After River (23 page)

I confined myself to the kitchen, the bathroom and my room while I tried to be invisible. Late at night when the rest of the house was asleep, when I was sure Mom was not up, I began to sneak downstairs and carry food back to my room. I stayed awake as long as I could, reading and eating, stuffing myself with words and food hoping to ward off the images that came with sleep. Still, every night the visions came–dreams of tendrils of smoke rising from under the kitchen sink in Boyer's cabin. Because no matter how many times I heard Mom tell someone that the police suspected that the fire was arson, or Dad say he believed it was deliberately set by the same hands that painted our gate sign, I knew who the arsonist was. And every time I closed my eyes I could see the embers from marijuana butts that I had so carelessly emptied into the trash, smoulder–smoulder and ignite while Boyer slept.

I
DON'T KNOW
how Boyer and I lived together in the same house that winter. Yet during the months after he returned from the burn unit, we somehow managed to avoid each other.

When I wasn't at school or doing chores, I hid out in my room. Boyer lived between the sunroom and the kitchen. An entire world away. Sometimes I caught glimpses of him passing through the kitchen on his way to the bathroom. It was as if a stranger had taken over his body. I couldn't see Boyer even in the relatively normal right side of his face. Certainly it could not be my brother who sat for hours on end in Dad's recliner in front of the television set.

Mom became his keeper. She protected him from the curious eyes of visitors and even from us. She took meals out to him in the sunroom. Each morning she ran his bath, tested the water, and then led him like a reluctant child into the bathroom. She rubbed his thickening scars with oils and insisted he keep mobile. Every few hours, she took him by the arm and led him on short walks, first around the house, then venturing outside, his temperature-sensitive skin bundled up against the cold.

The snow came early that winter. I watched from my window as drifts covered the fence tops in the yard. I watched the snow plough
come up our road in the early morning, the giant blade sending great waves of white up onto the snowbanks.

No matter how deep the snow became we were never allowed the luxury of being snowed in. Like the mail, the milk must go through. South Valley Road was the first road to be cleared each day. But except for the milk deliveries and necessities, we rarely went to town. We became as isolated as if we were snowbound. Mom still attended church each Sunday morning, the only one of us who went on a regular basis now. I refused to go at all. No one challenged me.

Before Christmas a few of Dad's old customers tried to renew. He ignored their requests while Mom argued we couldn't afford to be proud. ‘I'll sell some cows in the spring,' he argued. ‘Well it's either that,' Mom threatened, ‘or sell the milk in bulk to the commercial dairies.' That was a solution my father said he'd rather die than see happen. He almost got his wish.

Our dairy was one of the last operations in the province to bottle and sell raw milk. ‘Those suits from the city want to sterilize everything,' he used to say. ‘If they have their way, pretty soon there won't be any goodness, anything natural, left in anything. We'll all just swallow little plastic pills instead of eating real food.' That winter the inspector from the Milk Board began to show up on a regular basis to do random quality checks.

‘Someone's looking for an excuse to shut us down,' Dad complained each time they showed up. The tests always came out clean.

During Christmas break it was harder to avoid Boyer. Whenever I wasn't doing chores I retreated to my room. One afternoon, my mother called after me as I plodded upstairs. ‘Go to Boyer's old room and bring down some of his books,' she told me.

The attic bedroom had been empty ever since Boyer moved out to
the cabin the year before. Neither Morgan nor Carl had any inclination to move up there, both of them content to remain roommates.

Most of Boyer's books were lost in the fire, but some still remained stacked in his old room.

It was not only the chilled, damp air that held me back as I trudged reluctantly up to the attic. There was more than a bed and desk missing from the room. It was as if it was the room of a ghost. I hesitated for a moment before I entered with a shiver and began to search hastily through the piles of books. I carried an armload to the kitchen and placed them on the table for my mother's inspection. She lifted one, then another, as if choosing tomatoes in a store. They were all familiar novels, classics, which I was sure both she and Boyer had read a number of times. Finally she chose
A Tale of Two Cities
and shoved it at me.

‘I want you to read this to Boyer,' she said.

I stepped back, recoiling from the book, ‘But—but, I can't,' I stammered. She had no idea what she was asking of me.

‘Yes, you certainly can,' she insisted. ‘It's too difficult for him to hold a book for any length of time.' She nodded towards the parlour. ‘Now go in and sit down beside him and just read.' She pushed the book into my hands. ‘It will do you both good.'

In the parlour Boyer lay in Dad's recliner, his eyes closed. On the television screen the Galloping Gourmet chopped onions. I walked over and switched off the set. Graham Kerr's tear-stained face shrunk to a tiny white dot on the screen. When I turned back Boyer was sitting up. I could feel his eyes following me.

‘Mom said, she said I should read to you.'

Boyer said nothing. He may have nodded. I don't know. I stared at the book in my hand, at the oval rag rug at my feet, anywhere but into that face.

I sat down in Mom's chair on his right side and turned to the first page. I found my voice and began to read. ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…'

I read the words, but I heard, felt, none of them. I kept my eyes on the pages while my monotone voice droned on. We must have appeared a strange pair, the two of us sitting straight and rigid in our parents' chairs, ignoring each other's presence. Boyer, who taught me to read, who taught me to pay attention to the rhythm, the music of the words, stared straight ahead.

When I was a child, he would listen closely as I read, then interrupt me in the middle of a sentence if he couldn't ‘hear the passion', as he said, ‘the truth', in my voice for the words on the page. That Boyer would never have endured my lifeless reading. He would have stopped me after a few lines and insisted I let him hear the beauty of the words, or he would have repeated them from memory, giving them the life they deserved. But this Boyer said nothing.

When I finished the last sentence of the first chapter, he stood up. The voice of a stranger said, ‘Thank you,' a harsh gurgle sounding in his throat. He retreated to the sunroom.

I held the sleeve of my sweatshirt against my nose to stifle the sneezes and the tears I felt building. Those two words were the first my brother had spoken directly to me since the night of the accident.

The accident. That's what my family had come to call it whenever they spoke of the night of the fire, which was seldom. I never spoke of it at all. But I ached to blurt out the truth. The next afternoon I sat down beside him to read again. But before I started, I decided I would tell him. I must tell him. I set the book unopened on my lap, and took a deep breath as I searched for the words. ‘The fire, Boyer, I…'

I felt him wince as he leaned back in the recliner. ‘Not now,
Natalie, I'm tired,' the raspy voice of a stranger dismissed me. I fled to my room.

When I came downstairs later to help with dinner, I heard Dad's voice coming from the parlour. I peeked in to see him sitting in Mom's chair beside Boyer. My father held a Dr Seuss book in his hands and was reading out loud from it. I backed into the kitchen and turned to my mother. ‘When did Dad learn—?' I whispered.

For the first time since summer, his name passed between us. ‘River,' she said. ‘He was teaching him. That's why he went on the milk round. They stopped for lessons at a booth in the back of Gentry's every day.'

I went back and stood in the doorway. My father was concentrating on the words while Boyer, who was laid back in the recliner, listened with his eyes closed. A smile lifted the right side of his lips. I turned away but not before seeing the trickle of moisture move down the smooth skin below his right eye. From the kitchen I listened to my father read those simple words about green eggs and ham as if they were the most important in the world. At that moment they were.

Something changed for Boyer after that. Every afternoon he and Dad sat together in the parlour while Dad read to him. Before long they moved to the kitchen table with books spread out in front of them. By the end of January, my father was reading the newspaper for real.

Boyer moved back up to the attic room. He took his place at the table for meals again and started working with Mom in the dairy. And the more he joined the world, the more I retreated.

Once again, most nights I refused dinner and would later sneak down to raid the kitchen while everyone slept. One night in mid February, I loaded my plate by the light of the refrigerator.

‘How long can this go on, Natalie?' My mother's voice startled me. She stood in the parlour doorway in her nightgown.

‘What?' I asked and shut the fridge door.

Mom sighed and switched on the kitchen light. She came to me, put her hands on my shoulders, and spun me around to face the oak-framed mirror on the kitchen wall. I didn't need to see the image, the tangled hair and swollen face. I knew what I looked like standing there in a baggy, food-stained shirt and sweatpants, clothes I had been living in night and day. I didn't care. I twisted away from her and headed towards the stairway door hunched over a plate piled high with buttered bread, hunks of cheese and a wedge of apple pie.

‘Boyer is learning to live with his scars,' she said wearily. ‘Why can't you?'

Because those scars are my fault, I wanted to scream. I wanted to tell her then, all of it, but I remained silent, sullen. How could I tell her? How could she still love me if she knew the truth?

Later that same night I woke to the sound of my own muffled moans. A few minutes later, I heard Boyer's voice. He pushed open the door, ‘Are you all right?' he asked from the doorway.

I could feel him standing there, just as he used to when I was a child and had wakened from a nightmare. For a moment it was if everything was the same again.

‘Yea, I'm okay,' I said. ‘I must have been dreaming.'

‘I could hear you from my room,' he said. ‘Are you sure you're all right?'

‘Just a stomach ache,' I said. He came in and switched on the bedside lamp. I saw his scarred fingers reach across the crumb-filled plate–evidence of my once again stuffing myself until I was uncomfortable–on the night table.

‘Turn it off,' I wailed as I rolled away. After he left, I pulled a pillow to my stomach as another cramp twisted my abdomen.

I drifted in and out of sleep on waves of pain. Sometime later, I woke to Mom leaning over me, her hand on my forehead. Boyer stood in the doorway behind her.

‘It must be her appendix,' Mom said.

‘Does your side hurt?' she asked. Before I could answer, she lifted my shirt to feel my right side.

‘Dear God!' she said as her hands touched me.

I pushed her away. She turned to Boyer. ‘Can you drive us to the hospital?' she asked.

 

Growing up on a farm means knowing where things come from. Living close to raw nature means nothing is secret. You know the water you drink comes from a mountain spring because you helped your father repair the lines. You know the bacon and ham came from the sow that was once a piglet you were foolish enough to name. You know the eggs and drumsticks are from the same yellow puffballs you watched grow into beady-eyed hens. When platters of sliced roast beef are set on the table, you give no thought to the sudden whoosh of mucus that blew out of the steer's nose as his knees hit the ground at the moment of death. Still you know. You know where it all comes from. You know birth and death, the realities of life.

And yet, I still cannot explain how unprepared I was for Dr Mumford's words in the sterile silence of the emergency room. ‘We'll take her up to the delivery room,' he said as he removed his probing hands from my stomach.

Delivery room? What was he talking about? Delivery room? I tried to sit up on the examining table but another pain gripped me. I felt the firm touch of a nun's hands insisting that I lie back down. As the grim-faced sister wheeled me away, I heard Mom's voice repeating the questions that had formed in my head.

‘Delivery room? What?'

‘She's about to give birth, Nettie,' Dr Mumford told her. ‘Surely you knew that.'

For the rest of my life, I would wonder how I could not have known. How I could have carried life inside my body for almost eight months and not know of its existence. But until that moment I had no idea. And yet, when I heard Dr Mumford say those words to my mother, my heart recognized the truth in them.

I gripped the icy stainless-steel side of the gurney as another pain ripped though me. And suddenly I was back in the gravel pit pressed against the black metal hood. The same searing heat assaulted my body promising to rip me apart.

Since that June night, I'd managed to stay detached, numb. It was as if the horrors of that night, and the tragedies that followed, had shut me off. In the months since, I had walked around in a world removed. I acted on direction, doing what was asked of me, following where I was led when I had to, but unconnected from the life around me. With each wrenching pain, it was as if my body was waking up, being reborn against its will.

I fought to stay numb. I didn't want to return. I wanted to stay in the empty vacuum that had become my existence.

As the elevator doors closed, I heard the nun's firm voice. She was the first to say it. ‘You must have known,' she said.

In the cold white light of the delivery room, I twisted my head away from the gloved hand holding a black rubber mask to my face. I fought against inhaling the suffocating fumes, but after a few gulping breaths, I welcomed the darkness, the pulsating rings of light sucking me into their vortex, leaving the pain behind.