Small Beneath the Sky Read online

  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

  GRANDMOTHER 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.

  At first I worried her affliction might be genetic, and one day I’d wake up with a leg I had to heft from bed and drag behind me, waves of milk slapping the inner walls of my skin, walleyed, lice-ridden barn cats yowling behind me. Finally I decided it was God’s punishment. With perfect irony, he’d smitten her with an excess of sweet maternal liquid—in the breast, a source of nurturance and love; in her leg, a heavy, sour weight that caused suffering, a visible sign of her betrayal of her son and the hurt he would carry into death. I could think of no better vengeance for my father, who loved her anyway and wouldn’t have asked for such a thing. Milk leg, I whispered inside her little house while the grown-ups talked, milk leg, God’s righteous anger curdling on my tongue.

  first cause: mom and dad

  HIS FAVOURITE breakfast is Cream of Wheat. His favourite supper is roast chicken with mashed potatoes. His favourite bread is store-bought white, though your mom bakes her own. His favourite shirt has snap buttons and two pockets, one for cigarettes, one for pens. His favourite pen shows two minks, one on top of the other. It’s in the bottom drawer of his side of the dresser, below the hankies your mother washes and irons. You’re not supposed to know it’s there. His favourite story is how he picked up a semi trailer from the factory in Windsor years ago, drove it through Detroit and all the way to Swift Current without stopping for a sleep. His favourite competition is arm wrestling. He wins all the matches at the Healy Hotel. You wish your arms were as hairy and powerful as his. His favourite expression is “real good.” His favourite drink is Pilsner Old Style. Before you could read, you sat on his lap and counted the crows on the label. His favourite TV program is Don Messer’s Jubilee. He always says, “Look at old Charlie dance.” He doesn’t have a favourite book. The only thing he reads is the Swift Current Sun. He follows the lines with one finger, the nail bitten to the quick, and reads everything three times. You don’t know how much he understands.

  HER FAVOURITE drink is water from a tap. Her favourite outfit is a loose tank top that covers her belly and a matching pair of shorts with an elastic waist. Her favourite game is curling. She’d miss a wedding or a funeral to watch the final in the Tournament of Hearts. Her favourite dance is the foxtrot. Her favourite dog is still a bull terrier named Patsy that Dad bought when they got married. There are two photographs of her holding your brother at eight months old above Patsy’s back as if he were sitting on the dog, but he isn’t. Her favourite possession is two Dionne Quintuplet spoons. The letters E-M-I-L-I-E climb from the bowl up the handle on one spoon, C-E-C-I-L-E on the other. Her favourite footwear is the first pair of bowling shoes she could afford to buy, “Goodyear” stamped on the rubber heels. Her favourite place to sit in church is in the balcony, near the back so she can get out fast. She uses her favourite expression to stop you from complaining when you don’t get what you want: “It’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.” Her favourite place is Saskatchewan: she can’t understand why anyone would want to go anywhere else, even for a holiday, even in winter. Her favourite meal is what anyone else in the family wants.

  spoilt

  AS WELL as practising piano, my friend Ona had to help her mother do the housework every Saturday morning. Their house had two sets of stairs, and it was Ona’s job to wash them on her hands and knees with Spic and Span and a stiff brush. Then she had to clean the bathroom and their big verandah with its dozens of windowsills. For this, every Wednesday she got a dime to spend on penny candy at the corner store. I’d beg her for one of her jawbreakers. Sometimes, dazed with pleasure, I’d forget and bite into the bitter seed at their core. The first time I tasted cardamom, a rush of warmth swept me back to that bliss, my blackened tongue and the click of the sweet shrinking ball against my teeth.

  Ona’s mom was strict, and their house was spotless. Even their backyard was spotless; it looked as if someone had taken a scrub brush to the sidewalk, the lawn and the daisies and sweet peas Ona’s mom had planted instead of potatoes. Ona’s stepdad was a pig farmer, though, and every night he parked his truck, the sides splattered with manure and straw, in the driveway at the back. In the truck box rested a huge barrel that he used to haul buttermilk for the pigs. Instead of the scent of sweet peas, it was the rancid smell of sour milk and swine that wafted into the neighbours’ yards. And as soon as Ona’s stepdad left his truck and walked towards the house, hundreds of flies rose from the ground to drape the buttermilk barrel with a thick, black cloth that buzzed and shifted. It was alien and creepy, and I always cut a wide swath around it.

  My mother had a thing about flies. She’d drop what she was doing if she heard a buzzing in the kitchen and go after it. On the farm, before her mother cooked the meat from a slaughtered pig or steer hung in the cold cellar, she’d send one of the kids down to pick off the maggots. That’s why Mom’s roast beef was cooked to death, all the juices gone into the gravy.

  Compared to Ona, I was a spoilt kid. Mom said she didn’t know much about mothering; she just wanted me to have a childhood different from her own. My job was to have fun, she said. All she asked me to do was the dusting once a week. To make sure I lifted every ornament and didn’t skip any piece of furniture, I’d pretend that the Queen was coming to visit in the afternoon, and I’d picture her running her white-gloved finger over the dresser, the coffee table and the chiffonier. “Good job,” she would say in her snooty voice. Then she’d give me a whole quarter to spend on candy. She’d put it heads-up in my palm, her face in profile cameoed into the silvery shine.

  Imagining the Queen coming to our house wasn’t such a stretch. A few years after the war, she’d passed through Swift Current on the train. My brother had gone to the station with the rest of his Cub pack, and he’d seen her and Prince Philip wave from the platform of the royal car. Whenever I heard the story, I tried to imagine what a royal car would look like. Surely there’d be red velvet everywhere, even on the ceiling. Though it was rude to think of the Queen having to go to the bathroom, th
e toilet must have been made from solid gold.

  There was more to the story than that, though. When the train with its regal passengers pulled out of the station, my brother refused a ride home with the other parents because my father was coming to pick him up. It was a winter night. Barry stood alone on the empty platform, his Cub uniform too thin to stop the cold, the doors of the building locked up, snow swirling along the tracks as if it were a ghost train pulling winter through every town along the line. Dad showed up an hour late, delayed by another round of beer at the Legion. He took my brother to the Venice Café for an orange pop and a big sugar doughnut. My brother pushed the plate away, he said, and Dad got angry. It wasn’t every day we got a treat like that. As he got older, that was one of two stories Barry told about our father. The other was about Dad hitting him with the piece of rubber hose that hung like a hollow black snake in the doorway to the cellar. That happened when he was around fifteen. I, not my brother, was the one who cried.

  Our father had never wanted children. Mom told us this again and again, as if it were an excuse for his selfishness and neglect. If anyone was to blame, she said, it was her, because she had insisted on it. Dad wasn’t a violent man, and he wasn’t cruel, but he seemed to feel a love of children would make him unmanly. Once, shortly after my brother was born, Mom and Dad were driving to her parents’ farm when she had to pee. She asked Dad to pull over on the side of the road, and then to take the baby. As she was walking back to the car from behind the stubby screen of wolf willow, Dad thrust my brother into her arms. A car was coming down the road; you could see the plume of dust half a mile away, and he didn’t want to be seen holding a baby.