A Song for Nettie Johnson (6 page)

“That would be me,” Nettie says.

“And this beautiful mother wanted her girl to be strong and good when she grew up, so every Saturday she sent her to church to learn from the brown book. Each page had questions, and the answers were underneath. Everything was in a straight line. And on Saturday morning the mother would say, ‘Nettie, get going. The preacher always starts on time.’ He was real old, skinny like you, and his eyes watered, old watery eyes, and he smelled sour.”

Nettie stretches her legs out in front of her.

“It was cold in that church,” she says, “even when the stove was going. The ceiling was high, and the benches were hard, and we all sat on a bench except for the preacher. He stood in front and looked at everybody.”

“Who’s everybody?” Eli asks.

“Oh, Martin and Grace – your Grace.”

“She’s not my Grace. She just sings a solo in the
Messiah
. ‘He Shall Feed His Flock.’”

Nettie pushes herself up. “Well, isn’t that just dandy. She gets to sing the important song.”

“Tell the story,” Eli says.

Nettie pouts for a moment, then continues. “Well, that old Swede would stand in front of the bench and put his head down like this.” She moves closer to Eli, stretches her neck out, and stares into his face. “He’d talk half in Swede and his voice would go up and down and he’d say, ‘Vy did God create man?’ He’d say the same thing in front of each person, ‘Vy did God create man?’ His breath would come out in puffs. And everyone was supposed to say the answer without looking in the book. Only I never could. So he’d ask Alice or Grace or Martin to say it over, so I could learn it real quick. Then he’d come back to me. ‘Nettie?’ he’d say.
‘Now
do you know vy God created man?’ But the right words never came to me.”

She turns to the quarry and leans over its edge. “Hey you down there, vy did God create man?”

She waits.

“No answer,” she says.

She calls again. “Stones and bugs and snakes and toads, wake up!” She looks out across the pit. “Magpies and ugly buzzards, do you know the answer?” She stretches her neck back and looks straight up. “Hey, wind and clouds, and all you angels on top of the sky. Doesn’t anybody know the answer?”

“The Swede knew,” Eli says.

“He made it up,” she says.

“So what was his answer?”

She raises her right hand in front of her, and with her finger, slices through the air in one long horizontal line. “Question! Vy did God create man?”

She waits, then cuts the air again with her finger. “Answer! God created man to be...” She stops.

“This is so scary,” she says.

“Try again,” Eli says.

She draws the line once more, faster. “Answer! God created man to be...” She drops her hand.

“Try
blessed,”
Eli says.

“How did you know that?”

“I must have read it someplace.”

“What does it mean?”

“Good. Happy. Something you’d say thank you for.”

“You’re lying,” Nettie says.

“No,” Eli says.

“Then it’s true,” she says, and runs to the pit and yells down into it.

“Good! Happy! Thank you! There’s your answer.”

Her face darkens. “And that’s where he did it. That’s where my daddy always did it to me after Mama died. Down there on the stones. And one day the men came. They saw my daddy and me, and they crawled down into the hole and got a hold of him, and pulled him off of me and dragged him into a car and they drove away. And my daddy never came back.”

Eli gets up, holding the blanket in his hand. The bottle drops to the ground and lodges in a clump of weeds at the edge of the pit. He goes to Nettie, puts his hand on her shoulder, and leads her back to the chair. He sits down, pulls her onto his lap, and covers her knees with the grey cloth.

Peter, Andrew, and Elizabeth
are in the front yard. They’ve cleaned the garage, straightened the pile of newspapers on the back porch, and walked the perimeter of the yard in single file, seeing who could come closest to the fence without touching it. Now they’re sitting on the porch steps watching a flock of sparrows perched in a straight line on the telephone wire across the street.

Suddenly the birds swoop down into the branches of the maple tree beside the gate. With thin claws they rustle the dry twigs; then off they go as quickly as they came.

“Where do sparrows live anyway?” Elizabeth asks.

“Nowhere,” Peter says.

“But where do they sleep at night?”

“Anywhere. They’re wild.”

“But they’d want to come back to the same place to sleep. They’d want to come home.”

“Why? What’s so great about that?” Peter says.

“Everything wants to come back to their own place. They may fly around a lot, but they always want to come home.”

“Not sparrows,” Peter says.

“You don’t know that for sure,” Elizabeth says. “It’s not a proven fact.”

The late afternoon
sunlight spreads over the prairie in curious slants of light, glowing copper on the burnished stems of thistles, yellow white on the dying grass, a deep grey purple in rocky crevices in fields and ditches. At the quarry it spreads over house and pit and chair, leans against the rocks, forms small shadows among the stones.

Eli and Nettie are still sitting in the chair. They’re watching a flock of waxwings play with the sky and with the top branches of the willow tree. The birds dip, turn, swoop up, then down again into the branches of the tree.

“Look at them,” Nettie says. “They don’t know if they’re coming or going.”

“Going,” Eli says. “Getting out of here. Flying south. To Montana.”

Nettie’s heart thumps faster. “That’s no place to go.”

“This place isn’t so hot,” Eli says.

Nettie points to the town. “Well, if you stayed away from there,” she says. “They’re mean over there. Over there they do not have a heart.” She taps Eli’s chest with the tips of her fingers. “Do you know what they’ve got right there where the heart’s supposed to go?” Eli shakes his head. “Well, they don’t have a heart there, I can tell you that.” She knocks against him with her knuckles. “Do you know what they’ve got there?”

“No,” he says.

“A hole,” she says.

“Well, so what?” Eli says. “Everybody’s got a hole somewhere inside of them. And everybody fills it up the best way they know how.”

And from somewhere deep in the recesses of his memory, a picture surfaces, faded at first, but gradually becoming clearer, more focused. He’s nineteen years old. His father has died. He and his mother are poor. But his dad’s friend has given him money so he can go to the university in Saskatoon, to study music.

One day in October, a long van drives up to the campus. Students are told to line up outside the vehicle and wait their turn to go inside. Finally, it’s Eli’s turn. He goes in, removes his shirt, and stands facing the wall, his chest pressed against a cold slab. A nurse snaps a switch. And it’s all over. They put him on a train and send him to Fort Qu’Appelle to the TB sanitarium.

“So I was sitting on this train feeling low,” he tells Nettie. “My bones ached, my skin felt clammy. I wanted to lie down, but I couldn’t. There was this old man sitting beside me, really old, and he kept looking at me. He asked me what was the matter and I told him. He listened to me in a kindly way and seemed to sense just how I felt.”

“Do you know why he did that?” Nettie asks. “Because right here...,” she hits her head against Eli’s chest, “he had a heart and not a hole.”

“I tell him everything,” Eli continues. “About my dad who’d been a farmer, and my dad’s friend who paid my way to university. I tell him about my studies – about Haydn, Franz Joseph Haydn, a farmer’s son like me. And about Mozart. Then I tell him about 1685. God’s lucky year. The year Johann Sebastian Bach was born, and Domenico Scarlatti, and George Fredrick Handel. And then I say I’m on my way to Fort Qu’Appelle to the sanitarium because I have tuberculosis.”

Nettie shakes her head, sadly. “A capital T and a capital B,” she says.

“And after I tell him all this, the old man strokes his beard and is quiet for awhile. Then he says, ‘I have no words. Your pain is very great.’

“I didn’t answer him. I just turned to the window and looked out. The sky was grey, and the wind and rain beat against the skinny trees beyond the track, bent them right over so their tops nearly touched the ground. The fields and pastures looked desolate. Wet and cold. And then the old man said, ‘Some day, not now of course, you may find value in this. Some worth. You might even be able to say thanks.’ That made me mad, and I said, ‘What value? Like zero? Like a goose egg? Like a hole?’ And he said, ‘So what can you do with a hole?’ After that I slept. All the way to Fort San.”

Suddenly, Eli nudges Nettie off his lap and stands up. The blanket falls to the ground. “I have to go in now,” he says, “I need to get ready, study my music.” He puts his hand on Nettie’s shoulder and leads her into the trailer.

It’s a warm
Indian summer day. The sun is bright and the ground is grey and rusty brown, settling into rest. Jonathan is working in his study when Christine appears in the doorway. “Eli’s back,” she says. “He’s in the yard talking to the children.”

Jonathan considers whether to go down and talk to Eli in the yard or to wait up here and see what happens. He was not expecting another visit from Eli, not for another year at least.

In the backyard Peter is directing his choir. Andrew, Elizabeth, Ivan, and Vera are lined up against the garage wall, mouthing words. Peter stops swinging his arms to say, “They’re dropping out like flies. We’ll have to take over.”

“Who’s dropping out?” Elizabeth says.

“A whole bunch of them. They can’t stand old Hilda.”

“She’s a croaker,” Ivan says.

Eli speaks up from behind the hedge, where he has stopped a moment for breath. “You want to direct the choir, Peter? Let me show you how.” He breaks a twig from a caragana bush, walks around the hedge.

“Try using this,” he says. “Some conductors use their hands, but I’ve always found a stick more precise. It makes clear signals. You strike the air with it and out come the sounds.” He thrusts the twig into the boy’s hand and curls his own fingers over Peter’s. He raises their two hands together, poised in front of the choir. “First you pause and wait for everyone’s attention. Then pull down.” He lowers Peter’s hand and sings,
And the glory, the glory of the Lord...
He swings their joined hands up to the left and down and up again.
And the glory, the glory of the Lord...
He drops Peter’s hand. “That’s how you do it. It takes training and a lot of practice. It’s not easy.” He turns and heads for the house. Christine directs him to the study.

When Jonathan finishes reading from the sheet of paper Eli has placed on his desk, he looks up in astonishment.

“We both agree,” Eli says.

Jonathan examines the paper once more. Everything’s in order. Eli and Nettie are licensed for lawful marriage in the province of Saskatchewan. A red seal stamps the corner of the page.

Why should he be feeling resistance? Had he not advocated this very thing at one time? But what was he thinking of? Eli, aging, sick, homeless, and Nettie, outcast, damaged in mind and spirit, joined in holy matrimony. And then he understands. Eli is doing this for one reason: so that he can direct the choir.

“I know this is short notice,” Eli says, “so if you can’t do the honours, I’m sure Reverend McFarlane will.”

“This won’t do the trick, you know,” Jonathan says. “Rehearsals have already started.”

“You don’t think I’m getting married just for that, do you?” Eli says.

On Saturday morning,
under a yellow sun, Eli and Nettie stand in front of the trailer, facing the quarry. Beside Nettie is Christine Lund. Next to Eli is Peter. Halfway between the trailer and the pit, Jonathan in a dark suit stands facing them. He holds a black altar book in his hand. A small wind ruffles his sandy hair. The rocking chair has been moved to face the trailer, and Andrew and Elizabeth sit in the chair together.

“When is she going to put on her wedding dress?” Elizabeth whispers into Andrew’s ear.

Andrew leans as far away from her as he can, but her voice still reaches him.

“There aren’t any streamers,” she says. “How can there be a wedding without streamers?”

Andrew stretches his neck and looks up. The sky is clear blue, like lakes he’s seen in pictures, like his mother’s eyes.

Christine does not want to be here. She does not approve of this wedding. “How can you go along with this?” she’d demanded of Jonathan. “You know very well what his motives are.” Jonathan did not answer her. “And how could you possibly agree to having it out at the gravel pit, knowing what’s gone on there?” To which Jonathan replied, “Nettie won’t leave the quarry.”

And now, here she is, a witness, wearing a green wool dress and standing beside Nettie, who wears a skirt and faded sweater, clothing donated by the Sunshine Circle at St. John’s years ago.

Jonathan begins reading, holding his book high in front of him. His voice is small and thin in the vast air.