I knew Abram, and I knew he thought in large, slow arcs. To prompt him I demanded, “So, are you going to say it or am I?”
“You think we should run off? Go away?”
“Don’t you?”
“We’ve no money. But it’s something to work toward and plan for.”
“By the time we have the money Mum will be well. We have to wait till then anyway.”
“I think you should plan on finishing high school. That gives us a two-year time frame.”
I knew he was right, but his acceptance of the situation infuriated me. I hate recognizing the inevitable, let alone bowing to it.
“Damn,” I said. That got his attention. “You know what I wish, Abram? That sometime you’d just go for it and hang the consequences.”
Again his smile held hurt. “I wish I would too.”
“All right, let’s practice.”
“Practice what?”
“Practice doing, the heck with consequences. Are you game?”
“All right. Sure.”
“Then come on.”
I knew he was going to ask where, so I cut him off. “No questions. Just doing. Remember?”
He grinned.
Some people look worse when they grin—not Abram. He was especially cute-looking when he grinned. I took him to Jellet’s pub. I’d discovered a window at the back in the storage shed that was open a crack. “Give me a boost.”
He did and I made a grab for the ledge. I jimmied the window down farther and crawled through, then fumbled for a light.
Abram landed with a jar beside me. “Judas Priest!” That was his most outrageous curse. He had ripped the sleeve of his shirt on a nail.
“Why don’t you just say ‘damn’ and get it over with?”
“I can’t do that.”
“What’s the matter with ‘damn’?”
“Well, if you think about it, you’re damning whatever or whoever you’re angry at to hell. You don’t want to do that.”
“But Abram, it was a nail.”
“It could be the beginning of a habit. Next time it might be a creature or a person.”
“Oh Abram,” I said, although I knew it did no good, it was like talking to a wall. “Nobody takes these things literally. It’s just a way of talking.”
“What good is speech if it doesn’t mean what it says?”
“Judas Priest, Abram, do you have to be so Judas Priest logical?”
He looked around. “What are we doing here anyway?”
The light was unhooded and revealed rows of Big Rock Lager and another stack of cans labeled Alberta Gold Beer. There was a keg of draft beer and something called Warthog. “We’re going to get drunk,” I announced.
Abram bit his lips over the protest that was forming. He crossed to the Alberta Gold and opened two cans. “Here goes nothing.”
We clinked cans. After the first sip I asked, “Do you like it?”
He claimed he did, and after a while you didn’t really care what it tasted like.
I made a stab at singing Abram. I’d tried for years. I’d get one part, only to have another part slip away. That’s what happened this time.
“What are you singing?” Abram asked.
“None of your business.”
When we finished the second can we couldn’t get back out the window. I didn’t mind. It was a nice storeroom, and Abram started confiding in me, telling me that his mind kept poking holes in his faith. “If I’d been in that rickety boat with Jesus and Thomas on the Dead Sea I couldn’t have walked on water either. I’d know I was going to sink.”
“That’s because you’ve got good sense,” I told him.
“No, it’s the same thing that keeps me from accepting that God is calling me to the church. I don’t know how to believe. I want to, but I can’t. It’s a failing in me.”
He looked so miserable that I resisted an impulse to comfort him, and instead spoke briskly. “What about those who are called? Why are they so sure? Do they hear God’s voice like you hear a person talking? Or maybe hear it in their own heads? I mean—how?”
“It’s simple, fundamental. You know in your whole being.”
Abram worried a lot about his differences with the believing church. He thought it might be traced to a man of his house and name who lived in Holland four hundred years ago. Dirk Willems was, along with the pastor of his church, accused of heresy. They fled over ice with their enemies at their heels. The ice grew thin under them and the pastor fell through. Dirk went back and pulled him out. As a consequence, he was captured and burned at the stake by the Inquisitors.
“You’d do exactly the same thing,” I accused him. “You’d go back, pull the guy out of the ice, and be burned at the stake.”
“You think so?” Pleasure that was almost bliss suffused his face.
“Because you’re dumb, dumb, dumb!”
Abram laughed at this. “I have the feeling my father would like to see me burn in hellfire for the questions I ask. I can’t accept without questions, Kathy.”
“Well, there you are. It’s just what I said. You’ve got to question, and I’ve got to sing.” I told him again what it was like. “My singing held them like it was a spell I’d put on them, and on me too. It’s magic, Abram. Elk Woman told me that years ago, and it’s true.”
Abram let go of his problem and considered mine. That was one of the things I liked about him. However, I didn’t think much of his advice. People were always giving me advice, and I didn’t think much of any of it.
“The singing part,” he was saying, “is okay. But you know yourself, Kathy, a pub is no place for a girl like you. It’s worldly and ungodly.”
“Oh, go dunk yourself in the river. You might as well. You’re holier than an old sock.”
“If I were, I wouldn’t be here drinking beer. Besides, like I said, singing in a choir, I can see that.”
“Music connects with everything around you,” I agreed dreamily.
Abram nodded, “Praise the Lord.”
He didn’t know he’d said it. It was like when you write a sentence you just naturally put a period to it and don’t even notice.
A drifting kind of light-headedness came over me, and half-formed ideas began tumbling out. I didn’t listen to them because…
Abram put his arm around me. He’d never done that before. Then he kissed me. I liked being kissed. I wished he’d do it again, but instead he went for the window and this time made it.
Chapter Three
I DIDN’T see Abram for a while because Mum was sicker than usual, and I was once again in charge of the house. That didn’t prevent me from thinking about him. I had serious doubts as to whether he could make our plan happen. In spite of this decidedly major defect, Abram had a lot of things going for him. For one, he didn’t think I should change from being a lefty. He thought a person should be what they were.
Abram was a big influence on me. I never let him know this. And I never tried to be like him either. I knew it was no use. It simply wasn’t in me. But I respected his ways—with spiders, for instance. I never had any use for spiders. If I saw one I’d go out of my way to step on it or bash it. Abram felt differently. “They’re one of God’s creatures,” he told me, as he carefully cupped a spider in a leaf or a handkerchief and carried it to some place he felt would be favorable to spiders. He did that with any bug or insect. I don’t think his brethren in Christ taught him this. I think they squashed as many spiders as I did. No, it was Abram, it was the way he was.
Most of my information about the world came from him, and he got it from library books. Strictly speaking, he wasn’t supposed to read anything but holy scripture because the elders told him that all knowledge was contained in the Good Book. Abram himself said that was probably true when God shaped the world, but a lot had happened and a lot of people had reshaped it since. Also, according to Abram, man hadn’t interpreted God’s word too well. Take lightning. It wasn’t God’s wrath emanating from the heavens as his f
ather preached, because the St. Alban’s public library stamp was on a volume that explained lightning as coming from the ground. Abram thought that was important to know. “You live in the world, and you should know how it works.”
The rock upon which Mum founded her home schooling was partly that same library, partly her own background as a wartime nurse and the rigorous courses she’d taken at the Sisters of Charity, but even more the homespun wisdom of someone I’d heard about all my life, Mrs. Mike. She had taken my Mum in when she was a baby, and she and her sergeant husband raised her and imparted lots of good, old-fashioned ideas like—never give in to a man until you’ve got a preacher and a ring. It was things like this that got passed along to me.
Mum said it was more than Mrs. Mike’s fundamental sense of goodness and fairness, it was the way she was—spunky and high-spirited, yet always instinctively on the side of the underdog. Why did she choose Oh Be Joyful from the mission in the first place? She was the one in trouble, an older girl sent to sit on a bench in punishment row along with the little kids. Oh Be Joyful, my Mum’s mum, was the one who didn’t fit in, the one they couldn’t control. It was typical of Mrs. Mike to stand up for her.
“That’s the way she was, and that’s why I’m ‘Kathy’ and you’re ‘Kathy.’ It’s a proud name, and you must try to live up to it. You see, when you live in Alberta as we do, there’s a lot to contend with. But think how it was in those days—no trains penetrated this far, there were only dogsleds, and the telegraph lines were always down. As for paved highways, forget it. The Indians used to say, ‘It’s a good land for men and dogs, but hard on women and horses.’ It was hard for Mrs. Mike, but it held all the important things.”
“And what are they?” I’d ask.
“They’re different for different people. You’ve got to discover yours for yourself, Kathy.”
I took that as a challenge to grow up.
But I didn’t think I would grow up until Abram and I ran away. That’s when I’d start to live my life.
An uneasy feeling nagged at me, however. I felt as if I were becalmed in the Sargasso Sea. Nothing moved or was likely to move. I was entangled in seaweed, mosses, and kelp beds, helpless, drifting, going nowhere.
I attempted to fight this feeling, but it persisted, and one day when Abram and I were stretched out by the stream, leaning on our elbows and taking aim along our jawline with Jellet’s BB gun, I came out with it.
“Abram,” I said, putting the gun down, “I’ve got to know. How much money have you saved? Please, tell me it’s a lot.”
Abram looked uncomfortable. “I raked leaves for Mrs. Pringle, but she didn’t pay hardly anything. Then I helped out in the drugstore when Mr. Stalling’s wife was sick. But she got better….”
“I don’t want to hear your biography. Just tell me the dollar amount.”
“Thirty-five bucks.”
“Oh, Abram.” His words were confirmation of my fears. “That’s nothing. We could eat maybe for three days, but what about sleeping? We’d have to hide in barns and be on the lookout for dogs.” I jumped up, wrapped the gun in the pieces of flannel it was kept in, and hid it in the bowl of the old oak so I wouldn’t have to bother with it for a while.
We started to walk, past farmland, through fields, into woods where the sun filtering through branches created patterns of light.
“I’m sorry, Kathy.”
I saw that he was. I saw that he had disappointed himself too.
“I haven’t been able to put anything by either.” We walked on in silence. “I can’t go anyway,” I said suddenly.
He stopped where he was. “But—”
“I know. It was never practical. It was a dream, a Cree dream, and we believed it for a while.”
Abram thrust out his chin, the way he did when he was determined. “I can make it happen.”
“I don’t think so. It’s Mum. She isn’t well.”
“I’m glad you told me. I’ll pray for her.”
I squeezed his hand. Abram would pray for her with a wonderful purity of purpose, but it wouldn’t do away with the small, hard kernel of fear in me.
WINTER came and deepened. Snow piled into drifts and on sunny days there was the sound of icicles dripping from the eaves and porch rails. I took on more and more of Mum’s tasks. Mum now and my memory of Mum didn’t blend easily. When I looked at her I saw her as she had been, always moving, doing things that nobody noticed or thanked her for, but that made the house run. The house itself had the clean smell of soap when she was in charge of things. Now that it was up to me I began to see what she had done, and to wonder how she found time to teach us into the bargain. While Jason, Morrie, and I did sums and essays, she supervised with mending in her lap, or her hands might be busy canning, pickling, and preserving.
I knew this was not going to be my life. Yet I only remember Mum as happy.
“Not happy,” she would correct me, “joyful.”
Joyful was her Cree name. And she lived up to it. She laughed, made little jokes, told stories, all the while keeping an eye on us. Then one by one she gave up things that only months ago she had done without effort.
To escape thinking about it, I took to singing everyone. Mum was a slender, crisp melody, with little runs for the joy she put into things. Jason was a boisterous refrain, light and good-hearted. Morrie of course was a hop, skip, and a jump up and down the scale. And Jellet a lot of bombast.
It was Abram I had trouble with. I did him as a kind of gospel hymn, but that was only part of Abram. Anyway, it got me through the winter. I also tried slipping into the old dreams about my Austrian father. When I was little I’d imagined him as living in a castle on top of a hill, with hunting dogs at his feet. He’d come for me of course, and the castle would belong to me then, and the dogs. As I grew older that dream faded from its unlikeliness.
Spring went by too fast and summer was brief, as it always is here. I’d counted on warm days to get Mum well. They were here but didn’t seem to help. I was as housebound as in the winter with the Sargasso Sea closing about me. It was almost impossible for me to get away, because if I didn’t do the chores, Mum would. So I stayed close, only seeing Abram once or twice. We laughed about the plans we’d had and said what children we had been. I think he felt shy with me, and for some reason I did with him.
I hated to see fall come that year. I had no dreams to pull around me, and I was afraid of another long white silence. Cabin fever, Mum called it. But it was on account of her that I dreaded it. She slept a lot during the day and coughed most of the night. Her movements slowed, so that one felt her think about doing something before asking it of her body. I didn’t want to sing her anymore because the little runs and trills weren’t there.
There was no holding back Alberta’s climate. Housebound most of the time, there was nothing for it but to resurrect the old fantasy world. The one I liked to relive was when my father came back. He got lonesome for Mum and wanted to be with her again.
And there was I, a daughter he didn’t know he had. In some of these daydreams I rushed into his arms and he hugged and kissed me, and said he would never go away again. Sometimes he’d pack us up, Mum and me, and take us back to Austria. Just for a visit of course. It wasn’t a castle anymore, but a nice snug house. He taught me to sail on the Bodensee. We hiked forest trails and searched for sprigs of edelweiss. He loved me so much that he wanted me to stay with him forever.
Observing me, Mum would frequently say, “You’re so quiet, Kathy. What are you thinking?”
I’d laugh and shake my head—out loud it would sound stupid.
Snow gusted against the house, blown high by wind. Wolves howled. In mockery I sang back at them. I sang the quiet, I sang the storms. I didn’t sing Abram anymore. I didn’t know him as well as I had. When I was fifteen I had known him. When I was eight I’d known him best of all. Now that I was seventeen I didn’t know him at all.
Warm winds, springtime chinook. I began to think it would be all rig
ht, that the family had made it through another year.
With the thaw came comforting buds, light new foliage, and Elk Woman. Saskatoon berry jam, freshly baked bread, stalks of wild asparagus. She took to coming by with these and other gifts produced from her voluminous skirt. She would look around for the pail in which she made tea, start the water boiling, draw up a chair, and sit with Mum. They were old friends. They had gone to school together, and she had given my Mum a wolf tail to remind her she belonged to the First Nation people. Elk Woman always slipped a small packet of herbs under Mum’s pillow. “Good medicine.” Mum would smile and say she thought the last one had helped her. I thought that was good of Mum, being a nurse, to pretend so outrageously for Elk Woman.
One day, a bright, sunny, blue-sky day, Elk Woman motioned me to the porch. “You’re a strong girl, Kathy. And you’ve strength in you that you don’t know about yet.”
I had an intimation that I wouldn’t like this conversation. I didn’t want to hear what Elk Woman was about to say.
“Mum feels better today. She sat up in the rocker for a while. Now that the weather has changed…”
“My little bird, Loki the Trickster has made up this dream for you. I, your friend, tell you your mother makes the long canoe trip.”
The top of my head was blown off, as though Jellet had aimed his shotgun at me and pressed the trigger. “Get off this porch,” I spoke quite steadily, looking Elk Woman in the eye. “My dad’s asleep in the back bedroom. He doesn’t allow Indians on our porch. I’ll wake him up and he’ll run you off.”
“Oh little bird,” Elk Woman said sadly, “don’t pull away from your friends in bad times.”
I threw my arms around her. She was a power woman, a wind shifter. “God won’t let her die, will He?”
“When you come to the end of your life, you got to die.”
“But she’s not at the end.”
“The best you can do for her, Little Bird, is to let her know you’ll be all right. It’s you she’s worried about.”
I looked at her hard, trying to see into her. “Why should she worry about me?” I asked. “I’m grown up.”