by Joan Thomas
I can see Harry as soon as I turn off the section road. I can’t imagine how I missed him on my way to town. He’s doing it the old way, with a team of horses. I stop at the edge of the field and wait until he makes his way up to the road and lifts one hand in greeting. The horses are already wet in their withers.
You’ve got a hot day for it, I call.
Sure do, he calls back and turns the corner. There’s nothing to be seen in his sunburned face. No curiosity.
I park the Ford close to the barn, the way I have been lately. Russell’s sitting up in the straw when I get to the top of the ladder. He’s been sleeping. His face is red from the heat, wrinkled like a satin dress, his hair is damp. He’s stripped down to his shorts. I know, he says. I saw him when he came. I guess I shouldn’t be sleeping. Is he going to fill the loft?
Yes, but not today. He has to let the hay cure first. I lean on the edge of the loft, but I can’t bring myself to climb up into the heat.
When, do you think?
A couple of days. Not long in this heat. But he’ll be in and out of the yard to water his horses and I may end up feeding him. You’ll have to work at staying out of sight.
Maybe I should just go now. I can’t take much more of this.
Where will you go?
I’ll go to town and hitch a ride to Winnipeg. I keep writing Al that I’m coming and then I never do.
We can’t talk about it. The heat baffles us, it’s so thick in the air that our words don’t carry. Are you thinking tomorrow? I ask, although he’s begun to cram his things, his letters and towel and tobacco, into his knapsack.
He’ll be here again first thing in the morning, won’t he? I’ll go now, while he’s over in the field and you have the truck out. I think I should just go now. He stands up and starts to pull his pants on.
It’s cooler down by the river, I say. You could spend the day down there.
Lily, he’s working down by the river.
Oh. I’m feeling a little dizzy and suddenly it’s important to get off the ladder. Sorry, I say, I can’t seem to think today.
I sit in the kitchen and drink a glass of water. Mother’s lying on the chesterfield. She’s loosened her hair and it floats above her on the cushions, as though she’s sinking down into a lake. She has the afghan over her legs. How can you stand that? I ask.
The circulation to my feet isn’t the best, she says.
Listen, I say, I have to make another trip to town. I forgot to drop off the eggs. I’m such a dolt. They’re sitting in the truck.
She doesn’t say anything and I feel relief that this charade may be almost over. I’m losing perspective when it comes to lies — I can’t tell what’s reasonable and what isn’t. I go to my room and take a couple of bills out of the envelope I keep in my top dresser drawer and slip them into my purse.
I stop the truck on the east side of Burnley, near the highway. Russell and I sit in the Ford like any farm couple come to town, except that the woman is driving. We sit and look at each other. I have no idea what this is, so I have no idea how I should be acting. I wish you didn’t have to go, I say.
Well, when it comes right down to it, I guess I don’t, he says.
What do you mean?
Well, Lily. Let’s not pretend I’m hiding for my sake. I stare at him.
I’m ready to go to the house and introduce myself to your mother, he says. I told you that. You’re the one who wants to keep hiding me.
I look out at the road.
It’s true, isn’t it? He nudges his knapsack with his foot. If you can’t live your life around here you should leave. You could come with me now. I can hang around Burnley for a day or two until you get yourself sorted out. We could go to Winnipeg. I’d get work at the Clarion.
You think I can just leave Mother on her own? I say.
He makes an impatient little movement.
Well, what then?
Ask your sister-in-law to move back.
I can’t do that.
Why not?
I don’t answer.
What are you going to do? he asks me. You can’t stay here forever.
I sit behind the wheel. I refuse to look at him again.
It’s just going to get harder. She’ll get worse. There are people who are good at nursing.
My mother wouldn’t let anyone else help. She’s too proud.
Well, maybe that’s something she’ll have to get over. A hayrack moves down the road with three children nestled in the back. They wave at us and I lift my hand in response. Lily, he says, and waits until I look at him. Lily, there are a lot of women like you who sacrifice their lives to look after others. It’s unselfish and I admire it. But is it the best thing in the long run? As long as people work on their own like this, the system doesn’t have to change.
I’ve just been called unselfish, this is not lost on me. But this is an artificial argument, it’s not the argument of the moment. It’s hard to breathe and I reach over to roll the window down, but it’s already down. I feel sick to my stomach.
He reaches to the floor of the truck for his knapsack. I wonder if this is the best place to catch a ride, he says.
There’s a train in an hour, I say. Why don’t you just take it? I take the folded bills from my purse and hand them to him.
Thanks, he says. He lifts one hip from the truck seat and slips the money into his back pocket. By now I understand why he can take money from me so easily. It’s not for him, not really. I start the Ford up again and drive to the railway station, where I park by the fence.
Listen, he says. I’ll just go to Winnipeg for now. I won’t go back east without you. So you’ve got some time to figure out what you’re going to do.
How long, do you think?
I have no idea.
He doesn’t want to meet my gaze. He’s been glib, he knows it. He leans over and drops a neutral kiss on the corner of my mouth. The city’s coming back to him — I can see his purpose and excitement and relief. He turns at the station door and waves. I start the Ford up and back crookedly out to the road. On the road I press my foot to the floor, wanting to get some breeze. At the first corner I turn up the Nebo road and head towards fall.
8
My deck of playing cards was seized and burned a year ago by the Inquisition. And Russell took his deck with him. I wish I’d asked to keep it, he’d have given it to me. I miss playing cards. The cards are dealt, the cards are played — all in ten minutes the game is up.
I find a stack of old calendars and cut them into pieces. I pick out sets of numbers and paste them to little pieces of cardboard. Mother would never play cards, but she doesn’t realize that’s what she’s doing. I teach her a couple of games, including a calendar version of Old Maid. Do you have August 15? we ask each other. Do you have September 3? She’s very good at it and beats me the first two games. All right, I say, that was best of three. You win, Joe Pye.
For supper I make her a chip butty. We still have a few wizened old potatoes and they’re best for chips, they don’t spit as much when you fry them. Remember how Dad always talked about the way they ate when he was growing up? I say. Chip butties and sugar butties and tea leaf butties.
Tea leaf butties, you and Phillip would shout, she says. Her speech slurs a little, as though she’s had a couple of drinks too fast.
August has vanished, there’s no getting it back. All that heat is gone, collapsed on itself like a plague that went too far and gobbled up its own food supply. The colour has drained from the grass, and yellow patches in the Manitoba maples draw your eyes to the branches that are dying. It’s the season of Dieppe, that’s all people will remember in the long run. But someone set the clock for harvest and no matter what else is going on in the world there’s no putting off the harvest. The second crop of beans is finished, and the peas, and we’re eating bright orange corn that no one except a fiend for salt and butter would consider eating. On the ground everything is drying up. It’s the time for underground growth, for
the carrots pushing wider into the earth during the night, the potatoes furtively swelling. Our best crop is unintentional, the turnips that came up as volunteers in the pigpen, where I kept throwing the kitchen slop even after I sold the pig.
Inside the house two women take their Saturday-night baths: the younger one tall and strong and healthy, spectacularly healthy, she has health enough for two. The older, her muscles shrivelling in retaliation, but retaliation for what? Her fingers are losing their range of motion, there’s a hint of vindication in her face when she shows me. She can handle bathing herself, but she can’t get in or out of the tub on her own. When she calls me to help her out, she struggles to hold a towel in front of herself like a curtain. She looks fearfully, defiantly over it at me. It’s always there, Betty’s question about what will happen to her. It’s always possible that her life matters as much to her as mine does to me. This is what I think: that I have to show I can do this better than a Christian.
Finally she’s dried and in her nightgown, sitting forward over a chair back with her head bent into a basin on the kitchen table. We don’t wash her hair very often and a sharp smell rises from her scalp. I gather up the ragged ends and press them down into the water. The colour’s stripped from them, the way it’s stripped from the grass, and they resist the water. When her hair is finally wet it’s like reeds rotting in the bottom of a slough. A handicraft of some sort: yarn I’m dyeing — that’s what I have to tell myself.
Your scalp must ache, I say. Imagine what it would be like to have a man use your hair as a ladder. Do you know that story? Rapunzel?
I’m thinking of getting you to cut it off, she says. Her voice is muffled. I can’t believe I’ve heard right, but I know better than to press the point.
Whenever you want, I say.
My own hair gleams like never before when I brush it, and high colour shows through the tan of my cheeks. I dry myself methodically. If I don’t pay too much attention, maybe my body will shut up, stop sending me messages. There’s a strange, metallic taste in my mouth. My breasts are heavy, the flesh of my nipples seems darker. There’s also a sign I can count on my fingers, but it’s the other things I brood over — they tell me more, the way a glance can tell you more than a word.
Every time I go to town I pick up a newspaper. On September 8 I read a little article I would never have noticed before and learn that some members of the Communist Party of Canada were released from Headingly Jail. A few days after that the names of the dead in Dieppe are released and start to fill the papers, page after page, day after day. Not too many Manitoba boys, although the blacksmith’s son, Jimmy Thrasher, is one of them and everyone is talking about it in town. I don’t buy the paper that day. How could you read a paper like that, what would you do with it after you’d read it?
I get letters. From Madeleine:
We’ve been cleaning out George’s shed. Mother wanted to leave it until the end of the war, but Dad wouldn’t let it rest. I saved a lot of funny things I couldn’t bear to throw away. I’ll share them with you when you come back. I’ve had another new frock. I have filled out, if I do say so myself, and I had nothing that fit. Nettie’s gone to work at a factory in Leeds, so I had to do my own sewing. I’m not much with fasteners. Every time I put it on Mother has to stitch me into it and then cut me out of it after. I guess that will keep me out of trouble. Which leads me to my biggest news! Lois is expecting at Christmas! She’s feeling poorly, no surprise there, but even Archie’s mother is happy about it and has been over to see Mother.
So.
From Russell:
I said I’d come back to the farm before I go east, but there is so much happening here I never figured on. A big party to celebrate Jake Penner’s release. He was held for over a year. But they’re still holding on to warrants for quite a few. I assume I’m one of them, but how would I know? I guess I could walk into a police station and ask if they want to arrest me!
Actually, that may happen. I’ve had a letter from Everiste saying that some of the comrades down east are going to get together and turn themselves in. They will probably do it in Hull. Or Toronto. The idea is to force the hand of the police, see if there really is a will to arrest Communists right now. (And to provoke a public reaction.) Al and I have been talking about it. I’d like to join my comrades, but we don’t have the fare to go east. So I am seriously thinking of walking into the police station here. If they arrest us here they might send us to Ottawa on the public dollar. I don’t think Al will go along with it in the end. He has a big garden and he wants to be around to get it all in, the carrots and potatoes, etc. He’s feeding half of Burrows Avenue.
If this works out, you might have to come east on your own. You can visit me and smuggle cigarettes in. I don’t know what you want to do, Lily, you never tell me.
I put the letters in a chocolate box on the window ledge in my bedroom. A stony little cigar still lies there. Lapides lyncis. When the scholars wanted a Latin name for the belemnite, petrified lynx piss was the one they took up. It would be so amazing to come across a belemnite in a sheep pasture, a tiny talisman dropped from heaven. It was somebody crouching on a rock on the coast of Wales who identified it as the chamber of a mollusc. This was back in the nineteenth century, but George was coy about that. He never really wanted to admit it — the closing off of possibilities about the belemnite. Problematica — that was his favourite category. It’s not a category that exists for Russell, I think, and I feel a stab of longing for Russell, for his certainty. I think of one night, a night I got up and walked barefoot across the yard under a litter of stars and climbed up into the pitch-black loft without waking him, crawling clumsily through the straw in the direction where he always slept until I bumped into him and felt the heat of his body and nestled in close, smelling cigarette smoke and perspiration. I always think about George in the night, I whispered. About the way he died. There was a long silence. Russell stirred and curled one arm around me. You never told me what happened, he said, his voice thick with sleep. So I did tell him while he lay still with his arm around me.
Were you back here when you found out? he asked.
No, I said. I knew it when I left Oldham. Before it even happened.
Oh, Lily, he said. You didn’t. He propped himself up on an elbow then and tried to kiss me. You imagined something terrible, you were afraid. But you didn’t know.
He was wrong, I knew, I knew. I rolled over onto my back then and pulled him towards me. I sank down into the dark under him, feeling his weight on me, turning my face away from his kisses.
Was he your cousin? he asked me after a time. Was he your lover?
No, I said. No, I said to both questions, he wasn’t.
I stand in my bedroom now and roll the belemnite back and forth in my hand. It’s a lovely brown, the very brown of the scrub oaks by the river. Polished, as though someone has taken a soft cloth to it. It’s not a stony finger or a bullet casing, it wasn’t made by magic and it wasn’t made by man. It’s a buoyancy chamber. Some little speck of an animal excreted it to keep itself afloat, millions and millions of years ago, halfway around the world. I stand in my bedroom with the belemnite in my hand and then I put it back on the window ledge.
I go to bed earlier and earlier, I sink hungrily into dreams. I dream that Mother and I get jobs. We’re taking the train to work. She has had her hair cut — its waves peep out from the rim of a jaunty beret and her face is glazed and willing. I have no idea where we should be getting off. I get up at every station to see if it’s our stop, but the train never slows down enough for me to tell. Then I’m walking back from the barn in my nightdress, being followed by a dog, a stray dog with shaggy fur tinged with rust. The sheets are tangled around my legs like ropes of seaweed. I kick them down to the bottom and lie under the scratchy blanket. I dream of a catalogue coming in the mail, its pages sticking together where someone spilled sweet coffee on them. Then I’m in St. Ambrose Parish Church in Salford. I’m walking up the stone aisle, squeez
ing past a big watering trough. (it’s for the baptisms, says Nettie Nesbitt.) When I finally open my eyes the light is grey. It’s the dawn of a cloudy day. I lie in bed for a long time, thinking about telling her.
I’ll do it one evening when the sunset paints the underside of the clouds crimson. Mother will be sitting in the front yard where she sits to watch the fake air battles. I drag a chair out and sit down beside her. Mother — , I say. Her eyes turn up, fear rising in them. I tell her, in one clean and fearless sentence. I watch the rage collect in her face. She doesn’t ask how this could have happened, with us alone on the farm these last two years. It’s something I hatched up in my own sinful body, it’s been in the cards since I was thirteen. I want you to leave, she says in a strangled voice. Get out of this house. Now. Before anyone finds out. She would rather lose me than face the disgrace. In fact, she’d love it if I left — the world would know me then, the sort of child she’s always had to contend with: everyone would know my breathtaking wickedness. I take some pleasure in imagining this, I enjoy tearing down the fragile structure the two of us have been building.
The rooster is doing his best to wake up the henhouse. Mother’s bedsprings creak. The sheets need washing — I smell myself on them, sweat, and the garden, and the yeasty smell of bread. I wonder guiltily when Mother’s bed was last changed. I should get up and start the laundry, I think. Or, I think, dipping back into my story. Or maybe I don’t tell her. Maybe while she’s sleeping I just drag my empty trunk out to the Ford, and then gradually I spirit my things outside and fill it. On cue I get a telegram from Phillip. He’s in Halifax, he’s being sent home! He’s been diagnosed with a heart murmur. I drive to town to pick him up. He gets off the train wearing his civvies. My trunk is standing on the platform — the station master unloaded it from the Ford. The whistle blows and I hand Phillip the keys of the Ford and board the train. Mother would rather have him anyway, she’d much rather have Phillip and Betty than me.
