Reading by Lightning (15 page)

The rail line was single-tracked, and the specials had to pull off for every regular train that came along. There was a stove at one end of each car for people who wanted to cook, but on the advice of Isaac Barr the single men were not carrying food. As soon as they sensed the train begin to slow for a stop, the men raced to get off at the front of the pack, because within ten minutes the local store would have nothing left but a few wizened potatoes and carrots. This meant pushing your way into the doorway and leaping from a moving car onto the embankment, leaping because if you were at the front of the pack and didn't leap fast you would certainly be pushed. On those occasions when my father was at the front he bought bread and a wedge of cheese, a can of sardines and once some bologna with little spots of white blooming under the skin. The farther west they went the higher prices were. Most of the families on the other trains would be carrying provisions, but my father worried about Joe Pye.

It was farther across to Winnipeg than any one country had
the right to be. In the first few days they passed through some decent, hilly farmland, but that was soon finished and my father judged that no one could farm in most of this country. The railway stops were not yet villages, but they had names, strange names with consonants poking out of them, not like the names at home (Salford, Altrincham, Oldham) that sounded as though they'd been worn smooth by being often spoken. He began to feel an urgent desire to look at a map. As he had never seen anyone with a map in the bachelors' train he inquired at stores. In one store he saw a box of chalk and bought a piece. He walked up the line to a rock face and wrote
JOE PYE
on it so Joe would see his name on the rock as he sped by. He also bought a pencil and a tin cup. With the tin cup he caught cold water where it dribbled down the wet red rock face behind the depot. With the pencil he began to keep a list of place names (in the back of his Bible because he had no paper and in any case someone had already used his Bible to keep cribbage scores). He wrote,

Nitawagami

Missinabi

Nipigon

but didn't bother to note what happened at each stop because he believed he'd always remember. (At Nitawagami, Bantam Bradshaw bought a set of buckskins with fringes off the back of an Indian boy by the track. At Missinabi, a deer showed itself briefly on a rocky rise beside the track and the colonists took to propping their loaded rifles at the open windows, shooting at any movement in the forest. At Nipigon, when the train was almost at a stop, his challenger Tommy Blecker slipped while leaping to the platform and fell under the wheels. He was surrounded by men who lifted him and carried him to the station, holding the leg that was crushed close to his
body so that they didn't have to see just how much of the thigh was attached. By the time a doctor arrived Tommy Blecker was unconscious. He would die the next day, news that didn't catch up to the bachelors' train and so never reached my father during the journey. But it didn't need to — he saw Blecker sink under the wheel and turn his face eagerly up to the men, crying, “I'm all right, I'm not hurt”; my father was standing right there and the damage had been done.)

After that he more or less abandoned notions of eating and gave himself over to sleep. All the telegraph poles were the same height, and their wires rose and fell with the terrain like a drawn-out strand of music. By now the earth was covered with snow and ice, as though they were travelling backwards into winter. The light changed and then changed again as the train hurtled along, but the forest was always the same; every time he opened his eyes it was to see, like a persistent dream, the same rock face and the same ragged column of spruce. Then, when even the trees fell away for a time and there was only rock, something began to squeeze his chest. The feeling did not go away when the forest resumed but squeezed tighter and tighter. When they stopped at Port Arthur he walked down the cinder track and into the woods and knelt on the snow (something he had never done before, he'd never knelt on snow) and coughed out some tears as though a nasty bit of phlegm had caught in his throat. It was clear to him that he was not equal to this country and he couldn't imagine how his parents could have chosen to send him.

The train station in Winnipeg was a vaulted cathedral. The men abandoned the train in a rush, leaving behind a litter of sausage rinds, whisky bottles, rabbit pelts, cigar stubs and spent shells, and pestered the staff for their luggage. But all the luggage was on the fifth train, they were told. Boris, with shockingly bloodshot eyes, came down the platform to tell my father that he was going off with some of the others to see
the town. My father stayed at the station because he wanted to see Joe. The next two trains came in one after another about four hours later and stopped only briefly. There was a huge press of people, not just the colonists bound for the Britannia Colony who wanted to get off to stretch their legs but regular passengers boarding other trains going east and west. My father searched up and down the platform, but he did not see Joe. He did see the girl he'd watched on the ship, standing on the little stage between two cars as the third train pulled out. She was wearing her green travelling costume and as she was carried past my father she absently collected her hair with her hands, lifting it and twisting it into a knot on the back of her head. Her eyes slid over him and her expression didn't change.

Close to nightfall porters dumped the luggage from the last train onto the platform. My father spent several hours digging through it, moving methodically from one end of the platform to the other, turning tags from tin trunks up to the yellow light from the windows of the station. Boris appeared and said, “Give it up. We'll look in the morning.” They walked through the station and out onto the street. The conductor had given them the name of a hotel down the street from the station, the Occidental, and Boris had already secured a room. At the hotel Boris asked for the key and they climbed three flights of stairs and went down a passage to a little room with two cots. “I'll be in the beer parlour with the lads,” he said, dumping his knapsack on one of the cots. “Don't you go havin' one of them fits.”

The next morning the cold in the room woke him. Boris was lying on his back on top of the blanket, breathing heavily, still wearing his boots. My father tied up his knapsack and closed the door quietly and went down the three flights of stairs to the lobby. At the desk he asked to pay his bill. Then he walked out onto the street. He turned south onto a wooden sidewalk, stopping two or three times to read notices in win
dows and on lamp poles. The streets were full of people, and the unfamiliar hats they were wearing and the babble of languages they were speaking told him that Isaac Barr's cause was already lost. When he got to the corner of Portage Avenue and Main Street he turned west. If he went east the sun would be in his eyes, so he went west.

In the summer an evangelistic crusade rolls into town. It's a tired remnant of the tent revivals in the States, leftover stock being sold off cheap in Canada. I am ripe for the plucking. I fancy myself daring and audacious, I have broken my mother's heart. But half the things I say and think come out of the books on the one narrow shelf at the Nebo School (
My life is a graveyard of buried hopes, You don't know how utterly wretched I am,
etc.), books I no longer have access to, and when it comes right down to it, on the day of my most dramatic transgression I left Russell Bates and climbed into Mr. Tandy's truck without a word of protest. I am neither one thing nor the other, and something in me has been weeping since the day the cattle were lost down by the river. I long to be sprung from the trap of who I am.
Born again
might be a term for it.

At the same time I am appalled at the thought — of it happening to me on their terms. And so of course it is bound to, isn't it, or how would it be what it needs to be: renunciation, capitulation, surrender, all my righteousness as filthy rags? My being saved is bound to be as banal as it can be, bound to happen in a tent set up at the fairgrounds and at the hands of a West Virginian named Wesley Moore, who has had a call
directly from God, which in his particular case happened one day when he was riding on a ferry in New York harbour and took up a pair of binoculars to look at the Statue of Liberty and saw tears coursing down her stone cheeks, tears for the stench of sin that rose from that great land. A middle-aged man with blurred features and the suit and shoes of a gangster and a way of adding a syllable to the end of every second word
(Prayin-ah, and testifyin-ah, and bearin' witness to God-uh),
and a way of seeking out individuals and fixing them with a hooded gaze while we all hunch on backless plank benches in front of him, benches so raw the sap is oozing from the knotholes.

There I am in my yellow dress in a row of girls, the Stalling sisters and my Gilmore cousins. During the hymns I stand looking around to see what Burnley boys have come to the crusade, looking for things to mock. All the hymns are about blood, lamb's blood: wading through fountains of it, or being washed in it. My mother is directly behind me, her anxiety drifting forward and settling damply on the back of my neck. Not just about me. She is rigid with fear that the Pentecostals will take it too far, disgrace us in the eyes of the town by falling into babbling fits, or hobble up on stage and mention some unspeakable disease to do with their inner organs, or try to cast the devil out of one another. During the sermon Wesley Moore paces back and forth, fondling the fine leather cover of his Bible, moving his hand intimately through its pages the way he might when he reads alone at night, building to his climax. He is a dab hand at the bait and switch, first getting people to slip their hands up privately if they want him to pray for them (
You there, I see that hand, bless you, God bless you)
and then, while his otherworldly wife at the piano diverts us seamlessly into the altar call, cajoling his victims out into the aisle. Mr. Gorrie the druggist stands at the side also facing in the wrong direction, watching the crowd through his dark
glasses, like a marshal hired to prevent people escaping. The endless verses of “Just As I Am” run slower and slower and I crank my head right around and look shamelessly behind me. I want to see the faces of people coming up the aisle, I want to see the horror of their secret sins: how people look when they say,
I'm not who you think I am,
say it to the whole town. But on their faces is only resolve and caution, embarrassment, as though they've been called up to the stage as volunteers and can't see an easy way out of it. Betty Stalling slips past me and goes forward, her curtain of shining hair hanging down her back. She's done this once before, she was saved in church last summer. I recall this and a superior smile takes hold of my mouth.

Women come and hold a prayer meeting in our living room. I am not invited — it is clear they mean to pray for me. What Mr. Dalrymple said about me so long ago, it is still there in everybody's mind. I begin to feel eyes on me all the time: not Wesley Moore's, or God's, but my mother's, always on me with a fervent look, even when she is turned away kneeling in the garden. Bugger off, I whisper, and a small dark figure in my imagination creeps up and sinks sharp fingers into the white of her throat, into her skin white as a puffball, and then runs off into the bush, wiping the stink of her off its fingers. Standing by the bunkhouse witnessing this scene I think I will faint.

The fact is, I am ill and frightened that summer and have been for some time. I have started to
bleed
intermittently, my private parts are bleeding, or, more accurately, it is coming from inside me, at first just a little but lately profusely, so that I have to use a ripped-up towel to keep blood from seeping into my clothes. I've started having pains in my stomach as well. When I am having one of these spells the terror of my
impending death fills me and I throw my blankets off in the night and will myself out of bed to tell my mother, but in the face of all that appalling blood I never can. Even when it goes away the dark knowledge of it lies like a stone in my stomach.

During the tent meetings I sense I am in for another bout of it. Night comes and steals away my daytime way of seeing things. A flaming scene materializes against the wall of my bedroom, cast there in shadows by the crocheted border of my curtain: roiling human figures in hell, thin, anguished creatures with arms and legs grotesquely stretched. All the talk about blood, I understand then, is a code meant specifically for me. On the path to the outhouse I am clamped by a fit of crying. Oh God, oh God, oh God, I cry as though I've just burned my hand on the stove. They all have a truth I can't deny: something is deeply wrong with me. It isn't the way I behave, it isn't the movie or Russell Bates with his flask of liquor, nothing as simple as that. It is the sin of being who I am.