Authors: Sharon Butala
“Are you enjoying your stay in the city?” Bella asks her politely. Jenna hesitates, then says, “I find it interesting—this event, for instance.” She looks back through the open door to the darkened room beyond. She suppresses the urge to chatter on about how she got here by accident, has never attended an event quite like this one. “I enjoyed your last novel very much,” she says, then immediately thinks, Oh, God, why did I say that—she won’t believe me.
“Thank you,” Bella says. “I’m afraid I haven’t read any of your books.” Jenna says nothing. There’s a sudden burst of laughter from the auditorium and Jenna gives an involuntary start.
“You’re not used to crowds,” Bella says. “It is very crowded in there.”
“Country dances used to be much more packed than that,” Jenna says. “And noisier. But all that has passed …” She can hardly launch into an explanation about rural depopulation, and lets her voice trail away. Bella is scrutinizing her with her penetrating grey-green eyes, as if she would see exactly what makes Jenna tick.
Under her silent gaze Jenna’s sense of irony, which she wears as armour in the city to protect her from all the things she doesn’t understand, isn’t part of, that she at once longs for and hates, slowly deserts her. For an instant, in its place panic threatens, and then recedes. She flounders, confused and not knowing what to think or say, feeling her face growing hot, and her hands perspiring like a grubby child’s. In the face of Bella’s polish and sophistication, she sees herself as a forty-eight-year-old woman who doesn’t pay enough attention to her hair and nails, or to fashion and diet, to undergarments or shoes, sitting in the midst of an event to which everybody who is anybody
has come—only she doesn’t know who everybody is, nor anybody—and she’s suddenly very tired.
Bella says, “A long time ago I came from the country too.” She looks down at her long-fingered, elegantly groomed hands. “When I was young I went to France to become a painter. At an embassy reception for Canadian artists, I met my husband.” Jenna nods, but Bella isn’t looking at her. “I’ve written in cities on three or four continents over the years,” she continues. “I wrote, and lived, in the tradition that a writer was someone who was familiar with the wider world.”
“Yes?” Jenna says, suspecting she’s being insulted, and trying to sound cold, but succeeding only in sounding querulous. Bella glances at her and then looks down to her hands again, smoothing one with the other so that slender mauve veins rise.
“Such a long time ago,” she says, as if she’s a little embarrassed by having spoken so much.
Jenna says matter-of-factly, “I’ve lived thirty years in the country. When I married my husband I wasn’t writing, hadn’t thought of such a thing. I didn’t make my choice with that kind of future in mind.” She lifts her head and meets Bella’s gaze full on, but Bella lowers her eyes quickly, as if she doesn’t want Jenna to guess what she’s thinking. Jenna’s tiredness feels huge to her, but she’s beginning to recognize what it is. She struggles against it, but it’s no use. “I think—” she begins, then stops. Bella waits, not lifting her head. “The truth is,” Jenna tells her, “that, for me, there was no choice. Your book was head and shoulders better than the others.” She half expected she would have to explain to Bella what she’s referring to, but Bella lifts her head instantly to fasten her gaze on Jenna.
“Am I to believe that?” she asks sharply.
“Yes,” Jenna says. There is a long silence, Bella’s patrician expression wavering and then quickly returning.
“Tell me, then,” she says slowly, “what were the objections
of the others?” Jenna hesitates. “Oh, yes,” she says angrily. “You’re not supposed to tell me.”
“I can’t remember,” Jenna says too quickly. One of them had said, “It’s just Bella doing what she always does,” in a bored, dismissive tone. Jenna doesn’t repeat this. “They just weren’t interested, I guess.”
“And you couldn’t persuade them otherwise, I take it,” Bella says, and laughs lightly, as if she’s afraid she’s revealed too much with this remark. Jenna winces and lowers her eyes. What she was going to say to excuse herself was that she wasn’t used to such occasions, she wasn’t used to having power, the city frightened her—but with Bella Griffin right here in front of her, waiting for an explanation, she sees the futility, even the insult, of offering this.
She’s shocked at herself, her cheeks are heating again with something like shame. She says, “I am to blame. I thought—I was afraid,” she says. “I was afraid because—” She stops. The air in the room is still, but it seems to Jenna that it has gained texture, that it waits for her, too, as Bella is doing. There’s another burst of noise from the outer room, clapping, then loud conversation, laughter, the sound of people milling about. Now some are drifting slowly into the lounge.
“There’s no excuse,” she says, and meets Bella’s eyes. “I’ve blamed them as jealous, as men—older men—assuming their right to make the decision and ignoring my opinion as valueless. The jury officer even told me to argue with them and I said, ‘What can I say to these men?’ and both men dropped their eyes and fiddled with their papers. I could have swayed them then, if I’d tried. I
could
have—but I didn’t. I—it was—I know what it was.” She’s afraid she’s going to cry, and furious with herself, blinks rapidly until the urge vanishes.
Bella looks as if she’s about to speak, but Jenna lifts a hand to stop her. Even as she does it, she finds herself smiling at the
preposterous imperiousness of her gesture. More people are moving into the lounge now, heading for the bar or to the table of snacks. She leans closer to Bella to be heard over their chatter and says quickly, “It was that I couldn’t part with what I knew What I knew about books, I mean, about writing them. I was biding my time; it seemed too soon.” Bella is perfectly still, listening with her whole body. “I gave no thought to you,” Jenna confesses. “It was my fault.”
She had said, of the book they’d chosen, “It never sang for me,” and that had made the men glance quickly at each other, and then down, shuffling their papers again. She doesn’t know why she’d said that, when she might have said other, more discerning things. And she doesn’t know what the men—university professors both—were thinking of when they’d acted as if she’d embarrassed them: that she was stupid and wrong? That she was right? That they didn’t understand what it meant to have a book sing for you as Bella’s had done?
Bella doesn’t move. She is staring down at her hands, tightly clasped now and resting on her lap, as if she’s weighing what Jenna has just said. Jenna waits, breathless, for whatever wisdom—or anger—Bella might choose to impart to her. Waiting, her heart beating too fast, she becomes aware that someone is standing nearby. She glances up and sees a young, handsome man in a dark suit, neat shirt and tie, and polished black, tasselled loafers. He’s staring with an eager smile at Bella, as if he knows her and is just waiting for her to notice him.
He says, “Miss Griffin, we’ve met? I’m ….” Jenna stops listening. To her surprise, Bella smiles graciously at him, if distantly, and murmurs something that is clearly permission for him to go on talking to her. Jenna waits, expecting Bella to turn back to her, perhaps to introduce the young man.
But Bella doesn’t, it’s as if Jenna has become invisible, and after a moment, Jenna realizes she’s been dismissed, that to
stay on would only invite further insult. Or at least that’s what she’s thinking, as she rises awkwardly and walks slowly away toward Carol, who is standing in the doorway across the room, evidently waiting for her. She’s ready to turn back should Bella call her name, but this doesn’t happen.
The next morning, after kissing Hannah goodbye, she takes a cab to the airport an hour before she needs to. Now all she wants to do is get out of this city. But as soon as she makes her way onto her plane and settles into her seat she feels her spirits plummeting back into that mood the city always induces. She’s brooding, morose, sullen; she is, she thinks ironically, completely herself again.
As the plane lifts off the runway she finds herself wondering if she’d told Bella the truth, and if she hadn’t, as she suspects, what the truth might be. She thinks, I am simply a coward, afraid to speak up against two men; she thinks, I don’t know enough about literature to be on a jury. She knows that she has far too much pride to admit either of these—whether true or not—to anyone. Anyway, she tells herself, it’s worse than that. Surprised at herself, she struggles to put into words this amorphous sense of guilt and shame that she feels, that nothing she’s so far thought of has managed to dispel.
Although it was raining and foggy when they left Toronto, here, high above the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border, they’re flying in pale fall sunshine. Below them the Great Plains glisten white, and then, as the sun sinks and they approach Regina, they glow a deep, resonant blue. She is coming home again, to the place where she was born, with its miles of open, grassy plains, its fields of crops, its thick northern forests, its multitude of lakes and rivers, even its sand dunes, river rapids, and its waterfalls.
Gazing down, she thinks, I know its secrets, I know what
matters about this place, I know what it
is
—or, at least, I can keep searching for that, I can keep trying to say it—
To take responsibility for what I know, she thinks, that’s what I haven’t wanted to do. And she realizes that when she denied Bella Griffin, she also denied herself. It seems to her that at some level she’s always known this, and has refused it, craving instead a world she can’t have. But now they’re rushing downward for a landing, the plane quivering and whining against the air’s resistance, its power pushing her back against her seat. As they plunge downward through layers of resonant blue toward the vast, mysterious plains below, she feels an unexpected answering surge of emotion, visceral and powerful, and after a second, she recognizes it as the purest joy.
Louisa has been thinking about Pat, and the girl’s face had intruded again, her stillness, so that when Nick rides up to her and bends down from his horse to speak to her where she’s leaning against the truck’s grill, she nearly jumps out of her skin. “We’ll stop up at the corner for lunch,” he says. “They’re played out from that uphill climb.”
“Okay,” she says, as if they haven’t been stopping for lunch at this rare patch of unploughed and unfenced grass every year for the last twenty. He rides off again to join the others, and she gets back into the driver’s seat, starts the half-ton, and moves it slowly ahead.
At the top of a long hill that leads down past stubble fields on both sides of the road, with miles of grassed and rolling ranch country in the distance ahead, she stops the truck and sits for a minute, watching the hundred head of cows and their calves ambling down the road ahead of the riders, the clump thinning as the cows see unmowed grass in the ditches and lumber down to snatch a mouthful or two before the horsemen move them on. There are five riders: Nick, who is Louisa’s husband of twenty-five years, their neighbour Brody Reiker, his son Cody and daughter Raeanne, and Cody’s friend, Jesse. The
boys, in their late teens, are wearing chaps, although it’s a warm day, and here on the bald prairie there’s no brush or trees they have to ride through that might scratch their legs, and spurs, although their horses are well broken and this has to be the tamest job possible—they’re only moving cows and calves from a community pasture home for the winter—and Stetsons and colourful neckscarves just like in the movies. The vanity of the men has lately begun to amuse her, as if who they are as human beings is all invested in their hats.
She sighs, a little ashamed of her thoughts; she used to be as starry-eyed as the next girl when she saw one of them in all his cowboy gear. Vanity it may be, she tells herself, but at least it’s harmless. After all, she grew up here, she knows as well as anybody what it really takes to stay in this life: it takes everything. It takes stuff you don’t even have, she thinks. You have to be smarter than bankers and machinery dealers, and when you need to be, tougher and meaner than the lowest snake. You have to—She tells herself,
Shut up, just shut up,
jerks open the truck door, and steps out. It’s Pat, she knows it. She’s reminded again, fleetingly, of the young woman, Stephanie is her name, she saw Friday night at supper at the Mcintosh ranch, her new baby bundled and sleeping on her lap, as if the child were a purse or a package from the store.
She stands on the dirt road for a minute and kicks at small stones, her eyes on the ground, then stretches to ease the ache out of her legs and back from hours spent sitting in the truck. On her left is the old Garrett place where Pat was raised. There isn’t a soul around, it’s been deserted for years, harvest is over, and the new renter lives a few miles away, over the west hills.
She wanders across the road and onto the dusty approach into the yard, past the double row of scraggly, leafless caraganas and into the farmyard proper. On her left, rising up out of the uncut crested wheat grass, is a crooked row of rusted,
bent, and obsolete farm machinery that stretches back into pioneer days: a binder, an old threshing machine, even a walking plough. Standing with her hands in her jacket pockets and staring up at the house’s boarded-over windows and unpainted shabbiness, she can’t believe how many people once lived in it—seven kids in Pat’s family. It’s barely twenty feet by twenty, bigger if you count the porches. How we used to live, she thinks, and twists her neck to relieve the tension that’s giving her a headache.
She steps back to the trees, and walking in between the double row of gnarled caraganas, she unzips her jeans and pulls them down and squats in the tall grass, the stiff heads of the crested wheat grass scratching her rear. Relieved, she rises, zips her jeans, and walks back onto the road.
The cattle and riders are maybe a half-mile ahead of her now. She opens the truck door, sits sideways on the driver’s seat, and stares out across the road to the house. Pat was one of the older girls. Their father, drunk at the time, died in a runaway when Pat was about fifteen, and after that her mother had lost the farm. Everybody knew what a mean old bastard Jug Garrett had been. They used to pity Dorothy, Pat’s mother, but nobody had ever done a thing to straighten Jug out. Pat wouldn’t talk about him, never had.