Leaning, Leaning Over Water (13 page)

Something was lifting. I dared to feel safety, mercy, acquittal, release. We stripped off our clothes and dropped them to the floor and slipped into our big double bed. As if the
moment had been choreographed, we heard Father stir in his chair and walk through the front of the house as he turned out the lights and went to his room.

“You didn’t get your other shoe,” I whispered. “It landed in the field.”

“I don’t care,” said Lyd. “I hate the damn shoes anyway.”

“We could find it if we went back,” I said. “It would glow in the dark.”

We tried to laugh but we couldn’t.

“We’ll have to go back to the
Curtain of Dread,”
Lyd said. “When I save enough money. You’re coming with me.”

“I know,” I said.

It was only when I started to tell her about Leo staring into the fistful of black hair that we began to let go. We shook with hysteria and mourned the ponytail, and Lyd made me describe, over and over, the look on Leo’s face as he dropped what he must have believed was my scalp, which lay curled like a dead animal on the car floor. We laughed about Willard coming up to Lyd’s armpit, and how it was a good thing she hadn’t had to lead him around the dance floor. We laughed about plates being the next bonus at the drive-in, how Leo would soon have a set of four to place before his square-jawed children who would never look like me. But even while we laughed, we did not gloat. We did not once mention the rules of the house, and we did not mention running away. We had got away with something very big and we knew this. And we knew, as we fell into silence, that what we had got away with had nothing to do with the way we had deceived our father.

1959

T
he wind roared in our ears all the way home from Darley. Father refused to shut his window and said he had to have air. Eddie was riding shotgun. The window on his side was down, too. Lyd and I tried to lip-read in the back; we couldn’t hear a thing over the wind.

“It’s no use,” her lips exaggerated. She had to form the words three times before I understood. Then we got into it.

“He’s upset,” I mouthed. “The funeral.”

“He’s always upset these days,” said Lyd’s lips. “Weird.” She jabbed a finger into the back of the driver’s seat and made twirling motions. The inside of our Chevy was turquoise, even the back of the seats. It was our first car. It was one year old and it had fins.

“I felt that,” said Father. “Cut it out, whatever you’re doing back there.”

“Did he cry?” I asked Lyd. I dragged two fingers down my cheeks.

“Don’t think so,” said the lips.

The call had come while we were at supper. The Giant Ant in tears; Grampa King, dead. We sat in silence and listened to Father’s side of the conversation.

Grampa’s heart had stopped after he’d done a day’s work. He’d eaten his supper and was sitting in his chair about to darn a pair of wool socks. He’d put the darning egg inside the sock and dropped the sock to the floor. When Uncle Ewart heard the crack he looked up. Grampa King had leaned into his chair, dead.

“Egg?” Father said into the phone. “Darning egg?”

At the funeral parlour, Father and Uncle Ewart, the Giant Ant and Uncle Wash, were directed to an alcove that faced the coffin;
their
grief was meant to be separate. The rest of us sat in pews in the main room, also facing the coffin. Granny Tracks had come, “Out of respect,” she told us, and sat beside me, scrunching my right hand between both of hers. Lorne, the hired hand, was in the pew behind. The room was filled with people I didn’t know; there were men standing at the back. Grampa King had been dressed in a navy-blue suit and there was a red splotch over one eyebrow. His hair was neat and I thought he’d been made to look like an imposter. For one thing, he’d never worn anything but overalls. I was pleased to see that beneath his top shirt button, a safety pin was holding him together.

When it was time to close the coffin just before the service began, a curtain was pulled across the alcove so the eyes of
Father and Uncle Ewart and the Giant Ant would not see the lid coming down on their father. Granny Tracks had taken a dizzy spell at that very moment and I had to help her outside so she could breathe. Lorne followed us out. The three of us sat on the steps and missed most of my grandfather’s funeral. We got to hear the last hymn when Lorne propped a stone to hold the door ajar. Everyone inside was singing “How sweet the hour of closing day.” Lome and Granny hummed in harmony until the
Amen.

I’d been to one funeral before, and that was Mother’s. The memory I held of that was of Rebecque’s voice overhead, telling me what to do. The kindness of her had kept us all moving. We’d had to drive through Hull in a long black car, following the hearse from the church to the graveyard, up the hill. The car had moved so slowly and smoothly I kept thinking we weren’t moving. My entire Sunday school class had been at the service, and most of my classmates from St. Pierre, too. There had been no place to get away; we just had to keep moving.

“The head has many aches,” Granny Tracks said, and she pulled herself up from the top step and brushed her dress. Her face looked as if it had been chalked. Lome nodded in gloom. We went back into the funeral parlour, past the door with the removable sign that said
Whitley King.
I did not believe that
that
Whitley King was my grandfather.

When we returned to the farm to eat and drink, Uncle Ewart called Lyd and me and Eddie upstairs to Grampa’s room. He raised the lid of the trunk at the foot of Grampa’s bed and lifted out a heavy Bible.

“This was your grandmother’s,” he said. “It’s been in the trunk all these years. I don’t think your Grampa ever took it out. There isn’t anyone here who walks through a church
door more than twice a year, Christmas and Easter, sometimes not even Easter, so you’d better take it home with you.”

He handed the Bible to Lyd because she was the eldest. It was worn along the edges and had a pebbled black cover. I looked at Uncle Ewart, who seemed big and uncomforted, and I thought of how he listened to “01’ Man River” on Grampa’s wind-up gramophone, and how every night after supper he washed down his food with a glass of milk from his own cow.

Lyd had the Bible open in the back seat while Father raced through one Ontario town after another, heading for Quebec. He wanted to get home before dark. He’d missed two days’ work but could not take a third because of his new job. “Can’t take the chance,” he said. “I’ve been at it less than a year. Those people in Ottawa want to know that I’ll show up.”

Father now worked in a glass tower at a big General Motors car dealer across the Interprovincial Bridge, in downtown Ottawa. He told us that bookkeeping was better than munitions and trays any day.

“My intimate relations with the fleurs-de-lis have ended,” he announced, the day the factory closed in the village. “The postwar prosperity I’ve been reading about all these years has not dipped down to the bottom of Quebec. Darkness encroaching,” he added. “Tunnel narrowing, ahead.” Then he and Duffy disappeared to the hotel and stayed out half the night.

Father was without work only four days. The car dealer needed a bookkeeper to replace the one they’d just fired because the accounts had been jimmied. Father heard about the job on a Saturday, when he was riding the bus.

He needed a car to get back and forth to Ottawa because he said he couldn’t breathe through the dust that rose up through the bus floors. The past winter, he’d bought a ‘57 Chevy off the
used-car lot; the used-car manager told him that in its first year and a half it had been owned by two nuns. I had my learner’s permit now but I could already drive. I was just waiting for my birthday so I could get my licence in the summer. Lyd said she didn’t want a licence. She didn’t care if she ever drove.

She knocked me in the ribs and pointed to the King Bible. “Look,” said her lips. “Read.”

In the centre were two pages marked
Family Register.
On the left someone had filled in the birthdates of Aunt Lucy, Uncle Ewart and Father. It was not easy to imagine the event of Father’s birth. Beside Father’s date, a note had been added:
Born with a caul.

Lyd raised her eyebrows and mouthed, “What?”

I read the entry again and shrugged. She put her finger to her lips and rolled her eyes in Father’s direction. “Don’t even ask,” said the silent voice.

Born with a caul.
I said it over and over to myself but could not make sense of it. I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to read Lyd’s lips any more. Instead, I thought of Grampa King in his navy suit. I tried to think back and remember him the way he’d been, a long time ago, when we’d moved away from Darley.

We had stood on the platform at the station, the train puffing beside us. Both sides of the family had been there to see us off. Granny Tracks had clutched Mother as if we were moving two thousand and not two hundred miles away.

“Can you say any French words?” Grampa King had asked. “You’ll have to learn
oui
and
non.”

“I know more complicated words than that,” I told him. “I’ve been practising. No one in Darley knows one word of French so
I’ve been teaching it to myself. You run the words together fast until they sound like this: Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.”

“I know
ooo la la,”
said Grampa King, over my head. He was staring into the vanishing point in the tracks. “I learned it in the First Great War. That is also the place I learned the gesture of hands.” He looked down at his own.

The train was making jerking noises and we raised our feet to the steps and climbed aboard. When we were all inside I lowered my window and stuck out an arm, ready to wave. We were so high up, Granny Tracks looked small standing on the platform below. She glared meaningfully at me. “You and your sister prepare yourselves to mind your p’s and q’s when you grow up,” she said.

The train answered with a rush of steam.

“Ooo la la!”
I shouted down to Grampa King. “Blah-blahblah-blah-blah!”

“Shut the window,” Father said. He’d settled into the seat facing me and Eddie. Lyd was sitting with Mother across the aisle. Mother had turned away from us and Lyd was pretending that she was not part of the King family on the move. Soot was pouring in and already Eddie’s face and mine were smudged with black.

“Shut the damned window,” Father had said, again. “Just try to stay clean, will you, until we get to your new home.”

Well, I thought. I opened my eyes. Grampa King is under the ground and I hardly know anything else about him except that he was silent most of the time, and his favourite radio program used to be “Jake and the Kid.”

Our family is shrinking, I thought. And now I’m a traveller
in my father’s first car and we’ve been living in Quebec for years and I know hundreds of French words, maybe even thousands, if I counted them up.

As if he could read my mind, Eddie began to sing in French, from the front seat. He quickly switched songs.

Alouettey

Smoke a cigarettey

Chew tobaccy

Spitty on the floor

No one was in the mood.

“Enough!” Father said.

“I don’t think I can stand one more thing going wrong in this family,” said Lyd. “Father’s getting more weird by the day.”

She had come home early from business school in Ottawa where she was learning shorthand. I loved the swirls and curves and lines of it. She’d showed me how to write my name—a right-leaning
w
with a fallen side, the other side shooting off into the air.

Lyd had a grey suit now, which she’d bought at Middleman’s. She wore it with black shoes, flats. The suit had a straight jacket and two pleats at the waist of the skirt. I teased her about looking “office proper.” The business school taught her that her hair was supposed to be up, too. And how to dress when she went to apply for a job.

I was about to graduate from grade eleven, high school leaving in Quebec. In the fall I planned to move to British Columbia.
I was going to get a job for the summer, save the fare, cross the whole vast country sitting up in a train—no berth—and find work in Vancouver. I knew Father would say I was too young but I was prepared to fight him when I was ready. It wasn’t my fault Quebec schools had only eleven grades. Anyway, I planned to live safely at the “Y” in Vancouver until I got on my feet.

I was off for five days, now, because it was review week before exams. I’d been peeling potatoes when Lyd came in. We took turns making supper before Eddie came home from his paper route, and Father from work.

“What do you mean, things are weird?” I said.

“After we go to bed,” Lyd said, “Father writes things. I got up last night to see who was in the living room. Whatever he had in front of him, he tried to cover over. It was two o’clock in the morning.”

I knew Father had been getting up in the night, leaving for work earlier than usual, spending more and more time alone when he was home. Sometimes he went to the Pines—to the cliff overlooking the headwaters of the rapids—and stood there as if awaiting a sign. Other times he marauded up and down the banks, stepping over heaps of drift logs that had washed to shore. Occasionally he and Duffy rowed upriver to fish, one at the oars, the other at the prow to call out deadheads—the log drive had been heavy this year. Most of the time, Father was pulling more and more into himself. All of this made me more determined to get away.

“I have to study for finals, Lyd. I don’t want to stay in high school the rest of my life. Anyway, I can’t solve Father’s problems. I’m getting out of here, remember?”

“Then you’d better tell Father your plans,” she said. “Anyway, I’m only mentioning it. He
is
our father.”

“It’s the grief,” I said. “Mother died. His father died. Even if there
is
something else, what would we do?”

“We could try to find out what that something else is,” she said.

I looked at her and groaned. We walked into the living room, checked the desk, checked the shelves. Went to his bedroom and pulled out the heavy mahogany drawers. At the bottom we found a thick Hilroy scribbler with times tables on the back. Inside the cover Father had written:
Private journal of Jock King.
None of the entries was dated, except for an occasional day of the week.

Tuesday: Five-thirty, tidied desk in tower. Walked downstairs and through showroom. Aware of an increase in pulse. Didn’t think much about it, opened car door in staff parking lot and slipped behind wheel. By the time I reached Sussex St. and curved down to the bridge, was perspiring and grabbing at my collar. Loosened the knot of my tie. Hands clammy at the wheel. Sucked air when the tires bumped onto the planks of the bridge. Could feel and hear the rattle and echo of wood. Heart fluttered like wings in a cage. Was certain I’d black out.

“Jesus Cripes,” said Lyd. “He’s sick.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Keep reading.”

We took turns and read aloud to each other.

Wednesday: River calm. Left early. The drive to Ottawa, no problem. But can’t get home at night. Can’t seem to get across the Interprovincial Bridge.
In my head, the picture of black black water. Know its distance beneath the bridge, know its depth and speed of flow. Dare not look down. Tonight when I reached the Hull side, careened to the right and parked at edge of road. Had to get out. Leaned into car roof and knew I’d never cross again. Logic denies this. Have to cross again. How else to feed my children? How else to get home?

“This is like a book,” I said.

“Or something very strange,” said Lyd.

“Hurry up and read,” I said, “or Father will be home from work. If he can
get
home.”