Reading by Lightning

by Joan Thomas

  Of course when I finally saw England I was able to elaborate the whole thing — I could slide what I’d pictured earlier into the endless uniform row houses of Lancashire mill towns. Walls took on the lavish designs of English wallpaper, all stained with pipe smoke and soot. Shelves appeared in the living room, crammed with ornaments from Blackpool. There was the fryer of lard sitting on the cooker shelf, and the oily smell of coal. The way the women dressed — lace collars and artificial flowers pinned to their blouses. But my father himself, as he lived in my stories and my heart, did not change when I saw his home, so I believe that I was always right about him.

  I know what he must have felt the first morning on the ship, with the green hump of Ireland sliding evenly past the railing, how hard he would have found it to call up a sense of home. He would spy someone looking at a pocket watch and ask, “Do you have the time in Liverpool, sir?” and he would try to think what they were doing at home at that hour and he never could. He could trace his way down the passage and into the kitchen and then up to the boys’ bedroom, but he could never call to mind whether you could see over the fence and into the ginnel from the back window. He could conjure up only the vaguest outline of his parents’ faces, expressionless like dolls. All that existed of the world was a circle of ocean and the throbbing ship with its eager, pacing passengers.

  The day it first happened, the day that swallowed up all his previous days — I’m irresistibly drawn to imagining that day. There are days that drain the meaning out of whole months before them. Joe Pye knew that sort of day — when his dog disappeared, when Dad and Joe climbed up on deck one morning and found that six or eight of the bigger dogs were gone, their yelping silent, the deck swabbed, and none of the crew willing to answer questions. That was the only day Joe did not like to talk about, although he would, when he was in a black mood. There are days that turn other days into a jumble of underexposed photographs you can hardly look at for the pain it gives you to recall your former, naive self. The day the dogs died and the day my dad’s troubles began have merged into one day in my mind, and as time has passed I have been able to picture that day from beginning to end.

  What they noticed first was that the deck was clean, as it had never been clean since they boarded at Liverpool. Five or six small dogs sniffed at their hands, but Chummy herself and the pack of dogs she ran with, the pack that had lain on the fore-deck and bulkhead like a motley herd of sheep for the first four days of the journey, were nowhere to be seen.

  “Someone’s locked them up,” my dad said.

  A bony-faced woman from cabin class was there, clutching her lapdog to her like a life preserver. “Listen,” she said. All they heard was the rumble of the engines and the roar of the sea, sounds they had stopped noticing days ago. William ran to the aft deck with several of the others and looked with dread into the churning wake. A lone sailor was swabbing close to the railing with his back to them.

  “Hey, you there,” one of the colonists called. “What the bloody Christ have you done with our dogs?” The sailor turned and lifted his shoulders to say, I haven’t a clue.

  “You lying swine,” the colonist shouted. “Get me the captain.”

  It was the first mate who eventually appeared. “This is nothing to do with us,” he said. “You were responsible from the first day out for your own dogs.”

  “Ought we to have set a bleedin’ armed sentry on our bleedin’ dogs, then?” they shouted.

  A chemist from Leeds tapped the ebony tip of his walking stick on the deck. “You have misjudged the calibre of man in this enterprise,” he cried. “The Beaver Line will never carry another colonist, not when we’re finished with you.”

  There was another meeting, an indignation meeting, they had begun to call them. All afternoon sitting in steerage Joe and William heard distant argument, shouts and the scuffle of shoes on the deck. Some thought Reverend Barr should take the captain to task, but those who had turned against Isaac Barr were prepared to believe that he had come up during the night himself and tossed the dogs methodically over the side, although to William it seemed an unlikely undertaking for a portly man.

  “It were the crew,” he whispered to Joe Pye. “They couldn’t abide the barking.”

  Joe declined to attend the meeting. “I’m that bloody sick of bickering I’m ready to throw meself overboard,” he said. That night he bought a pint of gin from Bantam Bradshaw and gave William a couple of nips. The skies began to pour rain in the late afternoon and the men spent a long evening on their bunks, exhausted by the effort of breathing in the thick air. Someone tapped haphazardly on a tin drum, and an irritating boy named Tommy Blecker roamed through the rows of bunks, pulling bootlaces loose, trying to provoke a fight. Most ignored him, but Boris had never been one to suffer fools; he kicked out with his hobnailed boot as though Tommy were a pesky cat. “Git,” he growled. “Git to your own bunk. I’d fight me own sister before I’d fight you.”

  “Your sister, eh?” said Tommy. “She the one I seen on the quay with a sailor?” He giggled his manic giggle.

  Boris leapt from his bunk. “You wants to fight?” he yelled. “Fine, then. Let’s see you take our Willie, then. If you wants to fight let’s see you take a Salford lad.” With one of his wicked smiles, he turned to the bunk where William and Joe were playing cribbage and laid hold of William’s arm. William tried to twist free, but he was lying right at the edge of his bunk and he lost his balance and slid to the floor.

  “Leave me be,” he said to Boris. “I’ll pick me own fights.” He was aware of amused eyes watching from the bunks around and of the gin humming in his blood, and he felt his heart beginning to thud, for he didn’t like fighting. The man who was tapping on the drum sat up and delivered a theatrical roll, and William braced himself to the lift and drop of the ship. He saw Tommy Blecker turn eagerly, and he took a step back and felt disgust for Boris and for himself, for his timidity.

  And then a strange electric sensation seized him, the notion that he had been there before, exactly there at an important time of his life, seeing Boris with his peaked black eyebrows pasted onto his face, Boris waving his bulging arm, seeing Boris’s open mouth and his big teeth with the black spots of rot between them, seeing Tommy Blecker’s foolish face framed between the bunks, something of terrible significance coming out of Tommy Blecker’s mouth, his voice bouncing back and forth through William’s head. Time was winding back on itself and he was caught in its gears, he had been held in this moment before, a long time before when everything had a grand and terrible meaning. It was close, close and familiar, as familiar as the secret intake of his breath, and he surrendered and felt himself swaying forward and let the voices and that terrible insistent meaning pull him in.

  Later, it seemed a long time later, he was aware of faces above him, although he would not have been able to say whose they were. From their moving lips and the urgency of their expression he knew they were speaking, possibly asking him questions, but their voices meant nothing to him, and he longed to sink back into the darkness. There was something in his mouth, a stick shoved in crossways like a bit, and he spat it out and found that he was spitting blood. Some of them helped him over to a lower bunk and someone, it was Joe, he realized, helped him pull off his trousers. Soon after that the lights went out and he lay still, feeling terribly ill. He tried lying with a hand on the rough planks of the lower deck to root himself in the darkness, but still he felt himself floating giddily on the endless furlongs of water and the hours of the night until finally the two blurred in his mind and became the same thing.

  Then he realized that it was morning. Strange images from the night before came vividly to him. He saw the drummer’s stick rolling on the floor between his bunk and the wall and he recognized it as the stick that he had found in his mouth, left behind from his nightmare like the token in a fairy tale. He was terribly stiff and sore and his tongue was raw and he thought the fight must have gone on for a long time and that he had been hit on the head.
He found his trousers, but they were damp and smelled of urine. Joe was standing by the bunk watching him.

  “Did he beat me then?” he asked.

  “Nay, lad, you fell down before he hit you,” Joe Pye said.

  Did it have something to do with the dogs? He could never say. He and Joe never spoke about it, or about Chummy. But Joe stayed with William every minute of the rest of the journey except when he went to the loo. Boris no longer joked with him, and he thought that maybe the other colonists looked at him strangely as he passed and talked to him less than they had before, although he couldn’t be sure because how much they talked to him was not something he had taken note of in the past. In any case he kept his distance because of the shameful smell of piss. He was tired. He felt relieved of a kind of tension, as though something had exploded out of him and left him spent and exhausted. When he tried to think of what had happened he could only see himself from outside himself — although that is not where he had gone, he had not gone outside his body but rather into some cramped black place inside his mind, down some trap door he had not even known about before. But now in his mind he could see his abandoned self from above, the men bending over him, his thrashing arms and legs (he must have been moving around in order to be so stiff and sore), and the thought that his body had performed in this way on its own and that others had witnessed what he was denied knowing about himself filled him with humiliation.

  It was then he saw the girl he’d watched on the Liverpool pier. He had watched for her daily but saw only two small, well-dressed boys he judged to be her brothers because they had the same high forehead and sharp, sweet face. But that day the girl herself appeared on deck with the two boys and with a toddler in her arms. She walked back and forth patting the toddler’s back with a practised hand, looking out to sea the whole while at the clouds piling up on the western horizon. She wore black leather boots with shiny black buttons. Little loops of gold seemed to penetrate her earlobes, and the wisps of hair along her hairline gave her the look of a composed child. Afterwards he couldn’t recall the device holding her hair back from her face or what she was wearing, but he recalled a general air of smartness, and himself pressed back against the bulkhead not daring to move when she walked by.

  After that there was a day of moving in and out of fog and brilliant sunshine. Passengers looked at schools of porpoises through their telescopes. They saw flying fish and vessels with cod heaped on their decks in nets. By night the sea was so calm that the stars were reflected in white blotches on the water. Something cool and solid in the air made them feel they were near land. At the coolness William’s chagrin lifted a little, but with every movement the smell of pee rose from the wool of his trousers, a smell he could not escape because his second pair was in the trunk and he had nothing to wear while he washed these.

  On the last evening a lopsided moon spilled a narrow trail of light over the water and he leaned with Joe against the bulkhead for Joe’s evening pipe. The lavatories were unusable by then, even the crew agreed, and the men had taken to relieving themselves directly into the sea as soon as there was a semblance of darkness. Boris preferred to pee from the rail. “Give us a hand, lads,” he called. Someone hoisted him up and the whole gang held him by the knees. “Land ahoy!” he hollered. “It’s England, by heck! I can see darling old England from here.”

  “Get on with it,” one of his pals said, giving his leg a shake.

  “What’s that in the water?” Boris yelled. “Hey, Joe! Where are you, mate? Git over here! I can see your old Chum! By heck, she’s swimming after the boat. There she is, I can see her likkle head in the waves.” He fumbled with his crotch buttons. “Chummy, me darling,” he called, directing an arc of piss over the waves.

  Joe stood against the bulkhead giving no sign at all that he heard. He stood and smoked, moving only to bring his pipe to his mouth. “What work will you look for, then?” he asked my father eventually.

  “Don’t know,” said William. He ran his fingers along the bulkhead and dug at a blister of paint. “How long did you take to save up your stake?” On the western horizon, opposite the moon, lightning trembled in the clouds, showing where the sky divided from the sea.

  “Didn’t save it,” said Joe. “Me uncle give it me. He’s a good man, is me Uncle Samuel. The farm’s to go to our Alfred, so me uncle give me me stake.”

  William kept his eyes on the moonlight dribbled like silver paint across the waves. He could hear the sucking sound as Joe drew on his pipe, but he could not turn his head to look at Joe, could not bear to see Joe’s mild eyes and the long slide of his nose, his high forehead and the thick, sandy hair curling over his neat ears. Can I come with you to the colony, Joe? Those were the words that came into his mind every time they were alone together, but he could not find the courage to open his lips and say them, especially not now.

  The rim of the moon slipped into the sea and they turned to go below. Joe stopped to tap his pipe on the railing. “She did hate water,” he said. “She were a queer ’un that way.”

  William had seen the last speck of England and he vowed to see the first of Canada, but when he woke up the next morning the engines were silent and they were floating in the Bay of Fundy with land on either side and the town of Saint John before them. With Boris and Joe he squeezed into a narrow space against the deck rail and stared at the shore.

  “By heck, look at them trees,” Boris breathed. “That’s some blight.”

  “It’s winter yet, ya thick git,” said Joe.

  I can imagine my father’s response to the east coast because I’ve made the same journey and have seen the rocky shores of Canada with eyes softened by England. I can see the dark and barren forest and the rocks along the waterline and I can imagine how squat and makeshift the buildings looked to him.

  They were loaded into five trains, into huge cars three feet off the ground, my father and Boris into the “bachelors’ train” that would terminate in Winnipeg and Joe into Train Number Three, bound for the colony. There were no compartments in the rough cars but benches in rows like on a tram and bunks hanging on chains from the wall. The train ran along a high bank, lurching around bends and hurtling through rock canyons that looked as though they’d been blasted out earlier that morning.

  The rail line was single-tracked, and the specials had to pull off for every regular train that came along. There was a stove at one end of each car for people who wanted to cook, but on the advice of Isaac Barr the single men were not carrying food. As soon as they sensed the train begin to slow for a stop, the men raced to get off at the front of the pack, because within ten minutes the local store would have nothing left but a few wizened potatoes and carrots. This meant pushing your way into the doorway and leaping from a moving car onto the embankment, leaping because if you were at the front of the pack and didn’t leap fast you would certainly be pushed. On those occasions when my father was at the front he bought bread and a wedge of cheese, a can of sardines and once some bologna with little spots of white blooming under the skin. The farther west they went the higher prices were. Most of the families on the other trains would be carrying provisions, but my father worried about Joe Pye.

  It was farther across to Winnipeg than any one country had the right to be. In the first few days they passed through some decent, hilly farmland, but that was soon finished and my father judged that no one could farm in most of this country. The railway stops were not yet villages, but they had names, strange names with consonants poking out of them, not like the names at home (Salford, Altrincham, Oldham) that sounded as though they’d been worn smooth by being often spoken. He began to feel an urgent desire to look at a map. As he had never seen anyone with a map in the bachelors’ train he inquired at stores. In one store he saw a box of chalk and bought a piece. He walked up the line to a rock face and wrote JOE PYE on it so Joe would see his name on the rock as he sped by. He also bought a pencil and a tin cup. With the tin cup he caught cold water where it dribbled down the we
t red rock face behind the depot. With the pencil he began to keep a list of place names (in the back of his Bible because he had no paper and in any case someone had already used his Bible to keep cribbage scores). He wrote,

  Nitawagami

  Missinabi

  Nipigon

  but didn’t bother to note what happened at each stop because he believed he’d always remember. (At Nitawagami, Bantam Bradshaw bought a set of buckskins with fringes off the back of an Indian boy by the track. At Missinabi, a deer showed itself briefly on a rocky rise beside the track and the colonists took to propping their loaded rifles at the open windows, shooting at any movement in the forest. At Nipigon, when the train was almost at a stop, his challenger Tommy Blecker slipped while leaping to the platform and fell under the wheels. He was surrounded by men who lifted him and carried him to the station, holding the leg that was crushed close to his body so that they didn’t have to see just how much of the thigh was attached. By the time a doctor arrived Tommy Blecker was unconscious. He would die the next day, news that didn’t catch up to the bachelors’ train and so never reached my father during the journey. But it didn’t need to — he saw Blecker sink under the wheel and turn his face eagerly up to the men, crying, “I’m all right, I’m not hurt”; my father was standing right there and the damage had been done.)