Patterns of Swallows (2 page)

Bo's father hadn't left them.
He'd died right enough. But Bo and his mother and the rest of her
six kids were poor. Very poor. Until Bo's mother began to earn
money for them. In the only way she could think to do it. How she
earned her money was another of those town unmentionables.

When we were much younger, we
didn't understand how Bo's mother came by her income. We just knew
it was something you couldn't talk about.

And Bo's mother didn't try to
hold her head up. She held her head down to escape the eyes of the
other women. She avoided them, and they avoided her.

That day, she didn't manage to
avoid Lily Turnbull's mother, however.

Mrs. Weaver waited off to one
side, watching for a moment or two before leaving Bo to the rest of
us. Waiting for what, watching for what, I couldn't say. Maybe she
only wanted to have a minute or two to watch her little boy and the
fine, manly way he carried himself; to watch him take the rightful
place he'd earned among his peers.

For whatever reason she
lingered, she was still lingering as the Turnbull sedan drove the
dusty lane to the Chavinski farm. Mrs. Turnbull was driving, Lily
rode in the front seat, and Graham MacKellum and Wynnie Starke were
in the back.

The Turnbulls, the MacKellums,
and the Starkes were friends in a casual sort of way, and Mrs.
Turnbull had offered to take Graham and Wynnie with her to Ruth's
party. In looking back, I can imagine Mrs. Turnbull had asked the
other children to ride along with her and Lily as a means of
providing herself with reinforcements before venturing into enemy
territory.

Edith Turnbull had experienced a
run-in or two with Beatrice Chavinski before. I don't imagine she
came away from those encounters with much satisfaction. Ruth's
mother had an acid edge to her tongue that would have quailed many an
opponent. And Mrs. Turnbull was not one to accept defeat gracefully.
In fact, she may well have been spoiling for a fight as she drove
toward the Chavinski's farmhouse.

Bo's mother was the first person
Edie Turnbull's eyes lighted on as she emerged from behind the wheel
of the car. Without a second's waste for a greeting, she strode over
to Beatrice Chavinski and said to her in a carrying undertone, “You
haven't asked her to stay, have you?”

Mrs. Chavinski's head came up.
The light of battle was in her eyes.

“
What
'her' are you referring to?”

“
You
know exactly who I mean. That woman. Over there.”

“
She's
welcome to stay if she chooses,” Mrs. Chavinski answered. She
looked directly at Bo's mother, and her tone was not an undertone.

Others had been arriving during
this exchange, and the small cluster of guests milling around the
decrepit picnic table, choosing party hats or jabbing pins through
paper donkey tails, froze in mid-motion, all eyes focused on the two
combatants. We all found ourselves helpless to resist the morbid
fascination of the onrushing scene.

“
Do
you think she's a proper chaperone for a ten-year-old's birthday
party?” Mrs. Turnbull inquired, not bothering to lower her
voice this time.

“
Were
you planning to stay?”

“
I
hadn't thought to leave the children here by themselves.”

“
Well,
if you consider yourself a proper chaperone for my daughter's
birthday party, I don't see why Mrs. Weaver shouldn't be.”

Mrs. Turnbull swallowed this
barb in righteously-indignant silence while we all waited, holding
our collective breath.

“
I
guess I should have known what to expect by bringing the children
here. A mother can't be too careful of the influences she exposes
her children to.” She encompassed Mrs. Weaver and Mrs.
Chavinski in a single glance which expressed plainly they were to be
put in the same class.

“
Then,
maybe it would be best to take your precious little princess and get
back into that fancy car of yours and drive right back the way you
came from. If you haven't already dirtied yourself and your car and
your little Lily by coming here in the first place.” Mrs.
Chavinski's voice was as cool and even as if the weather was under
discussion. But she'd grown visibly taller by inches.

Mrs. Weaver spoke up at this
juncture. “I go now. I go now,” she said. Her voice
revealed plainly that she was hovering on the edge of hysteria. Her
English was poor, but she had followed enough of the discussion to
know that she was the subject of it and to understand its gist.

“
There's
no need,” Beatrice Chavinski said quietly without looking at
her. Her voice gave nothing away. Only the whitening of the
knuckles clenched along the edge of the picnic table told any tales.

The two warriors locked gazes.
Edie Turnbull looked away first.

“
Come,
Lily. Come, Wynnie and Graham,” Mrs. Turnbull said without
another word or look for Ruth's mother.

At that point, Wynnie began
crying with a child's abandon.

She and Ruth considered each
other best friends when Wynnie had nothing better going. Wynnie had
no time or notice for the little band of outcasts who were Ruth's
other friends, but Ruth, who provided no competition and gave Wynnie
a pleasant feeling of social superiority yet wasn't entirely an
outcast herself, was just acceptable to a girl of Wynnie's middle
standing...until Lily Turnbull tossed her a crumb of attention.
Then, when Wynnie found she needed leverage to catapult herself to
the dizzying heights necessary for riding the tail of Lily Turnbull's
comet, anyone was fair game. Even Ruth.

But
Wynnie wasn't crying for the girl she called her best friend. She
wasn't crying over Ruth's humiliation or the demolition of her best
friend's only hope for a
real
birthday
party. She cried because she was the type who always cried under any
provocation. And because she'd hardly had time to be seen in her new
dress.

“
Wynnie
and Graham can stay,” Beatrice Chavinski said.

“
I
hardly think so! I'm certainly not coming back for them. And what
would I tell their mothers if I left them here. Wynnie, Graham.
Come. Now!”

Wynnie was hustled, still
sobbing, into the backseat with Graham who had retreated to the
safety of the car when the outcome of the skirmish had become obvious
to him.

Wynnie needn't have cried to
miss out. The party was over for the rest of us at that point, as
well. Ruth had disappeared. And she wasn't discovered for another
two hours until her mother thought to look for her under the firs in
the back pasture.

Her tenth birthday party was
another of those memories that burned itself into her mind to give
her thinking material in her leisure hours under the fir trees.
Perhaps it became her symbol for her mother.

*
* *

Ruth thought about her mother
often in the times she sat beneath her special thinking tree. But
she never came to any conclusions. Except, perhaps, that she didn't
understand her. Was that lonely for her mother? To have no one that
understood her? Ruth thought it must have been. It was lonely for
Ruth.

There were few worth spending
her precious thinking time on. Her mother and Wynnie and Bo and
Joshua and Phil – they were the ones who needed to be thought
of. Even if the thoughts weren't always pleasant ones, they were
people who had to be thought about.

People like Lily Turnbull
weren't worth wasting a thought on, so Ruth tried not to think about
her.

She couldn't help thinking about
people like Graham MacKellum, though, however much she tried not to.

She tried to think about her
father sometimes, but she couldn't find much to think about him. She
could remember the swallows, but there wasn't much to think about in
that.

In the southeastern corner of
British Columbia, tucked between the Selkirk range on the west and
the rugged Purcells on the east, lies Kissanka Lake, a bright jewel
in a rough setting of mountains and evergreen forest.

Just south of
Kissanka Lake is an unpretentious uprising of earth that goes by the
pretentious name of Arrow Mountain (more of a large hill, really),
and here the Arrow River (more of a large creek, really) begins. At
the foot of Arrow Mountain and the head of the Arrow River lies our
small town, Arrowhead, named by some punning settler. Arrowhead
(population unknown by me at this moment, but somewhere under five
thousand, I guess) has grown some since the days of this story, but
i
n
essentials, it remains very much the same town that Ruth saw that day
through the window of the greyhound bus.

*
* *

The sun was just setting as,
from the steep mountain pass, the bus swooped down upon the Arrowhead
Valley like an eagle dropping from its eyrie. Ruth's eyes, after
their seven-year fast, hungrily took in their fill of the little
town.

It was late April – nearly
unarguably the most beautiful time of year in Arrowhead. The apple
and cherry orchards were aglow with their earthly glory of seasonal
white and with a heavenly glory of rosy, evening light, reflecting
from the sky.

The bus took a turn from the
open farm land of the valley and passed A.A. Turnbull Enterprises
sawmill. It wasn't a sight Ruth would normally have relished, but
everything was beautiful to her just then.

MacKellum Milling – the
rival sawmill, a newer facility and a more attractive one in Ruth's
opinion – inhabited the other side of town. Guy MacKellum had
started the mill himself as an enterprising young man who grew tired
of working for Old Man Turnbull.

Old Man Turnbull's son, Angus,
ran Turnbulls' after the Old Man died. Angus was Lily's father, and
Guy was Graham's father. These facts may have played a role in
Ruth's preference for the MacKellum sawmill.

The MacKellums were considered a
good family, but not quite so good as the Turnbulls. Not old money.
Just nice people, really. Nice, hard-working, down-to-earth people.
Everyone liked the MacKellums. Everyone had liked Guy's father when
he'd been alive. Everyone continued to like Guy and his wife. She
was a good-natured woman. A bit tight with her money – that
was the worst that could be said about her. And she managed to carry
that fault in a likeable, laughable kind of way. It was a sort of
family joke.

And Graham was nice, too. He
moved in Lily Turnbull's circles, but he wasn't like her.

He was ordinary. You'd never
have called Graham a handsome face. Or a brilliant mind. But we all
thought he was a nice boy.

I know Ruth thought so. I was
the only person who knew it, but I knew it.

He'd changed as he grew older,
though. When he grew into his teenage self, he seemed intent on
proving something. To whom, I could never decide.

But Ruth wasn't there to see the
changes that took place in all of us. By the time she came back, she
was practically a stranger to most of us, and everyone she'd known
was a stranger to her.

*
* *

After Ruth came back, she and
Graham met for the first time again at the dance at Marjorie
Trapwell's wedding.

It was a huge event. Nearly the
whole town turned out for the dance, even those who hadn't been
invited.

Ruth didn't want to go. She
didn't know Marjorie at all well, but Wynnie Starke wouldn't take no
for an answer. Wynn didn't have a date, and she refused to go solo.

Ruth and Wynnie (who now
insisted on being called Wynn) were standing together near the bowl
of punch. Wynn feigned thirst every dance she wasn't asked to dance
rather than looking on from the row of chairs along the wall. Ruth
didn't care about being a wallflower, but she was there to keep Wynn
company, however strange they had become to each other. So Ruth and
Wynn spent a lot of time by the punch bowl at that dance. Wynn
didn't dance much because, as usual, there were more girls than boys,
and the boys found other things to do out behind the hall where an
atmosphere of cigarette smoke and boisterous maleness drifted in
through the open back door.

Ruth hadn't been asked to dance
at all, so she watched Wynn drink more punch than she really wanted
and eyed the dancers half-wistfully. Her feet tapped and her fingers
kept time on the skirt of her new-but-cheap-and-deeply-discounted,
full-skirted taffeta.

How desperate she'd felt for
something to wear besides her old, much-worn blue jeans and
second-hand cotton dresses! How much she'd wanted something at least
a little bit pretty! She'd bought the dress for herself from her
first-ever pay cheque. She'd live on nothing but potatoes for a
week, but it was worth it.