Real Life (11 page)

“I’ve thought of closing the school tomorrow until this snow stops and the municipality gets caught up with the ploughing,” the director was saying.

“That wind comes up tonight, that’s it,” a driver said. The others murmured agreement, shaking their heads worriedly. The director went on, “If it’s still snowing in the morning, listen to your radios for the announcement.” They went slowly out, leaving behind puddles of melting snow on the tile. “Don’t take any chances now,” the director called after them. “That’s pretty valuable cargo you’re carrying.”

Back in her empty classroom, Astrid sat gazing out the wall of windows at the seemingly impenetrable sheet of falling snow.

“Mrs. Park.” A woman of medium height, overweight, but in the strong-looking way of countrywomen, wearing a fur-trimmed parka, snowpants, and boots, stood in the doorway. “I’m Jody’s mother,” she said. Astrid rose and went toward her, extending her hand. The woman did not take it. “Jody says that you told her that we are wrong about Saturday.”

“She was distraught—” Astrid began, but Mrs. Akinson interrupted.

“This is our belief,” she said. “When you tell our children differently, you violate your role in our community. It had better not happen again.”

“I repeat,” Astrid said, feeling blood rushing to her face, “she is eight years old and she is terrified.” Mrs. Akinson’s calm—how surprisingly well spoken she was—helped Astrid to contain her emotion, but the woman was already turning away. “Wait,” Astrid said. “The world is ending in two days and you take the time to come here and confront me? I think that is proof that you no more believe this ridiculous claim than I do.” Then uncertainty struck her, the absurdity of the situation, the fear that she would now probably be fired for having interfered in community affairs and for quarrelling with a parent, and she put her hand up to her face.

“Your soul is in mortal jeopardy,” Mrs. Akinson said, “and all you can think of is to attack us. I know your kind.” She said it with such a cold firmness that Astrid, who felt she shouldn’t be letting this ignorant woman insult her, was appalled to find that, instead of anger, what she felt was an overwhelming eagerness to be told,
Please, what kind am I?

On Friday morning it was still snowing, although the dreaded wind had not come up. But fewer than half her children were present and none of those whose families belonged to the Church of Holy Brethren. She spent the morning reading stories to the few left and helping them paint pictures and do puzzles. At noon, Warren announced over the intercom that as the weather report wasn’t good, the buses would be coming to take home those children whose parents weren’t able to come for them. After they’d all gone, and most of the teachers too, Astrid tried to work at her desk, but she felt
depressed and drained of energy and couldn’t concentrate.

At home she tried to read a novel, but a restlessness had taken hold of her and she couldn’t concentrate on it either and thought of going out. She wanted to pass by the church to see if anyone was there, and if there were, she imagined herself going inside and—doing what? Doing battle with the pastor in front of his parishioners? Of course not, she just wanted to be there to see what was happening, she told herself. But it worried her, too, that she was unable to dismiss the situation as everyone else did. For the first time she felt less sure that she was right and they were wrong. Anyway, the weather was too threatening now to go outside.

She was wakened in the night by the scream and thud of wind as it buffeted her house. Alarmed, she got up, noticing at once how very cold the house had grown, and pulled back the curtain at her bedroom window. She could see nothing but a torrent of white pelting furiously past the glass. When she clicked the lamp’s switch, nothing happened. She was used to the power being interrupted as a result of a variety of weather conditions, and she merely left her freezing bedroom and retrieved from the porch the kerosene heater the owner of the house had left for such emergencies. She carried it into the living room, filled it from the five-gallon pail of kerosene she’d bought from him, and in a few minutes had it running. Then she went back to the bedroom, wrapped herself in her down-filled quilt, and returned to the living room, shutting the doors leading to the other rooms in order to conserve what little heat was left and that generated by the heater. The clock on her desk told her it was three in the morning.

She sat down in her one armchair, her feet off the cold floor on the footstool, pulled the quilt up around her, and tucked it around her feet, shoulders, and under her chin. The light from the heater cast glowing orange bars across the floor and she
leaned back in her chair, watching them dance, and listening apprehensively to the wind on the roof, banging and tearing at the shingles. Its roar was so powerful she could almost believe it alive and a malevolent force out to destroy her house, the village, everyone in it. She was afraid, but she’d survived storms like this one the previous winter, she had shelter, she told herself, she would be all right, and the noise became, in a curious way, almost lulling, and she grew drowsy and soon slept.

She dreamt she was in the church with Pastor Vernon and his congregation. Candles burned at the end of every pew, dozens lit the altar, and torches hung at intervals down each side of the long, bare walls. There was an unrelenting noise, a high-pitched whine with a hint at back of it of something celestial—the singing of angels, perhaps. The pastor stood at the front of the church preaching. He was thin, almost skeletal, and his handsome face was oddly, startlingly paper-white as if he had already withdrawn to the next world and had sent back only his ghost. A woman screamed, a long high note, and fell forward over the pew in front of her, and a man stood, raising his arms to the ceiling and calling out in a voice that had a strange, non-human timbre and that rose to meld with the background wail. In the wide space between the pastor and the first row of pews lay a heap of children, their flaccid bodies piled crookedly on top of each other. Astrid saw clearly that their souls had departed. Then the church darkened ominously, the noise lifted to a deafening pitch and there was a loud crash.

She leaped from her chair, the quilt falling to the floor, and looked frantically around, remembering where she was and what was happening at the same time as she became aware of a freezing draft of wind and that the ill-fitting kitchen door was vibrating rapidly and noisily in its frame. And wasn’t there a faint pealing in the background, as if the phone had been ring
ing all along? Trembling, she hurried to the door and pushed it open. Snow was piling up in the sink and spilling over onto the floor, and she realized that the crash she’d heard had been wind-hurled debris breaking her kitchen window. Snow-laden, icy wind swept in and she put up her hands to shield her face, edging first to the phone and lifting it to find that, of course, it was dead. Still fighting the last fragments of her dream, she understood, though, that she would have to block off the broken window or she really might freeze.

An old rag rug left by the owner lay in her tiny porch and, fear spurring her, she got it, rolled it into a ball, and shoved it into the snowy space left by the broken glass. Then she tacked up a blanket over the window with hands grown awkward and stiff with the cold. That done, she pushed the snow on the counter into the sink and added the snow from the floor to it.

Shaky from her scare, her exertions, and from the cold, she shut the kitchen door and hurried back to her chair. Glancing at the clock she was surprised to find that it was six in the morning, that she’d slept a couple of hours. Now she realized that the high-pitched scream in her dream had to have been the storm’s howl, and she remembered dismally her dream-self that had wanted it to be a choir of angels.

She thought of the schoolchildren who would have had ample time to get home before the storm had broken, and were surely safe. Anybody who wasn’t already in the church couldn’t get there now, though, and she imagined the pastor waiting out the end of the world all by himself. It was a scene that saddened her, and she thought it a shame that a man of such unusual charisma had chosen to apply it in so fraudulent and ultimately useless a way. His character must somehow be deeply flawed, she mused: excessive vanity, or laziness, or some profound fear of living a real life in the real world like everyone else.

She thought, too, of Mrs. Akinson and wondered what
would make such a seemingly sensible person believe him, but found she couldn’t understand the reasons, other than that of spiritual desperation, which she recognized as a cliché, and mistrusted as such. Maybe it’s only that he catches people and holds onto them by sheer personal magnetism, not by wisdom or selflessness as true spiritual leaders do. A thief of souls, she thought, that’s what he is. Then she shivered and began to tremble through her whole body, and couldn’t stop for a long time, no matter how she snuggled into her quilt and pressed her back against the warmth of her chair.

She dreamt again unusually active, vivid dreams. In them she and Donald were meeting for the first time: he was smiling, then touching her forehead with his, so gently that she flushed with a heat both sexual and love-filled; they were at a party, he was telling a joke, then dancing with her; then they were in their own apartment eating breakfast at the small table in the kitchen. Donald seemed younger, softer than she remembered him being.

She woke a few hours later, looking around wonderingly, noticing that her heater had used up its fuel and gone out and that the room was so cold she could see her breath. She knew at once by the stillness that the storm was over, and then realized that someone was pounding on her door. Clutching her quilt around her shoulders, she went slowly to it and pushed it open. Sunlight striking the wind-sculptured banks and sheets of snow flooded in, so bright that she had to put a hand over her eyes, but the blessed post-storm peace and the wonder that always accompanied it touched her too, and she hesitated an instant before she backed away into the room’s relative darkness.

“You look all right,” a man boomed at her in that hearty way all the men here adopted for social exchanges. She recognized the district’s robust young reeve by his voice, and lowered her arm from her face, hearing the faint roar of a snowplough
somewhere out in the village. “Power company says it’ll be at least tomorrow before the electricity comes on again. Storm took down a hundred poles and lines are down all over the place.” Before she could answer, he went on. “The dance hall’s got backup propane heat and we’re taking all you ladies over there.” He added quickly, “Need somebody able-bodied like you to make coffee and sandwiches for the boys on the ploughs.” Knowing she had no choice, she went to dress. Outside in the blazing light, male voices were shouting across the banks of snow, and behind them she heard the whine of motors she took to be snowmobiles.

“Men just love a good disaster,” one of the old ladies in the hall said to her, her dark eyes alight with humour and intelligence. The village’s handful of old women were wrapped in blankets and seated in comfortable chairs while they waited for the roads to open so their relatives could come for them. Children played board games at the tables, or ran about giggling and dodging each other, and the murmur of women’s voices came from the kitchen. At the far end of the hall a few men were setting up the last of the long wooden tables and placing wooden stacking chairs around them. Astrid suddenly realized that one of the men was Pastor Vernon, that the other men working with him, the children, and also the women in the kitchen must be his flock rescued from the church. Pastor Vernon lifted his head from his task; his eyes met hers, giving no glint of recognition; he went back to his work as if he hadn’t seen her. Steeling herself, Astrid went to the kitchen and pushed open the door.

For an instant every eye in the room was on her, a hush fell; just as suddenly the glances dropped, the women went back to the buttering of bread, to the rattling of plates and cups. She recognized the pastor’s wife and, across the central worktable facing her, Jody Akinson’s mother. That she’d been the object
of censuring conversation among them was obvious. She felt her face growing hot and, without speaking, backed hastily out of the room, deciding that she would instead help by entertaining the children and chatting with the old people.

Astrid had been reading a story to three little girls at the end of a long table when one of the mothers came to take them to their makeshift beds on the stage. She watched them go, then continued her gaze around the hall, lit, now that evening had come, by a variety of kerosene and battery-powered camping lamps which, turned low so the children and old people might sleep, cast a comforting yellow-orange light edged by shadows. The women murmured softly to their children or each other, the men, exhausted from their long shifts in the snow and cold, dozed in chairs or stretched out on the floor, or sat playing cards at a table by the kitchen. She watched the pastor pacing alone with his Bible at the hall’s far end. A chair scraped the floor and she turned to it to find Mrs. Akinson sitting down across from her.

After a moment Astrid asked, “Is tonight …” Mrs. Akinson said, glancing down the hall toward him, “The pastor says he believes he misunderstood when he was in prayer, that he had the wrong date. It isn’t tonight.” She spoke quietly, but Astrid could feel a sadness wafting from her, or perhaps it was merely weariness, the same bone-deep weariness she felt herself.

“You mean,” she said, as the message with its implication of other dates began to sink in, “that you will go through
this
again and again?” She couldn’t keep the distaste out of her voice. Colour flooded Mrs. Akinson’s neck, then her cheeks and her forehead. She stared at Astrid, a depth appearing in her eyes, as if this meaning were just dawning on her, too.

“I think—” she began, then stopped, her face working as she struggled to maintain her composure.

Astrid leaned toward her.
“Death is not so cheap,”
she said.
“I
have suffered a great loss, and I can tell you that, for people like us”—she glanced around the hall, meaning more than these few people, but the dead in wars, of starvation, and disease all around the world—“I can tell you that
death
is not so easy. You have children—your
children
—” She shook her head, then sat back in her chair, staring at Mrs. Akinson.