Prairie Ostrich (17 page)

April

Mrs. Syms is grumpy because she is the lunch monitor now. Mrs. Ayslin is gone. She left Bittercreek and all her classes too. Egg overhears Mrs. Syms tell Vice Principal Geary that Mr. Ayslin is wearing a groove on a seat in Ol' Jake's Saloon and sucking soup out of all the cans in Gustaffson's General Store.

Egg hopes he chokes on peas.

At recess Egg takes the long way around. Then she sees Kathy's locker. Someone has scrawled
jap dyke
in black marker that you can't get off.

Egg is afraid. Because Kathy is Popular, she's on the basketball team and there are even pictures of her in the yearbook. The world does not make any sense. Albert is dead, Mama is drunk, and they are the only Japanese-Canadian family on the prairie. This is not fair and fair is fair, that's what everyone says. And now Leviticus and Romans are against them. All the world's a jumble and Egg can't tell up from down.

At home, Egg sorts through the cupboard with the old ribbons and Christmas wrapping. She is looking for a shoebox to bury her Evel Knievel. Since his adventures on the railway track, Evel Knievel is half the man he used to be. He's had his trials and tribulations. Egg is sure it has made him better than he was. That is the point of suffering, isn't it?

But what if that isn't it?

What if there isn't a Moral, or a Meaning? What if Reverend Samuels is just another bully boy? What would he say about Raymond's penguin walk?

What if God can't do anything?

And what would He say about Kathy and Stacey?

No no no.

There is a plan and things will be perfect. There is a destiny. Good things come to those who wait.

If all of it's a lie, then there is nothing. No. So many people can't be wrong.

When she steps back, she knocks over the empty whiskey bottle. She freezes and listens for a sound from Mama's room but no, Mama has not heard the thunk. As Egg places the bottle at the back of the cupboard, she sees the camera, tucked into the dark corner, almost hidden by the bag of tinsel. Gently, she pulls it up by the strap, holds it, feels the heft. She peers through the viewfinder, the little box that gives perspective.

Another clue from Albert.

…

Egg bursts off the porch, into the air. For a moment she eludes gravity as her arms reach out like hawk's wings catching the late evening light. The sky is stretched thin, streaks of gold, streams of blue. The days draw longer now, a burst of yellow and orange buffalo beans break the muted earth behind the barn, though the slough is still capped with rubber ice (slide across and don't break through!) and the melt trickles into the ditches alongside the road. Magpies strut on the matted straw mound by the barn, pecking at who-knows-what. Egg takes a running leap over the steps to the ground as budding stems of grass, stiff with frost, salute her. The field is a sea of purple crocuses. Her toe catches on a tuft without give and she plants headfirst into the grass.

Snow eyelashes.

But Egg bounces back and she's off.

She checks her pocket: finders keepers. She takes out the camera, loops the strap around her neck. She runs to the barn and spins.

The camera swings on the strap and the weight pulls her wider. The sky tilts and she stops, her hand cradling the camera. Careful, she tells herself, as she scuttles up the ladder, across the side shed top, to the flat roof before the crawl space window. On the flat roof she turns and pauses before the width and breadth of her domain. She feels the weight of the camera in her hands, the pull of the strap against her neck.
Click click, click click
. She likes pressing the button and pulling the lever for advancing the film, that
whirl-click
sound — that is the best.

From the side roof she can see the distant Rockies, how the jagged mountain edge recedes and contracts, like a slumbering dragon caught in perpetual dreamtime. West to the foothills, the land of the giant vole-moles, with their starfish noses and ferocious claws.

Egg hisses at the air and claws, most vole-like.

“Egg!”

She starts, almost tumbles.

It is Kathy, calling from below. “Goddamnit Egg, you're gonna break your neck!”

Egg's arms fall to her sides. She watches Kathy get into the truck. The tires kick up gravel as Kathy pulls up and away. Kathy Grumpycakes Moodymug Murakami. Kathy, with her own secret life. Sometimes it seems like Kathy is trying to wriggle out of her own skin. Egg's heart lurches as she gazes at her sister, the fishtail of the truck pulling out of the drive. She feels protective and so she throws out her arms for an
abracadabra
. Do abominations get blessings? There must be another word for that.

She ducks into the loft, her crawl space, into her secret niche above the pens. She blinks away the dust, her eyes growing used to the dark (always so dark in the ostrich barn) and glances past her clutter and her comic books.

She stops.

The ostriches are inside but there is no scratching, no chirps, no calls, only a strange kind of rasping. Egg feels the cold creep up her arms, like a draft. She freezes — that sound again, like something strangled. She stoops and peers through the eye-knot in the floor.

Her father draws the hush around him.

Egg feels the clutch in her lungs.

Beside him lies an ostrich, so still, too still. The bulk of feathers is a stark contrast to the bare thin flesh of the legs. It seems so wrong, those legs, stick-skinny and broken, like a toy smashed up and thrown away. Her father's breath is harsh in such quiet, and Egg can see the ostrich, the limp, fragile neck and clouded liquid eyes. Goose pimples. Egg wants to pull away, out of the loft but her legs are so heavy, knees so weak, she's pressed down to the floor. She thinks of the frozen figures of Pompeii, the petrified stumps outside the Badlands, Lot's wife and all of Jericho trumpets blasting; did they kill the children too?

Her father is so still. Fumbling, Egg makes it to the ladder, down to the boxes. She stands by the chick pen. She is afraid to come closer.

“Papa,” Egg says. It is like dropping a stone down a chasm.

Her father does not turn. He kneels by the broken body, his hand stroking the feathered wing. He says, “Dog got in last night. Dog or coyote. Little bit of panic inside. This one got her head caught up in the bars. Snapped her neck.” Her father speaks in a voice so rough, as if torn out of a too-small space and caught on the jagged edges, twisting and pulling away.

“They're stupid creatures. Jittery. They're strong and fast, but they're skittish. Gets them into trouble. She only had to pull her head up . . .”

He blinks, as if trying to make sense of it. He stares. He is lost in his own vision of the bars, the broken neck.

The elephants, Egg thinks. She gazes at his unruly hair, the wiry strength of his frame. She wants to help him, her Papa, but she is afraid.

He stands. “Go. Just go, Egg.”

She starts forward but he swings back, his hand raised, dismissive. His knuckles meet her chin, the click of her teeth knocking together, the shock of contact.

Egg falls back.

The shadows of the barn weave in and out, the bars and beams and the darkness of the loft. The ostriches shudder, their plume, a quivering dance, their long legs scratch at the straw in the pens, their necks bob and peck, a jerking motion. The ostriches scratch and flare, kicking at the barn gate, hissing at the bars.

Papa stands, frozen.

Egg feels the straw and grit beneath the palm of her hand, a numbness in her jaw. She runs, her hair clinging to the dampness of her forehead as she races to the house.

In her room she stomps on the Lego and dinky cars. Crash crash crash. It doesn't matter anyway. Let it all fall down.

…

Her pictures are back, the film from Albert's camera taken into Gustafsson's General Store, sent on to Calgary, and now, in Egg's hands, this tidy little package. She crawls beneath her bed and opens the flap of the envelope.

Egg likes packages.

In the first few shots of the barn, the ostriches are fuzzy, feathery lumps, and here, what looks to be Egg's thumb encroaching on the viewfinder. Behind the barn, the blank field races to the horizon. Egg has started reading about photography. In the
Young Reader's Guide to Science
, there is a glass triangle that holds all the colour. If you shine a beam of light, the colours can all come out —
presto magico
! Egg thinks it would be neat if you could shine a light on people and all their stuff came out — all the happy and sad — like X-ray vision.

Egg would like a superpower. Just one.

Egg thinks her photographs are nice but things are more real in real life. In photographs everything looks far away. Sometimes it doesn't even look like now. She peers closely at the photo of the barn, at the shadows of the wall. Her finger rubs a streak, a smudge; it looks like there's a face — Albert's face. She drops the envelope and goes screaming to Kathy.

Kathy takes a look at Egg's pictures, at the ghosties in the dark wall of the barn. Then she clucks her tongue and says, “Double exposure.”

Egg bounces on one foot. “Are you sure? Albert's not stuck in the camera, is he?”

“No. It's old film. See, someone took a picture and you just took a picture on top of it, so that's why it looks like that. Besides, there's no such thing as ghosts.”

Kathy, who has an empirical method and everything.

Egg runs to her bedroom and slides under her bed. Her magnifying glass is there. She checks the darker objects in the photos, a bush, the side shed, the blackness of the slough. She shuffles through the photographs, searching — shadows are the key. Nekoneko on the drawer, the sparkle of the china bureau, the stubble field that retreats to the horizon. The last picture is of the barn in twilight. In that print, she sees it, an image; she can barely make it out. Her hand trembles; it is Evangeline.

…

Kathy finally relents and takes Egg into town for the grocery run. But Egg has other plans. With her magnifying glass snug in her pocket, she is on her own mission. There's a mystery here, hidden in the photographs, the ghost images. It is like an Encyclopedia Brown Choose Your Own Adventure. They drive past the Dairy Dream, the rundown grounds of the old stockyard and park by Robertson's Repair-All. Egg doesn't say that there is a parking space in front of Heap's Hardware, even if it is closer to Gustafsson's General Store. The storefront of Robertson's Repair-All is chock full of ancient televisions and radios. The light beams out of a dusty box against the glare of the afternoon sun.

Kathy hands her the empty cardboard box, pulled from the back of the truck. “Here, you take this in. I'll just be a second.”

Egg shuffles to the store, the bell on the door jangling loudly. All heads turn, voices drop. Egg shrinks. It's like stumbling into a room where she does not belong, when
Japanese
turns into
Jap
. Mrs. Crawley is there, with five of her sewing circle, their heads all tucked together. By the counter, Mrs. Gustafsson, her voice too proud to fall, says, “Not that one. It's the sister.”

Egg feels like something under a microscope. She backs into the door, only to have it swing open. She almost bumps into Kathy.

“What is it?” Kathy asks.

Kathy has not heard the voices.

“Nothing.” Egg places the cardboard box on the counter and scoots away.

Egg skulks by the doorway as Kathy asks for her stack of newspapers. The long aisles of Gustafsson's are packed with canned meats, sacks of sugar, salt, and flour, and short, long, thick, thin sausages dangle behind the counter. Peach baskets line the floor, filled with apples and onions. There is a briny pickle barrel near the door. On the counter, in a glass display, sits a tray of pastries, swirls of cinnamon and marzipan. The cash register still has the old sign of Gustafsson's Supplies. Mrs. Gustafsson stands behind the till, her smile so tight. Egg thinks, you couldn't squeeze a penny from her. On the counter, she can see
The Globe and Mail's War in Review
, a picture of a burning man. She can see the outline of his robes, the shaven head, serene repose. She picks out a word: immolation.

This is not what she came for.

“Kathy,” she says, “I'm going to wait outside.”

Kathy, fingers drumming on the cardboard box at the counter, nods absently.

Egg steps out the door. She looks down the street, to the intersection of Main and Maple.

Evangeline lives two blocks down in a bird box house, the asphalt siding peeling from the corners. The rose bushes are all twisted vines and prickles, weaving into the iron fence that surrounds the sagging porch. Egg thinks, Rapunzel. The windows are closed, curtains drawn. This is worse than a tower with no stairs and no doors.

Egg presses the bell.

Evangeline Granger opens the door, wisps of hair tucked behind her ears, curled at the nape of her neck, as the notes of “Sola, Perduta, Abbandonata” float through the air. At the sight of Egg, Evangeline does not move, there is no surprise, as if she has been expecting Egg all along. There are dark circles under her beautiful eyes. Evangeline Granger holds time in the creases of her lips, in the pinch of her brow. Someone must release her.