Road to Thunder Hill (4 page)

“Man, that was wicked,” he says, looking back out at the storm. In the time it has taken him to come into the house, the squall has moved on, so the lane is visible once more.

“How did you get through all that?” says Olive, who has perched once more on the edge of her seat, looking like one of the ravens who watches my every move from the top of the linden tree.

“Easy,” he says. “Built-in radar. You don't drive down a lane for twenty-odd years and not know your way through a snow squall.”

“Right. I noticed how your radar almost put you right through my house,” I say, peering around him. “How close did you come? A foot?”

“More like three. Hey, I thought Ray was coming up this weekend.” He reaches for a muffin on the table and pops the whole thing in his mouth.

“He is. Today.”

Olive offers him some tea and he's soon settled into a kitchen chair, his coat open, his beard catching crumbs.

I reach over to whisk them away. “I wish you'd shave that thing off.”

“Yes, mother.”

He winks at Olive who giggles then snorts. Then he tells us he's on his way over to Sandra Birdshell's to help her with a stuck patio door. Apparently, the snow is blowing clean across her living room floor.

“So it's true that you provide house calls to damsels in distress.” Olive gives me a knowing look.

“Now, where did you hear that?” Bear says.

Olive winks at me and says, “A little bird told me that you practically delivered Gayl way back when.”

“A little bird, you say?” he says, grinning at me.

I say, “It was Alana who told you that. Not me. And he didn't practically deliver Gayl either.”

Bear laughs then. “That's true. Only in Trish's case it was Ray who stuck Gayl into her, so I figured he was responsible for helping to get her out. Unfortunately, I have to take full blame for installing those patio doors in Sandra's house.”

I can't believe I'm blushing. Sometimes Bear comes out with the worst jokes, but that's not why I'm turning red. It's because of things we said about Bear a couple of weeks ago, the night when Olive and I were rug-hooking over with Alana at the Four Reasons.

Rug-hooking is something Alana and I have done since the Farm days. Our rugs hang on walls, are draped over the backs of chairs, and lie beside every bed. As soon as Olive saw them she wanted to hook rugs too. Mostly, I think she gets a kick out of telling everyone she's a “hooker.” So she insisted we get together every two weeks at the store.

The last time we got together, Olive raised her bottle of fancy lager from Ontario that she'd brought for us and said, “Here's to you two women and your wonderful men. I don't know if Arthur and I would have lasted this long in Thunder Hill if it hadn't been for such civilized people.”

“Don't forget Bear James,” Alana said, as she clinked her bottle against Olive's. “If you're going to accuse us all of being civilized, then you have to include Bear.”

“Yes. Mr. Bear,” said Olive, laughing like she'd never heard his name before. “Bear, who believes it's a virtue to have not left the province in his entire life.”

“He knows about a lot of things though,” Alana said, stretching her rug onto her frame.

Olive said, “From what I can see, all he does is grow pot and make bad wine.”

“I thought his last batch of wine was pretty good.” I tugged at a strip of red wool with my hook. My design was of a maple tree in fall. At least that was my idea until the thing started to look more like a rooster than a tree, and if that wasn't annoying enough, Olive and Alana decided to list all the things they called “Bearisms.”

“Toking while driving,” Olive said, counting on her fingers.

“Showing up at mealtimes,” Alana offered. She held out her work at arm's length and squinted at what she'd done so far. Her rug was a picture of the Four Reasons Gas n' Stop, but she was having trouble with the gas pumps in front of the store. So far, they looked like penguins. Meanwhile, the second rug Olive had ever hooked was so well done it could easily sell in Damrey's department store there in town. Alana told her that her lilies looked so realistic you could almost pick them off the rug.

Now Olive raised three fingers and said, “Bear tells really bad jokes.”

Alana said, “And how about getting chased by the ladies.”

“Oh?” Olive's eyes widened. “Bear gets chased?”

“You mean you haven't noticed? Trish, should we tell Olive about our Bear?”

“Huh?” Here I'd been thinking that Bear James really did know a lot about what really matters in life, like friendship and how to live in nature. I mean, the things about Bear that aren't easy to put into words.

“Tell me what?” said Olive.

In a last ditch effort to drop the topic, I said, “Let's just say that Bear doesn't have trouble finding women.”

“Oh come on, Trish,” said Alana. “Let's just say he has the biggest dick in the county.”

While Olive almost choked on her beer, Alana nodding her head knowingly.

“It's not like that's all he has going for him,” I said. It bugged me when Alana talked about Bear's penis like it's his finest quality. It's like saying Danny chose Alana for her tits. And even though Danny would be the first to agree and Alana would give him a swat for it, we'd all know it was a joke. “Anyway, I don't think it's fair to discuss Bear's penis behind his back.”

“Uh, Trish,” said Alana. “News for you. It ain't behind his back.”

Olive snorted and said, “I can't stand it any longer. How big are we talking?”

“I don't know, maybe like this?” Alana said, biting on her hook so she could hold her hands apart about a foot. “Trish, remember when we went around naked back in the farm days?”

Of all the things that went on at the farm, the one day when we decided to go around nude is what Alana remembers most fondly. I said, “I think you're exaggerating.”

Alana shook her head. “Bear is built like a horse. Everybody used to ask him how ‘big guy' was making out. It made him all self-conscious so he tried to cover it up in a towel that looked more like a droopy diaper.”

I frowned, remembering. “I thought it must have hurt, the way it flopped around.”

“But more importantly girls, did either of you get to try out ‘big guy' for yourselves?” Olive asked, her eyes growing wide.

“Good God, no,” said Alana, waving her hand like it was the last thing to ever cross her mind, even though I know better. “Bear is more like a brother to Trish and me than anything. And he practically delivered Gayl, didn't he Trish?”

“Hardly. He drove me into town that night, that's all.”

“And stayed with you at the hospital until Ray got there, don't forget.”

“Oh really? Where was Ray?” Olive said.

And at this, I yawned, and said I had to get on home. It bothered me to know that Alana was itching to tell Olive the whole story about Ray in town drinking the night his baby was born, and how I had signalled to Bear that I needed help by flicking the porch light off and on, off and on. The contractions were coming about ten minutes apart when Bear slid down the path from his place up on Thunder Hill to ours.

“Yes, that was quite the night when little Gayl was born,” Bear says with that sad voice he gets whenever anyone brings up the past. “I thought Ray would never get there, eh Trish?”

I nod and look out the window.

“And did he?” Olive asks.

“Oh yeah, we tracked him down at the Roll-a-Way Tavern. You never saw a drunk move anywhere so fast. I had to give him credit,” Bear says, looking at me. “Somebody had to, remember Trish?”

“Not really,” I lie. “I was too busy worrying about having a baby to bother with Ray.”

Actually, I remember quite clearly, because I'd begged Bear to stay in the delivery room instead of Ray, that drunken father of my child.

Bear had stroked my forehead and said, “Ray's the daddy. He's the one who belongs with you. But I'll be waiting right outside that door when that baby comes.”

I stare back at Bear, wondering if he remembers that. The expression on his face doesn't reveal a thing so I say, “What I remember most is that big rip in your pants from you sliding down the path to my rescue.” I nod towards the window, and the path beyond.

“Look at it out there,” Bear says, reaching over to tap his finger against the windowpane. “You can't even make out the stairway to heaven.”

That's what Bear and Ray called the path leading up to Bear's cabin halfway up on Thunder Hill. They'd gotten a big kick out of building a door's frame right where the path starts. They even put in a screen door. In summer, the path is filled with raspberry bushes and Queen Anne's lace, but today it's choked with snow. The snow whips around the barn like angry bees and we can make out a drift halfway up the door. I'm starting to have my doubts about Ray making it home at all today.

My father was known for changing his mind according to his moods, so I still don't know if he decided to give Kyle House to Olive when I turned it down all those years ago, or if he'd had a change of heart near his death. When the lawyer read the will, everybody, including my mother, was surprised he'd left Kyle House to the daughter he refused to believe was his. Everything else went to my mother, and everything else was nothing to sneeze at, since my father had worked well over a million dollars out of blueberries. But still, the fact that he'd given his beloved house to Olive made for great gossip. Everyone knew his first marriage ended because Olive's mother had spent a week at some riding camp where there was a red-headed veterinarian and someone told my father there'd been talk of an affair. When my father confronted her, she admitted to it. And when she announced she was pregnant a month later, well, that was that, in my father's mind. Everyone in the county, except for the judge, agreed that the kid was likely the vet's. But the judge ruled in Olive's mother's favour, and Bernie ended up paying support for a red-headed kid he refused to accept as his own.

No wonder everyone was surprised that he left the house to Olive. I figured she'd sell the property right off and that the house would come down. That suited me fine, because by the time my father's will was read three years ago, the kitchen roof at Kyle House had caved in and the windows were rotting in their sills. In fact, I expected to hear any day that the house had gone up in flames. The local kids called it “the haunted house.” I didn't blame them. Back when I spent my summers there, I thought it might be haunted too, the way the wind swept over the bluff and whistled through all those multi-paned windows causing paintings to fall from the walls and lamp chains to clink against their bases. I dealt with it by imagining that the ghost felt sorry for me stuck out there on the edge of a cliff with no one except my parents for company.

My mother didn't seem to mind that Olive got the house either. She was haunted by a different kind of ghost, in the form of Olive's mother. Phyllis had furnished the parlour with delicate furniture imported all the way from France and even had a bidet installed in the upstairs bathroom. When my mother moved in she had filled it with earth and turned it into a planter.

What haunted me in recent years was the thought of the local kids who liked to hang out in and around the house falling through a floor and suing our family. This so-called half sister could have Kyle House, along with all of its problems.

Olive didn't sell the house. Later, she told me that it was the vision of a Monet-inspired garden of perennials tumbling all the way down to Thunder Hill Road that moved her to keep the house. Then there was the path she tripped along through aspens and wild rose bushes to the edge of Kyle Point, whereupon she discovered that she was in possession of her very own ocean. That day she had an epiphany, a sea change she said, in the most literal sense. She was ready to leave the city to lead a cleaner, saner life where the children would thrive and Arthur could surely secure a position in the small but prestigious university, less than an hour's drive away.

I guess Arthur had put up quite a fight. Olive said she understood his reluctance as he had just received tenure at York University in Toronto and had no intention of giving that up to become a country bumpkin. But Olive persevered, because ultimately, she knew what was best for her family. She would take up painting, and writing, and best of all she would get to know her half sister, Patricia.

Lucky, lucky me, I remember thinking.

Now I watch Olive search through her pockets for her keys. A gust of wind snatches the hood of her cape clear away from her head and loose strands of hair whip at her face. She tries to rein in her cape from the wind tearing it off her body. Who but Olive would wear such a thing in a storm? I look around to see if she might have left her keys on the table. Upstairs, I can hear Gayl thumping around in her bedroom. Outside, I see that Olive has finally found her keys and is climbing into Billy. She waves to me and I wave back. As she drives up the lane I notice a corner of her cape sticking out of the door and it is almost white with snow. This snow is not about to let up. I wonder again if it's a good idea to let Gayl drive into town today.