by Joan Thomas
And the wish seemed to take, because my father had some good years after that. He worked his way south and got a job in a general store and eventually moved on to the store in Burnley. One day he was weighing out navy beans for the CN conductor when Joe Pye walked into the store looking for tobacco. He was on a threshing crew working its way north from Burnley. On Sunday he hitched a ride into town, carrying his crib board, and spent the day at the kitchen table where my dad boarded, regaling my father with tales of the Barr Colony and Isaac Barr’s chicanery. Neither of them ever raised the question of where Boris had ended up (except once, when there was a story in the paper about a man who dressed up as a lady and robbed a bank in Lethbridge, and Joe Pye said, “So he’s still in the Dominion then, our Boris”).
When my dad’s fits started up again he couldn’t just leave. There was my mother by then, and the whole thing started to weigh on him in a different way. I keep wanting to say (about everything: his marriage, his life in Canada), He never imagined it would be like that, but honestly I don’t think he imagined very much of anything. I don’t think my father had the habit of building a world in his mind and sending some version of himself ahead to try things out; it wasn’t something he did. So he wasn’t always having to reconcile himself to the way things turn out. But he knew what people generally don’t discover until something terrible happens to them: he knew things drained of their meaning. What it is to open your eyes to a world you’ve never seen before, where every ordinary thing around you is blank, as senseless as a word you’ve ruined by saying it over and over a hundred times, turning it into babble. As I stood on the deck of the Manchester Division the first morning of the crossing home, what I wondered was whether this is the truer world, heaving grey waves with nothing of me in them, the blunt iron prow pushing through water intent on its own secular purpose. Whether meaning is just something our eyes bring to things, when what we should be straining to see is the nothing that was their real meaning all along.
1
When we pull in to Burnley, the train overshoots the station and has to grind its way backwards to unload the passengers. I’ve been on my feet since the whistle sign a quarter-mile back, watching a dark speck in front of the station materialize into Phillip. Bracing myself on the platform between cars, I’m carried past him, and then past him again in the other direction, while he stands looking at the train with his mouth slitted open, squinting against the rising sun.
Dad did not have a seizure and topple from the loft. He did not fall face first into the river. It was blood poisoning. Phillip tells me this as we drive along the section road towards home, my trunk in the back of the Ford and my suitcase at my feet. Dad was cutting wood near the river. He’d just sharpened the axe, and somehow he nicked his leg just above his boot. Three days later his leg swelled up and he was full of fever. So they laid him in the truck and took him to the hospital in Burnley. But half an hour after they got him there, he was gone.
Dad always said a dull blade is more dangerous, I say. I dig through my bag, but I seem to have left my handkerchief behind on the train. Did you let Joe know? I ask.
You tell me where he is, I’ll let him know, Phillip says. On either side of us stubble fields lie like rough carpet. We’re shuddering over washboard, I’d forgotten washboard. Phillip just drives. It’s taken me twenty questions to get this story out of him.
When the truck pulls in to the lane, the screen door slams and my mother comes slowly across the yard. She’s not terribly changed, but she moves as though she’s walking through deep water. I go to meet her and she starts to cry and plucks at my blouse spasmodically. Her hair is paler, a pale apricot, but still in a coiled braid. Behind her comes Betty, my new sister-in-law, an apron tied high above her stomach. No one wrote to tell me she was pregnant. I say hello, but I don’t kiss her. Just a few hours back on the prairies and I know better than to try to give her a hug.
I stand by the Ford and breathe in the air. It’s September, but the yard is lusher than I’ve ever seen it. Look at the grass, I say.
Green all right, says Phillip.
A short-haired brown dog nudges its nose against my thigh. This is Blue, says Betty. You won’t have met Blue. He’s a rascal! Look, he’s trying to say hello!
It’s just breakfast time. They’ve made baking-powder biscuits for breakfast in my honour, and put out two kinds of jam. The floor is different — they’ve covered the boards with linoleum. Red, with a pattern of curling grey feathers. On the counter sits the Elizabeth and Margaret Rose tin I sent home. We sit down and bow our heads. There’s a little pause and then Phillip says, Lord, bless this food to our use and us to thy service, amen. My mother holds her head bent after the grace in her own private prayer. Afterwards she doesn’t look at me and I feel the old dark ache. And there is the old sour-sweet smell of the cream separator and the bitter smell of boiled coffee. The clock with its scraping hand; I’d forgotten about that clock.
I want to linger over this scene, picture it from a vantage point high in the southeast corner of the room, the way a watcher perched on top of the cabinet would see it, or the two little princesses looking serenely off their biscuit tin: the daughter returned from abroad, a young woman wearing wide-legged navy trousers, an elastic belt with a red metal buckle, and a white cotton blouse (terribly creased, though she did her best to freshen up in the yellow light of the station washroom in Winnipeg), red lipstick on her mouth and her hair pinned up in that new way so the waves stand high in front. She’s twenty — a glamorous age, she’s always thought — but life is not about her. There’s her mother, suddenly a widow because an axe fell two inches awry. There’s the white-blonde sister-in-law lifting her cup consciously to her lips, only nineteen herself, and a baby at that very moment drumming its heels against her spine. And the brother, the brother with a farm and a sick mother and a pregnant wife to look after, stolidly working his way through his third biscuit with jam. No, life is not about the daughter, although she is twenty, and (for all she’s just lost her father, and is shaken by his absence at the table that day and his grey jacket and cap gone off the hook by the door) she yearns for someone to say, Well, what a fine young woman you’ve grown into, Lily. And how was your voyage? But no one says it; even this moment, the morning of her return from a long stay abroad, is not about her.
So I sit below the clock with the bent minute hand and break open a warm biscuit, and what I say is, Have a lot of the lads from here signed up, then?
There’s a moment of strange chill and then Betty blurts out, Phil has signed up.
Phillip swallows his biscuit and takes a long drink of coffee before he finally says, I got my papers in August. RCAF. RCAF! So much pride in the way he says it.
Who’s supposed to keep the farm going? I cry.
Had my call-up last week, he says.
It was supposed to be last week, corrects Betty in her exuberant child’s voice. He was supposed to report for basic training on September 20. But after the funeral he called them and told them what happened, he went to Feazels’ to use the phone, and asked for the number on his call-up letter. The man on the phone said they would likely give him time to get things sorted out. And then he got another letter saying he has until October 20.
He could get a compassionate discharge, says Mother. She gets unsteadily to her feet. All he has to do is ask for one. He can say his father’s passed away and his mother’s sick and he has a farm to run.
She’s hardly eaten, but it seems she’s done. She shuffles off into the living room. She is thin, so thin, but she was always thin. Phillip smears butter and jam on the top of another biscuit, not bothering to split it open. Dabney’s going to put the crop in next year, he says. Harry. I’ve rented to him.
What if he decides to enlist?
Already tried.
And?
Wouldn’t take him.
Why not? Heart.
What’s wrong with his heart?
Nothing. Just a heart murmur. He’s fi
ne.
But, Phillip, didn’t you try for a discharge? I cry.
He tips his chair and teeters on its back legs the way he’s always done, and then he turns his face and looks straight at me. Why shouldn’t I have my chance? he asks. You had yours.
None of this serving King and country business for Phillip. Betty’s cheeks turn pink. She gazes at him, her tear-filled eyes saying, Isn’t he outrageous? Can’t you see why I love him so?
I can hardly speak. What about Mother? I ask at last, dropping my voice.
She’s been mad at you for a long time, he says. Now she can be mad at me.
Back in my room I open my trunk and start to unpack, shaking out my two frocks and hanging them in the wardrobe, spreading my other clothes on the dresser and the bedstead to air them. I take out Nan’s milk jug that I saved for Dad and the tea tin full of George’s letters. George’s belemnite I put on the window ledge, the way they did, for luck. My bedroom has the sad familiarity of things you remember in your bones, not in your mind. I couldn’t have told you the colour of the walls, for example, but I see now they’re whitewashed plaster — yellowed like newspaper that’s lain in the sun. Dead flies have collected between the two windows and I fling the inside pane open and use my washcloth to wipe them up. As I turn back to the room I’m jolted by a sudden glimpse of Dad in the corner of my eye, walking across the yard with Chummy, wearing his overalls and big rubber boots. I fling the cloth down and dart out of the house through the veranda and hurry with trembling legs to the barn. The door slides heavily aside and the dry hay and damp manure smell fills my nostrils. It’s dark, but I know at once he’s not there. The barn’s changed, it’s been shortened — someone’s built a crude wall with planks halfway down, just past the loft opening. There are only four stalls on each side now and they’re empty — Phillip’s taken the cattle out to the pasture. A cat, a grey cat I know, stretches at my feet. The pitchfork leans against a manger, and the gloves Dad wore are stuffed into the Y joint of a beam. Above me birds clatter in the loft. I stand for a minute in the dim light with a cat pressing itself against my ankles and try to see my dad. Milking, as he did every morning and night. I can see the whole business of it, the way he flipped a pail over to use for a stool and settled himself on it, reaching for the udder that hung like part of the cow’s insides fallen out. The din of milk pounding into the bottom of the pail suddenly muffling when he got a fast double rhythm going. His cheek is pressed against the cow and his eyes are hidden by his cap.
It’s the middle of a sunny morning, but my mother is lying on her bed when I go back in. I will be the one who talks about him, I think fiercely at the bedroom doorway. She’s lying on her side, her long pale hair loose, clutching a balled-up handkerchief. I see she’s crying, and then I feel pity and something else, surprise at what a child she seems to be, a tired, hard-used child. I sit beside her and put my hand on her rounded shoulder. She reaches up and presses my hand. Finally I ask, Were you with him at the end? This makes her cry harder.
The doctor was in the room, she says finally, rearranging her hanky, looking for a dry spot. And the nurse was nowhere around so he had to go out himself to get what he needed, some medicine, I guess. And then he didn’t come back and your dad’s breathing was very bad and I was worried so I sent Phillip to see if he could find the doctor and finally I went out myself. And when we were out in the hall — sobs shake her and she can’t finish. He went so fast, she chokes out at last. No one would think it could happen that fast. If I’d had any idea I would have made him go to town the day before. It was just such a small cut, you’d never have thought anything about it.
I sit there for a long time until her sobs subside. She lies with her cheek against the pillow then, looking straight ahead. Her window is closed, but the sounds of the farm seep in, Betty’s high voice, the rooster strutting out by the bunkhouse. The dog whines and the screen door bangs.
How about you? I ask. Are you feeling pretty bad?
Oh, it’s no different from how it’s been. I’m not in any pain. I’m just a little clumsy. I need a lot of help around the house.
I should have come home sooner.
Yes, you should have. She sits up and wipes her mouth with her hand, and then dries her hand on her skirt. Then she locates her handkerchief on the bedspread and blows her nose. She straightens the collar of her dress and smoothes her apron. Her face is defiant. This is grieving, her gestures say, a rough business, but don’t think it changes anything.
Dad, I say. Was he mad at me for staying in England?
He never would be mad at you for anything, she says. She says it with the old bitterness, but I do what I want with it, I take it as a gift.
I arrived home in late September, the same week that I left in 1936. Autumn has resumed as though it’s the same autumn: the prairies have a will to make those four years a dream of someone else’s life.
It’s going away that’s supposed to be a voyage of discovery, but for me, coming home is. I learn that our fall is a very brown affair, bereft of splendour, and that in Manitoba everything is weighed down by the weight of the sky. The buildings are low, the trees don’t aspire to be much more than what a child can throw a rope over. I understand now that our roads are straight because there’s nothing for them to go around. Wandering out to the yard that first morning, I discover that in a prairie garden asters and marigolds are planted in military rows made straight by unwinding a spool of binder twine tied between two sticks.
Phillip is working hard to get ready to leave. He’s sold the cows to a farmer at Shadwell and cancelled the cream contract. He’s already shipped half the cattle and then cleaned out the barn. It was an amazing crop, Dad’s last crop, a bumper crop, but the Wheat Board quota is only five bushels an acre, so for now it will sit in the barn. That’s why they built cribbing across the back half — so we can use it for a granary. We’re going to keep one cow for our own use, so in that first week home I go out every morning and help with the milking. The second day my hands are so stiff I can hardly hold my hairbrush, but it soon gets better. Molly, I tell Phillip, is the one I want. I’ve picked Molly because she’s small, and my forehead fits neatly into the hollow of her hip, and the size of her freckled teats is right in my hands. She’s not the best producer, but he can’t be bothered to argue. He has three grieving women on his hands and I’m at the bottom of the list. He nudges me off the stool and sits down and manages to get almost another pint of milk out of her. You’ll have to do better than that or she’ll dry up on you, he says. How amazingly like our Uncle Hugh he is, our uncle he’s never seen.
If he really is going to leave, we have a lot to do. I take the Ford out on the road and practise driving, and when I have the hang of the gears I drive to the low, long town of Burnley and park at the town hall and pick up my driver’s licence. While Betty tends to the house and makes the meals, I clean up the garden and Phillip cleans out the well. He also rebuilds the pigpen, deworms Molly and cuts and hauls wood until we have a pile the height of my waist running all along the north side of the house. We go to town together and open a bank account jointly in my name and Mother’s. A truck comes from Shadwell and loads up the rest of the cows, and the farmer hands Phillip a roll of worn bills. We stand in the yard and watch the truck drive off and then I put out my hand for the money. I’ll deposit it, he says, shoving it in his hip pocket. Phillip hasn’t changed in the slightest, except that he’s about fifteen percent larger in every proportion than when I left. When Phillip was a small boy he looked like a big-headed little man and now that he’s a grown man he looks like an overgrown boy. I feel a familiar tingling in my foot, the urge to kick him in the shin.
So, I say. Do you think they’ll let you stay around until Betty has the baby?
I don’t know, he says. I guess they’ll do what they wanna do. He has a look about him I remember from the sign-up days in England: the proud, surrendered glow of someone who’s attached himself to an absolute power, like a courtesan just
chosen by the king.
I’m going to take Mother in to the doctor’s, I say. To see what I can find out.
Good luck, he says, turning and walking back to the barn.
And he’s right, she won’t go. She says she’s been and he told her everything he can tell her and she’s not going to bother him again.
I haven’t heard what he has to say, I say.
Well, I’m not going in with you, she says, fiery. I’m not a child. He said I should come back in six months and that’s what I’ll do. If there’s anything I think you should know, I’ll tell you.
She’s standing by the window and I can see her making little adjustments to keep her balance, the way you might if the floor was tilting under you.
What did he say it is? I ask.
He didn’t say. It’s just one of those things that happen sometimes. He said I should eat raw egg whites.
I make an appointment with Dr. Ross without telling Mother and I go on my own. I don’t really know him, I was never sick. His hair is longish but immaculately shaped (I’m a professional man, it says). And he wears a ring with a polished agate in it. He has an office full of solid oak furniture, like a city doctor’s, but the picture on the wall is of a prize Charolais bull.
