The Sudden Weight of Snow (25 page)

“So, I’ll pick you up around three-thirty?” Gabe would ask every morning when he drove me to SCSS, both of us struggling through the thick haze of morning, coffee in plastic 7-Eleven cups our beacons. “Yeah, thanks,” I’d answer. We each tried to pretend that his taking me to and from school wasn’t a given, that we were living from day to day, making plans to meet like friends would after school. Sometimes I drove the truck there, but he always took it with him, then came back to get me.

“What’re you going to do today?” I would usually ask. The answer was almost always vague. Work in the shop, draw up some diagrams, or, simply, “I don’t know.” His dad was a carpenter but had never taught him a thing, so Gabe was trying to learn on his own. There was a woodworker on the farm who’d offered to teach him how to make shelving, cabinets, even
chairs, but Gabe wanted to make a guitar. Even I knew that was absurd. He had taken apart one of Thomas’s old guitars and was drafting diagrams, weighing and measuring things, holding thin wood up to bright light. I saw the pieces scattered across the workbench each night. Nothing seemed to change.

Sometimes I asked him questions, led him into speech. Once: “Tell me about making a guitar. How’s it going?”

He answered by telling me what it felt like to take it apart. “I don’t know how to describe it, Harp. Each piece on its own is so perfect, you know, each curve. I know this will sound stupid but I don’t know if I want to put it back together. It’s like I can never get it as perfect as it is now, in pieces. You know?” I nodded, not really knowing.

Another time Gabe told me about how he looked forward to the spring, when the ground thawed and he could start putting up fencing, like he had when he visited the farm in the past. How he loved the feeling of hard ground breaking open, of pounding the post in. “I like the routine of it, the certainty, you know?” He talked about the Clydesdales. They were used during the winter for tourists visiting the ski hill sled rides and brought in a little bit of extra income. In the spring and fall, Thomas and some of the other men were experimenting with horse-logging, using the Clydes to pull trees out of the forest one at a time. “We’ll get better at it,” Gabe told me, as though he had been working with the guys. “Steve’s read everything about it and Decker, he’s taken an eco-forestry course in Oregon. One day we’ll get the trees out the right way – not have to go in and cut them where they’re felled because we’ve gotten them stuck.” Gabe chuckled and I joined him.

Once back at the farm after school, I spent afternoons doing homework at the table in front of the window in the shed while he puttered in the workshop on the other side of the wall. Sometimes, I would do schoolwork at Thomas’s loft, or I would avoid it, sit on the couch and read his magazines –
Utne Reader, The Economist
– and ask him questions about the articles. Gabe and I would piece together dinner – rice and beans, stir-fries – then smoke a joint and watch an old TV in the corner of the cookshack. The TV had to be at a certain angle to get any kind of picture, and even then lines of static would appear and pick up their high-speed descent on the screen. In the times that I wished we were talking, we were taking turns getting off the couch and slapping the side of the TV with an open palm, trying to rid it of static. Late at night, if we had struck the right balance between smoking and sobriety, the talk would come. This was when Gabe told me what he remembered about being on the farm as a kid, about growing up in California and his family there. They were other people, far away. They seemed separate from him, distanced both by geography and by the way he spoke about them. They were a series of stories he told to put himself in a context for me, other than the one I knew him in that winter at the farm.

On some nights, the cookshack filled up around the space in the corner of the main hall to which we had laid claim. Thomas and other musicians would jam or people would sit around the long table, drinking wine or impossible amounts of tea. Through their conversations, I discovered the things that were respected and revered. I learned about arts festivals up and down the coast, protests in various endangered areas, alternative
theatre companies that performed in fields or on beaches, artists who lived and created in every conceivable small space – tree houses, boats, geodesic domes built into the ground. I learned that people made houses out of used tires, pop cans, and bales of hay. That there was an entire informal network across North America of people who inhabited the periphery. The things I had learned about the world so far – that church and family were the most important things, and after these a good education and a job – no longer seem to apply.

One night, a few weeks after I had arrived, Gabe left during one of these cross-table conversations and didn’t come back. When people got up to leave, I stood and looked out the window toward the shed. There were no lights on there. I decided to wait in the cookshack.

Thomas stayed behind with me. He came out of the kitchen, two mugs in hand. I knew his ploy already. “Black, right?” he asked, handing me one. I nodded. Even the small lies stick with you. I took the mug and watched his hands. I had a new fascination with the wrists of men and boys. How fine or coarse the hairs could be there. How, sometimes, I could see the shift of small muscle around bone.

“Do you know where Gabe went?” I asked.

“Back to the shed, I’d guess.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, motioning with my chin toward a window from which the shed was visible. “No lights on.” I went to the stove and started poking at the wood, adding a couple more pieces. I was practising my fire-building skills. As I blew and nudged the wood, I could imagine Thomas’s eyes on
the curve of my spine, my waist, my butt where it met my heels as I crouched.

“Have you talked to your mother recently?” he asked.

I turned, remained on my knees. “Yes. Well, kind of. I told her I didn’t want to come back, that I needed to stay away for a while, but I don’t know … I said some things to her that I probably shouldn’t have and I don’t know how I can talk around that.” I stood up.

“Have you tried talking through it?”

“Yes, a little.” I shifted in front of the fire. “We tried.” I held my palms open behind me to collect warmth.

“What are you going to do here, Harper?”

“What do you mean, what am I going to do here? What everyone else does, live. I’ll help out, too. I just don’t know how yet. I’ll garden in the summer, I don’t know, maybe help Gabe fence. Maybe Susan can get me work at the nursery. There’s got to be something I’m good at.”

“That’s not what I meant. You’re welcome here, Harper. You don’t have to do anything until you’re ready. I just don’t know if this is the right place for you.”

“Really? What do you think would be the right place for me then?”

“It’s just not the right place for everyone, that’s all. To be honest, not much happens here. We play music, people do their own thing, every once in a while we put on a play or a craft fair. Not much. There are so many other things you could do. I don’t mind it. I like meeting the people who come and go. I like things simple – good food, good music, good people.”

“I like things simple too,” I said, heard my own voice pleading.

Thomas laughed when I said this, then stopped. He put down his coffee mug and cleared his throat, but instead of saying anything, he took one step toward me. I watched as his hand reached for my jaw, felt the tips of his fingers along the outline of it, then trailing down my neck lightly. I felt something tighten. A cord between chest and neck and his fingers, a taut string. Just as quickly, his hand dropped. “You’ll figure things out,” Thomas said, then left the room. I heard him rinse his cup in the kitchen, his footsteps out the back door.

The kid cracked. Gord told your family that they took him into a room and interrogated him like they do people on TV. Hard-nosed, suspicious cops, one-way glass, grey light, and stifling air spotted with dust. Gord tells you he can understand why people buckle, tells you all he’s so sorry. You learn first-hand that there is a wholesale war on drugs and that drugs tear families apart. Peter is taken away for questioning, then arrested. After that, everything changes.

Anise cries for weeks. Peter asks you from the other side of the glass to be strong, to be there for Anise and the girls, just like a scene from a movie. The girls experience personality reversals of the kind you thought only existed in Anise’s books, the ones you flipped through when they were left open on the kitchen table. The oldest becomes kind and compassionate, wanting to devote all of her free time to nurturing her mother and sisters. The middle one snaps out of years of daydreaming and transforms into her older sister’s former role, stubborn and demanding. The youngest one becomes quiet and withdrawn, and, as much as she was beginning to grate on everyone’s nerves, you all miss her theatrics. You find out from another mom that the girls are being ridiculed at school, that people are
calling your father a stoner and a drug lord. She tells you because you are the one who answers the door. Anise is in her room, not able to get out of bed to see anyone. Moms – older women – still like you and this woman tells you how strong you’ve been, asks if you need a hug. If there’s anything you don’t need now, it’s a hug. You thank her politely and close the door behind her when she leaves.

They don’t fine drug traffickers in California. It makes no sense. Drugs make money, so traffickers could just pay the fines off and go deeper underground. They send them to jail; it is a crime, after all. Your father, it is believed, is being used as an example. He has been sentenced to nine years in a state correctional facility – a phrase you have only heard on TV, read in books. He will be eligible for parole – another one of those phrases – in three years. By that time, you will almost be legally able to drink and to vote.

Peter and Anise have a lot of friends – theatre people, people for whom Peter has built things, young families, and all the decent, simple-living folk that “the conservatory” supplied. You find out that your father was a good supplier, an honest man. He charged a fair price and never sold to kids, gangs, or other dealers, just to people like himself and Anise. People who simply wanted to relax every once in a while.

Several of Anise and Peter’s sundry friends drop by in the months after your father’s arrest. They bring care packages for your family – Mason jars of soup, frozen vegetarian lasagnas, squash and zucchini from their gardens, loaves of bread, cookies, and homemade granola bars. Eventually, Anise is able to get out of bed for these visits. She emerges from her room
looking like some kind of prophet in billowing pants and long loose tunics and tells her friends that their visits sustain her. You are the one who takes the care packages, puts the food away, makes tea and brings out cookies on plates to pass around. Anise makes a point of telling everyone how she could never make it through this without you. If the girls are home, they glare at you, whine, or launch tantrums.

All of their friends tell Anise that Peter’s been done wrong and that they’ll do everything in their power to get him out sooner, although none of their friends have a lot of social clout. “They should be concentrating on the real criminals, the guys dealing hard drugs. A little smoke has never hurt anyone,” one of them says.

Another concurs, “It’s alcohol that kills – with the drunk driving, assaults – you’d think they’d know that by now. They should be thanking Peter, not arresting him.”

“It’s Reagan and his almighty war on drugs, nothing but misinformation and propaganda. Another instrument of oppression by the right wing.”

“Well, we know he’s being used as an example. He’ll be out as soon as they find another one.”

Talk like this can go on for hours, Anise cross-legged on the couch, nodding and dabbing tears from her cheeks. If their friends come over after dinner, they bring bottles of wine and raise glasses to Peter over and over, reassuring themselves that that’s what he would want them to do. No one, thank God, lights up. Even these friends have more tact than that.

After one of these evenings, Anise scares you in the kitchen. You have been washing the wineglasses in the dark, letting them
drip-dry by the sink on a tea towel. When you turn around, she’s standing there, not moving, not making a sound. She looks like an apparition with those white clothes on. You jump at the sight of her and she doesn’t say anything but comes toward you and gives you a hug. Anise rarely hugs you, and when she does, it’s usually when other people are around as if to show how close you all are. This time, she’s hugging you in the dark, not letting go. What follows next is like a scene from another bad television special. Your life has become surreal, full of awkwardly dramatic moments. Anise sobs softly then tells you how much your support has meant to her, how proud your father would be. As she says this, she strokes your hair and not in a particularly maternal way. She leans back to give you a meaningful look and then draws you in, shifts until she meets your mouth. Anise’s lips are surprisingly soft, her tongue quick. While she kisses you, you think of the magazines, bad porn movies you have watched in the basements of friends’ houses, all of you jerking off together under blankets. You think of Hamlet.