A Song for Nettie Johnson (22 page)

When she heard her father’s words, the sister crumbled a small lump of dirt between her fingers and wondered why Frank Schultz had suddenly become a thou. Up until now he’d only been Frank, a farmer six miles south of Stone Creek. When Ivan heard them, he flapped his arms like a bird flying. Abie heard a different voice, an old voice from an ancient flame: “Take off your shoes, Moses. The ground you stand on is holy ground.”

One afternoon
in fall she caught him smoking. He was sitting on the ground behind the garage, nearly hidden by Russian thistles. First she saw the wisps of grey rising from the thistles and the red spark of his cigarette. Then she saw him sitting there, leaning against a rock. She stood and watched, strong in the righteousness of her sex.

”So. Here’s where you keep yourself,” she finally said. He jerked the cigarette out of his mouth. “I didn’t know you smoked.” He held the glowing object down by his knee.

“So? Now you do.”

“Well, isn’t this interesting. I guess Dad would find it interesting too if he knew about it.”

“Make sure you let him know then,” he said, holding up the cigarette with a flourish.

“I didn’t say I was going to tell him. I only said that if he knew he’d find it interesting. That’s all I said.”

“Well, if he’d find it so interesting I think you should tell him. I think you should go right now and tell him.” He rubbed the cigarette into the dirt, snuffing it out, then covered it with stones and grass. He picked up a thin stick, placed it on the end of his nose, the tip resting on his forehead. This was a favourite trick of his. Only he could do it because of his odd-shaped nose.

“You think that’s quite clever, don’t you, balancing things on your nose like that. I suppose you think the girls at school consider you very smart and clever when you balance pencils on your nose like that and get them to laughing.”

“Do you know anyone else who can do it?”

“I should hope not.”

“It might interest you to know I’ve made fifty cents doing this, for people who appreciate it.”

“Oh, really,” the sister said and walked away.

“Hey, wait a minute,” he shouted after her. “Have you ever heard this song before?”

She stopped, stood there among the swaying weeds and listened to her brother sing in that curious new voice of his that she detested.

Hang out your washing on the Siegfried Line

If the Siegfried Line’s still there.

“Certainly I’ve heard it. Mr. Nelson sings that when he’s mowing the grass.”

“Do you know what it means?”

“How should I know what it means?”

“Well, I guess you haven’t heard what that song’s all about, have you. That,” he lowered his voice significantly, “is the dirtiest song in the English language. A very obscene song.”

“What’s dirty about it?”

“I’d never tell.” He leaned back against the rock and slipped another Sweet Caporal out of its cellophaned package.

“What can be dirty about hanging out your wash on the Siegfried Line?”

“O. You said it.”

“Said what?”

“The dirty words.”

“You mean those are the dirty words?”

“That’s what I said.” He flicked a match against a rock, bent his head into the weeds, out of the wind, and lit the cigarette, inhaling deeply.

“What part is dirty – hanging out the wash? or the Siegfried Line?”

“O. You said it again.”

“But you said it first.”

“I sang it. Singing’s different. It’s like quoting.”

“Well, tell me what it means then.”

“Me? Never.”

“Does it mean the same as what Gussie Skogland did to Rattray’s cow?”

“I’d never say. You wouldn’t get me to talk about anything like that.”

She stood in a patch of dandelions and looked at him.

“So. You said the words, didn’t you.” He raised his head smoothly, easily, sending a delicate ribbon of smoke curling into the prairie sky.

He didn’t forget. When she stood by the kitchen sink in a white apron, washing the supper dishes, he crept up behind her, nudged her with his shoulder, and whispered the song in her ear. When she climbed down the basement stairs to use the toilet behind the furnace, he followed her halfway down the steps, then stopped, and sang between closed teeth.

Hang out your washing on the Siegfried Line

If the Siegfried Line’s still there.

Once in the living room, where their father was kneeling at the front door, working with a screwdriver to fasten a broken hinge, her brother sprawled on the brown sofa and hummed the song under his breath. She left the room, her heart pounding, and asked her mother in the kitchen if there was anything she could do to help.

Later he told her. “You really thought that was a dirty song, didn’t you. You were scared I was going to tell. Ha.”

“Oh, really. Wasn’t that a smart thing to do. Weren’t you smart and clever to think of something like that.” She ran, furious, down the street to Sorensons’.

When he was fifteen,
he got Zig Karetsky’s old job working for Louie in the undertaking parlour.

“Do you think it looks right?” Mrs. Carlson asked Eva Skretting in the Red and White. They were standing next to the bread shelf. “The preacher’s son working for Louie like that? Won’t people think it’s kind of fishy? It could cause talk.”

“What’s a mystery to me is why Louie would hire him. He’s one who needs watching,” Eva said, fitting a loaf snugly into the row of other loaves.

But he went to work every Saturday, leaving the house at nine, whistling down the driveway.

One morning in June he forgot his lunch. His mother
picked up the brown bag from the kitchen counter and told his sister to take it to him. She combed her hair, preened in front of the hall mirror until her mother called her to stop fussing and get started. She slipped on her new blue sweater and examined herself again from different angles in the hall mirror. She was going downtown to bring her brother his lunch.

Outside, the sun was pouring down, shining on the purple blooms of lilacs, stippling the young leaves of caraganas. It flecked the wings of a meadowlark perched on a fence post and spread over weeds and grass onto the gravelled driveway. It soaked into the little crevices between the stones, warming the sleek backs of ants and beetles. There was no space anywhere without the light.

At the end of the driveway her father was kneeling beside the car, fiddling with his tool box. The sun spilled out over the car’s slick top and down on his greasy tools. It shone warm on his curved shoulders and smooth grey back.

She walked past the lilacs to where her father knelt by the blue car. He looked up. “My, aren’t you spiffed up this morning,” he said. “Are you going to a wedding?”

She held the brown bag out in front of her. “He forgot his lunch. I have to bring him his lunch.”

She opened the gate and walked down the sidewalk to Sorensons’. She stopped to watch her friend Mary do a back bend under the clothesline, her body curved against the earth, her hair streaming.

“Where are you off to?” Mary asked, upside down.

“To Louie’s. I’m bringing my brother his lunch. You knew he was working for Louie, didn’t you?”

“Well, I guess,” Mary said, her back circling the grass.

She turned at Sorensons’ corner and walked over to Main Street. She stopped in front of Cutler’s Dry Goods, where Label was sweeping the sidewalk. The straw of his broom gathered dust, gravel, crushed candy wrappers, guiding them over the sun-warmed cement into the narrow ditch at the curb’s edge.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked.

“Me? Oh, nowhere special. My dumb brother forgot his lunch and I have to bring it to him. You knew he was working for Louie, didn’t you?”

“Of course.” He continued sweeping, tufts of yellow straw swirling over the concrete.

At Louie’s she walked across the oiled floor, past lamps and sofas, to the office at the far end. She opened the door. Her brother was sitting on a wooden chair, his feet up on the desk, staring at the ceiling.

“Is this all you have to do?” she asked.

He jerked his feet off the desk and sat up straight. “All! Don’t you know Louie’s away? Who’d answer the phone if I wasn’t here? Who’d take care of things?” He picked up a yellow pencil, held it by his ear, ready for any important message.

“It doesn’t look like much of a job to me,” the sister said.

“Some jobs take muscles. Some take brains.” He laid the pencil on the desk blotter and fussed about in the drawer with a box of paper clips. She looked at a closed door across the room.

“Is that where you keep them?”

“When we’ve got them.”

“You don’t have any today?”

“Not in there.”

“Well, here’s the lunch you forgot.” She set the bag on the desk and turned to leave.

“Hey, wait a minute,” he said. “You might be interested in that shoebox.” He pointed to the shelf beside the desk. The shelf was littered with old magazines, an ashtray, and a white shoebox with 5.98 written in black on one end.

“Why?”

“Oh, no special reason. I just thought you might like to know what’s in that box. But I guess you wouldn’t be interested after all.”

She walked over to the shelf and grabbed the box. She opened the lid, lifted up a gauzy sheet of tissue paper. She saw it for less than a second, smaller than her hand, tiny fingers curled tightly like the claws of a kitten, eyes shut tight. She felt a ragged lump in the centre of her stomach, and shoved the box back on the shelf.

“Why did you do that?” she shouted. “Why did you do such a stupid thing as that? What a stupid thing to do!”

“What did I do? I didn’t make you open the box.”

“Why is it in a shoebox?”

“Because they’re going to bury it. Any smaller they’d flush it down the toilet.”

“Oh, you’re really something, aren’t you? You really think of marvellous things, don’t you? Brilliant and marvellous. It must make you very proud to think of such marvellous things. Well, have a nice time eating your lunch, that’s all I have to say.”

She fled from the room, past the sofas, lamps, and cane-back chairs, out the front door. She ran past Cutler’s, cut across the back alley to Sorensons’. She didn’t stop running until she reached her own yard and leaned against the gate, her heart pounding.

Her father was still working on the car. He was lying under it on the gravel, hammering away at something. She saw only his feet twisting under the bumper.

She ran into the house, hurried through the kitchen where her mother was chopping walnuts, into the living room.

She sat down in front of the piano and paged through ragged song books. She looked up at the photographs sitting on top of the piano. A picture of her grandparents on their Golden Wedding Anniversary, standing in front of a poplar tree, holding a cake. One of her cousin Wesley on his Confirmation Day, standing on the church step, holding a scroll. One of her and her brother, when he was six and she was three, sitting in a chair together, holding a ball.

“Ketchens,”
she said.

“Ketchens?”

“The chickens in the kitchen at Ketchens’. Don’t you remember? We made up a song about them. They’d walk in through the screen door that had no screen and wander all over the house.”

She was lying on a narrow bed in a Toronto hospital. The head of the bed was raised, making it look like a chaise lounge. She was wearing a green hospital gown. Her brother, in a tweed jacket, was sitting on a chrome chair beside her, holding a pair of sunglasses by one stem and swinging it in little half-circles in front of him. A huge bouquet of yellow roses rested on the windowsill behind him.

He stopped twirling the glasses. “I remember now. The place with the flies. Everywhere you looked, flies.”

“Well, the door had no screen,” she said. “Just a big hole where the screen was supposed to be. And it was summer.”

“And hot,” he said.

“And there was no screen, and the chickens just wandered in and out.”

“And the buzzing flies.”

“Mrs. Ketchen asked us to stay for lunch and Dad said yes, and she served canned peaches on a flat dinner plate. You couldn’t manage them with your spoon and started laughing, so Dad told you to use your knife and fork.”

He uncrossed his legs and leaned back in the chair. September sunlight streamed through the window onto his back, his shoulders and his greying hair.

“Why would he take us to a place like that anyway?” he asked.

“He wanted us with him sometimes, when he made his calls.”

He leaned forward. “And why does he choose to stay in that God-forsaken town?”

A nurse, plump and middle-aged, her clipped hair tidy under a white cap, walked into the room, carrying a trayful of tiny paper cups.

“For your bowels,” she said and set a cup on the bedside table. “I’ll bring the baby in later for her snack.” She turned and walked out of the room. They heard her footsteps clicking down the corridor.