Reading by Lightning (44 page)

My mother's put her coat on and joined me in the yard. Look at that! she cries. The drogue is right above us and you can see a dot of blue sky through a rip in the canvas.

How can they tell which pilot hit it? she asks. Her neck's cranked back and colour's surfaced in her white cheeks — the war is having its intended effect.

I don't know, I say. Maybe they'd train you to keep score. I'll take you out to the base and see if they want to recruit you.

The three planes bank over the river and drone back towards us. They've got roundels painted on their sides, the way
RAF
planes do. Archery targets. What is that — a taunt to the Germans? When the first training plane tips I see the little heads of two airmen in the cockpit and feel (not for the first time) surprised. I can't shake the notion that it's the machines fighting this war on their own. But there are miniature men up there. Prairie farm boys. They'll be smug, looking down at our farm tilting beneath them: up there in the cockpit they think they've stumbled onto something real at last.

I haul a chair outside for my mother and she settles on it eagerly. After that as long as it's warm enough she sits in the front yard whenever the plane with the drogue is out, watching the fighter planes training. At dinner she tells me all about it. It's like they say in England,
What did we do with ourselves before there was a war on?

Fall passes, all fall I read, while Mother watches the planes and waits for news from Phillip, while the grass between the house and the barn freezes into a spongy carpet and our own modest version of the English sparrow gathers in the garden. Madeleine writes me that in Oldham the stars have gone out again because the night sky glows red from all the buildings burning in Manchester.
Oh, Lily,
she writes,
you would be shocked to see the corner of Oldham Road and Linacre Street, it's just a huge crater. Everyone tries not to dwell on it. At work we have to wear badges saying,
DON'T TELL ME. I'VE GOT A BOMB STORY TOO
.

Here we still have stars. Here, across the river, coyotes yip like geese. Winter comes, the winter of 1942, and I lift my eyes from the black letters on a white page to see four crows working their way across a sky filled with snow. Hoarfrost
collects along the steaming bellows of Molly's sides in the big, empty barn and I pile straw two feet deep into her stall to make a cozier nest. When Betty comes over with Billy, we can't let him crawl on the floor.

There are dances at the base in Burnley. The town is full of Aussies, and I have a fair idea how the evening would go, but still I toy with the idea of slipping out after Mother's asleep. Although she'd be bound to hear the Ford start up. I picture creeping in at two in the morning, beer on my breath and my lipstick nibbled away, to see her fallen on the step between the living room and the kitchen, one accusing eye open against the linoleum.

By now Betty's living in Burnley. She stayed only a month at her dad's and then Isabel's husband shipped out and Betty moved in with Isabel. So I stop in at Isabel's house in Burnley and ask Betty if she'd come out to the farm on Saturday and stay overnight with Mother.

Where do you want to go? she asks. Stupidly, I tell her.

I don't think Phil would want to see his sister at one of those dances, she says. Come on, Betty, I say.
Hope deferred maketh the heart sick.

She looks at me, startled; she knows it's a Bible verse. I'm amazed myself sometimes at what is buried in my brain, at what comes out of my mouth. I could ask Gracie to stay with Mother, but I don't care that much.

I wish
Gracie
could meet a boy, I happen to say to Mother one day. She should move to Winnipeg. She should get a job at Eaton's, or take a secretarial course.

Is that what you're thinking of doing? she says, darting me a frightened look. She's sitting on the chesterfield knitting. It's
just squares she's making, for a shawl, for some missionary project. Afghans for Africans is what they have in mind.

Of course not, I say sharply. I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to stay on the farm and marry Joe Pye.

Joe Pye, she says, drawing her needle out of the last row and pulling at the tail of yarn so the last chain of loops disappears. He hasn't been by for ages. Since before the war. He's probably dead by now, the way he smoked. Remember how he wore his combinations all summer? When they were threshing and it was so hot, he'd take his shirt off and there he'd be in his combinations.

I turn away to the window. Joe Pye sitting on the backless chair by the back door, spear grass and thistle barbs sticking in his wool underwear, impossibly skinny. Watching us with affection, with his hands dangling between his knees. Watching his ready-made family. She's pronouncing him dead without a shiver! Oh, he'll be back, I say after a minute. Remember those old moccasins he wore in the winter?

You and Gracie will both meet nice boys one day, she says. This generous thought coming out of her mouth scares her a little and she tacks on a warning. You have to be careful, though, she says. You never really know a person until you marry them.

Dad was a nasty surprise, was he?

I never said that. But I had to find out what was wrong with him on my own and you'd think he could've told me ahead of time. I had to find out by seeing him fall down in the middle of the living room. Her face is stiff.

I don't remember that, I say. I move casually into the kitchen and pick up a damp rag from the table. Back in the living room I wipe at the window ledge. I think about the day I looked it up in the public library in Oldham, stood riveted between the stacks reading about excessive signals from cerebral neurons,
about
déjà vu
and
jamais vu.
I open my mouth to tell her, but I can't risk squandering the moment.

It started when they were on the ship coming from England, didn't it? I say instead.

Where did you get that idea?

I don't know exactly. If it was happening in England they wouldn't have sent him. And I thought it might be why he went on his own up to the lumber camps as soon as he got here.

I run the rag over the upper sash. Really (but I don't tell her this) I gleaned it all from Joe Pye's stories. From my instinct for when Joe Pye was holding back. My mother is silent. She's flattening her new square onto the stack she's finished, lining up the edges.

Remember that time he fell down in the pigpen? I ask. You went somewhere the next day. Where did you go?

Now she's picked up her needles again and she's casting on for a new square, counting stitches. Once she has her first row on she says, We went to Winnipeg. We went into the big hospital there and talked to a doctor. I made your father go. So then we knew what it was. We never knew before that, he never once went to a doctor. I wouldn't let him go to Dr. Ross. You can't trust Dr. Ross not to talk.

She presses her mouth into a straight line and bends over her knitting. I stand with the rag in my hand. So. I have to cast off the doctor in Lloydminster, the genial Dr. Hignell hanging his shingle up in a boardwalk frontier town. I have to slip Dr. Hignell back into the American western I got him from, likely a picture I saw with Madeleine on Horsedge Street.

The conversation is finished. I rinse the dust cloth in a basin in the kitchen. This all started with a moment of panic about my leaving. But she's not thinking of me, of what I'll do. There must be a faint smell of failure in her nostrils from her enterprise in raising me, but my actual independent existence
is not something she considers. No doubt she thinks mostly about the body she's found herself in, the cage she can't escape, the way her shaking hands slop tea onto her lap. And of small memories, old humiliations sending out their poisonous fumes, things no one else has thought about for decades. I stand with my hands in a basin of cold water and watch my mother frowning over her wool.

My Tucker grandmother had five children, and in the dance of her family my mother was the one without a partner. Agnes and Eva were princesses who ran into the bush after milking in the morning, dragging an old pillowcase of lace collars and high-heeled shoes for their court. Franklin and Morris were soldiers who played with sticks in the dirt under the veranda. But my mother was an orphan who hid alone under the rhubarb leaves against the garden fence, until their mother came out of the house and pulled her up by the yoke of her dress and made her collect the eggs and chase the chickens out of the garden. From the shadows of the barn eyes watched, the sad eyes of the plow horses and the piggy-dumb eyes of the sows in the wallow, but there was no one besides her who cared about the injustice of it.

Agnes was the one my mother longed to be. When she made a sampler she copied Agnes's exactly, embroidering the letters
L N M O
in the middle of the alphabet, a mistake Agnes had been too lazy to pull out, and everyone laughed when they saw it. Even the hired boy got the joke. Agnes had soft, full lips and a slow way of talking and it was Agnes she longed for, not Eva, who was halfway between them in age and had the same pale wavy hair as my mother and the same set to her mouth and was the one who had stolen Agnes's love. Eva was full of malice. She pulled Mother's underpants down once when all their cousins were in the bedroom changing so that
everyone saw her bum, she dribbled molasses in my mother's autograph album. At the supper table Agnes and Eva looked at each other with shining eyes and laughed and then Franklin and Morris pretended to share a secret joke too, but she had no one to laugh with and Agnes never so much as looked at her.

When Mother was about my age she worked as a hired girl for a bachelor farmer named Felix Macdonald, who lived on a treeless yard on the Bicknell road, a tall, stout man with black spots on his gums, who always came to the table stinking of the pigpen, never slipping his overalls off or even his boots. She lasted only two months. She always said it was too bad her hands had to get so coarse for nothing, although being a good milker was handy later when she and my father were shipping cream. She lasted two months with the smell of the pigpen at the table every morning, noon and night, but finally one day she dared to complain. The next day Felix Macdonald came in at supper and walked straight over to the table and dropped a kielbasa on my mother's plate, a fleshy red sausage like a stallion's penis. A sausage of the type my mother's family would never eat: he must have stopped in at one of the Galician farms to buy it. There was no wife in that house, just Mr. Macdonald's sister Frances, who sat at the table with her head down. My mother wanted to knock the sausage off to the floor, but she was afraid to move. And then he asked her if she knew why her family had sent her,
her
in particular, and told her that he'd asked for the homeliest sister, he didn't want his hired girl getting married on him. That was when she packed up her bag and left. When she got home she cried and told her mother angrily what he had said, and her mother got angry too and said, None of my girls are homely.