An Audience of Chairs

by Joan Clark

  Moranna has never cleaned the house from top to bottom and the rooms upstairs haven’t been touched in years. She rarely goes up there any more and the evidence of mistakes and madness have now become little more than dry museum pieces. Contrary to what Murdoch thinks, she does clean the downstairs once a year, usually at the end of winter. She’s thorough about it too, moving furniture in order to clean corners and baseboards before washing the windows and scrubbing the floors.

  When Bun arrives, she’s scrubbing the kitchen floor, down on her hands and knees scraping the sticky spots off the chipped yellow paint. She hears the sound of truck tires squeaking over snow in the yard and the thud of the storage box lid behind the cab. She’s already on her feet when the familiar thump of his boots lands on the step.

  At last, her hero, as she sometimes calls him, makes his entrance, clomping across the wet floor in his boots, jacket unzipped, arms wide open, the lopsided grin on his face. Moranna goes to him and, laughing and crooning, wraps her arms around him as they sway back and forth, hugging each other. After a while he takes off his jacket and boots and hand in hand they go into the bedroom and clear the bed, Bun carrying the chairs back to the kitchen and Moranna dumping the books on the floor. Stripped of clothes, shivering with anticipation and cold—in the spurt of cleaning Moranna forgot to add wood to the fire—they get into bed and warm each other with caresses.

  Bun and Moranna have never made the pretense that their living arrangement is based on anything more than sex and companionship. A casual observer might wonder what they see in each other. Why does Bun drive more than a thousand miles twice a year to see a woman who although interesting—one of a kind, Bun likes to say—is definitely skewed and at times downright loopy? Why does a woman with intellectual pretensions anticipate the arrival of an unpretentious man with so much pleasure? What do they have to say to each other? The fact is they don’t talk a lot and don’t have much in common.

  Moranna has never once considered having a child with Bun. She was forty-five when they met on the ferry—he was forty—and even if she had been able to bear a healthy child, she was unwilling to risk becoming a mother again. It wasn’t childbirth she wanted to avoid but the fear she wouldn’t be up to the job. When she asked Bun if he regretted not having his Seed passed on, he hooted and said, Not particularly, and that in his view, whoever invented the condom deserved a medal.

  Bun learned the craft of building ships inside bottles from his Grandfather Abel, whose tools he uses. In Fox Harbour his grandfather worked at a bench made of shipwreck timber from the Margie Norah. As a boy, Bun sat for hours beside Abel watching a ship being built and, like an operating room nurse, handed his grandfather tools on command, a long-shanked hook, tongs, forceps, whatever was required to ease the miniature ship inside the bottle and position it on the tinted sea before raising the threaded masts.

  In their fourteen years together, without much being said, Moranna and Bun have established rituals. In the mornings after Bun lights the fire and the kitchen warms up, he pokes his head in the bedroom and says, “Concert time” before going outside to chop wood and light the stove in the barn workshop. Dressed in laid-out clothes, Moranna sits at the piano board and, still wearing knuckle gloves, plays to the audience of chairs until the heaviness lifts. She makes tea and porridge she and Bun eat together while listening to the news. After breakfast they settle down to work, Moranna in the house, Bun in the barn. It wasn’t always like this.

  The first October they lived together—this was after the Argentia ferry stopped running for the season—they worked outside, Bun at a bench made from planks laid on sawhorses, Moranna at the picnic table she uses when she carves outdoors. Bun didn’t mind working side by side, but Moranna, unused to company, was foul-tempered and ill at ease. Whenever he lit a cigarette she glowered at him so he moved the bench two or three feet away, until he was working on the far side of the yard near the sandbox, now used as a strawberry bed. He only put up with the aggravation one season and the next year built himself a workshop inside the barn with a bench in front of a large window overlooking the orchard. He installed a wood stove, electricity and a sofa, making himself a hideaway where he could smoke undisturbed. When Moranna is gripped by despair, sunk in the black mood Bun calls the “old hag,” he sleeps on the sofa. He also sleeps there when Moranna gets antsy, ranting on about the Witch and the Mermaid Sisters and other fairy-tale characters she keeps in her head. In their years together, Bun has picked up random bits and pieces of Moranna’s past, not enough to piece her life together, but he recognizes pain when he sees it and understands its need for privacy, which is why he gets out of the way.

  At present there are three bottles containing putty on the Baddeck workshop windowsill. Bun has thumbed the putty into waves and troughs and when it’s dry, he’ll tint it varying shades of sea colour. A beer drinker, he keeps a stash of empty liquor bottles picked up in the North Sydney bottle depot beneath the workbench. The gin bottle on the windowsill will hold a three-masted schooner, the rum bottle, a Spanish galleon, the whisky bottle a single-masted cutter. It takes him about a week to carve the cutter’s tiny keel and decking and apply three coats of varnish. Unlike Abel, who whittled his masts, Bun cheats by mail-ordering mast wood, but he cuts his own sails from unbleached cotton and threads the downhauls and stays himself. It’s painstaking, intensive work undertaken while he listens to country music on the radio—Johnny Cash is a particular favourite. Where did he learn the patience to do this work?

  Not from his father, whom he never knew. Doris met Bun’s father, Freddy Clevet, a twenty-one-year-old American, when he was serving at the Argentia naval base during the Second World War, and moved with him to Maryland soon after their son was born. On a sweltering, sheet-sticking night, Freddy got out of bed and threw the baby through the open window to stop him crying, cracking his son’s left collarbone and leg. In the morning, Doris quietly packed up her belongings and boarded a bus, which was the beginning of the long journey back to Fox Harbour, cradling the baby she called Eugene in her arms. She had examined him for broken bones and not finding any, thought he had escaped injury. The leg healed an inch too short and the collarbone was crooked. To compensate for the leg, Bun wore a built-up shoe but nothing could be done about his left arm and shoulder, which sloped downward at an awkward angle. He told Moranna that the injuries didn’t slow him down much and as a boy he played softball in summer and hockey in winter, using a frozen horse bun as a puck. He was always the goalie, a position he played without a helmet or mouthpiece, which was how he came to be hit in the tooth by “a puck” and subsequently nicknamed Bun.

  Once she had made it to her father’s house with the baby, proving she had resources she didn’t know she possessed, Doris lost her nerve and became fearful. She kept Abel’s shotgun beneath the bed and locked the door, which was unheard of in Fox Harbour. Her hair was grey before she accepted the fact that Freddy was either too ashamed of what he’d done to hunt her down or was relieved to get rid of the seventeen-year-old he had married only because he had knocked her up. Bun left school at the end of grade nine to work on the water with his grandfather and, when he died, found work as a galley steward on the ferry, which kept him at sea from May to September.

  Doris refused to ever set foot off Newfoundland again and told Bun that if he wanted her to meet his new woman, he would have to bring her home. Three years after Moranna and Bun began living together, she took the ferry back with him in late spring and they drove to Fox Harbour, a village tucked between surprising mountains rising straight up from the shoreline and encircled by a small bay where eider ducks splashed in tidal pools across the road from the house. A nervous woman, Doris reminded Moranna of a pigeon because of the way her head bobbed on her short neck as she waddled on an arthritic hip between the house and church. She was welcoming and gossipy and, while Bun was outside splitting wood, confided to Moranna that she was glad he had finally found himself a girlfriend and given up “that slattern in
Argentia,” who was married and had three youngsters and was carrying on with several men besides Bun while her husband was way up in Fort McMurray. It was better Bun live with Moranna, even though it meant she herself had to spend the winter months with her sister in Baie Verde where she didn’t know everybody like she did in Fox Harbour. Although with her father gone, God rest his soul, living here wasn’t the same any more. Was Moranna Catholic? No, well it didn’t matter, not like it once did. Bun wouldn’t go near the church, but she still went out of loyalty to Father Keilley who was one of the good priests, not like them that won’t keep their hands to themselves. Did Moranna go to church? Not much? Well, never mind, it took a lot more than church-going to make a person Christian. What mattered to her was that Bun was more settled since he’d been with her. She hoped Moranna was settled with him because he was a good man, a kind man and as the Lord knew, there weren’t enough of them to go round.

  In Baddeck, Bun rarely uses the track lighting he installed above the workbench because by the time the natural light begins to fade in late afternoon, he is more than ready to put down his tools. Restless, he drives to the village to pick up something to cook for supper, if not, pizza or fried chicken. If there’s a hockey game playing on TV, he stops at the Big Fellars Steakhouse for a beer, an eatery Moranna has never been inside. Once in a while, he manages to persuade her to go to the Thistledown Pub for supper, which they eat while Moranna tries to ignore the television. Although she has an aversion to television, she doesn’t mind Bun watching the hockey playoffs at the pub while she stays home reading books from what was once her father’s library. Bun isn’t much of a reader but likes listening to Moranna read aloud. She enjoys reading Shakespeare’s plays and has memorized certain parts which, much to Bun’s amusement, she acts out, gesturing, changing her voice and sometimes her clothes. He also likes listening to her recite poems by Robert Burns, whose bed she claims she slept on when she lived in Scotland.

  By the time Bun arrives in Baddeck, the worst of the winter is over and intermittent flakes of snow fall half-heartedly, disappearing soon after reaching the ground. By late morning the gardens of ferns and flowers frosted overnight inside the farmhouse windows have begun to melt, while outside the snow that accumulated throughout the winter is slowly evaporating beneath the strengthening rays of sun. The comforter of snow hanging on the back railing since January is now a pile of slush and the fence posts surrounding the garden have lost their turbans. Looking through the window, Moranna notices ridges of brown earth appearing between the garden furrows. “Time to plant my seeds,” she says. Bun is already in his workshop but she often talks to herself.

  First, though, she has to set the bread. She punches down the dough, covers the pans with a dish cloth and gives them a snug berth on a chair beside the stove. She tosses a handful of barley into the soup pot and stirs while humming “Au Clair de la Lune,” which she played on the piano board earlier that morning. She’s as relaxed as she’ll ever be—Bun’s presence always helps calm her agitation. It’s nearly noon when she carries a bucket of dirt, pots, and her small gardening tools from the porch and begins the ritual of planting seeds for the garden. The dirt is dry and crumbly but she adds water and stirs it up. Then she begins planting the seeds Bun picked up from the hardware store: zucchini, lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, tomatoes, corn. She tamps the seeds into small cardboard pots that expand as the roots develop. Absorbed, she completely forgets the rising bread, but when Bun comes in later for a bowl of soup, he notices the pans and shoves them into the oven. Moranna doesn’t bother eating but is reminded to take the bread out of the oven by the pungent aroma of molasses and yeast.

  By late afternoon the planting is done and the small brown pots are lined up on the shelves in the kitchen window. Moranna is taking a shower when Bun raps on the bathroom door and shouts, “Wear something nice. We’re going to the Thistledown for supper.”

  Moranna doesn’t object and after slipping into a blue Madras cotton dress she bought years ago at Frenchy’s, she braids her hair. When Bun’s ready, they get in the truck and drive past the thawing lake and the village shops to the inn. Bun parks behind the inn, close to the pub. The corner booth to the right of the pub door is already taken so they sit one table over facing the bar and the television, which is always on. “What’ll it be?” asks Jimmy, a sometime university student wintering in Baddeck. Bun orders beer and ginger ale—Moranna no longer drinks alcohol. She once had the habit of using her father’s money to binge on wine but stopped when she realized wine made her condition worse. She and Bun study the specials on the chalkboard before ordering spaghetti and meatballs. On the opposite wall, images of Afghanis float across the television screen like kites, men running over a stony field toward bundles of food being parachuted to the ground. As she watches, Moranna notices that three of the men hop on one leg using a crutch. The missing legs have been blown off by exploding dolls, the Afghani being interviewed says. He’s being asked about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. Wary about being ambushed by Duncan’s sudden appearance on the television, Moranna tries to avoid looking at the screen but her gaze keeps straying toward it. The food comes and she settles down to eat, determined not to watch the news, which she’s already heard on the radio that morning.

  During her breakdown Moranna carried a transistor radio everywhere she went, feeding on the bad news of the world, the murders, airline crashes, famines, floods, hurricanes, bombings, genocides, reminding herself of the inescapable fact that the world really is a stage and all the men and women merely players, people who are assigned parts not of their choosing, but which they nevertheless perform until the final exit that invariably comes, not with applause but with barely a whimper.

  The national news is over and the local news is finishing up. By now Bun has ordered a second beer and Moranna a cup of coffee when the newscaster reappears. A dark-haired woman with pencilled eyebrows and lips, she smiles and says, “Stay tuned for an interview with our special guest, Dr. Bonnie Fraser.”

  Moranna slams the mug down so hard hot coffee slops onto her wrist, but she scarcely notices. Dr. Bonnie Fraser, the newscaster says. Could it be her Bonnie? Surely not! It’s probably another Bonnie Fraser. And yet … Moranna locks her eyes on the screen while two angoras discuss the merits of Cat Chow, and an SUV driver sits on top of a mountain admiring 360 degrees of scenery. At last the newscaster returns, this time sitting in an easy chair with her legs crossed, clipboard in hand.

  “This evening I have the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Bonnie Fraser, a climatologist and environmental researcher and this year’s recipient of the Canadian Science Award. Dr. Fraser has recently returned to Canada from Australia, where she has been conducting research.” The newscaster swivels her chair sideways. “Congratulations on winning the Canadian Science Award, Dr. Fraser, and welcome back to Halifax.”

  “Thank you.” The camera moves across the coffee table to a slim, serious-looking young woman with short blond hair tucked behind her ears, who is sitting in a chair identical to the newscaster’s.

  There’s no doubt in Moranna’s mind that she’s looking at Bonnie. She can tell by the level gaze and wide-spaced eyes, the quiet demeanour Bonnie had as a child.

  Moranna reaches out and grips Bun’s arm. “That’s her. That’s Bonnie.”

  She’s whispering and he leans closer. “What did you say?”

  “My older daughter. That’s her on the screen.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m her mother, aren’t I,” she snaps and he sits back as if he’s been struck.

  Moranna doesn’t notice Bun, or those she has startled who are now looking at her. Why would she notice when there, above her on the screen, is the daughter she hasn’t seen for thirty-four years?

  The newscaster glances at her notes. “It says here that you are the youngest recipient of the Canadian Science Award.”

  “I’m told that is the case,” Bonnie says. Moranna detects a slight twang in her voice that
sounds vaguely Australian.

  “She’s thirty-seven,” Moranna announces to the others in the pub. To the newscaster, she says, “Ask her about the award.”

  But the newscaster asks, “What brings you to Halifax this time, Dr. Fraser?”

  Bonnie grins. It’s a quick shy grin that tugs briefly at the corners of her lips.

  “I’m here to give a lecture on the effect of aerosols on global climate.”

  Looking directly at the camera, the newscaster says, “Could you explain to our viewers exactly what aerosols are? I suspect that like me many people out there have heard the word, but don’t really know what it means.”

  “Aerosols are tiny particles travelling the world in clouds that researchers like myself have reason to believe have contributed to the reduction of rainfalls in Africa and Australia, possibly by as much as fifty per cent.”

  “That’s a huge reduction.”

  “Yes it is, and the result has been widespread and catastrophic.”

  Glancing at her notes again, the newscaster asks where aerosols come from and Bonnie explains that they are a natural occurrence, but are also produced by industrial pollutants. It is imperative, she says, that wealthier nations undertake stringent measures to curtail industrial emissions, not only to insure a healthier world but also because it makes sound economic sense. “In the 1990s alone, extreme weather changes caused economic losses amounting to more than $300 billion U.S. And that is …”