A Beauty (24 page)

Mrs. Knoblauch was standing at her kitchen window, looking out over her backyard, and when she heard the knock at the front door, her heart jumped in her chest. She’d been remembering the evening Elena Huhtala had come to her, how she’d watched her standing in the backyard looking out to the prairie. And the caragana pods were shooting off the bushes. Now piles of them lay spent on the ground all along the hedges, glittering a rich brown that belied their emptiness. She went to the front door remembering the many-coloured sunset, the sky so tender and the young girl waiting. She knew before she opened the door it wouldn’t be Elena standing there.

She didn’t offer Mr. Huhtala coffee or tea or anything to eat. She didn’t ask him to come in and sit down. She wasn’t disposed to like him. He also seemed slightly antagonistic towards her, or perhaps he was just impatient. She had no compunctions about letting him know what was what. “There’s one person in Gilroy who might know where they went, and that’s Mrs. Janet McLaughlin,” she said. “If he told her. Which I doubt.”

She didn’t point out the way to him and he didn’t ask if she would. He could ask anyone he met in any street in town.

My mother never set eyes on Elena Huhtala. As soon as she heard about her, she avoided going uptown. She sent us kids to the store and the post office instead of going herself. She often did that, anyway, but she made sure of it in those days, as if she knew in advance the girl would be trouble for her. Some things aren’t hard to predict.

She only referred to her once to anyone outside the family, and that was the day Anna Quinn visited.

“Everyone says she’s so pretty,” Anna said that day. “But I canna see it.”

A momentary startle in my mother’s eyes turned to amusement. She even laughed, letting Anna laugh too. The statement had been so staunch and ridiculous.

You might think she wouldn’t have given Mr. Huhtala the time of day. After all, she must have been in shock over my father’s leaving. Betrayal was one thing; abandonment had some bigger repercussions for a woman with seven children. You might imagine she’d be so bitter about it, her bitterness would spill over in such a situation, but she put the coffee on and fed the man.

My mother knew when a person needed to talk. She brought the coffee and the simple meal and sat across from him, rocking Louisa in her arms and crooning to her so it wouldn’t seem as if she was waiting for anything from him. I was doing some work, pasting in my scrapbook at the table, and she didn’t tell me to leave. He started slowly and it took a while before he warmed up. Maybe even more than the food and her quietness it was his sympathy for her that drew him out. He had a thoughtful way of explaining that seemed to thank her for her kindness.

He told us of his travels. He said he’d talked to his neighbours and to people in Addison and Charlesville. He’d stayed a while in Virginia Valley; he didn’t say why. He’d figured the fellow his daughter had been travelling with would head for Regina, so he’d gone right there and had tracked him down. It wasn’t hard, he said, because of the car the guy was driving, a big gold roadster that people had remembered seeing on the road. Bill Longmore was the guy’s name. A young man from Calgary. He told Mr. Huhtala she’d left him here, at this little place called Gilroy. He didn’t have a clue why. She just got out of the car and took off down the road, he said.

Before then, any time in my life before then, I’d have interrupted. I’d have hopped up and down and waved my arms if I had to, until they let me speak. Because I knew why. I knew why she’d stopped the car and got out and come to our town. But I didn’t say anything. I let them go on talking, not even speculating, either one of them – as if it didn’t matter why a person did a thing. They just went on in their calm voices, following Mr. Huhtala’s course to Gilroy, and skirting around the fact that my mother didn’t know where my father had gone, and the fact that, therefore, it was unlikely Mr. Huhtala would ever find his daughter.

I suppose if I had spoken up, what I had to say wouldn’t have mattered to either of them. It wouldn’t have meant anything. To my mother’s mind it would have been only another instance of me thinking I was important. But it was what Elena Huhtala had left behind for me, whether she’d wanted to or not.

She’d stopped the car and got out and come to Gilroy because she’d seen me. And something about me, I suppose the way I was trudging along the tracks, alone, reminded her of herself. I was right from the start. Even though she’d tried to deny it, even though she wouldn’t admit we had anything in common and had tried to
ignore me. She’d seen herself like me. She was riding in that open car, dreaming an open kind of dreaming, oh yes, imagining that the world was like the view from the passenger seat – endless, lying all before her. Until she saw me. A girl. And she’d lost her girlhood. I don’t mean she thought she could get it back, not at all, in any way, but maybe she was reaching for some bit of herself she didn’t want to travel on without.

My father once told me the stars had crossed my eyes. It was only to get me to wear my eye patch; I knew that at the time. He liked being fanciful. But I never forgot it, how he called me to sit on his knee, how I felt too big – my arms and legs draped over him – yet privileged. His favourite; I always thought so. My brother and sisters watched with their mouths hanging open, and my mother clattered the dishes to register her disapproval. He picked it up from the table and tied the hated thing around my head, and all the while he was telling me I had a special vision. A gift that I must develop.

I’d already suffered a little, knowing I was different from other children, and I took to the idea of specialness with fervour. I wore the patch. It didn’t make much difference, otherwise, in my life; it didn’t incite any worse teasing than my wonky eye had. But the idea that I was important, not because the stars thought so, but because he did – a lot depended on that.

I believed that because of watching so much, I saw more than other people saw. I thought Mr Huhtala recognized that, even though his daughter hadn’t. I thought that was the reason he talked to me when my mother took Louisa to the bedroom to change her. But it might have been just that he’d got started talking and then he couldn’t stop.

Mr. Huhtala told me that Finnish people are supposed to be good at finding lost things and lost people. Finns pride themselves on seeing, he said. They think they have a special sense that enables them to find what they’ve lost, and also to know the future. “Especially when it concerns a death,” he said. “They can predict their own demise, you know, sometimes so far in advance you have to think it’s more inevitable than clairvoyant.” He stopped there and smiled, I think the only time I saw him smile. I remember how I felt when he said that, with that melancholy smile, how strangely rewarded I felt, as if I had been admitted to a secret and incredibly select society. And so I told him about the picture I kept in my mind, of his daughter walking that first night through the streets of Gilroy, carrying her shoes full of dimes. And he told me the Finnish people did that at their wedding dances. The bride took off her shoes at the close of the evening and they were passed around so everyone could fill them with silver coins for good luck.

I didn’t tell him I had one of her dimes, one she’d dropped, pasted into my scrapbook under the heading: “What a fortune costs.” I didn’t tell him I’d written down the things he’d told us earlier about Bill Longmore and the gold roadster he was driving and that he was from Calgary. I didn’t tell him my father had once said I possessed a special vision. Speak a little, hear a lot, that’s a Finnish proverb I would learn years later, but my mother had already taught me the concept.

Mr. Huhtala rose from our table and thanked my mother, standing over her.

“Wait,” she said. She took up a pencil and opened her bible to the back page. “Give me your address, and if I hear I’ll let you know.”

So she wrote “Matti Huhtala, Trevna, Sask.” into her bible,
and I surreptitiously noted it down in my scrapbook, in case the bible was ever lost.

I know that I, in the last stage of my childhood, reminded Mr. Huhtala of his daughter. I expect that’s really why he talked to me and told me things he didn’t tell my mother. I had the same sturdiness Elena had at that age, before she grew taller and more slender, the better to slip away from him. He told me more about being Finnish than he’d ever told her; why he did that was a mystery to him, I’m sure. My fanciful picture of those shoes full of dimes provoked it, perhaps. It was a long time since he’d thought of weddings in the old country.

Those days when Elena had been her more solid self, before privacy had become important to her – and naturally so; all adolescents must be reticent in order to protect themselves, he knew that – those were good times for the two of them. And when she changed, she still played cribbage with him, she still listened to the radio with him, maybe, curling up in her chair, next to his, in the living room. She did her homework at the kitchen table while he read the newspaper or pored over his bank statements or filled out government farm reports. They had learned English together at that table, he told me, studying her elementary readers. As she grew older, she took on more of the cleaning and cooking and gardening. The chickens became her job, the only animals they kept besides a dog to bark at foxes. He stayed away from everyone, and didn’t think it harmed her.

From time to time during her last year of school, he worried about her future, but he didn’t speak of it and she didn’t, either. He didn’t talk to her about the failure of the farm; it wasn’t necessary; she had eyes to see. He didn’t put a crop in that spring. She finished
school and continued with her daily chores, which were not many since they had no animals anymore. She read all his books again, sat motionless on the swing he’d put up in the yard for her years before. He thought she was waiting for him to say what he was going to do for her, while every day went on like the day before.

He’d had to leave, he told me. The farm had failed. He couldn’t provide for his daughter. All he could do for her was set her free. He was talking to himself, really, more than to me, telling himself again how it had been, the way you do when you think going over the steps you took will tell you why you made a decision. He’d left her some money, all the money he had in the world; he wanted me to know that. It wasn’t much, he said, but it would have been enough to keep her until she could find a job. I didn’t say she’d landed in town penniless; I opened my mouth to tell him and then the look on his face scared me. I don’t know how to describe it. Like he was ready to do something desperate if he couldn’t hold on to knowing he’d done that. He knew he’d frightened me and settled his features. I watched him do it. Then he told me some more about Finland. Maybe that was when he told me about Finnish people being good at finding lost things and lost people. So I wouldn’t worry.

He went back to his farm when he left Gilroy. He didn’t know what else to do. He had no money and no hope.

I don’t know what it would be like to lose your daughter. Losing your father is like losing your footing. Your vision tilts. You say to yourself: Things are not what they seemed to be. And they never will again be what they seemed to be.

My father called me to come sit on his knee. “Come here, Ruthie,” he said, and patted his knee. We were at the table, finishing our
supper. My little brother and my little sisters set their forks down to watch and I slid off my chair. I slid around the table, too, so as not to create too much fuss, and climbed up on his knee. My mother rose from her place and started gathering the dirty dishes, clattering. I giggled and clapped my hand over my mouth. Then I couldn’t stop laughing even though it felt as if I’d grown extra arms and legs that hung too far over my father, and I pulled myself in as small as I could when my mother passed by.

My father was a man who did everything easily. He did everything as if he’d already half-forgotten what he’d intended to do, and it wouldn’t matter much if he did forget, but after all, here he was, in this dinky little rented house, at this child-crowded table, with this what’s-a-great-big-girl-like-you daughter on his knee, so he finished what he’d started; he reached over the mashed potatoes bowl and picked up my eye patch from the tablecloth where I’d thrown it down beside my plate. The hateful, homemade, black thing. I closed both eyes when I saw what he was going to do. His fingers fumbled with the strings at the back of my head, and some of my hair got caught in the knot and pulled. I opened my mouth to squawk. Too late. He was speaking. He was telling me the stars had crossed the sky the night I was born.

Every night in a small town that did not have electricity the sky was crammed with stars, banks of stars diminishing in size as they multiplied in numbers – presumably to infinity – but none of us had ever seen them move. The interest on my siblings’ faces turned to awe. The baby drooled. My mother clacked plates and banged pots a few steps away in the kitchen. My father, who appreciated opposition, went on with pleasure lifting little eyebrows in his voice. His method was to toss out details as he would have tossed scraps to a dog too disciplined to beg at the table, if we’d had a dog, which we didn’t because our mother said we
needed to eat our scraps ourselves. In spite of the nonchalance, my dad couldn’t hide the fact that he liked to tell a story. And he was apt to let it carry him away. In this case, not only had the stars swept from their usual, seemingly fixed spots in the firmament on the night of my birth, but their doing so had given me a special gift of seeing, which it was up to me to develop.