Believing Cedric (5 page)

“Zamóvkny!” they heard their father yell. Shut up. And they spun around to see him marching along the street from the field. Neither of them moved. The tire faltered beside them, spinning onto its rim, gyrating faster and faster until it had settled on the road and was suddenly still. “Zamóvkny,” their father muttered again. Then he was speaking English, something they had never heard him do before. “You must come home.” He gave the woman a quick nod. “Home,” he pointed over his shoulder and turned on his heels to walk back in the direction he'd come. They followed, none of them speaking until they'd crossed the broad field and were inside the house. When their father closed the door, he turned around and slapped Peter, whose hand shot up to his face and started rubbing the cheek that was hit. Then his father walked to the table, sat down, and told them the child's version of what was happening in town.

Which was that on the bare soil north of the slough, the city had taken the framework of a sturdy chicken coop and turned it into a concentration camp, which was to be used for interning “enemy aliens,” meaning anyone who had emigrated from Germany, Turkey, Austria-Hungary, or Eastern Europe. That included the Ukraine, from which Peter's parents had immigrated ten years earlier. Already some of his Ukrainian friends from the mines had been taken, and he'd heard of a carpenter a few blocks away who was arrested and carted off for having a German-sounding name. German-
sounding
, that's all the evidence that was needed. And did they realize that their name, Kushnir, could sound German too? Did they know that there were labour camps all over the province that were filled with Ukrainians, just like them? People
just
like them, he had said, poking an emphatic finger into his own chest.

At that point, their mother came out of the kitchen, wiped her hands on a towel that was draped over her shoulder, and sat down on the other side of the table, moving the chair without making a sound.

And what could they do about it, move? Of course not, because that would implicate them, it would be an admission of who they were, and someone—probably the Meyers, from whom they rented the land—would report them to the Home Guard, and they would be picked up within days.

No, the best thing to do was be quiet, to look like everyone else, to stay out of trouble, and under no circumstances holler out to your brother in Ukrainian when everyone in the neighbourhood could hear you. Was that understood, was it? He wanted to know.

Peter's memories of the months and years that followed were flashes of jittery apprehension. He had the feeling that things would fall into a natural pattern of school and chores and talk of the war, and the minute, in fact the very second, that he felt like his life was becoming safe, words would rise up out of the playground or the street, or from people milling in their backyards, talking over the splashes of watering cans, a few syllables jutting from the sentences like bayonets. Words like “Huns,” or “Central Powers,” or “the six escapees that tunnelled out of the henhouse.” Or sometimes they were whole sentences: “And why
wouldn't
they have tampered with the threshing rigs? I mean, they've been called what they're called for a reason. They probably see it as an obligation of some kind. It's like in Hillcrest, I guess they had five hundred of them working in the shafts, until the other miners just had enough, you know? It's a question of safety.” Peter would walk away from his eavesdropping with hands sunk deep in his pockets, watching the ground, the sidewalk, his shoes, and looking up at no one. Because it was his family they were talking about—his parents, his brother, himself—they were enemies, aliens and enemies. And someone was bound to find out at some point.

Sometimes he heard noises at night and would slip out of bed, careful not to wake Michael, and press his nose against the window to see if it was the Home Guard coming to take them away, having already imagined what they would look like when they did, a squad of men marching across the night fields, rifles swinging above their shoulders with each step, the muzzles catching flickers of frozen light.

And out of all these vivid images that stayed with him, there were none of the day that the war ended because for Peter, that feeling that his security was tentative, was faltering, never really abated.

He grew up in the 1920s, a decade candent with destructive fires in the area. He spent it farming with his father and brother, watching from a saddle or the seat of a tractor as columns of wavering smoke rose from the city as something else ignited: factories, houses, granaries, whole blocks, and at times enormous swaths of farmland. There were areas of town that were ablaze so predictably that the firemen would joke for months about the “winter annual” coming up. Then it did, and people were trapped on the higher floors, calling through the smoke until their shouts turned to coughs, and their coughs into that uneasy silence that follows a tactless punchline.

In the summer months he spent a great deal of time looking over his shoulder for anvils of hail clouds that listed toward the farm like collapsing buildings, purple flashes illuminating their cerebral folds from the inside out. Once, he watched as a pasture just north of their property was pounded to mulch by fists of ice that were the size of onions and layered just as delicately.

Today, there were only a few, thin high clouds hovering over the mountains in the distance. Peter, adjusting the glass of whisky on his lap, looked away from Cedric for a moment, up at those thin clouds, then down at the bottom of the draw where the group of neighbourhood boys were inspecting something they'd found. Like most twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys, thought Peter, these ones also seemed to spend most of their time and energy trying to kill themselves, in the winter finding the steepest slopes to toboggan down, crashing into rosebushes or rusted car frames at the bottom, and in the summer scavenging anything that would roll downhill and pushing it over the edge, cheering as its speed escalated in sluggish leaps, gouging deeper divots into the clay with every bounce. He'd once seen them line up an entire row of tires along the lip of his draw, and it was only when they'd pushed them over at the same time and yelled, “Initiation!” that he realized there was a boy at the bottom, cowering close to the ground in a tiny hollow that somehow managed to save his life, vicious blows of careening rubber hammering the grass and cacti around him. They were the kind of boys that made him happy that his wife had given him daughters instead of sons.

On the night that Peter met his wife, he and a friend had gone to a public dance in town. It was six days after the summer solstice, a glow loitering on the horizon, and there he found himself, nineteen and leaning on his elbow, managing to make a young woman laugh so hard she was covering her face with embarrassment, a woman who struck him as being sparrowlike in every way, petite and sharp and amber, with two rims of freckles masking her eyes. It was the first time in his life that he felt infallible, and the sensation lasted all of four glorious minutes. Then the chairs began to reverberate until they were floating along the floor, the electricity flickering in frenetic strobes, and something heavy and glass toppling from a shelf and shattering as the band stopped playing, an accordion hurriedly dropped into its case. As far as earthquakes went it was a piddling one but was enough to lose her in the chaos of evacuation, everyone scampering outside and into open ground, watching the sky as if the tremors were coming from above. He walked home that night without knowing her name, kicking at pebbles that were in his way on the sidewalk.

The second time he saw her she was standing at an intersection, waiting for a streetcar to pass, and he'd followed for three full blocks before working up the nerve to stop her, having reached out to touch her shoulder twice before actually doing so. They married in 1926 and, as the farm wasn't big enough to support two families, they rented a house in town. As luck would have it, her father was a divisional trainmaster for the Canadian Pacific, who managed to get Peter a job as a fireman, shovelling coal into the furnaces of the locomotives on their runs to and from the Crowsnest Pass.

When their first daughter was born, Peter started looking to buy a home, hoping to find something that was affordable but that also overlooked the coulees, wanting the guarantee that he wouldn't be boxed in by other houses as the city grew. His farm life had instilled in him a need for open spaces, the walls and fences in the city seeming to grow higher and closer every month that he lived there, a clutter of new constructions that invaded his periphery, crowded him in. His father told him about a woman who had some land and a tiny house, which had just been cleaved in half by a tree snapping with the weight of a freakishly early snowstorm. He went to the property and saw the gaping holes in the roof, the walls buckling around the diameter of the tree. But more importantly, behind these ruins, was a yawning skyline that opened up onto a yellow carpet of prairie that unrolled all the way out to the Rockies. “Perfect,” he'd said, looking into the coulee draw just beside the house, which snaked an auburn path of hawthorn and snowberry down to the river. “Perfect.”

He bought the house and the three acres it was on for only eight months' wages, quickly putting an addition on it and fixing the roof with the help of his brother on the weekends and after work. His father, who had probably had the idea in mind when he'd recommended the place, asked Peter if he would take his horses, whenever their working years were over with, and put them out to pasture on his land, instead of having to shoot them. He arrived with the lumber and some friends from church, and they built a modest barn in the better part of a day.

After they'd moved in, their daughter was just learning to walk, and the three of them would shuffle out to the barn to feed the horses in the evenings. At the end of one of the hottest summer days that Peter could remember, they were standing just in front of the barn doors after he'd spread some oats into the trough, listening to the horses grind their feed, watching the bulky workings of their jaws, when a woman started screaming across the coulee behind them.

Her scream was hoarse, panicked, and when they turned to look at her, all they could make out was that she was pointing at the cement on her driveway. Her back was against one of the outside walls of her house, and her other hand was blindly searching along it, as if for some kind of magical door to escape through. Within seconds, a neighbour sprinted toward her, sized up the situation, and swiftly returned with a garden hose, water jetting a thin arc through the air and splashing the spot she was pointing at. The man seemed to be washing whatever it was down the gutter toward the coulee, and when he looked up and noticed that Peter and his wife were watching, he hollered out a one-word explanation, managing to sound a little embarrassed, “Rattlesnake.”

They relaxed, turned back to the horses, both of them dropping a hand down to touch their daughter, who was between them. Only she wasn't there. In the few seconds of their distraction, she had made her way into the barn and was now walking in the space under the horses' bellies, between the restive stilts of their legs as they transferred weight from one limb to another.

“No,” Peter whispered, “please, no.” Then he started moving toward her, gently easing into his steps while his wife tried coaxing the child out to safety.

“Teresa, sweetie! Come over here.” She held out her arms wide, and then opened them even wider, wiggling her fingers with overstrung enthusiasm. “Come and see Mommy. Come on. Come here.”

But Teresa didn't move. She was watching the strange way her father was creeping closer, working the soother around in her mouth. At one point she pivoted to the side and fumbled, holding out a hand to steady herself on one of the horse's fetlocks, as if it were the leg of a table. It happened to be too far and she managed to regain her balance on her own.

And all that Peter could think about as he stepped closer—watching the enormous disks of the horses' buttocks as they trembled to shake off flies, listening to the thump of their hooves as they distractedly shifted and jittered—was that, yes, he understood, he
knew
that his world was frail and prone to collapse, but what more could he do to be prepared for it? How could things like this happen to people like him, people who mistrusted every situation, who never let their guard down, not even for a second? Because he hadn't, he was just busy assessing another danger, which happened to be in a different direction. What exactly did it take to make a life safe?

And then he was there, at the horses, managing to reach far under their stomachs without touching them and clenching on to his daughter's shirt. He pulled her out as smoothly as he could, and up into his arms, the horses flinching and clomping the ground as he straightened up beside them.

On the way back to the house, he talked about having another baby, a boy, a brother who would be able to look after his sister. But a year later, following the crash of Black Tuesday in 1929, they had Marianne instead. Then, after a long debate over the prospect of another mouth to feed, they tried yet again, and in 1931, had Susan.

During the 1930s when work was hard to come by—and whatever work there was, labour conditions were degenerating—Peter kept his job at the railway and prudently held his tongue about it. Because between the incessant talk of unemployment relief camps, unions, and strikes, there was an animosity in the air, a desperation that sometimes swelled to the point of bursting: news of daring robberies, of communist polemics, of riots and violence. Peter kept quiet through it all. He went to work in the dark of morning, accepted his pay cuts with a phlegmatic nod, and avoided clusters of men on his way home.

In 1935, the same week that a mine blast in a neighbouring town killed more than a dozen people, he was demoted to track maintenance and spent the coldest days of the winter swapping the worn-out rails in the bends that wove toward the mountains. Once, while having to do some work between two parallel tracks—a place he'd heard other workers refer to as the “devil's strip”—he was caught by surprise and cornered there, being deafened by a train that was passing on one side of him and not hearing a second that was coming from behind on the other. The colliding gust of air jarred him to his knees, a thunderous roll reverberating in his chest cavity, the shriek of metal screaming above it. He covered his ears, cringing at the loudest sounds, and looked forward until the optical illusion that he was spinning became so overwhelming that he had to bury his face in the shivering rocks. It wasn't until both trains had passed, and the ground had stopped rumbling, that he got to his feet and looked around, the prairie landscape widening with his focus. He had never felt so small in his life.