Small Beneath the Sky Read Online Free PDF Page B

E-M-I-L-I-E climb from the bowl up the handle on one spoon, C-E-C-I-L-E on the other. Her favourite footwear is the first pair of bowling shoes she could afford to buy, “Goodyear” stamped on the rubber heels. Her favourite place to sit in church is in the balcony, near the back so she can get out fast. She uses her favourite expression to stop you from complaining when you don’t get what you want: “It’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.” Her favourite place is Saskatchewan: she can’t understand why anyone would want to go anywhere else, even for a holiday, even in winter. Her favourite meal is what anyone else in the family wants.

spoilt
    A S WELL as practising piano, my friend Ona had to help her mother do the housework every Saturday morning. Their house had two sets of stairs, and it was Ona’s job to wash them on her hands and knees with Spic and Span and a stiff brush. Then she had to clean the bathroom and their big verandah with its dozens of windowsills. For this, every Wednesday she got a dime to spend on penny candy at the corner store. I’d beg her for one of her jawbreakers. Sometimes, dazed with pleasure, I’d forget and bite into the bitter seed at their core. The first time I tasted cardamom, a rush of warmth swept me back to that bliss, my blackened tongue and the click of the sweet shrinking ball against my teeth.
    Ona’s mom was strict, and their house was spotless. Even their backyard was spotless; it looked as if someone had taken a scrub brush to the sidewalk, the lawn and the daisies and sweet peas Ona’s mom had planted instead of potatoes. Ona’s stepdad was a pig farmer, though, and every night he parked his truck, the sides splattered with manure and straw, in the driveway at the back. In the truck box rested a huge barrel that he used to haul buttermilk for the pigs. Instead of the scent of sweet peas, it was the rancid smell of sour milk and swine that wafted into the neighbours’ yards. And as soon as Ona’s stepdad left his truck and walked towards the house, hundreds of flies rose from the ground to drape the buttermilk barrel with a thick, black cloth that buzzed and shifted. It was alien and creepy, and I always cut a wide swath around it.
    My mother had a thing about flies. She’d drop what she was doing if she heard a buzzing in the kitchen and go after it. On the farm, before her mother cooked the meat from a slaughtered pig or steer hung in the cold cellar, she’d send one of the kids down to pick off the maggots. That’s why Mom’s roast beef was cooked to death, all the juices gone into the gravy.
    Compared to Ona, I was a spoilt kid. Mom said she didn’t know much about mothering; she just wanted me to have a childhood different from her own. My job was to have fun, she said. All she asked me to do was the dusting once a week. To make sure I lifted every ornament and didn’t skip any piece of furniture, I’d pretend that the Queen was coming to visit in the afternoon, and I’d picture her running her white-gloved finger over the dresser, the coffee table and the chiffonier. “Good job,” she would say in her snooty voice. Then she’d give me a whole quarter to spend on candy. She’d put it heads-up in my palm, her face in profile cameoed into the silvery shine.
    Imagining the Queen coming to our house wasn’t such a stretch. A few years after the war, she’d passed through Swift Current on the train. My brother had gone to the station with the rest of his Cub pack, and he’d seen her and Prince Philip wave from the platform of the royal car. Whenever I heard the story, I tried to imagine what a royal car would look like. Surely there’d be red velvet everywhere, even on the ceiling. Though it was rude to think of the Queen having to go to the bathroom, the toilet must have been made from solid gold.
    There was more to the story than that,