The Barclay Family Theatre

by Jack Hodgins

  Macken leans back on his pillow and pulls the covers up to his neck. “Who are you?” he says. He is cold. No, he is frozen. His hands are blue. Ice-water runs through every vein, out to the ends of his toes, his fingers.

  The youth dances like a boxer across the floor to Macken. “That don’t matter,” he says. “But who are you?”

  For a moment Macken doesn’t know. His name is a foreign sound that people used against him years ago. He can’t recall it now. If this stranger should ask him his age, however, that is a different matter. Macken suddenly knows that he is old. “Get out,” he says, too weak to put any force in the words. “Get out.” He closes his eyes until he is sure there is no one in the room but himself. Even then he doesn’t get out of bed.

  Not even the sight of Frieda Macken in his bedroom is enough to raise him up. Not even the devastated look on her handsome face, or her plea for help. What are they going to do, she wants to know. She’s learned, from people in town who claim to know these things, that lime kills every kind of mushroom you can think of except this psylo . . . psylo . . . whatever it is, this thing. There is no antidote that will stop this plague amongst them. What she and Eddie have done, she supposes, is wasted time and energy spreading lime on fields where none of those things would have had the inclination to grow anyway. And made fools of themselves with their smugness.

  Dennis Macken is not surprised to discover that the mushrooms are indestructible. He sees them in his mind’s eye multiplying undeterred until they carpet the entire valley, until they are the only crop that grows in this part of the world. All he wants to do is look at his hands. They’re old. They’re wrinkled and old and covered with splotches like some terrible disease. He’s caught it, he thinks, from that youth who slept in his bed, but how can he tell that to Frieda without sounding insane? He can’t. He’d rather be silent. He rests his hands on the top of his blankets and hopes she’ll notice. She doesn’t. His hands look no different to her than her own. It’s his eyes she’s worried about. His eyes look as if they’ve seen something they can’t accept.

  Dennis Macken knows that finding something that will kill the mushroom has nothing to do with anything, that even if every mushroom in the community turns to poison, the plague will not go away. It will increase the energy of its attack, like a horde of starving rats; it will overrun the district, destroying everything in sight. That’s why he stays in bed until he’s heard Frieda Macken’s car pull out of his yard. That’s why he listens until he is sure that the pickers are again at work, and gets up to watch from a kitchen window until everything he can see is alive with people. His own fields, Desmonds’ fields, Powers’ stumpy pasture. Down on their knees with their noses only inches from ground, they part the grass as if they’ve been told there are diamonds amongst the roots. He knows what they’re after, he’s seen it himself, a small pointed cap of flesh on a long wiry stem. The first few they find they will eat, to start the day off feeling good, the rest they will hoard in their tins or their plastic bags. He’s heard three thousand dollars a pound is what they’re worth. Having tasted one once, he can’t understand why. All it did was give him a dizzy head.

  A dizzy head is what time has given him too, with its incredible speed. Why has it gone so fast? One day you look out a window and dream of all you can do once you’ve grown into a man; the next, so it seems, you look out the window and find yourself wondering what you’ve done with it while it flew by. In his case, he wonders what Frieda has done with his life, the one he offered her years ago. Given it back. Having returned it, she seemed to have left everything else up to him. Some travel, a job, this little farm, helping his neighbours a bit — is this what they like to call life?

  A pick-up truck slows down and parks in the shallow ditch. Close to a dozen people hop out of the back, and two more out of the cab. On the gravel shoulder they pause for a moment to look over his field, then climb through his fence and drop to their knees to start combing. One of them wears something that looks like pajamas. One is a child with a crutch. They haven’t been there for even a minute when the people who got there before them stand up and converge to a knot in the centre of the field. Some carry sticks, a few swing their pails, all of them seem to be shouting. Macken sees, when they break apart and start walking towards the intruders, that the marathon youth takes the lead. Face to face the groups engage in some conversation. An arm is raised. A short piece of lumber is swung. The bodies convulse in a brawl. Even inside he can hear the sounds of their yells. One of the newcomers breaks free and makes for the truck. Others follow his lead. Waving their fists from the back of the pick-up they make their escape, while the rest go back to their work.

  Once he is dressed, Dennis Macken crosses the yard and climbs on board his tractor, a monster he’s made from a hundred scrap-yard wrecks. Big as a tank, it has back wheels that stand higher than he does and a bulldozer blade on the front. Its motor rattles windows. Its tracks cut patterns of three-inch holes in the ground. Its exhaust pipe stretches skyward like a flagpole, and flies his flag — a flowered rag that whips about in the blue exhaust as if it wants to tear free and have a life of its own. A life of his own is what Macken wants too, and up on this tractor he’ll claim it.

  He starts the engine and manoeuvres out onto the grass. Selecting a cluster of adults down on their knees like pilgrims worshipping their god, he opens her up. Oh holy terror, the screams! Bodies leap up, fall away, scatter. Macken rattles on through. They yell at him, in thirteen different languages. Someone throws a jam tin that clatters against the hood. Someone throws a clod of grass that barely misses his face. He laughs, he laughs, he feels almost young again.

  And now he is off to new encounters. This time they haven’t the sense to scatter, they run in a pack, and he can’t resist the need to give them chase. He stands, he hollers insults, he whoops like a cowboy. He follows them down the length of the field, as close as he dare on their heels. When they turn, he turns. Hair flies. Rags ripple and flap. The girl in a purple velvet coat who looks like Frieda Macken’s runaway daughter trips and screams, crawls ahead of the blade, gets up in the nick of time. Macken swings to the left and heads for a new cluster of pickers, he won’t be happy until he has them all stirred up, he won’t be happy until he’s given them all a scare, until he’s made their lives so miserable they’ll be glad to leave, get off his land, and spread the word that Dennis Macken’s not a man to take advantage of. Off to one side he sees a car on the highway backing up for a better look, he sees Angel Hopper getting out of his truck, he sees Frieda Macken running in this direction across the Desmonds’ field.

  One youth alone stands upright, steady, refuses to move. Macken decides to run over him. But the youth doesn’t move, doesn’t leap, except onto the top of Macken’s blade where he rides with his rusty beard whipped up across his face, his powerful hands on the bar. He is wearing a Macken cap on his hairy head.

  Macken stops for no one, not even this wild-eyed youth on his nose. Not even the crowd of neighbours that’s collected along his fence. Let them gawk, let them admire his pluck. He sets out on a new crusade. “Get off my field you pack of bastards, git!” But the marathon youth crawls up the engine hood towards Macken’s face. “Get out of my way, you creep, I can’t see where I’m going!” The eyes are so deep and frightening that Macken can’t bear to look at them. The youth pushes his face up close to Macken’s face, his breath in Macken’s breath, his nose against Macken’s nose. He says something that Macken can’t understand, some foreign sounds, but he tastes their meaning with his teeth. He won’t get out of this alive. Nobody will.

  When the youth pulls out the key and rides the tractor to a stop it’s already far too late. Behind them a child is lying in the grass and screaming. People are yelling again. People are running to see what Macken has done. Someone hauls him down off his tractor and shoves him towards the commotion. The girl who looks like Frieda Barclay’s daughter stops in front of him and spits in his face. Terrified by what he sees, M
acken is almost relieved when the marathon youth pushes the others away and hustles him forward towards the child. The crowd from outside his fence is running this way, all of Waterville seems to be here. Macken can hear someone calling his name.

  Some faces in this crowd are familiar, some are not. That could be Frieda Macken trying to get to him, but it could be someone else. Macken can’t tell his neighbours from these children of the plague. A confusion of bodies. He thinks he sees Angel Hopper pushing someone, he thinks he sees Alan Powers. How carefully does a plague select a territory it will attack? Macken thinks that maybe it doesn’t strike blindly at everything in its way, as people believe, he thinks its victims probably select themselves. The magnetic force it can’t resist is fear.

  The magnetic force he can’t resist is that fallen girl. People move back so that he can be pulled towards her. A youth in wire-rimmed glasses is down on his knees in the grass with his eyes squeezed shut and his hands clasped together beneath his chin. A young woman is down in the grass beside him, holding the child’s head in her arms. An arm, crushed by one of his wheels, is bleeding. Her mouth is open and her scream is so high and loud that Macken’s ears are unable to bear it. He thinks, instead, that he’s hearing the sirens that announce the end of the world.

  A few of their names are appearing in the papers even now, along with their exotic addresses. Mexico City, Marseilles. Most of the pickers, however, have gone. Like other crops, the magic mushroom has its time and disappears. The marathon youth buys an Oh Henry! bar in the general store and sets off running down the road with his even pace. And where will he go to now? Does he scout for other causes? Will he lead his herd into department stores and onto beaches, will he usher them into picket lines and protest marches and demonstrations? Few have the time to wonder. They pick up liquor bottles and plastic bags and peanut butter jars in the fields. They examine livestock for signs of abuse. They bury smouldering campfires with shovelled sand. Some start giant bonfires of their own to burn up everything those hands have touched. Everyone is fixing fence. Lenora and Albert Desmond scour their house and scrape dried vomit out of corners with a paring knife. Grandma Barclay announces she wants to move into an old folks’ home in town. Eddie and Frieda Macken lock up and head for the ferry, in order to spend some time with Frieda’s sister Bella in North Vancouver. No one wants to believe what has happened. This collection of thirty hobby farms has never wanted to be anything special at all, except what it’s always been. Nearly everyone has lived here for fifty years or longer. Rumour has it that Angel Hopper has decided what he’ll do next year when the pickers return, if he hasn’t sold out first. He’ll sit by the gate and hold out his hand. For a hundred dollars a day — adult or child — he’ll let a person pick on his private land and promise not to cause trouble. So what if he’s lost a war? Dirty money or not, it’s better than breaking bones, it’s better than crushing children under your tractor wheels like somebody else he knows.

  Dennis Macken still believes in law, but not the law of the courts. He believes in Macken’s law, which will have something to do with magnetic force when he finally figures it out. Watching that youth pump past his fence-line heading south, he knows that some day someone will drag him out of his house and try to convince him with speeches and legal documents and perhaps with a gun that these forty acres don’t belong to him any more, or to anyone else that he knows. They’ll tell him that everything belongs to this entire race of children from another planet who follow that bearded runner in a swarm from place to place throughout the universe harvesting their crop of drugs. Maybe this youth is dangerous and maybe he isn’t, nobody knows for sure. What Dennis Macken knows is that there’s much he’s never thought of in this world, and plenty more to be found. What Dennis Macken knows is that before that plague of mushroom pickers returns he has eleven months to find some way of stopping clocks or step outside of time.

  Ladies and Gentlemen,

  the Fabulous Barclay Sisters!

  DON’T THINK MY father didn’t warn me. I knew what was likely to happen if I didn’t stay clear of my mother’s sisters. He said marrying into the Barclay family was like getting a lifetime’s pass to the movies for him. You just never knew what that pack of women would be up to next; there wasn’t a one of them could tell if she was living a real life or acting it out on the screen. It was entertaining to say the least, he admitted, but hardly good for an impressionable growing boy.

  Of course he didn’t hold much hope for me. “Clay’s already tarred a little with the same damn brush,” I heard him tell my mother. “Keep him away from that bunch whenever you can.” He believed her sisters’ exaggerated sense of melodrama was catching.

  My mother didn’t believe for a minute in his “catching it” theory. To her, things were born right in you or they weren’t. In her they weren’t, or so she claimed. Of seven sisters she was the only one who didn’t thrive on histrionics. She liked to think of herself as the sober one, like her father. When her sisters reminded her of the three engagements she’d broken with other men before she settled on one, she said that wasn’t a sign of an eccentric nature at all, it was just that she’d always had trouble making up her mind.

  Yes, my father said, and she’d also had trouble making up her mind whether it was T. B. or pneumonia she was dying of every time she caught cold. She’d had even more trouble making up her mind whether to name my little sister Marie Antoinette or Joan of Arc or Scarlett O’Hara Desmond. Don’t tell him she hadn’t caught the family weakness, he was there when she managed to fall off her horse and feign a twisted ankle on their wedding day. He’d known as well as she had that all her limping and wincing and show of bravery were bound to get their picture onto the front page of the weekly paper instead of buried on the Women’s Page amongst the other brides.

  Of course, when she said she was level-headed, she meant only in comparison with the others. Lenora Barclay Desmond had little use for the way her older sister Frieda, a married woman like herself, liked to tell deliberate lies at the general store and post office just to see people react. That her husband Eddie had demanded a divorce, for instance, on the grounds that she’d stirred horse buns into his porridge in a fit of rage when he refused to buy her a motorbike of her own. Or that she’d just heard on the radio that the provincial government had plans to expropriate one of the farms in this very community to give to some Germans for some kind of factory. “A sauerkraut factory,” added her younger sister Christina, who loved to see people upset. “You can imagine the smell.” When the entire settlement of loggers and farmers and housewives had got themselves all in an uproar — planning letters to the nearest paper, designing petitions to send to Victoria, calling meetings to organize a protest — Frieda brought in some updated news that set things right again. But Christina, who hated to see people calm, said yes she’d heard it wasn’t the Germans it was the Japs, who wanted to locate a factory for canning seaweed. Sauerkraut would have smelled like roses, she said, compared to rotting kelp. Then Frieda and Christina would snicker and snort about how gullible everyone was in this hickish dump of a place. My mother, on the other hand, failed to see what humour there was in making fools of people.

  Making fools of people was precisely what my mother’s sisters liked to do best. It was Mabel’s habit to mimic people behind their backs. While making people laugh was all very well, my mother said, how did you think old Mrs. Morris would feel if she ever turned around and found Mabel behind her, imitating her limp and rolling her eyes and running her finger under her nose while she made grunting sounds like a pig? But cheeky Mabel with her freckled face and frizzy red hair had already won herself a reputation as the life of any party, called upon whenever things got dull to do her imitations of local eccentrics. She admitted that there was little fun in it for herself unless the person being mimicked was right there in the room, however. The challenge was in doing it when people didn’t expect it, and not for long, so that every person there except the mimicked one knew who yo
u meant.

  There must be better ways to put all that energy to use, was my father’s word on all this nonsense, . He said if he ever caught me up to Mabel’s kind of tricks, he’d send me off to a private school in Victoria, where vicious teachers with English accents would beat it out of me with a wooden cane. He said he didn’t know how my grandfather could live with that crazy bunch without going crazy himself. That quiet man must be some kind of saint. No wonder, when the family had moved out here to the coast from Alberta back when they all were young, he’d chosen to ride in a railroad car with the pigs rather than sit with his family! My father said that if he himself had had to live in an eight-woman household for long he couldn’t promise he wouldn’t resort to murder.

  When tragedy or even sickness struck one of the homes in the community — an accident in the logging camp, say, or chicken-pox — the aunts were happy to spread the word themselves, since telephones hadn’t yet been installed in private homes in the 1940s. They were happy to embroider the details with morbid speculations while they were at it. But my mother grabbed a couple of loaves of bread from a drawer and managed to arrive at the stricken house before anyone else, ready to dig in and work. You could tell by the way she grimly set her lips that she got a certain amount of pleasure out of being the charitable workhorse, but she never complained or tried to make herself out a martyr. “A waste of energy,” Frieda warned her. “Don’t think for a minute it’s appreciated. If anything ever happened to you they’d stay away in droves.”

  “Either that,” my grandmother said, “or you’d have fifty loaves of bread delivered to your door and swarms of people trying to do your work for you, and doing it wrong. Personally, I’d rather they stayed away.”