Marilyn Gear Pilling - On Hurons Shore

On Hurons Shore

On Hurons Shore

linked stories by

Marilyn Gear Pilling

DEMETER PRESS, BRADFORD, ONTARIO

Copyright 2014 Demeter Press

Individual copyright to their work is retained by the authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published by:

Demeter Press

140 Holland Street West, P. O. Box 13022

Bradford, ON L3Z 2Y5

Tel: (905) 775-9089

Email: info@demeterpress.org

Website: www.demeterpress.org

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for its publishing program.

Demeter Press logo based on the sculpture Demeter

by Maria-Luise Bodirsky < www.keramik-atelier.bodirsky.de >

Front cover photograph: Dan Pilling

eBook development: WildElement.ca

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Printed and Bound in Canada

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Pilling, Marilyn Gear, 1945, author

On Hurons shore : linked stories / by Marilyn Gear Pilling.

ISBN 978-1-927335-34-5 (pbk.)

I. Title.

PS8581.I365O6 2014 C813.54 C2014-901897-5

For Sheena, Merrick, Philippe, Maurice,
Aime, Andr and in loving memory of
Stphanie (19872007) and Sari (19652013)

Contents

The truth that had just been revealed to me, and that Chekhovs Yalta exile revealed to himthat our homes are Granada. They are where the action is; they are where the riches of experience are distributed.

Janet Malcolm, Reading Chekhov

PART I

She chews the bitter pieces of walnut in her ice cream and

suddenly is no longer quite steady on her chair. A thought, a

surety, has come to her that will make all the days of her life

before this different from all the days that follow.

Beyond Aunt Beas Garden

i.
Tomatoes

L EXIES FATHER IS A TRUE BLOND. Hes small. He weighs only one hundred and thirty pounds. He doesnt look like a man who would eat eight large tomatoes in a row, then look around and ask his wife whats for supper. He stands five feet eight inches, and his eyes are the blue of the chicory that blooms along roadsides in August.

Lexies mother says that Lexie is a blond too, but not a true blond.

Whats the difference? says Lexie.

Your fathers eyelashes will never go dark, says her mother.

Lexie files this answer in the large drawer in her head where she keeps her mysteriesthose things she does not understand. Whenever shes bored, for instance in church, she opens the drawer and picks one of the items to ponder.

Lexies father loves tomatoes. Fresh tomatoes only. Fresh means picked after Lexies mother calls the family to supper. When her mother calls the family to table, her father drops what hes doing and gallops to the garden. He plucks eight or so large tomatoes from their stems, gathers them against his old shirt, runs for the house, crosses the kitchen with giant strides, comes to a sudden and dramatic stop at his place, and carefully rolls the tomatoes onto his white plate. Lexie has watched him do this many times. The galloping and the gigantic strides are because Lexies mother objects to him waiting til the last minute to pick the tomatoes. It holds up supper, she says.

God is gracious God is good Let us thank him For our food, says their father, at top speed, making food rhyme with good, though at all other times he pronounces the word food to rhyme with mood. With a paring knife, he cuts the tomatoes in slices, covers his dinner plate with their redness, and stacks the extras in high columns on his dessert plate. He takes the spoon from the bowl of white sugar and scoops sugar onto each slice, then douses each heap of sugar with vinegar, and sprinkles the lot with salt and pepper. Down the hatch, he says.

Lexies mother wears her black hair rolled up in small metal curlers until she must, for some reason, leave the house. She sits opposite her husband, and she is the opposite of her husband. Her mothers hazel eyes take in their fathers tomato performance. She says, Im aghast, James. She says this, yet Lexie has heard their mother more than once boast to her sister, Aunt Bea, about how much their father can eat. Aunt Bea always says the same thing. James do beat all, Irene. For all the size of him, too.

Lexies father stabs the red circles one after the other, and swallows them whole. He folds a slice of soft white bread in half, uses it to mop the seeds and the juice, and eats that too. The whole family watches. Lexies father keeps on until there is no sign that there has ever been a tomato at table. He looks across at Lexies mother. Whats for supper tonight, Mommy?

You must be a bottomless pit. You must have a cast iron stomach, James. Id be sicker than a dog if I ate one tenth the amount of tomatoes. And please dont call me Mommy. She shakes her head. Theyre starving in Africa. And just look at you.

Lexie always looks at her father then, trying to see what her mother sees. She sees only a small man with eyes of chicory blue, a true blond whose eyelashes will never go dark, sitting at the table waiting for his supper. Another mystery for the drawer.

Every day, Lexies father runs to and from the office where he works. He runs in his brown suit, brown fedora and brown leather shoes. Fridays, he runs as fast as he can. Even though the housewives in their neighbourhood are used to seeing Lexies father run up the street, hes moving so fast on Fridays that they give him a second look. People who have never seen him before stop and stare. This is 1956. Grownups do not run in the street, only kids who are playing tag.

Lexies father doesnt care that people stare at him. All he cares is that her mother has packed the suitcase and the supper, loaded the car, and made everything ready for blast off, so they can pull out of the driveway in their blue Austin no later than 4.22 p.m. Their father has figured out that it takes twenty-two minutes for him to run the mile home from work, take the stairs of their small city home two at a time, change his clothes, and be ready. He has trained their mother, Lexie, and Graham to be on high alert for his appearance.

Lexie is eleven; her brother Graham is eight. On this Friday afternoon, Lexie is leaning against the open trunk of the car, watching her father fly up the street towards her. When he sees her, he leaps into the air and kicks his heels together, then resumes his flat-out running.

Lexies mother is ashamed of their father, running in his suit, running in front of the neighbours. Im appalled James. I cant hold my head up in front of anyone on this street.

Lexie wonders what the people who stare at their father are thinking. Do they think hes being chased? That the police are after him? Or do they think hes in a race, a strange kind of race theyve never heard of, where grown men in suits run like greyhounds through the quiet neighbourhoods of medium-sized Ontario cities?

As her father blurs past his firstborn, he tilts his head in her direction and makes his eyes bug out. This meanshello, I havent seen you since last evening, but greetings must never delay blast off. Lexie feels the whir she always feels when her father is near, like the whir within the wood stove at the farm, when its going strong. Her father burns through all his days, running towards his next chunk of work the way a dog runs after a ball.