Reading by Lightning

by Joan Thomas

  This is what I finally figured: that, as with most things, there was no real moment when my grandparents decided to send their son away forever. They started talking about it, and then excitement took over, and they couldn’t bear to go back to ordinary days. Ten pounds spent on curtains and pots would have raised their stock in the street, but not the way it rose from just talking about sending Willie to Canada. And then Boris’s friend Joseph Pye, a farm boy, committed to go and mailed away his fare and homestead fee. When my grandparents walked out onto Kersal Moor on Sundays they could see the Pye property on the other side of a drainage ditch: a square house of whitewashed stone. The Pye barn and the important cluster of outbuildings around it had the force of an argument.

  How can you ever separate all the strands that make up a motive? “‘Goodbye, Dolly, I must leave you,’” Nan sang as she knelt cleaning the flagstones with a donkey stone from the rag and bone man, and then she lifted her flushed face and said to my father, “You must take Duke. You’ll want a dog on a farm.”

  “Nay, I’ll leave her with the kids,” my father said. I imagine a queer feeling going through him: he would know they had just crossed the line between dreaming about it and planning it.

  By the end of February his name was on Isaac Barr’s list and his fare was booked on a ship sailing from Liverpool. Those without a stake — like my dad — could work for a year in a nearby city called Winnipeg, where jobs were going begging, and for a fee Isaac Barr would undertake to register their claim. They discussed farming, a mysterious process to all of them. The thin face of Joseph Pye, newly graced god of agriculture, hovered over all their conversations. “Do they make machines for seeding wheat, do you suppose?” my father asked. He had seen grain being cut down in the fall but never seeded. “I believe they do, but Joe Pye will be able to say for sure,” my granddad answered. Then added, “I wonder if you’d be best off going to cattle or sheep. Best ask Joe Pye.” When it came time to strap up his trunk they found that one of the buckles was bent. “Happen Joe Pye can fix it,” said his little sister Lucy.

  It was April 1 when the Barr Colonists set sail from Liverpool, which might have told them something. My father and his parents rose very early that foggy morning to catch the train. He and his father put on celluloid collars, and Granddad put on his bowler hat (what they called a billy pot) and his white muffler. My father had said goodbye to his friends and the children the night before, a scene that he bore calmly because there were still several hours between himself and his leaving. I think that only Lucy got up in the morning and stood in front of the house, the curls on the back of her head matted and the corners of her mouth turned down.

  My father and his parents walked to the station carrying the tin trunk that by then bore a label reading MASTER WILLIAM PIPER, SALFORD, COUNTY LANCASHIRE and a red and blue sticker from the Beaver Line. In the trunk were all the things the mother of a prospective colonist would think to pack for a life in the All-British Colony where (as Isaac Barr assured them) the weather was favourable and the Red Indians were almost civilized. My granddad used his hook (this was the sort of job it was good for) to lift one end of the trunk by its leather strap. They walked by Willie’s friend Robert’s house, where Robert was asleep in an upstairs room, and by the house of Basil Milgate, who owed him two shillings and had not come down the night before to say goodbye. When they reached the rise at the end of the street my father did not look back. I’ll see it again soon enough, he said to himself.

  Boris was already on the platform, along with Joe Pye and his border collie, Chum.

  “Will she sail for free?” my granddad asked.

  “I’ll pay what it takes,” said Joe Pye, cupping one hand affectionately over her muzzle. “She’s that good with sheep.”

  “Me and Willie are getting us-selves wolves,” said Boris. “That’s what they use where we’re going.”

  The fog melted and sun flickered through the trees as they sped towards Liverpool. They clacked through Warrington and my father gazed for the first time at a town made of golden brick. Boris and Joe talked more and more and my granddad less and less. Nan had a gay moment at the station, but after that she did not speak at all and did not look at my father. She kept her shawl over her head and stared at the window. She was wearing her Sunday shoes instead of her clogs, and they were famous for hurting her feet, but my father had never seen her like this and thought she was angry about something.

  At Edge Hill they went into a long dark tunnel and then they pulled in to Lime Street Station, under a high glass and iron ceiling, with clumps of fern growing from cracks in the brick walls. They disembarked and claimed their luggage and stood baffled among the throngs of people. Each of them felt a little squeeze of private disappointment that Isaac Barr was not there to meet them. Eventually they made their way up off the platform and Joe thought to walk out to the street to look and came back to tell them that a big wagon bearing the sign BEAVER LINE stood in the street. They dragged their gear outside. “Is this for Reverend Isaac Barr’s ship, then?” my granddad asked, and the driver said, “It’s the Beaver, ain’t it?” In a few moments they set off through the stained stone buildings of Liverpool, on streets that descend to the sea.

  When they got to the pier head the driver pointed out the SS Lake Manitoba moored out in the Mersey, a trim black and white steamship but not large. She had only one stack, unlike the other ships that loomed over the quays.

  “Will she carry them all?” asked Granddad doubtfully. Isaac Barr had advertised for five hundred, but a man on the wagon said two thousand were going.

  “They’ve fitted her out special,” the driver said. He let them off at the Beaver Line baggage area, where massive carts were piled with crates and barrels and trunks and trunk-sized wicker baskets. A lad handed them a grease pencil and told them they must write on all their luggage WANTED, NOT WANTED.

  “We wants it all,” Boris said to him, “or we wouldn’t of brung it.”

  “If you don’t want it before Saint John it must go in the hold,” said the lad firmly.

  My dad was handed the grease pencil and printed NOT WANTED on all three trunks and they hoisted them up onto a cart. Boris pointed out six crates labelled PIANOFORTE SET UPRIGHT and two huge crates of oblong shape with no label.

  “Them’s coffins,” he said. “Some navvy’s takin’ his coffin to Canada.”

  “Them’s bathtubs,” said Joe.

  The long floating pier was crammed with parasols and women’s hats as wide as the horizon. My father’d never been to Blackpool like certain of his friends, he’d never seen the sea, and he was dazed by the brightness of the air and the smell of salt and sewage and horses, the wild squabbling and swoop of gulls and the thunder of freight wagons trundling over the cobblestones. They saw two parrots and numerous cages of canaries and possibly some sparrows. They noted that patent-leather shoes were highly favoured as colonial wear. A brass band stood on the edge of the pier playing “Rule, Britannia!” My father looked eagerly at a girl with a pretty, sharp face sitting on a trunk. She wore her hair down, and he judged her to be somewhat younger than he was. Her mother was heavily pregnant. “They’re never putting the poor dear on a ship in her condition!” cried Nan.

  Excitement rose as the SS Lake Manitoba was moved up to the pier. They were soon separated from Boris and Joe. “Ne’r mind, you’ll track them down on the ship,” his father said. “You’ll have nowt else to do for a week.” Nan had bought some ship’s biscuit and helped Willie tuck it into his knapsack under the Bible that she insisted the night before should come out of the trunk so he could read it on the ship. Granddad gave him the guinea he would need for expenses on the journey and watched Willie pin it into his pocket. “You don’t want your knapsack pinched,” said Granddad. “You must take care to sleep with it under your head.” They acted as though they were preparing him for a week’s voyage instead of for his whole life.

  As no one was boarding they made their way into a pub. It was
crammed, but Granddad managed to work his way over to the bar and came back with three pints, one in his one hand and the others held against the front of his jacket. “Here, lad, get that down your neck,” he said. There was no place to sit so they stood and looked out the salt-etched window. In front of them was the Mersey full of steamships and tugboats of all sizes and across the water the miniature town of Birkenhead. As soon as she took a sip of her ale, tears began to stream down Nan’s cheeks as though they were dislodged by her swallowing. She hung her head and the tears dropped in dark circles on the front of her dress. “There now, pet,” said Granddad. They watched the baggage being loaded onto the SS Lake Manitoba, trunks and crates dangling from huge ropes and skidding across the deck. Just as Nan looked up a tin trunk like my father’s swung wide and banged against the hull, splitting open. Everything inside fluttered silently through the air and fell into the water. Nan let out a little cry. “There now, pet,” said Granddad.

  “There’s a thousand trunks on this dock just the same as that ’un,” said my father gamely.

  When they got back to the pier a voice was calling, “All aboard steerage” through a megaphone. There were throngs of men on the pier, but none of them recognizable as Isaac Barr. The band began to play Nan’s very song, “Goodbye, Dolly, I Must Leave You,” and she cried harder. My grandfather shook my father’s hand, and Nan pressed her wet face into his neck and sobbed. “I’ll do me best to send home,” said my father. If any of them had any other last words they were lost in the din.

  I know something about this kind of goodbye. It was impossible for my father to feel anything equal to the situation and so all he thought about was getting a spot on the portside deck so he could wave at his parents as the Lake Manitoba moved away. He was on his own and quick and he managed to work his way through the press of bodies to the railing, but by then his parents had been swallowed up by the crowd on the pier and all he could see was a flock of waving handkerchiefs. As the gangplank rose he felt a chasm of panic open at his feet, but he stepped back from the edge of it, telling himself that if he handled this bravely he’d be allowed to come home. But in this respect I know more about my father than he knew himself: I know the whole shape of his life and I know that he never will.

  4

  Aunt Eva starts to climb the ridge and Gracie trails after her.

  You better watch! calls my mother. There’s poison ivy up there!

  My mother goes back to picking berries like a steam-powered machine. King stands under a basswood tree, lifting his tail and swinging it elaborately from side to side. It’s horseflies — they’re bothering us too, landing on our legs and digging in with a sudden malicious pick. My mother’s got the honey pail on a string around her neck and she picks with both hands. It was just a disagreement about where to pick, but any argument with Aunt Eva energizes my mother, and she’s been in a good mood anyway from the time she woke up.

  I’m so thirsty, I say.

  There’s lemonade, says my mother. We’ll have a drink while it’s still cold.

  Aunt Eva brought the lemonade. It’s in a vinegar jug under the wagon, and there are four tin cups. Guiltily we unscrew the jug and fill two cups, and then we sit in the shade of the wagon. Without discussing it, we sit where Aunt Eva can’t see us from up on the ridge. The horseflies find us, and my mother reaches up and locates the pins in her hair in four unerring stabs of her fingers. Her bun collapses and slides down her shoulder, and she clutches the hair in a tail and swishes it from side to side, her face crumpled in helpless laughter.

  I glance down and there’s a yellow jacket floundering in my cup. I dash the lemonade on the grass.

  Lily! my mother cries. I thought you were thirsty! You’ll end up like Bertha Parrot. Her mind always goes to Mrs. Parrot when she thinks of waste. Those people, she says, pressing her tin cup to her forehead to feel the cold. They had toilet paper! Did you go to the outhouse during their sale? They were going broke and they were buying toilet paper! And they were getting the Family Herald mailed out. It was in their outhouse. (The corners of her mouth go down — a confidence is coming.) I had to go to the toilet during the sale and I started reading a story in the Family Herald and I couldn’t stop. I read the whole thing! I was holding the door open a little ways with my foot so I could read. And then when I was almost done, somebody came down the path! I was so busy reading that I didn’t notice until he was right there. (Her voice drops to a whisper.) It was Felix Macdonald.

  What did you do? I ask.

  Well, I knew he had seen me! So I couldn’t go out. I just shut the door tight and turned the latch. I sat there until he left. He kept thumping on the door. Finally (she mouths the words at me), he peed in the bushes.

  Any mention of Felix Macdonald, the farmer she used to work for, signals an intimate interlude, knowing looks. Unwelcome pictures, my mother sitting in the dark on the toilet hole with her underpants down, listening to the startstop hiss of an old farmer peeing. I pull my skirt down over my legs to discourage the horseflies. I tuck it tightly under me. Above me a bird sings the same two notes over and over. Finally I ask.

  What happened to Dad? The day he fell in the pigpen.

  There’s a little silence while she takes a last swallow of her lemonade. Nothing happened, she says then. She rips off a handful of grass and uses it to wipe out her cup. Can’t your father slip and fall?

  Joe Pye goes away for months at a time, and then he comes back. Phillip and I come home from school and he’s sitting at the kitchen table nursing a cup of tea and there’s a little celebration, not in the way of food or drink, but in the way of talk. Not about where he’s been lately. He’s been at another farm that had the cash to pay him for a while, there’s nothing to tell.

  If his arthritis is giving him a rest, he’ll fall into talking about his great adventure. Find a way to ask about how they got to the colony — that’s how you can always get him started. He’ll always tell it, that amazing part, how they pulled in to Saskatoon one cold April afternoon, two hundred miles from their claims, and were told to get off, they were at the end of the line! They’d woken up excited, expecting to roll in to the settlement by nightfall, eager to see the hospital (St. Luke’s — it even had a name) and the British Canadian Settlement Store that some of them had invested fifty pounds in, and the school and lending library. Instead the train ground to a halt at Saskatoon and they were dumped off on a muddy field. This is where Joe Pye dissolves into chuckles. If he’s outside smoking at the time he’ll be in danger of swallowing his cigarette.

  Phillip, teetering on a chair tipped against the wall, interrupts. That’s not what Dad says, he says. Dad knew from the beginning that the line stopped at Saskatoon.

  Dad wasn’t even there, I say. He got off at Winnipeg. I keep my eyes on Joe Pye. His cigarette is down to a flattened shred clamped between his stained thumb and forefinger. He takes a last pull on it, his eyes gleaming. What is coming is talk about that wicked man, a wicked minister, Reverend Isaac Barr. It’s a strange kind of wickedness, not to do with liquor or murder or stealing. Well, stealing of course, but the real wickedness was his imagination, the way he created something beyond this world and lured them all into it.

  The first sign of trouble, Joe said, was long before they got to Saskatoon. It was the way he refused to talk on the ship. As soon as they boarded they clamoured to see Reverend Barr. There was always a stir when he appeared — they wanted him to talk about what lay ahead. But he pushed on to his cabin, answering questions in a flat voice that said he was tired of repeating the obvious.

  He had put another leader in place for all that, Reverend George Exton Lloyd. Reverend Lloyd was a tall man in a flat black hat, thin in all his aspects (legs, nose, fingers, smile). Joe Pye saw Barr and Lloyd together only once, standing in a passage talking. They talked for a long time and never once looked at each other. This was because Reverend Barr did not like to look up to anyone and Reverend Lloyd did not like to look down. Reverend Lloyd was a rea
l-life hero. He had fought with the Queen’s Own Rifles and defeated the rebel Louis Riel. In the middle of the battle he’d gone back to rescue a fallen comrade and been wounded and left for dead himself, and later had a bullet cut out of his back without gas or morphine. But he had a melancholy face. He was no threat to Isaac Barr — visions were not his department. His department was the mundane reality of homesteading, supply syndicates and crop rotation. Every afternoon he gave a lecture on the cabin-class deck, on a topic posted on a slate at breakfast: INDIANS. AGRICULTURE. CANADIAN LIFE AND PROBLEMS. Most of the passengers attended, although they didn’t know what to do with all these details and they were distracted by Reverend Lloyd’s lisp.

  As one of a handful of actual farmers on board, Joe was eagerly sought out (though when it came down to it his expertise was confined to sheep). After the lectures a crowd of plasterers and publicans and bookbinders and estate agents would gather around the farmers, listening gravely to their talk and risking the odd question. Boris didn’t bother coming to the lectures. He had his own business to conduct. Someone had asked him about harnesses and he sprawled against the bulkhead sketching horses. Colonists who dropped five pence in his hat could buy a diagram of how to harness a horse for a Lancashire tram.

  Meanwhile Isaac Barr kept to his cabin. Finally the rumour spread through steerage that they were all to go to meet him and be assigned their homesteads. My dad and Boris were not going directly to the colony, but they lined up with the others. Joe went first. In a large stateroom, a desk had been unscrewed and moved towards the door to serve as a wicket. At the desk sat Isaac Barr with his huge drooping moustache and his small head bent over a chart. When he looked up and raised his eyebrows Joe said, “Joe Pye, sir. Can ye point me to a claim with stones on it?” Joe had in mind to build a stone house, but he didn’t say that part and Isaac Barr didn’t ask. He just pressed his pen to an ink-soaked sponge and wrote PYE on a square near the bottom of the chart. After that he gave Joe a slip of paper on which was written 36SW-49-2 and said, “Mind you don’t lose that.” Next Boris stepped up to the desk and said, “Me cousin and me sent you ten pound to save our claims for next year, and we wants to know if we can pick them out now,” and Isaac Barr said, “No, you can’t. Move on now,” and so they did.