“The wind woke her,” he says out loud to the horse, who is now grazing on the dry August grass, tugging at the reins, then the next line coming into Lee’s head, and the one after that, still vivid even though he was just a child when he decided he was too old for Astrid to coax him to sleep with stories. He can see the luminous hands on Astrid’s bedside clock as she checked the time and saw that it was just after three, can see her move from the bed to her armchair by the window, wrapping herself in the orange and brown crocheted afghan she kept there for just such a purpose.
She closed her eyes, hoping that she might nod off. Not much chance, she thought, with the wind blowing as it was. (Listen, she would say to him. Can you hear the wind? That’s just how it sounded.) The bedroom window rattled in its frame. Tree branches groaned and cracked, and Astrid could hear the slapping of a canvas tarp in the yard. Sand hit the windowpane in gusts and she could well imagine its sting against your face if you were outside unprotected. And a tomcat was making an awful noise under the window, likely the orange one from the Patterson place (Astrid always winked at Lee when she said this), who came in search of the Torgesons’ barn cat and was responsible for the batches of orange and tortoiseshell kittens that Astrid was always trying to give away. The wind was howling like a banshee and she wondered why even a tomcat would venture out on such a night.
And Lester was talking in his sleep. This in itself was not unusual; he always talked in his sleep. What was unusual was that Astrid could understand what he was saying: Never underestimate the value of a map. It was clear as a bell, although she had no idea what it could mean. He spoke again, with great authority: Never underestimate the value of a map.
“What kind of map?” Astrid asked.
“A road map,” Lester said.
“Lester,” Astrid said, “what in the world are you talking about?”
He rolled away from her then (Astrid described the sound of the bed creaking over the racket outside) and the talking stopped.
She decided she might as well go downstairs and make herself a cup of tea. She wasn’t sure where her terry-cloth robe was in the dark, so she went as she was, with the afghan around her shoulders. It wasn’t cold—it was summer after all—but the wind made her think it should be cold.
She went to the kitchen and turned on a light. The first thing her eye landed on was Lester’s mother’s silver tea service in the oak cabinet across the room. It had come from Norway, so the story went, and Astrid could see that it needed a good polish. Well, she had nothing better to do at three in the morning. She plugged in the kettle and then got the tea service and placed it on the kitchen table. She was about to get the silver polish from under the sink when she heard the tomcat yowl again, making an ungodly sound like that of a baby in distress (sometimes she would throw in another wink here). It sounded as though the cat was in the porch off the kitchen. How in the world could he have gotten in there? she wondered, imagining the mess, a tomcat spraying everywhere.
“Git you,” she said, opening the door to the porch and flipping the light on, a glass of water in her hand for encouragement should he refuse to go. But it wasn’t a cat that was yowling. It was a baby (“a lovely baby,” she sometimes added—Lee liked the sound of that, and when he was playing alone with the new kittens in the barn he would repeat it to himself: a lovely baby), not a newborn, but not very old, either, in a red plastic laundry basket. He’d been wrapped in a blanket but had kicked that off and was now wearing nothing but a diaper and a blue knit hat. A baby bottle and a half dozen disposable diapers were tucked into the basket with him. The baby stopped crying and scrunched his eyes shut against the light.
Astrid stared. She didn’t know what to do. “I didn’t mean it,” she said. “‘Git you.’ I didn’t mean it. I thought you were a cat.”
She came to her senses and set down the water glass and picked up the baby. She felt his hands and feet, expecting them to be cold, but they weren’t.
Her first instinct was to call Lester, but then she thought, What good will he be? And she wasn’t calling the Mounties, not yet anyway. She and Lester were far enough off the highway that no stranger was going to pick their farmyard at random, in the dark, as a good place to abandon a baby.
She sat down at the kitchen table with the baby, who now seemed content, and tried to come up with a logical explanation. He had been left sometime after Astrid and Lester went to bed. The yard light switch was in the porch, and there certainly had been no baby there when she’d turned the light off, as she always did, before they retired for the night. A calamity, perhaps. Someone from down the road had left the baby while she, the mother, dealt with whatever had come up. But that was ridiculous. She and Lester never locked their doors. Someone desperate for help could have walked into the house and right into their bedroom if need be.
The kettle was boiling. Astrid moved the tea service from the table to the counter, and then she spread her afghan on the table and laid the baby down. She made tea in the silver pot, she wasn’t sure why, perhaps just because it was handy. (Or perhaps because we had special company, she said to Lee in one telling of the story, and from then on Lee would say if she forgot, “Because you had special company, right?”) She wondered if the baby was hungry, and retrieved the bottle and the pile of diapers from the porch. Although she’d never had a child of her own, she knew about caring for babies, having done quite a bit of that over the years for neighbor couples who’d been luckier than she and Lester. She placed the bottle in a pot of hot water and changed the baby’s diaper. She took off the knitted hat so she could get a better look at him, and found a note tucked inside. It said, Dear Uncle Lester, please take care of this child, you’re own flesh and blood, as I can’t. That was it.
What in the world? Lester had no niece that they’d ever met.
“Oh, my,” Astrid said, and decided she had better, after all, call Lester.
She woke Lester and showed him the baby and the note. He sat down at the table and Astrid poured him some tea.
“This is impossible,” he said.
She hadn’t expected him to say more than that. He talked more in his sleep than he did when he was awake.
“I know it’s impossible,” Astrid said. “But, Lester, somebody left this baby for us.”
The baby, of course, was Lee. Astrid had told him the story so many times that he swears he can remember it—not the story, but his actual arrival—in the same way he believes he can remember, although he was only a toddler, the day he had his picture taken on Old Tom. He can, for instance, remember the sudden flash of the porch light when Astrid flicked it on, Astrid’s face when she first bent over him, the tea service on the counter. These memories are picture-clear. The back porch in darkness is less clear, but he remembers himself wailing and the sound of the wind outside. Over the years, he’s tried to go back just a little farther, just minutes would be enough, to see a young woman hastily write a note in the dim light of a car’s interior, step with him out of the car into the windy night, hold him with one arm as she carefully opens the door to Astrid and Lester’s porch. To see her kiss him on the cheek as she lays him down, perhaps cry as she gives him one last look in the darkness. But he’s unable to drag his memory back just that little bit so that he can see his mother’s face. To know who she was would be asking too much, he thought, but to know that she existed would require only a glimpse, just the briefest of memories.
Once, when Lee was seven or eight years old, he asked Astrid, “Who do you think my mother is?” and listened to her distress as she carefully tried to maneuver around the question she feared the most: Why didn’t she want me? Astrid told him that his mother was a young woman—very young, far too young to look after a baby—but responsible enough to make a difficult decision, and didn’t things turn out for the best because Astrid and Lester had for years wanted a baby of their own, and here he was and no one could love him mo
re than they did.
And then later, when Lee was ten, more difficult questions. He came home one day and said, “This kid at school said I was really Lester’s love child and so why do I call him Uncle Lester. But what does that mean? Love child?”
Astrid squirmed and turned red in the face, and then she gave Lee information that he didn’t quite understand about how he could not be Lester’s son because, well, Astrid and Lester had no children of their own, and they had tried for many years to have a family, and it wasn’t to be. . . . And so whatever you hear at school, Lee, don’t you believe it, and if you have questions, you come right to me and ask them, just like you did today . . . all of which was confusing and made him wish he hadn’t said anything, and he still didn’t know what love child meant.
But that evening Astrid sat him down again, this time with Lester there to help, and told him about the two theories of how Lee was related to Lester. “You pipe up, Lester, if I get something wrong,” Astrid said, but Lester mostly looked down at his socks while Astrid talked.
The first theory involved a cousin with whom Lester’s father had immigrated. The cousin had immediately left Canada and headed for California in search of warmer weather than the Canadian West had to offer. No one knew for sure what had happened to him but, through correspondence among relatives on both sides of the ocean, the rumor circulated that he had come to no good and was killed in a fight over a woman. The woman, it was said, had been expecting a baby, so it was possible that Lee’s mother was a descendant of that line of the family. How such a relative would track down Lester and Astrid . . . well, who knew, but it was possible.
The second theory was generated by Lester’s cousin Olaf in Norway and involved other relations in that country. Lester’s grandmother on his mother’s side had been the second wife of a man who had been widowed young, leaving two small children. The children were sent to live with the first wife’s relatives until Lester’s grandfather could find himself another bride and a suitable mother for the children. When he eventually remarried, the first wife’s family refused to send the children back and the link with that line of blood was broken. When Astrid wrote to the relatives in Norway about finding Lee in the porch, Cousin Olaf proposed that one of the descendants of the two lost children had traveled to Canada to give back to Lester what had been taken from his grandfather. Lester looked up from his socks and interjected that Olaf was a watercolor painter and knitted sweaters for a hobby, so he no doubt had too much imagination.
“Lester,” Astrid said. “Be serious. Lee is asking about his roots.” So Lester got up and took a world atlas from his shelf of books and showed Lee exactly where in Norway his family had come from and where Olaf the watercolor painter lived, and then he patted Lee on the head and went to the barn.
“Well,” Astrid said after Lester left. “He wasn’t much help, was he?” Then she told Lee that the authorities had been unable to prove either theory, but blood tests presented evidence that Lee could be related to Lester, and custody of Lee was granted to them, and they were overjoyed. She told Lee that he was the greatest gift that she or anyone else, with the exception perhaps of Mary, had ever been given by God. “Can I go to the barn now?” Lee remembers asking, and Astrid said of course, and off he went after Lester.
He’d had no idea that his simple question about how he was related to Lester would precipitate his being given so much information, and in such a formal way, not like the bedtime story. And although he was reassured by what Astrid said, he was puzzled by her sudden reference to God. Astrid had never been much for church, although she did make Lester and Lee go with her at Christmas and Easter. From then on, Lee kept his thoughts on the matter to himself, except for the time of the barn fire when he’d blurted out, regretfully, that he was just a shirttail relative.
Lee feels a tug on the reins. He blinks, gives his head a shake, and wonders if he’d maybe dozed off on his feet for a few minutes. The horizon, he notes, is beginning to turn pink, and his watch tells him that he should be getting out of bed in another two hours to prepare, as usual, for the day’s work ahead. He leads the horse from the cemetery, back under the iron gate, and looks up the road to the Lindstrom place just south of the old Hundred Mile School. He calculates that he’s covered nearly twenty-five miles. In the soft light of near-dawn, it seems crazy to have set out the way he did in the middle of the night. Weary now, he remounts and heads up the road toward the Lindstroms’, not prepared to ride the whole distance over again. He’ll get Tyler Lindstrom to haul him and the horse back to his place.
As he approaches the farmyard, he looks for signs that someone is about, but he sees no one. It’s too early to arrive at the door. The school then, Lee thinks. Although the windows are now boarded up and it’s been demoted into a grain bin, there’s still a good well in the schoolyard. When they get there, he’ll give the horse a drink and let him graze for a while before he sees if Tyler can spare the time to take him home.
The Lindstroms’ collie dog comes to the end of the approach and barks once, then lies down with his head on his paws and watches in a bored way, as though it is not all that unusual to see a horse and rider across the road.
“Good boy,” Lee says to the dog.
The horse’s ears rotate as though he thinks Lee is talking to him.
“You’re a good boy, too,” Lee says.
The sound of his own voice is disconcerting, jolting him back to the reality of who he is and what he does every day. Now that there’s light in the sky, everything seems normal again. He can hardly remember what possessed him just hours ago.
HAPPINESS
The Cat
Hank Trass is dozing in the warm cab of his truck with his mouth wide open and his head jammed into the corner between the passenger seat and the window, which is rolled up against the mosquitoes. His cowboy hat is beside him on the seat, his take-out coffee spilled on the floor at his feet where he’d accidentally kicked it over. The day before, he’d traveled to a town just west of Winnipeg to pick up a used stock trailer he’d found on the Internet, but then he hadn’t bought the trailer after all because it was covered in rust that suspiciously had not been evident in the pictures the owner had sent. Then Hank’s truck had broken down and he’d waited several hours for a mechanic to get him on the road again, and he’d tried to make it home by driving all night, but caught himself nodding off and ended up grabbing a few hours’ sleep in the campground just east of Juliet. Hank knows from past experience that when he starts to fall asleep at the wheel, he’d better pull over, pronto. He rolled his truck once while trying to drive through a sleepy spell with the window down, gulping air to keep himself awake. It hadn’t worked. He’d totaled the truck, but somehow emerged with only a few bruises.
When he pulled into the campground, he’d planned to sleep for only an hour or so, but the sun wakes him and when he looks at his watch he realizes he’s slept for a good four hours. He can hear the steady sound of semitrailers passing on the highway a quarter mile to the south. His neck is so stiff, he can hardly turn it. His wife, Lynn, is always trying to get him to do exercises—she herself does yoga that she learned from a DVD—and for once, in desperation, he thinks it might possibly do some good. He opens the truck door and wills his uncooperative body to unfold itself and step out into the early morning. The campground, pretty much empty, is just an open field with a half dozen barbecue stands and picnic tables, a water tap, and a pair of pit toilets. In the campsite next to his is a little red car with two mountain bikes on top. A young couple is sleeping in a pup tent with the front door unzipped and the top halves of their bodies out in the open air. Their hides must be tougher than his, Hank thinks, to sleep like that with a swarm of mosquitoes at them all night. Across the field next to the fence is a truck towing a small stock trailer just like the one he’d looked at in Manitoba only not quite as rusty, with several bales of hay in a rack on top. Another pup tent is pitche
d by a picnic table a few hundred feet from the rig. If there were a horse in the trailer he’d know why the tent was so far away from it, having spent more than a few nights next to a horse making a racket, but the trailer door is wide open and there’s no sign of a horse tied inside or out.
Hank visits the nearest toilet without checking to see if it says GENTS or LADIES on the door, then goes to the tap and splashes cold water on his face. The act of bending to the stream of water is painful, and then straightening up again is even worse, so he tries to picture some of the stretching exercises Lynn has shown him, thinking he can’t get back in the truck until he’s limbered up a little. There’s one she calls the cat, he recalls, where she gets down on her hands and knees and arches her back and then lets it sink toward the floor. Well, he’s not getting down on his hands and knees—he’d never make it up—so he improvises and does the exercise standing on his feet, bent forward at the waist. The stretch feels surprisingly good. He remembers Lynn doing something else, standing against the wall and sliding down and then up again, so he does this against the cab of the truck. The down part is easy enough, but to get back up he has to push himself with his hands on his thighs. Still, this one feels pretty good, too. He won’t let Lynn know, but maybe he’ll find a way to do this once in a while when she’s not looking.
He closes his eyes, puts his hands on his hips, and turns his head slowly, one way and then the other. Each time he manages to turn it a little farther. When he opens his eyes, he sees the girl in the pup tent watching him. He thinks he must make an amusing picture to a young girl like that—a rickety old cowboy trying to stretch out his aching body, what hair he has left on his head sticking out all over. He reaches up to smooth it down and then gets his hat off the seat of the cab and puts it on. When he looks toward the tent again, the girl and her friend have moved inside. He sees the tent flaps being pulled together by a male hand with some kind of colorful woven bracelet on the wrist.
Juliet in August Page 7
