Driving Minnie's Piano

by Lesley Choyce

  A pair of skunks had taken up residence beneath the floorboards and it would be unkind to deliver them to different locations. Instead, they would find each other in the wilderness by the lake near the painted green frog on the rock outcropping.

  That night I was awakened by my sleepless wife. She jabbed me in the ribs. “Do you hear it?”

  “It's impossible,” I said.

  “Listen.”

  I listened. “It's just the wind. Go back to sleep.”

  “No. Listen.”

  I listened.

  And then I heard the familiar scratching of little clawed paws in the dirt beneath the house. And there was something like the scraping of tree branches - the nest. A skunk was still down there rearranging the furniture of its living space. Perhaps the happily married couple of skunks I had moved away had left behind a little one. If so, it would have to be reunited with its parents.

  The next day the trap was set again and I caught my third skunk. Another successful catch, another call to Glenn.

  “Impossible.”

  “But true,” I said.

  And so another skunk was driven to the lake by the green frog and somewhere in the woods yet another reunion took place.

  News of the three skunks beneath our house spread up and down the shore and as far away as Halifax. It seemed that everyone loves to hear a story about another family afflicted with skunks. Three skunks! What bad luck.

  I refused to believe that there could be more but my wife insisted I keep resetting the live trap until it remained empty for up to a week. I humoured her. I knew better. No way could there be yet another black and white scoundrel beneath those boards.

  But a fourth one appeared in the morning like clockwork. This time Glenn politely let me know that he had done his duty as a surfing friend. Three skunks, he could take. But we were moving into the Twilight Zone territory here. He could not come over every morning to help me with my skunk problem. Besides, his truck had the perpetual smell of skunk. People were starting to notice. His girlfriend was refusing to ride in the cab. I was destroying his relationship.

  So I was on my own.

  I put on the overalls, cap, goggles, boots and gloves and sat down four metres from the skunk. I stared at him and began a one-sided conversation.

  “What is this all about?”

  “You're the last one, right?”

  “I don't have a truck this time, you know.”

  “You're going to have to ride on the roof of my station wagon.”

  He looked at me with those beady little black eyes and sniffed the air. As if I was the one who might smell bad.

  I gingerly dropped the old smelly blanket over him and carried him to the car, delicately set the cage on the roof rack and strapped it down with bungee cords. Next, I followed the familiar route to the distant lake and ushered another skunk back to where he belonged in the wilderness. His family awaited him.

  Now, some people go their whole lives without ever encountering a skunk except in a children's cartoon. Sadly, no one in my family falls into that category. Some people around where I live even say that there are no skunks in Nova Scotia. That I must be mistaken. They are very convinced on this point and think I am a great liar. I dearly wish that such was the case.

  It's true that, up until recent history, there were no skunks in my part of Nova Scotia. But they were obviously on the move and great at increasing the population every year.

  Skunk number five turned out to be more docile. The whole skunk business had already turned me mildly insane and now I found myself sitting beside the cage of the new skunk, feeding him a hot dog out of my hand. He ate it with two delicate paws and I went inside the house to get him a second.

  “What are you doing out there?” Sunyata asked.

  “I'm feeding the new skunk.”

  “We have another one?”

  “Yep.”

  As I closed the refrigerator door and stood there with a hot dog in my hand, I foolishly said, “This one is really cute. Maybe we can have that operation to remove the sacs and then we can keep him as a pet.”

  My family just stared at me with glaring eyes.

  So I hoisted the hot dog eating skunk to the roof of my station wagon and we went for a drive.

  Skunk number six was an angry skunk who did not take kindly to me approaching him with hot dogs. I didn't get out of the way fast enough and had to bury my hazardous waste overalls and find new skunk gear.

  Along my daily commute to the skunk lake, I passed two women out for a morning jog. I hadn't really noticed them before but they must have noticed me. They were jogging towards me when I rounded the bend. Suddenly, one of the women pointed at my car. It would have been pretty obvious that I was driving down the road with some kind of animal on my roof. But they must have caught the aroma on other days.

  They quickly stopped running towards me and darted down a side street clutching their noses. I'm sure they could not figure out why a person in a station wagon drove down this road - almost every day - with a live skunk on the roof of his car.

  With snow on the ground, there were several cold but clear days to follow. I discovered that the process was more streamlined if I set the live trap in an old plastic child's sled with a rope attached. In the morning, the skunk would be in the cage, in the sled and all I had to do was tow it to the car, set it on top, covered now by that incredibly odoriferous blanket. At the lake, I would tow the skunk sled to the woods for release. Day after day.

  I was pretty certain that number thirteen would be the last. I had now read up on skunk families and knew that they could have litters of ten or eleven skunk kittens. But it wasn't until I caught skunk number sixteen that I was through.

  The final skunk had clearly been in a bad temper. He had chewed at the bars and tried to take a swipe at me with his paw. The last skunk gave one final, great spray of skunk juice to the old blanket to vent his anger at me. As Glenn would later say, “Guess that blanket's not going back on the bed.”

  There was a heavy snowfall on the day I caught skunk number sixteen. The joggers were not out to watch as I took a corner too fast on a snow-slick surface and skidded off the road, missing a row of mailboxes by mere centimetres. I was headed towards the lake. My front wheels dangled over the edge of a drop-off, with a frozen lake below. My heart was pounding. I watched my breath in the frosty air as I opened the door.

  It was a close call. The skunk and I were both shaken but not harmed and, after getting some assistance to get back on the road, I delivered the skunk to the designated location for the skunk family.

  It was almost spring by now and it seemed downright odd to awake in the morning to see an empty skunk trap in front of my house. A big chunk of my morning every day had begun with talking to, and chauffeuring, skunks. I began to feel that something was missing from my life.

  Life slowly returned to some semblance of normality in our household, although it took months before a visitor could come to our house and not detect some aroma of skunk. Even now, you can open a closet or peer into a cabinet and discover the smell has been somehow stored there from the past as if in some bizarre kind of skunk smell museum. Damp weather, too, brings back aromatic reminders of days gone by.

  When summer approached I decided to drive to the drop-off point by the lake to the north and see if there was any evidence of the large family of skunks I had displaced. I began to think that this was probably how skunks migrated - how they moved into new territory. I had been responsible for increasing the range of skunks in Nova Scotia. Who knew what this would lead to? Skunks, it is said, because of their great defense, have no predators except for great horned owls that apparently have very little sense of smell. And we had very few great horned owls in this neck of the woods. Every other predator in the animal kingdom left skunks alone. Except for me. And I wasn't a real predator. I was just the operator of a skunk taxi service.

  As I got out of my car and walked to the familiar spot of release, I could smel
l skunk, nothing dramatic, just the sightly heady scent of skunk presence. I was trying to do the math in my head. I had dropped off two parents and fourteen offspring - or so I guessed. If paired off, two offspring might each have up to fourteen more cute little baby skunks who would grow up to be adult skunks who might have more children. How long before there were ten thousand skunks in this beautiful wilderness forest? And what might that do to the environment?

  That's when I noticed a newly constructed sign, just a short distance from my favoured freedom trail for skunks. It was over towards the big rock outcropping painted to look like a green frog. The sign announced that here was the future site of a major housing project. It showed a map with curved streets and housing lots all around the lake. “150 one acre housing lots now for sale at reasonable prices,” the sign boasted.

  I was pretty sure that it would be a very interesting place to live for whomever was going to move into that neighbourhood. I felt bad that developers would carve away at this beautiful forest and put houses all around the lake and I worried about the fate of those generations of skunks to come. But I was pretty certain that they would adapt to life in backyards and find comfortable homes in sheds and garages. On the other hand, once word got around - and word about skunks travels pretty fast in these parts - there's a good chance that the houses won't ever be built and thus the wilderness will be spared. Maybe the skunks will save the forest and urge everyone to keep a safe distance. Skunks may not be smarter than people but they have a lot going for them.

  The Final Draft

  I had been living with this one for nearly six years. I didn't know what the original title was but now, on the verge of becoming a real book, the novel was titled Cold Clear Morning. It was either a clever, sharp title - a model of simple elegance - or it was a dull, stupid title for a book: mundane, flat, uninspiring. But it was the title that would appear on the cover nonetheless.

  The problem with the novel was that I had rewritten it twelve times. It had been composed with inspiration and enthusiasm, but now, on the very cusp of publication, the author wanted nothing to do with it.

  Every time I begin a new book (and I've been through this fifty-odd times before), I have to fool myself into believing it will all be fun and games. I will sit down and the words will pour out. The story will be true and vital and change the lives of all who read it. I feel the honesty of it welling up from deep within as I spill my soul into the keyboard. I doubt that it has any imperfections at all but if they should occur, I pretend that someone else will rewrite it, fix it up.

  This is a great and sustaining myth that allows me to begin every new book. Without it, I would be silenced.

  I can't remember what originally inspired Cold Clear Morning. I think it was actually a cold, clear morning. Standing by the shore of a harbour on that morning, I began thinking about a story that would begin just like this. But it was not to be a tale about me; instead, it was about Taylor Colby, a musician who had left this place, these sacred shores of Nova Scotia, to seek his destiny as a professional guitarist. There would be a girl, the love of his life. She goes away with him and she does not survive.

  Taylor must eventually come back home, back to the harbour. And then stuff happens.

  Well, the danger here is great - trying to explain the plot. I've begun to refuse answering the question, “What is your new book about?” Reducing novels to plots that make sense to your relatives is a bad business. What people want is a short blurb like the ones in your TV Guide for the movie Independence Day: “Aliens invade earth and are met with resistance.”

  My novels often get reduced to something like that. “Man (or woman) tries hard at something but fails, then figures out how to succeed (or not).” Reductionism is not a healthy thing when it comes to novels. You could try it in headline form and it is equally disastrous. “Man beaten down by circumstance fights back.” Or my favourite (this one borrowed): “Man Bewildered by Woman.”

  As a writer and an English professor, I also fail to possess the verbal apparatus to properly categorize my novel. My colleagues in the English department want to know if it is modern or postmodern. I haven't a clue. My neighbours here on the Eastern Shore want to know if it is a mystery or a thriller. Well, not really. People die but no one gets murdered. Murdering your characters seems unconscionably uncreative. I say that it is a contemporary story and that helps not at all. I say that it is a novel about “real” people - a boldface lie since it is fiction. I sometimes stumble and suggest it is a literary novel and the eyes glaze over.

  What is it then?

  It is a story about a man.

  Taylor Colby came into my life on that cold clear morning six years ago. He had problems, sure. He whined a lot about his problems and, eventually, in the final draft, I did not let him whine and moan as much as he wanted to. He still feels sorry for himself and his losses, the way we all do. He is beaten down, despite his seeming success, and he doesn't have a clue as to what will save him. (And we all want to be saved by something, by someone, or by ourselves.)

  To every pre-publication critic who read the manuscript, I defended the first thirty pages of my novel until it was finally submitted to its current publisher - Beach Holme Publishing. I was on the verge of mailing the manuscript to Michael Carroll, the editor there, when I looked at the stack of pages - all three hundred and twenty of them. I knew I had to eventually lop off the first three chapters. (Household critics had told me this so often before but I always liked those first thirty pages. Now they were smoked.)

  The great thing about mailing off a manuscript is that you can fool yourself into thinking your work is over. Taylor Colby, with his guitar and his missing mother and dead wife, was gone for a while and I could rent out his room to some other protagonist.

  So the novel was accepted. Nervous Nelly that I am, I said I would “go through it one more time” before the editor undertook his work. I wrestled with it, nipped and tucked and cut out more whining and complaining. Taylor Colby was learning to suffer (and heal) with fewer complaints. I told him not to repeat himself so often. I harangued the author for beating his reader over the head with a shovel each time a point was to be made.

  I am an optimist so I can be a poor editor of my own work at times. I want to think that everything is okay - when it is not. So I hired a competent friend, an English professor named Julia Swan, to go at my manuscript before I shipped it back to Beach Holme.

  She pencilled in quite a few changes and told me outright when a scene that I thought was dramatic was downright silly. And she was right. She found typos that had eluded me for six years. She corrected me about details that I had wrong. Timelines, for example. I get easily confused as to what year my story is taking place in. Anachronisms crop up. A minor character is thirty-four one day and somehow has turned forty within a month, as if she has stepped into a time machine.

  So it was spat upon and polished and fired back to Beach Holme. Then there was a long hiatus where nothing happened. I often basked in such halcyon days. It was off my desk and on someone else's. I got on with other things - another novel about a woman with a bookstore who tried to apply Strunk and White's Elements of Style as a guidebook for living.

  As hiatuses go, this one was ponderously long. Taylor Colby had fallen into a kind of cryogenic suspended animation due to catastrophes in the publishing and book selling world. Publishing seasons came and went and still Taylor Colby remained dormant.

  I grew concerned and there was a preponderance of phone calls and e-mails over the plight of Cold Clear Morning and for a while it began to seem that dawn never would break over the harbour, that Taylor Colby and his tale of woe and healing would be left in its cryogenic numb slumber like Walt Disney's proverbial head.

  And then one day, during a foggy, sodden noon hour here at Lawrencetown Beach, a Purolator truck appeared and my dog began barking as if we were being attacked by a pack of wolves. It was the first batch of manuscript pages with editorial corrections and sugge
stions - but mostly deletions.

  It would be my job to say yea or nay to the changes suggested by the elusive Mr. Carroll. Without my glasses on, all I could achieve, at first, was a survey of the literary landscape before me. Unlike Julia Swan (who had a light, feminine touch with the pencil), Mr. Carroll had put a lot of wrist and elbow into the work. Sentences and sometimes paragraphs were crossed out in thick graphite lines. The page was like a battlefield where mines had gone off, bombs had been dropped. Words had been cut down where they stood. Sentences had fallen. Page after page, I saw carnage. Indignant, I went in search of my reading glasses.

  Comments in the margins said things like, “I think we can cut this altogether, don't you?” and “Not necessary. We get the point.”

  The editor admonished at one stage, “I think the self-pitying and soul-searching goes on too long.” Questions were put forward about baseball caps, water temperature, species of trees and politics.

  At one point, I was challenged with the comment, “A bit purple? Let's cut it.” This, over a line about potatoes that went, “The potatoes had long, alien-like sprouts on them as it was that time of year when a potato goes to seed and self-destructs in its blind lunar thrust towards reproduction.”

  Why would any sane man write such a thing? I guess I had been carried away in an unguarded moment of creative bliss. Clearly, the potato's “blind lunar thrust” had next to nothing to do with Taylor working out his destiny. I don't know why I thought describing potato sprouts was so important as to expend a couple of lines giving it a cosmic importance. What was I thinking?

  Now my head was beginning to clear and I started to admit that Mr. Carroll was bloody right ninety-four percent of the time. He was slashing and burning and lopping off leggy potatoes for good reason. The problem was back on my desk.