I stand up and look closer. Whoever painted that picture knew what he was about. The other’s one of those weird ones, the kind Tina professes to like, all red and black triangles and blobs that make no sort of sense.
The Shipley place didn’t have a single solitary picture when I went there. I could never get hold of many, but over the years I managed to put up a few, for the children’s sake, especially John, who was so impressionable. I thought it was a bad thing to grow up in a house with never a framed picture to tame the walls. I recall a steel engraving, entitled The Death of General Wolfe. Another was a colored print of a Holman Hunt I’d brought from the East. I did admire so much the knight and lady’s swooning adoration, until one day I saw the coyness of the pair, playing at passion, and in a fury I dropped the picture, gilt frame and all, into the slough, feeling it had betrayed me. I have kept Rosa Bonheur’s The Horse Fair, for John was fond of it as a child, and still in my room the great-flanked horses strut eternally. Bram never cared for that picture.
“You never gave a damn for living horses, Hagar,” he said once. “But when you seen them put onto paper where they couldn’t drop manure, then it’s dandy, eh? Well, keep your bloody paper horses. I’d as soon have nothing on my walls.”
I have to laugh now, although I was livid then. He was quite right that I never cared for horses. I was frightened of them, so high and heavy they seemed, so muscular, so much their own masters—I never felt I could handle them. I didn’t let Bram see I was afraid, preferring to let him think I merely objected to them because they were smelly. Bram was crazy about horses. A few years after we married, all the farms around Manawaka had bumper wheat crops, even ours, the Red Fife growing so well in the Wachakwa valley. Bram planned to put every cent into horses, intending to switch over into raising them, and do less farming.
“You’re off your head,” I told him. “Now’s the time to cash in on wheat. Any fool could see that.”
“Let somebody else cash in,” Bram said easily. “I got enough to buy what I want. I never had no interest to speak of in work horses. It’s saddle horses I got in mind. I seen that gray stallion of Henry Pearl’s the other day, and I asked Henry about it—he’s not keen to sell, but I think he might. That’s the one I’m going after first.”
“I thought you told me once your place would be worth looking at someday.”
“So it will,” he said. “There’s more than one way. What do you know of it, anyway?”
“I know sufficient to know exactly what it would be like. You’d not want to part with a single one of them, once you had them, and here we’d be with the pastures chock-full of horses and not a cent to bless ourselves with. Well, it’s your money. I can’t stop you.”
In those days I still hoped he’d do well, not for its own sake, for I never cared about making a show with furniture and bric-à-brac, the way Lottie did, but only so that people in Manawaka, whether they liked him or not, would at least be forced to respect him.
“I’d make a living,” he said sullenly, “and live as I wanted.”
I was wild at that. “How do you want to live, for pity’s sake? Like this, all your life? An un painted house with not a blessed thing except linoleum on the floor of the front room?”
I don’t know why I chose that to remark on. He always sat in the kitchen, anyway, and I never had a soul in, except sometimes Aunt Dolly, so the front room might just as well not have been there.
“All right, all right,” he said furiously. “You can buy your goddamn carpets with the money. There—does that suit you?”
“I wouldn’t touch a nickel of it,” I retorted, stung by his anger and his interpretation, for it was not really the carpets that concerned me at all. “Go ahead and buy your horses. Buy up every horse in the province, for all I care.”
“I won’t buy a Christly thing,” he said. “Bugger the money.”
“You’ve no call to talk like that.”
“I’ll talk any way I feel like. If you don’t care for it, you can—”
Wrangle, wrangle. It ended that night with Bram lying heavy and hard on top of me, and stroking my forehead with his hand while his manhood moved in me, and saying in the low voice he used only at such times, “Hagar, please—” I wanted to say “There, there, it’s all right,” but I did not say that. My mouth said, “What is it?” But he did not answer.
He bought that gray stallion from Henry Pearl, after all, and a few mares, but the venture never came to much. We had colts around the place in spring, but when it came to selling them, Bram never got a good price. He wasn’t much of a man for bargaining. It didn’t seem to worry him, though. When I brought up the subject, he’d only shrug and say what was the use of bothering unless you were going to raise horses seriously, and he’d rather see the few he sold going to men he knew would look after them well. This rankled with me, for clearly he meant it as a reproach, but it seemed to me just an excuse for the fact that he never did have any head for business.
He always used to ride that stallion, never any of the others. He called it Soldier, such an unimaginative name. He groomed it so carefully, you’d have thought it was a prize race horse.
The time I’m thinking of, I was two months pregnant with Marvin, and feeling constantly ill, and it was winter and cheerless, and I was trying on the particular evening to get the ironing finished up even though I was dog-tired, so when Bram came in and said that Soldier wasn’t in the barn, I can’t honestly say I took much notice. He went on and on, all about how he shouldn’t have left the barn door open, but he thought he’d be away only a minute and he thought the black mare was securely tied, for she had a wandering streak and he always took care with her, but when he came back she’d somehow got out. She must have been witless, that mare, to want to go anywhere in forty-below weather, but she had, and the stallion must have gone after her. Soldier was rarely tethered, and never put in a latched stall, for Bram had once seen horses burn in a barn fire, and although God knows he never seemed to be a worrying man, that was one thought that always troubled him. He’d hurried with the milking as much as he could, and when he was nearly through, he’d heard hooves on the crusted snow and thought Soldier had brought the mare back. But the mare had returned by herself and Soldier was nowhere in sight.
“Well, you can’t go after him in this weather,” I said. “It’s starting to snow again, and the wind’s rising. Besides, it’s almost dark.”
But Bram took down the storm lantern, and lit it, and went out. He was away so long I was frantic with worry, both for him and for myself, wondering what I’d do if I were left alone here. The snowfall thickened, the flakes like gobbets of soap froth, blown crazily by the wind, and piling in thin drifts halfway up the windowpanes. It didn’t matter how well a person knew his way—he could easily mistake it, with everything white and unrecognizable, and the darkening air so filled with the falling snow that you could hardly see your hand before your face. I used to like snowstorms in town, when I was a girl, the feeling of being under siege but safe within a stronghold. Out in the country it was a different matter, with so few light as landmarks, and the snow lying in ribbed dunes for miles that seemed endless. Here I felt cut off from any help, severed from all communication, for there were times when we couldn’t have got out to the highway and into town to save our immortal souls, whatever the need.
The wind grew worse until it was so loud that all the reassuring domestic sounds of clocks and hissing green poplar in the stove were lost entirely, and I could hear only the growl and shriek of air outside the house, and the jarring of the frames in our storm windows. I’d almost given Bram up, when he came back, opening the door suddenly and letting in a gust of night and snow-filled wind. His face was frozen, and both hands. He took his coat and boots off and sat down, rubbing his hands gingerly to work the frostbite out.
“Did you find him?” I asked.
“No,” he replied brusquely.
Seeing Bram’s hunched shoulders, and the look on his f
ace, all at once I walked over to him without pausing to ponder whether I should or not, or what to say.
“Never mind. Maybe hell come back by himself, as the mare did.”
“He won’t,” Bram said. “It’s blowing up for an all-night blizzard. If I’d gone any further, I’d never have found my way back.”
He put his palms to his eyes and sat without moving.
“I guess you think I’m daft, eh?” he said finally.
“No, I don’t think that,” I said. Then, awkwardly, “I’m sorry about it, Bram. I know you were fond of him.”
Bram looked up at me with such a look of surprise that it pains me still, in recalling.
“That’s just it,” he said.
When we went to bed that night, he started to turn to me, and I felt so gently inclined that I think I might have opened to him openly. But he changed his mind. He patted me lightly on the shoulder.
“You go to sleep now,” he said.
He thought, of course, it was the greatest favor he could do me.
Bram found Soldier in spring, when the snow melted. The horse had caught a leg in a barbed wire fence, and couldn’t have lived long that night, before the cold claimed him. Bram buried him in the pasture, and I’m certain he put a boulder on the place, like a gravestone. But later that summer, after the grass and weeds had grown back, when I mentioned the rock curiously and asked how it got there, Bram only looked at me narrowly and said it had been there always. After that night in winter, we had gone on much the same as before—that was the thing. Nothing is ever changed at a single stroke, I know that full well, although a person sometimes wishes it could be otherwise.
“Come and sit down, Mother.” It’s Doris’s voice, hissing at me, and I see now that I am in the doctor’s waiting-room, standing here gawking at a picture of a river in spring. Have I been mumbling aloud? I can’t for the life of me say. The room is full of curious eyes. Nervously, I plunge back to the chair.
“I only wanted to have a look. Just two pictures he’s got—fancy that. You’d think a man in his position could afford to do a little better, wouldn’t you?”
“Sh—sh—” Doris looks embarrassed, and I wonder if my voice has been louder than I realized. “This is the way he wants it, Mother. Both those pictures cost plenty, you can bank on that. People don’t hang up dozens any more.”
She thinks she knows everything there is to know, that woman.
“Did I say dozens? Did I? I only said two wasn’t many, that’s all.”
“Okay, okay,” she whispers. “People are listening, Mother.”
People are always listening. I think it would be best if one paid no heed But I can’t blame Doris. I’ve said the very same thing to Bram. Hush. Hush. Don’t you know everyone can hear?
The Reverend Dougall MacCulloch passed away quite suddenly with a heart attack, and the Manawaka Presbyterian Church had to get a new minister. The young man’s first sermon was long and involved, mainly directed at proving scripturally the ephemeral nature of earthly joys and the abiding nature of the heavenly variety, to be guaranteed by toil, prudence, fortitude, and temperance. Bram, beside me, restless and sweating, whispered in a gruff voice that must have carried at least as far as three pews ahead and three behind:
“Won’t the saintly bastard ever shut his trap?”
At the front of the church, above the choir loft and the organ, were painted letters in blue and gold. The Lord Is In His Holy Temple—Let All Within Keep Silence Before Him. I don’t know if the Lord was there that day or not, but my father certainly was, sitting alone in the family pew. He never turned, of course, but after Bram had blurted his impatience I saw my father’s shoulders lift in a massive shrug. Nothing to do with me, his shoulders apologized to the congregation. I never went to church after that. I preferred possible damnation in some comfortably distant future, to any ordeal then of peeking or pitying eyes.
But now, when time has folded in like a paper fan, I wonder if I shouldn’t have kept on going. What if it matters to Him after all, what happens to us? That question should concern me most of all. Yet the awful thing is that I can’t get out of my mind a more pressing question—could Doris have felt the same about me just now as I felt that day in church about Bram? It doesn’t bear thinking about.
I will be quiet, I swear, never open my mouth, nod obligingly, keep myself to myself for good and all. And yet, even as I swear it, I know it’s nonsense and impossible for me. I can’t keep my mouth shut. I never could.
Finally I’m called. Doris comes in as well, and speaks to Doctor Corby as though she’d left me at home.
“Her bowels haven’t improved one bit. She’s not had another gall-bladder attack, but the other evening she threw up. She’s fallen a lot—”
And so on and so on. Will she never stop? My meekness of a moment ago evaporates. She’s forfeited my sympathy now, meandering on like this. Why doesn’t she let me tell him? Whose symptoms are they, anyhow?
Doctor Corby is middle-aged, and the suggestion of gray in his hair is so delicately distinguished it looks as though he’s had a hairdresser do it for him on purpose. He has a sharp and worldly look behind his glasses, which have mannish frames of navy blue. Before we came, Doris maintained that on a warm day like this, I’d perspire and spoil my lilac silk, but I wore it despite her. I’m glad I did. At least it clothes me decently. I never have believed a woman should look more of a frump than nature decreed for her.
Doctor Corby turns to me, smiles falsely, as though he practiced diligently every morning before a mirror.
“Well, how are you, young lady?”
Oh. Now I wish I’d worn my oldest cotton housedress, the one that’s ripped under the arms, and not bothered to comb my hair at all. I wish I had the nerve to conjure up and hurl at him one of Bram’s epithets.
Instead, I fix him with a glance glassy and hard as cat’s-eye marbles, and say nothing. He has the grace to blush. I don’t relent. I glare like an old malevolent crow, perched silent on a fence, ready to caw and startle the children when they expect it least. Oh, how I am laughing inwardly, though.
Then, swiftly, the tables turn. He bids me disrobe, holds out a stiff white gown. Then he walks out of the room. Why bother granting this vestige of privacy, when all’s to be known and looked at, poked and prodded, in only a moment?
“I told you this dress was foolish,” Doris grumbles. “It’s so hard to get out of.”
Finally it’s done, and I am swathed in the white canvas and resemble a perambulating pup-tent.
“I don’t care for these things. My, I do look a sight, don’t I?”
But laughter is only a thin cloak for my shame. Hippocrates’ suave descendant returns, with his voice of careful balm.
“Fine, fine. That’s fine, Mrs. Shipley. Now, if you’d just get up on the examining table. Here, let the nurse help you. There. That’s just fine. Now, a deep breath—”
At last it’s over, his coldly intimate touch, Doris and the nurse pretending not to look, I grunting like a constipated cow in a disgust as pure as hatred.
“I think we should have some X rays,” he says to Doris. “I’ll make the appointments for you. Would Thursday be all right, for a start?”
“Yes, yes, of course. Which X rays, Doctor Corby?”
“We’d be safest to do three, I think. Kidneys, of course, and gall bladder, and the stomach. I hope she’ll be able to keep the barium down.”
“Barium? Barium? What’s that?” my voice erupts like a burst boil.
Doctor Corby smiles. “Only something you have to drink for this particular X ray. It’s rather like a milk shake.”
The liar. I know it’ll be like poison.
On the way home, the bus is packed. A teenage girl in a white and green striped dress, a girl green and tender as new Swiss chard, rises and gives me her seat. How very kind of her. I can scarcely nod my thanks, fearing she’ll see my unseemly tears. And once again it seems an oddity, that I should have remained unweeping
over my dead men and now possess two deep salt springs in my face over such a triviality as this. There’s no explaining it.
I sit rigid and immovable, looking neither to right nor left, like one of those plaster-of-Paris figures the dime stores sell.
“We thought we’d go for a drive after supper,” Doris says. “Would you like that?”
“Where to?”
“Oh, just out in the country.”
I nod, but my mind’s not on it. I’m really thinking of the things not settled. How hard it is to concentrate on prime matters. Something is forever intruding. I’ve never had a moment to myself, that’s been my trouble. Can God be One and watching? I see Him clad in immaculate radiance, a short white jacket and a smile white and creamy as zinc-oxide ointment, focussing His cosmic and comic glass eye on this and that, as the fancy takes Him. Or no—He’s many-headed, and all the heads argue at once, a squabbling committee. But I can’t concentrate, for I’m wondering really what barium is, and how it tastes, and if it’ll make me sick.
“You’ll come along, then?” Doris is saying.
“Eh? Come where?”
“For a drive. I said we thought we’d take a drive after supper.”
“Yes, yes. Of course I’ll come. Why do you harp on it so? I said I’d come.”
“No, you never. I only wanted to make sure. Marv just hates plans to be changed at the last minute.”
“Oh, for mercy’s sake. Nobody’s changing plans. What’re you talking about?”
She looks out the window and whispers to herself, thinking I can’t hear.
“Prob’ly forget by supper, and we shan’t go again.”