by Paula Fox
“A still, you mean?”
“That’s right. In the line of work I know about these places.” He turned toward her. She smelled his mint-flavored breath.
“But it’s illegal. Don’t you arrest bootleggers?” she asked. She felt helpless, crouched there behind him.
“Yes, I do arrest them. Not on my time off, though. After a while, they start up all over again. It’s the laws that are wrong. The farmers know they can be arrested, and they know some judge could make it hard for them. They’re poor people mostly. They need the extra money.”
“What about when they don’t need extra money?”
‘I don’t know about that,” he replied indifferently. “Your father was saying he might write a book about us here, about Nova Scotia, and that’s why he wanted to know about the bootlegging. Get the flavor of the place—so to speak.”
She squeezed herself tighter into the seat. What a fool Macbeth was! Chewing a mint to make himself sweet, putting on his buttercup tie—didn’t he know what was up? Would he believe her if she shouted at him that her father was on a tear, that he wanted to drink up every still for miles around?
“I’ve got to get out of this back seat. I feel like a pretzel,” she said.
He was quick to help her out, gripping her wrist with his warm, hard hand. She was being unfair to him. Her father was making everything turn bad.
They stood silently in the moist air. He lit a cigarette. Only the blurred light from the barn showed there was anyone else abroad in the night. There wasn’t any noise coming from there at all.
“You go to school here in Canada?” Macbeth whispered.
“Yes,” she answered loudly. She wanted the bootlegger to know there was someone out here. The barn door opened; a ray of light fell on the ground. She saw her father coming back. She got into the car at once.
“Fascinating!” Mr. Ames said expansively. “What an extraordinary process! It’s been going on forever, of course. I wonder if you know, Macbeth, that in Sweden there’s a limit on profits you can make from liquor. Ethically sound but absolutely senseless.”
Macbeth nodded but said nothing as they drove to the tarmac road.
“I hope you got a sample,” Catherine said.
“Indeed, I did,” replied Mr. Ames quickly. “And delicious it was. I had to test the product … quite a bit like gasoline, I imagine.”
“Cranshaw’s new at it,” Macbeth said apologetically.
“All the same to me, lad,” said Mr. Ames with an easy laugh.
They drove down other rough roads. Once Catherine was flung up and hit her head on the roof.
“I beg your pardon,” said Macbeth.
“Ow!” cried her father in a falsetto voice.
How she hated them both!
As they waited for Mr. Ames outside a large shed, rain began to fall. Macbeth tried once more to engage her in conversation. “Where is your school?” he asked.
“Montreal,” she replied, and not a word more.
The enmity she felt toward him, unjust as she knew it to be, had the effect of making her feel as old as he was. She heard him sigh. She didn’t feel a touch of sympathy for him. He was a country cop who now and then arrested a farmer. He was someone her father was making a fool of.
Yet she felt a contrary emotion; she wanted to apologize to him, to tell him everything. They were nearly the same age. Her father was an old pirate. They might just drive off and leave him in that shed with the still and the bootlegger. Let him talk to the bootlegger about social contracts!
Mr. Ames returned. He got into the car, talking. His arms waved. For Macbeth’s benefit, she guessed, he told the story of the man who lived in a lighthouse, the one whose appendix had burst. But he changed the ending. The man walked eight miles only to die on the steps of a village post office. She was as shocked as though she’d known that man, and her father had betrayed him, killed him.
Mr. Ames turned to look at her. “Lots of endings to a story,” he said challengingly.
They stopped at one more place, a garage behind a pool hall just outside of Halifax. It was raining hard now, and she and Macbeth went into the pool hall to wait. Her father had seemed more or less sober until that moment. As he walked past the pool table, and a coffee bar where a lone man sat reading a torn newspaper, he began to stagger suddenly, as if something invisible to the eye were striking him, his shoulders, his back, his arms. “Daddy,” she muttered. It almost seemed as if he had heard her. He turned, straightening up, smiled vaguely, and waved in her direction.
The dark street ran with rain. Across it, in a farmhouse set back from the road, a light flickered like a candle in a draft. She leaned against the pool table, her hand on the green baize, picking at its surface.
She had to try to keep still, to keep calm. There would be tomorrow; this night would end.
Macbeth was lighting another cigarette.
“I’ve never been to New York,” he said. “Just went to Augusta, Maine, once.” He looked at her hopefully. Still trying.
“In New York there’s a bar on every corner and three in the middle of every block,” she said, with so much anger she was sure he ducked, as though she’d hurled some object at him.
He went to the door and threw his cigarette into the street. When he turned back, she saw how troubled his broad face was. He shook his head. “I didn’t know he’d drink so much,” he said in a low voice. “I thought he was mostly going to see how the stills worked.”
She heard her father shout incoherently. Catherine ran to the back of the pool hall and stepped across a narrow cement walk to the threshold of the garage.
Mr. Ames was on his hands and knees barking like a dog. An elderly woman who was leaning against a pile of tires was laughing, her mouth wide open, a gold tooth gleaming under the dim light of a single bulb that hung down from the raw wood ceiling. Next to her stood a short, skinny man with work pants rolled up around his thin shanks, his feet in heavy muddy boots. His lips clenched, he seemed to taste something bitter. Another woman, even older than the first, was sitting in a straight-backed chair, bent forward with laughter. Slowly, one by one, their faces turned toward her. In a dark corner was the shadowed still, most of it covered by tarpaulin. She saw part of a boiler, a spiral pipe, and on the floor several fruit juice bottles filled with copper-colored liquid.
“I want to go home,” she said urgently. “Daddy. Please.” Her voice broke. The skinny man smiled faintly as though she might be part of the joke of this grotesque American on his knees in front of them. But the woman in the chair stood up in an efficient way, smoothing her housedress, looking at a large man’s watch on her wrist.
“Now, Mr. Ames, daughter has come for you,” she said. “Time to be off with Alistair out there.”
The skinny man darted forward and grabbed her father by his shoulders and lifted him up and held him there, his head lolling. “The women …” he mumbled. “They call the tune, right, lads?”
Macbeth came to help lug the shapeless bundle of Mr. Ames back through the poolroom and into the car. The pool hall light went off. Macbeth was speaking; she didn’t listen. All the way home, Catherine held onto her father’s shoulders so he wouldn’t slip forward against the windshield. He muttered from time to time, his words indistinguishable.
It was after midnight when Macbeth parked in the yard. They pulled Mr. Ames from the car and pushed him up the staircase and into his room. Macbeth aimed him at his bed and let him drop. His eyes were shut tight but he emitted a series of shrill yelps. At once, he began to snore heavily.
Macbeth continued to stand in the room, his hands in his jacket pockets. “I’m really sorry, Miss,” he said.
“Could you go?” she asked urgently.
“I feel terrible.…”
“Mr. Macbeth, you gave him the chance. You didn’t force him to drink. Please just go away.”
“I’d like to see you again,” he said, with a kind of desperation that startled her. “I could show you some bea
utiful beaches, places a lot of people don’t even know about. I mean—nice places.”
“Mr. Macbeth, I don’t want to ever see you again.”
He left then. She went to the window. He tripped on his way to the car. She saw his face when he turned on the ignition. God only knew what he thought about it all.
Mr. Ames had stopped snoring. His breathing grew noisy, labored. She walked to his bed and took off his beautiful cordovan shoes, dropping them on the floor. She removed his jacket, lifting him and turning him on his side. He flailed out violently once. She stood back and watched him settle down, one clenched fist against his cheek. A thick, sour smell rose from him; he reeked like a swamp. Disgusted and frightened, she moved away from him, back to the window.
The silence pressed in, a silence broken only by his stertorous breathing. The farmers all would be sleeping now; they’d earned their few dollars for the night’s work. Mr. Ames groaned deeply. Catherine shivered.
Her mother could not have known this about him—this obliteration. That’s what it meant—to pass out, the heat of life gone. He had passed out from among the living.
“How lonely are the dead,” she said silently to herself. Where had that scrap of poetry come from? It didn’t matter. What she felt suddenly, intensely, was pity. She tiptoed back to the bed and drew up a thin blanket to cover him. She didn’t know why she bothered to tiptoe. The end of the world couldn’t have waked him up. She had never seen anyone so drunk, except for a man lying on a sidewalk in New York City. She and her mother and Carter had just come out of a movie theater. The man had risen from a pile of newspapers and staggered after them. Carter clutched them both and hurried them into a taxi.
Mr. Ames coughed, and the cough turned into a bubbling, choking spasm. He began to tremble violently.
Without pausing to think about what she was going to do, Catherine ran down the stairs, found the car keys on the hall table where Mr. Ames usually left them, and went out and started up the car. She drove down the center of the road, faster than she had ever driven, until she came to Mackenzie. In two minutes, she was knocking at Reverend Ross’s door.
“My father is sick, drunk,” she said when the Reverend opened the door. She was gasping with fear now, a sense that it was too late—everything was too late. Yet she noticed he was wearing a burnoose. What her father had said flashed into her mind—everyone has a hidden life. What if he died on that bed in the little house? Drowning in all he had consumed that night?
“Come in,” the Reverend said. He took her arm and led her to a chair in the hall. “Sit there. I’ll get dressed and go back with you. If he needs a doctor, we’ll take him in to Halifax. Our local fellow has gone out to Moncton to a conference.”
She heard his voice upstairs, a woman’s voice answering. Her hands were fists in her lap; she was pushed against time, trying to corner it. Ross returned, dressed. As she drove him back to the house, she told him about the bootleggers, how her father had been drinking steadily for four hours.
“I know all about it,” the Reverend said. “I know what happens.”
“He might be dead,” she suddenly cried out, her hands gripping the steering wheel.
“No. He won’t be dead. He’s a strong fellow,” Ross said. “I noticed that about him when we went fishing. His vigor.”
She parked and ran into the house, not looking behind her to see whether the Reverend was following. But she heard him, pounding up the stairs just behind her.
Mr. Ames was lying on his back. He had thrown off the blanket. There was a long tear in his shirt, as though he had tried to rip it off. His breathing was heavy, uneven. But he wasn’t choking now. Even though she wasn’t alone, she didn’t know if she could bear to hear that choking again.
The Reverend stood by the bed, staring down at Mr. Ames. Carefully, as though it were breakable, he lifted her father’s hand and held it. A long time seemed to pass. Catherine felt Ross was holding her father to life as one held a swimmer in trouble above the water.
“He’ll sleep it off,” said the old man. “He’s no worse off than many a man I’ve seen collapsed at midnight, able to get up in a few hours to milk the cows. Yes, they keep doing it until they die from it. They think it’s their own will that keeps them drinking.” He lowered her father’s hand to the bed.
Mr. Ames sat up, his eyes wide open. He didn’t appear to see them standing there, watching him. He bent over and gripped his belly, flung himself out of bed, and staggered from the room across the passageway to the bathroom. Ross and Catherine went after him. He was leaning over the toilet bowl, vomiting. The Reverend put one arm around Mr. Ames’s waist, the other he pressed across his forehead. Catherine felt the answering, upward movement of her own guts as her father heaved and spat into the bowl. She went to the tub, wet the edge of a cloth, and wiped his face, wiped away the tears of his struggle, her hands entangled with the Reverend’s as they tended him.
When they got him back to his bed, Ross said, “I’ll get his clothes off, make him more comfortable. He’ll be better now with the poison out of him. He’ll sleep. Does he have nightclothes somewhere?”
Catherine took a pair of old flannel pajamas from a nail behind the door and handed them to Ross. Mr. Ames mumbled. He grinned dreadfully, his eyes shut. Ross gestured toward her with a certain impatience. “Go, wait,” he said.
She went downstairs and sat in the parlor. After several minutes, Ross came down. “He’s well away. He’ll be all right,” he said, looking at her closely. She could tell he was thinking hard about her.
“I thank you so much,” she said, barely recognizing her own voice, it was so thin, so calm. “I don’t know what I would have done.…”
“You would have managed,” the Reverend said gravely. “Only, of course, it’s better to have—it’s a comfort to have someone else about. You can feel more alone in a room with someone who is drunk than if you’re by yourself. The women around here often call me. They know what to do with the men when they get in that condition. But I’m a comfort to them.” He wasn’t boasting. He was simply telling her what was so.
Would her father have laughed at him as he had after their picnic together? She wouldn’t ever laugh at him again. Everything he said was so plain and true. Could her father ever comfort someone by just being around?
“It’s a shame,” Ross was saying, “that you have to see such things at your age. But not altogether a shame. If you can understand it a little. Forgive it. We’re all helpless in one way or another. Drinking is a terrible misfortune. If you remember that—Well, I don’t know what more to say.”
She had been ashamed. Now the shame was gone.
“When I was a young man, I had his trouble,” Ross said, staring at her. He seemed about to say something else but he didn’t. The night had worn her so, she felt like litmus paper, as though she could take the imprint of words left unsaid. She knew he had been about to speak of religion, of his belief. But he was a man of some tact. She would not have known that if he hadn’t come with her tonight.
“We’re leaving very soon,” she said. “I’ll be going home to New York, to my mother. And then back to school.”
He walked over to where she sat and pressed her shoulder for a moment. “You’ll be all right, too,” he said, and went out the door. He was silent during the drive to his house. She was glad for that. There wasn’t anything more to say.
Just before he got out of the car, he said, “Perhaps you’ll come back and see us one of these days.”
She didn’t think she would come back, but if she did, she thought she would want to see him again.
She drove home slowly.
Her father was sleeping quietly. His breathing was normal. She cleaned the bathroom, opening a small window over the bathtub to air it out. She washed the toilet bowl and the basin, even the bathtub, then mopped up the floor with a sponge. It was nearly five A.M. when she finally got to bed. She fell asleep at once.
Seven
When she awoke
the sun was blazing at her window. It was Saturday. Mrs. Landy would not come today. It was hard to get up but harder to lie in bed, thinking of the day ahead. At last she rose and went to the door of her father’s room. He was asleep. The brilliant morning light fell across his face. He looked like a yellowing photograph of himself. There was a stubble of beard on his cheeks. She wouldn’t shave him again.
She made herself a cup of tea. Gradually she grew aware that she was behaving fussily, folding her hands between sips of tea, keeping her feet neatly in place, gazing at a wrinkled apple on the counter, then at a dish towel hanging from a nail, as though she were reflecting deeply.
The truth was, she was scared.
Her father was an elderly man, out of control. How did Emma stay with him? Did she, with all her money, run away in airplanes and limousines unless he promised to stay sober? How could Catherine and he manage to get through the two days left of their time together?
“It’s painful to know you’re alive,” he had said to her, “because then you know you’re mortal.” That was why people wanted distraction—not to have to feel that life in themselves that would run out someday. But you had to know it, he had said; it was the only victory a person could have. Had he known he was alive last night when he was crawling around on his hands and knees, barking? She shuddered at the memory of that scene.
He would try to win her. He often spoke of winning this person or that the way you won a trophy. People would be disappointed in him—then he would have to “win” them back. She felt a stitch of pity for him, the kind of stitch she got when she had run too fast, forgetting she had a body. And the stitch would remind her of her rib cage, her heart, its vulnerability. Her pity for him was her vulnerability to him. Maybe Harriet was better off sneering and pointing her stubby, fat finger at the world. There was no romance of life for Harriet, no pity in her.
She realized that her father would not have been surprised by the side of Reverend Ross she had seen last night. Although she had been. But her father knew about people, knew they were full of contradictions. What she couldn’t bear was how he used his knowledge.
