by Joan Thomas
I’m not in a very good position to plan.
I can’t feed you forever without my mother noticing.
He shrugs and draws again on his cigarette. So don’t feed me. He has a way of seeming to smile when he’s not smiling, and it softens his words. Does anyone else ever come out to the barn? he asks.
Betty does sometimes. My sister-in-law. She brings her little boy out to see the cats. Just watch out when there’s another truck in the yard.
We sit and he smokes and I watch the sunlight shining on each separate moving leaf of the cottonwoods on the other bank. We sit side by side a few feet apart as though we’ve arranged to meet to watch the passing of the river. Dabs of fluff from the cottonwood trees ride east on the surface of the water, lit up by the sunlight. Khaki, that’s the colour of the water: it takes its colour from the trees and sends back a light that reflects in moving ripples on the branches. Thistles have sprung up where the ice ripped the bank open in the spring, and a dark butterfly tries to settle on a thistle head and is thwarted by the breeze, carried past us with its wings motionless.
So how long were you in England? Russell asks.
Four years. I tell him about looking after Nan and then moving to Aunt Lucy’s and going to school.
Why didn’t you write to me? he asks.
George wrote to you.
He smiles. You’re right, he did. That was so strange, suddenly getting a letter from this English guy I’d never met. He’s quite the character, George. He’s got an amazing mind, he’s got a theory about everything. And then in other ways he’s such a kid. He used to address my letters to Master Bates, he thought that was a real gas. I haven’t heard from him in ages. I had to leave Rosamund Street and I guess he lost track of me.
No, I say. I raise my head to look at him. That’s not what happened.
Oh, he says, and the word is a groan. Oh, shit. He doesn’t ask me. He throws his butt like a dart into the river, and we watch it float around the bend. He doesn’t ask me and I don’t tell him. It’s as if he’s wearing Madeleine’s badge: don’t tell me. I lie back and lower the red screen of my eyelids down against the light. But the grass picks at me through my blouse, and I arch my back. When I open my eyes again he’s eyeing me and I sit up, embarrassed.
Wild strawberries, I say, lightly touching the white flowers scattered through the grass. I’ll come out in a few weeks and pick them for jam. They’re so tiny, it takes forever. But it’s the best jam in the world. I push the tin with the picture of the two little princesses towards him. Don’t you want your dinner?
He lifts the lid and looks at his dinner with appreciation, picking a sausage up with his fingers to eat it in two bites. It would stab my mother in the heart to see me eat these, he says. It would send her to an early grave. It’s a Jewish thing, he adds, when I raise my eyebrows. You have no idea.
Oh, maybe I do, I say.
That’s right, your family is religious.
Yeah, I guess that’s one way of putting it.
After a minute he asks, What about you? Still waiting for the Lord to come?
Naw, he stood us all up. We share a little laugh.
So you’ve totally given it up? No more heaven, no more
hell?
I still believe in an afterlife, I finally say.
Really? Some plane of existence out in space?
No. Some plane of existence here. When you feel like your life is over.
Curiosity flickers in his eyes.
Well, it’s a test of character, isn’t it, the war? You start to see yourself in a different light.
Oh, I don’t know, he says. Not the truest test. Something primitive kicks in. He sits with his back against the rough black bark of the oak. There’s a grace to the way he sits, his hands dangling on his knees. Konk-la-ree, whistles a red-winged blackbird, lifting and resettling on a different reed. Suddenly I can’t bear to have his eyes on my face.
I should get back, I say, and scramble to my feet.
Wait a sec, he says. You’ve got something all over your blouse. He stands too and takes my hand to draw me to him. With his free hand he pulls three or four spear grass heads off my blouse and shows them to me.
I pluck one out of his fingers and stab him lightly in the upper arm. That’s for you, I say. Nature’s tooth and claw. It’s been in the grass since last fall. Waiting for a city boy to show up. I smell his cigarette, the grease of the sausages, I see dark hair curling where his shirt opens in a V at his throat. I can’t look at his face for the sunlight glittering off the water and the spinning poplar leaves. I have to go, I say. I’ll bring you some supper when I do the chores.
Bring it later, he says, still hanging on to my hand. After your mother’s asleep.
He’s nowhere around when I lead Molly into the barn after supper. I don’t see him and I don’t sense him watching from the ladder. She’s restless tonight, lashing her tail back and forth. Her teats feel more rubbery than usual, resistant. It takes me a long time to milk, trying to keep her tail pinned by my shoulder. When I finish and carry the pail towards the house, the setting sun is smeared along the side of the bunkhouse and light gleams off the bellies and forked tails of the barn swallows wheeling over the yard in their nightly roost. Everything is catching and holding the sun, conspiring to keep night at bay.
Mother is annoyed when I carry in an armful of wood. Who’s for popcorn? I cry, cramming split poplar into the stove.
It’s too hot, she says. It’s far too hot. She sits on a kitchen chair watching sullenly while I open a lid in the stove and shake the popcorn basket over it. When the popcorn’s done she ignores the bowl I give her. Don’t eat it so fast, she says. You’re just shovelling it in. I must have told you about the girl I went to school with who was so crazy about popcorn.
Yes, I say. You’ve told me.
Well, she choked while she was eating it, a kernel went into her lung. And it festered there until she died. It took three months. She was only fifteen, did you realize that? One of the Skinners from the Shadwell road. She would have been Susan Skinner’s aunt.
I’m going to have a bath, I say. I may as well, as long as we have a fire. Why don’t you have one too? You’ll sleep better. Then she is thin-lipped with annoyance, not about the waste of water, but about the challenge to the principle of the Saturday-night bath.
I’ll just have a little one, I say (thinking, If she gets too worked up she won’t sleep). I’ll just use the kettle and the reservoir. You’re right, I shouldn’t have built up the fire. It’s too hot. But now we have the water so I may as well.
Afterwards in my bedroom the towel falls open and in the mirror I catch a narrow image, as if through a keyhole: a frank female torso like the most daring of the Blackpool postcards, the ones Monty found on a rack at the back of the store. Turning my eyes from the mirror I dry myself quickly and put on my cotton eyelet nightdress. The nightdress Aunt Lucy gave me for my birthday that hot summer just before the war started, the finest thing I own. The night air from the window is wonderfully cool on my skin. I don’t let myself think about him, lying in the straw across the yard. It’s not him pulling at me from the dark, it’s something else, the self I’m going towards.
I wrap a blanket around me like a shawl and go out to the porch and sit on the Toronto couch, the tin with Russell’s supper on the railing. Are you okay, Mother? I ask through the screen. Night, she answers, and I hear the creaking of her bedsprings. The sky is dark blue, it’s as dark as it will get this night. Across the way a few late frogs chant in the river. It seems a long time until I hear the falling rhythm of her sleeping breath, the little disgusted huffs that mean she is asleep. Suddenly I can’t bear it any more and I slip my feet into my shoes and start across the yard, still wearing the blanket.
There’s a commotion of silver light behind the cotton-woods. Even now the moon may be leaning into the big, square loft opening. Blue wants to come with me. I bend over and scratch his ears. Home. Go home, I say. Through the
thin cotton of my nightdress I can feel his cold nose against my thigh. Go home, I repeat, giving him a little shove. He stands in the middle of the yard, watching me. Clever, he’s a clever dog, and he can’t make this out at all.
The darkness of the barn is a kindly, lived-in dark, like the dark of a quiet bedroom, full of breathing and turnings: there are corners that are never out of shadows, even in winter when you bring a lantern to milk by. But the work you do in a barn you can do half asleep, by smell, by a thousand repetitions, your hands sliding along rails polished by other hands. Inside the barn the cats greet me, moving like wraiths around my ankles. I move past the lying-down prow of Molly’s rump, to the square of moonlight the loft opening has dropped on the aisle. At the ladder I slip my shoes off, I drop the supper tin on a bench and clutch the blanket around me and begin to climb, the rungs pressing into the arches of my bare feet. Above me a dark shape kneels, and a hand reaches down and pulls me up.
6
Russell’s story was not the sort of story I would ever have put together on my own, and my comments the morning I discovered him in the barn were stupid, offensively stupid, evidence of how ignorant I still was, how all the time in school, all the reading, all George’s efforts to drag me into the twentieth century had not managed to let more than a few pinpricks of light into my dim understanding of the world. Of course I knew he was a Communist, but I did not give a moment’s thought to what was happening to him from day to day all this time, in spite of George’s reminders. When I did think about him it was to picture him thinking about me and wondering why I never wrote. I was bold as brass that first night. It was bravado, it came out of my indistinct grasp of what I was going towards.
Now it’s not just him I have to hide, but my astonishment at the new force field I’ve moved into, at the light glinting off the kettle, the boiled beets throbbing in their red juice, energy dropping like mercury from my fingers while I scrape the plates into the slop bucket.
You’re going to ruin those slacks working in the garden, Mother says as I clear the table after dinner.
They’re already ruined, I say. I’ve been wearing them in the garden all spring. It’s not the slacks, and she can’t put her finger on what it is. Besides, I say, I’m not working in the garden this afternoon, I’m going to town. Do you want to check the list?
She bends over it and her lips move, but she’s reading mechanically — suspicion is hammering at her concentration.
I take the list back from her. Bye, I say and go out.
He’s waiting in the Ford, as we planned while I was doing the milking that morning. He’s half lying on the passenger side, half crouching on the floor. This is a waste, he says from the vantage point of my right knee as I start the truck. I thought you’d be wearing a skirt. When I turn onto the section road he presses on my foot on the gas pedal to make me scream. Once we’re well away from the farm he makes a move to climb onto the seat. No, I say. Get back down there. You have no idea how people talk.
I give him a couple of dollars and let him out on the blacksmith’s road. This trip is for cigarettes, which I can’t buy in Burnley without creating a sensation. He takes the money without protest or any hint of embarrassment — he just winks at me and starts down the maple-lined street in the direction I point him, an ordinary-looking workingman walking a packed dirt road. The people who see him will have to place him and they’ll decide he’s a Galician farmer without the cash to buy gas.
After I do my own errands I drive back to the corner by the blacksmith’s and wait, reading my letter from Madeleine. Lois and Archie were married in June by Special Licence. Everyone pooled ration points so they could have a nice reception. The wedding wasn’t so different from what Archie’s parents would have put on, Madeleine writes. You can say that for the war. And then she tells me about the frock she wore, made from the yellow and green dress Nettie Nesbitt made for Aunt Lucy at the start of the war. It had such a full skirt they were able to get two straight-skirted dresses out of it. Father’s taken down the iron railing from the front garden, Madeleine writes, and hauled it out to be salvaged for armaments. We have not had to go to the air raid shelter since Easter, but every night we can hear the bombing at Manchester. I’m used to my job and I like talking to the people, but my legs still ache at night from standing so long. Next week I have three days off. If you were here we could go somewhere together. And I think, I’ll send Lois the credit note from George’s gloves, that can be my gift. I should have left it in England in the first place. I wonder if they’ll still honour it, if the shop is still there. A bee buzzes in the corner of the windshield. I open the passenger-side window and use the letter to try to scoop it out. It dodges me and flies behind my head and I ignore it. I’m overcome with drowsiness — somewhere between the grocery store and the post office my need for sleep caught up with me.
Suddenly Russell’s face is at the window. He climbs into the truck with two paper bags. Besides a tin of tobacco he’s bought a newspaper, six bottles of beer and a dozen tins of beans and canned meat.
You might get tired of feeding me, he says. I don’t want to wear out my welcome.
I start the truck and pull onto the road. We spin along, not talking. There’s no way back from the sort of conversation we’ve had. I roll down my window and let in the spring smell of alfalfa and the piping of red-winged blackbirds in the reeds that have been resurrected in the ditches since the drought ended. The road is empty all the way home and he stays on the seat until we get close to the yard. I park the truck close to the barn with the passenger side away from the house.
Wait, he says from where he’s crouched. What are you up to this afternoon?
I have to smile. Betty will probably show up, I say. You should keep an eye out.
I creep into the kitchen and put the things away. Mother’s sleeping on the chesterfield. There’s work to be done, most urgently hauling water out to the transplanted tomatoes. I stand in the quiet kitchen, the linoleum cool under my feet, and then I go to my room, where the thin white curtain breathes in and out with the breeze. I sit on the bed, up against the wall, my head stuffed with sleepiness. I sit like a brood hen over the night just past, not looking at it, not letting anything draw me away.
I don’t know if I will always be able to recall what it was like in the loft that night. Maybe not, if I have a lucky life with lots more of the same. But when I’m an old woman, I’ll still go back to the morning when I climbed down the ladder and walked barefoot across the yard in my nightdress, pale green light rising from the fields towards the dark of the sky, the trees secretly breathing over the house. The grass damp under my feet, a robin singing on the old bedspring by the garden, its song curling into the cool air the way a breath does. Blue lying on his side, not moving. I’ll remember opening the screen door and stealing into the silent house, creeping along close to the wall to avoid the floorboards creaking, crawling into bed with my feet wet and grimy, pulling sleep over me like a blanket.
These are the things I filch from the house for Russell: a bar of soap (he has his own towel in his knapsack), a plate, fork and spoon (he has his own cup and knife), a pillow and an old quilt. The blanket I wore out to the barn the first night stays there as well. He’s desperate with boredom so I start taking books out to him: Emma, which he abandons on the third page, Dickens’s Hard Times, which he sinks into with astonishment and insists is a socialist tract. I bring him writing paper, a pen and ink. I steal a shirt of Phillip’s. Candles or a lantern I refuse to bring because I have no wish for Mother to see a light in the loft and I don’t trust him not to burn the barn down. Although of course he smokes in the loft, while we lie among the bars and arrows of brilliant sun that burn through cracks in the walls and pick out certain airborne dust specks and certain bits of trodden yellow straw to touch with gold.
This is the story: In 1938, he was living in a flat with a friend named Lennie, who was a member of a Communist youth club. There were a lot of soldiers coming back from S
pain that fall, Mac-Paps, he calls them, and Lennie talked Russell into letting some of them stay in the flat until they could be sent home. The mornings Russell got up for classes he had to step over snoring bodies on his way to the door. They were mostly from Alberta, he said. They were Finnish. At first I thought he said finished, and he said they were that too, exhausted and discouraged. Groups of them came and went, different men sprawled over the living-room floor all that winter, talking all night and sleeping till mid-afternoon. By the spring of 1939, Russell had more or less stopped getting up for classes. He joined the Communist Party and took a job in a tire factory, where they were trying to get a union going. Then the government stepped up the harassment. At that point the police actually had a squad dedicated to harassing Communists, assigned to throw tear gas into meetings and to condemn buildings where the Party met. The Red Squad, it was called. Finally there was an Order-in-Council declaring them an unlawful organization. That Order-in-Council included Fascist groups too — that’s what was really galling, that in people’s minds they were one and the same. Lennie was picked up and taken to what Russell called a concentration camp. Russell happened to be out the day the police raided the flat. He knew the police would be back for him so he packed up a few things and left, went to a house in the suburbs, to the basement of some friends. And there he hid for almost two years. The two years I’d been back in Canada he was living in a cellar in a brick house in Montreal. Sometimes people brought him work to do, writing pamphlets arguing for a Second Front, writing newspaper articles under an assumed name. A couple of times he took the risk of going out to a meeting somewhere, in a barn or another house, once to a big meeting at St. Janvier. Finally he had to move on and he came west. He stayed in Toronto for a couple of months, with a woman who was selling her silverware one place setting at a time to help him and his comrades. She gave him money and he took the train to Winnipeg, tried and failed to arrange a meeting with some Communists there, and hitched a ride to Burnley. He found me without having to ask a single person for directions because he remembered the six-sided silo I showed him from the Lookout the day of our ride in his dad’s car.
