The Princess of Stubble Fields

by Kate Smith

I USED TO HIT THE ROAD with a song in my heart and the radio on, just a small town girl going somewhere greener, somewhere warmer. There was a lot of country music and classic rock on the radio in that farming town.

When I turned on to the highway my spirit would lift its wings. It would turn up the music and check the gas, the map. Wind in my hair and me singing along, even when I didn’t know the words. My old Honda rattled its way past the patchwork fields, down into the river valley, and at last the farms petered out into the forest. Aspens gave way to conifers in the mountains and the seasons changed with the altitude. Then we’d drift down into a dry plateau, the Honda and I, the car smelling like dust and melted crayons as the sun heated up the debris of previous owners stuck between the rear seats. Up and down and at last through more and higher mountains and out into the fog of a different forest with a sigh of relief. Following the river’s idea: always to the coast.

Where the river coursed along at the bottom of the canyons I felt sorry for those fish that I imagined bashing themselves to death against the rocks following an ancient instinct to get back to their headwaters.

Every visit home was a day and most of a night of mixed tapes and coffee, too young and too broke to stop. I was always happy to leave behind the farm and the mud and the familiar struggle for the rain washed streets of the big city. For struggle and promise of a different kind. Exuberant and guilty. My mother told me she was bereft when her children left home. I didn’t understand or even want to understand but I immediately felt the weight of that word on me. Pressing my wings down and the accelerator to the floor. 

I always call my mother when I get home from a visit. If I forget, she calls me. “Hi Sarah Jane. Just checking to make sure you made it, that the trip went alright.” Sometimes I’m grateful that she worries, sometimes I’m annoyed—but I always answer the phone.

* * *

WHEN I WAS YOUNG (in that house in Chatham—when everyone called me Barbara Ruth, like it was one word—before we moved closer to the city) my father doled out the housekeeping money on payday. I remember him jocular, playing generous, and my mother’s lips pressed tight. She would fold the money silently into her apron pocket and straighten her watch or her rings, not looking up. She always wore a dress and an apron and sensible heels in the house. At least, that’s what I remember. She taught me how to wrap my wet hair tightly around empty orange juice cans to smooth out the curl and frizz. When I started high school she returned to teaching. “No sense letting my Toronto Normal School go to waste!” she’d said to the neighbour ladies who came over for coffee and cake on Saturday afternoons. 

Before she went back to work, I walked home from school every day for lunch. Soup and crackers or sandwiches. Cream of mushroom, cream of celery, tomato. Tuna salad, chicken salad, individually wrapped cheese slices. Post-war food, I’d call it now. I remember the lace edges of the table runner and the pink roses on the sugar bowl. I still have one of the aprons my mother wore when she crumbled potato chips on a casserole, or kneaded dough for dinner rolls. 

On her first winter in the classroom we went shopping for new coats. I tried on a red wool one with real fur on the hood and shiny black buttons. “How much is it?” I asked, twirling in the mirror. “Don’t worry about how much it costs. A person needs a good coat,” was my mother’s reply. After, we took the street car to lunch. It was steamy and smelled like wet wool, full of the crowd of weekend shoppers and I was thrilled by the clanging of the bell, the brown leather seats and high blue windows. We must have been in Toronto, but I don’t remember getting there. I remember that we had Cokes and sandwiches and pie. I felt grown up and like I’d caught a glimpse of something shiny, sharp-edged that had been there all along.

I wore that coat to church and Sunday school and Baptist Ladies Teas paired with equally good but much less comfortable shoes. I didn’t believe a word of it by then and I was fixing my resolve to live a different kind of life. I learned a breezy, head tilted laugh and said, “Call me Barb.” I stopped including my biblical middle name. 

I went west, of course, as soon as I could. After I finished the parentally financed degree in literature and used their money to spend a summer in Europe and one in Montreal. Fast, free summers without concerns about money, the future, or the weight of disapproval and disappointment. 

So, eventually west, then north like I was following a water route to an unseen ocean. Falling joyously into odd jobs and a new wide open landscape. I found new friends and a new life. In those days I had wild hair and my easy laugh was real. I fell in love and out of love with men, with myself, with possibility. Summertime, and the livin’ wasn’t always easy. 

Then, some years later, one long dark winter, I took my mother’s advice and my father’s money and went south and east and got a job as a teacher. Maybe it was an ending, maybe a beginning. I knew there would soon be diapers to buy and didn’t think too much about how much resolve I had left. “Barbara Ruth, tell the truth!” The kids at school used to think this rhyme was hilarious.

I wrote my mother with our new address and my due date. My mother loved a long and chatty letter. It was always easier to write than to call. Reactions tempered by time and distance were easier to take.

* * *

WHEN I WAS NEW TO THIS CITY, fresh off the farm, the rain was the best reminder that this life was different from the other. Before the dampness was fully realized, I loved it. It called for a different wardrobe and new shoes. This was enough to keep me interested through a few wet grey winters. 

I went on dates with nice young men in my nice new shoes. I felt so vivacious, so desirable—feeling myself, the kids would say. The game was new and shiny too, but still tedious, “What’s your favourite band?” “What were you like as a child?” Later, after I learned to say no, I was surprised at the lack of disappointment on both sides. Maybe I’d misunderstood the game all along. 

When I was a child, I failed to imagine that I’d seek approval this way. “When I was young, I was the princess of stubble fields, but then I grew up and moved away,” I answered once. “Is that a quote from something?” he replied, with a hint of distaste. I wasn’t sure, likely it was a relic of my mother’s education. Something about “the prince of apple towns.” When I told this story to my friends, the distaste grew with each repetition and allowed us shrieks of derision.

My favourite activity, when I was young and it was summertime, was to take my dad his lunch in the field. A mason jar of water, a thermos of tea, sandwiches, cookies, an apple, some radishes, and maybe a cucumber were stowed in the faded orange canvas backpack. I followed the sound of the tractor past the barn, across the creek and through the horse pasture into the hay field. My ankles were stabbed by the sharp stubble of the freshly cut hay. My dad stopped and turned off the tractor when he saw me coming. In the sudden silence we leaned against the tires in the sun and watched the swallows and the cumulus clouds scutter past in the huge blue sky. My dad drank standing up before he sat down to wipe the sweat and dust off his neck and eat the sandwiches and cookies. He told me that he’d seen coyotes, or a goshawk, or a bear. I must have shared my stories too. I took the long way home with the empty backpack—through the cottonwoods along the creek to pick arnica and wild asters and sweet clover and goldenrod. I hit the flowers off thistles with a stick and picked up feathers. 

The winters closed in early, to balance the idyll of those endless nightless northern summer days. Long dark afternoons were spent dismantling carefully built stacks of bales, emptying the granary, feeding livestock. One winter my dad worked away and left me to look after the farm. It was so cold that winter, below minus 40 for weeks on end. My scarf dripped icicles and froze to my face. My fingers and toes were numb in spite of all the layers, the boots and the gloves and the sweat of effort. I forgot about the chickens for three days and they were all dead by the time I shovelled a path out to the chicken coop. Frozen solid. I cried in the cold and didn’t tell my mother. The next spring I finished high school and left home and only ever went back to visit. I guess my dad was home that next winter, but I was too far away to notice.

When I would call home and talk to my mother, our conversations wandered. Friendships and bus routes, history classes and news of aunts and cousins from my grandmother’s letters. Of cabbages and kings, not of fears and sorrows. 

“I remember the dining hall in my first year at university,” she told me. “I always went for breakfast and I’d put a few pieces of toast in a napkin in my pocket for lunch.” 

“Dry toast or buttered toast?” 

“Marmalade, I loved the marmalade they had there.” 

“Didn’t it leak out?” 

“Well, that’s what the napkins were for.” 

“Were you Barb, or Barbara then?” 

“Oh, Barb. Only your grandmother called me Barbara. Or Barbara Ruth when she was mad.”

* * *

YEARS LATER, I told my daughter stories of places I’d been and interesting men I’d had known. Sons of diplomats, writers, ones with trust funds and ones with paint on their hands. Back when I was Barb and I was nobody’s mother.

“One summer, when I was in university, I worked for somebody Dad knew, what a creep. He chased me around the desk once, I remember. But I went out with his son, we went swimming at the lake. I left my bathing suit in his car. It was a blue and white bikini—not like bikinis you see these days, this was the ’60s—I really liked that bathing suit. I never got it back.” For a moment I was back on those shores of Lake Ontario, in that body that wore a bikini with confidence, with innocence. 

Then I saw Sarah Jane waiting for the story to finish. Instead, I said, “You know, the first time I wore a bikini was in Nice. I took the train with a girlfriend but I didn’t bring a bathing suit. I bought one out of a basket on the beach—it was very … European.” We laughed and discussed the cut of bikini bottoms through the decades.

My parents bought me a car to take to university. I thought about selling it out of spite—they were so … middle class. I loved taking the streetcar on the weekends. Although the little blue windows of my childhood were gone, the press of people and the clanging were the same. I stopped ironing my hair and learned to eat watercress sandwiches. The older I get, more of these memories come back to me in flashes—walking in drifts of autumn leaves, leaving a theatre in the dark, heavy summer rains that broke the humidity. The brand of cigarettes I used to smoke, at parties only. The job I had in the library. I bought a tweed skirt and drank milky tea on my breaks. I needed the car for that job, it comes back to me now. 

I’ve kept my impulses and desires to myself, muted rage that ranged from irritated to incoherent. Even though I no longer believe that this will get me into heaven. I felt loved and saw beauty in a chinook sunset where the mountains ran into the prairies. The clear arch of blue, framed by a blanket of clouds turned crimson and orange and purple with the promise of warm winds by morning. Stoicism and salary have been life rafts. I know my own corners but have come to realize that no one else could see them. I seem to fit perfectly into this hole, as if I’d dug it myself.

“How could you expect me to stay here?” Sarah Jane shrieked during an argument. “I never expected you to stay,” I told her, “I just don’t want you to leave.” I don’t want to be left, I wanted to leave, I want to have more of my life in front of me.I thought these things and more, and managed not to say any of them aloud. Barbara Ruth, tell the truth, I think.

When Sarah Jane was in university, she would call home when she was lonely or scared. Not that she’d admit it and I pretended not to notice as we talked and I cleaned up the kitchen, or ironed shirts. We talked about her classes, her friends, things she’d learned for the first time. “What did you want to be when you grew up, Mom?” she’d asked. Doctor, lawyer, librarian, seamstress for the band.

* * *

WHEN YOU ASK ME what I remember about my childhood, I can tell you I remember being loved. I remember the hot feeling of fear, the fizz of noise in my head and the sound of my own heartbeat. I remember standing in the garden eating rhubarb raw. I remember the heat of the sun on my head and the smell of horses and alfalfa blooming. I remember the song of a white-crowned sparrow. I remember believing in the beauty of a chinook sunset where the prairies run up against the mountains. I remember my mother in her underwear on an ambulance stretcher. I remember the outside noises of things in the night. I remember the first time I saw snakes in the water.

I remember that my mother refused to help with the farm that winter. I remember the dead chickens, their surprisingly small feathered forms in the straw and my breath in the cold air.

My mother claims not to remember that winter at all, except she agrees it was exceptionally cold.

Every time I call my mother, I hear her start to run water into the sink or stack plates in the dishwasher. “Hello?” “Hi mom, I just called to …” “Hello? Hello, Sarah Jane, can you hear me?” “Hi mom. I can hear you.” “Oh, hi. I can’t really hear you.” “Do you have the radio on, Mom?” “Hold on, let me turn this off…”

When she tells me stories, she leaves most of the details out. If I press her, or tease her for more, she’ll change the subject or end the conversation. But rarely I’m lucky, and she’ll laugh and give me a little more. Like that she used to like her name before kids started to tease her about it.

* * *

SO, OF COURSE, I didn’t sell the car. I went west in that car and it saw me through a lot. I kept it until the night I turned left in the dark on a rainy street. The rain reflected the streetlights and the headlights and the flashing signs in a rainbow of colours and I misjudged the oncoming car. Misjudged. 

When I came home from the hospital my mother was there. She’d come to look after the kids, she said. To look after me. She’d brought along her own apron and a housecoat for me. It was nicer than anything I could afford to buy myself. I was so grateful to have her there. I wanted to scream at her, to see if I could make her leave. Instead, I cried and let her make me tea. This is a story I don’t tell my children.

I tried to present an optimistic and even-keeled self for them, maybe hoping to make it true. I think I’ve told hopeful and interesting stories. Even so they often disappear behind their eyes while I talk. They have never wanted to see me differently than they already understand me to be. The cruelty of this still renders me speechless, felled by the unfairness of loving someone who appears not to know you. 

Sarah Jane called to say she wasn’t coming home after her first year of university. She expected me to react badly and I did. She was defensive and I pretended to be surprised and the conversation went in predictable, well-worn directions.

“Obviously, you do what you want. It’s not that I’m saying you shouldn’t—I understand why you want to stay in the city for the summer.” I’m just bereft. “We were expecting you home, that’s all. Tell me about the job.” I opened the cupboard and reached for a teacup and I filled the kettle. I rolled up the plans already made and tried to imagine all the new paths that might unfurl from this moment. 

* * *

I HUNG UP THE PHONE and told myself that I did not feel guilty. I told myself that I wouldn’t spend a penny more than necessary, as if financial independence would help. The gilt was off the lily of summer in the city once it was real. Summertime and the livin’ is easy. Talking wild and looking pretty. 

I walked to work and in my memory it was always raining. Smiled at the people, made a little money, and went for a walk at lunch. On Fridays I washed my hair. Did competitive shots of vodka and danced till the lights came on. The street lights spun as we stumbled outside. I went home with men who were not ones you took home to your mother. Certainly I never planned to take them home to mine.

It was in these years especially, with a fresh university degree and a frequent hangover and a restlessness fuelled by the combination of steady income and lack of purpose, that I suspect I was hard to feel sorry for—no matter how sorry I felt for myself. I would often find myself walking somewhere and have the urge to keep going, nowhere in particular, just to go. Maybe it was the fear of getting old that made me restless.

On lonely nights, I called my mother. She never asked what I was doing on the nights I didn’t call her, just when I was coming home. And she never called me, just reminded me how long it had been since we spoke. “Hi Sarah Jane. You’ve been busy I guess.” “Why do you say that?” “Oh, I haven’t heard from you in a while.”

Now when I hit the road and turn on the radio and then lean my head on the window and cry as soon as it is too late to turn back.

* * *

EVEN AFTER ALL THIS TIME I’m still not used to how dark it gets here in the winter. This afternoon, turning left, I misjudge the icy roads. Misjudge. Again. For a few suspended moments, the world outside the windows glides past smoothly. Then we hit the ditch, roll over once and everything stops.

Is the best outcome to find joy inside a life you haven’t fully chosen? How do you explain fear? How do you anticipate disappointment? How do you tell someone that you wish you would make different choices if you could do it all again but that you probably wouldn’t. Maybe that’s how you explain fear.

Sarah Jane is there when I wake up in the hospital. She is home for a visit, that’s right. I’m glad she’s here.

“Mom, what happened?” 

“I’m fine, it was icy.” 

“You’re not fine.” 

“I’ll be fine.” 

“Where’s your father?” 

“He’ll come later, he went to see what’s happening with your car.” 

“Where are the kids?” 

“They’re with Dad.”

A doctor comes in to explain the surgery. They need to reset my arm, to put plates in to reinforce it—they say the old fractures complicate things. “What old fractures, Mom?” she asks when the doctor leaves.

“Oh well, that’s from a car accident. A long time ago, just after we moved here. You were really young. Anyway, I was in the hospital for a while.”

* * *

I WAIT FOR MORE, but there is no more coming. There never is when I want it. Barbara Ruth, tell the truth, I want to say. Instead, I get up and refill her water. 

* * *

SARAH JANE GETS UP up and starts to tidy the rolling cart beside the bed. She refills the pitcher from the bathroom tap and puts the two empty coffee cups in the garbage can, stacking them inside each other. 

“What time is it?” 

“Late, after eight I think.” 

“Can you get me something to eat?“

“I’ll check with the nurse, you might need to wait.” 

“Well, I won’t go anywhere.” 

“Ha ha.”

I wish I knew what my hair looked like right now. It’s silly for an old lady to worry about her hair. It’s silly of an old lady to be proud of her hair, but I am when I look at the wisps of white and patches of scalp on the other old ladies. 

* * *

I NOTICE MOM fussing with her hair and I rummage in her purse for a comb. I’ve always wished I had my mother’s hair. I’ve wondered if I might be different if mine were thick and curly instead of thin and straight.

Mom comes home from the hospital and starts to call me. She talks about her mother, about those years in her life before I was there. I learn that when she was a child, her grandmother lived with them until she wandered outside one winter night, trying to go home. I learn that her brother used to drive his motorcycle through the mountains to visit us, until he thought better of it. 

“Mom, was I there when you had the accident—the other one?” 

“What do you mean, there?” 

“I mean, did I see it?” 

“What makes you wonder that?” 

“I have a memory of seeing you … in an ambulance.” 

“Oh, well. I’m not sure if you saw that. It was a long time ago. I don’t remember all the details.”

She tells me, instead, about the things she does remember. A summer cottage and a dock on a cool lake. Excursions to the city in a good coat—she has always liked a good coat. The humidity of summer and rich hardwood colours of autumn. A flash of a cardinal in the snow. Driving to Buffalo with her girlfriends, singing in the backseat. Football games and church picnics. Summer storms and rain that only ever fell at night. The regret that creeps into her stories now is hard for me to hear.

In the summer, the kids and I go home for a longer visit. We walk down to the hay field, covered in purple and white alfalfa flowers. We visit the horses and chickens. I tell them a version of the chicken story. In this one the villains are clearer (me), the story is cleaner (no tears in the snow). It’s funnier, certainly. But the whole story is harder to tell. I wish that my children knew the things I knew. Open fields and clear blue prairie skies. Saddling a horse and warm eggs clutched in the bottom of a t-shirt. The sweat of effort and thrill of accomplishment. I wish my children knew some of the things that I know.

I wish I knew if I’ve made them a good life. A good enough life. Good enough to resist impulsivity, impetuousness and alcohol. Good enough to absolve me for never going home. I wonder what they will remember from their childhood. Snakes in the water, flashes of rage, homemade pizza, the weight of my expectations. 

We go to visit the river. We hold hands and wade out together. My daughter delights at the tug of the current and the slippery rocks and squeals at the sudden plunge into the cold water when the river bed drops down. I want to slip under the surface and let the river quietly wash away my need to prove something, my guilt, my rage, my fear. Carry it out to the unseen ocean.

We pick up rocks from the edge of the river to take home, and a leaf and a flower that we find on the way back to the car.

Kate Smith, currently a graduate student at SFU, works in science and lives for the arts, in the Okanagan Valley. “The Princess of Stubble Fields” is her first piece of fiction. 

*

The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster