Small Beneath the Sky Read Online Free PDF Page A

three times its normal size. Milk leg, my mother called it, and I savoured those words like a dirty secret from the schoolyard: milk leg. I tried not to stare. I imagined her lisle stocking full of thick, creamy liquid, sloshing when she walked like the cow’s milk in the tin pail she used to carry to the house from the barn, the cats with their ears and tails clipped by frost following behind.
    We didn’t see much of her, because she’d left the farm to her younger son while the elder one, my father, who’d quit school at thirteen because he was needed at harvest and seeding, inherited nothing. He never got over that, Grandma leaving him out as if she hadn’t held him to her breast, told him stories and, like every mother, waited for his first step, his first word, his bright seeing of the world. No one could come up with a reason why she’d done such a thing. In later years, my mother and I wondered whether my dad would have kept away from the booze if he’d been able to stay on the land. Farming suited him. He loved the solitude and the grandeur of nothing but the sky ahead and all around him as he drove a tractor back and forth across a field, no one but the weather to boss him around, no one but the sun to tell him when to start or stop. Like most farmers, he was a master of tools and engine parts. His other skill was more rare. Neighbours called on him when a horse or a dog needed to be put down and they couldn’t bring themselves to pull the trigger. My father was a good shot. One bullet would do the job fast and clean, and such killing never bothered him. Sometimes he’d be paid with a case of beer, other times with a handshake or something the wife had made, a flapper pie or a sealer of canned chicken, the meat encased in jelly.
    After the loss of the farm, nothing turned out right for my father. It was the end of the thirties, and he and my mother lived in a cook car abandoned by the CPR on the outskirts of Success. It was better than the homestead shack they’d squatted in just after their wedding. They whitewashed the walls of the cook car and moved in a metal bed and an old folding table with two mismatched chairs. Dad put a shelf in the middle of an apple crate turned sideways and nailed four legs to the bottom. It was Mom’s first dresser. Across the front, she tacked a yellow satiny curtain that pulled back and forth on a string.
    Dad helped with the combining and pounded fence posts for Shorty Turnbull, his brother-in-law, who owned a farm too big to manage on his own. After the crops were off the fields, Dad shovelled grain for a dollar a day at the Pool elevator, his saliva black with dust. The jobs were never enough to pull him and Mom out of poverty. When she was pregnant with my brother, she’d knock on the back door of the nearby Chinese café. Cookie, whom Dad had befriended, would give her a bowl of chop suey and a piece of banana cream pie if there was any left over from the day. That’s why my brother grew so big and strong, she liked to say. When my parents moved from the train car to Swift Current, thirty miles away, Cookie gave my father a cleaver with an old wooden handle he’d brought with him from China. It was one of the few heirlooms in our family.
    After my brother’s birth, Dad sold their only cow to pay the hospital bill. One Christmas, he went alone into the country at thirty below with a rifle and shot a coyote, whose hide he sold for five bucks at Western Hide and Fur. He’d set out on foot and was gone so long Mom was afraid he wouldn’t come back. The kill bought not only two Dinky Toys for my brother, a tin jack-in-the-box for me and a can of lily of the valley talcum powder that made Mom smell sweet for months, but a bag of oranges that came all the way from somewhere else. On his right hand, frost had bitten his fingers, and they ached in the cold from that day on.
    By the time I was in elementary school, Grandma