Northward to the Moon
Read Northward to the Moon Online
Authors: Polly Horvath
To Arnie, Em and Becca
O
ur family lasted almost one year in Saskatchewan. It took the town that long to figure out that Ned didn’t speak any French.
“I always looked on it as kind of a frill,” he explains to my mother.
“French?”
“Teaching,” says Ned. “I coach the girls’ basketball team and keep real good order in the classroom, so the kids don’t, you know, go out and smoke in the hallways, at least during class time, and I always help out at assemblies. I was the one who rustled up some World War Two veterans for Remembrance Day. Remember, Jane, the knack I had with the veterans?”
“Knack with the veterans?” asks my mother. She seems stunned by recent events.
“You don’t want them drooling on their shoes. And you want them to look like they’re having fun even if they’ve forgotten what they’re doing there. It takes a certain deft touch,” says Ned.
“So you didn’t think knowing French was really so important?” My mother is trying just desperately to understand Ned’s point of view.
“Not in the general scheme of things,” says Ned cheerfully.
“Well!” says my mother. “Are they
angry?”
“Oh, livid,” says Ned.
“I guess they want you to resign?” asks my mother.
My heart leaps up at the thought of leaving this crummy little house on the edge of town where we have lived for the last year. None of us have warmed to Saskatchewan. We moved here from Massachusetts the summer before when my mother married Ned, who got a full-time job here. His first full-time job ever. But it turns out that there is more to life than this.
The town has financed this house for us but at
great cost. There is no one very rich in town but still we are despised and pitied for the charity they afford us, giving us this house and lending us this furniture. I have no friends here. It is rumored we get our clothes off the dump. I don’t mind so much for me but it is very hard on Maya, who has never had her own friends and wants some desperately. She has one so-called friend named Katie, who lords it over Maya and her poverty-stricken state. She is always saying things like she will give Maya her dolls when she outgrows them, knowing full well that by that time Maya will have outgrown them too.
We are not really so poverty-stricken. We have not had chicken and rice without the chicken once since moving. There is always food and heat. But whereas back in Massachusetts our house on the beach carried some cachet, it is different here. No one cares that my mother is a poet. Once at a school dessert night one of the moms asked me what my mother did for a living and when I said she was a poet the mom replied, “Don’t worry, she’ll get over that.” I know that none of this bothers my mother but I am bothered on her account.
The only thing that has given us any respectability is Ned’s position as the new French teacher.
“Resign?
Are you kidding? They
fired
me. Darn shortsighted. You know I was one of only two male teachers in the whole frigging town,” says Ned.
“Oh no!” says my mother. She looks so stricken that Ned and I glance at each other. But then the stricken feeling leaves her eyes and in its place I see the warm glow of possibilities. “But maybe,” she goes on slowly, “this is a blessing in disguise. Now after the school year closes we can go back to Massachusetts. In the back of our minds, we always had that as a place to return.”
I am not so sure that this was as true for Ned, and I snap my head back around to look for his response. His eyes are flickering, full of thought, but moving too quickly for me to detect anything definite. My mother’s eyes are quiet, still waters running deep. My mother’s deep waters all lead to us. I don’t think any of us know where Ned’s waters run. Or what his deep well holds behind those constantly flickering eyes. But between the two of them, from these mainspring places, the fate of me and my sister and brothers and our six destinies will be decided.
“Well, gosh darn it, gosh darn it all to heck! I didn’t want to leave
this
way,” he says at last. He has cleaned up his language considerably since marrying my mother and moving in with us and I mourn the loss. His salty language was expressive and lovely—poetry in its own way. “I was a role model for boys who want to teach. Now what are they to do?”
“They still have Mr. Christenson,” I remind him.
“One male teacher means he is a blip in the natural order,” says Ned, picking up an apple and chewing on it musingly. “Two says it’s a respectable career choice.”
I also pick up an apple and munch on it musingly, one leg tucked under me. I am thrilled at the idea of movement in any direction. I have been almost a year here and it has changed me.
The wide horizons of the prairies have caused me to pull in, to gather myself about and box myself carefully inside me, the way when you are outside and cold without a coat, you hug yourself to preserve your heat, to keep your vitality within. Maybe this accounts for the stoic unflinching faces of the prairie people. Maybe what I take for
coldness or meanness is just the battening down of hatches against the inevitable blows from nature. And when they come, they come swiftly, unannounced and catastrophically. Crops gone in minutes from locusts. Sudden rains turning roads to flooding and unpassable mud. Lightning. Unchallenged unbarricaded winds. And there is not the rhythm of the ocean to keep you breathing. Instead perhaps you hunker down and hold yourself in against the deadly winters. The excitement but devastation of tornadoes. The look of the long lonely flat grasslands where you are exposed and vulnerable with nothing to hide behind. These people, dried and parched and suspicious and unwelcoming, may only be each holding on to themselves to keep from blowing away or withering in this place of capricious harm.
It has amazed me, as much as anything, that anyone would settle here forever and even try to keep such a town alive when letting it die might be best for all concerned. Then they could move to the seaside. Why would they spend a lifetime by choice in this dry place? It has been fascinating for comparative purposes. To see what people have
and what they miss. To see what we have had and what we have not. But interesting is all it
has
been; it has never been an
us
place, it is a
them
place.
Maya hasn’t been very happy but the boys, who are only six and four, fit in. They love the drifts and the cold. They love putting on their heavy snowsuits, pretending to be from space and building forts and rocket ships of snow. They love the dust storms and the lightning that flies across the prairies and the sudden thunderstorms and being sent home during tornado watches. The first time we heard prairie thunder rumbling far away on the horizon, Hershel said the sky was growling at us. It is a joy and wonder to him, a place where the sky takes note of us and speaks. Even in anger. He and Max are completely captivated by prairie dogs. They go out with their friends onto the grasslands to the prairie dog colonies and wait beside one of the many holes, guessing where the next prairie dog will emerge. I realize if they grow up here they will be prairie boys. This will be their place memory of growing up. It will separate us in a fundamental way. As if we will then belong to different places, they to the prairies and me to the
ocean. As if at some stage of our early development, our hearts take root in the landscape that surrounds us and remain rooted there all our lives, even when we’re not.
I do not want them rooted somewhere different from me. Families drift so easily anyway—look at Ned’s. He says probably nobody in his family even knows where the other members are. Perhaps it is an extreme case. I can’t understand how someone as nice as Ned could have lost track of his family so easily and not seem to care. Could this happen to me and Maya and Max and Hershel? I would like us to make a pact saying it never will. I would like to know that, even if it does, at least we are united in the same memory of landscape.
“But didn’t
you
learn French in school?” asks my mother. How could Ned not know any French when it is mandatory in Canada?
“Well, as you know, I didn’t get much schooling. At least in the early years. I managed to move around often enough to avoid it.”
Ned’s mother had taken her eight children and moved to Fort McMurray, Alberta, in the far north after Ned’s father took off one morning without a
word. Ned said his mother explained their father’s speedy exit with “You never know what someone will up and do.” As if an unpredictable universe were the one thing you could count on, and humans the most unpredictable element therein. Then she demonstrated it herself by moving them all from the civilized town of Edmonton to the wilds of Fort McMurray with seemingly nothing to offer in the way of employment for her or opportunities for them. In fact, it appeared that she had moved them for no reason at all. “She was true to her maxim,” Ned said about his mother. “We could never tell what she was going to do.”