Thorn-Field

by James Trettwer

  She says, “I’m not interested in mining, the machines that run in the mines, the computers that run the machines, or the computerized accounting systems that pay for all of it and make gobs of profit for the mine owners, or the government in our case. The mine’s tendrils are thick and invasive. Once they’re in you, it’s like trying to get rid of thistles. Even if you poison them to brown crumbling powder there’s still living roots that eventually grow to claw at you.”

  She involuntarily scratches at her legs where, in her dreams, the gnarled stocks and thorns tear at her bare flesh.

  “That’s very metaphorical,” Lee says, “if that’s the right word. But does that kind of stuff actually pay bills? Besides you don’t have to work in a mine.”

  “I’m not going to be an office drone like Barton’s brother Buck either. Especially in some office tower.”

  “It’s not all about mining,” Lee says, his voice taking on an edge. “There’s plenty of support industries. There’s research. Just think, you could become an engineer and maybe find ways to make things safer for all miners. Or would you rather stay here and be a waitress and cleaner all your life? And continue to literally clean up other people’s crap?”

  She practises her breathing and metabolism control. She will not react like an Edna-banshee. There will be no plates smashing into cupboards here, either.

  And she intends to stay here — she’s fine, thank you very much; she has a plan; she does not need to escape to her hollow anymore. She calmly and quietly says, “I don’t intend to, literally, clean up other people’s crap forever. What I intend to do is try the U of S and see what happens.”

  “Okay,” Lee says, his voice back to that passive, and now very annoying, tone of his. “Clearly I’ve upset you with my thoughts on your education. And for that, I’m sorry. I only wanted to point out that with your intelligence and drive, you could do anything, absolutely anything, you want. I’ll be happy to help you with that, if you’d like. But it’s late.” He rolls over and turns out the light.

  They lie on opposite sides of the bed, still slightly touching in the narrow width of the double. Lourdes runs their conversation over in her mind. She notes Lee did not repeat his offer for her to move in with him. He obviously won’t do so until she complies with his choice of education. Her breathing and heart rate are under control.

  Close to sleep, she wonders what ever happened to her crow with the purple sheen.

  In her dream, Lee has shrunk to normal proportions. He has been shrinking a little every dream since he first invaded them. He still smokes the Cuban cigar, which is more toxic than ever. The smell reminds her of that painful and stinking half-hour on the trailer floor waiting for the ambulance so long ago. In this dream, Lee digs frantically with a short spade in the brown field of dead thistles. Going in circles, he shovels dirt, stalks, and thorns over his shoulder. Lourdes watches, unable to move, thorns scratching her legs, holding her in place. Lee tosses the seedpod toward her with a shovel full of dirt. The seedpod plops at her feet and lies dormant until she pokes at it with her bare toes. It lifts itself and lunges.

  Heart pounding, she awakes with a gasp and sits up straight. She’s covered in sweat. Mary is in her lap, and she throws the covers back revealing emptiness. She claws at her hair where the crow’s wing brushed it until she regains control of herself.

  Lee is in the bathroom getting ready for work. She is thankful he didn’t see her jump out of sleep and can’t ask her any stupid questions about her dreams. His absence gives her a moment to think. Why did she stay at the trailer so long after she lost Mary? Why was she unable to act? Dawdling like that. What a stupid thing to do. Will she be able to take charge when the time comes? Or will she simply submit to Lee’s wishes? Is it fear of failure?

  She thinks about how much trouble she has writing lately. She has trouble finding the right words for the most simple description. How is she supposed to complete university-level work then? The longer she is with Lee, the more that blank whiteness fills her mind. It’s particularly bad when his arrival is pending. It takes her longer and longer to get back into the swing of writing after he leaves. But then he is due back and the cycle starts over again and, of course, it’s impossible to write with him around. Last year she didn’t register at U of S because she was afraid of change. This time, though, will she have the will to act?

  Is there something more, something deeper, to Lee’s “things yet to be resolved” comment?

  No! There isn’t. All those tailings are buried, including, literally, that of Mary.

  Lee comes out of the bathroom wearing crisp, fresh work clothes. He smells of shampoo and Old Spice. “Hey you,” he says, almost in passing.

  Suddenly, concern furrows his eyebrows and he sweeps toward her, sitting right beside her on the bed. “Are you okay? I love your messy morning-hair but it looks absolutely dishevelled today. Did you not sleep well? Are you sick?”

  He reaches over and puts one hand on her shoulder, the other on her cheek. “Are you ever hot,” he says. “You’re, you’re not well?”

  “I just woke up,” she says. “It’s just night sweats.” She turns toward him and hugs him hard. He returns her embrace. If he is still upset about last night’s university conversation he doesn’t show it.

  Normally she closes her eyes when she hugs him but this time she keeps her eyes open. The light shining from the bedside lamp is nothing like the dappled sunshine in her hollow.

  Lourdes is in the brown field of dead thistles. The writhing thorns hold her in place while she watches a shrimp-sized Lee erect a towering white wall of canvas between her and her hollow. Smoke billows from Lee’s cigar and he puffs with satisfaction over his work and wipes his forehead with his sleeve. The smoke blows with force toward the mine’s plume and joins it. The plume shifts and the sun shines on the white wall. The glare blinds her and she squeezes her eyes shut, turning her head away. Slowly opening her eyes to a squint, she begins to turn her head toward the wall and spots a slithery movement in the thorns at her feet. The seedpod.

  Opening her eyes wide, Lourdes thinks of Mary. She brushes her hair with her hand and focuses on the discomfort in her lower abdomen. A whole night after drinking two eight-ounce glasses of water after her run just before bed, she really has to urinate. She sits up and throws the covers back. Shunting to sit on the side of the bed, she drops her pyjama bottoms on the floor and dashes quickly to the bathroom.

  After a long, pressure-relieving pee, she reaches her arms straight up in a soothing stretch and arches her back, cracking it. Two buttons across her breasts pop open. Remaining seated, she takes off the top and tosses it through the open bathroom door. She holds her belly in both hands, grabbing only about two inches, and flops it up and down. She was 171 pounds the last time she weighed herself, and her belly flab continues to shrink. She manages a three to five kilometer jog six days a week now, although only on the treadmill. She misses running on the highway; miners driving to or from work would always honk and wave and she would always wave back even though she didn’t know them. Some probably knew her father and their story.

  Today will be a day off from running and she slides her hands up to her breasts, gently lifts them, and watches the skin wrinkle around her cleavage. She thinks of Lee and slides her fingers down to the end of her reddish nipples and gently rolls them between her fingertips. The warm pee relief is replaced by a delicious heat.

  Enough of this nonsense, he’ll be here soon enough.

  She wants to try to get some new writing done before he arrives. She immediately gets up and steps into the shower and lets the cold spray wash away the sweat still clinging to her skin. She then turns the water off.

  Scrubbing herself with a bath sponge and back-brush, it takes ten minutes to completely lather her hair and body. She turns the water back on and lets its coolness flow soothingly over her for another ten minutes. She hates wasting water like this but today is not a day to rush. She’ll get to her laptop soon en
ough.

  She dries herself, puts on her fluffy white housecoat that hangs to her ankles and goes to the refrigerator for a bottle of Boost. Chocolate flavour this morning. She pads across the shag carpet and opens the gold and green drapes. Blinking against the bright sunshine, she lets her eyes adjust. Sunlight glares from the field of ripening purple flax. For a moment, she watches the plume drift lazily across the sky. Sitting at her round wood laminate table she flips open her laptop, waking the machine up, and opens her dream journal file. Even though she’s blocked, she still writes in the journal every day as a warm-up exercise. This morning she will describe the Lee dream with the white wall.

  She fondles her manila file folder marked “University” but doesn’t open it. Lee has not broached the subject of her choice of faculties since the one time they talked about it. Inside the folder is the acceptance letter from the U of S. She no longer carries the letter in her notepad. She has until July 15 to accept and register, which can be done online. A dorm room is also available if registration is completed and a credit card deposit is made before the deadline date, now only five days away. It would take a few clicks and she’d be registered. How hard can this be?

  Very hard, it seems, but now is not the time to get mired in that quandary again. There’s work to do. She finishes her description of yet another Threading Through Thorn-Fields dream, and saves and closes the journal. She opens a new word file and poises her fingertips on the keyboard.

  And it happens again: her mind is like that blank whiteness. Well, I’m not just sitting and wasting precious time. She turns toward the window and stares intently at the plume. She thinks of the mine’s four-rotor boring machines deep under the earth, soil hoisted to the mill where her father worked with the centrifuges, separating various ores from tailings. She turns back to the laptop, types:

  The mines of men rend

  and tear Gaia’s pearl

  ripping, shredding, ripping,

  well, shit

  She slouches back in her chair, arms tightly crossed on her breasts. She lunges forward, seizes her bottle of Boost, and chugs the contents. Normally she would savour the drink, make it last for at least part of her writing time. She clunks the bottle on the tabletop and then types — bottle’s clunk on table so much like my words.

  She leans back again. Stretching her legs straight out, she crosses her feet at the ankles and stares up at the white stippled ceiling. Turning her head back to the window, she again stares out at the plume. How exactly did her father manage from day to day, first so deep under the earth and then with the grinding tedium in the mill? Her one and only descent terrified her so much they never talked about it again. And then he died when she was so damn young . . .

  She abruptly reaches for the laptop and types:

  I barely knew my father. He was a big man. “Fat Like Me.” The title of my nonfiction story starring daughter, co-starring father. He worked at Liverwood Potash mine until he died. Before he died, he worked at the Liverwood Potash Mine . . .

  She has heard so many snippets of conversation over the years about her father’s accident and death, her adult mind has galvanized the story. She knows the story by rote and can tell it — like Lee said when she told him — with such dispassion.

  Weighing in at over 250 pounds, well over six feet tall, the father dwarfs the mother and makes the daughter feel like a shrimp. He is not overweight, just big, and the man has stamina. The daughter is a wisp of a child — not gaining her father’s kind of weight until puberty — and her father calls her “Tiny Lady Lourdes.” He holds her up over his head with one hand. She keeps herself straight, arms and legs spread like a ballet dancer, and he flies her until her body folds over and they both tumble to the ground, laughing.

  But this happens so rarely. Either at the mine working overtime or playing poker with his buddies, often all weekend, he otherwise lies in bed. It seems to the daughter that he is an occasional visitor with sleeping privileges instead of a member of the family. In the beginning of the time of the father’s long absences, the mother would quietly get drunk at home. Eventually, she started to drop the daughter off at the eccentric neighbours and hang out at the Liverwood Steak House, sometimes until late; sometimes the daughter saw more of the neighbours than of her mother and father.

  The little daughter scribbles notes and draws pencil crayon pictures for her father, leaving them under his pillow. She hopes he will at least communicate with her that way. But he never does. This makes her sad, and her mother scolds, “Don’t mope like a Sad-Sadie.” So she begins to smother her feelings so she won’t, heaven forbid, mope.

  It’s not until after Mary Bliss is gone that she fully understands why the three of them lived in a drafty and decaying trailer in a mobile home park. The daughter understands why the father, after a weekend of playing poker, needed to stay in the bedroom with the shades drawn. Why they had to eat peanut butter sandwiches every day until next payday. These parents couldn’t help themselves, let alone each other. The daughter pines over Mary Bliss in her bedroom. She floats in the corner of the room watching herself eat large bags of chips and jumbo chocolate bars, listening to her father’s same old Human League and Flock of Seagulls albums over and over on the MP3 player.

  If only she was a real writer, she could write poems that would make her father happy and bring him up from the metaphorical mineshaft so he wouldn’t have to play poker. Lourdes types:

  I see you sink and I throw you lines you choose not to see.

  Her father said that new contracts with Asia were a godsend. They meant unlimited overtime. Although exhausted from playing cards and working too many hours to begin with, he took as many shifts as he could. The intense production schedule sent down from the executives at head office, as dictated by the Ministry of Mining’s directives, permitted maximum work-hour rules to be conveniently overlooked.

  And then, a freak accident. The accident wasn’t the freakish part — constantly rolling conveyors in the vicinity of workers’ arms and legs were, according to Long-shanks, vindictive goblins waiting to pounce on the fatigued toilers of the mine. It was the way he fell. His arm was broken at the wrist and elbow, the shoulder dislocated. Witnesses said they saw him take off his hardhat to wipe his forehead. Then they saw him sway, stumble, and fall forward over the safety rail of a centrifuge platform. He tried to break his fall and his hand landed flat on a tailings conveyor, whipping him forward. He cracked his forehead on one of the rollers. Had his head hit anywhere else or at any other angle, he would have had a severe concussion at worst. But with that precise angle of fall, at that particular speed, on that particular edge of the roller, his skull cracked like a melon from the bridge of the nose to the base of the skull. He was pronounced dead on arrival at the Yorkton General Hospital.

  The mine’s First Responders had him secured and stabilized within minutes of the accident. A credit to the miners’ fellowship and safety and emergency procedures. But the Liverwood Hospital’s emergency department had closed months earlier due to lack of funding and a reduction of medical staff in rural areas. It took more than a hour for an ambulance to respond and get him to the nearest open hospital.

  Edna wept and drank and passed out, leaving Lourdes to mourn alone with a vague understanding that Daddy will never come home again. The Treadwells looked after funeral arrangements and the installation of the survivor payments, both at company expense. They invited Lourdes to stay with them for a while.

  It was when she was with the Treadwells that she found her hollow while wandering behind the hotel. The hollow was a comfort. Her crow with the purple sheen was there to share their respective losses. Surely her father’s death was her fault. If only she had tried harder and written better, her father wouldn’t have had to work all that overtime.

  When she returned home, she found Edna passed out in bed. She made up her mind. She couldn’t help her father but maybe she could help her mother. She crawled into bed with Edna. It was now up to her to look after
Edna. This was no time to grieve. She should not to be allowed such privileges.

  If only she had not been scared in the service elevator. Her father had said, while she snuggled into his barrel chest, “It’s a happy accident we named you Lourdes. You’ll do what you need to do, to make yourself all better once we’re back in the sunlight.” Fear was misbehaving. If she hadn’t been afraid, she and her father may have been able to talk things through. But that descent in the elevator was like plunging into a bottomless ocean.

  Lourdes, frenzied now, types, retypes, and retypes. If only her words could at least bring him out of his dark, undersea bedroom. Maybe put some colour into that big-cheeked zombie face. Get rid of the circles under his eyes . . . She types until the 11:15 AM alarm turns on CBC One. She reads what she has written:

  Heavy water

   rolls in

     dousing you in your dim room

  where pale light frames drawn shade

  you’re shackled in an armoured diving suit

  I see you sink, throw

  lines you choose not to see

  me frantic on shore, I can’t wade in

  breach the deep pitch enveloping you.

  Her words bring a dangerous surge of emotion. She couldn’t save her father after all. And now, not even on the page. The crow’s wingtip brushes her hair and she closes her eyes. She breathes out, her whole body loose, her arms hanging at her sides. She then closes her laptop, putting it back to sleep. With the click of the lid, it is time to focus on motel work. She will not be one of those surly servers who lets personal life affect customer service. She is above this.

  She is done with these old feelings. They are silt and clay, crushed, and dumped in the tailings heaps. Discarded, they surface only in emotional moments when she is not on guard.