Forecast (4 page)

Behind the Republic of Texas title page in Jodie's scrapbook, item one, is a
New York Times
piece dated 13 February 2005, filed from Overton, Texas.

 

The road to the capitol,
Jodie reads (though she knows this piece almost by heart),
winds through a landscape of pine trees, rusting pump jacks and a few tidy churches in this East Texas town. Literature in the lobby describes how citizens can apply for passports or enlist in the interim defense forces. The building is the headquarters of the Republic of Texas, a sometimes militant organization whose members repudiate the authority of Austin and Washington and believe Texas should be a sovereign nation. The group gained notoriety eight years ago when some members took a couple hostage in the Davis Mountains of West Texas, and endured a week-long siege by more than 100 police officers, after which a follower who fled into the mountains was killed. The leader of the faction involved in the stand-off is still in prison.

 

Jodie has only vague memories of the shootout since she was four at the time. This is how she remembers it: like cowboys on TV but sticky. The sticky was blood. From before that, she remembers the beat-up truck and the road that went on forever and the pillows on each side that her pa put there to stop her from sliding across the front seat of the cabin. She remembers sirens behind them and the trees rushing by very fast and the seatbelt she chewed and the way her pa kept promising, promising, promising. ‘Leave your country, your people and
your father's household,' he kept saying, ‘and go to the land I will show you. Thus saith the Lord.'

Is it possible she can remember the words so exactly?

Of course not.

She knows the words from sermon after sermon preached in Texas and in Outer Barcoo. She knows from his telling and retelling.

She knows, all these years later, that the truck-and-pillow-and-siren memories are about the frantic flight from South Carolina, the state troopers flummoxed at the Georgia border. Somewhere between Georgia and Texas, or perhaps before Georgia, they seem to have lost her mother, but Jodie has no information on that score. Many times she has rehearsed asking what happened, but each time the words turn into vapour on her lips. They rise, she sees them float toward her father's ears, but they have no sound. Her father is very good at staying out of prison and out of trouble. He charms people. He makes friends easily and quickly. He has (she has now figured out) friends in all the right places, oil men, cattle men, military men, born-again politicians. Everyone says her pa is a charismatic preacher. Friends become followers and then they become afraid.

Everything seems to end in flight and a lot of bodies.

 

New York Times
, February 2005, quoting the chief of police of Overton, Texas:

 

‘I normally wouldn't be alarmed by a few boys getting into a fisticuffs thing. But this is a group with a violent past … However ludicrous their beliefs might sound to you and me, we can't forget that Jim Jones got a bunch of folks to drink Kool-Aid with him down in Guyana. You could shave one side of your head and have a loyal following around here by nightfall.'

Chief Williams said that his officers have fined or issued arrest warrants for group members. Violations included carrying Republic of Texas passports instead of a driver's license; driving unregistered vehicles; and redesigning license plates to show a Texas that includes significant chunks of New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado and Wyoming. Group members say those areas are part of Texas, wrongly wrested away by Washington.

Group members believe that the Texas referendum in 1845 in favor of joining the United States was illegal … They also advocate the creation of an alternative monetary system using minted silver and gold coins. One coin made of one gram of silver has a large Texas star in its center and the word ‘Overton' emblazoned around it.

After the conviction and imprisonment of the original leader, the new president has promised a more
conciliatory future. He said his administration, unlike some splinter cells, did not base its political philosophy on Old Testament beliefs, did not oppose women's suffrage and did not support a return to a legal system permitting slavery.

 

‘What are you reading?' Danny asks, stepping in from the dark verandah. He is showered and shaven and smells good. ‘Hey, didn't mean to give you a heart attack.'

Jodie stuffs the folder back into a cardboard banker's box and covers it. Her hands quiver so she keeps them inside the box.

‘Jeez,' Danny laughs. ‘What is it? Pornography?'

‘What do you take me for?'

‘Normal. Probably. Except for the church stuff, but that don't count. I know a heap of bible-bashers keep
Hustler
under their pillows, praying like crazy for the Lord to forgive while they jerk off, so I ain't gonna be shocked—'

‘You disgust me. It's nothing like that.'

‘So I disgust you. And what are you hiding in the box? What disgusts
you?
'

‘Nothing. And none of your business.'

‘Tell that to the crows. Who tries to hide nothing, tell me that?'

‘It's the History of the Republic, if you must know. I keep a scrapbook.'

‘Oh that. You mean Texas and the Call? Your dad told me. Personally speaking, only kind of voodoo I believe in comes out of the last bottle of a twelve-pack. But I got a lot of time for your dad and he said for him the Call came loud and clear.'

‘Loud and clear,' Jodie says, fitting the lid over the box with some force. ‘Delivered by state troopers, announced by sirens. The Lord God spake and said
Go west, Mr President, as fast as you can,
and here we are.'

Danny raises his eyebrows. ‘You are good and pissed off, that's for sure.'

‘I know how this ends.'

‘Know how what ends? You and me?'

‘The Republic. All this. I know how it ends. One day my pa will be freckled with bullets and that's what he wants.'

‘Bullshit,' Danny says. ‘There's not one man living wants to die, and certainly not your dad.'

‘Don't you get it? He doesn't believe he'll stay dead. He wants martyrdom. Believe me, I know how this ends, over and over, every time.'

Jodie covers her face with her hands.

‘You're serious, aren't ya?' Danny is amazed and uneasy. He almost puts a hand on her shoulder. ‘What d'ya want to do then?'

‘I don't want to be here when it ends.'

‘Well then, let's get cracking. Truck's waiting, and I got my passport, my tent, sleeping bags—'

‘Forget it,' Jodie says, furious. ‘Is that all you can think about?'

‘Hey, swear to God, that's not what I meant. I won't lay a hand on you. We'll just keep driving if you want. Sleep under the stars.'

‘I've never slept under the stars. Have you?'

‘Often. Closest to religious that I get.'

‘And we can just keep driving?'

‘Drive forever, if you want. Drive to Darwin.'

‘What about the funeral in Brisbane?' Jodie asks.

‘Changed my mind. Something else came up. Where d'ya want to go?'

‘Just away,' Jodie says. ‘That's all.'

‘That's where we're going,' Danny says.

On one night, the worst one, and the last one before Katie ran away, there were eighteen of those calls. They were not all the same. If our mother answered, there would be heavy breathing and silence. ‘Why are you doing this?' our mother would ask in a soft puzzled voice, as though she really expected an answer, as though it might explain the past months. ‘I don't understand,' she would say. ‘Why are you doing this?'

Then Katie would come hurtling down from her bedroom – I would flinch at the drumming on the stairs – and she would kill the call with one finger.

‘Why are
you
doing this?' she would ask our mother coldly. She would pull the phone jack from the wall. ‘Why do you keep plugging us back in?'

‘The lawyer has to be able to reach me, Katie.'

‘You can call
him
,' Katie said. ‘Or he can send you the stuff by Fedex.'

Our number was unlisted. We had changed it three times. We had an answering machine. Yet still our mother, with a hungry look on her face – the look of children in CARE posters – would pick up on the first ring.

‘She's waiting for the lawyer to tell her it was all a mistake,' Katie said, furious, as we hung out between the dumpsters at the back of the shopping mall. We'd pretty much given up on school by then. We'd taken up chain-smoking although neither of us was very good at it. Katie had invented a game. We would bite the burning tips off our cigarettes and see who could spit them the farthest, and then we would watch the sparks glow and die on the parking lot. ‘She acts like it's going to be God every time,' Katie said. ‘She's waiting for Him to give her an explanation. Or a miracle. She thinks He owes us.'

He does, I thought. But I knew whose call our mother was waiting for. That was the worst part. She missed our father. ‘You don't understand,' she kept telling us. ‘You don't understand how much we mean to him. You don't understand what he went through.'

‘What
he
went through.' Katie would roll her eyes. She would thump on the dumpster with her fist until her hand bled. ‘She's in denial, you know. If she hadn't been so deep in denial all these years, we wouldn't be in this mess.'

‘Nobody knew,' I reminded her. ‘Nobody could ever have guessed.'

‘I knew,' Katie said.

‘No, you didn't. You didn't even guess about Duncan.'

‘I didn't realise I knew,' Katie said. ‘Not until afterwards. Then I realised I did know.'

Not until after Duncan's suicide is what she meant.

Not until our father was arrested.

I said, in defence of our mother, ‘It's hard not to answer when it rings.'

‘That's why we have to stay disconnected.' Katie relit the stub of her cigarette and inhaled. ‘For the rest of our lives, probably. The thing is, Marina, there's nowhere to go from here. We're fucked.'

Like Duncan, I thought. And the others. We didn't know how many others. Not then. We didn't know then about our father's own childhood years.
What he went through …
We didn't know what our mother meant, not then. We learned the terrible details later, from newspapers and from television.
It's not enough,
Katie said when we knew.
Explains but does not excuse,
the newspapers wrote.
I don't forgive him,
Katie shouted at me.
It's not enough
. But back then, when we smoked with our backs against the dumpsters, all I could think of was touch football. I remembered the games on our back
lawn: Duncan, Katie, me, our father, all the kids in Dad's theatre club. I remembered Duncan and Katie and our father in a tackle, everyone rolling around, tickling and laughing.

‘I don't believe you knew,' I said to Katie.

She turned her cigarette around and bit off the smoldering end. I waited for her to spit, but she chewed. She kept on chewing and then she swallowed. I stared at her. I could feel a knuckle of fire burning its way down my gullet. I could feel scorch lines on the inside of my gut.

‘Katie,' I said, frightened. I put my hand on her arm.

‘What?' she said. ‘What are you staring at?'

‘Nothing.'

‘I'm going to cut the phone line outside,' she decided, and I thought
yes
with a surge of relief, because even when our mother was sedated, the answering machine was like a sniper in the house. It would respond on the fourth ring and then there would be an interminable nothing until the two minutes for an incoming call had ticked by. I used to think two minutes was a very short time. It is not. The callers did not hang up and they did not leave a message. They waited. They listened to the way we stood there, hypnotised. We could feel them watching us. And so, when our mother was too deep in sleep to react, when we had watched
the message eye blinking for the length of one call, and then for the duration of the second call and then for the duration of the third, when the house seemed wired with eyes and smoky with malevolent silence, either Katie or I would pick up the next time a call came in, though we never picked up on the first ring. We tried not to pick up on the second. We tried to wait until a split second before the answering machine. And then Katie would say in a hard voice: ‘The police are tracing this call,' until someone laughed and told her: ‘My father's a cop. How d'you think I got your number, sluthouse? The cops keep a list of pervs.'

The callers were not always male. Sometimes they were young. Sometimes their voices quavered with age. Many of them said things so foul I was afraid I could never forget, would never be able to. But on that last night, the night that Katie ran away, I lifted the receiver on the second ring and a woman spoke in a low rushing voice and her words had such clear edges that I knew she was one of our teachers. ‘So the prince of darkness is a gentleman,' she said. ‘We should have known, but we didn't want to.'

I had no idea what to say.

‘We were wilfully blind,' she said. ‘Which doesn't absolve us. Obliviousness is not a defence. You need to understand that, Katherine Goldsworthy.'

‘This is Marina,' I said.

‘We sold our souls for a mess of gold medals,' she said. ‘None of us is innocent. You're not innocent either, Katherine. He used you as the lure.'

‘I'm not Katie,' I said. ‘I'm Marina.'

‘Oh my son, my son,' she moaned.

‘I'm so sorry,' I said.

There was silence. I should have hung up.

‘He wanted to drop out, but he didn't want to stop seeing you,' she said. ‘Do you understand? It's hard to forgive that.' I don't know why I didn't hang up. ‘It's even harder to forgive myself,' she said, ‘for not letting him quit.' I thought she was crying. ‘Look, I know things must be difficult,' she said. Her voice sounded swollen and damp. ‘I just wanted to let you know that I realise it must be difficult and I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Katherine, that there's nothing I can do.'

‘I'm not Katie, I'm—'

‘No, I take that back. I'm lying. There's nothing that I'm willing to do. And I'm sorry.' I heard the click, but I went on standing there with the receiver against my ear until I heard Katie on the stairs.

When I told her, she said immediately: ‘Duncan's mother.'

That was what I thought too, but I asked her: ‘How do you know?'

‘I don't want to talk about it. Let's go outside for a smoke.'

‘Now? But it's nearly midnight.'

‘Now.'

So we sat at the bottom of our drive with our backs against the garbage cans. There was no moon. There were cats – not ours – who prowled and watched us with their burning witch's eyes. Katie's voice hung between the red tips of our cigarettes. ‘That was from
King Lear
, what she said.
The prince of darkness is a gentleman.
'

‘What's
absolve
?' I asked, but she wasn't listening to me.

‘Duncan tried to get out of the play. Do you understand?'

I didn't say anything, because I knew our father had dropped Duncan from
Lear
. I thought this was what had broken Duncan's heart. High school or community theatre, it was all the same. ‘There are people who would
kill
,' our mother joked, ‘to be cast in your father's plays.' The CBC made a documentary which at least half of Canada had watched: Derek Goldsworthy, director of genius.
A small-town miracle
, critics wrote,
who is Stratford-bound.
And the year before there had been a photograph, front page of Weekend Arts, in the
Toronto Globe and Mail
:
Winston High wins national prize. Derek Goldsworthy, theater director, with students
Duncan Taylor (Hamlet) and Katherine Goldsworthy (Ophelia) who also happens to call the director Dad.
Katie looked so beautiful in the photograph, with flowers trailing through her long golden hair.

There were awards and citations and parties and more awards. ‘He is a genius,' our mother told people in the supermarket, ‘but he is also a loving husband and a wonderful dad.' All the most distinguished families invited him and he held court in their dining rooms. He was the shining centre of an energy field. When he left the room briefly – and he always did, the newspapers noted afterwards; he always absented himself from dinner parties for twenty or thirty minutes at a stretch – it was as though the lights dimmed. ‘I'll just pop upstairs and see how Duncan is doing with his homework,' he might say at the Taylors.

And people would smile: ‘He's
so
good with boys,' they would say.

Later, stunned, they admitted this to the newspapers. We had no idea, they said. Above our heads in our own houses, they said.

For a while, there was a photograph of Duncan and our father and Katie –
our Ophelia last year, currently our lovely Cordelia
– on the refrigerator door. Our father was in the middle. He had one arm around Duncan, the other around my beautiful sister. I have never known if Katie stole that
photograph for herself, or if our father removed it after he banished Duncan from
King Lear
or if our mother hid it. Duncan got moody and silent after his dismissal from the play. He wouldn't come to our house and he wouldn't return Katie's calls.

‘He didn't want to go on the retreat,' Katie told me as we leaned against the garbage cans and watched the cats watching us. ‘He told me he wouldn't go, but I talked him into it. I didn't know that's what the retreat was all about. But Duncan did. Duncan knew. Do you understand?'

I didn't, though I already understood far more than I wanted to. Katie and I had been hiding the papers from our mother but we read them ourselves. For a while we read them, and then we stopped. We tried to stop. We didn't want to know any more. We didn't want other people to know things that we didn't know. The
Winston Standard,
the
Globe and Mail,
each morning we scanned them, we torched them with our cigarettes, we tossed them into the dumpsters, we let them burn.

I remember all this as though I once watched it on a version of the late-late show that was beamed in from a dying star. I was only twelve at the time. Katie was sixteen and in high school and Duncan was her boyfriend and she had Duncan's mother for English and she and Duncan had both gone on the school trip to see
Lear
at Stratford a few weeks
before Duncan died, and then they went with our father and the rest of the cast to a camp at Lake Simcoe for rehearsals.

After the retreat at Lake Simcoe, Duncan was dropped from the play.

Later that night, the night Duncan's mother called, Katie ran away. I remember the chill concrete drive against my butt and the garbage cans and the cats' eyes that blinked on and blinked off and blinked on. I remember that I could no longer keep my own eyes open. ‘You go to bed,' Katie said. I remember that. ‘I'll talk to the cats for a while.'

Next morning, our mother was frantic. I can't remember how I felt. There's a blank space from that night that has stretched across many years. Katie did not even leave me a note. All that day, I sat beside the dumpsters, smoking and biting the end off my cigarette and spitting. It was, I remember, a Wednesday, and the phone kept ringing, so Katie had not cut the line after all. On Friday, she left a message on the answering machine. ‘Marina, it's me. I'm in Toronto and I'm OK. Pick up on the next call.' But the next call was one of those other calls, and so was the one after that. Katie had not cut the line, so I did, and then our mother did what she did and I was sent to Toronto too, to a boarding school.

That was years ago. That was so long ago and
took place in a galaxy so far away that the light from that year has not reached me yet.

 

The first time I heard Katie's voice again, I was in college. She said: ‘Is that Marina?' and I knew instantly who it was but I couldn't speak. I was afraid she'd hang up before my voice could cross the vast space from my planet to hers. ‘Hey,' she said, jokey, ‘if that's you, Marina, you should know that I'm very allergic to silence on a telephone line.'

‘Katie,' I whispered.

‘Are you crying?' she asked. ‘There is nothing worth crying over, Marina darling. Nothing.'

‘Seven years,' I said. ‘I didn't know if you were even … Where are you, Katie?'

‘I'm in Vancouver.'

‘
Vancouver.
'

‘I've been here for years. Toronto got too small.'

‘It's a lot bigger than Vancouver,' I said.

‘And a lot closer to Winston. Way way way too close to Winston. I don't know how you can bear to stay so close.'

But I don't, I thought. I live light-years away from all that. ‘Katie, can I see you?' I couldn't tell if I was laughing or crying.