A Song for Nettie Johnson (29 page)

“It’s all right,” she says.

“The living womb of the sea of creation and I forgot. Come here. Give your father a kiss. Apollo was a dolphin, you know, when he carried poor damned souls to the land of the dead. Did you know that?”

“It was me who told you.”

“Come. Right here. One kiss.” He curls his finger, inviting.

Emily goes to him and bends over him. His skin is yellow. She touches his forehead with her lips. It feels damp and cold.

“You’re my dolphin,” he says. His eyes are wet.

She turns to go.

“Hold it. Stay right where you are.” His hands clutch the table’s edge. He lifts himself up, lets go of the table, stands alone, stretches tall. “They’re whales you know.” Slowly he slides back into the chair. “Stunted whales. Runts. Not in the big league. No leviathan.”

His eyes slits, he gazes at Emily standing quiet in front of the refrigerator.

“Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook? Tie a rope around his tongue and pull him out? Well? Canst thou?”

“No,” she says.

“Canst thou put a hook in his tongue and a chain on the hook and swing him around in the deep?” His voice rises. The veins on his forehead stand out.

“Canst thou pierce his skin with barbed irons?” He coughs, gurgling, and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

Emily leans hard against the refrigerator door. Her hands are fists against her thighs.

“Hey, I asked you a question, Miss High and Mighty. Canst thou?”

“I said no, Dad. I already said no.”

“Hold it. No talking back, like Job, right? Getting God all riled up.”

He shakes his head, puzzled. “But God didn’t know, did he? The Heavenly Father such a refuge e’er was given just didn’t know. He
thought
he knew, but he was mistaken. That’s the problem right there. Mistaken. Isn’t that the whole problem? Isn’t that the trouble? That’s it, isn’t it?”

He sits up, makes his hand a gun, and points it at his daughter. “Ra-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a,” he croaks. He bends his head back. “Ra-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a,” he shouts to God somewhere above the roof. “Have you heard the latest?” he says. “We can fill his skin with iron. We know how to do that now. We can crush his huge whale heart and smash his liver to bits.” He tries to raise the gun, to point it up, to wave it in the face of God, but his hand falls limp onto the table.

Emily is quiet, unmoving, watching.

He looks at the empty glass in front of him. His voice turns to crooning. “Don’t cry,” he says to God, now floating just above the glass. “Don’t cry,” he says, and strokes the rim with his finger. “Hey, fathers make mistakes too, you know, they’re not perfect, they have their weaknesses. But we try our best, don’t we?” He sucks in his breath, makes small whimpering sounds, then large ragged sobs, his body shaking.

Suddenly he’s up, his arm extended, his hand clutching the glass. He aims it at her. Emily ducks. The glass smashes against the fridge door, falls in chunks, pieces, powdery crystals onto the tile floor. He walks slowly, only a little crookedly, very carefully, into the living room.

“Fathers are a piece of shit.” He groans, falls into the sofa, and snores almost immediately.

For now it’s over. Emily can breathe.

In the alley,
she stands beside the back gate. She has emptied the dustpan of shattered glass, replaced the lid on the aluminum garbage can that leans against the fence. She is holding the empty pan in her hand and looking down the alley at the houses: at the roofs and doors, fences and gates, at the windows letting out the light from inside, at Bornemans’ next door, whose little kids run naked in the yard in the summer rain, at Hallesbys’, where Sarah is probably right now practising her cello for church tomorrow, at the house at the end of the alley, with the huge kennel in the backyard, where sometimes dogs howl in the middle of the night. The sky has darkened. The rim of a narrow moon hangs below a grey cloud. The wind settles into quiet ripples about her, and Emily turns back to her own house.

The front doorbell rings.
Emily doesn’t answer. She’s setting the dustpan on the floor in the kitchen closet. It rings again. She sits down on the edge of the chair beside the table in the darkened room. There’s a knock on the back door, loud and persistent, then a voice.

“Anyone home?” it says.

“Are you there?” it says.

Gladness. Comfort. Hope. Richard is back. Emily rushes to the back door to welcome him in.

“How the hell are you?” he says, his big hand on her shoulder. In the dimness she looks up to where his face is, brown and shiny, to where his welcome eyes are, his smile.

“Hi, Richard. When did you get back?”

“Thursday,” he says. “Can I sit down? Aren’t the lights working? Did you blow a fuse or something?”

Emily flips the switch by the refrigerator. The room glows. They sit at the table, facing each other.

“So. What’s new?” he asks.

“Not much.”

“Where’s Papa Sam and Mary?”

Emily jerks her elbow toward the living room and Richard strides into the room, his long feet gliding over the tiles.

Richard is a friend of her father. In the old days they were together often. They’d stay up nights singing, talking, drinking. Later, fighting. Then Richard disappeared for a year and when he came back two years ago he was different.

He returns from the living room. “I put his leg up,” he says. “You can’t sleep very well with one leg dangling. Where’s the coffee?”

He goes to the counter, pulls out the filter from the coffee maker, empties the soggy grounds into the sink. He rummages on a shelf for a clean filter and fresh grounds.

“So did you like Australia?” she asks.

“Did I
like
it? Do I like blue skies? Do I like strawberries and cream? Do I like a warm bed in winter?”

“You’ve got a tan. Did you see any dolphins? Me and Hannah Shimizu are doing a report on dolphins.”

“Is that so?” he says. “Well, I’m sorry to say I didn’t see the dolphins. I heard a story about one though.”

“What
did
you see?”

“Fish.” He plugs in the coffee maker and sits down across from her. “Water and fish. I learned to dive with one of those tanks on my back and a mask on my face. Get this – in the
Pacific. Ocean.
Deep, eh? And I saw fish. Huge, tiny, fat, skinny, pink, purple, polka-dotted, fish with spikes on them, honest-to-god, like nails sticking out all over, and little yellow fish that looked like flat canaries, really cute, and blue fish and silver. I’d hang there in the water, tons of it, thousands and millions of tons on all sides.” He leans toward Emily, his eyes intent and personal. “Water’s so powerful you know. And there I’d be, suspended in all that power. And the fish would swim up to me, right up to my goggles, and they’d look in at me with those bulgy eyes, and they’d say hi Richard, and I’d say hi fish, and then they’d take off, who knows where.” He gets up from the chair.

What’s the story?” Emily asks.

“Story?”

“About the dolphin.”

“Well.” He pours himself a cup of coffee and sits down again. He holds the cup in both hands. “It’s about this dolphin called Opo, not in Australia, in New Zealand actually. People used to go out in the ocean and swim with her and touch her. She even let children ride on her back. They all loved her. But one day someone found her in a coral pool near shore. She was dead. And when the village people heard, they became very sad. And that evening at dusk, some Maoris dug a grave by the town hall and carried the dolphin there and buried her. And they covered her grave with flowers.” He sips the coffee. “That is a true story,” he says.

Emily sits very quiet. She looks toward the living room, then at Richard. “Why can’t he stop?” she says. “You did.”

He stands up and moves to the counter to refill his cup. “It’s a mystery to me,” he says.

For a moment she considers his words.

“I think it sucks,” she says finally.

Emily is home from school.
She sees her mother in the living room, looking out the big window, staring at something beyond the ravine. The television is on, her mother’s favourite afternoon soap, “The Young and the Restless,” but she’s not watching it.

Katherine Chancellor, in living colour, is flicking her fingers about her face in little circles, long jewelled fingers glittering near her eyes, her cheek, her chin. Kay Chandelier, Emily’s father calls her, but her mother loves her. She loves her fancy house, everywhere huge bouquets of flowers in crystal or gold vases. She loves her maid Esther in her tidy uniform, and Katherine’s own expensive clothes in colours to match the flowers, never the same outfit twice, and her hair graceful and stylish, even when she’s sleeping, even when she’s walking in a strong wind.

Emily throws her books on the chesterfield.

“Get in the car,” her mother says. “Your father’s at the Grey Nuns.”

The narrow bed.
The square table. The ice water in a green glass. The metal dish, pewter kidney turned inward. The high pole. The bottle strapped to the pole. The tube from the bottle dangling down, onto the bed, onto the blue sheet, onto his hand resting there, into the silver needle, the needle flat, visible under the skin, slim outline on a blue vein.

And Richard on a chair at the foot of the bed watching the form in front of him: the feet and knees smooth hills under the sheet, the chest a little field, the penis a small stone. Emily stands by the high window. She looks at her father’s face. His eyes are closed. The skin is tight over the cheekbones.

Her mother pushes the door open and backs into the room with a tray holding two cups of coffee and a can of Coke. She sets the tray on the bedside table, then goes to the window. She lays her hand on Emily’s arm, and they move together to the bed. And the three of them sit on the chairs by the bed. They linger there in the semi-darkness, sipping, talking in low tones, their voices strangely clear, melodic in the stillness.

He opens his eyes and looks at them.

“Everyone’s here,” he says.

He looks at her.

“Hi, Emily,” he says.

“Hi, Dad.”

Emily dreams
again of the vessels. She’s standing in a long tunnel. Its walls from floor to ceiling hold the shelves filled with glass. She’s waiting for the right container to reveal itself to her, to empty its secret to her. Then gradually, almost imperceptibly, the shelves begin to loosen from the wall, to dip, lean, bend. Pitchers, bottles, tumblers, cups are falling one by one, softly, slowly. They turn in the air, circle, glide, and finally land. Pieces of amber glass, and jade, and ruby red, rise like fountains before her, then fall in piles everywhere, glittering heaps on the tunnel floor.

And she’s standing by a streetlight on a road she doesn’t know. It’s evening. A small rain is falling. From the house at the end of the street a woman walks toward her. She’s old and wearing boots that glisten. Emily knows that when the woman reaches her she will stop for a minute under the light. They will look at each other. Emily will say hello, and the woman will say hello. Emily will say it’s a nice rain isn’t it, and the woman will say yes it is.

And in that instant, that one swift and slippery moment, circled in light, washed in rain, Emily knows exactly what she needs to know. She knows nothing. She knows everything.

In the Atlantic,
north of the Hebrides, a mother dolphin nudges her calf through purple water into white spume on the ocean’s surface. With her snout she pushes the calf into the cold clear air above the spray. The infant muscles on the baby’s head stretch open, and the dolphin takes her first breath.

In the Mediterranean, off the coast of Tripoli, two dolphins swim close together. They nuzzle each other with their beaks, caress with the soft tips of their flukes. She opens herself to him, a thin crevice in her slick body. And he is there, twisting himself around her. They turn and swirl in the foam. They dip and glide and together plunge down into the ancient sea.

On a windy shore in New Zealand, a dolphin lies stranded. His pearl grey neck and white belly blacken on the stones. In the ocean a family calls. Their whistling clicking cries speed through the rolling depths, the crashing surf. Where have you gone? Oh. Oh. Where?

At the mall in Edmonton, the dolphins are playing. They’re swimming around in circles, being friends, having fun, taking care.

~

The Day I Sat with Jesus
on the Sundeck and a Wind Came
Up and Blew My Kimono Open
and He Saw My Breasts

W
hen an extraordinary event takes
place in your life, you’re apt to remember with unnatural clarity the details surrounding it. You remember shapes and sounds that weren’t directly related to the occurrence but hovered there in the periphery of the experience. This can even happen when you read a great book for the first time – one that unsettles you and startles you into thought. You remember where you read it, what room, who was nearby.

I can remember, for instance, where I read
Of Human Bondage.
I was lying on a top bunk in our high school dormitory, wrapped in a blue bedspread. I lived in a dormitory then because of my father. He was a religious man and wanted me to get a spiritual kind of education: to hear the Word and know the Lord, as he put it. So he sent me to St. Paul’s Lutheran Academy in Regina for two years. He was confident that there’s where I’d hear the Word. Anyway, I can still hear Mrs. Sverdrup, our housemother, knocking on the door at midnight and whispering in her Norwegian accent, “Now, Gloria, it iss past midnight, time to turn off the lights. Right now.” Then scuffing down the corridor in her bedroom slippers. What’s interesting here is that I don’t remember anything about the book itself except that someone in it had a club foot. But it must have moved me deeply when I was sixteen, which is some time ago now.