Reading by Lightning (43 page)

I open my eyes and look at the bent heads in front of me. None of us take it all in. We each have a little sliver of this war, our own little universe of suffering, but nobody has the whole thing. Except God, maybe. We sit then and I cross and recross my legs against the bubbly varnish of the pew, straightening the front pleat of my skirt. Maybe that's what God is. God is a mind that can comprehend the whole thing, the sheep starving in Dannert wire on the Yorkshire moors, each separate child falling burning into the sea from the deck of the
City of Benares,
old men crying out from under rubble in London and Berlin, chimneys standing in rubble all across Europe and all the boys in khaki in Stuttgart and Oldham and Kiev with knowledge in their hearts. I turn my head, fix my eyes on the white cross-hatching of the window, on the pale green fields beyond. In the fraught days of my salvation, I never really put it to myself, what it would mean if God were true — a mind that could comprehend the whole world.

The next week I roll up to the church and hear the gravel crunch under the tires, and I say, I'm not coming in. Do you think you can manage the steps on your own, or do you want me to help you? My mother turns her white face to me and looks at me with loathing for the power I have over her and says, Take me home, then. While I negotiate the turn onto the Burnley road she clutches the edge of the seat and keeps looking straight ahead, terrified someone will see us. She'd rather miss church, rather have people believe she's too ill, than appear in the doorway on her own and have to explain about me.

I've found myself in an alien life; she's found herself in an alien body. It would be clear to anyone which one is worse. Sometimes I feel a wave of shock go down my back when I see the way the flesh has dropped from her arms, how swollen her shoulders and elbows and knees look in her skinny limbs, like ball joints, which I guess is what they are. But pity is not love. Her body might change, but nothing else has. It's hard for her to know if she's here and breathing; it always has been. The only way she can tell is if she can get other people to do what she wants. And now we have to, because she's sick.

But I have my ways. I can furtively put three spoonfuls of cocoa into her cup instead of the two she insists on, I can bring the Hudson's Bay blanket when I know she wants the thin grey one. When she has to ask me to make a second trip, I can move in a way that shows her how demanding she is and how long-suffering I am. Or I can be scrupulously kind, another kind of cruelty. Not showing her my anger, which would be honest, never giving her anything real.

She hears from Mrs. Feazel that three ships transporting Canadian soldiers have been sunk. Phillip is safe in Ontario, so it has nothing to do with her. I guess a lot of girls will have to get used to being on their own, she says with morbid satisfaction. My stomach knots and I refuse to look at her face, which I know is lit up with the excitement of hearing news as bad as anyone could hope for. But really I feel a little thrill myself and I hold the moment up like a trophy — how cold she is! How cruel! I picture her as a little girl, sitting on the path swallowing stones, one of which eventually worked its way into her heart.

In June, when the nights are warm enough and the smell of lilacs fills the yard, I drag a big quilt smelling of mothballs out to the Toronto couch on the veranda, and that's where I sleep, in an old pair of Phillip's pyjamas. Before the war girls never wore pyjamas. That's what the war's done, one of the things. I fall asleep right away. But late in the night the song of the frogs down at the river falters and something touches me on the back of the neck and I'm awake, suddenly aware of a soldier standing in the yard, like a sentry, beside the old bed-springs. I open my eyes and sit up and look out through the screen. By the time I get my eyes focused he's vanished, but I know who it was. Not George. It was Wilf, waiting for me to wake up, wanting to talk, to tell me about the waves crashing on the deck of the frigate moored outside Scapa Flow. About the shrouded moon, the strange red light that fell from it. The moment when George slid out of his frame of vision, and the sick terror Wilf felt when this registered, the way he turned to climb down to the hold, turned away from the deck
knowing.
Crawled into his bunk (muttering,
Taperlegs is playing the fool)
— while every impulse in him cried out to do what he could not do: turn on the searchlights, raise an alarm, run to the stateroom and call out the officers. I know it was Wilf wanting to confess, wanting me to carry his sin, to add it to my own.

I know Wilf's sin, but he doesn't know mine. No one but me remembers me wandering the streets of Manchester that afternoon in some sort of cowardly funk, not going to meet George, not letting him know, too weak to know myself what I was doing. That day is only in my mind. There's a revised version of it that I've turned to more than once: me climbing the stairs to the flat on Whittle Road, the door opening the minute I knock. (A worn oriental rug on the floor, a blue velour sofa. A stranger's belongings, thoughtfully assembled
for a lovers' tryst.) George at the door, the real George, wearing a white shirt and his hair standing in tufts. Give him his gift . . . a leather-bound book with gilt edging. Wait for him to say something. His face is strangely fixed; nothing comes. A sick feeling comes over me, disgust at this enterprise, so far from the marrow of truth.

I'll never know what I missed that day, the awkwardness, false starts, the faulty satisfactions. I'll never know what I missed and I'll never have it now. There's a difference between what I try to make true and what is. And I understand with a wrench that the dreams I'm left with are not much different than what I had when he was alive: I always made him up out of my own brain, I never really saw him the way I see him now, standing separate and apart, his mind teeming with ideas, scanning the world to see how one thing fit with another. I see him, the body he hardly inhabited, his long, thin arms, the nub of his Adam's apple rising and falling in his throat, his way of turning slightly away when you spoke, as though looking straight at you would compromise his listening. George, who tried, finally, to evolve, to fit into a different world, but couldn't do it fast enough. I think, He was and he is gone, I feel this like a pain in my bones, I lie rocked in it.

When the pain recedes a little I get up and stand for a long time looking out through the screen. At the lane curving out to the road, outlined by lilacs. The pump, and the rusty bedsprings propped up to keep the chickens out of the garden. The wagon abandoned on the lawn, quack grass growing up around its handle. Homey objects standing in their private, nighttime guise, no colour at all in the dark but gleaming with a light that they gather from the night sky.

In the fall there's no more sleeping on the veranda. There is an extra hour of darkness, and then light filtering in around my bedroom blind.

Early, while my mother snores gently in the next room, I get up and pull clothes on over my flannel pyjamas. I steal down the hall and out through the veranda and down our lane. Stubble fields lie flat all around me. The sun is behind the Feazels' shelter belt, but light from the east fills the sky. At the road I cut across onto the field on the south side. Sparrows twitter in the bluff along the river. They're English, those sparrows. They were brought to the New World by colonists and they don't migrate, they don't know enough to do it. Otherwise it's a perfectly quiet fall morning — just me moving, a tall girl walking across a flat Manitoba landscape at sunrise, another transplanted species.

The sun's rising now, shooting bright shards of light through the tree branches at the river. I stand and stare, brought out here on an ordinary morning by an impulse I can't put a name to. I'll never show this solitary landscape to George. I don't know what he'd make of it, anyway. He was one for reading
backwards and forwards from things and England suited him so well, the way its past was scattered all over its surface. The crumbling town hall, held together by vines, the gigantic trees in Alexander Park like trees in the Garden of Eden, their massive limbs twisting upward like the limbs of naked wrestlers. There were initials carved in the trunks of those trees as high as a boy can reach, but they'd blurred, been stretched and thinned by the years.

I turn back to the yard. The cottonwoods in the yard shimmer in the rising sun, and beyond them the fields stretch golden brown. There's just one maple left, rotten and hollowed out with age, dead branches poking up from its crown. It's not the tree I used to perch in while I waited for my dad to finish chores — that one's been chopped down and burned in the stove. I stand at the edge of the lane and narrow my eyes, trying to catch this landscape giving itself away in the morning sun.

Harry Dabney ships some grain and drops off a cheque, and I come home from town with a new dress for myself and an Eaton's catalogue for Mother so she can pick out something new. I show Mother the balance in our bank book. She peers at the number in disbelief and declines to look through the catalogue. There are certain virtues you had to have in the Depression: frugality, self-denial, pessimism. You needed to shrink yourself down to what was available to you. These virtues are stodgy now, I decide, like cotton stockings. I try my dress on and check it out in the mirror. It's dark green with a white collar. She watches me sourly, denied the satisfaction of seeing hard times teach me what I declined to learn from her.

Look, I say, showing her the tag. It's made of
nylon.
They invented it for the war. You don't have to iron.

Phillip comes home around then for his embarkation leave: he's being sent overseas. He and Betty spend their days at the farm and our Gilmore cousins come over and we all sit around the kitchen table drinking coffee and talking about grain quotas and about the war. Not like the last war, Uncle Jack says. You won't be killing Huns, from what I hear, you'll be killing time. Billy sits on Betty's lap and gnaws at the edge of the table. Mother and Betty wear tragic faces. He's
ground crew,
for God's sake, the biggest risk he'll face will be driving a lorry on the wrong side of the road during the blackout.

After he leaves, Mother is keen for the mail and so I drive to Burnley at least twice a week. Madeleine writes, she always writes. Phillip is safe in England. He's visited Aunt Lucy's and given them all his ration coupons. She describes him as
nice but very quiet.
He's based in Dishforth, Yorkshire, he's servicing Lancasters. She shouldn't be telling me this. The military police are going to show up at Aunt Lucy's door one day and ask for Madeleine.

I go to the library and carry home bags of books. I stay up later and later, carving out a private time for myself in the night. One morning, bleary from lack of sleep, I hear the sound of artillery and go out to see a big grey Harvard lumbering over the shelter belt, dragging a canvas windsock across the sky. It will be from the air base at Burnley, out on a training exercise. Two little fighter planes dart around it like starlings around a crow, pretending it's a Messerschmitt. Puffs of grey smoke blossom around the windsock, and a second later I hear the bangs of another round.