SKUNKING MURDOCH
Curly was walking home from Murdoch’s after a game of cribbage. It was a good night. There was a gentle rain falling but it was warm. And his belly was full of rum. He was on foot because his truck was at the Irving waiting for a new radiator. He had refused Murdoch’s offer of a ride. The last time his neighbour was caught drinking and driving, his wife, angry at having to get up at four in the morning to drive him to the wharf, had refused to take him anywhere else: Curly had chauffeured him around for almost a year.
‘I heard the price of lobster was good this year,’ Curly had said when he saw Murdoch uncap the Captain Morgan.
‘Yeah but there was no mackerel – we had to buy herring for bait. Cost us a fortune.’
Listening to Murdoch you could be forgiven for thinking that fishing was the most futile and unprofitable enterprise in the history of the world. He never admitted to having had a good season, even when his yard boasted a brand-new pickup and the biggest, most expensive snowmobile you could buy. That night, however, he had been so generous with the rum, and in such good cheer – even after Curly skunked him with that twenty-four hand – that Curly knew it had been a good year.
There was a low rumble in the sky. A storm was coming. Or not. It was hard to tell. He wondered what time it was. Pretty late, he guessed. Murdoch’s wife Alice had gone to bed hours ago. She had been kind of sour all night, maybe because Murdoch was on the hard stuff again. That was her way. No wonder she and Annabel had never hit it off. But everyone liked Murdoch.
Curly’s thoughts turned to that little heifer he’d seen at Murdena MacLean’s earlier that day. Murdena had told him she didn’t want to sell, but Curly knew she didn’t have enough hay to keep her all winter and that if he walked in at the right time with the cash in his hand she was bound to change her mind.
Lightning flashed once, and then again, and the rain began to fall in earnest. It brought back all kinds of memories. Of driving a wagonful of loose hay into his father’s barn just before a downpour. Of playing on the parlour floor with his brother Johnny D. Of his first taste of moonshine behind the Glencoe Hall at his aunt Girlie’s wedding. Going back into the hall with the blaze of shine in his gullet. How confident he’d felt. How big. The swirl of light and music and dancing hitting him full on – the fiddle and the piano, the thumping of feet on the wooden floor, the whoops and cries, the women’s legs below their twirling skirts.
‘Where have you been?’ Girlie winked. Sanctioning his entrance into the society of men. That great laugh of hers. Before the smoking choked it. Only six years older than him, more like an older sister than an aunt, Girlie had loved him like no one else. He ran to the kitchen whenever he heard the sound of her voice in the house and always ended up on her lap. He had craved her affection, his mother so busy with the house, the garden, the care of his seven brothers and sisters.
It had been hard to see Girlie die of cancer that April. Especially because her life had been unhappy. The good-looking husband, whom Curly had not liked from the get-go, had fathered a child with a girl from Black River around the time of Girlie’s second miscarriage. She had eventually given birth to two ungrateful girls. Along the way she lost heart, sank her loose bulk in a dirty housecoat and played solitaire by the kitchen window, not even emptying her ashtrays.
A clap of thunder directly above him. He picked up his step. The rain was really coming down now. He had to have a piss but he’d wait; Annabel was scared to death of thunder, she’d be glad when he got home. And so would he. He looked forward to taking off his wet clothes and getting into the warm bed beside her. He wasn’t far now, he could tell. He knew every tree and bush and hump of grass along the road, every rut and hole and rock on the surface. A zigzag of lightning lit up the road and he saw the Canadian flag on his mailbox. He was almost home. But he couldn’t wait anymore. He had to relieve himself. He unzipped his fly. Another crack of thunder, really close. The rain falling in the dark, running down the brim of his baseball cap, the ends of his fingers. Then the lightning. It struck the road, ran over the glistening gravel, and entered the sole of his left foot.
CURLY SAVES ERIC’S MARRIAGE
After Eric finished the milking that muggy summer evening, he ate the hodge-podge Jenny had made for supper, put on a pair of dark trousers and a clean but wrinkled shirt and drove to the wake. He had never met the deceased but he knew his son Harry well, having cut pulp with him one year.
What a summer that was: the blackflies, the heat, the noise. The blue fumes of the chainsaw. He never felt comfortable holding the thing, could not help imagining, as it bit through a tree, that it was spitting out bits of his flesh. Not so Harry. He ran, he crashed through the underbrush, the saw an extension of his arm, lifting his heavy orange and black boots over fallen trees and tangles as easily as if he was barefoot on the beach. Even the blackflies didn’t seem to bother him. Harry had taught him everything: how to open up a new stand, how to figure out where the tree wanted to fall, how to make a proper notch and back-cut and how to service the saw. Twice a day they sat down on a log for thermos tea and sandwiches and Harry explained things to him: The grants you could apply for to clear land for blueberries, spread lime, repair old houses. The price of a lobster license or a milk quota. How to get a farm plate for your truck. The earnings you needed to get maximum unemployment insurance, the training courses you could take when it ran out, the make-work projects that gave you stamps, everything. As soon as he was finished swallowing his Wonder Bread-and-Klik sandwiches, Harry would jump up as if somebody had shot him out of a twenty-two. He left a trail of wreckage: stumps and rotten trees and dense clouds of branches, empty packages of cigarettes and potato chips, cans of beer, containers of motor oil. Eric hadn’t made any money that year, but he had learned much. And he had qualified for pogey, which was the reason you did this.
At the funeral home he didn’t know anyone except Harry and it had taken him a moment to recognize him because he had shaved and he was wearing a suit and tie. Eric went down the line of family members repeating ‘Sorry for your trouble’ and then he stood in a room in the back with a lot of people and swallowed a coconut square and strong tea in a Styrofoam cup.
He woke to a hard rain on the low roof. Stiff curtains flapping at the window. The nervous light of candles on the floor. Beside him on the narrow daybed Cathy was lying on her side, watching him.
As he drove through the rain and dark he tried to come up with a plausible excuse for coming home so late: he had run out of gas; he had dropped in on Lorne and they had played a game of chess; he had gone to the Admiral for a beer. But none of it would wash. And he couldn’t reassure himself with the thought that Jenny was sleeping: she never slept well when he wasn’t home and was probably reading in bed. Why had he ever put himself in this position? Could he be having a mid-life crisis? How trite, he thought. How predictable. But he had been feeling restless lately.
He was looking out the kitchen window one day and it had hit him that he would be looking at this same view for the rest of his life. This had once appealed to him. But no longer. Nothing seemed to change anymore; nothing happened except the small irritants of rural life: a cow getting milk fever, a frost killing the tomatoes, the chassis of the latest used truck breaking in two. He was tired of the sameness. Tired of his friends, and maybe even his wife. Did he still love Jenny? Did Jenny love him? They were less lovers now than life partners, tied in material ways: the house, the farm, the animals. Santana.
Jenny had often talked of leaving Cape Breton. Crazy to be living so far from everything, she said. Everything being Toronto. She missed the diversity of people, the movie theatres and libraries and bookstores. The Toronto Star on your doorstep, Kensington Market and Chinatown. She often expressed regret at having raised their child so far from their families.
‘Look at them,’ she would say as they met car after car on the road on a Sunday afternoon. ‘They’ve all had din
ner at their folks.’
‘But first they all had to go to church,’ he’d say. He knew that she would soon tire of Sunday dinners with her family. She hated conformity and predictability. But he also knew that if they broke up she would go right back to Toronto.
With Santana.
* * *
A flash of lightning brought him back. His hands at the top of the steering wheel, the dark road that he could barely see it was raining so hard. He remembered thunderstorms like this in Manitoba but they were rare in Cape Breton.
When the thunder exploded he felt it in his chest. Right over his fucking house, he thought, making sure his wife would be wide awake when he got home.
And then he saw the dark shape on the road.
DOOZIE
Donatello ‘Donnie’ Marino had heard of hair going straight overnight but he had never actually seen it. But he said nothing as he adjusted one of the pinstriped barber capes his wife sewed for him around Curly’s neck. He was quiet for a barber. He heard dozens of stories in the run of a day but he never repeated them. Not out of professional discretion. The stories bored him. He had no interest in people.
That morning Curly appreciated his reserve. He was still shaken from last night. When Eric had found him passed out on the road he had assumed, because he smelled of liquor, that he was drunk. Annabel had assumed the same thing. But the proof was his hair. Annabel near had a fit that morning when she saw it. He couldn’t believe it either when he looked in the mirror. And he felt funny. He couldn’t explain it, he just felt funny. Not himself. So he was glad that Donnie didn’t ask him any questions. And that the men waiting their turn behind him in orange plastic chairs were busy talking. To avoid meeting their eyes in the mirror he looked at his own reflection.
Except for the years when he was courting, Curly had never paid attention to his looks. He had his hair cut when Annabel told him it was after getting long and he wore the clothes she bought, washed and mended for him. When he looked in a mirror it was for one reason: to follow the path the razor made across the foam and bristle on his cheeks and chin. He had more important things to worry about. A cow to pick up, a driveway full of snow, a deal to close. So he had not noticed the storm advancing. The clouds under his eyes. The gathering of sags and folds. His nose and cheekbones, his ears, asserting a craggy prominence. He was still strong and capable, still virile, so he assumed he was the man he had always been. But there was no trace of that man in Donnie’s mirror. He looked at the barber. Did he still think of himself as that wiry young fellow who had arrived from Sydney one spring day to open a barbershop in town? Or did he see the small paunchy man in the smock, whose thin grey hair, greased into a comb-over, smelled of Vitalis? And what about John Texas? He sat directly behind Curly, long legs spread apart to accommodate his big belly. In his mind’s eye was he still the skinny guy in cowboy boots who had once strutted down Central Avenue drinking out of a Texas mickey?
Earlier that year John Texas had made a seamless transition from seasonal employment to the old age pension. Freed from the annual struggle to earn his stamps, he spent his days ferrying news from kitchen to coffee shop to horse barn. The rest of the time he was on his CB or listening to the police scanner.
Some men are addicted to booze, some to women or cards, but John Texas (a recovering alcoholic) was addicted to gossip – more specifically, to the spreading of it around town like margarine on a piece of toast. For him there was no bigger buzz than revealing a juicy bit to a yet-uninformed audience. For one glorious moment he was on top of the world.
This morning he was relating something that had happened at the rink dance on Saturday. Nothing earth-shattering but it was early in the day and all he had.
A pair of Mounties had showed up at the dance a couple of times, just walking around, making their presence felt. One of them happened to be the new Mountie. A group of men were standing outside the doors as the policemen left the arena the second time. When they were some distance away, Phonsie Beaton was said to have called out ‘Goodnight, girls!’ The new Mountie had wheeled around then and said, ‘Who said that?’ There was no answer, of course, but as soon as he resumed walking a roar of laughter erupted behind him.
‘Good night, girls!’ Texas repeated, laughing and slapping his thigh.
Then he noticed Curly’s hair.
‘Happen to your hair, Curly?’
‘Not sure a-tall, John. Think it might have been lightning.’
‘You don’t say.’
As Curly gave him the scant details of the incident, John Texas felt a growing excitement. Never mind the Mountie story. This one was a doozie. He had a mind to skip the haircut and get going on it right away.
Walking out of the barbershop, Curly figured he still had a half-hour left before Annabel was through at the Co-op, maybe more if she ran into someone she knew and started talking. He got in the truck and headed north. It wasn’t quite ten yet but there were already cars parked in front of the liquor store, waiting for it to open. He drove by vacant stores, buildings old, peeling, leaning. Trash in the ditch. There was a wet scum on the curb from last night’s storm. Everything seemed forlorn, even in the sunshine. The town was exactly the same as it had been last week last month last year but today he saw it with different eyes. God this place is sad.
He turned onto the next road and drove the short distance to the end. There was a bluff there that overlooked the water, a set of stairs that went down to the beach. Curly was fond of this spot. He and Annabel often ended up there when they went for a drive. Especially the first few years of their marriage. They would sit in the truck and watch the sunset and the surf. He and his Bella. If they were all alone they would kiss. Sometimes she ran her hand along his thigh, a promise of later. When the boy came they took him there, too. Bought him an ice cream cone to lick while they watched the water. Murdoch liked the place, too. Curly took him there often the year he lost his license. They’d stop at the liquor store first so Murdoch could buy beer (he was a good man, Murdoch, but he couldn’t live without drink) and he’d have a few while they looked over the water and talked.
There were no other vehicles there that morning. Normally Curly rolled down his window and remained in the truck. But today he felt like being outside. He closed the truck door and removed his cap. Patted the short surprising stubble of his new brush cut. Looked out.
And away.
A line of wispy cloud, silver water and blue horizon melting into haze. A string of white gulls lifting. Below him on the beach, two logs pulled together to form an L cradled the sooty remains of a campfire. One of his boots, then the other, down the wooden treads. Then the soft churning sand. The air was briny and fresh, clean. It smelled of faraway. He walked toward the water. Close to the shore the sand was packed hard and smooth. It was shiny as a mirror. He began to walk on this road.
Little birds ran in and out of the water, comical birds with fast little legs. He stopped to watch them. He sighed. It was a long, drawn-out sigh. As if it had been stuck in his body for a very long time.
POGEY BOOTS
‘We’ll take it,’ Annabel heard Curly say on the phone. He meant the sunny day, the first after weeks of grey skies.
The sun had put Annabel in the mood to clean her closet that morning, even though it was still winter. She had hung her clothes outside in the brisk air and sunshine and was washing out the closet walls with hot water and Mr. Clean when she heard Curly at the door. She hadn’t expected him for lunch. She had opened a can of Campbell’s cream of tomato soup and grilled some cheese sandwiches, now getting cold on the table.
Curly hung up the phone.
‘Who was that?’ Annabel said at the same time as Curly said, ‘I hear a car.’ Then Annabel heard it, too. She went to the window: it was Donalda.
‘Who was that on the phone?’ she said again.
‘John Murdoch,’ Curly said, but he didn’t elaborat
e. They heard Donalda stamping the snow off her boots on the steps, opening the porch door and stamping them some more, rapping on the inside door. She was wearing her new winter coat, lilac with a fur-trimmed hood. On her feet were the green rubber boots with felt liners that Curly called pogey boots. Annabel had never seen Donalda wear anything but dressy zippered boots in the winter.
‘I wanted to come over after lunch but I couldn’t wait!’ she said, lifting one foot then the other out of the tall boots.
‘Sit down,’ Annabel said, motioning her to the table. Curly had not resumed eating, out of politeness.
‘Let me get you some soup,’ she said. (There was a tiny serving left in the pan; maybe she could add some milk and a squirt of ketchup …) She went to the stove. ‘Do you want a grilled cheese, Donalda?’
‘No-no, I’ve eaten. I’ll have tea if you have some made otherwise don’t bother. Eat, Curly.’
‘What’s going on?’ Curly said, picking up his sandwich.
‘I got a call from a lawyer in Boston this morning.’
‘What!’ Annabel said.
‘Uncle Paul died.’
‘Uncle Paul!’ Annabel said. She sat down in front of her half-eaten sandwich. ‘Tell you the truth I’d almost forgotten about Uncle Paul.’
‘He had another stroke.’
‘Another stroke? What do you mean?’
‘He had one after Aunt Paula died.’
‘I didn’t know that. Did the lawyer tell you this?’
‘No, it was Uncle.’
‘Uncle Paul?’
Annabel was confused. The Paulas had not been a topic of conversation for years.
‘He called me after it happened …’
‘Oh.’
A sigh lifted Donalda’s bosom. She looked at Annabel. ‘I never told you but after Aunt Paula died I got to thinking about her and how good she’d been to me, how she and Uncle Paul had raised me like I was their own, and that I’d never thanked them for that. So I got his address from Aunt Verna and sent him a letter. He wrote me the nicest letter back, he was a really nice man, and we just kept in touch after that. I didn’t want to tell anyone about it. Because of Ma.’
Lucy Cloud Page 15
