A Geography of Blood Read Online Free Page A
growled down a gravel road on the western edge of town. But apart from these brief transgressions, the houses on both sides of the street seemed to lie in a trance, as if even the ticking of their clocks had been silenced.
In the kitchen of the Stegner House, the prevailing quiet was broken by an aged refrigerator, which wheezed asthmatically in the performance of its duties. When the wind blew, the storm windows rattled in sympathy and the rooms filled with the rhythmic, wavelike whooshing of the spruce trees in the front yard. But inexplicably these sounds served only to signal an eerie absence of noise. The black rotary telephone beside the dining-room table did not ring. Although our hosts had foreseen all of our basic needs and comforts, they had neglected to provide a radio, and the antiquated TV in the living room, equipped with rabbit ears, could emit little more than hiss. (Our attempts to watch the Canadians beat the U.S. 3â2 in the gold-medal game of the Womenâs World Hockey Championship came to naught because the action appeared to be taking place in a blizzard.) With the van consigned to dry dock for as-yet-undetermined repairs, we did not even have the benefit of the radio there. We had been cast adrift, with nothing to guide us but our thoughts and our unaided senses.
Morning after morning, Keith woke to report strange dreams, many of them about his father, who had died, in England, six months earlier. âIâve never dreamed anything like that,â heâd say, and then tell me how, in his sleep, he had looked at himself in a mirror and seen the face of his dead father looking back. Do you think itâs this stillness? we asked each other. Do you think that staying busy, in constant commotion, is a way to keep from knowing what is really happening to us? Is that why people talk about âprofoundâ silence? For my part, I slept dreamless, as if I were made out of wood, as if I were sleeping the rooted sleep of a poplar.
That was another thing: the dark. On clear, moonless nights just at bedtime, weâd often stand, shivering, in the backyard and gaze out into the universe. The darkness was as black as water, and you sensed that if you lost your footing, you might fall helpless into its depths. And the stars, stars beyond counting, streaming across the sky, all trillions of miles distant across an ether of space and time. âStay put,â the voice had told us. âPay attention to where you are.â We were in the yard of the Stegner House, on Tamarack Street, in the town of Eastend, Saskatchewan, at the foot of the Cypress Hills. We were whirling through space on the skin of a living planet.
In a town where everyone knows everyone else, visitors are painfully obvious. So we werenât surprised when, occasionally, someone stopped us on the street or in the grocery store and politely ran through the basics of who, what, why, when, and where. Were we enjoying our stay in Eastend? theyâd ask in conclusion, and we were happy to oblige with a âyes.â But the aisles of the Co-op, between the tea and the tinned beans, didnât really seem like the place to talk to strangers about our inner lives. Instead, I might say that it was a treat to see cottontails and white-tailed deer grazing on peopleâs lawns. Or in a more expansive mood, I would rhapsodize about the view from the room at the top of the Stegner House (where I should have been working but wasnât, though they didnât need to know that) and the way the land drew your eyes from the backyard across the alley to the creek, with its fringe of willows, and then up and away to the hills. Strange, misshapen hills that made me think of ancient, fantastical worlds.
If the questioner seemed particularly sympathetic, I might even admit to the homely pleasures of nostalgia. For walking the streets of Eastend that autumn was like walking onto a set for the movie version of my childhood. Although
In the kitchen of the Stegner House, the prevailing quiet was broken by an aged refrigerator, which wheezed asthmatically in the performance of its duties. When the wind blew, the storm windows rattled in sympathy and the rooms filled with the rhythmic, wavelike whooshing of the spruce trees in the front yard. But inexplicably these sounds served only to signal an eerie absence of noise. The black rotary telephone beside the dining-room table did not ring. Although our hosts had foreseen all of our basic needs and comforts, they had neglected to provide a radio, and the antiquated TV in the living room, equipped with rabbit ears, could emit little more than hiss. (Our attempts to watch the Canadians beat the U.S. 3â2 in the gold-medal game of the Womenâs World Hockey Championship came to naught because the action appeared to be taking place in a blizzard.) With the van consigned to dry dock for as-yet-undetermined repairs, we did not even have the benefit of the radio there. We had been cast adrift, with nothing to guide us but our thoughts and our unaided senses.
Morning after morning, Keith woke to report strange dreams, many of them about his father, who had died, in England, six months earlier. âIâve never dreamed anything like that,â heâd say, and then tell me how, in his sleep, he had looked at himself in a mirror and seen the face of his dead father looking back. Do you think itâs this stillness? we asked each other. Do you think that staying busy, in constant commotion, is a way to keep from knowing what is really happening to us? Is that why people talk about âprofoundâ silence? For my part, I slept dreamless, as if I were made out of wood, as if I were sleeping the rooted sleep of a poplar.
That was another thing: the dark. On clear, moonless nights just at bedtime, weâd often stand, shivering, in the backyard and gaze out into the universe. The darkness was as black as water, and you sensed that if you lost your footing, you might fall helpless into its depths. And the stars, stars beyond counting, streaming across the sky, all trillions of miles distant across an ether of space and time. âStay put,â the voice had told us. âPay attention to where you are.â We were in the yard of the Stegner House, on Tamarack Street, in the town of Eastend, Saskatchewan, at the foot of the Cypress Hills. We were whirling through space on the skin of a living planet.
In a town where everyone knows everyone else, visitors are painfully obvious. So we werenât surprised when, occasionally, someone stopped us on the street or in the grocery store and politely ran through the basics of who, what, why, when, and where. Were we enjoying our stay in Eastend? theyâd ask in conclusion, and we were happy to oblige with a âyes.â But the aisles of the Co-op, between the tea and the tinned beans, didnât really seem like the place to talk to strangers about our inner lives. Instead, I might say that it was a treat to see cottontails and white-tailed deer grazing on peopleâs lawns. Or in a more expansive mood, I would rhapsodize about the view from the room at the top of the Stegner House (where I should have been working but wasnât, though they didnât need to know that) and the way the land drew your eyes from the backyard across the alley to the creek, with its fringe of willows, and then up and away to the hills. Strange, misshapen hills that made me think of ancient, fantastical worlds.
If the questioner seemed particularly sympathetic, I might even admit to the homely pleasures of nostalgia. For walking the streets of Eastend that autumn was like walking onto a set for the movie version of my childhood. Although
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