Road to Thunder Hill

by Connie Barnes Rose

  “That’s the spirit, old man,” said Arthur, who was obviously full of spirit himself, as he introduced Ray to his colleague as “a man’s man.”

  The colleague, who had a big red face, acted as though Ray was really interesting, and Ray fell into the role happily enough, launching into his talk about road salt. He rattled off the numbers of metric tons used on the county’s highways every winter and how a recipe of salt and calcium was spread on the roads in summer to keep the dust down. He scratched his forearm with his free hand. “But, like everything, how much we use depends on how dry the summers are.”

  “Fascinating,” said the Doctor “And how long have you been in the salt business, Ray?”

  “Only for about two months. Before that I was the school janitor.”

  “And a school bus driver,” Olive added, passing around a plate of hors d’oeuvres. I could have sworn I saw her wink at the colleague. Why was it that only I could see how this whole thing was a set up to show off her quaint, yet inferior, relatives.

  “Yes, and a school bus driver,” Ray said, with genuine pride in his voice.

  I have always been amazed by Ray’s sense of self-esteem.

  While Olive was showing off her summer kitchen, soon-to-be potter’s studio, to her guests, I sipped my wine in the doorway of Olive’s dining room and wondered how the hell I’d found myself in this situation. Each one of the seven settings on the table boasted silver napkin holders. Glasses and silverware sparkled under the antique chandelier she’d hauled down from Toronto. An arrangement of fall leaves and dried flowers sat in the centre of the table. It looked like Olive had been working on it the entire day. Wait a second, I thought. Seven table settings? That could mean that two guests had cancelled at the last moment. Ah, so that could also explain the last minute invitation.

  And maybe that explains what I said later over supper.

  It started off innocently enough, with Olive informing her guests that I had spent all of my childhood summers in the house. The Doctor’s wife asked me if I missed calling Kyle House my home.

  “Not at all,” I said, as I rushed down another gulp of wine. “My mother hated it here and truth be known, I didn’t care much for it either.”

  “Oh no? But it’s such a charming house! What could you possibly find wrong with it?”

  “What was wrong with it?” I said. “You mean, what was right? First there were the earwigs. We used to find them crawling through our toothbrushes.” I think I shuddered here just before I held out my glass for Arthur to refill. “But they weren’t nearly as bad as the rats! You could hear them running through the walls. The only way to get rid of them was with poison and then they’d stink up the place for weeks. I bet there’s hundreds of rat skeletons in these walls.”

  I felt a tap against my leg. I looked at Ray who was sitting across from me.

  “I’m only telling you how it was when I lived here,” I said, lowering my voice when I felt, rather than saw, Olive’s stare.

  “But we think Olive has done a fabulous job of fixing it up, don’t we, Trish?” Ray said, kicking my shin again.

  “Oh, for sure,” I said, and even added, “she’s done an amazing job with the place.”

  “And we appreciate it so much!” Olive said, waving her hand around the dining room. “I can’t understand how anyone could not absolutely love this house!”

  “I can’t either!” gushed Dora, the doctor’s wife, while the others murmured their agreement.

  “Of course, everyone has his or her own taste,” Olive said, as she passed along a bowl of chutney. “I must confess I’ve often thought it would be nice to have a smaller place, like Patricia and Ray’s. It’s as cute as a button with much less upkeep.”

  “Are you ever wrong there,” Ray said, and then proceeded to cheerfully rattle off some of the many problems with our own home, beginning with the mildew in the bathroom. He moved through the draftiness of the windows and how each winter we tacked them up with plastic.

  I resisted the urge to kick him back because I knew he’d come right out and ask me why I was kicking him.

  “Eh, Trish? And the clutter! There’s where you’re wrong about living in a smaller place, Olive. Just look around this house and you can see there’s a spot for everything.” He shook his head and sighed. “I can’t tell you how much I admire that in a house.”

  “Oh, come now,” said a glowing Olive, who now passed him candied sweet potatoes and leaned forward in her chair to address her guests. “I’ve been to Patricia and Ray’s place on numerous occasions and I assure you their home is very … homey.”

  “Homey.” I’d heard her use that word before when talking about the Four Reasons, and she used it sometimes to refer to people from around here, especially if they were overweight.

  “Excuse me,” I said, and left the table. I wandered down the hall to the front parlour.

  My mother had called this room the red parlour because of the velour love seat and chairs that Olive’s mother had bought. Three decades of renting the house out to summer vacationers had left them tattered and stained, but Olive had had them reupholstered in green velvet. It felt like forever since I’d been in the room. The writing desk where my mother had penned the letters to Olive was gone, but I noticed the door of my parents’ old hi-fi was open. I’d forgotten about this thing, and I was surprised it hadn’t been tossed out on its ear as well. I reached in and pulled out an old record. Nancy Sinatra.

  “Did your parents dance together in here too?”

  Olive’s voice almost made me drop it. She swept into the room in her long corduroy dress and took the record from my hands. I watched her pop it onto my parents’ old turntable. Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made For Walkin” suddenly filled the room. Olive turned to look at me, her hands gripping the edge of the hi-fi. “My mother told me she and my father danced at every ball and dance in the province. Not to this fluff, of course. They danced to the big band sound. She said that everyone in the room stopped what they were doing, just so they could watch my parents dance.”

  Maybe it was her look of satisfaction that ticked me off.

  I said, “You know, I can’t say I ever saw my parents dancing in here. But they used to play some of these old records at suppertime. And sometimes my father would jump up from the table and get my mother dancing with him in the kitchen. And sometimes…” I looked her straight in the eye. “I danced with him too.”

  Olive’s mouth twisted, like she’d just bitten into a lemon. Then she sniffed and said, “Byron informs me they’re now called vinyls. Naturally, he thinks these things were invented by his generation. Do you find that with Gayl? That absolutely nothing existed before she was born?”

  I had to smile at this, because in spite of the crap between Olive and me, there’s nothing like the subject of kids to bring two mothers around to the same page. I said, “Absolutely nothing. Including us.”

  Then I followed her back to the dining room where the others sat admiring a large bowl of trifle topped with freshly whipped cream.

  18. Day Three

  I’M AWAKE. AND IT must be morning. That’s all I can tell. Because except for that dormer window, the one that has clumps of little lacy flowers on the sheers, I can see that I’m not home. Home? Maybe I’m in one of those dreams where I’m in a place that only seems familiar. Oh, now I hear a slurping noise that can only come from a certain dog named Suzie, who’s probably licking her privates under this bed. Okay, it’s coming back to me now. My old bedroom in Kyle House, me at forty-some years of age, not a child at all, which explains why there aren’t horses on the curtains like there used to be. There was a bad storm and now I’m Olive’s pet refugee.

  “Time to face the day, Suzie,” I say, as my feet hit the floor. A very cold floor, in spite of the warm kitchen below. No sounds are wafting up from the kitchen, but the
smell of porridge sure is.

  I throw on the sweater Olive loaned me yesterday, and with Suzie at my heels, I squeak my way down the dark back stairway to the kitchen. I wonder if I’ll be greeted with another mountain of dishes in the tub to wash. Here it is Monday and for once I wouldn’t mind going to work at Foghorn. No question of that, I see as I look out the kitchen window at the snow that’s still coming down. I feel like shaking my fist at the sky out there and shouting, don’t you know what month it is?

  There’s no sign of Olive or the twins. The table, I notice, is set with bowl and spoon and a teacup with a note tucked inside.

  Have gone for provisions with the girls. I’ll phone your mother and Gayl and Ray to tell them you are staying with us. Porridge is on stove. Make some tea and be cozy. We’ll be back before you know it, Olive

  Wonderful. I bet she’ll tell Ray all about the flue fire. And then she’ll tell him all about my night on a pool table with Bear James.

  At the thought of Bear James, my stomach lurches like a teenage girl thinking about her first kiss. Ever since the other night, the man I’ve valued as nothing more than a friend for twenty years, suddenly has this whole new role in my life. I remember way back to a night at the Roll-a-Way Tavern when I sat in the booth between Bear and Ray. Bear’s thumb was wrestling with mine, and Ray’s fingers were braiding the fringes on my vest, and judging by the way neither of them were about to give up their game I figured a choice had to be made. Someone had put on a reggae tune, which was a new and interesting sound. We got to dancing and swaying to “No Woman, No Cry.” Bear had his arms across my shoulders and I could feel Ray move behind me and it must have been the way he held my hips that made my head tip back and he kissed my hair and the choice was made. We all seemed to know it too. Bear just sort of backed up and started dancing with Angie Dove and when I caught his eye he winked at me. He left the building then, with Angie hanging on to his sleeve. After that, Ray and I found ourselves bumping around in the girl’s bathroom stall, all elbows and knees. It was a magical night, I remember thinking, because it seemed like Ray and I were meant to be. I used to think that that meant forever.

  Here I am now, looking out Olive’s window at the clouds regrouping over Thunder Hill and I’m thinking that maybe the time has come to play things out in a different way. Now, is this wisdom talking here, or simple foolish fantasy? Maybe Alana is right when she says that all wisdom amounts to is a bag of marbles if you can’t apply it to your own life. Is it wisdom that screams out that life is short and I should have a go at Bear? Or is this simply a case of hormones gone wild?

  Out the window I see Billy chugging up the lane looking like a tank trying to pull through mud instead of snow. The engine roars past the summer kitchen kicking up all the fresh snow that has fallen and pulls up beside the barn. The twins tumble out of the back while Olive and a fourth person grab groceries out of the back.

  Now, who the hell is that woman? Is it a woman? By the way the figure is hunched under the weight of a parka that looks two sizes too big, it’s hard to tell. Olive is pointing in the direction of the cemetery. The way she’s waving with her hand suggests she’s talking about my father being buried there and how she had created this amazing monument in his honour. The figure shields its eyes with one hand even though there’s no sun. Now, they’re turning towards the house. There’s something familiar about the way this person carries one arm in front of its body, like it’s in a cast. It’s a she, I’m pretty sure of it, and she reminds me of Rena Dickson whose arm got mangled in a wood shredder when she was a kid. Everyone felt sorry for her, that her father would have taken her to his work like that. Funny how public opinion changed when she grew up and started going through all the boys in town like a deck of cards. Back then, the boys just thought it was cool that this girl would get high with them and politely ask them to pull out their dicks. I heard that if they resisted she’d talk so dirty they had no choice but to obey. Hey, free love and all, the boys would say, looking all sheepish and confused if anyone found out. And really, what could we girls say at the time? After all, we were trying to be cool about our sisters. Sisterhood was powerful, right? Until we sisters started getting pregnant, that is, and suddenly we weren’t so generous in our thinking. We began to watch Rena Dickson like a flock of wary hens.

  Whoever she is out there, she seems to be asking Olive a lot of questions. There they go, to the barn, their boots breaking through the crusty snow. And here come the twins towards the house. Into the summer kitchen they stomp, their arms loaded with grocery bags. I go out to help and ask, “Who is that?”

  They shrug. “A woman was standing by the road.”

  “Where? Near the Four Reasons? Near the bridge?” I unravel Kira’s scarf and hang Kyla’s jacket up for her.

  “Near that old cottage down from the store.”

  It comes back to me then; the cracks of light coming from the boarded up Chase place, and me not wanting Bear to turn around in the storm. So it was Rena Dickson in the Chase cottage. And now Rena Dickson is here at Kyle House.

  Back in the day, Rena didn’t limit herself just to the boys. We’d sometimes see a car idling out there by the industrial park, some business guy sitting straight up in his seat, his eyes staring straight ahead.

  When Rena gave all that up to move in with Ricky Chase, who was my cousin Nancy’s boyfriend before she left for good, it would have been fair to say a collective sigh of relief ran through the town. And not just from the women. I wouldn’t be surprised if the men may have been the most terrified. After all, getting caught in a romp with Rena could have cost them their entire families.

  “Rena, this is…” Olive begins, as they enter the house

  “Nurse Trish. I know,” says Rena with a smile that says she knows me only too well.

  “Nurse Trish?” Olive repeats, looking confused.

  Just hearing her call me that name causes my bowels to churn and believe me it has nothing to do with her blowing the boys way back then.

  “Oh, that.” I force myself to chuckle because that’s the only thing that keeps me from choking. No one has called me that since the night the farm fell apart. So I say, “Oh, ‘Nurse’ was a little nickname I picked up because I was so good at removing splinters. Everybody was always getting splinters back then from handling barn boards, right Rena? I don’t know about up there in the city, Olive, but down here everybody was nailing up old barn wood in their kitchens. You know, for that rustic look. But the problem was, besides it being full of bugs, there were all those splinters we got from handling the wood. Splinter removal has always been my specialty.”

  Olive looks at me like she’s never heard me put so many words together at once. I’ve been staring at the walls all this time and don’t dare look at Rena. I can feel Rena looking at me too, and just as I turn to meet her eyes there’s a knock at the door. We hadn’t even heard a truck pull into the yard.

  19. The Linemen

  OLIVE OPENS THE DOOR. Standing there in storm gear is a lineman from the power company. Could he trouble us for some hot water for his thermos? He and his buddies have run out of coffee and they’re working on the transformer at the end of Olive’s lane.

  Ten minutes later, all three men are in the kitchen, boots warming in front of the stove, gloves propped up in the bread warmer along with Rena’s. The drying pole hanging above the stove is bright with wet, yellow snowmobile suits. The room suddenly smells like men. I had been thinking that it was time to make a trip to the Four Reasons myself, but now I’m thinking I might wait a bit.

  When they first came in the door they’d all looked like heroes to our rescue in their yellow gear and hard hats. Now that their suits and hats are off they look like three regular guys standing in a kitchen. The oldest guy has a pouchy face. The taller one looks like Billy Bob Thornton. The younger one with the tousled brown hair has eyes the colour of blueberries and th
e way his eyes are looking at me right now is making me squirm in my chair.

  They’re all standing there like they don’t know what to do with their hands. A moment later and Olive has hustled them to the table. So now they’re wearing the biggest smiles you’d ever see on three men. For a moment I forget I’m in my forties and think those smiles are about finding themselves in a the company of young women, but now I’m realizing the smiles might be more about the good fortune of stumbling into a warm kitchen belonging to a cook named Olive. Olive, who is, today, dressed in a soft flannel skirt and capable looking apron.

  Today’s soup contains eggplant and potato and zucchini with a sprinkle of grated Parmesan and fresh parsley. Who has stuff like that kicking around their kitchen in Thunder Hill at the best of times, but, especially, at the end of winter during a snowstorm?

  Blueberry Eyes says, “This is the best soup I’ve ever tasted, and I’m not kidding.”

  The others seem to agree as they reach for more bread. We ask them questions about the storm. How widespread is the power outage? Sporadic, they say. One county might be down and the one next to it up. The roads are bad everywhere. In fact, they’d had to get here by way of Newville.

  “The road is open through to Newville?” I say.

  One of the men nods. “Oh it’s open, and not nearly as drifted over as some are. But some slippery! A salt truck must have passed a few minutes ahead of us, but the freezing rain covered the salt right over.” They tell us that with any luck we should get the power back within a day or two.

  We eat in silence for a bit. Well, hardly silence, since Rena is slurping up her soup like she hasn’t eaten in days. Then she licks her spoon and points to the cracked and blackened bowl holding the bread. “How’d that bowl get so burnt?”

  Olive’s eyes brighten. “It’s an ancient Japanese method of firing pottery. It’s called raku.”