Reading by Lightning (38 page)

None of the things he fancied about farming in Lancashire applied to Canada, but by that second summer he'd developed an unexpected affection for his claim: for the thick, spicy turf with its tangled grasses, the smell of the sage and wild onion, the tiny, nameless flowers, different every few weeks. The meadowlark's amazing song (
I left my pretty sister at home,
Amelia's little girl translated it). He had to break his claim if he wanted to hold it, break it open so the birds would be forced out and the Russian thistle moved in. In the end he didn't have the heart for it. He had something wrong with him that summer, a hernia I think, and couldn't do much heavy work and never did get started on a house. He was surviving by collecting buffalo bones off his land and selling them to be ground up for fertilizer. Then it started to get cold again and he couldn't see himself turning up at Amelia's door. One day in a mood he walked the twelve miles into the colony headquarters (by then it was Lloydminster in honour of Reverend George Exton Lloyd, in honour of his not being Isaac Barr). He went into the homestead office and asked if he could transfer his claim to Amelia Playfair's son. The clerk probably knew that the Playfair boy wasn't more than fourteen, but he let Joe Pye do it.

On his way out of the district Joe stopped in at the Playfair house and left the claim paper made out to Harry Playfair in the latch of the door. He left the team for her too, a larger gesture than he wanted to make but he couldn't bring himself to ask her to buy him out. It was one of those brilliant sunny
days of late fall. The dog bumped at his hand in welcome. Amelia might have seen him out there, a telescoped version of Joe Pye in her porthole window, but she didn't come out, that part I'm sure about.

My dad was in Canada for ten years before he saw Joe Pye again. All that time Dad worked in the green belt that runs across the middle of the prairie provinces, where spruce trees grow like quills all the way from Lake Winnipeg to Peace River. The lumber camps tended to be in lowlands, in monotonous, insect-ridden bush relieved only by swamp. It was easy to get work, though, and he could save a dollar a day, he could send money home. There were a lot of camps and he moved often. Because, because.

It was the strangest thing. When he had one of his spells, when he fell into it, he was always seized with
recognition,
in this strange, rough country was swept back to a place where his true self had been before, to a terrible memory of leaves trembling against white sky, of following a doomed trail through bush, the squalid weeds with their white seed heads, the smeared toe of his boot sinking into mud. And then he was gone into the echoing silence, taken away. The place he surfaced to, after a lost time, was an
alien
place, a world without names, where he had to lie motionless until he recognized the brown shape lying in front of his eyes as his
hand
.

He couldn't predict when it would come, nor could he resist it. The most he could ask was that he be on his own when it happened. What I think he must have dreaded most was the way people looked at him afterwards: as though they had never seen him before either — and the sensation seemed to last longer with them than it did with him, never really went away. Once when he came to under a threatening sky, he just got up and started walking. He had no idea where he was. He
could see everything with uncanny clarity, but he wouldn't have been able to tell you it was trees he was walking through. It was lucky he had Saturday's pay in his pocket and his knapsack stuffed with his lunch, and that he came across a road and had the wits by then to follow it. He could just as easily have headed straight into the bush. He never went back to the camp — he just held his sore tongue on the floor of his mouth and picked the moss and twigs out of his hair and kept walking.

That became a way of doing it. It was the way he left three or four crews, including Peace River, in his seventh or eighth year. The trail he followed south had been etched in the prairie turf by the buffalo and deepened by Métis freighters and settlers in ox carts; it led past Lloydminster, where, he knew, the Barr Colonists had ended up. So he went into the post office and asked after Joseph Pye. The postmaster remembered Joe for his name. He laughed and said Joe Pye had left the district a long time ago. William stood on the boardwalk for a while, wondering whether Isaac Barr was still holding a claim for him. He looked through the window into the dry goods store, at the pretty young woman measuring cloth behind the counter, but he didn't go in. In his mind the girl in the green travelling suit had gone back to England some time ago. A Dr. Hignell had hung his shingle on Main Street, and my father, riding on what was left of his resolve, paid two dollars to see him. It was the first time he had ever asked anyone about it. The doctor was matter of fact. He said there was no cause of it but birth and no cure for it but death, a cure my dad might be able to stave off for a while by avoiding sharp-edged tools, machinery with belts, stairways, and bodies of water. There was an asylum in Battleford where he could go if he had to, but he shook my father's hand and said he hoped it wouldn't come to that.

And the wish seemed to take, because my father had some good years after that. He worked his way south and got a job
in a general store and eventually moved on to the store in Burnley. One day he was weighing out navy beans for the CN conductor when Joe Pye walked into the store looking for tobacco. He was on a threshing crew working its way north from Burnley. On Sunday he hitched a ride into town, carrying his crib board, and spent the day at the kitchen table where my dad boarded, regaling my father with tales of the Barr Colony and Isaac Barr's chicanery. Neither of them ever raised the question of where Boris had ended up (except once, when there was a story in the paper about a man who dressed up as a lady and robbed a bank in Lethbridge, and Joe Pye said, “So he's still in the Dominion then, our Boris”).

When my dad's fits started up again he couldn't just leave. There was my mother by then, and the whole thing started to weigh on him in a different way. I keep wanting to say (about everything: his marriage, his life in Canada),
He never imagined it would be like that
, but honestly I don't think he imagined very much of anything. I don't think my father had the habit of building a world in his mind and sending some version of himself ahead to try things out; it wasn't something he did. So he wasn't always having to reconcile himself to the way things turn out. But he knew what people generally don't discover until something terrible happens to them: he knew things drained of their meaning. What it is to open your eyes to a world you've never seen before, where every ordinary thing around you is blank, as senseless as a word you've ruined by saying it over and over a hundred times, turning it into babble. As I stood on the deck of the
Manchester Division
the first morning of the crossing home, what I wondered was whether this is the truer world, heaving grey waves with nothing of me in them, the blunt iron prow pushing through water intent on its own secular purpose. Whether meaning is just something our eyes bring to things, when what we should be straining to see is the nothing that was their real meaning all along.

When we pull in to Burnley, the train overshoots the station and has to grind its way backwards to unload the passengers. I've been on my feet since the whistle sign a quarter-mile back, watching a dark speck in front of the station materialize into Phillip. Bracing myself on the platform between cars, I'm carried past him, and then past him again in the other direction, while he stands looking at the train with his mouth slitted open, squinting against the rising sun.

Dad did not have a seizure and topple from the loft. He did not fall face first into the river. It was blood poisoning. Phillip tells me this as we drive along the section road towards home, my trunk in the back of the Ford and my suitcase at my feet. Dad was cutting wood near the river. He'd just sharpened the axe, and somehow he nicked his leg just above his boot. Three days later his leg swelled up and he was full of fever. So they laid him in the truck and took him to the hospital in Burnley. But half an hour after they got him there, he was gone.

Dad always said a
dull
blade is more dangerous, I say. I dig through my bag, but I seem to have left my handkerchief behind on the train. Did you let Joe know? I ask.

You tell me where he is, I'll let him know, Phillip says. On
either side of us stubble fields lie like rough carpet. We're shuddering over washboard, I'd forgotten washboard. Phillip just drives. It's taken me twenty questions to get this story out of him.

When the truck pulls in to the lane, the screen door slams and my mother comes slowly across the yard. She's not terribly changed, but she moves as though she's walking through deep water. I go to meet her and she starts to cry and plucks at my blouse spasmodically. Her hair is paler, a pale apricot, but still in a coiled braid. Behind her comes Betty, my new sister-in-law, an apron tied high above her stomach. No one wrote to tell me she was pregnant. I say hello, but I don't kiss her. Just a few hours back on the prairies and I know better than to try to give her a hug.

I stand by the Ford and breathe in the air. It's September, but the yard is lusher than I've ever seen it. Look at the grass, I say.

Green all right, says Phillip.

A short-haired brown dog nudges its nose against my thigh. This is Blue, says Betty. You won't have met Blue. He's a rascal! Look, he's trying to say hello!

It's just breakfast time. They've made baking-powder biscuits for breakfast in my honour, and put out two kinds of jam. The floor is different — they've covered the boards with linoleum. Red, with a pattern of curling grey feathers. On the counter sits the Elizabeth and Margaret Rose tin I sent home. We sit down and bow our heads. There's a little pause and then Phillip says, Lord, bless this food to our use and us to thy service, amen. My mother holds her head bent after the grace in her own private prayer. Afterwards she doesn't look at me and I feel the old dark ache. And there is the old sour-sweet smell of the cream separator and the bitter smell of boiled coffee. The clock with its scraping hand; I'd forgotten about that clock.

I want to linger over this scene, picture it from a vantage point high in the southeast corner of the room, the way a watcher perched on top of the cabinet would see it, or the two little princesses looking serenely off their biscuit tin: the daughter returned from abroad, a young woman wearing wide-legged navy trousers, an elastic belt with a red metal buckle, and a white cotton blouse (terribly creased, though she did her best to freshen up in the yellow light of the station washroom in Winnipeg), red lipstick on her mouth and her hair pinned up in that new way so the waves stand high in front. She's twenty — a glamorous age, she's always thought — but life is not about her. There's her mother, suddenly a widow because an axe fell two inches awry. There's the white-blonde sister-in-law lifting her cup consciously to her lips, only nineteen herself, and a baby at that very moment drumming its heels against her spine. And the brother, the brother with a farm and a sick mother and a pregnant wife to look after, stolidly working his way through his third biscuit with jam. No, life is not about the daughter, although she is twenty, and (for all she's just lost her father, and is shaken by his absence at the table that day and his grey jacket and cap gone off the hook by the door) she yearns for someone to say,
Well, what a fine young woman you've grown into, Lily. And how was your voyage?
But no one says it; even this moment, the morning of her return from a long stay abroad, is not about her.

So I sit below the clock with the bent minute hand and break open a warm biscuit, and what I say is, Have a lot of the lads from here signed up, then?

There's a moment of strange chill and then Betty blurts out, Phil has signed up.

Phillip swallows his biscuit and takes a long drink of coffee
before he finally says, I got my papers in August. RCAF.
RCAF!
So much pride in the way he says it.