Small Beneath the Sky (2 page)

Of the grasses, it is the wheat. At dusk, the golden heads ripe with seeds nod and dream they are that ancient glacial ocean, swelling and breaking, moon-pulled: you feel an undertow at the edges of the fields and want to go under. Seagulls drift above you, forever it seems, as if they'd been sent from the ark, and they're riding hunger and belief on currents of air. It's easy to imagine you could push off in a boat, wind at your back, going home by a sea that tosses and heaves, without a light to guide you.

Of the animals, it is the badger and the wolverine. They have met their match. They bare their teeth and the wind does not weaken or retreat. They dig in the earth and the wind dives in ahead of them. They bite and won't let go, but the wind can hang on longer. They know wind is the better hunter though they've never seen what it catches, what makes it thrive.

Of the human, it is a woman, though most of her kind hate it, will tell you how it drives them crazy on the farms. This one walks right into it, head lowered, thighs and calves working hard as if she's climbing, pushing the boulder of the wind with her shoulders and chest. There's an energy that gusts inside her; wind steals her soul, adds distance and desire, then gives it back. One woman bent into it, a flat country's Sisyphus, the wind rising. What lungs are capable of punching out such an exhalation, inexhaustible and lowly, blowing farther than any prairie eye can see?

common birds
of canada
  

T
HE MORNING
sun hammered the roofs of the stores along Central Avenue. I could smell the tar in the black
–
top, and my skin burned as if I stood too close to a stove with a roast in the oven. In spite of the heat, the two
RCMP
officers who led the Dominion Day parade wore their dress regalia, tan stetsons, black breeches and red serge jackets with tight collars that grazed their chins. The glare on their brass buttons made me blink.

Behind the Mounties on their regulation black mares rode a posse of local politicians and businessmen. They were decked out in cowboy boots and cowboy hats, some sitting as comfortably as Gene Autry about to burst into song, others slippery in the saddle, reins gripped so hard you could see their hands turning white. If we got lucky, this year's cavalcade would include a hockey player who'd gone on from the Swift Current Indians to an
NHL
farm camp. He'd be waving from a red convertible with a big Ham Motors banner covering each side.

Some distance behind the riders, so that the horses wouldn't spook, lumbered a life-sized black-and-white pinto made of steel. He clanked stiff-kneed between the float carrying the Ladies of the Nile and the flatbed truck of old-time fiddlers, who broke into the Red River Reel whenever the parade paused to let the entries in the rear catch up. As famous in our town as Trigger, the pinto was named Blow Torch. His mane of real horsehair gleamed. Smoke puffed from his nostrils every five minutes or so, and he let out a roar that came nowhere close to a whinny or a neigh. Everyone laughed and clapped as he clomped by. The clamour he made was like a grain bin collapsing in on itself in a high wind.

People referred to Blow Torch's creator, Mr. McIntyre Jr., as an inventor. He'd inherited McIntyre's Foundry from his father, and though some considered him eccentric, his construction of the mechanical horse made him even more of a celebrity than the mayor or the skip who'd almost won the Brier. Mr. McIntyre rarely accompanied Blow Torch in the parade, though. Usually it was a clown, maybe one of the bull wranglers from the rodeo, who held the reins to make sure the steel pinto didn't veer into the crowd.

My family could have walked the four blocks from our house on Fourth West to Central Avenue, but Dad didn't walk anywhere he could drive. He'd herded my mom, my brother and me into the car and parked as close as he could get. To watch the parade, we always stood in front of the Lyric Theatre near the middle of the route that passed rows of houses before the stores began. Swift Current's downtown was only three blocks long, but it boasted a second theatre, the Eagle, and three department stores: the Metropolitan, Christie Grant's and Cooper's. Cooper's was the only store that sold merchandise on two levels. Mom took me there once a year, and we climbed to the second floor to buy me a new pair of shoes. There were three cafés strung along the avenue, the Modern, the Venice and the Paris, and at the end of the street stood two hotels—the York and the Imperial. The third hotel, the Healy, was one block east.

The parade started on top of the hill by the elementary school, where the marshalls lined up the horses, the marching bands, the fire truck, the floats, the Shriners with their red scooters and toy train built out of tin and plywood, the waxed and polished police car, and the big new farm machinery from John Deere and International Harvester. If you looked down the six blocks of Central Avenue from that height, you could see all the way to the
CPR
station house at the end.

As people stood at the curb, alert for the police siren that would launch the spectacle, they dabbed sweat from their foreheads, sipped from Thermoses of coffee or bottles of pop and chatted about the weather, wondering if those black clouds rolling in from the west meant rain or if that was dust darkening the sky. Should the women make a quick trip home to close the windows and take down the washing from the line? Lots of farmers had driven in for the day, and Mom and Dad would always ask those nearby how many bushels to the acre they expected this year and how many weeks till harvest. Had anyone got hail out their way? Were the dugouts filling up after last week's rain? Impatient with the wait, kids and some adults would step into the street and peer up the hill to see if anything was moving. For the parade and the rodeo we'd go to later, I always wore my red felt cowboy hat with the wooden toggle that made the rope short enough to snug under my chin.

Tommy Ham, the father of my best friend, Lynda, owned the Chrysler dealership in town. I looked forward to waving at him as he trotted by on his big palomino. When he spotted me and my parents, I hoped he'd doff his white cowboy hat and sweep it high above his head. For the first few years, I couldn't understand why my father wasn't on a horse alongside him. After all, when my dad was a kid, he'd raced a gelding named Tony in all the local fairs and won cash prizes he'd taken home to his father. I was impressed when he told me he got to keep some of the money for himself.

DURING THE WEEK
, my father drove a green, snub-nosed oil delivery truck with the words
Emerson Crozier
painted in white letters on the driver's door. The Pioneer Co-op paid him a wage to fill the tanks for the growing number of residents who had switched from coal to oil. We were the only family on our block who rented; our neighbours owned their houses. I wasn't sure what that meant, but I knew the distinction was important, especially to my mother, though she fancied up the inside of our house as best she could. Three pictures hung on the walls of our living room. Two were copper bas-reliefs Dad had won curling. One depicted a parrot in a palm tree and the other a covered wagon pulled by horses. The third picture, of a deer beside a lake with a mountain backdrop, was frame
–
less, painted on a piece of particleboard by a man who'd crossed the prairies in the early 1940s and set up his easel in the streets. Dad had bought it for two dollars outside the bar at the York Hotel.

The kids my age in the neighbourhood, including Lynda, went to kindergarten in the mornings. I didn't. In those days, you had to pay for it. My other best friend, Ona, who lived next door, was one year younger. Maybe because she and I still hung around together in the mornings, the absence of my other playmates didn't bother me much. The difference between us didn't show up until the first week of Miss Bee's grade 1 class at Central School. They could read the words our teacher wrote on the board and say them out loud. I could not.

I hadn't known I had a shortcoming in the area of books and letters. Along with a few pocket books with yellowed pages and the black Bible my mom received from the Anglican church when she first took communion, there were three hardcovers in the house—an ancient
Book of
Knowledge,
its pages as durable and thick as the cardboard inside a newly purchased shirt; Sir Walter Scott's
The Bride
of Lammermoor,
its corners chewed by mice; and the spine and covers, back and front, of Zane Grey's
The Code of the
West.
No one ever said what had happened to the rest of the book. The family library fit easily into a wooden apple crate turned to stand on end in the front hall. Inside it, Dad had nailed a shelf. The bottom level and three cardboard boxes along the wall were heaped with comic books. My brother, Barry, had the best collection of any of his friends. At the end of each month, he spent all his newspaper deliv
–
ery earnings at Bill Chew's on Central Avenue. It was every kid's dream of a corner store, stocked to the ceiling with racks of pocket books, magazines and comics. On the glass counter sat big-bellied jars of caramel milk bottles and hard globes of gum, strawberries with marshmallow centres and licorice cigars that blackened your teeth and tongue.

On Saturday mornings my brother's friends traded comics in our front hall. For that hour or two, the wide passageway filled with the smell of grubby eleven-year-old boys who'd come in from playing Dinky Toys in the dirt, bubblegum wadded in their cheeks like chewing tobacco. Their sales pitches and chatter were punctuated by pauses and pops as the bubbles expanded, then burst, a transparent pink skin covering their mouths and chins. As long as I was quiet, my brother let me watch as he and his buddies spread their treasures in front of them, the titles blaring from the boldly coloured covers. The best bargainer of them all, Barry would get three comics for every one he gave away.

Although he was seven years older and loved to tease, calling me “Turkey Dirt” in front of his haggling friends because of the freckles that dotted my face, my brother never denied me access to his stash of comics. Everything was there, from Superman and Archie to the Classics, which retold the great novels and myths on cheap paper in comic-book style. In those vibrant pages my poetry education began. Evident even to the youngest purveyor was the value of the succinct, densely packed narratives charged with words like
POW
!
SHEBANG
!
BAM
! When my brother shouted them out and pointed to them on the page, they detonated like the circles on the red narrow scroll I stole from him and pounded on the sidewalk with a stone; I dared not borrow his cap gun, even for the shortest time. The stories unrolled so effortlessly in sounds and pictures, I didn't miss not knowing the meaning of the other words on the page.

After the first few days of observing her new students, Miss Bee divided our class into four groups of readers: bluebirds, meadowlarks, sparrows and crows. I was placed in the last group, and Lynda became a bluebird. It didn't take a genius to figure out the difference. Bluebirds were so special that farmers like my uncles and grandfather built houses for them, nailing the small boxes to the fence posts along the fields. When a bluebird took flight, you'd have sworn a scrap of sky had grown wings, and they and the yellow-throated meadowlarks sang so beautifully it was as if someone had tossed a dipper of well water into the air, each drop a clear, bright sound. Even tough men like my dad and grandfather had to stop in their tracks to listen. Crows couldn't carry a tune. They cawed and cawed; something stuck in their throats, and they had to cough it up. They flapped through the air like tar shingles torn loose by the wind. On the ground they walked stiffly, as if they'd had polio like Jimmy Coglin up the street and their legs were caged in metal braces. If too many of them gathered in town, the city sent out a man to shoot them.

Sitting with a group of crows in the classroom, stum
–
bling over the words in our reader, was not where I wanted to be. I felt no anger at Miss Bee for her lack of subtlety, only disappointment in myself for being stupid. From my desk, I stared at the letters of the alphabet. Along the top of the blackboard, they marched in a row from A to Z, as unstoppable and unreadable as a line of warrior ants.

Every morning, after we'd settled into our desks, Miss Bee walked down the aisles to check our palms and fingernails. On the bulletin board near the door she'd tacked two big hands. One was cut from white bristleboard, the other from black. If you passed her cleanliness test, she pinned your name, printed on a strip of paper, on the white hand. If you failed, she pinned your name on the black hand, and often that happened to me. Dirt loved my fingernails; it wormed under them even if I'd cleaned them on the way to school with a toothpick. Some of my classmates never got to move from the black hand to the white, and I felt sorry for them. They were the kids who didn't have the right kind of scribbler and whose crayons had worn down to nubs they could barely hold.

A few months into grade 1, I walked home after school with some new friends who lived a couple of blocks from my street. At the top of our alley, one of the girls pointed out my house, with its ramshackle garage, buckled back porch and junk-filled yard. “I wonder what poor people live there,” she said.

“Maybe it's the Thistlewaites,” the other girl replied.

The Thistlewaites were known to be on welfare. I'd seen the shack they lived in near the swimming pool. The six Thistlewaite kids came to school in old clothes that never fit, and they smelled bad, but once a week they spent money on candy. That I could never understand. We weren't on welfare, we weren't
that
hard up, yet Mom rarely gave me money for sweets.