Inside the house, Willard is awakened, not by anything he hears outside the window, but by Marian in the hall. Through the crack beneath his door he sees a light go on, and then she closes the bathroom door and opens it again a few minutes later, and the light goes off. He hears her footsteps in the hallway once more and they stop, as they have been stopping every night for the last month, outside his door.
Although Willard was initially perplexed by Marian’s lingering every night in the hallway, he now has it figured out. She wants to tell him something, and he’s concluded after several weeks of mulling that she’s made the decision, finally, to pack up her things and move on. He’s been expecting Marian to leave ever since Ed’s death nine years ago. It’s a wonder, he reasons, that she’s stayed this long.
He checks the digital numbers on his bedside clock: 3 a.m., about the usual time. The minutes pass. The night is as still as a church. He imagines he can hear her breathing. Five minutes. Six. Seven. Seven minutes is the record, but tonight he counts eight and she’s still there. What makes her hesitate? he wonders. Perhaps he should speak up, put aside his own trepidation about her departure. It might make things easier for her, he thinks, if he were to jump-start the conversation. But he’s by nature a quiet person, and so he says nothing.
In the months after Ed’s death, Willard fully expected Marian to leave. Why would she want to stay with Ed gone? He supposed that she would move into Juliet, or to Swift Current, or back to Manitoba and her own people, but when she didn’t say anything and time passed, Willard thought about it less and less and became merely grateful that she’d decided to stay on for a while longer, although he had never come to believe that she was staying for good.
He assumed people in town talked about the two of them living together in the house but he decided he didn’t care about gossip if Marian wasn’t bothered by it. In the long hours of winter, Willard grew to prefer Marian’s company to his own, although he had never really lived with just his own company. Ed and Marian had married late in life (or at least late in Ed’s life; he was a good ten years her senior) and before her arrival the two brothers had lived, always, together. Ed, the cantankerous older brother who once joined the Communist Party of Canada and talked at great length to whoever would listen about the benefits of living in Mother Russia, and Willard, the eccentric younger brother who never joined any questionable political movements but provided plenty to talk about anyway.
Willard’s most famous exploit was buying Antoinette the camel so he could sell camel rides to tourists passing through on the Number One Highway. He came up with the idea after he heard the provincial minister of tourism talk about the uniqueness of the Saskatchewan landscape and about how Americans were generally better than Canadians at recognizing potential gold mines in the tourist industry.
Willard looked around. He saw sand. He bought a camel from a wild animal park in Alberta and painted a huge sign in the shape of a cactus, saying, snake hills camel rides: see the desert the way god meant you to. The sign, which Willard stuck in the ditch by the approach to the drive-in, drove Ed crazy because he was an atheist. It also irritated Ed that, in the spring when the ditch was full of runoff, the cactus appeared to be growing not in the desert, but in standing water.
When Willard came home with Antoinette, the people of Juliet were well entertained. They said Willard bought the camel because Ed had kicked him out of their double bed when he married Marian. They referred to Marian and Antoinette as the Shoenfeld women. Much of the teasing about the camel was to Willard’s face and he took it good-naturedly, as was his character. He had Antoinette for three years and, even though she was as ornery as Ed and didn’t work out as a tourist attraction, he became attached to her. He found out that Canadians don’t stop for the Canadian version of American trends, assuming (probably correctly) that they won’t be as good as the American counterparts. And the Americans, who did stop because they were used to such things, expressed their disappointment by saying, “One camel? You’ve got just the one?”
Despite the fact that Antoinette was not a roaring financial success, Willard kept her and fed her, and when she appeared to be sick he called the vet, who was not a camel expert but did his best. Ed didn’t think Antoinette was worth the vet bill and didn’t hide the fact that he hoped she would die on Willard. He hated it when neighbours who had guests from other parts of the country would bring them to see the camel, especially if they had children visiting. Sometimes Willard would give them free camel rides just so he could enjoy Ed’s predictable irritation.
One morning after Willard had had Antoinette for three years, he woke up and she was gone. He picked up her tracks north of the drive-in, but immediately lost them again. He thought because she was a camel she’d probably headed for the sand hills, so he borrowed an old horse from Lester Torgeson and spent several days riding through the grass–lands and dunes searching for signs of Antoinette. He found the odd track, but nothing more. He couldn’t believe she could disappear. The Little Snake Hills, after all, were not as expansive as a desert like the Sahara or the Gobi. Willard got numerous anonymous tips telling him Antoinette had been spotted masquerading as the rodeo queen in Maple Creek, or Antoinette had fallen in love with a camel in a travelling circus and was now following it from town to town in a love-sick fever. Harmless jokes, and Willard accepted them in good spirit even though he missed his camel.
In a way, Antoinette figured into Ed’s death. A good number of years had passed since Antoinette’s disappearance, and Willard’s cactus sign was still standing in the ditch, annoying Ed. One spring day Willard found Ed in his hip waders, standing in the ditch with a crowbar, and they had a brotherly quarrel. Willard argued that the cactus was a monument to Antoinette and a bit of a local curiosity, a landmark that would be missed if Ed destroyed it, but he knew this was a fight he wasn’t going to win, so he went to town for the mail. When Willard came home and saw the sign still up, he knew something was wrong. As he drove alongside the sign, he saw Ed face down in the ditch. He’d had a heart attack while trying to pry the sign out of the still-frozen mud under the spring runoff.
After Ed was buried, people wondered, like Willard, what Marian would do. She kept to herself as she always had, but sometimes in the summer that followed Ed’s death she sold tickets or drinks at the drive-in. Because Willard was liked, people who knew him hoped that a love affair would develop between him and Marian, but it never had. Willard kept the cactus sign and changed the words to read, desert drive-in: see the movies the way god meant you to. One Christmas he’d gotten the idea to decorate the cactus with Christmas lights. He did an elaborate job, stringing the green lights so they followed exactly the contour of the cactus, and using white lights to represent the cactus needles, and he even created a pink cactus flower. Most people in the district now look forward to the night when Willard hangs the lights and illuminates the cactus. It marks the onset of the Christmas season more so than the decorating of the Christmas tree in the small foyer of the United church. It gives Willard pleasure that people, especially the kids, like his cactus. After he decorates it, he lies in bed at night and imagines a whole ditch full of cacti, but he never gets around to building and decorating more than the one, just like he’d never got around to buying more than one camel. And apparently Marian likes the decorated cactus even though it was the immediate cause of her husband’s death. She told Willard once, “I do like your Christmas cactus. Much easier to bring into bloom than a real one.”
Those had been a lot of words for Marian. One of the things Willard appreciated about Marian right from the start was her apparent lack of any need to chatter, and her ability to communicate without talking. Her gestures, her expressions, even the attitude in her walk, all made sense to Willard. Within days of her moving into the house, they exchanged their first glance at Ed’s expense, which they continued to do over the years for their own pleasure, without Ed having the slightest clue. Ed was their common denominator, and Willard’s and
Marian’s glances implied both tolerance and affection for a man who could summon passion when not much was at stake, but wouldn’t know how to give a compliment to save his life. They both understood Ed even though, to this day, they haven’t really talked about him.
Willard hears a creak outside his door and realizes that Marian is still there. He sits up and checks the clock: 3:20. She’s never before stood there for twenty minutes. But perhaps he’s mistaken. Perhaps she slipped back to her bedroom just as the dog barked and he missed the padded footsteps. He decides she isn’t there after all, and is about to lie down again when he hears another creak and Marian pushes the door and it swings slowly open. In the moonlight Willard can see her in the doorway. She’s like a ghost in her long nightgown. He swallows and prepares himself for what she’s sure to say: I’m sorry, Willard, the time has come . . . But then she pulls the door closed again without speaking, and Willard hears the footsteps padding back down the hallway.
So she’s put it off for one more night. He doesn’t know whether to hope she’ll keep putting it off or to wish she would just get it over with. The latter, he concludes. Always best to get things over with. He’ll try to bring it up tomorrow at breakfast. Perhaps she’s worried about him, about leaving him on his own, and he’ll try his best to let her off the hook. He’ll be attentive when it’s her turn to speak—Yes, Willard, you’re right, I feel the need to carry on with my life—and to look like a man who can accept bad news.
It doesn’t occur to Willard that his explanation for Marian’s odd behaviour is entirely wrong, that he’s not understanding the new language she’s added to her quiet repertoire. And that, in nine years of living with Willard, of his constant companionship, she has grown to love him. Romantic love is not a topic Willard has spent any time at all on, in spite of being the proprietor of a business that thrives on the anticipation of love in its various forms—silly, tragic, dangerous, young, old, true, dispassionate. He’s seen it all, but never once felt that he was watching a movie that had the remotest thing to do with him. And all that love in the front seats and back seats of cars, or on the hoods of cars on summer nights when it’s too hot to sit inside them, or next to cars on blankets in the sand—love for teenagers, Willard believes. Willard has never been in love, not even once. Or at least not that he knows.
He’s feeling something now, though, as he tries to go back to sleep. He’s feeling the loss of Marian. It’s a feeling of dread, an ache in an unknown place. Just to prepare himself, to get used to the idea of her being gone, he tries to picture her walking out the door with her suitcases. He can’t remember her having had suitcases, although she must have, when she arrived to be Ed’s wife. Willard tosses and turns and throws his pillow to the floor, and then retrieves it when the bed feels too hard and flat under his head, and when he finally falls asleep again, he dreams he has the most awful toothache. He is jolted awake by a rhythmic throbbing in his jaw, and then he realizes that the throbbing is an owl—who who whooo—and the sound has gotten right inside him like the bit of a dentist’s drill.
Sleep now is impossible, so Willard rises and pulls on his clothes and walks out into the night air. He stands in the middle of his drive-in lot with its miniature hills of sand, ordered to position the cars with their windshields at the right angle for movie watching. He rolls himself a cigarette and looks up at the blank screen, and then he turns a slow circle, puffing on his smoke and looking at the yardlights in the distance, thinking about all the people in Juliet and in the farmhouses around him, and how people come and go, they grow up or die or go broke and move away, and the ones who are left carry on, that’s just the way it is. He’ll carry on without Marian in the same way the two of them continued without Ed after his death. When Willard’s circle points him in the direction of the house, he thinks about the way she sits in the picture window—Ed’s window—invisible in the dark and watches the movies. He stares at the window, perplexed by his own feelings, without knowing that Marian is staring back.
Watching this man. Wishing she could speak up, wondering if she ever will. And where would she go if she were to speak up and ruin things, frighten Willard half to death and drown the two of them in awkwardness? Her life would be over if she had to leave. She follows Willard’s dark shadow as he turns another circle like a man who has lost his way and is trying to remember the tricks of navigation. She watches the firefly light of his cigarette, disappearing and then appearing again as he turns, turns in the darkness.
Crash
The Dolsons’ yardlight is one of the ones that Willard can see north of town. The Dolson house—which of course Willard can’t see—has the same vinyl siding as his own house. It had galled old Mrs. Dolson to no end when she realized she’d been taken in by a confidence man with coloured brochures and a promise of siding longevity. As the siding began to lift and snap in the wind and her calls to the sales company remained unanswered and finally they wouldn’t go through at all because the phone had been disconnected, Mrs. Dolson’s disappointment at her own gullibility caused her finally to agree to her husband’s retirement plan, and the old couple moved to the West Coast a dozen years ago and left the farming operation to their son, Blaine, and his wife, Vicki. And no sooner had the senior Dolsons settled in a condominium complex in Nanaimo than Mr. Dolson died, and now Mrs. Dolson lives near Blaine’s sister in Vancouver and shows no interest in returning to her former home, even for a visit, because she just can’t bear to see what has become of it in Vicki’s care. It’s convenient to blame Vicki for the siding mistake.
The Dolsons’ three-bedroom bungalow was built about the same time as Willard’s to replace the original farmhouse that was old and small and did not reflect the prosperity of the times. The new house (not so new any more) sits three hundred yards off the grid road, surrounded on three sides by trees lovingly planted by Blaine’s mother: poplars, Manitoba maples, even a weeping birch that has somehow survived the arid conditions of this part of the country. The house faces the road and from the living room window you can see the barn that is now pretty much unused, a rail corral, and a half-acre pen that is home to Blaine’s horse, the only one he has left. In front of the house is a miraculous plum tree, of which Blaine’s mother was exceedingly proud. South of the house is the vegetable garden, enclosed by chicken wire to protect it from the deer. The fact that it is still bountiful is perhaps more miraculous than the plum tree, since the gardens throughout the district are sparse, even non-existent, thanks to drought and grasshoppers. Vicki’s garden is rich with produce. No one can figure it out. She plants in the spring and then forgets to water and never has time to weed. And the grasshoppers seem to have passed Vicki’s garden by as they devoured everyone else’s. Her own theory is that grasshoppers don’t like weeds. They’ve cruised the country looking for the weed-free gardens, she tells Blaine, which is why it’s a good idea not to weed a garden. “Ha ha,” she says. “It’s a joke.” Blaine—who remembers the neat garden his mother was famous for—doesn’t laugh.
Blaine’s parents had three children and the house was a perfect size for their family, but it’s a tight fit for Blaine and Vicki, who have six kids. Until today, the boys shared one bedroom and the girls the other. What’s different about today (or technically, yesterday) is that Shiloh, the oldest and almost a teenager, has been allowed to “build” his own bedroom downstairs. Blaine didn’t see the need for it, but Vicki tried to be more understanding of Shiloh’s growing desire for privacy. She and Shiloh decided on the south–west corner as the driest and brightest spot in a mostly dark unfinished basement. Although she didn’t really have time (the garden’s bounty was waiting for her attention) Vicki helped Shiloh build a low wooden platform out of scrap lumber to keep the bed up off the cement floor. They carried a worn area rug down the basement steps and laid it on the platform, and they hung two old bedspreads from the ceiling to create walls, or at least the illusion of walls. Then they took Shiloh’s bed apart and reassembled it in the new room, and Vicki f
ound a floor lamp and a couple of plastic storage tubs for Shiloh to use for his clothes, and she made him some shelves out of boards and bricks for his CD player and other personal things.
Vicki noticed that Shiloh was sullen the whole time they were creating the room and moving him into it, but she didn’t say anything. She assumed it was his age and adolescent hormones, and she promised to get him a desk as soon as they had a bit of extra money, and even a computer if they could afford it. She ignored him when he said, “I guess that won’t happen anytime soon”—he was getting so like his father—and she said cheerfully, “Well, maybe not, but you never know, I might win the lottery.” She left him to his decorating then, and he covered the two cement walls with pictures of hockey players cut from Sports Illustrated and a poster from the national rodeo finals in Edmonton that Lynn Trass had let him take from the window of the Oasis Café.
Shiloh Dolson, just shy of his thirteenth birthday, likes his new room even if he doesn’t show it. He doesn’t care that it’s dark and it doesn’t have real walls and he’s already had to squash a couple of sowbugs. There is one problem though, which he discovers on this, his first night in the basement. The problem is a heating duct that runs along the floor joists above his head. He wakes up at three in the morning, and through the duct he can hear his parents arguing. The fact that they argue is nothing new. Shiloh’s heard them a hundred times before. What’s problematic is that he can now hear what they’re arguing about. He’d always assumed money, being fully aware of the situation his parents are in. He knows the farm is mostly gone, all but the home quarter, although Vicki keeps trying to reassure him that things will get better and that Blaine will get the land back, or at least be in a position to rent before too long. It’s happened to people before, she tells Shiloh, and they bounce back. It’s not your father’s fault, she says, it’s the times, it’s like people running out of fish on the East Coast, not their fault, but things will change. Wait until people in Ottawa and Toronto have to pay five dollars for a loaf of bread, she says, then the politicians will come to their senses.
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