Small Beneath the Sky: A Prairie Memoir

By Lorna Crozier

Small Beneath the Sky is a tender, unsparing portrait of a family. It is also a book about place. Growing up in a small prairie city, where the local heroes were hockey players and curlers, Lorna Crozier never once dreamed of becoming a writer. Nonetheless, the grace, wisdom, and wit of her poetry have won her international acclaim. In this marvellous volume of recollections, she charts the geography that has shaped her character and her sense of home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Greystone Books
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781926812274

Lorna Crozier

Lorna Crozier, an Officer of the Order of Canada, is the author of sixteen previous books of poetry, most recently The Wrong Cat and The Wild in You. She is also the author of The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Ordinary Things and the memoir Small Beneath the Sky. She is a Professor Emerita at the University of Victoria, has been awarded the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, and is a three-time recipient of the Pat Lowther Award. Born in Swift Current, she now lives on Vancouver Island with writer Patrick Lane and two fine cats.

Book preview

small

beneath

the

sky

( a prairie memoir )

d1

LORNA CROZIER

small

beneath

the

sky

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D&M PUBLISHERS INC.

Vancouver/Toronto/Berkeley

Copyright © 2009 by Lorna Crozier

09   10   11   12   13    5   4   3   2   1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Greystone Books

A division of D&M Publishers Inc.

2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201

Vancouver BC Canada V5T 4S7

www.greystonebooks.com

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Crozier, Lorna

Small beneath the sky : a prairie memoir / Lorna Crozier.

ISBN-hardcover: 978-1-55365-343-1

ISBN-ebook: 978-1-926812-27-4

1. Crozier, Lorna. 2. Poets, Canadian (English)—20th century—

Biography. 3. Swift Current (Sask.)—Biography. I. Title.

PS8555.R72 Z476 2009     C811’.54     C2009-900943-9

Editing by Barbara Pulling

Jacket design by Peter Cocking

Jacket photo illustration by Peter Cocking;

original photos © Momatiuk-Eastcott/CORBIS (sky);

Dave Reede/First Light (landscape)

Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.

For Barry and Linda Crozier

and for Lynda H.

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And the land around us green and happy,

waiting as you wait for a killer to spring,

a full-sized blur,

waiting like a tree in southern Saskatchewan,

cremarked on, lonely and famous as a saint.

JOHN NEWLOVE, The Green Plain

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IN WRITING THIS BOOK, I am indebted to

Aristotle, who hypothesized that there must

be something beyond the chain of cause

and effect, something that started it all. He

called this immovable force the first cause.

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Contents

First Cause: Light

First Cause: Dust

First Cause: Wind

Common Birds of Canada

By and by

The Drunken Horse

Milk Leg

First Cause: Mom and Dad

Spoilt

Familiar as Salt

My Soul to Keep

Crazy City Kid

First Cause: Rain

First Cause: Snow

First Cause: Sky

A Spell of Lilacs

Fox and Goose

Tasting the Air

Spit

Light Years

The Only Swimmer in the World

As Good as Anyone

Lonely as a Tree

First Cause: Insects

A Very Personal Thing

Perfect Time

Dark Water

First Cause: Grass

First Cause: Gravel

First Cause: Horizon

The Diamond Ring

Till Death Do Us Part

My Mother for a Long Time

Not Waving but Drowning

First Cause: Story

Acknowledgements

first cause: light

YOU DON’T KNOW what light feels or how its thinking goes. You do know this is where it’s most at home. On the plains where you were born, there are no mountains to turn it back, no forest for it to shoulder through. A solitary tree marks its comings and goings like a pole sunk in the shore of the ocean to measure the tides. Here, light seems like another form of water, as clear but thinner, and it cannot be contained. When you touch it, it resists a little and leaves something like dampness on your skin. You feel it the way you feel a dog’s tongue lick your cheek in the early morning. After an hour or two of walking, you are soaked in brightness. When you shake your head and shoulders, you see the spray. If you stay too long in the open, you could drown, its currents carrying you to its source, your body bobbing, then going under, your lungs full of lustre. Nowhere else in your travels will you see light so palpable and fierce. It is too huge for dreams, too persistent for solitude. All day long it touches you with the smallest of its million watery wings.

first cause: dust

IN SUCH clarity of light there has to be its opposite. Something that smears, stains, drops a shroud and forms a film across the eye. When the wind is up, the season dry, the world turns upside down: the sky becomes the earth, particular and grey, and you breathe it in. You can get lost in dust as in a blizzard. You need a rope to make it from the house to the barn and back again. Dust settles on dugouts and sloughs, on drifts of snow, on the yellow of canola, on the siding of houses, on washing hung on the line. It rises in small asthmatic clouds as your feet hit the ground. It insinuates itself under the thickest hair, forms a thin cap that hugs your skull, a caul for the dying. It thickens your spit, it tucks between your fingers and toes, it sifts through the shell of an egg. Here’s dust in your eye and ashes to ashes. It is the bride’s veil and the widow’s, the skin between this world and the next. It is the smell you love most, the one that means home to you, dust on the grass as it meets the first drops of summer rain.

first cause: wind

WHAT LOVES the wind in this spare land? Of the trees it is the aspens, their leaves long-stemmed so they flutter in the slightest breeze. If you were led blindfolded to a grove of them, you’d step back, sure you stood on the brink of Niagara. The mist the wind sprays is gritty on your cheeks, but it doesn’t dull these leaves. Wind flips them and wins the toss; it frisks them from stem to tip and shakes them insensible. When they soar, then fall, the leaves forget they cannot rise again.

Of the unwanted, it is the tumbleweeds, cursèd, straw-coloured candelabras of brittle stems and thorns. Shallowly rooted, they leave their rainless gardens of neglect and somersault like ribs of acrobats across the fallow fields. At lines of barbed wire stretching from post to post, with the surety of stone, they build a border, a wailing wall, the wind hauling sifts of clay and packing them in, so the wind itself cannot pass through.

Of the grasses, it is the wheat. At dusk, the golden heads ripe with seeds nod and dream they are that ancient glacial ocean, swelling and breaking, moon-pulled: you feel an undertow at the edges of the fields and want to go under. Seagulls drift above you, forever it seems, as if they’d been sent from the ark, and they’re riding hunger and belief on currents of air. It’s easy to imagine you could push off in a boat, wind at your back, going home by a sea that tosses and heaves, without a light to guide you.

Of the animals, it is the badger and the wolverine. They have met their match. They bare their teeth and the wind does not weaken or retreat. They dig in the earth and the wind dives in ahead of them. They bite and won’t let go, but the wind can hang on longer. They know wind is the better hunter though they’ve never seen what it catches, what makes it thrive.

Of the human, it is a woman, though most of her kind hate it, will tell you how it drives them crazy on the farms. This one walks right into it, head lowered, thighs and calves working hard as if she’s climbing, pushing the boulder of the wind with her shoulders and chest. There’s an energy that gusts inside her; wind steals her soul, adds distance and desire, then gives it back. One woman bent into it, a flat country’s Sisyphus, the wind rising. What lungs are capable of punching out such an exhalation, inexhaustible and lowly, blowing farther than any prairie eye can see?

common birds

of canada

THE MORNING sun hammered the roofs of the stores along Central Avenue. I could smell the tar in the black–top, and my skin burned as if I stood too close to a stove with a roast in the oven. In spite of the heat, the two RCMP officers who led the Dominion Day parade wore their dress regalia, tan stetsons, black breeches and red serge jackets with tight collars that grazed their chins. The glare on their brass buttons made me blink.

Behind the Mounties on their regulation black mares rode a posse of local politicians and businessmen. They were decked out in cowboy boots and cowboy hats, some sitting as comfortably as Gene Autry about to burst into song, others slippery in the saddle, reins gripped so hard you could see their hands turning white. If we got lucky, this year’s cavalcade would include a hockey player who’d gone on from the Swift Current Indians to an NHL farm camp. He’d be waving from a red convertible with a big Ham Motors banner covering each side.

Some distance behind the riders, so that the horses wouldn’t spook, lumbered a life-sized black-and-white pinto made of steel. He clanked stiff-kneed between the float carrying the Ladies of the Nile and the flatbed truck of old-time fiddlers, who broke into the Red River Reel whenever the parade paused to let the entries in the rear catch up. As famous in our town as Trigger, the pinto was named Blow Torch. His mane of real horsehair gleamed. Smoke puffed from his nostrils every five minutes or so, and he let out a roar that came nowhere close to a whinny or a neigh. Everyone laughed and clapped as he clomped by. The clamour he made was like a grain bin collapsing in on itself in a high wind.

People referred to Blow Torch’s creator, Mr. McIntyre Jr., as an inventor. He’d inherited McIntyre’s Foundry from his father, and though some considered him eccentric, his construction of the mechanical horse made him even more of a celebrity than the mayor or the skip who’d almost won the Brier. Mr. McIntyre rarely accompanied Blow Torch in the parade, though. Usually it was a clown, maybe one of the bull wranglers from the rodeo, who held the reins to make sure the steel pinto didn’t veer into the crowd.

My family could have walked the four blocks from our house on Fourth West to Central Avenue, but Dad didn’t walk anywhere he could drive. He’d herded my mom, my brother and me into the car and parked as close as he could get. To watch the parade, we always stood in front of the Lyric Theatre near the middle of the route that passed rows of houses before the stores began. Swift Current’s downtown was only three blocks long, but it boasted a second theatre, the Eagle, and three department stores: the Metropolitan, Christie Grant’s and Cooper’s. Cooper’s was the only store that sold merchandise on two levels. Mom took me there once a year, and we climbed to the second floor to buy me a new pair of shoes. There were three cafés strung along the avenue, the Modern, the Venice and the Paris, and at the end of the street stood two hotels—the York and the Imperial. The third hotel, the Healy, was one block east.

The parade started on top of the hill by the elementary school, where the marshalls lined up the horses, the marching bands, the fire truck, the floats, the Shriners with their red scooters and toy train built out of tin and plywood, the waxed and polished police car, and the big new farm machinery from John Deere and International Harvester. If you looked down the six blocks of Central Avenue from that height, you could see all the way to the CPR station house at the end.

As people stood at the curb, alert for the police siren that would launch the spectacle, they dabbed sweat from their foreheads, sipped from Thermoses of coffee or bottles of pop and chatted about the weather, wondering if those black clouds rolling in from the west meant rain or if that was dust darkening the sky. Should the women make a quick trip home to close the windows and take down the washing from the line? Lots of farmers had driven in for the day, and Mom and Dad would always ask those nearby how many bushels to the acre they expected this year and how many weeks till harvest. Had anyone got hail out their way? Were the dugouts filling up after last week’s rain? Impatient with the wait, kids and some adults would step into the street and peer up the hill to see if anything was moving. For the parade and the rodeo we’d go to later, I always wore my red felt cowboy hat with the wooden toggle that made the rope short enough to snug under my chin.

Tommy Ham, the father of my best friend, Lynda, owned the Chrysler dealership in town. I looked forward to waving at him as he trotted by on his big palomino. When he spotted me and my parents, I hoped he’d doff his white cowboy hat and sweep it high above his head. For the first few years, I couldn’t understand why my father wasn’t on a horse alongside him. After all, when my dad was a kid, he’d raced a gelding named Tony in all the local fairs and won cash prizes he’d taken home to his father. I was impressed when he told me he got to keep some of the money for himself.

DURING THE WEEK, my father drove a green, snub-nosed oil delivery truck with the words Emerson Crozier painted in white letters on the driver’s door. The Pioneer Co-op paid him a wage to fill the tanks for the growing number of residents who had switched from coal to oil. We were the only family on our block who rented; our neighbours owned their houses. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I knew the distinction was important, especially to my mother, though she fancied up the inside of our house as best she could. Three pictures hung on the walls of our living room. Two were copper bas-reliefs Dad had won curling. One depicted a parrot in a palm tree and the other a covered wagon pulled by horses. The third picture, of a deer beside a lake with a mountain backdrop, was frame–less, painted on a piece of particleboard by a man who’d crossed the prairies in the early 1940s and set up his easel in the streets. Dad had bought it for two dollars outside the bar at the York Hotel.

The kids my age in the neighbourhood, including Lynda, went to kindergarten in the mornings. I didn’t. In those days, you had to pay for it. My other best friend, Ona, who lived next door, was one year younger. Maybe because she and I still hung around together in the mornings, the absence of my other playmates didn’t bother me much. The difference between us didn’t show up until the first week of Miss Bee’s grade 1 class at Central School. They could read the words our teacher wrote on the board and say them out loud. I could not.

I hadn’t known I had a shortcoming in the area of books and letters. Along with a few pocket books with yellowed pages and the black Bible my mom received from the Anglican church when she first took communion, there were three hardcovers in the house—an ancient Book of Knowledge, its pages as durable and thick as the cardboard inside a newly purchased shirt; Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor, its corners chewed by mice; and the spine and covers, back and front, of Zane Grey’s The Code of the

Reviews for Small Beneath the Sky

[skent_31 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

As you read this slim volume you can't help but feel it is coming straight from the heart. And if you have prairie roots (Crozier grew up in Swift Current), it will further enhance the appeal (it reminded me of Dorothy Livesy's memoir A Winnipeg Childhood.) Read it and be inspired to pick up a volume of Lorna Crozier's poetry.

[mahallett · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

very short vignettes which join to form a great memoir

[obtusata · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I've only just discovered a few of Crozier's poetry books in the past few months, so I'm not sure why I decided to read her memoir. Honestly, I think it's at least in part because of the cover, which is gorgeous.

Her memoir is not like a typical memoir. Through out the book, in little collections of 2 or 3, she includes mini chapters that aren't always memories (at least, not the historic kind you generally find in memoirs). Prose, I suppose, on grass and insects and such. It's a lovely and unexpected addition to her family's history.

Crozier is honest about her life and her family, even sharing some of the more painful things she endured. She writes as if she was telling a friend anecdotes about her childhood and her family. It makes for an easy and interesting read that feels more like a story than a autobiography.

Even if you aren't a fan of her poetry, you may find this interesting as it offers insight into the lives of people living in the prairies in the 1900's (she was born mid-century, but she talks about the trials her parents' families faced) and the lives of people who struggled with being poor.

[librarycin · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

3.5 starsLorna Crozier is a poet. She was born in 1948 and grew up in Swift Current, Saskatchewan. This tells of her life, much of it during her childhood. Her family didn’t have a lot of money and her father was an alcoholic. I liked this. I wasn’t sure at first, as there are short chapters that just seem descriptive, which I guess shows more of her poetic side, but those sections didn’t interest me nearly as much as her life stories. I grew up in Southern Sask, and my dad grew up in Swift Current, so it’s always fun to read about places you know. It’s a short book, and she did skip over a lot of stuff. Overall, though, I did enjoy the parts about her life and the familiar places.

[gypsysmom_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I've heard Lorna Crozier interviewed a number of times but I don't recall hearing that she grew up in Saskatchewan in the city of Swift Current. I mainly know Swift Current as a place to get fuel and coffee while heading towards the foothills and mountains of Alberta. I also know it as a place where scientists develop new varieties of wheat at the Swift Current Research and Development Centre. However, that latter piece of information is not mentioned in this book so I guess it's not really relevant. Suffice it to say that I now know quite a bit more about this prairie city since reading this book.Crozier is a well-known poet and her poetic phrasings are sprinkled throughout this book. Her descriptions of the prairie light and the skies made me long to get out into the country. The cover of this book is perfect at capturing the feeling one gets when you stand on the prairie.Despite these moments of poetic bliss Crozier also unflinchingly tells us what it was like to be poor and have an alcoholic father. Both her parents grew up on farms, quite close to each other, but they ended up living in rented houses and barely managing to make ends meet. As the saying goes, you can take the boy out of the farm but you can't take the farm out of the boy. Crozier thinks it was the disappointment of not inheriting the farm that turned him to drink. Despite their hard-scrabble existence both Lorna and her older brother turned out well. That is probably due to their mother's influence and both children retained strong relationships with her.I think Ursula K. Le Guin who is quoted on the front cover sums up this book well:"How rare such honesty is, and how hard-won, and radical, and beautiful."