Reading by Lightning (39 page)

Who's supposed to keep the farm going? I cry.

Had my call-up last week, he says.

It was
supposed
to be last week, corrects Betty in her exuberant child's voice. He was supposed to report for basic training on September 20. But after the funeral he called them and told them what happened, he went to Feazels' to use the phone, and asked for the number on his call-up letter. The man on the phone said they would likely give him time to get things sorted out. And then he got another letter saying he has until October 20.

He could get a compassionate discharge, says Mother. She gets unsteadily to her feet. All he has to do is ask for one. He can say his father's passed away and his mother's sick and he has a farm to run.

She's hardly eaten, but it seems she's done. She shuffles off into the living room. She is thin, so thin, but she was always thin. Phillip smears butter and jam on the top of another biscuit, not bothering to split it open. Dabney's going to put the crop in next year, he says. Harry. I've rented to him.

What if
he
decides to enlist?

Already tried.

And?

Wouldn't take him.

Why not? Heart.

What's wrong with his heart?

Nothing. Just a heart murmur. He's fine.

But, Phillip, didn't you try for a discharge? I cry.

He tips his chair and teeters on its back legs the way he's always done, and then he turns his face and looks straight at me. Why shouldn't I have my chance? he asks. You had yours.

None of this serving King and country business for Phillip.
Betty's cheeks turn pink. She gazes at him, her tear-filled eyes saying,
Isn't he outrageous? Can't you see why I love him so?

I can hardly speak. What about Mother? I ask at last, dropping my voice.

She's been mad at you for a long time, he says. Now she can be mad at me.

Back in my room I open my trunk and start to unpack, shaking out my two frocks and hanging them in the wardrobe, spreading my other clothes on the dresser and the bedstead to air them. I take out Nan's milk jug that I saved for Dad and the tea tin full of George's letters. George's belemnite I put on the window ledge, the way they did, for luck. My bedroom has the sad familiarity of things you remember in your bones, not in your mind. I couldn't have told you the colour of the walls, for example, but I see now they're whitewashed plaster — yellowed like newspaper that's lain in the sun. Dead flies have collected between the two windows and I fling the inside pane open and use my washcloth to wipe them up. As I turn back to the room I'm jolted by a sudden glimpse of Dad in the corner of my eye, walking across the yard with Chummy, wearing his overalls and big rubber boots. I fling the cloth down and dart out of the house through the veranda and hurry with trembling legs to the barn. The door slides heavily aside and the dry hay and damp manure smell fills my nostrils. It's dark, but I know at once he's not there. The barn's changed, it's been shortened — someone's built a crude wall with planks halfway down, just past the loft opening. There are only four stalls on each side now and they're empty — Phillip's taken the cattle out to the pasture. A cat, a grey cat I know, stretches at my feet. The pitchfork leans against a manger, and the gloves Dad wore are stuffed into the Y joint of a beam. Above me birds clatter in the loft. I stand for a minute in the dim light with a
cat pressing itself against my ankles and try to see my dad. Milking, as he did every morning and night. I can see the whole business of it, the way he flipped a pail over to use for a stool and settled himself on it, reaching for the udder that hung like part of the cow's insides fallen out. The din of milk pounding into the bottom of the pail suddenly muffling when he got a fast double rhythm going. His cheek is pressed against the cow and his eyes are hidden by his cap.

It's the middle of a sunny morning, but my mother is lying on her bed when I go back in. I will be the one who talks about him, I think fiercely at the bedroom doorway. She's lying on her side, her long pale hair loose, clutching a balled-up handkerchief. I see she's crying, and then I feel pity and something else, surprise at what a child she seems to be, a tired, hard-used child. I sit beside her and put my hand on her rounded shoulder. She reaches up and presses my hand. Finally I ask, Were you with him at the end? This makes her cry harder.

The doctor was in the room, she says finally, rearranging her hanky, looking for a dry spot. And the nurse was nowhere around so he had to go out himself to get what he needed, some medicine, I guess. And then he didn't come back and your dad's breathing was very bad and I was worried so I sent Phillip to see if he could find the doctor and finally I went out myself. And when we were out in the hall — sobs shake her and she can't finish. He went so fast, she chokes out at last. No one would think it could happen that fast. If I'd had any idea I would have made him go to town the day before. It was just such a small cut, you'd never have thought anything about it.

I sit there for a long time until her sobs subside. She lies with her cheek against the pillow then, looking straight ahead. Her window is closed, but the sounds of the farm seep in, Betty's high voice, the rooster strutting out by the bunkhouse. The dog whines and the screen door bangs.

How about you? I ask. Are you feeling pretty bad?

Oh, it's no different from how it's been. I'm not in any pain. I'm just a little clumsy. I need a lot of help around the house.

I should have come home sooner.

Yes, you should have. She sits up and wipes her mouth with her hand, and then dries her hand on her skirt. Then she locates her handkerchief on the bedspread and blows her nose. She straightens the collar of her dress and smoothes her apron. Her face is defiant.
This is grieving,
her gestures say,
a rough business, but don't think it changes anything.

Dad, I say. Was he mad at me for staying in England?

He never would be mad at you for anything, she says. She says it with the old bitterness, but I do what I want with it, I take it as a gift.

I arrived home in late September, the same week that I left in 1936. Autumn has resumed as though it's the same autumn: the prairies have a will to make those four years a dream of someone else's life.

It's going away that's supposed to be a voyage of discovery, but for me, coming home is. I learn that our fall is a very brown affair, bereft of splendour, and that in Manitoba everything is weighed down by the weight of the sky. The buildings are low, the trees don't aspire to be much more than what a child can throw a rope over. I understand now that our roads are straight because there's nothing for them to go around. Wandering out to the yard that first morning, I discover that in a prairie garden asters and marigolds are planted in military rows made straight by unwinding a spool of binder twine tied between two sticks.

Phillip is working hard to get ready to leave. He's sold the cows to a farmer at Shadwell and cancelled the cream contract. He's already shipped half the cattle and then cleaned out the barn. It was an amazing crop, Dad's last crop, a bumper crop,
but the Wheat Board quota is only five bushels an acre, so for now it will sit in the barn. That's why they built cribbing across the back half — so we can use it for a granary. We're going to keep one cow for our own use, so in that first week home I go out every morning and help with the milking. The second day my hands are so stiff I can hardly hold my hairbrush, but it soon gets better. Molly, I tell Phillip, is the one I want. I've picked Molly because she's small, and my forehead fits neatly into the hollow of her hip, and the size of her freckled teats is right in my hands. She's not the best producer, but he can't be bothered to argue. He has three grieving women on his hands and I'm at the bottom of the list. He nudges me off the stool and sits down and manages to get almost another pint of milk out of her. You'll have to do better than that or she'll dry up on you, he says. How amazingly like our Uncle Hugh he is, our uncle he's never seen.

If he really is going to leave, we have a lot to do. I take the Ford out on the road and practise driving, and when I have the hang of the gears I drive to the low, long town of Burnley and park at the town hall and pick up my driver's licence. While Betty tends to the house and makes the meals, I clean up the garden and Phillip cleans out the well. He also rebuilds the pigpen, deworms Molly and cuts and hauls wood until we have a pile the height of my waist running all along the north side of the house. We go to town together and open a bank account jointly in my name and Mother's. A truck comes from Shadwell and loads up the rest of the cows, and the farmer hands Phillip a roll of worn bills. We stand in the yard and watch the truck drive off and then I put out my hand for the money. I'll deposit it, he says, shoving it in his hip pocket. Phillip hasn't changed in the slightest, except that he's about fifteen percent larger in every proportion than when I left. When Phillip was a small boy he looked like a big-headed little man and now that he's a grown man he looks like an
overgrown boy. I feel a familiar tingling in my foot, the urge to kick him in the shin.

So, I say. Do you think they'll let you stay around until Betty has the baby?

I don't know, he says. I guess they'll do what they wanna do. He has a look about him I remember from the sign-up days in England: the proud, surrendered glow of someone who's attached himself to an absolute power, like a courtesan just chosen by the king.

I'm going to take Mother in to the doctor's, I say. To see what I can find out.

Good luck, he says, turning and walking back to the barn.

And he's right, she won't go. She says she's been and he told her everything he can tell her and she's not going to bother him again.

I haven't heard what he has to say, I say.

Well, I'm not going in with you, she says, fiery. I'm not a child. He said I should come back in six months and that's what I'll do. If there's anything I think you should know, I'll tell you.

She's standing by the window and I can see her making little adjustments to keep her balance, the way you might if the floor was tilting under you.

What did he say it is? I ask.

He didn't say. It's just one of those things that happen sometimes. He said I should eat raw egg whites.

I make an appointment with Dr. Ross without telling Mother and I go on my own. I don't really know him, I was never sick. His hair is longish but immaculately shaped (
I'm a professional man,
it says). And he wears a ring with a polished agate in it. He has an office full of solid oak furniture, like a city doctor's, but the picture on the wall is of a prize Charolais bull.

It's hard to predict, he says, but it doesn't look as though
she has the galloping kind. He tips his chair back, as though he's taking a break from work. This is, what, two years?

The galloping kind?

She's got the symptoms of MS, he says. Has no one told you?

I ask him what this is. Can you write it down for me? I say, and he sits forward and prints the two words on a sheet of paper, printing upside down so I can read it, as if to demonstrate a boyhood prowess.

What is it? I ask, staring at the words.

No one is quite sure. It might be a hardening around the nerves. A buildup of plaque. That's one theory.

Have you told her?

I may not have mentioned the term to her. Sometimes it just makes it worse, attaching a long name like that to your troubles. You never know how it's going to go. There are people who go on for decades with just a little wobble in their gait.

If it does get worse what can we expect?

He stands up and pulls a book from the shelf and flips through the pages, reading silently for two or three minutes, and then he sits down and reads out:
weakness, numbness, tremor, incoordination, pain, slurred speech, loss of vision, bowel and bladder dysfunction, paralysis, dementia.