Invisible Publishing
Halifax & Picton
Text copyright © Andrew Forbes, 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any method, without the prior written consent of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or, in the case of photocopying in Canada, a licence from Access Copyright.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Lands and forests / Andrew Forbes.
Names: Forbes, Andrew, 1976- author.
Description: Short stories.
Identifiers:
Canadiana (print) 2019007969X | Canadiana (ebook) 20190079703
ISBN 9781988784250 (softcover) | ISBN 9781988784311 (HTML)
Classification: LCC PS8611.O7213 L36 2019 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
Edited by Bryan Ibeas
Cover design by Megan Fildes
Invisible Publishing | Halifax & Picton
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.
for CC
Inundation Day
THEY BEGAN MOVING the houses in 1954. Those too large to be moved they would set alight, as the families and their neighbours gathered to watch.
Believe me when I say that it was a burdensome thing to live in a condemned town, a place soon to cease its existence. That every casual act carries an urgency, a fire, when your home’s destruction is a foreordained event.
“They’re doing it for electricity, Holland,” my employer, Lester Smart, said to me one lunch hour as I stood outside the dairy’s garage. “Electricity and cars. The Americans are after all that Labrador iron. Ford and GM, I mean. And where they’re concerned, you can bet Ottawa will bend over backwards to accommodate.”
“It stinks pretty bad,” said Robert Lacey, who was having a cigarette. Lacey was a bit of a drunk, but he held himself together well enough to be a decent worker. We had known each other in school and spoke from time to time, increasingly about the changes to our home, which was all anyone seemed able to talk about for months.
“I’m told they call it progress, Robert, and it’s only the fool and sentimentalist who oppose it,” said Smart. “I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what it brings us.”
And that was it: the waiting. Waiting and watching and being unable to see beyond that fixed date. Trying to picture tens of thousands of acres of flooded land—to imagine cemeteries, where your family has lain for generations, lost under thirty feet of moving water. In your dreams maybe you could picture the park you played in as a child suddenly being at the bottom of a river, the church you attended being skimmed over by a massive freighter, but likely you couldn’t. I certainly could not. The human imagination, it seems to me, cannot easily conjure such things. And so we could only wait to see just what our world would look like.
I thought I might leave this place altogether. I had a brother in Ottawa. My uncle Roger was in Toronto, a shop supervisor for the Transit Commission.
Something would come along, I felt, some new direction would come into or be granted to my life, though I’d no concrete notion of what that might be. I would hope people would see me as capable of a good many things. That would be a word I would like to hear applied to me: capable. Not mediocre, not average, but capable, in the best sense. That I could do several things, and teach myself to do what I did not already know. I flatter myself, perhaps, but it is not true to say that all men possess capability. My father, as an example, had patience and sense, but lacked ability. Whereas I had all three, enough to run a small engine repair business on the side.
Anyway, there were possibilities.
***
Poppy Sturges’s husband, Alex, was known to be a good man. Before he died, he was liked in all corners of Loucksville, trusted in all dealings. It was generally held that he ran a good farm. Calamity struck, though, when he’d gotten his arm caught in a thresher during the harvest, and by the time they got him to Cornwall, he’d lost too much blood and there was nothing to do but call Poppy.
Poppy came to work in the office several months later. Smart had been a friend of Alex’s, and he told Poppy, shortly after the funeral, that he’d be happy to help her out any way he could. So she filed, answered the telephone, followed up on accounts. She was an excellent worker, I was told, beavering away in the thin-walled office with the slat blinds always closed, per Lester Smart’s preference.
I would see her there in the office, a quiet presence, slipping in the door, sitting behind a hulking metal desk, or moving toward a bank of green file cabinets, her arms full of papers. She seldom spoke, at least in my company. Though I did my best to be polite, I will admit that I did not fully conceive of her as an individual in those days. It would be more correct to say that I saw her as a fixture: an aspect of the place, of Mr. Smart’s office, and the business conducted there.
***
It was a Tuesday in September, 1957. I’d just finished my early-morning run around Loucksville and the surrounding towns, and was once again checking the truck’s oil. That was a habit of mine, almost a dictum: keep it ready. Meaning the truck, but also other things. Be ready. Think ahead.
Smart approached me as I stood wiping my hands with a rag. A great round man whose nose whistled when he breathed, he said, “Holland, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind doing something for me.”
“Of course, Mr. Smart,” I said, “what is it?”
“I’m sending Poppy Sturges into the bank with a deposit, and I don’t think she ought to be alone with so much cash. I wonder if you’d drive her. You can take my car, if you wish.”
Minutes later, Poppy and I were in Smart’s gleaming black Chevrolet Bel Air, exchanging pleasantries on the two-lane toward town.
I sat at the wheel, in uniform. Smart didn’t ask me to wear a uniform, but I did anyway. It gave me a straighter back. The cash box sat in the middle of the sedan’s front bench seat, a way station along the great distance of runnelled blue vinyl between us. And on the other side was the woman, I was sure, with whom I would soon be in love.
I mean you to know that: I knew right away.
She was luminous in a way I don’t think you would understand if you were not there next to her on the wide bench, with the sun streaming through her hair. Her widowhood had worked to make her more tangible, made it appear that she had lived more in this world, been present for more of the things that mattered. I felt a charge that I hoped she felt, too. In her bones, in the skin of her face. The wind buffeted the car and the sun glinted off its hood and into my eyes, and I felt it all, saw us both crystallized inside the moment, preserved within a great, hard clarity.
I had nowhere to put these feelings.
She was, I thought it right to assume, committed to being a widowed mother, to doing what she could to provide a life for her little girl. That she was done with romantic love and all the rituals. But I felt what I felt. You may rightly call it love. And like a rising tide or a wall of water, there seemed little point in trying to stop it.
***
Like most of us, Poppy was scared and anxious about the completion of the seaway. But in the main, she was hopeful. She was hopeful that such progress, writ so large—heavy machines literally altering geography—would necessarily impose some small bit of the modern world on this place. Most others in the doomed towns and villages feared that very thing, but Poppy knew the world she wanted to leave behind. That world chewed the arms off good men and left women and their children alone. She hoped the modern world would be a little different.
Her home, which stood on high ground, would be spared. But most of the town, and the other towns along the river, too, would soon be moved. Buildin
gs would be lifted and relocated or razed, their replacements built on a piece of land selected by the government’s engineers, and then suddenly, Loucksville would be to the north and east of the old farm and the Sturges house. We had trouble fathoming it, though the work was well underway.
An entire town, moved. How could it be the same place?
***
My house, where I lived alone, was a bungalow in a small development off the highway, farther out of town. It would be underwater in a few months’ time. I had accepted the government’s money, slight as the sum seemed. There weren’t likely to be any better offers.
One evening, on a chill November night, Poppy Sturges stopped in. I suppose I had pointed it out to her as we passed on our way into town in Smart’s Chevy.
At just past six, with the sun gone and the grass bleached and dry and ready for winter, she swung the nose of her old Pontiac off the highway and onto the crescent where my bungalow lay. I imagined Poppy was just stopping to say hello, as she pulled in at the end of the drive and stepped out. Maybe she felt it was the right thing to do, having seen the door of my garage open and me, clad in coveralls, lit garishly, tinkering away at greasy things inside. Perhaps, with her town soon to become a historical footnote, she felt emboldened. I cannot say for certain just what drove her actions. That is for her alone to say.
“Hello, you,” I said, squinting into the dark, discerning her identity. Poppy was in a skirt and thick stockings, a long coat, a scarf around her neck. “What brings you by?”
I believe I had a smile on my face.
“Just happened by, I suppose,” she said. Then she turned back to her car, opened the door, and retrieved a little girl of four or five in a thick coat and a wool hat. “This is Evey,” Poppy said, looking down at her daughter.
The child had long limbs and almost translucent skin. Her pale eyes peeked out beneath red bangs.
“Well, hello,” I said. “Happy to meet you, miss.”
Evey smiled, then retreated behind her mother’s legs.
I would raise her as my own, I said to myself.
“What do you do here?” Poppy asked, nodding toward the garage.
“Nothing worthwhile,” I said, and though it was not a nice place, and it did not show me to any advantageous effect, I led them inside. There was a bare bulb hanging from the beams. The air smelled of oil and damp concrete and faintly of sweat. The uneven floor seemed to radiate cool air, while the plywood walls pulsed with old moisture. There were tools arranged in rows, hanging on the pegboard behind a broad work table. There were large clamps and tins of oil. A calendar with a picture of a Cadillac on it.
“You repair things?” she asked.
“If they need fixing, yes, I try.”
“Do you take money for your trouble?”
“On occasion,” I said. “It depends on the job.”
“There’s a sump pump in my basement’s stopped working,” she said. “Do you think I could ask you to take a look at it? I could pay you something.”
“I wouldn’t take a penny,” I said. “Can I come by this weekend?”
“Saturday afternoon would be perfect,” she said. She took a nubby little pencil from a coffee tin on my workbench, leaned over the greasy and beaten wooden work surface, and etched her address on Saturday’s date, just below the Cadillac, though I knew very well where the Sturges farm was. Then she strapped Evey back in her Pontiac and got in herself, saying, “I’ll see you tomorrow at work.”
I watched her go, tail lights swallowed by November’s dark, before heading back into the shop. I stood there for a time holding a wrench, turning it over in my palm. Then I shed my coveralls, closed the rolling door, switched off the light, and went into the house.
Their visit had left me buzzing, weak-kneed. I paced about the living room, then decided I needed air, so I slipped on a coat and stepped out into the night, felt the chill wind race up my sleeves and across my face.
I walked across the highway and into a field, frozen grass underfoot.
I looked at the sky, which held no answers.
***
Poppy has said that she and Alex had been very much in love—and yet, as in most marriages, they could also be utterly monstrous toward one another. After six years, they had both developed a sort of mithridatic callousness. Each reserved their deepest cruelties for the one they could not live without. It reflected a lack of imagination, an inability to picture their lives without the other, and so they withheld no barb, feeling certain each would stand and absorb the abuses.
Then Alex had gone and died, and in the immediate aftermath, there came several days when Poppy was sure she would die also. But Evey was there, and that forbade it. And so Poppy had had to invent a new way of living.
In addition to taking a job, she had the farm parcelled. Poppy sold lots around the house, ninety-eight acres of good pasture and grain land. She auctioned the farm equipment, including the thresher that had taken Alex’s arm.
But buyers were few, and those few were wary. Land values, since the start of the project, had been significantly depressed, and most of Alex’s equipment was outdated, good for little more than parts. With what she made off the sale of the land and the equipment, she was able to pay for the funeral and a few outstanding debts, but little else.
Still, she kept the house, and three and a half acres around it.
“For Evey to play on,” she said.
***
On the Saturday of my visit, Poppy’s apron was bright yellow. Her hair, once blond, was browner now, but still fair, and tied back into a ponytail but for a few strands about her ears and temples. She wore denim pants and a tan work shirt, rolled to the elbows. She was the picture of everything you could ever hope to see waiting for you at the door. Her face framed by thin lace curtains as she turned her head and called to Evey somewhere inside.
The house was empty-seeming, its siding’s light blue paint fading. Poppy opened the door at the side, off the kitchen, and walked in her tall rubber boots out to the lane where I had parked. The afternoon was bright and large-skied. The slanting November sunlight made the fields appear endless.
Inside she led me, Evey in her arms, to the dank cellar. At the bottom of the damp sump hole sat the hulking, rusted pump.
“I don’t need it now,” she said, “but I will come spring. I hope you can fix it.”
I unclamped its hose and hauled the pump out of the hole and looked it over. Rusty water seeped onto my pant leg and across the earthen floor. “Might be best if I just take it home and look at it there,” I said. I carried it out the cellar door and heaved it into the trunk of my car.
Back upstairs she made tea. We sat at the kitchen table talking while Evey played with a set of blocks near our feet. The house was modest and I felt immediately comfortable in it. Light flooded the kitchen, golden and sharp. Poppy spooned honey into her tea. I was disarmed by her assuredness.
“I should probably be going and leave you alone,” I eventually said.
“Not at all,” she said. “You’re welcome to stay. I just have to...” She looked at Evey, then at the clock on the wall. “I’m sorry. I’m not sure what I’m trying to say. Evey needs to nap. Can you stay until I get her down?”
“I’ll be right here,” I said.
Poppy took the child in her arms and walked out of the kitchen and through the parlour. I heard her climb the stairs, then in a few moments, the faint sound of her voice, singing.
This is where I want to be, I thought. Here and nowhere else.
When Poppy re-emerged a half-hour later, my teacup was empty and I was sitting silently at the table with my hands folded, listening to the silence of the house.
“I’m sorry to have taken so long,” she said. “You shouldn’t have waited. I’m sure you have things to do. I just wanted to walk you out to your car.”
“No, it’s fine,” I said. “That would be fine.”
As we stood next to my blue Dodge, she took my hand and, with ab
solute certainty, she leaned to my cheek and kissed it.
“That. That is what I meant to say earlier,” she said.
***
What I came to know about Poppy was her great capacity for sadness. In the mid-evening dark, once Evey had gone down, we would pad about the unlit house, sombre, while the radio sang distantly. It was not simply that she was still in mourning for her husband. It was something more—
something in her bones. It was in her downcast eyes, a vacancy that was not even remotely related to vacuity. It was in that same spot where most people held happiness like a trophy on a shelf. She was quick to smile, but the smile would soon thin, trail off, become something different.
We spent evenings and weekends in one another’s company. It was never in question. We had found one another. The propriety of it seemed never to have entered her mind, but if I’m being honest, I had some pause. I was not quick to suggest, for example, that we dine outside the house. I preferred that we stay in. I preferred that we keep it to ourselves. I wanted there to be nothing to spoil what we’d found, the small flame we’d kindled.
We were chaste through that winter, but in spring, just as the lilac came into blossom, she said to me, “I think we should. I want to.” And I stayed the night. We were quiet, careful not to wake Evey, who slept in the small room adjacent.
I woke early the next morning. I have always been an early riser. I lay awake and still in the ringing silence of the house, thinking. Poppy, her eyes fluttering, lay on her side, facing me. Birds called.
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