Agassiz Stories

by Sandra Birdsell

  Ancient history. Ancient bloody history. I rest my head against my knees and I don’t want to cry, Larry’s not worth it, but I do. And then I take the lid off the shoebox and I pet Satan for a few moments and then I carry him to the side of the road and drop him into the tall grass. He scurries away without a backward glance.

  Do you think it’s true, Larry said, turning away from me to examine his naked physique in the mirror, that a large ass means a short sex life? That’s what my mother told me.

  And I spent the next two hours convincing him that she was wrong and that he had the neatest, hardest, turned-in buttocks I had ever seen. Bullshit. I wish for Larry an extremely short sex life. May he never have sex again. I pick up the shopping bag, swing it back and forth a couple of times and let loose. It flies across the ditch and whacks against the telephone pole. Screw yourself, Larry. Stick your scrawny dink in your ear.

  Free now, I walk faster, arms swinging, following the fish-bone tire pattern pressed into the yellow clay. I will go to Winnipeg, look for work. Or I will go to bed and stay there. Or I could go back to school. And then I hear a sound, the sound of a motor geared down low — Larry? My heart leaps. I wouldn’t put it past him. Larry can do anything. Even materialize out of thin air. I look up. There on the crest of the muddy graded mound is a pale blue car, the bullet-nosed shape of a ’51 Studebaker. It slithers sideways first one way and then the other. It stops, starts, makes its way slowly towards me. I see a man behind the wheel, copper-red hair, a brushcut. Not Larry. The car comes to a stop and the man opens the door. I measure the distance to the farmhouse beyond. Could I outrun him? He unfolds from the seat. He’s match-like, tall and thin. He stands up, shakes creases from his grey slacks, tiptoes across the ruts in shiny brown penny loafers and I begin to relax, he looks harmless. He stretches out a long pale hand to me, it looks fragile, like worn porcelain. I keep my hands behind my back. He doesn’t seem to mind and folds his, one overtop the other across his stomach. He tilts back slightly on his heels and smiles down at me. “Well, well. Bless you. This is the day that the Lord hath made. Let’s just take a moment to rejoice in it.” He breathes deeply. “Thank you, Jesus.”

  God. A Pentecostal fanatic. One of the holy rollers.

  “I saw you coming down from the corner and I said to myself, ‘Now there’s the reason God had for waking you up this morning.”’ He lifts his hand suddenly, pokes a long finger into his red hair and scratches.

  A grasshopper leaps up between us and lands on the roof of the car. I can see a resemblance between the insect and the man: long limbs, angles, ball-bearing-shaped eyes.

  “So, you’re stranded then,” he says.

  “I didn’t know about this.” I indicate the upturned road.

  “No matter,” he says. He flutters his flimsy hand in my direction and catches himself on the chin in the process. I begin to like him. His smile is wide, lights up his steel grey eyes. “Everything works out for the good in the end. For those that trust in Him. Where are you hoping to get to?”

  Life, I want to say. I am hoping to get through life, but I don’t think I will. “Agassiz.”

  “Agassiz. Well, well. The heavenly Father has given me business just outside of Agassiz. I can get you close to it. Closer than this. Didn’t I say everything would work out?”

  He leads the way around to the passenger side, opens the door and suddenly I feel awkward. Larry would let me crawl through the window before he’d think to open a door for me. The car is like new inside. The seats are covered in clear plastic. A sheet of plastic lies on the floor. On the dash is what looks to be a deck of playing cards but the box says, “Thought for Today.” Clipped to the sun visor is another card that reads, “I am a Flying Farmer.”

  He turns the car around in stages and soon we are bumping down the road, mud scraping against the bottom of the car. Despite the good condition of the car, there’s a slight ticking and I want to tell him that he ought to watch the valves but I don’t think it would be polite. I look over my shoulder and sure enough, tell-tale blue smoke billows from the exhaust. He’s a clumsy driver, shifts gears too soon, strains the engine, rides the clutch. And then the tires grab hold of a groove of deep ruts and he speeds up, letting the car find its own path.

  “So, what’s your story?” he asks after a while.

  “Story?”

  “Sure. The Lord sends me lots of people. I know when someone has a story.”

  And so I begin the way I always do, with the question that makes people frown or shrug or walk away. “Have you ever thought that at this very moment, someone may be pressing a button and that the world may come to an end? And we’ll all be instant cooked weiners?”

  He laughs. “Now why would I want to waste my time thinking about that? I couldn’t live with those negative thoughts hanging over my head all the time. I know that He is able to keep me against that day. Whatever a man thinks, that’s what he is. And I think about all the good things we’ve got.” He thumps the wheel for emphasis, sticks his head out the window. “Look around you, this country is beaudyfull. Good crops this year. The fields are white unto the harvest. Thank you, Jesus.” He begins to hum to himself as we slither down the road. Then he sucks something loose from his teeth. “Cooked weiners, my, my. That just won’t happen. Know how I know? Because I wouldn’t be here right now if that was true. The Lord would have returned already if it was the end of the world and I wouldn’t be here. I’d be with Him.”

  I know the story. I have been brought up on this. Graves opening, the rapture of the saints. People reaching towards a shining light. Whenever I heard the story, I would imagine grabbing hold of a tree on the way up so I could stay behind. “How do you know that’s true?”

  He laughs once again. “And how do you know that it isn’t? It takes more faith to believe that it isn’t true than to believe that it is. Know why? Because of hope. Man is born with hope right in him and you’ve got to go against the grain not to believe. Now tell me, what’s the story behind the story? What brings you here today, to this place, this time?”

  And suddenly, my tongue takes off and I tell him everything, about being young and hiding pieces of paper from the calendar that say, Whoever finds this, my name was Lureen Lafrenière, I lived in Agassiz, Manitoba. This month, when I was running, I slipped and fell and cut my hand on a sharp piece of ice. Five stitches.

  “For a while, I stopped doing this, I thought it was a silly thing to do. But it came back to me, the feeling, so strong, that I couldn’t sit still in school. I had to get up and move, just do something, because I felt that something terrible was going to happen that would prevent me from … from. …”

  “From doing all the things you want to do even though you aren’t even sure what it is you want to do.”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s nothing new under the sun. I’ve heard that one before.”

  “Yes, but just when man says, nothing is new, everything is the same as yesterday, then comes the end. Therefore, watch and wait.”

  He smiles and his smile makes me smile. “You know your scripture. Bless you, sister.”

  And then I tell him how I met Larry, about the past six months, about the feeling of impending doom leaving me. I talk to him as though I have known him for years and he doesn’t ever interrupt, just says, “whoops” and “bless you” when we hit large clumps of mud. I talk non-stop, as though this man were sent for just this reason. And when I finish, he doesn’t answer for a long time, just squints nearsightedly at the road and I think that I have made a mistake. I hold my breath and wait for his sermon. The Thou Shalt Nots.

  “You love him,” he says finally and puts a long, slender, cool hand overtop mine.

  “Yeah.” I realize this is true. That I am in love with Larry. While waiting for the world to end, I have fallen in love. I fell for Larry Cooper. I’m falling.

  “Well, well. Love is great. Love is wonderful. The Lord knew what He was doing when He created Adam and Eve.”

/>   I wipe my eyes on Larry’s denim shirt.

  “That fella of yours will come back. You can be sure of that.”

  “He will?”

  He squeezes my hand. “Believe it and it will happen. Tell yourself, Larry’s coming back.”

  Shit. The power of positive thinking crap. “Larry’s pretty stubborn, you don’t know him like I do.”

  “Shh. I understand. You know Larry and you may be right. But that’s only one side of it. Listen, this is my story. Long time ago, I was in a bad accident. A plane crash. I went down in the bush in northern Manitoba. I thought I was finished. I walked in circles for two days with a broken collarbone. When I came upon the plane the second time, I cried. Broke right down. And then a verse from the Bible came to me. It was, ‘not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit.’ It was the Lord telling me to trust Him. So I knelt in the bush and I prayed and I said, ‘Okay, God. I’m lost. I can’t find the way myself. I’ve already tried. And I’m tired and I’m injured and so I have no choice. I’m going to trust you. Show me the way.’ And I opened my eyes, got up, started walking and I hadn’t walked more than five minutes and there in front of me was a road. A paved road. So you see, from my side of it, I was finished. There was nothing I could do. But from God’s side, He had only just begun. And God knows Larry better than you do.”

  I want to say, I know how that happened. Often, when you try too hard, the answer escapes you. You have to give up and then the inner mind brings the answer to the surface. There wasn’t anything supernatural about your experience. It happens all the time. I bite my tongue.

  “That’s very nice,” I say.

  He turns to me in astonishment. “Nice? I tell you about my wonderful experience, how the Lord delivered me and you say, ‘That’s nice’? It was more than nice, sister. It was a frigging miracle.”

  Would an angel swear? I ponder the question later that evening as I lie in bed in the front bedroom of my house in Agassiz. He dropped me off three miles from town, near the elevators, and when I turned to tell him, as a favour, that he’d better get the valves checked, the car had vanished. And I was shocked. I sat down beside the road to think about it. I rubbed my stiff calf muscles, my feet burned as though I had walked a great distance. And I came to the conclusion that I had imagined meeting that man. The mind can do that. It was a way of coping with the situation I was in. But the question intrigues me. Would an angel swear? And was that swearing? I have always imagined swearing to mean to swear on something, to have to prove in some way the fact that you are telling the truth. The error of not being trustworthy.

  The reception I received from my family was surprising. My mother was strangely tender, as though I had fallen ill with a fever. My younger brothers and sisters regarded me as someone who had come from a long way away, a distant relative, and they were guarded and shy. “Are you expecting?” my mother asked while the two of us changed the linen on the bed in the front bedroom. And I said no, but that I wished I was. She flicked the sheet and smoothed it straight. “No you don’t,” she said. “You just think you do, but you really don’t.”

  As I lie in bed, the sounds around me are all familiar. The town siren blares out the ten o’clock curfew. The curtains on the window are the same ones I’ve had since I can remember. But I pull the sheet up around me and I feel like a guest, a visitor in the home I grew up in. How will I ever be able to sleep without Larry?

  I remember our first date. Larry showing off, climbing up on a snowplow in the municipal yards, starting it and ripping through the chainlink fence before he could figure out how to stop it. And later, driving eighty miles to Manitou to crawl across the roof of the butcher shop, breaking a window to get into the suite. Still wearing our parkas, it was bitterly cold, I gave up my virginity while our breath hung in clouds of frost in the air above us and the beer we’d bought popped the caps and climbed up in frosty towers from the bottles. Afterward, teeth chattering, we chewed frozen malt and Larry warmed my hands in his armpits.

  The memory climbs up the back of my throat, finds its way into my eyes, leaks down the sides of my face into the pillow. Okay, God. I’ll give you this one chance. This miracle involves another person, his own stubborn will. I clench my teeth. I feel as though I am levitating off the bed. This is it. Thanks for bringing Larry back to me.

  I sigh. I’m calm. Tension seeps from me as I lie in the room where I have first thought of love and making it happen. And I hear the breeze in the trees outside the window. I have hidden many particles of time beneath their branches. I see the faint glow of the town. And if I got up, I would see the green watertower and the siren on it that orders the movement of my town. I would see the skating rink, my father coming down from the corner on his way home from the Hotel, to the news that Lureen’s back home. And then I hear it, a jangle of keys that stiffens my spine, sends my heart jumping. Then a cough. I’m rigid, listening. A whistle. I leap down the bed, pull aside the curtains and below I see him, his narrow pale face turned up to the window, Larry in his white windbreaker, collar turned up, the glow of his cigarette.

  “Larry?”

  “For shitsake. What’s keeping you?” he asks.

  And I run barefoot down the stairs, through the rooms, out the front door and then Larry catches me by the wrist and pulls me to him, wraps me around his skinny shivering body.

  “Blew a rod at Thunder Bay,” he says. “I couldn’t fix it.”

  Liar. “I’m sorry,” I say. He kisses me. His mouth is chilly and warm at the same time. I wedge my tongue between his shivering lips.

  He pulls away. “I caught a ride with a real weirdo. He offered me fifty bucks if I’d jerk him off. So I said to hell with it and I took the first bus going west.”

  “Hey, honey bunch,” I whisper into his neck, “let’s go to the park. We can talk tomorrow.”

  “The park, what for?” But I can feel him growing hard against my stomach. “I haven’t got anything on me. You know.” His tongue answers mine and it’s like the faint fluttering of a moth.

  I link my arm through his and lead him in the direction I want to go. “Oh, by the way, I let the rabbit loose.”

  He stops walking, frowns. “What did you go and do that for?”

  “Well, he was heavy, Larry. I suppose you never thought of that. And there I was, thirty miles from nowhere. I had to walk because the bloody road was under construction, so what was I supposed to do?”

  “You’ve got all the brains,” Larry says. “Why ask me?”

  And we walk arm in arm down the road, Larry and me going to the park.

  NIAGARA FALLS

  n January, Henry J. Zacharias had his first stroke.

  It was late afternoon, around four o’clock, when Elizabeth began the eleven-mile drive from the hospital in Reinfeld to their farm, a trip she would make over and over. “I keep a close watch on that heart of mine,” Johnny Cash sang as she travelled down the long stretch of road that connected the town with the highway. She switched off the radio. Music didn’t seem right at a time like this. She drove cautiously, holding on to the wheel too tightly, fearing an accident. It was at times like these, when your nerves were stretched too tight, that things went wrong. She passed by the feed mill and slowed down as she approached Ellis’s Greenhouses. Should she stop and let him know about Henry, that she wouldn’t be able to come in for the seeding? No. He would wonder how she could even think about such things.

  The thump of tires against the pavement felt rhythmic and sure, but the point at which she aimed seemed fixed and unreachable as the horizon which sometimes in winter disappeared so that she couldn’t tell, where was sky, where was land? She was vaguely aware of a cluster of brown trees in the middle of a field, huddled together in a bank of snow like old women at a funeral, long shadows, their skirts blotting out the wash of pastel sky-colours reflected all about in the hard snow. Minutes later (how many, five, fifteen?) she passed by her lane, past the buildings all yellow with green trim that distinguished Henry J. Za
charias’s farm from the others; from Henry P. Zacharias (no relation), who was called Hank by his neighbours and whose farm was twice the size of theirs and stretched all the way to Roland.

  Realizing her error, she braked quickly, felt the wheels skid on ice. She held her breath to contain her rising panic, steering into the skid instinctively, thinking, already I have gotten myself into trouble, felt the vehicle swing out of the slide, pass centre and fishtail sharply. Today she couldn’t go off the road, not today because then Hank P. would have to come with his tractor to pull her out and (one thing for certain) she didn’t want to have to ask him for anything, but the wheels caught at buried gravel and the car steadied. She breathed a prayer of relief. She backed the car slowly towards the lane. The driveway had disappeared. She searched through the windshield for some sign of it, a track that would guide her safely into the yard, but the combination of waning light and fresh snow had erased all traces of it. The house itself appeared abandoned, the windows dark mirrors reflecting the setting sun. She was cut off from her house. She got out of the car and walked down the lane. The fluffy snow, ankle-deep, bit at her bare skin. She hadn’t stopped to put boots on this morning when she saw Henry fall. She’d run from the house not thinking, just oh God, oh God. One minute he was walking, strong, and the next, like a bird crashing into the window, he faltered, his arms flailing, looking for something to hold on to, and he was down, a brilliant red plaid heap in the snow. Fresh snow covered the spot near the mailbox where he’d fallen. She walked back to the car and followed her footprints into the lane, passed them by, and then braver, drove by faith into the circle of her yard.

  She waited in the car until she’d stopped shaking and then went into the house. She stamped snow from her feet and walked across the kitchen, her steps sluggish, as though she waded through water, to the calendar which hung beside the telephone. “Arrive Niagara Falls, 8 am,” she’d written on it that morning. Only a week away from their first vacation, an anniversary present from their only son, John, and his wife, Sharon. She picked up the pencil and wrote, “Henry goes to the hospital.” Her spidery, odd-shaped letters ran off the square into the next date. Henry was there in Reinfeld in the hospital and she was here, at the farm. The floor cracked suddenly as though someone just entered the room. Phone John’s place, she told herself, see if they’re back from the city yet. But she didn’t pick up the receiver. She knew too much. She’d seen the doctor thump hard with the heel of his palm against Henry’s breastbone to try to rouse him. She knew his illness would take up many squares on the calendar. Inside his head, a large field had been marked off. She’d stood beside his bed and watched him fall deeper into sleep. Where are you? she’d asked him silently, and then, where am I? Was she the one who had fallen asleep today?