fading, the idea of him lying like the prodigal son in the pig wallow, staggering across the yard smeared with manure. Other visions hang over me now, worlds outside my powers of imagination. It wasn’t Tarzan, the Ape Man I saw with Jimmy Thrasher — it was Bette Davis and Gene Raymond, living in a shining silver city. Tall, beautiful buildings, with awnings that cars drove under in the rain, gleaming stone streets. All of it unbearably lovely and exciting. Bette Davis’s satin gown with no fabric at all over her thin back, her shoulder blades sprouting like the wings of a baby chick below the shining cap of her hair. Gene Raymond with the same silver hair, as though he and Bette were made as a matched set. Bette’s rooms with their silver carpets and curtains. All of it real, and not real, and not from my own mind. And yet in the light of it I can hardly make out my mother and Mrs. Feazel, stooping over the dry dusty rows, their hair tied up in kerchiefs.

  Just after we get home in the late afternoon, our fingers green from shelling peas, my dad drives into the yard with the little wagon in the Ford. He picked it up at the creamery, where I’d left it, and he found out that I’d been to the show with Jimmy Thrasher. I’m sent to my room, and about an hour later, Mother comes in and sits on the bed beside me. She’s not carrying the fly swatter they use for lickings, she’s carrying a story. Something Aunt Eva told her, about a girl who died, in Burnley.

  This girl wasn’t a Christian, says my mother, her voice weighted with intent, but she was a well-brought-up girl. But one night she went to the show with a boy, a boy who just wanted one thing from her. In any other place she would have said no to him. But that night she forgot who she was. It was being with him in the dark like that, with those filthy pictures playing. And then afterwards, when she finds out (here excitement breaks through the hush of my mother’s voice), when she realizes she’s been caught and all the world will know what she’s done, she can’t bear to tell her parents. She can’t bear the disgrace. For her whole family.

  My mother waits for me to ask a question, and when I lie in silence she finally just says it.

  She drank a bottle of lye, that’s what killed her. Her and her baby. Her voice drops into a hush when she says baby. This is it, the crack of the whip, not lye or killed but baby.

  I slide down on the bed and turn my head into the pillow. It’s a good pillowcase, with flowers embroidered on its hem, pink daisies pulsing pinkly under my open eye. The last two days have been too much for me to take in — I feel the vertigo of an overextended traveller. You’re a foolish, selfish girl, my mother cries. She weaves her fingers into my hair and cranks my face around to make me look at her. You don’t know what it would do to your father, she says. It would kill your father!

  I remember so clearly the body I had in those years. My thin arms, my hip bones jutting up from my stomach when I lay in bed, my thin legs that I think of as always in motion — running, hopping, skating, scrambling under barbed-wire fences, walking miles over the pasture and along the dusty roads. Dirt bedded in cracks in my heels, a boil in the fold of my arm so I couldn’t bend my elbow all the way. Sties swelling like seedpods on my eyelids. The understanding growing inside me that I was not just one thing any more. I had entered the second stage of my childhood: I was now a child who had a memory of being something different.

  Had a memory of summer evenings, for example, and climbing the maple tree beside the bunkhouse. The earth below me dark and the sky evening blue, as bright blue as a delphinium, moving swiftly to green a few inches above the horizon. The crickets starting up their chorus, the house and the barn sinking to nothing, merging with the dark, flat fields. I’d sit in the tree waiting for my dad, up against the trunk, bark digging into my backbone through my blouse. When he finally came out of the barn he’d be a shadow moving in and out of the yellow circle of light cast by his lantern. He’d go into the house and the screen door would slam — he’d go in without knowing I was there. I’d sit on in the tree, above the yard, above the perilous fate that bound me to my mother. Not a child and not a small animal, just thought, a nub of heat and longing, a point of view, above being born and above dying.

  3

  I kneel in the box of the bouncing truck and peer through the window into the cab. My mother sits on the passenger side in her white daisy-print dress clutching a plate on her lap, on which is stacked a mountain of egg sandwiches under a tea towel. She made mayonnaise that morning, beating oil into eggs, while a film of oily sweat glistened on her forehead. I was watching and saw the moment when the eggs and oil in the bowl turned into something completely new, something thick and creamy white. My mother rides beside my father, not looking at him, although I can tell she’s still arguing. Tractor is the word on her lips. My father is not speaking. He made his comment at breakfast: I can’t see myself buying Hughie Parrot’s tractor out from under him. To which my mother said (and is no doubt saying again, although I can’t see her lips): it’s not Hughie Parrot’s tractor. It belongs to the bank and it has from the beginning.

  When the truck swings off the Burnley road and starts the long climb to the Lookout, I turn around and sit down. I want to be watching when we crest the hill and catch our first glimpse of the Parrot farm at the bottom of the rise, a barn that still has traces of red paint on its planks, a brick house with hollyhocks softening its corners. There is a goat in the yard, which I’ve seen only from the road. (You can make a good cheese with goat’s milk, my dad said. Cheese! my mother said. Not likely! Bertha Parrot just has to be different. She always has to try to be different.) Today everything will be outside in the yard for the selling-up sale, beds with weeds poking up through the springs, the sock stretchers and chamber pot put on display, who knows what other different
things.

  Phillip squats in the other corner of the truck box, not holding on. That’s the way he likes to ride, proving he can keep his balance in the back of a moving truck. I sit watching the road spool out from under the truck and think about Jimmy Thrasher, with that shock of black hair that like a dog he didn’t bother to push out of his eyes. The way he suddenly spit towards the weeds by the road as we walked to town and said, Girls aren’t worth the dirt they’re made of. I’m not made of dirt, I said. Girls are made from Adam’s rib. Then he squatted right in the road, the way Phillip is squatting now. Can a girl do this? he said. When I squatted beside him he dared me to lift one leg, and I showed him I could and then he let out a shrill, exultant laugh. Ha, ha, dog taking a piss, dog taking a piss, he shouted, and gave me a shove so I toppled over.

  When we get out of the truck at the Parrots’ my mother says to Dad, If you can’t get the tractor, at least go in with Jack on the harrow, and then she takes the sandwiches over to the lunch table where a group of women stands. The sale is well underway. Mrs. Parrot is there, bending the brim of her straw hat down to shield her eyes. Her baby is hanging on to one of her legs, his diaper — a yellow towel — sagging down past his knees. My mother sets the sandwiches on the table. I better leave them covered, she says. All this dust.

  Mrs. Parrot laughs. She laughs so no one will feel sorry, so my mother won’t have to say anything about what is happening. The big kids are down at the creek, she says, looking at me.

  Your furniture is sure going fast, Mother says.

  Some of it’s still in the house, says Mrs. Parrot. We’re taking a lot of it with us. I sold the sideboard, though. It was too big anyway.