This is My Song Page 9

  She sat with her back to a tree, closed her eyes and hoped that the goshawk was happy. If the bird couldn’t be here, with her, then at least let it be freewheeling over the mountain range, circling and dipping and singing its hymn to the thin air.

  There would be, Annie eventually decided, no memories of that spring. Oh, she would still exist, but then so do rocks. She thought that is what I am, a rock bedded into the soil, being rained on and shone on, heated and cooled, ignored. I am a sinking rock, because rocks never rise. They stay in one place and are slowly, silently, anonymously pushed down until finally, without anyone noticing, they leave the open world and slip into the airless tomb of the substrata.

  Her father worked and ate and slept and cried out most nights, as he had always done. Her mother painted bleached landscapes, cooked and ate and slept and murmured comforts to her father, as she had always done. Their daughter, the rock, ate and went to school in a stupid converted barn and did her pointless chores and pushed her bed close to the bare window where she lay in the hope, the forlorn hope –

  Why was her life taking so long to be … whatever it intended to be?

  A second decision: it was time to hate Nancy Jefferson. Not just be mean, be unforgiving. Be rude! As sharp as a knife! It was deserved. Nancy had been skiting to the other girls about Honey Academy, which was particularly hard on Brenda, who’d been told that she was just as likely going to boarding school next term, way over in Moose Jaw. Of all places, winked Nancy. Don’t they call those folk Moose Javians? Hey, Brenda, you’re going to be a Moose Javian. Might have to grow some big antlers on that pretty head of yours, uh-huh? Here, eat some grass.

  One day Annie said, ‘Hey, Nancy?’

  ‘Annie.’

  ‘Something I need to say –’

  ‘Annie? Oh, you’re coming too! That’s grand –’

  ‘Nancy,’ she said in a plain-as-day voice, ‘I’ll never go to Honey Academy, not if they take the likes of you.’

  Oh, delicious! Exquisite! She thought that Keira Krug’s eyes were going to pop. Keira had big shiny bull eyes. They would make a mighty black mess if they did go.

  Nancy, meantime, couldn’t believe it. Could not believe it! Delicious!

  They were outside, squatted on a thick green mat. Annie kept nibbling at her cheese sandwich, which now tasted sweeter than caramel. Nancy’s face was brick-red and sort of pocky, patchy. She said in a narrow voice, ‘Annie, I think you’ve got that wrong.’

  ‘No,’ said Annie, ‘came out exactly right.’

  ‘No,’ insisted Nancy, ‘I insist, your facts are wrong.’ Aware now that she had recaptured the audience which had always been faithfully hers, she said, ‘Annie, I believe you meant to say, I’d never go to Honey Academy because my lowly father is a fence-mender –’

  The shifting air –

  ‘And my lowly mother is a deaf mute who can’t do a single thing that might benefit another person –’

  Howling air –

  ‘So I can’t go to such a well-considered academy because those lowly people can’t pay. Besides which, it is clearly stated in the school prospectus that bird-freak bitches are not welcome. They are actively discouraged. Oh, yes, uh-huh. I do believe those were the facts that you meant to impart, Annie Ullmann.’

  She sat with her head bowed as it surged into her, the sense that all of it was wrong, not just this moment but everything. The entire span of living. She’d been so free and optimistic when the goshawk had come but now her precious bird was gone and she was a rock stuck in a toxic bed … She heard Nancy’s voice continuing but muffled, like she was underwater or there were pieces of thick cloth covering her ears.

  ‘Girls,’ Nancy was saying from some distant place, ‘summer-break stories. I’ll start. The Jefferson family will be in Spain. Yes, that’s right, Brenda Whitmore, Spain. Where the Spaniards live. Our family will be there on account of the beaches and the bulls. Daddy wants to see the bulls, so he’ll take George while Mummy and I lie on the beach and get ourselves nicely tanned –’

  Annie reached across and slapped her, but the second hit, a follow-up punch to the midpoint of Nancy’s flapping mouth, was much harder. Nancy clamped her lips, fell back and rolled sideways, knees drawn high until the breath that she was holding finally expelled itself, her legs flailed and the wails began.

  ‘Oh my,’ said Keira Krug.

  Heat transported Annie. She vaulted the fence and ran deep into the heart of the prairie.

  She hadn’t thought to do that. Nor had she thought to feel so guilty.

  Hit her. Hit her! Hit Nancy Jefferson!

  Annie stumbled on but it didn’t seem right or reasonable for such a violent criminal to remain on a well-formed and visible track. That track was surely for the righteous – nice-mannered children trundling home to their proud parents or God-loving men moving their tractors and ploughs and harvesters after a long day of honest toil. Not for the likes of her!

  She veered left, veered right, scrambled ahead, turned back and around. When the prairie shifted to the orderliness of the cultivated paddocks she headed in the opposite direction, beating past uneven crowds of grass and weeds. She had quickly determined that there should be no fluency or pattern to her exit in case she’d been followed, or the other, greater likelihood, that the police had been called in to locate her and prosecute her and whip her into jail for the remainder of her days.

  Hit Nancy Jefferson … sore in the chest she stopped, bent over and breathed hard. When her air had returned she thought to check her fist, which was sore. Was there blood? Maybe a speck of red on that knuckle, even a tiny split – but what about poor Nancy’s mouth? A big bruise or busted lip or worse, bucked-in teeth … she’d need a dentist, maybe braces, which cost a fortune, hurt too, all that silver metal strangling your gums and rasping against your tongue –

  Annie raised herself to a big sky, big land. She wept briefly, rubbed her eyes, considered for a fleeting moment that she might avenge Nancy by hitting herself in the face because that would be a way of setting things right, wouldn’t it, that would be a fair and proper atonement for her sin … Instead she saw a biggish rock with a flattened edge and decided to sit there a while, maybe even die there, if only the grass dust would stop tickling inside her nostrils and drying her throat.

  Warm sun, reason returning. The thing about Nancy, she thought glumly, they all knew that she was a big talker who liked to skite about money and that huge house that Brenda, looking around for fear of being heard by someone or even something for pity’s sake, said must be burdensome. Liked to skite about that do-as-you-wish kind of life, but it was mostly harmless, mostly Nancy amusing herself or, more likely, filling in the empty spaces. Annie knew about that, she’d known for a long time. Nancy didn’t set out to be superior or snooty about stuff – it was a big puffy put-on because the girl just had to talk. Otherwise those silences could be long and heavy and pretty scary. Some people didn’t mind the silences, some people did. Some people, like Nancy, dreaded them. So that was just her way, to prattle through her time on earth – which wasn’t such a bad a way to be. She certainly didn’t deserve some crazy punching her on the mouth.

  Annie breathed deep, glanced around. She was in a bitsy clearing, a raggedy patch where the grass hadn’t properly grown because of cramped, unfriendly soil and a thick scatter of stones. She gazed across the prairie and saw through a light haze that the Jeffersons’ barn was still and empty-looking. Her own home, closer but in a different direction, looked exactly the same. Elsewhere, the crops and the wavering grass, the giant blue with its white sun nestled inside, the lilting breeze and nothing else. She closed her eyes and thought, I could be the last person on earth ...

  … The noise chilled her.

  Dutta-dutta! It was hard and metallic with an even tempo, same as someone’s thumb clacking through a pack of new cards.

  Then silence, perhaps a bird in the distance, perhaps not –

  Then the noise again, faster, angrier. D
utta-dutta-dutta-dutta! Dutta-dutta-dutta-dutta!

  Fear put sweat onto Annie’s brow, pulled a sickness into her gut. But she had to do it. Had to look.

  The snake was basking on the rock lower down, less than a yard from her leg.

  They’d all heard about rattlers. Stories that should never be told at night: the farmer who’d stepped on a monster, died before he hit the ground. The rattler that took a baby, swallowed it whole. They’d killed the snake, sliced it open and pulled out the baby. When they put the poor little mite in a coffin for burial the baby had rattled, like it had been turned into a baby-snake with that terrible end-piece stuck inside. Billy DuPont, who only ever came to school for the winter term, claimed to have a cousin, ex-military, who owned a rattle, preserved in a jar of chemical. Billy said his cousin wanted to get another, pin them on the ends of his Harley’s handlebars.

  Annie saw rough, pale skin coiled into a perfect mound, the rattle held high like a sword. Dutta-dutta-dutta-dutta!

  She bit inside her mouth, felt fresh tears on her cheeks. The snake had been sent, surely. She deserved this. The snake would rise, open its jaws and … She wanted her father, she was going to be sick, she wanted to pee, she wanted to run.

  No, don’t run! He told you …

  She had a vision: the entire prairie turning up at the edges, folding over and wrapping the two of them together into a weird and terrible parcel.

  Don’t run! Don’t even move …

  It hurt her muscles to be so still. The light faded; the day blended into itself. No such thing as time, no such thing as knowing until – from someplace else, a sudden madness of screeching and whistling! Annie flinched, lifted her eyes and saw the snake’s beady-eyed surprise as it was hauled into the disturbed air, its long form contorting and writhing then flying up as if magnetised. She realised that claws held the animal, strong black claws that might be attached to a different beast, a dragon or something prehistoric, because there was a beak and a black tail – it was a bird! Her goshawk surely, for which other could it be? Annie, suddenly giddy with it all, stood on quivering legs and instinctively raised her arm as the hawk screamed, its powerful wings beating a turbulence that dragged the snake towards the sun. She cried out, the bird continued to soar and scream until finally, when it was far away, she saw it hover and release, the snake cast out to float like a single strand of dark spaghetti before tumbling to a distant part of the forest, maybe to the side of a mountain. Annie wept freely as the hawk returned, delivering two wide, celebratory circles then spearing once more beyond sound, beyond sight.

  She spied the smoke first then heard the truck, chugging along the connecting road. As she came out of the grass he stopped the truck immediately, eased out of the driver’s seat and limped towards her. Annie did not dare look at his face. She stood on the lip of the road with her head down, staring hard at ancient tyre ruts as she waited for whatever judgment would come.

  But her father remained silent as he ushered her to the truck and drove them back down the road, to their cabin.

  Her mother held her and for a brief time Annie felt like a small child again, snuggled into her mother’s breast during summer storms. It was uncomplicated to be that way but she knew it could not last: she was twelve now, good as fully grown, and those kinds of moments, safer and holier than any church, could never last.

  Her father cleared his throat and said, ‘Mrs Jefferson sent a message.’

  Annie nodded. Her father touched her shoulder. She looked up and was surprised to see great tenderness in places that were usually cold and unyielding.

  He said, ‘Annika, listen to me. You must not fight back.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I –’

  ‘There will always,’ said her father slowly, ‘be people like that.’ The last word close to a spit. He closed his eyes. ‘But you must not fight back. You must not hate. If you do –’

  Her mother’s fingers flew into a sentence. The battle will never end.

  Annie said in a small, cracked voice, ‘I feel so ashamed –’

  Her mother kissed her on the brow and briefly stroked her arm with light fingers. Her father said, ‘It is done. You will apologise.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And if she says no,’ he continued, ‘then you will walk away. You will not fight and you will not hate. You must never do these things.’

  Annie sat untouched between them. The cabin was cosy. She could see their rickety wooden table with the brown glass vase and the saucepan that always held soup for replenishing or reheating and the patchwork curtains that her mother had made by cutting and sewing old dresses, and at that moment she loved it all.

  Tick-tock. She turned to him and said, ‘Pappa, why do you cry at night?’

  Her father stared. There were thin red veins in his eyes. He shook his head and suddenly Annie understood both the grandeur and limits of her role: to be there, to ask no more than he could give.

  That night she lay near the uncurtained window, as was now usual, closed her eyes and, in the absence of sleep, began to wonder if it had really happened – not Nancy Jefferson, her sore hand told her the truth of that – the rattler and the goshawk. Maybe, amid all that confusion and feverishness, she had dreamed it? Maybe she’d been stumbling about, lost and dismayed, and that filtered afternoon light, the prairie’s notorious trickery, had sent spirits … it was difficult to know. She hunkered down, pulled her blankets to her chin and replayed the day, over and over. It was late, a bright moon tipping the land with honey, when Annie slid into a thick-knitted sleep, having finally decided that whether the event had happened inside or outside her mind, the point was that she had seen the goshawk save her from the snake, and that was all that mattered.

  Ms Loveday had flat shiny hair and a kiss curl that leaked like oil onto her forehead. Nancy had once claimed that the kiss curl was a giveaway: no one who had actually been kissed would advertise in such a manner, which proved it once and for all, the other girls uncertain as to what was proved and how, but gingerly abiding with Nancy’s proclamation because that was what they did, had always done.

  Annie didn’t hear the whole conversation, which took place in the kitchen, but she picked up enough: perhaps it would be better if she did her final exams at home, the extra work sent over tomorrow and in a manila folder no less. Her father’s staccato murmurs suggested his agreement with this plan although he did cut the air with an emphatic ‘No!’ when Ms Loveday recounted, with some hesitation, the Jefferson family’s belief that Annie’s recent behaviour could well be seen as part of an ongoing campaign of harassment against Nancy and young, impressionable, sensitive George.

  She was eventually called out of her bedroom. Ms Loveday’s eyes and cheeks were as shiny as her hair. She asked for permission to hug Annie, which was odd, but Annie said okay. Ms Loveday hugged with surprising power, obviously having muscular arms beneath that array of tweed jackets that she preferred to wear. She said, ‘Sweetie, you know I do understand,’ which Annie wondered about, although it was best not to say.

  Hug completed, Ms Loveday stepped back and perused her with a tight smile. ‘Annie,’ she said, ‘next year –’

  Annie’s father said stiffly, ‘My daughter will be going to the Academy in Honey.’

  What? What!

  He said, ‘She is a girl of intelligence. This is what we want.’

  Ms Loveday frowned. ‘You do realise,’ she said, ‘that –’

  ‘This is what we want,’ repeated Annie’s father obstinately.

  The story, when it came out later that afternoon, bewildered Annie. Her parents had planned this for years – not weeks or months, but years! – by saving what money they could, refusing to buy anything but necessities. Her father had taken to working all day Saturdays because most of the other men did mornings only. Working afternoons meant some extra salary, which he kept locked inside his special brown case, the one that Annie had never been allowed to see inside. She only knew about it because her mother had confided.
>
  ‘What’s in the case, Mamma?’

  ‘It’s private. He will not say.’

  ‘Not even to you?’

  ‘He is allowed that much. We all are.’

  Now, in the centre of the table, a preserving jar stoked with silver dollars and thin rolls of notes sat next to a clip that held her school reports, sequenced.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ said Annie.

  ‘What we want,’ her father told her, his face long and proud and pinched in the yellow light.

  Those next few years, the intermission between twelve and sixteen, became entirely seasonal in their patterning. Summers were spent on the prairie, helping her parents with chores or making artificial friendship-time with Brenda, home on holidays from Moose Jaw, and Keira, failing every subject but loyal without question to Ms Loveday, whom Keira had long loved from afar, even to the point of developing her own droopy kiss curl. The girls were pleasant, undemanding company but better when rationed. Annie’s preferred pastime was to find the silent seclusion that she had once railed against and read books that she had brought home from the Academy library. With the exception of her father’s history tomes with their tiny print and abbreviated footnotes, there were few books in the cabin, so she absorbed the spirited ideals of the poets, especially her part-namesake Annie Louisa Walker and those Romantic Englishmen, Shelley and Keats. She enjoyed giggling at the airs and graces of her other part namesake, Anne of Green Gables, from the pen of that wondrous writer L.M. Montgomery, but most bewitching of all were the travel books. She was entranced by their descriptions of fractured landscapes and historical cities with cathedrals, and relished their coloured photographs: Le Tour Eiffel, the cliffs and castles of Ireland, those hot bubbling mud holes in New Zealand and a place called Machu Picchu, which made her feel both excited and strangely uneasy. As the years passed and the shadows of future plans began to form, Annie even considered that she might spend her summers writing novels and poems to sell in preparation for a life of travelling.