by Tom Moore
“So, he finally got Alice back,” I said.
The next Sunday afternoon, Gib and I went to the Waterford hospital. Snow swirled about our knees as we approached the big brick building.
Outside the front door, a fellow in pyjamas and a parka asked us for a cigarette. Just inside, a gentleman in a straw hat and a light summer suit sat in the lobby with a suitcase at his knee, as if waiting for a flight to Jamaica. A nurse took us under her wing. When we asked to see Billy, she said, “He’s very sick, I’m afraid.”
“Mentally?” Gib asked.
“Mentally and physically. It’s his heart.”
She led us to the third floor and unlocked the door to the ward where Billy Crotty had found his final abode. He was sitting on a bed with his back to us, looking out at the swirling snow.
“You have visitors,” the attendant said, and Billy turned around.
“Come over here so I can see you,” he said with a frail wave.
As soon as I rounded the bed, he said, “Felix, and look, Gib! Good to see you boys. Good of you to remember your old landlord.”
The attendant was pleased. “You’re feeling better today, Mr. Crotty.”
He ignored her. Gib sat in the only chair, and I sat on the end of Billy’s bed. “How are you?” I asked.
“Good and bad. My mind is fooled up, and my ticker is . . . well . . . fooled up too. But it’s okay. I don’t have to worry about the house, or cooking, or taking my medicine, so that part’s good.”
“Are they taking good care of you, Mr. Crotty?” Gib asked from the chair.
But Billy spoke to me. “Alice is here.”
I said nothing.
“I don’t mean really here, physically.” He smiled. “I’m not crazy.”
“No! You’re just here visiting us,” I teased him.
He chuckled. “I mean she’s in my dreams. Drug-induced, I suppose. Demerol.”
“You dream about her?”
“I always have. But now her presence is around me all the time. All around. Like the dancing hearts.”
“Hearts?”
“Yes. I’m in a graveyard, and it’s nighttime. I see movement and come upon a heart. Big. Almost three feet high, with the two stumps of arteries serving as little legs. He’s sad, but he’s trying to dance.”
“Dance?”
“He hops from leg to leg on those little stumps, and with no music it’s pretty hard. But he keeps trying. Crying and trying.”
“Do you ever get out of this room?” I asked.
“They take us down to the exercise room twice a week.”
“Do you walk, do push-ups, what?”
“My heart is too weak for push-ups. I get tightness in my chest. But I can do a few sit-ups if I use the roller with the headrest. I take my time. Put my head on the black leather headrest. Know what it’s shaped like?”
“No.”
“A heart. It’s the size of a cow’s heart, or a bull’s,” he said. “Know which one I always take?”
“Which one?”
“The leather is split on one of them. That’s the one I pick. It’s such a comfort to lay my head back on it. I just rest there for a while before I do a sit-up or two. No one minds. No one else wants it anyway. It’s broken.”
Then he looked away from me, over Gib’s head and out through the barricaded window to the snow devils dancing on the roofs. A smile came over his face, and he said to me, “A comet. This life is just like a comet. You fly in and fly out at great speed. It all happens so fast!” Then he looked back to the window.
Soon, Gib was looking toward the door, and I stood up to go. Outside Billy’s window, secured and wire-meshed, the wind was driving the dry snow in frenzied swirls and whirls around the stone corners.
“Is he crazy or what!” Gib said in the parking lot.
“I guess so,” I said.
“Roller bars with broken hearts, and hearts dancing in graveyards! Poor Billy!”
“Yes, poor old Billy,” I said, feeling a tightness in my chest.
Early in the New Year, Phil Wallen had his big exhibition in Petley. He held it in his studio, and everyone went, even Mullins the undertaker. No doubt looking for a few inspirational pieces for his funeral home. Ellen went early to help set up the paintings and lay out the hors d’oeuvres, that sort of thing. It was her job, she said.
The paintings were mostly abstracts and made no sense to me. No landscapes, portraits, or people, with one major exception. In the far end of the long, narrow studio, there was a hum of activity and murmuring. I wandered down to see, and a bunch of people moved aside. Before me were four pieces, all dazzling paintings of Ellen.
In the first, she was wearing her blue dress with the lace at the throat and the little buttons. The next one was a large close-up of her head and shoulders. In the last two, she was naked, and that was what the murmuring was about. In one, she was sitting in the lounge chair I could see behind me, and in the other she was reclining on a bed.
I looked around me, and I was alone. I looked back at the paintings of Ellen, whose beauty the artist so faithfully captured. Then I heard a gasp beside me and turned to see Shirley, her hand over her mouth. Father was with her. I said, “Excuse me,” and went into the bathroom.
I splashed some water on my face and looked in the mirror. I felt my stomach churn. I vomited into the toilet and flushed quickly, hoping no one had heard. I fixed myself up as best I could and came back into the gallery. Shirley and Father were waiting beside the bathroom door.
“Did you know?” she asked me.
“No.”
She took Father’s hand. “Walter, I’ve seen enough art for one day.” A lot of people were leaving.
“Philistines,” an annoyed Phil Wallen hurled after them.
“Hors d’oeuvre, Felix?” Ellen held the tray.
“Thanks.” I took a little wiener on a plastic toothpick.
“Try a little pickle,” she said. “They’re lovely.”
I looked at my pickle, skewered on a toothpick, but could think of nothing else to say or do, so I left without meeting the artist.
Outside, Father and Shirley were waiting in the truck. The windshield and the side mirror had been replaced. Shirley pushed the door open for me. We sat in the cab, as Father pulled out through four inches of dry snow.
Shirley spoke first. “Why don’t you come over for a cup of tea, Felix? Ellen will be busy at the exhibit.”
“Sure.”
The tea was warm and soothing. The wood stove soon had the kitchen snug, as fresh spruce steamed and whistled in the fire. But Father gulped his tea and said, “Think I’ll go out to the stable and get more wood.”
Shirley and I had second cups. “You know they’re having an affair, don’t you,” she said.
I just looked at the tea leaves in my cup.
“It’s all right if you know and are ready to wait. She may come out of it. All may be well when it’s over, if you can get around the pain.”
From the stable we could hear the clomp, clomp, clomp of Father’s axe as he cleaved junks of wood. I knew he was thinking, thinking, thinking about my situation. Thinking for Father was a physical as much as a mental process. He pushed his mind against walls of possibilities and scenarios like a wrestler pushing an opponent in the ring. You could walk into that stable and set it on fire, and he’d still be there cleaving wood when the volunteers arrived in the fire truck.
Shirley and I sipped our tea, silently. Clomp, clomp, clomp came from the stable. One thing was certain: Father would eventually come to his conclusion, and when he did, it would make absolutely no sense.
“I love her,” I said. “I don’t want to lose her.”
“Does she love you?”
“I think she likes me. S
he loves pretending we are Clara and old Wayne White. You know, rich and prosperous pillars of the community.”
“My God, Felix, this is not going to work!”
“I know. But she is the most extraordinary thing that has ever happened to me.”
Clomp, clomp, clomp.
“I wouldn’t mind the affair, but the problem is she doesn’t care about me. I know she doesn’t love me.” I started to cry. Jesus, I hate remembering this part. Shirley reached her arm around my neck and pulled my head to her shoulder. I cried in her arms that day, like in the arms of a mother.
Back at the White premises, Ellen was still not home, and I found myself in the flour store. I went upstairs to Dick’s workshop and looked at the silent boxes in the corner. I began to take the dolls out and place them, one by one, beside those standing on the floor. It was cold in the unheated building, and I could see my breath in front of me, a grey, silver mist that wafted around my head.
Here was Clara, almost pleasant in her wooden form. Dick had painted a faint smile on her lips. A happy cow popped back into the world, and I placed it on the bare brown floor, not in a grassy meadow. It’s not always the world we want, is it, cow? I thought.
I found Mullins, Father, Shirley, me, and most strikingly, Ellen. Dick had taken pains to convey not just her physical attributes, but also his love for her. The inner beauty of the doll came not from inside Ellen, but from inside Dick. I placed the figures of me and of Ellen together on the workbench. From there, she and I gazed down on our perfect little village assembled on the floor. But I was shorter than she, because I was only a kid when Dick had created my doll. She looked like a queen on a chessboard, and I a lowly pawn up to her royal waist.
Old Walter White had a big wooden box filled with carpenter’s tools, some almost a hundred years old. He used them to create his better world—the world he shared with Clara and Dick. The box also served as a seat, so I sat on it near the window and looked at Dick’s wooden Curlew. It was a happy world, replete with more kindness and love than God’s attempt.
I took out Dick and placed him on his father’s tool box. He stood beside my knee, gazing sadly at the door, as if he were waiting for someone. I thought I had placed him facing his village. A quiet came over me, and I withdrew, like Father, into my own thoughts as I sat on the tool box. It grew dark. A big moon and a million stars peeped in at us, glazing our silent forms with silver. But life’s silver breath came from only one of us, the one with the troubled mind.
The window was touched with frost on the bottom corners. The stars shone through the upper glass, reminding me of my mother, and for an instant I felt the warmth of her love like stardust on my face.
“There you are. I looked everywhere for you,” Ellen said, staring at me from the door. She ignored Dick’s stature at my knee.
“Why?” I asked.
“What are these things?” she asked from the shadows.
“These are dolls Dick made years ago.”
“Dick?” She came over and looked at the doll beside me.
“Dick White. Remember him? He’s the guy you promised to love for better or worse until death.”
“What are you raving about?”
“You promised me the same thing,” I said.
“We both made promises.” She glared at me.
I had one more thing to say to her. It came hard, but I wanted to say it here, in Dick’s workshop, in front of the whole village. “Ellen,” I said. “Ellen, it’s over.”
She pushed the door open without a word, and she was gone. I think she already knew, and it was no great loss to her.
Back in the house, I found her angry. “This didn’t have to happen, Felix. If you had gotten your law degree, we would have lived here happy till we died. But you were selfish and went to MUN to be a schoolteacher, like Shirley and your stupid dead mother.”
“Well, at least I didn’t screw Phil Wallen,” I said.
Her eyes narrowed. “I must have been unhappy here with you, or I wouldn’t be interested in Phil Wallen. All you were interested in was your precious studies. You ignored me. Phil didn’t ignore me.”
This was a pointless debate. The deed was already signed. The witnesses were leaving the room. The judge had retired to his chamber.
Clomp, clomp, clomp came from the stable as I went into my father’s house without knocking.
“Felix, how’d it go?” Shirley asked.
“Okay,” I said. “Has he been chopping ever since I left?”
She nodded.
I went out to the stable. Father had his coat hung on a nail and had amassed quite a pile of split wood. Perhaps enough for the rest of the winter. He was splitting the junks of spruce with long, firm swings of a sharp axe. “Father,” I shouted, between clomps.
No response. I waited till the axe struck down again, and then I leaped in and took him by the arm. My fingers went around his elbow, and I was surprised how small it was.
His eyes came back to reality. “Felix, boy, how are you? I know. I know. You’re depending on me to figure it out, and I will. It’s a father’s place.”
“Then you’ll need a lot more wood,” I said.
“Humour. Taking it well. That’s good. That’s good. Be of good cheer.” Then he stepped back from me to start swinging again. But I held on to his arm.
“No, it’s all right.”
“Solved?” he asked.
“Solved!” I said.
“Thank Jesus!” He put down the axe and sagged against the post. “I was just about done in.” He didn’t even ask me what the solution was. His mind had moved on.
“I might stay here tonight,” I said.
“What? Ellen, too?”
“No, just me.”
He thought about that for a minute, revisiting the problem before he left it for the last time. “Yes, probably just as well,” he said.
Then he took his coat from the nail and put it on. “Come into the house and we’ll have a cup of tea.” He looked at me, and I thought he was going to put his arm around my shoulder. “Getting too dark to cut wood,” he concluded as we stepped into the yard. He shut the stable door behind us and kicked some dry snow against the bottom of the door to keep out the drifts. We walked toward the warm yellow glow from the kitchen window.
Happy as a child, he said, “Wait till we tell Shirley!”
But Shirley already knew that the problem was solved when she heard the last clomp.
I was living alone in the old White house when unresolved business brought me to the graveyard one night. I stumbled up the snowy path toward my mother’s grave. Low drifts covered the White family, where a large statue of an angel marked their plot as clearly as their shop sign had marked them in life.
Mother’s stone was smaller. Black shadows marked her letters chiselled into the white marble and visible even by moonlight.
Mary Helen Ryan
1923–1954
Dearly Beloved Wife and Mother
I stood up to my knees in snow by her grave and looked at the silent stone.
Then I had a clear memory of when she died. I felt again the strangeness of her absence from our house. A cap left on a chair at morning was there on my return at noon, and there again at suppertime. Nothing moved, with no mother’s hand to move it. I remember stopping in the doorway and looking at it like at a ghost.
Father spent most of his time in the stable tending to the horse or chopping wood. I walked into the kitchen one day and looked at the silent dishes and the still-open cupboard door. I said hello to no one, knowing that it was the only word spoken there all day. It was as if life itself had stopped in the house. Like when an elevator stops between floors and you wonder when it will move again and if the little sign will point up or down.
I might have said a prayer fo
r her in the graveyard, but soon I realized that there were no answers there. A rough wind blew ragged clouds across the moon. The stars came out as I found my way back down to the truck.
I drove home but did not go inside the house. I parked the truck on the road and stood for a while looking at the shop. Ellen’s arms still splayed across the open door in Phil Wallen’s big sign. But icicles now drooped from her feet, and a crust of snow covered her welcoming smile.
I walked around the corner and up past the house to the flour store and the adjoining sheds. One of Clara’s Adirondack chairs still sat in a clearing between the drifts. I brushed off the snow and sat down, facing the sheds. Behind me, the road was deserted. I looked at the flour store and thought of the summers that had transpired there with Wayne and Clara, Ellen and me, Ellen and Dick, Ellen and Joe, Dick and his dolls. Something clicked in my head.
I got up and took one more look at the flour store, and I walked down to the old house with a clear purpose. I opened the door with the big key and felt the warmth from the old Maid of Avalon waft around me like memory. The fire had burned down, but there were charred sticks of birch that still flamed and glowed in the bottom of the stove. I took out the two top dampers and the iron centrepiece and slid them to the back of the stove. I put my glove back on, reached in, and pulled out a long birch stick that glowed and flamed red on one end.
In the living room, I touched the glowing rod to the old lace curtains, and they leaped into jubilant flame. Soon the wallpaper caught, and then the dry wainscotting. The varnish from another age bubbled and popped as it burned, and the gases soon drove me from the room. Back in the kitchen, I lit the newspapers behind the stove and dumped kerosene on the floor.
Then I walked out into the January night, the kitchen door left open behind me. From the window, a pink glow was troubling the quiet night. I walked up to the flour store. I passed Clara’s Adirondack chair and touched it in a benediction with the fiery rod, and it whispered tsss in reply. Inside the flour store, I splashed the old canvas rolls and the four-gallon barrels of tar with kerosene and touched them with my hot birch. I did not go upstairs, but instead came out through the open door and walked down to the shop. The snowy yard was becoming lively as the dancing pink glow replaced black shadows.
