Road to Thunder Hill

by Connie Barnes Rose

  Olive now says, “I’ve been so happy getting to know you as a sister, and in doing so, I feel I’ve gotten to know our father better too.”

  Now two things hit me, both colder than snow thrown in the face. There’s a chance Olive could decide to move back to Toronto too. And now here comes a thought that surprises the shit out of me: Olive disappearing from my life doesn’t exactly thrill me as much as I thought it would.

  I say, “Well, maybe you’ll both change your minds once summer comes and it’s so beautiful here.”

  “He doesn’t want to be here,” Olive says, her voice suddenly so cold my thumbs freeze between her shoulder blades. “That’s one thing we agreed upon when we made this move — that we’d be honest with each other. And the last time I spoke to him he confessed that he’d rather be back in Toronto. And that goes for Byron too.”

  She drops her head back down onto her arms again and this is where we’re at. My thumbs are feeling stiff now, both from the constant movement and from the cold. But I don’t dare quit for fear she’ll come up with something even weirder to tell me on this night.

  “You know, when I heard that I’d inherited the house, I looked at it as a sign or as a gift that had fallen out of the sky. Arthur and I had been drifting further and further apart and I was hoping we’d have one last chance to reconnect.”

  The moon has been hiding behind a cloud these past few minutes and now it reappears, casting shadows from the aspen branches onto the snow. In this new light, I can almost make out the inscription on Olive’s marble monstrosity.

  “The stone is handsome, isn’t it?” she says, reaching over to brush it with her hand. “I hope he likes it. It was important to me to make an overture to my father. I mean, our father.”

  “Our father who art in heaven,” I say, and now she’s laughing like I just told the funniest joke she’s ever heard.

  Then she says, all wistful, “He was kind of like a god to me, or at least a mythical hero. When I was a kid, I’d run to the front door every day in case there might be a letter from him.”

  I am starting to doubt that Olive has any idea how deeply his rejection of her went. She once told me she was envious that I had grown up with him. Now I wonder if I should tell her my little story about our father, about the last time I rode my banister horse at the age of thirteen. My father had joined me on my pillow saddle as he often had. We picked up where we’d left off the last time we had played cowboys. Here we were, gaining on the rustlers, and, as I lowered myself closer to Thunder’s mane so we could ride like the wind, I called back to my father to hang on tighter, because we had to jump over a giant gorge. My father reached through my arms to hang on tight like he always did when we played this game, but just as he flattened his hands over my chest, he suddenly yanked them away as if they’d been burned. At first I thought he was pretending that the rustlers had shot him clean off our horse. But no, he headed down the stairs mumbling that he had something important to do. The game was over, and that night at bedtime it was my mother who came to tuck me in. I didn’t think to ask why her and not my father, but after that night he never again came into my room and neither of us ever again rode my banister horse.

  I talked to Alana about this, years later, and we had a good laugh about it.

  “Fathers,” she’d said. “They can’t handle the thought of their daughters turning into actual women. And those are the good fathers. There are plenty who are not. You hear about it all the time.”

  I’ve decided not to tell Olive this story about our father, about how I felt so punished for growing up. It strikes me that his rejection of Olive robbed her of a father altogether.

  Olive takes a deep breath and so do I. The night air is rich with the smell of spring rot. “I come up here sometimes,” she says. “To talk to him. To thank him actually.”

  “For Kyle House, you mean?”

  “For finally letting me into his life,” Olive says, looking intently at me, “through you … Patricia.”

  She places her hands upon my shoulders and in her eyes I can see how desperate she was for my father’s love. My father who, it turns out, was so foolishly stubborn, just like me. Tears sting my eyes and I fight them back, clearing my throat to ask, “So what do we do now? About our men, I mean.”

  We begin to walk, her hand over my shoulder until the path grows narrow and now I am walking ahead as she says from behind, “I think that until we’re actually face to face with them we don’t have much choice but to wait it out, the same way we’ve been waiting out the storm these past three days.”

  The storm. I’ve been so oblivious, really, to any storm but the one raging in my own heart. I’ve been oblivious to so much lately.

  Then, as if she has read my mind, she says, “I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t come over to stay with me.”

  I’m relieved we are back to normal, almost. “Oh, come on, you found Rena the next day and then there were those linemen.”

  Olive snorts, “That’s right, the linemen.”

  “You have to admit they were kind of cute.”

  “I noticed that you thought so.”

  “Me? I’m not the one who traipsed them all through my ‘private parts’ as Rena put it.”

  “Rena is one funny duck, don’t you think?”

  Then I do something that surprises me as much as it does her. Just as we clear the aspens and tramp towards Kyle House I lay my hand on her shoulder. “You know, Olive, I don’t think you should give up on you and Arthur. You might end up going back to Toronto too.”

  “Are you kidding? And leave the most fucking beautiful place in the world, man?”

  It’s my turn to laugh to hear her quoting Alana. “All I know is that I refuse to move back to Toronto. Maybe we’ll miss each other once we’re both where we want to be. But you know, sometimes a girl just has to take a stand.”

  “But what about the sex?” I nudge her like a guy would. “Wouldn’t you miss all that tickling with the feather?”

  “I told you about that, did I?” We’ve reached the door to the summer porch. She places her thumb on the latch and turns to me, a sheepish smile crossing her face. “That happened a long long time ago and it’s never happened since.”

  She presses down on the door latch. “At least you still have that with Ray.”

  After all the damp and dark of outdoors, stepping into the kitchen is like returning to life. Everything is bathed in warm yellow candlelight. Over in the corner the fire in the cookstove glows through the side vents. Gayl jumps up from her chair and comes to hug me. “What were you doing outdoors?”

  “Just doing some thinking,” I say, hugging her back.

  “Ma,” she whispers, her breath soft on my ear. I have a feeling she’s had a few glasses of Olive’s wine just by the way she’s not letting me go. “It’s not you I want to get away from. It’s just that I want to live in town.”

  I pat her shoulder and we stand like this, her arms around me feeling solid. My daughter has turned out to be so strong. She’ll finish her schooling and do better than spend her whole life standing on a cold cement floor in a factory. Maybe Ray and I haven’t done so badly by her after all.

  My eyes find their way to Bear over there on the kitchen couch and the rest of me marches right over there like I have every right to him. He looks like he’s almost scared of what I might do next as I plunk down on the couch and lift his arm so that it drapes around my shoulders. But then I jab him with my elbow and the look that runs between us is as natural as it always has been.

  Here comes Alana carrying a glass in her hand that she thrusts out at me.

  “Cognac,” she says. “The best thing for fainting. You wave it under the nose until they come to their senses.”

  “Great,” I say. “Except that I didn’t faint.”

  “M
aybe not, but have you come to your senses?”

  “What’s the big deal?” I say, coughing from the smell of cognac. “I only went for a walk.”

  “You seem to be doing a lot of that lately,” she says, sitting on the other side of Bear.

  “Alana?” I say, swallowing another mouthful. “Thanks. I’m sorry. Stuff got weird.”

  She softens at my words. I can see it in her face. I look straight into the eyes of my old friend hoping she’ll read all that I’ve been feeling. Maybe one day she will explain it all to me. Bear chooses this moment to place us both in headlocks.

  “My two favourite ladies in the entire world!” he shouts as a blinding light comes from the camera that Olive has suddenly stuck in our faces.

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute. Let me get one more!”

  I can just imagine these same photos that will be passed around for years to come. They’ll sit in an album bearing the title of “April Storm at Kyle House, 1994.” Everyone in these photos will forever look grateful to be in the warmth of Olive’s kitchen.

  28. The Lifeboat

  I OPEN MY EYES to the blackness of the room just as the bedroom door slowly opens. When I was a kid, I’d watch the door from my bed, my eyes convinced it was actually opening. The only way to return the door to its original position was to blink. I try blinking the door shut now, but it keeps opening, and now I know it’s for real because there’s a sudden draft in the room. I sense, rather than see, that someone has stepped over the threshold. When I hear the reassuring thump of Suzie’s tail against the floorboards I’m relieved to know that at least it is not a ghost. Whoever it is tiptoes around to the other side of the bed trying not to make too much noise.

  What if it’s Ray? For a second my heart feels like it might break into song or something. I’m about to whisper his name into the darkness when I remember him saying he wouldn’t get home until the weekend.

  It could be Olive coming in to get another blanket from the closet. Or Kyla looking for one of her stuffed animals. It had better not be Rena looking to cozy up. You never know with Rena. What about Bear? Suzie doesn’t whine that way for just anyone. Does he really expect to crawl under my covers? I’ll tell him, sorry, Bear, but I’ll still hold him in my arms like a friend in need of warmth.

  I hear the sound of a pair of pants dropping to the floor and I hold my breath as the old springs squeak beneath this figure crawling into my bed.

  I know now who this is. Obviously, Suzie does too because she scrambles out from under the bed.

  I twist in my nightgown to stick my cold nose into Ray’s warm neck. “How did you find me?”

  “You know I’ll always be able to find you,” he whispers back, his hands moving up to my face.

  “But how did you know I’d be in this room?”

  “Bear.”

  “Bear?”

  “When I came through the back door into the kitchen, I saw this arm rising up from the couch and pointing to the ceiling. I took it as a sign.”

  Ray kisses me now. He kisses me like he’s hungry. I return the kiss with all the passion of a woman teetering on the edge of a cliff. But then I remember my promise to myself and I wrench myself away from him. I whisper that while it’s all very well to have him crawl into my bed, there is something we need to discuss before we go any further. Now it’s his turn to pull away and in spite of the covers over our bodies I feel a chill between us.

  I’m thinking, okay Trish, you’ve set the stage. Everything that’s been banging around in your head has to come out. Be strong and say … what? “Ray,” you could say, “there was a flue fire and I was afraid to tell you because you are right to think I am careless and irresponsible.” Or you could say, “There was a flue fire and the house was cold and I planned to walk over to the Four Reasons, but instead ended up at Hog Holler where I tried to fuck your best friend.” You could say, “Ray, my love, you were so right when you said we’ve come to the end of the chapter about us. I think we should call it quits.”

  I take a deep breath because I fully expect at least one of these things to slip out of my mouth, but something else tumbles out instead. “I want you to quit the salt mine and come home,” I say. “To me.”

  The only one who seems to be breathing in the room right now is Suzie. The silence coming from Ray feels like torture. Then he exhales in a sort of whistle and says, “I want to come home too.”

  “Really?”

  “But there’s something else besides my job that I need to quit.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Drinking,” he says. “I want to quit drinking.”

  “Good for you,” I say. “So quit.”

  I hear him swallow. “It’s hard for me to quit drinking if you’re still drinking.”

  I look to where I figure his face ought to be. “So you decide to quit drinking and you won’t come home unless I quit drinking too?” I can feel my back come up along with the need to say that I’m not the one with the problem.

  But then he says, “It’s something we’d both have to work on.”

  Something clicks in my thinking. Ray is telling me that he wants to work on us. Now it’s up to me to decide if I’m willing to work on us.

  I know I didn’t say that out loud, but Ray must have heard me anyway because he says, “I’ve been thinking about fixing up the house. We could make it real nice.”

  Right. And where does Ray think we’ll get the money to do that since he’ll be without a job? Now’s not the time to get all practical though because I have this sudden image of just Ray and me and something that feels like a future. In this future we’re cracking open the door to the barn and going to work on that skeleton of a dingy he and my father started to build, the one that’s been sitting there in the dark ever since.

  I’m about to tell Ray my idea just as he decides to touch my cheek and pokes me in the eye instead.

  “Ow.”

  “Sorry.”

  I tell him, “It’s not like us quitting drinking is going to solve everything that’s … you know, wrong with us.”

  “But it would help me to quit if you were to quit too.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I say. “But I guess we could try.”

  Everything is quiet, as if even the furniture is listening to us in the dark.

  “Okay then,” he finally whispers. “Let’s start there.”

  I’m not sure how he has managed to find my mouth in the darkness but his lips are now on mine. His breath warms my face and he presses his body hard against mine the way he has done forever. His hands sliding under this nightgown feel exactly as they always have, warm and generous and in need of me. I ache for him in ways I don’t remember feeling before this night.

  So here we are, Trish and Ray, joined together for about the millionth time and we’re trying to be as quiet as possible in a squeaky iron bed in a house full of people. I feel like we’re riding out a storm at sea where the strength of it gathers and swells until I’m sure the whole house must be shaking too. It’s like this bed is our lifeboat.

  Acknowledgements

  I am very grateful to the following people for reading this novel in part or entirety at various stages of its development. Their insights and opinions were greatly valued in the shaping of the work. Thanks to Hannah Ayukawa, Judith Berry, Terence Byrnes, Sarah Gilbert, Anna Turner, and Juliet Waters. I also want to thank my brother Robert Barnes for his sharp editorial eye, Ed Hubbard for his technical advice, Bärbel Knäuper for a timely suggestion, and Cathy Moss for her continued interest and encouragement throughout the years. I am especially appreciative of Luciana Ricciutelli at Inanna Publications for choosing to recognize my work and for bringing it to life. Finally, thank you family members, for showing me the way.

  A variation of the chapter “Instant Sister” was pu
blished in the anthology, Telling Stories: New English Fiction from Quebec, under the title “How I Met My Cousin Biz” in 2002.

  An excerpt from the chapter “Flue Fire” was published in the fall issue of Matrix Magazine in 2010.

  Photo: Jens Pfeiffer.

  Connie Barnes Rose is a native of Amherst, Nova Scotia. She moved to Montreal where she met her husband and where they raised their two daughters. She earned a BA in Creative Writing in 1992 and an MA in English from Concordia University in 1996. Her collection of linked short stories, Getting Out of Town, was published in 1997 and short-listed for the QSPELL Award and the Dartmouth Award. Since then she has taught creative writing at Concordia University and at the Quebec Writer’s Federation. She continues to live with her husband in Montreal and still manages to return to Nova Scotia every summer.