The Barclay Family Theatre

by Jack Hodgins

  She looked stunned for a moment, as if she couldn’t make out what I was saying. “The damn . . . gun . . . backfired,” she said. “I’ve never heard of anything so . . . stupid. But it’s only a scratch. Just wait a minute and see.”

  I couldn’t help it, I felt as if I had been cheated. Here we had this real-life tragedy unfolding in the house, something that could rival the theatricals of the Barclay household any day, and no one was around to witness it but me. If Mabel had been there, think what she might have done with this. Or Eleanor. If the whole lot of them had been in the house at the time this happened, the incident would already have taken on the importance and excitement of a royal assassination. The world would be talking about it for years. As it was, I was the only witness; whatever was to be made of this thing would have to be made by me. Dull and sensible me.

  I was not so dull that I didn’t recognize the gift I had just been given — once it was clear that no one was in any danger. Not only had my mother just shot herself before my eyes (how many ten-year-olds could boast of that?) but she’d done it in the course of breaking the law. My sober reliable mother was an outlaw! A gun-toting suicidal heroine, if you stretched the point just a little. A person could even say that her life still hung in the balance at the moment, and that everything depended on me. They made movies of situations like that.

  “Maybe you better hop on your bike,” she said, examining the forehead scratch in the mirror. “Phone the doctor. I should have this looked at at least. I don’t think I should try to drive myself in.”

  “You’ll be okay?”

  She was okay, I could tell by the way she levelled that threatening eye again. “Just don’t go telling the doctor I was breaking the law. As far as he needs to know, it could just as easily have been a grouse.” Grouse, unlike pheasant, were already safely in season.

  The only telephone in the district at the time hung on the wall inside the door of the general store and post office a mile and a half down the highway. No time to put on shoes, I told an invisible audience, when my mother could be dying. I stood up on the pedals of my balloon-tire bike and pumped as hard as I could out the gravel drive and down the blacktop highway to the store, where my aunt Frieda was already shouting something into the phone. Behind her, Big Glad Littlestone in a purple hat thumbed through the pile of Star Weeklys on the counter and licked at an ice-cream cone. They were about to discover that something truly exciting had happened in the world.

  “Get off that thing and call a doctor,” I yelled. “My mother’s shot herself.”

  I’d never before seen words I’d spoken cause such dramatic results. Big Glad dropped her cone on the floor, and Frieda stopped in the middle of a word to gape. I saw fillings at the back of her bottom jaw. “Which doctor?” she said, and swung her eyes at Big Glad Littlestone. “Are you sure it isn’t too late?” Her hand pressed the cradle down and then let it click up again. “Glad, you get on up there and see what you can do. And you, you get home fast.”

  The fastest way to get home (mostly uphill) was to keep on going downhill to my grandparents’ farm, where there’d be a car, and plenty of people to drive it. Now that I’d taken the plunge into this world of excitement I wasn’t about to pass up the best audience of all. “Don’t you go telling the police,” I panted at the door to my grandparents’ house. “They’ll only throw her in jail — if she lives.”

  Mabel leapt up from the kitchen table, where she’d been sewing something. “Is that blood on your face? What are you talking about?”

  “My mother,” I said, and collapsed into the nearest chair. “Don’t you tell the police. She’s been shooting up the countryside with my father’s gun.”

  Mabel groaned and put a hand on the table to steady herself. This was easier than I’d hoped. “She’s snapped at last,” she said. “I knew it would happen some day.” To Christina, who appeared at the door from the pantry, “Lenora’s finally snapped, I knew she would, she’s gone crazy as a loon and is threatening to kill people.”

  Christina looked blank for a moment, then let out a scream that brought sisters running from every part of the house. “He says that Lenora’s gone mad and tried to kill him,” she said.

  Another day of drama in the Barclay household. Only this time I was the centre and the cause of it. While Bella went whimpering out the back door to get my grandmother in from the dairy — my grandfather was off at a cattle auction — Mabel streaked out the front door to tell the neighbours across the road, so they wouldn’t miss out on this. I was left with Christina and Eleanor staring at me. “There’s blood all over the house,” I said. “She’s gone and shot herself.”

  Christina leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes. Eleanor said she’d been suspecting for quite a while that my mother had been seeing another man and now she was sure of it. A case of love gone bad. Maybe she thought my father was getting suspicious. Christina opened her eyes and told her to shut her face, that was no way to talk in front of a boy. Suppose it were true? She said that Eleanor must have left her brains somewhere, to talk like that, and gave her a swat on the arm. Eleanor, swearing, narrowed her eyes and bunched up her fist and threatened to hit Christina in the throat.

  I began to wonder if I hadn’t made a mistake in judgement. This fighting, this talk of other men, made my stomach uneasy. If it was excitement I’d wanted to cause, I was seeing plenty but somehow I had the feeling that things had got out of control. When my grandmother appeared at the door I was sure of it. She was frantic. Things had already gone too far.

  Riding home in the Barclay Dodge I began to see just how far they had gone. Dennis Macken waved us over to the side of the road just outside our gate and suggested we park where we were. The driveway was already clogged, he said, and people were finding the field a little too soggy to trust. Gordon Selby had already sunk his Hudson to the axles.

  My grandmother stuck her head out the window. “What is it that’s going on?” Beside me, Mabel snivelled, and Christina chewed on her bottom lip. Sharp cramps stabbed my innards.

  “Oh pardon, Mrs. Barclay, I didn’t realize it was you. Just go on through, right on down to the house. Naturally you want to get there fast. Right on through, right on through.” He was waving us on with one hand and already pulling someone else over with the other. “Just park ’er right over here sir, you’ll only get stuck or jammed into the crowd if you go any farther.”

  “This is outrageous,” my grandmother said. “Haven’t these people anything better to do?”

  You’d think it was an auction sale, or a wedding. Down either side of the driveway cars were parked in the grass. I saw Mrs. Korhonen hurrying across the pasture from her house with a Pyrex pot of coffee in her hand, and a loaf of her braided bread. I saw three of the Grenoble brothers riding their bikes around and around our house, stretching their necks to see in the windows. I saw an ambulance parked by the door, and people talking in clusters out in the yard. Mabel shoved her handkerchief into her mouth to stifle her threatening sobs.

  “Vultures,” my grandmother said. “Pretending to be good neighbours but they’re really a bunch of vultures.”

  Obviously the telephone company didn’t need to bother installing phones in all the houses of this community. People were proving they could manage just fine without. Couples, families hurried down to the house, cutting across the garden where the pheasant had almost met his end.

  Oh how I wished he had, to avoid all this. What was the sacrifice of one feathery life compared to the trouble I’d caused? If running hadn’t been an obvious admission of fault — as well as a cowardly public escape — I’d have lit out for the bush immediately, I’d have run until I found a boat that would take me off this island to another world. “Maybe I’ll stay in the car,” I said, when we’d come to a stop. “I don’t really want to go in.”

  “Why not?” My grandmother clutched at my arm. Did she suspect that things were worse than I’d said, perhaps a body too mutilated to look at a second time?
Or was she suspicious? Living with those daughters of hers she could hardly have been naive. Her fingers dug into my flesh. “Why not?” she said again, and dragged me by the arm towards the house.

  “You!”

  The voice belonged to Frieda, who stood on the top step with one hand against the wall as if she would block our entrance.

  “What is it?” my grandmother said. “What’s going on in this house?”

  But Frieda’s eyes were on me. “You! Do you see, you little creep, do you see what a fool you’ve made of . . . of everyone?” With one helpless hand she gestured weakly, towards the cars, the people, the whole world. “Do you see?” Then she sat down on the wood-box and pushed the hair back from her face. “I could beat you, I could kill you.” Yet she made it clear that she had energy for neither, that she was a wreck. “Your poor mother,” she said.

  “Would someone explain what is going on in this household?” my grandmother shouted through the door.

  She found out for herself soon enough. Once she’d elbowed a path for us through the people who blocked our way, she could see for herself that the woman standing with a Band-Aid on her forehead was in no immediate danger of dying. She could hear for herself as well that my mother was trying to convince people to settle down, to go home, to believe her when she said nothing serious had happened. The cakes, the pies, the flowers, the offers of help were all unnecessary, she said, though much appreciated. It was wonderful to discover how generous everyone was but someone, she said, seemed to have got the story just a little bit wrong. She caught my eye at that moment and I felt the blood rush up to my face.

  My grandmother raised a threatening hand. “If this was my kid I’d paddle his backside until he couldn’t sit down.” She wouldn’t, though; only my father was allowed to hit and he wouldn’t be home for another half-hour. Whatever happened to me would be up to him. I expected the Victoria private school. My grandmother sat on a chair and held the hem of her dress up to her eyes. Her shoulders trembled. “Your grandfather,” she said to me, “would be ashamed.”

  “That wasn’t bad,” Eleanor told me. “Maybe you’ve got more imagination than I gave you credit for.”

  “Imagination!” Mabel, who pulled her freckled face into what must have been an imitation of my own confused and shocked expression, said that I ought to be dropped down a well. “He’s got enough imagination to dream up a way to give us heart attacks but not enough to see that he was bound to be caught in his lie.”

  Christina agreed. “He’s a bloody little liar is what he is.” The heads of neighbours, friends, relatives all around me, nodded agreement. A bloody little liar was what I was, no question about it, and look at the trouble I’d caused.

  My mother didn’t speak to me until all the others had gone — my grandmother, her own sisters, the neighbours. Some left their gifts behind, some took them. All of them gave me a parting look that was meant to sizzle me there on the spot. None gave me a look, however, that came anywhere near the look my mother gave me when we had the kitchen to ourselves. The fury I could have handled, I think, but there was pity in it as well, and something else. “Don’t you ever pull a trick like that again,” she said. “Do you realize, now, that no one will ever again believe a thing you say? I hope you’re ashamed of all the ruckus you stirred up with your nonsense.”

  As a matter of fact, behind the fear I was not entirely unproud of all the ruckus I’d caused. For a dull and sensible boy I hadn’t done badly at all; when people calmed down they would say I was cut from the Barclay cloth. It was clear, however, that if I continued to live at home I’d have to keep this new-found talent under wraps, or find a safer outlet.

  “Talent?” Eleanor said the next day, and laughed. She’d been thinking it over, she said, and decided I hadn’t all that much to be proud of after all. “You’ve got to know how to control it.” The way she shook her head I could see she didn’t believe it was something I’d ever learn.

  The private school hadn’t materialized after all, except as a repeated threat. But I was sorry to hear, I told her, that no one, ever again, would believe a thing I said. It didn’t seem fair.

  She shrugged. Who cared about fair? “If no one is going to believe you anyway, you may as well tell them lies from morning to night.” It was a notion that appealed to her, I could see. “You can tell them any old thing that goes through your head. Or write it down in a book, where people will assume it’s the truth.”

  To give me a start, she suggested I write a play. “About this beautiful gun-slinging outlaw woman. At the end of the play she learns that her true love has been unfaithful to her and turns her gun on herself.” It was to be a jazzed-up version of my mother’s escapade. Another invasion of privacy? Of course, Eleanor said. All fiction was an invasion of one kind or another, or it had no point. We would stage it in the garage, another Barclay Family Theatre enterprise, and splash plenty of ketchup all over the place at the climax. The audience would be in tears. She, of course, would play the heroine herself. And she could see no trouble convincing the other aunts to co-operate, once they got wind of the juicy roles. Even if they thought quite rightly that I was a little creep, they’d break their necks to play the parts of the faithless cowboy lover and the treacherous barmaid and the sheriff. Naturally there’d be no role in it for me; I’d be billed as just the author. Which was, Eleanor said, the perfect job for a person who was — let’s face it — basically dull and uninteresting and totally lacking in flair.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jack Hodgins’ fiction has won the Governor General’s Award, the Canada-Australia Prize, the Commonwealth Prize (Canada and the Caribbean) and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, amongst others. He has given readings, talks, and workshops in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and several European countries, and has taught an annual fiction workshop in Mallorca, Spain. A Passion for Narrative (a guide to writing fiction) is used in classrooms and writing groups across Canada and Australia. In 2006 he received both the Terasen Lifetime Achievement Award and the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence in British Columbia. In 2009 the Governor General appointed him a Member of the Order of Canada. His most recent novel, The Master of Happy Endings, was published in 2010. He and his wife Dianne live in Victoria. More information is available on his website: www.jackhodgins.ca.