Snow Apples Read online

  SNOW APPLES

  Snow Apples

  MARY RAZZELL

  Copyright © 1984, 2006 by Mary Razzell

  First published in the USA by Groundwood Books in 2006

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher, or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free at 1-800-893-5777.

  Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press

  110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801, Toronto, Ontario M5V 2K4

  Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West

  1700 Fourth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) and the Ontario Arts Council.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Razzell, Mary

  Snow apples / Mary Razzell.

  First published: Vancouver: Groundwood Books / Douglas & McIntyre, 1984

  ISBN-13: 978-0-88899-741-8 (bound) ISBN-10: 0-88899-741-8 (bound)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-88899-728-9 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 0-88899-728-0 (pbk.)

  I. Title.

  PS8585.A99S66 2006 jC813’.54 C2005-906986-4

  Design by Michael Solomon

  Cover photograph by Tim Fuller

  Printed and bound in Canada

  With thanks to the late Carol Shields, who encouraged me to tell what it was really like to be a young girl at that time.

  1

  “DOES SHE scare you?” I asked Sonia. We had just jumped down from the school bus after classes, and we could see Helga Ness come out of the woods on one side of the road and start down the beach trail on the other. She looked skinny and old, and her running shoes flopped. Her eyes darted nervously at us, then away. Her dress was faded, with only traces of the original pattern remaining.

  “A little...” said Sonia. “Look at her. Why is she always carrying a stick and hitting the salal bushes?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “It’s like she’s angry or something.”

  “Maybe she’s crazy.”

  I agreed. “And she’s always talking to herself.”

  Helga was an old Norwegian woman who lived near us, and I often passed her on the way to the store.

  “Are you coming to my place today, Sheila?” Sonia asked.

  “Oh, I wish I could.” It was true. I’d rather go to Sonia Kolosky’s house than my own. I felt more at home there, if only because her mother treated me as if I was a nice person. My mother had a way of making me feel the exact opposite. “But I have to pick up the mail and go right home. My mother says I spend too much time at your house.”

  Before Sonia’s family moved to the Landing from Saskatchewan a year earlier, I was so lonely, I thought I would die. We’d moved here ourselves from Edmonton two years before, and there were no other families with children. When the Koloskys came with their five boys and five girls—and all looking like Mrs. Kolosky, with blonde hair and pale blue eyes—the census was raised to forty-three. There must have been a Mr. Kolosky because there was a small baby, but no one had ever seen him.

  There were other girls at the school at Gibson’s Landing, four miles away, but almost all of us went in by bus or boat, so there were no after-school friendships for me. Until Sonia.

  If I’d met Sonia in Edmonton I doubt that we would have become friends. For one thing, she was only fourteen, and I was almost sixteen. And we were too different. I would have been too busy going to the library or Guides with friends I’d known since grade school. Sonia was more a home person. She was like a second mother in that house on the Upper Road.

  I loved being in that house. Mrs. Kolosky was as plain and wholesome as a parsnip, but she treated me like I was kid number eleven in her brood.

  I was thinking all these things as I waved goodbye to Sonia and headed down the road to the village store and post office.

  Then, all of a sudden, the world seemed to split apart with noise.

  There was a series of loud blasts from fish boats out in the Sound. I could see a tug circling round and round in a tight circle, and all the time it was blowing its whistle. Seagulls shrieked and scattered. Frightened birds flew in clouds from the trees on the side of the road.

  I ran toward the beach. There was Helga Ness trying to drag her old boat from above the tide level down to the water’s edge. She was pushing and shoving and straining like a crazy woman.

  I felt I had to go over to help her. Together we got it into the ocean. She hesitated a moment, then looked at me as if she wanted me to get in. I didn’t want to, but that’s what she seemed to want, so I pushed the boat out and we both hopped in. Helga started the motor, and we headed out to the nearest fish boat to see what the trouble was.

  As soon as we got close enough to the Nancy D, she called out to the skipper, “Did you find them?”

  “I don’t know who you mean, missus,” he shouted back. “All I know is that it’s VE Day. The war is over. The war is over, thank God!” And he pulled on the boat’s whistle once again.

  Helga’s head sank onto her bony chest, and she slumped as if she’d been hit. I had to reach around her to grab the rudder to straighten out the boat.

  By the time I got the boat back to shore, Helga was sitting up again, staring out at the sea. I pulled the boat up as far as I could and tied it to one of the logs that lay above the line of dried seaweed ribboning the shore. But by the time I had finished, Helga was already off the sand and heading up the pine-needled beach trail.

  Before she turned off the trail, she looked around and saw me watching her. The look in her eyes made me flinch, it was so desolate.

  * * *

  “There you are, Sheila. Two letters for your mother today.” Mr. Percy slid them through the wicket.

  Mr. Percy runs the village store and post office, and there is nothing in the village that he doesn’t know about. Some people say that he isn’t above holding the mail up to the light, but I think it has to do with his eyebrows. They are thick and peaked, and when Mr. Percy gets interested in anything, his eyebrows rise higher and higher until they almost disappear into his hair. I’ve found myself telling Mr. Percy’s eyebrows things that I would never tell anyone else.

  “Did you hear the good news?” he said. “The war is over. It’s VE Day, Victory Day in Europe. It’s just come over the radio.”

  I told him about Helga. “What did she mean, Mr. Percy? ‘Did you find them?’ Find who?”

  Mr. Percy sighed. “Her two boys and her husband. They drowned in a canoeing accident. The bodies were never found. It was before you folks moved here.”

  The old wooden clock over the counter ticked away our thoughts. Mr. Percy busied himself at the ice box. He handed me an opened bottle of 7-Up, then popped another one for himself.

  “This is a day for celebration, nonetheless. A day for the history books. You can tell your children that there you were, fourteen years old...”

  “Fifteen, I’m almost sixteen,” I interrupted.

  “...and stood on the beach and watched the fish boats and tugs celebrate the defeat of Adolf Hitler. It’s a day we’ve all been praying for.”

  * * *

  My mother wasn’t pleased that I was late. I could tell by the way she rammed the alder wood into the stove and let the lid go bang. So before I hung up my jacket, I started talking. I told her about Helga, and about the war being over, and by the time I had finished explaining, I had the potatoes out of the cooler.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her sit down suddenly
at the kitchen table.

  “Well, I never,” she said. She sat still for a long time, which in itself was unusual because she was always moving, always busy. Even when she sat, her hands were occupied, mending or knitting.

  I finished peeling the potatoes, put them in a blackened pot and set the pot on the hottest part of the stove.

  Still she sat.

  “You want carrots?” I asked.

  “Um, yes. You know what this means, don’t you? The war over and all...” My lateness was completely forgotten. “It means your father will be back home.” She marched her fingernails on the table like so many troops. “And he’ll be out of work, as per usual. At least with him in the service, I could be sure a check was coming in every month.”

  I stiffened. As I cleaned the carrots, I thought about my parents. My mother is fifteen years younger than my father but you’d never know it. She acts older. I wondered why she said she loved him but was always complaining about everything he did. And, if he loved her, why did he cause her worry about money and food and taking care of us kids?

  It had been this way as far back as I could remember. It was a relief for her when he joined the air force. He had lied about his age to get in; he was fifty-five but looked forty. For the first time she had enough money, as she said, “to keep the home together.”

  I set the table around my mother. She was scribbling something on the back of a used envelope—adding, subtracting, calculating. It seemed to work out all right in the end, because she got up briskly and reached for the frying pan.

  The sausages were a crisp brown by the time I heard my brothers outside. Their timing, as usual, was perfect. You could call and search and never find them, but have a meal ready to be put on the table, and they would appear out of nowhere. I considered it a special talent of theirs.

  Paul, my oldest brother, was away in the air force. That left three brothers at home. Tom was fourteen, and being so close in age, we were rivals in everything, from who got the highest marks at school to who could stay up latest at night. Jim was eleven and Mike was ten.

  They were good-looking boys, even if they were my brothers. Everyone said so. It griped me that they had the best features of both parents or else—somehow—it looked better on them. But my mother just told me, “It’s what’s inside that’s important.”

  She was strong on character. That was the big difference between my parents. My father thought the here and now were to be enjoyed. She thought we would be rewarded later, when we died and went to heaven. In the meantime there was work to be done and responsibilities to be met. Dad loved to drink beer and talk. She wanted the outhouse whitewashed and some money put aside for a rainy day.

  My mother said I took after my father, and the way she said it, this was not a good thing. It was true that we both had brown eyes and dark skin that tanned quickly in the summer, but it was my character, or lack of it, that she meant.

  The boys came in with armfuls of wood and cedar kindling. Jim and Mike had been riding horses, they said. This was free-range country, and it wasn’t much trouble to get hold of a horse if you wanted one.

  Tom smelled of fish and salt water. The cat roused herself from the couch and coiled herself around his legs so that he couldn’t move to unload his armful of wood.

  “Sheila,” he said, “unwind this animal from me.” As I moved closer to him, I caught a glimpse of a cigarette package in his jacket pocket. I had one on him now, something that would counter any threat of him telling that I wore lipstick at school.

  When we were seated at the table for dinner, I couldn’t help smiling at Tom.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Nothing,” I answered. We were back to a normal day. Helga, the shrill whistles of the circling fish boats, the German surrender, my father’s homecoming—they had all faded to the background. Our hands reached for the food.

  “Sheila, Tom, Jim, Mike.” My mother strung our names out in a litany. “We will say grace first, please.”

  “Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts...” I sneaked a look at the plate of sausages. There were eighteen. That meant three each and one extra for the boys because my mother said they needed more protein for growing than girls did. “...Amen.”

  2

  SO THAT was Tuesday. VE Day, May 9, 1945. The day Mr. Percy said would go down in the history books.

  The girls’ basketball team was to play against Port Mellon on the Victoria Day weekend, and I was one of the forwards. Sonia was the other. A fish boat had been hired by the school board to take us up to Port Mellon, a pulp-mill town whose smell often drifted down the Sound, depending on which way the wind blew.

  “Do you think there will be any cute guys there?” I asked Sonia as we huddled together at the stern of the Mimi 1. The smell of the diesel was rich with adventure, the sound of the engine was music.

  Sonia shrugged. She didn’t really care.

  I did. My mother accused me of being boy-crazy, and for once I had to agree with her. I felt kind of funny around boys. Too excited. Too interested. At the same time, I was afraid of them because of the longings they caused.

  Even in Edmonton when I had been a couple of years younger, I’d felt it. One of the neighbor boys my age had been kicking a soccer ball around, and it had landed in front of me. Without thinking, I’d grabbed it and started running. He had run after me and tackled, and we’d rolled around on the grass. There had been a sharp rapping on the window, and my mother had called me in.

  “No more wrestling with boys,” she’d said. I’d acted as if I didn’t know what she’d meant, but I had been aware of the sharp, sweet ache within me when I had been on the ground with the boy above me, his head blotting out the sun, a halo around his head. I had felt dizzy, scared, stirred.

  * * *

  We were in the last quarter of the game. The score was tied. The Port Mellon team had a loud cheering section. We had no one because there hadn’t been room on the fish boat. To make matters worse, a male voice was making rude remarks every time I got hold of the ball.

  “Who is that creep?” I asked one of the Port Mellon girls when a time-out was called for a foul.

  “Bob McLean. His father runs the mill.” Then there was no more time for conversation because the whistle blew, and the game was on again.

  Sonia got the ball and passed it to me. I was at the halfway line of the court, and I pivoted, looking for Sonia to move forward toward our basket.

  “Watch the dum-dum drop it!” Bob McLean yelled from the bleachers.

  I pivoted again, and with the momentum of that plus the anger that exploded inside me, I brought the ball up from my side in a great sweeping arc. The ball swished through the net without even touching the rim.

  No one was more astonished than I was. Back of the whistling and applauding, I heard Bob McLean again.

  “Wow-eee,” he called.

  At the dance following the game, he came straight over to me. I expected him to be conceited, and he was.

  He had every reason to be. He looked like an ad for tennis sweaters: good-looking, well built. I couldn’t help wondering why he was bothering with me. He could have had any girl there.

  “You’re pretty good,” he said.

  If I’d been honest, I would have told him it had just been a lucky shot. But I just smiled.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said, “and go over to my house and listen to records. Do you like Jackie Teagarden?”

  It didn’t occur to me not to go. This was what I’d come to Port Mellon for. But still, I had to be careful.

  “I can only stay a little while. I don’t want to miss the boat home.”

  “We’ll be back in plenty of time,” he promised.

  We walked along the wooden sidewalks that led from the community hall past all the identical houses where the mill workers lived. The windows were curtainless, and I could see the workers in their kitchens, suspenders down, underwear showing. One had a radio on loudl
y. From another house I heard the wail of a baby.

  At our right were the buildings of the mill. Naked light bulbs hung high, showing the heavy wooden beams supporting the structures. The saws whined, and the wood shrieked as if the logs were being desecrated.

  The McLean house was far from the sound of the mill and set in the middle of a terraced garden. From the living room we could see the glow of the lights of Vancouver reflected in the southern sky. Out in the night, frogs croaked.

  Bob’s parents were out for the evening. They never minded, he told me, if he brought someone home even if they weren’t there.

  He let me choose the records while he got the fireplace going. He had Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra—everything. When the logs had caught and the flames were dancing flickers up the chimney, Bob went out into the kitchen and made us each a cup of hot chocolate.

  While we drank that, I looked around. I’d never been in a house like this before. Leather chairs and books and rich oil paintings of cedar trees and Indian totems and logged-off mountains. Then I felt his arm on my shoulders as he turned me to kiss him. In the background Bunny Berrigan was singing: “I’ve flown around the world in a plane/I’ve settled revolutions in Spain/Now the North Pole I have charted/Still I can’t get started with you.”

  I was beginning to come apart inside. Bob touched my breast. But then he got up abruptly and turned away from me, going to the picture window to stare out at the stars.

  Had I put him off somehow?

  When he came back to stand in front of me, he just said in a serious voice, “Come on. Let’s go back now.”

  The dance was beginning to break up by the time we got back. Bob walked with me down to the government float where the Mimi 1 was tied up.

  “I’ll write you,” he said, “and I’ll come down to see you. How about next weekend? Would that be all right with your family? I could come down Friday night and leave on the Sunday noon boat.”