Small Beneath the Sky (11 page)

I mastered the footwork of the cheerleading routines and the five jumps that concluded the yells, but I hung back when the rest of the squad cartwheeled or backflipped in front of the players' bench. It didn't take long, though, for me to find a way to make up for my lack of gymnastic skills: I became the writer of cheers. I lay in bed at night and composed words to tunes like “Long, Tall Texan,” “Walk the Dog,” “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and “He's So Fine.” For the “doo-lang, doo-lang, doo-lang” I substituted the name of the Beatty boys' team, accenting the last syllable: “Bar-óns, Bar-óns, Bar-óns.” When I sang the cheers to myself, I was transformed into a Chiffon, a Shangri-La, a Marvellette.

During basketball season, I'd rush to practice with my verses in hand. We'd try them out, delighted to be original and risqué. We'd already lowered our voices so that we didn't squeak and shriek like the cheerleaders from Irwin. All the boys on our team had a crush on them, but we thought they sounded silly. We bought full-support bras from Woolworth's and panty girdles that stopped our flesh from jiggling when we jogged onto the court. We didn't want to be sex objects. We wanted to be taken seriously when we jumped and kicked and launched into our new repertoire in voices deep enough for a singer of the blues.

It was all going well until the captain of our team walked over after our halftime show at a tournament and told us he'd kill us if we did that shit again. “What is your point?” he asked. “Why can't you sound normal?”

LIKE MY
elementary school friends, the girls I hung around with in high school took lessons my parents couldn't afford to give me. Every Sunday, one after another, they spent an hour with Mrs. Town, who taught them how to sing. After, they rehearsed in the choir she conducted, getting ready for performances at the Ladies of the Nile's strawberry tea or the United Church fall supper. My family didn't go out to the farm anymore for Sunday dinner, so my friends' lessons made the day long and lonely. Boredom seeped from every corner of the house. It settled in the yard and in the empty streets downtown. The sky was one big yawn that lasted until school began on Monday morning.

Despite my lack of training, I summoned up the courage to audition for the school operetta. Maybe it was my ululations as a cheerleader that gave me confidence in my voice. Maybe it was my mother's encouragement and her naïve, unconditional faith that my brother and I could do anything we wanted. When I failed my first swimming test and came home crying, she marched me back to the pool and signed me up for the next set of beginners' classes. When I swore I'd never learn to ride a two-wheeler, she wiped her hands on her apron, took me out to the back alley with my bike and ran alongside, holding on to the back of the seat until she finally let me go. I rolled down the gravel, the feel of her behind me, and I didn't fall off. Even if I'd taken a spill and skinned my knees, she'd have made me get up and go at it again.

Carol Baba, the school's best singer, got the lead in the operetta every year. To my surprise, the teachers holding the auditions announced I'd won the role of supporting actress; my friends were assigned to the chorus. It was my energy that impressed them, I guess, and my ability to throw myself into another character. I hadn't seen that as a strength but as a weakness; it came from pretending to the world that everything was okay in my family, that my father's drinking wasn't a secret source of shame. Now I realized I'd spent years acting. As for the singing, Mr. Brown, the teacher in charge of the musicals, said he'd show me how to talk the songs. Although he was a small, quiet man, he was known to lose his temper if a singer didn't catch on. During our practices alone in the music room, I could see he sometimes despaired, but he never banged his hands on the piano keys or bawled me out. The night of our first performance, the gym was packed. The members of the cast peeked through the curtains, trying to spot parents or schoolmates they had crushes on. I talked the songs as Mr. Brown had taught me, but whenever the choir broke in with the chorus, I'd sing with gusto, my slips in and out of key muffled by their trained, melodious voices.

The operetta was such a big event in town that the
Swift
Current Sun
sent a reporter to cover the show. He wrote an article and took photographs for the next edition. My mother couldn't get over her daughter on the stage. She clipped each article in the paper—I was in the school musicals for three years running after that—and pasted them into a scrapbook she'd bought at the Co-op. On the cover was a blonde girl in a sombrero-like hat, her arms around the neck of a golden collie that looked like Lassie. Every time I saw the picture I thought of my brother being forced to take me to
Lassie Come Home
at the Lyric Theatre when I was four. I had embarrassed him in front of his friends by grabbing his hand and sobbing loudly when Lassie was lost in the pouring rain. “Shut up,” he whispered, though his voice wasn't harsh. “Lassie always comes home.”

My father never made it to my plays. Mom said he couldn't sit still for two hours on those metal folding chairs in the gym. What an excuse, I thought. He just didn't want to leave the shuffleboard or pool tables or give up on the Friday night meat draw at the Legion. When my mother saw the sour look on my face, she added, “There's no better man than your father when he's sober.” Her tone warned me not to argue, but every time she defended him like that, I wanted to yell, “When is he sober? Why do you put up with it?” Though reporters took my picture, though I won awards at school, I was not as good as anyone. I was Emerson Crozier's daughter. That was the circle of light I stood inside no matter what I did or who I tried to be.

lonely as
  
a tree

B
EFORE I SIGNED UP
for driver training at school, my father took me out in the car a few times so I could get used to being behind the wheel. He was patient with me, though he got bored fast. He'd drive to the city limits, then stop on the shoulder where we'd change places. I'd take the car for a five-minute run on the straight stretch of highway that led north, stop at the tree, turn around and head back. The tree marked the boundary of how far my father was willing to go. It was a big cottonwood with a height of about fifty feet and a span of thirty. In another place, there would have been nothing remarkable about it, but here it was the only tree for miles.

The cottonwood was more accurately the only
wild
tree for miles, or at least the only tree that no one admitted to planting. Swift Current was summer-lush with cultivated trees in its parks and neighbourhood lots. Every farm in the surrounding countryside flaunted a shelterbelt of seasonal greenery planted in a square around the yard. Double rows of Siberian elm and caragana cut green swaths through most of the fields—not tall, gracious trees like maples or birch, but dwarfed, gnarled survivors noted for their ability to thrive on little water and to endure the heat and cold. Provided by the government, these were humble, working trees planted to tame the wind, stopping it from blowing the topsoil away. In the years following the drought of the 1930s, each seedling was slipped into the ground by hand and watered with buckets carried from a well. If any of them on your land died from neglect, the tree inspector the next spring could make you pay. Each row of aged trees I saw when my family drove into the country, including the shelterbelt Grandpa Ford had planted in the early forties, added up to hours of hope and labour.

But not that tree. It wasn't part of any windbreak. Nor was it near a farmhouse. Its seed, embedded in soft cotton, had been carried by a bird or the wind. Its early survival might have been accidental—perhaps as an elastic sapling it had slipped between the blades that plowed the soil on either side. It's possible the farmer didn't see it until it had grown a few more inches. After that, he must have made a deliberate decision to swerve the tractor around it, allowing a rare wildness to burgeon without care at the edge of the tended field.

Besides the dapple-grey under the branches of the windbreaks, the only other shade in the fields fell from man-made things like grain sheds or giant tractor wheels. During harvest at the farm, I'd sometimes see my aunt and uncle sitting in a wheel's cool shadow eating the sandwiches she'd made, opening sealers of lemonade or iced tea beaded with water, their black-and-white collie-cross panting beside them. I had thumbed through art books in the school library, and I knew a painter could make something of that—three creatures at the centre of a dark circle, a huge machine looming over them, the sky's burning globe shedding its unremitting light. In a country without trees, you sought relief in any shadow big enough to hold you.

The cottonwood cast its shade with wide generosity. After I had passed my driver's test, Dad would sometimes give me the car for an hour or so. I'd take the road to the tree, stop on the shoulder and walk through the ditch to stand under its boughs. Its singularity and its size fascinated me. I measured out twenty-two giant strides from its trunk to the end of its shadow. So much life flourished in the area its roots and branches claimed. It was a breeding ground for robins and sparrows, its cottony seeds the perfect stuffing for a nest, the thinnest of its fallen branches scavenged by crows to build their houses of sticks. Wild grasses greened here. They were grazed by antelope and deer—I saw their rich brown droppings—the seeds a feast for birds and mice whose narrow paths tunnelled through clumps of prairie wool.

Once I stumbled upon a covey of partridges; they pulled my quickened heartbeat into the sky and out over the field until they disappeared. Grasshoppers bumped against my forehead and cheeks like fleshy pebbles some invisible bully was tossing from the long grass. On the ground over the hump where a root spread wide, I crouched to watch a darkling beetle, solitary and shiny, trundle his daily troubles away from his hole in the earth. When I looked up, the sky vanished in a green glistening of leaves that ate the light and changed it.

To the four-legged animals that populated the countryside, the tree and its pool of shade must have been a station stop, a cool watering hole without water, a pause in their journeys through the lean light of dusk and early morning. The tree was too close to the highway to be a permanent dwelling for them, but was it a landmark for foxes, coyotes, badgers? Did it say to them,
you're halfway to your sleeping
den?
Did a fox rub its cheeks on the scaly bark to let others know it had been here? When I touched it, the tree touched back. I inhaled its scent and let out my breath, so small compared to the massive lungwork of its leaves.

The cottonwood was the most important landmark outside the city limits. If you heard a kid say “Let's meet at the tree” to his buddies on the first spring day they hauled their bikes out of the basement, that was the one he meant, and everyone knew it. More than one graduating class cut out paper place cards in the cottonwood's mushroom shape to set on banquet tables in the school gym. Brides and grooms had their pictures taken there. You'd see the photographs a week after the wedding in the display window of Ogilvy's Photography on Central Avenue, the tree a living backdrop to the white dresses and dark suits; the bride's veil, thin as a leaf, teased by the wind.

Long before I was old enough to drive, I'd picnicked under the tree's branches with my friends. We'd make our own sandwiches out of my mom's homemade bread and Ona's mom's chokecherry jelly. Lynda would bring three Cokes from the machine at her dad's garage. We needed those Cokes—to get to the tree we had to climb the biggest hill outside town. At least once in the summer and the early fall, we pedalled from the valley our city nested in up into the sky before the highway slightly dipped, then levelled out and rose again. Three times we would get off our bikes and push, sweat drawing the dust to our skin. Black flies
BB
'd our faces until we coasted in the wind down the less steep incline on the other side, hoping to go fast enough to ascend the slight rise before the tree without needing to pedal any more.

Finally there, beach towels spread and our lunch unpacked, the cottonwood's huge presence curtained us from the cars and trucks whizzing past. We were invisible, as if we were hidden in a dense forest, as if we'd opened a door and stepped into another world like kids in a story. Above our heads the leaves chattered. On a blustery day, we lay under a green river's rush and roar. Even if the wind fell still, the leaves fluttered as if sensitive to the rising and falling of our voices.

We ate the sandwiches we'd packed, drank our Cokes and touched our cheeks and foreheads to the cool, shapely bottles. If it was fall, the leaves would be as gold as the foil on chocolate coins, and we'd hear wild geese passing overhead. For reasons we didn't know then, their flight filled us with longing. Did the geese look down at us? When they saw the tree in its splendid isolation, did they measure the distance they had yet to go before the southern marshes? Beneath their wings and melancholy calls, beneath the golden branches, we knew exactly where we were. Then, we didn't know how rare that was or what it meant. We didn't know how easily you can get lost once you move away from childhood.

Sometimes we watched a storm bluster in, lightning striding from the black horizon towards our small city. If we stood tall around the trunk, our backs pressed into the rough bark, we knew we'd stay dry, at least for the few minutes before rain found its way through the loose shingles of the leaves. Sometimes a half-ton would stop, the driver loading our bikes into the back as he gave us a lecture. A tree calls the lightning down, he'd scold. His warning made the tree more magical. In our minds its branches exploded into brilliance; zigzags of silver shot down the trunk and through the roots, then burst back into the sky, the tree fusing heaven and earth with a deadly brilliant seam.