Small Beneath the Sky (7 page)

For hours, my cousins Diane and Lou-Anne and I would sweep and decorate and make tea in an abandoned wooden granary we'd turned into a playhouse. There were no windows, but we'd nailed a thrown-out curtain on the wall to make a pretend one, and we kept the small door open. We had our own fly swatter, its rubber flap cracked and limp, and a curled, sticky ribbon hung from the ceiling. You couldn't tell what colour the ribbon had been originally. Now it was black with old dead flies.

Uncle Lyn stored a rusted pot-bellied stove inside the granary. With its detached tin chimney pipe it took up most of the room, but it was perfect for the imaginary meals we cooked for the imaginary crew that came at harvest time. We saved Black Magic boxes from Christmas and patted mud into the pleated paper cups to make chocolates. Several times we coaxed Diane and Lou-Anne's youngest brother to eat one, and he didn't even make a face. There was always a barn cat begging to be fed, a different one each summer, sometimes with the tip of an ear torn off by another cat, its fur ragged. We'd tame the cat enough to come inside and lick cream from an old saucer with the pattern worn off, but it would never let us pet it.

My favourite part of the day was the killing of the chicken for Sunday supper. Nothing that bloody or exciting took place at our house in town. Grandma would pick out the bird she wanted from the hen coop, and Grandpa would grab it around the wings, flop it onto the chopping block and cut off its head with a hatchet, leaving the neck intact. The cousins and I leaped back to avoid the spurting blood while the chicken flapped madly around the yard, almost flying. Grandma told us the bird was trying to carry its own soul up to its maker. She often said funny things like that. She'd been born in what they called the Old World, in her case Wales, and she'd passed on a lot of superstitions to her children. On New Year's Day, for instance, a woman couldn't be the first person to walk through the door or your household would be cursed. A shoe left on a table at any time of the year brought bad luck to the owner of the house. Though Grandma never mentioned the effects of getting splattered red by a headless chicken, I thought that would surely be the worst, a hex that could last a lifetime. That didn't worry my boy cousins, who ran after the chicken till it skidded to a stop in the dust and fell down dead.

By then, my two other aunts and their husbands had arrived at the farm. Once they'd greeted one another and talked about the weather, all the men, including my dad, left the house to “check the crops.” Uncle Lyn always said this with a big grin. He was the youngest of Mom's siblings, and he acted goofy and boyish when Grandpa was around. Uncle Lyn was the only one who paid attention to me and my cousins in our playhouse. Sometimes he'd stop by for tea, pouring golden whiskey into his cup from a mickey tucked in his overalls and sticking out his little finger as he gripped the handle to make us laugh.

Once the men had gone outside, the women got to work in the kitchen. Auntie Glad, the oldest of Mom's sisters, told Grandma to sit at the table. “Get off your feet for a while,” she said in her bossy voice. “We can do this without you.” I sat beside Grandma because Auntie Glad, who didn't have kids herself, hated it when her nieces or nephews got in the way. My Aunt Kitty, who, according to Mom, had got the best of everything when they were kids, scalded the chicken in a big pot of hot water on the wood stove to loosen the feathers. The sisters took turns plucking, then pulled out the pinfeathers. Mom passed the naked bird over the flames that sparked and hissed from the stove's open burner to singe the hairs. The smell in the kitchen reminded me of the time my brother had burned the hairs on his arm with a cigarette lighter, only worse. It was hard to imagine that the roasting chicken would soon smell so good.

The best part of all came next. My mom and my aunts, for no reason I could understand, gave me first dibs to clean out the inside of the chicken. My cousins thought I was the crazy city kid, but I didn't care. I loved reaching my hand inside the warm hen and pulling out the slippery package of intestines, gizzard, heart, liver and sometimes, if I was lucky, a string of small, translucent eggs, pale yellow and firm between the fingers but without the hard shell.

After supper, before we left for home, I'd sometimes go with Grandma to lock the chickens in for the night. I let her herd them on her own from the run into the coop, swinging her apron in front of her. I didn't get too close; there was one hen who'd tried many times to peck the freckles on my ankles. Grandma raked out the old straw, and I helped her scatter the new. She let me toss yellow seeds from a burlap sack onto the dirt floor. I jumped back as the hens rushed towards the feed. Outside the coop, Grandma closed and snibbed the door. “Sleep tight, girls,” she said.

Grandma walked back to the house after that, but I stayed behind until the hens had finished eating, staring through the screen that covered half the door to let in the fresh night air. Some of the hens seemed to hover in the dusk of the coop. I knew they were perched, but I couldn't make out the rafters. Their feathers seemed brighter than during the day, as if a flashlight had caught one after another in its electric eye. The smell was almost indescribable: a whiff of wet feathers, though they were dry now; dust that had tufted from their feet when they'd pecked the seeds; an acrid pungency from the white droppings that spotted the floor. Every few seconds there'd be a soft cluck, then silence, and a sound close to whispering. What was the secret they were sharing?

It would be a few years before I sat in squirmy silence with the other grade 8 girls to watch a film about “human reproduction.” We learned there were eggs inside our bodies too, so small most of us would never get to see them. Were they as beautiful, I wondered, when magnified and held up to the light? Watching the dust motes flicker in the projector's beam, I dreamed myself back to my grandmother's kitchen, my hand warm with blood as I pulled from the hen the necklace of tiny eggs, singular and lovely as amber beads. How I longed for something as exquisite inside me.

first cause:
rain

THERE'S RARELY ENOUGH
of it, though in a deluge it floods basements and roads and barns and crops and a city underpass where once a woman, trapped in her car, drowned on a day that began with blue skies and no weather warning. It can be a malevolent mercy, keeping a farmer off the field for half a season; a hard baptism, dropping crystal pebbles on your skin, flattening the ripened crops, the most bountiful in twenty years. It can be lifted up by wind, come at you horizontal or fall half-way, then evaporate and never hit the ground. The name for that is
virga.

Rain takes any mood you want to give it: sadness or grief or exaltation or the longing for a lover far from home. For all its noise, it has never had its own language. It sounds only when it strikes, a mynah bird calling its notes from tin Quonsets, wooden shingles on a shed, wolf-willow leaves, the hoods of slickers, car roofs, the glass of skyscrapers, the canvas of a tent, water running or standing still. For centuries on the plains, it has made the people dance. It has made them stamp the ground like bison, lift their faces to the sky and build the fires they call rain down to douse.

first cause:
snow

SNOW FALLS
slowly in memory. It is tentativeness given form and temperature, seeming again and again to hesitate, not knowing what lies below, whether the surface will be slippery or smooth, level or steep, a hillside, a field of purple clover, an open mouth. The snowflakes fall and lift, then fall again, the first ones melting as they touch the ground. Those that follow retain their shapes, remain as they were when they feathered the sky. One by one they accumulate, form a density of stars, a thousand nameless constellations, none of them bruising or breaking, not a word, not a sigh. Their whole purpose is to fall, to settle down. A parking lot, a birch grove, a woman's hair. No thought can stop the snow, no panegyric or lament. Even if you're sleeping, you know the sky is white with down. To the world outside your window, it brings a riddled hush, a new religion, everything has been touched but touched softly, without hands.

first cause:
sky

ABOVE YOU,
the sky is a vast blue wonder, something held tight in the chest and then released to rush like the breath of a god, quickening the grasslands into stark, bewildering beauty. The sky is skinless yet animate, strangely expectant. It is waiting for something to happen. Some days anvil-shaped clouds ride the horizon—lightning leaps from field to field, spears through a window, splits a tree, blows off the hooves of cattle near the dugout. You see it long before you hear a sound. When at last the thunder booms, it drums the ground and the mirrors in the houses tremble.

Calm or restless, the sky follows your every step. It touches you with loneliness. It humbles your tongue. Nothing is taller, more open. It makes you fall in love with weather, with nimbus and feather and hollow bone. Under its blue gaze, you mark the smallest thing: a lichen scab on stone, thin legs of a crab spider on the petal of a rose, a snowdrift on the beak of a chickadee. Though you lower your head, your prayers go upwards. Imagine all the praise and fear and doubt the sky must hold.

a spell of
    
lilacs

O
N EITHER
side of the six steps that led to our front door, two lilac bushes exploded into fragrant blossom every spring. The bushes were so wide and tall we called them trees. In late May the branches bowed low, and the blossoms brushed across your hair when you walked beneath them. If you were the romantic kind, like some of my brother's girlfriends, their scent could make you swoon. Even strangers passing by stopped to admire the lilacs. Sometimes they knocked on our door to ask if they could pick them. Mom always went out with a knife Dad kept sharpened for that purpose and cut a huge bouquet.

The opposite of frugality, the lilacs made us special; they hid the poverty of the house, the messy yard, the worry that lived inside the walls. My mother could give and give; her natural generosity had a chance to show itself. I couldn't walk by the bushes without burying my face in the purple flowers and inhaling deeply, taking in with the scent my mother's pleasure, her small pride in being able to bestow on whoever asked such a lush and momentary beauty.

In many family photographs, my brother and I stand in front of the lilacs. There's one of him at around thirteen with his first new baseball glove, me small beside him, my skinny legs bare. There's another of him posing in the spiffy pants and shirt he wore to his grade 8 graduation, and one of me seven years later for the same occasion in a blue dress my grandmother Ford had sewn. I hated that dress. Though my grandmother was an expert seamstress, the sleeves didn't lie flat at the shoulders, and she'd bought enough material to sew exactly the same dress for my two younger cousins, who were only in grades 6 and 7. My mother always said Grandma liked them better than she liked me, and this seemed the proof.

Twice, I posed as a flower girl in front of the lilacs. The first time, at five, I wore a diaphanous yellow, the colour of a cabbage butterfly. After Mom snapped the picture, I ran to the backyard and pumped myself high on the swing, feeling light and lovely in the skirt that puffed out from my legs, then flattened, puffed out and flattened again. From the porch next door, Ona called me over. I skipped towards her, thinking she wanted a better look at how pretty I was. When I got close, she stepped outside and hit me on the head with a piece of firewood. “You think you're so great,” she said, and banged the door shut.

I ran home crying, not sure what had happened, my hand on my head, my fingers sticky with blood from the scrape. In the kitchen, my mother got me out of the yellow dress then pulled the kitchen table over to the sink. She lifted me up and laid me on my back so she could wash my hair, careful with the sore spot. “You'll feel pretty again,” she said. “Wait till you get to wear your headband of flowers.” They weren't real flowers like the lilacs, but made of some kind of satiny material, flat and overlapping as if they'd been pressed inside a book. As soon I donned the headband, my head stopped hurting. Besides, I knew I'd gone far enough with self-pity. My mother's “If you don't stop crying, I'll give you something to cry about” was something I heard too often to keep snivelling for long.

The bride, Doris, who'd chosen me for her flower girl, was one of the three Andrews sisters who rented the upstairs rooms in our house, with their mother. They came in from their farm in late fall and stayed through the winter. Their brother remained in the old house on the land. He seeded the crops and drove the combine during the harvest, though Dad said the sisters worked like men on the farm, raising pigs and calves, fixing barbed-wire fences and driving the grain truck in the fields to catch the wheat streaming from the hopper. I looked forward to their move to our house every year. More often than not, it was the first snow that announced their arrival. In the spring, their return to the country coincided with the delivery to our front door of a box of downy yellow chicks. Until the Andrews left a few days later, they kept the chicks upstairs under a low light bulb they'd rigged up. I'd dip my hands into the warm, soft pool and scoop one out to hold in my palm. It was like a small ball of sunshine that had sprouted feathers.

With the Brownie box camera Mom had acquired by saving coupons from Nabob tea, she took a picture of Doris in her white bridal gown in front of the lilacs. Two years later I wore blue taffeta as a flower girl for her sister, Myrtle. The dress came with a blue, three-layered crinoline that I would later wear when I twirled like a ballerina on the linoleum in front of our couch. Different blooms on the same bushes beautified the backdrop in the two pictures, which Mom hung on the wall of her bedroom. Seeing the lilacs behind and above me made my nostrils flare every time I looked at the black-and-white photos in their wooden frames.