My winter work is done, but there is April to get through before I can plant outdoors. I’m waiting for the thaw and the blackflies. I read homesteading books and write in my journal.
*
The end of my childhood, 1989-1990
I still felt like a kid the day Dad and I left for our camping trip the summer I turned fourteen. I settled into the passenger seat, as comfortable and eager as I had been previous summers, then swivelled to wave at Mom through the rear window. She stood on the driveway by the garage, wiping her eyes. We pulled onto the street and she turned back into the house. In that moment something sleeping awoke within me. I thought, for the first time, She doesn’t really want me. She had never seemed that interested, and I wondered if she thought something was wrong with me. I turned back to face the front. Dad’s profile was expressionless, his lips set, his eyes looking forward. I put on my seatbelt.
We took two days to get to Maine. By the time we arrived at the state campground on Moosehead Lake I had more or less put aside my worries about my mother. On the night of my birthday I opened the gifts he had for me as well as the one Mom had sent with us. Hers was wrapped beautifully in orange tissue paper, with a blue ribbon tied in a bow around it. Middlemarch. It was a thick, softcover book, and its heft made me happy. Heavy going for a teenager, but I liked that she thought I could read it. Her inscription was a mystery though.
It is Dorothea Brooke that I identify with. Do not squander your intelligence and invention on a too domestic life as she did.
After supper, we put on our bathing suits and drove to the beach on the lake. On the way, we tried to phone her from the pay phone at the check-in, but she didn’t answer. At the beach, the air was cool and the sky black. The car’s headlights shone on the shallow water near shore, the light disappearing into the murk in the middle of the lake. We waded in, and once we were immersed, the cool night air, by a trick of physics, my father explained, made the lake water feel warmer than it had earlier in the day. Everything was relative, he explained, and depended on its opposite for definition, as the languid sunny day we had spent fishing in the lake from a canoe contrasted with that cool night.
An onshore breeze, companion to the sheets of lightning dazzling soundlessly across the lake, thrilling and fresh, carried clean lake air and ozone toward us. My father, his face illuminated by lightning, smiling, was exhilarated to be out in the weather. He was not anxious about the storm, nor yet for our safety. We swam until the drops began to plink! plink! around our heads on the rippled black glass.
On the shore I wrapped myself in the huge orange towel. Dad put his arm around my shoulders as we gazed across the lake. We were lit up each time a flash of blue glowed above the trees on the far shore.
“The world is a wonderful place, Bean,” he said. “You can do anything in it. Anything.”
We were alone, embracing the night storm, the light on the water, the dry cloth against cold skin, the wind in our faces. We saw the storm that night, coming toward us, and were happy.
The nights were cold. Dad heated water on the gas stove and filled two empty gin bottles. I loved the yellow labels on those bottles, with the flowers running down the sides, and back then I loved the clean smell of juniper in his glass when he drank it. He wrapped the bottles in towels and pushed them to the bottom of our sleeping bags before we went to bed. I put my bare feet on the warm towel while my father talked. The Coleman lantern glowed white hanging from a pole in the roof. Once he was in his sleeping bag, Dad reached up to turn off the lantern. The light faltered and turned from white to yellow until all that was left was a soft glow on the mantle. When I could no longer see my father’s face I contracted into myself, separate and uneasy. I lay still, waiting, remembering my mother not even waving as she turned to go into the house. When he spoke it was only one of his silly jokes, but it relieved me of my anxiety, at least for that night.
“Three men sat around a campfire. One man said, ‘Joe, tell us a ghost story.’ And Joe began, ‘Three men sat around a campfire. One man said, ‘Joe, tell us a ghost story.’ And Joe began . . .”
He quizzed me for a few square roots, then told me how you could calculate the height of a tree using trigonometry. It didn’t matter to me what he said, as long as his voice went on until I glided into sleep, which I soon did.
It was still hot and sunny when Dad and I pulled into the driveway. Summer wasn’t spent and the evening would stay muggy. The mailbox in the breezeway was full and the postie had left a pile of letters and flyers that didn’t fit on the ground below it. Dad opened the door, and there was another pile of mail on the kitchen counter, unopened. The kitchen air was still and stale. The windows were all closed.
“Marlene?” he called. But we both knew. He wouldn’t look at me. On the counter beside the stove was a note propped against a bottle of olive oil. He read it, looked dazed, and sat down by the bay window facing into our backyard. I asked him to read it to me, but he said nothing and stared out the window.
I went up to my room and waited. There was no sound downstairs. When he didn’t come up, I unpacked the little I’d taken on the trip. I put Middlemarch on my bedside table. I took our sleeping bags outside and hung them on the clothesline to air out. I hung our sheets on the line too because they had been in that stuffy house and smelled stale. When I came back in Dad was still sitting in his chair, the crumpled note in his hands.
“Let me see the note.”
He shook his head. Later, I ate a cheese sandwich alone and went to bed. The sheets from the line were crisp and smelled sweet and I loved their feel on my bare legs. I lay awake thinking and listening to him downstairs. He came to say goodnight as I was drifting off.
“Everything’s going to be O.K.,” he said. His speech was thick, and he staggered a bit on his way out the door.
I never got to read the note. I wish I still had that green sweater she knitted me.
We didn’t hear anything from my mother for months, and then a thin envelope arrived, addressed to me and with no return address, containing the briefest explanation for why she left.
. . . There are things I want to do with my life that I have been putting off. No doubt they will sound small to you and I don’t expect you to understand. I had dreams as a girl that I have been watching vanish. Maybe one day you will know what I mean. I think you must hate me right now and I don’t blame you. But . . .
There was not much there to hold on to but it turned out it was all I had. She never phoned, and I never saw her again. I wanted to, if only so I could gouge her eyes out.
Dad wouldn’t talk about Mom and this meant neither could I, at least not to him. It was like she had vaporized, taking the uneasiness she had lived with in our home with her. But instead of lightening the mood or making life at home easier, her absence had the opposite effect. Marlene’s desertion settled into my father like a weight that could only drag him down.
One morning in February I got up in the dark, put my bare feet on the chilled linoleum, and went to my window, which overlooked the backyard. It was as black as it ever got, a sprinkling of stars above the trees. It had snowed in the night and the rink was covered. I wanted to clear the ice so it’d be ready to play on as soon as I got home from school that afternoon. I put on my long johns, track pants, and a sweater and went downstairs. I turned the floodlight on and went out to shovel the rink. The neighbourhood was silent. No cars. No wind. No birds. Nothing. A gust blew flakes off the roof where they sparkled in the light like stars drifting through the gelid air. The snow was fluffy but deep, and shovelling was heavy work. I rested on the handle of the shovel and turned toward the house. Dad stood at the picture window, watching me. He waved. That wave, the cold air in my lungs, the stars, and the shovel scraping the ice: In that moment I needed nothing more.
That afternoon when he came home from work I gave him a painting I had done of the white-throated sparrow.
“Promise me you’ll never leave,” I said.
“You k
now I don’t make promises, Bean. No promises, no debts.”
I said nothing.
“I have no intention of going anywhere.”
But it turns out there is more than one way to leave someone. A distance grew between me and Dad as we settled into our private preoccupations. For the rest of high school mine were pot and promiscuity. Most of what I did was either harmless or led to minor scars that do little more than remind me of that time. I spent a lot of evenings alone in my room then, reading, listening to music.
That fall I’d come home from school and shoot a tennis ball with my hockey stick at the net standing in front of the garage door. Slapshot after slapshot the muddy ball hit the garage door when I missed the net. When Mom was around she had made me paint the door each spring to cover the marks. Now there were hundreds of perfect brown circles on the beige door. I took specific joy in hitting a target, none more satisfying than the crossbar of the net. Again and again I aimed for that bar, and when I hit it, as the net rocked back slightly and the ball flew off into the air and back toward me, I had the sensation of having accomplished something worthwhile.
One afternoon in early November, our neighbour Ted came by. My father was home but hadn’t turned on the outdoor lights. Ted was studying engineering at university in the city. The tennis ball flew off the blade of his stick faster and harder as he wristed it at the door. He took a wrist shot against the door, and when the ball came back to him, he cradled it on the blade of his stick. He asked me if I thought the ball stopped at any point between leaving his stick and the time it returned. I couldn’t see it come to rest. He picked up the ball and walked to the door. The ball came in, hit the door, was compressed, stopped, then reversed its motion. That moment of reversal could not be held. It was such a small length of time that it didn’t actually exist.
I began going for walks most weeknights after dinner. Dad asked if he could join me. He said he wanted to stay in shape, but I guess he saw us drifting and thought he should do something about it. Our routine was set early on. If we ate dinner together he would look at me as he rose to clear the table and say, “Walk?’” I always said yes. He’d go to the fridge, open the crisper, pull out an apple, and toss it to me. He pulled one out for himself and salted it. He had measured out a few routes in the car so we would know how far we walked. The one I liked best was three miles long and took us across the cut the trains used to get into the city, over to Crystal Lake. In my memory the pavement always looks oily in the streetlight and smells sweet and earthy. To fill the time I made up a game we called World Without, in which we imagined what the world would be like without, say, birds or cars. Other nights I walked by myself, relieved to have a silence I didn’t have to try to fill.
One hot, still night we took our bathing suits on our walk to the lake. The surface was so smooth as we approached the dock that it looked like a challenge. I picked up a stone near the shore and threw it as far as I could, breaking the mirror with a splash.
We swam in the dark. He got out before me, dried himself and dressed, and asked me to hurry up. Dad had always been affectionate with me — wrapping an arm around my shoulder, hugging me goodnight — but that summer it stopped.
It’s possible to live in something like happiness without even knowing it. There comes an instant when you recognize it exists. And in that moment it no longer does.
13
Forest Garden
It’s my second May here and I’m going to meet Lina. She’s taken the train to Halifax, and a bus from there to Middleton. It’s foggy when I start down the hill to meet her. Walking gives me time to think and see things I miss when I whiz down the mountain on my bike. Dozens of Tim Hortons coffee cups and plastic lids in the ditch. Beer cans. Six-pack rings. Soda bottles and water bottles thrown from speeding car windows. Those may all be gone soon.
The sun has burned off the fog by the time I get to Spa Springs. A little girl in a field by the side of the road picks dandelions with her grandfather. She laughs as she puts them in the pot he is holding. The man smiles at me when I wave and stoops over to offer her the pot. The girl looks up from the flowers, and when she sees me, she stops and stares.
I pass the veal calves and the fields of rye and newly sprouted corn. Lina is standing by her backpack by the time I get to the motel where the bus stops. She is different than I remember, more beautiful, and she’s cut her hair above her shoulders. She wears a navy blue hoodie with “Maine” written on the chest in large white letters, jeans, and hiking boots. When she sees me she shouts my name and comes running to me, her arms outstretched. We hug and then grow ill at ease by the intimacy. I throw her pack over my shoulders and fasten the straps for the hike home. She is reticent after our greeting. I am babbling beside her, telling her about the cows and the history of Spa Springs, and my garden.
She pitches her tent near mine by the fire circle. After dinner we sit by the campfire, talking late. Then she gets up to go to her tent and I long to hold her back, to keep her seated across the flames so I can watch the light throwing shadows on her face for a while longer. At least I know she is there for the summer and that there will be many more nights like this one.
The last few weeks have been glorious. I wake in my tent, and like a dog with its wet nose twitching at a beguiling scent, I know that she is on the land. There is a buzz, heightened energy I sense among the trees and birds and in the air.
We garden when the weather lets us. When it rains hard we sit in my tent, which is bigger than hers, and talk and read to each other. I read the gardening and building passages from The Good Life to her as she knits. Mostly, she is quiet around me. At times I am nervous and feel like a galumphing sea lion, the way I crawl about the tent and speak too loudly as if I am trying to prove something or win an argument we aren’t having.
There are green-scented breezes this spring like the ones I grew up with, when the snow melted into puddles on the pavement under the warming sun and I put on my sweater and ran.
—
In early June I am swinging the mattock to get at tree roots and rocks in a new bed. Between tugging on spruce roots and lugging rocks to the wall at the top of the garden, I steal glances at her. We are both wearing bug shirts with screening covering our heads, and I can’t see her face. She is rolling sod with the garden fork and piling it in mounds, ready for squash and pole bean seeds. She works with a determination I admire, jabbing the earth with the fork the same way each time. We work without speaking for an hour or so, then she straightens her back and looks over at me. She unzips her hood, pulls it back, and drinks water from a Mason jar. When she bends over to put the jar back on a stump her cleavage reveals that she is wearing nothing under her bug shirt. She brushes a wisp of her black hair away from her face with a dirty hand, leaving a smear of soil on her cheek. I want to go over, lick my finger, and wipe it off. Or, better, just lick her cheek directly.
“All this digging doesn’t feel right to me. Every time I stab the land my arms shudder.”
“Try holding your arms farther apart.”
“I mean my arms don’t want to stab the fork in the ground. I’m telling them to push and they’re resisting. I want to plant without piercing the land.”
I am skeptical, despite the experience she has gardening with her grandmother when she was a little girl and the flower gardening she did at Art’s last summer. It didn’t work for me at all last summer to plant directly in sod, but she insists on trying. The next day we buy a fifty-pound burlap bag of seed potatoes. We cut them, leaving at least one eye per piece, and place them a foot apart directly on the ground. We cover the rows with a foot of oat straw. Three weeks later, when the potatoes sprout, we pull the straw back a bit to let them reach light.
Our seed orders arrive in the mail from Vesey’s and Richters. Spinach, lettuce, kale, chard, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, onions, some herbs. She opens the packet containing her tobacco seeds and pours some into my hand. They are like dust, smaller than poppy seeds. We plant the
seeds in pots and take them to Martin and Jen’s greenhouse. While they germinate she prepares a bed for the tobacco. This she has to dig as the seedlings will be small and fragile, unable to compete with the hawkweed and grass.
On one of the first days of summer, we plant beans and squash and corn in the mounds we made. It’s too hot and dry to transplant our seedlings during the day, so we wait until the sun drops behind the trees and the garden beds are in shade. Then we go to Martin and Jen’s greenhouse and retrieve all our potted seedlings. The air grows still after supper and is hotter and heavier than it has been all day. The gentle breeze of the early afternoon has abated, leaving conditions perfect for blackflies. Lina and I don our bug gear. It’s like a greenhouse inside my bug shirt. Soon there are spots of blood on my wrists. The flies crawl through any fold into the jacket and buzz, trapped by the material. I rub my hands over each other like Lady Macbeth with OCD, but the buggers are assiduous in their hunger. Where the hood rests against my ears they bite through the cotton. My ears are hot and itchy.
“Leave me alone, you miserable pricks,” I shout, slapping my hand against my hood and running to get away from them. It feels better while I do this, but they are quick to return once I kneel again. I ease each seedling from its pot, make a small space for it with my fingers, and put its roots below ground. Every dozen or so I sprinkle them from the watering can. We sing Beatles songs we both know while we work to distract ourselves from the annoyance. Occasionally, the dragonfly cavalry flies in, their wings crinkling like Chinese paper dragons, to snatch the flies that hover in front of my face. One lands on my arm to eat its prey, munching rhythmically on one of my tormentors.
We take turns having a shower-in-a-bag on the pallet. I promise her we’ll have more water soon. I’m going to get a well drilled. I’ve had enough of hauling pails and jars of water down the road.
The Rest is Silence Page 9
