Small Beneath the Sky Read Free Page B

Current. The farmyard hadn’t changed much since Mom was a kid. The barn sagged in the middle, but the house looked exactly the same. It had only two bedrooms, and she and her six siblings had slept in one bed. There wouldn’t have been room for a dog on top of the blankets, even one as small as Tiny. We must have all stunk to high heaven, Mom said, one bath a week in the same bathwater, and sleeping so close. Nobody seemed to notice, she told me. At least they didn’t complain.
    Uncle Lynton, my mother’s youngest brother, had never left home. He, Auntie May Jean and their four children lived with my grandparents in the house’s small rooms. As if the place had a magic capacity, its walls seemed to expand when the whole family gathered. For special Sunday dinners, like Grandma’s birthday, it could hold nineteen. Though the farm dogs couldn’t get past the porch, Tiny was allowed inside. Even my grandfather put up with her as she begged at the kitchen table. But his tolerance had its limits. One afternoon, near the barn, she did the unspeakable: she killed a chicken. Grandpa went to get his gun; Barry scooped up Tiny, ran to the car with her and locked the door. It was an unarguable law in the country: a chicken-killing dog got shot. There was no second chance. Once dogs acquired a taste for blood, no one could stop them.
    Mom signalled for me to go to the car with my brother. She told Grandpa she’d pay for the chicken, but he was having none of that. This kind of outrage couldn’t be corrected so easily. Cutting our visit short, not even staying for supper, we drove back to town, Tiny in Barry’s lap, none of us saying anything about what had happened. For the next several weeks, we didn’t visit my grandparents. We waited till Grandma said Grandpa had cooled off. When we went back, never again in his graces but at least allowed to set foot on the farm, we had to leave Tiny behind. That wasn’t so bad, because Barry was bored with his country cousins by then and preferred to stay at home on Sundays to hang around with his friends. Tiny wouldn’t be lonely, I knew, because whatever they were doing, my brother would take her with him.
    That summer Dad won two ducklings at the July 1 fair. He was always good at things like that, playing darts or throwing a ball into a basket. Once he won a guinea pig named Elvis; another time, a one-winged turkey plucked and gutted and ready to roast. Inside the house, the ducklings imprinted on my brother, tagged along behind him across the linoleum when he moved from the table to the couch or walked down the hall to go upstairs. They couldn’t climb the steps but fell over backwards and made pathetic quacks. To give Mom a break when they started to get on her nerves, splatting here and there across the floor, Dad banged together a wooden cage and set it near the woodpile outside by the porch. The cage was square, the size of a portable television, with a wire screen covering an opening Dad had cut into the side to let in air. The door, just big enough for me to stick my head through, was latched by turning a flat wooden stick with a nail pounded in the centre.
    The yard of our neighbour to the north was built on a slight rise. I played in their sandbox—filled with dirt, not sand—with Dennis, the boy who lived there. He’d just moved in, and I was the only kid who’d play with him, because every day so far he’d worn nothing but a bathing suit. We were building roads for his Dinky Toys: I knew he’d be okay as soon as the other kids saw his collection. He had matchbox trucks, too; how I loved the little boxes they came in. They’d have made a perfect home for beetles, or a daddy long-legs if I could get it to bend its knees.
    Dennis was loading a truck with gravel while I pushed a toy Caterpillar with a wide rubber band around each wheel through the dirt, making a machine-like noise in the back of my throat.