But neither of us is really listening to what he is saying; we are listening for sounds from upstairs. But everything is quiet.
On the way home from taking Nelly to the pasture I go to see where the barn was. There are people still standing around, some of them the men who got up in the night to go to the river. Everyone seems quite cheerful there, too, but the smell of burned hay is awful, sickening.
* * *
Now the front bedroom is empty. My older aunt has gone back to Boston and my other aunt is making plans to go there after a while, too.
There has been a new pig. He was very cute to begin with, and skidded across the kitchen linoleum while everyone laughed. He grew and grew. Perhaps it is all the same summer, because it is unusually hot and something unusual for a pig happens to him; he gets sunburned. He really gets sunburned, bright pink, but the strangest thing of all, the curled-up end of his tail gets so sunburned it is brown and scorched. My grandmother trims it with the scissors and it doesn’t hurt him.
Sometime later this pig is butchered. My grandmother, my aunt, and I shut ourselves in the parlor. My aunt plays a piece on the piano called “Out in the Fields.” She plays it and plays it; then she switches to Mendelssohn’s “War March of the Priests.”
The front room is empty. Nobody sleeps there. Clothes are hung there.
Every week my grandmother sends off a package. In it she puts cake and fruit, a jar of preserves, Moirs’ chocolates.
Monday afternoon every week.
Fruit, cake, Jordan almonds, a handkerchief with a tatted edge.
Fruit. Cake. Wild-strawberry jam. A New Testament.
A little bottle of scent from Hills’ store, with a purple silk tassel fastened to the stopper.
Fruit. Cake. “Selections from Tennyson.”
A calendar, with a quotation from Longfellow for every day.
Fruit. Cake. Moirs’ chocolates.
I watch her pack them in the pantry. Sometimes she sends me to the store to get things at the last minute.
The address of the sanitarium is in my grandmother’s handwriting, in purple indelible pencil, on smoothed-out wrapping paper. It will never come off.
I take the package to the post office. Going by Nate’s, I walk far out in the road and hold the package on the side away from him.
He calls to me. “Come here! I want to show you something.”
But I pretend I don’t hear him. But at any other time I still go there just the same.
The post office is very small. It sits on the side of the road like a package once delivered by the post office. The government has painted its clapboards tan, with a red trim. The earth in front of it is worn hard. Its face is scarred and scribbled on, carved with initials. In the evening, when the Canadian Pacific mail is due, a row of big boys leans against it, but in the daytime there is nothing to be afraid of. There is no one in front, and inside it is empty. There is no one except the postmaster, Mr. Johnson, to look at my grandmother’s purple handwriting.
The post office tilts a little, like Mealy’s shop, and inside it looks as chewed as a horse’s manger. Mr. Johnson looks out through the little window in the middle of the bank of glass-fronted boxes, like an animal looking out over its manger. But he is dignified by the thick, bevelled-edged glass boxes with their solemn, upright gold-and-black-shaded numbers.
Ours is 21. Although there is nothing in it, Mr. Johnson automatically cocks his eye at it from behind when he sees me.
21.
“Well, well. Here we are again. Good day, good day,” he says.
“Good day, Mr. Johnson.”
I have to go outside again to hand him the package through the ordinary window, into his part of the post office, because it is too big for the little official one. He is very old, and nice. He has two fingers missing on his right hand where they were caught in a threshing machine. He wears a navy-blue cap with a black leather visor, like a ship’s officer, and a shirt with feathery brown stripes, and a big gold collar button.
“Let me see. Let me see. Let me see. Hm,” he says to himself, weighing the package on the scales, jiggling the bar with the two remaining fingers and thumb.
“Yes. Yes. Your grandmother is very faithful.”
* * *
Every Monday afternoon I go past the blacksmith’s shop with the package under my arm, hiding the address of the sanitarium with my arm and my other hand.
Going over the bridge, I stop and stare down into the river. All the little trout that have been too smart to get caught — for how long now? — are there, rushing in flank movements, foolish assaults and retreats, against and away from the old sunken fender of Malcolm McNeil’s Ford. It has lain there for ages and is supposed to be a disgrace to us all. So are the tin cans that glint there, brown and gold.
From above, the trout look as transparent as the water, but if one did catch one, it would be opaque enough, with a little slick moon-white belly with a pair of tiny, pleated, rose-pink fins on it. The leaning willows soak their narrow yellowed leaves.
Clang.
Clang.
Nate is shaping a horseshoe.
Oh, beautiful pure sound!
It turns everything else to silence.
But still, once in a while, the river gives an unexpected gurgle. “Slp,” it says, out of glassy-ridged brown knots sliding along the surface.
Clang.
And everything except the river holds its breath.
Now there is no scream. Once there was one and it settled slowly down to earth one hot summer afternoon; or did it float up, into that dark, too dark, blue sky? But surely it has gone away, forever.
Clang.
It sounds like a bell buoy out at sea.
It is the elements speaking: earth, air, fire, water.
All those other things — clothes, crumbling postcards, broken china; things damaged and lost, sickened or destroyed; even the frail almost-lost scream — are they too frail for us to hear their voices long, too mortal?
Nate!
Oh, beautiful sound, strike again!
1953
Primer Class
Every time I see long columns of numbers, handwritten in a certain way, a strange sensation or shudder, partly aesthetic, partly painful, goes through my diaphragm. It is like seeing the dorsal fin of a large fish suddenly cut through the surface of the water — not a frightening fish like a shark, more like a sailfish. The numbers have to be only up to but under a hundred, rather large and clumsily written, and the columns squeezed together, with long vertical lines between them, drawn by hand, long and crooked. They are usually in pencil, these numbers that affect me so, but I’ve seen them in blue crayon or blurred ink, and they produce the same effect. One morning our newspaper delivery man, an old Italian named Tony, whom I’d seen over and over again, threw back the pages of his limp, black, oilcloth-covered account book to my page, and there, up and down, at right angles to the pages’ blue lines, he had kept track of my newspapers in pencil, in columns of ones and ones, twos and threes. My diaphragm contracted and froze. Or Faustina, the old black lottery-ticket seller, and her limp school notebook with a penciled-off half-inch column waveringly drawn for each customer. Or my glimpse of a barkeeper’s apparently homemade, home-stitched pad, as he consulted long thin numbers referring to heaven knows what (how many drinks each of his customers had had?), and then put the pad away again, under the bar.
The real name of this sensation is memory. It is a memory I do not even have to try to remember, or reconstruct; it is always right there, clear and complete. The mysterious numbers, the columns, that impressed me so much — a mystery I never solved when I went to Primer Class in Nova Scotia!