Small Beneath the Sky (12 page)

One year I drove to the tree a few days after Christmas. It had been a bad holiday—Dad out of work again, Mom weary with worry. Its branches bare, in the falling snow the tree looked lonely. I wondered if, like me, it longed for companionship, for the moon to rest on its bare shoulders, for the red-tailed hawk to preen in its highest branch. When the wind tumbled through its boughs, was the tree less alone? Did it feel a presence, warm-blooded and comforting, when an animal curled against its trunk in the night? I wondered what it made of me as I stood beneath it.

Ordinary yet remarkable, the two of us were the only upright things for miles. Beyond us on all sides, fields unrolled their bolts of white, nubbed cloth to the darkening horizon. Now that the cold had come and the leaves had fallen, the tree had stopped talking. Its branches bore the blue star-silence of the snow.

first cause:
insects

flies

Surely they're the shrewdest. The ones who started it all, needing light to pull them from the cold, warm their blood so they could do the thing they're named for. There is nowhere you can't find them. In outhouses on the farms they're big as marbles and just as shiny. In the kitchens of fancy restaurants, in garbage dumps, in pastures, in huge cathedrals where no one blesses them, they wash their faces before and after every meal. Their gaze is ancient and compounded, going back before the Fathers who set down rules in books. That buzz they make, think of it as the only song that lasts forever, the one the whole world knows in the darkest chamber of the heart.

grasshoppers

They come instead of rain, but they rain down, fill buckets and troughs and flood the ground, green and slippery underfoot. You'd think their mouths were full of teeth, so noisy their jaws when they chew. In their leaps from place to place there is nothing more graceful, more dolphin-like. The farmers have laid out a feast for them across the fields. Absent for a year or two, they return, prodigal, and there are lamentations and the pulling out of hair amidst the demented clicking of their wings. Arrogant and regal, they have been inside a pharaoh's head; they have been a pharaoh's dreams.

dragonflies

Of every insect's relationship with time, the dragonfly's is most exquisite. On Earth before the dinosaurs, the golden ones are from Byzantium, fashioned to be gilded spokes on the wheels of a machine that measures the integers of what gets lost. No matter what their colour, they're lovers in the air, the male on top clasping her neck, his long body arched and curved, and she keeps flying. Passionate, of course, yet elegant and austere. You've seen the carapaces they leave, that they crawl out of to unfold in the sun their new transparent wings to dry. Few insects are slimmer; few more eloquent. The sound they make above the slough, among the bulrushes, is like the watch of your beloved when he drapes his forearm across your shoulders and falls asleep.

miller moths

Nothing to commend them, unlike the luna or hawk or white-lined sphinx. Miller moths are the colour of dirt. The length of your thumb, they've broken off from clods of summerfallow and grown the dull, ponderous wings that heave them through the air. No one would mistake them for butterflies or angels. Gravity's insect, they seek you out. Who knows how they get in, but they blunder into your room, batter the window behind the blind, land on your pillow with a small thud and crawl into your hair. Their dust bears no resemblance to pollen or the finest flour sifted on a pastry board. Across the wall and counterpane, they drag their wings and leave a grimy smudge, dust with some oil in it, close to what we must become.

mosquitoes

She gives you ample warning. Singular or in a swarm, her insistent whine cannot be mistaken for anything else. She makes you slap yourself hard and fast, like an angry parent might. She shrinks your geography, limits where you walk; every patch of grass becomes a bad neighbourhood, the lights shot out, engines revving. At night, when you think you are alone, her feet land among the hairs of your arm with the lightness of an eyelash. When you feel the bite, it's too late. Small airy thief, she has broken in, stolen what she came for. Warm inside now, she rides the updrafts, flies to open water where she'll lay her eggs, her need assuaged, her promise fulfilled. You, great provider, who hoard what you could freely give, feel only irritation and the beginning of an itch.

ants

We should be lighting candles around their mounds; we should be writing psalms and offering bread and sugar.

When the soil is frozen and the gravediggers can't bury the dead, they are life continuing, sleepless in their deepest nests below the frost line. They tunnel under your feet, excavate chambers for their many mansions. One mind, they seem, that never stops thinking. Pulled from the dark after the thaw, pouring from the ground with particles of clay clamped between their jaws, they carry the underworld into the glare; bit by bit, without reward or glory, they recreate the Earth.

a very
personal thing

O
NE OF THE BEST
things about the move to our new neighbourhood, according to my mother, was that Lynda and I would be out of touch. Lynda was what Mom called “boy crazy.” I knew that wasn't fair, but there was no arguing with her. Lynda had matured fast physically, and by grade 7 had started to run with her sister's crowd, two years older. In the summer between grades 8 and 9 I'd gone for a ride with her, her boyfriend, George, and George's friend. It was the closest thing to a date I'd ever had. George parked at the dam south of town, and he and Lynda slid together on the front seat and started necking. In the back, the other boy kissed me, which I liked, then touched my breast. I didn't know what to do. Lynda and I had talked about how we didn't want to be like the girls shunned by the popular kids in town. Those girls hung around the bus depot café, and most of them had dropped out of school to be carhops at the Dog 'n' Suds or to clean rooms at the motels along the highway.

Even when we were kids, boys looked at Lynda differently. Their gaze would skim over my head and rest on her, and there was a look in their eyes I had no word for. Lynda had always been tall and gangly. Our parents used to call us Mutt and Jeff; she had the legs of a colt and I, the legs of an Irish potato-digger. Often in play I'd hold my arms out to her, my hands clasped together as if in prayer, and she'd grab me by the wrists and swing me around. Sometimes she dropped me to the ground without warning and gravel studded my knees.

One afternoon soon after Lynda's eighth birthday, as we bounced her new rubber ball back and forth on the sidewalk, she told me she knew something I didn't. It happened only to women, she said, and it was happening to her right now. Her mother had made her promise not to tell me, and so she couldn't say more. At the supper table that night, I brought it up. “What did she mean?” I asked. I could tell by the silence around the table that I'd stepped into dangerous territory. My brother dug into his potatoes. My father reached for another pork chop. My mother threw me a warning look and said I should mind my own beeswax.

Four years later, when it was time for me, Mom gave me a booklet she'd ordered from Kotex called
You're a Young
Lady Now.
On the cover a blonde, pigtailed girl in blue jeans gazed into her bedroom mirror; a “young lady” with her hair down and wearing a mauve party dress smiled back at her. Inside the back cover was a special 1960 calendar, where a girl, every month, could make an all-important X
.
Girls were advised in one caption to “Stay Neat and Sweet.” That section suggested bathing once a day, something never done in my family. We'd always had renters, and there was only one bathtub to be shared among seven people. Another headline decreed, “Keep Fresh as a Daisy.” The booklet warned that even a girl's perspiration smelled stronger during that time of the month.

Though the Kotex company assured the reader menstruation was a natural part of growing up, it went on to chide, “It's a very personal thing, so you won't want to discuss it with anyone else except your mother, school nurse, or advisor.” It was obvious my mother didn't want to discuss it. My only contact with the school nurse had been to line up with my classmates in the elementary school gym for booster shots for mysterious diseases, and I couldn't even imagine what an “advisor” might look like. No wonder Lynda, dying to tell me, had promised her mother not to breathe a word.

In our fifth year of elementary school—two years after Lynda had reached puberty—the Eagle Theatre began a special four o'clock double feature of rerun movies. Every Friday, Lynda and I ran from our classroom and down Central Avenue so we wouldn't be late. It was okay with our mothers as long as we stuck together and didn't stay for the second show. If they'd known some of the movies were about vampires and Frankenstein's monster, they wouldn't have let us go. On winter nights we'd run the five blocks home from streetlight to streetlight, stopping in the glowing circles and blowing out our breath visible in the cold, pretending we were smoking cigarettes in long ebony holders. If we didn't reveal our fear, we thought, the pale, hungry monsters hiding between the houses wouldn't nab us.

During a Ma and Pa Kettle movie on a May afternoon, we waited in sweet anticipation for the pigs to get drunk on Pa's moonshine, which had puddled in the barnyard after his still blew up. We were sunk in our seats a couple of rows from the front, our heads tilted back so we could see the screen, when two older boys we didn't know sat down behind us. There weren't many people in the theatre, and no one else so close to the screen. They could have sat anywhere, and when they stood up again and headed down their row to the aisle, we felt relieved. Before we could do anything, though, one pushed by Lynda and sat beside me, the other dropped into the seat next to her. We tried to get up, but the boys held us down with one hand and with the other grabbed at our chests and between our legs, laughing. I pushed my elbows into my sides so the boy leaning into me couldn't get under my T-shirt. “You're lucky you got that one,” he said to his friend. “This one doesn't have any titties.”

Lynda and I didn't shout or fight. Like two cornered animals, we were shocked into silence. It was the boys' laughter that brought the usher to our row with his flashlight. When he shone it on us, Lynda and I leaped up, bolted down the aisle and out the back exit. Daylight slapped our faces. We ran the block to Ham Motors, where we locked ourselves in the women's bathroom. For half an hour, we sat on the floor by the sink, then we snuck from the garage and scurried home. We knew better than to tell our mothers. We still went to the movies every Friday after school, but now we took the seats closet to the aisle, in rows near other kids. We never saw the boys again.

Lynda and I did drift apart when we started high school. It wasn't something either of us planned. But there were two sections of grade 9, and we were placed in different rooms. I'd chosen Latin and she, typing; the choice separated one group from another. On top of that, Lynda hung around with a gang of older kids who had dropped out of school. I was dating boys my own age and trying hard not to be “bad.” That didn't mean I wasn't interested in sex. I felt terribly conflicted about what I wanted to do and what I
should
do in the narrow darkness of a car parked in places the streetlights didn't reach. The common spots were the dam; the gravel pit, with its hills of crushed stone; and, in spring and summer, the big parking lot behind the curling rink. No one but the most absurd romantic would have called these places lovers' lanes.

Not that it mattered. The trysts themselves were not the source of my teenage delight. The fun and sexual buzz were most delicious in the hour or so of getting ready for a date—the pink of the powder puff dusting my skin, the satiny cold cream rubbed on each toe and up my calves to the top of my thighs, the backcombing, the hairspray, the quick dab of Evening of Paris in the hollow of my neck, the tiny samples of lipstick tubes from Avon lined up on the dresser, their names full of promise: Ravishing Red, Candy Kiss, Peach Delight.

The boy who came to pick me up was never the debonair figure of my dreams. In his dad's car he'd be overly insistent and awkward, hasty and sometimes sloppily sentimental. It wasn't his eyes or hands I had preened for. No: what saved the evening were the other boys, boys whose gazes I'd catch at the movie, the Country Club Café or one of the Teen Town Friday dances, boys I knew only distantly or not at all. Among them there must be one who was waiting for me, a stranger from another town who would change my life forever.

Lynda's life changed forever much faster than mine did. In grade 10 she suddenly disappeared from school. It was generally agreed the worst thing that could happen to a girl and her family was an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. If her parents could afford it, the girl was sent to a home, though everyone pretended she was visiting an aunt in the city. When there was no extra money for room and board in Regina, Moose Jaw or Saskatoon, the girl's shame grew with her belly, if she dared to show herself in the streets.

On a cold morning in March, I saw Lynda at the drugstore, dabbing perfume on the inside of her wrist. She wore a long, baggy jacket, and she looked sad. “You've probably heard,” Lynda said. “I'm not going away. I'm going to keep the baby.”

No one her age in Swift Current had done that before. “Are you going to live at home?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Murray and I are going to get married next month and find our own place. My parents will help us out till he can get a better job.”