Reading by Lightning

by Joan Thomas

  So then you grew up with one parent, I say greedily, although I can see he’s running out of steam.

  He bends his head to light another cigarette, and I reach out my hand for the match and drop it into an empty beer bottle. Oh, it was all right, he says. She moved us closer to our uncles, she started going to synagogue again. She was free to make him the butt of her jokes. He always supported us, I’ll give him that. A principled man. He thinks of himself as a principled man. As long as he handles money properly. Stephen never went to visit. Stephen’s the principled one.

  Russell lies back in the hay. I was always a little ashamed that Dad could buy me, he says. Send me a train ticket, and you can’t see me for dust.

  I lie beside him watching smoke curl into the dusty air. No, I say. I’m glad you’re the sort of person who went to see his dad.

  He wants me to come to Montreal with him. There’s lots I could do, even if I’m not a Party member. I could be a fellow traveller — that has a nice ring to it. I toy with the idea of giving myself over, listening raptly from a seat in the front row in a crowded hall in Montreal, wearing a tweed jacket and the tie-up shoes I took to England. I try hard to keep my feelings off my face while he talks. Maybe there are situations where imperialist running dogs sounds like sensible language, maybe if you spend all your evenings in cramped rooms on hard chairs with comrades who talk the same way.

  But I hold my little seedling opinions close to my chest. If he sees them he’ll have them plucked out in a flash. I’ve joined the League of Esther, or whatever her name was in Montreal. Among the services I provide for Russell: Going to the Burnley library to ask for newspapers from down East (there are none). Stamping and mailing his letters (he writes a lot of letters). Carrying Mother’s scissors out to the loft and trimming an inch off his hair all over, letting the brown pieces fall onto the straw. And, after he’s been here a couple of weeks, delivering his mail. Unread — which, I might add, requires a lot of discipline, seeing as his letters all arrive addressed to me.

  He’s got two contacts in Winnipeg. He doesn’t know these people, but he says he can stay with them, a family on Selkirk Avenue or a single comrade named Al living in an apartment on Burrows. I’ll take off by the end of the week, he says (more than once, at the start of different weeks). But he doesn’t go. I keep slipping an extra piece of chicken or steak into the oven when I’m cooking dinner, I keep on with my double life. Two lives are more than most people hope for.

  Mother stands in the living room for the longest time, looking out towards the barn. I’m peeling potatoes for dinner and I keep calling comments to her, trying to distract her. Finally I wipe my hands on the dishtowel and go out to join her. What are you looking at? I ask.

  Oh, I was just thinking about your dad. He never did put a step at the henhouse door. For twenty years we’ve been tripping over that sill.

  George told me that the Chinese build their houses without steps so the evil spirits can’t walk in, I say. Maybe he was just looking after the chickens.

  She holds on to the window ledge. She has the skin, beyond white, of someone the sun never sees, not even for the twenty seconds it takes to go to the outhouse. it was a mistake to buy a commode chair. She’s using it all the time now, even during the day.

  Your dad was slow at getting around to things, she says. Maybe it was part of his trouble. He fell down in the loft, you know. When we had church there. The men had to carry him out.

  Fell down. That’s our term for it. Suddenly I remember. I was standing in the yard crying and I remember them carrying him out. It’s a scene from hell, three men carrying my father through the lake of fire, his body sagging between them. Was there a fire in the barn when it happened? I ask.

  We never had a fire in that barn, she says. It was an evening service, it must just have been the sunset. Sometimes it looks like fire, the way the sun shines on the windows.

  This was during the service? What did everybody do?

  I didn’t see it. You were being bad and I had to take you out, I had to give you a spanking. And then we were walking back to the barn and I heard the commotion and they were carrying him out.

  I didn’t realize everyone in the church knew all along, I say.

  They didn’t really know. They didn’t know what it was. Her face twists with pain and her voice breaks. Mrs. Stalling started the story that he was a Pentecostal. From before he came to the district. They thought it was something to do with that. You know, the way the Pentecostals behave.

  They thought he was speaking in tongues? I cry. When he had a seizure? They thought he was filled with the spirit? Suddenly I’m seized by longing, thinking of my father, his silence torn open by ecstatic words, his voice filling the loft. Crying out who he was, declaring himself, the swallows darting to the rafters in alarm. After a minute I reach for my mother’s arm. She grips my hand. Her mouth is held in a grimace of emotion, a silent upside-down U.

  Filled with the spirit, I say. Well, I think he was.

  When you’re naked in broad daylight, every subject is a confidence. I tell Russell about my dad, some things. I tell him about the Barr Colony. They wanted to come to the New World without really changing, I say. The man who led them made them think they were better than everyone else. I’m trying to confine myself to what I know for sure. Russell is more interested in the supply syndicate and all of Isaac Barr’s other schemes.

  It was a Utopian movement, he says. I’ve never heard of it, not this one from England. What were your dad’s politics?

  His politics? Oh, I don’t know. He liked the King. One Christmas he managed to get a battery for Joe’s radio so he could get up in the middle of the night to listen to the King’s address. We didn’t have an alarm clock, so he slept on the chesterfield with the thinnest of blankets — that’s what he did, so the cold would keep waking him up.

  Talk about conditioning of the masses, says Russell. Something floats up through the heedless warmth between us, something brown and murky, my distaste for his way of talking as though everything he says is the last word on the subject. I can’t bear feeling this way. I run my hand down his chest to where the curling hair ends, feeling the soft sinking at the bottom of his ribs, and then I turn my face up knowing that this will bring his down to me and we will kiss.

  We talk about the war, in our way, which is different from George’s. It’s one of our best subjects, the war, although Russell manages to make the Communists the centre of everything. He thinks, for example, that England and France let Germany build up arms in the Thirties in order to contain Russia. I don’t argue. All his opinions are so worked out — they’ve been distilled in all-night debates with other men wearing braces, they’re supported by covert sources of intelligence from all over the world.

  He drags his knapsack across the bare boards of the loft and pulls something out of it to show me, a paper folded into the packet of letters and pamphlets he’s hauling around. It’s in George’s familiar handwriting. A play script, or the first page of one, on a sheet torn out of an exercise book:

  A British undergraduate encounters the Major on the esplanade.

  MAJOR: (hale, scarlet): I envy you young chaps. It’s the life, the very life. Never happier than in the last round.

  UNDERGRADUATE: (examining a cloud over the ocean very like a whale)

  MAJOR: The last round was nothing compared to this! We’ve got tanks, we’ve got RDF, we’ve got the naval advantage.

  UNDERGRADUATE: I reject the naval advantage.

  MAJOR: Total war this time. War at sea, war on land, war in the air. We’ll show the Jerries what for!

  UNDERGRADUATE: (regards a cloud backed like a weasel)

  MAJOR: Salute when you meet a senior officer, young fellow.

  UNDERGRADUATE: (salutes) Sir!

  Where’s the rest of it? I ask.

  That’s all he sent me, says Russell. Maybe it’s all he wrote. Of that particular play. He looks at me, bemused. Does it make sense to you?

/>   Yes, I say.

  Well, I had to study the fucking thing, says Russell. The undergraduate salutes — that must be George, when he gave up and decided to enlist.

  He didn’t enlist, I say. He was conscripted. But he didn’t fight it. He just couldn’t step aside from what was happening. He saw himself a part of it, even if it was a terrible mistake. I speak slowly because seeing something of George’s has filled me with emotion. Because what I’m saying is about Russell too, Russell sleeping in a loft while other men are going knowingly to die.

  But he just sits and watches me with interest. Russell feels no shame about not going. He doesn’t think he’s part of it. He says, trying to be helpful, George must have just figured it was bigger than him.

  No, I say. It’s the politicians who think it’s so big. They act as though the war is an act of God. As though there’s no resisting it.

  Hey, Lily, they love it! he says. Ever noticed how baggy their trousers are? That’s so no one can see their woodies. Churchill’s been walking around with a woody since 1937. Hell, since 1914!

  He raises a toast. Let the warmongers fight the war! Conscript the bastards!

  We clink our bottles together. Down with the Fascist imperialists! he yells.

  A plague on both their houses! I cry.

  I need to make everything up new. They were wrong about everything, George Bernard Shaw and Neville Chamberlain and Mr. Dalrymple and my shamefaced mother. Russell may be wrong as well. I need to figure everything out on my own, and one day I will. But right now I’m more interested in pinning Russell against the loft wall, running my fingernails over the muscles in his back and then smoothing out the scratching with my fingertips. The brides on the train from Saint John are starting to pop up in my mind, though, girls perched in the aisle, juggling babies and cigarettes and saying things in brittle voices they wouldn’t dare say to their best friends. It all came back to sex. They’d just lived through a shipping-out leave — they had a bleary, worked-over look. There was a blonde girl about my age arguing that you have two safe weeks, with your period in the middle of them. That seemed like useful information and I stored it away. Of course, her system does not take into account the rainy days when I set myself the task of clearing up the old harnesses in the barn, or the days when Mother is unwell and sleeps right through from dinnertime until supper. I haven’t worried because you can’t worry and do what I’ve done. But when I think of it, she was very pregnant, the bride who said this, her belly button sticking out like a thimble in the middle of her stomach.

  And then there was that other girl I rode beside, the girl who sat and jiggled her leg from Sault Ste. Marie to Port Arthur. In the middle of the night she got up to go to the bathroom and when she came back she saw I was awake. Don’t ever get pregnant, she said. You have to pee every ten minutes. We started talking and we talked until morning. Doris, her name was. Her boyfriend had died in a training accident at Petawawa before she even had a chance to tell him. His name was Guy. He was French, a Catholic. She had a little diamond ring. She went to a jewellery store on her own and bought it as soon as she realized. I’m going to tell my family we were engaged, at least, she says. Not that we were. Not that he ever said a word about getting married.

  When Mother falls asleep on the chesterfield in the afternoon I steal into her room and pull her underwear drawer open. The paper I’m remembering is still there, up against the back of her underwear drawer, yellow and cracked. I unfold it. There is the title, Family Planning Aid. As far in as possible? Ten minutes before? No wonder I remembered it. I slide it back into her drawer and go back to the kitchen, to where a roasting pan of cucumbers sits on the table. We’re making pickles. The cucumbers are perfect for fancy dills, just three inches long. But they already have little nubs on them, like the black whiskers on an unshaven chin. I pour water into the pan and work the nubs off with my fingers in the clear, cold water, feeling the small pimple each one leaves behind. Tannic acid. Boric acid. I wonder who gave the recipe to her and if she used it. She must have, she must have used something. Boric acid, I think, is used for cleaning. Tannic acid maybe for tanning cowhides, that would make sense. I can’t imagine doing it, it makes me feel sick.

  One day she sees him in the yard. I tell Russell while we play rummy, sitting down by the river where there’s a bit of a breeze.

  She saw me? When?

  At the pump.

  What did you tell her?

  I told her it was Harry Dabney. The fellow who rents our land. I told her he walked in from the road. I said his truck broke down and he needed water for the radiator.

  Lily, you are a scary broad. I dread the day you have to lie to me.

  I’m good at making them up. I’m not that great at delivering them.

  Russell picks up a card and deftly reorders everything in his hand. While I was a girl memorizing Bible verses he was squatting in a Toronto alley playing rummy. He snaps a run of clubs, king high, on the grass between us without even bothering to look at me: he’s won the game and winning is his due.

  I wish you’d let me get your water, I say.

  Well, you know what I wish? he says. I wish I could walk into the house and introduce myself. I’d tell her I’m in a bit of trouble and need a place to stay. She won’t let on. She won’t want the police out here. If I know mothers.

  You don’t know my mother.

  You don’t know your mother.

  What do you mean?

  You don’t know your mother. Women never do. Women never really see their mothers. He has a clever grin on his face.

  And why is that, do you suppose?

  I guess they don’t want to see themselves.

  I give a sharp kick to his shin and then I roll away from him and down the bank. He doesn’t react. He sits silently above me, smoking. I roll under a spruce, a big spruce. I lie among its knuckled roots in a bed of needles. I’ll get sap in my hair, I think, but I don’t care. This is the tallest spruce, it’s the spruce where my father saw a lynx long ago. This is where he opened his eyes and saw the lynx watching him. Whatever it is that makes a lynx afraid of humans was gone that day.

  My dad saw a lynx here once, I call up to Russell. You better watch out.

  He doesn’t answer. He sits there looking thoughtfully down the riverbank. I’m included in his gaze and I look silently back. He looks tired. The romance of living in a barn is wearing thin. He hasn’t had mail for a few days, nothing to remind him he’s a revolutionary. He should go, I think, for his own good. I’d be glad, I’d like a break from him. To find out what I’m feeling, just to drop a leg down and see if I’m in over my head or can still wade to shore. I study his face between the dark spruce boughs. He’s more tanned than he was. He’s been weeding the field plot where we grow potatoes and corn. He took it on because it can’t be seen from the house or even really from the road, and when I tell Mother I’m weeding it we can be busy with other things.

  He’s still watching me. It’s not just my body he wants. He wants my silence, he wants my moods, he won’t leave me even a tiny place in my brain. I roll over, I roll out of the shadow of the spruce tree and press my face into the leaves and grass of the riverbank: poplar leaves, and that narrow beige grass with seed heads like tiny scythes, grass we walked on every day of my growing up but never spoke of because no one had ever given it a name. The blackbirds pipe and there’s the constant electric hum of insects. I lie face down, I flatten my body into the tough, dry grasses and listen for a pulse.

  There’s a day when summer peaks. You don’t always sense it the day it happens, but you know it the day after, as soon as you step into the yard. All that pulsing green is static, there’s a stuffiness to the heat that tells you you’re on the slide towards fall, that plants are starting to put their force into seeds and not into flowers. You tell yourself you’re wrong, but out in the garden you see that the bottom leaves of the peas are drying yellow, and you have to take down the flypaper in the kitchen, carry it at arm’s leng
th out to the outhouse and drop it in a hole because it’s black with dying and dead houseflies. And then you see spikes of goldenrod poking up out of the ditches and you know summer is well and truly over.

  I decide to buy the ingredients one at a time, and on a morning when the sun is obscured by a haze of heat I ask the clerk in the grocery store for boric acid.

  Boric acid? she says. Why don’t you just use vinegar?

  Mother said boric acid, I say.

  Her eyes narrow in their wrinkly little pockets and I’m seized by the insane fear that we’re talking about the same thing. Well, you’ll have to try the drugstore, she says. We have Bull Dog Powder, and Blue Imperial, and Mrs. Stewart’s Liquid, but we haven’t carried straight boric acid for a couple of years.

  Mr. Gorrie is still behind the counter of the drugstore, wearing his dark glasses. He’s given no sign of recognizing me since I came back from England, but I feel my stomach tighten at the clerical bent of his back, the evangelical slope of his shoulders. Into the fog with the rag-tailed dog, I hum to myself, ho ho ho and a bottle of rum. He’s weighing out a white powder for the woman beside me at the counter. Half a pound, she says. No, make it six ounces. Her singed yellow hair is familiar, and then she turns her head and I see it’s Susan Dabney, our renter’s wife.

  Oh, Lily, she says. You haven’t had Harry knocking at your door this morning?

  No, I say cautiously. Should I have?

  Well, I gave him enough sandwiches for ten men. But they’ll be gone by noon. She has her little boy with her, and she reaches down and pries his hands one at a time off the glass counter. Can you manage an extra for dinner? I’d say send him home, but he’s got the team.

  Harry’s working at our place today? I ask stupidly.

  You didn’t see him? she says. He started haying north of the river.

  Mr. Gorrie adds another half-ounce to the white pyramid on the scales, and a tiny cloud of powder lifts towards his glasses. Into the bog with the rag-tailed sog, into the bog, into the fog. . . You know, I say to both of them, I just realized. I left Mother’s prescription in the truck. I’ll be right back.