Free Reading by Lightning by Joan Thomas Page B

two cups, and then we sit in the shade of the wagon. Without discussing it, we sit where Aunt Eva can’t see us from up on the ridge. The horseflies find us, and my mother reaches up and locates the pins in her hair in four unerringstabs of her fingers. Her bun collapses and slides down her shoulder, and she clutches the hair in a tail and swishes it from side to side, her face crumpled in helpless laughter.
    I glance down and there’s a yellow jacket floundering in my cup. I dash the lemonade on the grass.
    Lily! my mother cries. I thought you were thirsty! You’ll end up like Bertha Parrot. Her mind always goes to Mrs. Parrot when she thinks of waste. Those people, she says, pressing her tin cup to her forehead to feel the cold. They had
toilet paper!
Did you go to the outhouse during their sale? They were going broke and they were buying toilet paper! And they were getting the
Family Herald
mailed out. It was in their outhouse. (The corners of her mouth go down — a confidence is coming.) I had to go to the toilet during the sale and I started reading a story in the
Family Herald
and I couldn’t stop. I read the whole thing! I was holding the door open a little ways with my foot so I could read. And then when I was almost done, somebody came down the path! I was so busy reading that I didn’t notice until he was right there. (Her voice drops to a whisper.) It was
Felix Macdonald.
    What did you
do?
I ask.
    Well, I knew he had seen me! So I couldn’t go out. I just shut the door tight and turned the latch. I sat there until he left. He kept thumping on the door. Finally (she mouths the words at me),
he peed in the bushes.
    Any mention of Felix Macdonald, the farmer she used to work for, signals an intimate interlude, knowing looks. Unwelcome pictures, my mother sitting in the dark on the toilet hole with her underpants down, listening to the startstop hiss of an old farmer peeing. I pull my skirt down over my legs to discourage the horseflies. I tuck it tightly under me. Above me a bird sings the same two notes over and over. Finally I ask.
    What happened to Dad? The day he fell in the pigpen.
    There’s a little silence while she takes a last swallow of her lemonade. Nothing happened, she says then. She rips off a handful of grass and uses it to wipe out her cup. Can’t your father slip and fall?

    Joe Pye goes away for months at a time, and then he comes back. Phillip and I come home from school and he’s sitting at the kitchen table nursing a cup of tea and there’s a little celebration, not in the way of food or drink, but in the way of talk. Not about where he’s been lately. He’s been at another farm that had the cash to pay him for a while, there’s nothing to tell.
    If his arthritis is giving him a rest, he’ll fall into talking about his great adventure. Find a way to ask about how they got to the colony — that’s how you can always get him started. He’ll always tell it, that amazing part, how they pulled in to Saskatoon one cold April afternoon, two hundred miles from their claims, and were told to get off, they were at the end of the line! They’d woken up excited, expecting to roll in to the settlement by nightfall, eager to see the hospital (St. Luke’s — it even had a name) and the British Canadian Settlement Store that some of them had invested fifty pounds in, and the school and lending library. Instead the train ground to a halt at Saskatoon and they were dumped off on a muddy field. This is where Joe Pye dissolves into chuckles. If he’s outside smoking at the time he’ll be in danger of swallowing his cigarette.
    Phillip, teetering on a chair tipped against the wall, interrupts. That’s not what Dad says, he says. Dad knew from the beginning that the line stopped at Saskatoon.
    Dad wasn’t even there, I say. He got off at Winnipeg. I keep my eyes on Joe Pye. His cigarette is down to a flattened shred