This is what I say. But I don’t really know at all. She can’t be after my money—I haven’t much of that, God knows. My house, perhaps. Or just to have me away, so she can sleep through the night without disturbance. When I think this way, I make myself ill. The nausea has begun to scorch my gullet, as though I’d swallowed lighted coal-oil. I shouldn’t be smoking in the night. It plays havoc with my digestion. Where’s my purse ash tray that Marvin gave me? That was an odd gift from him, now I come to think of it, for he detests my smoking.
Where’s Marvin? I don’t hear either of them moving about downstairs. Can they have gone to bed this early?
Every last one of them has gone away and left me. I never left them. It was the other way around, I swear it.
When John was the age to go to college, he couldn’t go right away because what I’d been able to save wasn’t enough. Mr. Oatley got him a job in an office, and he worked for a few years. It wasn’t much of a job, but as I kept telling him, it was only temporary. I reckoned that between us we’d have enough within a year or so. To hasten the time, and increase our resources more quickly, I invested the money, on Mr. Oatley’s advice. Everyone invested in those days. It was the done thing.
I never understood the market in the slightest—what it was, or why it should all at once disintegrate. But it did, and men of substance wailed like the widows of Ashur, and I was told my handsomely engraved shares weren’t worth the paper they were printed on, and that was that.
I didn’t waste long in mourning. That’s never solved anything. My first thought was that John should apply for a scholarship or bursary. But when I told him, he only shook his head. I was annoyed.
“Don’t be silly, now, John, please. No harm in trying, is there?”
His eyes darkened with inexplicable anger. “They’re not easy to get. You don’t seem to realize. There aren’t many. I couldn’t get one if my life depended on it.”
“Why couldn’t you?”
“I’ve been away from school for four years, Mother, for heaven’s sake. It’s too late for me. And anyway, I haven’t got the brains for it.”
“You have so, if you’d only buckle down to work and not spend so much time trotting around with those so-called friends of yours. Not one of them is up to much, if you ask me.”
“I didn’t ask you, not that that would ever stop you.”
“There’s no call for you to be rude, John.”
“Okay, okay. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”
Finally he agreed that he would keep on working, and we’d both save, and he’d go back and get into university as soon as he was able. Then the office where he was working had to cut down staff, and he was let go. He couldn’t find another job. All at once, jobs were scarce as hen’s teeth. The coast was a bad place to be, for men and families poured in from everywhere, thinking, I suppose, that they would rather be broke in a mild climate where the fuel bills would surely be low and the fruit was said to be cheap in season.
In a year he had two temporary jobs. He worked in a soft-drink factory and used to bottle Cherry Creme, but he got laid off from that. And he worked for a while on one of the pushcarts that sold hot popcorn in the park, but when winter came there was no demand for popcorn.
“I’m leaving,” John said one day, abruptly. “I’m going back.”
“Back? Back where?”
“To Manawaka,” John said. “To the Shipley place. At least I can work there.”
“You can’t go!” I cried. “He might be dead, for all I know. The place might be in other hands by now.”
“He’s not dead,” John said.
“How do you know?”
I’ve written to him. He sent the reply to Marvin’s. Marv writes to him sometimes—didn’t you know?”
“No. He’s never mentioned it to me.”
This was hardly surprising, really, as John and I saw so little of Marvin. He’d gone to work for Britemore Paint some years before, and married Doris, and now they had a year-old boy. Marvin used to ask me over, but I didn’t often go, for I always felt ill-at-ease with him, somehow, and I couldn’t bear that fool of a Doris. Nevertheless, it irked me to think he’d kept in touch with Bram all this time and never said a word about it.
“Marvin might at least have told me.”
“I guess he didn’t think you’d be interested,” John said.
“What did he say?” I asked. “The letter to you?”
John laughed. “You can hardly figure out his handwriting. It’s like sparrow tracks on snow.”
“How is he?”
“Why should you care?” John said.
Then I was furious, and frantic to know.
“I asked you how he is, your father.”
John shrugged. “He’s okay, I guess. He didn’t say much. He had a half-breed girl there to cook for him last winter, but she went away in spring and didn’t come back.”
“To cook,” I said sourly. “I’ll bet.”
“I don’t see that it matters very much,” John said. “He liked her. She was kind, he said.”
“She’d have to be, to put up with him.” I could not restrain my bitterness. “He never showed much interest in you before. If he wants you back now, it’s to get even with me.”
John’s voice was distant. I could hardly catch the words.
“He never said he wanted me back. He only said I could come if I wanted to.”
“You’ve forgotten what he’s like,” I said. “You’ll not stay. You’ll soon see, once you get there.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” John said.
“Why go, then? There’s nothing for you there.”
“You never know,” he said. “I might get on famously. Maybe it’s just the place for me.”
His laughter was incomprehensible to me.
I didn’t go to the station with him, of course. Those who intended to ride the rods could scarcely have had their mothers there to wave as they clambered illicitly atop the already moving boxcars. I hated him to go like that, like a tramp, but I didn’t have the money for his fare, and when I suggested borrowing it from Mr. Oatley, John made such a fuss that I gave up the idea.
I walked to the wrought-iron gate of Mr. Oatley’s house with him, he wanting to be off, brushing away my words and hands, and I wanting only to touch his brown impatient face but not daring to. As I gave him the meaningless and customary cautions—look after yourself, write often—I added something else.
“You might just let me know how he really is,” I said.
I’d be the last one to maintain that marriages are made in heaven, unless, as I’ve sometimes thought, the idea is to see what will happen, put this or that unlikely pair together, observe how they spar. Otherwise, now. Why should He care who mates or parts? But when a man and woman live in a house, sleep in a bed, have meals and children, you can’t always part them by willing it so.
John’s letters were infrequent and told me little. Two years went by. Mr. Oatley grew wispier and only picked at his food. I grew stouter and dreaded the lung-taxing climb up to my room. Nothing happened. Then, almost laconically, John wrote.
“Dad’s sick. I don’t see him lasting very long.”
And so I went. I can’t explain it. I never could and can’t now. I went, that’s all. It was its own reason.
I couldn’t have picked a worse time. I’d read of the drought, but it didn’t mean a thing to me. I couldn’t imagine it. Words in a newspaper have small power to startle. You shake your head, say what a shame it is, and on you go to another page, another printed and insubstantial disaster.
The Shipley farm, I soon found, was in good company at last. However much or little they’d worked, the upright men and the slouches, it amounted to the same thing now. That must have been the worst, almost, to men like Henry Pearl or Alden Cates, who’d worked like horses all their lives, to see their places looking the same as Bram’s, who’d been so hey-day, go-day, God-send-Sunday.
The prairie had a hushed look
. Rippled dust lay across the fields. The square frame houses squatted exposed, drabber than before, and some of the windows were boarded over like bandaged eyes. Barbed wire fences had tippled flimsily and not been set to rights. The Russian thistle flourished, emblem of want, and farmers cut it and fed it to their lean cattle. The crows still cawed, and overhead the telephone wires still twanged all up and down the washboard roads. Yet nothing was the same at all.
The wind was everywhere, shuffling through the dust, wading and stirring until the air was thickly gray with grit. John met me at the station. He had an old car, but he wasn’t using its engine. It was hitched to a horse. He saw my astounded stare.
“Gas is expensive. We save the truck for emergencies.”
At the Shipley place the rusty machinery stood like aged bodies gradually expiring from exposure, ribs turned to the sun. The leaves of my lilac bushes were burnt yellow, and the branches snapped if you touched them. The house had never been anything but gray, so it wasn’t any different now, except that the front porch, which had been made of green lumber when the house was built and had been warping for years, now had been given a final pliers twist by frost and wore a caved-in look, like toothless jaws.
Our horse-drawn car pulled into the yard, and the dust puffed up around us like flour. My marigolds were a dead loss by this time, of course. I’d planted them behind the house to use as cutting flowers and they’d kept on seeding themselves, but now only a few wizened ones remained, small unexpected dabs of orange among the choking weeds, dry sheepfoot and thistle. The sunflowers had risen beside the barn as always, fed by the melting snow in spring, but they’d had no other water this year—their tall stalks were hollow and brown, and the heavy heads hung over, the segments empty as unfilled honeycombs, for the petals had fallen and the centers had dried before the seeds could form. In the patch where I had grown radishes and carrots and leaf lettuce, only the grasshoppers grew, leaping and whirring in the bone-dry air.
“He’s really let the place go now,” I said. “It breaks my heart to see it.”
“What would you have done?” John said. “Hired a rainmaker? Got the ministers to pray or the Indians from the mountain to dance for clouds?”
“I don’t believe it has to be this bad,” I said. “It gives him an excuse never to lift a finger.”
“That’s about all he can do now, anyway.”
“How is he?” I asked, looking at John sharply.
He shrugged. “You keep on asking that. What do you want me to say—he’s fine? I told you, he’s sick.”
I knew he was, and yet when I thought of him, I didn’t even think of him as he’d been when I left. In my mind I saw the Brampton Shipley I’d married, a black beard, a bony face, a way of lifting his shoulders to show he didn’t give a hoot for anyone. I smoothed my dress. I’d not grown slimmer. I was too padded on the hips and bust, but the dress was becoming, a green cotton with pearl buttons down the front, a dress I’d bought in the autumn sales last fall.
The house had that rancid smell that comes from unwashed dishes and sour floors and food left sitting on the table. The kitchen was a shambles. You could have scratched your initials in the dark grease that coated the oilcloth on the table. A loaf of bread sat there with the butcher knife stuck into it like a spear. A dish of stewed saskatoons, the berries hard and small, was being attended by a court of flies. On a larded piece of salt pork a mammoth matriarchal fly was laboring obscenely to squeeze out of herself her white and clustered eggs.
“I meant to clean up,” John said. “But I never got around to it.”
The house couldn’t have looked much worse than he did. He wore an old pair of Bram’s overalls, so stiff with dirt they’d have stood alone. He’d lost too much weight. His face was like a skull’s, and yet he grinned as though it pleased him no end to look that way.
“Welcome to your castle,” he said, and made a bow.
I looked at him shrewdly and wondered why I hadn’t noticed before. He hadn’t needed to drive the car, for one thing. The horse could have found the way blindfold, as Bram’s horses used to steer him home so long ago.
“I wouldn’t have thought you could afford to drink,” I said.
“All you need in this world is a little ingenuity,” he said. “A little get-up-and-go. You’ve often said so. We make it ourselves. At least, I do. There’s not much else to do. It’s my life’s work. The berries weren’t worth a damn this year, but I’ve evolved a vintage champagne from potato peelings. Care to try some?”
“No, I would not. Where’s your father?”
“He stays in the front room, mostly, these days. He never used it all his life here, so he might as well get some good out of it now, while he can.”
I don’t think anyone had so much as flicked a duster over the front room since I’d left. Dust grew like mold over every single thing—the golden oak armchair in which Jason Currie had once sat and drilled me in the multiplication tables, the glassed-in china cabinet, the carved settee from the Currie house. My father’s British India rug was still on the floor, but it had been so spilled upon and the dirt tracked over it that now the blue and russet vines and flowers were barely discernible.
Bram sat in an armchair, his legs splayed out, his frayed heather-gray sweater buttoned right up to his adam’s apple although the day was stifling. How had he grown so small? The broadness of him was gone. His shoulders were stooped, and his wide spade-beard had become only a tufted fringe along his face. When he looked at me, his eyes were mild and milky, absent of expression. And I, more than anything, was doubly shamed recalling how I’d thought of him at night these past years.
He didn’t know me. He didn’t speak my name. He didn’t say a word. He merely gazed a moment at me, then blinked and looked away.
“Time for your medicine, Dad,” John said.
At first I wondered how he’d managed to pay a doctor or a druggist. But then I saw what it was. He refilled the glass from the gallon jug that stood on the floor, and put it into the old man’s hands, helping him to drink it so he wouldn’t slop too much over himself.
“Is this the usual thing?” I asked.
“Why, yes,” John said. “Don’t frown like that, angel. He’s getting what he needs.”
“John—” I cried. “What’s happened to you?”
“Hush. It’s all right. I know what’s best.”
“You do, eh? You’re sure of that, you think?”
“Were you?” John said, with fearful gentleness. “Were you?”
Only John looked after Bram, washed him, led him to the outhouse, cleaned up the messes that sometimes occurred, performing all these rites with such a zeal and burning laughter they seemed both sinister and absurd.
Bram’s daughters, Jess and Gladys, still lived near Manawaka. They never came to see him. He stayed in his perpetual dusk all through the sifting days. Sometimes he talked, mostly in snatches and broken phrases, but occasionally with a momentary clarity, such as the only time he spoke of me.
“That Hagar—I should of licked the living daylights out of her, maybe, and she’d have seen I could. What d’you think? Think I should of?”
I could not speak for the salt that filled my throat, and for anger—not at anyone, at God, perhaps, for giving us eyes but almost never sight.
Bram looked at me with recognition one day.
“You’ve come to help out, ain’t you?” he said. “Funny—you put me in mind of someone.”
“Who?” Perversely, I would not tell him, or could not.
He seemed to find it so difficult to ponder anything. His face grayed in strain.
“I dunno. Maybe—Clara. Yeh, her.”
The woman I reminded him of was his fat and cow-like first wife.
I drove into town with John to take the eggs. The damnable chickens were a godsend now, for they seemed able to live on practically nothing. If people could do half as well, we’d have been all set. On the steps of Currie’s General Store we met a girl. She was
about John’s age, a trifle too plump but fair-haired and rather pretty. She seemed a silly thing, though. Such a fuss she made over John, laying her white hands on his brown hairy arm, cooing like a pouter pigeon. Johns eyes narrowed and mocked her, and she throve on it.
“What’re you doing with yourself these days, John?”
“Nothing, on Saturday. Going to the dance?”
“I might—”
“See you there, then,” he said, and she looked disconcerted, having hoped he’d ask her to go with him. How could he? He had no money to spare for that sort of thing. He and Bram were living mainly on the money I’d sent, and I guess he thought I wouldn’t take kindly to his spending it on girls. He was quite right. I wouldn’t have.
Finally he deigned to introduce us. “Mother—this is Arlene Simmons.”
I scrutinized her with renewed interest.
Telford and Lottie’s daughter?”
The same.”
Arlene. Trust Lottie to pick a name like that, all ruffles, the same way she used to dress the girl so fussily. John put an arm around the girl’s shoulders, smearing her white pique dress.
“See you around, eh?” he said, and we left, he whistling and I bewildered.
“You could have been a little more polite,” I reproached him when we were out of earshot. “Not that I was much impressed with her. But still and all—”
“Polite!” He snorted with laughter. “That’s not what she wants from me.”
“What does she want—to marry you?”
“Marry? By Christ, no. She’d never marry a Shitley. It tickles her to neck with one, that’s all.”
“Don’t talk like that,” I snapped, “Don’t ever let me hear you speak like that again, John. In any case, she’s not the sort of girl for you. She’s bold and—”
“Bold? Her? She’s a rabbit, a little furry rabbit.”