Leaning, Leaning Over Water (14 page)

“This might have been written weeks ago,” she said. “There are no dates, remember?”

“But you said he was writing last night.”

“Well, there’s more.”

Thursday: Walked to shore, sat on bank, stared at Ontario—far far away. Miles downriver, three bridges link Ontario to Quebec. Past the rapids, past the booms. Three ways to cross.

Checked to make sure children weren’t around, closed eyes, traced route in my head, starting at dirt road in front of house. Theory: If trip can be done in the mind’s eye, panic can be overcome on the bridge.

Begin: Follow pocked road out of village; turn right onto lower gravel road, follow river’s flow, catch glints of blue through scrub. Pass turn-off to first bridge, the Champlain. Long slow curve of
lampposts, Chinese restaurant below, mild ripple of white water all around.

Carry on to Moussette Park where my children roller skate; through Val Tétreau, up hill, down again, pass the graveyard, Armories, cross the tracks, pass the Standish Hall and into downtown Hull. Peer inside E. B. Eddy building through stickpropped windows; glimpse men in undershirts guiding thunderous rolls of paper. Ignore turn-off to Chaudière Bridge with old timber slides and falls.

Keep going: past Fortin Gravelle, past Ottawa House, bump over cobbles of Main Street of Hull. Waver in and out of streetcar tracks, see Achbar Furniture, St. James Anglican, the Laurier Theatre where children aren’t allowed to go. Pass the Interprovincial Hotel on the Quebec side, below. Salute, and cross the bridge. Carry on to my place of work.

No change of heart rate.

No shortness of breath.

Now. Return journey. Have to take the head journey home.

Lock door of office. Place one foot before the other, descend tower stairs. Identify sleek sharp fins of Chevy in the lot, rub sleeve over hood rockets, for luck, unlock door.

So far, okay.

Turn wheels away from lot; hands start to tingle, then feet. Blood rushes from my head; dizziness between the ears.

Can’t do it. Can’t get myself home.

Even in imagination, can’t drive onto bridge and reach the other side. Cannot turn the car homeward, to Quebec.

Lyd passed the scribbler to me and I read.

Friday: After they left for school, I circled back and came home. Went to shore and dipped hands in river. Thought of Maura and wondered what I’d say if I could speak to her now. Would I tell her that I carried on? Every fleur-de-lis etched onto aluminum placed a slice of pea-meal bacon on our plates. I carried on, though the girls don’t use the trays, now, in our own home. Carried on until last year, when the machines in the factory were silenced and every man walked away.

I’d tell Maura that I have my first shirt-and-tie job. Keeping books in an office in a glass tower that overlooks a showroom of waxed-and-polished cars. That we have our first car, a ‘57 Chevy with fins—two-tone blue, storm and sky. When I saw it in the used lot I knew I’d hold the picture forever.

But she’d want to know other things. I could tell her that a year ago, the Earth paused a beat to allow the news of Sputnik 1, and then began to spin even faster. I could tell her I failed to protect the girls from Elvis and his rocking hips. The most I could do was turn down the sound on Ed Sullivan. She wouldn’t believe any of it, not even the secondhand TV. TV’s almost had it anyway. Eddie
sits beside it and thumps it with the broom handle every time the picture tube blacks out.

If I said to Maura now, “First thing you know, scientists will be putting a man on the moon,” she’d say, “There’s already a man on the moon. Inside. A woman, too.” That would be Maura. If I told her I was worried about the children, she’d say, “The children will be just fine.”

But the girls are buying boys’ jeans with a fly and they’re making the pant legs tight by sewing them up the inside. They think I haven’t noticed, and they do their tightening when I’m not around.

“He’s worried about us?” I said. “He doesn’t even go to work.”

“Maybe he goes certain days,” said Lyd. “Where else would he be?”

“Well, I’m alone in the house all this week, so he can’t be here.”

Never felt right after her coffin was put to earth. The dream that night, the night I buried her, the same dream keeps coming back now. It’s my past reaching through—dark light through shutters.

Last night I woke and sat up. Didn’t know what to do. I’d seen her in her coffin under the earth. The coffin tilted and her head sloped to one side, lower than the rest of her body. She was trying to raise her head from the downward slant but the effort needed more energy than she had. She spoke in the dream; her eyes were sockets.

—
I’m not comfortable, Jock.

Couldn’t bear to think of her under the weight of the earth.

—
I’m not comfortable.

Thought of going to the graveyard in the night, digging her up, levelling the coffin. Could do it even now, after all this time.

Lyd stopped reading and we looked at each other. We were both crying. She put the scribbler back beneath the sweaters and closed the mahogany drawer.

“Maybe we should tell somebody,” she said.

“That we sneaked into his room and read his private journal?”

“We could tell Rebecque. We can tell her anything. Would she tell Duffy? Maybe Father talks about this stuff to Duffy.”

“Elvis and his rocking hips?” I said.

But we couldn’t laugh.

“Did you know he wrote stuff like this?” said Lyd. “It sounds as if he’s been storing it up and now it’s all pouring out.”

When Father came home, Lyd and I were watching. He looked normal, but I went outside and checked around the car, not knowing what I was looking for.

“We’d better not say anything to Eddie,” I told Lyd. “He’d just worry. But we have to keep an eye on Father.”

After supper Father changed into his khaki shorts, checked the barometer on the porch wall and grabbed the binoculars off the sill. He drove the car to shore and parked in four inches of water on flat riverbottom. He got out, washed the car, slipped back inside and stayed there. Lyd and I went down and sat on shore with our books, pretending to study.

“Maybe he doesn’t go to his office,” I said. “Maybe he wanders around on this side of the river looking for work so he won’t have to cross a bridge.”

But he did go to work. We read the journal the next day, and the day after that. As long as he kept writing, we kept reading.

Sat in the car and thought of water, cool under summer tires. Thought of why I can’t get across the bridge without having the attacks. Thought of outwaiting rush hour, putting the car in reverse and backing across, since its nose doesn’t like to be turned towards Quebec. Thought of the rattling planks on the bridge and covered the picture in my mind. Covered it the way canvas sheeting is stretched over the new car models at work when they’re offloaded in secrecy before each fall unveiling.

Maybe it’s fear.

Of the river.

I should have warned Maura. Couldn’t keep her safe.

What I’m afraid of? I am afraid of the fear.

“Do you feel safe?” Lyd said.

“Safe?”

I remembered how Father used to warn us about the invisible line above the rapids,
the last place of safety—or not.
How I had sometimes drifted past, to see how far I could go. But that wasn’t what Lyd had meant. It was too complicated to think about. And her voice was shaky.

On Thursday, Father called in sick. He’d never done that before; I couldn’t remember him missing a day’s work. I had the entire Chemistry text to review but he came looking for me and asked if I’d like to get some driving practice and go to Britannia, on the other side. We could take the Champlain Bridge.

But I couldn’t. Chemistry was my weakest subject and my first exam.

“I thought you were sick,” I said.

“Well I’m better now. And that’s that.”

Friday morning, Father went to work but by seven that night he hadn’t come home. At seven-fifteen, he phoned.

“I’m ill,” he said. “I need a drive. Come and get me. My joints are aching and my knees are weak—too weak to walk. I must have summer flu, after all.”

I stomped through the field, fuming. I had to take the bus all the way from the village, had to change in Hull. By the time the two of us were in the car, it was after nine and almost dark.

“I’ll sit in the back,” he said. “I don’t want to spread germs.”

When I approached the bridge, I watched in the rearview mirror as he ducked down in the back seat. Seconds later, his head came up and he stared down at the river below. We rumbled across.

Saturday morning, Father drove to Hull to get the groceries at the A&P. No river to cross. Lyd and I made a dive for the scribbler.

Had to be bailed out by my second born, my child-between. Before I called home, tried different routes to the other bridges. No go. Had to return to glass tower and call home. Back-seat passenger in my own car. Planned to drop out of sight as soon as Trude hit the bridge. Braced for the attack and—nothing happened.

Instead, body filled with well-being. Stared at river’s surface, even dared it to reach up and pull me down.

Something inside is marking time; I feel it closing in. Trude can’t come to Ottawa to drive me home every night.

Barely holding myself together.

No joy.

Miss Maura. Have to let go; can’t let go. Need her. Maura would know how to get me home across the bridge.

—
A broken spirit dries up the bones.

Lyd put the scribbler back in its place. “I wish he’d sound like his old self,” she said. “I wish he’d try to order us around, tell us what to do. He’s never been like this before.”

“It sounds as if he’s sad,” I told her. “I think he’s losing control.”

“I don’t feel right,” Lyd said. “Maybe we should tell him we know.”

But I was against this. I was afraid Father would explode if he found out that we’d been reading his journal. It was that unstoppable journey,
Life.
Father called it “the big trip.” And he’d sometimes add, “This is the happy part; this is the learning
part. This is the fun part.” But Father had bogged down on his journey and Lyd and I did not know what to do.

I was trying to memorize a year’s work in three subjects at once and had set up a desk in the porch. Every time Lyd or Eddie walked through the house my thoughts wandered. I could hear them breathing.

I’d been trying to stay out of Father’s way, too, but he seemed to be everywhere. Saturday, he’d returned from town with groceries and an armful of papers that he’d cached beside his maroon chair. I had seen him writing, pencil in hand. Scratching out, erasing, writing again. Not in the Hilroy scribbler but on long yellow foolscap. Lyd and I couldn’t find the foolscap, later, but in his journal we read:

Maura and I pulled up roots in Darley against the wishes of two families. We survived years of Duplessis, the old crook. When others around me blathered on about him I knew enough to keep my mouth shut. On Saint-Jean Baptiste Day, I shook hands with the village priest—never interfered in
his
affairs and he never interfered in mine. Now Maura’s gone and the priest and the “Chef” are still around. Didn’t Maura follow my thumb on the map of the atlas when I hauled it down and traced the Canadian Shield? Wasn’t she looking over my shoulder? No, I remember now. Behind me, she said, “You’re taking me to live beside a wide river, and I don’t know how to swim.”

Don’t know how it all went wrong. Sometimes I feel someone sit beside me on the edge of the bed
—a woman—can’t see her face. I reach, but when I do, she’s gone.

I dream the river running through me. I dream the river in its seasons. Shallow and log-strewn in summer, the stillness of shore-ice in winter, the turbulence of spring. Last night, I was surprised at the surface terror, the surliness of water hinting at what lies beneath. In my sleep I dreamed:

—
Maura, beneath those waves.

—
Maura, beneath that terror.

Woke and remembered that it was summer, not spring, when Maura drowned.

Terror, nonetheless.

In the evening, Father went to the river for his walk and I watched from the porch window. He stepped into our old rowboat, manoeuvred around some stray logs jammed in shallow water, and rowed upriver to the end of the cove. Then he turned around and rowed right back. He stood on shore looking through binoculars. I gave up and went back to my books. I did not have one speck of brain space to spare. But after school the next day, I read:

Stood on shore so I could pay attention to the view—the one I’ll always call up behind my eyes. Daylight fading, checked the sky, east towards rapids, then west. Stars becoming visible. Lowered binoculars but something made me raise them again. It was early evening dusk. Have to get this down—though I don’t expect to understand. Crazyman. What Maura’s mother used to call me.
Crazyman. Probably still does, behind my back. Lost. I lost her daughter. Who had a darkness of her own. She would never tell me what it was but she brought it to the marriage and there was darkness between us.

This is what I saw and I will write this down. Stood on shore and found myself separate from and facing my own planet. Crazy is right. It happened so fast, I remember only the loudness of my voice as I called out to the curve of Earth.

Shouted when I recognized the outline of continents. Cried out for South America and its perfect shape. All around me, stars drifted close. Unfamiliar constellations so brilliant I couldn’t have imagined. Heavens full of movement and light. One constellation stretched out, another pulled in close, shimmering with light. Tried to store what my eyes were seeing. Afraid I would not be able to recall.

Then.

Had to be asleep to see such a thing.

Above—in the sky—an egg. A giant egg, vast and luminous, tilted above Earth.

An EGG.

Must have fallen asleep.

The egg began to fade. When it shifted, I saw what it really was. A skull in the sky—an immense fleshless skull. The skull dissolved upward into the background of stars. As it disappeared—I heard Maura. As soon as I heard her voice, I knew it had always been there.

—
Protects. The caul. Protects. The caul protects.

I called out to prove that I was awake. I WAS NOT LYING ON THE BANK. Looked down at my feet to see where I was. I was in the same spot, standing at the edge of my own river.

Feet were on shale.

Shale is not Shield.

Whatever I heard and saw, I’ll never speak of again. Walked back to the house and felt like an old old man.