Reading by Lightning (10 page)

I'm
so
thirsty, I say.

There's lemonade, says my mother. We'll have a drink while it's still cold.

Aunt Eva brought the lemonade. It's in a vinegar jug under the wagon, and there are four tin cups. Guiltily we unscrew the jug and fill two cups, and then we sit in the shade of the wagon. Without discussing it, we sit where Aunt Eva can't see us from up on the ridge. The horseflies find us, and my mother reaches up and locates the pins in her hair in four unerring
stabs of her fingers. Her bun collapses and slides down her shoulder, and she clutches the hair in a tail and swishes it from side to side, her face crumpled in helpless laughter.

I glance down and there's a yellow jacket floundering in my cup. I dash the lemonade on the grass.

Lily! my mother cries. I thought you were thirsty! You'll end up like Bertha Parrot. Her mind always goes to Mrs. Parrot when she thinks of waste. Those people, she says, pressing her tin cup to her forehead to feel the cold. They had
toilet paper!
Did you go to the outhouse during their sale? They were going broke and they were buying toilet paper! And they were getting the
Family Herald
mailed out. It was in their outhouse. (The corners of her mouth go down — a confidence is coming.) I had to go to the toilet during the sale and I started reading a story in the
Family Herald
and I couldn't stop. I read the whole thing! I was holding the door open a little ways with my foot so I could read. And then when I was almost done, somebody came down the path! I was so busy reading that I didn't notice until he was right there. (Her voice drops to a whisper.) It was
Felix Macdonald.

What did you
do?
I ask.

Well, I knew he had seen me! So I couldn't go out. I just shut the door tight and turned the latch. I sat there until he left. He kept thumping on the door. Finally (she mouths the words at me),
he peed in the bushes.

Any mention of Felix Macdonald, the farmer she used to work for, signals an intimate interlude, knowing looks. Unwelcome pictures, my mother sitting in the dark on the toilet hole with her underpants down, listening to the startstop hiss of an old farmer peeing. I pull my skirt down over my legs to discourage the horseflies. I tuck it tightly under me. Above me a bird sings the same two notes over and over. Finally I ask.

What happened to Dad? The day he fell in the pigpen.

There's a little silence while she takes a last swallow of her lemonade. Nothing happened, she says then. She rips off a handful of grass and uses it to wipe out her cup. Can't your father slip and fall?

Joe Pye goes away for months at a time, and then he comes back. Phillip and I come home from school and he's sitting at the kitchen table nursing a cup of tea and there's a little celebration, not in the way of food or drink, but in the way of talk. Not about where he's been lately. He's been at another farm that had the cash to pay him for a while, there's nothing to tell.

If his arthritis is giving him a rest, he'll fall into talking about his great adventure. Find a way to ask about how they got to the colony — that's how you can always get him started. He'll always tell it, that amazing part, how they pulled in to Saskatoon one cold April afternoon, two hundred miles from their claims, and were told to get off, they were at the end of the line! They'd woken up excited, expecting to roll in to the settlement by nightfall, eager to see the hospital (St. Luke's — it even had a name) and the British Canadian Settlement Store that some of them had invested fifty pounds in, and the school and lending library. Instead the train ground to a halt at Saskatoon and they were dumped off on a muddy field. This is where Joe Pye dissolves into chuckles. If he's outside smoking at the time he'll be in danger of swallowing his cigarette.

Phillip, teetering on a chair tipped against the wall, interrupts. That's not what Dad says, he says. Dad knew from the beginning that the line stopped at Saskatoon.

Dad wasn't even there, I say. He got off at Winnipeg. I keep my eyes on Joe Pye. His cigarette is down to a flattened shred clamped between his stained thumb and forefinger. He takes
a last pull on it, his eyes gleaming. What is coming is talk about that wicked man, a wicked minister, Reverend Isaac Barr. It's a strange kind of wickedness, not to do with liquor or murder or stealing. Well, stealing of course, but the real wickedness was his imagination, the way he created something beyond this world and lured them all into it.

The first sign of trouble, Joe said, was long before they got to Saskatoon. It was the way he refused to talk on the ship. As soon as they boarded they clamoured to see Reverend Barr. There was always a stir when he appeared — they wanted him to talk about what lay ahead. But he pushed on to his cabin, answering questions in a flat voice that said he was tired of repeating the obvious.

He had put another leader in place for all that, Reverend George Exton Lloyd. Reverend Lloyd was a tall man in a flat black hat, thin in all his aspects (legs, nose, fingers, smile). Joe Pye saw Barr and Lloyd together only once, standing in a passage talking. They talked for a long time and never once looked at each other. This was because Reverend Barr did not like to look up to anyone and Reverend Lloyd did not like to look down. Reverend Lloyd was a real-life hero. He had fought with the Queen's Own Rifles and defeated the rebel Louis Riel. In the middle of the battle he'd gone back to rescue a fallen comrade and been wounded and left for dead himself, and later had a bullet cut out of his back without gas or morphine. But he had a melancholy face. He was no threat to Isaac Barr — visions were not his department. His department was the mundane reality of homesteading, supply syndicates and crop rotation. Every afternoon he gave a lecture on the cabin-class deck, on a topic posted on a slate at breakfast:
INDIANS. AGRICULTURE. CANADIAN LIFE AND PROBLEMS
. Most of the passengers attended, although they didn't know
what to do with all these details and they were distracted by Reverend Lloyd's lisp.

As one of a handful of actual farmers on board, Joe was eagerly sought out (though when it came down to it his expertise was confined to sheep). After the lectures a crowd of plasterers and publicans and bookbinders and estate agents would gather around the farmers, listening gravely to their talk and risking the odd question. Boris didn't bother coming to the lectures. He had his own business to conduct. Someone had asked him about harnesses and he sprawled against the bulkhead sketching horses. Colonists who dropped five pence in his hat could buy a diagram of how to harness a horse for a Lancashire tram.

Meanwhile Isaac Barr kept to his cabin. Finally the rumour spread through steerage that they were all to go to meet him and be assigned their homesteads. My dad and Boris were not going directly to the colony, but they lined up with the others. Joe went first. In a large stateroom, a desk had been unscrewed and moved towards the door to serve as a wicket. At the desk sat Isaac Barr with his huge drooping moustache and his small head bent over a chart. When he looked up and raised his eyebrows Joe said, “Joe Pye, sir. Can ye point me to a claim with stones on it?” Joe had in mind to build a stone house, but he didn't say that part and Isaac Barr didn't ask. He just pressed his pen to an ink-soaked sponge and wrote PYE on a square near the bottom of the chart. After that he gave Joe a slip of paper on which was written 36SW-49-2 and said, “Mind you don't lose that.” Next Boris stepped up to the desk and said, “Me cousin and me sent you ten pound to save our claims for next year, and we wants to know if we can pick them out now,” and Isaac Barr said, “No, you can't. Move on now,” and so they did.

When Joe and the others were told to get off the train in Saskatchewan, they still didn't quite get the picture. It took a
while to dawn on them that if there was no railway line west from Saskatoon, there was likely no settlement either. Most of them (although not Joe Pye) had given Isaac Barr six pounds for a tent and groundsheet, but the tents were apparently in the train carrying their excess luggage — and that train had vanished. The Dominion Immigration Department set to work pitching a village of army tents for them, but they resisted settling in, they resisted being obliged to Canada in any way.

I'd always felt I understood Isaac Barr — how fascinated he was by his own notions, to the point that he lost track of whether he had done the work of making things happen. If I were making this story up from scratch, though, I would not have him carry on all the way to Saskatoon. I'd have him pretend to be called away on some important errand when they crossed the border out of Manitoba (called to Regina, to discuss settlement affairs with the governor). I see him galloping south on a tall black horse, glee on his face and a leather satchel over his shoulder stuffed with banknotes.

But that's not what happened. According to Joe, Barr stayed with them all the way, sitting among the eager colonists, riding towards his downfall. Was he completely crazy? Maybe he
wanted
to see the whole thing collapse into rubble. Maybe he wanted to be tested, to find out just how special he was, to see for himself what he would come up with next. What he did come up with, Joe said, was a fine duck tent with rooms, in which he lay day and night with a revolver under his pillow while outside the colonists milled around and planned the suits they would file against him as soon as a proper King's judiciary was set up in the North-West.

They made it to their claims eventually. Joe Pye got his stony field, others ended up with land so light it would blow away overnight if they had a dry spell. But they broke it anyway, and
there
was
a drought, and now most of Saskatchewan looks like the wilderness where the Children of Israel wandered. When I was little it made me proud to know how much worse things were in Saskatchewan and that my father had been clever enough not to go there. We and most of our neighbours ended up having to help Saskatchewan out, feeding cattle and horses that came east in a boxcar. We agreed to board them because their owners had no feed and they'd die of starvation in Saskatchewan. We never knew the names of their owners — the elevator agent arranged it all, and one day the cattle were delivered in a truck.

Keeping livestock is not as much work as people think. In summer the cattle feed in the pasture, and in winter we put hay out on the river. The spring morning the ice goes out, all those smeared cow pies thawing and starting to stink, all that wallowing mess with the hoofprints of the cattle frozen into it, slides silently away down the river, and a few days later (close to Picou maybe, where the French farms are) it finds a home at the foot of someone else's yard.

One day in the fall I walk with my father all the way down to a field in the southeast quarter to fetch those cattle. He's put them out to graze in a wheat field that wasn't worth harvesting. My father strides along, his head bent into the wind. There are no earflaps to his cap, and he's pulled it down over his ears so that he seems to have no forehead at all — his face is just bony nose and jaw. I run along beside him, saying things to try to get him talking. Hmm, he says. Or, I s'pose.