A Bird in the House (11 page)

“I’m damned if I know,” my father admitted. “Beth –”

“Yes?”

They both seemed to have forgotten about me. It was at breakfast, which we always ate in the kitchen, and I sat rigidly on my chair, pretending to ignore and thus snub their withdrawal from me. I glared at the window, but it was so thickly plumed and scrolled with frost that I could not see out. I glanced back to my parents. My father had not replied, and my mother was looking at him in that anxious and half-frowning way she had recently developed.

“What is it, Ewen?” Her voice had the same nervous sharpness it bore sometimes when she would say to me, “For mercy’s sake, Vanessa, what is it
now
?” as though whatever was the matter, it was bound to be the last straw.

My father spun his sterling silver serviette ring, engraved with his initials, slowly around on the table.

“I never thought things would turn out like this, did you?”

“Please –” my mother said in a low strained voice, “please, Ewen, let’s not start all this again. I can’t take it.”

“All right,” my father said. “Only –”

“The MacLeods used to have money and now they don’t,” my mother cried. “Well, they’re not alone. Do you think all that
matters to me, Ewen? What I can’t bear is to see you forever reproaching yourself. As if it were your fault.”

“I don’t think it’s the comedown,” my father said. “If I were somewhere else, I don’t suppose it would matter to me, either, except where you’re concerned. But I suppose you’d work too hard wherever you were – it’s bred into you. If you haven’t got anything to slave away at, you’ll sure as hell invent something.”

“What do you think I should do, let the house go to wrack and ruin? That would go over well with your mother, wouldn’t it?”

“That’s just it,” my father said. “It’s the damned house all the time. I haven’t only taken on my father’s house, I’ve taken on everything that goes with it, apparently. Sometimes I really wonder –”

“Well, it’s a good thing I’ve inherited some practicality even if you haven’t,” my mother said. “I’ll say that for the Connors – they aren’t given to brooding, thank the Lord. Do you want your egg poached or scrambled?”

“Scrambled,” my father said. “All I hope is that this Noreen doesn’t get married straightaway, that’s all.”

“She won’t,” my mother said. “Who’s she going to meet who could afford to marry?”

“I marvel at you, Beth,” my father said. “You look as though a puff of wind would blow you away. But underneath, by God, you’re all hardwood.”

“Don’t talk stupidly,” my mother said. “All I hope is that she doesn’t object to taking your mother’s breakfast up on a tray.”

“That’s right,” my father said angrily. “Rub it in.”

“Oh Ewen, I’m sorry!” my mother cried, her face suddenly stricken. “I don’t know why I say these things. I didn’t mean to.”

“I know,” my father said. “Here, cut it out, honey. Just for God’s sake please don’t cry.”

“I’m sorry,” my mother repeated, blowing her nose.

“We’re both sorry,” my father said. “Not that that changes anything.”

After my father had gone, I got down from my chair and went to my mother.

“I don’t want you to go back to the office. I don’t want a hired girl here. I’ll hate her.”

My mother sighed, making me feel that I was placing an intolerable burden on her, and yet making me resent having to feel this weight. She looked tired, as she often did these days. Her tiredness bored me, made me want to attack her for it.

“Catch me getting along with a dumb old hired girl,” I threatened.

“Do what you like,” my mother said abruptly. “What can I do about it?”

And then, of course, I felt bereft, not knowing which way to turn.

My father need not have worried about Noreen getting married. She was, as it turned out, interested not in boys but in God. My mother was relieved about the boys but alarmed about God.

“It isn’t natural,” she said, “for a girl of seventeen. Do you think she’s all right mentally, Ewen?”

When my parents, along with Grandmother MacLeod, went to the United Church every Sunday, I was made to go to Sunday school in the church basement, where there were small red chairs which humiliatingly resembled kindergarten furniture, and pictures of Jesus wearing a white sheet and surrounded by a whole lot of well-dressed kids whose mothers
obviously had not suffered them to come unto Him until every face and ear was properly scrubbed. Our religious observances also included grace at meals, when my father would mumble “For what we are about to receive the Lord make us truly thankful Amen,” running the words together as though they were one long word. My mother approved of these rituals, which seemed decent and moderate to her. Noreen’s religion, however, was a different matter. Noreen belonged to the Tabernacle of the Risen and Reborn, and she had got up to testify no less than seven times in the past two years, she told us. My mother, who could not imagine anyone’s voluntarily making a public spectacle of themselves, was profoundly shocked by this revelation.

“Don’t worry,” my father soothed her. “She’s all right. She’s just had kind of a dull life, that’s all.”

My mother shrugged and went on worrying and trying to help Noreen without hurting her feelings, by tactful remarks about the advisability of modulating one’s voice when singing hymns, and the fact that there was plenty of hot water so Noreen really didn’t need to hesitate about taking a bath. She even bought a razor and a packet of blades and whispered to Noreen that any girl who wore transparent blouses so much would probably like to shave under her arms. None of these suggestions had the slightest effect on Noreen. She did not cease belting out hymns at the top of her voice, she bathed once a fortnight, and the sorrel-coloured hair continued to bloom like a thicket of Indian paintbrush in her armpits.

Grandmother MacLeod refused to speak to Noreen. This caused Noreen a certain amount of bewilderment until she finally hit on an answer.

“Your poor grandma,” she said. “She is deaf as a post. These things are sent to try us here on earth, Vanessa. But if
she makes it into Heaven, I’ll bet you anything she will hear clear as a bell.”

Noreen and I talked about Heaven quite a lot, and also Hell. Noreen had an intimate and detailed knowledge of both places. She not only knew what they looked like – she even knew how big they were. Heaven was seventy-seven thousand miles square and it had four gates, each one made out of a different kind of precious jewel. The Pearl Gate, the Topaz Gate, the Amethyst Gate, the Ruby Gate – Noreen would reel them off, all the gates of Heaven. I told Noreen they sounded like poetry, but she was puzzled by my reaction and said I shouldn’t talk that way. If you said poetry, it sounded like it was just made up and not really so, Noreen said.

Hell was larger than Heaven, and when I asked why, thinking of it as something of a comedown for God, Noreen said naturally it had to be bigger because there were a darn sight more people there than in Heaven. Hell was one hundred and ninety million miles deep and was in perpetual darkness, like a cave or under the sea. Even the flames (this was the awful thing)
did not give off any light
.

I did not actually believe in Noreen’s doctrines, but the images which they conjured up began to inhabit my imagination. Noreen’s fund of exotic knowledge was not limited to religion, although in a way it all seemed related. She could do many things which had a spooky tinge to them. Once when she was making a cake, she found we had run out of eggs. She went outside and gathered a bowl of fresh snow and used it instead. The cake rose like a charm, and I stared at Noreen as though she were a sorceress. In fact, I began to think of her as a sorceress, someone not quite of this earth. There was nothing unearthly about her broad shoulders and hips and her forest of dark red hair, but even these features took on a
slightly sinister significance to me. I no longer saw her through the eyes of the expressed opinions of my mother and father, as a girl who had quit school at grade eight and whose life on the farm had been endlessly drab. I knew the truth – Noreen’s life had not been drab at all, for she dwelt in a world of violent splendours, a world filled with angels whose wings of delicate light bore real feathers, and saints shining like the dawn, and prophets who spoke in ancient tongues, and the ecstatic souls of the saved, as well as denizens of the lower regions – mean-eyed imps and crooked cloven-hoofed monsters and beasts with the bodies of swine and the human heads of murderers, and lovely depraved jezebels torn by dogs through all eternity. The middle layer of Creation, our earth, was equally full of grotesque presences, for Noreen believed strongly in the visitation of ghosts and the communication with spirits. She could prove this with her Ouija board. We would both place our fingers lightly on the indicator, and it would skim across the board and spell out answers to our questions. I did not believe whole-heartedly in the Ouija board, either, but I was cautious about the kind of question I asked, in case the answer would turn out unfavourable and I would be unable to forget it.

One day Noreen told me she could also make a table talk. We used the small table in my bedroom, and sure enough, it lifted very slightly under our fingertips and tapped once for
Yes
, twice for
No
. Noreen asked if her Aunt Ruthie would get better from the kidney operation, and the table replied
No
. I withdrew my hands.

“I don’t want to do it any more.”

“Gee, what’s the matter, Vanessa?” Noreen’s plain placid face creased in a frown. “We only just begun.”

“I have to do my homework.”

My heart lurched as I said this. I was certain Noreen would know I was lying, and that she would know not by any ordinary perception, either. But her attention had been caught by something else, and I was thankful, at least until I saw what it was.

My bedroom window was not opened in the coldest weather. The storm window, which was fitted outside as an extra wall against the winter, had three small circular holes in its frame so that some fresh air could seep into the house. The sparrow must have been floundering in the new snow on the roof, for it had crawled in through one of these holes and was now caught between the two layers of glass. I could not bear the panic of the trapped bird, and before I realised what I was doing, I had thrown open the bedroom window. I was not releasing the sparrow into any better a situation, I soon saw, for instead of remaining quiet and allowing us to catch it in order to free it, it began flying blindly around the room, hitting the lampshade, brushing against the walls, its wings seeming to spin faster and faster.

I was petrified. I thought I would pass out if those palpitating wings touched me. There was something in the bird’s senseless movements that revolted me. I also thought it was going to damage itself, break one of those thin wing-bones, perhaps, and then it would be lying on the floor, dying, like the pimpled and horribly featherless baby birds we saw sometimes on the sidewalks in the spring when they had fallen out of their nests. I was not any longer worried about the sparrow. I wanted only to avoid the sight of it lying broken on the floor. Viciously, I thought that if Noreen said,
God sees the little sparrow fall
, I would kick her in the shins. She did not, however, say this.

“A bird in the house means a death in the house,” Noreen remarked.

Shaken, I pulled my glance away from the whirling wings and looked at Noreen.

“What?”

“That’s what I’ve heard said, anyhow.”

The sparrow had exhausted itself. It lay on the floor, spent and trembling. I could not bring myself to touch it. Noreen bent and picked it up. She cradled it with great gentleness between her cupped hands. Then we took it downstairs, and when I had opened the back door, Noreen set the bird free.

“Poor little scrap,” she said, and I felt struck to the heart, knowing she had been concerned all along about the sparrow, while I, perfidiously, in the chaos of the moment, had been concerned only about myself.

“Wanna do some with the Ouija board, Vanessa?” Noreen asked.

I shivered a little, perhaps only because of the blast of cold air which had come into the kitchen when the door was opened.

“No thanks, Noreen. Like I said, I got my homework to do. But thanks all the same.”

“That’s okay,” Noreen said in her guileless voice. “Any time.”

But whenever she mentioned the Ouija board or the talking table, after that, I always found some excuse not to consult these oracles.

“Do you want to come to church with me this evening, Vanessa?” my father asked.

“How come you’re going to the evening service?” I enquired.

“Well, we didn’t go this morning. We went snowshoeing instead, remember? I think your grandmother was a little
bit put out about it. She went alone this morning. I guess it wouldn’t hurt you and me, to go now.”

We walked through the dark, along the white streets, the snow squeaking dryly under our feet. The streetlights were placed at long intervals along the sidewalks, and around each pole the circle of flimsy light created glistening points of blue and crystal on the crusted snow. I would have liked to take my father’s hand, as I used to do, but I was too old for that now. I walked beside him, taking long steps so he would not have to walk more slowly on my account.

The sermon bored me, and I began leafing through the Hymnary for entertainment. I must have drowsed, for the next thing I knew, my father was prodding me and we were on our feet for the closing hymn.

I knew the tune well, so I sang loudly for the first verse. But the music to that hymn is sombre, and all at once the words themselves seemed too dreadful to be sung. I stopped singing, my throat knotted. I thought I was going to cry, but I did not know why, except that the song recalled to me my Grandmother Connor, who had been dead only a year now. I wondered why her soul needed to be ransomed. If God did not think she was good enough just as she was, then I did not have much use for His opinion.
Rest beyond the river
– was that what had happened to her? She had believed in Heaven, but I did not think that rest beyond the river was quite what she had in mind. To think of her in Noreen’s flashy Heaven,
though – that was even worse. Someplace where nobody ever got annoyed or had to be smoothed down and placated, someplace where there were never any family scenes – that would have suited my Grandmother Connor. Maybe she wouldn’t have minded a certain amount of rest beyond the river, at that.