Reading by Lightning (2 page)

With his back against the only light, Mr. Dalrymple's a cut-out figure, his outline soft where fat bulges over the waistband of his trousers. The sky is grey with dust, and he's a darker grey.
I'll fly away, oh glory,
he sings in a flat, dogged voice. The grey in the air around Mr. Dalrymple could be his distaste for this world, a distaste he shares with God, who is about to abandon the whole mess, pluck out the handful of people he wants and leave the rest behind. Not a glad morning, as Mr. Dalrymple pictures it, but a fearsome day. You can see
the earth gearing up for it, the sky darkening and lightning flashing without a drop of rain ever falling, grasshoppers rising up like a spray of bullets when you cross the yard, the sunsets daubed with blood.

The hay is fresh and springy and not well packed. As the sermon starts I'm not even trying to sit still — I'm wallowing along the haystack in my blue cotton dress and tie-up shoes. Who knows why I'm working my way towards the front of the loft? Even I don't know. Without warning the hay surrenders and I sink down onto something awkward — a leg, attached to my cousin Gracie. Her mouth turns down in an eager apology (everything is her fault). Or my shoe scrapes an arm — my brother Phillip's. His hands dart up (it's a reflex, if I don't move fast he'll give me a snakebite).

Now I'm above Mr. Dalrymple. I can see the oily black hair smeared across his skull like molasses, and the adults sitting motionless in front of him. The front of the loft is open for light and for the easy removal of Christians, who will be snatched any minute from where they hunch with their heads sunk into their shoulders and carried up to heaven — not flying like birds, but carried upright with their arms at their sides, as though pulled by wires under their armpits. Mr. Dalrymple prays for the Rapture to come during church, when the Lord's chosen are gathered together in this humble abode for beasts.
In a moment,
he cries hoarsely,
in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump. For the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible. And we shall be changed!
There's a practised excitement in his voice, but underneath he sounds naggy: this is a threat, not a promise.

There are those who long for the Second Coming and those who dread it. Although (I think, reaching a furtive finger behind me to dig at the hay caught in the elastic of my under-pants), isn't it possible that even those who are born again will dread it? They'll hear the trumpet, and they'll feel a stab of
fear and disbelief. They'd rather keep on weeding the garden, or whatever it is they're doing, but they'll be sucked up anyway, up over the shelter belt, their houses and barns and the parched earth falling away, the cattle in the pasture lifting big heads in surprise. But then as they fly they will be
changed.
They'll discover that they're dressed in beautiful white robes. They'll peer through the clouds to see who else made it — spying their friends, calling in astonishment, He
came!
We were
right!
— not thinking about the ones left behind, because (and I reach for a rafter to steady myself) this is
heaven
they're going to. Worry will fall from you — your heart has to change too, become the unthinking heart of a baby.

And I looked,
Mr. Dalrymple reads out, his voice going up a notch,
and behold a pale horse. And his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him!
He prods at the text on the page with his index finger: these are God's very words.
And I looked
(I breathe as I inch my way towards the opening),
and behold a pale horse!
All I can see of my dad is his two long legs stretched out straight and crossed at the ankle. My mother's between me and him. She's taken her hat off, it's on her lap. She's lifted her face to Mr. Dalrymple with a listening expression, but her eyes are moving steadily along the haystack, looking for me, filled with helpless fury. The rope of her fury zigzags through the air towards the haystack, probing for me, and Mr. Dalrymple's voice fills the loft like oily smoke coming off the burn barrel, and I climb unsteadily, just out of their reach, working my way clumsily towards the loft opening.

On a weekday there's a special, quiet air to the loft, as though the prayers trapped in people's hearts on Sunday finally escaped and are hanging now in the dusty golden air. I sit up there, my legs dangling out the opening, and watch my mother out in the big garden we call the field plot, picking the tasteless
pale yellow melons she and Mrs. Feazel cut into chunks and can for winter desserts. Citron, they're called. She's dragged the washtubs out there and she's filling them. Phillip is working, he's out snaring gophers. If my mother knew where I was, I'd be helping her.

From above like this, God has a clear sightline to my mother where she works in the field plot. She stretches her back, standing on the shrivelled vines, the only upright figure on the flat earth that God made the first Monday morning. The sun's right above her, she casts no shadow. She's wearing her green dress with a shirt of my dad's over it to keep the sun off her arms.

Joe Pye is at the other end of the garden, where the garden meets the field. Joe Pye, my father's friend who came with him from England. He's crouching beside the harrow, hard-edged with light, fiddling with the grease gun. I watch him ease his way gingerly down into the shadow of the harrow, his backbone sticking out like a mountain ridge on a topographical map. How're you feeling, Joe? I asked him at breakfast. Aw, everything's agin me today, even me underwear, he said. Joe Pye never goes to church. He pulls his mattress out of the bunkhouse every Sunday and lies sleeping under the cottonwoods all morning. When the congregation flies past him up into the sky, they'll see him curled like a cutworm on his side, sound asleep.

I inch along the loft opening, picturing what happened on Sunday during church: the way a pit opened in the hay and I dropped into it, whooshing down, clutching at straws, at the sharp edge of the loft opening (last chance to stop myself). A giddy moment in the air before the ground zoomed up and hit me with a whack. Faces peering out of the loft above and breaking into laughter as I sat up. My mother flying around the corner of the barn, her furious hands clutching at me. Then I see a white-faced, chastened girl back in church sitting
between her parents. Something has shocked them, her fall from the loft and something else. They sit weighted down with it, all three of them. The girl sits with her thin back straight, her hands cupped and all ten nails biting into her skin. Why didn't you at least
faint?
I say to her.

Our Ford truck bounces along the edge of the field and stops by my mother. My father gets out and they start to load the citron. My mother staggers a little under the weight of the second tub and it tips, and three or four melons fall to the ground and roll away. One of them's under the Ford. After she's picked them up, all but the one under the truck, she walks across the yard and calls me. I pull my feet up into the loft and lie back away from the opening and wait for exasperation to sharpen her voice.

By the middle of the afternoon the sick-sweet smell of cooked citron fills Mrs. Feazel's kitchen. Come here, says my mother. Sit down. You're going to break something. They're taking a rest in the living room, where it's cooler, Mrs. Feazel and my mother. I'm standing between the curtain and the window, flicking away the dead flies lying on the window ledge with their legs in the air. This window ledge is Mrs. Feazel's china cabinet, where she keeps her treasures lined up in a row. A clamshell with
Delta Manitoba
written on it in scrolled letters. A little brass dinner bell. Mr. Feazel's pin from the war, a tiny Union Jack. And the gallstone Dr. Ross took out of her, a flattened, yellow-green egg, not polished like a stone but with an irritating surface, like the scale on the inside of a kettle.

Come here, Lily, my mother says again.

Mrs. Feazel reaches over and nudges the side of my face with her knuckle, the way a man would. Oh, she's always been a restless one, she says. What a shock! My stars! We're sitting there worrying about our dinners and all of a sudden
this
one
goes shooting out of the loft right in front of our eyes! Oh, my stars — what a shock! You could of broke your neck! And that
man!
She leans forward, clenching and unclenching her eyes the way Mr. Dalrymple does. She makes her voice oily and accusing:
I don't mean any offence to the Piper family,
she says in Mr. Dalrymple's voice,
but Satan will sometimes take hold of a little child and use that child to distract listeners from the Word of God.
She shakes her head, shock at her own daring on her big, frank face. Satan! she laughs in her jolly way. Oh, my, my, my. My mother crimps her lips together and doesn't say a word. I step back and the rope my mother sends out pulls at me. It's caught me, it's coiled around both of us, a rope of secret fear.

My mother has only Phillip and me to think about. All around us are families with gangs of children, like the Stallings and the Abernathys. On Sunday mornings they ride into the yard on a hayrack pulled by plow horses, or, if there's a car and the gas to run it, they're crammed into the back seat and clinging to the running boards. Our family, the object of pity and envy, begins with Phillip and ends with me (because of me, because of what I did to be born). But it's our yard they come to, our barn, which had a church in the loft when we bought it.

When I was a baby we lived in a rented house in Burnley. Then my dad bought this farm. I remember riding out in a truck with all our things in the back, sitting squeezed against Phillip, riding out of the rust-coloured mist of babyhood (where all that I knew of myself was told to me by other people) and into the brown and grey world of my dusty childhood. A man with a shy, lashless face (a rabbit's face) is standing by the house. It's Mr. Pangbourne. His wife has just died, his second wife, and he's buried her by the first in the plot intended for himself, and is going back to the old country. The barn smells of freshly sawn wood. He built this barn because his old one fell down.
He never used it for animals. While his wife was sick, he offered it to Mr. Dalrymple to use for a church.

The house is old and has a summer kitchen tacked to the back of it. Its unpainted boards are silvered with age and shrunk down from the size they used to be. The minute Mr. Pangbourne drives out of the yard, my mother finds a book on a shelf in the pantry,
The Pilgrim's Progress.
It's just a stack of soft, thick pages tied up with string because the spine and covers have come off. In our new house in the evening she reads the story to us, about a man named Christian who has a heavy burden on his back that he can't lay down, and so sets off on a long journey to the Celestial City, where he will be free of it. Crouching in the living room while my mother reads aloud to us, I peer through a crack below the windowsill and see a chicken walk by outside.

When my mother finally puts the book down I tell them about seeing a chicken through the wall. This house was built by an eight-year-old boy taking instructions from a blind man, says Joe Pye, who that very afternoon walked up the lane from nowhere and sits now at the kitchen table chewing on a matchstick.