Wind Tails

by Anne Degrace

  “But that’s where she was?”

  “Yeah. I have to wonder what Donnie would have thought when she saw Howie. He was tall, quite a bit taller than me,” says Bob. “But kind of like a big kid himself, and so she may have seen that in him, the way kids do, sometimes.”

  Jo nods, knowing what he means. As Bob speaks, Jo wonders when that childhood clarity left her, and where it has gone.

  The man wore a brown plaid shirt and brown canvas pants hiked high on his hips. He didn’t see Donnie at first, and as he went to his woodpile he sang a song: She’ll be coming ’round the mountain, she’ll be coming ’round the mountain. He sang it several times, then when he had his arms loaded up with pieces of firewood he turned and saw the little girl, and when he did he whispered: when she comes. And dropped them.

  “Uh, oh,” he said, like he was finishing the song. Then he walked back inside and shut the door. He opened it again half a minute later. “Little girl,” he called out, looking down at the ground instead of at Donnie. “Little girl, who are you?”

  “Donnie,” she told him, then: “my name is Donalda Eve Sherbansky.” She enunciated each part carefully.

  He closed the door again. She could hear him singing on the other side: She’ll be wearing red pyjamas when she comes. He opened it again, his head bent under the doorframe.

  “I’ve seen you. At the restaurant. Do you want to come inside?”

  Donnie held out the brown paper bag, and he nodded like he knew all along a girl would come to visit, and that she’d be bringing lunch. He stepped back and opened the door wide, and she walked over the sill and into a one-room cabin with a wood stove, a cot with a grey wool blanket against the wall, a scratched orange kitchen table, and one wooden chair. On the row of hooks by the door hung an oilskin raincoat, a plaid jacket, and a bright hunter’s vest. There was a sink with a bucket underneath and shelves above holding tinned food and gallon pickle jars with teabags, sugar, flour. He turned over the empty wood box and sat on it carefully. Donnie sat on the wooden chair, her toes dangling above the floor. He looked at her paper bag and she opened it, unwrapped the sandwich, and gave him half. He took it, looked at it seriously, and took a bite.

  “Turkey,” he said, and smiled in its direction, his teeth full of white bread.

  “Cass made it,” Donnie told him. She watched him while he chewed.

  “I have cookies,” he said, his mouth full, and he set his sandwich down, crossed the room, opened one of the big jars and took out a crumpled bag of chocolate marshmallow cookies. “Derflops,” he said, holding the bag open.

  Inside, some of the cookies were broken, but she found a whole one and pulled it out. She hadn’t eaten her sandwich, and she knew she was supposed to eat that first, so she set the cookie on the table.

  “Why do you call them Derflops?”

  “Just do,” he said, and took one out of the bag and set it down carefully, opposite Donnie’s. They ate their sandwiches quietly. He finished well before Donnie, then wet his finger and began picking up crumbs off the table. When it was clean, he put his cookie inside the cleaned area and waited for Donnie to finish.

  “What’s your name?” she asked him.

  “Howie,” he said, and began eating the cookie. Using his bottom teeth, he ate all of the chocolate off the marshmallow top—his teeth never nicking the spongy white surface—right down to the cookie base. Then, he nibbled off the marshmallow down to the little dollop of red jam. He licked this off, and began eating the base in spirals until he reached a centre portion too small to nibble. Then he popped it into his mouth. He looked up at the ceiling and smiled. “Your turn,” he said.

  Donnie took the cookie and put the whole thing in her mouth. It made her cheeks bulge out like a chipmunk, and she started to laugh, crumbs spraying out across the table. Howie started to laugh too, great, loud guffaws that filled up the room. Then he stopped. When he spoke, he spoke to the table. “I have Snakes and Ladders,” he said. “Would you like to play?”

  Donnie nodded, and he got out a worn board and a pair of dice. The long snakes were green, the shorter snakes pink. Donnie liked them better than the ladders, but you had to go up the ladders if you wanted to win.

  They played several games. Sometimes, Donnie would get to the top of the board first, and sometimes Howie. As soon as the game was over Howie would clap his hands and move their men to the start again. But when the sun dipped and the light in the cabin changed, Donnie began to think about home. She didn’t want to be in Howie’s cabin anymore. She wanted to go home.

  “I have to go,” she said.

  “Don’t go,” he said. “You can go up all the ladders. I don’t mind.” But she was standing up. “You can have another Derflop. Would you like another Derflop?” He put his hand on her arm. It was a big hand, covered in hair, and it scared her. “They’re not called Derflops!” she shouted, backing up. “They’re Mallo-Puffs!”

  He stepped back, his hands in the air, backing up until the backs of his knees bumped into the cot. “It’s okay,” he whispered. “It’s okay.” And he began to sing at the ceiling, loudly, his hands over his ears. And she’ll have to sleep with grandma and she’ll have to sleep with grandma and she’ll have to sleep with grandma when she comes.

  Donnie, hand in her pocket, could feel the heart-shaped rock nestled there. She could see it in her mind, the way it was so perfectly shaped, pinkish-grey. She put the rock on the table, and she ran.

  “Wait!” called Howie. “Wait, it’s not safe!” As she ran up the path she could hear him calling, the sound of his feet pounding behind her.

  She could see the highway through the trees when the shot rang out. She heard yelling behind her, and as she turned she saw him rolling on the ground like an animal, making a high-pitched noise, and she started running again, away from the sound. She remembered looking at her shoes as she ran, then seeing them rise off the ground as she was lifted from behind, something gripping her shoulders, and she screamed. The big hand that covered her mouth smelled of sweat and something sharp, like metal. “Quiet,” said a voice urgently. “It’s okay. Shhhh.”

  “Howie had followed her almost all the way back to Cass’s before he was winged by a hunter. The hunter had caught a movement in the trees and assumed it was deer,” says Bob. “Happens every year, accidents like that.”

  Jo has sat down, a bowl of soup in front of her. Bob’s the only customer Cass doesn’t mind her sitting down with.

  “He was trying to follow her, to keep her safe. But he forgot his hunting vest. He always wore it in the woods, even when it wasn’t hunting season, so he’d be seen.”

  “We always looked out for Howie, Cass and I. Cass saved him day-olds from here, and I’d drop by a couple of times a week. She’d go by and clean sometimes, although he kept the place pretty tidy all on his own. I used to bring him these cookies he liked, the chocolate marshmallow kind.”

  “He just lived there by himself? He wasn’t lonely?”

  “Didn’t seem to be. Howie was nervous around people. He liked his own surroundings, where he felt safe.”

  “Seems kind of sad.”

  “Hard to say. I don’t know how Howie came to be there, to tell you the truth, or what might have happened to him to scare him off people. You don’t always know a person’s history.” Bob pushed his coffee cup forward. “Can you top me up?”

  Jo, her soup finished, clears the dishes and refills Bob’s cup.

  “Thanks. So anyway, following Donnie was no small thing for Howie, I figure. And what happened was exactly what Cass and I had been warning him about.”

  They are both quiet for a few minutes, Bob sipping his coffee. Jo pours one for herself.

  “The hunter who winged him drove him in his pickup to the hospital, Howie yelling all the way. The other one brought Donnie over to the café and told Cass he’d found her lost, and she was so relieved she didn’t ask much. He didn’t mention the shooting. I think they were probably just young guys, up from the cit
y, pretty inexperienced. Neither stuck around after that, with Howie delivered to the hospital and Donnie brought home. Figure they didn’t want trouble. By the time I circled back to find Donnie in Cass’s arms, there was no sign of either of them.

  “The hospital experience scared the daylights out of Howie. He wouldn’t talk about it at all when I took him home. Before the hospital I could sometimes get him to come for coffee at Cass’s. But after the hospital, he never went anywhere, just stayed in his cabin. But he talked about Donnie, long after she and her mother— Cass’s sister—took off. I think he really missed her. I know he kept the rock she gave him. Funny, isn’t it, how some people you wouldn’t expect to have something special between them?”

  “Maybe he just found someone to play with.”

  “Yeah, maybe. He kept hoping she’d come back to visit him, kept asking if I’d bring her, and it took me a long time to tell him that Donnie probably wouldn’t be back. He didn’t say much at the time, just started drumming his fingers on the table. He was still drumming when I left him.

  “About a month ago when I went to check on him I found him dead, in his bed. He looked like he went natural, and not very long before; maybe a day passed at most. And those sandwiches Cass been sending with me, the day-olds? Found a couple of weeks’ worth in a bin outside. You wouldn’t believe the smell when I opened the lid. I don’t think he could swallow at the end, figure maybe it was throat cancer. I did try to get him to hospital, you know, when he started losing weight. No way he’d go. That cabin was his whole world.”

  There’s a moment in which they are both quiet. On the highway there is the whoosh of a car, not stopping, the destination of greater pull than the promise of pie.

  “Never did find any relatives,” says Bob finally.

  “How could someone have no-one?” Jo cups her hands around her coffee to feel its warmth. “Everyone’s got to have somebody, somewhere.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Couldn’t even find a birth certificate.”

  Jo shivers. It feels cold in the restaurant, and yet the sun is shining.

  “Gotta go,” says Bob, leaving a five on the table. Then: “Glad you’re here, Jo. You make a good BLT.” He grins. “Cass always skimps on the bacon.”

  Jo

  A bird is singing outside, the sound far larger than the bird; light splashes across the floor. A million tiny details spinning, and I stand here in the middle of them. How is it that one person’s world can stop while everyone else’s goes on?

  In the house in Calgary, my mother and father go on with their lives. Eamon, wherever he is, snakes his way through the grass. I have no idea what happened after I left, and I don’t want to know. It doesn’t matter anymore.

  My friends—the friends I had—attend their classes, go to parties, get drunk, wake up and complain about their hangovers, and speculate on whether or not they’ll see the boy, again, who copped a feel in the corner by the bar.

  What determines the size of someone’s world: how small or how large it can be?

  Genevieve sleeps, the press of earth above her, flowers growing.

  Somewhere, my daughter sleeps in a woman’s arms.

  And I am sleeping in a cot in the back room of a trailer behind a diner on a mountain pass.

  Cass

  Sometimes I feel like all I’ve ever done is take in drifters. Seems like every kicked dog comes my way, every little thing that needs looking after. Archie’s strays, cats from who-knows-where. Howie, of course, but he came with the place, part of the terms of ownership, you could say, and a kind soul in his way. Truth is, I suppose I like having someone to cluck over now and then.

  Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, really. When we were teenagers the house seemed always full of kids with no place to go, living downtown like we did, and Dad gone half the time. There was always another loaf of bread, another jar of peanut butter. We never went hungry. If my sisters and I fought over who was wearing whose clothes, we were quick to lend a bra or a sweater to whoever showed up at the door looking lost. For all of my mother’s gruffness, her husky voice and sharp tongue, there was a kindness there. Bottom line for all of us, there was that.

  These days someone says boo! it’s a capital offence. People need to learn to hear the words under the words. So when I tell Jo to get to work, like today, when I need a day off and I figure she knows the ropes well enough to go it on her own, and I say: ’bout time you started pulling your weight, don’t you think? what I’m really saying is: I know you can do this and while you’re at it you’ll find out you have the smarts to look after yourself. A little hand up isn’t a hand out. It’s a way to say you know someone’s got something to give, and they’re worth a little investment.

  Bob likes the girl, all right. Been sitting in there for over an hour, talking her ear off no doubt. Cops are always sitting down for coffee, like they’ve got nothing better to do. But there he goes, heading off at last to go catch some speeder somewhere, make his quota whatever that is, and now hellooooo sunshine: there’s a yellow car pulled into the lot, lady dressed in yellow getting out, looks like an egg salad to me. Not just the colour, either. You get so as you can call ’em: hamburger & fries; slice of pie; cinnamon bun; eggs over easy. Whatever. This one’s an egg salad sandwich if I ever saw one, not something Jo’s likely to have any trouble with. Besides, there’s a soap coming on the tube. Everyone needs a day off once in a while.

  Blown away

  Rough winds do shake the darling buds

  of May.

  — William Shakespeare

  Evelyn keeps looking over her shoulder, although she can’t quite remember why. It’s a beautiful day, now that the sun’s come out. The leaves on the trees sparkle from the recent rain; from the road, vapour lifts in fairy tendrils. She loves driving the Rambler, loves its butter yellow colour. When she dressed this morning in her yellow suit and hat, white gloves and pumps, she thought of the picture she would make, stepping out of her car at the library. “Pretty as a picture you are,” Bryce would always say, and so she always tried to be. Then, as she appraised herself in the hallway mirror, she remembered about Bryce. Evelyn has a hard time holding onto thoughts.

  Bryce doesn’t like Evelyn to go very far. In fact, he forbids Evelyn to go very far. “This town is all you need, darling,” he tells her, and she believes him. At least, she did until yesterday. In town there is a pharmacy, a hardware store, a small library, and a medical clinic. At the Fashion Shoppe, the clerk knows her favourite colours. There are a handful of restaurants, from the Tastee De-Light to the Lucky Dragon. The movie theatre that shows each movie for three days, by which time everybody who wants to has seen it. Evelyn knows the town, from one edge to the other, and that’s all. It’s enough; Bryce says so.

  When Evelyn goes to City Hall to politely suggest the placement of more planters on the sidewalks, or to the shoe store for polish, or the greengrocer for tomatoes, everybody knows her by name. For Evelyn, there is an invisible wall beyond which she knows she must not go. So if Bryce asks her about her day, she will say: “Oh, I just stayed around town,” and that’s that. It’s enough for Evelyn, because Bryce looks after her. Ever since she was picked up by the police.

  Evelyn had always loved flowers. Blue hydrangeas, orange day lilies, roses the colour of a winter sunset. In her mother’s flower shop, she would touch the cuttings as they lay across the table, cascades of colour and scent. As a small girl she would place a rose petal against her cheek, feel the innocence there; in her white-blonde hair her mother would pin the flowers whose heads had broken, and so could not be used in an arrangement. Her hair filled with the broken heads of flowers, Evelyn would dance around the shop, delighting customers.

  When her mother died, the trustee set up an allowance from the estate under strict instructions as per the monthly allotment until such time as she was married, at which time the remaining funds would be released. This was because Evelyn’s mother was unsure of her daughter’s ability to ha
ndle money, and hoped that someday a good man would recognize Evelyn for the sweet girl she was. But until such a thing might happen, the allowance remained. Evelyn’s mother had not anticipated the increased cost of living, and so things for Evelyn became difficult. She didn’t mind the empty refrigerator; what she minded was the absence of flowers.

  It started off simply enough: she would find flowers poking out from under a fence, but there always seemed to be nicer ones inside the fence. I’ll just take one step, just one, she’d think to herself, and reach as far as she could with that one step, slender, pale fingers straining for the magnificent purple iris just out of reach. It became two steps, then three: tiger lilies, forsythia, calendula—as a child she wished she had been named Calendula—until a close call with a large Alsatian frightened her. Then she became attracted to bouquets. At the doctor’s, the cut flowers on the receptionist’s desk went into her purse, a large handbag she kept unfastened for the purpose. But the prettiest bouquets were at Frederico’s, the nicest restaurant in town. Small, exquisite bouquets on every table. Evelyn could see them through the window. If she was walking by she’d go in on pretext to use the bathroom; as she slipped out she would just tuck one into her bag— there were so many of them, after all—and step onto the street as if nothing had happened.

  Constable Bryce Smithson, as the investigating officer, took Frederico’s statement. Of course there was only a reprimand: it was a small crime, and then there was Evelyn, being who she was and all. But later, after the file was closed, the constable arrived one afternoon at Evelyn’s apartment door with the biggest bouquet of flowers the florist could make for him. It was obvious to Evelyn that he didn’t believe the reports that she was “a little touched” as Dr. Croasdaile said when he came to her defence that day at the police station. Bryce asked Evelyn out for dinner that very night, and again the next night, avoiding Frederico’s. He was besotted. “My delicate little flower,” he called her, always afraid of what might happen to her “out there in the world.”