Patterns of Swallows (4 page)

"Her mother's not even her
real mother. You can tell by looking at her. Her real mother was an
Indian. My mom said so." Wynnie's voice was exaggeratedly
loud. It was a comment Ruth was meant to hear.

"You can tell she's a
half-breed. Only a half-breed would be that dirty." Lily
looked directly at Ruth as she said it.

This was revelation to Ruth. It
had never occurred to her before. She knew the truth of it as soon
as Wynnie said that her mother wasn't her mother. It explained the
thing that Ruth had always wondered: why didn't she look like
Mother? Other kids looked like their parents.

She still had a clear picture in
her mind of her father with his freckly skin, his blue eyes, his
light brown, tight curls cut short, his misshapen, bony nose, and his
cleft chin. She had his nose and his chin. She had curls, too,
though hers were more just kinks in her long, brown hair that turned
her hair into frizz when Mother brushed it.

But she looked nothing like her
mother. Mother had light blue eyes and delicate, if somewhat
pinched, features, and her hair was straight and limp and pale, like
dead grass.

It was true. Ruth knew it at
once. She was a half-breed. It explained her skin, much browner
than either of her parents', and the chocolate eyes and dark hair.
Why hadn't she figured it out sooner so Wynnie's words didn't come as
a kick to the pit of the stomach? Why should it be Wynnie, of all
people, who made her know the truth? If only she could have known it
on her own!

Ruth knew that either tears or
the fury that threatened to take possession of her, begging her to
fly at the two girls with fists or feet or any handy weapon, would
have been a victory for the enemy (which was Wynnie's classification
at the moment). Ruth wasn't at all tempted to tears, but the
violence was a fierce temptation she must resist if she didn't want
them to win.

It went against her grain to
fight the enemy using their own tactics, but just then, she wanted to
hurt back with maximum efficiency, and she knew the weapons that did
more damage than her feeble fists could have.

"At least my dad didn't
have to go to prison," she said, narrowing her eyes at Wynnie
into the meanest smile she was capable of. "Everyone knows that
your dad's been to prison. My mother told me that." Then she
turned on Lily. "And everyone knows that he went to prison
because of your dad. Everyone knows that your dad's just a crook,
and he gets other men to go to prison for him."

Wynnie was prone to tears, and
she ran off in a fit of them, but not Lily. Her tendency was Ruth's
– to rage.

"No one talks that way
about my dad," she said to Ruth in a low, shaking voice that
told of the violence within. "I'll never forgive you for that."

Ruth stalked off, laughing an
angry, triumphant laugh.

"Do you hear me? I'll
never forgive you! Never!" Lily's voice followed her in an
uncontrolled shriek. She never allowed anyone to beat her at her own
game.

Ruth went to find Wynnie,
feeling repentant now that the score had evened. Wynnie would have a
cry and tell Ruth to go away, but then she'd be ready to make up when
Ruth told her she was sorry. Neither one of them was much of a hand
at grudge-bearing. They'd been through it before, and their
friendship (such as it was) had always recovered.

The one thing that Ruth couldn't
recover was the innocence she'd had before the moment of truth on the
playground. Her mother was not her mother. Things can never quite
be the same once a person knows a truth like that.

She had
little curiosity about the woman who had given birth to her. The
biological facts about those kinds of arrangements were hazy. Ruth
still wasn't quite sure exactly what it meant that her father was her
father and someone else was her real mother, but one thing was plain.
It was plain she hadn't been wanted by
that
woman.
That
woman was not her
real
mother.

In an odd way, Ruth found a new
affection for the woman she'd always called Mother growing out of the
experience. She hadn't realized that her mother was the type of
woman who could find it in her heart to take on someone else's child
as her own. It was never discussed between the two of them, but Ruth
looked on her mother with new eyes after that day.

After the initial shock and rage
at the enemy wore off, whatever Lily had hoped to accomplish with her
intended cruelty hadn't come off. Ruth couldn't have cared less if
she was a half-breed, she told herself. All that mattered was that
Mother had cared enough about her to want her and claim her as her
own. Nothing else mattered. She was determined nothing else would
matter. She was determined not to let the enemy have its way with
her.

The whole story of Ruth's
parentage didn't come out until she was twelve. There had been
plenty of surmise before that time, but the story was released
officially through the hard-working Arrowhead rumour mill after
Ruth's mother died.

*
* *

When Ruth's mother had been in
the last stages of the cancer, she'd attempted to extract a promise
from Ruth that she wouldn't see her father again.

"She's not in her right
mind," the nurse said in a quiet hiss to Ruth, banking on that
belief enough to say such a thing in the presence of Mrs. Chavinski
but not banking on it enough to say it in a normal speaking voice.
"Just tell her what she wants to hear to ease her mind."

But Ruth wouldn't say the words.
She didn't want to find her father particularly; she certainly
didn't want to have to live with him, but she thought that might be
how it would have to be. She would have no control over her future
after Mother died – she knew that – and the words once
spoken to her mother might end up being a lie.

Ruth explained it to the nurse,
and the nurse said, "Of course, but it doesn't matter. Just say
the words, anyways. It's just words."

Ruth
was shocked. "But it's a
promise
,"
she told the nurse, as if the nurse hadn't grasped that fact and when
she did, she'd understand.

"It's not a real promise,"
the nurse cajoled. "It would make her easier in her mind. It
would make her passing easier."

But it was a promise Ruth never
did make. She'd seen enough of what bitterness could do to a person,
and she didn't want any part of it.

"It would make her passing
easier," the nurse had said, but Ruth knew it wasn't true.
Bitterness hadn't made her mother's living easier. Why would it make
her dying easier?

Ruth had another, a private
reason, she wouldn't make the promise to her mother. She had no room
left in her for unforgiveness, even towards her father.

When a person has died to save
your life, you can never quite be the same again. Especially when
your last words to him were ugly ones. You don't get over a thing
like that in a hurry.

No, Ruth wanted no part ever
again of vendettas. Not even of participating in her mother's.

The townspeople speculated
whether Mr. Chavinski would come back now that "that woman"
wasn't there to come back to. But he never did. Some chapters are
written and read and closed for good.

Ruth never wasted time
speculating on the question. She knew, somehow, that he wouldn't.
Her swallow-like doggedness hadn't been inherited from her father.
She knew he felt no need to rebuild in the place he'd once called
home.

Mrs. Starke had taken Ruth into
their home for the weeks after her Mother's death while it was being
decided what to do with her, but there was no question of her staying
permanently. The Starkes had five girls of their own. They didn't
need another. They couldn't feed another, Mrs. Starke confided to
anyone who would listen. The child welfare authorities were called
in to handle things.

The first avenue taken was the
attempt to locate the father. Ruth had never made the promise to her
mother, but in the end, it wouldn't have mattered if she had.

It had been years since they'd
received any money from him. When inquiries were made at the last
address the money had come from, the only information that could be
found was that he had moved on and left no forwarding address.
Announcements on national radio, advising Rudolf Chavinski to contact
the R.C.M.P. for an important personal message, turned up nothing.
Perhaps he didn't listen to radio. Perhaps he just couldn't be
bothered with important personal messages relating to a life he
didn't want anymore. The Mounties knew nothing of his whereabouts
and never were able to trace him. For all intents and purposes, Rudy
Chavinski had vanished off the face of the earth. At least, vanished
from the face of Ruth's life, never to re-enter it. Perhaps he died
soon after the payments stopped coming to her mother. No one in
Arrowhead ever knew the answer.

Ruth couldn't feel any sorrow
about it at twelve. What would she have done if she'd had to live
with a father she didn't know who didn't want her?

Her father had one brother left
alive, but he was a bachelor, living in a mining camp way up north.
The child welfare people didn't bother to ask him if he wanted Ruth.

Ruth's mother had one sister in
Saskatchewan. She didn't come for the funeral. When she was
contacted about Ruth, she replied in no uncertain terms that the girl
was no blood relation of hers and she was under no obligation to take
her. It was the aunt (or the non-aunt, as she made it clear she was)
who revealed the story of how Ruth had come to be. She passed the
information along only to the child welfare people, but somehow the
story leaked out into the town grapevine with more or less accuracy.

It was no great scandal by that
time. The story hardly survived a week on the vine and then
withered. It was more or less what people had expected. Rudy
Chavinski's first wife (though wife was a courtesy title) was a Cree
woman from northern Saskatchewan. She'd borne him a child but hadn't
cared to raise it, and Rudy hadn't cared to stay long in northern
Saskatchewan. He'd married his second wife shortly before moving to
Arrowhead and settling on a farm there. The farm was in the wife's
name because it was her money that had paid for it, and she'd
insisted on it being in her name.

It must have been bitter gall to
Rudy Chavinski to live on his wife's money and his wife's farm, but I
suppose he did what he had to. The second wife had a little money
even if she did have a sharp tongue. And she was willing to take on
the child. There were reasons Rudy married her, and there were
reasons she married Rudy. Sharp tongues don't marry easily even with
a little money.

Such was Ruth's history.

The problem about history is
that it has such a way of influencing our presents and our futures
against our control.

*
* *

No foster home could be found
for Ruth in Arrowhead. Willing homes were filled up throughout the
entire province just then with the orphanage out by Victoria having
been requisitioned as a hospital for the returning, wounded soldiers.
The wards of the orphanage had all been put into foster care. The
war was nearly over, but the foster homes were still full. And
moving Ruth to another province would have meant extra paperwork and
complications.

The child welfare people checked
out the non-aunt's story and learned from Ruth's birth records that
she did indeed come from a mixed heritage. When the child welfare
authorities learned what had been obvious to townsfolk for years,
that Ruth was Métis, they had another avenue open to them.
There was a residential school available right in the Kissanka
region. It was seen as the ideal solution by all the townspeople and
presumably by the child welfare people, as well.

At twelve, Ruth left Arrowhead
to go and live in the residential school. She didn't return to
Arrowhead until she was nineteen, legally an adult, no longer a ward
of the government of the province of British Columbia, and entitled
to her inheritance from her mother. She never talked about her time
away, not even to me. And no one liked to ask her about what she
didn't see fit to say. Ruth had that effect on people. They held
their tongues. Not about her, but around her.

*
* *

After Ruth stepped off the
greyhound bus and set foot in Arrowhead for the first time in seven
years, she set about moving back into the house and the farm her
mother had left to her. It was all her mother had to leave. All the
money she'd had had gone into the farm.

The house had been empty for
seven years except for the squatters who had moved in and out at
will. The place was not livable when Ruth inherited it, but she was
hard-working and determined. And it was home. Where else would she
go?

The land, all except the acre or
so surrounding the house, was quickly leased to a neighbouring
farmer, a prosperous dairy man, who was glad of the chance. He'd
been pasturing his cattle on it unofficially for years already, not
seeing the harm in it and not knowing if Ruth would ever return to it
(though if he'd known Ruth, he should have known she would). Now
he'd be able to put up proper fencing for the hilly pasture land and
make hay on the flat.