by Lou Allin
“Bea was so young. I can’t believe what happened. In her own house. Tomorrow I’ll walk into that bakery, and she won’t . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she gripped her arms in an effort at composure.
“I’m here for her viewing, too.” Belle introduced herself and found that she was talking to Leonora Bruce, Bea’s business partner. “What’s your dog’s name?”
“Windsor. Even as a puppy he had such a regal look.”
Belle stroked the expressive, aquiline nose as the poodle batted its eyes at her. Was it true that people came to resemble their pets? “My friend has a mini. A hyper squirrel. Cute doesn’t cut it with me. I much prefer this serious standard poodle.”
“They’re even used as guide dogs, so that’s a real testimony.” Her spine straightened, and she managed a feeble smile as she reached into the car for two bakery boxes. “It’s crostoli and frotoli. I made them special. A touch of brandy. They were her favourites.”
They walked in together, but Leonora went to the ladies’ room to refresh her makeup. Leaving her coat with an attendant, Belle looked at the options board, like selecting a movie. Beatrice Malanuk: Continental Room. Almost like a Vegas show.
Down the thickly carpeted hall she proceeded, following discreet brass signs and listening to faint strains of Delius’s Florida Suite, an inoffensive, almost spritely choice. Did funeral directors take a music course? Hard-rock miner Jack MacDonald, Miriam’s ex, would have requested “Prop Me Up Beside the Jukebox When I Die.”
Two women in their thirties, both wearing dark blue dresses, passed her coming out, and she heard one say, “That panettone of hers was a miracle. I hope the next owner maintains the standards.” Who would take over the bakery? Would Dave step in?
Belle reached the Continental Room with her heart beating double time. No matter how often she experienced these rites of passage, she couldn’t grow a protective shell. Fortunately, Myron Halverson and his siblings had found their groove in meeting the needs of sorrowing families. Like selling a house on Landsend Street overlooking the mountainous slag pours, someone had to do it. She’d heard Myron speak on the CBC about the psychology of bereavement. His was a sincere and professional calling.
She stood for a moment at the entrance, picking up a memorial card from a table. The front pictured an angel with hands clasped: “Sadly Missed and Always Remembered.” Inside was a picture of Bea’s smiling face, perhaps cropped from a family photo. Belle thought about the gruesome duty of choosing the image. Uncle Bert at eighty-five had been replaced by his army picture in the Princess Pat’s Regiment. Bea’s family history was recorded on the facing page, all those predeceased names like a welcoming committee, parents, grandparents, husband and daughter.
She signed the guestbook, leafing through the gilded pages, amazed to note more than two hundred names. Bea was a fixture in the community, and with his high profile, Dave had many friends who would wish to offer their sympathies. Thirty people milled around, chatting quietly in small groups. On one side of the room, a huge buffet table held silver dishes pyramided with an array of pastries and a beverage selection, wine included. Trust the Italians to bend the rules. Her gaze moving forward a step at a time, Belle was wrapped in a cloud of roses. Long-stemmed and gorgeous, they sat in crystal vases on French provincial side tables and in four-foot sprays on racks. Pink, red and white. No yellow. Wasn’t that for infidelity in the quaint language of flowers? She saw Leonora, apparently recovered, embrace a man, whose broad back was turned. They seemed to cling to each other for a moment more than necessary. He went on to shake hands with a young couple, both in jeans and jackets. Perhaps workers from the bakery.
Micro wasn’t there. Perhaps he had come at the beginning for appearances, but she appreciated Dave’s forbearance against letting a young boy endure hours of heartbreaking drama. At one side of the long room, seated in Jacobean armchairs, two men with short hair and dark, nondescript suits talked briefly, and one of them slipped a notebook from his pocket, glancing around for a second as he wrote. Both looked like detectives that she’d met through Steve. They’d be at the funeral in case the killer wanted to observe the reaction to his sorry work. Did that ever happen, or was it a television cliché? Then she glimpsed an old German couple who had made tentative noises about selling their camp a few years ago but had decided to hold on to enjoy one more summer, then another and another. The magic age of eighty closed the door. The woman used a walker, and he looked none too starchy, setting his legs awkwardly as if he suffered a pinched nerve in his bowed back.
She headed in their direction when a deep, rich voice claimed her attention. Jack Palance, wearing a charcoal suit and a ruby rose in his lapel, twenty years younger than his Oscar-winning role as Curly in the City Slickers films. She pasted on a smile and chastized herself for this silly game.
“I’m Dave Malanuk. Thanks for coming,” he said.
So this was the man Bea had loved. Belle accepted his hand, which he squeezed gently, then added his other for an especially sincere touch. The fingers bore keloid scar tissue, and she looked up quickly, feeling gauche about telegraphing her thoughts. “Belle Palmer. I was . . .” Her syllables stuttered. It wasn’t often that you introduced yourself as a corpse finder.
He swallowed heavily and firmed his sharp jaw in an effort to continue. “I heard. How terrible for you. You must have been leaving when I arrived. I saw the police car and thought that we’d had a robbery. That house has been so unlucky for Bea. And now . . .” He broke off with a cough and lowered his head.
Looking at the spring-green carpet, Belle felt like patting his back or touching his arm, but that seemed too personal for people who had just met, no matter how many intimate details she had learned from the DesRosiers. How amazing that people rose to the occasion with such different coping mechanisms. At her neighbour’s funeral, the family had cracked jokes and laughed uproariously as the beer kegs emptied. What else could you do when your mother had dropped dead at forty-five from a wasp sting at a backyard picnic just as she cut her own birthday cake? And as for Belle’s mother, not long in Florida and far from friends and relatives, she’d had no funeral. George Palmer had attended a service at the hospital celebrating the lives of those who had died that year. Not very personal but enough closure for him.
In the neighbourhood of fifty, Dave had high cheekbones, a thin mouth with even white teeth, and thick, iron-grey hair. His skin, browned and leathery, seemed stretched too taut across his wide brow, lines etched on his face in irregular fashion. His mica-chip eyes were deep-set and penetrating. Was this an example of the French term “joli laid”? Malanuk, a Polish or Russian background? Jack Palance had been Vladimir Palanuik, mellowed nicely since his early days as Jack the Ripper, Attila the Hun and supporting roles in countless spaghetti westerns.
Suddenly, she noticed the silence. He bent his head to catch her eye. “This must be upsetting for you. How about some water, a coffee? Or a glass of wine?”
She smiled, ashamed that she was supposed to be here to comfort him, not be waited on. “Sorry. Just a bit preoccupied.” Fundraising was an odd job for such a virile man. She pictured him on a bold stallion, galloping across the steppes.
“Would you like to see Bea?” he asked, offering his arm as escort as if it were a pleasant invitation to a waltz. Belle had nearly forgotten why she’d come; too many preliminaries before the main event.
“Of course.” Walking at a dirge-like pace, at last she reached the far end of the room where on a dias with three velveteen steps, she encountered a coffin as large as PEI. In gleaming red mahogany, it seemed to expand as they walked, a ship of state preparing to weigh anchor and cast off for the Seven Seas. The rose motif continued in arrays of baby pinks and ferns at the base and wreaths on stands behind. The air was thick, almost cloying. Belle sneezed.
“Sorry,” she said, and accepted his linen handkerchief, wiping discreetly, wondering whether to return it now or after laundering, her hand wavering. With an easy moti
on, he settled the matter by retrieving it.
Bea lay enveloped in billowy folds of pink satin, the lower part of the casket dividing her waist like a burnished wooden duvet. Her square face, a pleased smile at the corners, wore light lipstick and discreet complementary eye shadow. Belle blinked twice at the baker’s hat which covered most of her light brown hair. Over a silk gown, she wore an apron with a host of buzzing bees. How well Myron’s magic had concealed the neck bruises. Clasped in one large, talented hand was a rosary. In the other, a long marble rolling pin. Suddenly, Belle was glad she had come. This vision was what she would prefer to remember when she thought of Bea. Two perfect red roses lay on her chest, with accompanying notes in envelopes, an adult’s handwriting to “My darling Bea” and a child’s to “Mom.” Letters to beyond the grave. She was glad that she had sent hers a few months before her mother died, telling her all the good things she remembered and honouring her with a poem. Some might find the gesture treacly, but her mother had photocopied the letter and sent it to her friends.
Dave placed a palm on the shiny casket, then turned to Belle with wonderment. “Bea was such a comic. She’d been to so many grand Italian funerals. She told me she wanted to enter heaven as a baker, like she’d been all her life.”
“Alice blue. I wore that colour at my senior semi-formal.” Hardly the time for a fashion statement, but his loving expression didn’t change.
“Her favourite colour and her favourite flower. I courted her with roses.” He gave a rueful laugh. “Thought I would go broke before she accepted me. I was such a regular at Helvi’s that they had the order ready every Saturday at five sharp.”
Dave’s method of coping seemed to involve time-tripping, revisiting the happy past. Why not, if it worked? Her mother had been so far away when she became ill. After the grueling operation, during the chemo, Belle would call faithfully every Sunday, hearing her grow weaker and weaker. “Do you want me to come down?” she’d ask. Her mother would say no. Had she been saving Belle from sad memories? One day at home, she’d developed a raging infection and was gone in hours.
Time for the obligatory comment, the hardest but merciful final act of the play. “She looks . . .” Belle thought of the buffet table, her last feast. Good enough to eat? She almost expected the soft, warm eyes to snap open, Bea to climb laughing from her coffin and pass the sweets. “. . . lovely.”
SEVEN
That Saturday at eight, Micro came streaking down the road on his mountain bike, panniers flying, Rusty ten feet behind with her tongue lolling. Belle was glad to see that Hélène had coaxed him into a pair of shorts instead of the baggy jeans. Fine for “hanging” in the mall, but a tripfest waiting to happen.
She led him to the boathouse, where she humped out the lawnmower and a five-gallon red plastic jerry can, spout attached. “It’s all ready, but you’ll probably have to refill the gas once. Don’t spill anything on yourself, and for God’s sake, watch the rocks. That blade has as many gravel dings as my van.”
He listened alertly, examining the controls with intelligent dexterity. “And the turtle and the rabbit on the side?”
“Choose your speed. It’s self-propelled. With a deadman feature.” Wincing at another death reference, she demonstrated how the motor disengaged when the handle was released. As she pointed around the yard, she explained the areas which needed cutting and cautioned him against trying to muscle the machine as a weed whipper at the rough edges, a sin of her benighted youth which had contributed to her back problem.
He was barely able to see over the handles, but his strong arms and legs carried him off. Boyz ’n men ’n machines. She headed into the house to read her e-mail.
Three hours later, Belle observed his progress. Micro had done a super job and earned the right to use her precious carbon-steel secateurs to prune the red osier bushes and maple saplings encroaching her property. She watched him wheelbarrow the debris neatly to the burn pile by the lake. This children deal had advantages. Then she thought about cellphones, cars, college, birth control . . . an increasingly disturbing order.
Belle spaded up her triangular flower bed by the road and planted sixty bulk tulips from Canadian Tire, a bit of life for the end of May when the last snowpack surrendered. The frozen lake delayed spring just as the warmer waters coaxed fall to linger a few more weeks. She trimmed the hydrangea and cut the monkshood and peonies back to ground level. By the house, tiger lilies with their lush foliage had taken over, so she let them. Freya was enjoying her play date with Rusty, chasing circles around the yard. Above in the cedars, a stunted northern red squirrel scolded them for disturbing his cone harvest.
At high noon, she paid Micro with crisp twenties, which he slipped into a zipped pocket. Hélène had said he was bored. Perhaps she could give him a tour of the bush. “If you don’t have plans for this afternoon, how about a picnic in the woods? There’s a big swamp I call Surprise Lake. We’ll take the dogs.” She nodded towards the house. “You can call your aunt.”
He shrugged, but she saw a glint of interest in the town boy’s neat, sharp eyebrows. A hike might beat watching Hélène cook and listening to Ed snore with a background of the Blue Hawaii album on their ancient stereo, but could she compete with computer graphics? “Sounds okay,” he said.
Not much later, they were on the trail behind her house, its entrance hidden from quads by drooping willows. How many footfalls had it taken to impress herself into the thin soil which covered the Cambrian rocks like an icing layer? Micro insisted on carrying the daypack with their cheese sandwiches, Smartfood popcorn, water bottles and dog biscuits. Slowly they climbed into the boreal forest, their path levelling out across a ridge. Freya stopped at an object at eye level in a fir tree, and Rusty whined. Micro followed their gaze and jumped back.
“Is that a real head? Creepy. Is it rotten?” His button nose twitched.
“Very old and very dry.” Belle laughed. “I call him the Deer Prince.”
Micro’s eyes widened, and his mouth opened to reveal small white teeth. “Somebody shot it and left it? Gross.”
“I found it fifty feet off the path when I was bushwhacking. Must have been lying there for years. Two horns have been sawn off. I think it’s required for the Ministry.” She gazed in endearment at the Prince, his eyes hollow, his hair thinning, and stroked his white bone nose. “I couldn’t leave him dumped and lonely. His spirit belongs in a prominent place.”
Micro’s voice mellowed, and he took a baby step forward, hand extended as if expecting an electric shock. Then with growing confidence, he rubbed the antlers. “I was scared at first, but now I see what you mean. Wait till I tell my friend Chris.”
As they walked, Belle chastized herself. Why did she have to run on at the mouth without thinking? Like Prospero at the end of The Tempest, her every third thought seemed to involve a grave or other sepulchral symbol. Micro’s last image of his mother had been in her casket, and here she was introducing him to her personal cadaver.
At the next brook, they took a break so that the dogs could slurp the peaty water. “That fellow’s at least three hundred years old,” she said, gauging the girth of a grandfather yellow birch. “Long before anyone . . . any settlers came. Of course, there were aboriginals here. On canoe trips I’ve seen their pictographs, painted symbols, on rocks over by Lake Matagamasi.”
He picked at the balsam pitch leaking from a fir tree. “Awesome. I saw a big tepee at Shield University. Some guys were drumming and everything.”
She laughed and picked up a heavy sheet of sloughed birch as Freya tossed a smaller round from a rotted log, catching it in her mouth to tempt Rusty. “You’re thinking about plains people out west. Tepees aren’t practical in our heavy snows, and moose weren’t as easy or plentiful to kill for their skins as buffalos were. Around here the Ojibwa made winter dwellings by placing this waterproof material over branch structures. A bit of sticky resin for glue, lashings of willow, and presto, a quick but temporary house.”
“Tep
ees are better.” He laughed as Freya speared the round of birch precisely on her nose.
Arriving at the lake, they found a sunny spot on a gentle slope. Something rustled in the brush, and a duelling pair of loons warbled across the shimmering water. The boy picked up the concept and called. “Micro, Micro, Micro” echoed back in the natural amphitheatre.
Belle set their lunch on a level rock and divvied it up. The boy was having fun in the best playground in the world. She couldn’t understand why some parents forbid their children to play in the woods, preferring them to ride quads down the road at seventy kmh.
As they ate, she pointed to a wooden blind in a nearby tree. “It’s a moose perch. The plywood is camouflaged so the hunter can hide and wait.”
“Sit up there and blast away?” Micro asked, flaring his nostrils. “No fair.” Not only did he have a love of animals but an inborn sense of justice.
“I don’t think so either, but if they get a tag in the fall through the lottery, it’s legal. You don’t even need one for a calf.” She explained how a small herd back in the Crown land was being squeezed between mining interests and a growing population of full-time homeowners.
“Uncle Ed has a .22 for varmints, he calls them. I shot it once. Just at a can in a gravel pit, though.”
She recalled the havoc in the boathouse when she’d tried to pull down her snow tires from the high shelves and found them filled with pine cones, a rodent food bank. “Fine for small game, but hunters use higher powered rifles for large animals.”
The sun made them sweat, and they welcomed the breeze that riffled down the lake. A splash by the beaver house was followed by the “v” of the irrepressible builder. She passed Micro the popcorn, savouring a mouthful of the white cheddar. He tasted it. “Good,” he said, then examined the label. “But I don’t think it’s so smart. Look at how many calories are in a serving. And you could make it yourself.”
