Crow Lake (15 page)

chapter
FIFTEEN

March. The snow still in deep drifts, still white and smooth. To look at, the same as February. When you walked on it, though, you could feel the difference. There was a thin crust which broke under your weight and beneath it the snow sagged. Fresh falls lay like dust for a day or two and then developed a crust of their own. Underneath, the old snow lay heavily, like the flesh of a fat old woman.

I think it was sometime around March that Luke started trying to potty-train Bo. It was quite a dramatic episode in our lives, Bo being Bo, and the memory of it is still with me. I remember sitting at the kitchen table doing homework with Matt, and Bo stomping in, wearing about six layers on her top half but naked from the waist down, carrying her potty—empty—in both hands. She was looking grim. Luke was just behind her and he was looking grim too. He was saying something about did she want to wear diapers for the rest of her life, and how could she stand it, being soaking wet and stinking like a cesspit all the time, and Bo was ignoring him. She took the potty over to the garbage pail in the corner of the kitchen and crammed it in and then stomped out again.

I remember Luke sliding down the wall until he was sitting on the floor with his knees drawn up, putting his arms on the knees and his head on his arms, and saying, “I am so tired of her shit.” And I remember Bo, who had stopped in the doorway, turning and looking back at him. She looked uncertain for a minute, and then she came back and patted his head and said, “Don’t cry, Luke.” She didn’t retrieve her potty though. She sympathized with him, but not that much.

And I remember Matt saying, “Luke? That’s her first complete sentence. ‘Don’t cry Luke.’” And they both laughed.

Maybe I’ve got the timing wrong though. Maybe it wasn’t March, because I don’t think they were doing much laughing at that time. I think we’d reached the stage by then where, like all roads leading to Rome, every conversation, every incident, ended in an argument—and usually the same argument.

There was an afternoon—maybe a Sunday, when we all had a bit of free time—when Luke decided I should teach Bo some nursery rhymes. A peaceable occupation if ever there was one. He was concerned that she was going to grow up not knowing any and persuaded me to sing some to her. She was over the measles by then and back to her old noisy self, slinging saucepans about in the kitchen.

“Teach her some, Kate,” he said. “Teach her the main ones.”

“What are the main ones?”

“
I
don’t know. Teach her the ones you like best.”

I couldn’t think of a single one. “I don’t remember any,” I said.

“Hickory Dickory Dock,” Matt said. He was sitting at the kitchen table writing to Aunt Annie.

Self-consciously I said, “Say ‘Hickory Dickory Dock,’ Bo.”

Bo paused in her work and looked at me suspiciously.

“She thinks you’ve flipped,” Matt said, scribbling away.

I tried again. “Bo, say ‘Hickory Dickory Dock.’

“Icky Dicky Dock,” Bo said brusquely. She looked around her, searching for a particular saucepan.

“Good!” I said. “That’s good, Bo. Now say, ‘The mouse ran up the clock.’”

“Dis
pan,” Bo said. She seized the largest pan and started whamming the others into it in order of size. She was pretty good at it, too. She didn’t make many mistakes.

“She’s ignoring you,” Matt said in a pause in the din. “She’s decided you’re nuts.”

“Come on, Bo,” I said. “‘The mouse ran up the clock.’”

“Silly,” Bo said, sparing a moment to wave a stern finger at me.

“It is pretty dumb,” Luke said. “Try another one. Sing her a whole one.”

I thought for a moment and then sang:

“Miss Polly had a dolly who was sick, sick, sick,
So she phoned for the doctor to come quick, quick,

quick. The doctor came with his bag and his hat
And he knocked on the door with a rat-a-tat-tat.”

Bo looked at me with narrow-eyed interest.

“You’ve got her,” Matt said in a stage whisper. “She’s hooked. Reel her in slowly.”

“Sick, sick, sick,” Bo said experimentally. “La la la.”

“Good, Bo! Good! Listen:

“He looked at the dolly and he shook his head

And he said, ‘Miss Polly, put her straight to bed.’

He wrote out a letter for a pill, pill, pill,

‘I’ll be back in the morning with my bill, bill, bill.’”

“Pill pill pill,” Bo said, watching my lips closely and bending her knees in time to the rhythm.

“Good, Bo! That’s really good!”

“Sick sick sick!” Bo chanted. “Bill bill bill!”

“Good!”

“Have we had a bill from Dr. Christopherson?” Matt asked.

Luke said, “What?”

“For Bo’s measles. Have we had a bill?”

Luke shrugged. “Don’t think so.” He went back to watching Bo.

“Sick sick sick!” Bo yelled, belting it out. “La la la!”

“How much will it be, do you think?” Matt said.

“Haven’t a clue.”

“Yeah, but roughly. He must have made four or five visits. It’s bound to be quite a bit.”

“Let’s worry about it when it arrives, okay? Sing it again, Kate. Take it a line at a time. She’s really learning fast.”

But I was watching Matt, who’d got to his feet and gone over to the window. It was dark already and he couldn’t have seen anything but his own reflection, but he just stood there, looking out.

There was silence for a moment and then Luke said, “You just love to worry, don’t you? You just can’t exist without worrying. You can’t let one single thing pass, you can’t have one single afternoon, one single
minute
when you’re not
stewing away, chewing
away at it. You can’t just let things
go
for one single solitary minute… . You have to ruin every goddamned thing we do.”

Matt said quietly, “We’ve got to do something, Luke. We’re going through Dad’s money so fast.”

“I keep telling you! Something will turn up!”

“Sure,” Matt said. “Sure.”

I think that was probably the turning point for him— the point at which he decided things couldn’t go on as they were. Which was absurd, really, because if he’d thought about it, he would have known that Dr. Christopherson would never have dreamed of sending them a bill.

There is a three-week gap in my letters to Aunt Annie in March and I know why. That was when the friction between Matt and Luke finally came to a head, and the Eleventh Commandment was well and truly shattered and our small world very nearly fell apart.

Matt broke the news at dinner. That seems to have been the rule in our household—if you had anything earth-shattering to say you said it at the dinner table, preferably when everyone else had a mouthful.

“I’ve got something to tell you all,” he said, helping himself to Mrs. Stanovich’s stew. “I’ve quit school.”

As it happened Luke did have a mouthful. He stopped chewing and looked down the table at Matt. At some stage during the preceding months they had changed the seating plan; Luke now sat at our mother’s place, which was nearest the kitchen, and Matt at our father’s. Bo and I were still side by side.

“I talked to Mr. Stone today,” Matt continued. “Told him I was leaving for financial reasons. I’ve got a full-time job at the Hudson’s Bay store. Nine to five, Monday to Saturday. Obviously transportation is a problem until we get the car going again, but I’ve got that sorted out. I’ll go in on the school bus, and if I can’t get back in the evenings they say I can sleep in the storeroom at the Bay. They’ve been really helpful. Mr. Williams—he’s the boss—he knew Dad, it turns out—he seems a good guy”

Luke was still staring at him, his mouth full of meat. Matt looked back at him calmly and started to eat. Luke gave a couple of chews and swallowed. It wasn’t very well chewed—you could see a big lump going down his throat, like when a snake swallows a frog. He swallowed again, twice, ducking his chin to help push the food down, and said, “What are you talking about?”

“Work,” Matt said. “I’ve got a job. I’m going to earn some money.”

Luke said, “What the hell are you talking about?”

Matt looked at Bo and me and raised his eyebrows. “Someone’s not too swift today, ladies. Should I try again?” He wasn’t needling Luke, he was trying to make a joke out of it, make it less of a big deal.

He turned back to Luke. “A job, Luke. Work. What you do to earn money, so you can buy things.”

“What do you mean you’ve quit school?”

“I mean I’ve quit school. You know? ‘Quit’ as in ‘stop‘? I’ve stopped going to school. I’m not going to school any more.”

Luke pushed his chair back from the table. He didn’t look as if he thought it was a joke. He said, “What the hell are you talking about? You’ve got exams in two months.”

“I’ll probably take the exams, get my grade thirteen. Mr. Stone said I could do that. It won’t matter that I’ll have missed a couple of months—I’ve done enough to pass anyway.”

“Passing isn’t good enough—you have to get a scholarship. You know that! How’re you going to get to university if you don’t get a scholarship?”

“I’m not going to university.”

Luke stared at him, bug-eyed.

Matt said gently, “Look, what we’re doing—trying to keep going with part-time jobs so one of us can always be with the girls—it’s not going to work. How can it work? We must have been nuts to think it could.”

He studied Luke’s face, which was going red, anger massing up under the skin, and glanced uneasily at Bo and me. He must have been regretting that he’d made his announcement while we were present. He couldn’t have expected Luke to be pleased at the change of plan, but he obviously hadn’t expected quite such a reaction.

“Look,” he said. “Let’s talk about it later, okay?”

“Oh no,” Luke said. “Ohhh no. We’re going to sort it out right now, because tomorrow you’re going back to school.”

There was silence for the count of two or three. Matt said quietly, “It’s not your decision Luke. Like I said, I’ve quit.”

“Well, you can just un-quit! There’s no goddamned reason at all for you to take a full-time job. At most we’ve got another month before we can start back with Old Man Pye, and then—”

“That’s no answer! Even if we make it through this year, how are you going to manage when I leave? It’s impossible! One of us has to work and one of us has to stay home—that’s the only way.”

“Like hell it is! Like hell!” Luke’s voice was rising in volume and pitch. “We’re not going to need to stay with the girls forever! Next year Bo can go to someone in the afternoons—lots of people have offered—and Kate can join her there after school. They’ll both be okay without us by then. I’ll be able to work five afternoons a week. We can live on that! That plus what Aunt Annie sends.”

He drew a breath, and you could see the effort he was making to calm down and speak reasonably, rationally, because he knew that that was the only way to influence Matt.

“You go to university, you study for three, four years.” He stabbed it out on the table with his finger, stabbed so hard with the effort to speak calmly that his finger shuddered. “You work in the summers. You pay for yourself and if there’s anything left over, you send it home. You get your degree.” He looked up at Matt and stabbed out the last bit again. “You
get
your
degree. Then
you get a job, because
then
you’ll be able to get a
good
job. And
then
you can help, if we still need help.”

Matt was shaking his head. “You’re kidding yourself. What part-time job is going to crop up next year just so you can work afternoons? You’re dreaming.”

“It’ll work out,” Luke said, hanging on to his temper with his teeth. “And anyway it isn’t your problem. Winning a scholarship’s your problem. Looking after the girls is mine.”

Matt went white. That was a funny thing about them; Luke’s anger rose to his face, Matt’s sank to his guts.

Matt said, “Since when do you have sole responsibility for the girls? Since exactly when? What do you think I am? They’re my sisters too, you know. Do you think I’m going to just abandon them to you when you can’t even get a job?”

Luke took hold of the sides of the table with both hands and ducked his head down like a bull about to charge. Then he leaned forward over the table and roared,
“I’ll get a job! Something will turn up!”

Matt stood up and walked out of the room.

For a moment Luke sat where he was, gripping the table. Then he scrambled to his feet and went after him.

I sat rigid, not breathing. There was a crash in the living room and they started shouting again.

Bo climbed down off her chair and went to the doorway and stood there, her thumb in her mouth, watching them. I went and stood beside her. An armchair was on its side, and they were shouting across it. Luke said that Matt was going to ruin everything. Matt said, who did Luke think he was, God? Planning out everyone’s life for them? Luke said that Matt just couldn’t stand it, could he? Just couldn’t stand the thought that he, Luke, was going to do something important for once, something really important. It always had to be Matt. Well too bad. Too goddamned bad.
He
was the one who’d said he’d bring up the girls, it was
his
job and
he
was going to goddamned well do it, and he certainly did not need any help from Matt.

Matt was white as a sheet by then. He said that was what it was about, wasn’t it? It was all about Luke. Saint Luke, carving out a role for himself as chief martyr and saviour of the family. It was nothing to do with the girls, really, was it? Nothing to do with what was really best for them. It was just Luke’s goddamned ego, all the way.

And there was more, and worse, months and months of worry and frustration and grief all coming out together, all spilling out in a great rage of words, and it went on and on until Luke said the one final and unforgivable thing. He said that he’d given up his goddamned future so that Matt could get a degree and if Matt threw that away now, he’d kill him.