It wasn’t that she lied. At least, I don’t think she did—not what she would have considered lying, anyway. The thing about my mother was that she always loved a good story, right up until the day she died, tucked under my grandmother’s wedding quilt on the chesterfield in the airless and darkened front room. She simply believed in a little embellishment, a little bending of the rules. She believed in constant and impromptu revision to keep things interesting.
It was a family trait that ended, apparently, with her. I would try sometimes, at her urging, to produce an adequately dramatized version of some dry bit of information I’d learned at school, something from history or science class, even bits of gossip I was privy to in the girls’ washroom. I tried to recreate these stories the way my mother did, vividly, punching life and colour into everything; but I always ended up losing my place, confusing details, forgetting that I should have provided a vital fact sooner—No, wait a minute, there were actually two Indians waiting around the bend, and one was really tired, or, no, he was sick, really really sick, and it was dark out, I should of said it was dark, and one of the Indians, well, no, let me go back a bit.
This failure in me was a flaw my mother could never accept, as if I had been born of alien and uncultivable flesh.
“That’s all right, dear,” she’d sigh, patting my leg halfway through some dull and tortured tale, perhaps sensing my misery or simply no longer able to listen. Releasing us both from my inadequacies. She would smile a little to keep me from feeling discouraged, scanning my face in a way that made me feel she was still trying to decide whether or not we might come to like one another.
Once she said abruptly, “I never told you enough,” and I’d thought at first she meant stories, that she was excusing me, taking responsibility for my failure. But then she closed her eyes and shook her head, patted my leg again, and said nothing more. Her silence was my cue to read from one of the books we were studying in school, A Tale of Two Cities or The Old Man and the Sea. She liked best those set somewhere else, somewhere other than the prairies, somewhere exotic, tropical, unleashing the possibilities in a shell, a vine, a fish. She had me read The Pearl twice during her illness and once more toward the end. She was so small by then that I would tiptoe in quietly some afternoons when the blinds were drawn and the winter light was a dull, dusty gold, and think for a moment that she had disappeared, simply evaporated from beneath the smooth blue of the quilt, that it was her dust that floated all around me, turned and glowed in the heavy light cracking from the edges of windows where the blinds did not quite meet. Once I thought, I could breathe her in now, her body like this, in such fine particles. I could take all of her in. And I stood there enchanted by the thought, both desperate and afraid to breathe, caught in that one moment of pure, terrified longing.
“Mom?” she said then, and for a second I thought I’d spoken out loud, felt my heart thudding against the back of my throat. But the quilt rustled and her still-dark head turned on the pillow.
“Oh, Del,” she said, half-apologetic, half-disappointed, “I thought it was Grandma.”
By the time my mother’s illness transformed the front room into a sickroom, my grandmother had been dead nearly a decade, following fast on the heels of my grandfather. Everyone knew the two of them would go that way, so close together. After her funeral, people stood around at the fenced edge of the cemetery on the outskirts of town, smoking or dabbing at lipstick or simply leaning their bodies into the wind, agreeing on the inevitability of such near departures.
“A testament to their bond,” the priest had said, the very words that seemed to be on everyone’s mind. “A testament to God’s will,” he’d gone on to say at length, encouraged by the nods he’d received, “a testament to the glory of God and to the bond of man and wife, for each one of us, sinners all, each one of us, lambs and sinners all, which no thing, not even the cold hand of death, can put asunder.”
Many thought he was going too far, though they agreed that his theory applied well to my grandparents.
“It’s a fitting thing, Rose and Herb,” they said, grinding the heels of their shoes in the patched grass.
“It’s only right.”
“We should all be so lucky.”
The occasion of her death may, in fact, have been the only time my grandmother had been considered lucky. Rose Correy came from hard-on-their-luck people, the Sand Hill Mayhews (to distinguish them from the Town Mayhews, who owned the grocery store and were known to be fine, hard-working people despite the shocking markup on produce and perishables). Her father, Philip Mayhew, was seen as largely to blame for the family’s misfortunes.
“Any fool can see that land over there isn’t worth a rat’s ass,” they’d say around the coffee shop. “Can’t grow nothing. Run some cattle, sure, but if you can’t grow nothing …” And they would shake their heads and tip back their caps.
No one knew what made Philip Mayhew select for his homestead a wretched few acres on the edge of the Great Sand Hills—the worst possible tract of land in all Saskatchewan. We knew only that, on the long trip back to town after staking his claim, he’d stopped to drink from a slough, fell into a fever and died eight days later in a rooming house in Maple Creek, leaving his teenaged sons—dazed and stupid with grief—to break the land as best they could. Some said it was the lack of a father figure that made the Mayhews run wild, that their mother, left alone with five children on a farm where nothing grew but sagebrush, kocia weed and thistle, just gave up, let those kids do as they pleased.
“Drinkers and fighters,” they said in town. “Four boys and no father—well, it’s no wonder.”
My grandmother, the youngest and the only girl, was tagged as guilty by association, though she herself had never been known to take a drink, not even a sip from the proffered bottles of her brothers’ friends, and she was too small to be much of a fighter. I’ve seen pictures of her in my mother’s album, a skinny child swathed in hand-me-down boys’ sweaters or roughly made-over grown-up dresses (donated by town ladies to the needy, a word basically synonymous with Mayhew) that somehow gave her a disturbing air of unwholesomeness, the way the too-shiny fabric gleamed in the light and flapped low across the narrow bones of her chest. From the pictures, it’s hard to tell what my grandfather saw in her, unless it was a certain waifishness, a vulnerability that appealed to his less noble instincts. In truth, the Correys weren’t a far cry from the Mayhews, either in habit or spirit. The only difference was the family patriarch, Ted Correy, whose existence well into his nineties lent the illusion of family stability and discipline.
When Rose Mayhew married into the Correys, few would have claimed she was lucky, though some may have gone so far as to say she wasn’t likely to do much better. But to the surprise of most, Herb and Rose seemed to fare well in married life. Rose grew plump and pinkish, could not, from the way she looked in those later years, possibly have been named anything but Rose. I’ve often wondered how her parents chose so accurately, why they had not selected the more popular Rosemary or Constance or even Violet. It has become a strange source of pride for me, the selection of that name, as though it spoke of a greater understanding and insight than the Mayhews were generally given credit for.
I suppose that the fibbing distinguished the Mayhews from the Correys as well. My grandmother, using what I came in later years to recognize as a considerable degree of creative licence, called it storytelling.
“We come from a long line of storytellers,” she’d say to me sometimes when the Mayhew reputation around town (kept alive largely by the doings of her two youngest brothers, who still resided together on the family farm) came once more to my attention. “Mayhews always were fine storytellers,” she’d say, pointing her little chin. “That’s a thing to be proud of.”
My grandfather, on the other hand, was known to remark that he’d never seen such a pack of BSers in all his born days.
“The whole bunch of ‘em,” he’d mutter, knifing into a pork chop, “talk you senseless. And what have they got to say for themselves? Not a goddamn thing.”
My grandmother would murmur, “Herb,” in that way she had and then lift her eyebrows toward where I sat at the end of the table, pretending not to listen.
“What?” he’d bark. “It’s the God’s truth.” Then he’d wink and say, “I got myself the best thing that ever come from them hills.”
And my grandmother, I swear to this day, would duck her head and blush clear up to the roots of her hair, saying, “Herb,” again, but not in the same way. And sometimes, seizing the moment, she’d add, “I wonder how Bob and Carl are doing.” If my grandfather didn’t respond, it was as good an answer as she could hope for. She’d sweep crumbs from the table into the palm of her hand and say, “About time we made a trip out there.” Then smile over at me and add, “Make sure the old place hasn’t blown away.”
I’d been out to the Sand Hills frequently as a child, usually with my mother and my grandmother, sometimes with my grandfather in reluctant tow. When he did join us, he’d stay in the truck and smoke while my mother, grandmother and I went inside the unpainted farmhouse to visit with Great-Uncle Bob and Great-Uncle Carl. At first, I enjoyed those visits, sitting at the sagging kitchen table, sucking on a warm, dusty bottle of Dr. Pepper from the crate by the fridge, kept there solely for the purpose of mix. The two women cleaned and cooked, and the two men creaked back in their chairs, feet up against the edge of the table, drinking. And all four of them talked. It was dizzying, really, that chatter, and I found it intoxicating to sit there all but ignored, with my pop bottle wedged between knees drawn up to my chest, just listening.
“People can laugh all they want, but I’m telling you I seen it with my own eyes, that light, it was ghostly blue and it came each night and skittered over the same spot on the floor, till one night we pried up the boards with a shovel and there it was, a tin box stuffed to bursting with dollar bills, two hundred and twenty-seven of them, to be exact. Old Man Dubyk had come back for his money, sure as I’m sitting here today.”
“What, Dubyk? Never had a penny to his name.”
“Well, now you know why. Ha ha.”
“That was the summer Forsby tried to swim his horse across the river.”
“You were all down there drinking after Tom Fidder’s branding.”
“No, that was later, years later. You’re losing your memory.”
“It was a dare, wasn’t it?”
“Emil Schlacht dared him.”
“No, it was a bet.”
“No, it wasn’t, it was just Forsby. He was on his horse and halfway across before anybody realized.”
“Well, it was in the spring. I know that because there was ice yet on the river and Mazey Cross was still alive.”
“Mazey Cross! There’s a name I haven’t heard in years.”
“That’s where we carried the body, through the moonlight, I remember it was a full moon or near about, and she opened the door, all white-haired and holding up that candle just like an angel, you remember? And the light fell on poor Forsby and she looked at us all and then led us inside, where we laid poor Forsby on the kitchen table and all of us dripping wet and shivering like anything, and Foxy Eavell, who’d got to him first, crying and shaking like he might bust apart and Forsby so still it didn’t seem possible. And then she covered him over with her good tablecloth and we knew it was done, and Mazey said so softly, ‘You’re through now, boys. Go on home. I think you’re about through.’”
“Poor old Forsby.”
“Poor old Mazey Cross. It was her heart got her in the end.”
I sat quietly and listened and hoped my grandfather had dozed off in the truck outside, as he sometimes did. We all knew that when he leaned on the horn, it was time to go.
As I got older, I began to suspect my presence in the kitchen wasn’t forgotten but rather indulged, that I was undergoing some rite of passage. Bob began to glance at me frequently, gauging my reaction to different stories. Did I laugh, was I embarrassed? Did I understand? Carl, on the other hand, continued to ignore me until one day late in the summer before my tenth birthday, when he turned to me abruptly and asked, loudly enough to make me start, “And what have you got to say for yourself?”
I froze, hands pressed to my kneecaps, toes curled over the edge of the chair.
“Well,” Carl prompted, louder, “what can you tell me, Delly Mayhew?” He said it with an odd and inexplicable sneer, drawing it out in an ugly way—Maaay-hew.
Until that precise moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that I was one of them, a Mayhew. My last name was Correy, of course, the same as my mother’s, my grandmother’s. But they were Mayhews, too. I was amazed that I had never included myself in their number, not consciously.
My grandmother and Bob had stopped mid-conversation, and my mother turned from where she stood at the kitchen sink, scouring a frying pan. Her long, dark red hair had pulled loose in the heat and hung down over her face, but I thought I saw alarm there, as if she was about to say something, then stopped, unsure herself what it might be.
I sat there dumb, looking from one face to another, sweat springing up all over my body, terrified by the weight of that moment, the expectation. Carl’s sneer still hanging in the air over all of us. Maaay-hew.
The long blast of the truck horn startled everyone, even Carl. I sprang instantly to my feet, forgetting the sweaty pop bottle wedged between my knees. It hit the edge of the table and bounced to the floor, spinning absurdly on the cracked linoleum like in a party game. I stood there stupidly while the sticky pop foamed out around my feet.
My mother was the first to move, coming toward me with the dishcloth in hand.
“She’s a Correy,” Bob said, excusing me, swishing a mouthful of rye down his throat.
Carl looked at me narrowly, then at my mother, on her knees, mopping at the linoleum. “No,” he said flatly, “she ain’t.”
It’s strange how you don’t see the most obvious things until someone points them out, like a deer at the edge of the highway at dusk, or those puzzles in children’s books: How many rabbits can you spot in this picture? Then you wonder how you could have missed them. The fact that I was descended from the Mayhews was, of course, no surprise. But the real connection, the blood and flesh and bone connection, had not occurred to me until that day at the farm. In much the same way, it did not occur to me until the following autumn to wonder about my father.
Until that time, I’d been living under the assumption that I simply didn’t have one. Oddly enough, I don’t remember ever thinking about him much before then. Perhaps on some level I wished to believe that, like Thumbelina, I had been found by my mother in the petals of a tulip. Or perhaps my grandfather’s presence more than adequately filled an obvious void. At school, for instance, I simply made the felt card or clay ashtray or whatever happened to be that year’s Father’s Day art project with my grandfather in mind. And each item was duly brought home and duly received without a sign of awkwardness on the part of any member of the family.
To the considerable shock of my grandmother, therefore, on a day not long after the unfortunate afternoon at Bob and Carl’s, I turned to her in the car as we drove down Main Street, with all those poplar leaves scattering across the road like sunlight, and said, without preamble, “What happened to my father?”
As ever, she appeared unruffled. She simply pulled the big old Impala to a stop in front of the post office, retrieved her purse from the floor by her feet, where she always kept it when driving, and said pleasantly, “He ran away.” Then she opened the car door and said, “Coming?”
I sat there, watching my grandmother swing neatly through the post office door, and pictured, instead, my father, inexplicably in top hat and tails, trudging away across the Sand Hills. Naturally, as he was running away, I pictured him from behind, but I’ve always thought it spoke largely of my creative inadequacies, that, in this only vision I ever had of him, I did not give my father a face.
When Bob married a widow woman from over near Swift Current, much to the surprise of everyone, he left the farm and Carl for the first time in his life. Everyone wondered what Carl would do without him. What Carl did, after about six months of solitary hard drinking, was load up a flatbed of rye bottles, some still half-full, and drive them out to the nuisance grounds. Then he stopped at the store, purchased five crates of Dr. Pepper, a paper sack of jawbreakers and all the cartons of Number 7s they had in stock, and headed back to the farm, stone cold sober possibly for the first time in more than forty years.
I had just turned seventeen, both my grandparents had been dead a few years, though not long enough for the crabgrass and sand flowers in the cemetery to completely cover their graves, and my mother was still simply feeling poorly, as she said; the cancer in her throat had not yet developed into the baseball-sized lump she would eventually keep hidden beneath the prettily scalloped edge of my grandmother’s quilt.
Carl called one Saturday morning to say he’d been out in the Sand Hills after a yearling—the same damn one as last week, if we could believe that, she must have some jackrabbit in her, or antelope more likely, something wild anyway, that was for sure—and saw the chokecherries were ripe for picking and hanging as thick and heavy as grapes on the vine.
“I wouldn’t mind putting some jam up this year,” my mother said afterwards.
“Jam?” Just that morning I’d seen her sit down wearily on the back steps for ten minutes after taking only a few towels from the clothesline. I was catching her in these moments of exhaustion more frequently, and they were making me feel anxious and irritable. “You must be kidding.”
She lifted the long red coil of hair from over her shoulder, then twisted it into a neat bun at the nape of her neck, the way she always wore it in hot weather—a motion that reminded me how young she still was. “We haven’t had a good year for chokecherries like this since you were a little girl.” She smiled and I turned away. “I remember because it was the same year Uncle Bob killed that rattler in the stable. Ten feet long if it was a foot. He kept the skin. It was the same year …”
She trailed off, as she had begun to do lately, looked instead down at her hands spread out on the kitchen table, fingers splayed.
I was seated across from her, folding a washload of socks and underwear, not much now, just hers and mine. I stopped, staring at her across the table, at her thin wrists, so white they were almost blue, and for a moment, I thought I hated her, hated them all and their stupid lies. Why couldn’t they ever just tell the truth? And before I could stop myself, I said, “Where is it?”
“What?” she said, looking surprised.
I held a pair of socks balled up in my lap. “The ten-foot skin. Where is it?”
A funny kind of half-smile skittered across my mother’s lips.
“I’ve never seen it,” I went on, hating myself. “You’d think I would have seen it. All these years.”
We stared at each other that way across the table, shame already worming its awful way up from my belly. Finally she said quietly, “Maybe you have. Maybe you don’t remember.”
“I’d remember,” I said, though thinking now that maybe, in fact, I had seen it.
It was a trick all the Mayhews could do well: convince you that you’d seen things, done things, you never had. It reminded me of that card trick where the magician makes you think you’ve selected a card, though he has really just slipped it ever so gently into your palm.
“You’d have to ask Uncle Carl,” she said. “I wouldn’t know what happened to it.”
She had me. She knew I’d never ask Carl. Though he had become a different man since he’d stopped drinking, I still harboured a certain distrust of him bordering on fear.
“Anyway,” she said, “I think I’ll go. I sure would like to see Uncle Carl.” She turned away, took two plates from the cupboard, two forks and knives, two glasses, and began to set the table. “Who knows how much longer he’s got.”
After dinner, we loaded the car with empty ice cream buckets, filled a jug with ice water and headed north toward the Sand Hills. My mother was quiet, and I looked over more than once to see if she’d fallen asleep, her head rocking on that thin neck as if every bump in the narrow road would snap it. I was hot and tired and filled with a terrible shame that lapsed every few moments into anger. Of course, it wasn’t anger at all I was feeling then, in those days before and during her sickness, it was simply fear.
“Should’ve gone this morning,” I said irritably. “It’ll be hot.”
Her head bumped against the side window as the car lurched from the grid road onto the prairie trail that led out through the hills. “Sorry,” I said.
I flicked the radio on, fiddled briefly with the one station we sometimes picked up out of Medicine Hat, flicked it off again. We both rolled the windows down, now that we were driving more slowly, listened to the pitched whirr of grasshoppers in the brush and across the sandy trail. It was high summer by then, and the wild roses had dried into their bright pink hips like crabapples, and the hot stench of sagebrush and ground cedar and the reeking hides of cattle baked in the sun blasted across the hills, seemed to shimmer in the very air with its awful weight. The sun off the hood of the car was like a blade. I watched as my mother shaded her eyes with one hand, then turned in her seat and looked backward out the rear window, watching the southern edge of hills slide past us.
“You know,” she said after a while, “those hills are moving all the time. Every day. I never knew that. To think I’ve lived here my whole life and didn’t know something like that. Did you know they were moving?”
I did. We’d studied erosion in science the year before, had taken a class trip to the Sand Hills to see it first-hand, but no one had listened to much the teacher said, unimpressed by something at once so familiar and so disdained. “Not all of them, though. Less than one per cent.”
“Who told you that?”
“Mr. Starkey.”
“Hmm,” she said shortly. “He’s not from around here, is he.”
I knew she didn’t expect an answer.
“Lloyd Stolley was saying the other day that in a hundred years they could be to Maple Creek,” she said.
“What,” I scoffed, “the Sand Hills?” I shook my head in scorn. My mother caught my look. “Probably not all the way to Maple Creek,” I added, part apologetic. “They don’t move that fast.”
“Lloyd’d know,” she said definitely, facing forward again. “He’s got a nephew in engineering in Saskatoon. Or a cousin.” She frowned. “Anyway,” she went on, as if we’d been talking about this all along, “this is where Uncle Carl had his accident, somewhere around where this break in the hills falls.”
This was news to me. “What accident?”
“His pelvis was crushed,” she said with an air of surprise, as though I should have known.
“How did that happen?”
She sighed. “There was a party.” In stories involving Uncle Carl, there was often a party. “He was standing between two cars parked along the side of the road. One of the Rawling boys pulled up behind. He was drinking, of course, and ran into the rear car. Not hard, just enough to pin him.”
That explained Carl’s limp, but something still puzzled me about the story. “The Rawling boys?” I said. “But they’re young, aren’t they? They’re younger than you. What was Carl doing at a party with them?”
My mother smiled briefly. “Looking for me.”
I wanted to ask more, but I felt baited and uncertain—was this just another story? I looked out the side window, watched juniper and snowberry blur smoothly together for a moment, then jolt as I hit another gully in the road. My mother sighed, shifted on the seat. My arms felt heavy and sluggish, as if I carried weights on my wrists, as if the blood was not quite reaching my fingers. I took an arm off the wheel and shook it.
“What’s wrong?” my mother said.
“Nothing.”
“Tired?”
A gopher skidded across the road and I winced at the small, soft thump it made under the tire.
“No.” I felt her eyes on me and I turned toward the side window again. “No,” I said, a bit sharply, “I’m not anything.”
She sighed again and looked past me, up ahead a few yards.
“There’s the boots,” she said. She said it every time we passed them. I took my foot from the gas and let the car roll itself slowly by, knowing she wanted to look. “There,” she said, “those three are mine.” She pointed to two small cowboy boots and a rubber boot, all worn to shreds, turned upside down and jammed on top of the fence posts. But I already knew each one that had belonged to a Mayhew.
“Most are the boys’,” she said, meaning my grandmother’s brothers. “I guess they wore out the most boots.”
I studied the long line of boots turned absurdly upside down. There was something disturbing about the way they stuck up into the air, all those heels pointing skyward.
“Those aren’t all Mayhew,” I said, knowing I’d said it before, possibly more than once.
“No,” she said, “there’s others.”
“Who?” I asked, though I already knew.
“Oh,” she said, “other hill families. Fidders have some, I guess, and Wallers. I don’t really know. Everybody.”
“I don’t have any,” I said after a moment.
“No,” she said, watching the last few posts slide past us, “you don’t.”
I didn’t know what I was waiting for her to say that day. I knew I was fishing, but I couldn’t say why or for what. Maybe for one of her stories—not a lie-story, just a story. Already I missed the sound of her voice, the lulling rhythm of her words. Those boots have been there as long as you and as long as me and as long as your grandmother, as long as people have lived and died on this land, and the first boot belonged to a boy, a small yellow-haired boy who was the first child born out here in these hills one autumn, just around harvest time, on a still evening when the moon rose fat and red from the dust of the men threshing hot, endless rows in the fields back of the hills. The first child, Henry was his name, and he was a beautiful child with yellow hair and the bluest eyes, blue like flowers you hear of in stories. Yes, he was the first child born here and the first child to die, poor Henry. To die in the winter here is a terrible thing… Maybe that was the story I wanted, one of the first stories I remember her telling me, of yellow-haired Henry and that one terrible winter—or maybe something more. It wouldn’t have mattered, though. By then, she had already begun to change the endings. Soon the stories would stop altogether.
Up ahead, we could see the farm wavering like a mirage in the afternoon heat, a trick of the atmosphere making it appear closer than it was. Making it appear larger than the great yellow dunes that surrounded it.
My mother’s voice came so softly and unexpectedly, I started.
“Where will they be in a hundred years, then?”
I turned onto the long road that led into the farmyard.
“Delly,” she said after a moment, as if I hadn’t heard, “where will they be?”
Carl had already loaded buckets into the back of the half-ton and sat waiting on the steps drinking a Dr. Pepper when we pulled up to the house. He looked much smaller than the last time I’d seen him, as if all the flesh had simply dissolved on his bones. I glanced over at my mother to see if she’d noticed, too. But she was already hoisting herself out of the seat, and as I watched her, I thought, Her, too. How thin they are, how terribly small. I followed her up to the house where Carl was saying, “We picked ourselves a hot one.” He cracked open another Dr. Pepper that had been waiting in the shade against the steps and handed it to me. I didn’t want it but took it anyway. “Get you a coffee?” he said to my mother, who shook her head and looked up at the sun glaring against the house.
She shaded her eyes. “Should’ve brought some hats.”
I looked over at her, puzzled.
“Plenty inside,” Carl said, as if it had been rehearsed, “straw ones back of the kitchen door.” Then he added, “Your mother’s.” As if we needed an explanation. As if we hadn’t known all along the hats were there.
“I’ll get them,” I offered when no one moved, setting my bottle on the narrow step and squeezing past Carl, who leaned to allow me room.
“Back of the kitchen door,” he said again.
We all knew they were there, of course. We’d used them plenty of times before. My grandmother had kept them specifically for the annual berry-picking. I grabbed two wide-brimmed ones off their hooks and then stopped, realizing I had never before been alone in that kitchen, and listened to the rhythmic ticking of the stove clock. The blinds were all drawn, curled and yellowing at the edges, and the linoleum had pulled up at the corners like tongues stiff with disuse, exposing the dirty wood beneath. Otherwise, the room looked much the same as I remembered it. The crate of pop still stood by the fridge and the table still swayed beneath stacks of newspaper, tobacco tins and stained coffee mugs. Over the back of the nearest chair hung what looked to be an old rag. I hooked it with my finger, held it up. It was an undershirt, worn and washed and worn again to a yellowy-grey, so thin I could see the pink tips of my fingers through the fabric. The initials C.M. still showed faintly in blue ink on the tag. I quickly dropped it back on the chair and left the room, embarrassed at having held something at once so intimate and so sad.
“You ever heard of a fella name of John James?”
Carl and I were under the chokecherry trees, and my mother had gone back to the truck to rest in the shade. I slapped at a mosquito on my thigh.
“John James,” he repeated. “Said he come from around here, but I never heard of no Jameses.”
I squinted up at him briefly from where I knelt in the hot, soft sand, but he had his back to me, stretching his thin arms high up into the branches.
“Best ones always at the top,” he said, bending a long branch toward me, pinning it beneath his arm. I noticed that he picked by closing his thumb and index finger over a bunch of berries and then pulling straight down so they fell into his palm. Both his hands were stained a bluish purple. I hooked my bucket over my wrist and continued plucking neatly, berry by berry.
“Anyway, this John James,” he continued, “I thought maybe your mother might’ve said something about him one time.”
I plunked two berries into my bucket, slapped at another mosquito. It left a smear of blood on my calf. “No,” I said, licking my thumb and rubbing it away, wondering with distaste, as I always did, whose blood it was. “Never heard of him.”
I glanced at Carl, but he was busy pulling and dropping and pulling again. It must have been hard on him, I thought, out on this farm all alone. Mayhews weren’t meant to be loners.
“There were some thought he might have come from the Hutterites over in Estuary,” he went on, “but I never did. He didn’t have that Hutterite look.”
I grimaced but said nothing.
“What I think is he wasn’t from around here at all, though he told everybody in town he’d come from the hills and wasn’t nobody questioned him. We all thought he meant Sand Hills, of course, but I guess he could have meant any hills at all.”
I shifted my nearly full bucket to the other wrist, rubbed at the welt the wire handle had left on my flesh.
“Here.” Carl handed me an empty bucket from the pile behind him. “He come to town, must’ve been about ‘66 or, no,” he said, thinking, “it was ‘67 because we had the big centennial do that year. Anyway, this John James come to town, and do you know what he was selling?”
I shook my head in spite of myself.
“Bibles.” Carl spat a little when he said it and a drop fell on my forearm. I forced myself not to wipe it off on my shorts, not right away, not while he was looking. “Not just any Bibles,” Carl said, beaming at me as if about to deliver a punchline. “Bibles”—he paused for dramatic effect—“he wrote out by hand.”
I looked at him skeptically and he nodded.
“Two of them,” he said, shifting the branch to his other arm, “one finished and one still in the works.” He chuckled. “I can see you don’t believe it, and I didn’t believe it neither. Till I saw one for myself.”
“You saw one?”
“Yup.” He nodded. “And if you still don’t believe me, you got someone that’ll back me up right there.” He pointed his chin in the direction of the truck and my mother’s head resting in the corner of the open window.
I stared at him. “She never mentioned anyone named John James.”
He shrugged. “That’s neither here nor there. But he come to town with them Bibles and made quite a laughingstock of himself. People made fun of him, called him names and such, on the quiet at first, but it wasn’t too long before people started calling him The King to his face, short for King James. And worse. But your grandpa, he got kind of friendly with him, not to put that past a Correy, and took him under his wing, sort of.”
“Why would Grandpa do that?” I asked doubtfully, for Grandpa was not the kind to take anyone, especially a stranger, under his wing.
“I can’t speak for them that don’t speak for themselves. All I know is he let him stay in the attic room for a few weeks.” He shook his head. “I knew from the start he was trouble.”
I’d stopped picking now, but Carl kept raking his fingers through the leaves, so mechanically I wanted to slap his hand.
“What kind of trouble?”
“Oh, the usual kind. He was heading east, he said, looking for work. And you know what that means.”
I didn’t but nodded anyway.
“Your grandpa put him up for a while, thinking sooner or later he’d figure out there wasn’t nobody going to buy them Bibles. But John James thought he was on to something, I guess, because he just kept going door to door, peddling. Of course, it didn’t take long before he’d gone to the same doors two, three, sometimes four or five times.”
Carl let go of the branch, and I jumped back as it thwacked against the sky. He reached up, grunting, to pull down another, and I noticed the sweat stains under his armpits had an unhealthy-looking brownish tinge.
“Started to make a nuisance of himself, and one day a few of the men from town went over to your grandpa’s and told John James to pack up his Bibles and head on out, keep right on going.”
“Did he?”
“Oh yeah.” Carl bent for a new bucket. “He left all right.” He paused again, looking up at me to see if he could draw out the suspense any further.
“And?” I said impatiently. “That’s it?”
“No, ma’am.” Carl shook his head. “That is not it. He left town all right … but not before he nailed every one of them Bible pages to the church.”
“The Catholic church?” I said.
“Yes, ma’am, the Catholic church. I was there the morning we found them and so was your mother, and we stood along with a bunch of others from town and stared at those pages, flapping away like a million wings, like that old church might suddenly go skyward.” He looked up as he spoke, as if he might see it there among the clouds. “I’m surprised your mother never said nothing.”
I waited for a minute to see if he would laugh, but he just took out a hanky, wiped sweat from his upper lip and said, “Are you going to keep picking or not?”
I looked back at the truck, at my mother’s dark red head leaned up against the open window, at the fine, pale curve of her chin. It looked as if she’d shifted position, and I wondered whether she was really sleeping or just lying awake, listening to Carl’s story through the hot hum of grasshoppers. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that if I asked her later, she’d say she never heard a thing.
I never did ask her later. Not later that day at the Sand Hills nor on the long, silent drive home, nor in the following months, when I spent most of my free time at her side, reading stories or just sitting, pretending not to notice as she gradually grew smaller and smaller under that quilt until finally she just disappeared—though not in the way I imagined it that afternoon as I stood mesmerized by golden bits of light. Her death was a darker thing, in the end. A sadder thing. There wasn’t much beauty in it after all.
And I never did ask her about John James. Instead, I harboured for many years the firm belief that Carl was trying to tell me something that day under the chokecherry trees, that he was trying, either with or without my mother’s consent, to tell me something about my father. And for many years, I believed my father to be that mysterious John James, the drifter, the zealot, the man from the hills of nowhere. I was wrong, of course. John James wasn’t my father. I heard the whole story, years later, from an aunt I’d got friendly with, my grandfather’s youngest sister. It wasn’t very interesting. He was just a farm boy from across the line in Alberta. They were both kids. They made a mistake: Life went on. End of story.
• • •
I have an image of my mother in a lavender dress, her body awkwardly canted against the white rails of a farmhouse porch, shoulders erect, one foot arched neatly outward to lend the illusion of confidence. It is late afternoon and the spindled shadows of rails stretch away from her, casting slats over clumps of crabgrass sprouting slow and painfully from the dirt. She is young, younger than I am now. Her hair, long and a brighter red than I remember it, is held back in a tight, unflattering fashion by bobby pins at her temples. I can’t say whether or not she is smiling, or what she is doing with her hands, whether they are propped graceless and freckled against the railing or fall lost and anonymous in the folds of her skirt. I don’t know where the image comes from. Likely, it’s one of my own fabrication—like that image of my father running away across the Sand Hills. And there are others, of my grandmother, my grandfather, even of myself. I have carried them around with me since childhood like malleable photographs I can add detail to over the years, if I choose, or do not choose, to expand the narrative. At least, that’s how I’ve come to understand it. This image I have of my mother could be her lie or my own. I know only that behind the porch rails, behind the house, there is a red barn with the loft door hanging slightly off one hinge, flapping and creaking in even the slightest wind. There is a rusted-out halfton behind it, and three granaries weathered to the same grey as the dirt, and just a few yards farther, sunk oddly almost below the level of the horizon, a sparse row of cottonwood and caragana someone once intended for a shelter belt. Beyond the trees, so far in the distance they can hardly be seen, the smooth, pale Sand Hills shoulder up from the prairie.
• • •
After my mother died, I saw it as a kind of duty to stop by the farm every so often, just to see how Carl was getting along, if he needed anything. Sometimes I cleaned a little, washed the dishes, swept the floor. Carl would sit at the kitchen table and watch me.
Almost always he said, “I guess it’s just me and you now.”
“There’s Bob,” I’d say each time. And he’d mutter, “Bob,” and flick his hand dismissively. It became a sort of routine for us.
“You don’t look much like your mother,” he said one day. I kept sweeping, my back turned toward him.
“No,” I said, bending to reach the dustpan, “I guess I don’t.”
“No,” he said again, as if to reinforce it. And then, “You ever ask her about that John James I told you about?”
I tipped the dustpan into the garbage bag.
“No,” I said, propping the broom in its place behind the fridge.
“Hmm,” he said, a short, sharp sound. He leaned back in the chair, propped his feet awkwardly on the edge of the table, trying for the old easiness in his bones.
“You need a wash done?” I asked, tying the top of the garbage bag shut.
“That’s funny you never asked her,” he said. “Seems like maybe you would’ve.”
I lugged the bag to the front door, set it outside. The sun was just beginning to dip below the bluing hills and the air had turned cold. I stood watching for a moment before I returned to the kitchen.
“I’ll run this garbage to the burning barrel on my way out,” I said, taking my coat from a hook by the door.
“I guess I never told you I read one of them Bibles.” He nodded, his eyes shining in the fading light. I wondered whether he’d started drinking again. “That John James,” he said, “he had nice handwriting. Must’ve took him a long time to write it because it sure took me a hell of a long time to read it.” He tipped forward, the chair hitting the linoleum with a thud that seemed too loud for the moment. “I read it all,” he said. “Ask me anything.”
I sighed and pulled my coat on.
“Go on,” he said, “anything.”
“Okay,” I said, trying to be funny, “how does it end?”
Carl frowned. “That’s the thing,” he said. “It’s a good story, but it don’t end well.”
Just for a moment, I caught that image of my mother, not the one where she’s standing against the porch rails in the sunlight, but the other one, her small body under the blue wedding quilt barely making a rise in the fabric, and all that yellow dust turning slowly in the air, as if I could touch it.
Carl leaned across the table.
“If it’d been me,” he said, “I’d of told a different ending. But not John James.” He gaped at me, wide-mouthed and toothless across the gathering darkness. “He stuck to that story word for word. Didn’t change nothing.”