The Sudden Weight of Snow (14 page)

The town was left reeling by the events. If we didn’t know how to feel, the
Sawmill Creek Chronicle
told us. We were told that we were, in turn and in rotation: “left reeling,” “in shock,” “mourning,” and “calling for answers.” Vera read the paper again and again, as though to justify her own feelings of grief, shaking her head slowly, sniffling. Dr. Holland gave her a day off work. I came home after school that day and saw my mother in the back field as I leaned over the sink, gulping down milk from the carton. I wiped my mouth and stood on my toes, bent toward the window. Vera was standing in the middle of the field, still, looking towards the mountains, not the house. It was the only time I remembered seeing her there, like that.

The afternoon I found out about the boy’s death, Vera was at the kitchen table, reading the paper when I came in the back door. She looked up and sighed, before saying, “A shame, hey, what happened to that boy at the game.”

“Yeah, everyone’s talking about it at school,” I said, hanging my jacket on the back of the door.

“You didn’t tell me that happened. You were working at the game last night, weren’t you?”

“We were, but,” I pulled out a chair and sat across from her, folding one leg under me so the other leg swung off the floor, “Krista and I left early. There weren’t a lot of people coming by.” My cold skin was beginning to burn from the warmth in the kitchen.

“Oh. I didn’t hear you come in. It must’ve been late.” Vera reached out and touched the back of her hand to my hot cheek. “Are you feeling all right?”

“Yeah. I was out walking.”

She looked like she wanted to ask me something else, but she got up and started to make dinner. I sat at the table and watched Vera. She was making something simple, a casserole, and she let me just sit and watch.

That night as I fell asleep, I thought about Gabe’s unusual expression, how he seemed so expectant and so reserved at the same time. I wanted to find out what was behind it. I felt unsettled, so I tried to recreate small things, those which can be easily forgotten after one meeting. I thought of the shape of his hands around a cup, his long, straight fingers, flat nail beds. Gabe’s lips above the rim as he took a drink. I tried to remember his smell but my mind was pulled back to his hands, the heat that had passed between his fingers and my body when he had touched my hair, the strands a conduit. I thought about my own hands as they traced bone and muscle under my sheets. They were becoming more adept at understanding the lines of my own body than they had been even a couple of years ago, though barely. There were still things that surprised me: a previously undiscovered mole, the occasional knot of something hard and sore beneath my skin, the hot slick of blood when I put my hands between my legs before knowing that time of the month had arrived, again.

Sometimes, just before falling asleep, I would feel a rocking motion, as though my body was remembering lying in the back of a moving vehicle. At one time, we had driven to Edmonton every year for Christmas. Vera would carry us out to the car in our pyjamas before we had a chance to wake up. By the time we did, we would be hours away from Sawmill Creek. When I woke, I would keep my eyes closed at first to feel the motion of the car in every part of me, my body moving with it. I thought it was the ultimate contradiction – moving yet staying still. Asleep yet on my way somewhere. If we drove straight through, Vera would be angry and close to tears by the time we arrived and would sleep through most of the next day. If we stopped on the way, it would be at an old high school friend of hers in Valemount where we would lie in sleeping bags on the floor, listening to the slow moan of snow as it slid off the roof, the muffled thud as it hit the ground.

That friend’s husband once told Nick and me about how their cat had gone missing the winter before. “Sure enough, found her under the eaves, next spring when the snow thawed. Flat as a pancake. Ha! Only good cat is a flat cat I keep telling her,” he motioned to Vera’s high school friend. “Ha!” The husband looked confused when Nick and I didn’t respond with laughter, shot us an expression that said something about
kids these days
, then cleared his throat, slurped his coffee and leaned back in his chair saying, “Hyup, yup, yup,” under his breath.

Winter in Edmonton was a different kind of season than what we had become used to. Sawmill Creek’s winter was a brief fairy tale of a season. The snow fell and kept falling until it peaked the mountains and smoothed out the valleys. It got
cold enough to keep the snow on the ground but not enough to cause skin to tighten and burn when exposed to air. In Edmonton, the cold was so dry that the mucus froze in nostrils with each inhalation and air found drops of moisture on eyelashes and stuck them together. The snow was hard and planed by the wind. People navigated the shortest routes between car and house. They said, “Cold enough for ya?” and, “Here, this’ll warm clean through,” offering drinks, hot or alcoholic, as soon as guests walked in the door.

We used to spend Christmas in one of my aunts’ bungalows. These houses were almost interchangeable, with all the rooms on one floor, something called an in-law suite in the basement in which in-laws rarely lived. Olga and Olesa, Vera’s twin sisters, lived across the street from each other, their houses mirrors of each other. Everyone talked about how ideal this was, how convenient and delightful. Auntie Al lived a drive away and Baba was in the basement suite, insisting on having her own space down there, no matter how much more difficult the stairs became with each passing year.

Always, the guest room was transformed into the hushed centre of the Christmas celebration. No one actually spent a lot of time in that room but this is where all the coats were piled and, more important, where the dresser was transformed into a bar, complete with Christmas-themed swizzle sticks and a bucket of melting ice. A
sideboard
it might have been called by people with larger houses and more specific furniture. In any of the houses, it would be difficult for the kitchen and dining room to accommodate the forty relatives gathered and so people brought card tables and tablecloths, and lined them in
a row in the centre of the living room. Every room became a dining room and people dodged legs, canes, fold-up chairs that would spring closed at the wrong time as they made their way into that guest room again and again. By the end of the night, I would have been grabbed by great-aunts who smelled of lilac powder and something like sour cabbage, great-uncles who would grind their whiskers into my cheek, and teenage cousins who wanted to tickle me to see if I’d pee like I had every other year from too much excitement, drinking too much pop and punch. Sometimes, the room that Nick and I were sleeping in was the same one that the bar was set up in and I’d push the coats aside, fall asleep under one of them, the sound of feet along the carpet, dropping ice, and splashing liquid the most peaceful I could imagine.

And then we stopped going back. Vera complained of the drive. Family members offered to pitch in for plane tickets for the three of us but Vera refused and her sisters called her proud, foolish. “They don’t understand, your aunts, they don’t understand that my life is here now.” I didn’t ask her to clarify. “And if I have to hear one more theory from them as to why my marriage didn’t work …” she added, trailing off.

After that, I talked to my grandmother, Baba, on the phone each Christmas Eve. I felt as though she had become a grandmother to someone else, a girl who saw her more often and could understand what she was saying. I knew from those awkward phone conversations that almost all of the little English she had once known was gone and I didn’t know any Ukrainian. Regardless, she spoke to me in her language. I knew that if I had been in the same room with her, I could’ve smiled
and nodded, pointed and mimed, and at least something would have been conveyed.

In Sawmill Creek, the Free Church Christmas services were simple, pared down to the usual singing and witnessing the work of God in our own lives. Children came to the front and told the congregation about how Jesus had filled their lives that year, how grateful they were that He was given to us, born so He could die for our sins while the rest of the congregation would hum and sway, a kind of living soundtrack for their testimonies. After the service, Vera, Nick, and I would usually go to a Friend’s place for dinner but no one ever ate so much they felt ill, no one ever drank. No one got red in the face and sang Christmas carols too loud, out of key, or off beat. We always left before midnight and returned to our own house, quiet and cold, the small tree blinking meekly in the living room, where Vera would say, “Merry Christmas, kids, and God bless.” When the three of us went to bed, there wasn’t a sound left to lull me to sleep.

Two days before Christmas, Vera came in the back door, cheeks flushed and stomping snow off her boots, and told Nick and me that we were going to get a Christmas tree. She had waited too long to buy one and so we were all heading into the bush to cut one down, haul it home, sap still dripping. She had borrowed a chainsaw from a neighbour.

“You can’t be serious,” I said, but Vera gave me a look that said she was nothing if not that. It was easy to forget that she
was once a farm girl, from a line of farm women that only ended with her own generation when she and her sisters married men who weren’t farmers.

We took the same road that Rob Hanshaw had driven into the bush, our sedan not as equipped for it. Despite the chains, when we hit potholes the car lurched to the side, jarred us against arm rests, seat belts jerking us back. The chains pulled us up to the first switchback where Vera stopped square in the middle of the road so we wouldn’t have to dig ourselves out. We got out of the car and Vera took a deep breath, looked around her. “Well, won’t this be good? Cutting down our own tree?”

“Somehow I doubt it,” I answered.

She didn’t respond to me, just made a straight line for the bush, arms swinging briskly. I realized that, farm girl or not, Vera hadn’t cut a tree down in at least twenty years. Nick shrugged and walked toward the forest.

I stood by the car for a moment, then walked to the edge of the clearing and fought my way through the brush and undergrowth. Fresh snow hid stones and roots and I swore under my breath as I tripped and steadied myself. When I heard Nick calling that he had found a tree, I returned to the clearing, brushing snow off myself. Vera started to lift the chainsaw out of the trunk, then winced and held the small of her back. She attributed her lower back pain to the years she had spent sitting behind the receptionist’s desk in Dr. Holland’s office. She turned to me and said, “Can you help me lift this out, please?”

“This was your brilliant idea,” I said. Vera just looked at me, still leaning into the trunk, one arm on her back, the other
on the car. Nick bounced beside us, rangy and twitching with cold and anticipation.

Vera straightened up and said, “Aren’t you in a great mood today.”

“Yeah well, are we allowed to come up here and just chop trees down, anyways? I mean, aren’t there some kind of regulations against that?” I asked.

Vera dropped her head and sighed, then looked up at me with an expression of forced calm. “Sylvia, sometimes a forest is just a forest, a Christmas tree a Christmas tree. We aren’t taking more than we need. Now will you please help me with this.”

“Come on!” said Nick, then, “Can’t I do it?”

We turned and glared at him. “No,” both Vera and I answered at once, then looked at each other. I lifted the saw out, then held it against my thigh. I certainly didn’t know how to operate a chainsaw.

Vera took it from me and walked toward the tree. She pulled on the cord three times before it caught, the last time looking away, jaw tight, then back at the saw, fixing it with her stare. When it started, she squatted and spread her feet apart and aimed the blade at the bottom of the trunk. I stared. It was the closest I’d seen my mother to a compromising position, although what was compromised, I wasn’t sure. The chainsaw whirred, the tree fell in the right direction, toward the clearing, and we hauled it back to the car. The most difficult task was securing the tree to the top. Pushing and pulling, we got it on the roof and tied it there in a way in which we had to leave each of the windows open a crack to accommodate the rope that secured it. There was also yellow line stretched out in front of
the windshield, tied to the front bumper, the same in the back.