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[Apr. 7th, 2008|09:39 pm] |
I wrote this today instead of my Shakespeare essay.
Early Thaw
“We gotta clear those trees out,” my uncle Ged says, his voice a puff of white breath against the grey morning sky.
The other men nod and shuffle their feet in the snow, their jeans only saved from getting wet up to the knees by mismatched pairs of rubber boots. We all stand facing the river; Uncle Ged, Uncle Jim, and my two older cousins – Ged’s two sons, brothers who could be twins. My ears pick out the water’s slow rumble; in patches its sturdy casing of ice has been peeled away and the cold river thunders loud, bare, exposed to the sky.
I see the problem and I nod along with them. Two giant cedar trees have fallen under the pressure of the snow, right across the river. In the spring thaw they could dam it up – it’s not a deep river, and the trees are thick and old. Their branches snake across the ice, the clutching fingers of an elderly-shut in on a nurse’s arm.
“We could bring the tractor down in the spring,” says my uncle Jim. His voice is the sun coming up, slow and measured and just enough words to illuminate things.
Ged claps his hands inside their dirty work gloves. I watch him standing there, I look at the plaid shirt that hangs from his broad shoulders under the coat he wears open, the oil-stained coat with patches on the elbows that he wears in the garage when he’s at work. He reminds me of old cars and firewood. “We’ll get it running at Easter,” he says.
Everyone nods and I nod too. My cousin Toby is stroking his chin thoughtfully with bare fingers. I feel a surge of envy – he is twenty-four, he’s grown now and his mother doesn’t make him wear mittens. He can feel the biting snow on his fingertips, he can break off twigs and hold icicles and scratch his nose. I remember last Christmas when he took my brother and I tobogganing, how much I wished I could have the wind in my ears like he could instead of sweating under the pink toque my mother insisted I keep plastered on, the one with the pom-pom right on top. She didn’t want me to get frostbite, she said. But I didn’t want that either. I just wanted to feel the cold.
“We’ll try, at least,” says Jim. I think about the last time I saw him. It was Thanksgiving maybe, the last time he was in town. The truck keeps him far away, but we all know how much he loves it. He took me for a ride once and I sat up so high in the cab and imagined what it would be like, days of wheat fields bent in the wind all the way from Manitoba to Alberta, and Johnny Cash on a cassette to accompany it. When he comes back it’s a treat for all of us, even his wife, my father’s oldest sister. She doesn’t always go with him in the truck, not since the cancer, but he’s been good about that too. He keeps her sane, she likes to tell us, at weddings and family dinners with her bald head wrapped in a scarf. He’s the best medicine she has.
The men laugh and I laugh too, briefly, until the sound reminds me I am an anomaly here. They are solid and steady, the weight of manhood pressing in on them, and I am young, I am just a little girl. They are a world apart and a world I want. But my mother doesn’t like me going to the river with the men. She says I’ll get hurt, she says they’re irresponsible. She doesn’t like it that they let me do everything they do. She doesn’t know how much I love it that they don’t treat me like she does.
My cousin Paul, older than Toby by three years and taller by three inches, tests the ice with his foot. We listen for the crack and when it doesn’t come he lifts his other boot out of the snow, and for a second I hold my breath until he’s firmly planted on the river.
“Seems pretty solid,” he says, presumably to Toby or to my uncles.
Toby shrugs and follows him, and we don’t hear a peep out of the ice. He walks a few steps and goofs like he’s going to fall, and I can laugh because I know it’s not true. Nothing scares him, not even the threat of being swallowed by the water.
“You want to walk on the river?” asks Ged.
My mother and father are inside, their hands wrist-deep in dishwater or wrapped around a mug of cider, not here where they can pull me back. I can walk on the river. If it will hold Toby and Paul, I know it will hold me too. I look at the trees and the slate-coloured sky and my boots buried in white powder that would be inside them if the snowpants weren’t tightly tucked down. My mother isn’t here this time to keep me safe from what I want.
I nod and I put my foot into the snow-covered imprint their boots left on the corner of the ice. I prepare to lift my other foot up, my smile betraying my excitement. I might have to wear mittens and a toque, I might not get to have a green jacket and hair off my neck like they did, but today I would get closer. So I pretend, for a minute, that I am a boy like Toby and Paul had been once, and I guess Ged and Jim too. I am a boy in a plaid shirt walking on water.
I’m standing there, my foot planted on the ice and my eyes locked to the shred of open water peeking through a few metres away. It winks at me, glinting in the winter brightness. I think of that same liquid silver rumbling by beneath me, maybe a foot or so beneath my boots, and it gives me a thrill. Toby and Paul are far away now, almost at the other bank, and Paul has turned to wait for me before he steps back on land. I am eager to follow and I go to raise my foot –
“I don’t want you doing that. Come back here right now.”
I turn and my mother is there, her voice icicle-sharp, wrapped up in her coat and boots and mittens and toque. She shuffles towards me in the snow. Ged and Jim turn their heads, not wanting to take the blame for breaking her rules. They know she doesn’t like me going to the river, they know she’s never let me walk across the ice.
I come back. She tells me we’re going up to the house. She pulls on my arm and I follow, blinking back the tears that want badly to creep out and freeze on my cheeks. The white world around me spins; the sky seems to fall to pieces in the snow. I close my eyes and try to be a boy in a plaid shirt again, this time walking uphill to a farmhouse, but I have already forgotten how. |
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