Reading by Lightning (47 page)

Now it's not just him I have to hide, but my astonishment at the new force field I've moved into, at the light glinting off the kettle, the boiled beets throbbing in their red juice, energy dropping like mercury from my fingers while I scrape the plates into the slop bucket.

You're going to ruin those slacks working in the garden, Mother says as I clear the table after dinner.

They're already ruined, I say. I've been wearing them in the garden all spring. It's not the slacks, and she can't put her finger on what it is. Besides, I say, I'm not working in the garden this afternoon, I'm going to town. Do you want to check the list?

She bends over it and her lips move, but she's reading mechanically — suspicion is hammering at her concentration.

I take the list back from her. Bye, I say and go out.

He's waiting in the Ford, as we planned while I was doing the milking that morning. He's half lying on the passenger side, half crouching on the floor. This is a waste, he says from the vantage point of my right knee as I start the truck. I thought you'd be wearing a skirt. When I turn onto the section road he presses on my foot on the gas pedal to make me scream. Once we're well away from the farm he makes a move to climb onto the seat. No, I say. Get back down there. You have no idea how people talk.

I give him a couple of dollars and let him out on the blacksmith's road. This trip is for cigarettes, which I can't buy in Burnley without creating a sensation. He takes the money without protest or any hint of embarrassment — he just winks at me and starts down the maple-lined street in the direction I point him, an ordinary-looking workingman walking a packed dirt road. The people who see him will have to place him and they'll decide he's a Galician farmer without the cash to buy gas.

After I do my own errands I drive back to the corner by the blacksmith's and wait, reading my letter from Madeleine. Lois and Archie were married in June by Special Licence. Everyone pooled ration points so they could have a nice reception.
The wedding wasn't so different from what Archie's parents would have put on,
Madeleine writes.
You can say that for the war.
And then she tells me about the frock she wore, made from the
yellow and green dress Nettie Nesbitt made for Aunt Lucy at the start of the war. It had such a full skirt they were able to get two straight-skirted dresses out of it.
Father's taken down the iron railing from the front garden,
Madeleine writes,
and hauled it out to be salvaged for armaments. We have not had to go to the air raid shelter since Easter, but every night we can hear the bombing at Manchester. I'm used to my job and I like talking to the people, but my legs still ache at night from standing so long. Next week I have three days off. If you were here we could go somewhere together.
And I think, I'll send Lois the credit note from George's gloves, that can be my gift. I should have left it in England in the first place. I wonder if they'll still honour it, if the shop is still there. A bee buzzes in the corner of the windshield. I open the passenger-side window and use the letter to try to scoop it out. It dodges me and flies behind my head and I ignore it. I'm overcome with drowsiness — somewhere between the grocery store and the post office my need for sleep caught up with me.

Suddenly Russell's face is at the window. He climbs into the truck with two paper bags. Besides a tin of tobacco he's bought a newspaper, six bottles of beer and a dozen tins of beans and canned meat.

You might get tired of feeding me, he says. I don't want to wear out my welcome.

I start the truck and pull onto the road. We spin along, not talking. There's no way back from the sort of conversation we've had. I roll down my window and let in the spring smell of alfalfa and the piping of red-winged blackbirds in the reeds that have been resurrected in the ditches since the drought ended. The road is empty all the way home and he stays on the seat until we get close to the yard. I park the truck close to the barn with the passenger side away from the house.

Wait, he says from where he's crouched. What are you up to this afternoon?

I have to smile. Betty will probably show up, I say. You should keep an eye out.

I creep into the kitchen and put the things away. Mother's sleeping on the chesterfield. There's work to be done, most urgently hauling water out to the transplanted tomatoes. I stand in the quiet kitchen, the linoleum cool under my feet, and then I go to my room, where the thin white curtain breathes in and out with the breeze. I sit on the bed, up against the wall, my head stuffed with sleepiness. I sit like a brood hen over the night just past, not looking at it, not letting anything draw me away.

I don't know if I will always be able to recall what it was like in the loft that night. Maybe not, if I have a lucky life with lots more of the same. But when I'm an old woman, I'll still go back to the morning when I climbed down the ladder and walked barefoot across the yard in my nightdress, pale green light rising from the fields towards the dark of the sky, the trees secretly breathing over the house. The grass damp under my feet, a robin singing on the old bedspring by the garden, its song curling into the cool air the way a breath does. Blue lying on his side, not moving. I'll remember opening the screen door and stealing into the silent house, creeping along close to the wall to avoid the floorboards creaking, crawling into bed with my feet wet and grimy, pulling sleep over me like a blanket.

These are the things I filch from the house for Russell: a bar of soap (he has his own towel in his knapsack), a plate, fork and spoon (he has his own cup and knife), a pillow and an old quilt. The blanket I wore out to the barn the first night stays there as well. He's desperate with boredom so I start taking books out to him:
Emma,
which he abandons on the third page, Dickens's
Hard Times,
which he sinks into with astonishment and insists is a socialist tract. I bring him writing paper, a pen and ink. I steal a shirt of Phillip's. Candles or a
lantern I refuse to bring because I have no wish for Mother to see a light in the loft and I don't trust him not to burn the barn down. Although of course he smokes in the loft, while we lie among the bars and arrows of brilliant sun that burn through cracks in the walls and pick out certain airborne dust specks and certain bits of trodden yellow straw to touch with gold.

This is the story: In 1938, he was living in a flat with a friend named Lennie, who was a member of a Communist youth club. There were a lot of soldiers coming back from Spain that fall,
Mac-Paps,
he calls them, and Lennie talked Russell into letting some of them stay in the flat until they could be sent home. The mornings Russell got up for classes he had to step over snoring bodies on his way to the door. They were mostly from Alberta, he said. They were Finnish. At first I thought he said
finished,
and he said they were that too, exhausted and discouraged. Groups of them came and went, different men sprawled over the living-room floor all that winter, talking all night and sleeping till mid-afternoon. By the spring of 1939, Russell had more or less stopped getting up for classes. He joined the Communist Party and took a job in a tire factory, where they were trying to get a union going. Then the government stepped up the harassment. At that point the police actually had a squad dedicated to harassing Communists, assigned to throw tear gas into meetings and to condemn buildings where the Party met. The Red Squad, it was called. Finally there was an Order-in-Council declaring them an unlawful organization. That Order-in-Council included Fascist groups too — that's what was really galling, that in people's minds they were one and the same. Lennie was picked up and taken to what Russell called a concentration camp. Russell happened to be out the day the police raided the flat. He knew the police would be back for him so he packed up a few things and left, went to a house in the suburbs, to the basement of some friends. And there he hid for almost two
years. The two years I'd been back in Canada he was living in a cellar in a brick house in Montreal. Sometimes people brought him work to do, writing pamphlets arguing for a Second Front, writing newspaper articles under an assumed name. A couple of times he took the risk of going out to a meeting somewhere, in a barn or another house, once to a big meeting at St. Janvier. Finally he had to move on and he came west. He stayed in Toronto for a couple of months, with a woman who was selling her silverware one place setting at a time to help him and his comrades. She gave him money and he took the train to Winnipeg, tried and failed to arrange a meeting with some Communists there, and hitched a ride to Burnley. He found me without having to ask a single person for directions because he remembered the six-sided silo I showed him from the Lookout the day of our ride in his dad's car.

What would happen if someone did turn you in? I ask. We're lying near the loft opening, where I can see the road and the house.

I'd be hauled off to a concentration camp in Alberta. To Kananaskis, where they're keeping the German POWs. I'd be put in a cabin with a bunch of fucking Fascists, pardon my language. I'd have a bull's eye sewn onto my back so I could be shot on sight if I left the camp.

Are you serious?

I'm serious. I'd be bunked with Nazis and they'd know why I was there and they'd beat the crap out of me every night while the guards played cards.

But what would they say at your trial? I turn in his arms, observing by the way he holds my waist how slender it is.

There wouldn't be a trial.

So I don't understand how they could put you in prison.

I'd be charged with belonging to an unlawful organization. Or I'd be charged with sedition, exciting ill will, creating
discontent. Either way, they wouldn't have to try me. We're under the War Measures Act at the moment.

What about the people who hide you? I ask.

Oh, he says. They'd be shot. Summary execution. He pinches the soft skin of my upper arm. No, my gallant collaborator, a wholesome farm girl like yourself, you'd be below their regard. Though they might start a file on you. It could have been nasty for Esther, where I stayed in Montreal, because she and Martin have links with the Party.

Russell casually pulls the blanket over himself, although he can't be cold. But it's not even that, he says. It's more that you don't want to give the bastards the satisfaction. When did the Germans invade the Soviet Union? June '41. So for a year now it's been Russia holding back the Fascists. And the feds are still chasing us down! Some people would rather see Germany win the war than have the Bolsheviks win it for us. At least the Germans believe in God.

This is interesting, but I suddenly can't listen, I come back to something.

What does
Esther
do? I ask.

She does typing.

Do they have kids?

Four, four boys.

Were they in school?

Three were. The smallest would be about five now. Esther works at home.

Russell launches into a long story about the husband, Martin, how the police broke into Martin's shop when he was out and waited for him to come back. He ran a press that was known to do printing jobs for the Party. While they were waiting the police pissed on the floor and started a fire in the stove with his antique printing blocks. Martin was taking his usual long lunch in a café somewhere. He was a big talker — that's what saved him from being picked up, how long he
talked at lunch. Someone went to the café and warned him, so Martin went into hiding too, in the cellar of someone else's house.

So when was this? I ask.

I guess it was early in 1940.

Just after you moved into
their
cellar? I ask.

Yeah, I guess it must have been.

If you were safe in Martin and Esther's cellar, why couldn't Martin just stay home?

He couldn't
come
home. They were watching the house. We could see them, two swells sitting in a car playing cards. Esther liked baiting them. She'd walk out and ask them if there was some problem. Something the neighbours should know about. She'd offer them coffee.

So why did you leave? I ask.

It was just time, he says. Time to move on.

I feel hurt rise up in my chest and I sit up and start brushing the straw off my blouse.

Hey, he says, pulling me back, pinning me down. Never mind that. Never mind getting all huffy. He knows right away what I'm on about; that tells me everything. I wriggle an arm free and cover my face with it. In the dark I can feel tears stinging in my eyes.

Hey, Lily, he says.

What about in Toronto? I ask. The woman who was selling her silverware? Were you sleeping with her too?

She was seventy-six, he says. Mind you, she did have a bosom on her for an old bird.

He pulls my arm off my face. Think about it, he says. He props himself up on one elbow beside me.
Lily.
Before you get all worked up, think about how I've been after you for years.

Well, yes, I say, with a sob. What was that about? You didn't have the slightest clue who I was. You met me
once.
it was just stupid.

I liked what I saw, he says stubbornly. I had an impulse and I followed it. It's not a bad way to live.

He leans over me and toys with the hair on my temple. I watch him, I trace the lines around his mouth with my eyes. His face is blunt-featured, amused, kind. He is knowing and contained. He gazes back at me and I can't look away. Remember this, I say to myself. Remember how he thinks.