squat white fridge in the corner by the woodstove displayed rows of labels peeled from Royal Reserve whisky bottles and stuck on the door. I counted the black squares with the red maple leaf and A PROUD CANADIAN lettering over and over, never getting the same number twice.
Between the woodstove and the fridge, half a dozen blocks of wood formed a ring, with the biggest block at the centre. These were the makeshift barstools and card table where the men played “Stop the Bus.” Three quarters to play, three cards to a hand. Collect the same suit, and the first player whose cards add up to thirty-one stops the bus. Loser pays a quarter. I didn’t understand all the rules, what it meant to “knock” and “pay the driver,” but I loved to watch the empty ashtray fill with quarters, to see a cussing man kicked off the bus and out of the game while the other men laughed at him and raised their bottles in a mock toast.
I watched my dad’s mood for signs that he might let me in. If I offered to clean the shop bathroom and scrub the sink of its black grease and the toilet of its spatter and scum, if I leaned on his shoulder, if I sweetened in his presence, then he might let me hold his hand of cards and throw down a jack of spades, draw an ace, then knock on the wood to signal the final round.
“Rugrat,” he said. “You little potlicker, come here.”
I didn’t care what name he called me, only that his voice was soft when he said it, not the voice that hardened to get outta here and a hand waved toward the door. Not you’re in the way or go home and help your mother.
He let me perch on his knee so that he could see the cards I held and tell me when to draw and what to throw away. When I said I was thirsty, he passed me his bottle for a sip. The other men talked above me, puffed their cigarettes, laughed, slammed down their hearts and diamonds, paid their quarters to the pot. When the final round ended, and all the men had lost their money, and I was the only one left on the bus, my dad picked up the ashtray and dumped the coins into my hand.
“Better take that home before you lose it,” he said, and nodded toward the house.
The bay doors hung half-cocked on their chains, and in the dusk, light from the shop rolled the warped shadows of trucks and trailers into the yard. I walked from the shop to the house with the quarters jingling in my coat pocket and the bitter, yeasty taste of beer still on my tongue. My breath in the night air whitened like a puff from a cigarette, like smoke from my father’s mouth. Up ahead, past the garden’s black soil tilled over after harvest, against a backdrop of wind-stripped birch and poplar, framed in the light of the kitchen window, my small, aproned mother stood, stirring and slicing, cooking to a Hagood Hardy piano solo wavering on an 8-track. How long until your father comes home, she would ask me. I never knew the answer. Pretty soon, he always said, pretty soon.
Between the shop and the house, I followed the groove he’d worn in the gravel, morning and midday and evening, as ritual as prayer before meals and sleep. As a boy, he must have followed a path his own father walked before him, to the barns, the woodshed, and the fields, carrying back to the house the buckets full of milk or an armload of kindling. When I reached into my pocket, the coins slid coolly through my fingers, proof of where I’d been, where I’d come from. Behind me, voices crackled and hooted, the talk and laughter of men hunkered on old stumps around a woodstove’s fire, their sound drifting out into the falling night. Among them, my dad, calling for one more game of cards, one more round of drinks.
First God
I CAN STILL SEE them in their circle of hardback wooden chairs, heads bowed over the onionskin pages of the King James, those women of the Wednesday-morning Bible study. In church-soft voices, they read aloud from Psalms and Proverbs, the prophets and epistles, following a paper script with questions for discussion. While they prayed and softly spoke, I roamed the building freely. Downstairs, I marveled at the men’s urinals, flushed every toilet. Sprayed the can of aerosol deodorizer until the room smelled like a chemical bouquet. In the upstairs nursery, I crawled into a crib, trying to remember what it felt like to be a baby. I tugged the plastic cow by its string and made it moo. I stacked a tower of wooden blocks and made it topple. In the Sunday-school rooms, I snooped through stacks of coloured construction paper, sniffed the pots of white glue, stood at the front of the class and pretended I was the teacher, telling a flannelgraph story with boils, locusts, and blood.
Upstairs in the sanctuary, the women told their own stories, pored over the scriptures, sniffled into Kleenexes and touched one another’s hands, and prayed on. Afterward, there’d be fellowship in the basement kitchen, tea and weak coffee, friendship cake and matrimony squares and egg-salad sandwiches cut cleanly into triangles, but first, they studied, bent over their Bibles with the devotion of ancient scholars, these Anns and Tinas, Sarahs and Netties, grandmas and never-marrieds and stay-at-homes with school-aged kids. Among them, my mother, quiet, smoothed her skirt and bowed her head.
She was one of the church’s devout, a Wednesday-morning Bible study lady and a Tuesday-evening sewing circle member, a volunteer in the church nursery and a Sunday-school student in the adult class. Every morning at the breakfast table, she read to us from Devotions for the Family, a slim paperback she bought at Streams of Life, the Christian bookstore and gift shop run by the preacher’s wife. Monday through Friday, as my brother and I gummed our oatmeal and chewed our toast, we heard about Jack and Jeanie, twins who sinned, confessed, repented, and were forgiven, all within a two-minute story. At the end of it, she read the daily Bible verse, which we repeated back to her until we could say it without mistakes. Sometimes, before the breakfast devotional, I’d stand at my mother’s bedroom door, peeking through the crack to see her kneeling by her bed, forehead propped on her clasped hands, slim black Bible lying open beside her. Then she’d rise, run through her exercises—toe touches and bicycle legs pedalling in the air as she lay on her back, counting aloud through her panting and puffing.
She was, I believed, exactly the woman King Solomon described in the book of Proverbs, the one worth far more than rubies. Like that Proverbs 31 woman with her litany of virtues, my mother provided food, worked with her hands, tilled the field, kept her clothes clean and mended. While it was still night, she rose to pack my dad’s lunch and make his breakfast, then see him off for another long shift. After he drove away into the dark, she crawled back into bed and I snuck in beside her, taking my dad’s place, rubbing my bare feet along her stubbly calves until I fell asleep.
Like that virtuous woman, she even sought out wool and flax—or at least the wool. Afternoons, in the coolness of the basement, she worked through the black plastic garbage bag full of last year’s wool, shorn off an old ewe. What was destined for the dump, my mother collected gladly. On the wire bristles of one of her carding brushes, she set a clump of dirt-specked wool, and with the other wood-handled brush, dragged the fibres across the bristles. The ball of wool untangled into wisps. With each brush, the wool loosened and lifted from the bottom carding brush to the top one. The grit, bugs, and flecks of sawdust fell away until a tiny cirrus puff rested on her aproned lap. When she dropped it into the stainless-steel washtub, it seemed to hover a moment, floating on the furnace’s draft. If, on a breezeless early-autumn afternoon, the sun was high and hot enough, she filled the washtub with warm water, and with a sliver of soap whittled from a block passed down through the family—soap that smelled of tallow and lye, ashes and birch trees—she scrubbed each fleecy cloud. Wet and washed, the wool perfumed the air with its animal history. Wrung out, it hung limp. But laid out on a faded bedsheet on the grass, the wool bleached white in the light until the back lawn looked like a pasture haunted by the ghosts of sheep.
Every night, before she tucked me and my brother beneath quilts filled with that wool, she sat on the bed, wedged between our pajama-clad bodies, and read aloud to us in a voice that rose and fell with the story’s tension. When she read from Little House in the Big Woods, I wanted to be Laura Ingalls, to live inside the one-room cabin in the Wisconsin woods, to hear the wolves howl at night and have a bulldog named Jack that turned three times before settling by the fire to sleep, to have a Pa that played the fiddle as the blizzard winds blew. When she read Heidi, I dreamed a