Reading by Lightning Page 3

  Imagine, she says. At three o’clock in the afternoon!

  Can ye picture spending a winter in a sod house? asks Joe Pye from the doorway. No one answers. If somebody as much as grunts, Joe will tell about his first winter in Canada. Like living in a burrow, he’ll say. Like being a badger in a hole. No windowpanes to be had for love nor money, so we emptied three pickle jars and worked them into the walls. Picture that, he’ll say, bringing his bent hands together to show us the size of the jars.

  But I don’t say a thing, so Joe doesn’t tell us. Instead, I press the heel of my hand against the window until its heat melts a hole in the frost. As I work I think about the calf I discovered behind the barn last spring, born too early, flat and white as though it were melting into a snowbank. I think about my father lying on the bed with his boots on. The frost refreezes as clear ice and I melt that too, I melt a clean circle, and in the melting frost I smell dust. My hand burning from the cold, I patiently melt a porthole as wide as a pickle jar. From time to time I press my stinging hand against my sweater.

  Three pickle jars, Joe Pye says from behind me. That’s all we had for light. That and the odd candle.

  Suddenly another voice, my dad’s. The windows of our house in the old country, he says. The glass in those windows was wavy. From being so old.

  Wavy? I say, cranking my head around and sliding down on the chesterfield to look at him.

  2

  My father came to Canada from England in 1903. I believe he thought of it as a temporary thing. Having little solid information, I thought of it in the nature of a fairy tale — he was the eldest of three sons, sent to seek his fortune. To Nebo, Manitoba, as it turned out, to a weathered frame house where the wind blew all the freezing long winter and topsoil drifted across the roads instead of snow. He never returned, but they didn’t send the younger sons after him, the way families do.

  He came in a party of two thousand led by a minister named Isaac Barr. When I was in England, when we cleaned out my nana’s house in Salford, I found, stuck at the bottom of a box of jam and Marmite jars, the recruiting brochure that brought him over. I had spent my early years wondering about all this, and it was a huge relief to be given material to work with. There is the world as the world will be, it said on the first page, which I think must be a quotation, the rest of the pamphlet not having quite the same literary flavour. The brochure had clearly lain in water. I saw rain, a dark evening in fall, gaslights gleaming yellow-green in the puddles. My granddad, Percy Piper, stepping out of the public house and spying the paper in one of those puddles, a brochure that had been making the rounds in the Woolpack. I pictured him plucking it out and taking it home and hanging it over a wire in front of the fire, prying its crinkled pages apart as it dried.

  At the time they called my dad a “nipper.” This didn’t refer to his size (he was seventeen, he must have been tall) but to the fact that he worked as a carter’s helper. I imagined him coming home from work to find his brother Roland reading to their mother in a shrill voice. All the characters in these scenes have the Lancashire turn of phrase and eyes the colour of wet slate, a shade I’m partial to but did not inherit myself. My grandmother was exactly twice my dad’s age at that time. I pictured her as a great overgrown girl with a wide, freckled face (she was still a great overgrown girl when I knew her in her seventies). She wore a dark serge skirt, a blue pinny, streaks of dried bread dough on it where she’d impulsively wiped her fingers while she was mixing, and wooden clogs. Above her head was a motto printed on cardboard in Gothic script: HOME IS THE NEST WHERE ALL IS BEST. “Here, Willie, you read,” she said.

  “‘Let us take possession of Canada!’” my father read. “‘Let our cry be Canada for the British!… ’ What’s this, then?”

  “Your da found it,” said his mother. “Boris has one too. It’s free land in Canada. Boris is dead set to go.”

  I imagine my dad’s cousin Boris coming over that night and all of them studying the pamphlet together. This was the year after the Boer War ended, when the English were all fired up to hold on to their colonies and it looked as though Canada was about to be taken over by types who ate garlic and prayed to plaster statues of the Blessed Virgin. Not that it was prejudice or politics that inspired my relatives, not that they ever thought about it that way. They had their own reasons. Boris, for example, was a stableman for the tram, and Manchester had started laying down electric tramlines.

  There was a voice behind the pamphlet, a minister named Isaac Barr. His tone was candid and respectful. He was addressing himself to a superior type of colonist, however poor. In a section headed “Programme of Action for Men of Small Means,” he declared that a resolute colonist can, in a week’s time, erect a small house to shelter himself for the winter. My dad fetched a pencil and they noted each mention of money: the steamer fare, the train fare, a registration fee for the land. My dad sat down to do the sums: eleven pounds, eighteen shillings, nine pence. This before living expenses, a horse and plow.

  “The blighter’s out to line his pockets,” my granddad cried in dismay.

  “Nay, Percy, the man’s a reverend,” said Nan.

  “I’m doing it,” said Boris (a fleshy youth with black hair standing up in clumps fortified by the grease from his scalp). “I’m signing on,” he said. “I’m that afraid of electrification.”

  No one asked my father what he wanted. Every Saturday his mother opened his pay packet and slid six pence spending money across the kitchen table — that’s the sort of boy he was. Canada must have seemed to him like something made up.

  His parents talked into the night, but when Boris left, my father climbed the stairs and crawled into bed beside his brother Roland. In my version of events, he lay awake for a long time, breathing in the marshy smell of Roland’s scalp and watching a wavy moon slide down the ancient glass of the bedroom window. In the other bed his little brother Hugh ground away at his teeth, and the voices of his parents drifted up the stairs. My father couldn’t make out what they were saying, but he heard his mother laugh, a careless, happy laugh, and he rolled over and pushed his face into the pillow. He was someone I could hardly imagine, a boy who loved home.

  I know from the minute I see my mother making coffee in the morning what sort of day we will have. Some days sadness and anger come off her like a smell, and something in my chest begins to hurt. My jobs are spelled out and I do them: I pick and peel vegetables, dry the dishes and set the table for the next meal, haul wood and water, clean the outhouse and carry ashes from the stove to pour down the holes, feed the chickens and gather the eggs. I do my work properly as an act of resistance: if she’s wanting to punish me, she won’t have a chance. Then I do extra things — carve petals out of the sides of the radishes, put jars of brown-eyed Susans on the table, arrange flowers in the outhouse between the two holes.

  My mother finds the flowers in the outhouse and shoves them down a hole. Satan finds work for idle hands, she says. She puts me to work sifting through the milled oats to pick out grasshopper legs, which are not welcome when they turn up boiled in our porridge. She sits me down on the veranda to do it so she can keep an eye on me while she does the laundry. It’s Monday and her hands are spongy and reeking of bleach. I strain the oats through my fingers, picking out the desiccated legs, shapely like miniature frogs’ legs, or women’s legs. Why are there legs and no bodies? I call down the veranda. What happened to their bodies? My mother, bent over a tub of grey wrung-out clothes, doesn’t answer. She moves hunched from the washtubs to the wringer, not bothering to straighten her back. Someone might imagine that we’ve been taken prisoner by the same ogre.

  Days he’s not plowing or seeding or mowing my father cuts wood down by the river — that’s how he uses his spare time. One night at supper he says suddenly, Saw a lynx today. Up in a spruce.

  In a tree? Phillip says. Lynx don’t climb trees.

  My father doesn’t answer. We’re eating cold chicken, a laying hen that stopped laying. My father’s
working at taking the bones apart. Could the lynx have been up in the tree when he arrived with his axe? Strange it didn’t take off! Could it have crept towards him as he worked? That would be stranger — lynx are very shy. While we pull his story apart, my father works on the hen, prying bits of tough flesh out from between its ribs. He never does explain.

  After supper I walk down to the riverbank. The land falls in three gentle, giant steps as though a carpet were laid over a huge staircase. The tallest trees are on the lowest bank. I can see where my father was working: he cut down seven or eight poplars, and he started skinning the branches off them. I can see the spruce tree where the lynx must have lain. There’s a bed of pine needles under it, and wood chips and shattered bark littered around. I picture the lynx on the lowest spruce branch, up near the trunk, its secretive, ornate face tipped to watch my father.

  Where exactly was my father? Suddenly I understand. My father was sleeping. He lay down to sleep in that fragrant bed, and so there was no movement or noise to alert the lynx. I think of him lying drowsily under the tree, slowly opening his eyes and seeing the lynx, my father’s grey eyes and the knowing eyes of the lynx connecting for an electric second before the lynx clenched its muscles and sprang away. He didn’t tell us because he’s ashamed to have been sleeping in the middle of the day. This happened in Pilgrim’s Progress: Christian was overtaken by slothfulness and lay down to sleep and got into no end of trouble because of it.

  I walk back filled with intention. In the shade of the granary, King and Dolly stand nose to tail swishing each other’s flies. My father will be in the barn milking. I walk down the aisle to where he’s perched on an overturned milk pail. His head is tipped against the cow.

  You were sleeping, I say. When the lynx crept up.

  He doesn’t answer for a minute. No, he says finally, over the sound of the milk thudding into the bottom of the pail. I was looking right at her the whole time. It just didn’t dawn on me what she were.

  I don’t understand how this could be. So what did you do? I finally ask. When you realized?

  I rolled out of the way, he says. She jumped down and took off.

  The cats are pacing around calling to him, switching their tails, furious with desire. He seems not to notice. Dad, I say. Finally he turns his head and sees them and then he stretches a tit in their direction and squirts out a white arc so they forget their dignity and rise up on their haunches, showing the crimson inside of their mouths.

  I sit beside him at the table. Joe Pye and Phillip are across from us, and my mother is at the end near the stove. My dad’s arm lies on the oilcloth beside mine. It looks darker because of the hair curling on it — but really, my arm is a darker tan.

  Smoked whitefish again. I position a chunk of it on the back of my tongue and wash it down untasted with a mouthful of milk. My mother can’t stand this performance. She swallows her last bite and stands up and goes out to the garden without stopping to pull her apron off — she’s trying to avoid evidence that a woman like her has raised a child like me. The porch door slams and I gag and regurgitate onto my plate, tears springing from my eyes. We’ve been eating smoked fish for a month — a man came through in a wagon and sold my mother a crate of it.

  Joe Pye looks at me with sympathy. You think that’s foul, he says. You shoulda tasted ling fish. Remember, eh, Willie? He leans back and plucks at his moustache, ferreting for crumbs.

  Ling fish? I ask.

  Ling fish, says Joe. Yella. We et it every bloody meal on the ship. Eh, Willie? Remember ling fish? Just about caused a riot. They grabbed ahold of Isaac Barr one night and drug him down to steerage and held a flap a that stinkin’ fish up to his face. Wouldn’t open his mouth, the canny bugger. Remember, eh, Willie? Wouldn’t taste the fish. So a chap hucks a piece a hardtack at him. It clips him right on the beak and he claps his hand like this over his face and the blood’s leaking out from his fingers. And then he yells at us: You’re a pack of goddamn savages! (Goddamn — my mother has gone outside, but Joe Pye still swallows that word with an apologetic laugh, so it sounds like gom savages).

  Were you there, Dad? I ask. When he called them gom savages? Phillip gives me a sharp kick under the table.

  I don’t rightly recall, my dad says. He ignores the gom. He sits there in his overalls drinking milky tea. His voice sounds rusty, as though those words have been sitting inside him for a long time. He has more of England in his voice than Joe Pye has. There, now, chuck, he says. Eat your fish. His eyes are fine and kind and evasive. Things happen to him, but he never speaks of them. I feel a fierce longing to pry him open and see what’s inside.

  He did not tell me about their journey. It was Joe Pye, our arthritic little hired man, who found a chance to talk about the Barr Colony in every small event that happened around the farm. I pretended ignorance to keep Joe Pye talking. I knew the stories, but I had to work at casting my father into them. The huge, resolute act of getting on the ship, that’s something I had trouble making him do.

  He fell under a spell was my theory for a while, the spell of Isaac Barr. Isaac Barr, wearing a shiny beaver hat and a black frock coat over his neat, stout, proud body. A great soft moustache and a dapper head, a head like a badger’s, planted into a soft thick neck. The way I imagine him, he had at his centre a testiness that he tried to cover with civil speech. Rather like Mr. Dalrymple. The day they steamed off from the Albert Docks at Liverpool there was a whole settlement in Isaac Barr’s head and under his hat: a school and lending library, musical and theatrical societies, a hospital, a commercial syndicate. It was all there, worked out in amazing detail. He’d spent the winter of 1902 in a rapture of creativity, writing a novel in his mind, the story of a perfect world.

  But in the flesh his characters turned out to be a problem. Like God, who would take only born-again Christians in the Second Coming, Isaac Barr would take only the English to the Dominion. His reasoning was the same, he wanted a perfect world. He’d gathered them up from all over England, and they weren’t farmers — a rather fundamental shortcoming, you’d think, but he was operating on the principle that a Manchester umbrella vendor will in every instance make a better Canadian than a Ukrainian grain farmer. He’d flattered them into joining, and by the time they boarded the ship they thought they were doing the New World a favour. So they were demanding, even belligerent, and the most belligerent were armed ex-soldiers just back from the Boer.

  They were too savage for my father. He dropped out while they were crossing Manitoba, somehow he escaped Isaac Barr. He ended up farming among the very people Isaac Barr had set out to protect him from. He settled in a district that was half Eastern European farmers — Ukrainian mainly, but also Polish, Czech, Russian. Galicians, we called them all, said it the way the English said Krauts in the war, or Huns. The Galicians have an epistle in the Bible written to them, I remember pointing out, but my mother said it wasn’t the same people (although from what I learned in history at Ward Street Grammar School, I believe she was wrong). When we ventured into their yards or kitchens we were cautious. Any question about the old country — their old country — was bound to produce something appalling, like the time Mary Kulyk offered to show us a picture of her grandmother, and it turned out she was dead, her mouth a straight line as though it was sewn shut and all her family with their heads tied up in black shawls standing behind the open coffin. The Galicians did not really belong in our district. Whereas my father was one of Canada’s natural settlers: he was brought over on purpose, he spoke English, he ate normal food.

  That’s what I told myself, but even then I knew it wasn’t true. Our neighbour Mr. Kulyk looked like something cobbled together out of the prairie, fine lines of dirt etching the wrinkles fanning out from his eyes, his eyes bright and his legs wiry, his hard little belly a storehouse of food for the winter. My father looked glazed, preoccupied, an undeveloped idea of a farmer, sleepwalking through the day.

  One night, an ordinary night, my dad is alone finishing chores in t
he barn. Joe Pye is not with us just then. It begins to get dark and Dad doesn’t come in, so finally Mother sends Phillip to see if he needs help. We’re in the living room and Phillip comes back in and stands in the kitchen and says, Mother. He has the look on his face of a much younger boy. Dad’s in the pigpen, he says. But by then Dad is at the window, walking unsteadily towards the house. One side of his hair and face is smeared with mud and pig manure. Mother says, Will, in a voice of consternation and blame. She says to me, Put water on.

  While we work, Dad sits on a kitchen chair. I want him to talk to me, but he just looks at me once apologetically and says, Quite a mess, eh? and then he sits with his eyes to the floor as if he is trying to draw a curtain around himself. So without being asked I go into the living room. All the while he bathes, Mother stays with him. I can hear her questioning him in a shrill whisper. Now and again he answers in a low voice. Then he walks through the living room wrapped in a quilt, chalky white, looking as though someone has whacked him between the eyes and he has just come to, and goes to bed.

  In the morning it is Phillip who wakes me up, banging his boot on my door. There is no fire lit, and one of the barn cats stares boldly from the arm of the chesterfield. Dad’s work-boots are by the back door, but Dad and Mother are not there. Phillip is sitting in the living room lacing up his boots. Get going, he says. We have to do the chores on our own. Where are they? I cry. Gone, he says. There is a queer expression on his freckled face. Dread clamps my chest. This is just as Mr. Dalrymple said it would be. While I slept I was thrust into a different life.