Just Beneath My Skin (11 page)

IT WAS IN MY SISTER
that the Indian came out full-blood in my family. She came out with a full head of raven black hair, my mother said, and dark eyes, and dark skin, with purple dimples at the tops of her thighs which my grandfather told me later was a sign of an Indian child.

My mother called Ruth “My Little Injun,” though my father told her not to.

When I was seventeen and my father and I weren't getting along, I got up enough nerve to ask him about the Indian blood in our family.

“What Indian blood?” he said.

“Nana,” I said. “And you. And Ruth.”

“I don't know where you heard that,” my father said, “but it's not true.”

“Granddad says it is.”

“Your grandfather says a lot of things I don't set much store by,” my father said.

“What would be wrong with it, if it was true?” I said.

“Nothing,” said my father. “But it isn't, so there's no need to bring it up.”

I couldn't figure out what bothered my father so about it. It wasn't that all Indians were heathens, because he preached to them and there were as many Christians on the reserve as in Middlebridge. And it wasn't because he was racist, because he always said the colour of a man's skin was created by God and therefore should be accepted. But it made my father small in my eyes. This one thing about him.

I was seventeen. Anything that made him small was welcome.

I WAS BORN ON A
Saturday, my mother said, and my father was in his study, preparing his sermon for the Sunday morning service. The moon was full. It was a low-hanging moon, and I can imagine it there, a great orange-yellow wheel in the dark November sky above the river, with those lines carved deep into its ancient face that are supposed to be mountains and valleys and craters. My father sits at his desk, in an old grey sweater my mother knit him and a pair of faded jeans, writing out his sermon in longhand on a piece of foolscap, his face halfcast in shadow under the light of the green-shaded banker's lamp on the desk. Once my mother gathered up all my father's sermons and had them typed and printed up in a single, leatherbound book by a professional printer and gave it to him for a Christmas present. He kept the book in the glass breakfront in his study, and sometimes I went in and flipped through it 'til I found the one he was working on the day I was born, though he never got to deliver it because he was in the hospital with my mother.

“Jesus stood on Mount Olivet overlooking Jerusalem,” my father wrote. He also wrote that Jesus said that just as a thief steals into a house during the night, so the owner of the house should like to know the thief is coming so that he can be prepared.

“And so it shall be with you when returns the Son of Man.”

That never made any sense to me, that bit where Jesus says he will return like a thief in the night.

“Jake came like a thief in the night,” my mother said to my father once about that sermon, the one he never gave.

“And Mount Olivet?” asked my father.

“Life,” answered my mother. “Mount Olivet is life.”

I must admit, I didn't understand this either.

THERE WAS A GREAT FIRE
in Middlebridge, the one that burnt the first Baptist parsonage to the ground in
1947
. That was the last year my granddad worked on the logging crews upriver, before he purchased the farm in Middlebridge and after he came home from the war. They lived in a rental house then, not far from the Wildcat Reserve where my grandmother was born and didn't admit to coming from. The fire started on the reserve, when a woman had a fight with her husband and went out and set the back woods afire in her rage. All the men on the reserve tried to put it out before it spread, but it had been a hot, dry summer and no matter what they did the fire kept burning, until most of them gave up, took their families and ran for the river, leaving their houses and horses and cattle and dogs to fend for themselves.

My grandfather was away at the logging camp, and they weren't due to run the logs down to North River for another week. My grandmother was alone with my five-year-old father. She was hanging the wash on the line when Bernadette Christmas, her closest neighbour who lived in the first house on the reserve-side, came running into the yard, her face soot-covered and sweating from working to put out the fire.

“You better git,” she told my grandmother. “It's coming this way, and ain't nothing you or I or anyone can do to stop it.”

My grandmother smelled the fire, of course, and saw the smoke billowing into the sky above the trees. But she thought the Indians had lit a bonfire, or someone was burning off the grasses in the fields. She thanked Bernadette and ran inside the house to get my father. By the time she came back out, Bernadette was gone. She could see the sky above the trees to the north was turning a deep crimson from the flames and the heat. Animals — deer and rabbit and skunks and fox and raccoons — were pouring out of the woods and running across her lawn. She saw a bear lumbering down the Reserve Road, away from the fire.

She hiked my father in her arms and started running down the Reserve Road. But it wasn't doing her any good. Already she could feel the heat from the fire and hear the unholy roar of it as it ate its way through the woods. She thought if she could get to the river she'd be safe, but the river was miles away, and she had a five-year-old to carry.

She turned back, towards the house.

“No, Mommy,” cried my father. “Fire's coming!”

But my grandmother knew what she was doing. She took him and ran across the yard to the well. Already the first tendrils of flame were snaking out of the woods and slithering across the lawn, and the smoke was pouring thick and fast into the air and stinging her eyes. She set my father down on the grass and pushed the wooden cover off the top of the well. Then she picked up my father.

“Mommy,” screamed my father. “Don't forget Bobby!”

My grandmother turned, and there was Bobby, my grand father's blue tick hound, tied to a stump at the corner of the house. He was barking and choking himself from pulling at the end of the rope. She sat my father down and ran over and untied Bobby but he didn't go anywhere. He just kept barking.

“Mommy!” my father cried. “He's not running away!”

“Bobby'll be all right,” said my grandmother.

She came back and looked down in the well. Perhaps if she'd been alone she could have tried to pick her way down the damp, slippery, moss-covered stones embedded into the sides of the shaft. Or she could have lowered the bucket from the hoist to the bottom and climbed down the rope. But she couldn't do either with my father in her arms. Suddenly a section of fire broke free of the woods. My grandmother felt a wall of heat behind her, and suddenly the oxygen was sucked from the air and she couldn't breathe. She could feel the back of her neck start to blister in the heat.

She did the only thing she could do.

She jumped, holding my father tightly in both arms. They dropped straight into the well, into the water at the bottom.

I WAKE UP WITH THE
sun pouring in through the little window over my bed and the sound of the river in my ears. It's too early to get up — the house is quiet and I can tell Jake and his dad still aren't awake. And so I lie in the bed and look around at the room and try to stay real still and quiet. It's a nice room, with white wallpaper with little faded pink roses all over it. There is a desk, and an old lamp and a chest of drawers and a rocking chair and some old pictures of people I don't know on the wall. I wonder if one of them is Jake's mom.

There is a sound underneath the river, and the quiet of the house. A hum, the way the electric lines hum on certain days in the summer if you're out real early in the morning.

Irene Lang told me once Jesus is underneath everything, watching us.

I wonder if that hum is Jesus.

Or is Jesus the light, pouring in through the window beside the bed?

“SO,” JAKE'S DAD SAYS. “WHAT'S
all this about?”

“What's what all about?” says Jake.

“Don't play smart with me, Jacob. You know what I'm talking about. Coming here in the middle of the night with Nathan in tow. No car, no jacket. The boy's mother nowhere in sight. There must be more to this than you told me last night.”

“No,” says Jake. “I told you. That's it. I took him, and I'm taking him back to the city with me.”

“When?”

“Today. If I can get there.”

“What about your car?”

“It's at Johnny Lang's.”

“And your jacket?”

“Same place.”

“What's going on with you and Johnny Lang?”

“He tried to kill me.”

“What?”

“He chased me through the woods with a shotgun and I got away.”

“Why, for Lord's sake?”

“He was high. I don't know.”

“I told you when you started hanging out with that boy years ago it would lead to trouble.”

“You did.”

“And hasn't it?”

“Yes.”

“So, what are you gonna do?”

“I'm gonna go and get my car and Nathan and I are going back to the city.”

“Are you taking him with you to get your car?”

“God no! What if something went wrong, or Johnny's still waiting for me?”

“Why don't you call the police?”

“Johnny really would kill me if I did that. I was kind of hoping he'd be calmed down by now, and I can get the car and leave.”

“So. As I said. What are you doing with the boy while you're gone?”

“I was kind of hoping I could leave him here.”

“I've got services this morning.”

“He wouldn't go at nothing.”

“I don't know, Jacob. I don't like leaving anyone here alone. You know that.”

“Take him to church with you then. I'll be back for him in a couple hours, at the most.”

“Who am I supposed to say he is, when my congregation asks why I got a seven-year-old boy in tow?”

“He's eight. And how about telling them the truth? They all know anyway.”

“Do they?” Jake's father says. “Funny. Isn't one of them ever mentioned the fact to me.”

“They know,” Jake says. “Everyone in North River and Middlebridge knows everything about everyone.”

“Maybe they do.”

“Leave him here, then. Like I said. He won't go at nothing.”

“Has he ever been to church?”

“I don't know. I don't think so.”

“The boy is eight years old and he's never been to church?”

“Carla really isn't the church-going type.”

“And what about you?

“You know the answer to that, don't you?”

“Sometimes,” Jake's dad says, “I wonder what your mother would think about all this, if she were alive to see it.”

“I don't know,” Jake says. “I know one thing, though. She would have taken him in. She wouldn't have denied him, like you're doing.”

There is quiet in the kitchen for a long while then, and that hum, that electrical voice of Jesus, seems to me to keep getting louder and louder and louder and louder and louder.

MY FATHER SAYS HE REMEMBERS
being down in the well with my grandmother. He remembers the smoke and the flame and the roar of the blaze above him, and the way my grandmother stood up to her hips in well water, her blue flower-patterned dress floating around her waist. If the fire had been at any other time they surely wouldn't have made it out again, or not with as few injuries as they did. Earlier in the year — in the spring, say — and the well would have been full at twelve or fourteen feet and they would have drowned or refused to jump at all and been burned up. Another month — at the end of August — and the well would have been almost dry and my grandmother might have broken a leg. As it was, she twisted her ankle in the fall, and underneath the water it swelled and bruised and she would feel a twinge in that ankle the rest of her life when it rained, or when it was hot.

“Just the Almighty's way of reminding me,” she'd say about it.

They stayed down the well for a full day and night. They listened as the fire took the house and the barn. They heard the hound stop barking. They felt the water around them get warm, and the steam start to rise as the fire swept over the top of the open well. And after it was over they heard the deep silence, the steady drip-drip of water on the rocks falling into the well, looked hopefully up into white disk of daylight at the top of the well and waited for someone to come. I imagine them down there, my grandmother, bedraggled, up to her waist in cold well water, holding my father tight to her chest, the two of them looking up at the world. The vision brings me to the edge of something, some kind of knowing.

It was like they were looking out on the world, and looking in from it at the same time. It was like they stood for something that's important, that means everything to them, but I can't name or talk about or put my finger on.