Leaning, Leaning Over Water (2 page)

He set the brick beside the five stacked saucers in front of Maura, and he waited. The ice cream had to be eaten at one meal because the icebox in the summer kitchen could not keep it frozen.

Maura’s job was to slice. She peeled back the cardboard until the sides flattened. She made four nicks across the surface, measuring for fairness. Each member of the family was served a band of pink, white and brown, the edges round with melting. Eddie, still panting from his run across the field, was permitted the scraping of the melted parts.

Jock’s job, when he wasn’t at the factory etching fleurs-de-lis onto aluminum trays, was to ensure that his children grew up and that they grew up well. He wanted them to know about poetry and imagination. He wanted them to know about life and danger, the sure connection between the two. When he first moved them to the village he took them to the ruins of the old hydro wall and showed them how the wall was crumbling outward over rapids. He told them never to lean against it, never, if they wanted to stay alive.

Later, binoculars around his neck, he stalked the river and
paced the bank. He inspected cloud formations above the waves and recited,
“For de win’ she blow lak hurricane, Bimeby she blow some more.”
He called his children down to shore in front of the house and taught them to memorize west by a sun that was sinking below the trees across the cove. If they learned west, they’d know east—sun rising over rapids—and south, a quarter turn to the right. “You can see a storm coming a mile away,” he told them. “See those black clouds? In eight minutes, nine tops, they’ll be hanging over the roof.”

He rode the bus to Hull and bought a barometer at Kelly-Leduc. He installed it on the porch wall near the grinning sturgeon that had been mounted over the doorway and hung there with its bony scutes and hoselike snout. After the barometer, life was never the same. Jock taught the children high pressure, low pressure, how the arrow fluctuated before a storm and how it stilled in periods of stagnant heat. “Stand with your back to the wind,” he told them. “Low pressure’s on your left, high on your right.” During summer storms they disappeared to the barn to play in the attic, but he came after them and shouted up from outside, “Barometer’s changing, watch for the clearing! You should be able to see the whole thing from up there. Watch for the clearing. It’s an amazing view.”

Whether there was wind or hail or thunder, and though he wanted her to see the turbulence outside, Jock knew that he could not convince Maura to leave the kitchen. She refused to look through any window as she outwaited every storm.

On Fridays, Maura cooked liver and onions for Jock though she did not eat these herself. She knew that, back from the river, streets and streets of the Catholic neighbours she did not
know were inside their houses eating tinned sardines. She knew, too, that in the summer they ate pickerel or bass from the river, sometimes even catfish,
barbotte.
Her own family caught and ate catfish, too. Jock cut off the heads on shore so she wouldn’t have to look at their barbels and their rubbery snouts before she threw them, skinless, into the pan.

Maura had other jobs. Mondays, the wringer washer was pushed from the summer kitchen to the main kitchen, and two galvanized tubs for the rinse were set on kitchen chairs. The wringers swung back and forth over the tubs. When Lyd had been a toddler she’d climbed up and caught her hand between wringers. Whenever the story was told by Maura’s mother in Darley, it always had the same ending:
Lydia, God-luv-’er, was lucky her entire arm wasn’t mutilated.

Trude had written to Granny Tracks to find out for herself:

Is the story true? You were right there in the same town before we moved. Did you see Lyd’s baby bones after they got whipped through the wringer? There’s no scar. Mother says she slammed the quick release in the nick of time.

Trude wanted to check the facts because Lyd had begun to pull the story out of her past to flaunt it, even though she had no memory of the event. When Trude got sick and tired hearing about it she went down to the riverbank and ran back and forth across the stones to toughen up the soles of her feet. It was she who organized the bare foot race at the end of every summer.

On Tuesdays, Maura dipped the Monday-washed clothes into a bucket of starch and ironed while she listened to
“Pepper Young’s Family.” Wednesdays, the sewing machine was set up between dining room and kitchen because that was the only place the cord could be plugged in.

Mother does everything in the kitchen. She drags the sewing machine in here even though it blocks the doorway and we have to squeeze past. She listens to the words of the radio songs and when she learns them, she sings them to us. She cuts up the material with pinking shears, and the leftover shapes get scattered around the linoleum. If we run out of toilet paper and someone uses a piece of pattern, Mother has to invent the missing shape. This makes her very mad. I am never going to be a housewife and I will never learn to sew. Mother made me sit in front of the Singer so she could teach me how to thread. I sat there for an hour before she let me go. I told her I’d never learn and I meant it. When she was a little child, did you force her to sew?

Maura listened as Lyd and Trude sang the French songs they’d learned the past year in their one-room school. Though Maura herself had managed not to learn a single word of French, she turned off her radio songs when the girls were singing. She caught the rhythm and hummed along beside her daughters and mouthed the strange and unfamiliar syllables into the vibrating air above their heads.

At the end of summer, the job of cleaning windows was assigned to Eddie and Trade, all windows, the entire house. Eddie was to use the ladder on the outside; Trude, the stepstool on the inside, starting with the room that was all windows, the porch.

“Work as a pair so you can get the streaks,” Maura said. She handed each of them a bar of Bon-Ami, which they began to smooth down, rubbing at the whiteness of the bars with a wet cloth. Maura called the bars “Bawn-Ammy.”

Trude and Eddie rubbed white all over the porch windows and circled out each other’s faces and Trude printed S-H-I-T backwards across an inside pane and Eddie looked startled and then printed on the outside, P-I-S-, but not in mirror writing. Both words were shined off before Maura came to inspect for spots, but they kept it up all afternoon.

While they were thinking up obscenities to stretch all the way around the house, Lyd was told to polish the dining-room suite, Jock’s smoker with its spool legs, and strips of wood that showed on the Queen Anne chairs. This was part of the furniture left behind by Duffy’s runaway wife and after that by Duffy when he sold the house to Jock—lock, stock and barrel. Duffy’s wife had run off with his best friend and Duffy had been too heartsick to carry so much as a tie-rack out the front door. After he’d clinched the deal, Jock had gone back to Darley to get Maura and the children and he’d listed off the contents, ending with the piano and the two Queen Anne chairs. Real ones. As if the chairs had been the deciding factor. Duffy had walked away from the treachery of woman and had taken a room in the village. Now, he was able to come
right back into the house as Jock’s friend and sit on his own chairs and switch on the pair of Tiffany lamps in the porch and look at himself in the long mirror that had held the image of his runaway wife. It didn’t seem to bother him at all.

Lyd and Trude had been dragging an old argument forward since early morning. The argument was about whose turn it was to use the top drawer of their shared dresser, the one that had the extra space. Lyd thought she should have it because she was older and needed more things.

It hadn’t been necessary to be in the same room until Trude had finally worked her way along the inside windows as far as the dining room. Lyd was already there, pouring a bubble of lemon oil onto the tabletop. She soaked the oil into the cloth and held the cloth away from her as the scent rose and hung before her face like a suffocating veil.

First she rubbed the wood, then she began to polish. Separate cloth. By the time she got to the rung of the first chair, she was bored. Trude was at the window trying to spell
diarrhea
backwards into the Bon-Ami-coated glass. She wasn’t sure if the word had one
r
or two, and she didn’t know about the
h.
Trude had won every spelling bee in her class but Mrs. Perry had never tested her limits with
diarrhea.

D-I-A-R she printed. Lyd came up behind her and flicked the polishing cloth close to her ear. Trude turned and snapped the window cloth at Lyd. Their mother walked into the room.

“Cut it out,” she said.

Maura had just washed her hair and was fastening a turban around her head. She held a hairbrush in her left hand.

“Lyd took a swipe at me first,” said Trude. She added a
Y
to D-I-A-R and from outside Eddie pointed and shook the ladder, laughing.

“They’re writing dirty words on the windows,” Lyd said. “They’re so juvenile.” She flicked her cloth at Trude again, catching her on the shoulder.

“D-I-A-R-Y,” Trude spelled. “What’s dirty about that? Dear Dirty Diary.”

“Cut it out,” said Maura. “I’ve already told you once.”

Trude flicked her cloth back at Lyd when she believed her mother was leaving the room. Maura’s body turned and the hairbrush left her open palm. It flew across the room and struck the wall between chair and window, between Lyd and Trude. The three of them heard the
crack
as the brush broke in two, missing the girls by inches.

Maura returned to pick up the pieces and walked out of the room. She did not apologize and she did not excuse herself in any way.

Trude watched her mother’s back tighten as she left the room. Because the broken pieces were gone, Trude was not certain, now, that Maura had thrown the brush.

Lyd’s face had whitened but there were red patches on her cheeks. She looked at Trude and pushed a chair in front of the mark on the wall. “Damn you and damn Mother, both,” said Lyd, under her breath.
“I’m
staying on this side of the room and
you
stay on that one.”

Trude glanced again towards the empty doorway, and felt a quickening in her chest. She climbed down from the stepstool and stood there, not knowing what to do. She set her cloth on the floor and waited, and as there was no other noise in the house, she went to find the dictionary so she could learn to spell the word
diarrhea.

When Eddie had finished his part of the job, he walked to the Pines, between cove and rapids. He lay on his belly at the edge of the cliff and stared at the water. He clung to the roots of some tangled bushes, peered over and, without thinking, began to climb down. The roots were above his head as he tested with one foot, for a ledge. He let go when he felt something solid, crouched as he dropped, his back to the river, and landed facing a small cave. To his surprise he could turn his body around and fit inside.

The cave was lined with layers of horizontal rock. At first, Eddie sat with his chin on his knees and wondered about the place. His sisters would want to know. But if he were to tell them, it wouldn’t belong to him.

He thought of his mother’s face as he’d watched her through the window from the ladder, outside. He did not know what was wrong but he’d seen her throw the brush at Lyd and Trude. He broke off pieces of rock and threw them into fast water below.

If his father found out about the cave he would say,
Stay away. The cave will crumble.
Jock was always threatening about the wall, too, the wall that tilted over rapids. Eddie looked towards the ruins, far to his left, and tried to imagine the wall crumpling like caved-in knees. So far, the wall had not begun to fall.

Swallows had gathered and now swooped and glided above the river. Eddie broke off a large piece of rock and tossed it hard into their midst. Though he did not intend to hit a bird, though he did not hear the thunk, he felt it, as a swallow disappeared. Its wings folded as it entered the blue-black swirl
of river. Eddie’s breath stopped. He had not meant to kill a bird. He should not even be in the cave. He did not move for a long time, frozen by the fear that if he moved, he, too, would thud into dark water.

Dear Granny Tracks,

We will soon be back in school. We went to the Ottawa Ex and saw Elsie the Borden Cow and got a bag of free samples from the Pure Food Building. Lyd won a lamp in bingo and had to carry it all the way home on the bus.

Father fired me from my cigarette-rolling job. He was in the St. Pierre Hotel all ready to clinch a deal on a secondhand Hoover. He offered cigarettes to the men around him and he held up the flame but the cigarettes fell apart when the men sucked in. I think I put too much water on the sticky edge. Father came home roaring mad but I don’t care. The men laughed hard but Father got the Hoover. He says we’re bloody lucky he doesn’t have to kick Lyd’s dust piles around the house any more. When he came back he grabbed his binoculars and went down to the river to look at the view but I don’t know what he could see, it was so dark.

I found out that Mrs. Perry is going to be my teacher again. She thinks the St. Lawrence River runs downhill. I keep showing her on the map that it runs up. We still have to take the bus out of the village with all the other Protestants, to our
one-room school called “Stone.” Geoffrey Babble will have a fit the first week of September. The last day of school in June, he was sitting in front of me and banged his head on my desk when he fell over.

Love, Trude

P.S. Today the river is the colour of dark green bottles, with raging rippling current. Mrs. Perry likes scenery and adjectives so I am getting some ready. There was a portage near our place, she said, because of the rapids. The Indians carried their canoes on their heads, or like that.

P.P.S. I won the bare foot race again this year.

Sunday morning, Jock was savouring the warmth of his bed, drifting in and out of sleep. There was a beat in his head, something endless and pulsing. He tried to recover it as he would a lost dream.