A Bird in the House

  In the days following my father’s death, I stayed close beside my mother, and this was only partly for my own consoling. I also had the feeling that she needed my protection. I did not know from what, nor what I could possibly do, but something held me there. Reverend McKee called, and I sat with my grandmother and my mother in the living room. My mother told me I did not need to stay unless I wanted to, but I refused to go. What I thought chiefly was that he would speak of the healing power of prayer, and all that, and it would be bound to make my mother cry again. And in fact, it happened in just that way, but when it actually came, I could not protect her from this assault. I could only sit there and pray my own prayer, which was that he would go away quickly.

  My mother tried not to cry unless she was alone or with me. I also tried, but neither of us was entirely successful. Grandmother MacLeod, on the other hand, was never seen crying, not even the day of my father’s funeral. But that day, when we had returned to the house and she had taken off her black velvet overshoes and her heavy sealskin coat with its black fur that was the softest thing I had ever touched, she stood in the hallway and for the first time she looked unsteady. When I reached out instinctively towards her, she sighed.

  “That’s right,” she said. “You might just take my arm while I go upstairs, Vanessa.”

  That was the most my Grandmother MacLeod ever gave in, to anyone’s sight. I left her in her bedroom, sitting on the straight chair beside her bed and looking at the picture of my father that had been taken when he graduated from medical college. Maybe she was sorry now that she had only the one photograph of him, but whatever she felt, she did not say.

  I went down into the kitchen. I had scarcely spoken to Noreen since my father’s death. This had not been done on purpose. I simply had not seen her. I had not really seen anyone except my mother. Looking at Noreen now, I suddenly recalled the sparrow. I felt physically sick, remembering the fearful darting and plunging of those wings, and the fact that it was I who had opened the window and let it in. Then an inexplicable fury took hold of me, some terrifying need to hurt, burn, destroy. Absolutely without warning, either to her or to myself, I hit Noreen as hard as I could. When she swung around, appalled, I hit out at her once more, my arms and legs flailing. Her hands snatched at my wrists, and she held me, but still I continued to struggle, fighting blindly, my eyes tightly closed, as though she were a prison all around me and I was battling to get out. Finally, too shocked at myself to go on, I went limp in her grasp and she let me drop to the floor.

  “Vanessa! I never done one single solitary thing to you, and here you go hitting and scratching me like that! What in the world has got into you?”

  I began to say I was sorry, which was certainly true, but I did not say it. I could not say anything.

  “You’re not yourself, what with your dad and everything,” she excused me. “I been praying every night that your dad is with God, Vanessa. I know he wasn’t actually saved in the regular way, but still and all –”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  Something in my voice made her stop talking. I rose from the floor and stood in the kitchen doorway.

  “He didn’t need to be saved,” I went on coldly, distinctly. “And he is not in Heaven, because there is no Heaven. And it doesn’t matter, see? It doesn’t matter!”

  Noreen’s face looked peculiarly vulnerable now, her high wide cheekbones and puzzled childish eyes, and the thick russet tangle of her hair. I had not hurt her much before, when I hit her. But I had hurt her now, hurt her in some inexcusable way. Yet I sensed, too, that already she was gaining some satisfaction out of feeling sorrowful about my disbelief.

  I went upstairs to my room. Momentarily I felt a sense of calm, almost of acceptance. Rest beyond the river. I knew now what that meant. It meant Nothing. It meant only silence, forever.

  Then I lay down on my bed and spent the last of my tears, or what seemed then to be the last. Because, despite what I had said to Noreen, it did matter. It mattered, but there was no help for it.

  Everything changed after my father’s death. The MacLeod house could not be kept up any longer. My mother sold it to a local merchant who subsequently covered the deep red of the brick over with yellow stucco. Something about the house had always made me uneasy – that tower room where Grandmother MacLeod’s potted plants drooped in a lethargic and lime-green confusion, those long stairways and hidden places, the attic which I had always imagined to be dwelt in by the spirits of the family dead, that gigantic portrait of the Duke of Wellington at the top of the stairs. It was never an endearing house. And yet when it was no longer ours, and when the Virginia creeper had been torn down and the dark walls turned to a light marigold, I went out of my way to avoid walking past, for it seemed to me that the house had lost the stern dignity that was its very heart.

  Noreen went back to the farm. My mother and brother and myself moved into Grandmother Connor’s house. Grandmother MacLeod went to live with Aunt Morag in Winnipeg. It was harder for her than for anyone, because so much of her life was bound up with the MacLeod house. She was fond of Aunt Morag, but that hardly counted. Her men were gone, her husband and her sons, and a family whose men are gone is no family at all. The day she left, my mother and I did not know what to say. Grandmother MacLeod looked even smaller than usual in her fur coat and her black velvet toque. She became extremely agitated about trivialities, and fussed about the possibility of the taxi not arriving on time. She had forbidden us to accompany her to the station. About my father, or the house, or anything important, she did not say a word. Then, when the taxi had finally arrived, she turned to my mother.

  “Roddie will have Ewen’s seal ring, of course, with the MacLeod crest on it,” she said. “But there is another seal as well, don’t forget, the larger one with the crest and motto. It’s meant to be worn on a watch chain. I keep it in my jewel-box. It was Roderick’s. Roddie’s to have that, too, when I die. Don’t let Morag talk you out of it.”

  During the Second World War, when I was seventeen and in love with an airman who did not love me, and desperately anxious to get away from Manawaka and from my grandfather’s house, I happened one day to be going through the old mahogany desk that had belonged to my father. It had a number of small drawers inside, and I accidentally pulled one of these all the way out. Behind it there was another drawer, one I had not known about. Curiously, I opened it. Inside there was a letter written on almost transparent paper in a cramped angular handwriting. It began – Cher Monsieur Ewen – That was all I could make out, for the writing was nearly impossible to read and my French was not good. It was dated 1919. With it, there was a picture of a girl, looking absurdly old-fashioned to my eyes, like the faces on long-discarded calendars or chocolate boxes. But beneath the dated quality of the photograph, she seemed neither expensive nor cheap. She looked like what she probably had been – an ordinary middle-class girl, but in another country. She wore her hair in long ringlets, and her mouth was shaped into a sweetly sad posed smile like Mary Pickford’s. That was all. There was nothing else in the drawer.

  I looked for a long time at the girl, and hoped she had meant some momentary and unexpected freedom. I remembered what he had said to me, after I hadn’t gone to the Remembrance Day parade.

  “What are you doing, Vanessa?” my mother called from the kitchen.

  “Nothing,” I replied.

  I took the letter and picture outside and burned them. That was all I could do for him. Now that we might have talked together, it was many years too late. Perhaps it would not have been possible anyway. I did not know.

  As I watched the smile of the girl turn into scorched paper, I grieved for my father as though he had just died now.

  THE LOONS

  Just below Manawaka, where the Wachakwa River ran brown and noisy over the pebbles, the scrub oak and grey-green willow and chokecherry bushes grew in a dense thicket. In a clearing at the centre of the thicket stood the Tonnerre family’s shack. The basis of this dwelling was
a small square cabin made of poplar poles and chinked with mud, which had been built by Jules Tonnerre some fifty years before, when he came back from Batoche with a bullet in his thigh, the year that Riel was hung and the voices of the Metis entered their long silence. Jules had only intended to stay the winter in the Wachakwa Valley, but the family was still there in the thirties, when I was a child. As the Tonnerres had increased, their settlement had been added to, until the clearing at the foot of the town hill was a chaos of lean-tos, wooden packing cases, warped lumber, discarded car tires, ramshackle chicken coops, tangled strands of barbed wire and rusty tin cans.

  The Tonnerres were French halfbreeds, and among themselves they spoke a patois that was neither Cree nor French. Their English was broken and full of obscenities. They did not belong among the Cree of the Galloping Mountain reservation, further north, and they did not belong among the Scots-Irish and Ukrainians of Manawaka, either. They were, as my Grandmother MacLeod would have put it, neither flesh, fowl, nor good salt herring. When their men were not working at odd jobs or as section hands on the C.P.R., they lived on relief. In the summers, one of the Tonnerre youngsters, with a face that seemed totally unfamiliar with laughter, would knock at the doors of the town’s brick houses and offer for sale a lard-pail full of bruised wild strawberries, and if he got as much as a quarter he would grab the coin and run before the customer had time to change her mind. Sometimes old Jules, or his son Lazarus, would get mixed up in a Saturday-night brawl, and would hit out at whoever was nearest, or howl drunkenly among the offended shoppers on Main Street; and then the Mountie would put them for the night in the barred cell underneath the Court House, and the next morning they would be quiet again.

  Piquette Tonnerre, the daughter of Lazarus, was in my class at school. She was older than I, but she had failed several grades, perhaps because her attendance had always been sporadic and her interest in schoolwork negligible. Part of the reason she had missed a lot of school was that she had had tuberculosis of the bone, and had once spent months in hospital. I knew this because my father was the doctor who had looked after her. Her sickness was almost the only thing I knew about her, however. Otherwise, she existed for me only as a vaguely embarrassing presence, with her hoarse voice and her clumsy limping walk and her grimy cotton dresses that were always miles too long. I was neither friendly nor unfriendly towards her. She dwelt and moved somewhere within my scope of vision, but I did not actually notice her very much until that peculiar summer when I was eleven.

  “I don’t know what to do about that kid,” my father said at dinner one evening. “Piquette Tonnerre, I mean. The damn bone’s flared up again. I’ve had her in hospital for quite a while now, and it’s under control all right, but I hate like the dickens to send her home again.”

  “Couldn’t you explain to her mother that she has to rest a lot?” my mother said.

  “The mother’s not there,” my father replied. “She took off a few years back. Can’t say I blame her. Piquette cooks for them, and she says Lazarus would never do anything for himself as long as she’s there. Anyway, I don’t think she’d take much care of herself, once she got back. She’s only thirteen, after all. Beth, I was thinking – what about taking her up to Diamond Lake with us this summer? A couple of months rest would give that bone a much better chance.”

  My mother looked stunned.

  “But Ewen – what about Roddie and Vanessa?”

  “She’s not contagious,” my father said. “And it would be company for Vanessa.”

  “Oh dear,” my mother said in distress, “I’ll bet anything she has nits in her hair.”

  “For Pete’s sake,” my father said crossly, “do you think Matron would let her stay in the hospital for all this time like that? Don’t be silly, Beth.”

  Grandmother MacLeod, her delicately featured face as rigid as a cameo, now brought her mauve-veined hands together as though she were about to begin a prayer.

  “Ewen, if that half-breed youngster comes along to Diamond Lake, I’m not going,” she announced. “I’ll go to Morag’s for the summer.”

  I had trouble in stifling my urge to laugh, for my mother brightened visibly and quickly tried to hide it. If it came to a choice between Grandmother MacLeod and Piquette, Piquette would win hands down, nits or not.

  “It might be quite nice for you, at that,” she mused. “You haven’t seen Morag for over a year, and you might enjoy being in the city for a while. Well, Ewen dear, you do what you think best. If you think it would do Piquette some good, then we’ll be glad to have her, as long as she behaves herself.”

  So it happened that several weeks later, when we all piled into my father’s old Nash, surrounded by suitcases and boxes of provisions and toys for my ten-month-old brother, Piquette was with us and Grandmother MacLeod, miraculously, was not. My father would only be staying at the cottage for a couple of weeks, for he had to get back to his practice, but the rest of us would stay at Diamond Lake until the end of August.

  Our cottage was not named, as many were, “Dew Drop Inn” or “Bide-a-Wee,” or “Bonnie Doon.” The sign on the roadway bore in austere letters only our name, MacLeod. It was not a large cottage, but it was on the lakefront. You could look out the windows and see, through the filigree of the spruce trees, the water glistening greenly as the sun caught it. All around the cottage were ferns, and sharp-branched raspberry bushes, and moss that had grown over fallen tree trunks. If you looked carefully among the weeds and grass, you could find wild strawberry plants which were in white flower now and in another month would bear fruit, the fragrant globes hanging like miniature scarlet lanterns on the thin hairy stems. The two grey squirrels were still there, gossiping at us from the tall spruce beside the cottage, and by the end of the summer they would again be tame enough to take pieces of crust from my hands. The broad moose antlers that hung above the back door were a little more bleached and fissured after the winter, but otherwise everything was the same. I raced joyfully around my kingdom, greeting all the places I had not seen for a year. My brother, Roderick, who had not been born when we were here last summer, sat on the car rug in the sunshine and examined a brown spruce cone, meticulously turning it round and round in his small and curious hands. My mother and father toted the luggage from car to cottage, exclaiming over how well the place had wintered, no broken windows, thank goodness, no apparent damage from storm-felled branches or snow.

  Only after I had finished looking around did I notice Piquette. She was sitting on the swing, her lame leg held stiffly out, and her other foot scuffing the ground as she swung slowly back and forth. Her long hair hung black and straight around her shoulders, and her broad coarse-featured face bore no expression – it was blank, as though she no longer dwelt within her own skull, as though she had gone elsewhere. I approached her very hesitantly.

  “Want to come and play?”

  Piquette looked at me with a sudden flash of scorn.

  “I ain’t a kid,” she said.

  Wounded, I stamped angrily away, swearing I would not speak to her for the rest of the summer. In the days that followed, however, Piquette began to interest me, and I began to want to interest her. My reasons did not appear bizarre to me. Unlikely as it may seem, I had only just realised that the Tonnerre family, whom I had always heard called half-breeds, were actually Indians, or as near as made no difference. My acquaintance with Indians was not extensive. I did not remember ever having seen a real Indian, and my new awareness that Piquette sprang from the people of Big Bear and Poundmaker, of Tecumseh, of the Iroquois who had eaten Father Brebeuf’s heart – all this gave her an instant attraction in my eyes. I was a devoted reader of Pauline Johnson at this age, and sometimes would orate aloud and in an exalted voice, West Wind, blow from your prairie nest; Blow from the mountains, blow from the west – and so on. It seemed to me that Piquette must be in some way a daughter of the forest, a kind of junior prophetess of the wilds, who might impart to me, if I took the right approach, some of the secrets
which she undoubtedly knew – where the whippoorwill made her nest, how the coyote reared her young, or whatever it was that it said in Hiawatha.

  I set about gaining Piquette’s trust. She was not allowed to go swimming, with her bad leg, but I managed to lure her down to the beach – or rather, she came because there was nothing else to do. The water was always icy, for the lake was fed by springs, but I swam like a dog, thrashing my arms and legs around at such speed and with such an output of energy that I never grew cold. Finally, when I had had enough, I came out and sat beside Piquette on the sand. When she saw me approaching, her hand squashed flat the sand castle she had been building, and she looked at me sullenly, without speaking.

  “Do you like this place?” I asked, after a while, intending to lead on from there into the question of forest lore.

  Piquette shrugged. “It’s okay. Good as anywhere.”

  “I love it,” I said. “We come here every summer.”

  “So what?” Her voice was distant, and I glanced at her uncertainly, wondering what I could have said wrong.

  “Do you want to come for a walk?” I asked her. “We wouldn’t need to go far. If you walk just around the point there, you come to a bay where great big reeds grow in the water, and all kinds of fish hang around there. Want to? Come on.’”

  She shook her head.

  “Your dad said I ain’t supposed to do no more walking than I got to.”

  I tried another line.

  “I bet you know a lot about the woods and all that, eh?” I began respectfully.

  Piquette looked at me from her large dark unsmiling eyes.

  “I don’t know what in hell you’re talkin’ about,” she replied. “You nuts or somethin’? If you mean where my old man, and me, and all them live, you better shut up, by Jesus, you hear?”