Agassiz Stories

by Sandra Birdsell

  “Twenty-five thousand.”

  “So much? I don’t have that much money.”

  “I know,” John said and she knew now the reason for his quietness. He was worried. She felt the knot of braids pull at the back of her head. She ran water into the sink, began stacking dishes down into the soapy water.

  “What then?” she asked, fearful, her old sickness bumping there beneath her breastbone, dreading his answer.

  “Sharon’s father has agreed to lend us part of it. I could sell Dad’s machinery,” he said. “I could get a good price for it.”

  Henry’s acreage was small, a little over one section, that was all. What kind of a price would she get without the machinery?

  “Mama,” John said, using his old name for her, a form of endearment. “He’ll never work again. I thought you realized that.”

  It was true. And Mr. Ellis could up and sell the greenhouse before Henry realized it. “And what would I do?” she asked. “If something happened to your father, what would I do in town? Work in the shop?”

  “You wouldn’t need to work,” he said. “If things go as well as they have so far, you wouldn’t need to work anymore. Sharon and I would see to that. I think it’s a good investment for you. We’d be partners, the three of us, you, me and the Lord.”

  “How could you refuse such a generous offer?” Irma asked the following day. They carried wooden flats in from the yard and stacked them against the wall in the greenhouse. The time was right to begin transplanting, culling the spindly seedlings and transferring the stronger ones to the flats where they would grow thick and straight. Now is the time to do it, John had said. Now is the time, she repeated over and over while she worked.

  “What do you mean?” Elizabeth asked, offended by Irma’s tone of voice. Irma Muller is an old woman who tries to look young, John had once said, because the woman coloured her hair blonde and used cosmetics. Elizabeth had not reminded him that she and Irma were the same age.

  “Well, kid, how could you refuse a partnership with God, tell me? He’s got you over a barrel, that one. Smart.”

  Elizabeth knew what it must look like to Irma, but she was certain John was sincere. “He’s my son,” she said. “If a son can’t come to his mother, then who should he go to?” She said this to slight Irma, who let her only daughter Marlene run free like a stray dog.

  Irma let a bundle of flats drop to the ground with a great clatter. “Why doesn’t he go to his father?” she asked. “No, he knows better,” she said and lifted her little finger. “He’s got you right there.”

  Elizabeth was hanging her overalls in the back porch after work when she saw Hank P’s truck pull into the yard. She was about to call into the house, Henry, you’d better come, Hank P. is here, and then quickly step out of sight, but. … She folded her arms across her chest. She would speak to him on her own. Had Henry somehow gotten a message to him?

  Hank stood with the door open neither inside nor out. He seemed uncertain whether he should enter. “How is Mr. Zacharias today?” he asked. His red sideburns grew thick and curly halfway down the sides of his face, making it seem broader than it was. She noticed a button missing from his shirt and his bare stomach, curly fine hairs. So he didn’t wear an undershirt in winter either, not like Henry who wore one summer and winter, day and night. Her eyes met his. He was almost as tall as she was. It made her uneasy to stand eye to eye with a man.

  “He’s the same,” she said.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, as nice and polite as if someone listened behind the door. He stood turning his cap in his hands, which were sprinkled with cinnamon-coloured freckles (young-looking hands cupping a large white breast). His hair, red, against her own dark hair. That old man, he can’t be of much use for you. Was he truly sorry? For her, or for Henry? She knew what he’d gone through when his Anna died with cancer.

  “I’ve come to see you about the cultivator,” Hank said. “Mr. Zacharais said last fall, if I fixed it I could use it.”

  She nodded.

  “So, I thought you should know. I’ll be working in the machine shed until it’s done.” He turned in the doorway and put his cap back on.

  He was being so polite. “Wait, Henry wanted me to …,” Elizabeth began.

  He removed his cap once again and waited.

  “Henry said to, he sends his regards,” she said and looked away. Blood rushed to her face. I have never made love to anyone other than my husband, she’d told Irma, so that she could taste the memory of him rushing against her. She had written on the calendar, “Today while I was digging among the garbage heap for mushrooms, I found a leper in lovely clothes of hard knotted flesh.” Henry had read it, asked her what it meant. It’s just an idea that came to me, she said. That’s all. Did Hank think she was remembering that afternoon halfway between Winnipeg and Reinfeld? The day she’d gone to get the chicks. “I’m not here most afternoons,” she said to cover her confusion. “But feel free to come in and help yourself to coffee. I’ll leave it on the stove.”

  He stared at her longer than was necessary to thank her. He closed the door behind him and she stood rooted, confused and angry with herself because she had not given him Henry’s message, because she had blushed so readily and now, after all these years, what did he think?

  In March, the doctor intercepted Elizabeth as she was about to enter Henry’s room. “I’m sorry,” he said flatly, “but Mr. Zacharias has contracted pneumonia.” It seemed like a strange way of putting it, as though Henry had an obligation to take on this new disease.

  Her chest ached as she watched Henry’s straining to breathe. Tubes dripped medicine into his veins. A nurse came in and pushed a rubber hose into his throat, switched on a machine and sucked up his mucus. Elizabeth gagged. But when it was over, Henry could breathe easier and so she was grateful to the nurse and smiled at her, stepping out of her path quickly to show she was anxious not to be a nuisance.

  Today, she would have told him about the snowstorm, how Hank P. had ploughed their lane so she could come to the hospital. “Snow as high as my waist in the lane,” she had written. But such news was of no use to poor Henry. He struggled to speak. “What is it?” she asked, dreading some message, some final command, some last question about chicks and accidents.

  “Ruining the land,” Henry said.

  Her heart constricted. “Who is ruining the land?” Had he heard somehow that she hadn’t leased it yet?

  His mouth, encrusted with fever blisters, moved painfully slow. “Communists.”

  Her shoulders sagged with immense relief. She watched the slow drip, drip of medicine into the glass tube for several minutes and then left.

  Elizabeth felt March press in on her as she listened daily to Henry’s feverish ranting. The septic tank froze and she didn’t call John. John was too busy with his own life and besides, she really was undecided about the money. She hated to picture them praying every day, or the thought that she really might be the answer to their money problems. She called a company in town to come with their heat lamps and torches to thaw out the septic tank, but they weren’t in any rush and so in the meantime, she squatted amid the trees beside the granaries and threw her dishwater onto the yard and bathed at Irma’s house in town until it was fixed.

  Henry seemed never better, never worse. They took away his exercise bar. He was gaunt and appeared bitter over this new setback. She felt responsible. As though she’d caused it to happen by talking of selling off the land. Since she’d decided not to carry Henry’s message to Hank P., she couldn’t look fully into her husband’s eyes, brilliant with the remnant of his fever, but off to one side. The evasion and the sameness of her life depressed her. March weighed heavily and it was on such a day that she arrived for work to find the “For Sale” sign pushed down into the ground beside the greenhouse. She stared at it, telling herself, this is what you get. This is what happens when you even think such selfish things. She backed the car out and drove home.

  When she
opened the back door, she saw rubber boots on the mat. She reached up to hang her coveralls and saw Hank’s parka. She felt the strangeness of its presence pass through her hands as she hung her clothes beside his. When she stepped into the kitchen he was working with his tools at the sink. The faucet lay in pieces on the counter.

  “I thought seeing as how I had my tools with me, I might as well fix it,” he said without turning around.

  That was what he’d said that summer, pulling alongside her car, offering to fix the tire. “You needn’t have gone to so much trouble. John would have fixed it for me.” Then knowing she sounded ungrateful, she thanked him, feeling the blood rushing to her face once again.

  There was nothing she could do without coming too close to him and so she poured a cup of coffee and watched him work. He was across the room and yet it seemed as though he was there beside her. Bending his red head across her chest, his hand cupping her breast, tongue circling her nipple. Soon he was finished and washing his hands, and she was lying across the seat in the car, thinking, so this is what it’s like with another man. She had to tell herself over and over to remember that she’d been disappointed that it hadn’t been all that different. He wiped his hands on her good dishtowel and squatted to pack his tools into the toolbox. She noticed the straining of the muscles in his thighs against the fabric of his pants. She stared down at the bottom of the porcelain cup. She used to imagine what it would be like with another man and when she’d glanced down at him poised above her, she’d been amazed at how similar he was to Henry, she thought he’d be bigger, stronger looking. Maybe if she had let herself go more it would have been different, she told herself. Let him touch her all over and smell her the way he wanted to. He stood beside the door ready to leave.

  “It’s fixed,” he said.

  “Thank you.” She smiled.

  “I’ve also finished work on the cultivator today,” he said. “Tell Mr. Zacharias it’s working.”

  “I will.” He acted as though someone were looking over his shoulder.

  He hesitated. His expression changed. He seemed to be nourishing a cunning thought. “Has Mr. Zacharias ever said what he plans to do?” He spoke with a gesture, indicating with his freckled, sure hands (between her legs forcing them open) the wide expanse of Henry’s fields. “We, some of the neighbours, would do the seeding for him. If that’s his wish.”

  “I plan to sell,” Elizabeth said.

  His thick eyebrows shot up, he recovered and his face became expressionless.

  “Would you be interested?” she asked.

  Again their eyes met and she saw something else flicker in his eyes, a look of unsureness. She was surprised and then faintly exhilarated by the thought, I have made him feel uneasy.

  “I might be.”

  As the door closed behind him, Elizabeth lifted the cup and pressed its edge against her teeth. Her breath was hot inside the cup and moisture clung to the fine dark hairs above her lip. She watched Hank’s truck turn the corner at the end of the lane. I plan to sell, she’d said, as though it was her farm to sell. And saying it made it seem real. I am tired of carrying people around on my back, she’ll tell Irma, who will crow and say, well it’s about time. She got up from the table and wrote on the calendar, “Make an appointment with the hairdresser.”

  In the middle of April, Henry had another stroke. “Henry has another bout, quite bad,” Elizabeth wrote, the terse calmness of the words denying the turmoil inside. She stayed with him all day now, leaving only to get a bite to eat at a restaurant in town. She stood at the narrow, tall window beside his bed and noticed it was finally spring. Moist warm air rushed into the room overtop the gentle hiss of the radiator. Below in the parking lot, people arriving to visit, wearing light coats, sweaters and also below, Hank P.’s truck.

  She emptied the basin of water into the sink beside Henry’s bed with shaking hands and turned to face Hank, who had come into the room without making a sound. He nodded to her. His eyes took in Henry’s shell-like body, the tubes in his nose, the bag at the foot of the bed that collected his wastes.

  “I heard he was worse. I’m sorry,” Hank said in a kind way that made her remember that his wife had suffered. Hank was different than the Hank who had laughed while she’d rammed her car into his car, because he wouldn’t let her pass, making her angry in a way she never thought anyone could. She was about to thank him but saw that his voice had lied. The same smug expression was there, uncovered, and his desire for her, controlled, he would wait until she couldn’t wait. He was passing his lust for her across the inert form of her Henry.

  “If you need anything at all,” he said. “I’ll come.”

  She nodded. “John can come, too.”

  Henry sighed deeply and they were diverted to him, to the bed. His chest moved gently up and down and the blankets with it. His sternness was pinched out like a candle; had it ever been real, or had it been a covering? she wondered. Henry hadn’t asked her for anything and he had shared all with her. He was a feather now, falling among feathers.

  Hours later as Elizabeth came back from eating lunch, the nurse met her at the door of the hospital and said, “Mr. Zacharias has just died.” Then they took her to his room and left her alone with him. She pulled out the drawer and dropped his comb and brush into the plastic net bag she carried in her purse. She collected his partial plate from the cardboard container. She thought she might cry. It was the time for it. She looked around the cubicle for one last time. Henry’s final giving out had already been absorbed by the breath of others. She imagined the lane, his residue fading even now beneath the melting snow. It was all done now: his slippers, housecoat, the partial plate. She set the bag down. There was one last thing she wanted to do. She gathered Henry in her arms and carried him over to the window. He was lighter than a child. “See, out there,” she said. “It’s spring.”

  When she passed through the large glass doors, she was surprised to discover that it had been raining. “First rain today,” she would write on the calendar. She’d signed the papers to release Henry’s body to the undertakers with a steady hand. No, she’d said, I don’t need to wait for my son to come. But I’ll wait. She walked towards his car on the parking lot. A door slammed shut as Sharon came running towards her. It’s all right, she’ll tell them. I’m all right. She would go to see the falls. She would hold on to the railing or she would let herself go. Whatever she did, she would do willingly.

  MOONLIGHT SONATA

  ugust 17, 1960. Above me, a moist burlap blanket descended over the shoebox of the town where I lived until the sky was in place, draped in heavy folds and turned beneath the horizon. There were four of us sitting in front of the Hotel on Main Street that Saturday night, waiting. We were always waiting for something to happen, some event which would ease our tension-filled boredom.

  Around us, pressed into the inky sky, were the blue cut-out shapes of buildings, windows lit, squares of hard yellow light dividing the shadows on the sidewalk where we sat on our haunches, leaning against the stucco wall. Moths skittered across the surface of the night, a blizzard in the lights above the doorways, the streetlights, drawing my eyes to their centre until I, too, had that feeling of swarming, of coming to the light.

  I remember on the corner, a telephone booth. Someone had kicked through the glass door and inside it, smelling of beer, a swaying man embraced the telephone to keep from falling. I recalled reading a survey in the newspaper on how forty-two per cent of women polled said they were discontented. The main problems, they said, were their mates’ selfishness, drinking, and bad house habits. I knew the man in the telephone booth and thought he was probably guilty of all three. And that if they had done a survey in Agassiz alone the percentage probably would have been much higher because all around, like the sickly sweet smell of a ripening garden, discontent hovered.

  Strung across Main Street, coloured lights and several burned-out bulbs combined to create a chain of dots and dashes. Coded messages. Get out, they sa
id. Go away now before you can’t. The warm pavement bit my haunches as I sat beside Gail and watched the horseplay of the two boys, Wayne and Scott, tearing at each other, karate-like chops, fake blows to the stomach.

  — flea brain!

  — hiyah!

  — pissuparope you sonofabitch

  — oh yeah? oh yeah?

  I see the same boys now, younger though, in almost every schoolyard I pass by. Their shouted obscenities are more vivid but the intent the same. I see the boys kneeing one another, grabbing at each other’s crotches. The fake blows. The not so fake blows. I remember my son, the oldest, coming home from kindergarten the first day with a bloody nose. They played pile on the rabbit, he said. And I was the rabbit. When they played football, he was the ball. He was small for his age, thin, loved to cut and paste and when my students came for their piano lessons, he wrapped his blanket about himself and curled up on the floor and listened. Now he drives around with them on the weekend, the ball carriers, screaming “faggot” at homosexuals on Memorial Boulevard. But, oh, I know his baroque behaviour well, the tensions lurking beneath his eyelids, the complexity of his bones. Frank, his father, understands other things. He understands the drinking, the speeding tickets. He hosed the boy down in the shower, towelled him dry, laughed at him as he retched his first drunk into the toilet. But the drugs Frank doesn’t understand. And like me, he lies in bed while the boy is out, perplexed and silent. The air in the room is heavy with our thoughts and I remember that.

  The air was close that night, my chest ached then, too, with the fullness of it. It made me want to stretch and gulp for more. I think I knew I would be leaving Agassiz soon and so I was making an effort to record the place. Like the soil of my valley, thick and black and sticky for days after a rain so that it spatters pant legs and has to be chipped or brushed free, I wanted the memory of that place to cling to me. I wanted to remember the heat of it, the discontent, the feeling of living in a shoebox.