Home Schooling (2 page)

He looked like the old troll that lived under the bridge in
Three Billy Goats Gruff,
one of Saffi's picture books. He wore an old brown cardigan, the pockets sagging with junk. “What do you think I've got?” he'd say, and he'd pull something out of a pocket and hold it in his clenched fist and if she stepped back he'd bend closer, closer, his colourless lips drawn back so that she could see his stained teeth, gums the bluish-pink of a dog's gums. She didn't want to guess, she was no good at it. She covered her eyes until he told her to look and it would turn out to be an old nail or a screwdriver or the sharp little scissors he used for cutting roses.

“Well?” he'd say. “What do you say? Has the cat got Saffi's tongue?” He slapped his hand on his trouser leg and laughed his old troll laugh and picked up his shovel and went back to work digging in his garden.

That summer Saffi's mother got hired as an operator at the B.C. Telephone Co. on Fitzwilliam Street. Her first job, she said, since she got married. Her first real job, ever. If she had a choice, she wouldn't leave Saffi every day, but the truth was, she had no choice, she needed the extra income; she'd lost interest in being poor her entire life. She ran up some dresses for work on her old treadle sewing machine, dark blue dresses, in rayon or a serviceable poplin, something she said she could gussy up with a little white collar, or a strand of pearls.

Saffi remembered her mother wearing those dresses to work for years. When at last they'd gone completely out of style or had simply worn out, she'd cut them into squares and stitched them into a quilt for Saffi, and Saffi had it still, folded away in a cedar chest her husband's parents gave her for a wedding present. When she took it out and ran her fingers over the scraps of fabric, little cornfields, meadows of blue, she couldn't help returning in her mind to those long-ago summer mornings, bright and hot, dreamlike, almost, when she'd clung to her mother and begged her to stay home, and her
mother had given her a weary, abstracted glance and pulled on the little chamois-soft gloves she wore for driving. She kissed Saffi on the top of her head and then she was gone, and Saffi heard her backing her car out onto the road and driving away. Aunt Loretta made Saffi sit at the table and eat her breakfast, but Saffi's throat ached from not crying and she couldn't swallow a spoonful. Aunt Loretta rinsed her uneaten porridge down the drain — what a terrible waste, she said — and then she wiped Saffi's face with a dishrag and sent her outside to play in the sun while she got on with tidying the house. Saffi sat on the front steps and looked at one of her books, with pictures of a frog prince, his blubbery mouth pursed for a kiss, a scraggly old witch with skinny fingers reaching out to grab anyone she could catch.

Even though she knew he couldn't see her, she imagined the bird-boy was watching, and so she turned the pages carefully. She was good at reading, but poor at arithmetic. It wasn't her fault. The numbers had their own separate lives, their own shapes, and refused to let her touch them. Nine in its soldier's uniform the colour of an olive with a double row of brass buttons. Three a Canterbury bell, a curled-up snail leaving a trail of slime, dragging its little clamshell house behind. Seven had a licking tongue of fire and smelled like a thunderstorm. Four was the sea coming in along the shore, it was a ship sailing, it was blue and white and stood on its one leg.

The numbers said: Leave us be! Be quiet! Don't touch! They kept themselves apart, like little wicked soldiers in a castle. The teacher held her worksheets up in class and said, Is this the work a grade one girl should be doing? Saffi had to cover her ears and sing to herself about the Pied Piper, how he made the rats skip after him out of town and then the children followed and the town got dark and the parents wrung their hands and lamented, Oh, what have we done?

When Aunt Loretta finished the housework she called Saffi inside and read her a story about a turtledove.

“I know what that is,” Saffi said. “I seen a turtledove in the cellar at Arthur Daisy's house.”

Aunt Loretta said she must have seen some other kind of bird. “All we have around here is pigeons,” she said. “You know what a pigeon looks like, don't you? And it's
I saw,
not
I seen.
”

“It looked like a boy,” Saffi said. “It had white feathers on its head. It sang like this:
cheep, cheep, cheep.
”

“Oh, Saffi,” her aunt said. “You are a funny little thing.”

Outside her house the road was all churned up where her daddy parked his logging truck when he got home. Sometimes he'd swing her up into the cab and she'd sit behind the steering wheel and he'd get her to pretend she was the driver, telling her, “Start the engine, Saffi, or we'll still be sitting here when those logs sprout a whole new set of roots and branches.” He made engine noises like a growling cat and she pretended to turn the wheel and he gave directions. “Turn left,” he'd say. “Gear down for the hill, now shift into third, that's the way.” It was hot in the truck and there was a sour smell of her daddy's sweaty work shirt, the smell of stale thermos coffee and engine oil, the beer her daddy drank. Her daddy always said he was a hard-working, hard-drinking man and people could take him or leave him. Leave him, was his preference. He liked a quiet life. He liked his home and when he got home he deserved a beer, didn't he? “Yes,” said Saffi. “Yes, sir, you do.”

“Who are you?” her daddy said. “Are you daddy's favourite girl?”

Her daddy. Danny Shaughnessy. He was away in the woods for days at a time, then he'd be home, he'd come into the kitchen, where Saffi was standing on a kitchen chair at the counter, helping Aunt Loretta coat chicken pieces with flour or peel potatoes, little tasks her aunt allotted her to fill in the last hour or so until her mother returned. Her daddy would go straight to the fridge for a beer and sometimes he gave Saffi a taste, the beer making her gag and trickling down her chin and her daddy laughed and kissed it
away. Her aunt told him to leave her alone. He said Saffi was his kid, wasn't she? He didn't have to leave his own kid alone, did he? Aunt Loretta said he could at least take off his work boots and wash his hands.

“Don't you have a kitchen of your own to go to?” he'd say. “Isn't it time you got back to good old Vernon, Loretta?”

They fought like kids, the way kids at school went at each other, hands on their hips, faces thrust forward, then they agreed to an armistice and sat at the kitchen table and had a glass of beer together, Saffi with them, and her daddy praised her, saying what a doll she was, a real little lady. On the drive down from Campbell River, he said, he'd heard on the radio a boy was missing, ten years old, a slightly built boy, with white-blond hair, last seen wearing shorts, a blue jacket, running shoes. And then, just south of Royston, a boy who answered that description exactly was standing at the side of the highway. He'd blasted the horn at him, because kids never understood, they had no idea how much room a truck like that needed to stop, they'd run out without thinking. More than likely it was some other kid, but what if it was this Eugene Dexter and he'd just driven on by?

He had another beer. He talked about joining the search party, if they needed more volunteers. He had a sense for these things, he said, a kind of infallible sixth sense, which was why he never got lost in the woods or took a wrong turn driving the truck. He stood up and stretched his arms and said he was going to have a shower. What time was supper going to be, he wanted to know, and Aunt Loretta said it would be when it was ready and not a minute sooner.

“Daddy's girl!” her daddy said, sweeping Saffi off her feet, holding her high above his head, shaking her as if she were a cloth doll, her hair flopping in her eyes, and she laughed so hard she thought her sides would split open and the stuffing would fall out. I'll knock the stuffing out of you, her daddy said when he was angry. But he was teasing. He was never angry with her. She was his girl. He tossed
her in the air and caught her safely, every time. His fingers dug hard into her ribs and she couldn't get a breath.

“Can't you see she's had enough?” her aunt said.

If she wasn't laughing so hard, if her daddy wasn't laughing and cursing Aunt Loretta, telling her she was a tight-assed old broad, she could tell him she had this bad secret in her head that hurt like blisters from a stinging nettle. In Arthur Daisy's cellar there was a bird-boy, a turtledove, its head tucked beneath its wing.

It seemed to her a line divided her yard from Arthur Daisy's yard. Even after all these years she saw this line as a real thing, like a skipping rope or a length of clothesline or a whip, taut, then slack, then pulled tight again until it sang like a banjo string and nearly snapped in two. The line or the rope or whatever it was separated the dangerous elements, fire and air, from the more tolerable elements of earth and water. That was how she pictured it. She crept into Arthur Daisy's yard, holding her breath, mousey small, so small and quick no one could catch her. She pressed her hands to the window. She had to see if the bird-boy was still there, perched on his roost. He was. He scared her to death. His skull was luminous and frail as an egg, yet he seemed strong to her, his gaze cold, not beseeching but full of strength, as if nothing could hurt him. His eyes were dark, like a bird's eyes. What did he eat? Where did he sleep? She called to him, whistling a tune she'd made up. She told him not to be afraid. She cupped a black and yellow caterpillar in her hand. It was so small she felt her heart curl around it. She pictured the hawthorn tree near the river, light spilling in tatters through the leaves, the sun caught in its branches. She saw the boy's jacket hanging there still, as if no one cared enough to take it home.

She held the caterpillar up to the window, saying, look at this, look at this.

All around there was fire and air, scorching her hair and clothes, leaving her weak and sick and shaking with a chill, so that her mother
would have to put her to bed and take her temperature and fuss over her and say, What have you done to yourself, Saffi? She put a cold cloth on Saffi's forehead and called her dumpling pie and gave her half a baby Aspirin and a little ginger ale to swallow it with.

What did Saffi see? She saw Arthur Daisy in his garden, snipping at blood-red roses and sprays of spirea, telling Saffi he was on his way to visit the municipal cemetery to put flowers on his mother's grave. His dear old mother, who'd passed away twenty years ago this month, almost to the day, dead of a wasting disease, did Saffi know what that meant? It ate her body up, her skin, her flesh, and she never was a fleshy person. She shrivelled up to the size of an old lima bean, a dried pea. She'd scare the liver out of you, he said, and that's a fact. That was what happened when you got to be the age he was, he told Saffi. You ended up having to visit the dear departed on a regular basis. He placed his scissors and cut flowers on the ground.

“What's wrong with you?” he said. “Cat got your tongue, little girl?” He bent over, his hands on his knees. He looked at her. He looked into her eyes and she knew he saw everything in her head; he knew how scared she was.

“Well, well,” he said, straightening up and brushing a leaf off his sleeve. “Isn't Saffi a funny little monkey?” he said.

Before she could do a thing — run, or squirm away — he'd reached out and pinched her arm just above her elbow. It burned like a hornet's sting. “There, now,” said Arthur Daisy, turning his face away. He picked up his flowers. He pocketed his scissors. Don't think anything, she told herself. Behind her in the house there was the bird-boy crouched in the cellar, eating crumbs from the palm of his hand. She saw him like that in her dreams. She couldn't get rid of him.

Sleep: what was
sleep?
Saffi's mother complained to Saffi that never before in her life had she suffered from insomnia, normally
she didn't even dream, and now she was lucky if she got two or three hours of decent sleep a night. It could be the heat, she said. Or it could be that her head was crackling with the sound of voices, her own voice repeating endlessly,
Number, please,
and
One moment, please, while your call is completed,
and then the voices of strangers, people to whom she'd never in this life be able to attach a face or name. She was in her bedroom, the blind pulled down against the evening sun. Saffi stood beside her mother's dressing table, watching her take off her pearl earrings and put them away in a jeweller's box. Her mother pressed her hands to her head. She wasn't used to working, she said; her nerves were shot. She'd lie awake until dawn, her temples throbbing, and a feeling of unbearable sadness, of grief, would descend on her. It haunted her all day. She hated this summer, it was unlucky; it was a trial to her and everyone else.

The real reason she couldn't sleep, she said, was that she worried about life passing her by, about not getting the things she'd set her heart on, like a nicer house, with three bedrooms, in case she and Danny decided to have more kids, which they might, a little brother or sister for Saffi, or maybe one of each. Wouldn't that be fun? she said, picking up her comb and tugging it painfully through the snarls in Saffi's hair. In the mirror her eyes were resolute and bright, the skin around her mouth taut and pale.

Aunt Loretta always said that as far as babies went, it was her turn next. Who could doubt her? At her house she had a nursery prepared, the walls papered with kittens tangled up in balls of yarn. There were drawers full of handmade baby clothes and a bassinet with a silk coverlet and when Saffi visited she was allowed to lay her doll in it. Aunt Loretta patted the doll's tummy and said, What a fine baby you have there, and for a moment it truly did seem there was a real baby asleep in the bassinet, snoring and fat as a little cabbage.

On the drive home, Saffi's mother would say what a shame, what a shame, but not everyone could have they wanted. She shifted
gears with a brisk movement of her wrist. “You can have a perfectly fulfilled life without children, they say. Sometimes I almost wish …” She glanced at herself in the rear-view mirror, running a finger along the edge of her lip. “Well,” she said. “I wish Loretta luck, that's all.” Saffi understood that her mother didn't want Aunt Loretta to have a baby or anything else; she was afraid Aunt Loretta would use up all the available good luck, the small quantity of it there was in this world, thus stealing something irreplaceable from Saffi's mother. But knowing this didn't make Saffi love her mother less. If anything, it made her love her more, but from a little further off, like the time her daddy took her to watch Uncle Vernon's team playing baseball and they sat so high up in the bleachers her daddy said they needed high-powered binoculars to figure out who in the hell was on the pitcher's mound.