At last, enthroned, he looked around. Again, that look of amusement. “It’s a shame what happened to you, Blondie,” he said, turning upon me his blue eye with its strange black sickle.
“What?” I asked. Considered. I was over sixty, so turning fifty wasn’t a big issue. Felt pretty good. Still had a cow. A sudden gust of wind blew dust under the door. I brightened. “Eli’s got a plan to fix the grasshoppers!” I told Richard proudly. “Tell him, Eli.”
The last thing Eli wanted to do was talk to Richard. But he was tempted. Since he’d had to give up the rodeo when the Depression hit, he’d fed his love for lyrics by reciting recipes, much like my dad once loved to do. And his recipe for grasshopper poison was a favourite. Still, he couldn’t bring himself to talk directly to his son-in-law. So he fixed his attention on Ida’s acorn brown eyes, as if it was she that needed to know. “You don’t know the green poison?” he asked. Ida smiled and looked at Daniel, hoping a story might interest him. “Well!” said Eli, “It’s, I take no credit for it, it’s God work.” When Helen heard him say “God,” she winced and said, “Oh, fuck,” under her breath. Ida jumped. She and Helen exchanged a smile.
From his chair, Eli had a good view of the manure pile. He said, “In all of Creation, there is nothing as powerful as the attraction of locusts to horse manure.”
We all looked out. There they were, the pile covered with insects so it looked like the scales of a fish or shingles on a roof; it glittered and moved.
“Laugh if you like,” Eli said. “Laugh and say, ‘Sure, old man; you’ve forgotten the birds and the bees, the power of procreation.’ But decay! Waste! Guano, shit, forgive the French.” He shook his head in wonder. “The sights we’ve seen, the sights we’ve seen.”
Richard had seen the smile between Helen and Ida. It bore investigation. To Ida: “You live around here, do you?”
Eli, warming, also to Ida: “You wet it down. That’s the tricky part. You’ve got to wet it down just right.”
Ida, to Eli: “The guano.” Then, to Richard, revealing childlike teeth: “The horse shit.”
Eli felt a surge of love for Ida. He slapped her knee. “You’ve got it!” He began to list the ingredients on his paw. “You take your poison, Paris Green, one part. You take your two parts salt. Unless of course your horse shit’s fresh. You take sixty parts horse shit.” He laughed, his surprising teeth. “The banks might take the harness, the pasture, the buggy, but they hardly ever take the horse. And they never take the horse shit.”
Ida laughed. “You’ve always got horse shit!” She nudged her husband with this evidence of bounty. Daniel smiled, perhaps at the joke.
Eli loved them both, a married couple! He warmly said to Daniel, a warning, “Ahhh, son, but here’s the tricky part. You got to mix it. You got to mix it right. So you can spread it.”
Richard said to Helen, “We have to be at the Allinghams’ by four.”
“You mean, like paint?” asked Ida.
Eli breathed happily through his nose. “You paint the whole damn field with it. Paris Green.” Then, generously, to Richard: “Green.”
“So, Richard,” I said, “enough about us. Tell us your own tricks of survival. How’ve you managed? Still solvent?”
He smiled. “Oh, yes.” His attention on Helen. “We’ll always be fine.”
Helen looked up sharply.
Richard continued. “But we mustn’t think always of ourselves. At times like this, we have to consider the needs of others less fortunate.”
I gather this was a form of seduction. Helen was rigid. I knew the signals: Richard was about to be dismissed. I put my hand on Richard’s shoulder and said, “Don’t do this for our sake, Dick. We’re used to you.”
He ignored this and blundered on. “Yes. I’m a man with a conscience. Especially when it comes to family.” From his pocket he withdrew a chequebook and pen. “Listen Blondie, I know you and Eli lost everything.”
“Not quite,” I said, indicating the roof over our heads.
“There’s no need to do without money. I feel slightly responsible. It was at my suggestion that you invested so heavily.”
“Your dad’s,” I told him. “Mr. John Anderson, bless him—Sorry.” Richard winced so deeply that nothing showed on the surface.
“I’m going to give you something to help you start over.”
“No need,” said Eli.
“You’re poor!” said Richard.
“Lighten up!” I told him. “We’re not that poor.” I put my hands in my pockets and tugged at my underwear, which was falling around my hips. “We’re not really poor.”
“If you want to help, give it to… give it to… Good Lord, I was going to say, ‘Give it to the CCF,’ ” said Eli and put his head in his hands. “So this is what it’s like to get old.”
Richard, looking hopefully at Helen: “I could contribute to the CCF.”
“Dick!” I knew then how badly he suffered. “To thine own self be true!”
Helen had reached her saturation point. She stood like a cobra prepared to strike. I moved to stand between them.
“Ask him how he feels about this Hitler!” she demanded.
Ida and Daniel sat upright. We all looked at Dick.
Richard, for the first and only time in his life, took my advice: he chose that very moment to be true to himself. He said, faltering, “I just feel the man should be given a chance.”
Eli left the table and walked outside. Helen watched her father go. Anger filled her up.
Richard pleaded, “He’s got some ideas! Look at the Volkswagen! I mean, he was in prison when he thought of that!” He appealed to me, “Blondie! You usually like people who go to prison!”
“Poor Dick,” I said. “Oh, poor Dick.” I reached out and touched Richard’s arm. His body was tight. “Not this Hitler,” I said, and stopped. I couldn’t look at Helen.
“You can’t keep Germany in the dirt! Versailles was a stupid mistake!” he said.
It was Helen who handed Richard the gun and indicated which foot. “And who will keep Germany in the dirt, Richard?” she asked.
“The Jews. The Communists. The, the rabble,” said Richard.
Ida slowly stood up, pushing back her chair. Richard looked at her, dry, keen. He was at last himself. “It’s just the truth,” he said. Then, to Helen: “We’re leaving.”
We heard a voice. It said, “I built a road.” It was Daniel. He was talking to Richard. Again: “I built a road. In the middle of the bush.”
Daniel did not look well. Richard could smell his illness. Daniel clearly knew this. His mind was clear. “They paid me vouchers, sixteen dollars a month.”
A pause. Richard considered this. His chest always lifted when he was about to inflict the truth. “You mean the land in Fort Garry. It’s not easy finding you fellows work. There will be houses there someday. You’ll be able to look at them and think, I contributed to that.”
A low-pitched growl started in somebody’s throat. I thought it would be Daniel, but he had this sharp clarity then; somehow you knew that he wouldn’t grieve for anything, that he’d let go. But Helen, the sound coming out her throat spoke of a long journey to come. Ida reached Helen just as she was digging her hands into Richard’s mouth. Helen hated Richard, yes. And she hated that she had so far to go, so empty-handed.
CHAPTER FOUR
HELEN LEFT RICHARD IN THE AFTERNOON of a sunny day. The first warm day of 1934.
In her husband’s navy backpack, she took whatever jewellery she could carry, the pearls and two wine goblets made of gold. The goblets were perhaps the only precious things she took that did not belong to her. Hand-crafted in the shape of her breasts, they were a gift that Richard had given to himself. She wrapped her gold breasts in a clean shirt and packed them beside her copy of Emma Goldman’s Anarchism and Other Essays.
She left behind the yellow Packard, her dresses and shoes, furs and hats. She had waited six months to leave Richard. Over the winter, she’d quietly acqui
red a wardrobe of men’s work clothes. She walked down the grand staircase in steel-toed boots, bought by stealth through Hudson’s Bay mail order, the pack slung over her shoulder. She paused to look out her favourite window, the large one on the mezzanine. She heard the drone of the hot-water pipes. Helen walked out of the mansion and passed through the stone gate.
She didn’t look back. Her rooms filled with light. The loom creaked, the way standing things do. Then the evening sun fell across her unfinished tapestry, its green bush and the face of a stranger staring out. A few hours later, Richard would come home to find her rooms unlit and the weaving left there like a forwarding address.
THAT WAS THE END of the larval stage of the most beautiful woman in the world. She took a streetcar for the first time in her life; it carried her a few blocks south of the Anderson mansion. Then she walked. She walked down the highway, all the way to the junction of the Red and the Rivière Sale, a distance of about twelve miles.
She and Ida had arranged to meet beside the trestles of the railway bridge. It was a mild evening and early spring, so the long daylight still came as a surprise and the aspen trees had barely begun to leaf, their hard brown buds exhaling a thin trace of green smoke. She walked over the bridge. It was another dry year. Marsh grass broke the water’s surface, the sluggish river below seen through the slats of wood.
She rolled a cigarette. Back when she wore mink collars, she had smoked cheroots. As a kid, she’d watched farmers’ affectionate handling of the gold leaves, stuffing the paper, bringing it up to a grizzled mouth for a lick. But Helen had studied for her new character downtown at the park by St. John’s Church. She had told Richard she was going to church, but she went instead to the park to watch the loitering men. Her return to rollys had an urban flavour, and it was these men more than the old farmers of her youth that she mimicked now while she strolled and smoked; it was their dangerous futility she would emulate. As an actress, character came to her from the inside out, a reversal of her real life. She knew the heartbeat of a hobo.
There was a thin deer path. Aspen mixed with oak on the riverbank. She didn’t see the swaying rope of the footbridge till she was under it. She flicked the flat yellow butt into the water and saw a reflection scrawled there, moving, a lanky construction of twisted hemp swaying in the windless air, recently vacated.
The footbridge gave all the security of a tightrope; it sagged and bounced. If she looked down, she’d fall in. On the other side, there was a cabin visible through the leafless trees. She passed through a miniature village of white wooden boxes, an apiary, currently a ghost town. Just then, the sun slid under a shelf of evening cloud and struck the trees at the horizon, lining each bud with light. Helen guided herself around the rough, tar-varnished logs. And saw the monk.
He stood several feet away. His arms crossed, his hands hidden in his sleeves. Helen held her breath.
He didn’t see her. He was utterly calm. When breezes shifted, he turned his head towards the sound. He was listening. He disappeared into listening, devoted to the exchange between leaf and light. He was unlike anyone she’d ever seen. He didn’t seem to know anything. He listened with his belly, with his feet. The motion of young leaves was infinitely eventful.
It occurred to Helen that her self-indulgence would be more difficult to abandon, that it had little to do with the things she’d left at Richard’s house.
When he finally looked at her, she was part of the scenery, at first. But he did look; he looked at Helen for a fraction too long. She knew she had destroyed something, as the second breath necessarily destroys the first. He had, she noticed, a handsome square face with a buzz of blond-white hair. He stood still, his lips opened, his head back. He was framed by the gnarly branches of the caragana.
Helen approached him with delight. She always entered new scenes headlong, but now she tiptoed. She curtsied, or stumbled. His eyes focused on hers, curtaining off both her foolishness and her beauty. She touched his sleeve. With instant surging affection, she wanted to put her face to his, to speak as she would speak to a newly recognized brother. She wanted to put her head on his chest, to listen to his heartbeat. He had a mouth; I assume she found it charming, the parentheses on his face when he smiled. She told him too much, though entirely without detail, highly philosophical and not quite true. He enhanced the idealist in her, so it wasn’t her fault she lied a little, rising to every expectation.
The subject was love. Of mankind. How it is expressed in a single stroke, a flash of the human spirit, the miracle of an individual.
And its manifestation in the structures of family, of the church.
Yes. Of course. The family. Love. Of man.
And God.
Him too. And the articulation of a leaf, budding, and the smell of spring this evening. “It’s messy, this world,” she said. “That’s what I love about it.” A shameless plagiarist, stealing lines from Grandmother Alice. But when he listened to her, it was like he was laying a blanket on the ground to wrap her inside.
It was getting dark. The trees were turning blue.
“I have to meet someone,” she said, innocently touching his arm, a fraternal gesture. “You are from Our Lady of the Prairies, from Notre-Dame.” The monastery, which she’d never seen but everyone knew; this was the property of the church. Then she drew her breath. “You are a Trappist.” The monk was looking sadly at the yellow grass. “A Trappist monk. But you are not supposed to speak.” There was a shade of anguish in her voice.
He let himself look at her face, travelled its contours, its frame of black hair, her mouth, her throat. Then he closed his eyes. “No,” he said. “As a Trappist, I would not speak.”
Helen could see nothing but his mouth; she could feel only the air slide open and pull her in. Her kiss was not fraternal. He had very soft lips. It was one kiss. On such things the world hinges.
SHE MET UP WITH IDA beside the train tracks in a dry field just as night was falling. The stubble smelled sweet, and the sky was a plate of blue glass with a hole for the moon. While they waited for a train, Ida cut off Helen’s hair, a nest of black snakes on the ground. Then Helen cut Ida’s hair into a short, thick pompadour that they brushed straight back. They appraised one another, circling, amazed. They had become, strangely, men. Helen rolled two cigarettes with one hand. Underfoot, they felt a train about a mile off.
“You look like a foreigner,” said Helen to Ida.
“That’s what I am, idiot.” Ida lit a match with her thumb. “I’m a Jew.”
“I’d like to be a Jew,” said Helen. She didn’t know what a Jew was. They didn’t have any on Millionaire Row.
“Well, you can’t,” said Ida. She pointed at Helen with the hand that cupped the cigarette. “You’re an anarchist.”
Helen thought she said “adulteress.” She panicked, thinking of the monk. The molten night was hammered by an approaching train. Its lantern strafed the bushes and then leapt out into the fog that rose over the river. It took every ounce of manliness to keep from running. Ida yelled something at her; there were red and yellow sparks, a light hit them, they flinched but stayed. The bullet of light coincided with Helen’s full recognition of the man she’d just met, he was the man in her tapestry, and the train screeched and swayed past them. Ida was panting as if she had run after it. It left a red trail. They watched it go, coal wind in their faces.
Ida began to laugh. “Oh, fuck,” she said. The curse would be their password. “We’re fucking idiots! It was going south! At a million miles an hour!” Ida laughed. “What kind of Canadian hobos would go south?”
Helen asked, almost shyly, “Why not south?”
“We have to go west!” said Ida. She put her arm around Helen’s shoulders, and they started to walk. “And when we’ve gone as far west as we can go, we have to turn around and go east. It’s the Canadian way.”
It was a long walk east to the railyards at Symington. They reached it at dawn. By then, they’d discussed the know-how of jumping freights. They
were hungry, tired, dirty, thirsty; they hurt everywhere. By the time they jumped their first freight, they weren’t even play-acting. They were hobos.
CHAPTER FIVE
FOR A WHOLE YEAR, THEY LIVED in the hobo jungles that had broken out like hives on a frayed nervous system. They lived on nothing. Helen was proving the unreality of money. It made her really skinny.
She was desperate to be homeless. It wasn’t just the railyard bulls, the private patrols, they ran from. Richard had the police out looking for her. Helen ran away from her husband while Ida searched for hers. Daniel had put a pencil in a paper bag and walked out. Ida hoped that he was riding freight somewhere. It seemed he was on every passing train, that tall man who sat apart from the others, his arms on his knees, the solitary stranger moving in the opposite direction. When newcomers joined them, she searched their faces under their soft billed caps. This was not a romantic pursuit, and Ida was not abject; rather, she was exceedingly forthright, almost bureaucratic, as if she’d been hired by a magistrate to deliver a summons to the man. Once, Helen dared to ask Ida what she expected from Daniel if she found him. Ida carefully turned this over in her mind and then said, “I just have to see him one more time, to know if he’s cruel, or if he’s…” She paused. “Or if he’s just beyond me.”
Helen was watchful too. Anything in a uniform made her heart pound, anyone well dressed or driving an expensive car made her think of Richard. He came to be associated, in Helen’s mind, with the police. She was afraid of his blue eye with its black sickle. When he looked at her, he seemed to wipe her out. If she were to survive, she had to get away from his eyes.
In the summer heat, they rode on top of the cars. Their bodies hurt from holding on, their faces burned and chafed. Cinder got stuck under their eyelids, and they splurged on some goggles. But the cold weather nearly killed them, bedding down in a refrigerator car or in the bush by a fire, glad for the exhaustion that let them escape for a few hours. The trains were the bums’ university. By starlight, on cold nights, flame from the boiler sprayed like red paint in the frosty air, the perpetual diagnosis of the world’s sickness.
When Alice Lay Down With Peter Page 26