After River by Donna Milner Page A

never seen Mom dip into her egg money before. I knew how much she wanted this portrait when I saw those wrinkled bills hit the table. She’d earned them, along with rolls and jars of quarters and silver half-dollars, selling chicken eggs at fifty cents a dozen. It was her dream money. Her dream that one of her sons would go to university. It was not a dream she shared with Dad. His dream was that his boys would take over the farm when it was time. I knew he’d quit school before he finished grade eight to work alongside of his father. So, although the egg money was my mother’s, he had no sympathy for its final destination. When she offered to pay for the picture that day, my father let her.
    I expect she had her own reasons for paying. I watched the silent messages pass between my parents and realized that somehow Mom had tricked him into buying the most expensive portrait. As my father tried to hide his shock at the price it dawned on me how she had manipulated him. I was stunned to realize their shared secret. My father could not read.
    The hand-painted aerial portrait arrived in less than a month. Mother proudly directed Dad as he hung it above the piano in the parlour. I can still see her through the years as she sat at the piano, her fingers deftly finding the keys, her eyes focused on the painting above. She seemed to disappear, become lost in it.
    The painting probably still hangs there over her piano. I wonder if Boyer ever looks at it. I wonder if he ever glances up and remembers a time when our lives were as simple, as neat and tidy, as the farm looks in that picture.
    Does he look closely? Does he ever think about that old miner’scabin by the lake? Does he ever wonder how different things might have been if he could change what happened in the place that now exists only as a darkened image beneath the faded watercolour?
    And does he ever pause to consider the life he may have led if only our father had been a literate man.

Chapter Twelve
    W HEN I WAS nine, Boyer left school. Quit. And just like that, on a snowy November day in the middle of his final year, Mom’s vision of one of her sons going to university began to fade around the edges.
    I never heard my father directly ask any of my brothers to quit school. But it was always there, unspoken. The first time I sensed it was during the days following Boyer’s sixteenth birthday.
    After the milking each morning Boyer changed into his school clothes as usual and squeezed into the cab of the truck with the rest of us. Every day Dad raised his eyebrows and heaved an exaggerated sigh, but said nothing as we drove into town. He didn’t need to speak. The words hung there in the air. The farm needs you .
    Then there was Jake, the hired man. Whatever Dad wasn’t saying, Jake was.
    I don’t know how Jake ended up at our farm, but he had lived in the room above the dairy for as long as I could remember. Anyone could see he was not part of the Ward family. He looked nothing like any of us. He was all knobby and gnarly, as grey as his personality. His bristled face carried a perpetual scowl. What little he had to say was blunt, sarcastic, or teasing. But unlike Morgan and Carl’s good-natured, elbow-in-the-ribs, wink-wink, kind of teasing, Jake’s was sharp, cutting. Sort of like trying to tickle a person with a pointedstick. And his teasing always had a point. Behind his back Morgan and Carl called him the Anti-Dad. He was so much the opposite of our father.
    Jake was fiercely loyal to Dad. His devotion did not extend to the Ward family. He tolerated us. I stayed out of his way. Mom said his bark was worse than his bite, but I didn’t want to test it.
    Morgan and Carl held no such fears. Even old Jake wasn’t immune to their good-natured taunts. They learned early though that some subjects were taboo.
    Jake was a confirmed bachelor. I couldn’t imagine him living with a woman, or there being one who would consider