Travelling Light Read Online Free PDF Page B

Starfighters are his ships.
    In the summer mornings I watch the flight break from the western hills and scream down over the swamp. After the planes disappear, the air rings like a plucked wire until the tension breaks with a loud boom . Sometimes they sweep around again in formation and come down on a strafing run over the Rockingham–Saint-Viateur highway, checking their airspeed so that six miles away I can hear the howl of the engines.
    My father plants the garden on Victoria Day, always blackfly season. We wear hats draped with netting and elastic bands around our sleeves and cuffs. He fertilizes the soil with manure from Maguire’s barn, and swamp muck wheeled up the road in a barrow. I construct fences to stop the porcupines, using scraps of wood, chicken wire, mothballs. Our basement is lined with jars and tins of preserves, labelled by year. There is a tin casket for potatoes. We have a chicken house. In the autumn we’ll hunt down a moose, haul it home in Maguire’s truck, and butcher it in the yard. We have a smokehouse, and my father buys casings from a sheep farmer in Saint-Viateur to make sausage.
    When he’s on base, I take my mother out in the canoe to gather water lilies. Every year the creek changes course, but the scenery is always the same, with the same gaunt trees lining the banks. She trails her hands in the water. The dead trees are full of nests. Once a bird attacked us and kept attacking us until I stood up in the boat and fought it off with the blade of my paddle.
    He drives us to Mass at Saint-Viateur on Sunday. I once lived for four days with the priest when I made my First Communion. At confession before Mass my mother goes into the booth before me and I hear her whispering in French. She never speaks French to my father or me, only to the priest, and sometimes to Maguire or Maguire’s wife. After confession she kneels at the altar rail and says penance while the church fills up. When I go into the dark booth, it smells of perfume, and the leather pad is warm and creased where she has been kneeling.
    The priest talks in English. “Alexander,” he says, “wouldn’t you like to come here to school with us?”
    â€œI can’t.”
    My father has told the priest I attend school at the base. At the base he tells them I go to school in Saint-Viateur.
    â€œWhy can’t you?” the priest says.
    â€œI go to school at the base. I’m learning to be a pilot,” I tell him. “They’re teaching me Voodoo and Starfighter.”
    â€œI will speak again to your father,” the priest says. Then he coughs, the signal to begin confession. Later, when he says Mass, he wears gold and green robes and the church fills with incense. When it’s over and we come out, our car is parked at the curb and my father is eating bakery rolls, drinking coffee from a cardboard cup, and reading a Montreal newspaper spread out over the steering wheel. His black hair is flecked with grey and brushed back against the sides of his head. He wears old khaki trousers and a flannel shirt rolled up at the sleeves. One of his forearms is marked with white blotches the size of dimes, shrapnel scars from when his ship was shot down over Germany. There are other scars scattered like coins across his back and shoulders.
    He folds the paper and tosses it into the back seat when my mother and I get into the car. “Well, Lucie, did you enjoy yourself?” he says.
    â€œThe priest was asking about the schools.”
    â€œScrew the schools,” my father says, starting the car. “He should read the newspaper. Berlin, Cuba — do you know we have bombers in the sky twenty-four hours a day? So do they. School or no school. Missiles everywhere. Underneath the ocean.”
    The priest, standing on the steps outside the church, is surrounded by old women. His robes look less wonderful in the sunlight. I can see the cuffs of his ordinary black pants. He is