After River Read online

  AFTER RIVER

  A Novel

  DONNA MILNER

  For

  Tom

  Always

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Geography has made us neighbours. History has made us friends … What unites us is far greater than what divides us.

  John F. Kennedy: Address before the Canadian Parliament

  Ottawa, May 17, 1961

  Chapter One

  HE CAME ON foot. Like a mirage, he rose in a shimmer of heat waves above the winding dirt road leading to our door. I watched him from the shadows of our enclosed porch.

  I was fourteen on that hot July day in 1966, would be fifteen in less than a month. I leaned against the porch doorway and squinted into the sun while the last dregs of water drained from the wringer washer behind me. Outside, the week’s laundry hung limp and motionless on the three clotheslines stretched across the yard. Sheets, hurtfully white in the brilliant sunshine, created a backdrop for the orderly procession of our family’s attire. Mom stood out on the wooden laundry platform, her mouth full of clothes pegs, her back to the road. She reached down and plucked a denim shirt from the wicker basket at her feet, snapped out the garment with a crack of wet fabric and pegged it to the line.

  There was something different about my mother that day. On washdays she usually wore a kerchief tied in a rolled knot in the middle of her forehead. That afternoon, bobby pins and combs held up her hair. Wayward blonde locks and wispy tendrils escaped around her face and at the nape of her neck. But it was more than that. She was distracted, flushed even. I was certain she had applied a touch of Avon rouge to her cheeks. Earlier, she had caught me studying her face as she fed my brothers’ jeans through the wringer.

  ‘Oh, this heat,’ she said, then pushed back her hair and tucked it behind her ears.

  Her attention was not on the road though, as she hung the last load, and I saw him before she did. I watched as he came around the bend by our bottom pasture. He crossed over the cattle guard, through the flickering shadows of poplar trees, and back into the naked glare of the day. He carried a large green duffel bag on one shoulder and a black object slung over the other. As he got closer I saw it was a guitar case bouncing against his back in the easy rhythm of his unhurried steps.

  Hippie. It was a new word in my vocabulary. A foreign word. It meant oddly dressed young Americans marching beneath peace signs that urged, ‘Make Love, Not War!’ It meant Vietnam War protesters sticking flowers into the gun barrels of riot police. And it meant draft-dodgers. Some of whom, it was rumoured, were entering Canada through the border crossing a mile and a half south of our farm. Still they were nothing more than rumours. Rumours, and the snowy images from the hit and miss television reception in our mountain valley. I’d never seen one in the flesh. Until now.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Mom’s voice broke my trance. She stepped in from the laundry platform and handed me the empty basket. Before I could answer she turned to look down the road. As she did, our cow dog, Buddy, lifted his head, then bolted off the bottom porch step where he had been sleeping in the afternoon sun. The border collie leapt over the picket fence and raced past the barn, a blur of black and white, barking a belated warning.

  ‘Buddy!’ Mom called after him. But by then the long-haired stranger was kneeling in the dust on the road, murmuring quiet words to the growling dog. After a moment he stood and, with Buddy at his side, continued up to the yard. He smiled at us from the other side of the fence as the border collie licked his hand. Mom smiled back, smoothed her damp apron and started down the porch steps. I hesitated for only a moment before I put down the laundry basket and followed. We met him at the gate. She was expecting him.

  She wasn’t expecting the heartache that would follow like a cold wind.

  Chapter Two

  I MUST HAVE known.

  In all these years no one has ever said it out loud. But I could see the unasked question in their eyes. How could I not have known? Thirty-four years later, I still ask myself the same question.

  Sometimes I catch myself falling back into memories. Back to the ‘before’ of my childhood. Before everything changed. Back to the time when it was unimaginable that my family would not always be together. To when my entire world was our family farm, four hundred acres carved out of a narrow mountain valley deep in the Cascade Mountains of British Columbia. Everything else, the town of Atwood three miles north, and its twenty-five hundred inhabitants, appeared to be only backdrop to our perfect lives. Or so it seemed until I was almost fifteen years old.

  That’s when the ‘after’ memories begin.

  Sometimes I can stop them, those ‘after’ memories. Sometimes I can go for weeks, months, even years, pretending none of it ever happened. Sometimes I even believe it.

  Still, it’s impossible to forget that summer day in 1966. The day that marks the time when my family was whole and good and right, to the time when nothing would ever be the same again.

  The beginning of the sequence of events that would change all our lives wasn’t catastrophic or earth shattering. It even looked beautiful for a while.

  Afterward, Mom would blame everything that happened on the world encroaching upon our little farm. New highways were being built; one would connect our town to the Trans-Canada. In the East Kootenays, valleys were being flooded and dams constructed to carry electricity to a growing province – and, my father said, ‘to our power-hungry neighbour to the south.’

  ‘There’s too many jobs available,’ Mom had worried out loud during dinner the evening Jake, the hired hand who had been with us for as long as I could remember, left without warning. ‘Who’s going to be interested in working on a small dairy farm in the middle of nowhere?’

  ‘We’ll get along,’ Dad
said between mouthfuls. ‘Morgan and Carl will take up the slack and Natalie can help in the dairy. We’ll be fine.’ He leaned over and patted her hand.

  ‘No,’ Mom pulled away and stood up to get the coffeepot. ‘You keep increasing the herd, and my boys keep quitting school. At least one of my sons is going to finish high school.’ She didn’t add, ‘and go to university.’ She never spoke this dream out loud any more. Carl was her last hope.

  She hired the first and only person to call about her two-line ad in the Atwood Weekly. ‘He has a nice voice,’ she said after she announced it that July morning. She started to gather up the breakfast dishes. Then, as if it was an afterthought, she added, ‘He’s American.’

  I glanced over at my father. His thick eyebrows lifted as he digested her words. I knew my parents held opposing views on the idea of young Americans fleeing the draft and seeking refuge in Canada. I wondered if, for the first time, I would see my parents have a real argument. Dad was seldom cross with Mom, but then he wasn’t used to her taking it on herself to make a decision without talking it over with him first. And certainly not over an issue she knew he held a strong opinion on. He said nothing. Still, by the way he stood up and snatched his snap-brim fedora – his milk delivering hat – from the peg by the door then slammed it onto his head, I knew he was not pleased.

  ‘Well,’ Mom said after the kitchen door closed behind Dad and Carl, ‘I think that went well, eh, Natalie?’ Then her face turned serious as she snapped on her rubber gloves and said, ‘I refuse to lose another son to this farm.’

  From the moment they could carry a bucket, my three brothers were hostages to the milking schedule. Each morning they woke up in darkness to step onto the forever-cold linoleum floors of the upstairs bedroom and pulled on their overalls. I still believe Boyer slept with his clothes on.

  Boyer, the eldest, had a room – more of a cubbyhole – to himself in the attic. When he was twelve years old he got tired of sharing his bedroom with Morgan and Carl. So he made himself a nest among the rafters above the two upstairs bedrooms. He hammered together a crude wooden ladder to climb through a hole in the hall ceiling. When he was fourteen he built a real set of stairs.

  That narrow attic room was so cold on some winter days that you could see your breath. In the summers even the open window would not let the stifling air escape. Boyer never complained. The room was his sanctuary, and those of us privileged enough to be invited in, to share his company and the books that eventually filled every available space up there, envied the world he’d created under the eaves of the farmhouse built by my grandfather’s hands at the turn of the century.

  I was the only girl and so had a bedroom to myself. It had been Boyer’s room before I came along and threw off the sleeping arrangements. If he ever resented me for it, he never showed it. I would have gladly shared the bedroom with him. I was too young to understand his need to have a room of his own. It was a long time before I stopped asking why he had to sleep with my brothers, and then way up in the attic.

  Every morning Boyer was the first one to make his way down the enclosed stairway into the kitchen. For many years he would stir the embers, then add kindling, to re-light the hulking cast iron cook stove for Mom before he headed to the barn. After we got the electric range in 1959 he would go straight to the front porch where he pulled on knee-high rubber boots, winter or summer. And every morning, at exactly ten minutes before five, Boyer let the kitchen door slam behind him. His cue to let everyone know he was on his way to the barn. In the early darkness he and Jake, the hired man who lived above the dairy, herded the cows in from the pasture.

  Morgan and Carl were never anxious to begin the day. Most mornings my father would holler up and threaten his youngest sons with ice water. ‘Mutt and Jeff,’ he called them. Morgan was two years older than Carl, but from the time they were toddlers Carl towered over him. The two of them were best friends, inseparable. Once Morgan stumbled down the stairs wiping the sleep from his eyes, we knew Carl would not be far behind, his heavy woollen socks flapping out in front of his feet like so much extra skin. Mom was forever scolding him to pull up his socks, and we all wondered that he didn’t trip over them, especially in the dark of the stairway, but they were as much a part of him as his toes.

  My brothers’ morning parade was as regular and expected as my mother’s prayers.

  Mom prayed at every occasion. When we were growing up she made sure we did too. At each meal we bowed our heads before a fork ever clicked against a plate. Every night after the milking, beneath pictures of Mary and Jesus propped on the mantel, beads in hand, she gathered us all together in the parlour. ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee,’ she led the rosary while I knelt beside my brothers on the scratchy pink and grey flowered linoleum trying not to fidget. Mom believed wholeheartedly in the saying, ‘the family that prays together stays together’.

  When I was very young I would peek up at my mother’s bowed head and moving lips as she fingered her beads and think that if praying made you that beautiful, then I wanted to be sure to do it right.

  Mother grew up Protestant. When she and Dad married she converted. She embraced the Catholic Church with the enthusiasm of a hungry lover.

  ‘I knew the first time I walked into St Anthony’s with your father, that I belonged,’ she once told me. ‘It was the feeling,’ she said, ‘the feeling of permanence. As if the building, the statues, the paintings, and icons had been there – would be there – forever. The light streaming in through the stained glass windows, the rituals, the perpetually burning candles, the incense,’ she mused as if talking to herself. ‘It all felt natural, right somehow.’

  The rosary beads were her comfort, something real, something solid to hold onto. They moved through her fingers as easily as breath through her lungs. ‘Converting,’ she said, ‘was like coming home.’

  She promised her future children to the Catholic Church. But the truth was, except perhaps for Boyer at one time, none of us ever became as devout as she was.

  Even our father, who had been born Catholic, was not as pious. Every Sunday, before he started his milk deliveries, he dropped us off at St Anthony’s. When his route was complete he picked us up. If the weather and roads were good, and the chores were finished at home, he headed back into town for a later mass. Mom would return with him, attending twice on those Sundays.

  She said nothing about his sporadic attendance. She knew the farm came first: before church, before friends, before family, before anything. Still, he joined us every evening for rosary in the parlour, and when my parents went to bed I often heard them murmur prayers in unison. I imagined them kneeling beside their quiltcovered four-poster bed like two picture-book children, their hands folded in reverence, their heads bowed.

  Prayers were not all I heard.

  My brothers, although we never spoke of it, must have heard too. The open ceiling grates that allowed heat to rise to the second-storey hallway also allowed the noises of the night to drift up. Noises not meant for children’s ears. Later, as a mother myself, I often wondered at that.

  They must have realized to some extent that sounds carried upstairs, because my parents seldom had conversations in their bedroom. The only words I ever heard were the perfunctory, ‘Goodnight, Gus,’ and, ‘Goodnight, Nettie,’ after their prayers. Then I’d hear the slow groaning of springs as they climbed into bed. And sometimes the rhythmic creaks and muffled animal sounds, followed by a few moments of silence before the night filled with my father’s throat-catching snores and my mother’s quick sneezes.

  It was not until years later, as I watched my mother hold herself together during the days following my father’s death, that I realized my mother gave three stifled sneezes whenever she was holding back tears. I don’t think my father ever realized it.

  He seemed as oblivious to her nocturnal wanderings.

  Often, deep in the night, I would awaken to the protest of bedsprings, then hear my mother’s footsteps as she left the
ir bedroom. Sometimes, when I was a child, I crept down the stairs on the pretence of needing to use the bathroom. If Mom wasn’t sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and a book I went searching for her. I tiptoed around in the dark until I found her, either in the sunroom behind the parlour, or out on the front porch, staring into the night. Once I’d located her I slipped back upstairs before she realized I was there. I never once heard my father get up to join her or ask her to come back to bed.

  During the day it was a different story. My parents were not above public displays of affection. They used any excuse to hold hands or put their arms around each other. Whenever they were within arm’s length they touched. Like a teenage girl, Mom always sat right beside Dad in the truck. He would lift his chin and howl like an adolescent school boy – enjoying the embarrassment of whichever one of his children happened to be riding along – whenever he accidentally-on-purpose brushed Mom’s bare leg with the gearshift. At the kitchen table, my mother constantly touched Dad’s shoulder or stroked his arm while they discussed the business of the farm. And whenever they were outside together they walked hand in hand. Yet it seemed, when the day was done, as if all personal conversation was cut off at their bedroom door and they became intimate strangers. As if after settling in bed these two ceased to be, and whatever happened after that was not a part of who they were. I cannot imagine the strange couplings, which must have taken place through layers of nightclothes, leading to my mother giving birth to four children by the time she was twenty-six years old.

  Years later, after my father died, my mother told me – in an unusual late-night, soul-baring conversation brought on by grief and wine – that she’d never seen my father without his clothes on, and that he’d never seen her fully naked. From the way she said it I understood this was not her choice, but just the way things were with him. I was left with the image of each of them in opposite corners of the room, their backs to each other, as they changed in the dim light. I imagined my mother, behind her wardrobe door, slipping out of her printed dress and pulling a floor-length cotton nightgown over her head. And in the other corner, I envisioned my father stripping down to his woollen underwear. Longjohns. He wore them like a second skin, winter and summer; the only time he was out of them was for his infrequent baths.