Madeleine pokes Colleen, but Colleen just shrugs. Madeleine knows that deer was murdered. But Colleen would never say that. She rarely gives her opinion — even though it is clear to Madeleine that she always has one. Not just an opinion, but the right answer. Trouble is, she refuses to say it. “If you don’t know, what’s the use of me telling you?”
“That’s a stupid answer,” Madeleine recently got up the nerve to say.
To which Colleen raised her eyebrows and smiled slightly with a corner of her mouth.
Colleen can fire a neat and tidy round of spit off the tip of her tongue. She does this after she has given an opinion, silent or otherwise. She does so now, and says, “My brother shot a deer once.”
For a moment Madeleine wonders who Colleen means, because the images of Ricky Froelich and shooting a deer don’t go together.
“Ricky?”
“How many brothers do I got?”
Madeleine knows that Roger and Carl don’t count. They’re babies.
She swallows. “How come?” Colleen doesn’t answer. Madeleine asks, “For food?”
Colleen has risen and is walking off. Madeleine follows. They slip into the chill of deeper shadows, up the gentle incline through grass that has begun to feel sinewy underfoot with the coming of frost.
She follows Colleen to where the monkey bars and merry-go-round glint glamorous and strange in the night. Through the gloom, the bare patch in the oak tree glows white, and she reaches out to stroke the wound as she passes—Get well soon.
The darkness makes the swings look bigger — giant metal A’s at either end supporting gallows in between. The teeter-totters tilt astride their hitching post like bucking broncos, the slide gleams sly and skinny, everything says, “I dare you.” Madeleine experiences a thrill at the lateness of the hour, only now realizing that she has stayed out long past when she is allowed. Her parents must have left by now for the Woodleys’. She lost track of time, what with the sunset and the electric light in the tree, the music, the men, the boys. And the deer.
“He had to shoot it,” says Colleen, walking up the teeter-totter till she is balanced at the centre.
Madeleine follows. “Why?”
“It was suffering.”
They stand back to back at the fulcrum of the teeter-totter and walk slowly toward opposite ends, as though about to fight a duel, trying to keep the board perfectly stable. Then they turn carefully and face one another. The object is to jump off with no warning, causing your opponent, should she not be quick enough, to come crashing down. They take turns. The darkness shines around them. The only light is from the houses and street lamps beyond — and from a wedge of moon that looks more remote than ever in the black sky. Certain questions may now be asked that would be impermissible during the day. Madeleine hears her own voice in the cold clarity of night — like the sound of a rifle being broken open. “Are you guys Indian?”
Colleen appears not to have heard the question. She stands at her end.
Madeleine swallows and says, “I don’t care if you are, ’cause anyhow I like Indians.” She cannot read Colleen’s expression. Her skin is darker, blue eyes paler in the night.
Colleen says, “We’re Métis.”
Madeleine waits for more but Colleen is silent, watching her. Playing the game.
“What’s that?”
“You know what a half-breed is?”
Madeleine nods.
Colleen says, “Don’t ever use that word.”
Madeleine waits.
“Ever hear of Louis Riel?”
Madeleine shakes her head.
“He was a rebel. He fought the settlers.”
“What happened to him?”
“He got hanged.”
Madeleine is poised with the keen anticipation of a hunter, or a deer, about to jump—
“Dieu merci!”
She turns at the sound of her mother just as Colleen jumps, sending her slamming to the ground, but she doesn’t yelp. She is instantly caught up in a tight embrace. She feels her mother’s chest, soft and cushiony, heart pounding beneath silk, she smells hairspray and perfume. The next instant, she is swung out at arm’s length, spun round, whacked on her bottom and yanked by the hand toward home. Her mother crying and promising Madeleine “a good beating from ton père”—an empty threat, as Madeleine well knows, but one that gauges the degree of her mother’s upset—“sick with worry!” Her ivory high heels sink into the earth with every step, spearing little clumps of mud and grass.
They reach the sidewalk and she turns to look back but Colleen is gone.
Five days later the weather has changed. Flurries in the morning. Thick flakes have swirled outside the windows of J. A. D. McCurdy all day, and in the afternoon a dark cloud moved in and the wind picked up. The snow blows like sand across the schoolyard and gathers in miniature dunes against the slide, the pitcher’s mound, the bicycle racks and car tires. The class makes snowflakes in art. Take a piece of white construction paper; fold it neatly in two; draw one half of a snowflake; cut it out, then carefully poke the sharp end of the scissors through to make numerous tiny holes; unfold the paper. Miraculous.
The first snow is always a surprise. It comes overnight, and in the morning parents wake their children, “Come look out the window!” It covers everything — trees, houses, backyards and bikes. It brings everything and everyone together, even sounds — a fresh white muted world where the roll of tires is intimate, every whisper and bird call part of the same story. Houses and cars peer out from beneath white coverlets that pleat at eaves and headlights, and trickle into icicles. Across the lawns, now just one great lawn, curves and contours take shape, mysterious sudden swellings.
After breakfast, kids put on snowsuits and toques; padded oblong figures with penguin arms tread out into the winter sunshine, eagerly yet regretfully making the first marks. The birds have been there before them with their three-pronged prints, but otherwise the snow is pristine. Soon it will be pitted and dirty, rolled into snowmen, piled into snow forts, swished into angels, the grass exposed in patches and green slashes. There is the particular scent of soil filtered through the damp wool of scarves beaded with breathcicles, the taste of snow on woollen mittens.
By afternoon, steam rises from shining black driveways, the last white slabs slide heavily from a mailbox, a porch railing. Overheated children unzip as they swaddle home, galoshes unbuckled, hats in hand.
“This will confuse the birds,” says a lady at the PX, where Jack is buying charcoal. The McCarthys are having a barbecue tonight. “The last one of the season,” says Jack.
It is a mild evening. And although Madeleine is embarrassed to be the only family barbecuing in the shrinking snow, the chicken does smell irresistible turning on the rotisserie just outside the back door. The way her parents behave whenever they do some crazy thing like this compounds her mortification and completes her happiness. Her mother laughing unaccountably, her father winking back; Maman slipping her arms around his waist from behind, the way she does whenever he cooks or does something that is usually women’s work. He boasts that all the great chefs of the world are men, and she bites his earlobe. Madeleine and Mike exchange looks, rolling their eyes.
HOUSECALLS
One day Willie writes a note to the milkman, and is alarmed to read what she has written: the single word ‘Help.’
JACK HAS BEGUN to feel rather like a chauffeur. “Errand boy” is too negative a term, especially considering that he is Oskar Fried’s only contact. But it would help if the man were more forthcoming. Jack has put miles on the Rambler. Even in the city. Fried will not walk anywhere and he will not take a cab. He has done his best to badger Jack into allowing him to take the wheel, but Jack is not about to let Fried drive without a licence — what if they were stopped by the police?