Surface Rights

by Melissa Hardy

  Well, there was nobody around to tell her what to do and, besides, the Macallan was hers now. She had inherited it and nobody, but nobody, was going to tell her how to drink it. If she wanted to guzzle it, she was going to guzzle it. And that, as they say, was that!

  This time the drink she poured herself was even bigger than the last. It all amounts to the same thing in the end, after all. Four little drinks. One big one.

  “Come on, Jude,” she rallied the dog. “Let’s get this stuff upstairs.”

  The Lab took the lead. Verna followed, carrying the suitcase in one hand, her drink in the other, and the carry- on bag slung over her shoulder. When they reached the top, “Whew!” she said. “I seem to be a little tipsy. I’d better slow down. Jude, will you remind me to slow down? Will you?”

  But Jude was dancing on his claws in front of the door to Donald’s room. The door was shut. So was the door to her old room. So were all the doors — the door to Fern’s room; the door to what had always been referred to as the “guest room” (despite the fact that there were never any guests); even the door to the bathroom at the end of the hall. That was not surprising. Some families shut doors; others leave them open. The Macouns liked their doors shut; they liked their privacy, their secrets. Still, it was a little creepy — all these closed doors with nobody on the other side.

  “Kind of like arriving at the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse long after all the Mousketeers have grown up and gotten fat or MS or become alcoholics or died of a drug overdose. No one left to say, ‘Here’s your ears!’” Verna told Jude, who just yelped at her as if to say, “What? Who? Let’s get on with it; I want to see Alpha Dog!” “Okay. Fair enough,” she said. “Mickey Mouse Club. Before your time. But Alpha Dog’s not in there, Jude. I’m sorry, but he’s just not.”

  She set the suitcase and the carry-on bag on the floor, and, summoning up her courage, turned the knob on Donald’s bedroom door and shoved it gingerly. It creaked open to reveal a slice of white-washed tongue-and-groove walls and ceiling and a rocker drawn up close to the dormer that looked out over the lake. Eager to get into the room, Jude squeezed between her legs and the door, causing it to open the rest of the way. He let out a happy bark, then fell silent when he discerned that his master was nowhere to be seen.

  Verna came alongside the dog. She laid her hand on his head. “Sorry,” she said.

  Jude sat down. Then he lay down. He looked abject. But, then, dogs always look sad when their mouths were closed. Those big eyes. Who was to say whether Jude was happy or not? Still, Verna knew he was sad. Hell, she was sad!

  She sat down next to him on the floor. “You’re stuck with me from now on,” she told him. Then she looked around the shadowy room. There was the bedroom set from the Eckert house in Kingston, her grandmother’s house — the oak bed with the high headboard and the matching chest of drawers topped by the splotchy bevelled mirror and the steamer trunk in the corner. But there were other things, objects that she recognized as being her father’s, his artifacts: the battered sheepskin slippers beside the bed, a half-full bag of generic eucalyptus-flavoured cough drops, an old pair of reading glasses from Shoppers, a photograph of her mother on their wedding day, looking a lot like Fern had at that age.

  “Here,” she said, reaching out and pulling one of the slippers out from under the bed. “You can have this to remember him by. I bet it smells like his feet. It smells like somebody’s feet.” Jude sniffed the slipper, then looked up at her. “It’s Okay,” she urged him. “You can have it. It’s yours.” Jude lifted his chin and then lowered it, so that it was resting on the slipper.

  Verna gathered her knees to her chest and rocked back and forth on her sitz bones. She looked up at the shuttered dormer. “I should get Lionel to open up the shutters,” she told Jude. “That’s what’ll sell the place. Lake views.”

  She drank thoughtfully. Which is to say, her head was full of thoughts while she drank, all jostling for space, half-formed and circling some sort of inner drain. After a few confused moments, she stirred. “Well,” she advised the dog. “One door down. Next!”

  Her legs felt a little shaky, so she crawled over to the bed and used it to drag herself up. She collected the glass from the floor with a swoop and wobbled unsteadily to the hall, trailed by the black Lab with the slipper in his mouth. “I’m here!” she told Fern’s door, then leaned back against the banister to gather her strength. For this was not simply the bedroom in which Fern had slept when they were children. This was the bedroom in which the OPP officer and his partner had found her four years earlier — the room in which she had died. Had died alone.

  “It wasn’t the cancer that killed her. Did you know that?” Verna asked Jude. She shook her head solemnly. “Nope. It was something called ‘sepsis.’ I had never heard of it, so I looked it up.” She laughed. “Of course, I did.” Super Grammarian — that’s what they had called her at the ministry — behind her back, of course, but then Bob had told her. Of course he had. Couldn’t resist, even though he knew it would hurt her feelings. Maybe because he knew it would. Because she was such a stickler for detail, so uptight and rule-bound, because it was important to her that everything — spelling, grammar, diction — be just right. “Come on, Verna!” he had cajoled her. “Lighten up! It means that you have super powers. The ability to parse. To conjugate. You and you alone can save infinitives from being split! It’s funny, Verna. Can’t you take a joke?”

  To which she had replied somewhat stiffly, “Apparently not.”

  “What was I talking about, Jude? Oh, right,” she continued, “sepsis. You’ll be interested to know that the word derives from the Greek word for putrefaction. Yes. That’s right. My twin sister putrefied to death. Alone. By herself. How do you like them apples?” Verna’s throat ached. Her eyes burned. “Jesus!” she muttered. “How did that happen?” She peered at the closed door to her sister’s room; it looked back at her — accusing, reproachful. Her stomach did a little jig. Not a good sign. “I can’t go in there, Jude. Not yet. Tomorrow. I got to get something in my stomach. Otherwise I’m going to pull a Fern.”

  She headed downstairs carefully, followed by Jude, and crossed into the kitchen. She looked at the aluminum tin of curry. Suddenly curry did not seem to be a good idea.

  “No more Scotch pour vous, madame,” she said sternly, pouring herself a vodka and tonic instead. She slipped on her jacket and tottered out to the screened-in porch and set the drink down on the lacy little Queen Anne table that, together with the Heywood rockers, made up a set. She made a second trip, this time for the bottles of tonic and vodka. These she set on the floor behind the table, so that she wouldn’t accidentally knock them over. “For that,” she informed Jude, “would be a tragedy of the first magnitude!” What, she wondered, “is the first magnitude”? She was certain she used to know what that meant. She would have to look that up. Of course she would. “Because that’s what I do!” she said aloud. “Because I’m Super Grammarian.” She plopped down in one of the rockers and gazed foggily out at the lake. Jude appeared in the doorway, carrying the slipper in his mouth.

  “Is that your WOOBIE?” Verna slurred. She hated it when she slurred. Good thing it was just the dog. “Ah, is that your WOOBIE?” For that’s what her father used to call the discarded stuffed animals that the succession of soft-mouthed retrievers who had informed his life felt compelled to carry about with them. WOOBIE. An acronym for Wonderful Object Occasionally Bitten in Earnest. Because, in some cases, after a brief period of infatuation, the dog of the moment ended up shaking the WOOBIE to death, then pulling out its eyes and nose and eating a good deal of its polyfil stuffing. (This invariably returned to haunt whoever was scooping up after them.)

  Donald used to buy stuffed animals at the Goodwill for a quarter apiece. He had felt bad about it. Embarrassed. “I don’t tell the cashier they’re for the dog,” he had confessed. “It doesn’t seem right when that’s all that some parents can afford for their kids.” A real bleeding heart, her father
, dyed-in-the wool NDP.

  “Come on!” Verna encouraged Jude. “Come here!” Jude approached. She patted his head. “Good dog! Keep me company, why don’t you? Heck! What else do you have to do? I’m it! The main attraction.”

  Jude grinned, a huge pink triangle of tongue lolling out of one side of his mouth, before oozing onto the floor the way retrievers do, suddenly boneless, flat like a bearskin rug.

  It was coming on to a quarter past eight. The sun was setting, but, in the absence of any large settlement in the vicinity, there was no brown light to soften the descending edge of darkness. Mist began to rise up from the lake in wisps, like ghosts from a graveyard.

  “Beautiful,” she murmured. “Beautiful.” She rocked and drank. Jude fell asleep and snored. She nudged him with her toe. “Stop snoring!” Eventually, after shadows had wrapped the house round in a dusky embrace and light had drained from the sky, the stars popped out. That’s when she remembered what the phrase, “of the first magnitude” meant. It meant the brightest stars in the sky, beginning with Sirius, the Dog Star.

  “See!” Verna pointed out drunkenly. “Sirius, in the constellation Canis Major. That means ‘Big Dog.’ Are you a big dog, Jude? Sure you are! Golly, but that’s bright!”

  At some point she fell asleep, only to startle awake, half-frozen.

  “What?” she muttered.

  She staggered into the house, Jude at her heels. She shaded her eyes and peered at the stairs, which seemed exceptionally steep to her. Unreasonably so.

  Nope, she decided and wobbled off into the living room, where she lowered herself onto the lumpy couch, assumed a fetal position, covered herself, more or less, with Frieda’s scratchy afghan and slept. Jude curled up with the slipper on the rag rug before the hearth.

  She woke only once, when a sound like a loon makes poked into her sleep, prodding her into a kind of temporary lucidity. Loons mate forever, she remembered, before the thought slipped away from her and she sank back into a churning ragout of dreams.

  She woke into a cacophony of loud banging and hysterical barking.

  “What?” she managed, rearing up a couple of inches, then, “Oh! Ouch!” Her head felt like a mangled screw top, half off. “Jeez!”

  “Anybody home? Yoo-hoo, eh?” Someone on the porch, at the front door. “Anybody home? Hey! Got eyes, don’t I? Can see the car. Give it up, eh? I know you’re in there! Oh, yoo-hoo!” A monotone exhortation, like the clanging of an infernal bell.

  “Just a minute!” Verna clawed her way out of her grandmother’s afghan (no easy task), set her feet on the floor, and, taking her thunderous head in her hands to steady it, rose with extreme caution. One for homo erectus, she thought, before noticing that she was in her stocking feet and wearing the same jeans and flannel shirt as the day before, only now they were rumpled and stuck to her in places. “Oh, God! Did I sleep down here?” she muttered. Then, when the pounding resumed, “I’m coming! Hold your horses!” She wobbled into the hall, and, with some difficulty, dragged Jude away from the door, interposed herself between him and it, and pushed it open.

  On the other side of the screen door stood a Native woman wearing a red-and-black plaid flannel shirt, jeans with the bottoms neatly rolled up, and white running shoes. Her straight black hair was pulled back into a loose ponytail and she wore silver dream-catcher earrings. She was no more than five feet tall, four inches shorter than Verna, and perfectly spherical. Not so much fat as round. Her face was also round and she wore John Lennon granny glasses.

  “Yes?” Verna managed, struggling to hold Jude back.

  “Woke you, eh?”

  “I’m afraid …”

  “You don’t look so good,” the woman observed. “Bad night, eh? Looks like you’ve been drinking. Smells like it, too. Whew!” She pinched her nostrils in the universal gesture of “P.U.” Verna fell back a foot, lest she offend further, and gaped at the woman. She was at a total loss for words; her brain seemed to be stuck in neutral. The woman was not so inhibited. She pointed to Jude and said. “He’s happy to see me. Wants to say hello. Wants to pee.”

  “Oh, yes,” Verna agreed in a rush. “Right. Of course.”

  The woman took a step backwards and Verna let go of Jude’s collar. He exploded through the door and plunged his head between the woman’s legs in frenzied greeting. Verna stepped forward to grab his collar and pull him back, but the woman told her, “Don’t worry.” She paddled the dog’s wagging behind with both hands. “Just docking, eh? Dogs, they do that, don’t they, Jude? They dock. Yeah. I’m glad to see you, too.” She pushed him away, and, crossing the porch, opened the door to the outside. Jude galloped through and began to zig-zag across the lawn, anointing this rock, that tree until he reached the water’s edge. He waded in, barking joyously.

  “Excuse me,” Verna sagged against the door frame in a forlorn attempt to remain upright, “but you are …”

  “Winonah.”

  “And you knew my father?”

  “All my life. I’d sit down if I were you. You look like you’re going to hurl. Don’t want to clean up hurl.”

  Verna opened the door, tottered forward a couple of steps, and then carefully lowered herself onto one of the Heywood rockers. She closed her eyes in order to re-establish equilibrium.

  “Like a smoke?”

  Verna grimaced. She shook her head.

  “Cause I can get ’em for you real cheap, eh. From the reserve.”

  “Don’t smoke,” Verna murmured. Did everyone from around here smoke? She wondered. Oh, right. They did. “Remind me again why you’re here?”

  Winonah extracted a cigarette from an unmarked pack in the breast pocket of her plaid shirt. “Carmen Beauséjour give me a call,” she replied. “Said you’d need help opening up the house. Seeing as how you never done it.”

  “Thanks, but Dad gave me a name. The guy he always used.”

  “Who?”

  “Lionel Somebody.”

  “Lionel Madahbee?”

  “Something like that. Yeah. I’ve got his number. Somewhere.”

  “Uh huh.” Winonah nodded. She lit the cigarette and took a long drag on it. She exhaled. “Good luck with that.”

  Verna blinked at her. “What do you mean?”

  Winonah cocked her head to one side, smoked, blew smoke rings. “Dead,” she said.

  “Dead? I’m sorry. You’re talking about Lionel?”

  Winonah nodded.

  “So you know him? Knew him, I mean?”

  “Yeah,” Winonah replied. “Somewhat. My brother.”

  “Lionel was your brother?”

  “My twin brother.”

  “Oh!” Verna was flummoxed. “Did he kill himself?” she asked. “I’m sorry. That was insensitive of me. It’s none of my business. It’s just that Dad said he was … melancholy.”

  Winonah stared at her. “Yeah. And?”

  “I just thought …” Verna fumbled. “I mean, if he was depressed …”

  “Melancholy is not depressed.” Winonah’s tone was firm. “What Lionel was — he was numb.”

  “Numb?”

  The woman nodded. “That’s right. He suffered from intermittent numbness. That’s different from depressed.”

  She seemed so convinced of this that Verna hadn’t the heart to pursue it. “Was this recent?” she asked. “Because just a couple of months ago, Dad —”

  “April,” Winonah cut her off. “Spring Pow Wow down there in Michigan.”

  “Was it an accident then?”

  Winonah shook her head. “He died in competition,” she said, sitting down in the other Heywood rocker.

  “I’m sorry.” Verna was confused now. She had pictured Lionel as looking like a bear — big and shaggy and lumbering. “Was he an athlete of some sort?”

  Winonah shrugged. “I suppose. If you call eating a sports event.”

  “What do you mean?” Verna asked. “Like a pie-eating contest or a how-many-jalapenos-can-you-choke-down or hamburgers or ramen noodles or
hot dogs?”

  Winonah looked offended. “Hardly,” she said, putting out her cigarette and tossing it into the rusty coffee can. “Not much skill involved in that. Just … capacity.”

  “What then?”

  “Chubby Bunny Contest.”

  Verna stared at her. “Excuse me, but … what?”

  Winonah looked at her with a mixture of pity and contempt. “You’ve never heard of the Chubby Bunny contest?”

  Verna shook her head.

  “Well,” observed Winonah, “you don’t get out much, do you?”

  Verna considered this. “I guess not.”

  “What happens is you stuff one marshmallow into your mouth at a time, then you say ‘chubby bunny’ until you can’t say it anymore,” Winonah explained. “If you gag, choke, or spit out the marshmallow, you lose.”

  “So what happened to Lionel?”

  “One of the marshmallows got lodged in his throat,” Winonah said. “They couldn’t get it out in time.”

  Verna was horrified. “How awful!”

  “Pretty stupid, if you ask me,” Winonah replied grimly. “Chubby Bunny Contests have killed a lot of our people over the years. It’s a silent killer. Ojibway didn’t have marshmallows before the white man came. Turns out they are just another way to kill our people — like blankets infected with smallpox. Some Traditional Pow Wow. I’m leading a movement to do away with Chubby Bunny Contests at Pow Wows. I have a petition with eighty signatures on it so far. So, have you primed the pump yet?”

  Verna blinked at her, then shook her head. “Uh, no,” she said. “Excuse me, but are you talking about the water? Because I don’t know where the shut-off valve is. You don’t happen to, do you?”

  Winonah was stoic. “Lionel and me were twins,” she replied. “We had this psychic bond, eh? Everything Lionel knew, I know. And you can’t just turn on the water. Got to prime the pump first.”