A Jest of God Read online

  Once in spring I was walking in the fields on the hillside just beyond the cemetery. There was snow, still, in the small hollows where the sun had not reached, snow latticed with the earth specks that never show until the drifts begin to melt. At the edge of the cold black-veined whiteness, in among the stalks of last year’s grass now brittle and brown like the ancient bones of birds, the crocuses were growing, the flowers’ faint mauve protected by the green-grey hairs of the outer petals. I crouched to pick some, scraping away the dead grasses and the soiled snow. Then I looked up and saw, at the foot of the hill, in a poplar bluff, only a few yards away, the boy and girl. They’d be sixteen, perhaps. I knew them both, although their names were gone. They’d been children of mine, once. The girl had opened her coat and put it around him, and they were private and close together in their shelter. I was the intruder. They didn’t move apart or look away. They regarded me with unstartled eyes. And then I wondered how I must look to them, squatting here as though I’d had kidney trouble and had to go on this open hillside. Or else as though I were looking at them on purpose, a peeping Thomasina. In a torment of embarrassment, I called out, “I just came here to look for crocuses.” It was the boy who replied, “Yeh,” he said. “Us, too.” Then they could not hold back their laughter any longer, and while they laughed I could see despite the tent of her coat that he had spread his legs and was holding her between them. I got away, somehow, marvelling at the webbed ironies. They hadn’t intended cruelty. They likely would only have said, afterwards, “Did you see the look on her face? Aw, never mind – she’s just jealous,” never actually suspecting it might be so, interpreting it really as my disapproval. And I recall myself walking back up the hill road into Manawaka that day, wondering if people would see something in my face or if they would merely say, “There’s Miss Cameron – she’s always going on walks by herself.” I could see myself like that, on every side road and dirt track for miles around, over the years. I wandered lonely as a cloud – like some anachronistic survival of Romantic pantheism, collecting wildflowers, probably, to press between the pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I wish I could forget that day, and those kids, but I can’t. Such moments are the ones that live forever.

  I don’t know what to do with myself. In winter I always say how much I need the sun, yet here it is July, and I’m free, and the sun in high and is blazoning warmth everywhere, and I haven’t set foot outside the house all day.

  “Where are you going, Rachel?”

  Mother is sitting at the living-room window, her favourite post of vigilance these days. She watches Japonica Street like a captain on the bridge of a ship, watching the ocean and hoping for some diversion. She almost yearns for funerals. They create a miniature parade on the street, and she can overhear the voices from the Funeral Chapel below. Well, she’s got little enough to entertain her. I ought to take her for a walk. I took her out yesterday and she was so slow. It’s not her fault. I must not be impatient. It’s not fair; it’s not right. I must be more patient. Also, more cheerful. I’m not cheerful enough with her.

  “I thought I’d just walk downtown and get some ice cream for supper. Would you like to come along?”

  “I don’t think so, dear. I’m played out today. I don’t know what it can be. That long walk yesterday, maybe. I think it’s exhausted me.”

  “Oh – I shouldn’t have taken you so far.”

  “Well, never mind, dear. You were enjoying it – I didn’t want to suggest turning back.”

  Oh God. Again. I can feel myself beginning to grow dizzy, as though a leather thong had lassoed my temples.

  “I’m sorry. I should have noticed. You rest now, then. Is there anything you want, before I go?”

  “Oh no. I’m perfectly all right, dear. I’ve got my magazine. And I’ll make myself a cup of tea, later on.”

  “I’ll be back by then.”

  River Street, and there is Willard. He isn’t strolling, like everyone else, in the lethargic afternoon. His short form hurtles along the sidewalk. No concessions must be made to the sun – that would be the rot setting in, he thinks. Will he stop or will he catapult past, without seeing me?

  He stops and smirks, and for a second I can glimpse his bustling as only sadly absurd. But what about the day he strapped James, and my own stumbling into that betrayal? I have to be wary.

  “How are you, Rachel? You’re looking well. Holidays agree with you, eh?”

  What does he mean by that? I mustn’t be so suspicious.

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  “I hear you met our mutual friend, after all.”

  “What?”

  “Prairie drums,” he says. “News carries, doesn’t it? That’s what they used to call smoke signals, if my memory of history serves me correctly – prairie drums. No, actually, Angela happened to see you in his car last week.”

  “Oh.”

  So it was Nick who was at Willard’s the evening I refused to go. I might have met him a month earlier. But it wouldn’t have been any good. I’m always off-balance at Willard’s house, with Angela pouring perfumed graciousness all round.

  Angela, naturally, would just happen to see. She is the reverse of those three wise monkeys that used to be a paperweight on my father’s desk. Angela hears all, sees all, and tells the whole works. I must not think this way. I’ve always hated that about Manawaka, but I’ve grown the same, bounded by trivialities.

  “He’s a bit of a joker, I thought,” Willard is saying. “Mind you, I’m not suggesting he isn’t a perfectly nice fellow. But he strikes me as not being very serious. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I don’t know him all that well.”

  “Never mind, maybe that’ll be remedied, eh?”

  As I walk on, I don’t seem to be seeing the street. I can smell the dust that is blown along the sidewalk by the incessant summer wind. I can hear the store awnings fluttering and flapping like the exhausted wings of pelicans. And I can feel, still, the innuendo in Willard’s voice.

  Home. As I’m walking up the steps, the phone rings. Mother answers it.

  “Who? No, I’m sorry. She’s out.”

  “I’m here!”

  “Oh. Wait a moment. She’s just come in.”

  The receiver is in my hands. Hello.

  “Hello – Rachel? Hi. I was wondering if you’re going to be busy tonight?”

  “No. No, I’m not.”

  “Can I see you, then?”

  “Yes. Yes, I guess so. Yes, that would be nice.”

  Afterwards, I have to go into my bedroom and close the door. A perfectly ordinary occurrence. I’m not worked up in the slightest. I’m quite glad he phoned, that’s all. It’s not of any real importance.

  It’s not only my hands that are shaking. My nerves pull me like a papier mâché doll jerked by a drunken puppet-master. How the boy and girl in the valley would laugh. I won’t do this. I won’t. There’s no sense in it, no reason.

  I can be poised, good company, gay. Men don’t like women to be too serious. Is that true, and who told it to me first? My sister, likely. She used to go to every Saturday evening dance from the time she was sixteen. It never bothered her. Or if it did, she never said. She used to tell me what they had said to her, how they had said please please please. I used to wonder if it were all true or if she had embroidered. I guess I never really doubted it was true for her. I wonder how she managed to draw that response from them, invariably instead of occasionally.

  Could a person be Calla’s way, without knowing it, only it might be obvious to a man, say, or at least sensed, and then he wouldn’t – no that’s impossible. It’s mad. I must not.

  What will I wear?

  “The movie doesn’t seem very promising,” Nick says, half apologetically. “Would you just as soon go for a drive?”

  He’s wearing a dark-green sports shirt and grey flannels, no tie or jacket. The evening is saturated with heat, and still almost as light as noon. He drives along the highway, out of town, and then
on to a side road that dawdles through bluffs of poplar with their always-whispering leaves that are touched into sound by even the slightest wind, and choke-cherry bushes with the clusters of berries still hard and green, and matted screens of wild rose bushes with nearly all their petals fallen, only the yellow dying centre remaining.

  “This road leads to the Wachakwa.”

  “Yeh, I know,” Nick says. “I haven’t been down around the river in years. I thought I’d like to have a look at it again. My brother and I used to come here a lot when we were kids.”

  “I’d forgotten you had a brother. Didn’t he –?”

  “Yes.” Nick’s interrupting voice.

  He doesn’t want me to talk about it. I should have realized and said nothing. He thinks I’m tactless. Stefan Kazlik died, but I don’t remember how. That was years ago. They couldn’t have been more than eighteen. They –

  “Oh. I remember now. You were twins.”

  “That’s right,” he says grudgingly. “But not identical.”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I used to be glad we weren’t the same, that’s all. How would you like there to be someone exactly the same as yourself?”

  I’ve never thought about it. Would it make a person feel more real or less so? Would there be some constant communication, with no doubt about knowing each other’s meanings, as though your selves were invisibly joined?

  “I don’t know whether I’d like it or not. You’d never feel alone, at any rate.”

  “That’s what I wouldn’t care for,” Nick says. “Even with Steve and myself, people used to group us together, although we were quite different. He never seemed to mind. He just laughed it off. But I hated it.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I just did. I wanted to be completely on my own. And then it happened that way.”

  What is he thinking? His voice is hard, cold, flat, nothing in it to give himself away. Did be reproach himself, when it happened, for having once wanted to be the only one? Was he surprised at how bereft he found himself? Or was he relieved, inadmissibly, and has never since been able to forget that relief or forgive himself for it? I can’t tell. I can’t tell at all what he’s thinking. I never can, not with anyone. Always this futile guessing game.

  He stops the car.

  “Here’s the place. Let’s go down by the river for a minute, eh?”

  The barbed-wire fence is slack, and Nick holds the two top strands wide apart, with foot and hand, while I slide through, trying not to snag the blue folds of my dress on the metal thorns. I never wear high-heeled shoes because of my height, and this is fortunate. The pasture is hillocked, filled with stumbling-places, gopher holes, stones. The rough sparse grass is not high except in tufts here and there. Beside the river, though, it is different. The grass is thick and much greener. The willows grow beside the Wachakwa, and their languid branches bend and almost touch the amber water swifting over the pebbles.

  Am I naïve to have come here so readily? Or am I naïve to imagine he might be thinking of anything except a half acknowledged pilgrimage to a remembered place?

  He is so apart. He walks purposefully, but as though he were alone. Probably he is. Why ask me to come here, then? Because it would look stupid to walk here by himself? But he wouldn’t think that. He’s not that sort of person. I don’t know what sort of person he is. He doesn’t reveal much. He only appears to talk openly. Underneath, everything is guarded. What do I expect? Why do I want to go so quickly, to get to know what he really feels? I don’t speak openly to him. But I could. I might. My God, you’ve only seen the man twice, Rachel. Show some sense.

  Yet I’ve touched him, touched his face and his mouth. That is all I know of him, his face, the bones of his shoulders. That’s not knowing very much.

  He stands beside the river. I don’t know what to say, what remark to make. I’m sure I don’t know why I came here. He didn’t want me to come. Anyone else would have done as well, just for the company. Is it like that? I feel I must be taller than he, and this is excruciating, until I force myself to look at him and see it isn’t so. As I knew it wasn’t, really.

  Nothing is clear now. Something must be the matter with my way of viewing things. I have no middle view. Either I fix on a detail and see it as though it were magnified – a leaf with all its veins perceived, the fine hairs on the back of a man’s hands – or else the world recedes and becomes blurred, artificial, indefinite, an abstract painting of a world. The darkening sky is hugely blue, gashed with rose, blood, flame pouring from the volcano or wound or flower of the lowering sun. The wavering green, the sea of grass, piercingly bright. Black tree trunks, contorted, arching over the river.

  Only Nick’s face is clear. Prominent cheekbones, slightly slanted eyes, his black straight hair. Before, it seemed a known face because I knew the feeling of it, the male smell of his skin, the faint roughness along his jaw. Now it seems a hidden Caucasian face, one of the hawkish and long-ago riders of the Steppes.

  I’m dramatizing. To make all this seem mysterious or significant, instead of what it is, which is embarrassing, myself standing gawkily here with no words, no charms of either kind, neither any depth nor any lightness.

  He sits down on the grass, and because I don’t know what else to do, I sit down beside him, arranging my cotton dress with a primness I despise and yet can’t avoid. Then I see he hasn’t noticed anything. His mind is on something else. He laughs, a dismissing laugh, shrugging.

  “Pointless to come here,” he says. “I don’t know why I wanted to see it, this particular place. There’s nothing for me here now. I knew it, of course, but that never stops anyone. These treks back – they make me sick, to tell you the truth. I always swore I’d never do it.”

  “Why not? What’s the harm? Isn’t it natural to want to see some place you’ve been fond of?”

  “I don’t have a clue what’s natural and what’s unnatural,” he says cheerfully. “I wasn’t fond of it. It was neutral territory, that’s all, and if any of the other kids ever came around, Steve and I used to scare them off. We had slingshots, and we were both pretty good, Steve especially. We never had a twenty-two. That used to burn me up. The old man wouldn’t let us have one. He always had this belief that all weapons were illegal, really, and he visualized one of us being toted off to jail for life for the possession of arms. Know what I mean? He knew this wasn’t so, but he could never believe it. I don’t know what he thought we’d do with a twenty-two – start a revolution, maybe.”

  “What did you mean – a neutral place?”

  “Oh, just that it wasn’t the town,” Nick says offhandedly, “and it wasn’t the farm, and it wasn’t used for anything, in those days, not even for pasture. Apart from the few kids who made the mistake of encroaching, I never saw anybody here except sometimes hoboes, and we didn’t mind them. They didn’t have much place anywhere, either.”

  All this sounds so strange to me that I can hardly believe it. But when I turn to him, and look, he looks away.

  “Rachel,” he says, as though trying out my name to see how it will sound. “Rachel Cameron. You must think I’m nuts. We’ll change the subject. I got off on this track the last time I saw you, too. I certainly didn’t mean to. Hardly a soul I used to know is left here now – you know? They’ve moved, and different people have come, and – anyway, that’s no excuse for shooting off my mouth to you. At one time I would’ve dropped dead rather than talk like this. At least I’ve changed some, thank Christ. Mellowed, as I like to think, although this may be some vast conceit.”

  Neutral territory – that was what he needed then. Some place that was neither one side nor the other.

  “Nick – I never knew you’d felt like that, in those days. I always thought –”

  “Go on. What did you think? This interests me.”

  “I envied you, I guess. I don’t mean you, especially. People like you.”

  “People like me?” He is gri
nning now, and I sense that he means to hurt. “There isn’t anybody like me, darling. What you’re trying to say is you envied Ukrainians. What I would like to know is why.”

  “Because – I don’t know – in comparison with the kids at my –”

  “At your end of town. It’s okay. You can say it. It’s not blasphemy.”

  “Yes. All right. Well, you – I mean, they – always seemed more resistant, I guess, and more free.”

  He laughs, and for the first time touches me, putting a hand on my shoulder and sliding it lightly down my arm.

  “More free? That’s a funny thing to say. How did you think we spent our time? Laying girls and doing gay Slavic dances?”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “How, then?”

  “I don’t know how to express it. Not so boxed-in, maybe. More outspoken. More able to speak out. More allowed to – both by your family and by yourself. Something like that. Perhaps I only imagined it. You always think things are easier somewhere else. I used to get rides in winter on your dad’s sleigh, and I remember the great bellowing voice he had, and how emotional he used to get – cursing at the horses, or else almost crooning to them. In my family, you didn’t get emotional. It was frowned upon.”

  Nick lies back in the grass. But his hand still rests on my arm.

  “That’s the most talking you’ve done so far, Rachel. Did you know that?”

  “No, I didn’t –”

  “I’m a tactless bugger, to mention it. I’m sorry. Well, I see what you mean, and in a way you’re right, I suppose, although at one time I wouldn’t have seen it. Argument never seemed much of an advantage to me then. My uncle lived at Galloping Mountain, and whenever he came down here, which luckily wasn’t more than two or three times a year, he and my dad would nearly kill each other. My uncle – my mom’s brother – was never actually a Communist, but he was pretty far left, you know, and the chief tenet of his belief was that it was a good thing for the Ukraine to be part of the U.S.S.R. My dad held the opposite view. He still believes the Ukraine should be a separate country. Incredible, eh? But that is his opinion, and he’ll never change it, not ever. The two of them didn’t just argue – they engaged in vehement verbal battle, storming away at each other like a couple of mastodons. Steve never minded – he was a lot more easygoing than I was. But it used to irk me like anything, because it was so pointless. Once I remember telling my dad I couldn’t care less what the Ukraine did – it didn’t mean a damn thing to me. That was true. But I shouldn’t have said it. Actually I wish now that I hadn’t.”