“Well, then,” Thomas said and, smiling, exchanged my cup for his. “I like your haircut.”
I instinctively reached my hand to my scalp and tried not to smile. I took the coffee into my mouth and willed my face blank as it scalded my tongue and seemed to coat the inside of my mouth with a bitter film.
“So, where’ve you come to us from?” He asked.
“Just my mom’s place in Sawmill.”
Thomas took a sip of his coffee and shook his head. “Whoa, that’s some sweet brew. Okay, so, you’ve left your mom’s place. You going to stay here then?”
“I can’t say I know. I mean not for good, but maybe for a while.”
“No, no one really stays here for good.”
“Don’t you?”
“Me? Yeah, well, it must look that way, but no. I’ve been back and forth for the last – man, what is it – twenty years? But I don’t stay. Got a few other places I go to. A person couldn’t always stay here, it’d drive you mad.”
“Why’s that? Seems pretty relaxed here to me.”
“Oh yeah, it is for the most part, but, you know, every group has its own politics. You’ll probably see that eventually.” I was beginning to enjoy the taste of the coffee. It made me feel sharp, bold. Before I could think of anything else to say, Thomas continued, “It’s just close quarters for a lot of people. A lot of decidedly eccentric people. I don’t mean to scare you or anything. It’s not that. The farm’s a great place. The people here, great. It’s just well, yeah, close quarters.”
After not going to classes the entire first week after the holidays, I decided to return. I called and woke Krista up that morning to make sure she would meet me in front of the school. I had left home, missed a week of school, lost a head of hair. I felt that I needed to know she would be there. Gabe drove me to SCSS. I had rarely been dropped off at school before. It was something that rich girls had done for them, or girls with tight jeans, too much makeup, and older boyfriends in Camaros and Firebirds. I had always noticed those girls, the ones who were dropped off by men, just as I knew I would be noticed.
Krista was waiting outside the front doors, hands tucked under her armpits, blowing her breath into the air in disappearing currents of steam. She looked at my hair, smiled, shook her head and didn’t comment. I smiled back and she hugged me in a kind of urgent, jerky movement, then released me and rubbed my short hair. “Shit, I’ve missed you.”
“Yeah, me too,” I said and opened the door.
“Oh, I bet. No time to even come to school any more.” Krista shouldered people through the hall, giving them sharp looks when they stared at me.
“No. No, it isn’t that, Kris. I was really sick last week. Still am a bit. I haven’t even got my appetite back.”
We were walking towards Krista’s locker. “Word’s got around,” she said. “About you running away. Some girls are actually jealous.”
“Jealous? Of what?”
Krista opened her locker and began pulling out books. “I don’t know. I guess because you’re not living in town.”
“Yeah, I’m living out of town where there’s even less to do. Speaking of which, you should come out this weekend.”
The bell rang. Krista waited for it to stop, closed her locker, then said, “I don’t know. There’s a party Friday and then I might be doing something with Mike on Saturday.”
“Mike Mike?” I asked. When she didn’t respond, I said, “I guess he’s not ignoring you then.”
“No, I guess not. Listen, I’ve got to get to class. Talk to you later?”
In the hall, I avoided eyes and faces. In class, I wasn’t called on. It was left up to me to ask each teacher individually what I had missed that week and how I could catch up. Each responded with the same lack of interest, feigned or genuine, I didn’t know, as they listed chapters and assignments, rearranging pens and paper on their desks or packing their own bags to leave as they did. I nodded, wrote it all down.
Vera and Jim are married in a chapel in Las Vegas, something she will regret for years afterward. By the time they get to Vegas, Vera is hot and tired and longs for something – stability, sex, something – and she hopes marriage might be that unknown. She spends a day touring the wedding chapels in Vegas while Jim gambles – “Going to win us our honeymoon, baby,” he says in a tone she knows is meant to be ironic. She is looking, Vera realizes partway through the tour, for a chapel that resembles her Ukrainian Catholic Church in Northern Alberta. She finds several small, ornate, white churches but none with the distinctive onion-shaped dome, the ornately painted ceilings. She chooses instead a chapel that looks like the kind that children draw – double doors, pointed roof, a straight, simple steeple. Jim doesn’t understand why she wants to get married in a church at all. If he had his choice, he’d marry Vera either in the desert at sunrise, perhaps with a Native American shaman officiating, or in a heart-shaped hotel bed, simply for the campiness of it. He loves Vera though, and loves the Catholic, flower-picking farm girl in her, so he agrees to marry her in the Chapel of Eternal Love. He doesn’t pressure her on their wedding night, their first night as man and wife. They have gone this long and he knows it won’t last forever. When she cries and admits her fear, he placates her, smooths her hair to her head until she falls asleep. When she does, he slips out of the room and back down to the casino. Jim Harper hasn’t won anything yet, but neither has he lost.
In San Francisco, they park the camper by Fisherman’s Wharf and walk each day through North Beach to Chinatown and back, each hoping someone will stop them, invite them to the place where everything is happening, neither of them saying this to each other. On the second day, they stop at City Lights bookstore, Jim excited about touching the pages of limited editions. The clerk appreciates his enthusiasm and tells them about a poetry reading in another part of town, near the park. The evening is the culmination of everything Jim hoped to find in San Francisco. They listen to poetry in a basement café that offers three drink selections: coffee, whisky, red wine. Women come up to Vera and welcome her, grasp hands and gaze into her eyes. When they ask where she’s from and she answers, they respond, “Canada? That’s cool. So, you know, unspoiled and clean.” The men talk about poetry, the Romantics, the rise of the Beats, the birth of the movement, the meaninglessness of existence. Jim is intoxicated by it all.
That night, he tells Vera again how much he loves her, how happy he is that they found each other and this whole scene, people who understand, who believe. They smoke a joint together in the camper, heads ducked as they try to sit upright on the bed. Jim has already had several joints, but it is Vera’s first. He shows her how to inhale. She spits out the smoke and coughs and he tells her it’s all right. Eventually, they are both laughing and soon after that, it seems, Jim is pushing himself inside her. He calls her “My sweet, sweet farm girl,” and planes the hair around her face with his palms as he moves. The camper rocks with them. Vera clenches her teeth and feels waves – waves off the Pacific, the wave of motion in the van, the wave that hits her body full force. She feels a hot slice of pain, then Jim makes a noise, rolls off her. Vera fights sleep. She wants to stay awake for this first real moment of man and wife even though Jim is already snoring beside her. She prays to remain fully conscious but wakes up the next morning, her neck cramped, the light through a narrow window hot on her eyelids.
Jim Harper is well-liked, a shining star. Though he speaks softly and slowly, people gather and listen. In the course of that month in San Francisco more and more of his anecdotes have to do with Fly Hills, Alberta. He talks about the town as though it were a close-knit community, simple and uncorrupted, even though both he and Vera know they couldn’t wait to get away, that they are travelling so they can find a place better than the one they left behind. Jim often uses Vera as an example. It is he who tells people how she grew up without water or electricity, he who talks about how she could homestead if she chose – she can grow a garden, milk a cow, kill a chicken, skin a pig, and preserve e
nough food to last a Canadian winter. He exaggerates and it embarrasses Vera, but she does feel a strange thrill when other women look at her with envy, the men with admiration, as Jim tells his stories. He throws a hand around her shoulder, looks at her with the expression that now tells her, without him saying as much, “You’re different, pure. That’s why I love you.”
Vera does begin to feel she is different, but not in the way Jim thinks. She feels different because she doesn’t understand what is so great about San Francisco. It seems to her that very little is going on. She is becoming bored with sitting on the sagging couches in so many different pads, listening to music and squinting through smoke. She is becoming bored with hearing Jim’s stories again and again, even with the poetry readings and jam sessions that he assures her will make history. “We can say we were here, babe. That we saw it all begin.” She is getting tired of the long-haired, glassy-eyed women who hug her, hold her hands in theirs and stare into her eyes, tell her she is beautiful. The same women stare at Jim, laugh at his stories or nod and say, “You are so right, man.”
Vera starts excusing herself early. The pot makes her tired and she wants some time alone. They are constantly with groups of people and Vera starts to cherish the few moments that she is in the camper by herself. One night, when she stumbles back into the house to use the bathroom, she passes a partially open door and has to back up to make sure she is seeing right. She is. What she is seeing is Jim Harper sitting on a bed, legs apart. There are candles and incense lit and there is a woman kneeling on the floor in front of Jim, her head between his legs. Jim’s eyes are closed, his hand rhythmically stroking the woman’s hair. Vera continues to the bathroom, throws up in the sink, brushes her teeth with someone else’s toothbrush, then feels terrible for doing so. She rinses the sink and the toothbrush with hot water for several minutes then scours the bowl with Comet and decides to take the toothbrush with her. She’ll throw it out later.
When Jim comes back to the camper that night, he finds her clutching her abdomen, gasping for air between tears. She confronts him and he tells her it’s different, it’s not sex. He tells her that he would never want her to do that to him, that she’s too good for that. Vera cries and tells Jim that they are leaving San Francisco. She has never been more certain about anything in her life. They are leaving tomorrow together or she is leaving on her own.
They travel up the coast in record time. When Vera and Jim drive through the B.C. interior on their way east and north, they both feel better. The landscape is like a tonic, an elixir. Here are the small communities, roaring rivers, rolling hills, blue lakes, and valleys of fruit that Vera had expected to find in the south. They stop at fruit stands and roadside pullouts, sit on picnic tables, faces angled to the sun, and Jim tells Vera how much he loves her, how one day they will move to one of these valleys, a place as beautiful as she is.
At first I thought I would find a way of knowing Gabe. That was what was supposed to happen between two people who spent time together – a gradual stripping away of things on the surface. It had always happened with friends and I expected, though I had no personal experience on which to base this, that the same would apply to boyfriends. For a while, I tried to convince myself that we were getting to know each other on a level that I simply wasn’t aware of yet. But it seemed the longer I was at the farm, the tighter Gabe held himself.
He confused me. He would tell me about his life before coming to the farm, his thoughts and memories, but it was as though he were talking about someone else. It didn’t seem as if he cared how I reacted, or what I thought about anything he told me. “Men are like that,” Krista told me with authority on the phone one night. I was talking to her in the cookshack, ducking my chin and the receiver into my chest and talking quietly when other people walked by. “That’s what Therese says – I know, like we should be taking advice on men from my mother but – she says that they’ll pursue you like you’re the Holy frickin’ Grail when they think you’re unavailable, but once they’ve had a drink, well –”
“Oh, come on, your mother is offering dating advice from Arthurian times and you’re passing it off as wisdom?”
“My mother does not know the word Arthurian. That was my own saying – what’s that called, is that a metaphor or a simile? – thank you very much.”
“Simile.”
“Yeah. By the way, he called. I am going out with Mike on Saturday.”
“Oh, now look who’s talking about being unavailable.”
“I know, I’m asking for it, but what can I do?” With that, Krista made the yowling sound of a cat in heat and hung up.
What flustered me most about Gabe, though, was his desire. How it flared up and became something larger than his own body, a presence in the room. He seemed to pride himself on his control over it. I would hear the intake of breath, feel the rigidity of muscle when he pulled it back in. Then, he would be closed to me. At first I felt relief. If popular wisdom was to be trusted, moving into the shed with Gabe was laying myself open. The equivalent of spreading my legs and forfeiting all personal boundaries. That didn’t happen. I felt vindicated, as though I alone had known there was something good in the world, something gentle. Not everyone had ulterior motives. Then I began to worry. I wondered if it was me that made Gabe pull back, reel his desire in, just as mine was rising to the surface.
“So, I’ll pick you up around three-thirty?” Gabe would ask every morning when he drove me to SCSS, both of us struggling through the thick haze of morning, coffee in plastic 7-Eleven cups our beacons. “Yeah, thanks,” I’d answer. We each tried to pretend that his taking me to and from school wasn’t a given, that we were living from day to day, making plans to meet like friends would after school. Sometimes I drove the truck there, but he always took it with him, then came back to get me.
“What’re you going to do today?” I would usually ask. The answer was almost always vague. Work in the shop, draw up some diagrams, or, simply, “I don’t know.” His dad was a carpenter but had never taught him a thing, so Gabe was trying to learn on his own. There was a woodworker on the farm who’d offered to teach him how to make shelving, cabinets, even chairs, but Gabe wanted to make a guitar. Even I knew that was absurd. He had taken apart one of Thomas’s old guitars and was drafting diagrams, weighing and measuring things, holding thin wood up to bright light. I saw the pieces scattered across the workbench each night. Nothing seemed to change.
Sometimes I asked him questions, led him into speech. Once: “Tell me about making a guitar. How’s it going?”
He answered by telling me what it felt like to take it apart. “I don’t know how to describe it, Harp. Each piece on its own is so perfect, you know, each curve. I know this will sound stupid but I don’t know if I want to put it back together. It’s like I can never get it as perfect as it is now, in pieces. You know?” I nodded, not really knowing.
Another time Gabe told me about how he looked forward to the spring, when the ground thawed and he could start putting up fencing, like he had when he visited the farm in the past. How he loved the feeling of hard ground breaking open, of pounding the post in. “I like the routine of it, the certainty, you know?” He talked about the Clydesdales. They were used during the winter for tourists visiting the ski hill sled rides and brought in a little bit of extra income. In the spring and fall, Thomas and some of the other men were experimenting with horse-logging, using the Clydes to pull trees out of the forest one at a time. “We’ll get better at it,” Gabe told me, as though he had been working with the guys. “Steve’s read everything about it and Decker, he’s taken an eco-forestry course in Oregon. One day we’ll get the trees out the right way – not have to go in and cut them where they’re felled because we’ve gotten them stuck.” Gabe chuckled and I joined him.
Once back at the farm after school, I spent afternoons doing homework at the table in front of the window in the shed while he puttered in the workshop on the other side of the wall. Sometimes, I would do schoolwo
rk at Thomas’s loft, or I would avoid it, sit on the couch and read his magazines – Utne Reader, The Economist – and ask him questions about the articles. Gabe and I would piece together dinner – rice and beans, stir-fries – then smoke a joint and watch an old TV in the corner of the cookshack. The TV had to be at a certain angle to get any kind of picture, and even then lines of static would appear and pick up their high-speed descent on the screen. In the times that I wished we were talking, we were taking turns getting off the couch and slapping the side of the TV with an open palm, trying to rid it of static. Late at night, if we had struck the right balance between smoking and sobriety, the talk would come. This was when Gabe told me what he remembered about being on the farm as a kid, about growing up in California and his family there. They were other people, far away. They seemed separate from him, distanced both by geography and by the way he spoke about them. They were a series of stories he told to put himself in a context for me, other than the one I knew him in that winter at the farm.
On some nights, the cookshack filled up around the space in the corner of the main hall to which we had laid claim. Thomas and other musicians would jam or people would sit around the long table, drinking wine or impossible amounts of tea. Through their conversations, I discovered the things that were respected and revered. I learned about arts festivals up and down the coast, protests in various endangered areas, alternative theatre companies that performed in fields or on beaches, artists who lived and created in every conceivable small space – tree houses, boats, geodesic domes built into the ground. I learned that people made houses out of used tires, pop cans, and bales of hay. That there was an entire informal network across North America of people who inhabited the periphery. The things I had learned about the world so far – that church and family were the most important things, and after these a good education and a job – no longer seem to apply.
The Sudden Weight of Snow Page 17
