Reading by Lightning (52 page)

Were you back here when you found out? he asked.

No, I said. I knew it when I left Oldham. Before it even happened.

Oh, Lily, he said. You didn't. He propped himself up on an elbow then and tried to kiss me. You imagined something terrible, you were afraid. But you didn't know.

He was wrong, I knew, I knew. I rolled over onto my back then and pulled him towards me. I sank down into the dark under him, feeling his weight on me, turning my face away from his kisses.

Was he your cousin? he asked me after a time. Was he your lover?

No, I said. No, I said to both questions, he wasn't.

I stand in my bedroom now and roll the belemnite back and forth in my hand. It's a lovely brown, the very brown of the scrub oaks by the river. Polished, as though someone has taken a soft cloth to it. It's not a stony finger or a bullet casing, it wasn't made by magic and it wasn't made by man. It's a buoyancy chamber. Some little speck of an animal excreted it to keep itself afloat, millions and millions of years ago, halfway around the world. I stand in my bedroom with the belemnite in my hand and then I put it back on the window ledge.

I go to bed earlier and earlier, I sink hungrily into dreams. I dream that Mother and I get jobs. We're taking the train to
work. She
has
had her hair cut — its waves peep out from the rim of a jaunty beret and her face is glazed and willing. I have no idea where we should be getting off. I get up at every station to see if it's our stop, but the train never slows down enough for me to tell. Then I'm walking back from the barn in my nightdress, being followed by a dog, a stray dog with shaggy fur tinged with rust. The sheets are tangled around my legs like ropes of seaweed. I kick them down to the bottom and lie under the scratchy blanket. I dream of a catalogue coming in the mail, its pages sticking together where someone spilled sweet coffee on them. Then I'm in St. Ambrose Parish Church in Salford. I'm walking up the stone aisle, squeezing past a big watering trough. (it's
for the baptisms,
says Nettie Nesbitt.) When I finally open my eyes the light is grey. It's the dawn of a cloudy day. I lie in bed for a long time, thinking about telling her.

I'll do it one evening when the sunset paints the underside of the clouds crimson. Mother will be sitting in the front yard where she sits to watch the fake air battles. I drag a chair out and sit down beside her.
Mother
— , I say. Her eyes turn up, fear rising in them. I tell her, in one clean and fearless sentence. I watch the rage collect in her face. She doesn't ask how this could have happened, with us alone on the farm these last two years. It's something I hatched up in my own sinful body, it's been in the cards since I was thirteen.
I want you to leave,
she says in a strangled voice.
Get out of this house. Now. Before anyone finds out.
She would rather lose me than face the disgrace. In fact, she'd love it if I left — the world would know me then, the sort of child she's always had to contend with: everyone would know my breathtaking wickedness. I take some pleasure in imagining this, I enjoy tearing down the fragile structure the two of us have been building.

The rooster is doing his best to wake up the henhouse. Mother's bedsprings creak. The sheets need washing — I
smell myself on them, sweat, and the garden, and the yeasty smell of bread. I wonder guiltily when Mother's bed was last changed. I should get up and start the laundry, I think.
Or,
I think, dipping back into my story.
Or
maybe I don't tell her. Maybe while she's sleeping I just drag my empty trunk out to the Ford, and then gradually I spirit my things outside and fill it. On cue I get a telegram from Phillip. He's in Halifax, he's being sent home! He's been diagnosed with a
heart murmur.
I drive to town to pick him up. He gets off the train wearing his civvies. My trunk is standing on the platform — the station master unloaded it from the Ford. The whistle blows and I hand Phillip the keys of the Ford and board the train. Mother would rather have him anyway, she'd much rather have Phillip and Betty than me.

But then of course the train that brought Phillip home carries me west, that's the way it's headed. Where do I go in the west? — under that endless sky, with stooks of grain running to the horizon in every direction, and farmhouses just like this one, one every mile, red kitchen floors with their pattern of curling feathers from here to Edmonton. The train chugs doggedly on. I can't get it turned back east, to Charlotte, opening a heavy oak door to greet me, wearing her nursing cap — Charlotte who hardly knows me but is kind. Or to Aunt Lucy, reaching out to pull my head down to her shoulder, saying,
There, there, love, there's no need for that.
Or to Doris, the girl I met on the train whose boyfriend'd been killed. Suddenly I see Doris. She's wearing a trim business suit and red shoes. She's standing outside an office on a wide city street with a handsome little boy beside her. Her child, the baby that was just a thought inside her when I met her on the train.
It was hard,
the caption below this picture reads,
but you can do it.

To Russell. In my mind I see the train come for me, but I can't get it turned back east to Russell.

It's cold now. I get up one night long after Mother's asleep and pull my clothes on, reaching in to the floor of the wardrobe where my winter clothes are piled and throwing on the first things that come to hand. I visit the outhouse and then I walk across the yard, out under the cottonwoods standing silver against the dark sky. They're always the last to lose their leaves. Their long roots go down into an underground stream, that's what my dad said. On the other side of the line of trees the fields stretch flat in the starlight.

I wade through the grass to the roof of the old chicken house. I used to sit there all the time before I went to England, I used to sit there and read the Bible. I climb up and lie back and stretch my legs out. Then I sit up again and hitch my jacket around to cushion my spine against the shingles. The air is cold, spiced with smoke from stubble burning on the other side of the river. This roof's at a perfect slant for lying to look at the stars. I tip my head back and narrow my eyes, and the tiny bits of light above me blur, jostling for space. Above me they dance, sending down their old light. They crowd into one another — that's the way it seems from here, but really there are infinite plains of darkness between them. I snuggle into my jacket, resisting the cold. Deep inside me my heart beats on unbidden. All through my body, cells go about their business, do their private, independent work. It's not a matter of thought: my thinking or not thinking will not affect it in the slightest.

We expect the threshing crew, but it rains. I run into Harry on the road. He rolls down his truck window to pass the time of day with me. He's grinning in spite of the rain. The
Farmer's Almanac
promises one big storm and then clear, dry weather
for weeks. Anyway, he has the bumper crop of all bumper crops, he can afford to see it drop a grade.

It's raining so hard when I come in from milking that I wish I had a lid for the pail. I open the kitchen door and slide the milk in, standing in the porch to shake the water off my coat. There's an unfamiliar oilskin jacket hanging on the nail by the door. When I step into the kitchen, someone's sitting at the kitchen table. A brown-haired man, his hair shining black from the rain. Mother's standing by the stove. There's a bright red spot on each of her cheeks. Her hands are shaking with her agitation, but she's managed to put the kettle on the stove for tea. Or Russell helped her. And there he sits at our kitchen table, an amazing sight, with his broad shoulders and confident, friendly face. And how it must amaze her too, this Satanic figure from my girlhood, such a commonplace man after all, seemingly sober and wearing a grey cotton shirt. An ordinary grey shirt — it should look ordinary to her, it's Phillip's.

I stand on the rag rug and shake rain out of my hair, and when I feel as though I can speak I turn towards the table. Russell, I say. He rises up a little from his chair. It looks as though he's about to shake hands with me, but then he sits back down. He's wearing a ridiculous, elated smile. Hello, Lily. Nice to see you.

Nice to see you too, I say.

He was just travelling through, says Mother. Someone dropped him off on the road and he came to the door. While you were milking. She's fumbling to get the tea tin open and I go to help her.

Actually, I've been in Manitoba for a few months, Mrs. Piper, Russell says. But I'm heading back east now. I just wanted to stop in before I left. Russell keeps his eyes on me while he talks, and I stare back. I'm looking for something in his face. For whether he came to ask me for his fare to Hull,
or for some other reason. Finally, without looking away, he says, Maybe before the tea is ready, I'll just use your outhouse. Out back?

Where else? I say. He goes out, lifting his waterproof off the nail.

Imagine that fellow showing up, Mother says when the porch door slams. Imagine him remembering you after all this time.

Yes, imagine, I say. I'm beginning to get my breath back. Of course, he did write to me while I was in England, I say. At least twice. I guess it's always possible that I wrote back.

She ignores this. That dog is not the watchdog he should be, she says. That fellow was right at the door before I knew. He said he knocked on the porch first, but I didn't hear him. I didn't hear a thing until he was right at the kitchen door. I wonder who it was that dropped him off? I asked him, but he didn't know the man's name. Whoever it was must have wondered why he'd be coming here.

She teeters over to the cupboard to get down teacups. He doesn't look much like his father, she says. Mr. Bates had a finer-featured face. This one is kind of broad across the cheekbones. His mother must be a Ukrainian or one of those nationalities.

I sit down in silence at the table.

When he comes back in he says, it's stopped raining. Do I have time for a smoke? He tips his head for me to join him, with an expression that will surely speak volumes to my mother, but she's staring at the cigarette he's rolled in the outhouse, rigid with fear that he'll try to light it in the kitchen. I should try to make this all seem natural.
I'll show Russell around,
I should say. But I can't be bothered. I just get up and stalk silently to the door and reach for my coat.

We stand under the overhang of the porch. The rain has slowed momentarily but water drips from the roof like vines.
He pulls me into his arms and kisses me. If you'd just shown up in the loft, we could have spent the night together, I say. (
You might have seen then,
is what I'm thinking,
you would know without having to be told.)
It's full of fresh hay, I add. It's very pleasant at the moment. Cool as well.

In a minute I'll be crying.

No, he says. No more of that. I've had it with living like a criminal. He lets me go and lights his cigarette. Anyway, your mother offered me a bed. She said I could sleep with you.