Just Beneath My Skin (12 page)

WE EAT BREAKFAST TOGETHER — JAKE
, Jake's dad and me. Jake's dad doesn't talk much. After breakfast, Jake tells me to go outside and play for a bit. It's sunny, and I don't need a coat, but Jake makes me wear one anyway. I hope Jake won't be long at Johnny Lang's or his dad will let me stay here while he goes to church. I am also worried, 'cause of my dream about Johnny and Jake and knowing now it was true.

Sometimes my dreams can be like that.

Once I dreamed Sammy, our dog, would get hit by a car, and he did, two days later. He wasn't hurt bad, though, except, a year later, he got shot and Jake and I buried him in the woods behind the house underneath a cross Jake built out of yellow pine he stole from the mill.

Another time I dreamed Mom would win money, and the next night she won the jackpot at bingo at the Masonic Hall. She came home with four hundred dollars. Boy, was she happy.

I tried to tell her about my dream but she looked at me funny. I could see she was scared by it, so I didn't tell her no more when I had dreams and they came true.

But there were lots of times that happened, though sometimes it was hard to tell what was gonna come true and what wasn't until after it happened.

Like I knew now Johnny had chased Jake with a gun, like in my dream last night in front of the television at Mom's house. I didn't think the part with the canoe would come true, or Wendy and baby Lucy. But I was worried because Jake thinks Johnny will be better now, and let him take the car and put down the gun. I keep thinking of my dreams and wonder if that's true.

FROM THE TIME RUTH DIED
when I was five until the time of her own death when I was eleven my mother would not allow me to step foot near the river or go swimming with my friends. My father tried to talk to her. If there was adult supervision, and I was careful, he said, he saw no reason to deny me this. But my mother was adamant I would not go, and my father respected her wishes. Often kids from North River would take inner tubes up to the first bridge above our house and then come down the river all the way to Eight-Mile Bridge and the Great Falls, a five-mile trip in all, and I would stand on shore and enviously watch them go by our house laughing and waving and shouting at each other as the current carried them along. I was twelve before I went with them. I waited a full year after my mother was gone before I asked my father.

“Go,” he said. “But be careful. And remember, Jacob: whatever you do, God is watching. And now your mother is watching too.”

I enjoyed my time on the river.

I enjoyed drifting down it laid back on a rubber tube gently warmed by the sun and trailing my arms and legs in the cool water. My head laid back and my face turned up into the sun, eyes closed, directionless, but always moving forward. Downward. Onward. But my father's words always stayed with me too. On the tube, being carried by the current down the centre of the Memragouche, there were no trees, no houses, nothing above but sky and clouds. God and my mother could see me clearly. My sister Ruth too. It seemed more of my family was in the sky than here on Earth, and the river some kind of narrow, blue, heartbreakingly soft passage between them.

JAKE TELLS ME TO STAY
away from the river, so I do. But it's hard, because Jake's house sits almost on the river and the temptation to go down to it is strong. If I lived at Jake's house I'd fish out of the living room, or go diving into the water from an upstairs window.

So what I do is I play in the barn and take rocks from the side of the road and sit on the grass and throw them in the river. I lie back and watch the white clouds sail like ships across the blue sky. I see a man and his team of oxen come by on the road and I stand out by one of the red maple trees and watch them. The man nods to me when he goes by and I nod back. The oxen are big, and red, and I see the muscles bunch under the skin in their shoulders as they walk and the way the red wooden yoke holds their heads together and the bells hung around their necks ring as they pass. They look sad, like they know where they are and what they're under. After they go up the road a bit I go out and look at the pile of oxen shit on the road, still steaming. I look at the houses up and down the road in Middlebridge. I stand in the road and look up again at the clouds and sky, at the red maples, and the oxen, disappearing around the bend in the road, their bells still ringing clear and cold in the morning.

I feel for a minute like crying for how new and shiny and clean and perfect everything is.

I SIT AT THE KITCHEN
table and watch as Brian Joudrey goes by with his team of prize-winning oxen. He marches those animals up and down the road every Sunday for no good reason I can see, other than to show them off and keep them exercised for when he enters them in the North River Agricultural Exhibition at the end of September. He's won four blue ribbons running for size and form, though he always loses out to Doug Flemming from Oldsport when it comes to the Friday night ox pulls.

“That man never goes to church,” my father says, staring out the window at him.

He doesn't need to, I feel like saying. He's got blue ribbons to believe in. But I don't say it. The old man doesn't take lightly to smart talk about religion.

Both of us watch as Nathan goes out and stares down at the ox shit and then stands in the middle of the road and stares up at the sky.

“He's dreamy,” says my father. “Like you were at his age.”

“I worry 'cause he doesn't have any friends,” I say.

“He'll have even less when you take him to Halifax.”

“How do you have less than none?”

“Don't get fresh. You know what I mean.”

I sigh and take a sip of my coffee.

“Well,” says Dad. “I should go get ready for church.”

“What about Nathan? Can he stay here?”

“I'd better bring him along.”

“I thought you said —”

“I know what I said. But he might set the house afire. Or go near the river. Does he have anything to wear?”

“I brought a few clothes. He could get cleaned up and I'll find him something. What'll you tell your congregation?”

“Nothing, I suppose. I'll say he's visiting. But I want you to promise me when you take that boy to Halifax you'll put him in Sunday school.”

“We'll see.”

“Well, go call him in to get ready. I'm running late as it is.”

Dad goes off to his room and I go to the front door to call Nathan. But he is already back from the road and sitting on the stoop, playing with a stick in the dirt.

“Whatcha doing?” I ask.

“Jake,” he says. “Do you think those oxen are happy?”

“Don't know,” I say. “Why do you ask?”

Nathan shrugs, his back still to me as I stand in the doorway. “Just wondering.”

“That's good. You'll be going to church with Dad while I'm gone to get the car, okay?”

“Okay,” says Nathan.

He looks up into the sky again. I look up after him, wondering what he sees there, besides a few wispy white clouds scudding across a broad basin of blue.

MY GRANDFATHER USED TO SAY
riding a log was like riding a horse.

“Both'll buck ya if ya give 'em half a chance, and neither of 'em's got any goddamned brains.”

My grandfather hated horses. He wouldn't board any at the farm, though there was lots of call for that and he could've made some extra money. “Horses are the most disloyal, stubborn, deceitful creatures on Earth,” he told me once when I asked him why he didn't keep any. “Most of 'em would rather kick you twice rather than look at you once, and I'll be damned if I'll have even one of 'em around to sink a hoof into me.”

My problem was I loved horses. Horses seemed to me to be smart, gentle, sensitive, alert — all the things my grandfather said they weren't. I didn't like cows. They stank. Their rumps were caked in their own shit, and they were stupid. You had to be careful when you were milking them they didn't kick you. A horse kicks straight back, but a cow kicks from the side, in a kind of roundhouse. One good kick can kill you if it gets you in the head or chest. Sometimes my granddad's cows wouldn't let their calves feed, and my grandfather had to tie a rope around their necks and hold their heads off while the calf crawled under to suckle. Even then they'd sometimes kick their own baby, or lie down on him.

I've never heard of a horse doing that.

MY FATHER DIDN'T TALK ABOUT
Ruth, but my mother, when she was alive, did once in a while.

“She was a pretty little girl, you remember, Jacob?”

I didn't remember. Not really. But I would nod and say I did, just to make her happy.

I do remember the night Ruth drowned in the river. How the fire trucks came, and the police, and my mother in the kitchen sobbing with the women. My father on his knees on the riverbank with some Middlebridge men around him, praying. They all forgot about me. I sat on the swings and looked at the sky, wondering what all the fuss was about.

When they dragged Ruth's body from the water, my father shouted to the Lord and cried. I could hear my mother wailing inside the kitchen. I caught a glimpse of Ruth, her hair blacker and thicker now that it was wet, her dress torn and heavy with water, as the firemen carried her from the river and put her on a gurney and threw a blanket over her.

Some of the men held my father back while he screamed and fell again to his knees. He asked God how He could have done such a thing. Later, when they gave her a pill, my mother slept. My father sat at the kitchen table staring at his hands, saying nothing. They forgot to put me to bed.

I slept with my teddy on the sofa in the living room, until my father found me there in the middle of the night and made me go to my room.

They closed off Ruth's room that day. No one went into it for a year. They later made that room into a sewing room, and my mother would sometimes go into it and you could hear the sound of her electric sewing machine firing like a tiny machine gun in it.

When Mom got sick and she couldn't sleep with my dad anymore they moved her into that room, which is where she died. Then my father washed down the walls and floors and closed it off for good, though sometimes I knew he went in, in the middle of the night, and prayed.

My father thought I'd not been in that room since my mother died, when I was eleven. It was always locked and he kept the key in the right-hand drawer of the desk in his study. Once, when I was sixteen, I stole the key and went in. There was no bed anymore, but my mother's sewing machine was still there, on a table in the corner, and an old dresser with a vase of plastic flowers on it — faded purple. There was an old metal trunk of my grandfather's from when he was in the war, where my mother kept scraps of old material for her sewing.

But it was the walls I stared at.

They used to be white, but now three of them were blue. Marked up, scrawled up, with ink.

Small, cramped writing I recognized from my father's sermons he wrote in longhand and then got his secretary at the church to type out for him in the middle of the week on her Underwood.

I looked close.

In the beginning
, my father had written beside the door, just below the ceiling,
was the Word, and the Word was God.

He'd written out the Gospels on the walls.

He was still writing them out, for there was part of one wall only half filled with writing.

I left the room and put back the key and never went in there again.

“I SAY UNTO YOU,” JAKE'S
father says. “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.”

I sit in the back of the church, watching Jake's dad on the pulpit in his suit and his hair slicked back and holding the Bible in two hands in front of his face like it was a baby. He told me to sit in the back and pay attention. I try, but people keep turning around to look at me. They whisper. And after a while I get bored with the sermon. I look out the window at the graveyard and wonder who is buried there. Is Jake's mom? His little sister?

I'm not scared by graveyards.

“Ye are the light of the world,” says Jake's dad. “Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.” He goes on about the salts of the earth and the poor people in spirits and other stuff and I think how it is all so much easier according to Irene, who only talks about salvation and the everlasting blood of the lamb.

After the sermon they sing songs, and the old woman next to me shows me where in the book to find them. I put a dime in the offering plate. Jake's dad gave it to me in the car on the way to church.

After it's over, Jake's dad disappears into the back and I go out on the front steps to get some sun, and there is a whole bunch of old men and women standing there.

“Where you from, sonny?” one of the old women finally asks me.

“North River,” I tell her.

“You Carla Whynot's little boy?” she says.

“Yes, ma'am.”

“And who would your father be?”
It seems like everyone on those steps gets quiet all of a sudden, waiting for me to answer. And then I think of something real smart.

“God the father,” I say. “And Jesus the son.”

But instead of confusing them like I want to do the old woman smiles. “You must have some of the blood of the preacher in you,” she says, and turns away to go down the stairs with her husband.

Long after everyone leaves and Jake's dad still hasn't come out of the church, I stand on the steps thinking about Jesus telling the disciples about the salt and the law.