A Song for Nettie Johnson (2 page)

But it hasn’t rained for several months. The fields are bare, pastures dry, the creamery closed. And Eric has retired to his large brick house in town.

If you were to continue a short distance past the creamery, you would come to the big hill, its incline long and steady, packed with dirt, sprinkled with dusty gravel. Eli stands at the foot of this hill and looks up. Then down at his feet. His shoes are old, the soles thin; he feels the rigid thrusts of earth through the leather. He waits a moment, takes a deep breath, moves one foot forward, then the other.

Halfway up he stops, gazes at the hill’s crest; the hardest part is left, but he can’t quit now. He hunches his shoulders and steps forward, watching his feet as he climbs, observing their slow and careful movements on the road, how, at each step, at each small resting place, they make a niche for themselves in the dust.

If you were an insect, a beetle perhaps, or a black ant, and if you’d stopped on this road to rest awhile, to sit at the road’s edge to catch your breath, you would see, with your bulging insect eyes, huge whorls of dust approaching, and emerging from dust like ships in fog, the shoes of Eli Nelson, up, down, up, down. And you would feel the movement of his steps on the ground beneath you, the heaviness pressing on the earth around you, the sharp weight of his sorrows piercing the earth’s crust and moving slowly in long thin streams toward the world’s centre.

Then the shoes disappear and he’s gone. He has reached the top, has already passed the elevators and crossed the railway tracks, and is standing at an intersection of roads, one road going east to Regina and west to Alberta, and the other, the one just travelled, leading north and becoming the main street of town.

If you were a bird,
a large bird say, or better yet an angel, a young angel sent from the north of heaven, and if you were flying south this day, over the town of Stone Creek, and if your muscles were strong and the sinews of your wings sturdy so you could balance above the town, resisting winds that could blow you past Regina and into Manitoba, and if you were looking down as you paused in your flight, you would see below you a huddle of ragged buildings beside thin and dusty roads.

In the northwest corner, the two-storied school; in its treeless yard, a metal swing creaking; and nearby, attached by ropes to a long pole, a torn flag whipped and flapping. In the southwest corner, the yellow Russian church, its roof a silver onion glittering in the sun. In the southeast, Sorensons’ house, with leafless vines climbing the brick walls and hanging, coarse and tough, over the windows. And up from Sorensons’, past Gilmans’ and Munsons’, past the tin-roofed warehouse, the parsonage of St. John’s Lutheran Church, where at this moment Christine Lund in a blue apron is stirring leftover potatoes in a black skillet. Then next to the parsonage, at the northeast corner of town, the church itself, silent now and empty, except for many sparrows swooping in and out of their home in the belfry.

And in the middle of town, Main Street.

At noon the siren whistles from the town hall at the north end of the street, and Morris Gilman, in the back room of his drugstore next to the hall, splashes water on his hands and scrubs them with soap that smells faintly of iodine. Across the street Tom Wong gazes over the oilcloth-covered tables in the café – the pink cloth faded, edges frayed – and waits for his noon customers: Louie from the furniture store and funeral parlour three shops down, who prefers the company of the restaurant to a silent lunch by himself in his room above the store; Steve Boychuck from Imperial Oil; Sam Munson, who prefers nearly any place to that of his own home next to Sorensons’, where his wife Hilda at this moment is fluttering the lace curtains of her front window, looking out, waiting, her arthritic fingers nervous on the lace. Maybe he’ll want lunch with her today after all, it could be. At the centre of Main Street, three women in hats stand on the steps of the United Church of Canada, considering the sky. Down from the church, past the post office and Cutler’s Dry Goods, in the Golden West Hotel, Doctor Long lifts a glass with Sigurd Anderson, forgetting for awhile his wife Nora, who’s raking brown and yellow poplar leaves in their yard across from the school.

Then, just as Gilman turns the key to lock the door of the drugstore, and Sam Munson steps into Wong’s Café, and Mrs. Long leans her rake against the garage door, and just as the old doctor gurgles over his glass, “You are a
very very
good friend, Sigurd,” just then, Jacob Ross, principal, standing in the doorway of the Stone Creek School, makes an extraordinary announcement to the children lined up in stiff rows in the dark and musty hall: “There will be no classes this afternoon,” he says. “I will be in Swift Current at the doctor’s.”

Down the steps they go, past swing and flagpole, feet crunching gravel, across the road, into the alley behind Longs’, around the corner, speeding past Grace Olson’s, hollering, no school, not now, not ever, barely hearing the music seep out of the window of Grace’s little house sunk in a dip of land among lilac bushes, now bare, and stiff hollyhocks, where Grace is sitting in front of the varnished piano, her thin foot pressing the silver pedal, her thin body leaning forward toward a faded sheet of music, playing and singing tenderly,
Last night I lay asleeping, there came a dream so fair, I stood in old Jerusalem beside the temple there.
And the dry stems of the hollyhocks under the half-opened window click and rustle against the house.
I heard the children singing....
Grace, with no children, no husband, not now or ever.

Peter Lund and Joe Boychuk are the first to reach Main Street – grade sevens get a head start. And when they lurch to a stop in front of the United Church, missing the ladies in hats, they see him down the block gazing at the wooden door of the Golden West Hotel, Eli Nelson, thin and worn and very still, standing as though suspended in the dry Saskatchewan air.

They whip their bodies around and run back to the small troupe that has been following. Peter reaches them first.

“He’s back,” he says, panting for breath.

“Who?” asks Elizabeth, his sister in grade four.

“Eli. He’s back in town.”

“Tell us another one,” says his brother Andrew, who’s eleven.

“It’s true,” Joe says. “He’s standing in front of the Golden West.”

“Is he drunk?” asks Mary Sorenson.

“Is he throwing up?” asks Mike Downey.

“Puking in the ditch?” asks Ivan Lippoway.

“Pissing his pants?” asks Gussie.

“No, he’s all cleaned up and walking straight.”

They ponder this a moment, standing on the road’s edge above a ditch of thistles.

“It must be Christmas,” Andrew says. And they all race over to Main Street to see this thing for themselves.

And there you are, the young angel, hill-high above the Golden West, and you see Eli too, and you flutter over him, dipping your feet in the prairie wind. He is standing on the sidewalk, examining the letters on the door, Golden West Beer Parlour, and for a long time he doesn’t move a muscle. Then you notice him shrug his shoulders, turn sharply, and walk on up the street. And you call down to him in that melodic, bell-toned voice of angels, “Good for you, Eli,” and whirl on south, over the tracks, the creamery, the pasture, and over the quarry, where Nettie is rocking beside the pit. And you hover ever so briefly above her and shake your golden sun-tanned face and sigh and coo gently, like a sweet and sorrowing dove, “Poor Nettie,” then soar off to the United States, because some things are too hard for angels to endure, too human and incomprehensible.

Nettie picks up the book,
opens it, and examines the words, bending her head to the left of them and to the right, trying to see them from every angle. She touches a word with her finger, presses on it hard. Maybe if her skin and the bone under her skin can reach beneath the print, dig under the letters, press together the parts of each letter, crumble the parts into tiny pieces, discover the ingredients of each piece, then, maybe, she will be able to tell exactly what the words are saying, what each word means.

In the kitchen of St. John’s parsonage,
Christine Lund glances at the clock beside the stove. 12:20. Jacob lets his pupils out at twelve sharp and the Lunds’ back door usually bangs open at ten after. Peter is first, Andrew next, and then Elizabeth, who dawdles. Why are they late? The potatoes in the skillet are crisp and golden brown, the meatballs smell rich of onions and meaty gravy, and string beans she canned in September are steaming in the pan. The table is set, bread and butter, a jug of milk. Jonathan will be hungry, will be wondering why she hasn’t called him. She looks out the square window over the sink, sees only sparrows flitting among the dry branches of the caraganas.

Upstairs in his attic study, Jonathan sorts through sermon notes he’s written on half sheets of paper (“He knows our frame, he remembers that we are dust”) and arranges them in a pile, sets the pile in the middle of the desk, and leans back in his swivel chair. The attic door is open; he smells the dinner below. He gazes out the small triangle of glass above his desk, the room’s only window, sees a sparrow dart past, hears the wind seep into the cracks that edge the glass. He gets up and stretches. Usually she calls, but maybe he’ll go down regardless. Why not?

Except for the three Lunds and Ivan Lippoway, all the children have gone home to eat, Mary to the vine-covered house on the corner, Mike to the big house north of town, Joe to the café to eat with his dad, Gussie to the tiny shack below the railroad tracks. Peter, Andrew, and Ivan follow Eli from a distance; Elizabeth trails behind them.

Eli has reached the town hall, turned right and crossed the street to the north corner of Wong’s Café. Here he stops for a moment as if considering his next step, then walks past the café, past the vacant lot behind it, toward St. John’s church. He cuts across the churchyard and shuffles toward the Lund house. The children run to catch up to him, but when they reach the vacant lot, they stop, wait for their next move. Beside the caragana hedge, Eli pauses briefly, then walks the short distance to the back door.

Christine hears the scraping sounds on the step, then the knock. She opens the door and sees him standing there, bent forward, his sandy hair blown in tufts from the wind, his jacket worn, shoes dusty. His cheeks have deep wrinkles in them, his skin is hard. He looks older than fifty.

“Eli,” she says.

“Eli,” she says again. “It’s you. I wasn’t expecting you.” She stands by the table and looks at him. Thin, gaunt. She’s glad she has never seen him drunk. She’s glad when Jonathan opens the attic door and steps into the kitchen. He stops abruptly.

“Well, Eli,” Jonathan says. “You’ve come. October, right?”

Eli looks down at the floor.

“So let’s go upstairs and have this chat that’s waiting for us,” Jonathan says.

“No,” Eli says. “The cellar’s fine. It’s always been the cellar.”

“Suit yourself,” Jonathan says.

Christine sees Eli’s skinny neck above his collar, his thin wrists stretching out from the sleeves of his brown jacket.

“Why don’t we eat first,” she says. “Why don’t we all sit down and have a bite.”

“No no,” Eli says. “None for me. I want to get this thing settled.”

When the two men have disappeared down the cellar stairs and Christine has closed the door after them, she goes back to the window and looks out. She sees the children in front of the caraganas. They’ll come in when they’re hungry, she thinks, and covers the food on the stove and goes into the living room. She sits down in the soft chair beside the piano. Sits under a bouquet of roses in pink and red needlepoint, flowers stitched by her mother and framed in a soft wood frame.

Outside,
Peter scrambles from the hedge to the small basement window at the side of the house. “They’ll go to the cellar,” he says. “That’s where they go.” He kneels on the ground and peers into the window. The glass is dirty, splattered with bird droppings; he can see nothing. Then a light comes on, and he can see figures moving, dim and indistinct. “I told you,” he says.

Andrew and Ivan creep up behind him, peer over his shoulder. Elizabeth remains by the caraganas.

“I know someone who wouldn’t quite approve of what you’re doing,” she says.

“Shut up,” Peter says, “I can’t hear.”

Ivan presses closer to the glass.

“How can you see with all this bird shit?” he says.

Jonathan
sits down on a wooden bench in front of the furnace, Eli on a backless chair facing him. The cellar is dim. One bare bulb hangs from the ceiling. The pale light falls on Eli’s head, on Jonathan, on the cement floor, chipped and dusty at their feet.

“So,” Jonathan says, “who’ll begin?”

“You,” Eli says. “The pelicans, remember?”

“Again?”

“You can’t beat it,” Eli says. He rests his elbows on his knees, his chin cupped in his hands.

Elizabeth
steps away from the caraganas.

“I’d stay a little farther from the window if I were you. I wouldn’t bump that glass. Someone we all know would not like this.”

“Why are they in the cellar anyway?” Ivan asks.

“They’re praying,” Andrew says.

“Eli’s repenting,” Peter says.

“What’s repenting?” Ivan says.