Reading by Lightning (46 page)

Where were you when I did the milking last night? I ask. My English accent seems to have returned.

I guess I missed you, he says. I'd gone for a walk. Foraging, actually.

Stealing eggs? I ask.

He laughs. That was earlier. You were out in the garden with your wheelbarrow when I stole the eggs.

I climb all the way up and show him from the loft opening where to meet me near the river. And then I go back and set the table. It's very strange to sit in the kitchen with Mother, under the clock that falters and dithers about declaring the morning over, and know he's out in the barn.

Are you going to have a nap this afternoon? I ask.

I guess I'll lie down for a while, she says. I don't like to sleep during the day because then I won't sleep at night. That's what she says every day, right before she tips her head back on the chesterfield and dozes off.

Finally I have the chance to pack potatoes and beans and a row of sausages into the Elizabeth and Margaret Rose tin and slip outside. He's where I told him to be, sitting with his back against an oak. Can we be seen from the road? he asks.

No, I say. I'm sure we can't.

You wouldn't mind checking for me? he asks. So to humour him I walk back and check, but you can see nothing. We're below the level of the road and entirely hidden by a fringe of poplars and chokecherries.

He's smoking when I come back and I sit beside him, putting the tin on the ground between us. He turns his cigarette sideways to look at it. Three left, he says, and then I'll be rolling whatever I find growing in the ditches. He takes pride in being in such straits, you can tell. You don't smoke? he asks.

No one has ever smoked in our house. Joe Pye used to smoke in the barn in the winter. He could burn the barn down as long as he didn't disgrace us by smoking in the house.

Joe Pye, he says, remembering. How old were you the summer
we went for that drive? He reaches over and circles my ankle with the hand holding the cigarette.

I think I was fourteen.

I must have been seventeen. It was just before I went to McGill. And Charlotte was sixteen, I guess. Did I tell you Charlotte's graduated as a nurse? She's got a job in a surgical ward.

In a military hospital? I ask.

He lifts his hand off my ankle and takes a slow pull on his cigarette. Hard to believe, he says, but there are civilians selfish enough to take sick while there's a war on.

There's a road here we could take, but I refuse to go down it. I sit with my arms around my knees and look straight at him. He's thinner than he was at seventeen — his face is bonier, with deep parentheses around his mouth. He seems very changed to me, but then I'd spent only the one afternoon with him years before, and my memories of that day are so pawed over, so grubby with use that they're almost unreadable. But it seems to me that the biggest change is internal, as it is in Gracie: a cockiness is gone, or it's settled into conviction, some of the fun has drained out of it. And he's wary, it's in his mind I can't be trusted entirely.

How long do you plan on being here? I ask. If it kills me I won't ask him again why he's hiding.

I'm not in a very good position to plan.

I can't feed you forever without my mother noticing.

He shrugs and draws again on his cigarette. So don't feed me. He has a way of seeming to smile when he's not smiling, and it softens his words. Does anyone else ever come out to the barn? he asks.

Betty does sometimes. My sister-in-law. She brings her little boy out to see the cats. Just watch out when there's another truck in the yard.

We sit and he smokes and I watch the sunlight shining on
each separate moving leaf of the cottonwoods on the other bank. We sit side by side a few feet apart as though we've arranged to meet to watch the passing of the river. Dabs of fluff from the cottonwood trees ride east on the surface of the water, lit up by the sunlight. Khaki, that's the colour of the water: it takes its colour from the trees and sends back a light that reflects in moving ripples on the branches. Thistles have sprung up where the ice ripped the bank open in the spring, and a dark butterfly tries to settle on a thistle head and is thwarted by the breeze, carried past us with its wings motionless.

So how long were you in England? Russell asks.

Four years. I tell him about looking after Nan and then moving to Aunt Lucy's and going to school.

Why didn't you write to me? he asks.

George wrote to you.

He smiles. You're right, he did. That was so strange, suddenly getting a letter from this English guy I'd never met. He's quite the character, George. He's got an amazing mind, he's got a theory about everything. And then in other ways he's such a kid. He used to address my letters to
Master Bates,
he thought that was a real gas. I haven't heard from him in ages. I had to leave Rosamund Street and I guess he lost track of me.

No, I say. I raise my head to look at him. That's not what happened.

Oh, he says, and the word is a groan. Oh, shit. He doesn't ask me. He throws his butt like a dart into the river, and we watch it float around the bend. He doesn't ask me and I don't tell him. It's as if he's wearing Madeleine's badge:
don't tell me.
I lie back and lower the red screen of my eyelids down against the light. But the grass picks at me through my blouse, and I arch my back. When I open my eyes again he's eyeing me and I sit up, embarrassed.

Wild strawberries, I say, lightly touching the white flowers scattered through the grass. I'll come out in a few weeks and pick them for jam. They're so tiny, it takes forever. But it's the best jam in the world. I push the tin with the picture of the two little princesses towards him. Don't you want your dinner?

He lifts the lid and looks at his dinner with appreciation, picking a sausage up with his fingers to eat it in two bites. It would stab my mother in the heart to see me eat these, he says. It would send her to an early grave. It's a Jewish thing, he adds, when I raise my eyebrows. You have no idea.

Oh, maybe I do, I say.

That's right, your family is religious.

Yeah, I guess that's one way of putting it.

After a minute he asks, What about you? Still waiting for the Lord to come?

Naw, he stood us all up. We share a little laugh.

So you've totally given it up? No more heaven, no more

hell?

I still believe in an afterlife, I finally say.

Really?
Some plane of existence out in space?

No. Some plane of existence here. When you feel like your life is over.

Curiosity flickers in his eyes.

Well, it's a test of character, isn't it, the war? You start to see yourself in a different light.

Oh, I don't know, he says. Not the truest test. Something primitive kicks in. He sits with his back against the rough black bark of the oak. There's a grace to the way he sits, his hands dangling on his knees.
Konk-la-ree,
whistles a red-winged blackbird, lifting and resettling on a different reed. Suddenly I can't bear to have his eyes on my face.

I should get back, I say, and scramble to my feet.

Wait a sec, he says. You've got something all over your blouse. He stands too and takes my hand to draw me to him.
With his free hand he pulls three or four spear grass heads off my blouse and shows them to me.

I pluck one out of his fingers and stab him lightly in the upper arm. That's for you, I say. Nature's tooth and claw. It's been in the grass since last fall. Waiting for a city boy to show up. I smell his cigarette, the grease of the sausages, I see dark hair curling where his shirt opens in a V at his throat. I can't look at his face for the sunlight glittering off the water and the spinning poplar leaves. I have to go, I say. I'll bring you some supper when I do the chores.

Bring it later, he says, still hanging on to my hand. After your mother's asleep.

He's nowhere around when I lead Molly into the barn after supper. I don't see him and I don't sense him watching from the ladder. She's restless tonight, lashing her tail back and forth. Her teats feel more rubbery than usual, resistant. It takes me a long time to milk, trying to keep her tail pinned by my shoulder. When I finish and carry the pail towards the house, the setting sun is smeared along the side of the bunkhouse and light gleams off the bellies and forked tails of the barn swallows wheeling over the yard in their nightly roost. Everything is catching and holding the sun, conspiring to keep night at bay.

Mother is annoyed when I carry in an armful of wood. Who's for popcorn? I cry, cramming split poplar into the stove.

It's too hot, she says. It's far too hot. She sits on a kitchen chair watching sullenly while I open a lid in the stove and shake the popcorn basket over it. When the popcorn's done she ignores the bowl I give her. Don't eat it so fast, she says. You're just shovelling it in. I must have told you about the girl I went to school with who was so crazy about popcorn.

Yes, I say. You've told me.

Well, she choked while she was eating it, a kernel went into her lung. And it festered there until she died. It took three months. She was only fifteen, did you realize that? One of the Skinners from the Shadwell road. She would have been Susan Skinner's aunt.

I'm going to have a bath, I say. I may as well, as long as we have a fire. Why don't you have one too? You'll sleep better. Then she is thin-lipped with annoyance, not about the waste of water, but about the challenge to the principle of the Saturday-night bath.

I'll just have a little one, I say (thinking, If she gets too worked up she won't sleep). I'll just use the kettle and the reservoir. You're right, I shouldn't have built up the fire. It's too hot. But now we have the water so I may as well.

Afterwards in my bedroom the towel falls open and in the mirror I catch a narrow image, as if through a keyhole: a frank female torso like the most daring of the Blackpool postcards, the ones Monty found on a rack at the back of the store. Turning my eyes from the mirror I dry myself quickly and put on my cotton eyelet nightdress. The nightdress Aunt Lucy gave me for my birthday that hot summer just before the war started, the finest thing I own. The night air from the window is wonderfully cool on my skin. I don't let myself think about him, lying in the straw across the yard. It's not him pulling at me from the dark, it's something else, the self I'm going towards.

I wrap a blanket around me like a shawl and go out to the porch and sit on the Toronto couch, the tin with Russell's supper on the railing. Are you okay, Mother? I ask through the screen. Night, she answers, and I hear the creaking of her bedsprings. The sky is dark blue, it's as dark as it will get this night. Across the way a few late frogs chant in the river. It seems a long time until I hear the falling rhythm of her sleeping breath, the little disgusted huffs that mean she is
asleep. Suddenly I can't bear it any more and I slip my feet into my shoes and start across the yard, still wearing the blanket.

There's a commotion of silver light behind the cotton-woods. Even now the moon may be leaning into the big, square loft opening. Blue wants to come with me. I bend over and scratch his ears. Home. Go home, I say. Through the thin cotton of my nightdress I can feel his cold nose against my thigh.
Go home,
I repeat, giving him a little shove. He stands in the middle of the yard, watching me. Clever, he's a clever dog, and he can't make this out at all.

The darkness of the barn is a kindly, lived-in dark, like the dark of a quiet bedroom, full of breathing and turnings: there are corners that are never out of shadows, even in winter when you bring a lantern to milk by. But the work you do in a barn you can do half asleep, by smell, by a thousand repetitions, your hands sliding along rails polished by other hands. Inside the barn the cats greet me, moving like wraiths around my ankles. I move past the lying-down prow of Molly's rump, to the square of moonlight the loft opening has dropped on the aisle. At the ladder I slip my shoes off, I drop the supper tin on a bench and clutch the blanket around me and begin to climb, the rungs pressing into the arches of my bare feet. Above me a dark shape kneels, and a hand reaches down and pulls me up.

Russell's story was not the sort of story I would ever have put together on my own, and my comments the morning I discovered him in the barn were stupid, offensively stupid, evidence of how ignorant I still was, how all the time in school, all the reading, all George's efforts to drag me into the twentieth century had not managed to let more than a few pinpricks of light into my dim understanding of the world. Of course I knew he was a Communist, but I did not give a moment's thought to what was happening to him from day to day all this time, in spite of George's reminders. When I did think about him it was to picture him thinking about me and wondering why I never wrote. I was bold as brass that first night. It was bravado, it came out of my indistinct grasp of what I was going towards.