A Hard Witching (5 page)

She pulled the blanket up under my arms and tucked it in tight. I could hear Aunt Gerri humming in the bathroom, where I knew she was standing in front of the tiny mirror, smoking and putting rollers in her flat red hair. We both listened a moment. It was a Christmas carol, “Good King Wenceslas.”

Grandma studied my face, then patted my foot beneath the
covers. “It won’t be the first time,” she said, and I thought even then that I knew what she was talking about. “Anyway,” she said, “it will be a long day tomorrow. Get some rest.”

“You’re not German,” I said, as she moved toward the door.

“No,” she said, laughing. “You know that.”

She stood there at the end of the bed, and I noticed she’d wiped her lipstick off, or hadn’t bothered to reapply it, and this was somehow comforting. I tried to picture Grandpa and Max across town, but I couldn’t see them in that house, not without Uncle Aloetius, not with the hot earth sucking the light so fast from the sky. And I knew Grandma would not stay long with me; she did not like to linger over things. So I said softly, hoping it would not carry, “But you call her Cherry, not Gerri.”

And she looked so strange then, sad maybe, or just thinking back, as if that name had meant something to her once, too.

“Oh,” she sighed, “you just pick things up.” She shrugged. “After a while, it all becomes the same.”

I found Max asleep on the chesterfield the next morning, half covered over with the plaid blanket from the spare room upstairs. He had not changed into pyjamas but wore his T-shirt and shorts from the day before. Someone had placed kitchen chairs facing the length of the chesterfield so he would not roll off in his sleep.

My grandmother was already in the kitchen frying eggs and potatoes, and I could see my grandfather beyond her through the window, puttering around the open garage doors.

“Watch these potatoes,” Grandma said. “I need to go down cellar.”

I stood at the stove, turning the smoking potatoes with a spatula, and Grandpa came to the door.

“I need a hand,” he said.

But before I could answer, Max came into the kitchen.

“Never mind,” Grandpa said to me. “Max, come help clean up the car.”

I stood at the window watching them swipe across the Buick with wet rags from the rain barrel, knowing how cold their hands would be from that water, which had not yet been warmed by the sun, and when Grandma came up she said, “Go on out there. Tell them breakfast is nearly ready.”

I slipped into my shoes and was about to open the screen door when I saw Aunt Gerri sitting on the concrete steps, and I stopped without thinking, made an awkward motion to go back inside. She’d seen me hesitate, but pretended she hadn’t noticed, looking the other way, out into the yard at Max and Grandpa. And I felt so bad that I had to go out.

“Morning,” she said, when I sat down. She was smoking, a pack of cigarettes with a lighter tucked inside balanced on her knee. Her hair was still in rollers, and I noticed how thin it was, her pinkish scalp exposed between the rows. She was wearing eyeshadow again, but this time a light shade of mauve that did not glitter and made her skin look vaguely yellow.

She caught me staring. “I never smoked a day in my life,” she said, “till I married Aloise.”

“Oh,” I said.

“That’s how it is,” she said. “That’s how things are.”

I felt she expected some sort of response, so I said, “We’re from Saskatoon. Max and me.”

“You got a sweetheart?” she asked, and I felt that old hotness on the back of my neck.

“No,” I said.

She nodded, as if I’d said yes.

“How’s Thunder Bay?” I asked, trying to make conversation. “It’s Thunder Bay,” she said.

“It’s not going nowhere.”

I nodded, unsure whether or not I was supposed to laugh.

Grandpa said something I couldn’t hear to Max, who went to the garage, came back with a bottle of liquid and, under Grandpa’s direction, began rubbing it on the chrome.

“They started going through Aloise’s things,” she said after a while, nodding toward Max and Grandpa. “I guess they don’t need my help. Nobody asked for my help. Which is just fine by me.”

I didn’t know what to say, though I felt she was waiting for some sort of assurance.

“You like your grandpa?” she said suddenly.

I squirmed. “I guess so,” I said uneasily. “He’s my grandpa.”

She took another long drag on her cigarette.

“He don’t like me much.”

I wanted to assure her that wasn’t so, but instead I said, “How come?”

She flicked ashes from her cigarette, pulled something from her bottom lip with her long fingernails. They were painted mauve, like the eyeshadow.

“I just hope he don’t want to palm that junk off on me,” she said. “I don’t have nowhere to put it. I’m moving into a new place and there’s nowhere to put it.”

And I remembered, then, that hairbrush I’d found months ago in the kitchen drawer at Uncle Aloetius’ house.

“Isn’t it your stuff?” I said. “Doesn’t some of that stuff belong to you?”

She snorted but said nothing.

“I mean,” I ventured, “you’re still married to him. After all.”

She peered at me, not in an angry way, just looking, then dropped her cigarette on the step and crushed it with her sandal.

“They don’t divorce,” she said, lifting her chin toward Grandpa. “They don’t believe in it.”

“Oh,” I said again.

“I just say I’m widowed. That’s what I’ve been saying all this time. I’m a widow.” She shrugged. “So? Now I am one.”

We sat there listening to the swish and rub of those rags across the Buick, Max and Grandpa working without speaking.

“I found a brush one time,” I said after a while. “I thought maybe it was yours. It was blue.”

“Maybe,” she said. “I guess so. I guess it must’ve been mine.”

“Don’t you want it?”

“No,” she said.

The sun was up full and hot, and I heard Grandma call breakfast from the kitchen window. Aunt Gerri looked as if she was going to rise, then stopped.

“Love,” she began, and nodded. I waited for her to go on, but she just stared across the yard, at Max and Grandpa and the old Buick, at the cottonwood tree that needed to be cut down. I waited, with the sun hot on my knees. “Love,” she repeated finally. “You think that’s what it’ll all be about. But then you find out, it is. Only not the way you thought.” Then she nodded again and went inside.

After the funeral, Aunt Gerri drove back to Medicine Hat and flew from there to Thunder Bay. She took nothing with her from Uncle Aloetius’ house, nothing that I knew of anyway, though I thought she should at least have that picture of herself from Uncle Aloetius’ bedroom. If I’d had the guts, I’d have gone over to get it for her. That and the hairbrush. But I didn’t. That much, at least, had not changed.

I was the last one to see her before she left. I was sitting under the willow outside the church. Everyone else had already walked over to the community hall for the lunch the
town ladies always provided after a funeral. Aunt Gerri came out the side door of the church, and I was about to call over to her when she stopped abruptly and leaned with one hand against the wall, as though dizzy. It was only a second, but I stood in alarm. Then she straightened and walked briskly to her car, her purple high heels clicking on the concrete. I knew she had seen me, but she did not look back, and I didn’t blame her, not really. She just climbed into her car and, in a moment, was gone.

I was not surprised when I learned later that Uncle Aloetius had left her what little money he had. But it reminded me of what Grandpa had said about her. That she took money from a man not even—what? I never did find out, though I thought I knew. I thought it had something to do with love.

Max and Grandpa weren’t around much in the days following; they spent most of their time across town, sorting through things, packing up all that junk or maybe throwing it away.

My grandmother said to me one afternoon as I stood by myself, kicking at the nearly dried cornstalks in the garden, “Why don’t you go on over?” But we both knew I couldn’t.

I crunched a browning stalk under my bare heel. “Why doesn’t Grandpa like Aunt Gerri?” I asked.

Grandma smiled a little. “It’s been so long,” she said, “I don’t think he remembers.”

She bent and began collecting garden refuse in fistfuls, stuffing it into the plastic garbage bag she toted by her side.

“But you remember,” I said.

Grandma stood up, laughed. “No.” She shook her head. “Some things, it’s best to let them go. Old hurts. Your grandpa
can’t let go.” She propped her hands on her hips and looked with dismay around the garden, as if she’d only just noticed it, the soft, yellowing leaves, the rusting, wrinkled flesh of pumpkins. “Such a waste,” she said. The thing she seemed to hate above all.

“Do you like her?”

“I don’t know her,” she said.

I nodded, though her answer wasn’t entirely satisfying.

“What will they do with his stuff?” I asked.

Grandma shrugged. “Keep it, I guess, his personal things. There’s room in the attic. See if your father wants anything.” She paused. “Is there anything you want?”

There was—of course there was.

“No,” I said.

Grandma went back to gathering cornstalks. “Anyway,” she said, “we could all blame someone if we let ourselves. We all have something we could blame someone for. But what’s the point?”

I felt bad, standing there watching while she worked, and so I bent to help her.

“No,” she said firmly. “I want to do this myself. If you want to help, you can get me some more garbage bags from the kitchen.”

So I went, taking my time. I took the bags from the cupboard below the sink, then, thinking she might appreciate it, went to the fridge to get her a cold drink. There on the bottom shelf stood the bowl of saskatoons Max and I had picked the day Aunt Gerri arrived. In all the upheaval, I’d forgotten about the berries entirely, though Grandma had washed them and put them in one of her good porcelain bowls. They lay like dark pearls, beautiful now out of context, like something of sand and water. It was almost a shock to find them among
the ordinariness of pickles and mayonnaise and eggs. I stood admiring them, just for a moment, and I thought, I’ll remember this. I’ll remember this one good thing.

Lucy Satterley was sunbathing again, her hair pulled up in a knot on top of her head and secured with a ribbon the exact green of her two-piece swimsuit. She did not move, but every so often the wind would lift a long end of the ribbon in a cool, shimmering flap and twist it gaily about her ears, then let it fall. From where he sat in the shade on the low cinder-block wall, Owen, who was almost eight, noticed she’d slipped the straps of her swimsuit down over her shoulders, exposing a white, shining rim of flesh. She looked, he thought, like a water queen, like something you read of in books, some fine thing washed in from the sea. He mouthed her name, counting the beats off on his fingers: Lu-cy-Sat-ter-ley, Lu-cy-Sat-ter-ley. Five beats exactly, five fingers. It wasn’t much of a game. He jumped down, brushed dust from the seat of his corduroy pants, waited a moment to see if she’d turn and notice him. When she didn’t, he crossed the Satterleys’ backyard to where she stretched belly-up on a silver blanket, glistening like a new fish. Owen sniffed. Up close, her skin had an oilier sheen and a smell like the cookies his mother
used to bake—raisins and coconut. And something else, something like mown grass after it has lain for a while in the heat. He stood there, shifting his weight from foot to foot, willing her to move. A meadowlark sounded from down the alley. The ribbon danced briefly and fell. Finally, he peeled off his shirt, spread it on the lawn and sat down with his back to the sun, precisely, so that his shadow fell true to the line of his body.

Lucy did not move. He stared at the side of her head.

“Sure is hot,” he said, plucking a blade of grass. He thought maybe she twitched, just a little, so he repeated himself, louder, and added conversationally, “Hotter’n a cat’s snatch.”

She rolled her head slowly toward him, opened one blue eye. For some reason, he had known she would have blue eyes, cool and transparent as rainwater.

“Where’d you hear that?” she drawled.

Her voice startled him a little. “Nowhere. I can just tell. It’s hot, isn’t it?”

“I mean ‘cat’s snatch.’ Where’d you hear that?”

He shrugged, looked down at the grass. Something in her tone made him wish he had not come over after all.

“You shouldn’t say that.” She shifted her hips on the blanket. “It’s not nice.” She opened the other eye and peered at him sharply. “I bet you don’t even know what that is.”

Owen squinted up at a thick band of clouds ballooning toward them across the sky. Who cared if he didn’t? He knew a lot of things. He knew it had not rained in forty-seven days. He kept track on a calendar his mother got from the bar. It had pictures of prairie scenes to match the seasons. Lucy humphed at his silence, but gently, like the sound a sleeping seal might make. Like the sound of those clouds moving. Fat with rain. Where did it go, that rain? If not here, where?

He knew by the rustle of her head brushing the silver blanket that she’d turned away again.

“It’s hot anyways,” he said after a while. He looked back at her, noticing how the sun lit the fine yellow hairs at the base of her head, how it left bluish shadows, like caves, behind her shoulders, under her arms. From the wall, he had longed to tickle her there, but now he could see this would not be possible. “I’m getting a new bike,” he said, then felt foolish. Why would she care? “For my birthday,” he added, but without conviction now. “Maybe.”

He sighed and looked around the yard. There were three patches of petunias, purple and white, along the back of the house, and a big lilac tree with the blooms already gone to seed. There was a small aluminum shed, the kind people used to store lawn mowers and snow shovels and red plastic jerry cans. There was a garden hose curled through the dusty grass like a garter snake and a clay pot with three pink geraniums and, wedged far back under the steps, a cardboard box of glass bottles. There was a potato chip bag blown up against the cotoneaster hedge, but so low you couldn’t see it unless you were sitting on the ground. There was a clothesline. And under the big shushing cottonwood at the back, there was a small table and two lawn chairs, the kind you could stretch out on. Beyond that, he knew, there was nothing. A few more houses, fields. The highway. And then the Sand Hills, barely visible. He often walked out to the eastern edge of town, just as far as the highway, and stared. People passing in cars and trucks stared back. Sometimes they waved.