Reading by Lightning (49 page)

That must have been
awful,
I say.

Russell draws on his cigarette and smiles his half-smile. No, it was better. It woke her up — what's the word . . . it has to do with science, with electricity? it
galvanized
her. Before she knew, before she really knew, she seemed half asleep all the time. It was like there was a slow leak somewhere and she couldn't put her finger on it. After he left at least we had our mother.

What's your mother like? I ask.

Oh, she's a bit of a character. The pleasure of the story he's going to tell creeps over his face. She likes excitement and she finally had a little drama in her life. She was actually the one
who packed his stuff up when he left. She went over to Loretta's and banged on the door while he was at work. She was dragging a case of his stuff, the most embarrassing things. He had this truss thing for a hernia, and she dragged the freaking thing out and tried to show Loretta how to wrap it and work the buckles.

Did you see this?

No, but my mother gave me a play-by-play. And Charlotte was there.

I've brought beer up, and he gets up then and takes both bottles over to the narrow slot where the ladder is nailed to the loft floor. Our bottle opener. He cracks them open and comes back and hands me one.

You knew Charlotte then?

I got to know her that summer when I went down to London to see Dad. He tips his bottle back and takes a long drink and I watch his Adam's apple pumping the beer down his throat. I'll say this for Loretta, he says finally, wiping his mouth and dropping back down onto the blanket. Once the whole thing blew open she wanted Charlotte to know she had brothers. Dad would send train tickets, and she always made me welcome. Well, in her fashion.

Which is?

Well, how can I put it? If my mother is borscht, Loretta is consommé. He grins at his own joke, showing me his strong, even teeth.

So then you grew up with one parent, I say greedily, although I can see he's running out of steam.

He bends his head to light another cigarette, and I reach out my hand for the match and drop it into an empty beer bottle. Oh, it was all right, he says. She moved us closer to our uncles, she started going to synagogue again. She was free to make him the butt of her jokes. He always supported us, I'll give him that. A principled man. He thinks of himself as a
principled man. As long as he handles
money
properly. Stephen never went to visit. Stephen's the principled one.

Russell lies back in the hay. I was always a little ashamed that Dad could
buy
me, he says. Send me a train ticket, and you can't see me for dust.

I lie beside him watching smoke curl into the dusty air. No, I say. I'm glad you're the sort of person who went to see his dad.

He wants me to come to Montreal with him. There's lots I could do, even if I'm not a Party member. I could be a fellow traveller — that has a nice ring to it. I toy with the idea of giving myself over, listening raptly from a seat in the front row in a crowded hall in Montreal, wearing a tweed jacket and the tie-up shoes I took to England. I try hard to keep my feelings off my face while he talks. Maybe there are situations where
imperialist running dogs
sounds like sensible language, maybe if you spend all your evenings in cramped rooms on hard chairs with comrades who talk the same way.

But I hold my little seedling opinions close to my chest. If he sees them he'll have them plucked out in a flash. I've joined the League of Esther, or whatever her name was in Montreal. Among the services I provide for Russell: Going to the Burnley library to ask for newspapers from down East (there are none). Stamping and mailing his letters (he writes a lot of letters). Carrying Mother's scissors out to the loft and trimming an inch off his hair all over, letting the brown pieces fall onto the straw. And, after he's been here a couple of weeks, delivering his mail. Unread — which, I might add, requires a lot of discipline, seeing as his letters all arrive addressed to me.

He's got two contacts in Winnipeg. He doesn't know these people, but he says he can stay with them, a family on Selkirk
Avenue or a single comrade named Al living in an apartment on Burrows. I'll take off by the end of the week, he says (more than once, at the start of different weeks). But he doesn't go. I keep slipping an extra piece of chicken or steak into the oven when I'm cooking dinner, I keep on with my double life. Two lives are more than most people hope for.

Mother stands in the living room for the longest time, looking out towards the barn. I'm peeling potatoes for dinner and I keep calling comments to her, trying to distract her. Finally I wipe my hands on the dishtowel and go out to join her. What are you looking at? I ask.

Oh, I was just thinking about your dad. He never did put a step at the henhouse door. For twenty years we've been tripping over that sill.

George told me that the Chinese build their houses without steps so the evil spirits can't walk in, I say. Maybe he was just looking after the chickens.

She holds on to the window ledge. She has the skin, beyond white, of someone the sun never sees, not even for the twenty seconds it takes to go to the outhouse. it was a mistake to buy a commode chair. She's using it all the time now, even during the day.

Your dad was slow at getting around to things, she says. Maybe it was part of his trouble. He fell down in the loft, you know. When we had church there. The men had to carry him out.

Fell down.
That's our term for it. Suddenly I remember. I was standing in the yard crying and I remember them carrying him out. It's a scene from hell, three men carrying my father through the lake of fire, his body sagging between them. Was there a fire in the barn when it happened? I ask.

We never had a fire in that barn, she says. It was an evening service, it must just have been the sunset. Sometimes it looks like fire, the way the sun shines on the windows.

This was during the service? What did everybody do?

I didn't see it. You were being bad and I had to take you out, I had to give you a spanking. And then we were walking back to the barn and I heard the commotion and they were carrying him out.

I didn't realize everyone in the church knew all along, I say.

They didn't really know. They didn't know what it was. Her face twists with pain and her voice breaks. Mrs. Stalling started the story that he was a Pentecostal. From before he came to the district. They thought it was something to do with that. You know, the way the Pentecostals behave.

They thought he was speaking in tongues? I cry. When he had a seizure? They thought he was filled with the spirit? Suddenly I'm seized by longing, thinking of my father, his silence torn open by ecstatic words, his voice filling the loft. Crying out who he was, declaring himself, the swallows darting to the rafters in alarm. After a minute I reach for my mother's arm. She grips my hand. Her mouth is held in a grimace of emotion, a silent upside-down U.

Filled with the spirit, I say. Well, I think he was.

When you're naked in broad daylight, every subject is a confidence. I tell Russell about my dad, some things. I tell him about the Barr Colony. They wanted to come to the New World without really changing, I say. The man who led them made them think they were better than everyone else. I'm trying to confine myself to what I know for sure. Russell is more interested in the supply syndicate and all of Isaac Barr's other schemes.

It was a
Utopian
movement, he says. I've never heard of it, not this one from England. What were your dad's politics?

His politics? Oh, I don't know. He liked the King. One Christmas he managed to get a battery for Joe's radio so he could get up in the middle of the night to listen to the King's address. We didn't have an alarm clock, so he slept on the chesterfield with the thinnest of blankets — that's what he did, so the cold would keep waking him up.

Talk about conditioning of the masses, says Russell. Something floats up through the heedless warmth between us, something brown and murky, my distaste for his way of talking as though everything he says is the last word on the subject. I can't bear feeling this way. I run my hand down his chest to where the curling hair ends, feeling the soft sinking at the bottom of his ribs, and then I turn my face up knowing that this will bring his down to me and we will kiss.

We talk about the war, in our way, which is different from George's. It's one of our best subjects, the war, although Russell manages to make the Communists the centre of everything. He thinks, for example, that England and France let Germany build up arms in the Thirties in order to contain Russia. I don't argue. All his opinions are so worked out — they've been distilled in all-night debates with other men wearing braces, they're supported by covert sources of intelligence from all over the world.

He drags his knapsack across the bare boards of the loft and pulls something out of it to show me, a paper folded into the packet of letters and pamphlets he's hauling around. It's in George's familiar handwriting. A play script, or the first page of one, on a sheet torn out of an exercise book:

A British undergraduate encounters the Major on the esplanade.

MAJOR
:
(hale, scarlet):
I envy you young chaps.
It's the life, the very life. Never happier than in the last round.

UNDERGRADUATE
:
(examining a cloud over the ocean very like a whale)

MAJOR
: The last round was nothing compared to this! We've got tanks, we've got RDF, we've got the naval advantage.

UNDERGRADUATE
: I reject the naval advantage.

MAJOR
: Total war this time. War at sea, war on land, war in the air. We'll show the Jerries what for!

UNDERGRADUATE
:
(regards a cloud backed like a weasel)

MAJOR
: Salute when you meet a senior officer, young fellow.

UNDERGRADUATE
:
(salutes)
Sir!

Where's the rest of it? I ask.

That's all he sent me, says Russell. Maybe it's all he wrote. Of that particular play. He looks at me, bemused. Does it make sense to you?

Yes, I say.

Well, I had to
study
the fucking thing, says Russell.
The undergraduate salutes
— that must be George, when he gave up and decided to enlist.

He didn't enlist, I say. He was conscripted. But he didn't fight it. He just couldn't step aside from what was happening. He saw himself a part of it, even if it was a terrible mistake. I speak slowly because seeing something of George's has filled me with emotion. Because what I'm saying is about Russell too, Russell sleeping in a loft while other men are going knowingly to die.

But he just sits and watches me with interest. Russell feels
no shame about not going. He doesn't think he's part of it. He says, trying to be helpful, George must have just figured it was bigger than him.