Reading by Lightning

by Joan Thomas

  I’ve found myself in an alien life; she’s found herself in an alien body. It would be clear to anyone which one is worse. Sometimes I feel a wave of shock go down my back when I see the way the flesh has dropped from her arms, how swollen her shoulders and elbows and knees look in her skinny limbs, like ball joints, which I guess is what they are. But pity is not love. Her body might change, but nothing else has. It’s hard for her to know if she’s here and breathing; it always has been. The only way she can tell is if she can get other people to do what she wants. And now we have to, because she’s sick.

  But I have my ways. I can furtively put three spoonfuls of cocoa into her cup instead of the two she insists on, I can bring the Hudson’s Bay blanket when I know she wants the thin grey one. When she has to ask me to make a second trip, I can move in a way that shows her how demanding she is and how long-suffering I am. Or I can be scrupulously kind, another kind of cruelty. Not showing her my anger, which would be honest, never giving her anything real.

  She hears from Mrs. Feazel that three ships transporting Canadian soldiers have been sunk. Phillip is safe in Ontario, so it has nothing to do with her. I guess a lot of girls will have to get used to being on their own, she says with morbid satisfaction. My stomach knots and I refuse to look at her face, which I know is lit up with the excitement of hearing news as bad as anyone could hope for. But really I feel a little thrill myself and I hold the moment up like a trophy — how cold she is! How cruel! I picture her as a little girl, sitting on the path swallowing stones, one of which eventually worked its way into her heart.

  In June, when the nights are warm enough and the smell of lilacs fills the yard, I drag a big quilt smelling of mothballs out to the Toronto couch on the veranda, and that’s where I sleep, in an old pair of Phillip’s pyjamas. Before the war girls never wore pyjamas. That’s what the war’s done, one of the things. I fall asleep right away. But late in the night the song of the frogs down at the river falters and something touches me on the back of the neck and I’m awake, suddenly aware of a soldier standing in the yard, like a sentry, beside the old bed-springs. I open my eyes and sit up and look out through the screen. By the time I get my eyes focused he’s vanished, but I know who it was. Not George. It was Wilf, waiting for me to wake up, wanting to talk, to tell me about the waves crashing on the deck of the frigate moored outside Scapa Flow. About the shrouded moon, the strange red light that fell from it. The moment when George slid out of his frame of vision, and the sick terror Wilf felt when this registered, the way he turned to climb down to the hold, turned away from the deck knowing. Crawled into his bunk (muttering, Taperlegs is playing the fool) — while every impulse in him cried out to do what he could not do: turn on the searchlights, raise an alarm, run to the stateroom and call out the officers. I know it was Wilf wanting to confess, wanting me to carry his sin, to add it to my own.

  I know Wilf’s sin, but he doesn’t know mine. No one but me remembers me wandering the streets of Manchester that afternoon in some sort of cowardly funk, not going to meet George, not letting him know, too weak to know myself what I was doing. That day is only in my mind. There’s a revised version of it that I’ve turned to more than once: me climbing the stairs to the flat on Whittle Road, the door opening the minute I knock. (A worn oriental rug on the floor, a blue velour sofa. A stranger’s belongings, thoughtfully assembled for a lovers’ tryst.) George at the door, the real George, wearing a white shirt and his hair standing in tufts. Give him his gift . . . a leather-bound book with gilt edging. Wait for him to say something. His face is strangely fixed; nothing comes. A sick feeling comes over me, disgust at this enterprise, so far from the marrow of truth.

  I’ll never know what I missed that day, the awkwardness, false starts, the faulty satisfactions. I’ll never know what I missed and I’ll never have it now. There’s a difference between what I try to make true and what is. And I understand with a wrench that the dreams I’m left with are not much different than what I had when he was alive: I always made him up out of my own brain, I never really saw him the way I see him now, standing separate and apart, his mind teeming with ideas, scanning the world to see how one thing fit with another. I see him, the body he hardly inhabited, his long, thin arms, the nub of his Adam’s apple rising and falling in his throat, his way of turning slightly away when you spoke, as though looking straight at you would compromise his listening. George, who tried, finally, to evolve, to fit into a different world, but couldn’t do it fast enough. I think, He was and he is gone, I feel this like a pain in my bones, I lie rocked in it.

  When the pain recedes a little I get up and stand for a long time looking out through the screen. At the lane curving out to the road, outlined by lilacs. The pump, and the rusty bedsprings propped up to keep the chickens out of the garden. The wagon abandoned on the lawn, quack grass growing up around its handle. Homey objects standing in their private, nighttime guise, no colour at all in the dark but gleaming with a light that they gather from the night sky.

  4

  In the fall there’s no more sleeping on the veranda. There is an extra hour of darkness, and then light filtering in around my bedroom blind.

  Early, while my mother snores gently in the next room, I get up and pull clothes on over my flannel pyjamas. I steal down the hall and out through the veranda and down our lane. Stubble fields lie flat all around me. The sun is behind the Feazels’ shelter belt, but light from the east fills the sky. At the road I cut across onto the field on the south side. Sparrows twitter in the bluff along the river. They’re English, those sparrows. They were brought to the New World by colonists and they don’t migrate, they don’t know enough to do it. Otherwise it’s a perfectly quiet fall morning — just me moving, a tall girl walking across a flat Manitoba landscape at sunrise, another transplanted species.

  The sun’s rising now, shooting bright shards of light through the tree branches at the river. I stand and stare, brought out here on an ordinary morning by an impulse I can’t put a name to. I’ll never show this solitary landscape to George. I don’t know what he’d make of it, anyway. He was one for reading backwards and forwards from things and England suited him so well, the way its past was scattered all over its surface. The crumbling town hall, held together by vines, the gigantic trees in Alexander Park like trees in the Garden of Eden, their massive limbs twisting upward like the limbs of naked wrestlers. There were initials carved in the trunks of those trees as high as a boy can reach, but they’d blurred, been stretched and thinned by the years.

  I turn back to the yard. The cottonwoods in the yard shimmer in the rising sun, and beyond them the fields stretch golden brown. There’s just one maple left, rotten and hollowed out with age, dead branches poking up from its crown. It’s not the tree I used to perch in while I waited for my dad to finish chores — that one’s been chopped down and burned in the stove. I stand at the edge of the lane and narrow my eyes, trying to catch this landscape giving itself away in the morning sun.

  Harry Dabney ships some grain and drops off a cheque, and I come home from town with a new dress for myself and an Eaton’s catalogue for Mother so she can pick out something new. I show Mother the balance in our bank book. She peers at the number in disbelief and declines to look through the catalogue. There are certain virtues you had to have in the Depression: frugality, self-denial, pessimism. You needed to shrink yourself down to what was available to you. These virtues are stodgy now, I decide, like cotton stockings. I try my dress on and check it out in the mirror. It’s dark green with a white collar. She watches me sourly, denied the satisfaction of seeing hard times teach me what I declined to learn from her.

  Look, I say, showing her the tag. It’s made of nylon. They invented it for the war. You don’t have to iron.

  Phillip comes home around then for his embarkation leave: he’s being sent overseas. He and Betty spend their days at the farm and our Gilmore cousins come over and we all sit around the kitchen table drinking coffee and talking about grai
n quotas and about the war. Not like the last war, Uncle Jack says. You won’t be killing Huns, from what I hear, you’ll be killing time. Billy sits on Betty’s lap and gnaws at the edge of the table. Mother and Betty wear tragic faces. He’s ground crew, for God’s sake, the biggest risk he’ll face will be driving a lorry on the wrong side of the road during the blackout.

  After he leaves, Mother is keen for the mail and so I drive to Burnley at least twice a week. Madeleine writes, she always writes. Phillip is safe in England. He’s visited Aunt Lucy’s and given them all his ration coupons. She describes him as nice but very quiet. He’s based in Dishforth, Yorkshire, he’s servicing Lancasters. She shouldn’t be telling me this. The military police are going to show up at Aunt Lucy’s door one day and ask for Madeleine.

  I go to the library and carry home bags of books. I stay up later and later, carving out a private time for myself in the night. One morning, bleary from lack of sleep, I hear the sound of artillery and go out to see a big grey Harvard lumbering over the shelter belt, dragging a canvas windsock across the sky. It will be from the air base at Burnley, out on a training exercise. Two little fighter planes dart around it like starlings around a crow, pretending it’s a Messerschmitt. Puffs of grey smoke blossom around the windsock, and a second later I hear the bangs of another round.

  My mother’s put her coat on and joined me in the yard. Look at that! she cries. The drogue is right above us and you can see a dot of blue sky through a rip in the canvas.

  How can they tell which pilot hit it? she asks. Her neck’s cranked back and colour’s surfaced in her white cheeks — the war is having its intended effect.

  I don’t know, I say. Maybe they’d train you to keep score. I’ll take you out to the base and see if they want to recruit you.

  The three planes bank over the river and drone back towards us. They’ve got roundels painted on their sides, the way RAF planes do. Archery targets. What is that — a taunt to the Germans? When the first training plane tips I see the little heads of two airmen in the cockpit and feel (not for the first time) surprised. I can’t shake the notion that it’s the machines fighting this war on their own. But there are miniature men up there. Prairie farm boys. They’ll be smug, looking down at our farm tilting beneath them: up there in the cockpit they think they’ve stumbled onto something real at last.

  I haul a chair outside for my mother and she settles on it eagerly. After that as long as it’s warm enough she sits in the front yard whenever the plane with the drogue is out, watching the fighter planes training. At dinner she tells me all about it. It’s like they say in England, What did we do with ourselves before there was a war on?

  Fall passes, all fall I read, while Mother watches the planes and waits for news from Phillip, while the grass between the house and the barn freezes into a spongy carpet and our own modest version of the English sparrow gathers in the garden. Madeleine writes me that in Oldham the stars have gone out again because the night sky glows red from all the buildings burning in Manchester. Oh, Lily, she writes, you would be shocked to see the corner of Oldham Road and Linacre Street, it’s just a huge crater. Everyone tries not to dwell on it. At work we have to wear badges saying, DON’T TELL ME. I’VE GOT A BOMB STORY TOO.

  Here we still have stars. Here, across the river, coyotes yip like geese. Winter comes, the winter of 1942, and I lift my eyes from the black letters on a white page to see four crows working their way across a sky filled with snow. Hoarfrost collects along the steaming bellows of Molly’s sides in the big, empty barn and I pile straw two feet deep into her stall to make a cozier nest. When Betty comes over with Billy, we can’t let him crawl on the floor.

  There are dances at the base in Burnley. The town is full of Aussies, and I have a fair idea how the evening would go, but still I toy with the idea of slipping out after Mother’s asleep. Although she’d be bound to hear the Ford start up. I picture creeping in at two in the morning, beer on my breath and my lipstick nibbled away, to see her fallen on the step between the living room and the kitchen, one accusing eye open against the linoleum.

  By now Betty’s living in Burnley. She stayed only a month at her dad’s and then Isabel’s husband shipped out and Betty moved in with Isabel. So I stop in at Isabel’s house in Burnley and ask Betty if she’d come out to the farm on Saturday and stay overnight with Mother.

  Where do you want to go? she asks. Stupidly, I tell her.

  I don’t think Phil would want to see his sister at one of those dances, she says. Come on, Betty, I say. Hope deferred maketh the heart sick.

  She looks at me, startled; she knows it’s a Bible verse. I’m amazed myself sometimes at what is buried in my brain, at what comes out of my mouth. I could ask Gracie to stay with Mother, but I don’t care that much.

  I wish Gracie could meet a boy, I happen to say to Mother one day. She should move to Winnipeg. She should get a job at Eaton’s, or take a secretarial course.

  Is that what you’re thinking of doing? she says, darting me a frightened look. She’s sitting on the chesterfield knitting. It’s just squares she’s making, for a shawl, for some missionary project. Afghans for Africans is what they have in mind.

  Of course not, I say sharply. I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to stay on the farm and marry Joe Pye.

  Joe Pye, she says, drawing her needle out of the last row and pulling at the tail of yarn so the last chain of loops disappears. He hasn’t been by for ages. Since before the war. He’s probably dead by now, the way he smoked. Remember how he wore his combinations all summer? When they were threshing and it was so hot, he’d take his shirt off and there he’d be in his combinations.

  I turn away to the window. Joe Pye sitting on the backless chair by the back door, spear grass and thistle barbs sticking in his wool underwear, impossibly skinny. Watching us with affection, with his hands dangling between his knees. Watching his ready-made family. She’s pronouncing him dead without a shiver! Oh, he’ll be back, I say after a minute. Remember those old moccasins he wore in the winter?

  You and Gracie will both meet nice boys one day, she says. This generous thought coming out of her mouth scares her a little and she tacks on a warning. You have to be careful, though, she says. You never really know a person until you marry them.

  Dad was a nasty surprise, was he?

  I never said that. But I had to find out what was wrong with him on my own and you’d think he could’ve told me ahead of time. I had to find out by seeing him fall down in the middle of the living room. Her face is stiff.

  I don’t remember that, I say. I move casually into the kitchen and pick up a damp rag from the table. Back in the living room I wipe at the window ledge. I think about the day I looked it up in the public library in Oldham, stood riveted between the stacks reading about excessive signals from cerebral neurons, about déjà vu and jamais vu. I open my mouth to tell her, but I can’t risk squandering the moment.

  It started when they were on the ship coming from England, didn’t it? I say instead.

  Where did you get that idea?

  I don’t know exactly. If it was happening in England they wouldn’t have sent him. And I thought it might be why he went on his own up to the lumber camps as soon as he got here.

  I run the rag over the upper sash. Really (but I don’t tell her this) I gleaned it all from Joe Pye’s stories. From my instinct for when Joe Pye was holding back. My mother is silent. She’s flattening her new square onto the stack she’s finished, lining up the edges.

  Remember that time he fell down in the pigpen? I ask. You went somewhere the next day. Where did you go?

  Now she’s picked up her needles again and she’s casting on for a new square, counting stitches. Once she has her first row on she says, We went to Winnipeg. We went into the big hospital there and talked to a doctor. I made your father go. So then we knew what it was. We never knew before that, he never once went to a doctor. I wouldn’t let him go to Dr. Ross. You can’t trust Dr. Ross not to talk.


  She presses her mouth into a straight line and bends over her knitting. I stand with the rag in my hand. So. I have to cast off the doctor in Lloydminster, the genial Dr. Hignell hanging his shingle up in a boardwalk frontier town. I have to slip Dr. Hignell back into the American western I got him from, likely a picture I saw with Madeleine on Horsedge Street.

  The conversation is finished. I rinse the dust cloth in a basin in the kitchen. This all started with a moment of panic about my leaving. But she’s not thinking of me, of what I’ll do. There must be a faint smell of failure in her nostrils from her enterprise in raising me, but my actual independent existence is not something she considers. No doubt she thinks mostly about the body she’s found herself in, the cage she can’t escape, the way her shaking hands slop tea onto her lap. And of small memories, old humiliations sending out their poisonous fumes, things no one else has thought about for decades. I stand with my hands in a basin of cold water and watch my mother frowning over her wool.

  My Tucker grandmother had five children, and in the dance of her family my mother was the one without a partner. Agnes and Eva were princesses who ran into the bush after milking in the morning, dragging an old pillowcase of lace collars and high-heeled shoes for their court. Franklin and Morris were soldiers who played with sticks in the dirt under the veranda. But my mother was an orphan who hid alone under the rhubarb leaves against the garden fence, until their mother came out of the house and pulled her up by the yoke of her dress and made her collect the eggs and chase the chickens out of the garden. From the shadows of the barn eyes watched, the sad eyes of the plow horses and the piggy-dumb eyes of the sows in the wallow, but there was no one besides her who cared about the injustice of it.