Reading by Lightning

READING BY LIGHTNING

JOAN THOMAS

Copyright © 2008 by Joan Thomas.

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any
retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence
from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact
Access Copyright, visit
www.accesscopyright.ca
or call 1-800-893-5777.

Edited by Bethany Gibson.
Cover illustration composed with images from iStockphoto.
Cover and book design by Julie Scriver.
Printed in Canada on 100% PCW paper.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Thomas, Joan
Reading by lightning/Joan Thomas.

ISBN 978-0-86492-512-1

I. Title.

PS8639.H572R43 2008       C813'.6         C2008-902745-0

Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council
for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry
Development Program (BPIDP), and the New Brunswick Department
of Wellness, Culture, and Sport for its publishing activities.

Goose Lane Editions
Suite 330, 500 Beaverbrook Court
Fredericton, New Brunswick
CANADA E3B 5X4
www.gooselane.com

For Caitlin

The oldest preserved maps of the world originate from Babylonian times, that is, from the third millennium before Christ. On these maps, the Earth is depicted as a flat disk floating on the ocean. Babylon is at the centre of the disk. To make a centre of power the centre of the world, just because it is one's own, is essentially a religious act.

Gerhard Staguhn,
Das Lachen Gottes

If God did not make us then we must make ourselves.

Leon Rooke,
The Fall of Gravity

A brilliant summer day, and an early version of me steps out of the general store in town. I'm wearing a yellow dress with tiny blue flowers on it, not a hand-me-down but a dress made especially for me from a proper bolt of cloth. My mother, who's behind me, has on a white cotton dress faintly patterned with grey worms (black and white daisies, this dress once was, although you would have to have known her for five years to know that).

I run down the wooden steps and there's Charlotte Bates standing beside the ice chest with a boy. Both of them are drinking root beer from bottles. Hello, Lily, says Charlotte in her warm way, and the boy looks up. He's dark haired and strongly built, not tall but taller than both of us. A cottonwood grows so close to the street that the boardwalk was built out around its massive trunk, and this tree drops moving green shadows onto his face and Charlotte's in the bright sunlight.

We're off for a drive, Charlotte says. Russell has Dad's car. Lily, this is my brother from Toronto. You meet at last! Lily Piper, Russell Bates!

Charlotte gestures prettily from me to Russell and smiles to acknowledge my mother, but my mother (who is unacquainted
with the formal introduction) just keeps walking, one shoulder lower than the other because she's hauling a jug of vinegar for pickling. She doesn't even say, Come on, Lily, and surprise flits over Charlotte's face.

Come for a drive in the country, the boy says, looking at me.

Lily's
from
the country, says Charlotte.

My mother's climbing into the truck by then, but I stand on the boardwalk in my tie-up farm shoes, pinned down by their attention. I'm outlined in black by Charlotte's words, by
from the country,
I'm struck mute. But still I see everything. The fine texture of Russell's white shirt and the way the sun picks out individual dark hairs standing up from his forehead and shows the red in them. The geometrical framework of his cheekbones and temple, the way friendliness livens his face, as though it's nipping at his cheeks here and there from the inside. I see him solid in the sliding patterns of shadow and sun, and I also see myself, a girl pretty enough to stand there being looked at by this boy from the east: with a lift of gladness I see that I'm all right, I'm the best thing anyone could patch together with the ingredients I had at hand.

That was seven or eight years ago, and when I look back it seems to me that this boy from the east was a sign that life might drop something
real
into my lap, that I might not have to make it all up myself, like the girl in the fairy tale wearing herself out trying to spin straw into gold. So you'd think I might remember every single thing about that day (which by some sort of miracle I did spend with Russell Bates). But actually I recall only parts of it, and all of those memories are a little ragged now from being played over and over in my mind. I also hung on to a lot of irrelevant detail, the way you do. I remember a woman in a farmyard as we rolled by, a thin woman in a brown dress standing halfway to the barn as though she'd just come to herself with no idea of what she had in mind to do. And a turtle broken like a saucer on the river
road, its white eggs spilled out into the dust. I remember also the way rain smacked against the windshield of Russell's father's big car while we were parked up at the Lookout, the clean circles the raindrops made on the dusty glass.

I wonder how you choose what you're going to remember.
That's what happened,
I say about any particular event. But of course we recall only a tiny fraction of everything that occurred. If every day that went by I'd saved a whole other set of details and impressions, my life as I tell it to myself would be completely different. This is a rather crucial human limitation. If your situation changes dramatically (if, for example, you're walking down a road and are suddenly scooped up in a whirlwind and deposited somewhere else, like that man in the Bible was), you may need to start thinking about your life in a whole different way. But how can you do that when all you have for information is what you chose to remember at the time?

I've tried to understand this. I remember talking about it with George when I was in England, far from my prairie home. While we were out walking one day, rain falling on the shoulders of our mackintoshes in the noiseless way it always falls in England, I asked him why you remember what you remember.

It's all electronics, George said. His hair was plastered to his forehead in clumps from the damp. He launched into an explanation of how the brain stashes everything away, and then an electrical impulse homes in to retrieve what you want. I just read a novel, he said, in which people wore
helmets
with electrodes attached to various parts of their brain. Every time an electrode lit up, the wearer of the helmet would think he was somewhere in his past. He would feel the things he felt back then. But there was no special importance to those moments.

Do you notice me wearing a helmet? I believe I said to that. We were walking along the hedgerows into town, our shoes
squelching wet. The narrow walls of privet were like a maze we had to navigate, and in the dim light his thin face gleamed — he had the sort of mushroomy skin that goes pale with exercise instead of flushing.

Or think about epileptics, George said. When an epileptic has a fit, everything happening at the moment feels familiar, dead familiar. That's because the fit fires up the part of his brain where his memories are kept. Everything feels
momentous.
But it's not, it's just the usual detritus.

The hedgerows ended abruptly just then — this was where the motorway sliced across the countryside at a diagonal. George climbed up the gravel bank of the motorway and shouted back over his shoulder:
And others when the bagpipe sings cannot contain their urine.

Oh, that was George.

At Ward Street Grammar School in Oldham, Lancashire (where for several years I impersonated an English schoolgirl), we looked at the memories in rocks, limestone sliced open so the ammonites inside made two beautiful coiled snakes. I learned that a whole civilization, Phoenicia, was built on a passion for
indigo.
I learned the French words for
umbrella
and
nightmare,
and I saw a coloured plate of a fetus in a woman's womb. Occasionally details from the farm would float into my mind like strands of spiderweb and cling there. I'd be swinging up the street in Oldham with my book satchel over my shoulder and I'd see a flypaper slowly twisting against the cloudy sky. Or the pitchfork from the barn, straw and manure drying into wattle on its tines. I hated it all, I wiped it off with a shudder. That was me sitting on a polished bench in the library in a navy pleated skirt, my coarse brown hair falling over my eyes, but as the world nudged its way into my brain, I was
changing,
my skin smoothing, the poison ivy scabs
dropping off, the dirt and raspberry juice scrubbed out from under my fingernails, the sins that stained me fading with my tan. While my desk partner muttered in Latin, I propped my history book up in front of me and let it fall open at random and my eyes slid onto the words Elizabeth I etched onto a window with a diamond when she was held prisoner as a girl:
MUCH SUSPECTED OF ME, NOTHING PROVED CAN BE
.

It was a new future I was glimpsing, not at all the future I'd pictured when I was growing up — which was not on this earth at all.

Straw is piled on one side of the loft and hay on the other. Our church is an open space between the two piles. The people sit on rough benches made from planks, and Mr. Dalrymple has a pulpit at the front where he stands with his back to the loft opening while he preaches. I'm nestled with other children in the hay under the eaves. We can't all fit on the benches so we're allowed to sit up there, from where we watch barn swallows plunge into the loft just over Mr. Dalrymple's ear, and the frantic beaks of their chicks strain up out of the row of mud nests plastered to the centre beam.
Some glad morning, when this life is o'er,
we sing,
I'll fly away. To a home on God's celestial shore, I'll fly away.