A Hard Witching (21 page)

“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.”

I wish to offer thanks to the following:

Tim Birch, Steve Price, Greg Hollingshead, & Esi Edugyan; the Alberta Foundation for the Arts; UVic’s creative writing department, & Jack Hodgins in particular; Anne McDermid; Phyllis Bruce & everyone at HarperCollins; Dennis & Rita Thorburn; John Baker; & most of all, my mother, Lorraine Bitz, generous always.

“Small Comfort” first appeared in
The Malahat Review
; “Lillie” appeared in
The Antigonish Review;
“Bloodwood” appeared in
Prairie Fire.
Thanks to the editors of those journals.

JACQUELINE BAKER
was raised in Saskatchewan, studied creative writing at the University of Victoria, and is a recent MA graduate of the University of Alberta. Her work has appeared in magazines such as
Grain, Prism, The Antigonish Review
and
The Malahat Review.
She lives with her family in Edmonton, Alberta, where she is at work on her first novel.