She’d cry and cry inconsolable sometimes, make me hate her, make me wish for her death – the world seemed reduced then to her cries, the brawling chaos of them. But then when they had died into sleep I would see her curled in her crib and feel solemn with responsibility for her, understanding that she was mine in some way, that that had been decided now, and wondering then at the strangeness of her, the soft feathery feel of her skull, vulnerable as a melon, her tiny fingers and toes.
The household seemed to shift again, its shadowy intricate web of alliances and emotion. The tension between my father and aunt had quietly become something new, an understanding: there was a rhythm now in how they spoke to each other, my aunt with her authority, her belligerence, my father with hissullen condescension, that seemed hermetic, almost intimate, a delicate weaving of their stubbornnesses into a kind of collusion that excluded me. I was aligned not with them but with the baby, who didn’t belong in our house, was awkward and unnatural there like the baby goats that farmers in Valle del Sole put with their ewes if they’d bought them before they’d been weaned.
It was not until the first frost, into October, that the tomato season ended and I began school. Tsia Teresa set out clothes for me, packed sandwiches in my father’s lunchbox, sent me out to the end of the drive to wait for the bus. The trees had begun to lose their leaves by then, all around the landscape preparing for its alien winter; and always there were the few moments then as I waited in the October cold when I seemed to belong to no one, the life going on in the house, my aunt in her morning clothes, the sleeping baby, seeming tiny and strange as through the wrong end of a telescope, and I myself, alone there at the roadside, like an aberration in a picture, the thing when all else was accounted for that didn’t fit. There was a smell in the air once, a crispness like the sun-cleared chill of mountains, that stirred something so deep and well-known in me, so forgotten, that I felt my body would burst with the pressure of remembering; and for an instant then the past seemed a kind of permanence I might wake into suddenly as into another country, all the present merely a shadow against it, this country road, this farm, this house.
IV
St. Michael’s Separate School, and the church attached to it, sat on Highway 3 at the eastern edge of town, just across from the old folks’ home. The school itself was a plain, two-storey rectangular building with walls of white stucco, long rows of metal-framed windows looking into the classrooms, like the ones that lined the walls of the Sun Parlour Canning Factory, and a glassed-in passageway at one side connecting it to the side steps of the church. The church was in white stucco as well, with a squat, arch-windowed bell tower, a slate roof, and a façade whose only ornament was a small circle of stained glass near the peak of its gable. In the patch of lawn in front of the rectory, on a three-stepped pedestal, stood a stone statue of the archangel Michael, his body clad in the short, girded tunic of a Roman soldier and his hands holding a rusting metal cross-staff whose tip was plunged into a strange winged serpent at his feet.
From the back of our farm the stark white walls of the church and school were partly visible across the mile or so of flat field that separated us from Highway 3. But the bus that carried methere and then home again took over an hour in each direction, winding me each way through nearly the whole of its erratic journey, up countless concessions and sideroads in a jagged circle that stretched as far as Goldsmith to the north and Port Thomas to the east. In winter the sun would just be rising when the bus pulled up in the morning and setting when it dropped me off in the afternoon; and on overcast days it seemed that the world the bus passed through was one where the sun never rose at all, where
The household seemed to shift again, its shadowy intricate web of alliances and emotion. The tension between my father and aunt had quietly become something new, an understanding: there was a rhythm now in how they spoke to each other, my aunt with her authority, her belligerence, my father with hissullen condescension, that seemed hermetic, almost intimate, a delicate weaving of their stubbornnesses into a kind of collusion that excluded me. I was aligned not with them but with the baby, who didn’t belong in our house, was awkward and unnatural there like the baby goats that farmers in Valle del Sole put with their ewes if they’d bought them before they’d been weaned.
It was not until the first frost, into October, that the tomato season ended and I began school. Tsia Teresa set out clothes for me, packed sandwiches in my father’s lunchbox, sent me out to the end of the drive to wait for the bus. The trees had begun to lose their leaves by then, all around the landscape preparing for its alien winter; and always there were the few moments then as I waited in the October cold when I seemed to belong to no one, the life going on in the house, my aunt in her morning clothes, the sleeping baby, seeming tiny and strange as through the wrong end of a telescope, and I myself, alone there at the roadside, like an aberration in a picture, the thing when all else was accounted for that didn’t fit. There was a smell in the air once, a crispness like the sun-cleared chill of mountains, that stirred something so deep and well-known in me, so forgotten, that I felt my body would burst with the pressure of remembering; and for an instant then the past seemed a kind of permanence I might wake into suddenly as into another country, all the present merely a shadow against it, this country road, this farm, this house.
IV
St. Michael’s Separate School, and the church attached to it, sat on Highway 3 at the eastern edge of town, just across from the old folks’ home. The school itself was a plain, two-storey rectangular building with walls of white stucco, long rows of metal-framed windows looking into the classrooms, like the ones that lined the walls of the Sun Parlour Canning Factory, and a glassed-in passageway at one side connecting it to the side steps of the church. The church was in white stucco as well, with a squat, arch-windowed bell tower, a slate roof, and a façade whose only ornament was a small circle of stained glass near the peak of its gable. In the patch of lawn in front of the rectory, on a three-stepped pedestal, stood a stone statue of the archangel Michael, his body clad in the short, girded tunic of a Roman soldier and his hands holding a rusting metal cross-staff whose tip was plunged into a strange winged serpent at his feet.
From the back of our farm the stark white walls of the church and school were partly visible across the mile or so of flat field that separated us from Highway 3. But the bus that carried methere and then home again took over an hour in each direction, winding me each way through nearly the whole of its erratic journey, up countless concessions and sideroads in a jagged circle that stretched as far as Goldsmith to the north and Port Thomas to the east. In winter the sun would just be rising when the bus pulled up in the morning and setting when it dropped me off in the afternoon; and on overcast days it seemed that the world the bus passed through was one where the sun never rose at all, where
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