Road to Thunder Hill (17 page)

17. My Father's Voice

M
Y EYES POP OPEN
like I'd never even been asleep, although the taste of sleep in my mouth tells me I have been. I may have just been thinking about Bear and Ray but theirs aren't the voices that have just rattled me awake in my old bedroom. It's none other than my father who spoke my name. I swallow hard. His voice is still fresh in my ears. My father who art in heaven. And here I thought I'd gotten used to him being dead.

There's a hot air register in the middle of the floor. Directly below it is the kitchen. When I was a kid, I'd lie on the floor in front of it and listen to everything I wasn't supposed to hear. Usually it was boring talk about the blueberry business or gossip about people in town who I didn't even know, and sometimes I'd fall asleep there on the floor. When I woke up, I'd have an imprint of the iron grid stuck on my cheek. I'd rub at it until it smoothed away because I couldn't let my parents in on my secret spying place. It's through the register when I was about eleven that I first heard about Olive.

At first, I wondered what my mother was doing down there in the kitchen waving around a piece of paper. She was saying, “Now she's getting her kid to send you drawings.”

“What are you getting mad at me about?” I heard my father say. “I didn't ask her to send me a drawing. But it's a pretty good drawing. She must know I like schooners.”

“You mean Phyllis knows you like schooners. And this is how she's trying to get at you.”

My father said, “If you recall, Phyllis got to me long before you got to me. She's
still
got me if you hadn't noticed the cheques going out to her.”

It got so quiet down there I twisted my head so I
could try to see this drawing. In the meantime, my mother had rolled it up and looked as though she was trying to squeeze it to death.

“What I want to know is what you're going to do about it.”

“I guess I should thank her for it when I send the cheque.”

“You want to know what I think?”

I heard my father sigh. “No, Bette, what do you think?”

I heard my mother's voice rise, and I could hear the boozy edge to it. “I think she's getting her kid to send these drawings so she'll worm her way back into your life.”

“So what if she is? We have a settlement and I'm not about to add to it,” I could hear my father's voice growing cold. “So you can relax.”

My mother's voice got shrill. “How am I supposed to relax when she's pulling stunts like this?”

“Here we go. Wind her up and let her go.”

“I don't think you should be writing to Olive. It'll just get her hopes up and that's not fair to do to a child especially if she isn't yours.”

Olive.
That was the first time I heard her name. The only Olive I knew was Popeye's Olive Oyl. But here was this Olive who could somehow make my parents as angry as I could.

My father was laughing now. “As if you're concerned about Olive's feelings! Don't bullshit a bullshitter, Bette. But if you're so worried that I'll get involved with Phyllis's kid, then how about if
you
write a thank you note to her.”

I must have moved and made a floorboard squeak because the next thing I knew, the talk in the kitchen had stopped and my father was standing right under the register. His voice switched to the jokey one he used with me.

“I think there must be a little mouse up there, Bette.”

My mother must not have caught on because she said, “What are you talking about?”

My father's balding head had moved directly under me and he was peering up.

I opened my mouth to say, “Very funny,” but instead, a gob of drool fell through the register onto his forehead. I didn't even get a chance to squeak out that I was sorry, that it was an accident, that I had thought the mouse joke was funny. The next thing I knew he was pounding up the back stairs.

I never knew what to expect at times like this. He might still be in a joking mood, which would mean torture by tickling, which would made me shriek and squirm with helpless laughter. Or, he might be mad enough to grab me by the arms and shake the living daylights out of me. My mother might call up the stairs, “Don't go crazy up there, Bernie.” All I could do was to wait for this monster to leave my father. When it left, almost as quickly as it appeared, he'd sit beside me on my bed and read poems from a book by William Blake. And sometimes, if he felt really bad, there'd be talk about hunting, and how he might take me along with him next deer season.

This time though, as his footsteps came pounding up the back stairs, I slipped behind my door. He charged into my room like a mad bull, swinging his head looking around for me. When he saw me I stood up straight and folded my arms across my chest the way my mother did and glared at him. “Who the heck is Olive?”

I expected him to really lose it, but instead I saw a pained look. When he turned away to look out the window, I knew I had discovered a new power. After that day, I'd just have to mention Olive's name and he'd turn away. It was like magic.

My mother was another story. I asked her about Olive that afternoon. She was getting potatoes ready for baking and she started stabbing them so hard the pulp flew around the kitchen. Finally, she put down her paring knife and said, “Come with me. It's time you knew about Olive.”

We went to the front parlour to a small cherrywood desk in the corner. I stood beside my mother while I watched her write a letter to this Olive girl who, my mother explained, mistakenly thought that she was my father's child. I had heard about my father's ex-wife Phyllis many times, but this was the first mention of Olive. “Another man was her father but he disappeared so Olive's mother wants her to think of your father as hers too.”

“How old is she?” I asked.

“I guess she'd be thirteen or fourteen by now.”

The letter, my mother explained, was supposed to be coming from my father, since he was the recipient of the drawing, but it was important that we keep it short. She wrote something on a plain piece of notepaper and read it to me: “Thank you very much, Olive, for the lovely drawing of the boat. My wife and I think you draw very well.”

My mother's pen hovered over the next line for a time before she signed it, “Best regards, Bernie Kyle.”

The envelopes were addressed to Olive's mother, as each month for eighteen years my father would cough up a cheque for this child he didn't believe was his. For a few more years a drawing would come addressed to my father near his birthday, and each time my mother would pop in the same note to Olive with the cheque to Phyllis. This was a strange time for me, to not only be learning about this false half sister, but to be in cahoots with my mother in this way. I thought all this pretending was very strange, especially because my father never mentioned Olive or her drawings again. All I knew is that he expected my mother to take care of this obligation, knowing full well how she felt about his former life and former wife. I guessed that Olive or her mother must have finally gotten the message because the drawings stopped as soon as the cheques had.

As for the possibility that Olive really was my half sister? Obviously, the letters hadn't rocked her faith entirely, seeing how, from the moment she arrived in Thunder Hill, she was hell-bent on making a sister out of me.

Like the time she phoned when Ray and I were hunkered down in front of the
TV
, not long after Ray had begun to come home from Newville on weekends. We were spending so much time bouncing on our bed that one night the mattress broke through the frame and we found ourselves on the floor. Thank goodness Suzie had always had the good sense to crawl out from her spot under the bed whenever she detected the slightest hint of activity. We could picture her rolling her eyes whenever she sighed and moved to the mat in front of my dresser. After the mattress fell through the frame, she stopped going under the bed at all.

On this particular night when Olive phoned, we'd been lying on the couch, just waiting for one of us to make the first move. Our legs were entwined, and I had been in the process of inching my foot up his leg when the phone rang and there was Olive screaming that we had to come over to Kyle House as soon as possible. There was no getting anything more out of her. We ran across our muddy yard, our jackets thrown over our heads against the rain. I imagined the worst as we drove the entire stretch along Thunder Hill Road — a fall, a serious cut, a heart attack. It's a good thing Ray knew the road so well, because the driving rain made it almost invisible. Finally, we parked the truck at Kyle House, next to two unfamiliar cars. We jumped over puddles and dashed through the rain to the house.

“Thank goodness you got here on time!” Olive said breathlessly as she greeted us at the door. Before we even had a chance to take off our jackets, she had pressed a wine glass into my hand. “I could not envision drinking this wine without my official sommelier present!”

Olive stores her wine in the cellar. Whenever she holds one of her famous dinner parties, like the one Ray and I had just been thrust into, she clumps down the stairs in her house clogs and returns with a dusty bottle. She passes it to Arthur like it's an infant to cradle and hold forth to be admired by the guests. The first time we came for dinner, Olive had pronounced me her official “sommelier,” a word which, until that night, I had never heard. Now, as we stood dripping in the doorway of Kyle House, and the glass of wine was in my hand, several pairs of eyes peered at us, and I realized the reason Ray and I had been summoned.

“Well,” said Olive in that shrill voice she gets when excited, “Taste the wine, Patricia. We've been waiting for your approval.”

I did what she said, although I felt like screaming at her for being such a fucking maniac for scaring us like that, let alone dragging us from our comfy couch. I sniffed the wine and sipped. Then sipped again. I was introduced to the guests during all of this, Doctor Mirrin and his wife, Dora, who had recently moved to town. And I supposed the large man in the tweed jacket to be one of Arthur's colleagues from Toronto. How could I have forgotten? Olive had mentioned to me that very day that she was having a dinner party in honour of Arthur's colleague, whose name I forgot right away. Funny, though, I couldn't help thinking, she hadn't said anything about Ray and me coming then.

“What better way for you to meet my long-lost sister, Patricia Kyle, and my wonderful brother-in-law, Ray, than over a fine bottle of Coteaux du Languedoc?” Olive said to her guests, who looked happy to be finally allowed to drink their wine. “Patricia, what do you think?”

“About what?” I said. I had just noticed the doctor's wife glancing down at my nubby sweatshirt. “My dirty shirt?”

“No, silly,” said Olive, in her tinkly social laugh. “The wine, of course.”

As I stood there, searching for a word other than embarrassed, Ray clapped one hand onto my shoulder and almost shouted, “Robust!”

“That's the spirit, old man,” said Arthur, who was obviously full of spirit himself, as he introduced Ray to his colleague as “a man's man.”

The colleague, who had a big red face, acted as though Ray was really interesting, and Ray fell into the role happily enough, launching into his talk about road salt. He rattled off the numbers of metric tons used on the county's highways every winter and how a recipe of salt and calcium was spread on the roads in summer to keep the dust down. He scratched his forearm with his free hand. “But, like everything, how much we use depends on how dry the summers are.”

“Fascinating,” said the Doctor “And how long have you been in the salt business, Ray?”

“Only for about two months. Before that I was the school janitor.”

“And a school bus driver,” Olive added, passing around a plate of hors d'oeuvres. I could have sworn I saw her wink at the colleague. Why was it that only I could see how this whole thing was a set up to show off her quaint, yet inferior, relatives.

“Yes, and a school bus driver,” Ray said, with genuine pride in his voice.

I have always been amazed by Ray's sense of self-esteem.

While Olive was showing off her summer kitchen, soon-to-be potter's studio, to her guests, I sipped my wine in the doorway of Olive's dining room and wondered how the hell I'd found myself in this situation. Each one of the seven settings on the table boasted silver napkin holders. Glasses and silverware sparkled under the antique chandelier she'd hauled down from Toronto. An arrangement of fall leaves and dried flowers sat in the centre of the table. It looked like Olive had been working on it the entire day. Wait a second, I thought. Seven table settings? That could mean that two guests had cancelled at the last moment. Ah, so that could also explain the last minute invitation.

And maybe that explains what I said later over supper.

It started off innocently enough, with Olive informing her guests that I had spent all of my childhood summers in the house. The Doctor's wife asked me if I missed calling Kyle House my home.

“Not at all,” I said, as I rushed down another gulp of wine. “My mother hated it here and truth be known, I didn't care much for it either.”