Reading by Lightning (50 page)

No, I say. It's the politicians who think it's so big. They act as though the war is an act of God. As though there's no resisting it.

Hey, Lily, they
love
it! he says. Ever noticed how baggy their trousers are? That's so no one can see their woodies. Churchill's been walking around with a woody since 1937. Hell, since 1914!

He raises a toast. Let the warmongers fight the war! Conscript the bastards!

We clink our bottles together. Down with the Fascist imperialists! he yells.

A plague on both their houses! I cry.

I need to make everything up new. They were wrong about everything, George Bernard Shaw and Neville Chamberlain and Mr. Dalrymple and my shamefaced mother. Russell may be wrong as well. I need to figure everything out on my own, and one day I will. But right now I'm more interested in pinning Russell against the loft wall, running my fingernails over the muscles in his back and then smoothing out the scratching with my fingertips. The brides on the train from Saint John are starting to pop up in my mind, though, girls perched in the aisle, juggling babies and cigarettes and saying things in brittle voices they wouldn't dare say to their best friends. It all came back to sex. They'd just lived through a shipping-out leave — they had a bleary, worked-over look. There was a blonde girl about my age arguing that you have two safe weeks, with your period in the middle of them. That seemed like useful information and I stored it away. Of course, her system does not take into account the rainy days when I
set myself the task of clearing up the old harnesses in the barn, or the days when Mother is unwell and sleeps right through from dinnertime until supper. I haven't worried because you can't worry and do what I've done. But when I think of it, she was very pregnant, the bride who said this, her belly button sticking out like a thimble in the middle of her stomach.

And then there was that other girl I rode beside, the girl who sat and jiggled her leg from Sault Ste. Marie to Port Arthur. In the middle of the night she got up to go to the bathroom and when she came back she saw I was awake. Don't ever get pregnant, she said. You have to pee every ten minutes. We started talking and we talked until morning. Doris, her name was. Her boyfriend had died in a training accident at Petawawa before she even had a chance to tell him. His name was Guy. He was French, a Catholic. She had a little diamond ring. She went to a jewellery store on her own and bought it as soon as she realized. I'm going to tell my family we were engaged, at least, she says. Not that we were. Not that he ever said a word about getting married.

When Mother falls asleep on the chesterfield in the afternoon I steal into her room and pull her underwear drawer open. The paper I'm remembering is still there, up against the back of her underwear drawer, yellow and cracked. I unfold it. There is the title,
Family Planning Aid.
As far in as possible? Ten minutes before? No wonder I remembered it. I slide it back into her drawer and go back to the kitchen, to where a roasting pan of cucumbers sits on the table. We're making pickles. The cucumbers are perfect for fancy dills, just three inches long. But they already have little nubs on them, like the black whiskers on an unshaven chin. I pour water into the pan and work the nubs off with my fingers in the clear, cold water, feeling the small pimple each one leaves behind.
Tannic acid. Boric acid.
I wonder who gave the recipe to her and if she used
it. She must have, she must have used something. Boric acid, I think, is used for cleaning. Tannic acid maybe for tanning cowhides, that would make sense. I can't imagine doing it, it makes me feel sick.

One day she sees him in the yard. I tell Russell while we play rummy, sitting down by the river where there's a bit of a breeze.

She saw me? When?

At the pump.

What did you tell her?

I told her it was Harry Dabney. The fellow who rents our land. I told her he walked in from the road. I said his truck broke down and he needed water for the radiator.

Lily, you are a scary broad. I dread the day you have to lie to me.

I'm good at making them up. I'm not that great at delivering them.

Russell picks up a card and deftly reorders everything in his hand. While I was a girl memorizing Bible verses he was squatting in a Toronto alley playing rummy. He snaps a run of clubs, king high, on the grass between us without even bothering to look at me: he's won the game and winning is his due.

I wish you'd let me get your water, I say.

Well, you know what I wish? he says. I wish I could walk into the house and introduce myself. I'd tell her I'm in a bit of trouble and need a place to stay. She won't let on. She won't want the police out here. If I know mothers.

You don't know my mother.

You don't know your mother.

What do you mean?

You
don't know your mother. Women never do. Women never really see their mothers. He has a clever grin on his face.

And why is that, do you suppose?

I guess they don't want to see themselves.

I give a sharp kick to his shin and then I roll away from him and down the bank. He doesn't react. He sits silently above me, smoking. I roll under a spruce, a big spruce. I lie among its knuckled roots in a bed of needles. I'll get sap in my hair, I think, but I don't care. This is the tallest spruce, it's the spruce where my father saw a lynx long ago. This is where he opened his eyes and saw the lynx watching him. Whatever it is that makes a lynx afraid of humans was gone that day.

My dad saw a lynx here once, I call up to Russell. You better watch out.

He doesn't answer. He sits there looking thoughtfully down the riverbank. I'm included in his gaze and I look silently back. He looks tired. The romance of living in a barn is wearing thin. He hasn't had mail for a few days, nothing to remind him he's a revolutionary. He should go, I think, for his own good. I'd be glad, I'd like a break from him. To find out what I'm feeling, just to drop a leg down and see if I'm in over my head or can still wade to shore. I study his face between the dark spruce boughs. He's more tanned than he was. He's been weeding the field plot where we grow potatoes and corn. He took it on because it can't be seen from the house or even really from the road, and when I tell Mother I'm weeding it we can be busy with other things.

He's still watching me. It's not just my body he wants. He wants my silence, he wants my moods, he won't leave me even a tiny place in my brain. I roll over, I roll out of the shadow of the spruce tree and press my face into the leaves and grass of the riverbank: poplar leaves, and that narrow beige grass with seed heads like tiny scythes, grass we walked on every day of
my growing up but never spoke of because no one had ever given it a name. The blackbirds pipe and there's the constant electric hum of insects. I lie face down, I flatten my body into the tough, dry grasses and listen for a pulse.

There's a day when summer peaks. You don't always sense it the day it happens, but you know it the day after, as soon as you step into the yard. All that pulsing green is static, there's a stuffiness to the heat that tells you you're on the slide towards fall, that plants are starting to put their force into seeds and not into flowers. You tell yourself you're wrong, but out in the garden you see that the bottom leaves of the peas are drying yellow, and you have to take down the flypaper in the kitchen, carry it at arm's length out to the outhouse and drop it in a hole because it's black with dying and dead houseflies. And then you see spikes of goldenrod poking up out of the ditches and you know summer is well and truly over.

I decide to buy the ingredients one at a time, and on a morning when the sun is obscured by a haze of heat I ask the clerk in the grocery store for boric acid.

Boric acid? she says. Why don't you just use vinegar?

Mother said boric acid, I say.

Her eyes narrow in their wrinkly little pockets and I'm seized by the insane fear that we're talking about the same thing. Well, you'll have to try the drugstore, she says. We have Bull Dog Powder, and Blue Imperial, and Mrs. Stewart's Liquid, but we haven't carried straight boric acid for a couple of years.

Mr. Gorrie is still behind the counter of the drugstore, wearing his dark glasses. He's given no sign of recognizing me since I came back from England, but I feel my stomach tighten at the clerical bent of his back, the evangelical slope of his
shoulders.
Into the fog with the rag-tailed dog,
I hum to myself,
ho ho ho and a bottle of rum.
He's weighing out a white powder for the woman beside me at the counter. Half a pound, she says. No, make it six ounces. Her singed yellow hair is familiar, and then she turns her head and I see it's Susan Dabney, our renter's wife.

Oh, Lily, she says. You haven't had Harry knocking at your door this morning?

No, I say cautiously. Should I have?

Well, I gave him enough sandwiches for ten men. But they'll be gone by noon. She has her little boy with her, and she reaches down and pries his hands one at a time off the glass counter. Can you manage an extra for dinner? I'd say send him home, but he's got the team.

Harry's working at our place today? I ask stupidly.

You didn't see him? she says. He started haying north of the river.

Mr. Gorrie adds another half-ounce to the white pyramid on the scales, and a tiny cloud of powder lifts towards his glasses.
Into the bog with the rag-tailed sog, into the bog, into the fog
. . . You know, I say to both of them, I just realized. I left Mother's prescription in the truck. I'll be right back.

I can see Harry as soon as I turn off the section road. I can't imagine how I missed him on my way to town. He's doing it the old way, with a team of horses. I stop at the edge of the field and wait until he makes his way up to the road and lifts one hand in greeting. The horses are already wet in their withers.

You've got a hot day for it, I call.

Sure do, he calls back and turns the corner. There's nothing to be seen in his sunburned face. No curiosity.

I park the Ford close to the barn, the way I have been lately. Russell's sitting up in the straw when I get to the top of the
ladder. He's been sleeping. His face is red from the heat, wrinkled like a satin dress, his hair is damp. He's stripped down to his shorts. I know, he says. I saw him when he came. I guess I shouldn't be sleeping. Is he going to fill the loft?

Yes, but not today. He has to let the hay cure first. I lean on the edge of the loft, but I can't bring myself to climb up into the heat.

When, do you think?

A couple of days. Not long in this heat. But he'll be in and out of the yard to water his horses and I may end up feeding him. You'll have to work at staying out of sight.

Maybe I should just go now. I can't take much more of this.

Where will you go?

I'll go to town and hitch a ride to Winnipeg. I keep writing Al that I'm coming and then I never do.

We can't talk about it. The heat baffles us, it's so thick in the air that our words don't carry. Are you thinking tomorrow? I ask, although he's begun to cram his things, his letters and towel and tobacco, into his knapsack.