Death of a Hired Man

by Eric Wright

  She stood in the doorway now, in one hand carrying a bottle of wine, and with her other hand leading forward a coffee-colored stranger of medium height, dressed in a white shirt, blue jeans and sandals on bare feet. He smiled, waiting.

  Pickett, not quite sure if he was to be introduced to this exotic—the man could just be asking for directions and Eliza holding on to him to prevent his native shyness from making him run away before he got them—wondered if someone would give him a signal.

  The man put out his hand. “Sarwingupta,” he said.

  Pickett shook the hand and said nothing, waiting to find out what the sounds meant. The possibilities were several: “Sarwingupta”—the Sanskrit (?) equivalent of “Clarence”; “Sarwin, Gupta”—“Gupta” being the first name but offered last in accordance with polite Sikh practice; or just possibly “Sir Win Gupta”, whose grandfather had been the last Indian to have an hereditary knighthood conferred on him before partition.

  “Sarwin has been dying to meet you,” Eliza said.

  “Has he? Famous, am I? Then we’ll have to arrange it. Come in, Sarwin. Come in. Sarwin, this is my wife, Charlotte. I’m Mel Pickett, by the way, Sarwin. No, no, you don’t have to take your shoes off because of Eliza. She always does. It’s not muddy, is it?” Pickett looked queryingly at Eliza. “Unless you’d feel more comfortable, of course.” If your feet hurt, that is, or if that’s the way you people always behave on a doorstep.

  “The road is muddy,” Eliza said, “and you’ve all got yours off.” She kicked off her shoes and crossed the threshhold. “Come on, Gupta.” Gupta followed suit.

  “Beer, Gupta?” Christ, no. Gupta was surely the man’s last name; Eliza was just horsing around. “Or a scotch, Sarwin?”

  “Beer, thanks, Mr. Pickett.”

  “Mel.”

  Gupta looked at Eliza. “Mel?” he asked.

  “That’s his name.”

  “Yes? An unusual name.” He turned to Pickett. “Call me Sarwin. Like you did.”

  Eliza said to Charlotte, “You would never know they were both Canadian, would you? Sarwin was born in Edmonton. How about you, Mel?”

  “Hamilton.”

  Charlotte said, “The pizza!” in tones that suggested it was filling the kitchen and now leaking out the windows. “I’ll have some of your beer,” she said to Pickett as she ran from the room.

  “Give Sarwin a whiskey, Mel. He’s been asking for it all weekend. It’s his favorite forbidden drink. Wine for me,” Eliza said.

  “I asked for it once, last night, because you said you had some, then you couldn’t find it. I haven’t been asking for it repeatedly, for heaven’s sake.”

  “Hold on, Sarwin. I’ve got some scotch here somewhere.”

  “I would rather have a beer. Really. Thank you. A beer.”

  “The scotch is around somewhere.”

  “A beer.”

  They might have gone on like this for some time, but they were interrupted by Willis, the dog, who came downstairs, took one look at Gupta and circled to attack. Pickett grabbed the dog and held her, yapping furiously, off the floor. “That’s the first time she’s ever taken after someone,” he said.

  “Dogs are very racist,” Gupta said. “Babies, too. Very frightening I am to both kinds.” He leaned forward and smiled at the dog. Willis recoiled in terror and barked an octave higher.

  “Put her in the basement,” Charlotte said.

  “Does she bite?” Gupta asked.

  “Not until you came along.”

  “Leave her, then. Better she should get used to me in case I come back. If she bites me, I’ll kick her arse.”

  Pickett put Willis on the couch, where she dug herself in, still glaring at Gupta.

  Charlotte brought in a pizza and a stack of plates and began cutting the pie into slices. “Sorry about this. Not much of a Sunday dinner, is it? But get Eliza to bring you to the house in Toronto and I’ll cook you a proper Canadian Sunday dinner.”

  “Charlotte …” Eliza began.

  “Yes, right. You were born in Edmonton. Sorry,” Charlotte said to Gupta. “I keep thinking you’re just off the boat.” She smiled at him. “That’s what they used to say after the war about those immigrants in long overcoats with belts tied all the way around. Just off the boat,’ they used to say. Now you’d have to say ‘just off the plane,’ wouldn’t you? Doesn’t have the same ring, though, does it? Anyway, you’re not. No. Have you two known each other long?”

  “I edited a book Sarwin wrote.”

  “What’s that mean? Corrected the spelling? The punctuation?”

  “That’s it. I corrected the spelling, and the grammar, things like that, didn’t I, dear? Translated it practically, from the original pidgin.”

  “‘Pidgin’ is African, though its origin is Chinese, I think,” Gupta told her.

  Pickett asked, “What’s the book about?”

  “It’s about why some immigrant groups retain their culture more and for a longer time than others.”

  “I see. What do you do for a living?”

  “That’s what I do. I’m an historian. Social history.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “At Douglas University.”

  “And you teach about which immigrants keep their culture longest?”

  “Ah, no. I teach the usual courses. European History to fourteen fifty-three, England eighteen-fifteen to nineteen-fourteen, Canada before Confederation, Canada after Confederation, that kind of thing.”

  “Well, well. And you write books in your spare time, like?”

  “Mel—” began Eliza.

  “That’s exactly right, Mel. A definition of academic life. Some of us write books in our spare time, others teach in their spare time. Ah, the dog seems to have adjusted to me. Shall I stand up, see if she responds?” He raised himself to his full height and walked several steps in the direction, but to one side, of Willis. The dog yapped once, then jumped down and trotted over to Eliza, who gestured that it would be all right for Willis to climb up on her lap.

  “So that’s all right now,” Gupta said. “She won’t be frightened of wogs from now on.”

  Charlotte ran out to bring back another pizza. While she was cutting it up, Pickett said, “I’m not sure what I’ll do about the cabin. It’ll be jinxed for a while as far as the locals are concerned. I’ll have to find a summer tenant, someone from the city.”

  “We could move in ourselves. Rent this place,” Charlotte said.

  “Then you’d meet all my lovers,” Eliza said.

  It was a complicated signal. Pickett heard a message addressed to him and Charlotte about Eliza’s wish for privacy, and guessed a very different one was being sent to Gupta, letting him consider the possibility that he didn’t own Eliza. On the other hand, she might just be joking, clearing up the residue from the slight embarrassment at having produced Gupta in the first place.

  Pickett said, to change the subject, “Did you ever hear anything or notice anything that would help the OPP?”

  “I talked to the sergeant about that. Not very much. Thompson never had any callers, and he didn’t own a car, so he used to walk to town and back every day. I did call on him two weekends ago to let him know that I’d pick up anything for him in town, and if he ever needed a cup of sugar, I was there.” She looked at Gupta. “That’s a traditional gesture in our culture. I was making a sort of joke about days gone by.”

  “Not a very good joke, though, is it?”

  Eliza turned back to Pickett. “I remember two or three pickup trucks, the kind half the people in town drive, just on their way somewhere. There was a white one, I remember, came up the road that afternoon, one of those with an engine on the back for welding. And a gray car parked on the shoulder near the highway. I think I’d seen it once before. Actually, it was the usual busy night. People—people in pickup trucks especially—sometimes use your yard to turn around in. And some of them park when no one is home. Someone in the diner once made a joke about Duck
Lake Road being the local teenagers’ nesting spot. There are also a few quiet lay-bys on the road where they can park for a while; then they turn around and go back to town. You get used to hearing them. And they leave traces of themselves behind.”

  “Like what?” Charlotte asked.

  “Like condoms,” Eliza said. “Safes. It’s early in the year and pretty cold, but on Friday, I heard at least three drive in the yard and park for a few minutes. One of them was kids, I would think, by the sound of the broken muffler. You know. Vroom! Vroom!”

  “You didn’t look out and see Thompson at all?” Pickett asked.

  “I looked out once and his light was on, but I never saw any activity. I guess he was already dead by then.”

  “Did you get any impression of the guy? Did he seem sad, crazy, manic, drunk? Anything like that?”

  “He just seemed like the hired man, answering the door. I couldn’t even be sure now what he looked like, he was so ordinary. He did wear suspenders, like a hayseed in an old farm movie, and the top of his forehead was white where his hat came to, but that’s all I noticed. Fact is, he looked so much like what you would expect, from pictures and old movies, that he seemed kind of quaint.”

  “You said no callers. None?”

  “I remember seeing a man standing in the door once, looking as if he was asking for directions. Nobody else.”

  “No one ever came at night? He never brought anyone home?”

  “No. You know, Mel, I’m the wrong person for this kind of thing. I used to share an apartment in Toronto with a girl who noticed stuff on the street. She could tell you about the life of everyone on the block, just by what she saw from the window. Why? Are you worried about me? Sarwin will protect me, won’t you, dear?”

  Gupta sipped his beer and leaned back with his legs crossed. “My ancestors were professional assassins, although we had to give it up when we emigrated to Canada. My family opened a corner store instead. I’m out of practice, but it’s still in my genes. The dog can sense it.”

  Pickett hung on to the amused tone to judge the seriousness of Gupta’s remarks, but withheld judgment on the man generally. He wasn’t sure if Gupta was making fun of him or inviting him to share in the fun he was having at someone else’s expense, a joke about WASP attitudes toward East Indians.

  Eliza said, “He has a secret wrestling hold known only to people born in the Kashmir.”

  “If I can find the right place on his neck, I can subdue a weight lifter with just one thumb and the first two fingers of one hand. Render him unconscious in eleven seconds. Of course he has to lie still while I find the place.”

  “That’s a Sikh joke,” Eliza said.

  “And that’s enough of that joke,” Gupta said.

  That was all right, then. It was just love talk, not Gupta getting at him in some way. What Pickett also got from this was that Gupta would be around to look after Eliza when she used the trailer.

  Suddenly Charlotte, not quite in the picture, said, “It’s all very well for you to make jokes, but we’re not having you in that trailer on your own. If you don’t bring someone up with you—” her eyes swiveled past Gupta and dropped “—then you have to let us know and we’ll move up to the cabin while you’re there.”

  There was a silence. Charlotte, childless herself, was treating Eliza, a woman almost thirty, as a child, her child. Charlotte realized quickly what she was doing. “I’m sorry. It’s not up to me, is it? You do as you like.” And then, “But don’t stay up there on your own before they catch this fellow.”

  “Or woman,” Gupta said.

  “I don’t think so. Norbert Thompson wasn’t one for women, as you just said. He never kept company around here. They say his only pleasure was hockey,” Pickett said.

  “Watching it, you mean? On television?” Gupta asked.

  “And listening. On radio.”

  “Who are ‘they’?”

  “They?”

  “You said ‘they say … .’ Who are ‘they’?”

  “The townsfolk,” Pickett said. “The customers at the coffee shop in this case. Charlotte used to work there. She went back this morning for a while.”

  “The village pump?”

  “I suppose so. Though there’s the Laundromat, too. But, yeah, you can find out pretty much anything around here if you drink enough coffee. Right, Charlotte?”

  “All the gossip,” Charlotte agreed. “Shall I make some coffee for us now?”

  Gupta said, “They say you make the best coffee in Larch River. That is all I came for.”

  “Charlotte’s the only one around here who doesn’t use instant,” Pickett said. “Country folk prefer it.”

  Gupta asked, “Can we hear about the rest of the case? What’s happening?”

  “They don’t know anything yet. I mean Wilkie, the OPP, doesn’t.”

  “Are you involved?”

  “I advise them from time to time.” He smiled to make sure Gupta realized that he was joking.

  “The gray fox,” Eliza said.

  “Tell us about Norbert Thompson, Charlotte,” Gupta said. “Where was he living before?”

  “You want all the gossip?”

  “Give us about an hour of it now, and the rest by installments.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  Pickett watched with amazement as his wife bloomed rosily under the attentions of this handsome dark stranger. She had made no move to make coffee. “Tell Sarwin why Thompson left the chicken farm,” he said.

  “The story was that she sent him packing.”

  “Why? Was he a poor worker?”

  “Oh, no. He’d run the place by himself for four years, I heard.”

  “Then did he do something? Did he make unwanted sexual advances to her? Did he neglect to make wanted sexual advances? Did he beat her? Did she beat him?”

  Eliza said, “When you’re from another culture, you can ask questions like that, even if you were born in Edmonton.”

  Charlotte said, “I don’t think he was after her in any of those ways, or her after him. She just didn’t need him anymore. It’s true, people around here thought that now her husband had passed away, she and Norbert might get together. Some did hint they probably already had, but she put a stop to all that talk by going into Sweetwater and bringing back a husband, a man she’d known for years. Norbert left a week or two later.”

  “What was the new husband’s name? Her name now?”

  “Sproat. Aaron Sproat. They met in church. They say now that she’d had an understanding with him for a long time.”

  “What does ‘understanding’ mean? Were they lovers?”

  Charlotte said, “I never know what that word means anymore. When I was a girl, you used to talk about a pair of young lovers, but it didn’t necessarily mean that they were having relations. I think in this case, I would say that yes, they were lovers, but no, they weren’t having relations, because it would be against what they believed in. She’s very religious. I think they used to have a meal together after church sometimes, waiting for the time they could get together properly. You never really know what goes on between people, though, do you? I don’t. The more I think about it, the sorrier I get for her. Not now. Then. She’s all right now.”

  “Certainly no hanky-panky with Norbert, then?”

  “No. No way. Not a chance. At least I don’t think so. First, her husband was in the house, and second, they say now that she never showed much liking for Norbert. To a lot of people, he seemed kind of sullen. Some people said he was a bit slow, but Harlan, the man who owns my coffee shop, didn’t think so. He says Norbert was underdeveloped—‘simple, but not mental’ was how he put it. At least no more so than a lot of people Harlan could name.’Course, everyone around here looks a bit underdeveloped to Harlan; that’s why he stays here, to take advantage of them. He’s been wheeling and dealing since he was in long pants. He loves a bargain, and he says there’s plenty here. He buys up the local rubbish and sells it in Toronto from a stall i
n the antiques market. You wouldn’t believe what people will buy from a stall.”

  “Did Thompson save much money? Do they say?” Gupta asked.

  “Harlan got the impression that he had hardly any; that’s why he was so pleased to get the cabin. I don’t suppose she paid him much. That would be one of the ways he was a bit simple.”

  “And while he’s been staying in the cabin—what? three, four months?—no one has gotten to know him?”

  “Not as far as I know.”

  “Still no girlfriend?”

  “Not from around here.”

  “A real bachelor.”

  “A real hermit, looked like.”

  There was nothing more to say about Thompson, and in the silence, Eliza offered to help Charlotte with the coffee, which Charlotte seemed to have forgotten. Pickett offered Gupta another drink, but Gupta refused and instead tried to be agreeable to Willis, who sneered at him and dug herself deeper into the couch, making it clear that her tolerance of him was temporary and fragile. Pickett picked the dog up and tried to have a rare anthropomorphic conversation with her, which made Willis so uncomfortable that she jumped out of his arms and followed the women into the kitchen. Soon the women appeared with the coffee, which was quickly finished and applauded, and then the two guests left.

  Charlotte, standing at the window, asked, “What do you make of that, then?”

  “Not much. A few pickup trucks, one with a broken muffler, a welder, a gray car parked on the shoulder.’Course, she’s only been around for a couple of weekends—three?—but you’d think there would be more traffic than that, wouldn’t you?”

  “I meant him. Sarwin.”

  “Oh, that, yes. Sorry.” Pickett had known perfectly well what she meant, but he didn’t know yet what he thought, or rather, didn’t think anything, so he’d created a diversionary tactic. Charlotte exercised the same prerogative as his first wife, that of asking him immediately what he thought of some new phenomenon—a television play, or as now, a new acquaintance—so that he always had to formulate the first unsophisticated response. The conventional structure of the exchange implied that the superior male wit was being consulted first, but in fact, it was a way of exploiting what looked like the traditional male/female relationship to give her time to think, and something to think against. Pickett had thought this often enough so that he was armed against the question, always saw it coming in time to create a diversion while he tried to discover what he thought he thought.