Read Online The Sudden Weight of Snow by Laisha Rosnau - Free Book Online Page B

Sawmill Creek. Sometimes, I would answer the phone and Jim would start talking before Vera knew who was speaking to me. There must have been something about the way I spoke into the phone, or my expression, because Vera could tell almost immediately who it was. She would take the phone from me and I would hear her say, “Jim, no. No,” apparently giving the same answer to several different questions. Eventually, it seemed to me, my father just gave up. As if to resign himself completely to the fact that we weren’t moving back, he himself moved to the other end of the country, to a village in Newfoundland called Heart’s Desire. “Well, I certainly hope he finds it there,” Vera had said. I knew that the child-support cheques camesporadically once he was in the Maritimes. Eventually, the phone calls eased off. I hadn’t seen him in years.
    Vera brought a jar of peaches to the table, breaking the seal with a large spoon, and we handed it back and forth, eating straight from the jar.
    “How’d you guys meet anyways?” I asked.
    “Us who guys?”
    “Mom, you know. You and Jim.”
    She looked at me for a minute, swallowed her fruit, and answered, “In a bar,” and slid the fruit over to me. I fished for one of the peaches with my spoon. I had always imagined Vera barefoot and full-skirted, picking flowers in a field along the road. Jim Harper would have roared by on his motorbike, carved a sharp U-turn into the gravel road when he saw her, and turned around. He would’ve stopped his bike along the field and lit a cigarette by striking a match on his boot. I could see it all. It was hot when they met there, on the side of the road, a ditch between them. Prairie hot – flat and unrelenting. A buzz of insects in the ditch, whir of grasshoppers clinging to the underside of wheat, the dust pitched up by Jim Harper’s turn settling on skin already covered with sweat.
    I struggled to balance the piece of fruit as I brought it up out of the jar but it slipped off as I tried to jimmy the spoon through the mouth. “Damn,” I said, then, “Sorry,” before asking, “Really? What kind of bar?”
    “Just a bar in Fly Hills. There isn’t much to describe really. It was the Legion – a low-ceilinged room in the basement of a hall, tables lined up down the centre, nothing but one commemorative tray of the Queen’s coronation on the walls. Theydidn’t even play music in the bars back then. For that, you had to go to a house party.”
    “But, how could you fall in love in a place like that?” I asked around the slice of peach that I had finally got into my mouth.
    Vera looked at me, then said, “Sweetie, I didn’t say we fell in love there, I said that’s where we met.” She paused. “Your father was wearing a navy blue turtleneck. I thought he looked dashing. That’s it. We didn’t fall in love.” That was all she said, all I asked.

    I know even less of Jim Harper’s past than I do of Vera’s. He was the youngest son of the mayor in Fly Hills, Alberta, the closest town to the farm where Vera grew up. He went to a private academy in Edmonton, one that crawled with ivy and served tea to children, and returned home on weekends to the Harpers’ brick house, the yard trimmed with roses. Not wild roses, Alberta’s provincial flower, but cultured roses. I imagine Jim rebelling against refinement, cutting roses from the bushes with a pen knife, dragging the thorn along the white, fine skin of the underside of his arm, blood appearing like tiny berries. I believed that I used to run my small fingers against the white ridges on his arm. When I told Vera this, years later, she laughed, said my father had no scars.
    Sometimes, I picture Jim Harper chain-smoking behind the brick private school. I see him sneaking out at night with other boys, drowning cats in the Saskatchewan River just because they can. I watch Jim Harper masturbating overcreased movie pin-up centrefolds, hidden when he’s done in no cleverer place