by Joan Thomas
Will you be taking the piano? says Mother, as though she’s just interested. At home she talks about the piano, about how, when he had his bull out on sire, Uncle Jack was in the Parrots’ yard once and heard piano music coming from the house at ten o’clock in the morning.
I couldn’t take it even if I wanted to, says Mrs. Parrot. It’s part of the chattel mortgage. So is that, she says, watching the men lift the cream separator up to the wagon the auctioneer is using as a platform. That’s the bank’s. It’s all the bank’s from here on.
Hey! she shouts suddenly. The cream separator is covered with a sheet to keep it clean, and the auctioneer’s helper has just pulled it off. I’ll have that, she calls. That’s not the bank’s. The man folds the sheet neatly and hands it through the crowd to her and everybody laughs, and Mrs. Parrot laughs too, showing the gap between her front teeth and the little bud of skin growing down into it.
Just then a dark blue sedan drives up past all the cars parked in the lane and pulls right into the yard, as though the driver owns the place. The driver gets out and slams the door, and I see it’s the new banker, Mr. Bates. He has a boy with him, a brown-haired boy about Phillip’s age in a store-bought white shirt and gabardine pants. Mr. Bates walks through the crowd as though he has just dropped in out of interest, and the boy follows him, and then the auctioneer’s chant starts up and people turn their attention back to him.
While they’re bidding on the separator I go to look for the goat. It stands with a rope around its neck, tied to the back of the auctioneer’s wagon. It is different beyond anything I’ve ever imagined. It has an old man’s bearded face and sweeping eyelashes and a miniature oblong udder with two pointed teats sticking out of it. Its ears hang down like wide ribbons, and two narrow, fur-covered ribbons dangle from its neck. At the sight of its white eyes and their golden centres I feel a little thrill go down the back of my legs. I pick up a stick and touch the wavy hair on its back, and it flips a snowy flag of a tail and lets out a petulant protest. Phillip and our cousin Donald come along, and I do it again to show them.
Keep back from him, says Donald. He’ll try to eat your dress.
That’s not a billy goat.
It’s a boy who says this, the boy who got out of the banker’s car. He’s standing right beside me.
Look, it’s a nanny. He reaches a hand towards me — he wants the stick. I give it to him and he taps the udder, once above each tit. Anyway, he says, a billy goat would have horns.
We drop back from the goat and stare at the boy, and he looks easily back. He has his white shirt and a barbershop haircut, a belt holding up his trousers instead of braces, his knowing about different animals. What we have is one another and our joint silence. Here, he says. He hands the stick to me and walks away.
I see the boy again when they sell the piano. We’re in the house then, and I’m standing right beside the piano, and as everyone crowds round I reach one finger out and press down on the end key, in the slow way you can press a piano key so that it goes all the way down without making a sound.
A Baldwin, says the auctioneer, standing with his hand on the polished top. One of the best. That’s cherrywood! You don’t see much of that around here. Made down east and brought in special by the national railroad. Look at the date on her, 1917. Those pedals are solid brass! Perfect condition. This piano will be a family heirloom one day. Who’s going to show us how she sounds? How about it, Bertha?
People look cautiously around, but Mrs. Parrot seems to have vanished. Then Mr. Bates cocks his head at his son, and without any further persuasion, the boy walks up to the piano. There’s no stool to be found so he just stands, his sturdy back inclined over the keyboard. He puts his hands on the keys and pauses for a minute as though he’s listening to a song in his head. Then he launches in and plays a song I know from school, “Country Gardens.” He plays straight through without mistakes but very choppily. At the end he shrugs and backs away from the piano, his mouth lifted in a rueful smile.
Mr. Stalling (who still has five daughters at home and a new wife with a bit of her own money) buys the piano. John Leslie, another man from our church, buys the tractor. My dad will pay Uncle Jack for a half-share in the harrow, but he doesn’t bid on the tractor — it was out of his reach from the beginning, he says. Nobody buys the Parrot farm, nobody has the money or the credit. A Pentecostal from Burnley buys the goat for $6.50 and loads it into the back of his wagon. As it’s being led to the wagon it looks right at me with its weird eyes and says, Blah in its woman’s voice.
I meet the piano-playing boy’s sister a few months later, which must mean I have been chosen out in a special way to know them. I meet her in the winter, when I skate to town. Phillip and I both have skates and so do my Aunt Eva’s children, a legacy from my grandparents’ big family, from a richer time. I learn to skate with my cousins on the slough behind Aunt Eva’s. Then we start skating on the river, climbing down the bank from Aunt Eva’s place, mostly me and my cousin Gracie. There is so little snow those winters that the river freezes clear, sometimes clear to the sandy bottom, sometimes with golden leaves suspended in the ice, and you can skate over this beautiful patterned carpet all the way to town, although from Aunt Eva’s it’s still a long way because the river winds back and forth like a whip being cracked. No one but me wants to do it.
I’m amazed the first time I make it as far as town, coming around a bend and seeing tiny figures like the children skating on a pond in our Christmas jigsaw puzzle. On the bank fire burns in a barrel, and people stand around it warming their hands. There are girls skating hand in hand who stare at me, and boys who glide up behind me and pretend to shove me by accident, and sometimes ask me to skate. One of them takes his mitts off and tells me to as well and we clasp naked hands, bits of red fibre from our mittens stuck in the sweat of our palms. When he’s gone a town girl skates up to me. You shouldn’t take your mittens off when you skate with a boy, she says kindly, making a pretty little turn to stop. It’s fast.
Fast, I say.
People will talk about you. Besides, you’re going to freeze your hands. Come on. She holds out her gloved hand to skate with me and I take it.
Her name is Charlotte Bates. She is fourteen. She wears a wine-coloured felt hat and gloves and a scarf in matching wool. I’m wearing a coat with a strip from a wool blanket sewn around the hem to make it longer. I ask her where she’s from, knowing from her hat and her confident ways that it’s somewhere else. She says London.
London! I say. My grandparents live in England, and three of my cousins. Lois, Madeleine and George. (I pronounce Lois the way we do at home, to rhyme with choice))
Charlotte looks at me with amusement. No, she says, it’s London, Ontario, we come from.
She asks me where I live, and I tell her on a farm, knowing it to be a lesser thing. She asks me what we grow and whether we keep chickens or cattle or pigs (as though there are varieties of farms, as though what livestock we keep is an expression of our personal interests). She asks if I have brothers and sisters. I have two half-brothers, she says. Stephen and Russell. They live in Toronto.
Half-brothers, I say, thinking of Phillip and intrigued by the concept.
They have a different mother, she says. My father was married before. She says this in a voice that knows it is not quite ordinary. But she turns her face towards me and her calm brown eyes look directly into mine. I see Russell sometimes, she says. He comes down every summer.
Then she starts to hum, and she tucks my arm under her elbow so that I have to skate in rhythm with her, swaying from side to side. Two town girls skate towards us and past. They act as though they haven’t seen us. Charlotte stops humming. Helen Hildebrand, she says softly in my ear. She stole my comb. Right out of my desk. And that’s Alice Pratt with her. She stole my bow.
There’s mischief on Charlotte’s rosy face. Bow? I think. No, beau.
Time to go, Charlotte says then. Someone’s standing on the riverbank in a sleek fur coat
and a hat made of matching fur. It’s Charlotte’s mother. She’s shocked to hear I’ve skated to town. You can’t intend to go home on the river at this hour! she says. It’ll be dark in a minute. It’s twenty-four below. Do your parents have a telephone?
No, I say.
Well, Mr. Bates will be along any time now with the car and he can run you home.
So this is the banker’s family! It’s only when she says Mr. Bates that I put it together. I’ve learned the name of the boy who played the piano at the auction sale: it must be Russell Bates.
Charlotte takes off her hat and smoothes her hair. She has a low forehead with a pretty, wispy hairline. Don’t, dear, her mother says. Your ears will freeze. There’s a nervousness in Mrs. Bates’s eyes and at the corners of her mouth. The light is failing by then, most of the skaters are leaving. Only a few shouting black shapes are left on the river. The only colour anywhere is a stretched-out heart of lipstick the colour of raspberries on Charlotte’s mother’s mouth. What about you, Lily? she says. Are you certain you don’t have frostbite?
No, I say. I’m fine. I turn towards Charlotte. I went to a Bette Davis movie, I say. Did you see it?
I don’t care for Bette Davis, says her mother before Charlotte can answer. So hard. Then the blue sedan pulls up on the road and Mr. Bates puts his head out the window.
I want you to run this little girl out to the country, dear, says Mrs. Bates. She’s skated in all this way on her own. Charlotte and I will walk home.
I try to protest, but I don’t have the social presence to carry it off. Mr. Bates insists on holding my arm as I hobble to his car, and shows me how to swing my legs around once I’m seated inside so I don’t scrape the floor with my blades or damage the seat. He doesn’t say anything else except to ask me who my father is. When I tell him William Piper, he turns up our corner without having to be directed. I watch him covertly all the way home, this man who has two wives.
You won’t be able to turn around in the yard, I say when we get to the end of our lane. It’s all drifted in. Of course this is nonsense, but he stops on the road as I asked him to, and it’s just bad luck that at the very moment I’m climbing out of the blue sedan my mother comes across the yard with a milk pail in each hand. She takes one look and then turns her head as though the question of whose car I’m getting out of is a matter of complete indifference to her. By the time I’ve hobbled into the porch and taken my skates off she has the separator going and is bending into her turning of the handle, and when I step into the doorway she looks up at me with an expression so savage that a shock of fear moves down the back of my legs.
I’ve prowled my parents’ room and I know its secrets. Her drawers are lined with yellowed newspaper. She keeps a recipe tucked up along the side of her underwear drawer, a recipe in the bedroom, where recipes do not belong. Family Planning Aid, It’s called, and it’s written in a woman’s round handwriting (not her own).
1 lb. cocoa butter
2 oz. tannic acid
1½ oz. boric acid
Heat in top of double boiler and pour into large cake pan to set. Cut into squares the size of a postage stamp. Place as far in as possible ten minutes before.
In the mornings my mother comes out of that bedroom as though a long night lying next to my father affords her no rest or joy. She walks out to the outhouse with a jacket over her flannel nightgown and her long hair hanging down her back in the bent waves her braids have imposed upon it. She’s the opposite of Samson: her long hair saps her strength. Her stomach is still saggy from where her babies were, all those years before. She’s haggard with her worries — her worries are like the puppies rooting into poor Chummy when she lay by the bunkhouse with her brown fur mangy and her tits stretched out, sharp-teethed little puppies sucking their mother to death. It’s not us feeding on my mother, me and Phillip: it’s her own unhappiness.
A sense of possibility is growing in me, a cold, crackling energy — I feel it in the long muscles of my thighs when I dig my skate blades into the ice. Little hard lumps have begun collecting under my nipples. When I first feel them I’m stung. I never asked for this, it’s not prompted by any secret aspiration I have to be a woman. But I’ve announced myself. The day I went to the show with Jimmy Thrasher I threw down some sort of gauntlet. I examine my mother’s reply, the story of the girl who drank lye. I’ve got a farm child’s grasp of reproduction, but certain elements of that story elude me. The practical matter of how they managed it in a theatre seat, for one. And the character of the girl herself, who seemed furtively, recklessly bad, and yet was prepared to kill herself in a hideous manner to spare her family — although surely her drinking lye would only deepen the disgrace?
I’m helpless in all this, carried forward like a piece of bark on the creek in the spring. I sense that my mother’s being carried along too, playing a part she might not have chosen to play. Satan finds work for idle hands, she said, and then seemed immediately sorry, as though he’s too close, he’s a family member we’ve decided never to mention. Jimmy Thrasher’s busy, dirty hands come to me, boldly slicing open the raccoon, sliding its skinned body into a sack. And then in the movie, his hands grabbing at me, trying to worm their way onto the bodice of my dress, sliding up my leg. Quit doing that, I had to say all through the show, until finally I sank my nails deep into the flesh of his forearm and he called me a word I had never heard before and went to sit somewhere else.
It was sordid, I can see that. I sit in the church listening to what Mr. Dalrymple has to say about sin. In a real church, not the loft. The Nebo Gospel Chapel, a new church the men built a summer or two ago, when a letter from Mr. Pangbourne arrived, Mr. Pangbourne who had come into his money in the old country. I’m too old for Sunday school. She’s too old, I think, considering myself sitting in a pew with other girls my age, noting my thoughtful expression. She sits in a navy wool skirt, her legs gracefully crossed above her clumsy galoshes. The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked, reads out the minister. The girl savours the words: desperately wicked. She thinks of Bette Davis, when her parents came to the door (sober, respectable people with foreign accents like the Galicians’) and Bette’s father saw the giant shadow of Gene Raymond in his daughter’s bedroom putting his clothes on. I don’t believe what you believe, said Bette Davis. She spoke so strangely, as though the concept of speech was foreign to her, as though she’d rather just cast her eyes up and down under their heavy, shiny lids. It is her desperation, possibly, slowing her movements, weighing down her eyelids.
In the new, whitewashed church the signs of the Lord’s coming are not so obvious. Maybe the girl will be here to grow up after all. She’s more than she was (they were right to forbid movies), but she has no conception of what she can be. She’s sent to her room to change her dress after church and she lies back on the bed and reaches up to feel the lumps on her chest (softer and bigger every week). She thinks about Charlotte’s funny, wry face, and Mrs. Parrot laughing as her things were sold. She toys with the possibility that she can be something wholly unconnected to her mother.
Other places exist, my father is proof of it. He’s a changeling, you might think: he has a changeling’s ways. He’s fitting a pane of glass into a window in the barn, and I go to help him, to hold everything steady while he presses a narrow bank of putty into the frame. He’s so close through the glass that I can see the dots of his whiskers, the fine lines of white at the corners of his eyes that the sun never reaches because he’s always squinting. He doesn’t speak.
It was my dad who sent me to my room after I went to the show with Jimmy Thrasher. After Mother and I got back from picking peas at the Feazels’ I was out in the yard when he drove in. He got out of the Ford and stood for a minute looking at me over the hood. After all that had happened, he was himself, with his faded overalls and his mild eyes, and the points of his shirt collar frayed and curling. But when he took the little wagon out of the truck and came over to talk to me, I was stunned to see tha
t he was angry. He asked me if it was true I’d gone to the show the day before. Mr. Gorrie, he said. Mr. Gorrie was on the street when you come out. He seen you. With the blacksmith’s lad. Hurt flared up in me — at the unfairness of it, that I should be held accountable to ordinary rules on such a night.
Your mother’s going to be upset, he said.
Why do you have to tell her? I cried. My chest quaked and a sob, a single, hard sob, burst out. We stood together beside the house, where drought and constant traffic had pounded the grass to nothing. I was choked by pain. I’d have been glad if he’d gone into the kitchen to get the fly swatter and given me a licking, I’d have been glad for the sting and the familiar voluptuous crying, the machinery of crying taking me over entirely. But he just stood there. He took his cap off and wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve, and then he dropped his eyes to me. For an instant I saw into him, I saw his love and his bewilderment. You better go to your room, chuck, he said, and I went.
In 1902, Salford, Lancashire, my father’s home, was a warren of narrow cobbled streets — just as it is today. They say Friedrich Engels navigated those streets every month in a buggy on his way to oversee his mill in Manchester. George claimed, in fact, that Engels wrote, The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains with a bit of charcoal while being driven down Eccles Old Road. My grandfather, whom I never met, was a toll man on the turnpike. He had worked in the mill until the mill took off his left hand and then sacked him as unfit for the job. He knew nothing about farming.
I wanted especially to imagine my dad leaving home, taking hold of his fate and getting on a ship. My mother scorned imagination, I went where she couldn’t go. It was hard — all I had for material was what Joe Pye said and the gleaming stone streets of a Bette Davis movie. Once I went to England, once I sailed into the port at Liverpool and met my nana with her big rag-doll face, I had something more to go by. But in a way it was even harder then to understand. Those mild-mannered, incurious people, exactly how did they do it? Did they dream of Canada the way I dreamt of England?
