Devotion

by Howard Norman

  “I was just holding hands, David. For comfort, you know? I wasn’t suggesting a hotel room.”

  The next day, from the clinic, she telephoned Haliburton House Inn and apologized for not canceling the reservation.

  Naomi noticed David sprawled at the pen’s entrance just as she climbed down from her jeep in the driveway. The gate swung back and forth as swans exited. Naomi carried her black veterinarian’s bag to the pen. Two swans stepped on and over David’s body, one got a solid bite to his nose, and both caught up with three swans along the path to the pond. For all they knew the swanherd was dead. Naomi set her bag on the ground. She stepped over David, kicked at the remaining swans until they, too, set out for the water. She leaned down over David, felt his pulse, decided she didn’t need to take out her stethoscope. He had dirty webbed footprints, pasty and dried swan shit and congealed cornmeal on his T-shirt and shorts. The words, in spontaneously antique locution, that came to Naomi’s mind were Behold a pitiful sight. But pity was not what she actually felt. More, disgust. David groaned awake without opening his eyes. “Guess you’re not dead after all,” Naomi said. “Well, that’s good for you, I suppose.” Still, she could not just leave him there. (Well, I could just leave him here—what harm would come of it?) She levered up David a little by the shoulders, slapped his face once, patted it roughly. David opened his eyes, said, “My head is pounding.” He reeked of whiskey and swan shit. Quite the unusual combination, Naomi thought.

  “Just drunk as a skunk,” she said.

  “Where’s the swans?”

  “The pond. Where else would they be?”

  “Any get into barbed wire?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Naomi managed to hoist David to his feet. With his arm slung around her shoulder, David leaning heavily into her, too woozy to help much, Naomi maneuvered him in fits and starts to the guesthouse. She kicked open the screen door and with great effort got David into the bedroom. She let him fall face-down on the unmade bed and tilted his head so he could breathe. Naomi went into the kitchen, put on coffee and returned to the bedroom. David was now asleep, snoring like a walrus, but suddenly touched his blood-dried nose, muttering, “Dr. Steenhagen, Dr. Steenhagen.” Naomi had no idea whom he referred to, seeing as there was no Dr. Steenhagen in that part of Nova Scotia. She stood there looking at him for a few minutes. She heard the coffee drip. “Oh, what the hell,” she finally said. She rolled David onto his back, unbuckled his belt, unbuttoned his shorts, lowered the zipper, slid off the shorts and tossed them into the wicker hamper in the corner, already brimming with rumpled clothes. David wore boxer shorts with a checkerboard design, with black and red checkers on the squares; they’d been a gift from Maggie.

  Naomi was about to strip off David’s splotched T-shirt when she heard, “You don’t mind if I have a cup of coffee, do you? I haven’t had one in months.” She turned to find William leaning against the doorframe, wearing his robe, pajamas and bedroom slippers.

  “I’ve dragged this poor slob of a son-in-law of yours in here and put him to bed, as you can see,” Naomi said. “I probably should have shot him up with something.”

  “I thought human beings were out of your jurisdiction, Naomi. Professionally speaking.”

  “Still, I could have put David Kozol here out of his misery.”

  “Don’t do him any favors, eh?”

  “I can only imagine how you feel about him, William.”

  Despite the heat and mugginess, Naomi judged it more seemly to cover David with a blanket, which she did.

  “A man who doesn’t have the slightest notion of how to handle life,” William said. “That’s how I feel about him. You didn’t rescue him from trying to drown himself in the pond, did you? I wouldn’t be able to forgive that.”

  “He was asleep next to the pen.”

  “Jesus, no kidding. That’s something, isn’t it.”

  “The swans were walking all over him. One by one. Like happy schoolkids stepping over a dead crossing guard.”

  “Dead-drunk crossing guard, shirking his duties and punished by swans for it. That’s got a nice ring to it.”

  “Yes it does. Well, I’ve got an appointment in Economy.”

  “Let’s have a cup of coffee together first. It smells good.”

  “What about Sleeping Beauty there?”

  “Let him sleep it off. Other than this pitiful display, I have to admit, Naomi, he’s been dedicated to those swans. I have to admit that.”

  Naomi and William went into the kitchen. Naomi poured two cups of coffee, set them on the table. “Take anything in it?”

  “Usually sugar, but I’ll pass.”

  They talked for a few moments. Then William reached out and closed Manuscript of a Country Doctor, which David had left on the table. “Laying a book open like that stresses the binding,” he said. “My good wife Janice would have protested.” He held the bookmark up for Naomi to see. “David Kozol stole this from the library.”

  “You might better think ‘borrowed,’ William.”

  “I’m returning it to its proper place.” He slipped the bookmark into the pocket of his robe.

  They sat drinking coffee, not talking. Naomi washed out the cups, placing them in the plastic drying rack. “Let’s get you back to the house, William,” she said.

  “There’s a morning MovieTime movie on. Some pirate story with William Bendix.” He did an imitation of a pirate: “Arr, Arr, Arr, me buckos.”

  “Not this morning, thanks. I’ve got that house call.”

  William’s voice was scratchy. “Now there’s a B actor if there ever was one, William Bendix. He’s got that spot in the alphabet all sewed up, you ask me.”

  “Never heard of William Bendix, I’m afraid.”

  “It’s not important.”

  William got up from the table. Naomi locked her arm in his. As they started for the screen door, William said, “I thought before I heard David Kozol say ‘barbed wire’ in his sleep. Could that be right? I don’t know why he’d be concerned about that. I cleared every piece of it over a year ago.”

  “People just say things in sleep.”

  On the porch Naomi noticed William smiling to himself. “What’s so entertaining?” she said.

  “Nothing, really. Except, I was recalling a night Janice woke me up. She said I’d said a name in my sleep, but she wouldn’t tell me what name, only that she didn’t like it. I said don’t take it personally. She jumped right on that, though. She felt the opposite, that it’s what a husband says in sleep that should be taken most personally of all. Because they can’t help who they dream about. And if you don’t inform a husband whose name he said in sleep, he can’t make excuses. In a way, the wife then owns the secret.”

  On the grass, they saw dozens of night-woven spider webs beaded and glistening with dew. There were crows by the pond. “Funny thing,” William said as they continued toward the main house. “Some mornings I feel like I’m still broken inside. From that taxicab. It’s hard to tell the difference between actually being broken and the memory of it.”

  Daring Nighttime Robbery

  MAGGIE MADE three visits in August. That month, too, David took a number of photographs; most were still lifes through rainy windows—so obvious. There were almost daily cloudbursts, lasting only minutes, but otherwise the drought continued. He’d photographed the swans, the elevated black well-cap amongst begonias in the garden, an archipelago of moss on a particularly wide boulder atop the stone wall near the guesthouse. He’d constructed a makeshift darkroom in a small outbuilding. The whole setup—bins, trays, chemicals, paper, enlarger—cost him $1,155. A hose running from the guesthouse provided water. Yet when he appraised the first contact sheets, he recognized the familiar lack of originality, took it harder than expected, threw out the negatives, every last one, stuffed them in the garbage.

  Around seven o’clock on the thirtieth, David walked to the pond. He’d allowed the swans to stay on the water, such a disgustin
gly humid night. He stripped off his shorts, boxer shorts, T-shirt, setting them on the ground, then waded in. The water was slightly brackish from the accumulated heat of June, July and August. He felt the slickness and slope of the hard-packed clay bottom. Up to his chest in water, he stretched out, performed a quick breaststroke, reversed direction, sidestroked back to where he stood again. And that was all, really, he wanted. To gain footing. To hold still. It was a peaceful moment. The slight beaded chill on his skin. The ineluctable strangeness of swimming with swans.

  He heard a bass voice originating from the direction of the tree-lined drive leading out to Route 2. It was a car radio; he not only recalled the tide, “Duke of Earl,” but the singer, Gene Chandler, the Duke of Earl himself. The pulsing refrain, as if Chandler had an amplifier held to his heart as he implored his great love to be his Duchess, the repetition of the word “Duke” two, three, four times in a row at different points in the song, returned with such vivid immediacy that all intervening time between 1962, when the novelty song was popular, and the present was erased. David had always loved that song, “Duke of Earl.” When he’d first heard it at age nine, he’d conjectured that the Duke of Earl was an actual figure out of history, and tried to find Earl on a map of England in the big atlas his mother kept in the living room. No luck there.

  People lost their way. They sometimes made a wrong turn off the two-lane into the estate. Tourists, visiting relatives of folks in Parrsboro, it might be anyone. At least a dozen times while lying in bed at night, or sitting on the screen porch, he’d heard a car radio. One night he heard a car approach, laughter, then, “Not here, Charlie, can’t you see it’s private property,” then the sound of the car leaving. That had been at 3:30 A.M., the night still young.

  The car seemed almost to materialize out of the crepuscular light, crunching gravel under its hubcapped tires, headlights sweeping the main house. David stood ten or so feet from the bank. When the car stopped, he saw it was a 1956 Buick, the exact model and year his family had owned in Vancouver. No doubt he’d heard “Duke of Earl” on the car radio; his mother used to listen to the pop station. “A big stupid American car,” she’d say, “but at least I have one. Some divorcées of my acquaintance don’t.” The mind plays tricks, if it does anything it plays tricks, but this was not the ghost of his father, the ghost of his mother, arrived to Nova Scotia after driving around in the afterlife of Canada all these years. And yet what were the odds of a 1956 Dynaflow suddenly appearing? Seeing as Buick had manufactured thousands of these cars, the conundrum—the uncanny aspect of it here at the estate—was, of course, meaningful only in the context of his own childhood.

  The Buick now turned around. Just someone lost, David thought. He swam a little—look, the swanherd’s hardly a graceful swimmer. The swans kept near the opposite bank. David sidestroked awhile. Then stood again, the water rimming his body, giving him the memory sensation of when he’d stood next to the leather examination couch in Dr. Steenhagen’s office, shivering in his skivvies as the doctor held a metal tape measure around his body at chest level. Ardith had brought him in for the swan bite, but Steenhagen decided to add a general checkup, too. He wrote down David’s chest measurement, listened to his heart and lungs through the stethoscope, all routine stuff.

  “Things look fine,” he said to Ardith. “I assure you, this bite is nothing to worry about. No worries here at all. You might expect David to have some soreness, but no infection. It’ll heal on its own. Just put the ointment on twice a day as prescribed. Change the bandage. He’ll be just fine.”

  The Buick came back. The headlights were off. David could scarcely make out the car’s full definition. Something wrong here.

  The car stopped. The driver’s-side door opened but didn’t close. The engine idled. David waited, staring at the car. Five or six minutes went by. He then heard a shotgun blast—thundering echo in all directions, it seemed, the pond, the trees, the guesthouse. David saw a figure running from the main house to the car (he hadn’t seen it go to the house, a trick of light), then heard William’s voice, straining but loud and clear, cracking in midsentence: “You broke my window, you cowardly little shit!” William fired off another round; David saw the flash. He heard a branch fall through other branches and hit the ground. William had aimed high on purpose, when he could easily have hit the car. The car door slammed. The car was jammed into gear, wheels spun, the car lurched into reverse, sending up a dust cloud, the spray and hover of gravel dust slightly illuminated when the taillights came on. Then it disappeared.

  David witnessed the incident as if it took place in a netherworld of shadow puppets. What snapped him back to his senses was hearing the swans’ distress. He turned and saw wings fluttering in the dark, heard wings roiling up water. David scrambled up to dry ground, threw on his shorts, hopping forward the whole time. He ran to the house, yelling, “William, it’s me—David! It’s me—David!” so as not to be shot.

  When he got close to the porch, he stopped, held up his hands as if under arrest, said, “It’s me—David.”

  “Jesus Holy Christ in heaven, will you please stop introducing yourself!” William said.

  “I was in the pond.”

  William did not respond right away, but finally said, “Hey, now’s an opportunity to knock your lights out, eh? But I guess a shotgun’s a bit extreme for that purpose.” William laughed hard, coughed a little, cleared his throat. He was wearing a bathrobe and unlaced work boots. He broke open the shotgun, held it slantwise, barrel pointing down and away from David. He stepped off the porch. “Daring nighttime robbery. The little bastard interrupted my favorite opera. Did you get a look at him?”

  “No. Too far away.”

  “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to take a dip myself, sweltering in my goddamn invalid bed as I was for so long.”

  “Are you all right, William?”

  “I’m the one had the shotgun.”

  “I didn’t even know you owned one.”

  “Under my bed the whole time.”

  “No kidding.”

  “This shotgun was my father’s in Scotland. Once in a blue moon I go quail hunting.”

  “We should call the authorities now.”

  “The thing is, I know that boy. The hooligan.”

  “Good, you can identify him. I’ll put in the call.”

  “Oh, hold on a minute,” William said. “Hold on. Let me tell you something.”

  “I’m making the call,” David said. “It’s a Buick Dynaflow he was driving.”

  “I know the car. I know the boy who drove it. His name is Toby Knox. He’s not so bad. He works at the drive-in movie in Truro, or did last I heard, but he’s from Parrsboro here. Toby’s one of those kids you might first theorize was knocked on the head, maybe playing hockey, and never quite recovered. But you’d be wrong. He’s got native intelligence. Though he keeps a good secret of it. Anyway, he’s the one broke into the house. What puzzles me, Toby’d likely have known I was in the house, because I’m so seldom not in it. Plus, there were a few lights on.”

  “William, what does it matter? He broke in. A report has to be filed.”

  “I’m not filing any goddamn report.”

  William went back into the house; David walked back to the pond. The swans were huddled out of the water. Without visible cue, they stood in unison and, like a weary encampment of white-muslin-clad infantry given marching orders by the wind, moved off along the bank into the cattails, out of view. Yet a few moments later they seemed to pick up the sound of the returning car before David did; the cattails rustled as the swans emerged and bellied out onto the water, their safest haven.

  “Alert the Mounties,” David said. “The Duke of Earl’s back.”

  He walked to the main house again. The car door opened, a figure stepped out, slammed shut the door. David saw a match flare, caught a glimpse of the young man’s face, slicked-backhair, a Hawaiian shirt. The ember of a cigarette like a firefly impaled to the dark. The ma
n took a few steps, then stopped. “I’m the one Mr. Field shot at,” he said.

  “Toby Knox, I’m telephoning to get you arrested.”

  “Seems only right.”

  “It is right.”

  “Give me a minute to apologize to Mr. Field first. Please.”

  “You tried to break in and you want me to let you in?”

  “You’re the temporary caretaker, right? David? David, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Naomi Bloor’s my next-door neighbor. See, just now I told you where I live. Mr. Field’s known me all my life. I’ve known Maggie my whole life too. I’m giving myself up.”

  “Good for you.”

  David went up on the porch and opened the door and stepped inside. He heard an aria on the phonograph; he didn’t know the language. He went to William’s room. William lay on the bed with his eyes closed. David knocked on the open door and said, “Toby Knox is outside. He wants to talk with you.”

  William opened his eyes. “Let him in,” he said.

  “I’m right here already,” Toby said, brushing past David. Toby sat on the end of the bed. “Fuck me, I’m sorry, Mr. Field. Oh, sorry about my language, too.”

  “Toby, what got into you?”

  William switched on the bedside lamp. David got a good clear look at the criminal. Toby Knox was about five feet ten; the word “gaunt” might come first to mind, but that finally best applied to his face, because his arms were solid, biceps stretching the short sleeves of the Hawaiian shirt, with its big blooming white hibiscus on a turquoise background, tucked in. Faded blue jeans, thick belt with a longhorn steer’s head on the buckle. His black hair, almost laughably to David’s mind, was swept back in a classic “duck’s ass.” Toby also sported a wisp of a mustache and goatee—halfhearted attempts, more negligence than purpose. He had handsome features. Three times in quick succession, a twitch at the edge of his mouth betrayed his nervousness. He stared at the floor.

  “Look at you, Tobias,” William said. “The time you spent in London with your cousin last year turned you into a thug of some sort. You used to have a nice look about you. Do you still even admit you’re from Parrsboro? You turned into James Dean. The American movie star who always whined and complained, life’s such a bad deal.”