North of Unreal
Cruel Winter
Ice and dark and dark and snow. It’s winter, and you drink black milk from a bowl. Your bedroom window is thick with ice. The sky is flat and grey. Long icicles hang from the roof by their fingernails and your father knocks them down with a fat, red shovel and he hands them to you, sharp end first.
At school, the Irish janitor sits in his hot furnace room by the Boys Entrance that smells of boiled soap, and you step in the puddles of your boots. You walk home at dusk along the tops of huge snow hills that line the roads after the plows are gone. There’s a boy who follows you home along the snow and over the ice. He chases you the last bit, and waits until you fall. He’s the boy who beats your face with his red toque until your nose bleeds just one drop. He’s the boy who will hang himself from the tree in his mother’s front yard.
One day, you’ll write a story about what happened. About the crab apple tree and the weeping willow. About the girl with red boots whose father burned her cheek with hot raisin toast and threw her out in the snow in her socks before school. About the mark it left on her face. You’ll write a story about the oil boom and the wave of American hiring and the young professors who put their babies and their books into cardboard boxes and drove their wives across the border, heading north along the flat prairie past Nisku. You’ll imagine they are smiling. You’ll write about their houses, built sharp with glass, and the wives inside the stucco homes. You’ll write about the winter their wives ran bottle drives to raise money to get rid of the dark. About their campaign to get rid of the dark and save their children. Of course, this last part is just fiction. When you took off your mittens at school, you had to count the fingers on both your hands just to remember all the kids they found hanging or falling into air or stumbling out of their lives.
Some day, after your father grows old, a drunken man will lunge at him and knock your father off his feet. You’ll try to pretend they’re dancing. But your father will fall to the ground. He’ll look up at the sky and move his arms a little, as if he’s making a snow angel. Your mother will blame the lunge and the fall on your father’s scowl. His frown. Your father’s feelings, frozen right there on his face.
It’s winter, and the ground is slipping out from under us.
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