“You like her, then?”
“Are you kidding? I’d lay her if I got the chance, that’s all.”
“You’re talking just like your father,” I said. “The same coarse way. I wish you wouldn’t. You’re not a bit like him.”
That’s where you’re wrong,” John said.
Another day I ran into Lottie on the street. She’d grown fat as butter, and her marcelled hair was gray as mine now. She wore a teal-blue shantung suit which might have looked quite smart if she hadn’t been so portly.
“Well, well, Hagar,” she chirped. “It’s so nice to see you back again, after all this time. We’ve heard such nice things about you—how you’ve done so well out at the coast. And such a lovely job—companion, we heard, to an elderly man who made his money in export-import or something like that.”
“You didn’t hear correctly, then,” I said. “I’m his housekeeper.”
“Oh—” She looked distressed and didn’t know what to say. “Is that it? Well, you hear so many things. We get news of Manawaka people who’ve moved to the coast from Charlotte, who’s lived there for donkey’s years. Goodness knows how she hears, but she has quite an ear, always had. You remember, she was Charlotte Tappen, old Doctor Tappen’s daughter. She married one of the Halpern boys from South Wachakwa. He’s in insurance and was doing awfully well before the depression. Of course, none of us is doing well right now. But still, we’re managing and that’s the main thing, isn’t it? Arlene’s home for the summer. She took Home Economics at the university, you know, and now she’s teaching in the city. She’s a joy to have around, I must say. A woman misses a lot if she doesn’t have a daughter. How long are you here for?”
“I have a month. But I found a temporary housekeeper for Mr. Oatley. I can stay longer if I need to.”
“Something wrong here, then?”
“Bram’s dying,” I said bluntly, not wanting to discuss it.
“Oh dear,” Lottie said feebly. “I hadn’t heard of that.”
John often used to go out after dinner, and I’d waken and hear the car-buggy returning at daybreak, when the edge of sky was just being prized open by the early light, before even the sparrows had wakened. I never bothered to ask him where he’d been, reckoning he wouldn’t tell me anyway. This jaunting was familiar to me. I’d seen it all before.
“Where’s Charlie Bean?” I asked.
“He’s dead,” John said. “Died a few years back. They found him outside Doherty’s in the snow. Drunk, likely, and he froze. Nobody knew for sure.”
“Good riddance to bad rubbish, if you ask me.”
Yet that was only an automatic reply, made because it was expected of me and because I expected it of myself. Charlie had no family, and he’d died alone, and I don’t suppose a living soul in Manawaka would have turned out for his funeral.
“He wasn’t such a bad old guy,” John said. “He used to give me jellybeans, when I was a kid, and let me have rides in old man Doherty’s two-horse sleigh—it was a nifty black one with an upholstered seat and it had a real buffalo robe to wrap around your legs.”
I could hardly picture Charlie in this role, dispenser of jellybeans and sleigh rides. It seemed we must be remembering two different men.
“I never knew that.”
“If I told you, you wouldn’t have let me go,” John said. “Or you’d have worried, thinking I’d be dumped out in a snowdrift or break my neck. You always thought something awful was going to happen to me.”
“Did I? Well, a person worries. That’s only natural. What else didn’t I know?”
He grinned. “Oh, lots of things, I guess. After you told me not to walk the trestle bridge, we dreamed up another game there, I and the Tonnerre boys. The trick was to walk to the middle and see who could stay longest. Then, when the train was almost there, we’d drop over the side and climb down the girders to the creek. We always meant to stay there while the train went over. We figured there’d be just enough room, at the very edge, if we lay down. But no one ever had the nerve.”
“I didn’t think you’d ever chummed around with those boys again.”
“Sure,” John said. “It was Lazarus Tonnerre I traded the plaid-pin to, for his knife. Probably he’s got it yet, for all I know.”
“Where’s the knife?”
“Gone up in smoke,” he said. “I sold it once, to buy cigarettes. It wasn’t much of a knife.”
“Gainsay Who Dare,” I said.
“What?”
“Oh—nothing.”
One afternoon I asked John to drive me out to the Manawaka cemetery.
“What do you want to go there for?” he asked.
“I want to see if the Currie plot’s been cared for. My father allotted money for that purpose.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” John said. “Okay, let’s go, then.”
The cemetery, being on the hill, caught all the wind but wasn’t cooled by it, for the wind was so hot and dry it seemed to shrivel your nostrils. The spruce trees beside the road stood dark against the sun, and the only sound there that day was the faint clicking and ticking of grasshoppers as they jumped like mechanical toys. The family plot had been tended, all right, even watered. The peonies grew as lushly as ever, although the wildflowers and the grass outside the square were withered and drained of color until they looked like the dried petals in an old china jar of potpourri.
But something was different, and for an instant I could hardly believe that such a thing could have happened, could have been done by someone. The marble angel lay toppled over on her face, among the peonies, and the black ants scurried through the white stone ringlets of her hair. Beside me, John laughed.
“The old lady’s taken quite a header.”
I turned to him in dismay. “Who could have done it?”
“How should I know?”
“We’ll have to set her up,” I said. “We can’t leave it like this.”
“Push up that thing? Not on your life. I bet she weighs a ton.”
“All right—” I was furious at him. “If you won’t do it, I will.”
“You’re off your head,” John said. “You couldn’t possibly.”
“I’m not leaving it this way. I don’t care, John. I’m not, and that’s all there is to it.”
My voice rasped in the thin air.
“Oh, all right,” he said. “I’ll do it, then. Don’t be surprised if she collapses and I break a bone. That would be great, to break your back because a bloody marble angel fell on you.”
He put his shoulders to the angel’s head, and heaved. The sweat broke on his sharp face, and a hank of his black hair fell over his forehead. Ineffectually I tried to help, but only got in his way and felt the stone straining at me as I pushed. Like two moles we scrabbled in the loose dirt and the parched afternoon. I was afraid for my heart. I always feared for it after I grew stout, thinking if I pulled too hard at it, it would be like a plug jerked from a sink and I’d gurgle and go out of life like wash-water. I stood aside and let John do it.
I wish he could have looked like Jacob then, wrestling with the angel and besting it, wringing a blessing from it with his might. But no. He sweated and grunted angrily. His feet slipped and he hit his forehead on a marble ear, and swore. His arm muscles tightened and swelled, and finally the statue moved, teetered, and was upright once more. John wiped his face with his hands.
“There. Satisfied?”
I looked, and then again in disbelief. Someone had painted the pouting marble mouth and the full cheeks with lipstick. The dirt clung around it but still the vulgar pink was plainly visible.
“Oh, Christ,” John said, as though to himself. “There’s that.”
“Who’d do such a thing?”
“She looks a damn sight better, if you ask me. Why not leave it?”
I never could bear that statue. I’d have been glad enough to leave her. Now I wish I had. But at the time it was impossible.
The Simmons plot is just across the way,
” I said, “and Lottie comes here every Sunday to put flowers on Telford’s mother’s grave, I know for a fact. Do you think I’d have her poking her nose in here and telling everyone?”
“That would be an everlasting shame, all right,” John said. “Here—take my handkerchief. I’ll even spit on it for you. That should do the trick.”
I scrubbed the angel clean, although she still wore a faint blush when I’d finished, the lipstick being more indelible than I’d reckoned. And then we left.
“Who could have done it?” I said. “Who’d do such a wanton thing?”
“How should I know?” John said again. “Some drunk, I guess.”
He never said another word about it, although he knew quite well I didn’t believe him.
Marvin came back for his holidays to see Bram. He only stayed a few days, and he and John bickered half the time. I always hated to listen to their squabbles. It gave me a headache. I felt, as I’d done when they were younger, that I didn’t really care what they felt or what was wrong between them, if only they’d be quiet.
“You can’t stay here,” Marvin said. “Look at the number of guys going to the city to find work—Gladys’s two younger boys went months ago. Even if things were better here, you don’t know the first thing about farming. You grew up in the city.”
“I’ll be on relief this fall,” John said. “At least there’s more space than I’d have in a two-by-four room, which is where you’d like to see me—so you could keep an eye on me, I suppose.”
“What do you need so much space for, anyhow,” Marvin said, “except to make home-brew in? You could have your room at Mr. Oatley’s when Mother goes back.”
“I’m not leaving Dad.”
“You won’t have to worry about that for long, at the rate you’re going.”
“Why don’t you come and stay, then, Marv, if you think you could do so much better?”
“Don’t talk so dumb. Doris wouldn’t live here on a bet, and I’ve got young Steven to think of, and the baby coming. I’ve been with Bitemore going on ten years now and I’m sure staying as long as they’ll keep me.”
“You’ve got everything all figured out, haven’t you, Marv? You still a church usher? Maybe they’ll promote you to vestryman.”
“I’ve heard about enough out of you,” Marvin said. “I’ve worked for everything I’ve got, I’ll tell you that. How do you think I feel when I see guys laid off every week? How do I know how long it’ll be before it’s my turn? Who’s painting their houses these days? You’re not the only one who’s having a tough time. They’re using gangs of unemployed on road work right now, but I’ll bet a nickel you haven’t even tried to get on there.”
“Shut up,” John said abruptly. “What do you know of it?”
“You’re too good to handle a pick, of course. Goddamn it, I worked in logging camps and then on the docks when I got back from the war.”
“Yeh, that’s right,” John said savagely. “You were one of our brave boys, as well as everything else.”
“I was seventeen,” Marvin said in a hard voice. “What do you know of it?”
I wanted to ask him, then, where he had walked in those days, and what he had been forced to look upon. I wanted to tell him I’d sit quietly and listen. But I couldn’t very well, not at that late date. He wouldn’t have said, anyway. It seemed to me that Marvin was the unknown soldier, the one whose name you never knew.
“Oh God, Marv,” John said, suddenly slack and stricken, empty of rage. “I didn’t mean a word of it, honestly I didn’t.”
But Marvin then could not accept without embarrassment this reversal.
“Okay, okay,” he said hurriedly. “Look, you come back to the coast as soon as you can, John, and I’ll do my damnednest to help you find something. You won’t need to pay rent at Mr. Oatley’s.”
John clenched his two hands together.
“No,” he said at last. “I don’t want to argue with you about it, Marv. But I won’t go back. I’m through with living in other people’s houses.”
Marvin might just as well not have been here, as far as his father was concerned. Bram didn’t know him anyway. But the night he left, I heard him go into Bram’s room, and heard his low voice.
“Dad—” he said. “I’m sorry, Dad.”
Bram was awake, or as nearly awake as he ever was now.
“Who is it? What’s that you say?” he murmured fretfully. “Sorry—what for?”
Marvin didn’t answer. Maybe he didn’t know, himself.
Bram referred to me as “that woman,” like hired help, when he spoke of me to John. In the night, once only, I heard him call—“Hagar!” I went to his room, but he was only talking in his sleep. He lay curled up and fragile in the big bed where we’d coupled and it made me sick to think I’d lain with him, for now he looked like an ancient child. Looking down at him, a part of me could never stand him, what he’d been, and yet that moment I’d willingly have called him back from where he’d gone, to say even once what Marvin had said, and with as much bewilderment, not knowing who to fault for the way the years had turned. I placed my hand lightly on his forehead, and found the skin and hair faintly damp, as the children’s used to be in the airless, summer nights. But there was nothing I could do for him, nothing he needed now, so I went back to Marvin’s old room where I slept.
One morning we found him dead. He’d died in the night, with no fuss and no one beside him. At the time, I thought it mattered that someone should be there, and reproached myself that I hadn’t wakened. I know better now. In death, he didn’t resemble Brampton Shipley in the slightest. He looked like the cadaver of an old unknown man, and that was all.
Marvin couldn’t get back to Manawaka for the funeral, but he sent some money to help cover the expenses. In the same letter he told me Doris had had a girl and they were calling her Christina. I was so inwardly torn over Bram’s death I scarcely gave a thought to the child. I couldn’t have guessed then that my granddaughter Tina would become so dear to me.
Bram’s daughters descended, wept dutifully, clucked over the few things which had been their mother’s and which now went to them. And then they went away. They didn’t even bother to go to his funeral, being annoyed that he hadn’t left the place to them. Why should it have gone to them? Precious little they’d ever done for him.
The Shipleys had no family plot in the cemetery. Gladys and Jess thought he should be buried as near as possible to his first wife, but I put my foot down. I had him buried in the Currie plot, and on the red marble name-stone that stood beside the white statue I had his family name carved, so the stone said Currie on the one side and Shipley on the other. I don’t know why I did it. I felt I had to.
“Do you think it’s the right thing for me to do, about the stone?” I asked John.
“I don’t think it matters one way or another,” John said wearily. “He’s dead. He won’t know or care. They’re only different sides of the same coin, anyway, he and the Curries. They might as well be together there.”
I don’t know what he meant by that. He wouldn’t say. I don’t know, either, which of us had cared about Bram at all, or whether either of us had. I know I’d nagged at him in the past, but God knows I’d had my reasons. And yet he mattered to me. John had washed and fed him, helped him to die—to what extent, only John knew, and whether he’d done the right thing or not and in what spirit, only God knew.
But when we’d buried Bram and come home again and lighted the lamps for the evening, it was John who cried, not I.
Seven
THE SUN needles me, and I’m awake. Why am I so stiff and sore? What’s the matter with me? Then I see where I am, and that I’ve slept with my clothes on, and even my shoes, and only my cardigan to keep me warm. I feel compelled to get out of this stuffy place and find fresh air, and yet I’m disinclined to move. Doris used to bring me my breakfast in bed when I’d had an especially bad night. If I went back, she’d do so again, no doubt.
For a mom
ent I’m sorely tempted. I could plod up the two hundred earthen stairs, out of this pit and valley, away from the lowering cedars and the sea, find someone, explain my situation quite matter-of-factly, ask them if they’d be so kind as to escort me to the local police station—
No. I’ll not do it. How pleased Doris would be, if I went back, to say she’d known all along she couldn’t trust me out of her sight for a moment. How she’d sigh and sidle up to Marvin with her commentary. And then she’d—
Of course. I’d almost forgotten. They’d crate me up in the car and deliver me like a parcel of old clothes to that place. I’d never get out. The only escape from those places is feet first in a wooden box. I’ll not be forced. They can go hang, the pack of them, the hounds, the hunters.
Now that I’ve made my mind up, I become aware of my parched flesh. I’ve not had a drop of water since—I can’t remember how long it’s been. A long time. It’s not the way I imagined thirst would feel. My throat doesn’t burn or even seem particularly dry. But it’s blocked and shut, and it pains me when I swallow. I can’t drink sea-water—isn’t it meant to be poisonous? Certainly. Water water everywhere nor any drop to drink. That’s my predicament. What albatross did I slay, for mercy’s sake? Well, well, we’ll see—come on, old mariner, up and out of your smelly bunk and we’ll see what can be found.
Almost gaily, though God knows I’ve little enough reason for it, I rise with some slight slowness and put on my hat, first taking care to brush the pebbled dust off the velvet petals as best I can. I pick up my bag of provisions and venture down the stairs and out the door.
The morning is light and calm, clean and gold. The old cannery stands quiet and unalarming in the warm air, and around the boards at the sea edge I can hear the water’s low rhythmic slapping. The ground is damp—it must have rained last night. The dust is off the trees. Every leaf has been sponged by rain and now they’re displaying a mosaic of greens—half-yellow lime, bottleglass and emerald, peacock tail and pigeon feather. I marvel at such variety.