Indeed, four hours later, he heard a racket. He drew back from his sunny rock. There was a big canoe coming up the hill, and now and then it would sway and bang into trees. There were human legs underneath that red shell, promising enough for a meal, but maybe a bit too much work? Yawn some more, that’s what the cougar did, but he shifted his weight again, now onto his hind legs. What’s that coming next? This was getting interesting. This had to be the biggest, thickest human being he’d ever seen. He could hear heavy breathing, a lingering funny odour wafting his way. Now’s the time. The hiker walked on by, slowly, staggering up the steep rise of the hill, as though sick, so slow, and then it was, with padded feet and teeth like spikes, that the big cougar slipped down from the sunny rock onto the path, and silently gained speed until he hit poor Ralph, the backpack, so hard on the back of the neck that he snapped Ralph’s spine in four places. Down went the hiker, pine needles in the face.
The funny thing was, the cougar thought, this piece of meat kept on shouting and shouting no matter how many times he shook the neck, no matter how many times he broke the spine, no matter how he twisted his victim’s head around and around again until he could see the whole face.
What’s that? Bang, bang, two bullets whipped by the cougar’s ears.
He gave up and ran from the spectre of his victim, from the man who stared up at him with his eyes all now open, a scab on the upper lip, the smell of death already upon him.
Ten days later, to his chagrin, the cougar developed a nasty sore on his right upper lip, just above the incisor. Every time he snarled, it hurt. That painful sore, that little ulcer seemed to come back forever, over and over again for the next fifteen years. It served as a cruel reminder, to the cougar, of that big mistake he made, back there by the sunny rock. After that, he left all human beings alone. He stuck to elk and grouse and rabbits.
When they finally got home, Ralph’s two canoeing buddies told the whole story to everybody they met. In their excitement, they almost forgot about the hours of CPR they performed down by the river. Then they remembered it, and they got a plaque from the Red Cross. They told everyone how lucky they were, how Ralph had saved their lives when the cougar struck, how he’d stepped in when he was needed, even though he was dead. Their poor friend was buried soon after they got home, buried like the hero he was. Unfortunately, he was unfit for an open casket.
The funeral director said, “No, Phyllis, I am sorry but there is no way, despite my schooling, despite my many, many years of experience, there is no way I can fix up Ralph, as you remember him, for public display. I cannot make your husband acceptable before the eyes of Man. But before God, I swear to you, Phyllis, I assure you, Ralph will be like the driven snow.”
How all the spectators cried, during the funeral, when he repeated that comment. Because of the rigor mortis, Ralph’s coffin had to be squared like a packing box, into which he was pushed and jimmied till he fit. Then, because he could not be thrust through the usual narrow slot for the fiery furnace, cremation had to be done outside, in front of a hundred well-wishers, on a bonfire built from pine boughs within a perfect circle of rocks. His two best friends, the ones who tried to save him with six hours of CPR, they were the ones who constructed that stone circle as though it were their last campsite together. As the flames licked higher and higher, they all backed away from the searing heat and sang, en masse, “Old Flames Can’t Hold A Candle To You.”
It was a tearful, yet joyful, celebration of Ralph’s finest hour, of the sacrifice he made for his buddies, on the last portage he ever made, as a canoeist, a dentist, a friend, a shield.
the
earlier
misfortunes
of
justin peach
“PEACH.”
“That’s a name that just oozes all the good things about life,” said Aaron Stoodley. “Oozes it. Our Justin must be an aberration, for a Peach.”
If he’d been born a Lemon, then that’s what you’d expect, misery. That was Aaron’s opinion, and Clyde Grandy’s too. They looked up Lemon in the phonebook but there were none of them. Nobody wanted names like that. There were lots and lots of Peaches though, a half-column of them, sweet Peaches who they all figured lived in innocence. No Peaches waiting to fall from a tree, or rot on the ground, or get filled up with wasps and honeybees and then get flattened by the next boot that walked through the grass. Like for Apples. Peaches had to be optimists, they figured. For a test case, Aaron phoned up some of the anonymous Peaches and every one of those people sounded happy.
“We’re taking a survey,” Aaron said, “are you happy with your lot these days?”
“Oh yes,” they said, “things could hardly be better for us.”
So there it was. The Peaches were a jolly crew even though for some of them— most particularly for Justin Peach, the Peach we knew best—things didn’t work out too well in the long run.
The very first time, no one could blame poor Justin. For one thing, he was only three years old. For another, his father never should have rented that little house out in the Battery. Didn’t he look up that hill, up the cliff? That’s what it was, really, a cliff, perpendicular, straight up and down with ridges too narrow for a goat. He signed the rent form on the dotted line but the cliff still loomed over the house like it was Mount Everest. The sun never shone there. Didn’t Justin’s father see the big rocks, some of them way bigger than the poor little house itself, hanging up there balanced on nothing, hanging like the raised Sword of Damocles? The house was affordable, sure, but it was made out of sticks, and there was no way it could have stood up to the force of what happened. Didn’t he read the history books, the avalanches that swept down in winter storms? Well, I guess he didn’t. Why should he? It had been there seventy-five years, they said afterwards, crossing themselves. The house lasted that long partly because there were so many holes between the boards that it offered up no resistance to the wind that blew threw it at a hundred miles an hour. Justin’s father wasn’t worried about that. He was in town at last. He had no concerns about the Hand of God, the Sword of Damocles, the Toss of the Dice, the Monkey’s Paw, or any of the things that maybe he should have. He was just looking forward to the new job he had up there at the Battery Motel, where he was the new handyman.
“This job looks good,” he said the first night he came home and the eight of them opened the door for him to see how it went.
“There’s work there for two hundred years,” he said, “break out the rum.”
They threw some more wood in the stove and the snow started outside with the fading of the light. The storm broke all records by midnight and, in the morning, at breakfast, it was still a whiteout outside the window.
“Put Justin in the chair over there,” his father said to the uncles and the aunts and to his wife and to the two older girls.
Those were the last words he spoke, or any of those uncles, aunts, or girls spoke, or Mrs. Peach spoke, lifetime. The rumble lasted one second, that’s all, long enough for them to turn their heads before one of those big rocks and the snow that feathered all around it sheared through the house and took it all—except for the part Justin was in—lock, stock, and barrel into the slob ice that blew up against the edge of the harbour. Down through that ice too, so all there was a half hour later was a piece of the roof floating cock-eyed out by Chain Rock. In the grip of the tide it was, heading outwards. Nobody ever saw any of them again, not even their mortal bodies, and only Justin was still there in his chair when the neighbours came in their undershirts, hurrying and looking up the hill with their eyes all wild. “Justin was crying a bit,” they said, “and cold, but right away he smiled.” He smiled his way into their hearts, at least for a while. He was adopted by the nearest ones, name of Poole, but they left him with the name Peach because it was his, and he was the last one of that particular bunch.
“You’re some peach,” they always said to him when things were good.
On the other hand, when things weren’t
so good, even when he did nothing wrong, his stepmother, Alice Poole, would look at him with her eyes flashing and she’d say, “Poison, Poison, that’s the name you should have been born with. Oh what in Christ has brought me this boy.” No, she was not a warm, a supportive woman.
When he was older, Justin would walk out onto his new porch and look at the gap next door where the rock ran through.
“How’d you like to experience something like that?” asked Aaron Stoodley. “You know that image of a fish out of water, gasping on rocks? I bet it was like that, for him.”
“I can see that,” said Clyde Grandy.
The second big thing that went wrong for Justin Peach came on a lot slower than the avalanche but an argument could be made, according to Aaron, that this problem was even worse. It struck into the heart of his growing, his cringing years, when there was nothing he could do. He must have felt it all happening, totally unlike that fall of rock and snow which was fast, clean and painless really, not the slow throttling that now went on day in and day out in that new house of his in the Battery. Ten years of it went by and then Alice Poole couldn’t take it anymore. “Poison,” was all she said. She destroyed all the books in the house. She destroyed crayons and drawings and homework and the posters Justin had up in the bedroom, posters of hockey players, Metallica. She emptied all the wooden toys they owned— the older children were all gone now—she emptied them out one morning over the edge of the porch, where they slid and bounced into the harbour in an eerie replay of the first disaster that orphaned Justin Peach. He wasn’t there to see it, thank God for him, but he was there when he came home from grade seven and there was the lady from the Children’s Aid with her little car, and the professional way she had, brisk really, who explained to Justin that it was time to move on.
“But I was adopted,” Justin said to her. “I was adopted. This is my family.”
“Well, not really,” she said, “you were only fostered here. That’s why you’re a Peach and not a Poole. Now it’s time for somewhere else.”
She moved him in with a family out Topsail Road, so now for the first time there was no harbour to look at, no gap in the row of houses that clung to the side of the hill. There were just cars and houses and patchwork lawns and a new school and still, the report from the Children’s Aid said, still Justin smiled with the new family and was right at home, right away. Perfect. There was no need for regular official check-ups out Topsail Road. That boy was as resilient as Indian rubber.
Yes, Justin Peach fit in real well. All the kids were fostered there, in that particular house on Topsail Road. There was no nuclear family. It was wild and warm and carefree and normal for them all, that kind of life. There were twelve of them, and the washer and the dryer went non-stop. At least forty pieces of toast had to be margarined every morning by those children who’d come from everywhere, and there in that kitchen they used a wide paint brush, according to Aaron Stoodley who once wandered into it himself by mistake, and everybody took their turn. Toast-maker. One by one, they’d dip that wide paint brush into the melted so-called butter that simmered there in a pot on the front burner, and then they slapped the drippings over all the toast they wanted. Peanut butter, jam, fruit spread, everything within reason. There was nothing wrong with that. It was good. The trouble was, after he was there just two weeks, Justin went out one evening with the oldest boy there, Michael, who said he’d show him the neighbourhood.
“Let’s look around,” Michael said.
They walked down Patrick Street and Michael said, “Look, down there is where the harbour’s at,” and Justin Peach tried to see the old Battery and the Poole house through a gap in the houses, but he couldn’t. He was too short.
While Justin Peach was doing that, his new friend Michael casually reached down to the curbside and picked up a piece of broken stone the size of a duck’s egg. He threw that rock real hard through the nearest front window of a fancy house, painted yellow, just three feet away. Justin Peach heard the noise and said, “What’s that?” but Michael was running off down the hill and turned the corner, out of sight. That boy could run. It was like he was never there, he vanished so fast. Justin just sat down on the curb because he didn’t know what to do. He never saw the Battery that day, that’s for sure. A man came out of the house with the selfsame rock in his hand and then a police car came up the road and the policeman took Justin Peach by the neck of the coat and said, “What’s with that, you little fucker?”
He took the boy right off down to the station and that’s how Justin Peach, though totally innocent of any wrongdoing, got into the justice system for the first time. Actually, it was the only time, Aaron Stoodley said, as far as he knew, and really Justin Peach was just by-catch in the wide-thrown nets of the constabulary. He wasn’t the main target. If Justin Peach had told the truth, he’d have had no juvenile record at all. He didn’t talk much though at the best of times, and when things got bad, Justin Peach could barely talk at all. He ended up taking the hit for that new friend of his. That’s the way it was on Topsail Road, the unspoken code. He lived there for four more years, on probation, and everybody in the neighbourhood knew he was on the wrong side of the law. He got some tattoos, some facial piercings, a tongue stud, and he wore his hair in some pretty weird ways, with gel and various colours of dye. A Mohawk. Of course he went back to the yellow house on Patrick Street on a regular basis, on the order of the court, and there he paid off the window he never broke with some yard work out back.
“Funny,” the owners said, “he doesn’t seem the type of boy to just up and smash things. If anything, he’s gentle.”
The owners got along fine with Justin Peach after the initial episode with the stone. When Justin left the foster house on Topsail Road, when he turned sixteen and was cast out into the world, the owners of the yellow house said, “Hey Justin, you want the basement apartment?”
“Sure,” he said, and he and a friend of his, Philip John Savoury, both of them now in welding school, moved right into the same house that had turned Justin Peach into the little criminal that a lot of ignorant people thought he was.
“That can happen to anyone,” said Aaron. “People get the wrong impression. You’re always the same to those who cannot see.”
The fourth bad thing that happened to Justin Peach, and the worst of them all, arguably, up until then (forget the much-later pizza party and the botulism and the death of the whole soccer team in Halifax) was how he lost his first real girlfriend, Rhynie Lights. She was a lively girl he met at high school and she had a family that lived up above Military Road. It was a real nice family. After a while, though she was nervous about it, she invited Justin to come along to this and that, to a picnic, to a party, and all of Rhynie’s family were there. They accepted him, more or less, and then one day they invited him to Thanksgiving dinner. He’d never been anywhere like that, what with the turkey and maybe twelve of them all told sitting round the table, saying grace, cranberry sauce, gravy, potatoes and peas, the big difference being they were all related to each other, not like the hodge-podge on Topsail Road, where nearly always somebody would flip out half-way through the meal to the merriment of some. There, at Rhynie’s, no one seemed out of sorts, no one said, “Well fuck you too,” and started crying and throwing mashed potatoes and running upstairs while the foster parents said, “There, there, settle down, boys will be boys.” Rhynie’s home was like a dream by comparison. Mind you, Justin Peach was grateful for those mostly-pleasant times on Topsail Road, but they were, when he looked back upon them, wild and even savage compared to the nice glassware, the laughs, Rhynie’s father tossing back a few, the easy times that a real family seemed to have, without even trying.
After Thanksgiving dinner was over and the dishes were all washed and dried by Rhynie and her mother, Justin and Rhynie went out together and walked around the corner to where he’d left his third-hand motorcycle parked by the curb. They never left it anywhere near Rhynie’s house. Rhynie’s mother hated bikers
and everything they stood for. It was one of her pet peeves. She couldn’t separate, in her mind, the difference between a biker and a boy with a motorcycle, but Rhynie herself, to Justin’s great good fortune, had instinctively known the difference. So, that Thanksgiving night, when he said, “Jump on, Rhynie, one spin downtown and I’ll bring you right back,” she said, “Okay,” and jumped on, both of them without helmets because the helmets were back on Patrick Street, hanging from the coatrack. “Go slow,” she said, and he did go slow but that was a particular night that going slow wasn’t good enough, because the temperature had dropped to freezing and there was, down at the corner of Military Road and Bonaventure, a broken water hydrant that sent a spray of water, invisible to all that went by, fanning out across the curve where the road dipped into the turn, and the water landed on the asphalt and froze there in a band maybe four feet wide, like a river across the intersection. No one could see it, the frozen river of black ice, and all the cars that went by drove over it without a problem. It was as black as the night itself and there were leaves blowing across it like a rustling shroud when Justin’s motorcycle banked into the turn. The wheels had nothing to grip on and down they went. Rhynie was thrown off to the right and her head hit the curb with what must have been an awful sound, had anybody been there to hear it, and Justin was knocked out too, his head skinned along the pavement.
“Maybe it was the gel in his Mohawk that saved him,” Aaron said, “because of the reduced friction. He slid rather than banged.”
All the news wasn’t bad though, despite the obvious horror of the accident, because when the police and the ambulance came and the policeman said, “This girl doesn’t look good, put on the siren boys,” a car pulled over and a man got out and walked over and bent down and looked at Rhynie. He had a little flashlight with him and he opened the upper lids of her eyes and flashed the light in.
How Loveta Got Her Baby Page 16
