Reading by Lightning (13 page)

The school goes only to Grade Nine, so this will be my last year. Gracie finished the year before and Phillip the year before that. I'm the only student older than twelve. I've read every book within the four walls of the school, most of them five or six times. One day Miss Fielding brings me a hair wreath she is working on, lying in a hat box. You might want to learn this, she says as I stare at the revolting little flowers in shades of mouse brown and grey. It's one of the handicrafts from my grandmother's day. It's not that hard to get hair. Miss Fielding and I want something from each other we are not going to get.

I last in school through most of the cold weather, until a cold snap in early March. At recess Betty Stalling and Mabel Feazel and I put on our coats and go out to the pony shed, a couple of the younger girls following us if we let them. This is
the winter after rumours went around about my being drunk and half dressed in a car with a boy from the east. Sometimes they ask me dutifully about him, sometimes I just work him into the conversation, although we've worn out all the details about him, some of which were invented in the first place. Words rattle around in my head, but when they come out they are thin and feeble from overuse and fall into the silence around me with no effect. October has come and gone, the month when Russell's picture was to be in
Maclean's
magazine (
his
picture, it has become in my telling and almost in my mind), and by now the wealthy people in cities in the east will have tossed it into the kindling bin and their servants will have twisted its pages into tapers to start the fire.

If it's very cold and my dad has to start the Ford up anyway he drives me to school, but he's trying to make one tank of gas last through the winter, so this is rare. One day when we're bundling up we see his truck through the window of the school and everyone who lives out in our direction gives a cheer. We cram four of the Stalling girls into the cab, and the rest of the kids ride in the back, sitting up against the cab with their faces buried in their arms because the wind is so bitter you could freeze your nose off even with a scarf.

My dad drops the Stallings and the Pylandes at the end of their lanes. Long, pointed tongues of drifting snow lie across the road even though my dad drove that way just an hour before.

It's drifting fast, eh? I say.

He doesn't answer. He seems preoccupied, staring straight ahead. Then, as though the Ford is encouraged in its own purposes by his failure of attention, it leaves the snowy tracks and drives straight into the ditch. The ditch is shallow, and the truck tries to mount the little rise into the field and founders in the snow. My father seems powerless to stop it, so in a panic I reach my leg across the seat and hit the brake with my left foot. The truck lurches to a stop and stalls. And now my father
is banging himself against the steering wheel. I grab his shoulder and cry, What are you
doing?
but he pays no attention. His body trembles and thrashes, back and forth, back and forth in an ecstasy of concentration. His eyes are open and a grin is on his face like the grin on the face of a dog, a mindless sound being forced out of him. His hand jerks in my face, protesting senselessly, and I sink back to avoid being hit. Finally the sound stops and his moving slows and he sags forward and lies with his head on the wheel.

We sit in silence. That animal sound sorrows on in my head, but in the truck cab and in the field around us is silence. The headlights poke into the darkness, lay their yellow shafts over the gentle low waves of drifts. The snow isn't deep, but under it is sand. We'll never get the truck out on our own. I reach over and turn the lights off to save the battery. Then there is nothing but the windshield and the white clouds of our breath. It takes a few minutes for light from the sky to seep back. But gradually the stars drill through the frost and grow brighter and brighter until the hood of the Ford and the field before us are bathed in silver. I risk a glance at my father. His face is shadowed by his hat, expressionless, lying against the wheel like on a sickbed. His mouth and eyes are closed. He's shared his secret with me; this is the private moment I longed for. But he did not choose to share it. It chose him. His body acted alone, took him over for its own rude, ridiculous purposes.

I know now, in fact I know more than he does because he went away and I stayed watching. It's mine to enter and understand. He still doesn't speak, doesn't ask me what I saw. Why should he ever talk about anything? My love for him wells up and I take his hand where it lies in his mitt on the seat and he squeezes my mitten. I'll get the shovel, he says then in a tired voice. There's relief in the sag of his shoulders and along with everything else I feel relief too, that it's over and he is still himself.

But he doesn't move, he lies there with his head against the wheel. We sit for another long time without talking. Then truck lights come along the road towards us. There's room for the truck to pass, but I know they'll see us and stop. I step out of the cab and walk with my mammoth shadow through the headlights and around to the driver's door. It's Mr. Stalling, Betty's dad, rolling down his window, turning his shy smile to the cold night.

That's us in the ditch, I say before he can speak. Can you run us home? My voice is ordinary, cheerful. I jump a bit to warm myself. Dad'll bring the tractor out tomorrow to get the Ford, I say. Then I go back to help Dad.

How'd you manage that? Mr. Stalling asks as I climb into his truck and slide across the seat. Driving off the road is what he means.

I guess he fainted, I say. My dad is climbing slowly into the truck after me and I reach across to help him close the door. As I lean over him I smell pee.

Everybody at our place is getting the flu, I add.

The week after my dad drives into the ditch I don't go to school because there is no let-up from the cold. In the dark of morning and early evening we trudge out to the barn carrying a lantern. It's so cold that the snowdrifts sound hollow. I haul the slop pail out to the pigs (who winter in the barn) and then I tramp to the henhouse and feed and water the chickens. The chickens despise one another in ordinary weather but are persuaded by the cold to sit in a tight row in the coop, warming the air around them with their chicken-smelling heat. They've stopped laying months ago.

In between chores, in that short winter day with the frost so thick on the windows that the house is dark, we all sit around the stove in the living room, the wind a constant
electric whine. My mother puts me to ripping old clothes from the rag box into strips, Phillip's woollen trousers worn so thin they won't hold a patch and my skirt that was Mother's and then Gracie's and then mine. These I braid into a long serpent that coils into a pile as high as my chair, and my mother winds it into a rug and sews the coils together flat. Then I am put to work unravelling sweaters, amazed at how eager the wool is to slip out of its rows and turn itself back into yarn again, although it still keeps the memory of what it was, the way my mother's hair does when it is unbraided. I unravel Dad's navy sweater, Mother's light blue sweater, and a red sweater my nana in England sent for me when I was little, collecting the short broken pieces from the worn elbows into a nest to be used for stuffing pillows and winding the long pieces of yarn into big balls. There is a sombre companionship to our days: our silence has a joint knowing within it. Mother says she will teach me to knit, but before she can, we all fall sick with a cold and flu. When I am better three weeks have gone by and I have lost the will to go back to school and no one makes me.

What I had to consider was the possibility that he was like this all along. That was why they sent my father to Canada, that was the missing piece in the jigsaw. It was the right shape, it snapped into place. But the colour was wrong. It was a sinister patch in the story of the kindly grandparents, did not fit with my father as a young man in England getting out of bed in the morning with unthinking confidence in what the day will bring him, knowing that he'll groom the carter's shaggy horses and take pleasure in it, that he'll bend effortlessly into lifting crates and rolling barrels, that there might be shepherd's pie for tea and a pint of cider after, and larks reeling in the sky in their evening roost when he walks out to Kersal Moor with his mates.

I did not invent this version of my father's life. I picked it up the way you pick a shell up off a beach. Polished, shapely, unlike anything you've seen or thought of before.
Sui generis.
When I learned this Latin term in school in Oldham I understood it immediately. There are things that are not cobbled together from something else, that have the authority of their own existence. Like the times tables that came to me intact in Grade Three, the numbers with their ready-made personalities,
Nine
a tall, responsible boy with thick brown hair, standing at a corner (at
Sixty-three),
waiting for
Seven
to ride eagerly up on his bicycle. No arguing with these stories.

Of course when I finally saw England I was able to elaborate the whole thing — I could slide what I'd pictured earlier into the endless uniform row houses of Lancashire mill towns. Walls took on the lavish designs of English wallpaper, all stained with pipe smoke and soot. Shelves appeared in the living room, crammed with ornaments from Blackpool. There was the fryer of lard sitting on the cooker shelf, and the oily smell of coal. The way the women dressed — lace collars and artificial flowers pinned to their blouses. But my father himself, as he lived in my stories and my heart, did not change when I saw his home, so I believe that I was always right about him.

I know what he must have felt the first morning on the ship, with the green hump of Ireland sliding evenly past the railing, how hard he would have found it to call up a sense of home. He would spy someone looking at a pocket watch and ask, “Do you have the time in Liverpool, sir?” and he would try to think what they were doing at home at that hour and he never could. He could trace his way down the passage and into the kitchen and then up to the boys' bedroom, but he could never call to mind whether you could see over the fence and into the ginnel from the back window. He could conjure up only the vaguest outline of his parents' faces, expressionless
like dolls. All that existed of the world was a circle of ocean and the throbbing ship with its eager, pacing passengers.

The day it first happened, the day that swallowed up all his previous days — I'm irresistibly drawn to imagining that day. There are days that drain the meaning out of whole months before them. Joe Pye knew that sort of day — when his dog disappeared, when Dad and Joe climbed up on deck one morning and found that six or eight of the bigger dogs were gone, their yelping silent, the deck swabbed, and none of the crew willing to answer questions. That was the only day Joe did not like to talk about, although he would, when he was in a black mood. There are days that turn other days into a jumble of underexposed photographs you can hardly look at for the pain it gives you to recall your former, naive self. The day the dogs died and the day my dad's troubles began have merged into one day in my mind, and as time has passed I have been able to picture that day from beginning to end.