Five The fur coat

This morning the tornado warnings were out, on the weather channel, and by mid-afternoon the sky had turned a baleful shade of green and the branches of the trees had begun to thrash around as if some huge, enraged animal was fighting its way through. The storm passed directly overhead: flicked snakes' tongues of white light, stacks of tin pie plates tumbling. Count a thousand and one, Reenie used to tell us. If you can say that, it's a mile away. She said never to use the telephone during a thunderstorm or the lightning would come right through into your ear and then you'd be deaf. She said never to take a bath then either, because the lightning could run out of the tap like water. She said if the hair stood up on the back of your neck you should jump into the air, because that was the only thing that could save you.

The storm was gone by nightfall, but it was still dank as a drain. I roiled around in the muddle of my bed, listening to my heart limping against the bedsprings, trying to get comfortable. Finally I gave up on sleep and pulled a long sweater on over my nightgown, and negotiated the stairs. Then I put on my plastic raincoat with the hood and slipped my feet into my rubber boots, and went outside. The damp wood of the porch steps was treacherous. The paint's worn off them, they may be rotting.

In the faint light all was monochrome. The air was moist and still. The chrysanthemums on the front lawn sparkled with shining drops; a battalion of slugs was no doubt munching away at the few remaining leaves of the lupins. Slugs are said to like beer; I keep thinking I should put some out for them. Better them than me: it was never the form of alcohol I preferred. I wanted nervelessness quicker.

I tapped and crept my way along the damp sidewalk. There was a full moon, ringed with a pale haze; under the street lights my foreshortened shadow slid before me like a goblin. I felt I was doing a daring thing: an older woman, solitary, walking by night. A stranger might have considered me defenceless. And indeed I was a little frightened, or at least apprehensive enough to make my heart beat harder. As Myra keeps telling me so kindly, old ladies are prime targets for muggers. They are said to come in from Toronto, these muggers, as all ills do. Probably they come in on the bus, their mugging tools disguised as umbrellas, or as golf clubs. There are no lengths to which they will not go, says Myra darkly.

I went three blocks to the main route through town, then stopped to gaze across the satiny wet tarmac towards Walter's garage. Walter was sitting in the lighthouse of the glass booth, in the middle of the inky, empty pool of flat asphalt. Leaning forward in his red cap, he looked like an aging jockey on an invisible horse, or like the captain of his fate, piloting an eerie ship through outer space. In point of fact he was watching The Sports Network on his miniature TV, as I happen to know from Myra. I did not go over to speak to him: he would have been alarmed by the sight of me, looming out of the darkness in my rubber boots and nightgown like some crazed octogenarian stalker. Still, it was comforting to know that there was at least one other human being awake at that time of night.

On the way back I heard footsteps behind me. Now you've done it, I told myself, here comes the mugger. But it was only a young woman in a black raincoat, carrying a bag or small suitcase. She passed me at a fast clip, head craned forward.

Sabrina, I thought. She's come back after all. How forgiven I felt, for that instant-how blessed, how filled with grace, as if time had rolled backwards and my dry old wooden cane had burst operatically into flower. But on second glance-no, on third-it was not Sabrina at all; only some stranger. Who am I anyway, to deserve such a miraculous outcome? How can I expect it?

I do expect it though. Against all reason.

But enough of that. I take up the burden of my tale, as they used to say in poems. Back to Avilion.

Mother was dead. Things would never be the same. I was told to keep a stiff upper lip. Who told me that? Reenie certainly, Father perhaps. Funny, they never say anything about the lower lip. That's the one you're supposed to bite, to substitute one kind of pain for another.

At first Laura used to spend a lot of time inside Mother's fur coat. It was made of sealskin, and still had Mother's handkerchief in the pocket. Laura would get inside it and try to do up the buttons, until she hit on a way of doing them up first and then crawling in underneath. I think she must have been praying in there, or conjuring: conjuring Mother back. Whatever it was, it didn't work. And then the coat was given away to charity.

Soon Laura began to ask where the baby had gone, the one that did not look like a kitten. To Heaven no longer satisfied her-after it was in the basin, was what she meant. Reenie said the doctor took it away. But why wasn't there a funeral? Because it was born too little, said Reenie. How could anything so little kill Mother? Reenie said, Never mind. She said, You'll know when you're older. She said, What you don't know won't hurt you. A dubious maxim: sometimes what you don't know can hurt you very much.

In the nighttimes Laura would creep into my room and shake me awake, then climb into bed with me. She couldn't sleep: it was because of God. Up until the funeral, she and God had been on good terms.

God loves you, said the Sunday-school teacher at the Methodist church, where Mother had sent us, and where Reenie continued to send us on general principles, and Laura had believed it. But now she was no longer so sure.

She began to fret about God's exact location. It was the Sunday-school teacher's fault: God is everywhere, she'd said, and Laura wanted to know: was God in the sun, was God in the moon, was God in the kitchen, the bathroom, was he under the bed? ("I'd like to wring that woman's neck," said Reenie.) Laura didn't want God popping out at her unexpectedly, not hard to understand considering his recent behaviour. Open your mouth and dose your eyes and I'll give you a big surprise, Reenie used to say, holding a cookie behind her back, but Laura would no longer do it. She wanted her eyes open. It wasn't that she distrusted Reenie, only that she feared surprises.

Probably God was in the broom closet. It seemed the most likely place. He was lurking in there like some eccentric and possibly dangerous uncle, but she couldn't be certain whether he was there at any given moment because she was afraid to open the door. "God is in your heart," said the Sunday-school teacher, and that was even worse. If in the broom closet, something might have been possible, such as locking the door.

God never slept, it said in the hymn-No careless slumber shall His eyelids dose. Instead he roamed around the house at night, spying on people-seeing if they'd been good enough, or sending plagues to finish them off, or indulging in some other whim. Sooner or later he was bound to do something unpleasant, as he'd often done in the Bible. "Listen, that's him," Laura would say. The light footstep, the heavy footstep.

"That's not God. It's only Father. He's in the turret."

"What's he doing?"

"Smoking." I didn't want to saydrinking. It seemed disloyal.

I felt most tenderly towards Laura when she was asleep-her mouth a little open, her eyelashes still wet -but she was a restless sleeper; she groaned and kicked, and snored sometimes, and kept me from getting to sleep myself. I would climb down out of the bed and tiptoe across the floor, and hoist myself up to look out the bedroom window. When there was a moon the flower gardens would be silvery grey, as if all the colours had been sucked out of them. I could see the stone nymph, foreshortened; the moon was reflected in her lily pond, and she was dipping her toes into its cold light. Shivering, I would get back into bed, and lie watching the moving shadows of the curtains and listening to the gurglings and crackings of the house as it shifted itself. Wondering what I'd done wrong.

Children believe that everything bad that happens is somehow their fault, and in this I was no exception; but they also believe in happy endings, despite all evidence to the contrary, and I was no exception in that either. I only wished the happy ending would hurry up, because-especially at night, when Laura was asleep and I did not have to cheer her up-I felt so desolate.

In the mornings I would help Laura to dress-that had been my task even when Mother was alive-and make sure she brushed her teeth and washed her face. At lunchtime Reenie would sometimes let us have a picnic. We'd have buttered white bread spread with grape jelly translucent as cellophane, and raw carrots, and cut-up apples. We'd have corned beef turned out of the tin, the shape of it like an Aztec temple. We'd have hard-boiled eggs. We'd put these things on plates, and take them outside, and eat them here and there-by the pool, in the conservatory. If it was raining we'd eat them inside.

"Remember the starving Armenians," Laura would say, hands clasped, eyes closed, bowing over the crusts of her jelly sandwich. I knew she was saying it because Mother used to, and it made me want to cry. "There are no starving Armenians, they're just made up," I told her once, but she wouldn't have it.

We were left on our own a lot at that time. We learned Avilion inside out: its crevices, its caves, its tunnels. We peered into the hiding place under the back stairs, which contained a jumble of discarded overshoes and single mittens, and an umbrella with broken ribs. We explored the various branches of the cellar-me coal cellar for the coal; the root cellar for the cabbages and squashes laid out on a board, and the beets and carrots growing whiskery in their box of sand, and the potatoes with their blind albino tentacles, like the legs of crabs; the cold cellar for the apples in their barrels, and for the shelves of preserves-dusty jams and jellies glinting like uncut gems, chutneys and pickles and strawberries and peeled tomatoes and applesauce, all in Crown sealing jars. There was a wine cellar too, but it was kept locked; only Father had the key.

We found the damp dirt-floored grotto beneath the verandah, reached by crawling between the hollyhocks, where only spidery dandelions tried to grow, and creeping Charlie, its crushed-mint smell mingling with cat spray and (once) the hot, sick stink of an alarmed garter snake. We found the attic, with boxes of old books and stored quilts and three empty trunks, and a broken harmonium, and Grandmother Adelia's headless dress form, a pallid, musty torso.

Holding our breaths, we would make our way stealthily through our labyrinths of shadow. We took solace in this-in our secrecy, our knowledge of hidden pathways, our belief that we could not be seen.

Listen to the dock ticking, I said. It was a pendulum clock-an antique, white and gold china; it had been Grandfather's; it stood on the mantelpiece in the library. Laura thought I'd saidlicking. And it was true, the brass pendulum swinging back and forth did look like a tongue, licking the lips of an invisible mouth. Eating up the time.

It became autumn. Laura and I picked milkweed pods and opened them, to feel the scale-shaped seeds overlapping like the skin of a dragon. We pulled the seeds out and scattered them on their flossy parachutes, leaving the leathery brownish-yellow tongue, soft as the inside of an elbow. Then we went to the Jubilee Bridge and threw the pods into the river to see how long they'd sail, before they capsized or were swept away. Did we think about them as holding people, or a person? I'm not sure. But there was a certain satisfaction in watching them go under.

It became winter. The sky was a hazy grey, the sun low in the sky, a wan pinkish colour, like fish blood. Icicles, heavy and opaque and thick as a wrist, hung dripping from the roof and windowsills as if suspended in the act of falling. We broke them off and sucked the ends. Reenie told us that if we did that our tongues would turn black and drop off, but I knew this was false, having done it before.

Avilion had a boathouse then, and an icehouse, down by the jetty. In the boathouse was Grandfather's elderly sailboat, now Father's-the Water Nixie, high and dry and put to bed for the winter. In the icehouse was the ice, cut from the Jogues River and hauled up in blocks by horses, and stored there covered in sawdust, waiting for the summer when it would be rare.

Laura and I went out onto the slippery jetty, which we were forbidden to do. Reenie said that if we fell off and went through, we wouldn't last an instant, because the water was cold as death. Our boots would fill, we'd sink like stones. We threw some real stones out to see what would happen to them; they skittered across the ice, rested there, remained in view. Our breath made a white smoke; we blew it out in puffs, like trains, and shifted from one cold foot to the other. Under our boot-soles the snow creaked. We held hands and our mittens froze stuck together, so that when we took them off there were two woollen hands holding on to each other, empty and blue.

At the bottom of the Louveteau's rapids, jagged chunks of ice had piled up against one another. The ice was white at noon, light green in the twilight; the smaller pieces made a tinkling sound, like bells. In the centre of the river the water ran open and black. Children called from the hill on the other side, hidden by trees, their voices high and thin and happy in the cold air. They were tobogganing, which we were not allowed to do. I thought of walking out onto the jagged shore ice, to see how solid it was.

It became spring. The willow branches turned yellow, the dogwoods red. The Louveteau River was in spate; bushes and trees torn up by their roots eddied and snagged. A woman jumped off the Jubilee Bridge above the rapids and the body wasn't found for two days. It was fished out downstream, and was far from a pretty sight because going down those rapids was like being run through a meat grinder. Not the best way to depart this earth, said Reenie-not if you were interested in your looks, though most likely you wouldn't be at such a time.

Mrs. Hillcoate knew of half a dozen such jumpers, over the years. You'd read about them in the paper. One was a girl she'd gone to school with who'd married a railroad worker. He was away a lot, she said, so what did he expect? "Up the spout," she said. "And no excuse." Reenie nodded, as if this explained everything.

"No matter how stupid the man may be, most of them can count," she said, "at least on their fingers. I expect there was knuckle sandwiches. But no sense in shutting the barn door with the horse gone."

"What horse?" said Laura.

"She must have been in some other kind of trouble too," said Mrs. Hillcoate. "If you've got trouble, you've most likely got more than the one kind."

"What is the spout?" Laura whispered to me. "What spout?" But I didn't know.

As well as jumping, said Reenie, women like that might walk into the river upstream and then be sucked under the surface by the weight of their wet clothing, so they couldn't swim to safety even if they'd wanted to. A man would be more deliberate. They would hang themselves from the crossbeams of their barns, or blow their heads off with their shotguns; or if intending to drown, they would attach rocks, or other heavy objects-axe-heads, bags of nails. They didn't like to take any chances on a serious thing like that. But it was a woman's way just to walk in and resign herself, and let the water take her. It was hard to tell from Reenie's tone whether she approved of these differences or not.

I turned ten in June. Reenie made a cake, though she said maybe we shouldn't be having one, it was too soon after Mother's death, but then, life had to go on, so maybe the cake wouldn't hurt. Hurt what? said Laura. Mother's feelings, I said. Was Mother watching us, then, from Heaven? But I became obstinate and smug, and wouldn't tell. Laura wouldn't eat any of the cake, not after she'd heard that about Mother's feelings, so I ate both our pieces.

It was an effort for me now to recall the details of my grief-the exact forms it had taken-although at will I could summon up an echo of it, like a small whining dog locked in the cellar. What had I done on the day Mother died? I could hardly remember that, or what she'd really looked like: now she looked only like her photographs. I did remember the wrongness of her bed when she was suddenly no longer in it: how empty it had seemed. The way the afternoon light came slantwise in through the window and fell so silently across the hardwood floor, the dust motes floating in it like mist. The smell of beeswax furniture polish, and of wilted chrysanthemums, and the lingering aroma of bedpan and disinfectant. I could remember her absence, now, much better than her presence.

Reenie said to Mrs. Hillcoate that although nobody could ever take the place of Mrs. Chase, who'd been a saint on earth if there could be such a thing, she herself had done what she could, and she'd kept up a cheerful front for our sakes because least said, soonest mended, and luckily we did seem to be getting over it, though still waters ran deep and I was too quiet for my own good. I was the brooding type, she said; it was bound to come out somehow. As for Laura, who could tell, because she'd always been an odd child anyway.

Reenie said we were together too much. She said Laura was learning ways that were too old for her, and I was being kept back. We should each of us be with children our own age, but the few children in town who might have been suitable for us had already been sent away to school-to private schools like the ones we should be sent off to by rights, but Captain Chase could never seem to get around to arranging it, and anyway it would be too many changes all at once, and although I was cool as a cucumber and would certainly be able to manage it, Laura was young for her age, and, come to that, too young altogether. Also she was too nervous. She was the type to panic and thrash around and drown in six inches of water, through not keeping her head.

Laura and I sat on the back stairs with the door open a crack, hands over our mouths to keep from laughing. We enjoyed the delights of espionage. But it did neither of us much good to overhear such things about ourselves.