Girl Runner (9 page)

I have one more trick. It seems, suddenly, a pity I didn’t learn more last summer, when I practiced walking the fence hour upon hour—but this trick is a good one. It’s the best I’ve got. I bend backward, reaching my hands for the peak of metal, and with one quick and forceful push, curve over myself, feet travelling overhead into a brief handstand that is meant to collect itself at the other end, and finish by coming around to standing.

But I’ve mistimed my push. My hands are not planted, my hips tilt off balance. I am coming down.

I hear them gasp.
No!

I hear my mother’s silence, her power. She would climb all the way up the tree and leap onto the roof and catch me if she could—if only the tree were taller, if only its branches brushed the barn.

My body collapses sideways, hip crashes vertical metal, the ridges, the nail heads poking through, the steep descent. Down is down. Down is hard dirt barnyard, broken stone, the rough unfinished roof of the never-occupied rabbit hutch, a pitchfork head, a rusted bucket, a broken plough, and God knows what: I am falling swiftly toward the side of the barn in which gathers the loose and lost elements of our farm’s life.

I will not go there. No.

A grunt, a core reflex of refusal.

I snap my legs, my spine cracking like a whip. Blindly, my arms slash out, hands slap the peak of the roof, fingers dig in. My face hits the hot metal, my legs slither straight. I hang like this, flat against the rough slide, flat against life. And then slowly, stiffly, I pull myself up, and mount the rooftop, like I’m climbing onto the back of a wild and unreliable horse.

All of this has happened in less time than it would take to say good-bye.

I gaze down on them.

They are silent. My mother is climbing down from the tree.

But I’m laughing, head thrown back, laughing like crying. Laughing like luck. Laughing like a child who knew she wouldn’t, couldn’t fall. I knew I couldn’t. I turn to look down on George, who crouches behind the windmill, pale as a ghost.

“If you were Tilda’s daughter,” he says in a low and angry voice, “you’d be dead.”

I am not Tilda’s daughter. I belong to the woman striding toward me across the barnyard, coming right up underneath so that her head tilts to an angle almost perpendicular, neck exposed, her face solemn with something that might—almost—be pride.

“Now you get down from there safe and sound, young lady!” my mother commands me.

“Yes, Mother! Right away, Mother!”

It is a relief to be commanded, and a relief to see her expression ease into a wide smile, even if she is shaking her head.

George holds his hand up to me, as if he could help me, as if I want his help, or need it. I swing my legs away from him, controlling this descent with my heels and the flats of my palms. We edge around the windmill on opposite sides and meet by the loosened boards.

This is our chance to say something to each other—this seems to be our chance. But we don’t take it. So often, people don’t. I can tell he wants me to climb through the hole in the wall first: chivalry, control. I give him that. The gesture is small enough, and I can do it. It doesn’t hurt me.

I go on ahead of George, descending the windmill steps. I don’t wait. On the way down, I pass my father walking up, nails and hammer in hand. He avoids looking at me. I guess he doesn’t know what to say, what expression ought to cross his face, so he chooses to say nothing, his features blank.

But I hear him speaking to George. He doesn’t sound angry, he sounds tired, defeated, almost. He can’t find enough words, so he uses only a few. “What is wrong with you, boy?”

I run across the mow floor and swing down the ladder into the stables below. I’m still running, across the spongy dirt floor and out into the yard. I still don’t understand that what I’ve done does not look to everyone else like it felt to me. It does not look heroic or brave. It does not look thrilling and original. It does not look like an act, which is already what I believe it to have been, believing myself invincible, believing therefore that the fall and quick catch were as foreordained and central to the performance as the fine balance, the precision turns, the element of surprise.

They think I’ve almost died. They think I’ve risked everything for a foolish show-off’s game. They don’t understand what I’m doing.

The problem will persist.

There is life, as I see it, going on all around me, terrible in its uncertainty, frightening even. And there is me, as I see myself, preparing, practicing, anticipating a series of performances whose timing and discipline I can’t predict in advance, but must be ready for at all times. These performances are not life, as I see it. They exist outside of what is real and dreadful. They arrive given an opportunity. I am in control of them. I shape them. I fold them into being and present them to an audience in order to give the audience pleasure, in order to show the world in its mirrored state, which is a state of perfect order, and the opposite of the world we’re doomed to inhabit, dark with confusion and accident.

The supposed slip, the apparent fall, the heart-stopping thrill of a moment nearly stolen back by life and thwarted by artful practice: that is what makes the entire performance succeed. That is what gives it depth and meaning.

Why else would anyone care?

The appearance of perfection does not interest me. It is the illumination of near-disaster beside which we all teeter, at all times, that interests me. It is laughing in the face of what might have been, and what is not.

THERE, WE
’
RE PAST
the bare yard, the grey house, and I can breathe again. Already I feel better, though the car is slowing, and I can see the weeds in the ditch waving slowly, taller than whatever’s in the field beyond. We’ve only come a short distance from one property to the next. Do I know where I am? Don’t I?

“I can’t see the lane,” the girl says. “Where is it?”

“It’s overgrown—past that bunch of crab apple trees.”

With a sharp turn, the car bumps over the ruts and into the lane. I see the front field has been planted with winter wheat, rising faintly green and fresh from deep wet furrows, and I see the row of pines that hides the house from view. I always come back here. In my mind, I’m never really away.

The maples are dying, great wide spaces in between like a mouth emptied of rotten teeth. The raspberry brambles look like tumbleweed. I think I see the path we trampled, Fannie and I. See? There.

Stop! I want to see the graves.

They’ve heard me.

She’s stopped the car.

They’ve loaded me like so much freight into the chair without dropping me, which is the best I can hope for, with the pair of them.

Max directs: “I’m going to film this from a wide angle. Bring her over to me, and then into the graveyard.”

“Are you ready, Mrs. Smart?” The girl stuffs the blanket up under my armpits. The white plugs dangle around her neck, emitting a distant beat, quicker than the heart, and the wad of bubble gum she snaps between her teeth pops in front of my nose.

How old is she? She looks like a child.

“Everything’s good, I think,” she says. But she hasn’t fastened the belt.

You haven’t fastened the belt!

Max waves her onward: “This is going to be a fabulous shot!” I feel removed from the scene, as if this is a long dream. I come here all the time in my mind. To be here, breathing the cool air and the wet soil, seems less real than a dream would be.

I can’t worry over the details.

The girl knocks us through brambles, and we shudder into mud where the wheels sink, and she wrestles and curses under her breath until we progress. Max is backing up one step at a time, leading us closer to where the split rail fence used to be (gone now, a blackened post and another standing out of the ground to remind us of how we stake our claim). We’re really rolling, into the little yard, or whereabouts it used to be, hitting a clear grassy patch as the girl turns the chair toward the flat stones and we sink again.

Underground, the wheel strikes an unseen root, violently.

This is how I fall: flatly, in a state that recalls relaxation, into the dank spring earth, alive with thin green promises and the sweet rot of last year’s roots and weeds.

I register nothing of their commotion.

I have fallen among the stones, but have struck none. One is quite near my head, the perfect distance for my eyes to focus on it with clarity. The stone looks soft, cushioned by moss, its edges crumbling and shot with rust-coloured veins, and it is sinking into the dirt, or being swallowed, pulled under.

A person might step on it and not see it for what it is; it is Fannie’s stone, I’m certain.

THE WAR ENDS,
November 11, 1918, like that. I am ten years old. George is a boy soldier marching around the ruins of the Halifax Harbour, dreaming of going to sea. He is not quite seventeen.

I wait for him to come home.

Olive and Cora and I walk through the woods to town, carrying our lunches in pails. The low, brick one-room schoolhouse stands on the edge of town, and we enter through the door marked
GIRLS
. Olive will finish this spring. Olive and I are satisfactory students and haven’t a hope (or desire) of attending the nearest high school, more than ten miles away; but Cora is clever. She won’t leave her desk at recess, poring over her lessons in the poorly lit classroom.

I burn past Olive, who ignores me, one in a clump of big girls near the door, all wrapped in coats and bright-coloured mitts, whispering together. They emit a shriek of laughter, their collective breath a frosty cloud. I scatter with the boys, heading for the playing field. I like boys. Boys say little, except what’s necessary and brashly mocking. Boys talk about what they’re doing, provide running commentary, try to make each other laugh. A boy would never shriek with inexplicable laughter when you pass by him. Instead, he would slide feet first into you at home plate in hopes of knocking the ball out of your frozen fingers. This makes sense to me.

When we return to the schoolhouse I separate and enter through
GIRLS
. I sit with Cora at lunchtime. I am not lonely that I notice, nor do I long for a best friend. I eat the bread and cheese and dried apple turnover, and listen to Cora and her best friend, Edwina, talk seriously about school and chores and what they’d like to do someday.

“There’s nursing,” says Cora, “which is better than teaching.”

“But sick people.” Edwina shudders.

“You can work anywhere,” says Cora. “Teachers have to go where they’re assigned.”

“I like children,” offers Edwina.

“I don’t, not really.” Cora looks at me with mild contempt, as if I were so much younger.

“Children get sick too,” I point out.

“I’ll specialize,” says Cora. “
Not
with children.”

When lessons are finished for the day, Olive and Cora and I walk home again, empty pails, town to farm.

ONE AFTERNOON
we arrive home to cracks of darkness opened, gashes in the ceiling, floorboards missing, an ugly pile of debris pushed into the empty space where the wall between the kitchen and the dining room has been. Father has knocked it down. He’s accomplished the task by himself, drifting a layer of white dust everywhere in the house, even in the rooms upstairs. Our feet leave behind prints, our fingers too.

Father shovels the pile of debris out the front door and into a wheelbarrow, which he trundles down the wooden steps. He dumps it out behind the barn. It is up to us girls to clean up the rest of the mess; we do not put forth our best effort.

Father’s new invention will be a floor-to-ceiling cabinet, with shelves going right through from the kitchen to the dining-room. At the heart of the cabinet, a large double-decker lazy Susan will spin behind glass doors. Food will be sent from kitchen to dining room, and dirty dishes returned. We admire the drawings.

The weather turns cold, snow blows in and stays, and it seems that the dust from the broken plaster and sawn boards is snow too, blown through the cracks. I watch it float and descend upon our house, inside and out, and I wait.

George does not come home for Christmas.

I decide, privately, that this is for the best; Father’s lazy Susan cabinet is nowhere near completion. I accept the circumstances in which our family is living, but I do not think that George would like it. The table and chairs crowd against the far wall. The food we eat is gritty with sawdust—or do I just imagine it? We trip over the ragged ends of boards, catch our skirts on exposed nail heads, find screws stabbed into the bottoms of our shoes. In the kitchen, the hammer and the corkscrew drill lie side by side with the knife strop and the soup ladle.

Olive screams at the scampering mice, boldly scurrying out of the opened wall or gaping floorboards. Their droppings infest any food stores left unguarded. Sometimes Olive’s scream is occasioned by a bat, winging wildly across the room.

What frightens me is the sight of the ceiling and walls and floor opened up, like a body cut apart, bones and guts exposed.

It is through the cracks, one lamplit evening, that I see my dead sister Fannie slowly appearing. She comes right into the room. I hold my breath, staring, the hairs standing up under my sleeves and at the back of my neck, but no one else seems to see her—neither my sisters, nor my mother, who are also in the room, entirely alive. I freeze, paused in the small actions I’ve been undertaking, the scratching of a pencil across a scrap of paper, the humming of a tuneless song.

I know it’s Fannie even though I can’t see her face. She doesn’t look at me. She slips quietly past and up the back stairs to the servants’ quarters.

I stand, knocking over my chair, pencil dropping from my fingers.

“Aggie? Are you all right?”

Without saying a word, I chase after Fannie. I’m running, stumbling the steep steps, trying to catch up, but she’s already gone around the corner and when I reach the cold hall, she has vanished.

“Aggie!”

My mother stands at the bottom of the narrow twisting staircase and calls me back, but I won’t come. It’s dark in this bleak hallway and I think that if I wait long enough, my eyes opened wide enough, I might see Fannie, she might emerge from wherever she’s hiding. I hold my breath, squeezing my hands closed and open, over and over again.

My mother climbs the stairs slowly, her footsteps heavy, her breath slow and heavy. When she touches me, I shudder and spin away.

“What is it, Aggie?”

“It’s Fannie,” I gasp out. “I seen Fannie.”

“You saw Fannie.”

“But I couldn’t catch her!”

“Aganetha.” My mother grabs my chin in her hand and directs my gaze to hers, though we can scarcely make each other out in the chilly blackness of the hall. Her voice is hard, and unlike her. “You’ll be more careful. You’ll not be wanting to catch up with the dead.”

In this way, even as she cautions me, my mother tells me that she believes me.

Mother’s solution is to brew me a tea prepared with dried rose petals, and to dose me with cod liver oil, but her medicines do not work. Now that Fannie knows she can squeeze through the broken plaster, she comes when she pleases, not every evening, but often enough that I look for her expectantly, a shiver of excitement greeting her arrival. I see her shoulders, her neck, an ear, and sometimes the edge of her cheek, as if she were thinking of turning to me and saying something, but she doesn’t. She never turns her face.

I, alone, watch her pass us by, my heart beating out of my chest.

Mother looks up from her book. “You’re restless. Go help your father in the barn.”

Olive and Cora study by lamplight at the dining room table. The dishes are washed and put away, the animals fed and watered. Father has returned to the barn to cut more boards on his lathe. Mother has cautioned him to use the oil lamp with care. His hands will be clumsy, thick-fingered in fat wool gloves.

I shake my head, no. I’m watching Fannie pass from the dining room into the unlit summer kitchen, cold and unused in this season.

Mother returns her attention to the leather-bound volume open on the table before her. Filled with handwritten notes and sketches, the book once belonged to her own mother, and is now hers. Its pages are unlined and their texture is rough to the touch, the paper tinged brown and flecked with red and green and blue threads and specks. I’ve inspected it closely. The pages in the back half of the book have yet to be filled. It is here that Mother records information she gleans from the
Farmer’s Almanac
, and from her own experimentation and experience. She writes down the name and sex and birth date of every baby whose birth she attends, and every visit from every girl who comes to our door, identified by first name only. She writes down dates, and medicines tried, and dosages, and results. She keeps track of the moon cycles, and the harvesting of herbs. But she uses a kind of code, a shorthand that I can’t interpret, though I’ve tried, poring over the handmade pictures and words.

“This will be a long winter, girls, and a short spring,” she tells us. How does the
Almanac
know these things? By the thickness of the bark on the trees, by the squirrels’ stores, the shells of insects, the migration habits of the birds? The world around us is mysterious, but not unknowable—the physical world of living and dying.

We hear Father come into the summer kitchen, the door slamming with the wind behind him, his feet stamping on the boards. “Help him, Aggie,” says Mother.

Father shoulders his way into the shadowed room bearing several small thin boards, veneers meant for the cabinet fronts. He brings the cold with him. As I’m shutting the door behind him, I glimpse Fannie in the summer kitchen and throw the door wide to be sure, but she’s gone.

“Aggie! You’re letting in the cold.”

Father arranges his little stack of wood pieces upon a larger stack with care, blows into his cupped hands, claps them together. “Look at this grain,” he says. “Look at the whorls. Look at the colour.” Beads of moisture glisten in his moustache and beard, the trimmed black hairs flecked with insistent grey. I go to look, but I’m the only one. I lift the veneer, pretending to be surprised at its lightness in my hands. But that is not what surprises me. What surprises me is that the grain has been painted onto the veneer by hand, the whorls too, and the hue is unnatural, a cherry-coloured stain.

It catches my breath, the care he’s taken. I don’t understand it—the artifice of beauty, the insularity of vision—and it frightens me.

Maybe I recognize it and do not want to. We’re akin.

AS PROMISED,
spring comes late.

We start seedlings indoors in broken crockery and glassware and twists of brown waxed paper, balanced on makeshift brick-and-board shelves before the windows, wherever we can find sunlight. Spilled dirt clumps in the corners, mingled with sawdust. I find an abandoned nest of kittens and bring them inside, with Mother’s permission.