.ONE

1975

Rebecca

My father threw his suitcase into the back seat of his rusted Chevy Nova. He pulled his coat collar up against the January wind. “I’m sorry, Rebecca.” He kneeled for a hug. “Everything’s going to work its way out. Wait and see.”

I waited to see but I never saw him again. He was replaced by a grey-haired lady who came after school to look after me. For the rest of the winter, my mother managed to hold down a job on the line in the Owen Sound dog food plant. Then one late-March evening, a tall, thin man with longish brown hair and a beard arrived at the door of our one-bedroom basement apartment. My mother introduced him as Leonard Jones, a special friend.

“He’s a buyer at the plant.” She hung his winter coat in the closet. “What do you buy?” I asked.

Leonard didn’t answer right away. “Horses,” he said as he shuffled from one foot to the other, removing his boots. “The plant’s not far from the Owen Sound horse auctions. The buyer, which is me, stands next to the auctioneer and bids on each horse.”

“What do you do with the horses?”

Again, Leonard didn’t answer right away. Then he said, “I can sight the weigh-in within one hundred pounds of any horse led into the ring. Ten cents a pound. If I’m outbid, the horse goes to a new home. If I’m not…”

“Oh.” I didn’t want to talk to someone who turned horses into dog food.

“That’s why I’m going to quit,” added Leonard. “Oh,” I said again.

The next Sunday, Leonard arrived with his five-year-old son, Bobby. His ear-flapped hat in one hand, and a red marble game — homemade, it looked like — in the other. My mother’s new pills were working better than the last ones, so with my help she had cooked a special roast beef dinner. What is the difference, I wondered — cows turned into roast beef or horses turned into dog food? I ate the potatoes and the green beans but not the roast beef.

Leonard helped my mother with the dishes. I sat in our Goodwill chair next to the Goodwill chesterfield and watched Bobby play his marble game on the floor in the corner. He placed a blue-and-white marble, which looked like an eyeball, in the top part of a trough and watched it run down to the first hole, roll to the next hole, and drop again, clattering and plunking its way from top to bottom. Then he picked up the marble and did the same thing all over again. Although I was wearing my good red dress with white tights, I went over and crouched on the floor beside him.

“I’m eight,” I said. “I’m five,” said Bobby.

We took turns with the marble.

“You have long eyelashes,” I said. Like a girl, but I didn’t say that.

Bobby and Leonard came again for Saturday lunch. They took off their coats and sat on the blue flower-patterned two-seater my mother had got from the Sally Ann. Leonard was dressed in pressed khaki pants and a polo shirt, Bobby in blue pants and a matching sweater. Leonard seemed excited about the farm he’d just bought on

Manitoulin Island, which was where he was from before he started making horses into dog food.

“The farm deal happened by accident.” When he folded one long, thin leg over the other, I noticed his socks didn’t quite match, both brown but different shades. “I was driving to the island hog plant to apply for a job and I noticed an old house and barn for sale on Pork Chop Road, not too far from the Wikwemikong Reserve. My dog food experience got me the job at the Gore Bay hog plant, so on my way back, I stopped to look at the farm. That was that. I made the down payment and now I’m a farmer.”

And then to me, he said, “No more turning horses into dog food.” I wasn’t sure why but turning pigs into pork chops seemed better than turning horses into dog food. I liked roast anything, so I decided

that turning cows into roast beef was okay too.

Leonard stretched out his long legs and unfolded his long fingers before holding them together in his lap as he settled into the two- seater. “The farmhouse needs work. A coat of paint and new wiring. But the land is good, two hundred acres, half cleared and half bush. I can work at the hog plant until I pay off the mortgage. Then it’s fresh air and live-off-the-land: grow vegetables and raise chickens and cut my own firewood and be independent. The simple life.”

My mother sat next to him on the edge of the blue easy chair, back straight, face turned towards him. Her pills had made her a little heavy, but wearing her dress with the scooped neck to show the gold necklace she got from her mother, my grandma, dead now, and wearing a little makeup, she looked pretty enough for me to be suspicious.

I said, “Manitoulin Island?”

“Beautiful there.” He folded his legs and leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “You go by ferry from Tobermory. The locals are called Haweaters because of the hawberry bushes that grow wild everywhere with little red berries they make into jam, chutney, ketchup, and wine.”

“You go by boat?”

“There are two ways: either the Chi-Cheemaun ferry to South Baymouth or the single-lane swing bridge in Little Current. Most people, if they’re born there, they stay there.”

He nodded, as though agreeing with himself. “The island is in my blood, I guess. That’s where I belong.”

After lunch, while he talked to my mother about the fresh air and grow-your-own food, Bobby and I sat at the kitchen table, me drawing the pictures, and Bobby, bent over with his crayons, colouring them in. Those long eyelashes. I wanted to give him a hug. “Look how well they get along,” said Leonard. “It’s like they’ve been friends forever, like soulmates. My mother, Bobby’s grandmother, believes in that. You meet someone and it’s like you’ve known them forever. They don’t even have to talk. It’s like they read each other’s minds. It’s like they walk in the same footprints. Doublewalkers,

they’re called.”

At first, I thought it was Bobby’s long eyelashes that got me. But then, when Leonard said that about Doublewalkers, I knew it was something else.

***

We had packed a lunch. Me and Bobby sat in the back seat of Leonard’s ’65 Ford Fairlane, bought ten years earlier brand new, he said. He showed me a picture, red with a white top and chrome along the side. Now it looked like rusted-out junk, the same as my father’s Nova.

We drove from Owen Sound to Tobermory. My mother, who usually didn’t say anything, talked with Leonard the whole way. She was happier than I had ever seen her. We took the Chi-Cheemaun to South Baymouth, my mother standing with Leonard at the rail, smiling into the bitter wind off Georgian Bay. We followed Highway 6 to the gravel road cut-off.

“Pork Chop Road,” said Leonard. “What a cute name,” said my mother.

“That’s not its real name; it’s a regional road with a number I can’t remember.”

Leonard not knowing the number of the road he was going to live on should have been my second clue, the first being the mismatched socks, the third being the lane that led to Leonard’s dream of fresh air and live-off-the-land: potholed mud that took us to a muddier potholed yard. Leonard told Bobby not to step in the puddles, but he did anyway so his sneakers were soaked.

The rickety side porch of the paint-blistered white house where we ate our lunch of ham sandwiches and celery sticks was as cold and grey as everything else about this farm. At the end of the lane stood an old barn with boards missing. It was bare black, the same as the fields straight ahead were bare brown, the same as the bush of bare trees off to my left, the same as the side of the house to my right, bare brown — except where the paint had not yet finished peeling off, it was green.

“For the children,” said Leonard. “Did you notice how well they played together in the back seat, Ruth? Already like brother and sister.” Looking off, he said, “That’s the Pattersons’, one farm over. He drives a hog truck. Nice neighbours.”

At the farm kitchen door, my mother removed her wet shoes. I removed mine. In the daylight coming through one dusty kitchen window, the walls, cupboards, and ceiling were a slippery yellow, I think from smoke and grease. The linoleum floor was so filthy that my mother put her shoes back on. So did I, before following her into what must have been the living room. With no furniture, it was hard to know for sure. The brown curtains pulled together across the front window blocked out the daylight, except for a thin crack of glimmer, which fell on one framed picture propped upside down against the opposite wall. I stepped closer for a better look. It was Jesus, in a dark robe and white halo, his feet in leather sandals, standing in a field of daisies, one hand out, palm up, as if to say, Come with me.

My mother felt along the wall but found no switch. We started up the gloomy stairway leading to the bedrooms. When her foot tripped

on a broken step, she steadied herself on my shoulder to adjust her shoe before continuing along the upper hall to the bathroom where she stared at the grey-ringed tub and the rusted taps of the sink hanging from the wall.

Next, she wandered down the hall, turning each rattly glass knob of each bedroom door and peeking in. In the last one on the left, she raised the blinds, but the added light could not change the blistered linoleum or the yellowed wallpaper or the cracked wall mirror hanging crooked to anything besides blistered and yellowed and cracked and crooked, just like every new pill prescription could not change my mother from blistered and yellowed and cracked and crooked.

“Everything will be fixed by fall,” said Leonard. “One room at a time. This will be our room, Ruth. It’s the biggest, with the biggest window.”

And the cracked mirror, I wanted to say.

But, I thought, maybe Leonard’s prescription could suddenly do what the doctor’s prescriptions could not: open the curtains on that cracked mirror to let in the sun even when there was none.

I turned. I hadn’t heard Bobby climbing the stairs but there he was, coming along the hall, staring at me from under those long lashes. It was like I knew he was coming before I turned. Maybe I had heard him climb the stairs, I don’t know. He came into the room and took my hand before he took Leonard’s and we three stood together, while my mother, off to one side, looked out the window at the endless brown fields and the black leafless trees along a road that had a number Leonard couldn’t remember.

“Pretty soon, Ruthie. Pretty soon all this bare brown will turn green.”

No one had ever called her Ruthie before. It was like he was stamping out yesterday’s weeds that might be sprouting among the seeds now planted in that glimmer of sun in my mother’s clouded mind. He led us along the gloomy hallway, Ruthie following him, and me following her, and Bobby following me.

He pointed as we passed. “That’ll be Bobby’s room and that’ll be Becky’s.”

No one had ever called me Becky before. At first, I didn’t know who he meant. But right away, I liked how it sounded: Rebecca to Becky. Ruth to Ruthie. I squeezed Bobby’s hand. It was so little in my palm it reminded me of a Mother’s Day card I had made in kindergarten, my tiny fingers in black ink on the white paper. My mother stuck it on the fridge and knelt to hug me. I couldn’t help doing the same. “Everything’s going to work its way out,” I said, hugging Bobby.

We went downstairs. For a closer look at everything, my mother said. The last owner had left empty garbage pails in the mud room, but had left all the garbage in the house. Leonard didn’t seem to notice until my mother, holding her nose, began to pick up the empty Cheezies bags, unwashed soup cans, banana peels, apple cores, and other stuff, I don’t know what it all was. I could see her mind trying not to write down the hopelessness of this farm idea, then trying to stroke it out after it got written. I was afraid she would take Leonard’s farm idea home, and she would take it to bed with her, and she would read it back to herself over and over again all night long, and in the morning decide this farm idea might work. And I would end up looking after her when it didn’t work, not in our apartment in Owen Sound, but here in this dirty old farmhouse. She did the same for every new prescription. She would read the instructions over and over to convince herself — and me, I think — that these new pills would work. When they didn’t, I would be looking after her in whatever basement apartment we were living, same as before.

But this time seemed different. Of course. The garbage could be picked up. The walls painted. What was broken could be fixed. I saw in her eyes that Leonard’s farm idea — not the farm but the idea of fresh air and garden vegetables — gave her hope, lifted the blinds of her basement-apartment mind and, unlike the pills, let in a little farmer’s wife sun. Yes, yes, that was what was happening.

I’d lived all my life with these once-in-a-while ups, but mostly always the downs that drove my father away. He never figured out,

even after trying to track them on a calendar from the Red and White Grocery Store, which day would be which. Me neither. But I learned one thing. The difference between my father and me was I couldn’t climb into a rusted-out Nova and leave when things turned bad.

Me and Bobby following, Leonard led my mother through the mud room to the back door. He helped her button her soggy winter coat. On the back porch, he said, “Breathe in deep, Ruthie. Hard work and fresh air cures everything. In six months, you’ll be throwing away all those pills. And eating proper food and losing a little weight.”

I think Leonard knew right away that he’d tripped. Out of his throat a stumble had come. My mother pulled her coat tighter around her shoulders from the chill of that comment.

I said to Bobby, “That’s the end of the farm idea.”

I think Leonard heard, for right away he said, “See that tree there? That’s an apple tree. Apple crisp is Bobby’s favourite dessert. Right, Bobby? And that little building over there is a chicken house. Fresh- laid eggs for breakfast. And over there, you can’t see it from here, is the Mindemoya River. Fresh-caught brook trout in the spring.”

Leonard took Bobby’s hand. I watched them walk across the dead wet grass, headed to either the chicken house or the barn. Bobby was thin and delicate, young for his age, it looked like. Leonard was thin and probably, at Bobby’s age, delicate. Because I could see his longish brown hair but not his bushy beard, he did not look like a farmer. Or like someone who turned horses into dog food and pigs into pork chops. He looked like one of those poets from my grade three reader series.

I don’t know what he looked like to my mother. But what I think, just a guess, he looked like Jesus in that picture, stood right side up, his hand out, saying, Come with me. But she didn’t say anything about Jesus to me. What she said was, “At least he doesn’t want to raise pigs.” She said that as Bobby and his father disappeared into the barn, leaving us standing there in the mud. When I turned to look at her, I saw that Leonard, who did look like the Jesus in that picture, had parted her curtains more than just a little and raised her

blinds more than just an inch and opened her coat more than just two buttons. “Better than that basement apartment with only one burner working on the stove. And better than working the line in the dog food plant.”

If Jesus could cure the sick and raise the dead, he could fix my mother. That’s what I wanted to think. But I was only eight. And I knew it was more than likely, more than probably, that these life- on-the-farm ideas of “better” that she was trying to warm up on a back burner in her mind would soon turn cold and soon be replaced with thoughts of “worse.” That after a month or two on the farm, her mind would cook itself into a porridge of bad thoughts that every morning would send her back to bed with her farmer Jesus turned from right side up back to upside down and her mirror turned from cracked to shattered.

I knew that for sure. What I didn’t know, would never have guessed in a thousand years, was how it would happen.