by Joan Thomas
But then of course the train that brought Phillip home carries me west, that’s the way it’s headed. Where do I go in the west? — under that endless sky, with stooks of grain running to the horizon in every direction, and farmhouses just like this one, one every mile, red kitchen floors with their pattern of curling feathers from here to Edmonton. The train chugs doggedly on. I can’t get it turned back east, to Charlotte, opening a heavy oak door to greet me, wearing her nursing cap — Charlotte who hardly knows me but is kind. Or to Aunt Lucy, reaching out to pull my head down to her shoulder, saying, There, there, love, there’s no need for that. Or to Doris, the girl I met on the train whose boyfriend’d been killed. Suddenly I see Doris. She’s wearing a trim business suit and red shoes. She’s standing outside an office on a wide city street with a handsome little boy beside her. Her child, the baby that was just a thought inside her when I met her on the train. It was hard, the caption below this picture reads, but you can do it.
To Russell. In my mind I see the train come for me, but I can’t get it turned back east to Russell.
It’s cold now. I get up one night long after Mother’s asleep and pull my clothes on, reaching in to the floor of the wardrobe where my winter clothes are piled and throwing on the first things that come to hand. I visit the outhouse and then I walk across the yard, out under the cottonwoods standing silver against the dark sky. They’re always the last to lose their leaves. Their long roots go down into an underground stream, that’s what my dad said. On the other side of the line of trees the fields stretch flat in the starlight.
I wade through the grass to the roof of the old chicken house. I used to sit there all the time before I went to England, I used to sit there and read the Bible. I climb up and lie back and stretch my legs out. Then I sit up again and hitch my jacket around to cushion my spine against the shingles. The air is cold, spiced with smoke from stubble burning on the other side of the river. This roof’s at a perfect slant for lying to look at the stars. I tip my head back and narrow my eyes, and the tiny bits of light above me blur, jostling for space. Above me they dance, sending down their old light. They crowd into one another — that’s the way it seems from here, but really there are infinite plains of darkness between them. I snuggle into my jacket, resisting the cold. Deep inside me my heart beats on unbidden. All through my body, cells go about their business, do their private, independent work. It’s not a matter of thought: my thinking or not thinking will not affect it in the slightest.
We expect the threshing crew, but it rains. I run into Harry on the road. He rolls down his truck window to pass the time of day with me. He’s grinning in spite of the rain. The Farmer’s Almanac promises one big storm and then clear, dry weather for weeks. Anyway, he has the bumper crop of all bumper crops, he can afford to see it drop a grade.
It’s raining so hard when I come in from milking that I wish I had a lid for the pail. I open the kitchen door and slide the milk in, standing in the porch to shake the water off my coat. There’s an unfamiliar oilskin jacket hanging on the nail by the door. When I step into the kitchen, someone’s sitting at the kitchen table. A brown-haired man, his hair shining black from the rain. Mother’s standing by the stove. There’s a bright red spot on each of her cheeks. Her hands are shaking with her agitation, but she’s managed to put the kettle on the stove for tea. Or Russell helped her. And there he sits at our kitchen table, an amazing sight, with his broad shoulders and confident, friendly face. And how it must amaze her too, this Satanic figure from my girlhood, such a commonplace man after all, seemingly sober and wearing a grey cotton shirt. An ordinary grey shirt — it should look ordinary to her, it’s Phillip’s.
I stand on the rag rug and shake rain out of my hair, and when I feel as though I can speak I turn towards the table. Russell, I say. He rises up a little from his chair. It looks as though he’s about to shake hands with me, but then he sits back down. He’s wearing a ridiculous, elated smile. Hello, Lily. Nice to see you.
Nice to see you too, I say.
He was just travelling through, says Mother. Someone dropped him off on the road and he came to the door. While you were milking. She’s fumbling to get the tea tin open and I go to help her.
Actually, I’ve been in Manitoba for a few months, Mrs. Piper, Russell says. But I’m heading back east now. I just wanted to stop in before I left. Russell keeps his eyes on me while he talks, and I stare back. I’m looking for something in his face. For whether he came to ask me for his fare to Hull, or for some other reason. Finally, without looking away, he says, Maybe before the tea is ready, I’ll just use your outhouse. Out back?
Where else? I say. He goes out, lifting his waterproof off the nail.
Imagine that fellow showing up, Mother says when the porch door slams. Imagine him remembering you after all this time.
Yes, imagine, I say. I’m beginning to get my breath back. Of course, he did write to me while I was in England, I say. At least twice. I guess it’s always possible that I wrote back.
She ignores this. That dog is not the watchdog he should be, she says. That fellow was right at the door before I knew. He said he knocked on the porch first, but I didn’t hear him. I didn’t hear a thing until he was right at the kitchen door. I wonder who it was that dropped him off? I asked him, but he didn’t know the man’s name. Whoever it was must have wondered why he’d be coming here.
She teeters over to the cupboard to get down teacups. He doesn’t look much like his father, she says. Mr. Bates had a finer-featured face. This one is kind of broad across the cheekbones. His mother must be a Ukrainian or one of those nationalities.
I sit down in silence at the table.
When he comes back in he says, it’s stopped raining. Do I have time for a smoke? He tips his head for me to join him, with an expression that will surely speak volumes to my mother, but she’s staring at the cigarette he’s rolled in the outhouse, rigid with fear that he’ll try to light it in the kitchen. I should try to make this all seem natural. I’ll show Russell around, I should say. But I can’t be bothered. I just get up and stalk silently to the door and reach for my coat.
We stand under the overhang of the porch. The rain has slowed momentarily but water drips from the roof like vines. He pulls me into his arms and kisses me. If you’d just shown up in the loft, we could have spent the night together, I say. (You might have seen then, is what I’m thinking, you would know without having to be told.) It’s full of fresh hay, I add. It’s very pleasant at the moment. Cool as well.
In a minute I’ll be crying.
No, he says. No more of that. I’ve had it with living like a criminal. He lets me go and lights his cigarette. Anyway, your mother offered me a bed. She said I could sleep with you.
I bet she did, I say. Comes the revolution. We smile at each other. It’s starting to rain again, it hadn’t really stopped, and I pull my scarf up over my hair and nudge him back under the overhang.
Blue crowds under the overhang with us. Bloody dog, says Russell, grabbing his muzzle. He was all over me. Almost ratted me out to your mother. Eh, Blue? You missed me, eh, Blue?
I thought you were turning yourself in to the police in Winnipeg, I say.
Oh, that’s a story, Russell says, letting Blue go and bringing his cigarette up to his mouth. I did try. I went to the station in the North End. The waiting room was full of thugs. Army rejects with bashed-in faces, and prostitutes trying to start a fight. A Sergeant Mike O’Connell was on the desk. Communist, eh? he says. So why you telling me? I told him about the Order-in-Council. I suggested he call the RCMP, get them to check their outstanding warrants. It’s a Saturday night, lad, he says. He’s about thirty himself and he calls me lad. Then he pulls a dollar out of his pocket and hands it to me. Take yourself off to the pub, he says. Be glad you weren’t at Dieppe.
Russell can do a reasonable Irish brogue. His tan has faded, he’s had his hair cut properly and he’s looking cleaned up and full of life. When I kiss him there’s the smell
of cigarettes and the pepper taste of his skin.
Mother and I had supper before I did the milking, but Russell hasn’t eaten, so while he drinks his tea I warm him up a meal of the leftovers we would otherwise have had for tomorrow’s dinner. Roast beef, new carrots, new potatoes fried in butter. A saucer of sliced tomatoes and cucumbers. The meat was in the Elizabeth and Margaret Rose tin I used all summer to take food to him, and he leans against the counter and fiddles with it while he watches me cook. We’ve lit a lamp — strange for the kitchen to be so dark at this hour. Prairie cooking! he says when I put his plate on the table. Thank you, says Mother, as though she cooked it. She turns away so that she doesn’t have to witness him starting to eat without saying grace and then she goes over to the cupboard to get him a piece of date cake. I can see him looking bemused at the sight of a thin braid that’s wormed its way loose from the ball at the nape of her neck and hangs halfway down her back. He catches my eye and winks.
I know he’s going to want another cigarette. Let’s go sit on the veranda, I say when he’s finished eating. I have never in my life seen Mother sit out on the veranda after supper.
But he has these city manners. Can I give you a hand, Mrs. Piper? he asks. So she takes his arm and I go out ahead of them and straighten the quilt on the Toronto couch. She lets go of his arm at the door and manages to grab a corner of the couch, sitting at the end where my father’s shoes are hidden. So I sit on the rocking chair and Russell eases himself down beside Mother on the couch. The wind is blowing from the northwest, so the rain isn’t coming in, although when I reach my hand out I can feel a mist. Blue presses himself against my legs. He won’t sit down because of the storm. He stands alert, on guard against thunder. The smell of his fur rises in the humid air. It’s so dark, Mother says. You should bring the lamp out, Lily. I lean over to scratch the base of Blue’s ears and wish her away. It’s in my bones to wish my mother away, it’s the calcium in my bones maybe, whatever makes them strong.
We sit and watch the storm. Thunder thumps in the distance. When lightning flickers you see the rain bouncing up from the lane, like hail. Russell takes his tobacco pouch and papers out of his shirt pocket and rolls a cigarette. I wonder if Mother appreciates the practice it takes to roll a cigarette in the dark. You wouldn’t have an ashtray, would you, Lily? he asks. I get him a saucer from the kitchen. I can’t see the expression on Mother’s face when I hand it to him. It’s so dark, it could be midnight.
Russell draws on his cigarette. The ember glows orange and lights up the planes of his face, the deep notches on either side of his mouth.
You’re not enlisted, says my mother.
No, says Russell. At the moment I’m a member of an illegal organization.
She doesn’t ask. It’s as if she didn’t hear. My son is in England, she says. He’s an airplane mechanic with the RCAF. He was an AC2, but he’s had a promotion, he’s been promoted to LAC.
What does that stand for? asks Russell. I couldn’t really say, says Mother.
Russell takes another drag and I can see he’s smiling his sardonic half-smile. The storm was in the west, but now a sheet of lightning flashes in the south, lighting up the fringe of trees along the river. Then a bolt cuts its way across the sky, fibres of light on either side of it. A few seconds later the thunder comes. I wonder, when artillery guns go off, whether you see the flash of fire before you hear their thunder. Probably not, they’d be too close to you. Apparently if lightning strikes close enough you can smell it, ozone George said it was, hanging in the air the way cordite hung on Union Street after a bombing.
My husband’s family is from England, my mother says.
So I understand, says Russell.
From Salford, County Lancashire, she says. Her uncooperative tongue makes it hard for her to get this out. Where is your family from?
He knows what she’s asking, but he’s not offended. My mother is a Polish Jew, he says. Her family left Poland in 1910. My mother was about twenty. I guess they were lucky. They were luckier than anybody knew at the time.
Lightning cracks across the sky again and Blue yelps. In the Bible lightning is God’s arrows, thunder is his voice. This could be the end times, the final battle; maybe the faithful have been snatched away without our noticing, leaving us, just us on this narrow veranda, with nothing but a ragged screen between us and the lashing rain. There’s another flash and we light up as if we’re in a photograph, captured in an unthinking moment. The three of us here in the damp autumn air — Russell with everything he’s sure of, his solid body shrouded by curling smoke, Mother and me with our secrets: she’s caught in a moment of attention, her white profile turned towards Russell and an expression of uncommon interest on her face; me, I’m balancing on the rocking chair with one leg curled under me, my hands tucked into the sleeves of a tartan jacket. And if so, if that was the Rapture, I’m relieved, glad it’s over, glad to be abandoned to this world.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Quotations from The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan are from the Dodd, Mead & Company edition (New York, 1968). Biblical quotations are from the King James Version. Lyrics to “I’ll Fly Away” by Albert E. Brumley are quoted with permission of Brumley Music Group.
Among many sources on the Barr Colony, I would especially like to acknowledge Lynne Bowen’s Muddling Through: The Remarkable Story of the Barr Colonists (Douglas & McIntyre, 1992), and among sources on the two World Wars, the work of Paul Fussell. George’s parody of “Oh, death, where is thy sting?” is cited in The Great War and Modern Memory (Paul Fussell, Oxford University Press, 1975). Numerous and varied accounts of the unfortunate airman falling into civilian hands in Kennington are found in Internet and print sources.
Thank you to the Manitoba Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts for grants that provided essential time to write. Thanks to everyone at Anne McDermid and Associates Ltd. and to my editors: Patricia Sanders for crucial advice in the early stages, Heather Sangster for judicious copyediting, and especially Bethany Gibson at Goose Lane Editions, who has been unfailingly responsive, insightful and encouraging. Thanks to Robert Kroetsch and my group in the Novel Symposium at the Sage Hill Writing Experience, and to friends for their astute readings: Connie Cohen, Heidi Harms, Faith Johnston, Susan Remple Letkemann, Hazel Loewen and Christina Penner.
I want to express my appreciation to Dr. Janice Ingimundson and my gratefulness to my family, whose gifts — my mother’s love of reading, my father’s love of the prairies, and my mother-in-law Betty Dunn’s wonderful Lancashire stories — have found their way into this novel. Special thank you to Bill and to Caitlin, for their love and for making room for this work in our home.
