Reading by Lightning

by Joan Thomas

  All she has from her old life is her love for her father, and around him she fears her misery will swell up inside her and burst out, blowing a ragged hole in her chest. Secretly she questions whether God is doing his part. She thinks about when Vera Stalling was baptized, her wading to the shore holding Mr. Dalrymple’s arm, the way her drenched skirt clung to her legs and her standing-up nipples showed right through her bodice. When thoughts like that come Lily knows she should pray: Oh, Lord, cleanse my thoughts. But instead despair stirs inside her. Nothing is different for her. As the days go by, her mother’s expression turns from jubilation back to anxiety. Lily says something mean to Gracie in the churchyard and her mother overhears. She takes Lily back into the church and says softly, Jesus expects better of you now. Lily sits alone in the church for a while and digs her fingernails into her calves and leaves a little row of half-moons on her skin, but this is wrong too, this is dramatic.

  On the morning she is to be baptized they are driving down the river road, Betty and Gracie and various people from the church in the back of the Ford, trying to get to the baptism before the water dries up, but she is still wearing her nightgown, branches from both sides of the road whipping against the windshield of the truck, the shame of her unpreparedness filling her. Later she has the Ford, she has turned back on her own to get her dress, she’s the one driving when someone standing by the side of the road flags her over. She follows him into the bush, walking then, almost blind with the dread of being late. He is wearing a white shirt and she follows it, and there in the bush against a scrub oak is her mother, suspended against the tree, her pale hair tangled in the branches like vines of wild hops, her bloodless face hanging, her soul there but her spirit divided from it by some terrible event, some ritualistic visitation. Then nausea seizes Lily, and she struggles up from her bed and runs out into the bright morning. She is almost at the outhouse before she vomits in the weeds beside the path.

  Later her father pumps a pail of water and dashes it over the spot where she vomited. She’s just putting it on, says Phillip, tipping his chair back from the kitchen table to look into the living room where she lies on the chesterfield with the basin on the floor beside her, floating on her nausea, thinking it better to make a public display of her illness.

  We don’t want her throwing up in front of everyone, says her mother. When it’s her turn.

  It’s only the river, says Phillip.

  Her mother walks through the living room to get her hat. Without Lily to help with chores they are late and there isn’t time to talk about it. If you’re not coming I want you in your bed, she says. A few minutes later Lily hears the truck doors slam and hears them drive away. Tears drizzle down the sides of her face and into her ears. She tries to pray. I was willing to do it, she tells the Lord. But something inside her says that this is a lie.

  The next winter is a winter of deep snow, the first Lily has known since she was a tiny girl. The drive to town is through an alien landscape, for snow has drifted over the fencelines. Lily is not going to school and seldom thinks about it.

  In the spring Dr. Riske, the vet, asks if she can come to Leithwood to be a hired girl to his wife, who has just had another baby, but Lily’s father says no, it’s too far away. That is the year the Bates family moves away (Charlotte is not to be her dear friend after all and Russell is gone for good). And when she finally understands about the blood, when someone, Lena Haywood, a ramshackle girl of fourteen with a distinct dark moustache, announces that she is not going on a picnic to the river. I’ve got my rags, she says in her boy’s voice, and Lily understands immediately. No doubt there were other clues, and she needed just this last one to put it together. She stands by the hitching rail at the church, not marked out after all, cursed but only in a normal way, a way she shares with Lena Haywood.

  One June day her father comes into the house and says, I never seen the potato beetles this thick. They been sitting in the furrows since we planted, just waiting. How about taking a crack at it this morning, Lily?

  After breakfast she gets the kerosene from the tool shed and squats down at the far end of the garden. The potato vines crawl with yellow and black striped beetles. She shakes each plant over the kerosene bucket and beetles fall in and swim in little circles until their legs stop moving. Some fall wide and she picks them up off the grey earth like fallen buttons and drops them into the kerosene. But this is only part of the job. Bending a plant over, you find a bright secret world on the backside of the leaves: clusters of perfect yellow eggs standing on end, tiny naked babies, glistening, monstrous, pumpkin-coloured larvae. She has to crush the eggs and scrape the orange larvae off with a stick, although they always end up on her fingers, where they cling like snot.

  She is halfway down the third row when she feels too sick to go on and lets herself drop into the furrows between the rows. On Sunday Mr. Dalrymple preached about the Unpardonable Sin. It is an unspecified sin, unspecified either by Mr. Dalrymple or the Apostle Paul, and so each struggling Christian is left to cut the cloth to fit his own coat. As Mr. Dalrymple preached, Lily sat in the pew and felt the pieces falling into place to complete her despair. It was the explanation, the key: in one of her low moments of wicked thought God took umbrage and decided that there was no way in for her. It made sense of everything: why she’d failed to be baptized, why her heart is still so dark, why she tosses and weeps in her bed at night and has no peace, why her body burns with fury when her mother touches her, why her legs want to walk and walk and keep walking, over the curve of the earth and into a different self.

  She lies on her back with her hands folded over her chest, ignoring the beetles and the dirt working its way through her hair to her scalp. A cluster of black dots moves unsteadily across the white sky above her. She can’t tell whether these are birds or something swimming inside her eyeballs. She tries to formulate a prayer, but the words and sentences break up into thin scarves of smoke. Then Chummy comes bounding down the row towards her and she raises her head. Phillip is standing at the edge of the garden. Dad’s back from town, he says. There’s a telegram from England.

  The bedroom curtain is pulled. When it opens she sees Dad’s legs in his trousers and house shoes, lying on the bed. Mother comes out. Your granddad in England died, she says.

  I was sixteen when Dad sent me to England to look after his mother. God saved me from my salvation and sent me to my backsliding, and for that one act alone I know there is a God.

  Book Two

  George spent the summer before the war digging up fossils, at Charmouth in Dorset. At one time fossils lay all over the shore for curiosity-seekers to pick up, but when George was there the shore had been picked clean and they had to dig in the humpbacked shale and limestone cliffs. But it was still easy, you could lift the shale off in thin sheets, like paper. Those cliffs were a book about evolution and you read it back to front. The blue lias, it was called, from the Dorset way of saying blue layers. Some of the pages were blank, and on others the fossils were just carbon scrawls on the page, flat as pressed flowers. But then you’d lift a sheet and a creature from two hundred million years ago would be sunk into the page, a slimy little bottom-feeder transformed cell by cell into a stone amulet.

  That summer George’s paleontology class collected ammonites, belemnites and crinoids, which put them handily by alphabet into three crews. George was in the B crew, where he wanted to be. Belemnites were common fossils all over England — people used to pick them up in sheep pastures and put them on their mantels for luck. They looked like slender, stony cigars, smooth and a warm brown in colour, with one end tapered. Before he went to Charmouth, George sat on the stool in his shed and made himself a chart about belemnites, listing all the things people thought they were: Elves’ candles. Fairy fingers. Porcupine quills. Starfish points. Cigars? I suggested. Narwhal teeth, George printed, ignoring me. Stalactites. Petrified twigs. Petrified lynx piss. Finally: Mollusc shells. It turned out the belemnite was a mollusc that went extinct in
droves along the Dorset coast. A preposterous creature, with ten rubbery arms where you expected whiskers, and a beak, and gills, and an ink sac — the sort of animal you might invent in a parlour game. But someone had dug one up intact in the Oxford Clay, so there it was, with a Latin name attached to it: Lapides lyncis.

  At Charmouth they worked to the constant moan of the sea and the cry of gulls. The coast would hang dreamily in the haze on either side of them, and then would gather colour and substance as the sun climbed. Estuaries would open up along the gleaming shoreline, the buildings on Lyme Bay would take on chimneys and mouldings and painted doors. When the war took George up he moved out of my imagination like a ship gliding out of the range of radar. But I can see the shore at Charmouth perfectly, and Mrs. Slater’s boarding house, where he stayed: dusty silk pansies on the mantel and a worn Persian carpet that they swept the crumbs from with a broom. I see the crew sprawled in the gaslight after supper, smoking and talking, talking about the war while mutton grease turns to lard on their plates. All chaps, as the English say, all chaps of a certain type. Ellen clearing the table, Cornish Ellen, who worked for Mrs. Slater all the time George boarded there. I can see things George’s letters never mentioned: Ellen’s pilly sweater the colour of tinned tomato soup and her touching efforts at glamour (grease pencil around the eyes, curls lacquered in a line to her forehead). Afterwards I follow George up to his room, see his narrow, sunken bed, watch George lean in to study the diagram tacked to his wall for a long, skeptical minute (the Oxford belemnite with a flat, haddocky eye). Watch him drop onto the bed and take off his boots and swing his legs up, draw a heavy book to his knees to use as a desk, and settle himself to write. To me.

  1

  For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful, said Uncle Stanley before anyone was properly settled. We passed our plates down to him and he carved us each a slice of the roast. Uncle Stanley had a morose, handsome face, like an important person come down in the world. He wore a jacket and bow tie in his own house.

  And the voyage, then? How was that? asked Aunt Lucy, my plump Aunt Lucy with wavy, fair hair and a rose-coloured dress with gored panels in the skirt.

  It was fine, I said.

  Oh, she’s a lovely gurl, my nana cried in a high false voice. Nan was sitting beside me at the table, and she turned her big rag-doll face in my direction and squeezed my cheeks between two flat palms and planted yet another kiss on my imprisoned lips. Oh, she’s a bonny, bonny gurl, she’s the image of her nana! she cried. By the time she got to the end of this, her voice was the voice of a gruff old man.

  Not seasick? Aunt Lucy asked when this little display was over.

  No, I said.

  We’ve never really been to sea, but we went to the Isle of Man once on holiday and I was that sick I begged Stanley to throw me overboard. Remember, Stanley? Oh, I wanted to die. Your Uncle Roland lives in Belfast and every year he writes and says, You must come over. But I can’t face the thought of the voyage.

  My two English girl cousins sat side by side across the table from me, each one prettier than the other. Lois, the eldest, had hair that shone like a petal, clipped back from her smooth forehead with a shell clip and falling to her shoulders, where it turned under neatly. As Uncle Stanley carved the roast, Aunt Lucy spooned potatoes onto each plate and sent them back. Lois tried to pass the first plate on to Madeleine, and when Aunt Lucy said, That’s yours, love, she pointed sulkily at a wide vein of gristle in her slice.

  Over in Altrincham they’ve roasted a goose for their dinner, said Uncle Stanley. That’s all gristle, a goose is nothing but fat and gristle.

  His name is Archie, he’s from Altrincham, and he lives on acorns, said Aunt Lucy mischievously. Green light fell on her face and hair from the screen of vines over the one high window in the dining room.

  No, no, Ma. He lives on artichokes, said Madeleine. Ar-ti-chokes, she said precisely, in an English accent that was different from her mother’s.

  Lois’s eyes gleamed and she lifted her chin. She picked a potato off her plate with her fingers and nibbled it, as though she were alone in the kitchen.

  Now, there, none of that, said her mother, leaning over and swatting her. Did I ever tell you girls about the rich boyfriend I had in the war?

  No, Ma, never, said Madeleine and Lois, looking at each other.

  Well, Lily hasn’t heard it, Lily hasn’t heard any of my stories, that’s the advantage of family from abroad. She mashed her potato with her fork, working a vast quantity of butter into it. Lily, love, she said, drizzling her whole plate with gravy and casting me a smile. Lily, at the beginning of the war I was working in a linen shop in Broughton Park, where all sorts of wealthy ladies and gentlemen used to come, and I met this lad. He came in one day to buy a present for his mother. Ooh, he was handsome, and a fine talker, not like the lads from Stott Street. I did fancy him — all the girls did. When he asked me to go out with him I didn’t want to tell him where I lived! (He knew the minute you opened your mouth, love, said Uncle Stanley, cutting his own beef neatly into squares with the carving knife.) So I told him to pick me up at the shop, Aunt Lucy went on, ignoring him. And then when he was taking me home I would get him to drop me at a corner, up at the start of the Crescent, where all the rich houses are.

  Didn’t he wonder why? I managed to ask.

  He did, love, said Aunt Lucy. And I told him it was because of my dad, my dad didn’t want me riding with the lads. She began to laugh. And then one night it was raining to beat heck and I had no brolly and the boy didn’t want to let me out to walk on my own. He was dead set on driving me home. So I named a street in the Crescent and he drove up it, all the while with a queer smile on his face, and I pointed to a house — they’re all detached houses up there. I picked a grand one that had a double chimney. Stop there, I said to him, and he said, I don’t think that’s your house, love, he says. Why do you say that? I asked. Because it’s mine! he says. (She collapsed into helpless laughter.) And here it was his house! I’d picked out his very house! Even Lois and Madeleine had to laugh, even Nan, who hadn’t been listening, sent up her shapeless, childlike laugh. Oh, we did laugh! cried Aunt Lucy.

  There was a little pause in the conversation. Pass Lily the sprouts, someone, said Aunt Lucy. Lois passed me the sprouts. While Aunt Lucy took a couple of leisurely mouthfuls, I sensed that the story had another chapter. And I was right, a sad chapter, signalled by a drop in Aunt Lucy’s voice. This was just at the start of the Great War, she said. I kept going round with him until he was sent up. By then I was training to be a nurse. And then he died, poor lad, just before Christmas. One of his pals come to the house to tell me.

  But that spring he sent you flowers, didn’t he? prompted Madeleine.

  Yes, he did, love, said Aunt Lucy, giving her a warm look. That year a lovely bouquet of greenhouse flowers come to the shop on my birthday, with no card to say who sent them, just the name of the florist. So I went round to the florist and they looked it up in their book and told me who they was from. And here it was him! Back in October, before he went to France, he asked me when my birthday was. And I told him April 14 and he went to the shop and ordered them. Fancy that! As though he knew he wouldn’t be coming back, poor lad. So I decided to go and give my condolences to his mother. I asked my friend Sally to come with me and we went round. And it was his mother come to the door herself. But when she heard we spoke Lancashire she wouldn’t let us in the door, she was that snobby.

  It’s not like that today, said Lois.

  Archie’s mother’s having you over to Sunday dinner, then, is she? Madeleine said brightly.

  Lois lifted her chin higher.

  Ooh, I wouldn’t be young again for a pension, sang out Nan. When I was a girl, my da smeared treacle all round the doorway so I couldn’t hide in there and snog with my beaus.

  Oh, Nan, he never! said Madeleine.

  He jolly did! Nan cried, lifting up her head and looking at us fiercely.

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nbsp; They looked at one another with amusement and fell into eating. These were china plates we were eating off, white china plates with a rose in the centre, and roses climbed a brown wallpaper all around us, in both the parlour and the dining room. In the hall behind Uncle Stanley, in a framed picture, red-coated soldiers in a dark-panelled room leaned over a map. I picked up my silver knife and fork with hands still brown from the prairie sun and set to work cutting my own meat, watching my cousins covertly. Lo-is, Lo-is, I said in my mind, so I wouldn’t disgrace myself by pronouncing her name the way we said it at home.

  Finally Aunt Lucy lifted her face and said with a little tremor in her voice, This is just the age your Uncle William was when he left and went to Canada to live on his own. He was just the age of you girls, think of it. Going all that way to live among strangers, with just his cousin Boris to turn to.

  Oh, the morning they left, I’ll never forget it, cried Nan. She reached for my hand, her faded eyes misting up. The crowds of people and all the piles of luggage! Goodbye, Dolly, I must leave you! God be with you till we meet again! They had a band, you know. She lifted up her old, hoarse voice and sang, God be with you till we meet again, keep love’s banner floating o’er you, smite death’s threatening wave before you; God be with you till we meet again. She looked tenderly at us one by one as she sang, making her voice vibrate as though she were on a stage, and for good measure repeating the last line before she launched into her story.