Agassiz Stories

by Sandra Birdsell

  ACCLAIM FOR

  Agassiz Stories

  “Impressive. … A masterful storyteller, able to render quiet moments of beauty and grace. …”

  — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Birdsell writes with the kind of emotional and psychological honesty that distinguishes Munro’s work. … She has good insight into family relationships and the alternating loyalty, duplicity, jealousy, treachery and compassion of its members. … By the final story, we feel we know this family as well as any other in Canadian fiction. … Birdsell has us well and truly hooked.”

  — Globe and Mail

  “Like Alice Munro, Sandra Birdsell writes of the trials of family, and of the past that clings to us no matter what efforts we make to scour it from our bodies and souls. … Sandra Birdsell is here to stay.”

  — W. P. Kinsella, The Reader

  “An infinite pleasure.”

  — Minnesota Daily

  BOOKS BY SANDRA BIRDSELL

  NOVELS

  The Missing Child (1989)

  The Chrome Suite (1992)

  The Russländer (2001)

  SHORT FICTION

  Night Travellers (1982) and Ladies of the House (1984),

  reissued in one volume entitled Agassiz Stories (1987)

  The Two-Headed Calf (1997)

  Night Travellers copyright © 1982 by Sandra Birdsell

  Ladies of the House copyright © 1984 by Sandra Birdsell

  First published in trade paperback by Turnstone Press 1987

  First Emblem Editions publication 2002

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher — or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency — is an infringement of the copyright law.

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Birdsell, Sandra, 1942-

  Agassiz stories

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-684-4

  I. Title.

  PS8553.176A2 2002 C813′.54 C2001-903824-0

  PR9199.3.B4385A35 2002

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  Some of these stories first appeared, in slightly different form, in Arts Manitoba, Canadian Fiction Magazine, Capilano Review, Grain, NeWest Review, Prairie Fire, and Writers News Manitoba, and in Manitoba Stories (Queenston House) and Metavisions (Quadrant Editions).

  The author wishes to thank the Manitoba Arts Council for grants that aided in the writing of Night Travellers and Ladies of the House.

  SERIES EDITOR: ELLEN SELIGMAN

  EMBLEM EDITIONS

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  The Canadian Publishers

  481 University Avenue

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5G 2E9

  www.mcclelland.com/emblem

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  NIGHT TRAVELLERS

  Dedication

  The Flood

  Boundary Lines

  Truda

  The Wednesday Circle

  Stones

  The Rock Garden

  Night Travellers

  Flowers for Weddings and Funerals

  Judgement

  The Wild Plum Tree

  The Day My Grandfather Died

  Journey to the Lake

  There Is No Shoreline

  LADIES OF THE HOUSE

  Dedication

  The Bride Doll

  Falling in Love

  Niagara Falls

  Moonlight Sonata

  Ladies of the House

  Dreaming of Jeannie

  Spring Cleaning

  Toronto Street

  The Bird Dance

  Keepsakes

  About the Author

  NIGHT TRAVELLERS

  For Roger, Angela and Darcie

  THE FLOOD

  aurice Lafrenière stood on the fire escape on the south side of the hotel and looked with awe at the litter-strewn lake which spread out where the town had been only two weeks ago.

  “My God,” he said, because he needed to hear the sound of his own voice. He felt abandoned, as though he were the only remaining human on earth.

  Across the street, a chunk of dirt-riddled ice battered against the Bank of Montreal. The wind had swept the ice into town during the night. He’d lain shivering in bed, listening to that ice crashing like a battering ram against everything that was his. And his thoughts had run together, had overflowed: his submerged business, the barber chairs bolted to the floor, one hundred years old, at least. Brought up from St. Paul on a steamboat, bequeathed to him by Henry Roy who had been like a father to him and who had also taught him his barbering trade. Mika, in Choritza, awaiting the birth of their sixth child. His other five children, cut off, wood chips floating about until the flood would subside. And his mother. When exhaustion had overcome the noise of the ice, he’d dreamt of his mother who was not dead, but alive in his dream, standing beside the river. She was gathering willow branches for her baskets. She’d looked up suddenly and she was not as he’d remembered, defeated and broken, eyes turned inward. Her broad face was strong and serious, her black eyes demanding his attention. If you have a large family, she said, you will need a bigger boat.

  He thought of his boat moored below and smiled. They didn’t come any smaller than his rowboat. He pulled his tweed cap tighter on his head and made his way carefully down the ice-coated fire escape. One slip and he’d be gone. Two minutes was all a person could hope for in the icy water even if he could get the hipwaders off. And then the little woman would be a widow, his children fatherless. The town would rush in for a woman like Mika. The town thought Mika had taken him in hand and with her clean habits and Mennonite ways had made him what he was today.

  His boat rose and fell with the waves, its wood squeaking and protesting against the piece of wooden sidewalk he’d lashed to the bottom of the fire escape to serve as a dock. Water, as far as the eye could see. Who would have thought that their tired, narrow river could have come to this? He told himself that he was anxious to see how the men at the courthouse had endured the ice. Damned fools, he called them, for letting a few rats in the hotel frighten them from sleeping safely as he did. But he knew his real anxiety. It had surfaced during the night and he needed to reassure himself that this flood had happened gradually, others knew about it too. It was not something that had happened overnight to him alone. He was not the only human being left in the world.

  He crouched, moved low in the boat and seated himself in the centre of it. No one accused him of being a careless person anymore. He still took chances, certainly, but not until he was sure everything was shipshape first. He untied the knot which moored his boat to the fire escape. He pushed off from the sidewalk with the oar and sliced deeply through the ice slush floating on the surface as he headed out towards the centre of Main Street. He wondered what condition the courthouse basement would be in. It was not what you’d call shipshape. No matter what Bill Livingston said, he would try and persuade the others to move into the hotel before it was too late.

  Up and down the wide street, there wasn’t another boat to be seen, no human sounds, just the wind and water rushing against the buildings. He stopped rowing, let the oars sink deep into
the water and stared for a moment at the bottom of the boat where his boots had crushed through the film of muddy ice. He felt the oar scrape against one of the drowned vehicles that had been parked on Main Street and he shuddered. It was like disturbing the dead, bumping into submerged things. He began rowing against the current which swept down from the mouth of the Agassiz River, across the cemetery and into town. The bottom of the hotel sign bobbed in the water. The sign had been sheared off by the ice during the night, one of the sounds that had kept him awake. He’d been kept awake all spring by the sounds of the ice cracking and groaning like a woman about to give birth. What are you up to? he’d asked the river. Gather up your skirts, it’s time, he said, fancying the sound of his thoughts, the idea that the river was a pregnant woman. But its deep complaining rumble made him uneasy. Then, when the weather turned on them, becoming bitterly cold with freezing rain and snowstorms, he sent his children away and only he and Mika remained. They’d been prepared. The flood hadn’t taken him by surprise. The last of the townspeople had been evacuated only three days ago, taken like cattle in boats with the few things they had time to pack and loaded onto railcars at the CN line. Evacuees, flood victims, the Winnipeg Free Press called them.

  Agassiz evacuation climaxes grim saga, the headline read. The saga of the rivers. The Agassiz and the Red meeting headlong in the north end of town, each carrying full loads into the late-melting tributaries. The pincer-like movement caused the waters near the mouth of the Agassiz to back up in twenty-four hours and run across Main Street at Agassiz Bridge. The saga of the government engineer’s stupidity: “We expect nothing this year to approach the ’48 flood.”

  “Expect?” Maurice had said and smacked the report in the newspaper with the back of his hand. “How can anyone expect things from the river? You listen and watch and you can feel what’s going to happen. You don’t go by charts and expect. It’s unpredictable.”

  The barbershop had become the meeting place for the daily discussions about the possibilities of the river’s flooding. Maurice, standing at the barber chair cutting hair, had remained silent until now. He was surprised by his outburst, to find himself throwing aside the need to be agreeable and to keep the peace with all around him at any cost. But if he knew anything well, it was the river. The knowledge was hidden inside him and flowed out naturally when he put his mind to it. The conversation which had centred around Bill Livingston, Agassiz’s mayor, trailed away. The men stared at Maurice.

  He was standing on an edge. His word on the line. “I’m telling you. If you know what’s good for you, then get ready for a doozer of a flood.”

  In the same tone of voice Bill Livingston had used thirty odd years ago when he’d pulled the blanket up over Maurice’s mother’s face and said to those present, “Now that’s drunk. Dead drunk. But what can you expect?” he got up from the bench, walked over to the barber chair and stuck his red face into Maurice’s. “Horse shit,” he said. “You’ll have everyone running for the hills.”

  Maurice caught sight of his own reflection in the mirror above the bench where the men had gathered. He moved around the chair gracefully, he was light on his feet. He wore his thick black hair swept back, it made him look taller. He saw the slender back of himself, the blue birthmark on his neck, while in the plate glass mirror above his marble sinks, he could see the front of himself. Mika fed him well. He had the beginning of a double chin and a slight paunch. He saw himself begin to gesture expansively, his hand extended, palm up in a sweeping motion. Look here, he was going to say to Livingston, I’m an agreeable man. He dropped his arm quickly.

  “Use your head. Forget what they’re saying in Winnipeg. Those dumbbells can’t forecast a flood until they’re up to their asses in water. I predict that it’ll be the worst flood ever.”

  Maurice’s breath came faster now as he rowed against a small side current where the water swept between two buildings. He’d said it. His word had stood and one by one the men had begun to trust his knowledge and come to him for advice. He passed by the barbershop. He passed by the movie theatre. The sign on the marquee, THE LADY TAKES A SAILOR, used to make him laugh, but because of the ferocity of the flood, now seemed to him to have been a portent filled with meaning.

  Freed of the metal graveyard of drowned vehicles that had been parked down Main Street, Maurice stopped rowing. He started up the small outboard motor that Flood Control had issued him. Engine straining, he moved out faster into the current, the bow whacking against the choppy water. And then he saw the lights of the courthouse beaming out at him from the tall narrow windows. So, the basement, she’d held. The courthouse had been built up on its foundation. It was entrenched behind sandbags, but water lapped inches from the top of the dike. He heard the sound of another motor and tension fled from his muscles. He wasn’t alone. A boat moved out from behind the courthouse, its hull cutting a deep v down into the water. It veered suddenly in his direction. He shut down his motor and waited. There were three men in the boat, two of them farmers from the area, and Woods, a young RCMP officer whose cap appeared to be held in place by his ears.

  “What’s up?” Maurice asked.

  Stevens, the younger one of the farmers, motioned wearily to the west. All three men looked alike, unshaven, complexions grey from too much coffee and too little sleep. Maurice saw the rifles on the floor of their boat.

  “He’s got fifty head of Herefords,” Woods said. His voice rose to an excited screech. “They’re stranded. Haven’t been able to get feed into them. Not sure they’ll even be there now, not after this ice.”

  “That was some night,” Maurice said. “Have you checked the basement?”

  “It’s tighter than a drum,” Woods said, echoing a Livingston pronouncement.

  That was the whole damned trouble. It was too tight. There was too much pressure on the walls. They should flood the basement or the whole thing would pop inward. Damned farmers. The closest they’d been to water before the flood was the dugouts they’d led their cows down to and Woods was still wet behind his big flapping ears.

  “What’s the situation with the livestock?” he asked.

  Stevens lifted one of the rifles and laid it across his knees.

  “Plain damned shame. Something should be done,” Maurice said. He’d told Stevens, ship ’em out. If you don’t, may as well shoot them now. “We’re all in the same condition,” he said. “My shop, your cattle. We’ll have to start over, that’s all.” He was surprised by his own sudden optimism. It was what Henry Roy would have said. He’d dispensed goodwill like pills when the going got tough.

  “Sure we will,” the farmer said. “With what? The money I’ll get from this year’s crop?”

  Maurice said, “Wait and see, the government will come through in the end.”

  The farmer spat. “Laurent doesn’t even know where Agassiz is,” he said. “And all they care about on Broadway is making sure the houses on Wellington Crescent don’t get wet.”

  “Watch, watch,” Maurice called out suddenly as a sharp piece of ice swept close to their boats. He angled his craft away into the waves. The ice slid inches from the hull of the other boat and then was gone. The three men watched it pass by. Maurice could tell they were unaware of the danger. It was a wonder there hadn’t been a serious accident, what with the mayor heading up the flood control committee. He had a bulldozer for a brain. Ran over people who didn’t agree with him. Sent people running off half-cocked to do what they damned well should have done a month ago.

  “If that one had hit, you’d have been able to drive a grain truck through the hole,” Maurice said. He felt strong, in control. “Keep your eyes open out there. An aluminum boat is no damned good in this stuff.” Old Man River. That was the name they’d given to him since his prediction of the flood had come true. Maurice Lafrenière reads the river like it was a newspaper. When the going gets tough, the tough gets going, he told himself. And he’d proven himself. Why do you have to stay, now of all times, Mika had asked. And he
couldn’t explain to her that for once he didn’t want to be on the outside, left out, but dead centre. Because Mika didn’t know otherwise. He was the one who went out each morning to check the waters’ rising, measured on a pole at Agassiz Bridge, and took the reading to the courthouse where the police radioed it into Winnipeg.

  “Why don’t you come with us?” Woods asked.

  Hold your hand, you mean. “I’m going to take the reading and then cruise around a bit, see what damage I can do. Was there any breakfast? Could eat a horse.”

  “We’ll bring you one,” Stevens said.

  Maurice chuckled at the bad joke. His spirits rose. He watched the three men head out across the open field. It was just a case of numbers to Ottawa: 28:1. If they could get the real story. Drop Laurent down in the middle of this hell, get his feet wet and he wouldn’t say, “No aid for the flood victims.”

  He tied the boat to the railing on the bridge. He didn’t dare venture into the river channel, it was choked with debris. He took the binoculars from beneath the seat and lifted them. The water rose and fell at the level of 29:3 on the pole. He predicted that the crest was days away. Three more feet of water and even the tops of the trees, the only remaining indication of where the river’s bank used to be, would be under. They were like scrawny black fingers now, pointing out the sweep and curve of the shoreline where he’d spent that terrible summer hiding from the priest who would take him to be with his brothers in the convent in the city. The memory caught at him suddenly like a camouflaged barb hooking an unsuspecting fish.

  He turned the glasses towards the cemetery. His hands shook with the cold. All the gravestones had vanished, had been tumbled by the waves or cut down by the ice and scattered like broken teeth at the bottom of the lake. He lowered the glasses. His eyes stung. His mother and father were there. They were side by side, locked into their early middle years behind the frozen ground. First his father; a railroad accident. And there had been no town clamouring to rescue that widow. She’d been ignored. Left alone to feed three kids with the money she made sewing and from her baskets. And a month later, they buried her. Dead drunk. Lying on her back in the centre of the bed, her head in a pool of grey vomit. Perspiration ran down between his shoulder blades.