The Robber Bride

  Karen didn't like being awake while her grandmother was asleep. This was the only part of the day she found frightening. The rest of the time she was busy, she could help. She pulled weeds out of the garden, she collected the eggs, at first with her grandmother and then by herself. She dried the dishes, she fed the dogs. But while her grandmother slept she didn't even go outside, because she didn't want to get too far away. She stayed in the kitchen. Sometimes she looked at the old newspapers. She would search for the weekend comic pages and study them: if you put your eye up close to the page, the faces dissolved into tiny coloured dots. Or she would sit at the kitchen table, drawing with the stub of a pencil on pieces of scrap paper. At first she tried to write letters to her mother. She knew how to print, she had learned at school. Dear Mother, How are you, Love, Karen. She would walk down to the mailbox beside the road and put the letter in, and lift the red metal flag. But no letters came in return.

  So instead she would sit there drawing with the pencil stub; or else not drawing. Listening. Her grandmother snored, and mumbled in her sleep sometimes. There were flies buzzing, distant cows, chuckling of geese, a car going by, way down on the gravel road at the front of the property. Other sounds. The tap dripping into the sink, in the pantry. Footsteps in the front parlour, a creaking, what was it? The rocker in there, the hard sofa? She sat very still, chilled in the afternoon heat, with the small hairs on her arms lifting, waiting to see if the footsteps would come closer.

  On Sundays her grandmother would put on a dress, but she didn't go to church - not like Aunt Vi, who went twice a day on Sundays. Instead she would take the huge family Bible out of the front parlour and stand it up on the kitchen table. She would close her eyes and poke between the pages with a pin, and then open to the page that the pin had chosen. "Now you," she would say to Karen, and Karen would take the pin and close her own eyes, and let her hand hover over the page until she felt it pulled down. Then her grandmother would read the part where the pin had stuck in.

  " 'If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise,' " she read. " 'For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.' Well now, I know who that must mean." And she would nod her head.

  Sometimes though she would be puzzled. " 'The dogs shall eat Jezebel by the wall of Jezreel,' " she read. "Now I don't know at all who that could be. Must be too far ahead." She only read one verse a Sunday. After that she would close up the Bible and put it back in the front parlour, and change into her overalls and go outside to do the chores.

  Karen kneels in the garden. She's picking beans into a six-quart basket, yellow beans. She picks slowly, one bean at a time. Her grandmother can pick with both hands at once, not even looking, the same way she knits, but Karen has to look, to find the bean first and then pick it. The sun is white-hot; she's wearing her shorts and a sleeveless blouse, and the straw sunhat her grandmother makes her wear so she won't get sunstroke. Crouched down like that she's almost hidden, because the bean plants are so big. The sunflowers watch her with their huge brown eyes, their yellow petals like spikes of dry fire.

  The air shimmers like cellophane, a clear sheet of it shaken over the flat fields; it crackles with grasshopper static. Good haying weather. From two fields over comes the drone of Ron Sloane's tractor, the clack and thump of the baler. Then it stops. Karen reaches the end of the bean row. She pulls a carrot up for herself, wipes off the dirt with her fingers, then rubs the carrot on her leg, then bites into it. She knows she's supposed to wash it first but she likes the earth taste.

  There's a motor noise. A dark green pickup truck is coming up the drive. It comes fast, skewing from side to side on the gravel. Karen knows the truck: it's Ron Sloane's truck.

  Why isn't he in the field, why is he coming here? Mostly nobody visits. Her grandmother has no opinion of the neighbours. She says they think stupid things and they gossip, and they stare at her when they pass her on the street, when she goes shopping in town. Karen has seen people doing that, all right.

  The truck skids to a stop; there's a rush of geese, the dogs barking. The door of the truck opens and Ron Sloane falls out. Staggers out, holding his arm. The tanned skin of his face looks like a brown paper bag, all the pinky-red gone out of it. "Where is she?" he says to Karen. He smells of sweat and fear. His sleeve is torn, his arm is dripping blood. Pouring blood, she sees now. The hurt, the danger comes off the arm in shock waves of brilliant red. Karen wants to scream, but she can't, she can't move. She calls to her grandmother inside her head, and her grandmother comes around the corner of the house carrying a pail, and sees the blood too and drops the pail. "God Almighty," she says. "Ron."

  Ron Sloane turns his face to her and it is a look of abject, helpless appeal. "Fuckin' baler," is what he says.

  Karen's grandmother is hurrying towards him. "Boys and girls, boys and girls," she says to the dogs and geese. "Cully, out," and there is a barking, cackling retreat.

  "It'll be fine," she says to Ron. She puts out her hand and touches him, touches his arm, and says something. What Karen sees is light, a blue glow coming out from her grandmother's hand, and then it's gone and the blood has stopped. "It's done," she says to Ron. "But you need to get to a hospital. All I can do is the blood. I'll drive you, you're not fit. That was a vein; it'll start again in half an hour. Get a wet cloth," she says to Karen. "A tea towel. Cold water."

  Karen sits in the back of her grandmother's truck, with Glennie the dog. She always sits in the back now, if she can. The air whirls around her, her own hair ripples against her face, the trees blur by, it's like flying. They go to the hospital, twenty miles away, in the same town as the train station, and Ron gets out, and then he has to sit and put his head down, and then Karen's grandmother gets an arm around him and they hobble together into the hospital like people in a three-legged race. Karen and Glennie wait in the truck.

  After a while her grandmother comes out. She says they're leaving Ron Sloane at the hospital to get sewed up, and he will be all right now. They drive back to tell Mrs. Sloane what's happened to Ron, so she won't worry. They sit at Mrs. Sloane's kitchen table and Karen's grandmother has tea and Karen has a glass of lemonade, and Mrs. Sloane cries and says thank you, and the grandmother doesn't say you're welcome. She only nods, a little stiffly, and says, "Don't thank me. It isn't me does it."

  Mrs. Sloane has a fourteen-year-old daughter with pale hair, paler than Karen's, and pink eyes, and skin devoid of colour. She passes a plate of store cookies, and stares and stares at Karen's grandmother as if her pink eyes are about to fall out. Mrs. Sloane doesn't like Karen's grandmother, although she urges her to have more tea. Neither does the white-haired daughter. Instead they are afraid of her. Their fear is all around their bodies, little grey icy shivers, like wind blowing on a pond. They're afraid and Karen isn't; or not as much. She would like to touch blood too, she would like to be able to make it stop.

  In the evenings, when it's cooler, Karen and her grandmother visit the cemetery. It's less than a mile away. At these times Karen's grandmother puts on her dress, but Karen doesn't have to.

  They always walk, they never take the truck. They go along the gravel road beside the fences and the ditches and the dust-coated weeds, and Karen holds her grandmother's hand. It's the only time she does. She holds it in a new way now, feeling its stringy veins and its knobs of bone and the loose skin on it not as old but as a colour. The colour of light blue. It's a hand with power.

  The cemetery is small; the church beside it small too, and vacant. The people who used to be there have built a new church, a bigger one, out beside the main highway.

  "That's where we put the women and children, when the Fenians came," says Karen's grandmother. "Inside that very church."

  "What are Fenians?" says Karen. The word makes her think of a laxative, she's heard it on the radio. Feen-a-mints.

  "Trash up from the States," says the grandmother. "Irish. They wanted war. Their eyes were bigger than their stomachs thoug
h." She talks about this event as though it just happened the other day, but really it was a long time ago. Over seventy years.

  "We're not Irish," says Karen.

  "Not by a long shot," says Karen's grandmother, "though your great-grandmother was." She herself is Scotch, partly, so Karen is part Scotch too. Part Scotch, part English, part Mennonite, and part of whatever her father was. According to her grandmother, Scotch is the best thing to be.

  The cemetery is weedy, though people still come here: some of the graves are mowed. Grandmother knows where everyone's buried, and why: a car crash at a crossroads, four dead, they'd been drinking; a man who blew himself in two with his own shotgun, everyone knew only they didn't want to say because then it would be suicide and that was a disgrace. A lady and her baby, the baby's grave smaller, like a tiny bedstead; another disgrace, because that baby had no real father. But "All fathers are real," says the grandmother, "though they're not all right." There are angel heads on the gravestones, urns with willow trees, stone lambs, stone flowers; real flowers too, wilting in jam jars. The grandmother's mother and father are in here, and her two brothers. She takes Karen to look at them; she doesn't say "their graves," she says "them." But mostly she wants to see Karen's grandfather. His name is carved on his stone, and his two numbers - when he was born, and when he died.

  "Maybe I should've sent him back to the Mennonites," she says. "He might like to be with his own people. But most likely they wouldn't've took him. Anyways, he's best here with me."

  Grandmother's own name is carved underneath his, but her right-hand date is a blank. "I had to get it fixed beforehand," she says to Karen. "Nobody around here to do it, after. That Gloria and that Vi would probably just dump me into the ditch, save the money. They're waiting for me to die so they can sell the farm. Or else they'd move me into that city, some hole in the ground. So I fooled them, I bought my own gravestone. I'm all set, come hell or high water."

  "I don't want you to die," says Karen. She doesn't. Her grandmother is a safe place for her, although hard. Or because hard. Not shifting, not watery. She doesn't change.

  Her grandmother sticks out her chin. "I don't intend to die," she says. "Only the body dies." She glares at Karen; she looks almost ferocious. Her hair on top is like thistles, after they've gone to seed.

  Did Karen love her grandmother? thinks Charis, halfway to the Island, sitting at the back of the ferry, remembering herself remembering. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Love is too simple a word for such a mixture of harsh and soft colours, of pungent tastes and rasping edges. "There's more than one way to skin a cat," her grandmother would say, and Karen would flinch, because she could picture her grandmother actually skinning one. Her grandmother went out at dawn with her .22 rifle and shot woodchucks; also rabbits, which she made into stews. She killed the chickens when they were too old to lay or just when she wanted a chicken; she chopped their heads off with an axe, on the wooden chopping block, and they ran silently around the barnyard with their necks fountaining blood and the grey smoke of their life rising up from them and the rainbow of light around them fading and then going out. Then she plucked and gutted them and singed off their pinfeathers with a candle, and after they were cooked she saved their wishbones and dried them on the windowsill. She had five there already. Karen wanted them to break one, but her grandmother said, "Have you got a wish?" and Karen couldn't think of one. "You save these for when you need them," said her grandmother.

  Karen asks more questions now; she does more things. Her grandmother says she is toughening up. When she goes to the henhouse by herself to get the eggs, she swats at the hens if they hiss and try to peck her, and if the rooster jumps at her bare legs she kicks him; sometimes she carries a stick, to beat him off. "He's a mean old devil," her grandmother says. "Don't you take anything from him. Just give him a good whack. He'll respect you for it."

  One morning they're eating bacon, and her grandmother says, "This here is Pinky."

  "Pinky?" says Karen. Pinky the pig is lying on her afghan where she usually is during meals, blinking with her bristly-lashed eyes and hoping for scraps. "Pinky's right here!"

  "This is last year's Pinky," says her grandmother. "There's a new one every year." She looks across the table at Karen. She has a sly expression; she's waiting to see how Karen will take it.

  Karen doesn't know what to do. She could start to cry and jump up from the table and run out of the room, which is what her mother would do and is also what she herself feels like doing. Instead she sets her fork down and takes the rubbery chewed piece of bacon out of her mouth and places it gently on her plate, and that's the end of bacon for her, right then and there, forever.

  "Well, for heaven's sake," says her grandmother, aggrieved but with some contempt. It's as if Karen has failed at something. "It's only pigs. They're cute when they're young, smart too, but if I let them stay alive they'd get too big. They're wild when they grow up, they're cunning, they'd eat you, yourself. They'd gobble you up as soon as look at you!"

  Karen thinks about Pinky, running around the barnyard with no head, the grey smoke of her life going up from her and her rainbow light shrinking to nothing. Whatever else, her grandmother is a killer. No wonder other people are afraid of her.

  35

  It was Labour Day. That was when Karen's mother was supposed to come on the train and take Karen back to the city. Karen had her suitcase all packed. She cried, in her narrow bed, under her chenille spread, under her pillow. She didn't want to leave her grandmother, but she wanted to see her mother, who - already - she couldn't remember clearly. All she could remember was her dresses, and the smell of Tabu, and one of her voices, her sweet voice, the too-sweet voice she used on the Grade Twos.

  Her mother didn't come. Instead there was a phone call from Aunt Vi, and Karen's grandmother said there had been a hitch and Karen would be staying a little longer. "You can help me put up the tomatoes," she said. Karen picked tomatoes and washed them in the pantry, and her grandmother scalded them and peeled them and boiled them in jars.

  Then it was time for school to begin, and still nothing happened. "There's no point starting you at that school," said Karen's grandmother. "You'd just be in and out." Karen didn't mind. She didn't much like school anyway, it was hard to pay attention to so many people in the same room at once. It was like the radio when there was a thunderstorm near: she could hardly hear a thing.

  Her grandmother brought the Bible out of the front parlour and stood it on the kitchen table. "Let me see, said the blind man," she said. She closed her eyes and poked with a pin. "Psalm Eighty-eight. I've had that before. 'Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness.' Well, that's right enough; it means I should get ready to go, myself, pretty soon. Now you."

  Karen took the pin and closed her eyes, and her hand followed the strong current that pulled it downwards. "Ah," said her grandmother, squinting. "Jezebel again. Revelations, Two, Twenty. 'Notwithstanding I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which callest herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols.' Now that's a strange thing, for a little girl." And she smiled at Karen, the smile of a withered apple. "You must be living ahead of yourself." Karen had no idea what she meant.

  Finally it was Aunt Vi who arrived, not Karen's mother. She didn't even stay at the grandmother's house. She stayed at the one hotel in town, and the grandmother drove Karen in. Karen didn't sit in the back of the truck this time. She sat in the front seat with the dog hairs, wearing her dress, the same as the day she came, looking out the window and not saying a thing. Her grandmother whistled softly.

  Aunt Vi wasn't all that pleased to see Karen but she pretended to be. She gave Karen a peck on the cheek. "Look how tall you've grown!" she said. It sounded like an accusation. "You've got her suitcase?" she said to the grandmother.

  "Viola, I'm hardly senile yet," said the grandmother. "I'm not likely
to forget her suitcase. Here you go," she said to Karen softly. "I put a wishbone in it." She crouched down and put her bony arms around Karen, and Karen could feel her square body, solid as a house, and then her grandmother wasn't there any longer.

  Karen sat on the train beside Aunt Vi, who fussed and fussed. "We'll have to get you enrolled in school, right away," she said. "You've missed almost a month already! My goodness, you're brown as a berry!"

  "Where's my mother?" said Karen. She couldn't think of any berries that were brown.

  Aunt Vi frowned and looked away. "Your mother isn't well," she said.

  When Karen got to Aunt Vi's house she went into her usual room with the orange-and-pink flowered curtains and opened up her suitcase right away. There was the hen wishbone, wrapped in a piece of wax paper, with a rubber band around it, from her grandmother's jar of saved-up rubber bands that was kept beside the sink. She took the wishbone out. It smelled sour, but rich and full, like a hand with dirt on it. She hid it in the hem of one of the curtains. She knew that if Aunt Vi found it she would throw it away.

  Karen's mother is in a building, a new flat yellow building that looks like a school. Aunt Vi and Uncle Vern take Karen to visit her. They sit in the waiting room, on hard chairs covered with a nubbly fabric, and Karen is frightened because Aunt Vi and Uncle Vern are so solemn; solemn, and at the same time avid. They are like the people who stop their cars and get out to see when there's been a car accident. Something is bad, something is wrong, but they want to participate in it, whatever it is. Karen would rather not, she would like to go back right now, back in time, back as far as the farm, but a door opens and her mother comes into the room. She walks slowly, putting a hand out to touch the furniture as if to guide herself. Sleepwalking, thinks Karen. Before, her mother's fingers were slim, the nails polished. She was proud of her hands. But now her hands are swollen and clumsy and there is no ring any more on her wedding finger. She's wearing a grey housecoat and slippers that Karen has never seen before, and also she has never before seen her mother's face.