Read Online A Hard Witching by Jacqueline Baker - Free Book Online Page B

bodies on the rocks, Lavinia could not look at them without a queasy, dizzy, skin-crawling feeling, as if she could sense their movements coming up through the earth to her feet. And so she’d tried to pretend she was somewhere else, staring instead at the sunlight beating off a tin sign she could not read in the distance, until her mother finally sighed, “We should get a move on, I guess,” and her father said, “Road’s not getting any shorter,” and they’d piled into the car, Lavinia in the back, wedged in on one side by suitcases and a plastic cooler, panting and sick, forehead up against the hot window, unable, for some reason, to roll it down, to touch anything with her hands.
    Just thinking of those snakes made her feel ill again, so she thought instead about earthquakes, about how the ground could split open in a second, swallowing everything. Not here, though. That kind of thing didn’t happen here. No natural disasters,nothing quick and awful and spectacular. Just drought. Just slow death.
    For two weeks now, she’d been feeling weak, tired—no, exhausted. “Strong as a horse,” Jack used to boast when they were first married, “and twice as hungry.” It was a stupid thing to say, but she’d liked it, heaping another helping onto her plate as if to say,
He’s right, you see? I never fill up, I never do.
As if it united them somehow.
    Now she could eat almost nothing; at times, she thought she could even feel something there in the pit of her stomach, something hard and foreign. Lump, she thought, and clenched her hands into cold fists against her belly. But there was no real pain. Not yet, anyway. Just a terrible sense of something gone wrong.
    When Lavinia met Jack, she’d already lived in Medicine Hat a few years, city girl, sworn off ever returning to the dust hole where her parents still farmed. “A desert,” she told the girls at the all-night pancake house where she worked, “right down to the damn dunes.” And she’d describe the hills where her father grazed his cattle, the parched scrub, the hot smell of stinkweed and sage, the sandfly bites that would swell instantly to the size of quarters. She’d tell all the jokes she knew—
Hear about the hooker who entertained a farmer from Saskatchewan? How did she know he was from Saskatchewan? First it was too dry, then it was too wet, then he asked if he could pay her in fall.
She’d shake her head and say, “Wild horses.”
    Then Jack turned up. He came in one night with some friends, drunk, all of them, and rude. She’d cried afterwards, when she was alone in the staff bathroom. She wasn’t sure why; she’d had worse customers. When he came back the nextmorning to apologize, she agreed—maybe because of the way he stood awkwardly at the till, waiting for her to finish her table, his plaid shirt so new she could still see the creases from the package; maybe because he used her name without checking the tag on her shoulder; or maybe just because, after all, he seemed awfully sincere—to go on a date with him.
    She wasn’t surprised to discover he was from the Sand Hills, too. Lots of people around town were, younger people, unwilling or unable to continue battling the land for a living. The struggle wasn’t worth it. Farming wasn’t about pride anymore, or love, and certainly not about money. Besides, there was plenty of work to be had in the oil patch. Big money. And you could travel.
Will the last person to leave Saskatchewan please turn out the lights?
That was the running joke. Lavinia never said it, though; that one she didn’t find particularly funny.
    Neither did Jack. “Ingrates,” he said that first night as they sat over beers in the Westlander. “And smartasses. Not a clue what it took to get those farms started. What their grandparents went through. Great-grandparents. Stuck it out through the thirties and God knows what all kinds of hell.” He shook his head. “Now? Too goddamn lazy. Spoiled. Got the world