The Hour of the Fox

by Kurt Palka

  And eventually she heard it. She set down the plate and looked out the window, but there was no moon and she couldn’t see anything. But she could hear the fox close by, loud and clear—five, six long yelping barks that most nights still gave her goosebumps and made her smile. But tonight her heart wasn’t in it.

  * * *

  —

  Later a wind did come up. She woke and listened to it, and after a while she could tell that it had backed right through the nor’east corner and kept going and it would not be so bad. She could hear the house coming alive and creaking and shouldering the wind, and she felt safe in it. Her mother’s house, and her grandmother’s before that. Dorothy Dundonnell from the Island of Mull. Called Dotty. A day labourer’s daughter in wooden shoes, come here on a settler boat with a good young husband and a few bundles and a baby in a basket. Her husband worked as a fisherman and she worked in the cannery with the baby on her back, and when they had saved enough money they bought this wooden house and the two-hundred-foot shoreline of rock as their very own, like a dream come true.

  The baby would grow up to be Aileen’s mother, who had no memory of Mull of course, but she would always know her cradle song, and in time when Aileen was a baby in that same little room under the eaves, the room that was now Danny’s, her mother would sit by her crib and sing it softly to her: Speed, bonny boat, like a bird on the wing / Onward, the sailors cry / Carry the lass who’s born to be queen over the sea to Skye…

  For a while Aileen lay listening to those words and to the ones she’d changed them back to with Danny, the lad who’s born to be king, and she lay listening to the wind and the waves and to her good house. She tried not to think of Galway’s story, and eventually she fell asleep.

  * * *

  —

  On Wednesday morning in Toronto, Margaret was at her desk when Aileen’s call was put through. She listened and wrote down the names of the fisherman and the detective. “You really don’t know where Danny is?”

  “No. He comes and goes. He’s busy. Especially this time of year. I think he’s looking after more than thirty properties now. People give him keys and he often stays over. Bunks on couches in his sleeping bag. The owners even encourage that because it makes the places look lived-in.” “And Crieff Island is a property that you know he’s looking after?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  Already she knew what Aileen was going to ask, and she knew without question that she’d do it.

  When she’d hung up she walked down the hall to Hugh’s office and knocked and entered.

  Hugh, grandfatherly and very rich, sat at his rosewood desk, in one of his suits where even the vests had lapels. He looked up.

  “Margaret. Is everything all right?”

  “Yes. But I need to take a few days off, Hugh. A good friend of mine on the East Coast needs my help with something.”

  “Really? But we’re very busy right now. You are. The upcoming Hong Kong deal. The Toronto Hydro case, the airport land acquisition. And any day now there’ll be that conference call with Chicago. You’ve got to wrap that up.” “I know, Hugh. I can do all that on the phone from the coast.”

  “Can you?”

  “Yes. I’ll bring the files, and if there’s the least indication that I should be here in person, I’ll be on the next plane. This is important, Hugh. I’d like to catch the one-thirty flight.” “So soon. Really? Hmm. Just a few days, though, right? Because I need you here, Margaret.”

  “Just a few days, Hugh. Two or three. I promise, absolutely.”

  * * *

  —

  She left a note on Jack’s typewriter telling him where she was going, and two hours later she sat by a window halfway down the plane as it taxied toward the runway. Rain on the tarmac. Pulsing reflections everywhere.

  The small bottle with the new, stronger codeine pills was in her purse, and one of the pills was ready in her jacket pocket. She put on sunglasses and fussed down the window blind and took the glasses off again. She hated flying. The insanity of a rattling aluminum tube stuffed with all these people strapped into their seats miles up in thin air.

  Under her the wheels were racing over the cracks in the tarmac now, taking her away faster and faster. Then liftoff.

  Seven

  THE CAPTAIN’S VOICE came on in English and in French and she thought of her time in Paris, after Lakewood. The day she left Halifax in a new dress and coat and stiff new shoes, she boarded that ocean liner as one person, and nearly five years later she came back as quite another.

  At École Olivier, the headmistress’s office was in one of the larger cells of what had once been a Benedictine nunnery, with two leaded windows of untrue glass like bottle bottoms. Thérèse was slim and well dressed in a long skirt and a white blouse with a jacket over it. Her hair was black, held up with combs in a French twist.

  Near the end of their first talk, Thérèse said, “In private, such as now, you can call me Thérèse. And I will call you Margaret. At all other times I’ll call you Mademoiselle like all the other girls, and you should call me Madame. Yes?” Margaret nodded.

  “This school was founded for young women just like you,” said Thérèse. “Women, girls from all over who had difficulties or who made a mistake, or to whom a mistake was made, as I prefer to put it. And now they need help. I was one of them too once, Margaret. I was. For the first few years I tried to keep it a secret, but after a while not any more. Secrets burden us. Your grandmother and I don’t quite agree on that, but she’s of another generation and it’s also true that small communities are different.”

  Thérèse sat back in her chair and smiled at Margaret. “I know your story, and there is absolutely nothing shameful about it. Some girls feel that there is, but there is not. The only disgrace is that nature feels free to impose it on someone so young and unready—”

  There was a knock on the door and Thérèse looked up and said, “Yes?”

  The door opened and a young woman came in.

  “Ah. Angelique. This is Margaret from Canada. Margaret, we have rules here, of course, and Angelique here will explain them to you and she’ll show you around. Please pay attention to the rules. I would not be able to make exceptions. We’ll talk more in a day or two.”

  * * *

  —

  Because she had to make up the time she had missed while at Lakewood, the workload was heavy, but if the girls needed help, and she did, there was access to tutors in the evenings. Thérèse taught philosophy and the classics, and one evening a week she also held a session she called Women’s Stories. For those occasions they sat on chairs and cushions in the lounge, and Thérèse sat among them, not as a teacher but as a storyteller and moderator, as a friend almost. They read women’s stories, fictional and real, from Madame Bovary to Madame Curie, then discussed them and made up alternate decisions for the characters, leading to alternate developments. Sometimes the girls made up their own stories, often surprisingly dark and fateful ones, which were then read to the class and discussed and resolved in similar ways. During those sessions Thérèse often talked to them freely about women’s choices and careers, and about sex and feelings and biology. Often also about what she called the inner self.

  “The reason I want to talk to you about these things,” she’d said early on, “is that no one else will. People are shy, or they think it’s inappropriate or too personal. But that is nonsense. What you need at this stage perhaps more than at any other is frankness and information and the examples of other women’s lives and choices to learn from. And all along, remember that none of what we are talking about may be the absolute or the only truth. Truth, not fact. And so in the end you must decide for yourself what you think is right and what is not. For guidance in all that, we listen to what?”

  She paused and looked around, and then she put her hand first to her forehead and then to her heart.

  “It’s as simple as that,” she said. “We’ll be talking a lot more about it.”

  But as
kind and refreshing as she could be as a teacher, as a headmistress Thérèse was very strict. Once, when two girls from America broke curfew, Thérèse called an assembly and before the entire student body said, “You were told this on your first day here, but I’ll tell you again. Break curfew once and you get a warning. Break it a second time and your parents will be notified. Break it a third time and you’ll be sent home. No excuses, no discussion.

  “Why? Because, if you stood where I am now, in front of so many young women in full bloom—open flowers, you remind me of, waiting for bees to buzz by and pollinate you. But young men cruising the cafés—we know all about them, and they’re more like wolves looking for little lambs than bees looking for nectar. And many of you know already from personal experience what can happen then. I see some of you giggling, but this is no giggling matter. Back home your parents are trusting us with precisely that, to get you through these important years in one piece, whole in body and soul, while also helping you to catch up with your education and to gain a bit of self-knowledge. Never be a little lamb. Never. Little lambs get eaten.”

  * * *

  —

  In her time at École Olivier, Margaret made many friends, and two of them—Franziska from Vienna and Anne from Geneva—went on to the Sorbonne with her. Two Sundays a month she was invited to lunch at Thérèse’s, and along the way on those occasions she met three of what Thérèse called her boyfriends. One was an airline pilot, the next a lawyer, and the third a civil servant and poet. They appeared and then disappeared one after another, and in Margaret’s last year it was another man who was often there for lunch, a man named Philippe, a teacher at another school. He was relaxed and funny, and he was a good cook.

  Thérèse would have been in her late thirties then, quite beautiful and stylish. One day Margaret asked if she ever intended to get married, and Thérèse said perhaps, and perhaps not. Looking around among her female friends, she said, it was obvious that few people ever found the perfect mate. Or even a tolerable one. Perhaps it was that loneliness and nature’s urgings blinded them and too often led them to think they had found the right him or her, until they discovered that they had not. But by then there were children and endless tedious chores and expenses, and life was set on narrow and often unhappy rails indeed.

  “Are you still shocked to hear me talking like that, Margaret? I know you were when you first came here, but you’ve been among us long enough to know how we think and how we like playing with ideas. And when we see shadows from the corner of our eye we like to invite them in and examine them.”

  Thérèse said that in terms of marriage and children she was not resigned; she was merely taking a rest, like pausing in some kind of never-ending dance. A step back for an overview. Philippe was divorced and very bright and in no hurry whatsoever, and that suited her fine. Her other men had often become angry with her, resentful of her independence. One of them, when she ended their relationship, had actually struck her. The pilot, of all people, she said. She supposed he resented that she was not an airplane responding to his controls. Another suitor had accused her of thinking like a knife.

  It was complicated, she said, but fortunately it was also not terribly important. Important was only what one made of it, how one allowed it to affect one.

  Eight

  WHEN THE PLANE SLOWED and began to bank, she put on her sunglasses and pushed up the window blind. Halifax and the Atlantic Ocean in the distance. Vast stretches of green, a few roads. For a while she sat with the cold surface of the window against her forehead.

  Aileen was waiting for her at the arrivals gate. She was dressed in jeans and a wool cardigan and running shoes. Perhaps a few pounds heavier than in earlier memories, but they suited her, and a bit of grey in her hair but still with those clear eyes that looked straight at you, could look right into you. Smart and funny, still with a laugh that made people turn around.

  “I came in your car,” she said. “Right now I can’t trust mine on the highway, and so Franklin put some gas in yours and we took off the tarp. It’s running well.”

  “Good. It can use the exercise.”

  “There’s a few bits that Franklin says I need for the Vauxhall,” Aileen said. “Can we stop at the GM dealership to pick them up? He’s written it all down. Is that all right?”

  “Of course it is.”

  She put the carry-on in the back seat and settled behind the wheel. She’d been with her father when he bought this Buick brand new. Almost ten years ago, four years before he died. He’d driven it off the lot, tall and straight and grinning behind the wheel.

  “I believe this thing will see me out, Maggie,” he’d said. “Eight cylinders and so much power. Want me to show you? I’ll step on the gas a bit, so hold on.”

  At the dealership she pulled up next to the parts entrance and waited for Aileen in the car. After a few minutes Aileen came back out empty-handed. She opened the car door and slipped into the seat.

  “They aren’t stocking those parts any more. Wouldn’t you know. But they’ll order them from Toronto and mail them to Franklin, and he’ll put them in. I paid up front.”

  “All right. Let’s go. Tell me again exactly what happened.”

  * * *

  —

  Her house in Sweetbarry was the same vintage as Aileen’s. Schooner-built, the old people called them, because their pegged structures with ridge beams like transoms and king posts and struts and hangers right down to the sill plate looked like upside-down ships set to meet the prevailing winds, with the steel eyes for fall trusses in place and in line with the anchors cemented into rock. Ships’ carpenters built them when there was no more wooden shipbuilding. Three bedrooms, maple floors, and good-sized kitchens.

  Her grandmother’s parents bought the house a long time ago. They’d come from Paris but were originally from St. Petersburg. Grandmother’s name had been Amélie Alexandra. She was good with languages, and when she was twenty, she worked in Halifax harbour as a translator from French, Russian, and German for the Department of Immigration. She married an Acadian man from the town of La Roche on Nova Scotia’s French Shore. Monsieur Jules Joubert was an assistant bank manager. They had one child, a son whom they named Charles, a name that worked in French as well as in English. They always spoke both languages at home. When Monsieur Joubert was promoted to manager of a Toronto branch, they moved there, but they never sold Sweetbarry, and from then on they and their family would return to the coast every summer for long visits.

  Locally, Grandmother became known simply and rather fondly as AJ, short for Alexandra Joubert.

  * * *

  —

  Margaret was pouring tea for Aileen and herself when out the window they saw a police car pulling up. Sully got out, and a moment later he knocked on the side door and opened it.

  “Hello!” he called. “Mrs. Bradley? It’s Sergeant Sullivan.”

  “In the kitchen, Sully!”

  He came through the door with his cap under his arm, holding a file folder with both hands in front of him. Sully was one of a group of local boys whom Margaret had known all their lives. Now he was a grown man filling a uniform, with his blond hair neatly combed, showing a flat ring where the cap had pressed it down.

  “Oh good, you’re here, Mrs. McInnis,” he said to Aileen. “I knocked on your door first. I’m looking for Danny. Would you know where he is?”

  “No, I don’t,” said Aileen. “There was a detective here yesterday with a folder just like that. He was looking for Danny too.”

  “That was Inspector Sorensen. He left it for us to find Danny. I was assigned to the case.”

  “What case, Sully? Is this about Crieff Island?”

  “I’m not supposed to say. You don’t have any idea where he is?”

  “Not really. He has his loops that he does in the boat, and properties on the mainland that he does in the truck. I told all this to the inspector.”

  “Like which properties?”

  She mentioned
some of the owners’ names. They sat at the kitchen table, and at one point while Sullivan was busy writing in his notebook, Aileen reached for the file folder and pulled it toward her. Sullivan saw that and quickly put out his hand to take it back, but somehow the conflicting motions sent the folder to the floor, and typed pages and two large black-and-white photographs slipped far out. They all looked down at them.

  Sullivan stood up from the chair and crouched and picked up the folder and collected its contents. He sat down again. He was red in the face now.

  “You shouldn’t have done that, Mrs. McInnis.”

  “Are those the Crieff Island children?” said Aileen. “They aren’t children. They’re young adults.”

  “All right, but are they the ones Galway found on Crieff? He was here and told us. They are dead, aren’t they?” Sully was sorting his file, pretending not to hear.

  “Sully, lad. Answer me. I’m a nurse and I know a morgue picture when I see one. What’s all that got to do with Danny?”

  Sully closed the file. He looked up at Margaret and then over at Aileen. He put his hand flat to his tunic front.

  “Mrs. McInnis,” he said. “You see this uniform? I’m a police sergeant now. I worked hard for it, at the college and in the field. If there are going to be problems just because you’ve known me a long time, I’ll have to report that. And if you won’t cooperate because of it, then someone else has to take over this case. I was kind of afraid of that.”

  Aileen sat back in her chair, looking embarrassed now. For a moment there was silence around the table.

  To help out, Margaret said, “Sully, I’m sure Mrs. McInnis will cooperate. Of course she will. I think she’s just a bit worried about Danny. We both are.”