“Oh. I didn’t hear you come in. It must’ve been late.” Vera reached out and touched the back of her hand to my hot cheek. “Are you feeling all right?”
“Yeah. I was out walking.”
She looked like she wanted to ask me something else, but she got up and started to make dinner. I sat at the table and watched Vera. She was making something simple, a casserole, and she let me just sit and watch.
That night as I fell asleep, I thought about Gabe’s unusual expression, how he seemed so expectant and so reserved at the same time. I wanted to find out what was behind it. I felt unsettled, so I tried to recreate small things, those which can be easily forgotten after one meeting. I thought of the shape of his hands around a cup, his long, straight fingers, flat nail beds. Gabe’s lips above the rim as he took a drink. I tried to remember his smell but my mind was pulled back to his hands, the heat that had passed between his fingers and my body when he had touched my hair, the strands a conduit. I thought about my own hands as they traced bone and muscle under my sheets. They were becoming more adept at understanding the lines of my own body than they had been even a couple of years ago, though barely. There were still things that surprised me: a previously undiscovered mole, the occasional knot of something hard and sore beneath my skin, the hot slick of blood when I put my hands between my legs before knowing that time of the month had arrived, again.
Sometimes, just before falling asleep, I would feel a rocking motion, as though my body was remembering lying in the back of a moving vehicle. At one time, we had driven to Edmonton every year for Christmas. Vera would carry us out to the car in our pyjamas before we had a chance to wake up. By the time we did, we would be hours away from Sawmill Creek. When I woke, I would keep my eyes closed at first to feel the motion of the car in every part of me, my body moving with it. I thought it was the ultimate contradiction – moving yet staying still. Asleep yet on my way somewhere. If we drove straight through, Vera would be angry and close to tears by the time we arrived and would sleep through most of the next day. If we stopped on the way, it would be at an old high school friend of hers in Valemount where we would lie in sleeping bags on the floor, listening to the slow moan of snow as it slid off the roof, the muffled thud as it hit the ground.
That friend’s husband once told Nick and me about how their cat had gone missing the winter before. “Sure enough, found her under the eaves, next spring when the snow thawed. Flat as a pancake. Ha! Only good cat is a flat cat I keep telling her,” he motioned to Vera’s high school friend. “Ha!” The husband looked confused when Nick and I didn’t respond with laughter, shot us an expression that said something about kids these days, then cleared his throat, slurped his coffee and leaned back in his chair saying, “Hyup, yup, yup,” under his breath.
Winter in Edmonton was a different kind of season than what we had become used to. Sawmill Creek’s winter was a brief fairy tale of a season. The snow fell and kept falling until it peaked the mountains and smoothed out the valleys. It got cold enough to keep the snow on the ground but not enough to cause skin to tighten and burn when exposed to air. In Edmonton, the cold was so dry that the mucus froze in nostrils with each inhalation and air found drops of moisture on eyelashes and stuck them together. The snow was hard and planed by the wind. People navigated the shortest routes between car and house. They said, “Cold enough for ya?” and, “Here, this’ll warm clean through,” offering drinks, hot or alcoholic, as soon as guests walked in the door.
We used to spend Christmas in one of my aunts’ bungalows. These houses were almost interchangeable, with all the rooms on one floor, something called an in-law suite in the basement in which in-laws rarely lived. Olga and Olesa, Vera’s twin sisters, lived across the street from each other, their houses mirrors of each other. Everyone talked about how ideal this was, how convenient and delightful. Auntie Al lived a drive away and Baba was in the basement suite, insisting on having her own space down there, no matter how much more difficult the stairs became with each passing year.
Always, the guest room was transformed into the hushed centre of the Christmas celebration. No one actually spent a lot of time in that room but this is where all the coats were piled and, more important, where the dresser was transformed into a bar, complete with Christmas-themed swizzle sticks and a bucket of melting ice. A sideboard it might have been called by people with larger houses and more specific furniture. In any of the houses, it would be difficult for the kitchen and dining room to accommodate the forty relatives gathered and so people brought card tables and tablecloths, and lined them in a row in the centre of the living room. Every room became a dining room and people dodged legs, canes, fold-up chairs that would spring closed at the wrong time as they made their way into that guest room again and again. By the end of the night, I would have been grabbed by great-aunts who smelled of lilac powder and something like sour cabbage, great-uncles who would grind their whiskers into my cheek, and teenage cousins who wanted to tickle me to see if I’d pee like I had every other year from too much excitement, drinking too much pop and punch. Sometimes, the room that Nick and I were sleeping in was the same one that the bar was set up in and I’d push the coats aside, fall asleep under one of them, the sound of feet along the carpet, dropping ice, and splashing liquid the most peaceful I could imagine.
And then we stopped going back. Vera complained of the drive. Family members offered to pitch in for plane tickets for the three of us but Vera refused and her sisters called her proud, foolish. “They don’t understand, your aunts, they don’t understand that my life is here now.” I didn’t ask her to clarify. “And if I have to hear one more theory from them as to why my marriage didn’t work …” she added, trailing off.
After that, I talked to my grandmother, Baba, on the phone each Christmas Eve. I felt as though she had become a grandmother to someone else, a girl who saw her more often and could understand what she was saying. I knew from those awkward phone conversations that almost all of the little English she had once known was gone and I didn’t know any Ukrainian. Regardless, she spoke to me in her language. I knew that if I had been in the same room with her, I could’ve smiled and nodded, pointed and mimed, and at least something would have been conveyed.
In Sawmill Creek, the Free Church Christmas services were simple, pared down to the usual singing and witnessing the work of God in our own lives. Children came to the front and told the congregation about how Jesus had filled their lives that year, how grateful they were that He was given to us, born so He could die for our sins while the rest of the congregation would hum and sway, a kind of living soundtrack for their testimonies. After the service, Vera, Nick, and I would usually go to a Friend’s place for dinner but no one ever ate so much they felt ill, no one ever drank. No one got red in the face and sang Christmas carols too loud, out of key, or off beat. We always left before midnight and returned to our own house, quiet and cold, the small tree blinking meekly in the living room, where Vera would say, “Merry Christmas, kids, and God bless.” When the three of us went to bed, there wasn’t a sound left to lull me to sleep.
Two days before Christmas, Vera came in the back door, cheeks flushed and stomping snow off her boots, and told Nick and me that we were going to get a Christmas tree. She had waited too long to buy one and so we were all heading into the bush to cut one down, haul it home, sap still dripping. She had borrowed a chainsaw from a neighbour.
“You can’t be serious,” I said, but Vera gave me a look that said she was nothing if not that. It was easy to forget that she was once a farm girl, from a line of farm women that only ended with her own generation when she and her sisters married men who weren’t farmers.
We took the same road that Rob Hanshaw had driven into the bush, our sedan not as equipped for it. Despite the chains, when we hit potholes the car lurched to the side, jarred us against arm rests, seat belts jerking us back. The chains pulled us up to the first switchback where Vera stopped square in the middle of the road so w
e wouldn’t have to dig ourselves out. We got out of the car and Vera took a deep breath, looked around her. “Well, won’t this be good? Cutting down our own tree?”
“Somehow I doubt it,” I answered.
She didn’t respond to me, just made a straight line for the bush, arms swinging briskly. I realized that, farm girl or not, Vera hadn’t cut a tree down in at least twenty years. Nick shrugged and walked toward the forest.
I stood by the car for a moment, then walked to the edge of the clearing and fought my way through the brush and undergrowth. Fresh snow hid stones and roots and I swore under my breath as I tripped and steadied myself. When I heard Nick calling that he had found a tree, I returned to the clearing, brushing snow off myself. Vera started to lift the chainsaw out of the trunk, then winced and held the small of her back. She attributed her lower back pain to the years she had spent sitting behind the receptionist’s desk in Dr. Holland’s office. She turned to me and said, “Can you help me lift this out, please?”
“This was your brilliant idea,” I said. Vera just looked at me, still leaning into the trunk, one arm on her back, the other on the car. Nick bounced beside us, rangy and twitching with cold and anticipation.
Vera straightened up and said, “Aren’t you in a great mood today.”
“Yeah well, are we allowed to come up here and just chop trees down, anyways? I mean, aren’t there some kind of regulations against that?” I asked.
Vera dropped her head and sighed, then looked up at me with an expression of forced calm. “Sylvia, sometimes a forest is just a forest, a Christmas tree a Christmas tree. We aren’t taking more than we need. Now will you please help me with this.”
“Come on!” said Nick, then, “Can’t I do it?”
We turned and glared at him. “No,” both Vera and I answered at once, then looked at each other. I lifted the saw out, then held it against my thigh. I certainly didn’t know how to operate a chainsaw.
Vera took it from me and walked toward the tree. She pulled on the cord three times before it caught, the last time looking away, jaw tight, then back at the saw, fixing it with her stare. When it started, she squatted and spread her feet apart and aimed the blade at the bottom of the trunk. I stared. It was the closest I’d seen my mother to a compromising position, although what was compromised, I wasn’t sure. The chainsaw whirred, the tree fell in the right direction, toward the clearing, and we hauled it back to the car. The most difficult task was securing the tree to the top. Pushing and pulling, we got it on the roof and tied it there in a way in which we had to leave each of the windows open a crack to accommodate the rope that secured it. There was also yellow line stretched out in front of the windshield, tied to the front bumper, the same in the back.
We drove back into the valley with the tree like roadkill strapped to the roof of the car. On the way, Vera told us that she had thrown the tree stand out the year before, because it had nearly fallen apart bearing the light weight of the spindly tree we had then. This being Christmas Eve in Sawmill Creek, the hardware store was closed. We stopped at 7-Eleven, hoping, and I got out to ask.
“I wouldn’t think so, but do you have Christmas tree stands here?” I asked the clerk.
“What?”
“Christmas tree stands, you know, those things that keep a tree standing?”
And then there was a voice coming over my shoulder, a single word, “Hey.” Gabe was standing behind me in line, his arms cradling a carton each of milk, orange juice, eggnog. “Hey, if they don’t have any, I think we probably have an extra stand out at the farm,” he said.
“Miss, was there something you wanted to buy?” the clerk demanded.
“Um, I guess you don’t have Christmas tree stands?”
“No, we don’t.” The clerk looked over me to Gabe. “Sir?”
“Here, just let me get these and then you can come back to the farm and I’ll find you a stand. I can give you a ride back.”
“Um, okay, just a sec.”
The lack of a stand had become an issue. While I was in the store, Vera and Nick were in the car trying to figure out how we would rig the tree up in the living room. When I poked my head in the car window, Nick was explaining how he was convinced that we could suspend it from the ceiling with dental floss – he had read about how strong floss was if braided – and this worked in my favour. Vera let me go with Gabe, looking straight at me with an expression that said, “I know exactly what you’re up to,” even if I myself didn’t fully understand. It wasn’t that unusual for Vera to surprise me with the things she would allow me to do, as though she were sending me out into the world partially expecting me to be shocked by what I found. To finally understand why she held herself so close.
The snow was falling when Gabe and I started driving out of town, small flakes at first then fattening to the size of coins. The flakes were black in the fallout from lights, white against trees, everything smattered with them. Snow can accumulate in valleys without wind almost instantly and it was piling up that night. When we rounded a corner for the last and longest hill on the way to Pilgrims, Gabe accelerated to make it up, a skiff of snow on the frozen road making it slick and awkward. The truck fishtailed then jerked back and started to climb before the road slipped out from beneath the tires. Gabe tried to move it forward but instead the truck shot across to the other side and into a bank of snow.
“Shit,” Gabe said, looked over at me and shrugged. “I’m a California boy. You don’t know anything about getting trucks out of ditches, do you?”
“Sure,” I said. “What we need is a bit momentum and something for the tires to catch on.” We took the mats from under our feet, then I slid over to the driver’s side while Gabe got out and placed them behind the tires, then fought his way through the snowbank to the front of the truck. He pushed and I shifted the truck into reverse. We remained like this for a few moments, me with my feet holding the tension between clutch and pedal, the vehicle unmoving, Gabe in front of the truck, pushing. A miscalculation by either of us – not enough balance, not enough force – and the truck would lurch forward, bury Gabe in snow. When nothing happened, I rolled down the window and called to him, “Try jumping on the bumper.”
“What?”
“The bumper. Jump. That might give us more momentum.” He jumped and I played the pedals until the truck lurched and I felt the crunch of mats under tire.
Gabe hopped off and paused to see if it would slip back before he struggled out of the snow. Everything in me tensed – hands, feet, wrists, ankles – as I held it all in balance. I tried to slowly pull the truck back onto the road but even with the mats it lost traction, slumped back into the bank.
“Do you have chains?” I called out to Gabe. “We need more traction, maybe we can put the chains behind the tires.”
He came over to the cab, said, “Chains, hey?” cocked his eyebrow, then, “I think there’re some in here. Lean forward.” I doubled at the waist and rested on the steering wheel while Gabe opened the driver’s-side door and looked behind the seat. He found the chains and pulled them out. He stood outside the door with them in his hands and looked at me. I didn’t want to break his gaze by saying anything or moving. Suddenly, a bright light reflected off the rear-view mirror and headlights filled the cab.
A door slammed and a man appeared beside the truck. “You need some help?”
“Yeah, thanks, man.” The men dug themselves between vehicle and snowbank and began to rock the truck. This time, when the tires caught the chains, I knew not to let go. I accelerated and shot back onto the road. The guys placed chains on the road ahead of the front tires and I drove onto them, waited until they attached them.
Gabe waved to the man, then held my leg to heave himself into the truck. I tensed my quads and felt him use my muscles as a grip. I threw one leg over the gear shift and began to slide over to the other side. Gabe stopped me there with one of my legs on either side of the shift, his hand on my thigh, his body moving into the cab, filling the dri
ver’s side. When his face was close to mine and I thought he was going to kiss me, he said, “You might as well drive, you’re doing a great job,” and got out of the truck, then back in on the other side. He closed the door. I shifted into first and we started to climb.
GABE
You know you will never bring anyone home with you. You’re never sure what you’ll find when you get there. Peter and Anise have become suppliers of quality handmade toddler paraphernalia. Most days, they take their coffees out to the deck and share a thin, smooth joint; then Peter descends to workshop in the basement and Anise goes to work in the rec room, which has been transformed into a sewing and crafts centre. Peter builds cribs, high chairs, playpens, bunk beds. Anise sews blankets, diapers, corduroy overalls. Their productivity may be either helped or hampered by the marijuana they smoke, you’re not sure. The house is full of sticky smoke and cloying wafts of incense. There is sawdust trailing up and down the stairs. In the kitchen, there is a sink full of bottles, glasses, and dirty dishes and a counter covered in jars breeding sprouts, bowls of fermenting soy, and the drippings surrounding a yogurt maker. NPR is playing somewhere and one of the girls is always crying. The place is a mess, even you realize this. You pick your way to your room, put in the earplugs that you took from Peter’s workshop, and read Louis L’Amour and Terry Pratchett novels.
When you first move in, Peter and Anise are so concerned about the suburbanness of the split-level that they cover every wall with decorative hangings. Overlapping in each room are knobby scraps of macramé hanging from pieces of driftwood or fabric patterned with concentric circles of bright, dancing figures, assorted gods. The floors, though they are already covered in wall-to-wall beige carpeting, are laid with handwoven rugs from Amish villages in Washington State. Mexican blankets are draped over chairs and couches. Anise would like to display pottery everywhere as well, but there are three children under the age of five in the house, so that would present a problem. Over all the layers of international folk art are more layers of baby blankets and diapers.
The Sudden Weight of Snow Page 10
