Nights Below Station Street

by David Adams Richards

  Tonight Joe was making their lean-to near the brook about a mile and a half from his camp, while Milly sat on a tree that had fallen over and told him about her favourite TV shows, “Scoobie Doo,” and “Star Trek.”

  “So then what happened?” Joe asked.

  “The monssir got him by the throat.”

  “By whose throat?”

  “Oh – Captain Kirk.”

  “And then what?”

  “A faser,” Milly said, yawning. “Got him with a faser.”

  Joe could never follow what his daughter was saying.

  After the lean-to was set up Joe brought her some soup which he had made in a pan over the coals. Because the cup was too hot for her, Joe held it for her while she drank. The evening was just getting dark. Joe looked cautiously about.

  “You know we might see a moose tonight, Milly.”

  The little girl nodded as if she knew this. She had been with Joe last year when they hauled a bull out of the woods, on the back of a truck. When they got home, Milly stepped out of the truck, covered in blood, and began spitting. Rita had to take her inside and scrub her for almost an hour while she screeched and roared. But Joe did not hunt moose this year. It was one more thing that since he was sober he decided not to do.

  Joe sat down beside her and drank from his own cup of soup. As the evening got darker, everything seemed further away. There was a boulder a ways off that seemed to disappear, and the white-pebbled brook beneath them took on a stranger and more insistent bellow.

  They sat together on the log with Milly’s feet hanging down but not touching the ground, and Joe rolling himself a cigarette. There was a wind, and it was cold on his ears. The gloom made the old spruces and stumps take on the shapes of animals and people. It settled down over the earth. The branches quivered in the dark area. A strange flower that had not yet died stuck up out of a torn piece of earth, and there was a shiver in the smell of dusk. Although only twenty miles from town they could have been a thousand miles.

  “Are you cold, darlin?” he said after a time, lost in his thoughts.

  “No,” Milly said.

  “Well, I’m going to make some hot chocolate – so you go over to the lean-to and get down in the sleeping bag, and I’ll go to the brook.”

  After the hot chocolate Milly lay down and began to rock back and forth and Joe lit the Coleman lantern and checked his rifle.

  A buck had made two scrapes just north of where they had built the lean-to. There was a doe travelling with a fawn, and another doe that was travelling alone in this heavy wooded area of mixed stands and gravel slopes and furious little brooks.

  As Milly slept, Joe oiled and cleaned the barrel of his rifle, outside away from the shelter, and made mental notes to himself on how he would travel the next day. He did not like hunting with Milly, but now that she was here, in her little red coat and hat, walking about as if she alone knew all about the woods, he would take her with him. To do this he began to rig the basket he had with him so she could rest on his back as he walked.

  Then as he tightened the last strap on the basket and slipped into it, to see if it was comfortable riding on his shoulders, he thought of the truck and the hood and Vye in his fur hat outside the curling club, and someone saying: “She can come with us.”

  And, bothered by this, he flinched his strong shoulders, threw the basket off to the side and, putting his hands in his pockets, made a stabbing motion in the dirt with his foot.

  Rita went out that night with Myhrra and didn’t get home until three in the morning. When she got into the house, and Myhrra honked her horn as she drove away, Adele was sitting on the stairs with a bowl of ice cream, listening to the wind and, with her housecoat and knitted slippers on, looking like she was dressed in a tea cozy.

  “I suppose Dad and Milly are going to freeze their holes out tonight,” Adele said, licking the back of the spoon. Rita put down her black purse, and rummaged in the drawer for a package of cigarettes.

  “Do you have a cigarette, Delly – I’m out.”

  “How do you know if I smoke or not?” Adele asked. Then from under her armpit she hauled a package of Cameos.

  “They’ll be alright,” Rita said. “Joe could go into the woods with a blanket and a bag of flour and last all winter.”

  “Well, it seems to me that some people don’t care if their wonderful little Milly lies tits up in the woods.”

  “You’ve been in the woods with Joe and you got out alright.”

  “That’s because I do the worrying in this goddamn family,” Adele said, crying suddenly, and she set her bowl on the step and walked upstairs, with the padded bottom of her slippers pouncing on the floor. Just then a huge gale came up, a tree made a loud crack, and her little slippers padded silently away. When she got to the bathroom she suddenly felt sick and threw up, waving her hands frantically to keep Rita away from her.

  “And I want to tell you about some of the people – some of them are sleazy, sleazy people, Mom – and you are going out booten around with that Gloria Basterache.”

  Rita came to the top of the stairs, and with her hand on the banister she spoke, and Adele put her hands over her ears.

  “I don’t care about her,” Rita said. “She’s Myhrra’s friend.” Rita’s hand on the banister looked white in the light of the hall. Joe’s red sweater lay over a chair in the hallway. “I don’t have a lot in common with Gloria Basterache.”

  “You do so!” Adele screeched. “You and Gloria Basterache.”

  “I don’t care about her,” Rita said. “Don’t get me angry.”

  “Well, I don’t like her – and who I don’t like is no good – so you just remember that,” Adele screeched. “I worry all night and then I get sick to my stomach and it’s the same all over again. As long as you go work for people they will make a hump of fun about you. And they don’t like Joe and make fun of his stuttering attacks, and I heard that Gloria was just the one to make some fun of his stutter. How could you go out with anyone who makes fun of his stutter!” She said suddenly breaking into tears again. “And Myhrra is just led along by the nose as always. She’s been hanging about a little too much with all those useless people!” Then her door slammed. “And that is my final word!”

  Everything that had happened bothered Rita as well. Joe standing at the curling club door, his huge frame against the outside light, the hood of the truck, and Gloria looking up at him, and then over at Rita.

  They all said they were glad he wasn’t drinking. They all hoped he would not drink again. But she felt they wanted Joe to drink and she could not deny this. And sometimes she herself hoped he would drink. She also knew that people who didn’t even know her sympathized with her because of him, but she knew also that it was a sympathy that had been manufactured by Myhrra and others – it was forced and had nothing to do with Joe, whom they did not know or care for. And sometimes Vye would give her arm a squeeze, and nod to her in a patronizing way.

  The first time Joe quit drinking it surprised her. This was some years before. Rita celebrated by getting drunk and falling backwards off the steps and twisting her ankle. Joe went outside and picked her up by the belt and carried her back into the house while she sang at the top of her lungs.

  Unfortunately, a week later, her two brothers arrived from Lethbridge, Alberta, and they wanted Joe to show them everything and take them everywhere, and be the same as they were.

  Joe acted as if he was shy of them, because he didn’t know how to act with them when he was sober. They complained about everything here, because everything here, back east, was evidently not as wonderful as where they were now from. And Joe listened to this, and also to the complaining that things they had expected to be the same were now, somehow, different. And, if they could not make Joe drink (which they insisted they didn’t want to do), they would ignore him.

  Because her brothers were back, and because everything was exciting, Rita forgot about Joe at that time. And one day she came into the upstairs hall
way and saw him sitting on the old chair in the corner sweating, though it was not hot, with his hands on his knees, and his duffel bag packed as if he was going to go somewhere. He looked up at her and smiled, in a worried way, and said:

  “If I drink now – I’m a real goner.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said, in an easy way, “you won’t drink – you’ve gotten it licked!”

  That night her brothers wanted to take them out to the new tavern, and busied themselves getting ready, while Joe stood in the kitchen with his hat (a cowboy hat they had brought him) in his hand, with the same worried look on his face. The house smelled of shaving lotion in the early fall air, and there was the scent of cigarettes and beer. The calendar in the kitchen was dated a month behind, and there was a scent of aluminum and tin from outside. The water was grey, and yet huge white clouds with pink bellies floated above. Therefore, the air, the scent of cigarettes and the boys singing, all gave Joe the feeling that it would be good to have a drink – to laugh and talk with a bottle and to forget your troubles.

  Joe sat in the tavern with them drinking tomato juice, and Rita found herself discussing old times with her brothers – and all of this, as innocent as it was, was an indication to Joe that he had become an outsider. Then her brothers asked her about her old boyfriend, the one she’d gone with the summer Joe was working in the woods. The brothers did not think that this would be a sensitive subject to Joe. Rita answered bluntly that she had not seen him in years and Joe said nothing. But for the first time because he was not drinking he was not the same.

  Her brothers deployed themselves on the couches, and slept on the floors, and every night Joe came home from work and found them already into the booze, and waiting to tell him of some innocent incident that had happened that day. Every night Joe remained an outsider to the one thing he had in common with other men, a capacity and willingness to drink.

  And through all of this Joe saw one thing – which he kept in his heart. He saw that her brothers, whom she pampered and protected, acted with no idea of the consequences, and therefore in them he could only see himself.

  So one night at the end of two weeks Joe found himself listening to the same stories coming from different bottles. And without even thinking he was going to drink, and drink being the furthest thing from his mind, he could not stop pouring a bottle of wine into himself.

  Then Rita, angry with him over this, shouted at him, and he pushed her away with one hand, and she fell on her rump. As soon as they saw Joe drinking, the brothers became sorry for Rita, and told Joe to settle down. And Joe laughed and picked one up by the belt buckle with his teeth and shook him. Then Adele flew into the fray, and hit him on the head with a broom, shouting: “Let go of Uncle Derwood.”

  And Rita stood and jumped him from behind. Then the other brother, Clement, hit him while they were all swinging him about. Then he shook his shoulders and Rita went flying, and Adele kept following him about, hitting him every step he took, and finally he turned about and grabbed her by her left ear and twisted it.

  “Don’t ya be twistin little Delly’s ear!” Derwood said.

  “Don’t you touch my ear, you bully,” Adele screeched.

  Rita came back up flying with both fists then and managed to hit Joe twice in the mouth. Then Derwood and Clement said they would call the cops, and they went to pick up the telephone. But as soon as they did, Adele came to life and tore it out of Clement’s hands.

  “You’re not getting the fucking cops here!” Adele shouted. She banged the receiver down and went at Joe again, fell to her knees, and bit his thigh.

  The next morning they were all sleeping in different parts of the house. And they woke to rain pouring down over the oil barrel and the sky dark and the September grass wet and cold. Joe was the first up, and he took a bottle of shaving lotion and mixed it with some beer, and sat at the table, shaking. Then Adele got up and dressed to go out. She came downstairs with a huge bandage on her ear that looked like a doughboy was stuck over it. “Well, someone has to go out and get something to eat to keep this family from starving right to death,” she said to him.

  “Yer not going to wear that goddamn doughboy-looking thing out, are you, darlin?” he said shivering and stuttering.

  “I wear what I have to to keep my ear from bleeding right to death – it’s just like the same when I was in Brownies and you come home drunk and mauled all my cookies,” Adele said, and she left the house.

  When Rita’s brothers got up, Joe looked at them and smiled weakly. They both mooched about for a drink and Joe called a taxi to bring up a pint. Then they reprimanded him while he sat there, and painstakingly went over the reasons why he should quit.

  Then they boarded the train that night, shaking their heads because he was asking them to stay just one more day, and had followed them to the train.

  The same fascination with herself that had caused Myhrra to get married, was the same that caused her to get divorced. That is, she saw the doorknob turn and she decided to get married; she was sure Mike would come back to her and she got divorced. They fought over everything, even the coat hangers in the front hall. But this was not done for the reason it seemed to be done, but for the exact opposite reason. The more she took coat hangers, the more Mike kicked her in the bum; the more she scratched his Legion dart trophies, and buried them where he’d never find them again, the more she actually did not want to get divorced at all. They fought They hauled Byron by the arms, standing out on the street while people looked on, and Byron screeched that they were hauling his limbs off. The more they fought, the more it seemed that they wanted nothing to do with each other. And yet they needed each other as much for the divorce as they did for the marriage.

  Now Byron was bringing his friends home and saying he hated her in front of them. He walked about with a dark expression on his face. Though he was only young he scared her and she would always give in to him. He would always make a comment at her expense to make his friends laugh. Then they would go into the bedroom together. He would say: “Hi Mom, how’s tits?” Or something like that.

  She worried that those friends measured him by how many rude comments he could make to his mother, who was loving to him and had never done him anything wrong.

  Myhrra was seeing the priest now as often as possible. With this new crisis in her life, with this feeling of being alone, she needed a priest to talk to. Father Garret, Allain’s brother’s youngest, a tall, unnaturally thin man, was the priest who counselled her at this time. Using a measure of his sociology classes from university, and his own desire to be looked upon as understanding, along with his abundant dislike of the type of men on the river, especially men like his uncle and Joe Walsh, he gave Myhrra a sympathetic ear. After each visit, Myhrra had the feeling of being pure and good – simply because she had talked to the priest, who of course believed in the “new” church – which she considered much more open. Myhrra liked the fact that people saw her coming and going from the priesthouse or talking to “Father” in the yard.

  But still, Mike was remarrying and no one could change that. The priest finally told her this one night when she went to see him.

  Everything Father Garret said after that remark took on a different meaning. Instead of liking her, he did not. Instead of being sympathetic, he was jealous of her. Instead of being sensitive, he was filled with that terrible piety. Suddenly she remembered him sitting on a bait box as a boy, out on the wharf. She remembered she was seventeen at the time, and they were playing “Rock around the Clock” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” He had just come from church with his mother, and his feet were covered in dust, and they were gossiping while the sun hit his eyes. Men walked about him, working, their clothes dirty and their faces strong in the wind. He looked over at Myhrra. He was a tall gangly boy. There was some hay on his left shoe.

  All of this she saw again in a second, as she stood in his office off the main hallway, and she now felt that they had lied to each other right from th
e start. That is, she had over-emphasized all of her problems, and he had tried to show a sympathy which he could not really give.

  Myhrra left the priesthouse. She walked out into the cold. She lit a cigarette and then another. She smelled burnt paper and railway ties, and she remembered all of the years she was going to go away on one of those trains. Suddenly she cried, and for some reason began to curse Rita.

  “Best friend,” she said. “Best friend – what friend do I have?” And at this moment she ran toward home in the wind.

  Myhrra got Byron ready to go to the wedding. She got him a new white shirt, and found his suit was so small for him he wouldn’t be able to wear it And though she had made comments about Mike and how he was supposed to give her money for child support, it was she herself who went downtown and paid for Byron’s new suit. Then she had to get him new shoes.

  She wanted Byron to look his best. The night before the wedding, Myhrra had all his clothes laid out. She had taken his new shoes out of the box, and put them at the foot of the bed, and had laid his pants over the chair.

  It was a clear night. The air smelled flat and cold. In the trailer, there were little drafts the source of which she hadn’t been able to find, no matter how often she’d gone about touching the walls.

  The next morning when Byron got up he said his egg wasn’t cooked right. A little of the yolk was running and he wouldn’t eat it This idea of being pampered whenever he had to do something gave Byron the edge on his mother.

  “I don’t feel like eating the egg,” he said.

  “Well, you have to eat it.”