Patterns of Swallows

by Connie Cook

  She still had a clear picture in her mind of her father with his freckly skin, his blue eyes, his light brown, tight curls cut short, his misshapen, bony nose, and his cleft chin. She had his nose and his chin. She had curls, too, though hers were more just kinks in her long, brown hair that turned her hair into frizz when Mother brushed it.

  But she looked nothing like her mother. Mother had light blue eyes and delicate, if somewhat pinched, features, and her hair was straight and limp and pale, like dead grass.

  It was true. Ruth knew it at once. She was a half-breed. It explained her skin, much browner than either of her parents', and the chocolate eyes and dark hair. Why hadn't she figured it out sooner so Wynnie's words didn't come as a kick to the pit of the stomach? Why should it be Wynnie, of all people, who made her know the truth? If only she could have known it on her own!

  Ruth knew that either tears or the fury that threatened to take possession of her, begging her to fly at the two girls with fists or feet or any handy weapon, would have been a victory for the enemy (which was Wynnie's classification at the moment). Ruth wasn't at all tempted to tears, but the violence was a fierce temptation she must resist if she didn't want them to win.

  It went against her grain to fight the enemy using their own tactics, but just then, she wanted to hurt back with maximum efficiency, and she knew the weapons that did more damage than her feeble fists could have.

  "At least my dad didn't have to go to prison," she said, narrowing her eyes at Wynnie into the meanest smile she was capable of. "Everyone knows that your dad's been to prison. My mother told me that." Then she turned on Lily. "And everyone knows that he went to prison because of your dad. Everyone knows that your dad's just a crook, and he gets other men to go to prison for him."

  Wynnie was prone to tears, and she ran off in a fit of them, but not Lily. Her tendency was Ruth's – to rage.

  "No one talks that way about my dad," she said to Ruth in a low, shaking voice that told of the violence within. "I'll never forgive you for that."

  Ruth stalked off, laughing an angry, triumphant laugh.

  "Do you hear me? I'll never forgive you! Never!" Lily's voice followed her in an uncontrolled shriek. She never allowed anyone to beat her at her own game.

  Ruth went to find Wynnie, feeling repentant now that the score had evened. Wynnie would have a cry and tell Ruth to go away, but then she'd be ready to make up when Ruth told her she was sorry. Neither one of them was much of a hand at grudge-bearing. They'd been through it before, and their friendship (such as it was) had always recovered.

  The one thing that Ruth couldn't recover was the innocence she'd had before the moment of truth on the playground. Her mother was not her mother. Things can never quite be the same once a person knows a truth like that.

  She had little curiosity about the woman who had given birth to her. The biological facts about those kinds of arrangements were hazy. Ruth still wasn't quite sure exactly what it meant that her father was her father and someone else was her real mother, but one thing was plain. It was plain she hadn't been wanted by that woman. That woman was not her real mother.

  In an odd way, Ruth found a new affection for the woman she'd always called Mother growing out of the experience. She hadn't realized that her mother was the type of woman who could find it in her heart to take on someone else's child as her own. It was never discussed between the two of them, but Ruth looked on her mother with new eyes after that day.

  After the initial shock and rage at the enemy wore off, whatever Lily had hoped to accomplish with her intended cruelty hadn't come off. Ruth couldn't have cared less if she was a half-breed, she told herself. All that mattered was that Mother had cared enough about her to want her and claim her as her own. Nothing else mattered. She was determined nothing else would matter. She was determined not to let the enemy have its way with her.

  The whole story of Ruth's parentage didn't come out until she was twelve. There had been plenty of surmise before that time, but the story was released officially through the hard-working Arrowhead rumour mill after Ruth's mother died.

  * * *

  When Ruth's mother had been in the last stages of the cancer, she'd attempted to extract a promise from Ruth that she wouldn't see her father again.

  "She's not in her right mind," the nurse said in a quiet hiss to Ruth, banking on that belief enough to say such a thing in the presence of Mrs. Chavinski but not banking on it enough to say it in a normal speaking voice. "Just tell her what she wants to hear to ease her mind."

  But Ruth wouldn't say the words. She didn't want to find her father particularly; she certainly didn't want to have to live with him, but she thought that might be how it would have to be. She would have no control over her future after Mother died – she knew that – and the words once spoken to her mother might end up being a lie.

  Ruth explained it to the nurse, and the nurse said, "Of course, but it doesn't matter. Just say the words, anyways. It's just words."

  Ruth was shocked. "But it's a promise," she told the nurse, as if the nurse hadn't grasped that fact and when she did, she'd understand.

  "It's not a real promise," the nurse cajoled. "It would make her easier in her mind. It would make her passing easier."

  But it was a promise Ruth never did make. She'd seen enough of what bitterness could do to a person, and she didn't want any part of it.

  "It would make her passing easier," the nurse had said, but Ruth knew it wasn't true. Bitterness hadn't made her mother's living easier. Why would it make her dying easier?

  Ruth had another, a private reason, she wouldn't make the promise to her mother. She had no room left in her for unforgiveness, even towards her father.

  When a person has died to save your life, you can never quite be the same again. Especially when your last words to him were ugly ones. You don't get over a thing like that in a hurry.

  No, Ruth wanted no part ever again of vendettas. Not even of participating in her mother's.

  The townspeople speculated whether Mr. Chavinski would come back now that "that woman" wasn't there to come back to. But he never did. Some chapters are written and read and closed for good.

  Ruth never wasted time speculating on the question. She knew, somehow, that he wouldn't. Her swallow-like doggedness hadn't been inherited from her father. She knew he felt no need to rebuild in the place he'd once called home.

  Mrs. Starke had taken Ruth into their home for the weeks after her Mother's death while it was being decided what to do with her, but there was no question of her staying permanently. The Starkes had five girls of their own. They didn't need another. They couldn't feed another, Mrs. Starke confided to anyone who would listen. The child welfare authorities were called in to handle things.

  The first avenue taken was the attempt to locate the father. Ruth had never made the promise to her mother, but in the end, it wouldn't have mattered if she had.

  It had been years since they'd received any money from him. When inquiries were made at the last address the money had come from, the only information that could be found was that he had moved on and left no forwarding address. Announcements on national radio, advising Rudolf Chavinski to contact the R.C.M.P. for an important personal message, turned up nothing. Perhaps he didn't listen to radio. Perhaps he just couldn't be bothered with important personal messages relating to a life he didn't want anymore. The Mounties knew nothing of his whereabouts and never were able to trace him. For all intents and purposes, Rudy Chavinski had vanished off the face of the earth. At least, vanished from the face of Ruth's life, never to re-enter it. Perhaps he died soon after the payments stopped coming to her mother. No one in Arrowhead ever knew the answer.

  Ruth couldn't feel any sorrow about it at twelve. What would she have done if she'd had to live with a father she didn't know who didn't want her?

  Her father had one brother left alive, but he was a bachelor, living in a mining camp way up north. The child welfare people didn't bother to ask him i
f he wanted Ruth.

  Ruth's mother had one sister in Saskatchewan. She didn't come for the funeral. When she was contacted about Ruth, she replied in no uncertain terms that the girl was no blood relation of hers and she was under no obligation to take her. It was the aunt (or the non-aunt, as she made it clear she was) who revealed the story of how Ruth had come to be. She passed the information along only to the child welfare people, but somehow the story leaked out into the town grapevine with more or less accuracy.

  It was no great scandal by that time. The story hardly survived a week on the vine and then withered. It was more or less what people had expected. Rudy Chavinski's first wife (though wife was a courtesy title) was a Cree woman from northern Saskatchewan. She'd borne him a child but hadn't cared to raise it, and Rudy hadn't cared to stay long in northern Saskatchewan. He'd married his second wife shortly before moving to Arrowhead and settling on a farm there. The farm was in the wife's name because it was her money that had paid for it, and she'd insisted on it being in her name.

  It must have been bitter gall to Rudy Chavinski to live on his wife's money and his wife's farm, but I suppose he did what he had to. The second wife had a little money even if she did have a sharp tongue. And she was willing to take on the child. There were reasons Rudy married her, and there were reasons she married Rudy. Sharp tongues don't marry easily even with a little money.

  Such was Ruth's history.

  The problem about history is that it has such a way of influencing our presents and our futures against our control.

  * * *

  No foster home could be found for Ruth in Arrowhead. Willing homes were filled up throughout the entire province just then with the orphanage out by Victoria having been requisitioned as a hospital for the returning, wounded soldiers. The wards of the orphanage had all been put into foster care. The war was nearly over, but the foster homes were still full. And moving Ruth to another province would have meant extra paperwork and complications.

  The child welfare people checked out the non-aunt's story and learned from Ruth's birth records that she did indeed come from a mixed heritage. When the child welfare authorities learned what had been obvious to townsfolk for years, that Ruth was Métis, they had another avenue open to them. There was a residential school available right in the Kissanka region. It was seen as the ideal solution by all the townspeople and presumably by the child welfare people, as well.

  At twelve, Ruth left Arrowhead to go and live in the residential school. She didn't return to Arrowhead until she was nineteen, legally an adult, no longer a ward of the government of the province of British Columbia, and entitled to her inheritance from her mother. She never talked about her time away, not even to me. And no one liked to ask her about what she didn't see fit to say. Ruth had that effect on people. They held their tongues. Not about her, but around her.

  * * *

  After Ruth stepped off the greyhound bus and set foot in Arrowhead for the first time in seven years, she set about moving back into the house and the farm her mother had left to her. It was all her mother had to leave. All the money she'd had had gone into the farm.

  The house had been empty for seven years except for the squatters who had moved in and out at will. The place was not livable when Ruth inherited it, but she was hard-working and determined. And it was home. Where else would she go?

  The land, all except the acre or so surrounding the house, was quickly leased to a neighbouring farmer, a prosperous dairy man, who was glad of the chance. He'd been pasturing his cattle on it unofficially for years already, not seeing the harm in it and not knowing if Ruth would ever return to it (though if he'd known Ruth, he should have known she would). Now he'd be able to put up proper fencing for the hilly pasture land and make hay on the flat.

  So the farm land was taken care of. And the house was still standing. But that was about all that could be said for it.

  Ruth felt as near crying as never happened when she saw what she was up against. The steps to the porch were rotting. There was hardly a window left intact. The front door was off its hinges. The interior walls had yawning holes the size of a man's large boot from one of the more destructive squatters. Some walls had no panelling at all, leaving dirty insulation to sag out without restraint. Insects of more varieties than Ruth knew existed had overrun the place. The mice gloried in their heyday as lords of the manor.

  It was impossible. The whole thing was utterly impossible. At least for her and at least right then. She'd have to sleep on it, and see how things looked to her in the morning.

  Her first night back, she found her mother's few remaining belongings stored in the attic and rolled up in a quilt on the bare, hardwood floor of the cleanest room she could find (which was only filthy). The quilt reeked of mothballs. In the morning, she'd have to see if the old wringer washer was still in the washing shed by the house. But there was nothing she could do about the mothballs or the dirt or the hard floor that night. As exhausted as she was from the bus ride into Arrowhead and the long walk out to the farm from the depot with her one suitcase, sleep was in short supply.

  * * *

  When word got around town that Ruth was back at the Chavinski farm, it was the Saturday after Ruth's arrival that Bo Weaver, Philippa and Mrs. Handy, and a few of Bo's friends came out for a work bee. Even Wynn came and stayed an hour or two. Ruth had been on the farm by herself for three days, and the human contact was more than welcome. As was the volunteer labour.

  Cleaning was one of Ruth's least-favourite jobs, but she wasn't much use at the bigger jobs. She had to let the men handle them while she, Wynn, Philippa and her mother, and the other women cleaned.

  Bo's boss at the apple packing shed, Eddie Hoffstetter, came along and brought his wife plus a few of the other apple shed employees. There was the prevalent party atmosphere usual to work bees: friendly insults back and forth between the men and small gossip and comfortable commonplaces amongst the women. Ruth had no refreshments to serve, but Mrs. Hoffstetter, anticipating that, had brought sweet apple cider and cookies for everyone, and most of the workers brought lunch pails and thermoses, expecting to make a full day of it.

  By suppertime Saturday, most of the big jobs were finished. The house was bare, but clean and respectably fixed-up.

  Ruth never knew for sure who to thank for the thought and the impetus behind the work bee, so she thanked all the volunteers repeatedly, especially Bo as the most likely instigator.

  After that Saturday, it began to feel as though she lived somewhere again. There were a few pieces of old furniture in one of the sheds that could be rescued and restored. She found the old bike in the barn and discovered that it still worked with a little greasing-up. She'd need something for transportation back and forth into town if she was going to find a job. And she desperately needed a job.

  She would have felt much easier in her mind at that moment if she could have known all about Jim and Morning Glory Metzke. But then, none of us can know the future.

  Chapter 4

  The morning after Marjorie Trapwell's wedding dance, the moment Ruth was awake, she knew trouble had found her.

  It was an unfamiliar feeling but one she could immediately put a name to though she tried hard not to put the name to it. The sensation was as if some lighter-than-air substance had invaded her entire body and settled down into her stomach. To her still sleep-frowsed mind the image appeared of being trapped inside a soap bubble, all shiningness and rainbow iridescence in the sunlight, carried off against her knowledge and will wherever the breeze took her. It was a very helpless feeling but a nearly irresistible one.

  She got up and dressed for work and tried to think about something else. But nothing else to think about occurred to her just then. At least, not that she could think about for very long. Her thoughts continuously returned to the lighter-than-air sensation.

  She didn't see Graham again for more than two weeks. She wasn't trying to keep track of the days, but when he showed up one evening for sup
per at the Morning Glory, she knew it had been over two weeks since Marjorie's wedding.

  Graham was with Bernie Jansen and two girls Ruth didn't recognize. She imagined they were both high-school girls, a little young for Graham and Bernie. But that didn't stop the two men, both of whom had an arm around a pair of young, high-school shoulders as they entered the cafe.

  The spirits of the foursome seemed to be exceptionally high that night, and when Ruth came to hand them menus, she knew why. The sour and unmistakable smell of liquor was apparent when she leaned across to the men's side of the table to wipe off a crumb. And it was only five o' clock in the evening. This was a side of Graham she hadn't seen before.

  He greeted her jovially enough but without any apparent memory of the four dances they'd had together. Had it really only been two weeks ago? At times it felt like years and at times it felt like days. Just then, it felt like another lifetime ago. The two-week-old soap bubble evaporated in mid-air, splattering her unceremoniously onto hard ground.

  She ignored the noisy teasing the men were doing and the giggling of the girls and went to wait on another table while the group decided on their orders.

  They were hard to ignore. All over the cafe, people were turning to look in the direction of the louder-than-normal men's voices and the squealing female ones.

  She was back at Graham's table to take their orders just as Mrs. Handy and Philippa arrived and took a seat at the counter.

  Every Monday, the widowed mother and her daughter came to the Morning Glory for a dinner out. It was their weekly treat – a chance to get out of the house and have someone else cook for them. Every Monday, they entered the cafe like a doe and her fawn, unobtrusively, with cautious eyes, looking from side to side, on the ware for signs of danger. But that was silly. It was the Morning Glory. Of course it was safe.

  "Are you ready to order?" Ruth asked Graham and his company, carefully avoiding Graham's eyes.