The Sudden Weight of Snow

by Laisha Rosnau

  When Anise goes through a kick that she calls Early American Folk, she has a garage sale. You are forced to work, apathetic and scowling behind the table. She sells all the wall hangings, rugs, incense-burners, and wind chimes. After this she hangs patchwork quilts on the walls and there are carved wooden Holsteins and flowers everywhere. The girls all wear floral-print dresses, no socks, no shoes. Anise isn’t so concerned with what you wear. You hear her and Peter fighting at night. Your family has no money, certainly not enough money to go redecorating the place, you hear through the walls. You also hear that Peter better go and get a real job and Anise is doing work enough for three people taking care of all these kids.

  Peter does get a real job, at the hardware store where he already spends so much time. He takes you there to meet his supervisor, Dave, “a great guy, a truly great guy,” he tells you. “Dave here is even willing to let me put up a little ad here and there for handyman work. I’ve been teaching Gabe here a bit about carpentry, myself,” he tells Dave. Peter has never taught you a thing about carpentry, although a couple times, when you know he has smoked up because of the way he smells, he has called you into the shop and had you run your palms against the grains of wood, how smooth they can be, how strong.

  The rec room is cleared out and transformed into a classroom. You remain at the desk in what was once the dining room and hear chaos reign below, Anise trying not to yell. By the early afternoons, you are able to finish your preplanned daily curriculum. You ask Anise if you can go out when she is in the middle of supervising body painting and colour recognition with the three girls. She always says yes.

  Peter loses his job at the hardware store. You can’t trust the establishment, he tells you, even if it is only a lousy hardware chain. That Dave asshole, you’d think he would understand a couple late starts, especially after all the business Peter has brought into the store, you’d think he’d have a little sympathy for a family man, the jerk. Anise cries for two days, then goes to a women’s retreat, leaves you and Peter with the girls. Peter thinks you might all drive up to Wyoming, visit the old grandparents, but when you remind him that the youngest still needs diapers at night and the oldest gets violently carsick, he changes his mind. Instead, the five of you spend three days eating fast food, going to the mall, the minigolf course, and the waterslide. The smallest girls are too young for the minigolf and the waterslide so Peter leaves the two of them in your charge and takes the oldest. “Don’t worry – girls can’t resist a guy with kids,” he tells you, winks. No girls approach you as your sisters cry and whine despite the colouring books, stuffed animals, and candy that you are equipped with.

  Each day ends with all three sisters wailing at the top of their lungs until they exhaust themselves and fall asleep. When this happens, Peter invites you onto the deck and you have your first full beer, your first drag of marijuana. “I’m glad about the way things have worked out, Gabe,” he says one night, referring to what, you don’t know. Peter pauses, looks out to the trees leading out from the yard, continues, “I love all of you guys – Anise, the girls – think we have a good thing going here. But I’m glad you’ve been with me from the start, Gabe, I really am.”

  You have no idea how to reply to that, so you don’t. Peter, you sense, is making a touching statement of some kind, but you are tempted to ask, “The start of what?” Your father has obviously been with you since the start of your own life but he didn’t start when you arrived. You have no idea of his own beginnings, though his parents in Jackson Hole give you some inkling. You think about your sisters. They are contradictions to you – both part of your family and part of an entirely different family at once. Peter is the only link between the two, and he seems like a weak one at that. Your feelings for them are equally contradictory. Sometimes you feel as though you would do anything to protect them. Other times, you want to throw them, one by one, in front of traffic. And Anise. Anise is your father’s wife. With not a speck of blood between you, you sometimes feel as though there is no connection there, only a shared housing situation.

  When Anise returns, the girls surround her, competing to tell her what fun they’ve had with Daddy and Gabe. “And then, and then, and then,” they each begin, sucking in breaths so quickly you wonder if they will hyperventilate. That night, you hear a headboard banging and Anise sounding like she’s going into labour yet again. Although it has always disgusted you to hear them doing that, Peter gave you a tiny, little joint that night, a “pinner” he called it, to enjoy on your own as a treat for getting through the three days. You smoked it by yourself out the window of your bedroom and now when you hear them and know what they are doing, you are filled with sticky, sweet heat. You jack off to the rhythm of their bed. When they are finished and the house goes silent, you do it again, rougher this time, hoping, for reasons you can’t quite comprehend, that you will hurt yourself.

  Anise suggests gently, and with your consent, of course, that you move your study out of the dining room. Since you rarely do anything in your own room any more except masturbate and sleep, and this takes up little space, you move your desk and shelves in there. The dining room is emptied out and Anise arranges large cushions around the perimeter. She suggests the whole family meditate together and you and Peter agree this is a good idea. You never do and soon the girls have spilled juice, crumbs, and paints in the meditation space and things get stacked there, shoes, toys, Anise’s books. Peter is exploring a new business venture and is rarely around. One afternoon when you come home, Anise is setting up a brand new TV in the corner of the living room. She tells Peter it is for educational programming. That night, they fight about money and you stay awake, hoping they will make up and the bed will begin banging again.

  I arrived home half an hour before the service began, Gabe in tow. He insisted on walking me to the door; it was Christmas Eve, and he must have assumed that, if I had a family that was going to church, I had a family that expected boys to walk girls to doors.

  I stepped into the front hall as my mother went into the bathroom, a flurry of beige nylons and slip. Gabe followed me in. I looked into the living room, where a Christmas album by Ian and Sylvia Tyson played on our ancient turntable. The tree was propped up between the end of the couch and the wall, a mess of needles dusting everything. There were boxes of ornaments piled on the floor and someone had plugged the tree lights in, left them draped across the couch.

  Gabe stood beside me in the hall, each of us holding a different-sized tree stand, neither of us sure what to do next. I called to Vera in the bathroom. When the door started to open, I quickly said, “Uh, Mom, I have a friend here.”

  The bathroom door closed again. Vera cleared her throat and asked, “Can you get my dress off the bed, honey?” in a controlled voice that was clear, if not loud.

  I handed a tree stand to Gabe and went into my mother’s room. The dress was laid neatly over the bedspread, which was smoothed just as immaculately over the bed. It was a red-and-white bedspread, quilted in the pattern of a large six-pointed star. Cresting the top and meeting the headrest was a row of decorative pillows covered in Victorian lace. The bed had been in the same place in the room since we had moved in, the pillows set there just so, every morning. Returning with the dress, I knocked on the bathroom door and handed it to my mother. My arm was barely withdrawn before the door closed again. Vera was dressed and out of the bathroom within a minute, smoothing her hair and smiling toward Gabe, her grin tight, as though she already knew everything she needed to about him.

  After I introduced them, Vera glanced at me, her gaze swift and sharp, then asked, in a tone of forced politeness, if Gabe wanted to go to the service with us. Before I could say anything, he accepted, as though he had been asked to come along to the fair, or a ball game, or something equally festive and wholesome.

  The record ended. Vera asked, “Why aren’t you dressed yet?” then said, “Never mind,” and turned to the table by the door. She picked up her camera and turned it over in her hands. �
��I guess you have a ride. Nick and I will meet you there – Nick!” she called before she looked at Gabe and smiled quickly, asking, “You’ll get her there on time?”

  I heard Gabe assuring Vera that he would as I collided with Nick on my way up the stairs. I got dressed, hands shaking and heart beating so fast I could feel it filling my chest and throat, while Gabe waited downstairs alone. In the last moment before leaving my house, Gabe said, “The lights.”

  “What?”

  “The tree lights. Shouldn’t we unplug those?”

  “Oh, yeah.” I went into the living room and got down on my hands and knees and crawled behind the couch, struggled for the outlet. When I backed out and stood up, he was beside me, the dim glow reflected off the snow outside the only illumination in the room. Gabe’s skin looked fine and thin in the blue light. We stood like that, breathing close to each other’s faces, until I said, “We should go now.” We walked out to the truck. I gave Gabe directions and put my hands under my thighs, crossing my fingers, as if holding my nervousness and excitement there, tight and small.

  When we filed into the church, Friends greeted each other saying, “Christ has come!” as though the birth had just taken place, the hay in the manger still stained with the afterbirth. To which others replied, “He has come to deliver you and me!” I grinned and bore it all, teeth clenched, Gabe beside me. Some Friends held their hands out to him saying, “Welcome, welcome in the name of Jesus,” and pumped vigorously. The rest of the congregation tried not to stare at us – or, rather, at Gabe – but they did, out of the sides of hugs, between bending to unlayer children from coats and scarves and standing again. Gabe stood out not only because he was a stranger but because he was wearing jeans, boots, and large wool sweater while the rest of us were decked out in finery.

  Gabe and I sat at the back of the church, behind and across the aisle from my family. During the service, I watched my mother take deep breaths when she prepared to sing, her back expanding beneath her dress with each inhalation. I watched Nick lean over and drum his fingers on the back of the chair in front of him until Vera swatted his hands away, gave him a look. I felt Gabe’s body beside me, wondered why he gave off so much heat, if I did the same. We sat and rose, rose and sat, and I sang along to every song, although not loudly, clasped my hands together for every prayer. I focused on the flicker of candles against the banners that hung alongside the looming cross until the colours bled together. I tried not to listen to Gabe breathe but counted each of my own exhalations like a rosary.

  At the end of that afternoon at the church, Gabe invited me to the farm for New Year’s Eve.

  Anticipation infused my thoughts, turned them into something physical, an internal upheaval whenever I thought about when I would next see him. Before that could happen, I knew I had to get through the Week of the Word. For five long days the men from the congregation met to discuss doctrine, politics, and the finances of the Free Church, the women gathered together in prayer groups and healing circles to pray the cysts, lumps, and viruses out of each other, and the children went to Bible school. Then there was us, the teens who fell into a category of our own.

  Krista, Nick, and I, two boys named Danny and Scott, and Pastor John’s son, Matthew, sat every day on fold-out chairs in the foyer. Matthew was home from Bible college on the coast, wearing thick-soled black shoes and baggy jeans, walking in a way that could only be called strutting. It was Matthew who had gotten Krista and me drunk for the first time on communion wine stolen from the church basement. He had led us with the bottles into one of the fields around the church and by the time Krista and I were drunk, wondering how we would get home and what we would do once we got there, Matthew had disappeared.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked him on our first afternoon.

  “Don’t you remember me, Sylvia? I’m the eldest son of our spiritual leader.”

  “Yes, and as such, shouldn’t you be with the other men discussing sacred policy?”

  “Don’t you wish. Instead, I have been assigned the illustrious task by my father, your pastor, to lead us all in prayer and a close study of the scriptures.”

  “Oh, we’re blessed, I’m sure,” said Krista.

  I bit my nails down to the skin and said, “All right, Pastor Matthew, lead away.”

  The week dragged on and on. The room was cold, the stacking chairs were thin and narrow, and my back and legs would inevitably ache with immobility, boredom. Though Matthew had done nothing to earn it, Nick seemed struck by awe for him. I guessed that he was looking for a big-brother figure. It didn’t take a psychologist to figure that out. Vera had signed Nick up with Big Brothers when he started elementary school, but despite their rigorous screening process, it was a disappointment of colossal proportions. The first Big Brother got his girlfriend pregnant and skipped town. The girlfriend then visited us for months, Vera pouring her tea and encouraging her to find strength as she bloated larger and larger. The second, Ray, was older and had a distinct air of loneliness about him, something picked up easily by kids and, I’d suspect, dogs. He owned a sporting goods store in Sawmill and he was a clean, solid guy. Ray once made the mistake of coming by with the stain of beer on his breath. A couple of slurred sentences to Vera at the front door and Nick never saw him again. The last was the golden boy of the Pentecostal Church. He was the closest Nick would get to a good Christian example. Lean and blond, he was the closest I, at fourteen, had been to someone whose beauty looked like it could have radiated from a movie screen. On the first of July, he miscalculated the depth of water and jumped off a cliff into the lake, never came back up.

  I imagined that Nick was, in a way, trying to replace a string of disappointing male role models with Matthew. I didn’t guess what else he was to my little brother.

  On those nights after the endless days spent at the church, I couldn’t fall asleep easily. I listened to the central heating creak and sputter, the hum of the fridge, and trucks downshifting, their engine brakes making a long, sour sound out on the highway. On the fourth night, the smell of marijuana slipped through my window. I got up, went downstairs, and pulled my boots on, put a coat over my pyjamas, and was led by the smell. After that, it was simply a matter of following Nick’s footsteps in the snow until I found him.

  Nick, who had been gazing at the trees that separated our yard from the ravine, letting smoke seep slowly from his mouth, gasped when he saw me and tried to pull the smoke back in, dropping his arm and twisting it behind him. He started to cough. “Ssshhh,” I warned, pointing to the house. Nick nodded back, eyes panicked, and coughed with his arm over his mouth, shaking but making little sound. When he stopped, he looked at me in a way I could only describe as pleading. “You little shit,” I said, without smiling, and enjoyed watching him try to figure out what to say. “Okay, well, the least you can do is give me a drag.”

  The joint was out. Nick fumbled in his jacket for matches, his cold hands shaking, fingers gripping the tiny end. When it was lit, he handed it to me and I inhaled deeply, easily, wanting him to know that he wasn’t doing anything I hadn’t done before – and had done better. I handed it back. “This stuff is shake. Where’d you get it?” When I asked, I knew that Nick was more frightened of answering than of being caught with the drug in the first place. He could have shrugged his shoulders and told me it was from some headbanger at school. But he didn’t. Nick’s eyes literally darted from side to side.

  “Uh, I can’t really say.”

  “Okay, fine.” I left it like that and simply enjoyed a moment with my brother, thought about how lovely it all was – the smell of spruce and pine, the dark circle of dirt visible in the tree wells, sharing a joint with my baby brother for the first time. Then it came to me.

  “You got that smoke from Matthew, didn’t you?”

  Nick shot up from the wall, stood post-straight, didn’t answer.

  “Didn’t you, you little shit?” I said without malice. This was going to be fun. “I can’t believe he brough
t you such crappy shake from the coast. They’re supposed to have amazing weed out there. I guess not at Bible college, though, huh?”

  Throughout the next afternoon, I stared at Matthew in a way I hoped conveyed I knew something. I smirked. I saw Nick squirm uncomfortably in his chair. Finally, Matthew looked straight at me, asked, “Would you like to lead us in prayer, Sylvia?”

  “Of course I would. Thanks, Matthew.” I folded my hands together and kept my eyes on him. “Our Blessed Heavenly Saviour, we thank you for guiding us through this week, for keeping our hearts and our minds clear in Christ. We just ask that you help us to keep our minds unclouded in the coming weeks and months, that you help us to see through the smokescreens of our daily lives. We ask that you help us to resist the temptation to distract ourselves from a clean and clear way of living. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”

  When I was finished, Nick kept his head down, I kept my eyes on Matthew. When he raised his head, his expression was full of something that looked like hatred.

  He had a suggestion. “Okay, I think we should pair up and discuss outreach and witnessing, how we can bring our love of Christ to other teens in our community,” Matthew said. “Let’s mix things up a bit. Danny, you go with Nick. Scott with Krista. Sylvia, shall we partner up?” I smiled. I didn’t like the candied authority in his voice. He led me into the sanctuary where the men were sitting on fold-out chairs in a circle near the front. They turned around when we came in, then away when Matthew raised his hand and nodded. We pulled two chairs into a corner.