by Patrick Lane
Nettie.
Mother’s mother.
Nettie couldn’t stop thinking of her husband hanging in the barn. It plagued her. Some are like that. It’s a sorrow she kept working on as if she hoped she’d got it wrong. The shallow caragana grave she was laid in back on the farm in Saskatchewan was uneasy. Her husband’s plot was in the suicide’s graveyard beyond Nokomis. Men like him, men who’d killed themselves. The silence in their lives stayed silent in that limbo. They slept it deep.
But what of Father?
He was at the farm for a year and then Nettie’s cancer. It started in her breast. Elmer had stopped coming to her bed months before. He was with her daughter then. It hadn’t been a sudden thing, it had crept up on Nettie. Watching them together was to get old. A kind of envy is what it was, a bitter wistfulness in seeing her daughter so young and with a grown man who’d shared her own bed, a man she’d thought was hers, such a fool she was. She’d see Lillian twirl a two-step to the kitchen window where she’d look out toward the barn. Her daughter couldn’t keep her feet still. He’d be walking from the corral or standing at the edge of the fields he figured were already his. She swore her daughter glowed she was so alive, like a young heifer or mare wild with summer and the heat. The girl couldn’t wait for him to come in from the fields, couldn’t be content unless he was there. And then the touching, the secret laughter. It pained Nettie to watch.
Lillian never once thought of her.
Nettie hated her daughter for that, but she understood. It’s what the young were, thoughtless. It didn’t occur to Lillian that her mother had a need. She thought her mother’s lust was past as if it never was, but it was never past, it just got denser, like alkali water, a heavier blue that sank. It was a different kind of longing to want that again, what her daughter had, what she couldn’t have, not any more.
Even in the beginning when she knew he’d been with Lillian out in the barn and she could smell her daughter on his hands and chest, his belly, he’d tell her she was imagining things, but she knew, and then the trying to hold him, competing for a man with her own child. He never understood what it was like after her husband hanged himself. How could he know what it felt like to have a man fall through her arms when she cut the rope? Her husband had been a clapper without a bell, turning slow in the air. How could Elmer know how she lay awake nights, seeing her man out there in the barn, hanging from the failure of his life?
Lillian was still a girl when her father died. Nettie called to her daughter to help. Nettie took one of his feet and made Lillian take the other, the shoes he’d shined, black in their hands. Then they dragged him across the barn floor, out the doors, around the wagon tongue, and past the loose bales of old straw to the yard and finally into the house. Nettie looked back across her husband’s body at the barn doors open, the dragged trail his head had left, and the ankle she held gripped crooked, braced on her hip as she leaned away from him, pulling backward, her rubber boots loose around her bare feet and slipping in the straw and dust.
Then they were at the kitchen table, the clothes he’d worn draped over two of the kitchen chairs, his pants smeared with dirt and manure from being hauled across the barnyard, his shirt and socks and underwear in the sink soaking in bleach. She’d folded the jacket after cutting off the brass buttons, the crease in the pants still sharp from when she’d ironed it into them the time two years before when he’d gone reluctantly with her to the Easter dance at the church hall in Nokomis.
She put Lillian to work. How else was it to get done, she said, the girl afraid of her father dead who she’d loved alive. Lillian, crying, brought basins of hot water from the stove to her mother, her hands shaking, her father’s body naked on the table, his head bent to the side. Nettie kept trying to straighten him, a thick welt like a bruised snake coiled around his neck. His one ear had been torn part off by the rope. She told Lillian he’d likely struggled as he tried to get out of what he’d done to himself. Then she cleaned him, telling Lillian to stop whimpering and pay attention because some day she’d have to do the same for her or for a husband, a son, a daughter. She knew his body frightened her. Lillian had only ever seen his chest and arms bare, his feet when he’d sat by the stove pulling on his socks in the morning. Now she was seeing her father’s sex, flaccid, a white thing grown out of the thatch of wiry black hair at his groin, the bag below a pale blue bulge, and him being washed between his buttocks where he was soiled. Her daughter had closed her eyes, not wanting to see what was being done.
What had it been like with her husband? It must have been good with him, sweeter maybe for the years. There were times she thought it was. There were times she could almost touch the part of him he’d hidden away. She tried, but each time she got close he slipped apart from her. A month after she buried him she went out to the barn to bring down some hay for the milk cow and smelled his tobacco, and him nowhere to be found. He never knew she was tired too. It was so like a man not to give a woman a thought.
Those years were bad, one after another. Winter to winter it was the old story of thin snow, wheat and oats barely come to a head before they wasted away. Little withered seeds. There were summers they couldn’t find the fence posts for the dust piled up, the winters with the wind alive in the walls. She loved him talking to her when they went to bed at night, their daughter a baby in the crib he’d made for her. And then the drought years when he stopped talking, the grain he grew left to rot under the snow. He couldn’t give it away. The day came when he sold the herd for nothing, the cattle bawling inside the truck. It was after that he crawled so far inside there was no finding him. She didn’t go out to the barn that night. She’d set his place and left it there till dawn, the food cold on the table. She went out then because the chickens had to be fed. Was that it? Was that why she went?
Oh, I don’t want to talk about it, she said to me.
But you do, you do, Nettie. You want to tell your granddaughter.
She said the cancer was in her breast. Her mother died the same back in Minot, North Dakota. She remembered washing her mother’s body. She dressed her mother in her one good dress, the green velvet one she’d been married in at the Baptist church in Fargo. She’d had to cut it up the back so it would fit around her mother’s swollen belly, pushing her mother’s thin arms through the puffed sleeves, and then tucking the halves of her dress under her so it looked like she was truly wearing it in the box her father had made for her from wind-worn wood he’d pried off the wall of an abandoned chicken house and nailed together any which way. She’d folded clean sheets into the coffin for her mother to lie upon, placing under her head the souvenir pillow from the summer rodeo they went to in Fargo on her honeymoon, bucking horses embroidered there on either side as if they were dancing in her combed-out curls, all the time her father asking why she’d wanted a coffin made, given it would rot anyway.
Elmer was afraid of her disease and so was Lillian. They stood around waiting for her to die. Nettie lay in the old spool bed brought over the Medicine Line. Her mother, Elvira, had told the story of how their wagon had threaded through the last of the Sioux at Wood Mountain, deserted tent circles like ringworm scars on the barren earth, a few squaws left begging food from farms, their children thin as winter rats. Elvira said she never forgot one woman’s face, the stillness in it a kind of peace, her baby dead in her arms. Her husband had told Elvira not to waste food by giving it to the dead. She’ll be gone too in a few more days, he’d said.
As Nettie laid herself finally down she saw her daughter in the bedroom doorway, half in and half out. She could see it in those young eyes, fear, and the desire to have her pass on. Maybe it was then her daughter knew that her mother was a woman. Strange how it took the cancer in her breast to teach the girl a simple thing like that. Elmer? He wanted it over. At first she thought it was the callousness in him, but then she realized he was just a man, impatient, as if with an animal gone sick, a threat to the herd and so a threat to them all.
They buried
Nettie beside a clump of Saskatoon bushes at the back of the house. There was no one to tell of her death. The nearest neighbours had packed up and left months before, searching for a place where water fell from the sky, where it gathered on the earth. The church was in town, but what would the church have done but talk? It cost three dollars for a grave in Nokomis. Elmer said some words he thought might quiet her, Yea, though I walk through the valley of Death, such words as that, a rare spring shower as if it was a help, the sun, the endless dust. Lillian seemed to cry. She looked like she was trying to find some grief, afraid yet relieved, somehow, at last to have her gone. Elmer was surprised Lillian had a tear in her at all. She thought only of herself. He believed she was spoiled, but spoiled by what or who? It wasn’t the land. It didn’t care enough to spoil a girl it was so busy killing things. It was like she was with the Bible. She read the words, but they didn’t touch her. She could speak the verses, but she couldn’t feel them.
I think there are those with something wrong in them, and no matter the trying to change them back to good, you always fail. She was like a jar of crabapples put up in the fall, the fruit so beautiful behind the glass, but something else inside, the lid not sealed right, some flaw in the ring, something, or nothing, and then the black smut growing behind the glass and you helpless to change it. You throw that fruit away, but what do you do with a daughter?
Lillian’s need was for a man all right, but a man who would take her away from the land and the life she saw her mother make, working from dark to dark until she died. But go where? Do what? She’d say she wanted to see the cities, but Elmer was uncomfortable in towns. He’d tried living in Calgary but he said there were too many people there. He’d lived outside Turner Valley, Alberta, in Dog Town where the bars and whorehouses were. The gas wells had come in and there was work to be had there. Dog Town was a place he despised, those tarpaper shacks and the men and women who lived in them a kind of damnation he never got over. He said the oil burning in the ravine on Hell’s Half Acre was enough to cure anyone of living near people. East of the ravine where they burned off the oil, it stayed green all winter from the heat, snow geese, swans, and Canada’s swimming in the snow melt, feeding on grass that grew in January. By spring the swans had changed colour, their white feathers black from the tarred grease that fell out of the sky. Most of the birds couldn’t fly for the oil on them, men coming from the bars and killing them with clubs, a few birds running out onto the snow above the coulee, their black bodies easy prey for coyotes. Father said towns and cities were useless places where people ate each other up. A town to him was a hunting ground, a place to wile away women, and to cheat and steal from men.
He was a desert man out on Ranch Road just as he was on the prairie. He’d wandered with Lillian in those early years after he sold the farm. He told me there’d been land down in the rattlesnake country of the Triangle where they’d found only remnant fences, land so dry a post lived longer than the wire it held up. The houses and barns were already disappearing, piles of boards lying in the dirt where the people had once tried to grow a crop. They left their homes behind as testament to all who passed that theirs was the land of Cain.
The one thing Lillian loved was dancing. The Town Hall in Nokomis wasn’t enough, seven steps and nine steps, minuets, and polkas. She wanted the new dances. Every two weeks she’d stared at the bedsheet nailed to the wall at the Hall in Nokomis, the projector clattering as she watched movies like The Gold Diggers and Love Me Tonight. She begged for Watrous, and Elmer finally took her there the year after Nettie died. It was just the once. They stayed two nights, Elmer doing the best he could on that horsehair floor, but it was the city boys from Saskatoon and Helena who could really dance and who took her away to the places she’d only read about in magazines, Chatelaine, Modern Screen, Canadian Home Journal. Slow waltz, quickstep, foxtrot, she did them all. She circled the floor with other men till Elmer hauled her off, telling her she danced too close to strangers. When was that? Nineteen-thirty-three, the Depression hard around them. Some time later he caught her out in the parking lot with a man from Great Falls. He chased the American slicker off and yelled at her by their Model A, said she was a cheap hussy, struck her in the face. She hit him back. They raged for an hour until Elmer threw her into the car, Mother howling at the indignity.
What was wrong in her was her need to be wild. It only took Watrous for her to tire of Elmer, but she was married to him then, the farm ready to be sold, and three months later they were on the road heading to a ranch near Manyberries, south of Medicine Hat, where Elmer had some deal in cattle that would eventually go bad. He lost at everything he put his hand to, cattle, grain, the land itself, his daughters, sons, and her. And always her frustration, his promises of a better life leading her deeper into the west until they ranged out of Pincher Creek into the foothills, threading their way through the Frank Slide into the Crow’s Nest Pass, the Rocky Mountains swallowing her, walls of trees like blinders taking away the light. She never forgave him that. Her dream was south to Minneapolis or further, California.
Every farm back then had a story not much different than hers, maybe a man not dead, just gone, a daughter or not, a son, accidents, runaways, a family loaded on a truck or wagon going farther west or north, away from the desert the drought had made, or back east on the train holding on to the nothing they brought out with them, a couple of silver serving spoons, a handful of quilting squares, two needles tucked into a cotton corner, things small and always less than what they came with, everything diminished, made worthless by the land. Dying seemed natural to a family, they took to it so well. Most of that earth should never have been broken. It was a place best left to grass and animals.
But there were times, after her husband died, Nettie would be kneading bread in the morning and she’d look up from her floured hands and see her daughter standing at the window looking out past the windbreak to the road. The girl had only been a woman for a year. Just fourteen.
She was waiting for him. All the wrong man had to do was come.
8
rafe’s cards lay on the kitchen table among the crumbs and crusts of the morning’s breakfast, the pack with thumbnail scars in the corners to mark the aces and faces. Patience was Eddy’s solitaire game, and though he had figured out the backs of the cards, he didn’t cheat. His game was simply picking up and laying down the cards, the beginning no different from the end, his only opponent himself. His sitting there was to wait for some interruption that would give him the action he needed, his freckled hands riffling the thinning deck as he slouched over the detritus of the breakfast they’d eaten so many hours ago, playing his lonely game for no one knew how long.
Tom had slept off and on through the day, Sally-Ann appearing every once in a while in the kitchen to talk to Eddy and then going back upstairs. She looked wasted, the chips of heroin Eddy was giving her just enough to keep her quiet. Tom wondered if Eddy had slept at all. His brother sat among the forgotten litter, greasy plates, bits of potato and onion, sausage tails, eggs that had dried to yellow blisters, all of it looking like the pictures of paintings Tom had once seen in a magazine. People stared at such magazines in the drugstore, seeing huge buildings, odd landscapes, and men and women so strange the people looking at them turned away in puzzlement, shaking their heads at how anyone could be so alien and still belong on the earth.
For Tom there was too much thinking about what wasn’t real to touch or smell or taste in the world. When he was a boy, Father had told him that out in the far cities were people who did things beyond reason, their minds bent from beauty or from ill. For Tom, such people existed only in books and magazines and in the stories that arrived in town with strangers and left with them, no one lasting long in the valley not born to it. If they did stay, it was in the town and not the country. Tom had met them over the years and listened to them talk about where they’d been or what they’d seen, parsing words out in riddles and random tales that made little sense to him. His brot
her never bothered to listen to their stories. He didn’t care what had happened to strangers. For Eddy, stories about the past, anyone’s past, were deadly and he wanted none of it. He looked at the town and saw a place to be swept down upon and pillaged. He’d long ago learned from his father that he was from a line of people who could not live among others and saw anything not their own as plunder, the things people owned fair to be taken. Eddy’s grin said it all, not his laugh, for Eddy had never laughed aloud in this life. Even as a child he only sucked at air as if stifling on what others thought amusing.
Tom turned from Eddy and walked back into the living room and over to the couch, where Marilyn lay sleeping under the blanket that was always kept there. Mother had knit it for when Little Rose was born. Half-awake on his feet, Tom swayed to Marilyn’s breathing, the faded blanket across her small breasts rising and falling in time to his body’s rowing the stale air above her. At her throat, the plastic snap beads seemed made from the same colour and substance as her eye, which, even as she slept stayed partly open, watching him, curious, blind. He stared at her in wonder. The Marilyn he looked at was grown and not grown, child and woman, sixteen years old and sixty, a girl who’d lived longer than most and not long enough. What lies under the dying will have a life, he said out loud. There was no one else there to answer.
He sat down heavily on the loveseat. It was the end of the afternoon now, the day once again losing to the coming dark. He heard the flisssh as Eddy shuffled cards in the other room, his brother at the table, a globe of stillness surrounding him. He thought about Eddy sitting there all day and saying nothing to anyone about what had happened. His brother never said what was in his mind. What he might have thought about anything Tom could only guess at.
For Eddy, the world was without boundaries. He learned that from both Father and Mother. Tom never saw it that way. Eddy’s crimes and misdemeanours, the things he did and didn’t do, were just a part of his life.
