A Brother's Duty
John was sitting on the porch steps fending Bruno away from a big Pizza Delight takeout bag when Lucy arrived home on Wednesday. He stood and waved as she got out of her car and stretched.
Lucy had seen the truck from halfway down the lane and wondered if she’d gotten the time wrong but suppressed her annoyance. As she got closer and saw Bruno sucking up to John she smiled and shook her head. It occurred to her as she parked that Bruno didn’t really like very many adults. Tolerated them, yes, but like? Maybe John was actually decent under that Puritan exterior.
Bruno came bounding up to her with a quiet woof and stopped to give her a good sniff. She patted his head. “Hi, John. You’re earlier than I expected. I would have skipped the stop at the library to check my email if I’d known.”
“I only beat you here by ten minutes.” He pointed at the chairs on the tailgate of his truck. “We ran out of the right mortar at the church so I sent the volunteers home early.” He shrugged. “It was my mistake. I ordered two types, one for the restoration and one for the new garden wall. They gave me five bags of the mortar mix for the repointing and ninety-five for the garden wall instead of the twenty-five and seventy-five bags I ordered. I didn’t check the order properly. Mike, one of my apprentices, is running everything into Ottawa this afternoon to make the switch. We’ll be back at it tomorrow morning.” He pointed at the tailgate of his truck. “Those are really well made chairs. I should bring over my spray painting gear to refresh the varnish on the rocker, though.”
Lucy crossed her arms. “How about we talk about that later?” Her tone was frosty.
John looked up at her. “I’m taking over again, aren’t I? Rob used to complain about that.”
Lucy sighed. “Look, I don’t know you very well yet. It was nice of you to do what you’ve done so far but I’m not a charity case.”
He managed not to look too skeptical as he nodded. “Okay. But before you get too mad, both my brother and sister have tried to tell me that I have a bad habit of fixing things before I’m asked to. You can call me on it anytime.”
She shook her head in annoyance but her face softened as she pushed past him to open the trailer door. “Come in and sit.”
“I brought supper, I hope you don’t mind.” John pointed at the takeout bag.
She raised an eyebrow. “I’d say yes I mind but my stomach is saying, ‘No, not at all.’ And Bruno is hoping you’re a softer touch than I am. My old roommate Zara used to slip him the pepperoni slices from her pizza when I wasn’t looking.” She opened the door and called over her shoulder, “It smells good.”
“I remembered liking their menu. I don’t stop in Smiths Falls that often. My work is mostly in the Kemptville and Merrickville area, although I’m getting more masonry restoration work in Perth these days. But I did supervise the restoration of the cathedral in Alexandria. That was my first major job. It took a couple of years to complete. And I’m waiting on the Catholic Archdiocese of Ottawa to decide who to hire for one of their stonework restoration projects in downtown Ottawa.” He reached over the back of the dinette bench to put the bag on the table. Then he sat on the sofa and watched as she closed the door dividing the bathroom from the living area.
“I’ll be out in a minute.” She called through the thin door.
Bruno sat watching John hopefully, tail thumping on the floor. “Sorry big guy. I don’t feed other people’s animals unless they ask me to.” He spotted the empty water dish. “But I can get you some water.”
He took two steps to get the bowl and turned to fill it in the sink. Bruno’s tail thumped faster as he set it down. John decided that he’d rather sit at the dinette and searched the cupboards for a glass to get some water.
Lucy looked in the bathroom mirror at her limp sweat-damp hair and pink and white polyester uniform. “Ugh. Well, he can wait until I’m presentable,” she muttered to herself. She searched through the small wardrobe closets until she found what she was looking for, a dark blue sleeveless sundress with white polka dots. She changed quickly then ran a brush through her hair and put it up in a loose pony tail.
When she opened the bathroom door, she almost hit John with it. Suddenly the trailer, already small, seemed almost claustrophobic.
“I hope you don’t mind that I set the table.” John gave a tentative smile.
She looked at the dinette set for two including glasses of water. To one side was a foil pan that looked like it might be lasagna, a Styrofoam container with an Italian salad, a plate with garlic bread and a two litre bottle of ginger ale.
“It looks good. Thank you.” She slid into the empty dinette bench.
“You’re welcome.” John slid into his side and put his head down for a moment of silent prayer.
“You are allowed to say grace if you want to. I’m not exactly a church going person but I spend too much time studying nature not to be aware that God exists.” Lucy wasn’t sure why she’d said that.
John studied her face briefly. He was getting used to the metal even if he didn’t approve. He reached for the salad and Lucy realized he hadn’t put serving utensils out. She reached over to get salad tongs and a serving spoon out of the drawer. “There.”
There was a brief silence as they served themselves and ate the first few bites. Lucy said, “This is better than I expected.”
“First time I remember eating there was probably twenty years ago on the way home from a junior volleyball tournament in Ottawa. You don’t stay in business that long without doing something right.”
Lucy shrugged. “I suppose. But I guess I assumed they only did pizza and that the baked dishes would be…”
“Less of a priority?” John finished.
Lucy gave him a pointed look warning him to let her finish her own sentences. “I was going to say lesser quality. Some of the other pizza places are like that.”
John said, “I forgot to ask. Do you have any dietary restrictions? I asked my sister what she ate when she was pregnant and she told me I couldn’t go wrong with cheesy Italian but to stay away from the really greasy pizzas.”
“Well, she’s right. I’m not handling high fat food very well right now. And no, I don’t have any dietary restrictions. But this is great. What is it?”
“It’s their cheese and parsley stuffed cannelloni. Mostly ricotta and egg in the filling.”
“Well I must need something in what you brought. I often don’t feel like I’ve eaten properly.”
“Irene warned me about that as well.”
“She knows about me?”
“Rob told her about you and Nick before he was killed. She was glad that you’d have someone to help.”
“Without meeting me?” Lucy felt her spine stiffen.
“She knows how much work it is to have a baby and take care of it in the first few months. She doesn’t know what she would have done last year without her husband and mother-in-law and the neighbours. And I pitched in where I could. Mind you, she had some complications with the twins and it took her almost six weeks before she could get around properly after the C section.”
A small sense of panic gripped Lucy. She hadn’t considered the possibility of complications or twins. John sensed her panic and patted her free hand to comfort her.
Both of them looked up, startled by the electricity that his touch generated and they both sat up straight to try to pretend that nothing significant had happened.
Lucy recovered first and withdrew her hand. “I forgot to say that I’m sorry about Rob. He seemed like a good guy.”
John’s grief reset his emotions to neutral. “He was a great guy, for an annoying older brother. He wanted to get out of the backwoods and see the world before he settled down. We both thought he’d be my partner in MacLeish Construction when he finally got out of the Forces. He was only two years away from his pension.”
Lucy reached over to pat John’s hand. “But now that’s not going to happen.” The electricity was back but muted by the remembrance of loss. “It really sucks when you have a dre
am and it gets taken away from you.”
John heard a different note in her voice than mere sympathy. “You sound like you speak from experience.”
Lucy withdrew her hand and gave a bitter laugh. “Too many experiences. The last one was the worst, though. My thesis advisor published three chapters of my draft thesis as separate research papers under her own name and I got cut from the program because she told the department that I hadn’t submitted my thesis on time. It’s one thing for her to take credit for my work if she initiated the project, professors do that all the time, but …” Lucy shook her head sadly.
“That’s despicable. I hope you’re sorting it out.”
“Oh, the university is happier I’m not there.” She waved a hand at her piercings and tattoos. “I’m not exactly the picture of a field naturalist, am I?”
John swallowed, sensing that this was some kind of test. “Well, you don’t look much like Terri Irwin. Except maybe the hair.”
Lucy laughed. “I somehow doubt that I’m going to get a show on Animal Planet any time soon. I’m an ecologist with primary training in botany. I don’t think there’s a Wild Plants show in the offing. My grandfather was a biology professor. We used to spend most of our summer weekends tramping around this place doing biomass surveys and bird counts and identifying animal droppings.” She paused. “So when I needed a safe place to go, this was the first place I thought of.” There was another pause. “I hope I’ll be able to keep it long term.”
John looked around. “I guess you can’t winterize it.”
“I’ve used it in the winter for cross-country skiing with friends or just a weekend alone to get some writing done. The furnace works very well and the pipes are heated and insulated but it’s too far from the main road to use it in the winter without a snow plow. Especially if I have to carry a baby and groceries in.”
“Have you thought about where you’ll go?”
Lucy shrugged. “Off and on. I think I have to move into town by November first at the very latest but I’m not certain if it will be Ottawa, Kingston or Smiths Falls although I’m leaning toward Smiths Falls because I’m making friends there. I figured I’ll start looking at the end of August. My old roommate in Ottawa still has all of my furniture at the place we shared. She’s got a post-doctoral placement in Australia that starts January second and won’t be taking anything but her clothes and a few books with her, so I’ll get all her leftover stuff. So I’ll have enough furniture to set up my own place.”
John put a second helping of salad onto his plate and looked a question at Lucy. She said, “You can have the rest of the salad. Do you mind if I finish off the cannelloni?”
John smiled and spooned the rest of the cannelloni onto Lucy’s plate. “So what were you doing in Edmonton?”
Lucy became very guarded and the conversation paused while John waited for her to speak. She searched John’s face trying to determine if he had a motive for asking. John finally said, “Look, if it’s a touchy subject we can talk about something else.”
“No, it’s okay.” Lucy sighed. “When I lost my grant and my place in the doctoral program I was a bit … lost.”
“That broken dream you mentioned?”
“Exactly. Well, the only family I have left is my mother and some cousins in Boston and Vancouver. Well, I think I might have a half-sister in England. My father died when I was six. He was based in Manchester and I heard a rumour from a doctor that knew him that he had remarried. Mother never talked about him, ever. They married when she was eight months pregnant with me and divorced a couple of months after I was born.” She took a drink of ginger ale. “So when I was bounced from the Ph.D. program I went home to Mother. Well, at least I thought it was home. Mother and I have a very … difficult… relationship. Suffice it to say that I didn’t stay with her for very long. You can make pretty good money in bars if you’re quick, friendly and actually remember what people ordered. But I didn’t have anything else to do when I wasn’t at work, so I got sucked into the party scene.”
John indicated the tattoo on her arm and the eyebrow piercing. “Is this part of it?”
Lucy snorted. “No. The tattoos and jewellery are from the last time I lived in Edmonton taking my Master’s degree. Everything except my earrings and the ankle tattoo was me trying to get Mother to notice. Grandfather didn’t approve of the earrings but he loved me anyway. He never saw the tattoos and certainly would not have approved of them although the ankle design is based on one of his sketches. My look was part of the reason I was working where I was when I met Dog and Sickie Nickie.”
John heard Pastor Jack’s voice from the reading ‘But such were some of you…’ He nodded nervously and finished his salad rather than saying anything. Lucy raised an eyebrow and felt her defenses drop a notch. She almost smiled at the thought that John was trying so hard not to say anything negative.
“You probably wouldn’t approve of what I was doing in the last few years. Hey, looking back at it, I don’t approve of much of it either. But what’s done is done and now I have to move on.”
John nodded agreement. “Rob knew I didn’t approve of his wild ways and drinking and weird tattoos but I really hope he knew I loved him. However, you’re right, it’s in the past and we have to move on.” Changing the subject, he said, “You said you study this place. I’ll bet there are some really interesting things you could show me.”
Lucy gave him genuine smile. “I’d like that. But what about the Mr. Fixit projects?”
“I’ll show you what I saw when I came out on Sunday before we take that walk. Then you can think it over while you show me around. Deal?” He held out his hand.
She took it and said, “Deal.”
There was an interesting dance to move around each other so they could put the leftovers away, avoid Bruno and each other, wash the dishes and use the washroom. But it didn’t feel as awkward as it had before dinner and within twenty minutes they were heading out the door.
John got his high power flashlight from the truck and showed Lucy the problems with the porch foundations and indicated where he thought the cross bracing for the roof was failing. He also mentioned the advisability of repainting the trailer roof with good epoxy sealant paint but that would cost her a bit for materials. He pointed up at the dead branches hanging overhead and said that he owned a cherry picker and pruning equipment so it wouldn’t cost anything but the gas to take care of them. She nodded as she took it all in but didn’t say anything more.
“Okay, John. I’ll think about it. Now it’s time to show you around my three hundred acre wood.” She put her fingers to her lips and whistled then called, “Bruno! Walk!”
Bruno came bounding around the end of the trailer with a wisp of dried grass attached to his nose.
John said, “Hey, Bruno. Did you find something nice and smelly?”
Bruno sneezed and pointedly ignored John as he loped past them onto an obviously well-travelled path.
It took almost an hour for Lucy to show John the deer meadows, the stagnant pond that was bogging over, the small drumhead bog, the abundant trilliums in the understory, and the six biomass study areas that she and her grandfather had been tracking for over fifty years. John was interested and asked some good questions but it was obvious to Lucy that he was not trained. But his interest seemed genuine and she was unprepared for how flattered she felt to be taken seriously.
John had finally gotten used to the piercings and was beginning to see Lucy for herself. He suspected that she was the neglected child of a selfish single mother who used her piercings both as a defense and to gain attention but behind the metal fence was a person who cared deeply, perhaps too deeply.
Her doctoral thesis had been on the natural recovery of abandoned farmland. During her undergrad she had come to realize that there were too many assumptions about how quickly or slowly an area would recover from human activity or natural disasters. She and her grandfather had discussed the lack of solid data the summer before he
r fourth year at Queen’s when she switched to biology from pre-med. They got excited as they both realized that they could do some truly useful research if they consolidated his notes.
She was matter of fact when she talked about Dr. Eldritch passing away before he could make use of the data. In his will he’d left the house in Ottawa along with the furnishings to Lucy’s mother but his books and notes and the old homestead went to Lucy along with most of the liquid assets. So when it came time to put forward a Ph.D. thesis topic, it wasn’t very difficult at all.
John said that she was lucky that her grandfather was able to leave all of this to her. Lucy gave John a teasing look and said, “I suppose you’d have parcelled all of this out for cottages by now.”
John looked around him at the tall maples they were walking under. “I don’t know. There’s more to life than money and I make a good living. I might sever a couple of two acre lots on the main road if I needed to or maybe a lot or three on the other side of the lake if there’s access from the concession road, but it’s really incredible back here. It has, I don’t know how to say it really. A sense of peace, I suppose. A place that just is, where you don’t need to do anything but be. Kind of like the green pastures and cool waters that David wrote about in Psalm 23.”
“It can certainly feel like that. But what I see is a kind of hushed frenzy, a constant buzz of activity. I see your point though. It’s not a place where our intervention is actually needed. God looks after the lilies and the sparrows here. If we need to use this place for something else, like the farm it used to be, God would be okay with that, I think. But right now, it’s like He’s taking care of it for us until we need to use it for something else.”
John looked a question at Lucy.
“I was brought up in the Church. A very liberal pro-choice United Church that my mother and I went to in Edmonton during the school year because maintaining her good reputation required that she go to some sort of church and a very solidly conservative pro-life Baptist church in Smiths Falls with my grandfather during the summer. We didn’t find a good church in Ottawa to attend although we didn’t try very hard. I haven’t been to any church since my grandfather died when I was in my last year at Queen’s. But I do know some of what it’s about.”
They walked down the path and it started to get swampy. “I hope your boots are waterproof.”
John shrugged. “They have to be. I’m always spilling water on them when I mix mortar.”
Then Lucy surprised John by grabbing his hand to pull him along. Bruno streaked past them and Lucy said, “We’re coming to my favourite place.”
John lengthened his stride to keep up and almost ran into Lucy when she stopped short at the top of a rise.
“What do you think?” John could sense the pride and love in her voice. He turned slightly to look where she was pointing. About twenty meters away was a babbling brook that flowed into a weed choked lake. The water around the stream’s outflow was free of vegetation and looked clear but most of the small lake was covered with a mat of mottled green that almost glowed in the waning sunlight. There were some large rocks poking out of the water and there was a flat topped log in a small cleared area next to the shore. Bruno charged into the water and stopped with his chest half submerged and began to drink his fill.
“It’s our swimming hole.” Lucy said with satisfaction.
“It’s beautiful here.” John looked at their clasped hands and gently tugged Lucy forward. “I think you need to sit and cool off your feet.”
Lucy turned her face to John with an affectionate glance. “Thanks. I think I will.”
They stopped at the bench to sit. Lucy took off her duck boots and wiggled her toes in the edge of the lake. “Oh, that feels so good.”
John gazed around them. There was a warm breeze blowing off the lake that cooled them off a bit. A hum of insects and various birdsongs echoed around the lake. “How much of the lake is yours?”
Lucy stood up and waded into the lake, leaning on a rock before finding a place to sit where she could dangle her feet. “All nineteen acres of it. Grandfather thought it was much prettier than the coveted rocky bottom lakes north of here but then he was a biologist. There are dozens of varieties of water plants in the lake and all sorts of bugs and worms and fish. A nice healthy lake. And there’s plenty of bass and perch to catch.” Then she splashed her feet happily. “And there’s clear water for swimming when it’s too hot out. It’s deep enough to dive off that rock toward the center if you don’t mind a few weeds, although the water level is lower than usual this year because of the drought.” She pointed to the farther of a pair of rocks sticking out of the water.
John’s mind created an image of Lucy’s tall fit form in a swimsuit diving off the rocks. He shook his head and asked, “You do know that, with the lake, you could get at least a million for this property?”
Lucy appeared to contemplate that. “If I was willing to sell. I may have to someday but I like your idea of severing lots by the road or on the far side of the lake. But it doesn’t feel right to sell this place, and not just because of the happy memories with my grandfather. There’s something special about this property and I feel that it’s my duty to preserve it.” She realized how she sounded and apologized, “I suppose that sounds pompous and self-serving.”
John shook his head. “No, actually. The three of us felt the same way about the family farm near Athens. Neither Rob nor I wanted to be dairy farmers but my sister did. While Mum was sick with her first bout of cancer we prayed about it. Finally Irene went to Guelph for animal husbandry and I helped Dad run the farm while I was taking my masonry courses. While she was at Guelph she met Ernie, Ernst vanVliet, my brother-in-law. He is the third and youngest son and there wasn’t enough income from his parents’ dairy farm near Stratford for all three brothers to make a good living. So after Dad passed on, Rob and I gave them a sweetheart deal to keep the farm in the family. They’re still in the process of buying me out but they own about seventy-five percent of the corporation now. So, yes, I do understand about keeping the land in the family. It’s almost like it isn’t your land but something you’re holding in trust for the next generation.”
Lucy smiled and turned her attention to a family of ducks that were opening up leads of clear water while feeding.
After a several minutes of comfortable silence, Lucy said, “I have to get back to the trailer.”
John raised an eyebrow, “Why?”
Lucy gave him a look and said, “I’m pregnant.” When he didn’t immediately clue in, she continued, “And I didn’t bring anything to wipe with.”
John jumped to his feet and offered a hand to help her out of the water. Trying to conceal a blush he said, “Reenie used to complain about that, too.”
Lucy slipped her hand into John’s as she put her damp feet into her rubber boots. “It’s not very far to the trailer. We took the long way around.” Without releasing him, she began to walk.
Chapter 8