Small Beneath the Sky Read online

  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.

  I walked half a block farther with my new friends. Then, I ducked down the nearest alley and snuck back home.

  OUR TWO-STOREY house with its wide front verandah, now collapsed, must have been beautiful years before the landlady had let it run down and my family moved in. My parents didn’t have the wherewithal or the money to repair what was broken or to clean up the yard. Ona’s house was the same vintage and style, but the flash of its clean white paint made you wish for sunglasses, and the house front yard displayed to passersby a bed of rose bushes and a neat, trimmed lawn bisected by a cement sidewalk. Three doors down, Lynda’s house was the newest on the block. Their small stuccoed bungalow had been built by her father. When he was in a good mood, sitting in his favourite armchair with a drink beside him, Mr. Ham would talk to me and Lynda in the voice of Daffy Duck. On the doors inside their house shone glass doorknobs like gigantic, multifaceted diamonds, and on the living room wall hung the only piece of real art I’d ever seen, an oil painting of the cutbanks south of the city limits done by a local high school teacher named Mr. Uglum. My mom was not impressed. She couldn’t understand why anyone would want a picture of something they could see every day just by driving five minutes to the edge of town.

  Lynda took singing lessons, and she and Ona studied dancing and piano. Lynda showed me how to shuffle-off-to-Buffalo after her first few dance classes and how to play “Chopsticks” with two fingers on the keyboard of the piano that sat glossy and square-shouldered by their big green couch. Ona’s piano was in a room off the kitchen that her mother called the parlour. From our backyard, I could hear Ona practising every Saturday morning it was warm enough for the windows to be open, the sounds of her finger-work drifting through the screens. Sometimes I climbed to the top of one of the oil drums Dad had hauled home for salvage and did a little dance by pounding my feet in time to the song she was playing over and over, waving my arms about the way I thought a ballerina would. I felt envious of Ona, but then she was the one cooped up inside on a weekend morning.

  To move up the bird ladder at school, I threw myself into the thin books I was allowed to take home from the six shelves in the grade 1 cloakroom. I asked my mother to help me unlock the secret code that filled the pages. So I’d feel better, she joked that maybe I was a crow because of our last name. My brother had been nicknamed “Crow” for a while, until he grew tired of it and threatened to punch anyone who called him that. After finishing the supper dishes, Mom would sit me on the couch and help me read out loud, making me stop and go back to the start of the sentence if I didn’t get the sounds right. I knew she hadn’t had any books to read when she was a child; she had no favourites among the collection I brought home, and she didn’t get bored. The stories were as new to her as they were to me.

  It didn’t take me long to fly from where the crows gathered to the more ethereal habitat of the meadowlarks and then the bluebirds. At home, Mom and I were soon into the old Book of Knowledge my brother had gone through several years before. Some of the pages were water-stained or marred with black crayon that I’d stroked across the paper as a little kid. Mom and I went over and over the page called “Little Verses for Very Little People.” I memorized “Rub-a-Dub-Dub”: “Three men in a tub; The butcher, the baker, The candlestick maker; And they all jumped out of a rotten potato.” The last line never failed to make us laugh. Many of the stories in the book were beyond me, and Mom, too. They sounded like nothing we’d ever heard before, but I delighted in the strange phrasing. If I was playing by myself outside, I’d recite into the lilac branches the first sentence of “Common Land Birds of Canada”: “The Orioles and the Meadowlarks are relatives of the Blackbirds, but differ markedly in their habitats.”

  One spring day Miss Bee led me and another classmate down the hall with its dark oak floor and wainscotting to the grade 2 classroom. Standing in front of the teacher’s desk, each of us in turn read a page of the grade 2 reader without having seen it before. I got stuck on the word “detour” and tried to slur over it, but Mrs. Anderson, the other teacher, stopped me. “A good reader doesn’t skip over words,” she admonished. I felt ashamed for trying to fake it, but the older students clapped anyway when I was through.

  At the end of the year, Miss Bee awarded me the prize for having read the most books in first grade. It was a black plaster-of-Paris cocker spaniel leaning on its front elbows, bum in the air, as if it were about to pounce. When I brought the prize home, Mom put it on the china cabinet beside my brother’s first hockey trophy. Eventually, the spaniel ended up on my bedroom dresser. Its head tilted like the RCA Victor dog’s, but it wasn’t music from a phonograph its long, curly ears were waiting for. Alone in my room I read out loud, as I had once with my mother, passages from the old Book of Knowledge: entrancing descriptions and perfectly punctuated sentences that might have flowed from the pen of an English governess. Over and over I recited the verses I had to memorize for school, and, later, the mantra of a boy’s name married to every rhyme I knew. My plaster spaniel sat loyal, attentive, listening.

  by and by

  ONE AFTERNOON when I was four, my father came into our kitchen with a toy Pomeranian tucked into his jacket pocket. Unbeknown to his boss, he had traded a half tank of oil from his delivery truck for one of Mrs. Rittinger’s purebred pups. Red and furry, the dog was smaller than my father’s hand. Lying on my belly on linoleum warmed by the fire in the wood stove, I watched her small pink tongue lapping milk. The thread of white stretching from the surface to her mouth didn’t break until she’d licked the bowl clean.

  My mother named her Tiny, and she became my brother’s dog. The seven years between us made me more of a nuisance than a playmate, but sometimes Barry would let me tag along when he and his friends played kick the can or built a soldiers’ fort out of the log ends waiting to be chopped for the stove. As soon as he grabbed his jacket from the hook, I was at his heels like a second dog, dumber in canine ways but just as loyal and underfoot. Some days he’d order me to stay in our yard. Other days, by the caragana hedge, he’d tell me to hide and he’d count to ten, and then he’d never find me. Tiny wasn’t sent away unless the games spread too far afield. “Go home, Tiny,” he’d say, and she’d we
nd slowly down the block, head and tail lowered. I knew exactly how she felt.

  On winter mornings from the picture window, I’d watch Tiny and my brother head off on his paper route, her trotting ahead, running up the steps to the houses that took the news and passing those that didn’t. Our neighbours thought this was the smartest, cutest thing and tipped my brother with change left over from the milkman. Once I went off with them because Mom was curling in a bonspiel out of town and had left the house early to make the first game. All down the block, every house or so, Tiny leaped straight up, as if springs had been buckled to the bottom of her paws, so that she could see above the snow piled on both sides of the shovelled walk. When my brother’s bag was almost empty, he lifted me and set me inside on top of the papers he had left, Tiny bounding ahead on her short legs and doubling back. I was so proud and happy. If he’d told Tiny any time, “Go home,” she’d have known exactly where to go, but she didn’t have to. The three of us had work to do, lights coming on one by one in the windows down the winter streets, the snow blue as flax just before the dawn.

  Because my brother tossed so much in bed, Tiny slept with me. A cranky little dog, she’d bite if I moved my feet. I learned to lie like a courtly lady on a tomb, dog on a carnelian cushion at my feet. No one would have guessed in the morning I’d lain all night in that neat bed.

  MOST SUNDAYS in the summer, we drove to Grandma and Grandpa Ford’s farm thirty miles from Swift Current. The farmyard hadn’t changed much since Mom was a kid. The barn sagged in the middle, but the house looked exactly the same. It had only two bedrooms, and she and her six siblings had slept in one bed. There wouldn’t have been room for a dog on top of the blankets, even one as small as Tiny. We must have all stunk to high heaven, Mom said, one bath a week in the same bathwater, and sleeping so close. Nobody seemed to notice, she told me. At least they didn’t complain.

  Uncle Lynton, my mother’s youngest brother, had never left home. He, Auntie May Jean and their four children lived with my grandparents in the house’s small rooms. As if the place had a magic capacity, its walls seemed to expand when the whole family gathered. For special Sunday dinners, like Grandma’s birthday, it could hold nineteen. Though the farm dogs couldn’t get past the porch, Tiny was allowed inside. Even my grandfather put up with her as she begged at the kitchen table. But his tolerance had its limits. One afternoon, near the barn, she did the unspeakable: she killed a chicken. Grandpa went to get his gun; Barry scooped up Tiny, ran to the car with her and locked the door. It was an unarguable law in the country: a chicken-killing dog got shot. There was no second chance. Once dogs acquired a taste for blood, no one could stop them.

  Mom signalled for me to go to the car with my brother. She told Grandpa she’d pay for the chicken, but he was having none of that. This kind of outrage couldn’t be corrected so easily. Cutting our visit short, not even staying for supper, we drove back to town, Tiny in Barry’s lap, none of us saying anything about what had happened. For the next several weeks, we didn’t visit my grandparents. We waited till Grandma said Grandpa had cooled off. When we went back, never again in his graces but at least allowed to set foot on the farm, we had to leave Tiny behind. That wasn’t so bad, because Barry was bored with his country cousins by then and preferred to stay at home on Sundays to hang around with his friends. Tiny wouldn’t be lonely, I knew, because whatever they were doing, my brother would take her with him.

  That summer Dad won two ducklings at the July 1 fair. He was always good at things like that, playing darts or throwing a ball into a basket. Once he won a guinea pig named Elvis; another time, a one-winged turkey plucked and gutted and ready to roast. Inside the house, the ducklings imprinted on my brother, tagged along behind him across the linoleum when he moved from the table to the couch or walked down the hall to go upstairs. They couldn’t climb the steps but fell over backwards and made pathetic quacks. To give Mom a break when they started to get on her nerves, splatting here and there across the floor, Dad banged together a wooden cage and set it near the woodpile outside by the porch. The cage was square, the size of a portable television, with a wire screen covering an opening Dad had cut into the side to let in air. The door, just big enough for me to stick my head through, was latched by turning a flat wooden stick with a nail pounded in the centre.

  The yard of our neighbour to the north was built on a slight rise. I played in their sandbox—filled with dirt, not sand—with Dennis, the boy who lived there. He’d just moved in, and I was the only kid who’d play with him, because every day so far he’d worn nothing but a bathing suit. We were building roads for his Dinky Toys: I knew he’d be okay as soon as the other kids saw his collection. He had matchbox trucks, too; how I loved the little boxes they came in. They’d have made a perfect home for beetles, or a daddy long-legs if I could get it to bend its knees.

  Dennis was loading a truck with gravel while I pushed a toy Caterpillar with a wide rubber band around each wheel through the dirt, making a machine-like noise in the back of my throat. When I glanced up, I saw Tiny trot across our yard below to the wooden cage. She bit the latch, turned it, and went inside. I could hear the ducklings’ squawks and see the cage shift, but there was nothing I could do. It was as if I were in a game of frozen-tag and had to stay locked in the position I was in when I’d been caught. Less than a minute later, Tiny backed out, her muzzle and bib stained red. She turned the latch again, this time to lock the door—she was that smart—then skulked away.

  Mom said later that Tiny had been jealous. The ducks had made too much of my brother. I couldn’t stop thinking of Grandpa’s rage. I thanked my lucky stars, as Grandma would say, that he hadn’t been here to see what Tiny had done. I knew without asking Mom that I wasn’t to tell any of the relatives. I didn’t love Tiny any less after that, but I looked at her differently. I understood why my friend Lynda kept her distance—sometimes Tiny would growl and snap at her when she came near. FOR OUR GRADE 1 Christmas party, which our mothers attended, Lynda and I memorized “The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat.” With appropriate barks and meows to illustrate their terrible spat, we recited it from the front of the room beside the teacher’s desk. Full of the music of rhymes and repetitions, over the holidays I wrote my own poem, about Tiny. She had caused me endless hours of suffering because she often fell ill. Having grown up on farms, both my parents were used to feeding scraps to dogs, including chicken bones. In a creature as small as Tiny, the bones split into shards that tore through her digestive and intestinal system. Every week, the morning after Sunday supper, Tiny dragged her bum around the house and whimpered. Sometimes there’d be a red smear on the floor behind her.

  Sure her sickness would be fatal, I had a ritual spot at the top of the stairs on the second-floor landing, where I’d fall on my knees and promise God anything if he’d save her—I’d give up Double Bubble, I’d do the dishes, I’d stop wishing for nicer things. Maybe it was the high drama of my grief and my worry over my broken promises that gave me the idea for my poem—I wrote that Tiny had died. The poem was full of pathos and sadness, with hope shining through in the refrain that I repeated to myself after the Christmas break on the way back to school: “And we shall meet in heaven, by and by.” It was like a line from a skipping song.

  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

  ON 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 grandfather 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.