A Song for Nettie Johnson (10 page)

Eli’s arm
is getting tired, his legs sore, his fingers stiff around the smooth baton. The choir strains toward him, watches his eyes, his mouth, his hands, for clues. They lap up his energy, take it into themselves.

For un-to us a Child is born, un-to us a Son is giv-en

And the gov-ernment shall be up-on his should—er;

And His Name shall be call-ed

Won–der–ful, Coun–sell–or...

The sound of their voices soaks into the air and into the walls and windows, pews and floors, and there’s no space anywhere without the song.

There’s a small rustling in the audience. The concert is longer than people are used to. Bud Olson slips out the door to check on the furnace downstairs. Mrs. Peterson follows with her small son who needs to use the toilet. Eva Skretting from the Red and White Store fans her cheeks with the edge of her hand.

Nettie
has reached the creamery. She stops at the foot of the hill, lifts her face to the lights of town. And she remembers – the creamery, the hill, the crossroads at the top. And then what? What else will she find up there? Her chest tightens. She’s come this far. Oh, Mama, look at me now.

Hilda Munson,
on the middle riser, is looking down at Eli, waiting for his cue. She’s counting to herself, doing her breathing as Eli has taught her. Lift the voice, Hilda. Put both hands beneath your voice and lift it up. And keep the sound clean. I know it’s beautiful and so touching, but try not to waver, keep it straight and simple, let the purity shine through. He nods his head and flicks the baton, and when the words come out of Hilda’s mouth they are just that: clear and smooth and delicate.

He shall feed His flock like a shep–herd,

And He–shall ga–ther the lambs with His arm, with His arm,

And car–ry–them–in His bo–som.

So Hilda got Grace’s solo. How did that come about? the people wonder. Christine looks down at the front pew to check on Peter. But Peter isn’t moving. He’s quiet, listening to Hilda’s song. Jonathan scans the audience. Hilda’s husband isn’t there. You could have come, Sam, he thinks. It wouldn’t have killed you.

Nettie is halfway
up the hill. She’s walking on the edge of the road where it’s not slippery. She walks carefully, sinking her feet into small ridges of snow. The dress hangs on her arm, and she holds her arm against her chest, and the dress moves slightly from side to side as she climbs.

Now the choir has speeded up.
The lines are coming fast. “Jerky,” Peter whispers. “They’re getting too jerky.” Eli’s stick is alive. It looks threatening, angry.

All we like sheep have gone a–stray

We have turn——ed ev-’ry one to his own way,

We have turn——ed ev-’ry one to his own way

Why do they sing the same line over and over, Elizabeth wonders. We have turned, we have turned, we have turned, we have turned....

Nettie has reached
the top of the hill. She’s standing in front of the Golden West Hotel. So this is where he soused himself with Sigurd Anderson. She passes the post office, the United Church, Gilman’s, the town hall. She turns right, crosses the street and keeps going. She could find the way with her eyes closed. Vy did God create man? Watery-eyed Swede, freckled hands, old breath. Then she sees the cars. Cars on the street and in the vacant lot, even some in the field north of the church. She doesn’t remember this. So many cars. She pulls her coat collar closer to her face and walks head down on the shovelled sidewalk to St. John’s.

Eli’s back aches.
His face is red and wet. The white shirt under the black coat is soaked. Can he finish this? His arm is lead. He punches the air. Give it more. More.

Lift up your heads, O ye gates,

And be ye lift up, ye ev-er-last-ing doors

And the King of Glo-ry shall come in.

And now she’s standing
on the bottom step of the church. The caragana bush is over there, the iron railing is here, the wooden door is up there, the big handles are on the door. She hears the music from inside the church. And under the music, old voices. Maybe they go to Regina, to Hudson’s Bay or Eatons, maybe to New York. Or Paris, France. She untangles the dress that has been scrunched in her hand, lifts it up so she can see it. The dots are there, the collar’s there, the lace is there. She holds the dress in her left hand and grabs the iron railing with her right, fingers curled tightly around it. She better get inside right now. They don’t like it when you’re late.

Sigurd Anderson’s Adam’s apple
rises and falls with the words. He sees from Eli’s face that it’s going fine, and he lifts his voice louder still.

Un-to which of the an-gels said He at a-ny time

Thou art My Son, this day have I be-got-ten Thee?

And Nettie says,
“Just go. One more step. Put your hand on that handle, there’s a space underneath it for your fingers, they’ve made it easy for you. So go on up there and pull.”

Christine Lund
lifts her head, tilts her score slightly so she can see the notes and Eli at the same time. Peter pokes Andrew with his elbow and whispers, “It’s her turn now, wake up,” and Andrew raises his head from his chest for a moment. Then Peter reaches across his brother and shakes his sister’s arm. Elizabeth opens her eyes ever so slightly, a thin line that won’t let in the harsh light.

How beau-ti-ful are the feet of them

That preach the gos-pel of peace,

How beau-ti-ful are the feet,

How beau-ti-ful are the feet...

No. It’s too much.
What would she do in a place like this? Nettie turns and hurries down the steps, clutching the dress. When she reaches the bottom she walks around the caragana bush to the yard at the side. She stands away from the building and looks up at the lit windows. Sees shadows of heads but can’t tell who they are. Moves farther. Wades through mounds of snow, then stops again. There in the window, that little window right there above the lilac bush, she sees it moving, the small thin stick, a narrow shadow against the frosted glass. Up and down and straight across it goes. And she laughs. Isn’t he having fun tonight. Well, let him. And she won’t have to go inside after all. She can hear enough thumping from where she is. She pushes through the snow to the spruce tree in the middle of the yard.

Let us break
their bonds a–sunder,

Let us break their bonds a–sunder

Let us break their bonds a–sunder...

The choir is shouting. To Bud Olson and Carl Jacobson and Eva Skretting from the Red and White and Mrs. Donnelly and the Mennonites and Beverly Ross and Peter Lund and Mrs. Sorenson...

Let us break their bonds a–sunder,

Let us break their bonds a–sunder...

Nettie stands
beside the tree and wonders. It comes so slow. It comes from far away in the dark, in wide circles in the night. It’s never in a hurry, and that’s how it is. It takes a long time to get the picture. She watches the stick in the window, whizzing this way and that. And she calls out.

“I’m here, Eli. I came. A thousand miles. And it wasn’t
easy.” She steps away from the tree. “
Oh, come, come, come, come.
That’s what I did, all right.”

She looks at the church window to where the thin stick moves dimly against the glass.

“I know something too,” she says. “It’s a new thing.” She spreads her feet apart, lifts up her head, stretches her neck, and opens her mouth wide.

“B-i-r-d. Bird! Did you hear that?”

She waves the dress in the air, back and forth and up and down, flapping.

“Sparrow, robin, magpie, owl...”

The stick in the window dips, rises, swings out wide, crashes down, then up again, and higher, cutting the air, carving through.

Hal–le-lu-jah, hal-le-lu-jah, hal-le-lu-jah, hal-le-lu-jah

Ha——le——lu——jah!

And Nettie shouts, “Crow. C-r-o-w. Duck. D-u-c-k. Loon. L-o-o-n.” And the sound of her voice speeds through night, past clouds and stars, to where the white birds hover. And others gather. Blackbird, hawk, thrush, and meadowlark. Singing around the golden chair where her angel mother in her pale blue dress plucks the strings of her silver harp.

The air is milder now,
the snow thicker. Nettie stands by the spruce tree and watches the flakes. She sees them whirling crazy against the steeple, bouncing on the slanted roof, falling on the lilac bush, tangling the branches. She watches them high above the evergreen, spinning dizzy in the purple blackness. And there, over there on the church windows, look, thin beaded streamers, glittering.

She shakes the snowflakes
from her dress and arranges the dress carefully over her arm. “I’ll stand right here and wait until it’s over. Then I’ll look for him. The snow will be deep at the foot of the hill. The hill will be icy. And the sky so dark. We might as well walk together. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

~

Mother’s Day

M
other’s Day was on May 9 that year.
On May 6 we had the blizzard and school was closed. On May 7 I was sick. I was sick until May 8, so I missed two days of school: May 6, the day of the blizzard, and May 7, the day I was sick. (May 8 was a Saturday, so there was no school that day anyway.) On Mother’s Day I found the cat. And on Monday, May 10, everything was back to normal.

I will begin with May 6, because that is the first day of all the days. I suppose I could even start with the night before, since I heard later that the blizzard commenced in all its fury around 11 p.m. I, of course, was sleeping at that time and knew nothing of it. But people talked about it for days and weeks and months afterward, so naturally I have quite a clear picture of how it all began.

It began with the wind. Even before I went to bed that night it was blowing. The snow had melted early that year, before the end of March, and although fields in the country were still wet and patched with dirty snow, the streets in town were dry and dusty. Every day we walked to school in whorls of dust and rolling thistles. Saskatchewan, as you know, is one of the three prairie provinces, and spring on the prairie is a dry and dusty scene indeed.

It is unlike spring in areas further south, such as the Southern States in the United States. I’ve read about spring in these places and seen pictures of it. In Kentucky, for instance, spring is calm and colourful and it lasts longer. In Kentucky there’s more foliage: japonica, forsythia, dogwood. All these plants have lovely blooms and the blooms don’t develop at the same rate. Thus the colours spread out over a longer period of time. My father subscribes to the
National Geographic.

In Saskatchewan, however, spring is bare. And if I may speak candidly, it is quite lonesome. The lonesome period is between the time the snow melts and the time the grass turns green. (Weeds, I should say, since we don’t have much grass.) The lonesome period is the dry time when the ground is grey, trees (what few there are) are bare, and rubbish, buried for months under snow, is fully exposed. The lonesome period is usually filled with wind that picks up the dust, dead thistles, mouldy scraps of paper, and whirls them across the alleys and down the streets, with no thought whatsoever to what pleases us.

I was lying in bed when I heard the wind. It rattled the windows, whistled in the chimney. It grew stronger, howling about the house like a great enemy who hated us personally and our home too, down to its very foundation. That’s the feeling I got, that it really was an enemy and wanted to rip us right off the ground we’d settled on.

I got out of bed and went downstairs to see how my mother and father were taking it. But they were sitting in the living room, reading, and didn’t seem at all disturbed. My mother looked at me, her face shining under the rosy lampshade, and said it was all right, nothing to worry about. “Crawl back to bed, Norma,” she said in a voice that was kinder than usual. So I did, and went to sleep finally, wondering why there was such a thing as wind. Nobody likes it that I know of. No prairie people anyway. And why had God created it?

I do not question the existence of God, as my friend Mary Sorenson does, whose father runs the Co-Op Creamery here in town and who is an atheist. I can’t deny what’s right there in front of my eyes in black and white. But at the same time I don’t condemn unbelievers. “Judge not, lest ye be judged,” the Scripture says. Nor do I try to convince them. Arguments lead to nowhere. If you tell a blind man the sun is yellow and he doesn’t believe you, what can you do about it? Nothing. Nevertheless, although my faith is firm, I wonder sometimes why certain things happen. Like the wind.

In the morning the sky was a whirl of grey and white. The snow was thicker than I’d ever seen it, and the wind still blowing, whining through the snow. I couldn’t see the fence or garage from my bedroom window. Every inch of air was disrupted, uprooted, the snowflakes swirling about. Like refugees, I thought as I knelt in front of the window in amazement. Like lonely refugees without homes, wandering in the cold, looking for a place to settle, a quiet place where they could put their babies to bed and have some hot tea and visit one another for awhile. But they couldn’t find such a place, so they wandered all in a frenzy, cold and lonesome.

I went downstairs in my pyjamas. There’d be no school, that I knew. My father was sitting in the dining room at his desk. He was playing chess, like he does on Sunday mornings and stormy days when he can’t work. He plays chess by correspondence since he has no partners here in town. You may have heard of chess played like this. A huge map of the world is tacked on the wall in front of his desk. On the desk itself is a wooden chessboard, and on a table next to it, little recipe boxes filled with postcards. These cards have been sent to him from his playing partners all over the world. He even plays with one man in South Africa, and he has several games going on at the same time. Every time a player makes a move, he sends the move by postcard to my father. Then my father makes his move and sends a card back to the player. Sometimes it takes nearly a month for a card to reach another country, so you can imagine how long one game might last. But my father seems to enjoy this, keeping track of all his partners with little coloured pins on his map of the world.