Small Beneath the Sky Read Free

neat, trimmed lawn bisected by a cement sidewalk. Three doors down, Lynda’s house was the newest on the block. Their small stuccoed bungalow had been built by her father. When he was in a good mood, sitting in his favourite armchair with a drink beside him, Mr. Ham would talk to me and Lynda in the voice of Daffy Duck. On the doors inside their house shone glass doorknobs like gigantic, multifaceted diamonds, and on the living room wall hung the only piece of real art I’d ever seen, an oil painting of the cutbanks south of the city limits done by a local high school teacher named Mr. Uglum. My mom was not impressed. She couldn’t understand why anyone would want a picture of something they could see every day just by driving five minutes to the edge of town.
    Lynda took singing lessons, and she and Ona studied dancing and piano. Lynda showed me how to shuffle-off-to-Buffalo after her first few dance classes and how to play “Chopsticks” with two fingers on the keyboard of the piano that sat glossy and square-shouldered by their big green couch. Ona’s piano was in a room off the kitchen that her mother called the parlour. From our backyard, I could hear Ona practising every Saturday morning it was warm enough for the windows to be open, the sounds of her finger-work drifting through the screens. Sometimes I climbed to the top of one of the oil drums Dad had hauled home for salvage and did a little dance by pounding my feet in time to the song she was playing over and over, waving my arms about the way I thought a ballerina would. I felt envious of Ona, but then she was the one cooped up inside on a weekend morning.
    To move up the bird ladder at school, I threw myself into the thin books I was allowed to take home from the six shelves in the grade 1 cloakroom. I asked my mother to help me unlock the secret code that filled the pages. So I’d feel better, she joked that maybe I was a crow because of our last name. My brother had been nicknamed “Crow” for a while, until he grew tired of it and threatened to punch anyone who called him that. After finishing the supper dishes, Mom would sit me on the couch and help me read out loud, making me stop and go back to the start of the sentence if I didn’t get the sounds right. I knew she hadn’t had any books to read when she was a child; she had no favourites among the collection I brought home, and she didn’t get bored. The stories were as new to her as they were to me.
    It didn’t take me long to fly from where the crows gathered to the more ethereal habitat of the meadowlarks and then the bluebirds. At home, Mom and I were soon into the old Book of Knowledge my brother had gone through several years before. Some of the pages were water-stained or marred with black crayon that I’d stroked across the paper as a little kid. Mom and I went over and over the page called “Little Verses for Very Little People.” I memorized “Rub-a-Dub-Dub”: “Three men in a tub; The butcher, the baker, / The candlestick maker; / And they all jumped out of a rotten potato.” The last line never failed to make us laugh. Many of the stories in the book were beyond me, and Mom, too. They sounded like nothing we’d ever heard before, but I delighted in the strange phrasing. If I was playing by myself outside, I’d recite into the lilac branches the first sentence of “Common Land Birds of Canada”: “The Orioles and the Meadowlarks are relatives of the Blackbirds, but differ markedly in their habitats.”
    One spring day Miss Bee led me and another classmate down the hall with its dark oak floor and wainscotting to the grade 2 classroom. Standing in front of the teacher’s desk, each of us in turn read a page of the grade 2 reader without having seen it before. I got stuck on the word “detour” and tried to slur over it, but Mrs. Anderson, the other teacher, stopped me. “A good