Our Daily Bread

by Lauren B. Davis

  Brenda watched him come near, wiped her nose with her palm and then turned back to the window. Albert put his hand on her shoulder, and his head next to hers. The window was smoky with grime. Inside, a bare bulb hung from the ceiling. Dan sat on the side of the bed, wearing only a stained undershirt. His head was tilted back, his eyes closed and his mouth open and slack. Between his legs knelt Brenda’s little brother, Frank. Dan cupped the boy’s head and moved it back and forth. The child’s hands flailed weakly.

  Time peeled away, fled backwards and Albert was six years old again, his mouth full, gagging, the stench and the sound of moans, his own flesh tearing . . . bile rushed acidly into his mouth. His hands shook. His knees shook. He turned away. Spit. Spit again. One of these days, he was going to do it. He’d get his rifle and put an end to the Erskines, all of them.

  “Down,” Brenda said.

  Albert lifted her off the bucket and watched her hobble off into the woods. He stomped across the yard, passing the plywood-covered well, and as he did he looked back at the front of the house. Old Harold stood on the tilting porch. He wore the same stained and smudged grey overalls he always wore, and the same John Deere cap. He was a big man, with a barrel chest, and if his arms were oddly short, they were thick with muscle, even though Old Harold had to be in his seventies. White stubble showed on his sagging features and his bulbous red nose was an explosion of broken blood vessels. His small, deep-set eyes—wolfish and keen—tracked Albert across the dirt.

  “You come visiting, Bert?”

  “Just heading back to mine,” said Albert.

  “That’s not very sociable. Not right for relations to keep so distant. Come on in.”

  “Not today,” said Albert.

  “Be seeing you then. I’m watching you, boy.”

  Albert felt Old Harold’s eyes on him until he ducked into the treeline and walked the short, but crucial, distance to his own place.

  Three years ago, Albert had built a sparsely insulated, one-door, two-window cabin from materials liberated from building sites and scrounged from junk yards. The roof was lower by a good foot and a half on one side, no running water and no electricity, but it kept the rain off and mostly it kept out the cold. He pulled the string with the key on it from around his neck and unlocked the padlock. Inside, he tossed a log into the black potbelly and jostled the log to make sure it caught on the embers. When he was sure it blazed, he flopped down on the mouse-chewed brown corduroy couch that folded out into a bed. Photos of naked women, some astride motorcycles, papered the walls. On the floor were boxes of books and a stack of tattered paperbacks—The Hobbit, The Catcher in the Rye, Tom Sawyer, Lord of the Flies. A sink drained through a pipe directly into a pile of gravel a few feet from the cabin, and over the sink was a shelf with a few canned goods, crackers and a box of corn flakes.

  Albert reached under the couch for a half-full bottle of Jack Daniels, and drank. Good liquor from Wilton’s Groceries and enough in the locked trunk under the window to last a man for weeks if he wanted it to last that long. No, it might not be much of a place, but it was his—a place where he was his own man. Albert drank again, wincing as the fiery liquor seared into a canker on the side of his tongue. He ran his hand down his stomach. Hard as a washboard. His arms were cut, baby, cut. He wasn’t going to be another of the fat fucks up here. Two hundred push-ups every morning. One hundred chin-ups on a tree branch out back, rain or shine, winter or summer. Bring it on. Just bring it on.

  He smelled the piss on his pants. “Shit,” he said. He crossed the room and lifted the lid on a steel bucket in the sink. It was three-quarters full of water. It would do. He used his knife to shave slivers off the bar of soap on the counter, stripped off his pants and dumped them in the bucket.

  Half an hour later there was a knock on the door. Not loud. A small, safe knock.

  “Come on,” he said.

  Ten-year-old Toots shuffled in wearing a too-big duffle coat, her sullen, sharp-featured little face hidden behind a curtain of greasy hair, her skinny legs bare and scratched above the rubber boots.

  “Put some pants on, will ya,” she said, not moving too far from the door.

  “Just washing mine out, don’t worry.” From where he sat on the couch Albert leaned over and pulled a pair of sweat pants from a small pile of clothes on the floor. As he was putting them on he said, “Dan’s got hold of Frank.”

  “Yeah, I know. I won the mailbox race today. Felicity said I could run for Brenda, too.”

  The mailbox race—first kid to the mailbox and back won a day without having to be “nice.” Kids learned to run awful fast. Albert could have won a fucking gold medal for sprinting.

  “You run fast,” said Albert. He sat back down on the fold-out bed and took a long draw from the bottle.

  “Harold says you got any booze?”

  “That what you’re here for?”

  “Harold said I had to come ask you.”

  “They drinking down there?”

  “You’re drinking, too.”

  “So?”

  “I’m just saying.” Toots folded her arms with her hands up the sleeves of her coat, scratching her elbows. “What you got to eat?” she said.

  He took another swig from the Jack and guilt wriggled into his bloodstream with the booze. He was the oldest of his generation. He should have stolen cans of beans or something—soup or crackers. The younger kids looked to him: Little Joe, Toots, Frank, Griff, Brenda, Cathy and Kenny. What was less clear was the nature of that responsibility, up here where the view was like heaven and the living was like hell.

  He looked at the calendar on the wall, the one with the picture of the earth taken from space. Six days to go until the first of the month and the welfare cheques. They’d be down to ketchup soup at the house.

  “I got a couple jars of peanut butter.”

  “Where?” Toots said, scanning his shelves. “You got any bread?”

  Albert got up and went to a wooden box by the back window. He pulled out two jars of extra crunchy peanut butter and turned to the little girl. “No bread, sorry.”

  She grabbed the jars and stuffed them under her coat.

  “You got no manners? You don’t say ‘thank you’?”

  “Yeah, right. Thanks.” She glared at him from beneath her dirty hair. “What about the bottle for The Others?” She used the kids’ name for the adults.

  He regarded her, skinny and defiant, practically feral, and so smart. What would she be like, if she’d been raised in some other place? It was a question he asked too often, this great what if? And it was always prodded along by the desire to get the hell out—the great lurching, gut-squalling impulse to grab a couple of kids and run for the city. But a couple? Toots and . . . who? How the fuck could you take a couple and leave the rest? How did you choose? He had no money, no schooling and no skills. How would they live in the world beyond? Besides, Erskines don’t leave. They were probably all fucking damned anyway. Erskines, for better or worse, stuck together. They’d drilled the code into his head since before he could remember. Nobody talks. Nobody leaves. Seems it didn’t matter how big Albert got, how grown he was, Harold would always be bigger, and meaner.

  “Where are the kids?”

  “Gone to the woods. Kenny and Frank are inside.”

  “Kenny, too, huh? You going to the woods?”

  “Can I stay here?

  “I’m drinking, too, aren’t I?”

  “You’re not much good then, are ya?” She looked at him for the first time and her eyes were razors. “Not when you’re drinking.”

  “Smart kid.” He raised the bottle, turned away from her eyes. “Tell Harold to go fuck himself.”

  “You tell him,” she said. “I’m going into the woods.”

  And she was gone then, like some scrawny forest sprite. She was
fast, that one.

  “Shit,” he said to the pictures on the walls. Albert considered ignoring the demand, but they might come up and take what they wanted. They’d clean him out if they found his stash, and God only knows what Ray and Lloyd were saying. He took a couple of bottles out of the trunk.

  Albert stood in the middle of his cabin. He sure as shit didn’t want to go up to the house, but what choice did he have? He ground his teeth and his knuckles whitened around the bottle necks. Wasn’t there anybody on his side? Surrounded as he was by kin—practically drowning in them—there wasn’t a single person Albert could call “friend.”

  Chapter Two

  When tom evans finally pulled into his driveway, the clouds had cleared and high noon did the yard no favours. There hadn’t been much snow this year, and what came went again in odd thaws. The patchy grass looked as though it had mange and the big maple had lost two limbs in thunderstorms the previous summer, leaving jagged, angry-looking amputations. He’d probably have to cut it down next year. Shame. It had been there since he was seven. He remembered planting the sapling with his father, the way the earth had smelled that day, rich and loamy and entirely unlike the slightly rotting mixture of leaves and dog shit the yard gave off this morning. He remembered the way his father’s biceps had bulged as he wrestled the root ball into the ground. If the old maple finally gave up the ghost, maybe Tom could plant something with Bobby, make it a new memory. The house looked a bit the worse for wear as well; could use a new coat of paint. His father would have been horrified. Robert Evans had built this house for his bride, with no help from anyone, neither plumber nor electrician nor roofer, which was the way he was. It was a sturdy, no-nonsense house, with a small attic and a wide porch, which was also the way Robert Evans was. No storm could damage a house like that, or so it had seemed to Tom growing up. The screen on the living room window was torn. Well, he thought as he jogged up the steps, this weekend for sure.

  He entered the house and stepped over a mound of shoes and boots inside the front door. In the living room, unfolded laundry overflowed a tattered wicker basket on the couch. Rascal, the black and white mongrel, rose up from his bed atop a scatter of loose CDs and their plastic cases. The dog stretched, extending his claws into the discs. The resultant scrape set Tom’s teeth on edge. A cartoon of the roadrunner and the coyote flickered on the television, but the sound was turned down. He walked toward the sound of running water and clattering plates coming from the kitchen.

  Patty stood at the sink rinsing off dishes. She had her jacket on, the blue and white striped smock Wilton’s Groceries made all their cashiers wear hanging below it. Tom picked up a piece of toast that had fallen to the floor in the morning’s mayhem. He bent down to kiss the back of his wife’s neck. She smelled of patchouli and lemony soap. A reddish-gold curl escaped from where she had gathered it, messily, enticingly, atop her head. He aimed for a tiny brown mole.

  She shrieked and jumped back, a wooden spoon in her hand, ready to clout him. “Shit, Tom. You scared me!”

  His lips were frozen in mid-pucker. Her face was a mix of rage and shock that seemed excessive. “Sorry. I thought you heard me,” he said. Tom Evans had a voice so deep Patty said it was a well in need of an echo. It fit his size, for he was all shoulders and arms, kept strong from the flats of bread he slung around as if they were no heavier than paper and meringue. Patty was forever telling him to be careful of things he might break without realizing it. When Ivy and Bobby were small and he’d held their wrists and swung them round in circles, she said, “You’ll dislocate their shoulders. You’ll bash their brains out against a wall.” But the children just laughed and laughed and asked for more. When Ivy was nothing more than a diaper with a big pair of brown eyes he’d bounced her on his palm, like a quarter he was flipping, and even though Patty had said nothing, he caught her looking at him now and then, her pale brows drawn in disapprovingly. Whether from a fear he’d drop the baby or from a dislike of roughhousing in general, he never could decide. Of course, at ten and fifteen respectively, Ivy and Bobby were too big for that now. But even when they were babies, Tom had never understood why Patty didn’t know how careful he was with them. He would never do anything to put his children in harm’s way. They were everything to him. They were the miracles of his life, as was Patty. The miracles that changed everything, forever.

  Now, she stared at him with that look of irritation he was, sadly, becoming accustomed to. She wiped her bangs off her forehead with the hand still holding the wooden spoon. A dribble of water fell from the cuff of the pink rubber gloves she wore, staining the front of her suede jacket. She looked down at it and then up at him. “You’re late.”

  “Yeah, The Indian Head said I got the order wrong and Dave wanted to have an argument.”

  “I thought the motel cancelled delivery.”

  “They started up again.” He leaned in to kiss her, but it was a clumsy move and he mostly kissed her nose. “Maybe things are going better over there.”

  “Who eats at a motel?”

  “I don’t know. People who stay there.”

  She turned back to the sink. “Who stays at a cheap motel in a pissy little town like this in March?”

  “I don’t know. It’s on the highway. Truckers. Salesmen, I guess.” Tom was unsure why they were having this conversation. He put his arms around her, kissed that place on her neck. “Kids all right this morning?”

  “As all right as they ever are. Sniping at each other. Bickering. Bobby hardly speaks. I don’t know any of his friends. There’s something wrong with that boy.”

  “He’s fifteen, that’s what’s wrong with him.” Tom chuckled. Bobby was a little surly, but what teenage boy wasn’t?

  “I don’t see what’s funny about it. And Ivy’s so prissy.” Patty frowned. “They’re so different.”

  “Why don’t you leave that? I’ll do it.”

  Patty peeled off the gloves and draped them over the faucet. She turned in his arms and kissed him. She tasted pleasantly of coffee and toast. “I hate you working these hours. We’re all out of kilter. We never do anything together.”

  “What can I do? Work’s work.”

  “You leave in the middle of the night. It always feels like you’re sneaking out. And I hate waking up to an empty bed. You know that. I get lonely.”

  “It’s work, Patty.”

  “So you said. Isn’t there anything else?”

  “We’ve been through this. When the warm weather comes I can try and get logging work, or maybe landscaping, but if I do we lose the benefits I get with Pollack’s.”

  “Logging’s no good. You’d be off in a camp. Why do you say logging?”

  “I’m just laying out the options. There’s Kroeler’s, they might be hiring, I heard.”

  “A paint factory? All those chemicals? Oh, that’s a fine idea. I don’t want you logging, Tom. It’s too dangerous. Look at Greg Keane.” Greg Keane’s right arm was crushed and had to be amputated after a steel bind-wire snapped on one of the trucks and he got caught when the load shifted.

  “Accidents happen everywhere, Patty. You grew up on a farm. You know that.” Forklifts, highway accidents, machinery—an endless possibility of industrial accidents. He often wondered how the world looked to white-collar workers, who had board room barracudas to fear, rather than tractors and folding cultivators and chainsaws.

  Patty pulled away and shuffled through a pile of unopened bills on the counter. “That fucking commune could hardly be called a farm. Where are my keys?”

  “On the hook by the door.”

  “I’m going to be late.”

  He walked her to the door and grabbed her elbow as she stepped out, pulling her back to him. “Don’t worry so much, babe. We’re doing fine.”

  “Are we?” Her face searched his. “At least you like your job. I hate mine.”

 
“Since when? I thought you wanted to work.”

  “I wanted to get out of this house. But Wilton’s? Jesus, what a bore.”

  “Well, I don’t know . . . quit then.” He ran his hands through his hair. “We got by before you worked. We’ll get by again.”

  “Getting by. What a life.”

  “I’m doing the best I can.”

  She put her small hand up to the side of his face. “You need a shave,” she said, and kissed him good-bye.

  He stood on the porch, with his hands deep in his pants pockets, watching her drive off. The old Chevy, bought second-hand six years ago, rattled and shook, then settled. Patty waved and he waved back. He kept his eyes on the car as it moved down the street. In all the years since he’d first seen her, there was this one constant thing: he loved her so much it scared him, for the world was harsh and jagged. Rascal came out onto the porch and stood there wagging his long tail. The dog whined and cocked his head. Barked sharply, inquiringly. Tom bent down and scratched his ear. The dog leaned into his leg and whined again.

  “They forgot to feed you, huh? Well, I can fix that, I guess.” He went back into the house and closed the door behind him. On the silent television, the roadrunner had just tricked the coyote into stepping off a high mesa and his legs spun frantically for a few seconds before he looked balefully at the viewer and then plunged to his death, which was never quite a death after all.