Small Beneath the Sky (8 page)

The two Andrews sisters were in their forties when they became brides, and no one had expected them to get married. Their older sister, Winnie, never did. I liked her the best, but my favourite of the Andrews was their mother, whom I called Grandma. In the morning, when I'd hear footsteps creak on the ceiling above my cot in the corner of my parents' room, I'd sneak upstairs in my flannelette pyjamas, knock on Grandma's bedroom door and be invited in. I'd climb beside her under the covers, and Winnie would bring both of us a cup of tea. Sometimes as a treat I'd get a piece of toast spread with jam. Grandma showed me how to roll it up, then dunk the end into the tea before taking a bite. It was a most elegant breakfast; I felt ladylike beside her. Grandma spoke with an English accent, and we always had matching saucers for our cups.

Mom worried that I was bugging the Andrews, and she told them to let her know if I was getting underfoot. I learned on my own to judge if I wasn't welcome. There was never a problem with Winnie, who was the least fussy of the sisters and the handiest on the farm. Mom said Winnie could throw a steer for branding without her brother's help. Doris would sometimes pinch her lips when she saw me about to walk into their hallway. Myrtle might go about her business and refuse to meet my eye. When either thing happened, I'd pretend I was there to use the toilet to the left of the stairs; it was the only one in the house.

Some evenings I'd go back upstairs, in my pyjamas again, and sit on Grandma's bed. She'd never turn me out. Every night, in a long white nightgown, she sat in front of her mirror on the stool that slid from the space in between the two pedestals of her dresser. She'd remove the bobby pins, one by one, from the bun coiled at the back of her neck and put them in a little porcelain box with a gold scroll around the rim and a red rose flaring in the centre. I loved the bobby pins. How gentle and thoughtful was the man who invented them: he'd rounded the metal tips with bulbs of plastic so they wouldn't scratch Grandma's head. Her hair spilled over her shoulders like the wisps of snow the wind blew across the roads in winter.

I dangled my feet over the edge of her bed as I watched Grandma brush her hair. The back of the brush was ivory, a white glow with a haze of yellow in it as if it had been polished by my dad's fingers, the ones he used to hold a cigarette. I couldn't believe how dazzling her hair was and didn't understand why she tucked it away every morning. When she put the brush down, I jumped off the bed and watched her climb under the covers. Her hair fanned out on the pillow, her face framed in its silky white. “Sleep tight, little girl,” she'd say. That was my signal to reply, “Don't let the bed bugs bite,” then slip from her room, close her door and go down to my own small bed. Sometimes I'd slide down the banister, the quietest way to descend, as if I were a burglar and had stolen something precious from the upstairs rooms.

Ona and Lynda didn't understand how it was possible for me to have three grandmothers. I felt lucky, especially as Grandma Andrews was by far the best of them. There were no bad stories about her like the ones I overheard my parents tell about Grandma Ford and Grandma Crozier. She'd never sent any of her children away or disinherited them. And if she had sewn my grade 8 graduation dress, I knew it would have been just for me. She wouldn't have made copies for my cousins.

On her daughters' wedding days, Grandma Andrews posed in front of the lilacs too. In both photos, she wore the same plain dress with buttons up the front, a thin belt, lisle stockings and black, laced-up shoes with a short heel. Her hair disappeared into her usual bun, above which perched a little black hat that looked like a conductor's except for the veil that puffed from the back. I liked to think of her calling, “All aboard,” and I'd jump on the train beside her.

Grandma died three years after she and Winnie stopped renting our upstairs rooms. Mom said I was too young to attend her funeral. Pushing myself back and forth on the swing when all the adults were in church, I wondered if Winnie had brushed her mother's hair and spread it on a satin pillow. I wished I could have placed her bobby pins in their small box beside her in the coffin and blessed her with a handful of lilacs. I'd have shaken a bouquet over her head and down the length of her, the way a priest shakes his censer to sprinkle holy water. She'd have carried the insistent fragrance and tiny black seeds with her no matter how far she had to travel. Around her sleeping body, they'd have cast their lilac spell in the darkest tunnels of the earth.

fox and
goose
 

I
T DIDN'T TAKE LONG
to get to the western outskirts of town and onto the road that led to my grandparents' farm. We'd pass the two grain elevators, shoulders sloped, beside the railroad tracks; the John Deere dealership with its gleaming green machines that looked like giant mutant insects; the horse plant where Dad had worked one winter (I didn't want to know what daily happened there); the stockyard with its nostril-burning stench, and finally, a long wooden shed fallen in on one side. It looked like a barn for pigs—I'd seen them in other places—but Dad said it had been a fox farm.

A farm for foxes! I imagined dozens of them like Grandpa's cows lying peaceful in a pasture, walking in single file towards the water trough, or stretching and yawning like barn cats as they woke from a nap. I thought they must have been pets like Tiny, who resembled a fox with her pointed nose, perky upright ears and long red coat. No, Dad said, they were raised for their hides. To make coats and hats for fancy ladies.

I didn't like to think of their fur being ripped from their flesh to make something else look sleek and plush and shiny. I was glad the shed that housed the animals had collapsed. Dad said that the owner, when he knew he couldn't save his business, opened the pens and let the remaining foxes go. They'd been bred for beauty: he'd raised not only red but silver foxes and grey and blue and black ones. Farmers who owned land close by, Dad said, still talked of seeing them. Though they worried about their chickens, they were often startled into wonder by a slurry of blue against the bluer sky or a spill of silver rippling through the tall grasses. In the car, I closed my eyes and saw dusk-coloured foxes slip through the twilight, then disappear like smoke into the place of dreams I fell into every night. Even there, where they could settle softly inside my sleep, there was nothing I could do to keep them safe.

ONCE WINTER
arrived, the backyard's tall yellow grasses my father never scythed caught the snow and held it. On mornings when the flakes in their falling grew as big as the paper ones we stuck to classroom windows, the neighbourhood kids tumbled from doorways. One behind the other, we tromped a circle in the snow with our boots, turning the yard into a white meadow for geese to run in, flapping their blunt wings, a fox in hot pursuit.

The most important word in the game was
home.
Home was the centre of the circle, and when you landed there, after whipping down one of several spokes, you were safe. The fox couldn't touch you. The problem was you were free from harm for only a moment: another goose fleeing for its life could force you out, back onto the dangerous circumference pocked with our tracks like the face of the moon.

Racing through the cold, parkas undone, faces flushed, my friends and I would have thrown off our scarves by now. They'd be scattered outside the circle like the skins of long improbable snakes, yellow, blue, green, white with wide red stripes. The spots where our mouths had soaked the wool hardened into disks of ice as the sun slid lower in the sky.

As we skittered and slipped and darted to the centre, we lost who we were, lost our names and the names of our mothers who had sent us out to play. We were legs and lungs and big hearts pumping. We were geese; one of us, a fox. No one in the game broke the rules. We never called “Time out!” We never stepped from the circle to catch our breath. How essential was that form we had drawn with our boots, how perfect and invariable, how charged with frenzy and delicious dread.

As geese, we shrieked with panic and joy and ran and ran—for our lives, we thought. But that wasn't it. The fox mustn't catch you not because he'll eat you up but because he wants to change places. He wants to touch you, to lose his fur and teeth, to grow feathers, to flee with the others, the hot musty breath of the new fox beating on the back of his neck. And suddenly—sure-footed on your paws—that is you. Cunning and radiant against the snow, you feel a different blood burning bright inside you as you leap to catch a wing.

tasting
the air

A
T RECESS
the boys would go crazy. They'd push us off the swings or pelt us with snowballs with stones in the centre. Every winter, at least one boy would stick his tongue on the metal of the monkey bar at another boy's dare, and a girl would run to get a teacher while tears and mucus froze on his face. It was common for the boys, like barbarian marauders, to invade our space near the girls' entrance, grab a girl and pinch her or yank the barrettes from her hair. They'd grip your forearm just above your wrist and twist the skin. It was called a snakebite, and it hurt a lot. I felt safe around the roughest boys, though, because my brother protected me. His reputation for toughness was so ingrained that even when he'd left for high school on the other side of town, I just had to say, “I'm Barry Crozier's sister,” and the bullies would leave me be.

The worst bully went to St. Pat's, the Catholic school across the road. His name was Larry, and he lived down our alley in a big two-storey of red brick, which wasn't really brick but sheets of tar siding with a red gritty surface and grey lines pressed in a grid to look like mortar. In the swimming pool he'd throw himself on top of me, push me under with his arms and chest till I thought I'd drown. My friend Lynda said it meant he liked me, but it didn't feel that way.

There was something wrong with Larry. Adults noticed it too. He was sneaky, and he assumed he could get away with anything. He had red hair, which my mother said was a sign of temper. She thought his parents let him run wild. They went out a lot, she said, and left their kids to fend for themselves.
Fend
was a word I liked, though I wasn't sure what it might mean.

Larry was tall and gangly, his bones seeming to grow more quickly than the rest of him, his skin stretched pale and thin and freckled. Maybe he wasn't fending well, I thought, and he'd keep growing taller, his skin more transparent, until one day we'd see right through him, as if he wasn't there. I wished for that. Some afternoons as I pumped myself higher and higher on our tall wooden swing, which my dad had salvaged from a city playground when they replaced it with a stunted metal version, Larry would steal up from behind and start to push. He'd clutch the chains to suspend me high in the air and slide one hand over my bare legs. I wiggled and tried to kick him, and finally he'd let me drop to where my feet could touch the ground. I knew what he did was wrong, but I didn't tell anyone. I feared what he'd do to get even.

One Saturday morning I was walking down the alley to Lynda's house, a chalk to draw a hopscotch in my jacket pocket along with a special stone to throw, when Larry came around the corner with one of his buddies from the Catholic school. In front of him, in both hands, Larry held a garter snake, green with a pale belly, a red stripe streaking down each side like threads of blood. It was too late for me to disappear. I raced towards my house, the boys chasing me, Larry's friend yelling, “Drop it down her back!” I knew I'd up and die if the snake slid down my spine. When I stumbled, Larry grabbed me. One hand grasped my jacket by the back of the collar—how sick I felt—and the long slick belly sluiced across my neck. I twisted in his grip and screamed. Above the fear that roared in my head, I heard my brother's voice: “Let her go.”

Like a hero in a cowboy movie, he walked from our yard into the alley. He must have been on his way to baseball practice; the glove on his hand made his fist look like Popeye's. The boys stared at him. Larry pulled the snake away. I hadn't noticed before that the boy I didn't know held a hammer. My brother reached for me, turned his back on them and led me down our wooden walk, past the swing and into the back porch. “Mom's home,” he said. “Go inside.” He went out again past the boys and up the alley towards the baseball diamond. “I'll see you later,” he said to Larry, who didn't talk back.

I waited a few minutes, then snuck out low and quiet and hunkered behind the woodpile at the back of our house. The boys had already forgotten about me. Larry handed the snake to his friend, who stretched it out to its full length—two feet or so—against a telephone pole. It glistened in the light like the new skin on my arms and shoulders when they peeled after a sunburn. Larry reached in his pocket, pulled out two nails and, with the hammer, pounded the snake into the wood. It twisted on those two metal spikes, unable to crawl out of its pain. Everything fell silent; even the wind lay down in the grass and held its breath. The boys stood not knowing what to do, their stupid hands dangling from their wrists, the beautiful green mouth opening, a terrible dark O no one could hear. I loved it then, that snake.

After that morning, my fear of snakes left for good. By the creek I would seek them out, watch them sip water among the stones with a delicacy that made me shiver. Their thin red tongues seemed to taste the air, the morning and the evening, the darkness at the heart of things.

spit

S
pit
, sb., a small, low tongue of land projecting onto water;
a shuttle pin; a straight horizontal stroke used as a marking in books; the fluid secreted by the glands of the mouth.
Orange Crush. I slid my dime across the counter at Bill Chew's, and he pulled a pop wet from the cooler and put it in my hand. It made me greedy. I got maybe one a week, and I wanted it all. Even the bottle was beautiful—its long skinny neck, the raised green letters you couldn't scrape away with your thumb—and worth two cents. The sun shone through the glass as I tilted the drink to my mouth. It tasted better than oranges, even the ones from Japan that came only at Christmas. There was always a kid who didn't have a dime, who wanted a sip, so I spit in the bottle, watched the bubbles slide down the neck, float on the bright liquid surface before they dissolved, and no one would drink it then, no one but me.