Reading by Lightning (4 page)

and outside her neighbour Mrs. Dempsey knelt by a flower bed in a little bubble of ordinariness, transplanting petunias from a plum case. Mother turned towards her and then turned back because she would have had to tell her why. The doctor's office was just two streets over. She would walk there. On the edge of her vision she saw Phillip playing in the sandbox, as if in the distance, as if he were someone else's responsibility. She walked quickly, although her knees had begun to shake. By the time she reached the corner she'd lost her grasp of where she was going. Then I picture darkness coming from the sides of her vision, closing off the light the way a camera lens closes. No one thought about Phillip sitting in the sandbox until hours later when Mrs. Dempsey found him, his little face swollen from crying and pee-soaked sand moulded under his backside. There is no end of children I can be compared to, quiet children, children who wait.

Because of me, because of the trouble I caused in church, our neighbour Mrs. Weedon becomes a Sunday-school teacher and leads the children out under the trees during the sermon, stopping at their truck and taking out a grey wool blanket for us to sit on. We'll sit in the shade, she says. But crossing the yard with all of us trailing after her she spies Joe Pye sleeping under the trees and she veers off in another direction, leading us to a patch of worn grass and weeds in the shade of the house. We sit in a circle and sing a song about a fountain flowing with blood. Flies bite at our ankles. Mrs. Weedon takes up a stick and shows us how they pounded the spike into Jesus' hands because of our sins: she shows us the place below the third knuckle where it went through.

I squirm off the blanket and thistles touch my legs and I begin to rub them and fuss. Mrs. Weedon reaches over and hauls me back onto the blanket. What about you, Lily? she
says. She has dark tangled eyebrows and a shot of white across the iris of one eye. Have you asked Jesus to come into your heart and take away your sins?

I feel a lurch of fear that I've so successfully distinguished myself. Yes, I whisper.

In the dead of winter it's dark in the house all day from the thick frost coating the inside of the windows. One day it's too cold for Phillip and me to go to school. My father sits with his jacket and cap on and his boots up on the fender of the stove. Joe Pye's got a blanket over his shoulders. Joe's pounded a nail into the door frame and he's braiding string from it to make bootlaces. He has a piece of copper wire wound around his wrist to draw the arthritis out of his body. There are white beans boiling on the stove, their skins peeling off into the froth rising in the pot.

My mother sits on the chesterfield, turning the pages of
Pilgrim's Progress
over like cards in a deck. We've read the first part more than once, but we don't always make it to the end. We're near the beginning now, where Christian meets a man named Worldly Wiseman, who tries to warn him against the journey.
You are likely to meet with weariness, painfulness, hunger, perils, nakedness, sword, lions, dragons, darkness, and in a word, death,
Worldly Wiseman says.
Why, sir,
Christian answers.
This burden on my back is more terrible to me than all these things which you have mentioned.

The beans start to boil over and my mother gets up to move the pot to the edge of the stove. I kneel against the back of the chesterfield and scratch at the frost on the window. My dreams in the night left a murky feeling in my chest, and Christian is making it worse, with his haunting dreams of his wife and children being burned up by fire from heaven and his constant blurting out his misery to anyone who comes along. I pick at
the frost with my fingernail and listen to a familiar scratching sound behind me. It sounds like a mouse in the walls but it's not. It's the clock, scratching its own yellowed face with a bent hand. Then I hear my mother sliding the globe off the kerosene lantern to light the wick.

Imagine, she says. At three o'clock in the afternoon!

Can ye picture spending a winter in a sod house? asks Joe Pye from the doorway. No one answers. If somebody as much as grunts, Joe will tell about his first winter in Canada. Like living in a burrow, he'll say. Like being a badger in a hole. No windowpanes to be had for love nor money, so we emptied three pickle jars and worked them into the walls. Picture that, he'll say, bringing his bent hands together to show us the size of the jars.

But I don't say a thing, so Joe doesn't tell us. Instead, I press the heel of my hand against the window until its heat melts a hole in the frost. As I work I think about the calf I discovered behind the barn last spring, born too early, flat and white as though it were melting into a snowbank. I think about my father lying on the bed with his boots on. The frost refreezes as clear ice and I melt that too, I melt a clean circle, and in the melting frost I smell dust. My hand burning from the cold, I patiently melt a porthole as wide as a pickle jar. From time to time I press my stinging hand against my sweater.

Three pickle jars, Joe Pye says from behind me. That's all we had for light. That and the odd candle.

Suddenly another voice, my dad's. The windows of our house in the old country, he says. The glass in those windows was
wavy.
From being so old.

Wavy? I say, cranking my head around and sliding down on the chesterfield to look at him.

My father came to Canada from England in 1903. I believe he thought of it as a temporary thing. Having little solid information, I thought of it in the nature of a fairy tale — he was the eldest of three sons, sent to seek his fortune. To Nebo, Manitoba, as it turned out, to a weathered frame house where the wind blew all the freezing long winter and topsoil drifted across the roads instead of snow. He never returned, but they didn't send the younger sons after him, the way families do.

He came in a party of two thousand led by a minister named Isaac Barr. When I was in England, when we cleaned out my nana's house in Salford, I found, stuck at the bottom of a box of jam and Marmite jars, the recruiting brochure that brought him over. I had spent my early years wondering about all this, and it was a huge relief to be given material to work with.
There is the world as the world will be,
it said on the first page, which I think must be a quotation, the rest of the pamphlet not having quite the same literary flavour. The brochure had clearly lain in water. I saw rain, a dark evening in fall, gaslights gleaming yellow-green in the puddles. My granddad, Percy Piper, stepping out of the public house and
spying the paper in one of those puddles, a brochure that had been making the rounds in the Woolpack. I pictured him plucking it out and taking it home and hanging it over a wire in front of the fire, prying its crinkled pages apart as it dried.

At the time they called my dad a “nipper.” This didn't refer to his size (he was seventeen, he must have been tall) but to the fact that he worked as a carter's helper. I imagined him coming home from work to find his brother Roland reading to their mother in a shrill voice. All the characters in these scenes have the Lancashire turn of phrase and eyes the colour of wet slate, a shade I'm partial to but did not inherit myself. My grandmother was exactly twice my dad's age at that time. I pictured her as a great overgrown girl with a wide, freckled face (she was still a great overgrown girl when I knew her in her seventies). She wore a dark serge skirt, a blue pinny, streaks of dried bread dough on it where she'd impulsively wiped her fingers while she was mixing, and wooden clogs. Above her head was a motto printed on cardboard in Gothic script:
HOME IS THE NEST WHERE ALL IS BEST
. “Here, Willie, you read,” she said.

“‘Let us take possession of Canada!'” my father read. “‘Let our cry be
Canada for the British!… '
What's this, then?”

“Your da found it,” said his mother. “Boris has one too. It's free land in Canada. Boris is dead set to go.”

I imagine my dad's cousin Boris coming over that night and all of them studying the pamphlet together. This was the year after the Boer War ended, when the English were all fired up to hold on to their colonies and it looked as though Canada was about to be taken over by types who ate garlic and prayed to plaster statues of the Blessed Virgin. Not that it was prejudice or politics that inspired my relatives, not that they ever thought about it that way. They had their own reasons. Boris, for example, was a stableman for the tram, and Manchester had started laying down electric tramlines.

There was a voice behind the pamphlet, a minister named Isaac Barr. His tone was candid and respectful. He was addressing himself to a superior type of colonist, however poor. In a section headed “Programme of Action for Men of Small Means,” he declared that a resolute colonist can, in a week's time, erect a small house to shelter himself for the winter. My dad fetched a pencil and they noted each mention of money: the steamer fare, the train fare, a registration fee for the land. My dad sat down to do the sums: eleven pounds, eighteen shillings, nine pence. This before living expenses, a horse and plow.

“The blighter's out to line his pockets,” my granddad cried in dismay.

“Nay, Percy, the man's a reverend,” said Nan.

“I'm
doing it,” said Boris (a fleshy youth with black hair standing up in clumps fortified by the grease from his scalp). “I'm signing on,” he said. “I'm that afraid of electrification.”

No one asked my father what he wanted. Every Saturday his mother opened his pay packet and slid six pence spending money across the kitchen table — that's the sort of boy he was. Canada must have seemed to him like something made up.

His parents talked into the night, but when Boris left, my father climbed the stairs and crawled into bed beside his brother Roland. In my version of events, he lay awake for a long time, breathing in the marshy smell of Roland's scalp and watching a wavy moon slide down the ancient glass of the bedroom window. In the other bed his little brother Hugh ground away at his teeth, and the voices of his parents drifted up the stairs. My father couldn't make out what they were saying, but he heard his mother laugh, a careless, happy laugh, and he rolled over and pushed his face into the pillow. He was someone I could hardly imagine, a boy who loved home.

I know from the minute I see my mother making coffee in the morning what sort of day we will have. Some days sadness and anger come off her like a smell, and something in my chest begins to hurt. My jobs are spelled out and I do them: I pick and peel vegetables, dry the dishes and set the table for the next meal, haul wood and water, clean the outhouse and carry ashes from the stove to pour down the holes, feed the chickens and gather the eggs. I do my work properly as an act of resistance: if she's wanting to punish me, she won't have a chance. Then I do extra things — carve petals out of the sides of the radishes, put jars of brown-eyed Susans on the table, arrange flowers in the outhouse between the two holes.

My mother finds the flowers in the outhouse and shoves them down a hole. Satan finds work for idle hands, she says. She puts me to work sifting through the milled oats to pick out grasshopper legs, which are not welcome when they turn up boiled in our porridge. She sits me down on the veranda to do it so she can keep an eye on me while she does the laundry. It's Monday and her hands are spongy and reeking of bleach. I strain the oats through my fingers, picking out the desiccated legs, shapely like miniature frogs' legs, or women's legs. Why are there legs and no bodies? I call down the veranda. What happened to their bodies? My mother, bent over a tub of grey wrung-out clothes, doesn't answer. She moves hunched from the washtubs to the wringer, not bothering to straighten her back. Someone might imagine that we've been taken prisoner by the same ogre.