A Bird in the House (7 page)

“Stop it, Beth,” Aunt Edna said. “You’re only upsetting yourself.”

“Ewen never spoke of it to me,” my mother went on, “until once his mother showed me the letter he’d written to her at the time. It was a peculiar letter, almost formal, saying how gallantly Rod had died, and all that. I guess I shouldn’t have, but I told him she’d shown it to me. He was very angry that she had. And then, as though for some reason he were terribly ashamed, he said –
I had to write something to her, but men don’t really die like that, Beth. It wasn’t that way at all
. It was only after the war that he decided to come back and study medicine and go into practice with his father.”

“Had Rod meant to?” Aunt Edna asked.

“I don’t know,” my mother said slowly. “I never felt I should ask Ewen that.”

Aunt Edna was gathering up the coffee things, for I could hear the clash of cups and saucers being stacked on the tray.

“You know what I heard her say to Vanessa once, Beth?
The MacLeods never tell lies
. Those were her exact words. Even then, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

“Please, Edna –” my mother sounded worn out now. “Don’t.”

“Oh Glory,” Aunt Edna said remorsefully, “I’ve got all the delicacy of a two-ton truck. I didn’t mean Ewen, for heaven’s sake. That wasn’t what I meant at all. Here, let me plump up your pillows for you.”

Then the baby began to cry, so I could not hear anything more of interest: I took my bike and went out beyond Manawaka, riding aimlessly along the gravel highway. It was late summer, and the wheat had changed colour, but instead of being high and bronzed in the fields, it was stunted and desiccated, for there had been no rain again this year. But in the bluff where I stopped and crawled under the barbed wire fence and lay stretched out on the grass, the plentiful poplar leaves were turning to a luminous yellow and shone like church windows in the sun. I put my head down very close to the earth and looked at what was going on there. Grasshoppers with enormous eyes ticked and twitched around me, as though the dry air were perfect for their purposes. A ladybird laboured mightily to climb a blade of grass, fell off, and started all over again, seeming to be unaware that she possessed wings and could have flown up.

I thought of the accidents that might easily happen to a person – or, of course, might not happen, might happen to somebody else. I thought of the dead baby, my sister, who might as easily have been I. Would she, then, have been lying
here in my place, the sharp grass making its small toothmarks on her brown arms, the sun warming her to the heart? I thought of the leather-bound volumes of Greek, and the six different kinds of iced cakes that used to be offered always in the MacLeod house, and the pictures of leopards and green seas. I thought of my brother, who had been born alive after all, and now had been given his life’s name.

I could not really comprehend these things, but I sensed their strangeness, their disarray. I felt that whatever God might love in this world, it was certainly not order.

I
n winter my Grandfather Connor used to wear an enormous coat made of the pelt of a bear. So shaggy and coarse-furred was this coat, so unevenly coloured in patches ranging from amber to near-black, and so vile-smelling when it had become wet with snow, that it seemed to have belonged when it was alive to some lonely and giant Kodiak crankily roaming a high frozen plateau, or an ancient grizzly scarred with battles in the sinister forests of the north. In actuality, it had been an ordinary brown bear and it had come, sad to say, from no more fabled a place than Galloping Mountain, only a hundred miles from Manawaka. The skin had once been given to my grandfather as payment, in the days when he was a blacksmith, before he became a hardware merchant and developed the policy of cash only. He had had it cobbled into a coat by the local shoemaker, and Grandmother Connor had managed to sew in the lining. How long ago that was, no one could say for sure, but my mother, the eldest of his family, said she could not remember a time when he had not worn it. To me, at the age of ten and a half, this meant it must be about a century old.
The coat was so heavy that I could not even lift it by myself. I never used to wonder how he could carry that phenomenal weight on himself, or why he would choose to, because it was obvious that although he was old he was still an extraordinarily strong man, built to shoulder weights.

Whenever I went into Simlow’s Ladies’ Wear with my mother, and made grotesque faces at myself in the long mirror while she tried on dresses, Millie Christopherson who worked there would croon a phrase which made me break into snickering until my mother, who was death on bad manners, tapped anxiously at my shoulders with her slender, nervous hands
. It’s you, Mrs. MacLeod
, Millie would say feelingly,
no kidding it’s absolutely you
. I appropriated the phrase for my grandfather’s winter coat.
It’s you
, I would simper nastily at him, although never, of course, aloud.

In my mind I sometimes called him “The Great Bear.” The name had many associations other than his coat and his surliness. It was the way he would stalk around the Brick House as though it were a cage, on Sundays, impatient for the new week’s beginning that would release him into the only freedom he knew, the acts of work. It was the way he would take to the basement whenever a man came to call upon Aunt Edna, which in those days was “not often, because – as I had overheard my mother outlining in sighs to my father – most of the single men her age in Manawaka considered that the time she had spent working in Winnipeg had made more difference than it really had, and the situation wasn’t helped by her flyaway manner (whatever that might mean). But if ever she was asked out to a movie, and the man was waiting and making stilted weather-chat with Grandmother Connor, Grandfather would prowl through the living room as though seeking a place of rest and not
finding it, would stare fixedly without speaking, and would then descend the basement steps to the rocking chair which sat beside the furnace. Above ground, he would not have been found dead sitting in a rocking chair, which he considered a piece of furniture suitable only for the elderly, of whom he was never in his own eyes one. From his cave, however, the angry crunching of the wooden rockers against the cement floor would reverberate throughout the house, a kind of sub-verbal Esperanto, a disapproval which even the most obtuse person could not fail to comprehend.

In some unformulated way, I also associated the secret name with Great Bear Lake, which I had seen only on maps and which I imagined to be a deep vastness of black water, lying somewhere very far beyond our known prairies of tamed fields and barbed-wire fences, somewhere in the regions of jagged rock and eternal ice, where human voices would be drawn into a cold and shadowed stillness without leaving even a trace of warmth.

One Saturday afternoon in January, I was at the rink when my grandfather appeared unexpectedly. He was wearing his formidable coat, and to say he looked out of place among the skaters thronging around the edges of the ice would be putting it mildly. Embarrassed, I whizzed over to him.

“There you are, Vanessa – about time,” he said, as though he had been searching for me for hours. “Get your skates off now, and come along. You’re to come home with me for supper. You’ll be staying the night at our place. Your dad’s gone away out to Freehold, and your mother’s gone with him. Fine time to pick for it. It’s blowing up for a blizzard, if you ask me. They’ll not get back for a couple of days, more than likely. Don’t see why he don’t just tell people to make their own way
in to the hospital. Ewen’s too easy-going. He’ll not get a penny nor a word of thanks for it, you can bet your life on that.”

My father and Dr. Cates used to take the country calls in turn. Often when my father went out in the winter, my mother would go with him, in case the old Nash got stuck in the snow and also to talk and thus prevent my father from going to sleep at the wheel, for falling snow has a hypnotic effect.

“What about Roddie?” I asked, for my brother was only a few months old.

“The old lady’s keeping care of him,” Grandfather Connor replied abruptly.

The old lady meant my Grandmother MacLeod, who was actually a few years younger than Grandfather Connor. He always referred to her in this way, however, as a calculated insult, and here my sympathies were with him for once. He maintained, quite correctly, that she gave herself airs because her husband had been a doctor and now her son was one, and that she looked down on the Connors because they had come from famine Irish (although at least, thank God, Protestant). The two of them seldom met, except at Christmas, and never exchanged more than a few words. If they had ever really clashed, it would have been like a brontosaurus running headlong into a tyrannosaurus.

“Hurry along now,” he said, when I had taken off my skates and put on my snow boots. “You’ve got to learn not to dawdle. You’re an awful dawdler, Vanessa.”

I did not reply. Instead, when we left the rink I began to take exaggeratedly long strides. But he paid no attention to my attempt to reproach him with my speed. He walked beside me steadily and silently, wrapped in his great fur coat and his authority.

The Brick House was at the other end of town, so while I shuffled through the snow and pulled my navy wool scarf up around my nose against the steel cutting edge of the wind, I thought about the story I was setting down in a five-cent scribbler at nights in my room. I was much occupied by the themes of love and death, although my experience of both had so far been gained principally from the Bible, which I read in the same way as I read Eaton’s Catalogue or the collected works of Rudyard Kipling – because I had to read something, and the family’s finances in the thirties did not permit the purchase of enough volumes of
Doctor Doolittle
or the
Oz
books to keep me going.

For the love scenes, I gained useful material from The Song of Solomon
. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for thy love is better than wine
, or
By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth; I sought him but I found him not
. My interpretation was somewhat vague, and I was not helped to any appreciable extent by the explanatory bits in small print at the beginning of each chapter –
The church’s love unto Christ. The church’s fight and victory in temptation
, et cetera. These explanations did not puzzle me, though, for I assumed even then that they had simply been put there for the benefit of gentle and unworldly people such as my Grandmother Connor, so that they could read the Holy Writ without becoming upset. To me, the woman in The Song was some barbaric queen, beautiful and terrible, and I could imagine her, wearing a long robe of leopard skin and one or two heavy gold bracelets, pacing an alabaster courtyard and keening her unrequited love.

The heroine in my story (which took place in ancient Egypt – my ignorance of this era did not trouble me) was very like the woman in The Song of Solomon, except that mine had long wavy auburn hair, and when her beloved left her, the
only thing she could bring herself to eat was an avocado, which seemed to me considerably more stylish and exotic than apples in lieu of love. Her young man was a gifted carver, who had been sent out into the desert by the cruel pharaoh (pharaohs were always cruel – of this I was positive) in order to carve a giant sphinx for the royal tomb. Should I have her die while he was away? Or would it be better if he perished out in the desert? Which of them did I like the least? With the characters whom I liked best, things always turned out right in the end. Yet the death scenes had an undeniable appeal, a sombre splendour, with (as it said in Ecclesiastes) the mourners going about the streets and all the daughters of music brought low. Both death and love seemed regrettably far from Manawaka and the snow, and my grandfather stamping his feet on the front porch of the Brick House and telling me to do the same or I’d be tracking the wet in all over the hardwood floor.

The house was too warm, almost stifling. Grandfather burned mainly birch in the furnace, although it cost twice as much as poplar, and now that he had retired from the hardware store, the furnace gave him something to do and so he was forever stoking it. Grandmother Connor was in the dining room, her stout body in its brown rayon dress bending over the canary’s cage.

“Hello, pet,” she greeted me. “You should have heard Birdie just a minute ago – one of those real long trills. He’s been moulting lately, and this is the first time he’s sung in weeks.”

“Gee,” I said enthusiastically, for although I was not fond of canaries, I was extremely fond of my grandmother. “That’s swell. Maybe he’ll do it again.”

“Messy things, them birds,” my grandfather commented. “I can never see what you see in a fool thing like that, Agnes.”

My grandmother did not attempt to reply to this.

“Would you like a cup of tea, Timothy?” she asked.

“Nearly supper-time, ain’t it?”

“Well, not for a little while yet.”

“It’s away past five,” my grandfather said. “What’s Edna been doing with herself?”

“She’s got the pot-roast in,” my grandmother answered, “but it’s not done yet.”

“You’d think a person could get a meal on time,” he said, “considering she’s got precious little else to do.”

I felt, as so often in the Brick House, that my lungs were in danger of exploding, that the pressure of silence would become too great to be borne. I wanted to point out, as I knew Grandmother Connor would never do, that it wasn’t Aunt Edna’s fault there were no jobs anywhere these days, and that, as my mother often said of her, she worked her fingers to the bone here so she wouldn’t need to feel beholden to him for her keep, and that they would have had to get a hired girl if she hadn’t been here, because Grandmother Connor couldn’t look after a place this size any more. Also, that the dining-room clock said precisely ten minutes past five, and the evening meal in the Connor house was always at six o’clock on the dot. And – and – a thousand other arguments rose up and nearly choked me. But I did not say anything. I was not that stupid. Instead, I went out to the kitchen.