A Hard Witching (7 page)

Still, with a mother like that, the kid was bound to be a little weird. A cocktail waitress, at her age, in those skimpy shorts, two kids later. Who was she kidding? She must be at least thirty. No, was she that old? She didn’t really look it, not in the face, not really. It was hard to tell. Lucy had seen her up close only that one time, in the alley outside the bar. And it had been dark, with just the yellow bulb over the back door. And Lucy had drunk the beer that Rick’s cousin had snuck out for him under his jacket. When she thinks about that night, she can still taste the beer. Awful. It had made her eyes water. But she’d drunk it anyway, tried to guzzle it to make it go down fast. And Rick had grabbed her, laughing, falling against her into the wall. And the cousin, laughing, too, cracking open another beer.
This one’s on Lillie.

Bullshit,
Rick had said,
you’re full of shit.

I’m not shitting you, man.

Shit,
Rick said, shaking his head.
So what’re you doing here?

And the cousin grinned, stepping back into the bar, Rick laughing.

And she had laughed, too, though she hadn’t found anything particularly funny, and she remembered there was glass under her shoes, she could hear it crunching, and she was scared it might punch right through her runners into her foot. She’d heard about that, about people stepping on rusty nails or dirty glass, so she’d pushed Rick backwards a little, just to get away from it. She didn’t know why he got so mad then, shoving her back up against the wall. She’d knocked her head on the bricks, but it hadn’t hurt, not really. And for a minute she’d thought it was all right, of course it was, this was just Rick. Only she was crying. She was dizzy and crying and her sweater was off and tangled somewhere down in the dirt. She was freezing, with glass under her feet and all that yellow light like stars falling, and then Lillie was right there, trashy Lillie Gower who wore her shorts too short and her hair too big. Her face was up against Lucy’s, so close Lucy could smell her gum, peppermint, and Rick was running down the alley with his cousin. Lillie was draping the sweater across Lucy’s chest, saying,
You okay, sweetie, you okay?
over and over, her face soft in that light and shifting, like sand.

And that’s when she’d been sick. Lillie had her by the shoulder, saying,
Stay here, I’ll get you some water. Stay right here.
And she had slipped into the door below the yellow bulb, a blast of laughter and music blowing out behind her. Before she could come back, Lucy’d wiped her chin with her sweater and run down the alley toward home, tripping against the ruts, wondering if Rick would be there waiting for her, half hoping he would be. He wasn’t, though. She hadn’t seen him since, except that one afternoon down at Boyle’s. But he was paying for a Coke and didn’t see her walk by.

She’d almost expected Lillie to show up, too, the next day, maybe say something to her mother. She hadn’t, of course—they weren’t friends or anything, her mother and Lillie. Anyway, Lillie Gower wasn’t anybody to be afraid of.

And now here was her kid, leering at Lucy in the backyard.

She pulled the blinds shut and headed for the kitchen. It was freezing. Her mother must be home, pumping the air conditioning again. The house was never the right temperature, cold in the summer, hot in the winter. She grabbed her dad’s old gardening cardigan from a hook by the back door and pulled it on over her swimsuit.

“Mom,” she shouted. “Lillie Gower wants her cake pan.” She could hear the low hum of a radio on somewhere above. “Mom!” she hollered up the dim stairs. And waited.

“For Jesus’ sake,” she grumbled, banging up the carpeted steps in her bare feet. She’d catch hell for that; there was probably grass all over them. “Mom,” she said, swinging open her mother’s bedroom door, “Lillie Gower wants her cake pan.”

Her mother was sitting in an armchair by the window, looking out at the backyard, a romance novel spine-up on her leg. “Yes,” she said, turning around, “I heard.”

Lucy pulled the cardigan across her stomach. Had her mother been sitting by the window the whole time? She fingered the ribbon on top of her head.

Her mother sat with her legs crossed, the pale blue house-wrap she always wore on Sundays draped neatly to her ankles. She stared at Lucy, then clicked off the radio that was playing softly on the nightstand.

Lucy rubbed her arms. “Does it have to be forty below in here?”

“Is that Owen down there?” her mother asked, turning back to the window. Lucy shifted her feet. Well, so what? She hadn’t really done anything. Besides, her mother should take care of her own problems. She noticed the glass tumbler beside the radio, empty.

Her mother rose then and stepped into the adjoining bathroom, closing the door. Lucy crossed the room quietly, sniffed
the empty glass. Water or vodka, she couldn’t tell for sure. She tilted the glass back to her mouth. Water. She set it carefully back down over its wet ring.

In the yard below, Owen had moved into the shade, sitting with his shirt on, the Pepsi tray balanced on his knees, staring up at the sky, motionless. Beyond the yard, she could see the highway and then the yellow glint of the Sand Hills. Looking just as they always did, rising up in gentle ridges from the horizon like the backs of whales. She hadn’t ever noticed that they looked closer in winter. And how did he know all that stuff anyway? Probably he’d made it up.

Her mother came back in a loose white sundress.

“I’m sure I returned that.”

“What?”

“That cake pan. I’m sure I returned it ages ago.”

Lucy stretched the cardigan down over her thighs. Jesus, it was freezing. “What’d you borrow a cake pan of Lillie Gower’s for anyway?”

Her mother smoothed her skirt, checked the hem. “Does she need it right now? I suppose so. Or she wouldn’t have sent Owen.”

“So he says.” Lucy turned back to the window, looked down at Owen. What was he staring at? “Is he sick?” she asked.

“Who?”

“Owen Gower.”

“Is he?” Her mother misted her throat with a spray bottle from the dresser. “Not that I know of. Why do you ask?”

“Just wondering.” Lucy leaned on the window ledge, stared down at her legs. She did have grass on her feet. She brushed it off against the carpet. “He
says”
—she drew the word out—“he says he’s got skin cancer.”

Lucy’s mother laughed. “I don’t think Owen Gower has skin cancer.”

Below them, Owen had not moved. Geez, that kid was patient. Lucy put a finger up on the glass, right over his small body. She could block him out completely if she wanted to.

“Don’t smear that, Lucy,” her mother said.

Lucy moved her finger, looked down at Owen, at his small, pale face turned up to the sky. She shouldn’t have flashed him like that. She picked up the empty glass on the table, watched her mother slip into a pair of sandals.

“Where you going?”

“To take the cake pan back.”

Lucy put the glass down, stared at her mother. “That’s what he’s here for,” she said. “He’s down there waiting. You can’t just send him home, after he’s been waiting like that.”

“Oh, I should probably stop by and see that baby.”

“What for?” Lucy said. She wasn’t chilly anymore, she felt her body flush, from the stomach upward. Her head began to ache. “You don’t even know her.” Maybe she’d stayed out in the sun too long. “Send it back with him.”

“What’s the matter with you?”

Lucy turned toward the window.

“You don’t even know her,” she said. She closed her eyes, rubbed her temples. Thought of Owen sitting below her on the grass. Of Lillie, her face so round and soft under the yellow light. She wasn’t anybody to be afraid of. She was just Lillie Gower. A cocktail waitress. A barmaid. She was trash.

“Lucy,” her mother said, stepping toward her in a hot cloud of lilac perfume, “what in the world are you crying about?”

For the second time that morning, Lavinia left her spade and the pails of potatoes she’d been digging to slip between the tight rows of corn standing blue and hard in the early light. She pulled off her coat—one of Jack’s old flannel ones, far too large—and wiped sweat from her forehead and upper lip with the hem of her shirt. She leaned back, resting her forehead against her arms, and tried to take long, slow breaths, tried to pull the air through her, clear and cold and still-dark, like water from the rain barrel when the ice was chipped open. It would be good to go there now, to where it stood under the shadows of the eaves on the north side of the house, hack off a big chunk to hold between her lips. But Jack would think she was slacking. So she crouched between the rows of corn,
smelling the rich root-cellar smell of dug potatoes and rolling her forehead against the skin of her arms.

From where she crouched, she could see Jack through the browning leaves, hammering against the truck engine by the barn, each blow ringing across the yard like the clipped pealing of a bell. It was a strange sound, one that did not travel up, toward the slowly lightening sky, but only outward, across the fields—still dark and rimy—as though it too stuck fast to the earth. Each blow running in ripples beneath her boots, shivering up through her bones, her stomach—a small, wayward earthquake.

That shivering made her think of those snake pits where she’d stopped once with her parents, on the only family holiday they’d ever taken—south, to Cypress Hills. They’d stood, the three of them, looking down at what appeared at first not to be snakes at all, but simply a shifting mass that rippled as though beneath one skin.

But once she’d been able to distinguish the individual bodies on the rocks, Lavinia could not look at them without a queasy, dizzy, skin-crawling feeling, as if she could sense their movements coming up through the earth to her feet. And so she’d tried to pretend she was somewhere else, staring instead at the sunlight beating off a tin sign she could not read in the distance, until her mother finally sighed, “We should get a move on, I guess,” and her father said, “Road’s not getting any shorter,” and they’d piled into the car, Lavinia in the back, wedged in on one side by suitcases and a plastic cooler, panting and sick, forehead up against the hot window, unable, for some reason, to roll it down, to touch anything with her hands.

Just thinking of those snakes made her feel ill again, so she thought instead about earthquakes, about how the ground could split open in a second, swallowing everything. Not here, though. That kind of thing didn’t happen here. No natural disasters,
nothing quick and awful and spectacular. Just drought. Just slow death.

For two weeks now, she’d been feeling weak, tired—no, exhausted. “Strong as a horse,” Jack used to boast when they were first married, “and twice as hungry.” It was a stupid thing to say, but she’d liked it, heaping another helping onto her plate as if to say,
He’s right, you see? I never fill up, I never do.
As if it united them somehow.

Now she could eat almost nothing; at times, she thought she could even feel something there in the pit of her stomach, something hard and foreign. Lump, she thought, and clenched her hands into cold fists against her belly. But there was no real pain. Not yet, anyway. Just a terrible sense of something gone wrong.

When Lavinia met Jack, she’d already lived in Medicine Hat a few years, city girl, sworn off ever returning to the dust hole where her parents still farmed. “A desert,” she told the girls at the all-night pancake house where she worked, “right down to the damn dunes.” And she’d describe the hills where her father grazed his cattle, the parched scrub, the hot smell of stinkweed and sage, the sandfly bites that would swell instantly to the size of quarters. She’d tell all the jokes she knew—
Hear about the hooker who entertained a farmer from Saskatchewan? How did she know he was from Saskatchewan? First it was too dry, then it was too wet, then he asked if he could pay her in fall.
She’d shake her head and say, “Wild horses.”

Then Jack turned up. He came in one night with some friends, drunk, all of them, and rude. She’d cried afterwards, when she was alone in the staff bathroom. She wasn’t sure why; she’d had worse customers. When he came back the next
morning to apologize, she agreed—maybe because of the way he stood awkwardly at the till, waiting for her to finish her table, his plaid shirt so new she could still see the creases from the package; maybe because he used her name without checking the tag on her shoulder; or maybe just because, after all, he seemed awfully sincere—to go on a date with him.

She wasn’t surprised to discover he was from the Sand Hills, too. Lots of people around town were, younger people, unwilling or unable to continue battling the land for a living. The struggle wasn’t worth it. Farming wasn’t about pride anymore, or love, and certainly not about money. Besides, there was plenty of work to be had in the oil patch. Big money. And you could travel.
Will the last person to leave Saskatchewan please turn out the lights?
That was the running joke. Lavinia never said it, though; that one she didn’t find particularly funny.

Neither did Jack. “Ingrates,” he said that first night as they sat over beers in the Westlander. “And smartasses. Not a clue what it took to get those farms started. What their grandparents went through. Great-grandparents. Stuck it out through the thirties and God knows what all kinds of hell.” He shook his head. “Now? Too goddamn lazy. Spoiled. Got the world figured out.”

He pulled a cigarette from the pack on the table, tapped it. Lavinia sipped her beer, thinking, He has the bluest eyes, blue like the lakes in the Wheat Pool calendars—photographs she’d clipped and Scotch-taped to the walls and ceiling of her bedroom when she was a girl, loving both the scenery and the names: Jackfish, Witchekan, Big Quill. She’d lie across her bed on hot summer afternoons and stare into all that blue, running the names cooly through her head, like a chant. Pelletier, Candle, Old Wives.

“Tell me,” he said, pointing his cigarette at her, “tell me you don’t miss it. All that open space. Those fields. The light there. Some days you can see ten, twelve miles.”