Edna cowers silently under the kitchen table as Lourdes marches from the bathroom, through the kitchen and out the door, leaving it open. She leaves the trailer with no backward glances or any words from Edna. Through it all, Herb has continued to snore, undisturbed, in Edna’s bedroom.
Lourdes still does not cry.
Slowly circling above herself and watching, the crow feels only grim determination while the girl marches on, toward what will hopefully be a safe place. Poplar leaves brush against each other with a soothing sigh in the morning breeze. Lourdes turns out from the poplars’ cool shadows among the cluster of trailers in the mobile-home park and onto the already sun-warmed road. The park is just within Liverwood town limits, half a kilometer east of the highway that runs north from the town toward the mine. The mine’s ever-present plume glares in its early morning climb skyward.
Reaching the rise in the gravel road, she can see her destination: the Treadwell’s Motel 6. Harold Treadwell is a skinny, six-foot-four Englishman who hates the name Harry. He always says, “I’m not named after any snot-nosed prince. Call me Treadwell.”
Lourdes secretly calls him Long-shanks.
Long-shanks and his Greek wife Helena are her pretend grandparents. Three of her four real grandparents died of various addiction-related diseases and she never knew them. Her father’s mother, who is still alive and living somewhere in Florida, disowned her only son shortly after he married Edna.
Labouring underground for twenty-five years, Long-shanks worked his way up to Shift Production Manager at the Liverwood Potash Corporation Mine before he retired and bought the Motel 6 with his wife. During his mining days, he mentored and was a friend to Lourdes’ father. The Treadwells were always available to babysit, usually on a moment’s notice on any sort of occasion. They had no children of their own and they were close to her father.
She marches on, now and then passing the suitcase from one hand to the other. Feeling the strain in her shoulder, she thinks there should be a thunderstorm or tornado to mark this event. After all, Wuthering Heights, which she read in grade nine, had some sort of storm at serious, dramatic moments, didn’t it?
The silence is absolute. There is no traffic and no birds sing in the tree-break between the motel and the houses on the edge of the town. She hates the way the sun shines and retreats from it. She dives down and back into herself. She crosses the deserted highway and trudges across the gravel parking lot toward the Treadwell’s living quarters attached to the motel. Normally, she would pass through the lobby to report for table service and dishwashing duties in the restaurant. The Treadwells still pay her in cash because she was just fifteen when they hired her.
Lourdes knocks on the screen door of their living quarters that is shaded by the overhang of the upper floor in that quadrant of the motel. The inner door is open and she smells the Treadwell’s Brazilian dark-roast coffee. Her stomach suddenly knots. This is it. The moment of truth. If the Treadwells turn her away — she doesn’t know what to do next. Or where to go. There is no going back.
Her whole body sags as if the weight of the entire earth at the lowest crosscut of the mine is pressing down on her. She has that oppressed, smothered feeling like the time she went underground in the mine service elevator with her father. In that terrifying and rapid descent in a garage-sized elevator car, she needed only a single look through the wire-mesh sides at the endless strata of dirt before she clung to her father’s legs. Face in his thigh and eyes squeezed shut, she refused to step off the elevator—just like the narrator in the Guy Vanderhaeghe story she read in English Lit class.
Lourdes hears Helena’s accented voice. “Who could that be?”
Helena appears at the door, opens it, and scowls. Her lips are thin and her lower jaw juts out. The knot in Lourdes’ stomach turns into a searing pain that rips upward and across her chest. She quivers, then shakes. Her lower lip protrudes. She can feel her eyes burning and bulging. The tears are welling up, blurring her vision.
She is lost after all.
But then the woman, still grim faced, opens her pudgy arms wide and says, “Gods and little fishes. What has that wicked witch done now?”
Lourdes drops her suitcase and collapses into Helena, who is as short as she is round, and her arms can’t reach all the way around her torso. She presses her face into Helena’s shoulder, body heaving with racking sobs.
Helena strokes her hair and whispers, “It’s all right. Let it all out.”
When she is spent, she lifts her head and says, “I’m sorry.”
“You sorry for nothing. Sit down. Come.” Helena leads her by the hand, stepping around Long-shanks who, she realizes now, is standing behind his wife, one hand on her shoulder, his other hand holding a wad of facial tissue. He passes her the wad.
She nods thanks and gives him a quivery smile.
He is totally bald on top. The remainder of his still-blond hair is curly and thick on the sides and back of his head and grows down into sideburns and moustache in a yellow flow of hair in the Victorian-age style. Skinny and gangly, he wears khaki pants and a comfortable casual shirt with epaulet loops on the shoulders. He is so different from Herb.
Helena wears a grey, man’s dress shirt that hangs over her thick upper thighs encased in stonewashed blue jeans.
Lourdes dabs at the stain of tears, spit, and snot on Helena’s shoulder. “Your shirt. I’m sorry.”
“No worry about this.” She takes the tissue from Lourdes and gently wipes under her nose and then under her green eyes.
“She’s a tough old bird, lass,” says Long-shanks, taking a towel from the chrome stove handle. “What’s a little wet between mates?” He separates the two, handing Helena the towel, and gently guides Lourdes to her usual place at their kitchen table. He says, “I’ve got your coffee in. Black, two spoons of brown sugar, well stirred. I had to do summat while the sob-fest went on.”
He points a bony finger at her. “Don’t look at me like that. You won’t have me blubberin’ like a wee lass too.”
Helena slaps him with the towel. “It might do you good, Old Coot, to cry once in a while.”
“Shove that towel in your gob, woman. Don’t tell me what to do.”
Lourdes laughs out loud. She is safe here.
Helena says, “Tell us all about it.”
She tells them about Herb. Tells them about the fight and Edna’s response. “I threw that plate as hard as I could. I wanted to smash it in her face. What if I had hit her? The cupboard door smashed apart. How could I do something like that? What kind of a horrible daughter . . . horrible person am I?”
Helena grips her by both shoulders, leans down and looks her directly in the eyes. “You couldn’t help it. Not your fault. You never think that. Never. Understand me?”
She nods.
Leaning back, hands behind his head, gangly legs crossed at the ankles and stretching out to almost the middle of the kitchen, Long-shanks says, “And don’t feel guilty ‘bout leaving the wicked witch either, lass. You did the right thing. And you did right coming to us. I’ve been thinking while all this crying’s been about.”
He goes on to say that now she is sixteen, she can be hired permanently. She can also live in one of the hotel’s rooms for as long as she wants. The room he has in mind is the smallest in the motel with a hallway utility closet containing a furnace jutting into it. The room is usually vacant because of the noise and the fact that its size allows for only one double bed. Of course, she will have to clean rooms to pay for her room and board. However, this is all contingent on two things. Long-shanks looks at his wife. One, Lourdes has to take a server job in the restaurant weekends and evenings at busy times, and two, she has to finish highschool.
He says with a sharp edge to his voice, almost a challenge, “Anything to add to that, woman?”
“How can I add, Old Coot?” Helena replies with a frown. “You don’t let me get a word in edgeways.”
Lourdes isn’t fooled by their harsh banter. She
caught the momentary softening of Long-shank’s expression when he barked his challenge at Helena. She sees Helena’s eyes widen slightly for a split-second when she gives him an infinitesimal nod.
Even though she is exhausted, she agrees to work that lunch hour and has her first crack at serving the church crowd. She does her dishes duty afterward. She revels in the work. Focuses on it. It is better than thinking about Edna and what has happened. She has supper with the Treadwells and spends the evening with them over a small birthday cake and coffee.
Helena escorts her to her new room. She continues to force herself not to think and focuses on how short Helena is, watching her large buttocks sway, noticing how the woman walks with one foot placed in front of the other; the way a model walks.
Alone in her room, she undresses and falls into bed without brushing her teeth or putting on her thin pajamas. She won’t think. She just lets fatigue wash over her. The starched motel sheets rub against her skin while she stretches spreadeagled on the double bed. How much better the motel bed feels than her rickety twin at the trailer. There, she had to endure a lumpy mattress, and a worn top sheet that offered little protection from her scratchy horsehair blanket.
For the first time since her father died, Lourdes sleeps a deep, dreamless sleep until Helena knocks on her door to wake her up for school the next day.
If only all of her sleeps could be dreamless.
The crow watches over her motel room. Edna, in a tattered, man’s “wife beater” T-shirt, which exposes folds of loose skin on her belly, is here to take her back to the trailer. Her mother grabs two handfuls of her hair and drags her out of bed. She seizes Edna’s wrists. Her bare feet slip on the carpet.
Edna’s black panties, the white of the waistband’s elastic showing through the thin spots in the fabric, hang on her bony hips. The tangled mess of Edna’s stringy black hair hangs down, hiding her face and brushing against Lourdes’ skin like creeping vines.
Edna is a silent dynamo. She does not scream or yell. Her grip is unbreakable and energy inexhaustible.
Lourdes sweats and gasps. Her heart hammers in her chest. She lets go of Edna’s wrists and chops at the inside of her elbows. Edna falls on top of her. She can smell booze on Edna’s breath as she seizes her mother’s face with both hands and plunges her thumbs into her eye-sockets and pushes her away by kicking straight with both legs. Edna crashes against the far wall.
Silently covering her eyes with both hands, Edna shakes her head once and then lunges, arms outstretched, hands grasping air, streaking across the room like a skeletal spectre from a B-grade horror movie.
Lourdes scrambles sideways. Jumps up and bolts through her motel room to the brown field of thorny thistles. Edna’s form is silhouetted against the open motel room door in the brownish light, her arms still outstretched, open hands still grasping air.
Lourdes runs through the field. The shredding thorns trip her. The seedpod thrusts and she awakens with a start and immediately thinks of Mary. She retreats to her hollow. Deep breathing, she tells herself to calm down. She’s safe in the motel with the Treadwells.
She’s been here for more than a year already.
Herb was arrested for drug trafficking and Edna burned the trailer down months ago and disappeared.
Calm now, but still covered in sweat, Lourdes slides out of bed and heads for the shower, mentally preparing herself for the breakfast rush.
Cool water washes away the night sweats. Grade eleven is finished and she’s proud of her straight A’s. Her academic standing, if she can maintain it, should help her achieve a scholarship or two at university. However, she wants to put in as many hours as she can over the summer and the next year to save for tuition. Lathering herself with the water off, she focuses only on the day’s work ahead.
After ten hours in the restaurant, acting as both greeter and server and working kitchen clean-up, Lourdes steps outside for a much needed smoke. She puts the cigarillo to her lips, fully aware that she has inherited her parents’ addictive personality traits. Food being her weakness, and determined not to be an addict like them, she’s taken to smoking cigarillos, without inhaling, to kill her appetite. She also smokes because she’s determined to avoid obesity and all of its related diseases. She has also taken up running four to six times a week.
Taking her Bic lighter from her pocket, she wonders why a tanker truck is idling on the highway, right beside the motel property. The big rigs always park in the vacant gas station lot on the other side of the motel when the drivers come for a meal.
About to light her cigarillo, she hears someone behind her shuffle along the sidewalk from the direction of her room. She turns and bile surges. Edna.
“I thought you left town.” She keeps her voice steady.
“I need money.” Edna sways, then leans her hand on the wall. Her eyes are bloodshot and vacant, heavy with black circles. “Help me out.”
“I don’t have any money to give you.”
“Whaddya mean? You must have a shit-load of money working here all the time. I hear you don’t pay rent. I have to help pay for gas.” Her head tilts in the direction of the idling tanker.
“I said, ‘I don’t have any money to give you.’ I have to save everything I earn for university.”
Edna straightens up, shuffles forward a step, and vaguely waves her index finger. “Oh, you’re Miss Hoity-Toity university student already, are you? You’re still in high school and you’re too good to help your own mother?”
“My mother abandoned me a long time ago.”
Edna says, “I named you Lourdes because you were supposed to heal my marriage. Supposed to heal me. You failed me and now you can’t even find the compassion to help me out?”
The only thing Lourdes hears while she races for the motel lobby is the air horn of the tanker.
She runs down her corridor, past her room, and out the hallway exit. Slamming that door open, she sprints down the path toward the hollow. Once there, she listens to the wind through the birch and willow leaves. The thistle flowers peer downward, their purple heads bent and battered. The flowers on a new batch of thistles by the female crow’s grave also droop. Lourdes spreads her arms and feels the damp and humid air on her exposed skin.
Calm now, she watches the field beside the motel. The purpling flax stalks wave in the wind. The wind swirls her hair around her face as she stands and stares up at the mine’s plume.
The mine, where her father went to work after he graduated from Liverwood Comprehensive High School. What would life be like if he hadn’t died in that mining accident? She feels an emptiness in the pit of her stomach that has nothing to do with food. She remembers her male crow with the purple sheen and his final flight from their hollow. She stares at the field of flax; the only sound is the wind. She tucks her hair behind her ear.
Back in her room, intending to change for a run, she instead fetches her laptop and returns to the hollow, sits at the picnic table there. Mindless of the darkening sky and nighttime chill creeping over her bare arms and numbing her fingers, she types and retypes until her laptop battery is fully discharged. Dashing back to her room, she plugs in the machine and continues to type until the sky reddens and morning light shines through her windows.
Silence In Wind
All I hear is endless
prairie wind
when the sun drops
in the west.
I turn my back
from where you were under a plume
watch night creep skyward
on an obsidian surge.
I turn back, call to you
hear only silence
in endless prairie wind.
“Silence in Wind” was published shortly after Lourdes’ eighteenth birthday. Over coffee and birthday cake in the Treadwell’s kitchen, Helena congratulated her on her first publication, for finishing high school with high honours, and, of course, wished her a happy birthday
“Thank you, Mrs. Treadwell,” she replied.
/> Helena waved her pudgy finger. “You call me Helena now. No more Mrs. Treadwell, for at eighteen you are a woman too.”
That was more than a year ago. Lourdes did not attend the high school graduation ceremonies and felt nothing about them.
Now, she sits in the restaurant kitchen during a slow moment after the supper rush. She takes her spiral notepad out of her server uniform pocket and unfolds the two letters she keeps tucked between the back page and back cover. The first is her acceptance letter from the University of Saskatchewan telling her that she can register in the University’s BA in English Literature program. The letter has been there since March but she has not yet acted. Over the past three years, she’s saved enough money to finance her entire program if she’s careful with her spending. Registering felt wrong at the time the letter arrived and still feels wrong at this moment. However, she keeps the acceptance handy as a constant reminder.
Helena always says, “Listen to your womanly instincts.”
The second letter arrived just the day before from the University of Toronto Press. It tells her that four of her poems, including “Silence In Wind,” have been accepted for publication in a yet-to-be-titled anthology of emerging Canadian poets. Lourdes consulted her womanly instincts and mailed her acceptance to the terms of the agreement within an hour of opening the letter.
She wonders if she should focus on her poetry manuscript instead of going to university. Acceptance in this anthology will surely help her chances of eventual publication when the manuscript is complete. At the same time though, she knows she is still a novice and should continue her education.
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