Lucy Cloud

by Anne Lévesque

  A brutal silence fell over the car. Lucy had stopped crying. Annabel grabbed the panties and stuffed them back in the purse. Fighting back tears of anger and humiliation she picked up the rest of her things. She wiped at the greasy grit on her lap – when had she last cleaned her purse – Carol must have some all over her coat, too. She tucked the purse between the door and her calf and looked out the window.

  Outside was a grey darkening sky, the fat grey limbs of leafless trees, the grey pavement and grey gravel. She poked her index finger under her glasses to wipe at her eyes and tried to still her trembling mouth. Maybe she’d made a mistake taking Lucy home with her. She thought of Blaise at that age. He would never had done something like this. She had always been able to count on him behaving in company.

  After a while the men began a quiet conversation and Annabel felt it would be rude to keep looking out the window. The first thing she saw when she turned around was Lucy’s little face all streaked with tears and snot and dirt. With a shock she realized how dirty and unkempt the girl was, a little ragamuffin, with her stained sweatshirt and messy hair. And that look in her eyes. As if she had just realized that far from home and parents, she had alienated the only person who could help her.

  ‘Come,’ Annabel said. ‘Come sit on Nana.’ The girl climbed up on her lap, wrapped her little arms around Annabel’s neck and lay her head on her chest. She lifted it once, to wipe her nose against the front of Annabel’s jacket. But Annabel didn’t care. They were both of them filthy by now, Annabel’s fingernails as black as if she had been working in the garden. She pressed the child to her heart and closed her eyes. Beneath them the rumble of the wheels of the big station wagon. The swish of a vehicle in the other lane.

  And then nothing.

  CO-OP CALENDAR

  Lucy was sleeping and Curly not yet home. Annabel was lying on the daybed next to the stove. She had turned off the television and the house was quiet except for that chunk of poplar she’d just thrown in the stove. She didn’t like burning poplar. Murdoch had almost burned down his house with it one year. But Curly got a truckload of it, nice and dry and already split, in exchange for something, she couldn’t remember what, and he said it was Murdoch’s own fault, he hadn’t cleaned his chimney and burned it green.

  So when the phone rang she wasn’t quite awake. It was Wendy. She was crying and Annabel couldn’t understand anything she was saying.

  ‘What?’ she said. ‘What did you say?’

  But her heart knew. It began to knock against her chest. Bleeding. Unconscious.

  Nothing they could do.

  So sorry to tell you like this. Over the phone.

  How could it be? The doctor had expected Blaise to live until Christmas, maybe longer. Otherwise Annabel would have never left his side. She looked at the calendar on the wall beside the phone. Sudbury was penned inside one of the squares. Everything was ready: she hadn’t packed yet but she knew what she was bringing; Murdoch’s son Ronnie, home from a shutdown in Ontario, would drive them to the station and her brother Alec would stay in the house while they were away to look after the animals.

  ‘Annabel? Are you still there?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. She was staring at the calendar. All those empty squares after Sudbury.

  ‘It happened so fast. I’m still at the hospital. No, I’m not alone. My mum’s here.’

  So you called your mother first.

  The receiver rattled when she replaced it in the cradle. Her teeth were also rattling. And she felt an urgent need to empty her bowels. She ran upstairs to the bathroom.

  Afterward, standing at the basin waiting for the hot water to come up from the basement. She looked at her hands dangling at the end of her arms, turned up as if in supplication.

  Lucy.

  ‘I’ll call tomorrow and tell her,’ Wendy had said. ‘I’ll call back tomorrow.’ A pause. Annabel could hear her crying. ‘I don’t know if she’ll understand.’

  Curly.

  Driving fast on a dark road. The image rarely appeared without its companion, the fatal car accident. What if it happened tonight, she thought. Such coincidences were known to happen. Curly would die not knowing.

  She would be spared the telling.

  Annabel had been alone with her mother when the news came that her father’s mother had died. Her aunt Tillie had walked a mile to tell them, would cry in her cup of tea, and then set off again to relay the news to another brother.

  After Tillie left Annabel’s mother went from window to window.

  Finally, she turned to Annabel and said, ‘You tell him.’

  Annabel was eleven; had watched for her father at the window, stepped into the cold porch as soon as the outside door closed behind him.

  Later she would judge her mother harshly. But tonight she understood. Who wanted to be forever associated with such news? She dried her hands and turned off the bathroom light. She stopped in front of Blaise’s room. The door was ajar. She pushed it open and looked at the sleeping girl. Poor child, she thought. Poor innocent little child.

  Then she went down to wait for Curly.

  BLUES MILLS

  Caidlidh duine air gach cneadh ach a chneadh fhèin.

  A man can sleep on every hurt but his own.

  It had been one of those days. Early that morning Curly had driven all the way to Blues Mills to see a Percheron that tried to kick him as soon as he walked into his stall. Each horse was different, but experience taught Curly that many of the bad ones had been mistreated at some point in their lives. They didn’t trust you and you couldn’t trust them either. He had walked right out, not even tried to bargain with the seller. But now a thought nagged him. What if some poor sucker who didn’t know better bought the horse and got hurt? One of those back-to-the-landers who thought it would be fun hauling his firewood out with a horse and had no paddock or fence and little barefoot children running around? Lucy. The right thing would have been to buy the horse and sell it to the glue factory. But the right thing wasn’t usually worth the trouble. And it didn’t pay the bills. So he thought of his granddaughter instead.

  The second morning after Annabel came home he was eating breakfast when he heard a rustling above his head. A mouse, he thought. It was the time of the year they liked to move in. Then he remembered she was there. A few minutes later she appeared on the stairs in her yellow pyjamas.

  ‘Look at her in her bare feet!’ Annabel said. ‘Where are your slippers?’ And she ran upstairs to get them, and a sweater.

  ‘Come eat breakfast with Grampie,’ Curly said, and the girl, taking him literally, had climbed up in his lap.

  ‘Want some eggs?’ he said, and he felt the back of her head move up and down against his chest. So he fed her scrambled eggs and cut up his sausages so she could eat them with her hand.

  ‘How ’bout some tea to wash that down?’ he said.

  ‘Don’t give her tea!’ Annabel said, but when she got up to fry more sausages he gave the girl a sip of his strong milky tea. They had eaten breakfast together every morning since.

  How long had it been since they had had anyone at the breakfast table, let alone a child? He thought of that first summer Blaise was away. That third plate Annabel kept putting on the table. The slow ticking of the clock.

  ‘Say something!’ Annabel had blurted once. Then started to cry. He wanted to cry, too, those first few weeks. Just going past Blaise’s empty room would set him off. Annabel had found him inside once, wiping his eyes. He thought she would make fun of him but she said nothing, just put her arms around him.

  ‘So fast,’ he had said. ‘It went so fast.’ Those had been his mother’s last words. What everybody said now they were old. ‘Where did the time go?’

  For Curly the strange thing was how long it took to get through a day. All the things you did in one day. Get dressed, have breakfast, feed the animals, work, eat
lunch, work, do the barn chores, eat supper, watch TV, drink that last cup of tea … But put three hundred and sixty-five of those days side by side and they seemed to cancel each other out. So that a single day seemed to take longer than a year, a lifetime.

  So fast.

  Driving past the Whycocomagh arena that day he remembered how much Blaise loved playing hockey. And of how he often had to bum rides and even walk to the arena in town. Because for Curly, work always came first. Money was money, after all. Somebody had to pay for the skates and the gear. And it wasn’t his fault Annabel was too stubborn to learn to drive. (Although that would have meant buying a second vehicle, and deep down he knew he would have balked at the expense.) But there was no doubt in his mind now: it had been his job to drive his son to his hockey games. And he had failed him.

  There were good times, though. Watching TV together. Bonanza and Mission Impossible. And Hockey Night in Canada. They’d be rooting for the Canadiens; Larry Robinson was Blaise’s favourite player, he was proud as anything the year he won the Conn Smythe.

  Now Curly didn’t care if he saw a game.

  And those times on the road, side by side in the truck. By the time the boy was ten he had been on every back road in the county. You couldn’t lose him, either. He always knew where they were.

  Coming home if they were going by Vi’s or the Big Stop they sometimes stopped for a hot chicken or a club sandwich. Annabel would be mad because she would have kept supper warm for them. But that didn’t matter when Blaise was in his teens. It was nothing for him to eat a second meal when he got home.

  He thought of that go-cart place they drove by so often. Blaise had never asked him to stop there but he knew he would have liked to. One evening he pulled in and gave the boy money so he could ride. The look of excitement and joy on his son’s face as he drove around the track made him sad; why had he waited so long to stop here? Yet he would never take him there again. There was always a horse he had to see, someone waiting for him, a deal to be made. And now it was too late.

  How strange life was. Here was this boy who should have never been theirs in the first place – had Carol Ann not given him up, had she married the father maybe, or stayed in Sudbury, they might never have laid eyes on him; and upon hearing, many years later, that Effie and Jackie’s grandson (‘Carol Ann’s oldest’) was dying of cancer he and Annabel would have felt bad for the family. But only until the next thing came along. The next thought. It would have been somebody else’s sorrow. Not like when it’s your own. Sometimes when he woke it was already there. Waiting for him.

  He felt hunger pulling at his insides; he hadn’t eaten since breakfast, had stopped to see that tractor wagon.

  It had caught his eye outside of Blues Mills. He had noticed it before, knew it hadn’t moved in at least five years, but now someone had called him looking for one. The rust-painted mailbox at the end of the lane had four letters on its side: M A C L. He didn’t know of any MacLeans around here. Or MacLellans or MacLennans. He turned in the lane. There were no recent vehicle tracks in the yard, and no rig. A thick smoke unfurled from the chimney, the kind you get from burning wet wood. The house hadn’t been painted in ten, maybe fifteen years but the barn was still solid. A dandy place for one of those come-from-aways. Filing away the thought.

  The woman who opened the door was tall and bandy-legged in her old-fashioned print dress. She had a wide flat face and looked to be about forty-five. He saw that she was simple.

  ‘I was driving by and saw the truck wagon,’ he said, peering over her shoulder to see if anyone was there. Surely she wouldn’t be living on her own. But he didn’t see anyone. She raised one eyebrow but did not answer him.

  ‘I was wondering if it was for sale.’

  She motioned for him to come in and stand on the mat inside the door, which he did. Then she left through a doorway.

  He was in an old crooked kitchen that smelled of fried food and wood smoke and lemon dish detergent. And of piss. There was a wood stove, a small table covered with a worn red-and-white-checked vinyl tablecloth, two chairs. An old-style toaster with opening sides stood on the table in a pool of crumbs beside a tub of margarine, a bottle of ketchup and a salt and pepper caddy. There was an ancient porcelain sink in which dishes poked out of a soapy pan of water. Which meant that the drain probably leaked. And, from the looks of the faded red pan, it had been like that for a long time.

  He thought of the woman having to carry the greasy pan across the kitchen, the dirty dishwater wanting to slop over the sides, her foot holding the door open as she emptied it beside the step.

  She came back in and gestured for him to follow. As he walked across the kitchen, the wool of his socks stuck to the floor. The smell of piss got stronger.

  In a small bedroom an old man was lying in a single bed against the wall. He had wispy white hair, a beaked nose in a thin yellow face, pale-lashed yellow eyes that he slowly opened. There was a big sore on his left cheek. It was black and brown and navy, and crusted with blood. The man gulped, and when his Adam’s apple came up again he grimaced. In his eyes was a mute, resigned suffering. Curly had seen this look before. In sick and dying animals; his dog Boots, as he carried her to the old pasture, his back muscles burning from the weight of her. Returning with his gun and shovel he had not looked at her eyes. But he had never been able to forget them.

  He cleared his throat.

  When Curly was dealing with strangers he never let on he was in business. He always got a better deal if folks thought he was just a fellow buying something for himself. Normally he would start with ‘I was driving by and …’ or ‘Nice spot you have here …’ or ‘Kind of a wet day …’ But as he stood before the dying man no words came to him. Only a memory.

  A pair of Clydesdales. They had belonged to Archie MacKinnon, a man old to him then but just days away from his sixtieth birthday when he died of a heart attack. His widow Sally called Curly three weeks later.

  In the old days Sally would have asked Jack Gillies, who did Mabou and Port Hood and parts in between, but when Jack passed away the business died with him. This had been good for Curly’s grandfather, and now for him, because with tractors far outnumbering horses there wasn’t enough business for two horse traders in the county. Or even one. Unless you branched out, as Curly would have to later.

  The MacKinnons he did not know well as they lived in West Mabou. Sally taught school before she was married but stayed home after the children came. Archie couldn’t have left her much – it would be like Annabel if he died; how would she survive? But he did not know that then the way he knew it now. The horses were famous. They won prizes at the Ag Fair and were in the Canada Day parade every year.

  Sally came out to meet him. She was a slender, dignified woman, still beautiful, dressed as if she were going out. She took him straight to the barn.

  As soon as he saw the horses he knew they would fetch a good price. Both had high withers and good markings and their feathers were clean and dry. Whoever was taking care of them knew what they were doing. And, Curly guessed, Sally would have to start paying him soon. She knew what they were worth. Still, her asking price was reasonable. Had he paid that amount he would still have made a good profit on the resale. But he low-balled her. Thinking (he told himself later) that she could counter his offer. That’s how you played this game: you made an offer and they came back with another and you made another one. But that was a lie. He knew that Sally wouldn’t bargain with him: the horses were a burden to her, they reminded her of Archie and she wanted them gone. She accepted his offer. But in that pause before she did, it was only a slight pause, the length of a heartbeat, a slight tremor ran over her lips. And it was as plain as if she had told him, all there in her gentle trembling lips: how sad and weary she was, weary to the point of exhaustion. How disappointed she was with life, and now, with him.

  Curly turned. He walked out of the dark stinking room, do
wn the dark sloping hallway towards the kitchen, towards the light. He focused on this light, poor and brown as it was as it made its way through the dirty pane of glass above the sink. The thick black mold along the windowsill, the peeling paint. A rusty SOS pad in the upturned lid of a jar. The yellow plastic of a bottle of dish detergent. And then – he had not noticed it while he waited on the doorstep – a houseplant in a bright blue enamelled pot. It was sturdy and shapely, with thick glossy green leaves and small pale pink blossoms. He heard steps behind him. It was the woman who tended the plant, who loved it and kept it alive in this house of misery. He didn’t turn to look at her. Ran out of the door and into the truck. Didn’t look at the wagon, didn’t even see it as he drove away. Probably because he was rolling down his window to get rid of the stench of the old man. But it wouldn’t leave. It was still in his nostrils when he came up to Vi’s. So he hadn’t stopped for lunch, went straight to Kim’s.

  He hadn’t been to the commune for years. Remembers the first time he was there. He had heard that there were eight or nine of them in a couple of A-frames. That they all slept together, men and women and children and goats. He had stopped in out of curiosity. And to introduce himself, see what they needed. They all needed something.

  It was a summer day so the road wasn’t bad except for near the top where it was rough even for the pickup, and he had parked it and walked the rest of the way. Cresting the hill he saw a dark burly fellow kneeling beside a heap of grey boards. As he came closer he saw that he was turning the boards over one by one and pulling out the nails with the claw of a hammer. He nodded but did not get up. It was Kim. But he would only meet him later.

  He saw the settlement now. A school bus, painted pink, two A-frames, a car and a van in a small clearing. There were bus seats everywhere – piled behind the back door of the bus, propped up against walls and trees, circling a fire pit. A frisky mutt came up to Curly, tail wagging, and tried to jump on him. He lifted his knee against the dog’s chest.