Road to Thunder Hill

by Connie Barnes Rose

  We shuffled from the bed over to the window where he had his cigarettes hidden behind the blind. While he blew smoke out through the screen, he told me to watch the door in case a nurse came by.

  “Sometimes they forget who helped pay for this wing,” he said, slipping into a coughing fit that lasted until Bette returned to the room.

  “I still don’t understand,” Bette said, picking up the same conversation that had sent her out of the room in the first place. “Why you would want to be buried in a place that your first wife loved so much?”

  “Who says I didn’t love Kyle House?”

  “You never said you loved it. You didn’t, Bernie, not once.”

  “Did you ever stop to think that maybe it was because I loved you that much more?” he said, with a voice so tender I turned to see who was speaking.

  Bette wasn’t buying the tone, because she cried out, “Ha! So now you’re saying you’re prepared to love me less.”

  “You see? I can’t win.” My father winked at me, his laugh shifting to a choking cough that sent Bette to the window to stare at the parking lot below. “You watch,” he whispered. “She won’t let up, even after I’m dead and gone.”

  The next day, just before he died, he patted Bette’s hand and told her to do whatever she wanted with his mortal remains, that he was heading for a whole new beginning somewhere new.

  She let him have his way, though, and had him buried in Thunder Hill Cemetery, right next to Kyle House. It was a breezy summer day filled with the sound of quaking aspens and scolding crows. Dappled sunlight lit our faces and behind us the ocean sparkled. There was something about all that sun and sea that made my father’s burial seem less final than I expected. But I still feel sad that my father died believing my mother wouldn’t bury him in Thunder Hill Cemetery.

  “When you’re ready we’ll have some nice hot curry!” Olive says from the other side of the bathroom door. “And I even have that home-made bread you like so much.”

  I’m still soaking in the tub at Kyle House. Feeling a whole lot cleaner than when Olive rescued me this morning from Hog Holler.

  I’d been in such a deep sleep there on the pool table that I might not have heard that soft knock on the door if Suzie hadn’t woofed. Before she had time to break into a full bark though, I had my hand around her muzzle.

  “Shh. Listen,” I’d said, waiting for another knock. I was laying there trying to put together the pieces of last night. Card games. Too much rum. The foot rub. That hashish nightcap! Bear was still asleep behind me, his arm draped over my shoulder, and a glance over at the couch told me Clayton was still there. I had no idea what time it was, or what I was supposed to do now. I knew I shouldn’t be found curled up in Bear James’ arms on Hog Holler’s pool table.

  I relaxed my grip on Suzie’s muzzle, which made her sneeze. Behind me, Bear breathed in deeply, and already I wondered what I’d say if he opened his eyes right then. Something like, hi, old friend, fancy meeting you here. His breathing went back to normal though and I relaxed against his warmth. Maybe I imagined a knock at the door? Maybe it was only something banging around in the yard. Besides, who would be knocking on Hog Holler’s door at … at … shit! There it was again.

  It was louder this time and I held Suzie’s snout whispering, “Shush,” into her ear. This was just fucking great. I lifted Bear’s arm high enough to pull myself away. My head was pounding and my legs felt stiff when I swung them off the pool table. When my feet touched the cold cement floor, I remembered my sore ankle. Sunlight poked through the grimy window.

  I gave a hand signal to Suzie that she should stay on the pool table, but then my heart jumped when a dark outline filled the window. I didn’t recognize who it was until I spotted a tassel bobbing on the top of the head. Only Olive had a hat like that. Suzie whined then and I lifted her off the table but when I set her down my knees cracked so loud I wondered if Olive might have heard. She wasn’t at the window when I looked up so I was hoping she’d gone away. Even so, as I crouched there beside the pool table, I wondered what I’d do next. I couldn’t walk all the way home with this foot. And I wasn’t sure I was up to facing Bear today.

  As I lie here in the cooling water of Olive’s tub there’s a knock on the bathroom door and Olive says, “Patricia, are you alright in there?”

  “I’ll be out in a minute.”

  “The curry’s ready whenever you are.”

  The woman does not let up, just like this morning when I realized she wasn’t about to leave Hog Holler without me. When after a few minutes it had gotten too uncomfortable to stay crouched by the pool table, I went over to the door and opened it a crack. A crack was the most I could open it anyway, since snow and ice had drifted up against the door. When I looked out, the sun hit my eyes and that just about killed my head. Through my squinting I could see how the ice covered everything in sight. Even the old pieces of metal in Perry’s yard looked like ice sculptures at the winter carnival. Then there was the silence. I had to listen real hard to catch the rumble of surf way out in the strait, or the whispering sound the wind makes as it rushes through the spruce trees up on Thunder Hill. Then I heard the crunch of footsteps as Olive rounded the corner carrying the shovel she keeps in Billy’s trunk. It was too late to duck back. She’d spotted me.

  “Hi Olive,” I croaked.

  “Patricia! What happened to you?”

  “Just help me get out of here, okay?”

  “Bear James must be in there too, is he?” Olive tried to peer around me.

  “What makes you think that?” I answered, and then remembered that Bear’s Rover was parked right outside.

  Olive didn’t seem to hear me. She was already hacking away at the drift as if her life depended upon it.

  Olive does everything as if her life depended on it. Like the time she and Arthur came to a dance at the Thunder Hill Community Hall, and her eyes popped open at the sight of the older farmers clogging away. She screamed, “Why, this is a form of Gaelic step dancing! And of course it makes perfect sense since practically everyone around here has their roots in the British Isles.” Then she went on about how traditional dances were her passion. It seemed she gathered them in her travels like some people collect thimbles. It didn’t matter if she was in Argentina, Egypt, or Iceland, she said that when she dances she flies free of earthly restraints. So that’s what she did that night at the hall. Got right up there and started stomping her heart out. She clogged and clogged, adding spins and twirls and didn’t notice when people stopped dancing out of fear of being knocked over. I could feel their eyes on me as the one who’d brought Olive along.

  Then there was the video show a week later. She invited some of the “farmers” over to Kyle House to see footage of her favourite traditional dance, that of the Chewa people of Central Malawi. As the video played, she also stretched her arms wide, thrust her pelvis forward and leapt and spun to the drums.

  Later, she said she’d assumed people would be curious to know about cultures in places they’d never travelled to. But she’d been disappointed by the comments after the video.

  “Don’t go much below freezing over there, I don’t imagine,” someone had said.

  “These pictures remind me of those National Geographic magazines I looked at as a kid. Closest I ever came to watching porno.”

  Jean Bradley said, “Coffee is served.”

  They stayed on a while, longer as Olive helped serve up the cakes and squares the women had brought. I was glad she’d had the good sense not to demonstrate the mating dance she’d shown me that afternoon.

  Then the talk moved on to Maynard Fleming’s young fellow who was building houses and barns out of bales of straw.

  Someone said to Maynard, “Didn’t you teach your boy about the three little pigs?” Everyone got a kick out of that.

  Olive and I climbed int
o Billy and started down Perry Card’s lane. The questions began. How in the world had I ended up at Hog Holler? What had I done all night that made me look so damaged? That was the word she used, “damaged.” She kept looking over at me when she wasn’t busy steering Billy in and out of the tracks she’d made earlier driving up the lane to Hog Holler. To avoid her questions, I made a point of turning around to ask the twins how their ballet recital had gone. Then I asked her how she’d found me anyway.

  I got the whole story. How she’d awoken this morning to a cold house and the sight of a quarter inch of ice coating everything outside her window. How she’d lit a fire in her big old Enterprise stove and gone out to the summer kitchen to the old hand pump and wasn’t it fortunate that she hadn’t gotten rid of that old thing because with the electric pump out, there was no running water to be had! She’d filled up the reservoir on the stove and then bundled up the twins, saying there would be lots of cold and hungry people out there who’d need rescuing this morning.

  I nodded and settled in for the blow-by-blow of how she came to rescue me.

  She said that next she had driven, no, slipped and slid all the way to the Four Reasons. Through slush and snow and ice, they charged, “Because, Patricia, you know how Billy loves a challenge.”

  Inside the store, Alana and Danny were at the freezers pulling out food and stuffing it into burlap bags. Alana told the twins to help themselves to the ice cream since it was all going to melt anyway and while they were insured for most power outages, they weren’t sure they were covered for ice storms. So they were hauling it across the road to the Bradley Farm, which, and did I know this, had a generator large enough to serve the house as well as the dairy barn. The power lines were down all over the county and no one knew when they’d be back up.

  “But I still don’t get how you knew I was at Hog Holler.”

  “That’s what I’m getting at. Just as Alana was saying that at least her phone wasn’t out, Gayl phoned, looking for you.”

  “And Alana knew I was at Hog Holler?”

  “No, Alana thought you were still at your house. In fact, she told Gayl you were likely sitting in front of your stove reading a book with your feet up on the oven door. That’s when she remembered the flue fire, which came as a total surprise to me since I’d just been over to your place yesterday.”

  I shrugged. “It only takes a minute for it to happen.”

  “Well, I decided you might need rescuing and I was just about to head out in Billy when Gayl phoned back saying she’d *69’d your call to her last night, did it sound familiar? Alana knew right off it was Hog Holler’s number.”

  Olive took her eyes off the road to stare at me.

  I pretended to concentrate on the road ahead of us. The sun had disappeared and now it was snowing again, sleet really, and ahead of us the tracks that Billy had made on the way to Hog Holler were barely visible.

  We’d almost reached the curve in the road just before my lane. I said, “You can just drop me off here, thanks.”

  “I can’t do that. You have no heat at your house, remember?”

  “I’ll manage,” I said, trying to sound firm.

  “Quite frankly, Patricia, you don’t look like you’re in any condition to be alone.”

  I must have looked pretty green at this point because the next thing I knew we were pulling into the Four Reasons and I was opening the door and puking my guts right in front of the gas tanks. The rest of me just about followed it to the ground, but Olive was suddenly there, catching me under the armpits. I caught a glimpse of the twin faces staring at me from the window as Olive half dragged me towards the store.

  Then I was lying under an afghan on the couch at the back of the store and Alana was passing a wet cloth over my face. I could hear Danny muttering that someone was going to have to go out there to clean up the mess I’d made.

  I jumped suddenly when I saw something slink around the cooler. When I realized it was a cat, I looked up at Alana expecting her to react like it was a rat. But she didn’t and that more than anything almost had me jumping out of my skin. Had I landed in some sort of parallel universe? A person disappears for one night and suddenly their whole world changes?

  Danny said, “Alana had a change of heart when the cat left a dead rat at the door. She actually opened the door for the cat.”

  Alana said, “Go figure. Cats. The lesser of two evils.”

  “Admit it,” Danny said. “You like the cat.”

  Alana muttered something about it not being so bad. Then the bunch of them followed the cat up to the front of the store. For a second there, I even fell asleep. Then I heard Danny say, “Don’t even think about driving Trish into town. The road’s closed anyway.”

  Olive said, “But what if she has food poisoning?”

  Alana said, “Looks more like rum poisoning.”

  One of the twins piped up. “Is Aunt Patricia drunk?”

  “No dear, she’s just a little off her oats today,” Alana said, her voice unnecessarily loud. “Who wouldn’t be, spending a night at Hog Holler?”

  “With Bear James, no less,” Olive said.

  “Bear? Bear was there?” This piece of information had Alana rattled. I could tell by the way her voice kind of cracked on “there.” Everybody knows Bear James goes to Hog Holler when he’s feeling lonely. She lowered her voice. “Are you sure he was there?”

  “Well, his Rover certainly was.”

  Alana marched over and stood in front of me with her hands- on-hips pose. “Bear was there? You spent the night together?”

  “Guilty as charged. We even slept on the pool table.” I added a laugh here and rubbed the back of my neck. “But I wish I hadn’t, because now I have an awful crick in my neck.”

  “Hmm,” said Alana, her foot tapping the floor. “Must have been crowded on that table.”

  “It was. Especially with Suzie sleeping on it too.”

  “Hmm.”

  “A pool table?” Kira asked. “Wasn’t it uncomfortable lying on top of all those balls?”

  Alana suddenly snorted, and said to Kira, “It all depends on whether or not the balls stayed in their pockets, my dear.”

  “Ha, ha, ha,” I said, wondering where the hell Alana got off suggesting such a thing, even as a joke. But I answer, “No it didn’t hurt at all, dear, because all the balls stayed in their pockets. But I can tell you this … Kira,” I had had to search for the mole on Kira’s earlobe as this was one way to tell the twins apart, “sleeping on a pool table is no fun at all.”

  No fun sleeping on a pool table, indeed, I was thinking, even if you are lying in the arms of a man who’s rubbing you like you’re someone pretty special. And you’re rubbing against him like a cat in heat. That thought must have crept into my face, in the form of a silly smile no doubt, because Alana cast me this I think you’re hiding something from me look.

  I chose that moment to say that I should probably call my mother and Gayl.

  According to Gayl, everything in town was operating as usual, with just the regular problems a snowstorm brings. Places were closed, shovels and scrapers were out, getting around was difficult, but not impossible. At least they had power.

  “How was your night, Mom?”

  “Lovely, dear, it was just lovely. Gayl had a friend over and I watched them play Scrabble. Did you know that Gayl has an excellent vocabulary?”

  I could tell that my mother was trying to keep me from asking about her. She needn’t have worried. I didn’t have the energy to get angry about her drinking, because to do so would be calling the kettle black, now wouldn’t it?

  “What friend of Gayl’s?”

  “Dixie. Lovely girl.”

  Dixie. I didn’t know any Dixie. I used to know all her friends.

  “Dixie who?”

  “Now, I�
��m not sure about that. Why don’t I pass you over to Gayl?”

  “Wait, I haven’t…”

  “Hi Ma,” Gayl was cheery.

  “Who is this Dixie person?” I ask.

  “A friend of mine,” Gayl said. “What were you doing at Hog Holler last night?”

  “I … I …” I began.

  “And thanks for lying to me about it too. You’re busted.”

  “Busted? Why?”

  “Because you told me you were going to the Four Reasons.”

  “No,” I said, in the firmest voice I could muster. “I said I might go.”

  “I’ll be sure to remember that line myself, cause I’d be in big trouble if I ever told you I was going somewhere and ended up somewhere totally else.”

  “It’s not the same thing at all,” I said. “The circumstances were unusual, I didn’t want you to worry.”

  “Worry? We all thought you were dead in a drift somewhere. But instead you were tying one on at Hog Holler.”

  Take control of this conversation, I told myself. Know when to admit you were wrong. “I’m sorry. I should have let you know where I was.”

  “Hey, no problem, Ma. Just remember this the next time you freak because I’m a little late getting home.”

  “Whoa. That’s where you’re dead wrong, kid,” I said, and seizing the moment, added, “I am an adult who is responsible for my own actions. You, meanwhile, are still my responsibility and therefore you have to answer to me.” I said all of this in a calm voice too.

  “Pretty hard for me to answer to you when you’re out drinking with a bunch of dirt bags.”

  “I was with your godfather, for Pete’s sake. And we just happened to be there when the power went out, and you might as well know, because I’m sure it will be all over Thunder Hill by tomorrow, we had to sleep on the pool table because Clayton Card was already on the couch, and the floor was cold, and I hurt my ankle, and we couldn’t drive home.”

  “Wow, so now you slept with Bear James. Dad know yet?”