Reading by Lightning (40 page)

Could I take a look? I ask. At what else it says?

He puts the book back on the shelf. He doesn't bother to answer this, and I see just how absurd I've made myself.

Is there anywhere else I can take her? I ask.

What's the point? There's nothing anyone can do. Nothing. That's all they'll tell you in Winnipeg. Save yourself the trip. He tucks a cigarette into the corner of his mouth and bends his head over the flaring match. I suppose you could get your people to pray, he says, his eyes mocking me as he shakes the little flame out. He doesn't mention my dad.

In our spare, clean kitchen I talk about England, no doubt I bring it into every conversation. It's not that I'm trying to impress them. Without thinking about it, I call the boys
lads,
and the truck the
lorry,
and a sandwich a
butty.
Don't start the whites until I get my knickers, I say to Betty on laundry day. All of that has to be packed away along with my trunk. Any hint that there's more out there, a world different to this one.

On a warm day Gracie comes over and we take kitchen chairs outside and sit in the yard. Gracie's short bangs lie pasted to her forehead, each clump indented by the clasp of the tin curlers she wore to bed. I think of the way she used to skate, in little stiff steps like a cat walking on ice, the socks she wore over her hands because her mittens were too short to cover the long wrists sticking out of her sleeves. And the way she smiled at me, love aching in her eyes, a half-inch of pink gum gleaming at the top of her teeth. She's wearing a baby blue cotton dress now — it could be the dress she wore when we were fourteen and dreaming about going to the Burnley fair. But she's changed, as much as I have. Something — disappointment maybe — has displaced her willing spirit. It's more striking than if her nose had suddenly grown into a different shape.

One fall Madeleine and Jenny and I went to York for the day, I say. We went by train.

Betty and Gracie glance at each other. In England I advertised Canada every time I opened my mouth. Now I discover that I have an English accent.

Was it nice? Betty asks.

Very nice, I say. It has an old wall around it, York. You can walk on it. Silence sets in. They know there's a world out there, drawing Phillip and the other boys away, but they don't know what to ask. They're like I was, on the ship in 1936.

Did you ever see Mr. Churchill in England? Betty asks finally, making an effort.

No. But I did live in Oldham. That's where he was first elected to parliament.

Phil and I heard his speech on the radio, says Betty.
We will fight them on the beaches, we will fight them in the mountains, we will fight them in the fields,
that speech. He has such a funny way of talking.

That wasn't actually Winston Churchill. It was an actor impersonating him.

How do you know?

George told me.

No mail from England. They must be writing, but for the time being there's no mail. I take old letters from George out of the biscuit tin and read them in bed at night. I examine the name and address on the envelopes, tracing the uneven, spiky letters with my finger, trying to feel the energy in George's hand, hear the sound of my name in his mind as he wrote. I don't write to him, except in my mind. I have all his letters, but the only ones I read are the early ones, from Durham and Char-mouth.

Charmouth, 16 July 1938

Dear Lily,

Six o'clock, still waiting for our tea. Mrs. Slater is starving us on purpose. This morning when Ellen came in to serve breakfast she looked like a cross between Cleopatra and a frightened rabbit. Turns out she has conjunctivitis in one eye and the nurse at the clinic told her to lay off the face-paint, so she gobbed up only the good eye. Mrs. Slater
would have let her stay but we made a big stink about the contagion. So now Slater's on her own and she's paying us back! Me stomach thinks me throat's been cut, to quote our mutual granddad.

I'm sending you a drawing of the Oxford belemnite. As you can see, the creature apparently had two parts. The thunderbolt fossil, like the one I gave you, was just its tail (which it used as a buoyancy chamber). A stony cone sometimes found in the same areas was actually the room where the creature lived. So they've identified two fossils in one stroke. A clever solution. But inelegant, wouldn't you say? We almost never find the phragmocone part. Apparently they're more fragile. I do have one I bought in a curiosity shop. It's in perfect condition. Interestingly, there are growth rings in it, like a tree trunk.

Lily, could you keep watching Bardsley's for a couple of books for me? I really need them but I can't afford to order them new. I'm sending you a pound. If you need more, ask Mother to lend the rest. Some of them are pretty old, so Bardsley might pick them up at an estate sale. In fact, you could leave my list with him so he can keep an eye out.

Pax,

George

And then there was a separate sheet with a list of the books, only one of which I was able to find.

Dad's clothes are too small for Phillip, and Mother wants me to clean them up and send them to the aid depot at Burnley.
All that's left are his three shirts and his work pants. He was buried in his suit. And then of course there're his heavy and light jackets, his Sunday shoes, his rubber boots. His combination underwear. His workboots. I wash the shirts and press them. I tell Mother I'd like to keep his light jacket. Tears well up in her eyes. She's been reading the
Burnley Herald,
showing me the ads for war bonds. I want it all to go to the depot, she says. It's all we have to give. I decide to slip the jacket out anyway and hide it. But she knows me. She follows me out to the kitchen when I carry the box and sits guarding it like a commissionaire until Phillip comes in to take it to town.

I go outside, trembling with fury. What she doesn't know is that I've found a pair of Dad's shoes, his house shoes, under the Toronto couch on the porch where he left them the last time he lay down for a nap. The shoes look different to me, cheap and shabby, not like his wedding shoes at all. I handled a hundred pairs like them in the WVS depot in Oldham. But the inside is finely polished from years of his feet sliding in. Each toe has made a distinct bed. When I slide my hand inside I feel the shock of intruding on his privacy. I wipe the dust from them with my sleeve and slip them back under the couch.

Three times a day we gather around the worn yellow oilcloth of the kitchen table. We begin each meal with grace, Betty full of conversation, my mother drooping like a wilted flower over her dinner, will and cunning and frustration chasing across her white face as frankly as they do across the face of a child. Some days she pulls her plate down to her lap and lifts her fork slowly to her mouth. We might be able to force her to eat, but she'll be damned if she'll enjoy it! Some days she gets up and shuffles into the bedroom in the middle of the meal, and we
never know why. We just keep eating. I always thought it was just me that was wrong with my mother, but now I hold to the fact that there is something else. Sometimes I think about the particles of stone collecting like crystals on the endings of her nerves, and I think, I should be kinder, but I'm exhausted at the concept.

Alone I encounter my father, I come across him as I walk to the pasture. His fundamental kindness hangs over the path, it glistens on the bare branches of a poplar bluff.
Tell me,
I say to him.
This life — was it real to you? Did you see yourself here?
Maybe Mother and Phillip meet him too, maybe they hang their heads and let out their tears the way I do, when no one else is near.

The Sunday Phillip leaves we all squeeze into the Ford and go out to the cemetery. It's on a little knoll marked from a distance by a clump of spruce trees. Some of the graves have painted white crosses, some large stones collected down by the river. Others have proper granite headstones. My father's grave is a blank garden plot. It's flat to the prairie turf around it, not mounded. There's a piece of shingle stuck into the ground at the top end with PIPER written on it in ink. The colour's drained from the grasses around it, they're all just shades of brown and grey. My mother clings to Phillip's arm.

Going to be sunk in by spring, says Phillip. What was Norbert thinking?

Lily will have to arrange for a headstone, says my mother.

Above us clouds move in two directions — low, fat white clouds skim west, and high above, against the white sky, wispier clouds drift slowly east. Wind murmurs in the tops of the spruce trees. It's a bleak day; It's October, what other sort of day could it be?

Soon it's too cold to be outside with no purpose, and when she's not working she lies on her bed. The fossil George gave her sits on the ledge above her. The ancients were wrong about it, of course, it has no protective powers. She leaves her curtains open night and day. All she can see through her window is black branches of scrub oak against the sky, haphazard lines of ink on a white paper. When there's a wind the oak branches scratch at the window. Someone should go out and prune them, she thinks, it's what Dad would have done. Instead she does what George would have done, she looks
untoward
up in the dictionary. Whatever happened that night may have been
improper
or it may just have been
unfortunate.
Or it could have been both.

She had to hear the news from her mother — Aunt Lucy addressed the letter to both of them. Betty brought the mail from town, and Lily climbed the ladder from the cellar with the enamel basin full of potatoes to find that her mother had opened the blue airmail envelope and had the letter unfolded in her hand. She climbed up through the hole in the kitchen floor to hear her mother saying to Betty, She seems to be the
kind of person who makes a fuss about things. You'd think he was her real son, the way she carries on.

Lily scrambled out of the cellar opening and snatched the letter out of her mother's hand. The first impulse of her eyes was to scan it, trying to snatch reassuring words out of the even blue lines. But Aunt Lucy's round script resisted her and she had to calm herself to start at the beginning. Aunt Lucy is sorry it took her so long to write and they hope Lily had a safe passage. They are all well, but feeling very anxious because of a telegram that came after she left, on October 20. It told them that George was missing. Then a letter arrived with the same information, that George was missing. Not missing in action. He was simply missing, he'd gone missing at sea, and his captain could not divulge the location or mission of the vessel at the time. There had been what he called an
untoward incident
during the night, not involving the enemy, and George, who'd been present for roll call in the evening, was not present in the morning. Lily read that they intend to conduct an inquiry. She read that Aunt Lucy wonders at times if he could have gone AWOL, but she knows he would never do such a thing and she can't really hope for it. He was like all the other brave lads, ready to do what had to be done, and there must have been some terrible accident.
We are trying to be brave too,
Aunt Lucy wrote,
but it's very hard not to know what happened. Lois and Madeleine are heartbroken but are trying to keep their hopes up. We know how much Lily cared for George, and are sorry to have to write to you with such bad news, dear, but send you all our love.