Small Beneath the Sky (4 page)

I was so pleased with the poem that I'd printed it with a fountain pen on a clean piece of paper, and Mom suggested I take it to Miss Bee. Not only did my teacher post it on the bulletin board, but she asked me to recite it for the class. And at recess, rather than sending me outside to play with the other kids, she took me to the principal's office, where I read the poem to Mr. Lewis. He was a tall, formidable man, but we'd seen another side of him when he'd performed in front of the whole school in the gym at the last assembly before the Christmas holidays. On a chair, alone on the stage, he mimed eating popcorn at a movie. You could tell when the action was exciting because he ate his popcorn faster and faster, finally slapping himself in his moustached mouth and knocking himself off the chair. It was one of the funniest things any of us had ever seen, especially because Mr. Lewis's dignified, no-nonsense demeanour usually scared us, whether we were six or fourteen, into our best behaviour.

Everyone believed my tale about Tiny's death and showered me with pity and concern. I didn't want to admit the poem was a lie, so I humbly thanked them for their sympathy. Lynda, who knew the real story, kept quiet. Maybe she thought if I read the poem often enough the mean little dog who nipped at her heels really would fall over dead. By and by, we'd meet Tiny above the clouds, where angelic dogs lay down with ducks and chickens and never growled or bit.

the drunken
     
horse

O
N BOTH
sides of my family there was a penchant for drink and horses. My Welsh maternal grandfather brought the two together. Grandpa Ford's father was a wagoner, working on an estate just north of the border near the town of Shrewsbury, where, my grandmother said, the church was round so the devil couldn't corner you. From the time he walked straight-backed out of school in grade 4 because the teacher wrongly accused him of cheating, my grandfather worked every day beside his father, taking care of the horses and driving wagons back and forth from the fields to town. He was allowed to ride one of the draft horses if he wanted to go off on his own after the farm work was done. The gelding he chose was a Shire named Billy, seventeen hands high and an uncommon grey with white feathered fetlocks above hooves that spread wide as platters on the ploughed fields.

When Grandpa reached drinking age, he and Billy made nightly trips to the local pubs. Luckily for him, my grand-father was a singer, and inside, at a table near the window, he bartered a song for his first pint. Perhaps he wasn't melodious enough to get a second or a third sent his way. Those were provided by Billy. It worked like this: my grandfather didn't allow himself to down his first beer. He had to have faith, like the thirsty man who primes the pump by pouring a ready bucket of water down the top, believing the sacrifice will pay off in a fresh stream gushing from the spout. When Grandpa raised his pint, Billy, tied up outside, would poke his head through the open window and guzzle the beer, his master feigning surprise and outrage. The patrons were so delighted they kept the drinks coming for the man and the horse until closing time, when the two would stumble home in the dark. Grandpa said he didn't know who was the shakier on his legs. Some nights he thought he'd have to carry Billy on his back.

The story of the drunken horse sat side by side with my mother's tales of her father's strictness and pride, his meanness to her and her six siblings on their Saskatchewan farm. Mom and five of the other children were born in Canada. Two, including a boy who died when he was six and my Auntie Glad, who would be a trouble to my mother all their lives, had been born in Wales before the family emigrated in 1913. Grandpa didn't say much in later years about the adjustment to a new country, except to call the immigration recruitment officers lying bastards. By the time he arrived in the West, there was no free land left to homestead. For twelve years, he worked as a hired hand and laboured on the railroad until he could purchase a section in southwest Saskatchewan from an American land speculator. Grandpa was allowed to spread the cost over several years by making a payment, with interest, after every harvest.

The Canadian recruiters sent to the Old Country had lied as well about the Edenic beauty and temperateness of the West. In history class, I learned they'd been forbidden to use the word
cold
in their advertisements. The weather was instead
invigorating, healthful, fresh.
Grandpa told us that the posters hung in the village shops and the post office showed pictures of blonde, Nordic-looking women bearing apples, grapes and huge vegetables, including pumpkins and gourds, in their arms. They offered their bounty with open, smiling faces under wide-boughed, oaklike trees, golden wheat fields rolling to the soft blue sky behind them. On the hardscrabble land where Grandpa ended up to raise his family, there was barely a stick of wood in sight, let alone an apple tree, and only a few basic vegetables had time to ripen before the frost. The blue of the sky was also different. It was unrelenting—a hard, no-nonsense colour impossible to romanticize. There was no way to match its gaze or change its mind.

I never heard my grandfather talk about the first people who'd lived for centuries on the land he claimed to own. Perhaps it was easier for him to be silent about the thieving, racism and heartbreak that had opened up the prairies for settlement. I didn't see any Cree, Sioux or Blackfoot people in the countryside or in the small towns of the district. They'd been driven out, exiled to reserves to the west and south. All that was left of them in their ancient hunting grounds were teepee rings on the top of a coulee and the rare arrowhead turned up by ploughing.

My grandfather's toughness got him through hard times in a hard country, but it spilled over to the way he treated his children. When my mother was five, she was sent to a farm about ten miles down the road, to “help out.” She was allowed to visit her family only a few times a year, and she didn't see any money for her work. If cash changed hands, it must have gone to her father. She moved back home when she started high school, and she was happier then, but if she didn't do the chores exactly as her father wanted, or came home late from a dance in the town hall, he'd go after her with a willow switch, slashing at her bare legs as she squirmed on her belly into the farthest corner under the bed. He treated her two sisters the same. He bullied my grandmother, too, her fear of his outbursts keeping her anxious and alert. No matter what her tasks in the kitchen, she stayed close to the window so she could rush out the door when she saw him coming down the road with his team of horses. She ran to the gate, swung it open and stepped to the side. Sitting tall and imperial on the wagon seat, he drove through, and she closed the gate, sliding the loop of wire over the post and into the satiny groove the wire had worn. He never looked back or spoke to her. How could that be the same man who showed me how to make a whistle from a caragana pod, who let me ride with him on the tractor seat, who loved to talk of Billy?

Though he'd mellowed in old age, his daughters and his wife, still wary of his temper, tried to keep me and my cousins from getting in Grandpa's way. Often when the family gathered at the farm for holidays and celebrations, he'd retreat to the barn to curry the wide backs and haunches in the stalls or haul hay to the feed troughs, the animals swinging their massive heads to watch him lift forkfuls of dry grass. The qualities the Shire draft horse was bred for—endurance and willingness to work—were also his.

Bitterness intact, my grandfather pounded home to anyone who'd listen his hatred for school and teachers, told me to pinch a dog's ear to make it obey, to hit a horse if it didn't behave, and to down a healthy dose of castor oil to clean a body out in spring. His shenanigan with Billy was the only complete story I heard him tell. It showed a warmth he rarely revealed, a sweet affection for a creature that was more to him than just a beast that pulled a plough or wagon.

When I asked my mother why I so seldom saw my grandfather smile, she paused, then said, “Maybe we're each given a certain amount of pleasure we can take from life.” The measure the blessèd receive is enough to fill a water tower. In my grandfather's case, his limit was a dipperful. Picturing Grandpa and his horse, the two of them weaving their way down that narrow country road under stars unwashed by city lights, I imagined them come safely to their rest in the barn's close scent of hay and horses, a rest companionable, bone-deep and brief.

milk leg

G
RANDMOTHER CROZIER
lived in the smallest house I'd ever seen. At age seventy, she'd moved from the farm into the town of Success, just ten minutes away. Her house was like something from a fairy tale that ended badly, but it was a blessing of sorts, because she had trouble getting around. One of her legs, the right one, was swollen to two or three times its normal size. Milk leg, my mother called it, and I savoured those words like a dirty secret from the schoolyard:
milk leg.
I tried not to stare. I imagined her lisle stocking full of thick, creamy liquid, sloshing when she walked like the cow's milk in the tin pail she used to carry to the house from the barn, the cats with their ears and tails clipped by frost following behind.

We didn't see much of her, because she'd left the farm to her younger son while the elder one, my father, who'd quit school at thirteen because he was needed at harvest and seeding, inherited nothing. He never got over that, Grandma leaving him out as if she hadn't held him to her breast, told him stories and, like every mother, waited for his first step, his first word, his bright seeing of the world. No one could come up with a reason why she'd done such a thing. In later years, my mother and I wondered whether my dad would have kept away from the booze if he'd been able to stay on the land. Farming suited him. He loved the solitude and the grandeur of nothing but the sky ahead and all around him as he drove a tractor back and forth across a field, no one but the weather to boss him around, no one but the sun to tell him when to start or stop. Like most farmers, he was a master of tools and engine parts. His other skill was more rare. Neighbours called on him when a horse or a dog needed to be put down and they couldn't bring themselves to pull the trigger. My father was a good shot. One bullet would do the job fast and clean, and such killing never bothered him. Sometimes he'd be paid with a case of beer, other times with a handshake or something the wife had made, a flapper pie or a sealer of canned chicken, the meat encased in jelly.

After the loss of the farm, nothing turned out right for my father. It was the end of the thirties, and he and my mother lived in a cook car abandoned by the
CPR
on the outskirts of Success. It was better than the homestead shack they'd squatted in just after their wedding. They whitewashed the walls of the cook car and moved in a metal bed and an old folding table with two mismatched chairs. Dad put a shelf in the middle of an apple crate turned sideways and nailed four legs to the bottom. It was Mom's first dresser. Across the front, she tacked a yellow satiny curtain that pulled back and forth on a string.

Dad helped with the combining and pounded fence posts for Shorty Turnbull, his brother-in-law, who owned a farm too big to manage on his own. After the crops were off the fields, Dad shovelled grain for a dollar a day at the Pool elevator, his saliva black with dust. The jobs were never enough to pull him and Mom out of poverty. When she was pregnant with my brother, she'd knock on the back door of the nearby Chinese café. Cookie, whom Dad had befriended, would give her a bowl of chop suey and a piece of banana cream pie if there was any left over from the day. That's why my brother grew so big and strong, she liked to say. When my parents moved from the train car to Swift Current, thirty miles away, Cookie gave my father a cleaver with an old wooden handle he'd brought with him from China. It was one of the few heirlooms in our family.

After my brother's birth, Dad sold their only cow to pay the hospital bill. One Christmas, he went alone into the country at thirty below with a rifle and shot a coyote, whose hide he sold for five bucks at Western Hide and Fur. He'd set out on foot and was gone so long Mom was afraid he wouldn't come back. The kill bought not only two Dinky Toys for my brother, a tin jack-in-the-box for me and a can of lily of the valley talcum powder that made Mom smell sweet for months, but a bag of oranges that came all the way from somewhere else. On his right hand, frost had bitten his fingers, and they ached in the cold from that day on.

By the time I was in elementary school, Grandma Crozier had become a Mormon. All I knew about her new religion was that she couldn't drink coffee or tea but instead sipped hot water poured from the kettle she kept on the back of the wood stove. Sometimes she'd look straight at me and issue a strange warning: if I ate too many Fudgsicles, I'd lose my hair. Since I wasn't particularly fond of them, I puzzled over the meaning of her words. Maybe once I'd brought one into her house and let it drip on her floor. Maybe she'd seen me suck the melting chocolate with too much pleasure.

We never went into her tiny bedroom in the back. During our visits, we perched on the edge of the camp bed in the room that served as both living room and kitchen, or we stood near the stove and fridge. A big man with his arms spread could have touched both walls. He'd have had to stoop so his head wouldn't brush the ceiling. I could never remember what we talked about. Grandma probably asked, “How's school,” as every adult did, but I wouldn't have told her anything. In the only chair, her swollen leg propped on a stool, she swallowed water with no colour and no flavour, warming something cold inside.