GABE
Peter insists it’s different in Arcana. You hear him say, “This is where it’s really happening,” and of the people you left behind, your mother, Susan, included, “They’re in denial up there. Think they’ve escaped but what they don’t know is you have to come back, we have to come back and resist from within now.” Of course you don’t remember these exact words but ones like them. You’ve pieced together your father’s tenets by what he’s said to others.
Peter gets a job building sets for a local theatre company. You and he sleep in the van behind the theatre, shower in a stall off the dressing room, eat in a place called the green room, which is, in fact, green, the shade of cut grass. The theatre supplies endless adventures. You crawl through the spaces under the seats as though burrowing a tunnel underground and discover that parts of the stage open up, an entire dusty mystery existing under there. You have a small red padded suitcase of Hot Wheels, each car with its own slot. You send the tiny cars down the slope from the back of the theatre to the front toward jumps made out the oddly shaped pieces of wood that Peter has given you. They rarely make the hurdles but you try again and again. You do what you have always done – keep yourself occupied, keep out of trouble. You hear other people say to Peter, “Well, he’s the opposite of a handful, ain’t he?” and “Quiet little guy, hey?”
To you the adults here seem similar to the adults at the farm, except they speak differently, louder and with more enthusiasm. The other kids, well, “Kids are kids,” as you heard someone say. You don’t know how it could be any different and apply this saying to everything: milk is milk, dogs are dogs. Sometimes, you repeat this over and over throughout the day, naming everything you come into contact with. It fills something in you, some kind of space in your head, which you’ve recently begun to think of as the inside of a bubble of Bazooka Joe. You know other people do this too when you hear a woman say, “Let’s call a spade a spade.”
There is even a woman at the theatre who looks like your mother, small and blonde, soft and bony at the same time, the way birds are. Her name is Anise and soon you and Peter are living with her in the basement of an old house. The people who own the house are old and German and lure you upstairs with fat sausages and sauerkraut. The inside of their house is coated in plastic – plastic walkways down each hall, plastic on the couches, over each lamp, plastic hugging the top of the table. It smells sour and smoky, and even though you don’t like the odour you keep going back, because Mrs. Goebel has an endless supply of candy in a hallway cupboard. You sit and watch TV with her in the afternoon, curtains closed so slats of sunlight slice into the room like knives and seem equally dangerous. Fill your mouth with candy until your cheeks inside are as furry as small, unsuspecting animals.
Soon, it seems, Anise has a baby and you move out of the basement. You start going to school – a couple years too late, you find out from your second grade teacher – and this seems to bring on more babies. With each grade, Anise has another baby until you are in the fourth grade and have three sisters. You know how each of these sisters is born. Anise and Peter explain their births to you in graphic detail. You know there is blood and something that looks like snot, something else that isn’t pain but, as Anise puts it, “a very very intense feeling” that makes her scream every time. They both want you to be in the room when Anise gives birth, but you refuse. Anise’s body scares you, the way it expands and shrinks, expands and shrinks. The bodies of the baby girls are no less frightening – crying, pooping and burping as they do, contorting themselves into red, wrinkled creatures. It hasn’t been just you guys in a long time, but by the time you’re old enough to figure out how much has changed, it’s too late.
As with Susan, Peter didn’t have time to build Anise a house. The first baby came too suddenly, followed in quick succession by two more. Instead, you all move out of the Goebels’ basement and into a split-level on a cul-de-sac. You come to understand that this is not the house that Peter and Anise wanted to move into. Whenever they tell other adults about the house, they add, “Not quite our style but it does have cedar panelling and the cul-de-sac is out on the east side of town, backs right on to forest. We’ll make it our own, won’t we, hon?”
Other adults are oddly sympathetic, adding their own understanding nods and words of encouragement. “Yup, yup, I hear ya. We’d all like to get a bit farther out, I suppose, but, hey, good solid build, lots of room. There’s so much you can do with the place. And the forest being so close, big yard. Anise can plant a garden. You really are lucky.” You have no idea why all these people are playing along, acting as though consolation is necessary. You think of the places you lived in Canada – the vans, the shack – it was your mother who complained about these places, your father who reassured her. You remember Peter speaking with pride about living so close, literally, to the land. He tutored you on the benefits of an uncluttered life on the drive south. “The less stuff you have the better, you know what I mean? The less to tie you down, keep you thinking you always need more. Look at how we’re living, hey? Like kings! We have everything we need and we can explore this whole continent if we want. Kings, that’s what we are, hey, us two guys?” Peter’s eyes would then slowly pan the landscape through the windshield. When he looked back at you, it was with an expression of curiosity, mild delight – as though he had just discovered something unexpected and beautiful in the passenger seat.
It’s been four years since you were on the road but Peter manages to bring it up every time you go out with him. You do things like pick up wood, nails, and files at the hardware store, drop things off – you’re never sure what exactly – at other people’s houses, go to McDonald’s to eat food that you know Anise would disapprove of. Peter jokes and says, “Here we are, us two guys on the road again,” even though you are just driving around town.
When your youngest half-sister is one and you are eleven, Peter and Anise get married in the back yard. Anise is barefoot and wearing a large hat. Peter is wearing sandals and jeans with an untucked white shirt that reminds you of a pyjama top. The little angels are all in tiny flowing replicas of Anise’s dress. You are allowed to choose your own clothes for the day. Anise tells you, “This is a very, very special day for your father and me and I know it’s a special day for you too. I’m going to let you decide what to wear. I trust that you’ll know what’s right.” For the special day, you choose your favourite clothes – your old, comfy cords and your cowboy shirt, the one with silver snaps instead of buttons. You are allowed to wear the shirt but Peter sends you back to your room after Anise whispers something in his ear. “Perhaps you’d like to choose a newer pair of pants?” he cues you.
Later, when you look at the photographs of that day, you like the effect. Peter, Anise, and the girls do, in fact, look angelic. All that flowing white fabric, daisies stuck into hair and button holes. You, in plaid and brand new dark denim, eyes squinting against the sun and the camera, look like you have been superimposed from another place – a rougher, dustier place than that back lawn on that day.
The next morning, the snow had stopped falling and by the afternoon all that was left was a skiff marked with footprints, tire tracks, and reemerging vegetation in the places where the earth was inexplicably warm. I went over to Krista’s for dinner, craving the kind of food I couldn’t get at home. The Delaneys lived in a house that appeared to be built from a kit on a street lined with identical split-levels. Carports, swing sets, TV rooms, wall-to-wall carpeting. The kind of place where you could pretend you were average. Dinner was a fend-for-yourself affair. The freezer was stocked with TV dinners for Mr. Delaney who supplemented these with meat that he barbecued on a grill set immediately outside the patio door until it was much too cold for him to do so. We were in the season when he was still persisting, the barbecue on one side of the open sliding glass door, Mr. Delaney standing on the other in sweatpants, slippers, a jacket, and a hunting cap. There was a deep freeze downstairs with the limbs of several animals cross-
hatched inside. Leg of deer, rack of sheep, salvaged part of moose found on side of road. Mrs. Delaney ate saltines, Caesar salad from a bag with a packet of dressing, yogurt, veggies and dip, Ultra Slim-Fast, and strawberry ice cream. Not a lot and never two of these things at the same time. Krista ate what she could find – boiled hot dogs stuffed into starch white buns, ketchup and mustard congealed into a brown mass, microwaved pizza, boxes of frozen burritos warmed up one by one.
Mrs. Delaney came into the kitchen in tasselled boots, black jeans, and a black sweater with a large cat appliquéd on the front in metallic brass and silver stripes. She looked around her as though she was confused, then her eyes lit up when they landed on me. “Harper, heard you’ve been let out of house arrest. What was it you did?”
“I told you, Mom, she passed out in church.”
Mrs. Delaney snorted out a laugh, dabbed at false tears. “Oh yeah. Atta girl, Harper. Don’t they love that kind of stuff? Aren’t you supposed to roll down the aisles there? You weren’t hungover, were ya? You, my dear, are supposed to be a good influence on my daughter. Lord, I mean, sorry, goodness knows I’m not going to be that influence, eh, Krista?”
“Mom, shut up, will you?”
“Do you even know what respect is, Krista?”
“Song by Aretha Franklin.”
“Christ,” Mrs. Delaney declared, then, “Ah shit, sorry, Harper, hon,” as she left the kitchen.
Krista and I made Kraft Dinner, substituting extra butter and two spoonfuls of Coffeemate for milk, and stirred in sliced dill pickles and ketchup. We snapped open Diet Cokes and ate in front of the TV in the room three steps down from the kitchen. When we had licked the dishes clean of ketchup and cheese product and rubbed water over the bowls with our fingers, we filled them back up with ice cream. I meant to tell Krista about what happened with Rob Hanshaw, but somehow I couldn’t find the right words. Instead I kept my eyes fixed on Jeopardy, tried to answer every question. “Where is Iceland,” I asked, Jeopardy-style, without inflection, then, “Who is Amelia Earhart.”
“Shut up, professor,” Krista said, flicked upwards till she reached MuchMusic, all sound and bytes of gyrating hip, guitar-flexed muscle. “Okay, Harp, you know what we need? We need a change of pace.”
“So, change the channel.”
“Not that kind of change of pace, smartass. A real change. You know what we’re going to do? We are going to go the Pilgrims Art Farm Solstice Fair.”
“You might be going, sister, but no Friend of Christ is going to let me go to anything with the word solstice in it.”
“Why not?”
“Do you know what the winter solstice is?”
“Darkest day of the year – don’t ask me why, Jeopardy girl, something to do with the sun and the earth’s rotation. If you get me a basketball, a ping-pong ball and a flashlight, I might be able to figure it out.”
“I’ll tell you. Jeopardy answer: solstice. Pastor John’s question: What is an excuse for an ancient pagan ritual performed by pre-Christian heathens locked in darkness without the guidance of Christ’s light.”
“Okay, so, we’ll say we’re going somewhere else.”
Mr. Delaney came in the door from the carport then, took one look at us and said, simply, “Trouble,” shaking his head in mock seriousness as he walked by. His role as a father had been to teach Krista how to tie a fly, hit a fastball, and play poker. He had given her a couple of spankings with the belt when she was a little girl, taught her to drive when she was sixteen, and now it seemed as though he thought his job had basically been completed. Mr. Delaney was like an amiable boarder in Krista and her mother’s house.
In the summer, he and other boys from the mill organized a series of backyard barbecues. It didn’t matter how old they were, if they worked at the mill, they were always the boys. The one thing Mr. Delaney insisted on was that Krista and her mother attend these barbecues. So, it seemed, did the other old boys: they brought wives and children ranging from toddlers to teenagers. These families were statements. Look how good we’re doing. We have good, solid work, families, barbecues in the backyard of what, everyone assured themselves after a couple of beers, could only be called paradise. God’s backyard, really. I came along as Krista’s moral support. The boys from the mill, true to their moniker, had not grown up. They slapped the backsides of their wives, the backs of their children’s heads – “Hey, I thought I told you to put that down. Didn’t I tell you to put that down? You better learn to listen, you understand?” – and leered at Krista and me while pulling in beer bellies, trying to convert them into abs, by then a distant memory. These men were who we would try to avoid, in no uncertain terms, until we left Sawmill Creek. When we did leave, we would simply forget them, remembering nothing but the taste of tough, barbecued meat in our mouths from those evenings. Nothing else.
I’d heard of Pilgrims Art Farm, we all had. It was fifteen kilometres from Sawmill Creek in one of the valleys that pooled between small peaks. Pilgrims Art Farm was in one of the narrow valleys that radiated out from Sawmill Creek, the mountains rising more sharply from the valley floor there. The farm informed our own perception of Sawmill Creek but most people tried not to acknowledge it. People from other places seemed more interested in what was going on out there than we did. People from the city, crews from small TV stations, artists who appeared in town with dark-rimmed glasses and black clothing, all of them looking around like they were on the set of a small town, like it couldn’t possibly be real. At the time, when I thought of Pilgrims Art Farm, I thought of women with hair knotted into crowns, the smell of blood and dirt, thin listless men with erections, children like feral wolves, dried herbs, thick dark oil.
We had convinced ourselves that everything would change after the night of the solstice – there would be a fraction more sunlight each day until June, the Sawmill Creek Loggers would win more hockey games, and we would go to Pilgrims Art Farm, discover something there, we were sure.
On that night, Krista and I had to work the Junior B hockey game at the arena. We had managed to get jobs there for the busy season leading up to Christmas. Sometimes we were there for the games, sometimes just for public skate times. That a hockey game corresponded with the Solstice Fair worked out perfectly. We wouldn’t have to invent an alibi. There were two concessions inside the arena – one large counter from which you could buy hot things – dogs spun sweating in a case, burgers, nachos hidden under bright, gluelike sauce – and one small booth on the other side of the arena where you could buy pop, chips, candy. That was our domain. Krista and I were situated in a triangular booth that was propped in an upper corner of the arena, with a window looking out on to the rink, separated by Plexiglas. We doled out strips of licorice, face-pulling sour candies, and watered-down Orange Crush with equal indifference and then went back to sitting on the counter by the window, the game a backdrop for whatever personal dramas we wished we had. We were metres away from the similarly enclosed glass box that housed the arena organist, a young Pentecostal guy who drove in from Yankee Flats. He had confessed his love for me in a lengthy letter months before but never spoke to me at the arena. I might have thought the letter was a prank but he had included a tape of himself playing his favourite organ songs and I didn’t think just anyone could pull that off. He was acne-ridden and awkward and Krista and I mocked him in a way that would make me feel sad whenever I thought about him.
On that night, we were unable to sit still. We fidgeted with the radio dial, trying to find a frequency without static. The only station that came through in the arena was playing a commentary of the game, and we didn’t want to listen to that. When people came by, we took their money quickly, shook the coins until they slid across each other on our palms, and repeatedly seemed to miscount change. The sports writer for the local paper, an attractive middle-aged man who was known to be a harmless pervert, came by and watched us bounce around behind the counter. “God, I wish women my age had your kind of energy,” he commented, one eyebrow
raised, both eyes on Krista’s breasts. “It’s intoxicating, you know that, eh, girls?”
Krista stopped bouncing and looked at him. “Don’t you have a game to cover?”
“I like a little spunk,” the sports writer muttered, then smirked. “I definitely do like a little spunk,” he said again as he walked off.
We pulled down the metal door that closed the concession counter before the end of the third period and left early. No one was interested in sugar at the end of games, they were already thinking of beer and salty things to increase their thirst for more beer. Krista had her dad’s truck for the night. We wiped the snow off the hood and windshield with our jacketed arms and sat in the parking lot with the truck running, waiting for the engine to warm and heat the air coming from the vents. Krista leaned across me and opened the glove compartment, took out a pouch of Drum tobacco. “Where’d you get that?” I asked, sitting on my hands to warm them. She just winked and started to roll. I ripped tiny rectangles out of an empty pack of Mr. Delaney’s smokes and handed them to Krista for filters. Not a bad roll job, bulbous in places, baggy in others, but not bad. The cherry cracked against the paper and we licked our lips for the sweet taste of fresh tobacco.
When we had finished the smoke, Krista told me. “I added a bit of weed to those.”
“What?”
“Not much, just enough to loosen us up a bit.”
“Uh, yeah, okay. Thanks for telling me.”
“Relax, Harp, obviously it didn’t work.”
The railway tracks flanked the arena. If we drove around the building and up a block, we could come back down a street that met the tracks then dropped off immediately. A relatively small hill but one that could launch a vehicle, for a brief exhilarating moment, into the air. We circled the block and Krista accelerated despite the slip of snow beneath the tires, one last pump on the gas as we hit the tracks. The tires struck the line and then, nothing. Nothing but air under the truck; nothing under us as we left our seat for a brief moment. All in slow motion, Dukes of Hazzard style. Landing, the bench seat sprang up under us and, buoyant with excitement, Krista rounded the corner, fishtailing, and did the whole thing again – acceleration, jagged track, air, the spring of seats – faster. We did this three times, the third gaining so much momentum that we each hit our heads on the ceiling. The truck threatened to spin out completely when Krista lost the wheel but she somehow regained control as I doubled over with laughter. From somewhere, we heard sirens. They sounded like they were approaching so we left quickly and drove out to Pilgrims Art Farm, the feeling of air still underneath us.
The Sudden Weight of Snow Page 7
