After River (11 page)

I waited until I heard Mr Ryan's car drive away before I went down to the kitchen.

I looked at Mom. I had never known my mother to tell a lie. I had no idea she was capable of even a little white lie. And this was a whopper. Somehow I expected her to look different. But she smiled innocently at me and continued filling the pie shells lined up on the table with huckleberries. I remained silent, but I wondered what penance she would have to do. Then I decided, that with all her praying she should have at least a few credits built up.

M
OM AND
I spent the next morning pulling weeds in the garden.

Working out in the vegetable garden with my mother was another of my favourite chores. I loved the feel of the soil on my hands, the smell of the earth and the sun-warmed plants. I loved listening to the sound of my mother's soft voice as we chatted across the rows.

I glanced at her over the lacy carrot tops. Mom straightened up and placed her arms at her waist to stretch her back. She threw a handful of chickweed into an overflowing basket. Then she stood, picked up the basket and headed toward the chicken pen.

‘Nettie's girls,' everyone called her chickens. Her birds were something of a local phenomenon the way they kept laying, summer and winter. Everyone wanted to know her secret. A few jokingly offered to hire Mom to counsel their hens. They tried her trick of playing a radio in the coops night and day, added eggshells to their feed, but in the end they said, the only difference was Mom.

Dad said the chickens–like everyone who knew her–were in love with Mom. He was certain they each produced an egg a day only to please her. And Mom's egg money kept piling up.

‘Hello ladies,' she called out as she approached the pen. The flock turned as one at the sound of her voice. The chickens ran beside her on the other side of the wire fence, their piston heads moving in
unison. As soon as she stepped inside the pen they crowded around her legs, rubbed themselves against her boots, and jostled for position to be petted. She bent down and, being careful to give each one the same attention, ran her hands down their white-feathered backs as they crouched to the ground.

Once, when I was very young, I made the mistake of trying to pet one of the birds. While Mom made clucking sounds and spread handfuls of grain in a wide arc to her brood, I bent down to stroke a white back. Before my fingers touched a feather a red-crowned head shot out. A globule of blood appeared where a razor sharp beak struck the back of my hand. Suddenly a flurry of beady-eyes and orange beaks swarmed me. I stumbled backwards, then ran screaming around the pen trying to escape the frenzied attack of beaks pecking at my bare legs.

My mother scooped me up and held me on her hip. I wrapped my legs around her.

‘It's all right, sweetheart,' she assured me as I sobbed into her neck. ‘They just don't know you.'

It was a long time before I ventured back inside the pen. By then Boyer had added another ten-penny word to my vocabulary: alektorophobia.

‘Those birds don't want anyone but your mom near them,' Dad consoled me when he heard about my ordeal. ‘They think she's their ruddy mother. I swear those chickens purr when she pets them.'

After Mom scattered the weeds and vegetable tops for her ‘girls' in the pen she returned to the garden. She grabbed two long-handled hoes and passed one to me.

We worked side by side hilling potato plants. The midday sun warmed my back. My nostrils filled with the rich aroma of the freshly turned soil, and the heavy perfume wafting over from the rose garden.

The rose garden was Mom's domain. I used to think Mom insisted on tending it alone because it was my father's wedding gift to her. Lately I noticed her weekly excursions looked more like a contest of wills than a labour of love. Sometimes I sat out on the sloped roof outside my window and watched her work below. She attacked the rose bushes with pruning shears, hedge clippers and even a hand saw. She could never keep ahead of the prolific runners and suckers. The bushes grew gnarled and tangled no matter how far back she cut them in the fall–so far sometimes that it looked impossible they would ever regenerate. Yet each spring new shoots sprouted and filled the garden with thick thorn-laden branches and rosebuds once again.

‘How come you never pick the roses, Mom?' I asked. Just then I heard the milk truck pull up to the dairy.

Mom leaned her hoe against the fence, ‘Roses die too quickly,' she said. She opened the garden gate. ‘Besides, flowers in the house only make me think of funerals and death.'

The only person I ever knew who died was my grandmother. I was twelve years old when Grandma Locke passed away. She visited us only a few times, but I never forgot the way she looked at my brothers and me, as if we were to blame for her daughter's lot in life. As if, by merely existing, we held our mother, who was meant for much finer things, captive against her will. And I remember the only words of advice my grandmother ever shared with me. ‘Never marry a farmer, Natalie,' she told me. ‘Remember it's just as easy to love a rich man as a poor one.' It didn't seem to occur to her, or to bother her if it did, that it was my father who paid her bus fare whenever she came to visit.

I followed Mom out of the garden. ‘Why didn't Grandma Locke like Dad?' I asked her, but my eyes were watching River climb out of
the truck. His ponytail bounced against his back as he started unloading the empty crates from the truck.

Mom closed the latch on the gate behind us. ‘Oh, it wasn't so much him she didn't like,' she said, ‘as what he did for a living. And when he called me Nettie. Well, both my parents thought that was barbaric!'

‘Ah, yes, the late, great Leslie and Christine Locke,' Dad's voice called from inside the back of the milk truck. ‘The king and queen of Victoria.'

‘Oh, Gus,' Mom answered. I'd heard her use this expression so many times that, when I was little, I thought it was one word.

‘I don't think your folks ever forgave you for marrying a milkman,' Dad replied, passing an empty crate to River. ‘And according to them an ill-bred one at that.' Then he added, ‘Maybe that was the attraction.'

I hurried to the back of the truck and reached up to take the next milk crate, then followed River into the dairy. He stacked his crate, then smiled at me as he reached to take mine.

‘Got a little sunburn there, Natalie,' he said and tapped me on the end of my nose.

I wondered just how much was sunburn and how much was from being around him. No one else had the power to make me blush except River. Although he had been there for a month I was still finding myself tongue-tied around him.

Outside, he gave me a conspiratorial glance as my parents continued to banter back and forth. After the last of the empty milk bottles were stored in the dairy, we followed Mom and Dad up to the house for lunch.

Dad threw his arm around Mom. ‘So, Nettie,' he said, ‘I hear congratulations are in order.'

‘Congratulations?'

‘On finding your long-lost relatives,' Dad said slyly. ‘We ran into Gerald Ryan this morning.'

Mom stopped so abruptly I almost bumped into her. She turned and looked at River, who was fighting to keep a straight face, then back to Dad. ‘Oh, I—' she stammered, a flush rising in her cheeks. ‘I didn't—I thought—'

‘Yes, thanks for vouching for me, Cousin Nettie,' River drawled.

‘I always knew you wanted a large family,' my father said. ‘I just didn't realize what lengths you'd go to get it.' He laughed and hugged Mom closer.

I let go of the breath I had unconsciously been holding.

‘And that's the only reason I married you,' Mom sniffed and shrugged off his arm in feigned anger. But I could tell she was relieved too.

River rushed up to the gate and, with a mock bow and a wave of his arm ushered her, and then me, past.

‘Don't ya believe it,' Dad said to me as he walked by River as if he wasn't there. ‘It was love at first sight when your mother saw me.'

‘Ha! For you, maybe.' Mom's back was straight and her chin held high as she made her way up the porch steps.

Dad hurried after her and pulled open the screen door. He held it as Mom and I went into the kitchen. Then he followed, letting the door close behind him. River caught it just before it slammed. Inside, Mom and I stood together at the kitchen sink, rinsing the garden dirt from our hands.

‘If you could have seen the goofy look on your father's face when he saw me, instead of Aunt Elsie, at her door on my first morning in town,' she said ignoring my father. ‘He stood there with a milk bottle in each hand, looking like he had just discovered them, and had no idea what they were for.'

River chuckled. As he pulled the kitchen table away from the window, he asked, ‘So what brought a city girl to Atwood in the first place, Nettie?'

Mom thought for a moment then said. ‘Well, my father joined the Navy in 1939, as soon as war broke out.'

She retrieved the kettle from the stove, took it over to the sink and filled it as she spoke. ‘He left my mother and me in Victoria on Vancouver Island and shipped out. After Pearl Harbor, when the Americans joined the war, Mother suddenly realized that Japan was “just across the water”. A week later she sent me to live with her Aunt Elsie here in Atwood.'

‘And then she saw me and was a goner,' Dad said. He winked at me before he headed into the bathroom.

‘Not exactly,' Mom said over her shoulder. She turned off the tap and lifted the kettle out of the sink.

River hurried over and took the heavy kettle from her hands and carried it to the stove. Mom watched him for a moment, then turned back to the cupboard.

‘Tell River about the dance,' I prompted. I had heard the story of how my parents met many times. I thought it was so romantic that I wanted River to hear it too.

She pulled out the cutlery drawer and continued. ‘Your father couldn't even stammer a hello that first morning. I'd completely forgotten him by the time he showed up at the Christmas social at the Miners' Hall the next weekend.'

‘To the surprise and delight of a number of excited young women there, I might add,' Dad called out over the sound of running water.

‘That's true,' Mom whispered.

‘Yes, it is,' my father said. He emerged from the bathroom drying his face with a towel. ‘I saw all those ladies look up hopefully with
their dance cards ready when I came into the hall. But I headed straight across the dance floor to where your mother stood and said, “I believe this is my dance.” She glanced down at her dance card, back up at me, put the card in her pocket and said, “Yes, I believe it is.”'

As River slid into his seat behind the table, he mouthed silently, ‘
dance card
?' and we exchanged a secret smile.

‘I was never one to make a scene,' Mom sniffed. She was slicing bread at the sideboard. ‘It wasn't as if I had many partners to choose from. There was a war on after all. There was a shortage of eligible men and I was new to town. The only names on my dance card were friends of my aunt's. When the song was over—'

‘And what was the name of the song?' my father crowed.

‘“It Had To Be You”.' Mom rolled her eyes at me as we set the table. ‘Anyway, when the dance ended I thanked your father cordially, but firmly. Then I returned to Allen Mumford. He was the town's new doctor then. It was his name that was really on my card. As Allen led me out onto the floor, I saw your father leave.'

‘
I
was never one to overplay my hand,' Dad retorted.

They were into it now and needed no further prodding from me. I glanced at River and caught the amused expression on his face as I passed him a platter of cold cuts from the fridge. ‘The next morning, when I delivered the milk to Aunt Elsie's,' Dad went on,

‘her front door opened and out comes your mom. She bounces down the stairs, opens the passenger door of the milk truck, jumps in, slams the door and says, “I believe this is my seat”, without even cracking a smile.'

Just who swept whom off their feet depends on which one tells the story. In the wedding picture taken eight months later my father looks a little shell-shocked. He says it was because he still
couldn't believe he was standing there beside this ‘beautiful stranger', his bride, ten years younger than he was. He had proposed to her on their second date–after more than a few gulps of whiskey from a brown-bagged bottle. When she surprised him by answering ‘yes', he walked into the alley behind the Roxy movie theatre and threw up.

Mom says they would have married even sooner except that it took a while to convince her parents, who had to sign for her because she was only seventeen. After she threatened to run off to the States and marry without their consent–a very real threat since the border was only minutes away–her mother and father gave in. If they had realized she would give herself over to the Catholic Church, my grandfather said, he ‘would have come here himself and kidnapped her, dragged her home and tied her to her bed until she got over this foolishness.'

‘As it was, he found out too late,' Mom said. ‘Dad was at sea when Father Mackenzie performed our vows in St Anthony's. Your grandmother realized it was a Catholic church only minutes before the ceremony.'

My grandmother was also not one to make a scene, but anyone in the church that day could have seen that the gulping sobs and tears she shed were not the normal mother-of-the bride tears of joy.

Contrary to my grandmother's belief–a belief she held until her dying day according to Dad–my mother insisted she never regretted becoming a farmer's wife. From the moment she stepped out of the milk truck at the Ward Dairy for the first time, she said her heart was captured.

‘It was really the farm I fell in love with first,' she said wistfully, the tea kettle whistling on the stove.

I've tried to imagine what it was she found so compelling when
she first climbed out from her shanghaied-seat that winter morning. By December the countryside is usually hidden under snow so deep it's hard to believe there's anything beneath the endless white, or that the fields and gardens will ever be green again. All winter the entire farm and surrounding hills are completely obscured by a heavy white carpet. The cows mill around close to the barn in a brown slush-filled mud and manure pasture. Still, to hear Mom describe the scene it's easy to understand how she romanticized her first vision of the farm.