A Song for Nettie Johnson (21 page)

Then he said a lot of other things like the universe is not perfectly symmetrical and that’s why we’re all here. He lost me at this point. I looked around the room. The others seemed confused as well. The speech got more and more complicated. Peter began to squirm, and Joe and Abie slouched lower in their chairs.

When Ivan had finished, Mr. Ross called on me. I went to the front, laid my notecards in two piles on his desk, and stood in front of it.

“Mr. Ross, honourable judges, worthy opponent, and fellow students.” I got right into my speech, wasting no time on an introduction. I didn’t need my notecards for the first verses.

A flock of wild geese,

A crimson western sky,

Tall pines and poplar trees

Through which the evening breezes sigh.

But there is no God, some people say,

Maker or Creator? No.

These things just are – like night and day,

And ever will be so.

I looked out over the class. Peter was squiriming. Ivan was shaking his head. I realized I had to be more compelling, so I recited the next four lines louder.

The wind howls in the night.

The mighty oceans roar.

“God is not tame!” the wise man says.

“Not napping on the floor.”

I glanced at Vera. She was nodding her head in agreement. I decided to recite the next verse in a lighter tone, for contrast.

The smoothness of an egg,

The scratching life within,

The breaking of its brittle shell,

And lo, our feathered kin.

The grade ten boys began to snicker. I picked up the second stack of cards, flipped through them quickly, and decided to read only my best verses.

Roaring thunder, slashing rain,

Tempestuous, violent weather.

Rough winds can roar and rip and groan,

But still we hang together.

No one was squirming now.

The mighty force of gravity,

Yet...

Love is even stronger!

When all around would pull us down,

Love lifts us up and holds us there,

And we are sad no longer.

For the next verse I again lowered my voice, but I pronounced each word slowly and distinctly.

A tiny grain of love,

So small one hardly sees it,

But still it travels through the air

(Fast as sound and quick as light!)

And lands on one who needs it.

I repeated the refrain, “But there is no God, some people say...” I’d decided not to use it after every verse, but to stick it in here and there.

The body’s shrewd design,

Each part a purpose serves,

The neck that holds the head upright,

A narrow hip that swerves.

I felt my cheeks getting warm. I glanced down at Ivan. He was looking at me curiously, but he wasn’t sneering. For the next verse I raised my left hand. On the second line, I curled and uncurled my fingers.

Five fingers of a hand,

And knuckles so they swing,

Two fingers hold a yellow rose,

And one, a wedding ring.

Things were going quite well, so I decided to skip over to the end.

A million needles on a spruce,

A billion stars on high,

Ten thousand dolphins in the sea,

WHY?WHY?WHY?

Whose idea was it to GIVE and GIVE and GIVE?

Whose idea was it to LOVE and LIVE?”

I had come to the last verse. Now I looked at everyone, individually. I’d seen my dad do this, and it seemed to work quite well.

Dear friends who’ve gathered here,

I very strongly urge you,

Throw off the blinders from your eyes,

Scrape off the scum that lingers,

And see the LOVE that touches YOU,

Your ears and eyes and lungs and heart,

Your hands and all your fingers.

The room was quiet. Everyone was looking at me. I saw Vera wipe tears from her eyes with her clean white handkerchief. And I knew I’d won.

That night
I went to the rink. All the lights were turned on, every string, as they were each Friday night. And music was playing over the loudspeaker. Tonight it was “The Blue Danube Waltz.”

I was skating by myself in the centre of the rink. Light from the bulbs hanging above glittered over me and around me in small circles and sparkled on the blue white ice at my feet. I felt as if I were gliding on the Blue Danube itself, heading into the Black Sea.

Then, from the corner of my eye, I saw Ivan skating toward me, head bent, arms swinging. He was zooming right at me. I jerked sideways to get out of his way, and I fell on the ice, legs and arms sprawling. He circled around me, his skates pointing in opposite directions, his body leaning over me, gliding smoothly around and around. He scraped to a stop, and snowy bits of ice sprayed up from his silver blades. Then he bent down and shoved his hands into my armpits and lifted me up, and I stood wobbling beside him. He stretched his left arm around my back, his left hand still in my armpit, his fingers pressing into me. He grabbed my right hand in his and held it tight, and off we went down the ice. He swirled me around the corners, whizzed me past the other skaters, moved me swiftly and surely through the circles of light.

I looked up at the black sky and the stars. The air
was cold on my face. And, oh, the beauty! I could hardly
breathe.

~

The Ground You Stand On

O
ne Saturday in spring, when the
brother was twelve and the sister was nine, they climbed the ladder in the church tower to the belfry. The tower was dim except for a yellow square of sunlight far above where the tunnel opened onto the bell deck. It was dusty, smelling of old feathers and bird droppings.

The sister was first. The brother followed below. She knew, climbing in her pink and flaring skirt, why he wanted to be second, and soft slender pleasures curled about in the centre of her stomach. But as she stepped up on the wooden rungs, clinging with stiff hands to the bars, she scraped her feet against each rung, sending bits of dust and shrivelled bird droppings down on her brother’s face, his upturned nose.

When they reached the top he shoved her with one free hand through the opening into the belfry and followed close behind. They lay on their stomachs, clutching with arms and thighs at the safety of the deck. Their heads leaned over the edge, their feet rested under the great iron bell suspended above, there was no railing, the height made them dizzy.

They looked down on the churchyard: the brown wet earth, the caragana hedge sprouting bits of green, a few old graves beyond the hedge, shabby in spring mud and winter’s limp weeds.

From here they saw everything: the hotel on Main Street, Louie’s place, the Chinese café, the vacant lot between the church and the café. Then they saw their father in the vacant lot, walking through straggling weeds toward Main Street. He was wearing a sagging grey sweater. “Why doesn’t he get rid of that old thing?” the brother said, crouching lower on the belfry floor. When he lifted his head again, his father was gone.

They crawled closer to the edge and looked out beyond Main Street. They saw the school and the onion dome of the Russian church, and south of the church, the small Ukrainian houses in yards that would soon be filled with green vegetables and tall yellow sunflowers.

“When I’m seventeen I’m going to leave this dump.”

“Why?” the sister asked.

“Why! Who wants to rot in this dump?”

“It’s nicer than Graveltown. I heard some people from Graveltown are moving here next month.”

“They can have it,” he said. “It’s a dump.”

They heard an airplane somewhere to the north, saw its distant curve approach, watched it roar over Main Street.

“Take me to United States!” the sister shouted, aiming her voice with her cupped hands.

“Take me to United States!” she yelled again, louder.

“United States! Who wants to go to United States?” the brother said.

“Where do you want to go?” she asked.

“Halifax,” he said, “to join the navy and see the world.

If they ask us who we are

We’re the rcnvr.

Roll along, wavy navy, roll along.”

His voice bounced off the iron bell, filling the tower and spilling out into the yard below.

When he was thirteen,
he got a job cleaning the church. Each Saturday he was paid fifty cents to straighten hymnals, dust pews, change numbers on the little wooden board above the pulpit that told what pages the hymns were on. The job didn’t include the altar, however. He didn’t wash the starched white cloth or polish the sacramental vessels. Only the women did that. A few complained. Mrs. Carlson said that just because he was the preacher’s son he shouldn’t get special privileges. “It doesn’t look right,” she told Eva Skretting in the Red and White. Eva said that Peter was a wild one and needed watching. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he wasn’t in on that Gussie Skogland business, and didn’t Gussie get two months in Reform School?”

But he kept the job for one whole summer, every Saturday flicking a limp cloth smelling of lemons over the dusty pews. Each time he finished, he’d stand in his father’s pulpit, observing his handiwork.

The morning Louie hauled Frank Schultz to St. John’s, the two children stood on the church steps and held the door for him. Louie and Zig Karetsky lugged the casket out of their truck, each hugging an end. They lifted it up the steps, Zig first, backing through the lobby, past swinging doors, down the nave’s long aisle. Louie told him, bumping against the pews, to watch his step. Zig said how could he with this thing right under his nose. The two men set the grey box on metal stands in the chancel of St. John’s, a few feet in front of the altar.

The news spread to the edges of town like spokes in the wheel of a bike. “They’ve got Frank Schultz down at St. John’s.” By 10 o’clock they’d gathered: Joe, Douglas, Ivan, Andy, Abie, Mary. The brother stood beside the swinging doors in the entrance, holding an offering plate.

“If you want to see him, it’ll cost you a nickel,” he said.

“Highway robbery,” Ivan said.

“Can you go in with someone?” Andy asked.

“With someone it will cost a nickel extra. A nickel apiece plus one if you go in by twos.”

The sister leaned back against the varnished wall. “I know a certain person who wouldn’t think too much of this idea of yours.”

“So are you going to tell?” her brother said.

“Yea, you better tell, Elizabeth,” Joe said.

“Who’s first?” the brother said.

“You be first.”

“No, you go.”

“I’ll go next after you.”

“Hell,” Joe said. “I’ll go.” He threw a nickel into the brass plate and disappeared through the swinging doors. He was back almost immediately. “It’s Schultz all right, and is he dead.” Abie and Ivan went in together. Three nickels clanged into the plate. Their stay was only a little longer.

“Did you see his hands?” Andy asked, standing under the bell rope, his hair the colour of the rope. “They were folded, like he was praying.”

The brother scoffed. “Louie just gets them to look like that. He’s the one who finally gets them looking good.”

“He didn’t get the thumb right,” Abie said. “It was sticking straight up. Louie should have tried to get the thumb right.”

When the sister went in with Mary Sorenson, she saw only the face, bluish white like skim milk, shiny as mucilage.

In the afternoon during the service, they sat by the hedge, snapping beetles between rocks and making whistles out of caragana pods. The sun was shining, warm and orange. The air smelled of upturned soil, crushed pods, the cracked shells of beetles.

Ivan said, “Soon old Schultz will be galloping his way to glory. Flying through the sky to the sweet by and by.” Ivan lived south of Main Street with his grandfather who spoke mostly Russian. Then he sang, “I don’t care if it rains or freezes, I am safe in the arms of Jesus.”

“Okay, Lippoway, you can shut your mouth right about now,” the brother said. Certain irreverences he would not allow.

“Yea, Lippoway, zip your lip.” Abie said.

“I understand the Communists in Russia hardly believe in anything any more,” the sister said, her neck stiff against a branch.

Later, at the cemetery, the small group watched from behind a clump of honeysuckle bushes. They saw the mourners on one side of the grave, huddled together beside a pile of dirt. The preacher stood on the other side, holding a shovel. With three ropes, the six men, three on each side of the grave, lowered the box into the hole. Then the preacher spoke. His voice was thin, like a wisp of smoke. “From dust thou came, to dust thou shalt return, from dust shalt thou arise again.” He shovelled clumps of earth down on the box below.