Wind Tails

by Anne Degrace

  “Three months,” says Dr. Pinkham after all the tests are through. “At the most.”

  She hadn’t felt all that bad before, but as soon as she hears, Eunice begins to feel terrible. She is unable to catch her breath; the least thing tires her out. The pain in her side is a gnawing animal. There are nights she wakes up and wishes it would just eat her and get it over with.

  “Hospital,” Dr. Pinkham insists. “They’ll monitor the pain.”

  “There’s something I have to do first,” she tells him.

  The receiver feels even heavier in her hand than when she had picked it up to hear Blanche and Mary. She knows now, without a doubt, that her boys will never call her, and if it makes her sad, the feeling is eclipsed by the sense of righteousness as she calls the first number.

  “I’m dying,” she tells each person. “I haven’t got long to live. Doc Pinkham says a few weeks left, that’s all. I want you to come and see me.” She gives them each an appointment.

  They come, one by one. They bring flowers and candy, and tell Eunice what an inspiration she’s been, how proud she must be to have raised such fine young men, how much the community will miss her. Eunice accepts it all from her deathbed, the scent of lilies fighting one another across the room. She pats her patchwork quilt and whispers to sit close, smiles as if she loves them as sons and daughters. “Give me a kiss on the cheek, dear,” she tells them. “Come closer, so I can tell you something.”

  Eunice watches while they shift and squirm. She watches them arrange their faces into expressions of sympathy and caring. And when their faces are an inch from her own, she tells them exactly what she thinks.

  Your husband hates you, she confides. Your friends laugh at you; your boss doesn’t trust you; your kids are embarrassed by you. Personal things: things everyone knows but nobody has the guts to say out loud. Who had to get married; what stalwart, respected citizen was caught shoplifting ladies underwear. She tells Muriel Brooks how everyone thinks she is so boring they’ll drive right past the Overwaitea rather than risk meeting her in the soup aisle and have to stop and talk. She tells Gloria Bruneau how, when her husband Frank fell in the vat at the winery, everyone might have said it was an accident, but that everyone knew it was because of the Eyetalian, and that she’s going to have his death on her conscience ’til the day she dies.

  When the last appointment is over, Eunice begins to laugh. She gets up, opens the window, and tosses the lilies into the yard. Then she leans on the window frame, feels the sun on her face, and realizes that in one day she has purged a lifetime of resentment. She doesn’t blame a soul for anything, not anymore.

  The telephone rings, three short. She doesn’t pick it up.

  It occurs to Eunice that she still might die, especially when she throws out the medicines from the nightstand. But she doesn’t. As the days go by, the house takes on a glow, and it’s not just the open curtains, the fresh air. Even as it settles, as old houses do, there’s a musical quality to the creaks and pops, Eunice’s personal percussion band. Twice, she catches herself whistling.

  And yet there is the matter of carrying on, medical miracle or not, in a town where she has told every individual exactly what she thinks. In the end, she realizes there is nothing left to do but leave. The thought itself is liberating. But something is missing; something keeps Eunice from turning the latch for the last time. Something left unresolved, but she can’t quite put her finger on it.

  Eunice’s bags are packed when Sylvia Bruneau knocks on her door. Eunice, carrying the last bag to set it with the others, is pretty sure she hasn’t seen Sylvia since that day she ran her off, and now Sylvia’s forty if she’s a day. Mousey little thing, thinks Eunice when she opens the door. But the venom is gone. Eunice hadn’t even asked her to come when she assigned her appointments, that’s how little she thought of Sylvia, but now the day comes back to her and she steps back with a small intake of breath, thinking: Bobby.

  Sylvia looks at Eunice’s bags and says, brown eyes wide: “Mrs. Currie! Are you going away?”

  Eunice remembers then that she is supposed to be dead. “Just a little trip,” she says.

  Sylvia sits down on the wooden chair Eunice keeps by the door. Eunice sets the suitcase she is holding down and watches while Sylvia leans over and runs her hands across the top of Eunice’s old green suitcase, fingers brushing the frayed canvas surface. She does this for a long minute, as if she is stroking a cat. Finally, she speaks, her voice soft.

  “I kept waiting for you to invite me to visit, like you did the others. Yesterday I was coming down McPherson and there was Muriel coming around the corner from your house, looking all flushed the way she gets when she’s excited or upset, you know the way her cheeks get blotchy. She told me what you’d said to her. And then when I got home there was a call from the hospital; the doctor said Mama’d had a heart attack. Even though her heart was always strong as anything. The doctor said she’ll make a full recovery, Mrs. Currie, in case you’re worried about her. Although I don’t imagine you are. When I went to see her, she just turned her head away. Her own daughter. What would make her do that? Did she come to see you, Mrs. Currie? What did you tell her?”

  Eunice doesn’t answer. Her heart is beating in such a way that it crosses her mind to note the irony in having a heart attack now, after not dying of cancer. The words in her head, would serve me right, come unbidden. With a stab, she recognizes their ring of truth, and closes her eyes for a moment.

  When she opens them, she sees that Sylvia is watching her with interest. Or is that concern Eunice sees there? After a few moments Eunice sits down on the bigger of the two suitcases. Their eyes meet, and Eunice notices for the first time how large Sylvia’s eyes are, and how brown. She can see the pretty thing Sylvia must have been when she was sixteen, could see, she thinks, what Bobby might have seen.

  “You know, I didn’t stop seeing Bobby the day you ran me off. I’ll bet you didn’t know that, did you? Even if you thought you knew everything. We kept on, in secret, for two more years. There were a lot of things your sons never told you. And yet they couldn’t cross you, not any of them. They could only tiptoe around, like they were walking on glass. Like thin ice. One wrong step, and they’d be under. And you’d hold them there, thrashing. They all knew that.

  “After my father’s funeral I begged Bobby to take me away somewhere. I wanted to run away worse than I ever had. I felt that if I didn’t run, then I’d never get away. I remember we were out behind the reservoir, lying in the leaves, me weeping into Bobby’s sweater and him promising me that, yes, we would go, he’d pick me up before dawn, he’d have everything arranged. Then he looked at the darkening sky and knew he was late for dinner and that you’d have his hide, like you always did, and it was suddenly as if you were standing there, looking at us where we lay in our winter clothes in the November leaves. I could feel his heart speed up in his chest, heard his breath catch, and I sat right up and looked down the road in the twilight, that’s how sure I was you were marching up to whack us with a tea towel. Or a shovel. And then Bobby was up and brushing himself off, and then me, and telling me he had to run, and then he did: just lit out through the woods, down the path that came out behind his house—your house.

  “Even then I thought he’d come, and I was packed, just like you are now, Mrs. Currie, and ready to go. But the early morning dark got lighter and the crows started up and when I heard Mama rustling in her bedroom I quietly set the suitcase in my closet and went to put the kettle on for her tea. I lit the gas and touched the corner of the flame to the note I had written, watched it burn until the last word reached my fingers and I dropped it. ‘Smells like smoke,’ was all Mama said when she came into the kitchen.

  “What was it like for you, Mrs. Currie, to get up that morning and read Bobby’s note?”

  “There wasn’t any note,” Eunice tells her. “I never knew why Bobby left.” She places her hand on her heart. “I worried myself sick. Got a postcard two weeks later, then
it was a year before I heard from him again, then two. No return address, not ever.”

  Eunice looks at Sylvia, imagines her four streets away, pining for Bobby, while in her empty house Eunice pined in her own way. They are quiet together, two women almost forty years apart in age, oddly mirrored in the pose they both take: feet together, hands in lap, eyes looking past the room around them. Shadows form in the corners of the room. It is peaceful there in the darkness.

  “You still living in that little apartment above Henderson’s?” Eunice asks her finally. Her voice sounds sharp to her ears, and she thinks: I don’t know how not to sound sharp.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m thinking it would be good to have someone staying here while I’m away,” Eunice begins. “You know, I’ve just this minute realized I’ve done nothing to close up the house: the gas is still on, food still in the fridge. I expect I’ll be gone a good while. You could stay here, save yourself some rent.”

  Sylvia looks at Eunice like she’s crazy.

  “Please,” whispers Eunice, and the word hangs in the air. She can’t remember when she last said please. Then: “Bobby might call.” The words are out of her mouth before she knew she would say them.

  Eunice has four hundred miles behind her when she makes the call to the lawyer to transfer the title. He doesn’t try to talk her out of it; it’s just one more strange action on the part of Eunice Currie in a series of strange actions. He’s just there to follow instructions, after all. Afterwards, she pulls the Morris into a rest stop and allows herself to imagine him arriving at her door, imagine Sylvia’s doe eyes taking him in, a lawyer on the front step with a briefcase full of surprises. She can imagine it perfectly, but she can’t imagine the moment when Bobby does call.

  When she pulls back out, there’s a young man on the other side of the road, a hitchhiker, looking like so many do these days, but Eunice isn’t going that way. She’s heading towards a place where she can get a bite to eat. She’s seen a sign: Cass’s Roadside Café. Last food for 57 miles. A cup of tea would be just the thing.

  She looks at the hitchhiker as she passes, and he grins at her. The wind blows the hair around his face; he looks impossibly young, a whole lifetime ahead of him. Without even realizing she’s about to do it, she blows him a kiss. In the rearview mirror, she sees his hand touch his lips, the kiss returned.

  9:10 a.m.

  Pie a la mode

  The old lady emerges from the parking lot dust. She’s driving an Austin Morris with a dented hood. Deer, Jo thinks.

  “Deer,” the lady nods towards the car as she settles herself on the stool at the counter. “Thought my number was up. Ha,” she says. “Not the first time. Got a cup of tea?”

  When Jo brings the teapot, the old lady pours sugar into her cup straight from the dispenser.

  “You can call me Eunice,” she says, tapping her bony chest with a bonier hand. Jo hasn’t asked to call her anything, and she’s not sure how to respond. With Cass in town, she’s alone with this crazy lady. “I’ve decided I want people to call me by my first name. I’ll have a piece of pie, too. You only live once, after all. Rhubarb.”

  When Jo sets the pie in front of her, “Ice cream,” Eunice says, as if Jo had forgotten. Then her voice softens, like she’s checking herself. “Didn’t I say ice cream?” When Jo comes back with a scoop of vanilla on the side she smiles, creases in her skin multiplying while she’s licking her lips. She heads for the kitchen, but Eunice’s voice follows her.

  “Ah. Time was, I’d have said this is no sort of breakfast. Oatmeal. That’s all I ever ate. That’s what I fed my boys, every day, so they wouldn’t grow up expecting fancy pastries and such. So they’d have an appreciation for a good, solid, no-nonsense breakfast. But the rules have changed.

  “Now, you’ll at least talk to me, won’t you, dear? I’ve been with my own company too long; I need a soul to talk to. Can’t swing a cat in this place, it’s so small. You can talk to me through this window, here.”

  When Jo looks at her through the window, Eunice’s mouth is full of pie, but her eyes are knife-sharp.

  “How old do you think I am?” she asks.

  “Ummm…” She is more than Jo wants to deal with.

  “Guess,” says Eunice, ignoring her.

  Six, she thinks. “Sixty?” she guesses. To Jo, Eunice looks about a hundred.

  “Hah. Shows how much you know. Let me tell you something.”

  Outside, the wind blows. Jo watches it, thinking about the direction Pink must be travelling. West. What would such a thing be like, travelling with the wind? No direction home, like the song. She imagines a road without beginning or end. No starting point, nothing left behind. If there’s a destination, it’s too far away to see.

  “I’ve lived a long time on this earth—what did you say your name was?—Jo. I’m eighty-one today. Bet that surprises you, doesn’t it? Yup, eighty-one, but I wasn’t supposed to live a day past eighty. Know why?”

  Jo shakes her head and takes the hard-boiled eggs from the fridge. “I really have to work,” she says again.

  “I’m supposed to be dead. That’s why.” Jo looks at her. She’s chortling. “Got my second wind, you could say.”

  Jo waits, but she doesn’t say anything else, just digs into the pie. She eats as if she hasn’t eaten for days, like rhubarb pie is the best thing she’s ever eaten her whole life. When she’s finished, “There,” she says, and pours another cup of tea from the pot.

  “Here’s my advice to you, girl,” Eunice says, settling on her stool. “Don’t look at me like that, now. It’s the same advice I give to anyone who’ll listen. Ha! You could call it my new mission in life. Now you pay attention, because I’ll just say it once. If there’s one thing in life you want to avoid, it’s regret.”

  Jo looks down at her cutting board.

  “The last time I spoke to any of my boys was…let me think, now. Nineteen forty-nine. That’s twenty-eight years. A postcard now and then, that’s about all, and no return addresses. Bobby, my youngest, would be forty-five, now. The evening he came home, before the morning he left for good, something was up, I could tell. ‘Ma,’ he said, like he was setting up for something serious. Funny, I can remember everything like it was last night: the colour of the sky through the sheer curtains in the windows, when the sun goes down behind the clouds and turns everything golden for a moment, and then its gone and back to flat, cold grey. I noticed it out of the corner of my eye, and I noticed Bobby’s hands and the way they were fidgeting. And I don’t think I thought about it, I just knew. Stu and Charlie, they’d left a couple of years before, together on the train. They told me they were going to see their cousin, my dead sister’s son Julius, about work in the oil patch for a season, and I guess I believed them, didn’t know they had no intention of coming back, but then, who wants two more mouths to feed anyway? The ungratefulness of it, after I worked my fingers to the bone raising them. But here was Bobby, the quiet one, and I think I knew what he was going to say and I couldn’t hear it. I just couldn’t. And him only seventeen years old.

  “‘What the devil are you doing dripping snow all over the hallway, boy? Did I raise you in a barn? Don’t you have any respect for your mother, who works her fingers to the bone for you? You’re hopeless, like your brothers.’”

  Eunice’s voice, mimicking her own of almost three decades earlier, sounds like a nail on a chalkboard.

  “That’s what came out of my mouth. Now I think about it, that’s what I’d been telling my boys for years. ‘You’re hopeless.’ I caught his eye for a moment and I wanted to say something else. Like that he was always such a good boy, and how much I loved him, but the words weren’t there. They must have been there once, but I’d been angry so long I’d forgotten how to be anything else. I always said: you have to be tough raising three boys by yourself, or they’ll come out soft. You have to be tough in this world, and don’t bend, or people will get the better of you. You have to be tough if you don’t want to g
et hurt.

  “Bobby was gone the next day. The last one, and I never said a kind thing to him the last chance I had.” She shakes her head. “Just told him he was hopeless. Wasn’t until things were looking pretty hopeless for me that I figured out what hopeless really was, and it wasn’t those boys in the primes of their lives, even if I told them as much every day. And then I started thinking about my own folks. Wouldn’t speak to me once I married Eddie. Said he was a good-for-nothing, all charm and no substance, that’s what they said. I can still see my mother, hands on her hips, saying: I didn’t raise you to marry some clown. Life’s not all fun and games, you know. You have to grow up sometime. Well, I did, and where did it get me?”

  Jo shakes her head, shrugs her shoulders. Eunice looks at her and shakes her own head. “That’s what’s called a rhetorical question, dear. The answer’s in front of you, that’s what. ’Course, both my parents died a long time ago. Never did reconcile. You know what I think now? I think it’s just easier to forgive than to go on blaming. Takes a chunk out of you, that.

  “Nothing like death knocking at your door to make a person think. Nothing at all like it, really. In fact, I recommend it. You know what I’ve figured out? That life keeps slapping you in the face with a lesson ’til you learn whatever the lesson is you’re supposed to learn. You get a chance, and then, if you miss that one, you’ll get another one. That’s one thing you can count on. Even old dogs like me get another chance.