Rabbit Foot Bill

by Helen Humphreys

  When William Scott and I finally got to the bottom of my obsession with Bill, he wanted me to write a letter to my mother. He thought that I needed to forgive her. It was the only way to truly move forward, he said. But I couldn’t write that letter. Every time I started, every time I sat at the kitchen table in my apartment above the restaurant in Weyburn and put Dear Mom at the top of a piece of paper, I couldn’t think of what to say next. My palms would sweat and I would get dizzy, and there seemed to be no stream of words that I could enter that would wash away the way I felt.

  I spent a year talking with William Scott three days a week. I still see him occasionally. After the Weyburn was emptied of patients and closed for good, he took a job in Ontario. He works at a clinic in Markham, outside of Toronto. Sometimes we’ll talk in the morning, when I’m at the lab on an early shift and before his day has officially begun. I retrained after my failure at the mental hospital and work in a lab for infectious diseases now. No more patients, just microscopes and slides. I have moved from the doctoring side of the equation to the scientific side. It’s probably where I belonged all along. I am more at home among blood cultures than human beings.

  I open my suitcase and close it again. I don’t really want to unpack, prefer to keep everything feeling temporary, like I could leave at any moment. But I walk over to the dresser and open all the drawers anyway. The wood smells like mothballs. In the bottom drawer is a folded bolt of fabric. I recognize the tiny repeating yellow primroses from the curtains above the kitchen sink.

  Childhood seems remote, like a landscape seen from the window of a speeding car, blurry and inaccessible. I can put my hand on the faded roses of the bedspread, or on the worn grooved wood on top of the dresser, on this folded length of cloth, but I’m not feeling anything of my former life.

  I want to call William Scott and ask him what to do, but he’s in the middle of his workday, and the only phone in this house is in the kitchen. My mother would be able to hear every word I spoke into the receiver.

  So, there’s nothing to be done, and I go back out into the hallway and start walking towards the kitchen. Even though I can’t call William Scott to ask for his advice, I know what it would most likely be. Keep moving forward, Leonard, he would say. Don’t let yourself fall backwards.

  My mother is sitting at the table, smoking.

  “I thought you gave that up,” I say.

  “It’s just for my nerves,” she says, not looking at me, tapping her long ash into the green glass ashtray in front of her. I can see how much older she is now, how her cheeks are furrowed and the skin around her eyes is lined. It makes me a little sad to think of her as an old woman. But then she was always careworn, always seemed a bit like an old woman, even when she was young.

  The green ashtray is in the shape of a fish. The cigarette butts covering the inside of it look like scales patterning the side of the glittering glass creature. I suddenly have a memory of noise and lights, the creak of carnival music from the sports field outside of town.

  “Did I give you that ashtray?” I ask.

  “You won it at the sideshow,” says my mother. “At the shooting range, I think.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  I can remember the weight of the gun in my hands, the spinning targets, the wooden shelves overflowing with their bounty of prizes. Was this before or after the murder? Before, I think, when I was still relatively happy.

  “You’ve kept it all this time.”

  My mother looks up at me then. I can see her eyes are bright with tears, that she’s been crying.

  “Why wouldn’t I keep it?” she says. “It was a present from my son.”

  WE EAT DINNER mostly in silence, just the knocking of the cutlery against the plates. I can hear the click of insects outside the kitchen window in the waning summer heat.

  It’s all so familiar—the sound of the insects, the mismatched silverware, the dinner plates with sheaves of wheat—and yet I feel removed from all of it, as though I’m watching from somewhere outside of myself. I look over at the refrigerator, which has shuddered and knocked itself back into life—another sound I am relentlessly familiar with—and realize, from my days of working with William Scott, that I’m showing signs of dissociative behaviour.

  My mother has made me a pie for dessert.

  “Saskatoons,” she says, slicing through the crust and revealing the firm purple berries underneath. “I thought you might have a hankering for them, after living in the city.”

  “Thank you.”

  I take the plate of pie she passes to me across the table.

  Once, when I tried to explain the Saskatoon berry to my wife, Maggie, I said it was like a meaty blueberry. That was the closest I could come to describing what it was like, but really that wasn’t close enough. The Saskatoon retains its shape when baked, doesn’t mush up like other berries or leak flavour in the cooking. The juice is the most beautiful purplish red, like a combination of grapes and blood. I used to pick and eat loads of the berries when I was a child, stuffing my face with them from the shrubs in the gullies at the base of Sugar Hill.

  “It’s delicious,” I say, and I don’t say no when my mother cuts me a second piece of pie after I have finished my first.

  And then, just when I am starting to relax, when eating the pie and thinking of the Saskatoons has made me feel like myself again, I can see the phantom bulk of my father passing behind my mother’s chair, can see how she flinched every time he crossed behind her and was out of sight, because often he would hit her on his way to the fridge to get a beer, club her on the side of her head with an open hand and enough force to spill her onto the floor.

  “What’s the matter?” asks my mother.

  My hand with the fork is poised above the wedge of pie.

  “Nothing. I’m just not hungry anymore. I think I’ve had enough to eat.”

  Through the kitchen window the sun rolls back behind the fields and the crickets begin in the yard. I can hear them tuning up under the rose bushes.

  I push the plate away from me. My mother pushes it gently, but insistently, back.

  “Finish your pie, son,” she says. “It’s always best on the day it was made. It won’t be nearly as good by tomorrow.”

  After supper I excuse myself by saying that I’m tired from the journey, go into my bedroom, and close the door. I lie down on my bed, fully clothed, and shut off the bedside lamp. The room is so dark that I cannot see my hand in front of my face. I switch the lamp back on.

  I would never hear him coming. That was part of it, the surprise attack. He was a big man, but he could creep down the hallway as silently as a cat. I wouldn’t hear him turning the doorknob or folding the door carefully back against the wall. He would cross the floor while I slept, and I only woke when he was right there beside the bed, when he reached down and grabbed me, shook me from the shrouds of sleep.

  I get out of bed and take the chair and jam it under the doorknob. But then I remember that I did this once when I was a child and he surprised me by coming through the bedroom window.

  I remove the chair out from under the doorknob and carry it back to the window. Then I lift the window in its sash and sit in the chair, lean my head out into the night, inhale the cool inrush of air, the scent of grass and road tar.

  Once, I sat here like this as a boy, with my head out the window, and I watched as my father chased my mother around the house. She was barefoot but running hard, running over the stones and the dirt as though they were the softest grass. She made a grunting noise when she ran, because she was trying to go her fastest and it was taking everything out of her. No use, though, as he caught her near the downspout and dragged her out into the field. And all through that, I just sat still on the chair at the window. What I felt in that moment was not fear, but relief that it was my mother he was after and not me.

  I don’t remember moving from the window or falling asleep, but when I wake it’s the next day. The bedside lamp glows dimly in the mo
rning light and I’m sprawled across the single bed with all my clothes still on, lying on top of the covers. I feel foolish and grateful at the same time.

  It’s the day of the funeral. I should have hung my suit up when I arrived yesterday instead of leaving it folded in my suitcase. But when I haul it out, it’s not too crumpled. I lay the shirt and jacket on the bed and smooth them down carefully with the flat of my hand.

  My mother is standing by the sink, looking out the window and drinking a cup of coffee. She’s wearing her one good dress—the same one good dress that I recognize from my childhood. Her hair is up.

  “Beautiful day,” she says, her back still turned to me.

  I pour myself some coffee from the pot on the stove and go to stand beside her at the window.

  “Your roses are looking good this year.”

  “I’ve had more time for them,” she says. “It’s always good to deadhead right after they bloom.”

  “Yes, they look tidier.”

  “I meant to cut you a spray for your room before you got here.”

  “No mind.”

  “Let me do it now. Before I forget and the day gets away from us.”

  Before I can say anything to stop her, my mother is out in the yard with a pair of scissors, snipping the heads off the yellow roses under the kitchen window. Her bent body looks vulnerable, like a child, and I can see that her hair is thinning around the crown.

  She comes back inside with a small bouquet, holds them up for me to smell. I drop my face towards them, but the sweet, perfumed musk makes me suddenly nauseous. I sway on my feet, reach out for the kitchen counter to steady myself.

  “What’s the matter?” asks my mother.

  “Nothing. I’m just going to go and get some air,” I say. “I’ll meet you out by the truck.”

  I walk slowly around the house until I’m at the back by the bed of roses. The pale yellow flowers grow along the wall of the house and twine around the door of the root cellar.

  When my father would grab me out of sleep, he would take me outside to beat me, so my mother wouldn’t hear. He would drag me around to the back of the house, to this place by the roses and the root cellar. It was on the opposite side of the house to the room where he slept with my mother, and in those days she took something every night so she could sleep. I remember the army of pill bottles lined up in the bathroom medicine cabinet.

  On the better nights, my father would hit me until I fell, and then, while I lay on the ground, the scent of the roses drifting around me, he would put the boots to me.

  On the worst nights, my father would beat me and then throw me into the root cellar and leave me there until morning. He must have weighted the door with rocks or logs, because it was impossible to budge from the inside, even though I pushed against it with everything I had in my panic to get out.

  He can’t hurt you now, William Scott would say if he were here, but I am shaking and still nauseous. Memory is a lesser substitute for my father’s brutality, but it is still terrifying.

  I slowly raise the wooden cover on the root cellar, lift it open, lean it back on its hinge against the wall of the house, and climb down the rickety wooden ladder of a staircase.

  I can’t, even now, think of a reason why I was beaten. In all honesty, it never really seemed to be about me at all. Instead it was about quelling my father’s rage. He had a rage that seemed to simmer for a while and then it had to boil over, by necessity. The beating put everything back on simmer and made him calm and human again. Until the next time.

  It was night, so I must be hit. It was Wednesday, so I must be hit. The world had treated my father unfairly, so I must be hit. He was a failure, so I must be hit. It had rained for three weeks straight, or it hadn’t rained all summer and the garden was ruined, so I must be hit.

  The smell of the cellar is the smell of darkness, sharp and damp and sweetened with decay. It is what blood tastes like, that smell.

  I would lie curled up tight in the hole of the root cellar. I was always cold in there and my body hurt from the beating. I curled up tight for warmth and to avoid touching the salamanders that lived in that dark place. Mud puppies, they were called, and they were sticky and cool when they scrabbled over my skin. A frightening lizard with the comforting name of a pet.

  I have been inside the earth. I have closed my eyes and opened them, and in the blackness my own hand in front of my face is impossible to see. I have been invisible. I have become this darkness I have entered—a darkness that is soft and cool and smells of mice and old potatoes.

  My mother is standing outside the truck when I come around the side of the house.

  “Where have you been?” she asks. “I went out back and couldn’t see you.” She brushes down the front of my suit jacket. “You’re covered in cobwebs. You have dust in your hair.”

  “I was down in the root cellar.”

  My mother gives me a strange look.

  “Why would you want to go down there?”

  I shrug and get into the truck.

  We drive along the dusty road, past one quarter section and then another. The fields humming by, wheat changing to rapeseed and then to flax, a line of poplars or length of dirt road segmenting one field from the next. I’ve always liked the blue of the flax when the flower is in bloom. It’s a blue like smoke. When a whole field of flax moves in the wind, it has the creep of water.

  My father was a godless man, but the funeral is at the Presbyterian church in the centre of town.

  “Where else?” says my mother as she rocks the truck to a stop beside the curb. “We can’t very well put him in the yard.”

  Through the double oak doors, the church smells like rotting lilies. Probably remnants from the last funeral, like a stain left on the air. There are no flowers here today for my father. My mother didn’t bring a spray of yellow roses to put on his coffin, and who would want to buy him a wreath? Certainly not me. He had a few drinking friends up and down the rail line, but no one in Canwood who was more than a nodding acquaintance. My father had a suspicious view of his fellow humans, always thought he was being cheated or would be cheated, that people were nothing more than opportunistic dogs, forever on the make.

  I sit beside my mother in the front row. A few people wander into the church. I don’t turn around to see who they are, and perhaps they’re not even there for the funeral, but have wandered in by accident, to enjoy the cool quiet of the church interior. But then someone deliberately enters the pew behind us and I feel a hand on my shoulder.

  “Hello, Leonard.”

  It’s Lucy Weber. She looks older but the same. I am filled with happiness at the sight of her.

  “Hello, Miss Weber.”

  She squeezes my shoulder and I put up a hand to cover hers. Her skin is dry and papery.

  The box that holds the body of my father sits beside the altar. When the minister says the requisite words for the service, he has to look down at the sheet of paper in front of him to get the name of my father right.

  Afterwards, we traipse out to the gravesite for the burial. It’s hot out now and the minister sweats through his vestments as he sprinkles the words of God down on the wooden box where my father will be trapped for all eternity.

  My mother and I stand side by side, not touching, while the coffin is lowered into the sleeve of earth. There are bits of root and small stones studding the walls of the hole. The squawk of a magpie comes from a nearby tree.

  “Amen,” says Lucy Weber firmly when the minister has stopped speaking.

  The coffin has reached the bottom of the grave. It wobbles to a stop and then the green canvas straps that lowered it are winched slowly up to the surface.

  “Come back to mine,” says Lucy Weber to my mother and me. “I have some lunch laid on for you.”

  As we walk away I can hear the sound of the dirt being shovelled into the hole. It sounds like rain, like a hard rain driving against a window, like the kind of rain we sometimes had in summer when I was a boy.
I suddenly miss my father, and I want to turn back to the grave, but Lucy Weber has me firmly by the elbow, guiding me towards the parking lot.

  I’m glad we’re going back to Lucy’s. It saves me from the inevitable crawl of small talk with my mother. We follow Lucy’s white car through the cemetery gates, my mother wrestling the gears of the truck into their sockets, and me staring out the window at the granite markers, the etch of birth and death dates, the sprigs of bright plastic flowers.

  “Will you get him a headstone?” I ask my mother.

  “I probably owe him that,” she says. “But it will be a small one.”

  Lucy’s bungalow is cheerful, packed with furniture and knick-knacks, plants on all the window ledges. It is the opposite of my parents’ stark farmhouse, with only my mother’s few nice things to brighten the space.

  “I like to have greenery in winter,” says Lucy as I run my finger along the frond of a potted fern. “It helps dispel the gloom.”

  She disappears into the kitchen to fetch the lunch. My mother kicks off her shoes, curls up on the couch with an ease that she never displays in her own house.

  “I like it here,” I say.

  “Yes,” she says. “I do too. It’s an oasis.”

  Lucy reappears bearing a tray full of sandwiches with their crusts cut off and a pitcher of iced tea. She sets both down on the coffee table, shoving piles of books out of the way to make room.

  “It’s cozier to eat in here,” she says. “So let’s do that. I’ll just go and get the plates and glasses.” She trots off back to the kitchen.

  The sandwiches are arranged in a wheel on the plate. Salmon paste, and ham and mustard, and what looks like cream cheese studded with chopped-up dill pickle.

  “They look so nice,” my mother calls out. “You shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble.”

  “Nonsense.” Lucy is back again, puts three glasses down on the table and hands us each a plate and paper napkin. “It’s the least I can do.” She pours the iced tea. “I wanted to help.”

  I’m hungrier than I knew, fill my plate three times with sandwiches, down the iced tea in a series of gulps.