Blood Secrets

by Nadine McInnis

  From the kitchen window he watches the main road behind their house. When he sees a car’s lights, he moves to the dining room to see if it is the taxi carrying her home. But for almost two hours, it is not. He keeps hearing her voice saying Maybe I do, like some cynical wedding vow, half-given, half-meant. Even though he thought they were getting somewhere at lunch, that maybe she wouldn’t need to do what she so obviously had already planned to do. Tonight. Tonight, as he was pacing the house, trapped.

  When she finally pulls into the driveway, she takes a long time to get out of the taxi. The driver is turned around and she’s talking to him. The conversation goes on long enough that he expects to witness a good-night kiss. Maybe this was the guy. Maybe she’s been riding taxis all night looking for some guy who would say yes, his legs hanging out the open back door, pulled over next to the river or parked with the motor running in the cemetery.

  She comes through the front door with her hair disheveled, mouth pale and bare of colour. Her eyes are puffy.

  “Where were you?”

  She stops, looks at him.

  “Are you happy now? Is that what you needed?” he says, not wanting an answer.

  “I need a bath,” is all she says.

  “I bet you do.” He’s standing over her, not caring if his height is intimidating. All the courtesy is gone between them, as far as he’s concerned. “I never rubbed your nose in it, not once.”

  She puts her hand in the centre of his chest, and he’s shocked because it’s a gesture he remembers from that distant long-ago time of their mutual seduction. The way she used to slip her left hand between the buttons of his shirt, pressing against his breast-bone, saying, “Do you have a heart in here?” But she pushes, steadily, until he has to step back.

  “I’m tired,” she says. “Leave me alone.”

  He lets her go, leaves her to the sound of the bath running behind closed doors. But anger lights its fuse in his chest, and he confronts her again. She’s locked the door from the hallway, but not from their bedroom. Then he’s standing over her, blocking the light. He’s never felt so huge, with her lying below him, her hair rippling softly beneath the surface. There’s a slickness to the bath water. Maybe a rank smell. He looks at her hips, scans her thighs for redness. She rises suddenly and grabs a towel from the rack beside the tub and pulls it down and over her, but not before he catches sight of her pink aureoles, punished a little darker by some other man. The towel darkens in the water.

  “Give me a moment’s peace,” she says. “For God’s sake, just leave me in peace.” There’s no fight in her voice. Water continues to run down her face. She sniffs, stuffily, then breaks into a sob. Her voice rises and echoes off the mirror, the ceiling. She’s crouched over the soaked towel as it weaves underwater, reacting to her every sharp breath, sending shock waves through the bathwater. He can see all the bones in her back, the shoulder blades, the backs of her ribs buttoned to her vertebrae, the thin flesh over the scaffolding twitching, almost convulsing, with emotion. She rocks forward and backward, holding the towel against her breasts.

  She’s keening in her own private world and then it feels obscene to be standing over her so he sits down on the toilet seat. He closes his eyes for a moment. The anger is gone, replaced by a hollow sadness, just a fraction of what he sees brimming over in her. She’s balancing herself with a hand on the edge of the tub, the towel having finally fallen away. He’s filled with tenderness for the delicate knob he can see at the base of her neck, the hair straggling out of its pins and flattened against her skin, and then by all of her. He does the only thing he can. He moves to her, puts one hand on the back of her neck, the other on her hand. Miraculously, her hand turns and grasps his. She’s gasping now.

  “I never knew,” he tells her. “I wouldn’t have done it if I knew … ” but he can’t say it.

  Her voice cries out again and then through force of will she slows her breathing.

  “No. No, you don’t get it,” she says in a small voice. He doesn’t want her to continue but now he knows that he hasn’t any right to demand anything from her.

  “As I was leaving, I saw her on a gurney in the hallway. She was alone. I knew her by the colour of her hair.” She stops, turns her face towards him and he’s shocked by how distorted she looks. There’s a vein pulsing in her forehead, her eyes are almost swollen closed.

  “What are you saying, Helen?” He’s feeling disoriented.

  She puts her face against his chest, almost pulls him into the water with her. First the water is warm, then quickly cool. He shivers, but she doesn’t notice because now she’s shaking too. Like that old superstition, someone has walked over their graves.

  “She was so terrified. She begged me to stay with her.”

  “Who are you talking about?” he asks, panicking a little. “Did something happen at work?”

  “It’s not work,” she says. “It’s life or death. Oh, God. Oh, God.”

  “It’s all right. It’s all right,” he whispers as he rocks her, holding her wet body. She feels as though she will slip out of his grasp at any time.

  “No. It’s not all right. She needed me. She wouldn’t let go of my hand. I had to pull her fingers back, one by one.”

  “Who?”

  “Anastasia. She was so frightened. I just went to check when a room would be ready.”

  “She was at the hospital?”

  “She was brought in. Her heart had gone crazy. Too fast, too slow. All over the place.” She pauses, tries to compose herself and says, “When I got back, she was shaking. She was arching her head back and I put my hand on her forehead. But she wasn’t breathing.”

  “She died?” he asks, still confused.

  She doesn’t answer. He strokes her wet hair, kisses her temple, but it’s an awkward posture he can’t sustain, separated as they are by the cold low wall of the tub.

  “She knew you were there,” he tells her. She lets go of him, curling back over herself in the water.

  “No, she didn’t. It was just her nervous system shutting down. She was alone. But how could you understand that?” The first note of recrimination in that, the first hint that she’s not ready to receive comfort from him.

  He wants to answer, to find just the right thing to say to draw her closer to him, stop her shaking, but he sees that she needs to be alone with her grief. He thinks of the days of silence they will spend together, cut off from each other, stripped down to bare bones. And the work he will have to do to change things.

  Then suddenly they are not alone. They must have disturbed Ephram’s sleep. He’s not with them physically in this damp miserable bathroom but he’s awake down the hall in his room, starting the upward ascent of a scale. The violin plods up and down the compulsory scales he didn’t practice before he went to bed. He stops and his father can only hear the faint tick of the metronome counting out the beats. Helen is breathing out of time. There’s a stumble, forlorn silence, and he waits to find out if Ephram will be able to catch the right pitch again.

  The Men Have Gone Hunting

  LAST EVENING, SHOTS WERE FIRED in the bush around the farmhouse, although officially hunting season started this morning at dawn. They live just north of highway number 3 which runs horizontally, cutting the province of Saskatchewan in two, north from south. The season starts one week earlier in the northern half, where the forest begins, and the muskeg and the lakes that are cold even in the heat of summer. All the hunters from the cities drive just as far as this line drawn in the snow before loading their guns.

  She had settled Maya in her crib for her afternoon nap when she heard the knocking on the kitchen door. Looking down on the stoop from the upstairs window in the hall, she could see the guns propped over the men’s shoulders, the bright orange hunting vests hurting her eyes against the unfamiliar white. The winter snow had come only two days before and she wasn’t used to it. She couldn’t see a truck in the yard, not even any footprints so she couldn’t tell if they’d walked in
by way of the overgrown northern approach or looped around, following the towering caragana that swung closer to the barn.

  She ducked, hoping Maya wouldn’t wake up, but heard the knocking again. Not daring to raise her head, she squatted beneath the window ledge, hoping they would go away. Norman was further north, hunting as well, in the vast unpopulated forest reserves. He thought that only rude city folk would hunt in places where people lived. Even though he was a city boy himself. He’d taken up these opinions over the two years they had lived in rural Saskatchewan, first renting a small bungalow in Glaslyn, then a rambling farmhouse out in the country.

  Last November, her first with him in the country, she’d been pulling Maya in her sled, wearing a scarlet jacket against the new snow. A truck had pulled over and the man had said to her, “You’re going to get shot walking the roads this time of year. Do you want to leave that little one without a mother?” Norman was incensed when he heard what a stranger had said to her practically in her own driveway, but he couldn’t be dissuaded from leaving her alone this year too. It’s what the men in his family had always done, even though they were now two generations removed from rural living. He told her a little self-righteously that she would have to give up her city sensitivities if she was going to be happy here.

  She heard the kitchen door opening and the men’s footsteps in the mud room. Heavy steps moving into the house. A glance out the window confirmed it. The two black rifles were leaning against the door frame but the men were gone.

  “Anybody there?” she called to them as she moved down the stairway, saying what they should have been calling out as they entered her house.

  One of the men was rifling through the key rack near the door, the other had walked across the kitchen to the phone. The floor was wet and muddy; he hadn’t taken off his boots.

  They both looked up at her without surprise.

  “Hey,” the one at the key rack said. “We slid off the road. This snow’s a bitch.”

  “Goddamn prairie gumbo,” the other near the phone said. “The Indians can have it.”

  “You prick. If you’d just given them our booze, they wouldn’t have run us off. Those guys are probably at the car right now, cutting the deer off the roof and stealing our beer. Goddamn land claims. Where the fuck are we anyways?”

  He looked at her and smirked.

  “The reserve is just north of here. Where’s your car stuck?”

  She wanted to make this clear because she’d sometimes been mistaken for a mixed-blood, with her long black hair and lean build. She could smell alcohol in the room, but stale so she knew they could be getting cranky as the buzz wore off.

  The man by the key rack wore glasses, which made him seem more trustworthy. Maybe an ordinary guy who sat at a desk in Saskatoon, only playing at being tough one week a year. Maybe a man like her husband. She spoke to him.

  “You need a phone book to call the garage in town?” And she turned away, bending to the cupboard where she kept the book, bending from the knees instead of her waist so that her backside didn’t present itself to either of them.

  The other one answered, the alpha, even though he was shorter, almost hunched and had dark circles under his eyes. “You’ve got a tractor. Where’s your husband? He can pull us out.”

  “Out in the back forty,” she answered, hoping that she made sense. They didn’t farm, although they lived in a farmhouse with an empty hip-roofed horse barn, a fragrant pile of silage out behind the slough. The man they rented the house from pastured cattle there, arriving silently every morning before dawn to fire up the tractor and spread silage in the coldest, darkest months. They never saw him, probably wouldn’t recognize him if they met in the Red and White store in town. She could always tell he’d been there because every morning, there was a lingering smell like rotten fruit, even on days so cold that moisture crystallised before it dissipated. And she saw tracks in the snow where he’d driven the tractor out to the silage pile and back.

  “The tractor’s sitting right there. I can drive one. Which is the right key?”

  Taken aback, she admitted, “I don’t know.”

  “Can’t you call him?” the one with tired eyes answered although she hadn’t spoken to him.

  She looked at him without comprehending.

  “Your husband,” he said, a little sarcastically, as though the word was just a way of putting on airs. He held his hand like a gun to his head, thumb pointing to his mouth, mocking her.

  “You know, phone?” mincing on his small feet. She broke eye contact, studied the pattern in her linoleum, the water that had gathered along the indentations, one of their boot prints that had dried almost white against the red. “Doesn’t he carry a cell?”

  “Cell? There are no cells here. No coverage outside the city,” she answered as she flipped through the slim phone book looking for the number of the garage.

  “Coverage! No coverage! Don’t wet your panties about it,” he said.

  “Hey, hey, no need for that,” his friend told him. “If you could call the garage then.”

  When the garage didn’t answer after dialling the number over and over for five minutes, she left a message and then called her neighbour, Harold, who had a woodworking business he ran from his house three kilometres away. She tried to look neutral as she listened to him berating the uselessness of hunters, clamping the phone close to her head so they wouldn’t overhear.

  “If they’re stupid enough to ditch their car, they can hitchhike back to the city as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Yes, yes,” she murmured, which only spurred Harold on.

  “They come up here, get drunk and shoot cows in the pasture because they don’t know any better and then they want to be bailed out.”

  “They’re here in my kitchen,” she said softly, almost warmly, as though she was so happy to have these unexpected visitors. “All they need is a little push, or a pull with your truck and they’ll be on their way.”

  “I wouldn’t waste one millilitre of gas on those buffoons.”

  “They’ve been sitting here, just waiting. The garage is not answering. If you could just come over, please. Norman’s gone hunting up north,” she said, realizing too late that she’d revealed that she was alone. And hoping she didn’t sound too pleading, too desperate.

  “I don’t run when hunters call. Sorry,” he said, and then again, more gently, “Sorry.”

  She could tell that he was still feeling badly about yelling at her when she had the chimney fire last winter and had placed Maya in the snow wrapped in a big comforter and gone back in to throw pails of water on the smoking wall. He was ranting about city people not knowing anything about living in the country. Hadn’t they cleaned the pipes? Why was Norman always at work when these things happened, making big bucks teaching while his neighbours had to scrabble up a little work building cabinets for those cottages owned by people who sat on the best land.

  AFTER TELLING THEM that her neighbour’s truck was in the shop and that they should try the garage again, she left the kitchen and went down the cellar steps to put more wood in the furnace, but once she was done, she sat on the woodpile thinking of what to do next. Maybe she could stay down here and they would eventually leave. But Maya was two floors above her, sleeping lightly in her three-year-old way. A girl now, not a baby. A pretty brown-eyed girl. She wasn’t in a crib anymore and might wander downstairs on her own, trailing her striped blanket behind her, if she woke up.

  She heard movement upstairs. One of them was still wearing boots, probably the short one, she thought maliciously. Isn’t it always the short one? She could also hear a creaking of the floor joists moving in the other direction, almost as though a ghost was up there protecting her, blocking the stairway going to the second floor. Then her heart started pounding hard. The other had obviously taken off his boots and was moving furtively. Was he about to go up the stairs? Why weren’t the two of them together? She stood up, listening from the bottom of the cellar stairs. Sh
e heard drawers opening and closing in her kitchen. They were obviously looking for something. She heard a rustling sound like paper crinkling and more cupboard doors being opened and then gently closed. The two men were moving methodically around her large kitchen. She could sense one of them standing at the base of the stairs leading to her daughter’s room. She took a deep breath and headed up from the cellar.

  They must have heard her coming because she heard their footsteps quickly move towards one another and a secretive conversation too low for her to make out. She was sweating down her back even though the basement was cool and the woodpile conducted the temperature of the frozen ground into the house. As she reached the top of the stairs, the phone rang. One long ring, then two short ones—her ring. Even though the men wouldn’t have known that, one of them answered the phone. She stood at the door of the kitchen, hoping it was the garage calling back, so they would go and wait beside their ditched car. The taller one was on the phone, while the shorter man wearing boots sat at her kitchen table. She saw a box of crackers lying open on the floor.

  “Yeah, she’s here,” he was saying. The person on the other end was talking for a while and she thought that was strange. What could the man at the garage have to say to this stranger? Then he started describing the buck tied to the top of his car.

  “Four point antlers. A real stud. Not an easy kill either. He was a smart bugger. Jumped a fence from standing and hid near a slough. Knew enough to keep that rack low in the willows.”

  More silence and she felt disoriented. She looked out the window, not entering the kitchen completely until she understood what was going on. Hoarfrost had grown on all the tangled branches of the caragana and now the days were too cold to burn it off by afternoon. The windbreak was once again opaque as it was in summer, impenetrable. From the road, only the side of the barn was visible. The house would be completely hidden again, after a brief bright period of sunlight in the shortening afternoons. The barn’s faded red paint looked like old blood in the white light of early winter. And the rolling prairie behind the house almost blended into the sky, seeming to go on forever. She felt a bit dizzy, as though she was lost on a vast, still, white ocean. Two by two by two—they were trapped together, but there was one too many. She was the odd one out here even though it was her house.