Small Beneath the Sky (15 page)

Sometime in my late twenties, I called to ask Mom if I could wear her dress to an art gallery opening. She'd cut it up for cushion covers, she told me. I was stunned, even more so when I saw the cushions. She hadn't taken the time to sew a smooth seam in the covers, and rather than buy proper stuffing she'd bent and folded two old pillows into the corners. The cushions were lumpy and their colour didn't match anything in the room. Was she simply being thrifty? Was she sick of her dress and what it stood for?

I was never able to remember what I did with my own wedding dress. Surely I didn't leave it behind in the blue metal trunk Mom bought me when I turned eighteen and moved from home to go to university. Surely it didn't sit in the basement of the house I'd owned with my husband, waiting for him and his new wife to find it. He'd met her at the high school where he and I both once worked. She taught home economics and designed and sewed her gown by hand. People said it was a masterpiece, nothing like it in the stores.

My husband did one thing that made my parents partly understand why I'd had to leave him. In August, ten summers after that day in the Crawford guest room, I packed up my car and headed down the road to Winnipeg to be with Patrick, the man I'd later marry. At the end of September, my parents drove out to the acreage where my first husband still lived. They'd come to dig up the potatoes we'd let them plant that spring. It was a huge plot of earth, and as they pulled up to it in their car, they saw that the whole thing had been rototilled, the potatoes split into small pieces by the spinning blades. There was nothing left to harvest. For two farm people who'd survived the years of drought, there couldn't have been a surer sign of bad character.

If it's true that our spirits exist pre-birth in some kind of ether, looking down, I'm sure I chose my mother when I saw her in that dress, the material so plush it briefly held the strokes of fingers. In spite of the harshness of the setting, the failed crops and dust, I picked the prairies as my home because she lived there; I opened my eyes to the startling light pouring around her as she stood on the church's top step. Just before she walked through the door to stand by my father, did she look up and meet my gaze? Did she sense me then and draw me to her? From the day of her wedding, I waited for my time to live inside her, the velvet she had chosen the same colour as the dark water that would hold me ten years later in her womb.

first cause:
grass

COME TO LIFE
each spring, who knows more about being born again? Grass rolls on the earth, thrashes in the wind, speaks in tongues thin as a hummingbird's. Blue-eyed, Little Quaking, Prairie Wool, Brome. Grass could be Appalachian. In its country churches without doors and windows, without roofs, it charms the snakes. Limbless, they rasp through the stems. They belly-glide; then, sleepy as cats, they draw circle after circle and lie still. Lovers, too, recline in the meadow, believing grass douses their bright flare so no one can see them. In ditches and unscythed lots, children duck and whisper, hiding from the one who counts to ten. Prairie Satin, Fox Sedge, Wild Rye. You are grass's daughter, grass's son. It will never orphan you. Even as you wade through the lush creases of a coulee, burs and spears catching in your socks, it knots and thatches, becoming day by day the blanket that will warm you when you sink into the earth. Foul Manna, Needle Grass, Dropseed, Switch.

first cause:
gravel

BLUNT MATTER,
unambiguous. On its surface, no moss or lichen grows. Sun and rain can't make it glitter, nor wind coax it into music. Among its countless small, grey pieces, none are asking to be saved.

You can think of nothing more speechless yet less in need of speech, its inflections so flatly clear. There's no un-man-made, earthly thing more lifeless. So much of it, it's easy to forget once it was a mountain. Though you're on the level, on the grid, you're climbing cliffs of fall.

Nothing so resists pathetic fallacies. But being human, heading out alone, you can't ignore how it pulls like tides under tires, shifts and slides, seems unsettled. Hauled by truck from somewhere else, its need-to-go tremors the road, moving you as you move, neither of you able to return to where you started from.

What can you know of anything so unlike yourself, without eyes or feet, without a drop of liquid in what cannot be mistaken for a shell? It defies comparison or care. Say only it is commonplace, and everywhere a prairie road can go.

first cause:
horizon

IF YOU
could get remotely close, you'd shake like someone with St. Vitus, the energy so intense where sky slams into earth you'd burst into a dancing fire. There, the folios of Galileo disintegrate to ash: the horizon convinces you the Earth is flat. You watch the sun rise, arch across the sky. In the evening, you spin a semicircle to watch it fall. You walk and walk towards that straight line. It recedes, though nothing is more still or bears more resemblance to a destination, a meeting place where suitcases sit in a row across a marble floor, and passengers, with bare open faces, look for someone they once loved. Certain times of day, a freight train turns the horizon into something solid. Cars shift quickly from east to west, no bend or curve to snag the noisy zipper of wheels on steel tracks. You don't know if the horizon marks the end of earth and sky or their beginning, or if one rises from the other's death like luminescent bees lifting from a badger's shallow skull. Still, you try to get there. Every year, you're convinced you're closer than you were before.

the diamond ring

E
ARLY ONE
Sunday morning, my father called me in Saskatoon, where Patrick and I had been living for the past few years. At first I was afraid that something had happened to Mom—he never phoned me. “No,” he said, “she's okay, she's gone to church. I just need you to do something.”

The something he needed me to do turned out to be finding a jeweller in the city who would appraise a diamond ring. A diamond ring? He didn't own one. “Why don't you take it to Fowne's Jewellers in Swift Current?” I asked. “He's as good as anyone I can find here.”

There was a pause on the line, then, “I don't want anyone to know.”

My father had always had his eye out for a deal. Mom and I thought he'd have made a good junk dealer like Mr. Froese, who started out storing what looked like scraps and trash in his barn at the edge of town, then opened his own business and ended up rich. Dad loved nothing better than buying something cheap and selling it for a profit. Even my mother and I couldn't escape his innate delight in bargaining. If I wanted to go to a movie, for instance, he wouldn't give me what it cost outright. He'd start with a third of what I needed and force me to cajole and humour him, nickel by nickel, until I had the full twenty-five cents. Mom had to do the same thing when she asked for grocery money.

One of the best places to make a deal, shady or not, was in the local bars. Dad would come home with items like a fancy set of steak knives with horn handles, telling Mom they'd fallen off the back of a truck. The guy who'd sold them to my father just happened to be walking by as the truck rounded the corner. His most serious thievery was several yards of thin steel pipe he brought home from the oil fields and hid in the long crabgrass in our backyard. For weeks, Mom and I feared the police would show up at our door. “They were just sitting out there,” he told us. “It's not a crime to pick up something laying in the open.”

I had tried to explain the buyer-beware side of my father's character to Patrick, but somehow my warnings had missed the mark. In the early eighties, when I was a writer-in-residence at the local community college for a year, the two of us rented a house in Swift Current. Patrick asked Dad if he could find him a bargain on a second-hand car. It didn't take long for Dad to show up with a dirty-brown Ford, about eighteen years old, with a cracked dashboard and torn upholstery, the sponge padding pushing through. “She may not look so good, but she's got a good motor,” Dad said, “and the guy'll let you have her for four hundred bucks.” Patrick thought it a fair price and went to the bank so he could pay my dad in cash. We soon found out that the car burned oil, its muffler roared and rain leaked in from the upper top right of the driver's windshield. There was worse, however, to come.

I'd told Mom the cost of the car, and a couple of weeks later, she appeared at our door with money in her hand. She'd learned that my father had paid the former owner, one of his drinking buddies at the Legion, only $200. She insisted that Patrick take the difference from her. He was shocked. In his large family, no one would ever cheat an in-law. Mom and I weren't surprised. “It isn't personal,” I said. “It's just my father.” Without an ounce of guilt, Dad would have delighted in badgering the seller down, upping the price for Patrick and pocketing the profit as his commission. So what if he hadn't told the whole story? It was money well earned. Patrick didn't know how to barter—he'd have paid top dollar anyway—and the car wasn't so bad, was it? Everyone was a winner.

Now we had to contend with my father's strange phone call and something about a diamond ring. Where had he got it? I wondered. Was he finally going to be arrested? “Mom and I'll drive to Saskatoon next weekend, okay? You have someone lined up. And don't say anything to her. We're just coming to see you.”

There was no way my mother would believe a visit initiated by my father didn't have an ulterior motive. He was a terrible guest. He'd start fidgeting and biting his nails before he even stepped in the door. Our house was too cold for him, we ate too late—sometimes near six o'clock—we wouldn't watch wrestling on
TV
, and he never liked the food I put on the table. Then there'd be the sitting around trying to carry on a conversation. He rarely had anything to say. And when we were all there, in the same room, everyone noted how many beers he'd drunk.

By the time my parents had made the three-hour drive to Saskatoon, Mom had wheedled the story out of him and wanted nothing to do with it. She didn't want me to get involved, either. Patrick, still not understanding my father, agreed to take him to the appraiser I'd found in the Yellow Pages. But he'd only do it if Dad filled us in before they left.

My father had always been a superior athlete. When he was a kid he pitched softball to win district tournaments, and he'd raced horses at the rural sports days. After he and Mom moved to town, both of them became champion curlers. Even half-cut, my father would almost always win. He'd grin as he walked into the house after the yearly bonspiel, carrying trophies and lamps, copper-pounded pictures, plastic
TV
tables, a chrome kitchen suite or a box of frozen beef. Once he won a quarter of a car. When he phoned from Lloydminster to tell us, Mom and I jumped up and down on their bed, holding hands and screaming. Nothing that wonderful had ever happened to us.

The eye-and-hand coordination that made my father a champion on the ice transferred to the pool tables in the pubs. Few could beat him. It seemed to make sense, then, when he suggested to the Legion that he buy their two pool tables. They'd been thinking of moving the tables out. No one wanted to take care of them, and the green felt was getting shabby. In exchange for the money he collected for the games, Dad agreed to give the Legion 10 per cent of the take and keep the felts and cues in good condition. Every Saturday morning, before the bar opened for business, he went in to empty the metal coin boxes, clean the tables and brush the felt. A few days before his phone call to me, he'd found a man's diamond ring tucked in the bottom of one of the pockets.

“Ask him if he knows who it belongs to,” my mother said in the kitchen as she unpacked the loaves of bread she had baked and brought from Swift Current.

“Will you get off my back!”

Dad did know. He'd seen the ring on the hand of a loud-mouthed cattle buyer who'd stop in Swift Current on his regular rounds for one of Medicine Hat's meat-packing plants. Because he wasn't a local, keeping the ring, at least until Dad could figure out its value, seemed reasonable. Besides, the man had never mentioned he'd lost it, and he was a braggart, always exclaiming that Alberta was better than Saskatchewan. On top of that, he was a poor loser. He'd look right at Dad and complain about the lie of the pool tables, and he'd never buy the winner a beer.

While Mom and I started supper, Patrick drove Dad to a little jewellery store on the seedy side of Twentieth Street, an area where I thought few questions would be asked. On the phone, the owner had seemed competent but not suspicious. He said he'd been in the business for fifty years and knew what things were worth. I had no idea how to handle what could be called “hot stuff.” This was the best I could do.

Dad was sure the ring was worth a couple of thousand at least. Several small stones surrounded the one in the middle, which was the size of a kernel of corn. Dad had asked Patrick to take him to the store just before closing, when no other customers would be around. Once inside, my father, a cross between cocky and sly, walked right up to the man in the back who was working on a watch, a magnifying glass pinched over one eye. With no explanation, Dad plunked the ring on the table. The watch repairman must have been the owner; he was an older, weary-looking man, Patrick said, and he was alone.

“What could a guy get for a ring like this?” Dad said, acting casual.