Hogs, covers, he said. He was right. What difference did it make? I knew his dad had been excommunicated for something but we didn’t talk about that. Nobody in town ever talked about that.
When it happened, years ago, Sheridan’s mom went nuts. Trudie had told me and Tash that she thought Sheridan’s dad should have left town to save his mom the pain of having to pretend he was dead. She’d really loved him. They’d had a lot of fun together when he wasn’t too drunk.
But now Sheridan and I were older and staring at the water and sharing a cigarette. I told him I hadn’t seen him in school lately and he told me he’d had an entire bottle of Swedish oil poured over his head in woodworking for falling asleep and after that, after being lacquered, he couldn’t muster up the energy to come back. I told him that in grade seven science I’d been strapped repeatedly on the hand with a wooden ruler in front of everybody for talking about something other than tuning forks.
We talked about our old expressions like monkey-doer, wordy and I don’t give a care. Remember bubble language, I asked him. He said yeah, but he couldn’t remember how to do it any more. We talked about pouring hydrogen peroxide into the blisters we got from playing tag on the monkey bars at Ash Park. And we talked about the stupid things we’d scratched into the metal of the bars like who loves whom forever.
Then I heard the truck start up and some music, some 10cc…something about dying…playing on the radio and the horn honking and I told Sheridan I had to go. Let’s meet here every five years to catch up on our lives, he said. Yeah, okay, I said, and waved goodbye.
six
When we were little, Tash and I would sit in the darkened dining room of my grandmother’s farmhouse, listening to the funeral announcements. They came on after supper, on the local radio station we were allowed to listen to because the elders knew that it was better for little children to listen to the names of dead people being read out in a terrifying monotone than the Beatles singing all we need is love. Afterwards my grandma would tell us: They have gone home at last. Praise the Lord. Then we would play this game called Knipsbrat with each other until our middle fingers were sore. It was one of the few games we were allowed to play. Golf was another one because it consisted of using a rod to hit something much, much smaller than yourself and a lot of men in this town enjoyed that sort of thing.
When I was a kid I stood in fields pretending I was a scarecrow. It was a sin to pretend we were something other than what we were but I have always enjoyed standing very still in fields. And often, when sin is used in the name of farming, Mennonites look the other way. Farming is very important to us. And I’m talking very important. When I was a kid we played a game in Sunday school, although we didn’t call it a game, we called it a pod. Our teacher played the roles of different people in a skit. First, she was Professor Knuf, and she couldn’t get on the heaven train. Then she was Rockin’ Rhonda, also not allowed on the train. Then the next Sunday she was Slugger Sam and again was denied access to the heaven train. Finally she was Farmer Fred and she was allowed onto the train because she had Jesus in her heart. It was a fun game. We all clapped for Farmer Fred and afterwards drew pictures of the other three people crying at the gates of heaven and Farmer Fred just sailing on by, with spokes of light coming off him. I enjoyed drawing very short shorts on Rockin’ Rhonda and a lipstick-stained cigarette dangling from her bottom lip. I drew Slugger Sam next to her, about to slam her over the head with his bat, and a word bubble coming from his mouth that said Jezebel! I didn’t quite get why Professor Knuf didn’t make the cut, unless it was because he was a professor of science and believed in facts. I considered giving Farmer Fred a word bubble that said Fry, Knuf, fry! but then I realized that that would be gloating and farmer or no farmer, you don’t gloat on the heaven train.
One afternoon when I was standing still in my grandma’s sugar-beet field I noticed two black dresses, the ugly Fortrel kind that many old women in our town wear on a daily basis, flying around like large crazy birds way up in the sky near the water tower. I hadn’t realized, right then, that they were dresses but I figured it out after a while. I stood and watched as they flew all the way over to my grandma’s yard. I was amazed that they were flying so close together and I thought it was great because they were dancing all over the place, seriously shaking it in this crazy, free, beautiful way until finally one of them fell onto the roof of my grandma’s barn and the other one coasted in for a spectacularly gentle landing right at my feet. It was one of the best things that had ever happened to me, watching those dresses dancing wildly in the wind.
I didn’t touch the one lying on the ground beside me, it seemed like some kind of sacred object, but I kicked a little dirt over it and then put a rock on top of the dirt. I said goodbye to it like I was a little kid who didn’t know the difference between a dress and a person and I completely ignored the dress that had dropped onto the barn roof. It might still be there. I should check one of these days.
Travis and me just got back from driving around. We drove around and around, not on Main Street, like Bert and his girlfriend do in Bert’s Red Phantom, but on country roads with a six of Old Stock between us and some reasonably good shit on the radio. We get dusty when the windows are open but we swelter to death if they’re not. I put my bare feet up on the dash and Travis gets bugged when I leave toe prints on the windshield. I can work all the knobs on the radio with my feet and even change the tape and put it back into its case.
Sometimes we race farm dogs, but I don’t enjoy that very much because I’m always afraid they’ll get caught up under the car wheels. It hasn’t happened yet. Sometimes we stick messages of protest onto cows, with wide black electrical tape. HANDS OFF, FARM BOY. Things like that.
Today we climbed a solitary tree in the middle of a field and took turns jumping from higher and higher branches. We saw a gopher that looked exactly like the old guy who bags groceries at Tomboy. Same expression. We thought a flock of crows was plotting to kill us like in the movie The Birds which we had never seen but knew about and then remembered that a flock of crows was called a murder. We threw pieces of dried-up dirt at them and they flew away. We accidentally broke a bottle in the field and spent half an hour picking up all the little pieces so that the cows wouldn’t step on them and then another half-hour burying them deep in the dirt. Then I taught Travis how to braid long pieces of grass and we made a little tiara and placed it on the head of a cow that was just lying there and didn’t seem to care at all. After that we just sat in the shade under the tree and I asked him if he’d donate one of his kidneys to me if I ever needed it and he said yeah and I said good, thank you, and then he said wait, will having only one kidney affect how much I can drink? And I said probably, and he said then, hmmm, he’d have to think about it.
On the way home I asked him if we could stop at my grandma’s old barn to see if the dress was still up there. He asked me what I wanted to do with it and I said nothing, I just wanted to see if it was still there.
My grandma died in the fall while watching a Blue Jays game on TV. Her feet were up and her hair was in curlers and there was a can of tomato soup simmering away on the stove. Now her house was used for missionaries to live in when they were home on furlough.
Travis and I drove up into the driveway and got out and stared at the barn. We went inside it to see if there was a ladder somewhere but there wasn’t so we drove his truck around to the back and then he stood on the cab part and I climbed up onto his shoulders and then up onto the roof. The dress wasn’t there. I had really been hoping that it would be and when I couldn’t find it I felt tired and pissed off and hot and stupid.