Reading by Lightning (7 page)

Just after we get home in the late afternoon, our fingers green from shelling peas, my dad drives into the yard with the little wagon in the Ford. He picked it up at the creamery, where I'd left it, and he found out that I'd been to the show with Jimmy Thrasher. I'm sent to my room, and about an hour later, Mother comes in and sits on the bed beside me. She's not carrying the fly swatter they use for lickings, she's carrying a story. Something Aunt Eva told her, about a girl who died, in Burnley.

This girl wasn't a Christian, says my mother, her voice weighted with intent, but she was a well-brought-up girl. But one night she went to the show with a boy, a boy who just wanted one thing from her. In any other place she would have said no to him. But that night she forgot who she was. It was being with him in the dark like that, with those filthy pictures playing. And then afterwards, when she finds out (here excitement breaks through the hush of my mother's voice), when she realizes she's been caught and all the world will know what she's done, she can't bear to tell her parents. She can't bear the disgrace. For her whole family.

My mother waits for me to ask a question, and when I lie in silence she finally just says it.

She drank a bottle of lye, that's what killed her. Her and her baby. Her voice drops into a hush when she says
baby.
This is it, the crack of the whip, not lye or killed but
baby.

I slide down on the bed and turn my head into the pillow. It's a good pillowcase, with flowers embroidered on its hem, pink daisies pulsing pinkly under my open eye. The last two days have been too much for me to take in — I feel the vertigo of an overextended traveller. You're a foolish, selfish girl, my mother cries. She weaves her fingers into my hair and cranks my face around to make me look at her. You don't know what it would do to your father, she says. It would kill your father!

I remember so clearly the body I had in those years. My thin arms, my hip bones jutting up from my stomach when I lay in bed, my thin legs that I think of as always in motion — running, hopping, skating, scrambling under barbed-wire fences, walking miles over the pasture and along the dusty roads. Dirt bedded in cracks in my heels, a boil in the fold of my arm so I couldn't bend my elbow all the way. Sties swelling like seedpods on my eyelids. The understanding growing inside me that I was not just one thing any more. I had entered the second stage of my childhood: I was now a child who had a memory of being something different.

Had a memory of summer evenings, for example, and climbing the maple tree beside the bunkhouse. The earth below me dark and the sky evening blue, as bright blue as a delphinium, moving swiftly to green a few inches above the horizon. The crickets starting up their chorus, the house and the barn sinking to nothing, merging with the dark, flat fields. I'd sit in the tree waiting for my dad, up against the trunk, bark digging into my backbone through my blouse. When he finally came out of the barn he'd be a shadow moving in and out of the yellow circle of light cast by his lantern. He'd go into the house and the screen door would slam — he'd go in without knowing I was there. I'd sit on in the tree, above the yard, above the perilous fate that bound me to my mother. Not a child and not a small animal, just
thought,
a nub of heat and longing, a point of view, above being born and above dying.

I kneel in the box of the bouncing truck and peer through the window into the cab. My mother sits on the passenger side in her white daisy-print dress clutching a plate on her lap, on which is stacked a mountain of egg sandwiches under a tea towel. She made mayonnaise that morning, beating oil into eggs, while a film of oily sweat glistened on her forehead. I was watching and saw the moment when the eggs and oil in the bowl turned into something completely new, something thick and creamy white. My mother rides beside my father, not looking at him, although I can tell she's still arguing.
Tractor
is the word on her lips. My father is not speaking. He made his comment at breakfast: I can't see myself buying Hughie Parrot's tractor out from under him. To which my mother said (and is no doubt saying again, although I can't see her lips): it's not Hughie Parrot's tractor. It belongs to the bank and it has from the beginning.

When the truck swings off the Burnley road and starts the long climb to the Lookout, I turn around and sit down. I want to be watching when we crest the hill and catch our first glimpse of the Parrot farm at the bottom of the rise, a barn that still has traces of red paint on its planks, a brick house
with hollyhocks softening its corners. There is a goat in the yard, which I've seen only from the road. (You can make a good cheese with goat's milk, my dad said. Cheese! my mother said. Not likely! Bertha Parrot just has to be different. She always has to try to be different.) Today everything will be outside in the yard for the selling-up sale, beds with weeds poking up through the springs, the sock stretchers and chamber pot put on display, who knows what other different things.

Phillip squats in the other corner of the truck box, not holding on. That's the way he likes to ride, proving he can keep his balance in the back of a moving truck. I sit watching the road spool out from under the truck and think about Jimmy Thrasher, with that shock of black hair that like a dog he didn't bother to push out of his eyes. The way he suddenly spit towards the weeds by the road as we walked to town and said, Girls aren't worth the dirt they're made of. I'm not made of dirt, I said. Girls are made from Adam's rib. Then he squatted right in the road, the way Phillip is squatting now. Can a girl do this? he said. When I squatted beside him he dared me to lift one leg, and I showed him I could and then he let out a shrill, exultant laugh. Ha, ha, dog taking a piss, dog taking a piss, he shouted, and gave me a shove so I toppled over.

When we get out of the truck at the Parrots' my mother says to Dad, If you can't get the tractor, at least go in with Jack on the harrow, and then she takes the sandwiches over to the lunch table where a group of women stands. The sale is well underway. Mrs. Parrot is there, bending the brim of her straw hat down to shield her eyes. Her baby is hanging on to one of her legs, his diaper — a yellow towel — sagging down past his knees. My mother sets the sandwiches on the table. I better leave them covered, she says. All this dust.

Mrs. Parrot laughs. She laughs so no one will feel sorry, so my mother won't have to say anything about what is happening. The big kids are down at the creek, she says, looking at me.

Your furniture is sure going fast, Mother says.

Some of it's still in the house, says Mrs. Parrot. We're taking a lot of it with us. I sold the sideboard, though. It was too big anyway.

Will you be taking the piano? says Mother, as though she's just interested. At home she talks about the piano, about how, when he had his bull out on sire, Uncle Jack was in the Parrots' yard once and heard piano music coming from the house at ten o'clock in the morning.

I couldn't take it even if I wanted to, says Mrs. Parrot. It's part of the chattel mortgage. So is that, she says, watching the men lift the cream separator up to the wagon the auctioneer is using as a platform. That's the bank's. It's all the bank's from here on.

Hey! she shouts suddenly. The cream separator is covered with a sheet to keep it clean, and the auctioneer's helper has just pulled it off. I'll have that, she calls. That's not the bank's. The man folds the sheet neatly and hands it through the crowd to her and everybody laughs, and Mrs. Parrot laughs too, showing the gap between her front teeth and the little bud of skin growing down into it.

Just then a dark blue sedan drives up past all the cars parked in the lane and pulls right into the yard, as though the driver owns the place. The driver gets out and slams the door, and I see it's the new banker, Mr. Bates. He has a boy with him, a brown-haired boy about Phillip's age in a store-bought white shirt and gabardine pants. Mr. Bates walks through the crowd as though he has just dropped in out of interest, and the boy follows him, and then the auctioneer's chant starts up and people turn their attention back to him.

While they're bidding on the separator I go to look for the goat. It stands with a rope around its neck, tied to the back of the auctioneer's wagon. It is
different
beyond anything I've ever imagined. It has an old man's bearded face and sweeping
eyelashes and a miniature oblong udder with two pointed teats sticking out of it. Its ears hang down like wide ribbons, and two narrow, fur-covered ribbons dangle from its neck. At the sight of its white eyes and their golden centres I feel a little thrill go down the back of my legs. I pick up a stick and touch the wavy hair on its back, and it flips a snowy flag of a tail and lets out a petulant protest. Phillip and our cousin Donald come along, and I do it again to show them.

Keep back from him, says Donald. He'll try to eat your dress.

That's not a billy goat.

It's a boy who says this, the boy who got out of the banker's car. He's standing right beside me.

Look, it's a nanny. He reaches a hand towards me — he wants the stick. I give it to him and he taps the udder, once above each tit. Anyway, he says, a billy goat would have horns.

We drop back from the goat and stare at the boy, and he looks easily back. He has his white shirt and a barbershop haircut, a belt holding up his trousers instead of braces, his knowing about different animals. What we have is one another and our joint silence. Here, he says. He hands the stick to me and walks away.

I see the boy again when they sell the piano. We're in the house then, and I'm standing right beside the piano, and as everyone crowds round I reach one finger out and press down on the end key, in the slow way you can press a piano key so that it goes all the way down without making a sound.

A Baldwin, says the auctioneer, standing with his hand on the polished top. One of the best. That's cherrywood! You don't see much of that around here. Made down east and brought in special by the national railroad. Look at the date on her, 1917. Those pedals are solid brass!
Perfect
condition. This piano will be a family heirloom one day. Who's going to show us how she sounds? How about it, Bertha?

People look cautiously around, but Mrs. Parrot seems to have vanished. Then Mr. Bates cocks his head at his son, and without any further persuasion, the boy walks up to the piano. There's no stool to be found so he just stands, his sturdy back inclined over the keyboard. He puts his hands on the keys and pauses for a minute as though he's listening to a song in his head. Then he launches in and plays a song I know from school, “Country Gardens.” He plays straight through without mistakes but very choppily. At the end he shrugs and backs away from the piano, his mouth lifted in a rueful smile.

Mr. Stalling (who still has five daughters at home and a new wife with a bit of her own money) buys the piano. John Leslie, another man from our church, buys the tractor. My dad will pay Uncle Jack for a half-share in the harrow, but he doesn't bid on the tractor — it was out of his reach from the beginning, he says. Nobody buys the Parrot farm, nobody has the money or the credit. A Pentecostal from Burnley buys the goat for $6.50 and loads it into the back of his wagon. As it's being led to the wagon it looks right at me with its weird eyes and says,
Blah
in its woman's voice.

I meet the piano-playing boy's sister a few months later, which must mean I have been chosen out in a special way to know them. I meet her in the winter, when I skate to town. Phillip and I both have skates and so do my Aunt Eva's children, a legacy from my grandparents' big family, from a richer time. I learn to skate with my cousins on the slough behind Aunt Eva's. Then we start skating on the river, climbing down the bank from Aunt Eva's place, mostly me and my cousin Gracie. There is so little snow those winters that the river freezes clear, sometimes clear to the sandy bottom, sometimes with golden leaves suspended in the ice, and you can skate over this beautiful patterned carpet all the way to town, although from
Aunt Eva's it's still a long way because the river winds back and forth like a whip being cracked. No one but me wants to do it.