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.