by Tim Wynveen
Unable to stand it any longer, she brought her beer bottle down with a thunk, and said, “Well, Cy, that’s enough about us, what about you?”
He flinched at the sarcasm and sat up straighter. “I thought you might find it interesting.”
“Baloney. You don’t give a hoot what we’re interested in.”
Cyrus squinted at her. “What’s your problem?”
“My problem,” she said, enunciating perfectly, “is that you’re full of yourself.”
Her face just then—the older-sister look, as if he was completely hopeless, completely useless—added a little heat to his next words. “You can’t stand to hear how great my life is,” he said, “because it makes yours sound like shit. You’re jealous.”
She looked at Hank, who was fidgeting uncomfortably, and then back to Cyrus. In a cool, measured voice she said, “I don’t envy you at all. Right now I pity you because you don’t have any idea what you’re doing. If you did, you wouldn’t act this way.”
He nodded his head and got to his feet. “Just so you know, I’ll tell you what I’m doing, Iz. I’m walking out that door and going to my hotel. Tomorrow I’ll be back on the road making a name for myself, and before you know it, I’ll be rich and famous and you’ll be a fat middle-aged real estate agent in Wilbury who never did anything. Big deal. And then we’ll see who’s acting right and who’s acting wrong.” He clapped his brother on the shoulder and walked out of the room.
When Hank said, “I wish he could take me with him,” Isabel threw a handful of ice cubes at his head.
CYRUS TOOK A CAB to the Park Plaza and went straight to Eura’s room. His guitar was there; the pins and ink were on the bed. She had waited for him, even though it was late. She poured him a glass of wine, as she did every night, and they sat quietly awhile.
For two years now he’d been her accomplice, helping tattoo the hard-to-reach areas. In return he was allowed to watch her work. He knew better than to expect a show of skin; she went about her business in a modest way, opening her robe just enough so she could concentrate on the chosen area: a flower here, a bit of vine, a red berry. What brought him back each night was the feeling of intimacy. Not only had she shown him her secret and enlisted his help, she had grown increasingly comfortable in his presence. They often sat for hours, Eura bent over some part of her body, Cyrus absently exploring the fretboard, and chatted amiably about the silliest things, like an old married couple after dinner. Twice since Wilbury he had spent the whole night with her, but both times were innocent, with Eura hugging him from behind and holding his hands in hers.
She dipped a finger into her wine, brought it to her lips and said, “It is too late to work now. Tell me about your night with your brother and sister. Were they very impressed?”
He didn’t have the courage to mention the argument. He couldn’t bear for her to think poorly of him. Instead he said, “More shocked than anything, I guess.” Then, needing to say something truthful, he began to tell her about Hank—the troubled boy on the marsh, the hardened criminal at Portland Penitentiary, the broken man of Willbourne. And in saying the words out loud for the very first time, Cyrus realized what a sad story it was, how sorry he felt for Hank, for Izzy, for all of them.
He turned out the lights and sat on the floor with his guitar. It was becoming a minor-chord kind of night, and every song he played sounded with heartbreak. Every phrase had a face and a history and a sense of loss. Sometimes a note would shimmer, a single note, and try as he might he could find nothing that followed, and it would hang there, growing sadder by the moment, until it fell of its own weight.
Finally Eura said, “This music is too full of tears for so late at night. How am I supposed to sleep?”
In reply he put aside his Les Paul, kicked off his clothes and crawled under the blankets, not with his bottom tucked against her but sliding into her embrace, their lips and bellies and hips aligned. This time she put up no argument but matched him sadness for sadness. When at last they were still, he nuzzled her ear and said, “From now on, no more tears.” And she hugged him with all her might and wondered how anyone could be so young.
Next morning when she awoke, Cyrus was on the floor again, tooling around with his guitar. She smiled uncertainly. “Play a happy song,” she said. And without a second’s hesitation, he launched into “Waitin’ on You.” This time he even scatted along:
Ba-doodle-la-doo dal-lee-doop
Ba-doodle-la-doo dal-lee-dah
Ba-doodle-la-doo dal-lee-doop
Ba-dweedy-eedy-ooo
Baba-do ba-ba-da …
Baba-dwee doody-ooo
Doodle-oodle-ee-doo …
Ba-do-dah dweedy-eedy-ooo
Dal-lee-doo
Ba-dwee-dee
Ba-dwee-doo.
Her smile broadened as she propped herself up on one elbow. “What kind of song is this to sing, ‘dweedy-eedy oodle-ee-doo’?”
He thought a moment and, after a few false starts, came up with two lines of his own:
Don’t know what you do with your lips,
Don’t know what you do with your hair.
Eura fell back on her pillow, unaware that something significant had sounded in the room. But Cyrus looked at his guitar, at his fingers and then over to the soft snuggled form of his heart’s desire. He wasn’t sure what had happened, either, but he knew something somewhere had shifted, as clear and fundamental as a switch from sleep to wakefulness. He took a deep breath and tried again. Ten minutes later he had it.
Don’t know what you do with your lips,
Don’t know what you do with your hair,
Don’t know what you do with your hips,
But baby, I declare
That my heart’s on fire.
I’m in love with
The itty-bitty things that you do.
Now if you really want to know—
It’s unreal
How I feel
About you.
WHILE CYRUS AND EURA MADE LOVE, Ronnie huddled on the floor of his hotel room and sipped a tin of milk. He had just spoken to Delmore Hinton, an agent in the U.K., who had called to confirm that the band was booked on Top of the Pops, with a tour to follow starting in six weeks. Even better, the latest single was number eight on the BBC.
The news didn’t surprise him. It was all a matter of faith, he figured, ever-widening circles of belief. Jim’s solo had created a believer in Ronnie. Ronnie then broadened the circle to include Sonny and Tony and Chuck and Eura. It came to include Adrian and Kerry and the rest of the crew, young Cyrus and Nate Wroxeter. The record company believed. Now, two albums later, the circle continued to expand with each concert, with every record sold, a growing army of believers out there, the faithful. If anything surprised Ronnie these days, it was how easy it had been to set a world in motion. The hard part would be to step back and, in a Seventh Day frame of mind, savour what he’d done. Because if there was a problem, it was this: he had no vocabulary for bliss, no grammar or syntax, and the words he did have were worth nothing at all. One might as well use numbers and equations to describe a sunset.
So what do you do when a dream comes true? Do you laugh? Do you cry? Do you gibber like a monkey? Or do you sit on a scratchy carpet in your boxer shorts, aching with the loneliness of a young god?
He could pick up the phone and order anything he desired—food, drugs, sex—but where was the sense in that? Instead he got to his feet and turned on his cassette player. He owned only the one tape, which held but one song. He stood there with his head bowed, his eyes closed, and listened, scarcely breathing.
NINETEEN
For most of his life, Clarence had dedicated himself to avoiding change, or at least minimizing it, his life a constant battle with blights and bugs, jet stream and market. He and his father and grandfather had created acres of identical fruit by grafting each tree by hand. He knew exactly when to prune and spray and thin, and he never wavered from his duties.
His efforts to maintai
n the status quo were grounded in an appreciation of risk, of what was at stake when things went awry. He had crop insurance for freak hailstorms and May frosts. He read every bulletin from the Department of Agriculture. Lately he had taken to buying futures contracts on Chicago Mercantile, which cost him a few pennies here and there per bushel but were a sensible hedge against a blind drop in prices. And although he never in his wildest dreams worried about losing the farm (he’d have to be a complete fool to foul up an enterprise as successful as Orchard Knoll), he worried about falling short of the mark. He was the third Mitchell to work this farm, and all his life he’d admired the efforts of his father and grandfather. He’d inherited good land, good trees, as generous a growing season as he would find in Canada. More than anything, he’d inherited a sense of natural responsibility. This was not just a job. He was the caretaker of a precious resource.
The only area of his life where he’d failed at risk management was his friendship with Riley Owen. He had tried to protect his friend, to keep him happy and healthy, especially in those first years after the war. But Riley’s confidence was so shaken, his unhappiness on the farm so palpable, that he seemed to lose the will to do the right thing.
Clarence, a teetotaller, followed his friend into the Wilbury Hotel and tried to cheer him up. Riley would nod and listen and make promises. Occasionally he’d perk up and try something new, like the year he planted a field of pumpkins, or the time he was convinced he’d make it big with eggplants. But he always ended up in worse shape than before, wallowing in his failures. He drank more then, his mood darker and angrier. Sometimes he took it out on Catherine; and Clarence, thinking the alcohol complicated matters, refused to accompany his friend into the hotel anymore. So Riley drank alone, or worse, with men who had even less character than he did.
Clarence, so accustomed to the trade-offs that made life pleasant and predictable, didn’t know how to deal with his friend’s behaviour. It sickened him to see the boy with the golden arm become a slouched and bitter drunk, a man capable of beating a child with a broom handle, of smacking his beautiful wife for trying to intervene. After a while, Clarence gave up on Riley, crossing to the other side of the street if they happened to be walking toward each other.
That went on for the better part of a year, maybe as much as eighteen months. Then one night in early December, he was coming home late from a town council meeting. It was pissing rain, almost sleet, and he saw Riley stumbling along the road by the golf course, without a hat or coat, his pickup likely in a ditch somewhere—it wouldn’t be the first time.
Clarence pulled his truck to the side of the road and opened the passenger door. He knew there’d been more trouble with Hank the past few months. The boy had run off that summer after torching the chicken coop. And the rumour was that Riley was close to losing the farm. So it was pity, more than friendship, that made him stop. It was freezing out there.
Riley slid onto the bench seat without a word, and they drove slowly out to the marsh. Clarence pulled into the parking spot by the house but didn’t turn off the engine; all he wanted was to get home to Ruby and a hot cup of tea. But Riley turned and in a lumpy-sounding voice said, “Want that glove back yet?” And before Clarence could respond, Riley started to blubber. It was Catherine this and Hank that and what a great big fool he had been, what a stupid, awful man.
In the first lull, Clarence took a deep breath and said, “I’m not sure I want to hear this, Riley. I don’t really know what you want me to do.”
Two nights later, both Riley and Catherine were dead.
Thinking about Riley’s troubles, Clarence was reminded that some things are immutable, or should be. Do your best. Love your kids. Pay your debts. Care for the sick. Stick by your friends. And until recently, he would have added one final, sacred constant: adore Catherine. But sadly, that bright light had faded, especially in the years since Cyrus had gone. The boy had resembled his mother enough that he’d served as a reminder of her beauty and goodness. There had been times in the past when Clarence had cursed the resemblance, but now, with Cyrus gone, Clarence felt some crucial nerve had been severed.
People in town figured it was the cancer that had caused his long, slow decline. And, no question, his health was largely to blame. He felt sometimes as though life were oozing out of him, drop by drop. He was beginning to cut corners on the farm. The yield wouldn’t be as high, but what did it matter? It wasn’t as if they needed the money. He’d mentioned to Ruby at breakfast that morning that he was thinking of retirement.
“Oh, brother. That’ll be the day.”
“Sure,” he said. “Get you one of them condos down by the marina. You’d like that. I know you would.”
She got up from the table, rinsed her teacup and set it on the rack to dry. Without looking up from the sink, she said, “What would you do? I don’t know if I could stand it if you were any more miserable than you are now.” She shot him a look. “Giving up never made things better.”
Since breakfast he’d been sitting on the sofa in the barn. Sitting and thinking—that was all he seemed to do anymore. He struggled to his feet and wandered around the orchard a bit, stopping every five minutes or so for a rest. He crossed the yard and began to circle the house, studying the flower beds as though he’d only just noticed them. As he turned the far corner, he looked in the living room window and saw Ruby crouched beside her table of knick-knacks, her eyes closed, her hands clasping a porcelain figure of Jesus.
The sight of her there, praying like a child, stopped him in his tracks. He was looking into the past at a young girl, long before her parents had moved away or her sister had died or her husband had grown cold and indifferent. He was looking at the present, too, at a woman of fifty-eight years, almost thirty of them married to the same man, a woman who believed in the resurrected Christ, in miracles of love and redemption. But there was the kneeling bride as well, weeping under her veil, weeping in his arms that night in Niagara Falls, and giving him so many years of unquestioning love, honour and respect. This collision of Rubys, her ever-changing face coupled with her perfect constancy, produced an emotion more complicated than he could handle. He turned away from the house and stared across the yard to the barn, wondering what on earth had gotten into him.
FOR TWO SUMMERS IN A ROW, Janice had flown to Florence with Jonathan Davis. They were attracted by the galleries and museums, especially the Uffizi, but the wine and food were important, too. So was the shopping. On their second visit, they drove to Siena to look at the marble quarries. Janice had already worked with soapstone, alabaster and limestone but knew you weren’t really a sculptor until you had tried your hand at the Carrara marble Michelangelo had made famous. She wanted to see what a piece might cost.
The quarryman, Antonio, liked them immediately—they seemed so young. He knew by the look of them that their purchase would not be made lightly, and he let them look around a bit, took them for a tour of the operation, before he showed Janice a few facts and figures. He had just shipped to New York a block of pure white statuary marble, eight feet high and two feet square, weighing almost a ton. “You see?” he said. A figure on his clipboard had been circled in red pen, a little more than ten million lira. Even with a growing appreciation of how little the lira was worth, the figure made her head spin. Ten million of anything was a lot.
Antonio did some figuring. “Five thousand dollars, U.S.”
That number, so much more comprehensible, was even more depressing. She understood it completely. Carrara was out of her league.
As she was turning to leave, however, Antonio touched her arm and, with a look that was more wince than smile, motioned her into an older section of the warehouse and showed her a misshapen piece that had been sitting there for three years. Altogether the block stood six feet high, but only one of the four sides boasted right angles; the base measured five by seven, the top five by four. And yet the moment she set eyes on it, eyes arguably blurred by the romance of Italy, she saw what she wanted
to carve: two wind-blown trees that would lean together and eventually twine. A foundation stone that she and Jonathan might build a life on.
Antonio did some hasty calculations. “This piece—” he tapped the stone with his pen “—two tons.” Then, with a grand flourish, he drew a circle on his paper and showed her the clipboard. Five million lira. Twenty-five hundred dollars. In response to her incredulous blinking, he waved his arms at the evidence around her. “Three years,” he said.
She looked to Jonathan, though she knew she would not pass this up. That night she phoned her father and begged him for the money. The next day she gave Antonio a cheque and made shipping arrangements. When Jonathan asked her what she planned to do with her Carrara, she drew the zipper across her lips.
Her silence saved her a painful explanation later on. From the time the marble was moved into her studio in Toronto, she realized she had chosen the wrong image for what she wanted their relationship to be—not a twining of two spirits, not a unity at all, but rather two separate strengths that connect at regular and important intervals for stability and support and, ideally, a passage to somewhere important.
When she broached the subject with Jonathan, he spoke with a frankness that caught her off guard. “People think too much about love,” he said. “What we have here is just another medium for expressing ourselves. I teach, I cook, I play squash, and I live with you. There’s nothing fated here. Nothing carved in stone. We choose what we choose. Bottom line is you’re one of my works in progress, and I’m one of yours.”
After that splash of cold water, she put aside the Carrara and all her romantic notions. Several months later, she studied the pearlescent mass and gradually began to see a life-sized human figure, a stylized Y that arched backward with arms extended to the sky.
