Frances Itani’s “Bolero”

The first in our collection of Summer is Short stories that will appear on the website over the next few months, please enjoy “Bolero.” Francis Itani’s collection of 10 connected short stories, Leaning, Leaning Over Water, is almost entirely narrated by Trude, the middle child of a family in pre-Quiet Revolution Quebec. Subtle, spare and intensely stunning, the stories are astonishing portraits of a family come undone, and a rich and honest reading experience that captures the delicate line between despair and laughter. In “Bolero,” Trude remembers the carefree days of a childhood in rural Quebec alongside her older sister Lyd.

Bolero

The following spring, after break-up, the logs came down, the river dark with timber. Lyd and I went to bed on a Friday night and when we awoke the next morning there was a hush over the river, logs coming and coming in that steady inevitable flow. After breakfast I followed the shore away from the house and up towards higher ground. I stood on the cliff watching. The river narrowed at the beginning of the rapids and the mass dipped like a broad dark raft heading into fast water, whitecaps tossing the logs singly into the air and then catching and concealing them again.

As always, strays drifted to shore in front of the house. Most logs were round and smooth and stamped with the company brand but some still had bark attached, reminding that these were trees after all. We left the strays to sit in the sun and later went back to peel and crack the bark. During the following weeks, right into early summer, we collected insects with latticed wings folded flat the lengths of their backs, and used them as bait for bass.

The place we fished bass was below the rapids. Past morning glory and blunt-petalled wild rose. Past the cliff and the long meandering ruins of the old hydro wall, the crumbling prop that hemmed the point of land where the river curved at the fiercest part of the rapids. The first day we’d moved to Quebec, Father had taken us to see the wall. “Someone had the vision and imagination to harness this energy,” he said. “But that was last century, not this. And I’m going to tell you right now. Don’t lean on the wall, because it’s old and cracked and someone’s going to go with it.”

Nothing could keep us away. We climbed the wall, straddled it, dug at it, pushed it, and when the water was not too high, walked it. We also feared it.

After the wall, the river calmed again and booms were strung out, chained end to end. We were not fooled by the calm. Down below was a bottomless place with tough roots twining through mud. Where weeds and bushes snared logs and where bodies drifted after they’d been tossed through rapids. Our paperboy had drowned in these rapids. Two winters ago, one of the girls who lived in the rooms behind Le Loup’s store had also drowned. Both bodies had been found down below, stuffed under the booms.

It was Lyd who’d spied the hooks on a rainy day when we were taking turns with our friends climbing the ladder rungs and jumping from the attic platform to the barn floor below. It was shortly after we’d moved — after Father had bought the house from Duffy. Lyd had found the hooks buried in dust behind an old storm door. Bulging pieces of iron with three great curves attached to a braided rope. “Bodies!” Lyd was the one who dared the rest of us to do what she would not do herself but she commanded our attention because she was the eldest. I had just jumped to the boards and my leg-bones were wobbling from the impact. I climbed back up and heard her drop into her scaring voice.

“Grappling hooks for bodies,” she said quickly. “Bodies all stiff and water-bloated. The men drag the bottom to hook a shoulder or a leg. They lower the hooks from rowboats and make a huge splash.” Her arms dropped iron through a black surface of river we all knew and imagined. “One man rows, two at the end of the boat drag.”

How did she know this? Father hadn’t told her because, later, he refused to talk about the hooks when we asked. But he set his mouth grimly and went with the men when they came to the back door after break-up, in the spring. It turned out that everyone in St. Pierre knew that the village grappling hooks were kept in Duffy’s old barn.

After that, one of our summer games while swimming in the river with our friends became “Dead Body.” Someone would dip beneath the surface and remember. Would rise with cheeks puffed and shriek, “Dead body below! Dead body!” Our legs ran thickly through water and we scraped knees and feet in the race for shore. Each of us had seen the bloated features of the waterlogged, had felt the hand of the drowned tighten around an ankle; each of us knew that wherever we might place a foot we would step on a body with swollen sealed eyes.

In fact, we never swam down below, by the booms. Our only swimming was in the cove in front of the house, shallow and quiet with its own current but safely above the rapids. It was where we had learned to dog-paddle. It was where Mother viewed the river as a danger that could sweep away her children’s limp rag bodies into its current. She had never learned to swim and sat on shore on a towel, wearing shorts, a blouse buttoned down the front, the tails of it tied in a knot at her waist. She stayed there, sunning her legs, crooking a finger at us when we waded out too far. Standing up and hollering when we pretended not to see.

It was the first week of July and our parents announced that they were having a corn roast. Not at the usual site on broad shale in front of the house but following the bank up onto the high flat part of the cliff where there were twelve white pines, grown tall and full with their bundles of soft needles. Quite naturally, we’d always called the place the Pines. It was halfway to the wall. Below the cliff were the first whitecaps, the place where true fast water began. The river was still high from spring run-off but the change of current could be seen from this very spot.

Eddie had left for Ontario as soon as school was out, and was now at Grampa King’s farm. Lyd and I had been helping Father and Duffy and Roy, from the club, collect driftwood and the smallest stray logs along shore. We pretended to find logs that were not branded, and dragged them onto the rocks to dry.

The men did not have their own club; it was the second annual party of the sewing club of their wives — and Rebecque, Duffy’s girlfriend. It was the summer the women made cotton sundresses with bolero tops that came halfway down their backs, with close-fitting sleeves ending just above the elbow. Clever cover-ups with a classic look was printed on the pattern.
Recently, on a scorching day, Roy’s wife, Mona, of the little feet, had been shopping in Hull when a policeman approached and advised her that she must put on her jacket. She was carrying her new cotton bolero over her arm. Her shoulders should not be bare, said the policeman, even though he could see that the sundress was held up by a two-inch width of straps. She could be fined fifty dollars or spend a month in jail.

The women of the club were buzzing with this story.

“Maudit fou,” Rebecque said, of the policeman and the law, which was suspect. When she spoke, this came out sounding like “Moodzee foo.” No one knew if a Quebec ban on bare shoulders really existed. But the enforcement of it came out of the same morality that prevented Lyd and me from wearing our shorts on rue Principale in St. Pierre. Even to run up to Le Loup’s for a pound of sliced bologna we had to change into a skirt. We could wear shorts in our yard and in the fields but if we were seen on the main street of the village, the priest would send us home.

Mother’s sundress, made from the same pattern used by the other women, was linen, not cotton. The colour of deep summer sky embedded with a myriad of tiny yellow stars. You had to stand close to the material to see the stars, they were so minute. When the last stitches were done, Mother pushed the iron over the new dress, back-forth, back-forth, flattening the straps last. The bolero, not meant to join in front, curved perfectly over her bust. The first time she wore the dress was to buy groceries in Hull. Warned by Mona, she kept the bolero on. Before she left to catch the bus she stood at the long mirror that had once belonged to Duffy’s runaway wife. She turned to view all angles of herself and patted her hips. She wanted her dress to be slightly different, and had added false pleats at the waist. It was hard to tell if she was pleased with it or not. She arched one arm and then the other over her head to check the sleeves. She pulled at a thread and then muttered to herself and left to cross the field so that she could catch the bus to town.

Rebecque sometimes came over to exercise with Mother in our house after supper. They pushed the kitchen table against the wall and twirled the radio dial till they found music they liked. They sat on the floor, one at each end of the linoleum. Legs outstretched, arms outstretched, palms down, fingertips leading, they crossed the room on their bottoms, shifting forward first one buttock, then the other. When they passed, each collapsed an elbow and pulled an imaginary cord. “Toottoot!” they shouted, trying to keep the beat of “Ragmop” or “Slow Poke” or “Gonna Get Along Without Ya Now.”

Lyd and I refused to watch this display and sat outside on the steps until they were finished. We stayed close enough to hear what they were saying, but we were mortified by their behaviour. Mother and Rebecque laughed at us. “We are firming our buttocks,” they said deliberately. “Just you wait until you’re our age, just you wait.”

All day Saturday, party food had been arriving. A copper boiler appeared. Duffy carried in a sack filled with corn, and he and Rebecque went down to the river to husk. Duffy laughed like Gildersleeve. He told us he’d driven through field roads the night before, to steal the corn, and we half believed him. Lyd and I followed him and Rebecque to the river and offered to help because we liked to be near them. Rebecque was forever teasing about kissing him through his moustache. By now they were living together in Rebecque’s house in the village but they were not like our parents or the other couples in the club. They were not married. They were living in sin, but they were in love.

Father organized a work party to arrange a circle of stones back from the edge of the cliff and we began to lug wood. We’d been collecting all week but he wouldn’t let us take it to the site until the last minute in case it was stolen. The cliff could not be seen from the house. It was the first time a party would be held there and I could not see the point of it. Every fork, every stick of wood, every cob of corn and slab of butter had to be carried. It wasn’t like ducking in and out of the house when ice was needed, or when someone had to use the bathroom.

How would Lyd and I know what was going on?

Would they dance under the twelve pines? How would they get music up there? It wouldn’t be pieces like “Coppelia Waltz,” played on our record player in the living room while Mother, holding our backs stiff, twirled us, one-two-three, one-two-three. It wouldn’t be “Dizzy Fingers” on piano. It would be radio songs: “Secret Love,” “Pretty Baby,” “Walkin’ My Baby Back Home.”
It was the music that made Lyd and me decide to sneak to the party after dark. We’d hide in the bushes and watch them dance. We’d go the long way round, skirt the Pines by taking a lower path to the booms and come back towards the party from down below. We knew every bush that would conceal us and we’d be able to see by the light of the fire. The adults would be drinking, the men beer, the women gin and tonic, and we’d be able to watch them misbehave.

The club women had decided to wear slacks, Mother announced, and she pressed her own with a damp cloth during the lull between late afternoon and early evening. Duffy and Rebecque had gone home to change; the fresh corn was piled into three brown shopping bags, ready to be boiled. Father kept changing his mind about the beer. Should he take washtubs and hack at a block of ice to keep the bottles cold? Should he carry up river water and stand the beer in that?
Mother wore a short-sleeved nylon sweater to match her beige slacks. She applied lipstick, and then a spot of rouge on each cheek, rubbed with her finger upward and outward over the bone. She had the Spanish look, again, I thought. This time her long hair was fastened at the back and flowed down over her shoulders. With her face turned away from us she looked like mystery. I remembered the name book Mimi and I had looked in, the day we’d buried the rosary. Moor, I said to myself. Dark One.
Mother turned to Lyd and me and looked like her ordinary self again. “I don’t know if I’ll be warm enough when the breeze comes up off the river,” she said. “What do you think?” She turned again, towards the mirror.

As if the three of us had planned the moment together, she went back to the door of her closet and removed her bolero from the sundress on its hanger. She slipped the bolero over her sweater. The tiny stars seemed to multiply, to pull inward.
She surveyed herself in the long mirror, once again, and said, “Do you think I look nice? What do you think?”

Father had come into the room and we watched as he turned his head to look at her. I thought he might go over to her; I thought he might touch her. But he didn’t.

Anyway, I knew she wasn’t really asking.

Lyd and I made cheese-and-mustard sandwiches and bided our time. We watched the clock and watched the clock and finally set out through the back screen door and got our feet onto a path that was so black it almost disappeared. I thought I knew every root and anthill but I kept stumbling. What I hadn’t allowed for was the roar. Usually I never heard the rapids because they were always there; now they pounded like drums rolling in thunder. It occurred to me that I’d never been deep into the Pines at night. Lyd was starting to change her mind. We took turns hanging on to each other’s sleeve.

“Did you know it would be so dark?” she said.

“We’re not quitting. We made up our minds.”

“Yeah, well if Father catches us, he’ll be madder than hops.”

“Too bad.” I got in front and yanked my arm free.

“Whether you go back or not, I’m still going.” I knew she’d rather be at home.

“Jesus,” Lyd muttered. “Jesus Cripes.” But I could hear her footsteps behind me.

We’d made a wide semicircle and approached the Pines from below as planned. A ridge of the old wall leaned out over the rapids in a meandering curve and gave us a landmark to follow. The bushes opened up and the path widened. From here we could see sparks shooting up from the fire and we heard deep distant laughter.

“Duffy,” Lyd said. “I hear the moustache.”

She couldn’t return now because it was darker behind than in front. I was glad, because I didn’t want to be there alone. We left the path and stuck to a thickness of trees far back from the open cliff. The entire club was there in silhouette, circled round a crackling fire. There was Father holding a bottle of beer; Mona, her husband, Roy, hovering as if he had to be right there to protect her little feet; Rebecque in wonderful tight red party strides, close-dancing with Duffy, who kept kissing her neck.

“It’s the perfume,” I said. “Where she puts it. Right on the pulse.”

“Ici! Ici!” Lyd said, jabbing her finger, and we doubled over, loving Rebecque.

We crouched down to settle in. The men were going back and forth to the washtubs for beer, the women dancing with one another’s husbands — except for Duffy and Rebecque. A log was kicked into the fire from one side and burst out the other. The laughter was shrill, edged with foolishness.

“They’re worse than we are,” I told Lyd, but that was okay.

We knew who they were; we’d been eavesdropping on them for years. We just wanted to be there to make sure we knew what they were up to and that what they were up to was the same old thing.

Now the radio was playing “Jambalaya.” Everyone stopped and pointed glasses and bottles up into the air. They planted their feet and became a chorus over the rapids. They could not be said to be in harmony.

“They’re half snapped already,” Lyd said.

“Not Mom,” I said. “Look.”

She did have a drink in her hand and we knew it was gin and tonic but she wasn’t holding it in the air and she wasn’t singing, either. She knew every showtune, every line from every musical, every radio song. But she didn’t shout her songs into the sky. Our mother sang privately, to herself and to her children. She’d been doing it since we were born and probably before that, too. In the kitchen, a tea towel wrapped around her waist because she couldn’t be bothered tying an apron. Our mother, her dark hair floating over her shoulders, her bolero drenched with stars.

Now, she set her drink on boards that had been propped on two logs, and looked through the circle of fire. She was by herself, away from the others who were singing, and she reached down into the paper shopping bag and started dropping corn, one cob, another, and another, into the boiler. She did this methodically, as if she were thinking about something else. And then she straightened, and looked through the fire again. I thought I saw her lips move but I wasn’t close enough to figure out what she was saying.

The members of the chorus, shouting to the treetops, arms around one another’s waists, were finding themselves very funny.
“What the hell!” It was Roy. He had his fly open and a dark stream had already arced into the bushes beside us. He turned his back one direction and Lyd and I twisted in the other.

“You little buggers,” he said. “Get the hell home before I tell your father.” He was fumbling with his pants. We thought he’d shout for Father right there and then.

“How did you get up here?” He hissed at us, his fly finally done up.

“We came the long way,” I said. “From down below. Are you going to tell?”

“You bet I’ll tell. Now get the hell out of here. Go back the same way you came.”

We bolted along the line of bushes, into a night as black as the waves, heading for the wall so we could follow its curve to the path. Lyd was in front this time and I was shouting.

“Where the hell did he come from? I thought they were all singing. Goddam him sneaking up like that. He almost peed all over us.”
We reached the wall and leaned against it. “Mother was saying something,” I told Lyd. “I was trying to see what she was saying.” I started shoving against the wall as hard as I could.

“Are you crazy?” Lyd said. “The wall’s going to fall.”

“You’re the one who’s crazy,” I said. “The wall’s a foot and a half thick. It’ll never fall.”

I kicked at it again, and shoved some more. But I gave up and we walked slowly home along the path, hearing the party behind us, never considering the hands groping up out of the black water as we skirted the booms, down below.

“Did you see Roy’s penis?” I said.

“No, did you?”

We started laughing hysterically, and ran the rest of the way, climbing in through our bedroom window, even though there was no need to with our parents up in the Pines. We laughed and laughed and laughed and got into our big double bed and didn’t draw a line down the middle of the bottom sheet or fight or swear at each other or make threats that would have to be resolved or carried out the next day. We went to sleep thinking of Roy telling or not telling, of almost being peed on, of Rebecque dancing in her tight red pants, of music floating up through the pines. We slept right through the blackest hours of the night and didn’t wake until we heard new sounds and crying and shouts in the dark. The barn door banging and the hooks thrown out of the attic to the earth below.

“What,” Lyd said. “What.” She got out of bed and I could see her long legs in the moonlight as she jumped from one foot to the other. We went through the summer kitchen and stood at the back screen. All the lights had been turned on in the house. Rebecque walked in and pulled us both tightly against her chest.

“What,” Lyd kept saying. “What. Tell us what. Please, Rebecque, please tell us.”

Because we still didn’t know. Because we’d been sound asleep when Mother walked to the edge of the cliff, slept while her left foot tripped and crossed over her right, slept while she lost her balance and slipped silent over the edge, disappearing in full firelight view of her husband and her closest friends. Looking into Rebecque’s face we still did not know. And it would be some time before we would be able to imagine the weightlessness, the air rushing past the two spots of rouge on her cheeks, her head bobbing in the white-tipped waves, the breeze resting, now, in her long dark hair.

From Leaning, Leaning Over Water. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. copyright © 2002 by Frances Itani. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.