On the gravel road a mile from home he stops to pee. Finished, he looks up at the sky and shouts, “I love Melody Krahn.” He says this again and then keeps walking. He reaches the house just as the sky is lightening at the edges. He looks into his mother’s room. She is sleeping, her left arm thrown back against the pillow. He tiptoes in and stands over her. Her fingers jump. In the dark like this, she looks foreign, Mexican maybe. He leaves her and climbs the stairs to his own small room. As he undresses he looks out of his bedroom window and sees Johnny trudging across the yard to the house. Chris crawls into bed. Before he falls asleep he pictures himself being roasted on a huge spit and, turning the spit, at either end, their elbows swinging in and out and in and out, are Melody and his mother.
BABIES
It is, to Johnny’s mind, a perfect spring. Though the farmers complain of too little rain, Johnny likes the occasional cloudburst followed by days of endless sunshine, producing the gradual greening of the shrubs and grass and trees. The leaves appear slowly at first, little brilliant tongues that slip out of hiding and then quickly, violently, become full grown. The birds are wild, drunk, out of control. They twitter and chant and wake Johnny in the early morning with their clatter.
The world is pregnant. Everywhere Johnny goes he sees the possibility of birth. He is especially aware of pregnant women. He sees them on the streets of Lesser in various stages of development. Farmers’ wives open their doors to his knocks and stand swollen and huge, fingers splayed over their abdomens, their faces round and full of promise. He talks to them first of feed, output, and prices, but in the end, the conversation comes back to babies and he lowers his voice, whispering of his own wife who is soon due. These are relative strangers, people from other places who don’t know of the town of Lesser and its secrets.
“Yes, it’s my first,” Johnny says, and he smiles and endears himself by speaking of morning sickness and false labour and of Loraine, his lovely wife, who can no longer sleep on her stomach.
In the late afternoon of these spring days, he returns to Loraine and finds her at the kitchen sink, or in the egg room, or simply feet-up by the TV, and he kisses her cheek and brushes his hand like a feather across her belly.
She still comes to him at night, though not as frequently. The last few weeks she has not wanted him inside her. “It’s a phase.” she says, “I remember this with Chris, suddenly needing privacy, as if preparing myself for something that was all my own. I should warn you, this continues for at least six months after the birth.”
Johnny mumbles something. He is nuzzling her rump, unable to get too worried; he can’t think beyond tomorrow. And besides, there are other ways, like using her leg, or spilling himself into the crack of her bum, here, sliding himself along that tuck of flesh.
She pulls him up so they are nose to nose. While he touches her, a fumbling attempt to communicate his need, she speaks of breathing methods and how, this time, she would like to stand for the labour. “That midwife I met at Claire’s. She suggested there was less work involved if you stand. Claire would have to hold me up though and I don’t know if she’s strong enough.”
“You want me there, then?” Johnny asks. He is pleased. His hands have found her ears.
She smiles; a hair is stuck on her upper lip. One leg is thrown over Johnny’s. His own belly touches her bigness; a circle of heat. “Yes,” she says, “that would be nice, I think.”
Johnny pulls the strand away. Curls it behind her ear. Kisses her lobe. “Thank you,” he says. “I need to learn to breathe.”
“I’ll teach you,” she says. “We’ll practise. Starting tomorrow.” Her arm jumps. She is sleeping.
But, tomorrow, a Friday, is not a day for breathing lessons. In the calm of the early evening it is revealed to Johnny that his life still teeters between light and shadow. In fact, he wonders if there are other people out there who shuttle between heaven and earth, never finding that comfortable and safe middle space. He questions too whether he has, in some way, more affection for darkness, for the coarse and obscene, represented so fittingly by the apricot-orange of Loraine’s anus which, when seen from above, produces an ache in his chest: the sphincter drawn tight, the puckered kiss and his desire to return that kiss, holding all the while Loraine’s tight fists as she shudders and drives against his face.
He is at the drop-in centre. Before he opens for the evening he goes to the back room and, leaning towards the rust-edged mirror that hangs over the tiny sink, flosses his teeth. He’s thinking and humming to himself when he straightens. The back of his head itches. Someone is here. He turns, the floss still twisted around his fingers, and discovers Melody Krahn standing in the doorway. She’s leaning against the jamb. Her hair is wet at the edges as if she’s just showered. Her fingers worry at a wooden beaded necklace.
Johnny’s working with his tongue at a stubborn piece of food. His cheek bulges and he is comically aware that he could be an animal in a zoo and Melody the keeper. Her eyes are sharp tonight, as if she had just walked beneath a fall of light and soaked up the brilliance there. Her hands fall to her sides. Johnny turns, rinses his mouth, and swivels back. “Hi,” he says.
“Hi.” She walks over to a chair and sits. She crosses her legs. It has been an unusually warm day and she’s wearing jean shorts; the frayed ends lie on her thighs. She swings a foot and looks right at Johnny.
“I gotta ask you for a favour,” she says. Her voice is sure and clear, almost too determined, as if she were acting, projecting to an audience.
Johnny notes for the first time that her hands are shaking. He pulls up his own chair; close enough to maintain intimacy, far enough away for decorum. He’d have to stretch slightly to touch her shiny, bare, and rounded knee. “Okay,” he says.
“I’m pregnant,” she says, and her hand flicks up to her throat and drops back to her lap.
Johnny waits. He looks into her eyes because this is the easiest; there’s a safety in their polish. They are marbles sitting in the sun. He waits some more.
“What I want, see, is an abortion and you can help me,” Melody says. She tips her tongue at her teeth and continues before Johnny can interrupt. “I’ve gotta go across to the States, Fargo. Winnipeg’s too close, I want the distance. Also, you’d have to be my father.”
“Your father?”
“Yeah.”
“Huh.” Johnny snorts out through his nose. This girl is amazing. She’s evoking all kinds of emotion in Johnny. He’s feeling fiercely protective. He pities her, considers her stupid for getting pregnant, admires her bravado no matter how false it is. She reminds him of Loraine; in the way Loraine juts out her little breasts and says, “So.” Johnny, try as he might to fight it, finds Melody’s swinging foot provocative. He clears his throat. Finally breaks this long gaze he’s held with Melody and says, “You’re asking the wrong person.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Do your parents know?”
Melody presses a finger down on her bare thigh so that it leaves a white mark. “Of course not.”
Johnny’s shaking his head. “I can’t do that,” he says.
Melody’s chin jerks up and then down. She licks her lips and looks around the room. “Okay, fine,” she says. She stands and turns. The hard edge of the chair has left red creases on the backs of her thighs.
“Wait,” Johnny says. “Sit.”
Melody turns and the lift of her chubby bell-shaped upper lip tells Johnny that she thinks she has won. He is so easily taken, he thinks.
“Why me?” he asks, implying that there are others more likely than him: the school counsellor, Melody’s older sister, even Loraine. But even as he asks this he knows what the answer should be. He is, despite his penchant for a grasping faith and a desire to appear clean, a wanderer, a tumble weed who sticks to no one and no thing. He is easy; a likable and gullible fool.
“You’re so moral,” Melody says. This is unexpected and Johnny wants to laugh. Instead, he says, “Really?”
Melody is sincere. She has her hand on his leg. With this touch she has claimed him and he senses how perverse her perception is, because her square fingers with the boxy black nails both beckon and warn. He wants to gather her in his arms; she is a fallen bird, one wing broken, mouth open in a silent squawk. He could so easily reach out and palm her tummy. He pulls back.
“How many weeks?” he asks.
Melody removes her hand and says, “Ten.”
“So?”
“So, we’d have to go next week.”
“Don’t you, like, I mean, isn’t any sort of counselling required?”
“No.”
“That easy?”
“Yes.”
“And no one else knows?”
“Only Carrie Klassen. I would be over at her house for a sleep-over. You know. That night.”
Again, Johnny is amazed by the efficiency of all this, as if he’d been picked long ago, in another life perhaps, to play a role in this young girl’s preordained drama.
“And Chris?”
“Not a clue.”
“Why not?”
“He’s a little boy.”
Johnny sees how males are essentially useless. Dicks that rise and fall. “You could give the baby up,” he says.
“Neat,” Melody answers. Her eyes tell him this is a stupid suggestion. In this way, too, Melody is surprising. In Johnny’s limited experience with pregnant teenage girls, the majority want to have their babies and keep them. This little girl’s cold calculating heart is frightening.
Johnny decides to hit her where it hurts. “And money? It’ll cost.”
This works, because now Melody is quiet. A slight drop of her head, and then a coy touch on his knee. Slut, he thinks.
“Could you make me a loan?” she asks.
“How much?”
“Five hundred. I’ll work it off.”
Johnny doesn’t answer. He’s thinking how easily Loraine got pregnant. She simply had to nod her head at him and think about it. The expanding belly then became a force of sorts, pushing him away from Charlene. It was true, Charlene knew it too.
“You can have the money,” Johnny says. And then he tells her to go, and after she has left he washes his face with cold water and holds the towel against his eyes for a long time and takes comfort in the darkness there.
Johnny’s life is not his own. There are forces greater than himself that pull him to and fro. He is wind-tossed, driven by the gusts of desire and greed and needs of others. And he accepts this. In one of his dreams Melody appears to take his hand and guide him through a maze whose walls he takes for the inside of a hive. Melody’s voice is low and calm, her fingers on his palm are clever and insistent. She refuses to let him go. She has sprouted wings and he can see through the webbed gossamer to the backs of her arms which are white and smooth. Her body is immature, perhaps underdeveloped, lacking a spine. She undulates as she walks. As they near the centre of the maze Melody turns to Johnny and smiles. Like a newborn infant, she has no teeth.
Johnny believes that messages are sent through dreams. He wakes and imagines Melody as a harmless bumblebee on the verge of splattering herself against a car’s windshield. He lies in the dusty morning light of his little room. The window is open; birds are busy.
Over breakfast he considers telling Loraine. He watches her slide into her seat, her hair unwashed, her housecoat tied tightly around the bulge that is his child. She has grown to enormous proportions in just the last week. Her mood is protective. These days she ignores Johnny and Chris, pays them the same attention she would one of her chickens. Even though it is still three weeks to her due date, her body seems ripe, ready to burst. Johnny butters an English muffin and says that last night was a good one at the centre.
“Hmm,” says Loraine.
“Chris was there, Melody too. Last weekend the kids had a party. Gary Wohlgemut went swimming in the river. Fool. Could’ve drowned. I don’t know why he still hangs out with the younger kids.”
“That was the night Chris got in at six?” Loraine asks.
“Yeah.” Johnny’s remembering last night. Watching Melody and how she was with Chris. She’d been distracted. Sat with Chris and then moved away. She was a cat on the prowl. Went out for a smoke and then came back in and rubbed up against the boy. Then back outside. She and Chris had left together at some point, Johnny hadn’t noticed until later, and then he asked and some kid said they’d gone to Melody’s.
He’d waited for her to come back, his thoughts returning to the up-and-down measure of her bare leg. It was like a deep and unsatisfactory affection for this girl who wanted to turn his world upside-down. By midnight, when the centre was cleared and Melody hadn’t returned, he’d made up his mind. But, this morning, after the dream and then suffering the brooding of Loraine, Johnny understands what will happen.
He holds his coffee and says to Loraine, “Next week sometime, I have quite a few customers out near Sprague and beyond. I’ll probably try to fit it all into a couple of days. Stay overnight somewhere. Maybe sleep in the car.”
Loraine’s eyelids are puffy. Her fingers chubbier. At this moment her thumb is pressing down on her bare calf. She’s looking for water retention. She seems unconcerned by Johnny’s intentions. They have a back-up plan, Mrs. Godwin, the neighbour, if Johnny’s not around. “Okay,” she says, whispering it would seem, to her leg.
Johnny experiences a small lift of jealousy. He has become a familiar and unimportant object at the edge of Loraine’s life. She is lost in her own rapture. So be it, he thinks.
Which is perhaps why, when Michael Barry calls late Saturday night and asks Johnny if he wants to go baiting bear early next morning, he says yes. Michael picks Johnny up at six in the morning. Johnny’s arranged for Chris to gather eggs today as Loraine’s ankles are swollen. It’s a warm morning and Johnny, dressed in work boots, jeans, a T-shirt, and plaid jacket, sits on the front steps, drinks coffee and smokes. Loraine is still sleeping; he listened for her but the house was silent, so he left a note on the kitchen counter.
Michael drives up in an old Fairlane station wagon. He’s pulling a trailer with an ATV. He hops from the car, rubs his hands together and says, “Let’s go.”
Driving down through Steinbach and La Broquerie and into the Sandilands Provincial Park, Michael talks. He recalls last year’s baiting. “A bear came after me,” he says. “Right up the tree, mouth frothing, claws scrabbling. I fired a shot into the air and she stopped and slid back down and bulked off down her path. They all have their own path. They’re scrupulous about stepping on the same track in the same way. A bear will approach the bait, sniff, go up on her haunches, swivel, and retrace her exact tracks.”
“You say she,” Johnny says. “You shoot females?”
“No. If I see cubs, I don’t shoot. In fact, these last years I haven’t shot anything. I seem to be going soft. I get a kick out of chaining myself high in a tree and just waiting and watching. It’s wonderful to observe the approach. The delicate swagger, the nose high up. God, they have lovely noses, what an instrument.” Unconsciously, Michael lifts his own nose and seems to sniff the air. “I hunt with a bow these days,” he says. “It’s a bigger challenge. More humane too. Shoot a bear with an arrow it’ll run twenty yards and drop dead. Shoot that same bear in the same spot with a .308 and it’ll run one to two hundred yards.”
Johnny feels obliged to ask why. Michael is excited. He’s pulling at his beard, shifting his chin down towards his chest as if focusing on a distant target. He answers, “You see, a .308 shell stops inside the bear somewhere, messes things up horribly, but doesn’t kill immediately. An arrow, on the other hand, goes right through. Zip. The bear bleeds to death, just like that.” Michael smacks his hands.
They’re deep into the park now and the road is lined with pine and birch and poplar. The car picks up stones from the gravel road and knocks them off the wheel wells. Michael points at a skunk beside the road. They see a buck with big eyes at the edge of the
forest. Its head kicks up at the sound of the car and then he’s gone.
Michael was here last week and he takes a familiar sandy side road, a trail with two narrow tracks, up to the edge of a gully where he stops and says, “We’ll go by ATV from here, I’ve got a series of sites about three miles further on. There’s bog and all kinds of shit we’ll have to wade through.”
They off-load the ATV and an hour of rough driving takes them to the first baiting site where Michael builds a fire and fires up some bacon. Johnny sucks on a rasher. He’s leaning against a stump, looking up at the sky, listening to the fire and the ticking of the small engine as it cools.
Michael takes an old sock from a bag and throws it in the frying pan. He stirs it, soaks up the grease, drops a good-sized stone down the opening of the sock, ties a long rope to the sock, and heaves the whole bundle at a fairly tallish tree in the clearing. Holding one end of the rope he drags the greasy sock through the limbs of the tree and finally leaves it dangling, halfway up.
Johnny watches from his stump. All this fooling around with nature strikes him as phoney, as if creation were a toy to be banged about.
Michael toes the ground. “In a week,” he says, “if a bear finds this place, we’ll come back and those drippings from the sock will have soaked the ground, and the bear will have ripped a four-foot hole in the earth. It’s a fact.” He looks up at the sock as if it’s a beautiful and intricate invention.
“Where do you get all this stuff from?” Johnny asks. He’s feeling slightly sleepy, slightly curious, locked in this sunny spot here in the middle of the woods.
“You pick it up.” Michael sits down close to Johnny. He asks for a cigarette and Johnny gives him one. “Like how to hunt for moose. When you come across a trail, head downwind. The thing is with a moose, he’ll loop back and come around like he’s making a U, so you don’t follow his trail, you cut across to meet him, knowing he’s going to circle with the wind. The last thing to know, and this is the most important, is that if he senses you he’ll spook. And when he spooks he’ll run for one to two hundred yards and then stop to piss. So you have to run like hell and catch him as he’s pissing, because once he’s started he can’t just cut if off. You could walk right up and kiss him.”
A Year of Lesser Page 16
