Starlight

by Richard Wagamese

  “Mel, you wanna come out with me’n Frank?” Jensen said. “The rest of you can wait with Miss Strong and Winifred here.”

  The store personnel nodded while Frank, Jensen, and the store manager walked out and shut the door behind them. They could see them talking on the small landing above the stairs. Frank spoke at length and then the other two took their turns. Then Frank and Jensen spoke to each other before concurring with the manger, opening the door, and stepping back into the narrow room.

  Jensen walked over and sat on the edge of the manager’s desk facing Emmy.

  “Miss Strong, Mister Starlight here is willing to pay for the groceries you tried to steal. Management has agreed to that so there won’t be a shoplifting charge. If there’s no charge on that, I can’t rightly charge you with the other offence. It was wrong, make no mistake about that. Clearly wrong, and you put your daughter at risk. So I could reasonably ask Child Services to look into this, and you would still lose your daughter for a time until this all got cleared up. I need you to understand that.”

  “I understand,” Emmy said.

  “But you can’t go on squatting either. Without adequate and safe housing, Child Services would apprehend your daughter until such time as you could secure a job and hold it until the court was satisfied you were stable and had stable housing.”

  Her voice shook. “I understand that too.”

  “Most importantly, I need you to realize that this was a desperate act that had the potential to separate you and your child. It was foolhardy and dangerous. Simply making charges go away does not clear you from responsibility in this. Now or ever. Do you hear me?”

  “I hear you.”

  “Good. I really hope you do because we’re going to go out on a limb here and try to help you and your daughter. You need shelter, you need food, you need gainful employment. If those were made available to you, would you take them?”

  Emmy stared at him, surprised. “Of course. Yes. Sure. I mean, yeah.”

  “Okay. Frank, or Mr. Starlight, is in need of a housekeeper. He has room in his farmhouse for you and your daughter. There are two of them there. Mr. Starlight and Mr. Roth. You’d be responsible for laundry and cooking and housekeeping. It’s not forever. It’s just to help you get your feet under you and provide for your girl. I’ll speak to Child Services and they will make an appointment for you with a caseworker who will inspect your living conditions at the farm and ensure that Winifred gets into school right away. You and Mr. Starlight will be held to their conditions and rules. Do you have any questions?” Jensen asked.

  “Yes,” Emmy said. “I do.” She looked at Frank, who put his head down under her gaze. “Why are you doing this?”

  The big man squinted in concentration. He looked at Jensen, who regarded him kindly. He pressed his hands into the pockets of his jeans and then pulled them out and clasped his fingers together, then unclasped them, and dropped his hands to his sides.

  “For the girl,” he said finally.

  He studied Emmy.

  “And because I guess I’m drawn to wild things.”

  THE MEN STOOD IN THE HARD SUNLIGHT and stared back at the hospital. They’d reset Cadotte’s nose, stitched up his face, and shaved his head to suture the gashes and he swore as he began to unravel the wrappings. Anderson had stitches over his head and face and was standing on crutches. His hamstrings had been cut deeply and walking was difficult with the staples they’d used to close the long, ragged punctures. Both men were gaunt from days in their beds and thirsty and eager for drink. They smoked and regarded each other.

  “What’s the plan, Jeff?” Anderson asked.

  “Don’t rightly have one. Figured on sitting with it over a jug or two.”

  “But we’re gonna find her.”

  “Damn straight we’re gonna find her. I owe that bitch some pain. And she toasted my digs.”

  “Can’t get far. That tank wasn’t full.”

  “Full enough. I imagine they got far enough to rest up. Emmy’d figure something to keep them moving.” Cadotte threw the butt of the cigarette onto the pavement and ground it out with the toe of his work boot. “Way I see it, she’d go where it’s easier to hide. Calgary. Vancouver. Bigger place.”

  “Make it harder to find her.”

  “S’what she figures. Me? She’s dumb as a sack of hammers. She’d leave a trail anywhere she goes. And she’s got the kid. Makes it harder to move without bringin’ attention on herself.”

  Anderson scowled. “Sounds right. Thing is to choose.”

  “Me, I’d say Calgary. She got a thing for twang and two-step and tall, lanky cowpoke fuckers,” Cadotte offered.

  “Seems as right a place to start as any.”

  “We gotta take your wheels. You got any loot stashed?”

  “I got a roll buried in the yard. You?”

  “Just what I fetched from the fire,” Cadotte said.

  “That was some crazy shit.”

  “Had to be done. Soon as I come to, I knew I wasn’t lettin’ her skate on this.”

  “Still. You’re lucky to not have roasted your ass,” Anderson said.

  “Close enough for rock ’n’ roll anyway, pal. We’re fixin’ to be gone a long while. Way I figure, there’s a lotta work in Calgary, Edmonton, wherever. We can keep ourselves goin’ while we track the cow.”

  “Whatta I got keepin’ me anywhere?”

  “Same. All’s I got now is this hate on.”

  “Me too,” Anderson said. “The kid’s okay. I don’t hurt no kid. But Emmy’s got some hurt comin’, that’s just a plain fact.”

  “We were like to be killed,” Cadotte said. “She left us to die. She lit that cabin up on purpose. Takes a cold and heartless fuck to do that. I figure to see she gets the same. Only final. No let-up. No mercy. This ain’t no hunt-me-down-and-slap-me trip. You good with that?”

  “I wouldn’t let a man do that to me. So I sure ain’t gonna let no woman.”

  “Good,” Cadotte said. “I got nothin’ left in the tank for Emmy. Fact is I coulda chucked her and the kid a long time ago. I was just hangin’ in for the tail.”

  “That was some good tail. Drunk or not,” Anderson said. “Gotta give her that.”

  Cadotte caught Anderson’s eye and grinned. “Maybe we take a last taste of that before we off the bitch.”

  Anderson smiled. “Yeah. Make a day of it. I can dig it.”

  Cadotte nodded. A cab swung into the parking lot and he raised a hand and flagged it over. They climbed in and as the car turned out of the parking lot and aimed for Anderson’s place both men sat straight, immobile and silent, staring ahead of themselves out the windshield. There was a grim, dark air in the car. The driver flicked his eyes nervously in the rear-view mirror but something in the set of the big men behind him kept his gaze firmly fixed on the road.

  “SO LET ME GET THIS STRAIGHT,” Roth said. “You go into town for butter and eggs and come back with a woman and a young girl?”

  “That’s the short of it,” Starlight said.

  “Well, that sets it then,” Roth said. “I can’t ever let you go into town on your own again.”

  “They needed help.”

  “We ain’t exactly the whatcha’ call dinner at six, fetch my slippers sort.”

  “Don’t gotta be.”

  “How you reckon?”

  “Way I see it, she cleans, washes, fixes meals and lunches for a while. The girl starts into school how she should. We live the way we live. When they save enough money to move out on their own they move and nothin’ changes.”

  “ ’Ceptin’ I gotta be all charmin’ all the time.”

  Starlight grinned. “Best behaviour is a good thing sometimes.”

  “Well, shit, Frank. I don’t ever rightly recall bein’ on best behaviour. What ya see is mostly what yer gonna get from me.”

  “It’s just until they get their feet set under ’em.”

  “Says you. Me? I might kinda get used to bein’ treated like t
he squire of the manor.”

  “You can’t even pick up your smelly socks.”

  “I suffer from a lack of lessons.”

  “What ya suffer from is kindly bones.”

  “I got plenty of kindness in me. I’m just worried how this is gonna affect our lifestyle.”

  “Lifestyle? You call this a lifestyle?”

  Roth pursed his lips and scanned the room. “She’s grim but yeah,” he said. “This is mouldy bachelor chic. Takes a studied hand to create this ambiance.”

  Starlight shook his head and smiled. “You and your words. I swear you’re better educated than you let on.”

  “Part of my charm,” Roth said. “Woo the women with the rollin’ lilt of language.”

  “Well, there won’t be no wooin’ going on while they’re here. This is straight-up work for her, a home for the kid, and some regular eats for us. That’s all.”

  “I hear that. I can do that. But lordy, I can’t be held responsible for the effect of my animal magnetism on womenfolk.”

  “You just try to keep it under wraps,” Starlight said. “We oughta sort this place out some before they get here.”

  “You’re a kind-hearted bugger, Frank.”

  Starlight studied Roth gravely. “I know how it feels,” he said quietly.

  “How what feels, bud?”

  “How not havin’ a place feels. I ever tell ya how I almost left here?”

  “No,” Roth said.

  “Was after the old man died. Place was hollow. Didn’t feel like there was nothin’ left for me here. So I leased out the land to my neighbours, got them to look out for the house, and was gonna head for somewhere to do something for some reason. I never did sort it out in my head.”

  “But you’re still here,” Roth said.

  “Yeah. I am. But I actually got to the end of the driveway. Sat there looking east, then west, wonderin’ what the hell was callin’ me. It was home. Home was callin’ me. I thought behind me was as empty as the road in front of me. It was sad, that feeling. Deeply sad. Sadder’n losin’ the old man. I come to know right there that when you figure ya got nothin’, goin’ back and movin’ on can feel like it’s all the same direction.”

  They sat in a deep well of quiet. The house creaked in the push of summer wind. A horse whinnied. Roth stared at the floor and then slowly raised his head to look over at his friend, who sat straight in his chair with his hands cupped in his lap. Roth splayed his legs out in front of him and the scrape of his boots on the wood made Starlight glance over and the pair of them eyed each other in the dim shadow of late afternoon.

  “Awful glad you stayed, Frank. I got me a belly full of that feeling too before I got here.”

  “Home,” Starlight said. “Comes to be a truth you carry in your bones. Figure if I can help someone find that, I’m doin’ a good thing.”

  “Best thing, I figure,” Roth said. “Count me in, pal. We know anything about this woman?”

  “She’s got a wildness in her, that’s a fact. But she’s strong. You can feel that. And she surely loves that little girl. Other than that, I don’t know. But I think a person could do worse than having a streak of wild runnin’ alongside strength and love.”

  “Amen to that,” Roth said.

  * * *

  —

  They arrived in a dark green Jeep with the Ministry of Child and Family Services crest emblazoned on the doors. Jensen pulled in behind them in the old and battered pickup Emmy had parked close to the store. Emmy and Winnie climbed out slowly, peering at the fields, the outbuildings, and the house. The girl looked in amazement at the horses grazing in the pasture. When she caught Starlight’s eye he grinned and she brightened. Jensen strode over to stand beside the social worker, a young, willowy woman with clear green eyes, good posture, and an earnest, open expression. She introduced herself as Madelaine Orr.

  “Maddie,” she said, shaking hands with Starlight and Roth.

  The pair of them had dressed for the occasion. Roth’s face gleamed a scrubbed and ruddy pink and he had his ring of hair patted down with gel. He’d clipped his fingernails but hadn’t quite erased the brownish yellow tattoo of tobacco at the edges of his thumb and forefinger. He rubbed his hands along the thighs of crisp new dungarees. Starlight wore new black jeans. His hair was cropped short and he’d shaved the line of his sideburns plumb and straight. His hands had been worried at with soap and a brush and looked raw and brown and were held closed at his sides like a pair of rocks at the ends of his sleeves. Both of them wore work shirts with metal snap buttons they’d done up to the neck and fastened closed around their wrists. They each wore stout cowboy boots polished to a high sheen. Town boots that had never seen the inside of a barn or the dust of a field. They stood straight and nervous in the canted light of late afternoon, blinking and casting their eyes about, uncertain of where to look.

  Maddie introduced Emmy and Winnie to Roth, and the skinny man swallowed hard and nodded as he shook hands with the woman and flared his eyes wide at the girl, not knowing what to say. He tucked his hands in his belt and swayed a little. Starlight looked at Jensen as if waiting for directions.

  “Well,” Maddie said brightly. “We should go inside and show Emmy and Winnie around. Maybe later you can show them the barn and the animals. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Winnie?”

  “I like the horses,” Winnie said. “And I heard chickens. I like chickens too.”

  Starlight and Roth flicked glances back and forth. Neither of them said a word.

  “Let’s go have a look then,” Maddie said, and the two bachelors startled and hustled to the porch to open the door and then stood like sentries waiting for the others to follow. Maddie and Jensen grinned. When everyone had entered, the two men followed and stood side by side in the kitchen, watching the woman and the girl investigate the old house.

  Starlight noticed what he’d always failed to notice. The kitchen was cramped with the juts and pokes and peninsulas of their living. Pots rinsed but unwashed piled on the corner of the counter. Candles gone to stubs in hardened pools at the centre of the table with its rough and scarred wooden top that could have used a wash and oil. Along the edges of the cupboard doors were thin lines of black from field-hardened fingers easing them open, and a thin filament smeared a pair of drinking glasses clumped down and abandoned beside the enamelled canyon of the sink. The curtains lank and haggard at the windows. Chairs akimbo around the table. Seed catalogues and equipment brochures strewn on unused seats. A pair of sturdy coffee mugs, grim with stains at the handles and the inner lips, set beside an ashtray heaped with butts and dead matches. He watched Emmy to gauge her reaction.

  She scanned the room with pursed lips and nodded. She looked at Maddie but didn’t speak and then wandered slowly through the darkened rectangle of the doorway into the living room. Roth regarded Starlight with arched eyebrows. Everyone followed Emmy and Winnie deeper into the house.

  The house faced due east and in the late afternoon it was dim. The bachelors had neglected to leave a light on and Roth fumbled with the switch on a pole lamp that threw everything into focus. The room was another bramble of living. There was no proper bookcase so there were photography magazines devoted to wildlife and coffee table books piled beside the chair that Starlight favoured and Roth’s was marked by strewn copies of tabloids and word search puzzles. A threadbare carpet covered most of the space in front of the hearth, blackened by years of neglect, and the windows were dressed by floor-length draperies that deepened the press of shadow and dark. Sweaters and small hand tools and bits of cord and a hacksaw blade sat on the counter of a hutch beside an old-fashioned radio. The glassed shelf space held nothing but unused candles and several dead watches.

  “Cleaned it as best we could,” Starlight said and coughed into his hand.

  “Mmm-hmm,” Emmy said and moved slowly about the large room lifting things and running her hand along surfaces.

  “Eugene’s got the downstairs room there,” he said. “
I have the room on the left at the top of the stairs. There’s a big bedroom that looks out over the yard at the end of the hall that’ll be for you. Bathroom’s up there too.”

  She stared at him wordlessly then turned and made her way up the stairs with Winnie trailing after her. Maddie followed them and the three men stood together watching them leave. They eyed one another.

  “Whattaya figure?” Roth asked neither of them in particular.

  “Coulda done better with the cleanup,” Starlight said.

  “Thought we done a good job,” Roth said.

  “Not for a lady.”

  “Or a kid neither?”

  “Can’t know.”

  They could hear them moving along the hallway upstairs and opening the door to the big room at the front of the house.

  “It’s a fine old house, Frank,” Jensen said. “They don’t build them like this anymore.”

  “Was a bachelor house when the old man lived here. Still is now. Never figured on no women,” Starlight said.

  “It’s a good thing you’re doing. You know that, right? The squat they were in wasn’t fit for anyone.”

  “Seemed right is all.”

  The two women and the girl came back down the stairs. Emmy looked around the living room again and then stared at Starlight and Roth for a moment. “How do I wash clothes?” she asked.

  “Old lady down the road takes it in for us,” Roth said.

  “I do my own wash.”

  “Sink then,” Starlight said. “It’s how I always done. There’s a line out across the yard.”

  “You’ll need a washing machine if there’s to be four of us.”

  Roth straightened and glanced at Starlight. The big man swept his gaze around the room. “Well, we dug in that new septic for somethin’,” he said.

  “If I’m to cook proper I’ll need a bigger fridge. And a small freezer.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “If you want me to housekeep I’ll need to be able to housekeep proper,” she said. “I can make a list of what I’ll need. We need a television for Winnie for one thing. Can’t expect her to sit around in silence reading equipment catalogues every night.”