The Fire-Dwellers

by Margaret Laurence

  Stacey gets off the bus at Bluejay Crescent. Then the sound she always dreads to hear. Scree-ee! Brakes. The white Buick shudders to a stop and the man climbs out. Very very slowly, as though he were moving underwater. He is terrified to look at the boy lying on the road. Stacey cannot see the boy’s face. Only the blue jeans. He could be seven years old, or ten. He is not making a sound. No cry. Nothing.

  Stacey does not go over to look, because she cannot. Instead, she begins running. Along the sidewalk, heels snagging on the cement, running crazily, until she reaches the big dark-green frame house with gabled roof and screened front porch.

  Katie!

  Yeh? What?

  Where are the boys?

  How should I know? They were here a minute ago. Where you been?

  Stacey runs through the house and out the back door. Ian and Duncan are playing in the back yard. The two auburn heads are bent over the wheels of the bug Ian is making. They look up and see her.

  Hi. Where you been, all this time?

  Sorry. I – I missed the bus. I’ll get your lunch right now.

  Katie comes downstairs and looks curiously at Stacey, who is now sitting in the kitchen with her hands over her face.

  Mum? You okay? Hey, what’s the matter?

  I’m okay. I thought for a second – there was this boy – an accident – white Buick – just at the corner. I didn’t know –

  Oh Mum. That’s awful. Please, don’t cry. Here – have a Kleenex.

  Katie stands there, awkwardly, inexperienced at consoling, looking at Stacey from wide grey eyes. She is wearing a dress the startling color of unripe apples, and her long straight auburn hair looks as though she has ironed it, which she has. No lipstick, but green eye make-up. For an instant Stacey catches hold of her hand and holds it.

  — It’s supposed to be the other way around. What a rock of Gibraltar I turned out to be. Katie, you’re so goddam beautiful. Sometimes I feel like a beat-up old bitch.

  Katie, I feel about a hundred.

  Well, you don’t look so hot, either. Just at the moment, I mean. Want me to bring Jen downstairs. She’s playing in her room. I fetched her from the Foglers’.

  Thanks, honey.

  Normality is re-established, and Stacey takes off her coat and hat and starts making sandwiches.

  Stacey in hospital, holding Katherine Elizabeth, age twenty-four hours. Katie with eyes shut tightly, walnut-sized fists clenched, look of utter composure. I did it. She’s here. She’s alive. Who’d believe I could have borne a kid this beautiful? (Or any kind of kid, for that matter.)

  You have to keep quiet about all that. Restraint. Some wise guy is always telling you how you’re sapping the national strength. Overprotective. Or else, you don’t really care about them – you’re just compensating because you’re guilty on account of the fact that in your core you’re trying to possess them, like hypnosis. Or something. Article in magazine at hairdresser’s. “Nine Ways the Modern Mum May Be Ruining Her Daughter.” I should never read them, but I always do, and then I check in my mind to see how many ways I’m ruining Katie. But how can you tell? I can see the doll who wrote that one. Jazzy office stuffed with plastic plants and never a daughter in sight.

  The boys come in. Stacey does not hug them. She restricts herself to putting a hand on their hair and mentioning the need for haircuts. Ian’s hair is the exact color of Mac’s, dark red, and Duncan’s is a little lighter, red-gold.

  At quarter to one, Katie and the boys go back to school. Stacey watches them go. Ian walks ahead, as usual, slim and wiry, tall for ten, impatient, moving with a quick grace, perfectly in command of his muscles. Duncan rarely hurries, and is largely unaware of other people. Yet he will tell Stacey what he is thinking, sometimes. Ian guards himself at every turn.

  — What did I do to make him that way? It’s the confusion that bothers me. Everything happens all at once, never one thing at a time, so how in hell do you know what effect anything is having on them? That other article, last week. “Are You Castrating Your Son?” God, Sir, how do I know? It’s getting so I’m suspicious of my slightest word or act. Maybe I shouldn’t have ruffled Ian’s hair just now.

  Stacey picks up Jen, who is robust enough but who seems fragile. Picking her up is like holding a kitten, when the first thing that is noticeable is not the softness of it but the fact that all its bones can be felt.

  Come on, flower. Time for a sleep.

  Babble babble

  Come on, honey, talk. It’s easy when you try.

  — Maybe she’s got ESP, like those sickening kids in that SF movie, whose eyes glowed like lighthouses when they were communicating by mental telepathy with one another. She’s probably chatting away silently this very moment with some mutated kid in Samarkand or Omsk. Oh God, it’s not all that funny. What if there really is something wrong? Should I be doing something about it? What I should be doing right now is finding out who that boy is, and how badly hurt. I can’t. It’s all I can do to cope with what goes on inside these four walls. This fortress, which I’d like to believe strong.

  After school, Ian and Duncan are in the back yard. The bug consists of wheels, planks, steering apparatus, nails, pieces of wire with some essential purpose. Ian works dartingly, knowing which hammer or screwdriver to use. Duncan has no mechanical know-how, but is trying hard to please Ian. Then wham. Chaos. Yells. Imprecations, threats, denials. Poundingly, they are both in the kitchen.

  Mum, tell Duncan to leave my bug alone!

  You said I could help. You said!

  I didn’t say you could wreck it, dumb idiot.

  I wasn’t. I never.

  You can’t just nail on the wheels, you moron. How do you think they’ll turn?

  You think you’re so

  You keep your hands off it

  I won’t – it’s not fair

  You better, or I’ll

  Fighting, Ian holds himself back a little, using his brains to plan attack. Duncan fights with the flailing recklessness of the one who knows he cannot possibly win. The fury rises until at last Stacey is unable to bear their battle and their noise. Cain and his brother must have started their hatred like this.

  Cut it out! Both of you! You hear?

  Slam. Only when she has done it does Stacey realize she has grabbed their shoulders and flung them both to the floor with as much force as she could muster. Ian does not cry. His pride sometimes permits him stomach cramps, but never tears. His bony face is bleached with anger. He rises and rushes outside, seizes the uncompleted vehicle and throws it down the outside cement steps which lead into the basement.

  The hell with it then! I don’t give a damn!

  The wheels come off and tumble across the basement floor. The cracking sound is the nailed boards coming apart. Duncan, listening, looks blank with bewilderment.

  He can’t. He can’t go and break it, Mum.

  Duncan does not ever destroy the work he has done. He draws pictures of the shark-shaped rocket which will one day take him to Mars or Saturn, and of the scarlet forests he will walk there, under the glare of innumerable purple suns. He puts them away, and sometimes digs one out and looks at it with amusement as the product of an earlier self. But he never destroys them.

  Ian looks at the shambles for an instant, his face desolated. Then he turns and runs to the garage, to the loft, full of tent poles and torn canvas chairs and sparrows’ nests, where once Stacey found a scribbler half full of writing, headed “Captain Ian MacAindra His Direy of How We Beat Enimy.” And she had wondered where he was bound for.

  Stacey puts her arms around Duncan for a minute. Then he goes outside and glances up at the loft, as though wanting to go there but not daring. He stands on the lawn, looking as though he cannot figure out what to do.

  — If Mac knew, he would think I was unbalanced. He never hits the kids in anger. No, maybe not, but that icy calm of his is worse. Okay, so I’m trying to justify myself. Earlier, I was worried sick in case that kid was one of mine. Now, look. Wh
y? What if I hit one of them too hard sometime, without meaning to? Am I a monster? They nourish me and yet they devour me, too. God, how can I make all this better as if it hadn’t happened? No answer. No illumination from on high. As if I expected any. If I could only talk about it. But who wants to know, and anyway, could I say? I can’t forget that piece in the paper. Young mother killed her two-month-old infant by smothering it. I wondered how that sort of thing could ever happen. But maybe it was only that the baby was crying and crying, and she didn’t know what to do, and was maybe frantic about other things entirely, and suddenly she found she had stopped the noise. I cannot think this way. I must not.

  Stacey pours herself a massive gin and tonic, and gets dinner. Mac is away on the road and will not be home until late tonight. The kids eat, do homework, look at TV. At eleven, even Katie is stashed away in bed and Stacey is off duty. She takes the current glass of gin and tonic up to the bedroom. She locks the door, temporarily, in case a kid wakens, strips and looks at herself in the full-length mirror.

  Every time Stacey ran down the stairs from the apartment above Cameron’s Funeral Home, which was home, she paused in flight like a hummingbird or helicopter and sneaked a glance into the mirror halfway down, circular and heavy, gilded in coy cherubs with bunches of grapes draped over their private parts. Stacey, Stacey, vanity isn’t becoming. The soft persistent mew from upstairs, the voice that never tired of saying how others ought to be and never were. And Stacey would be off, to laugh and talk so loudly in the jukebox-loud café that no one would guess she cared about her ugliness.

  She actually believed it was vanity, Mother did. It’s not how you look, it’s what you are that counts, she used to say – admirably, I guess, but brother, that was one of the finest lies anyone ever spun me. Do I know that little about Katie now? That old album – and when I saw a snapshot of myself, years ago, I thought My heavens. I was actually pretty – why didn’t I know it then?

  Stacey drinks the gin and tonic slowly, trying to make it last. She brushes her hair and makes up her face and puts on perfume. Then she looks in the mirror again. No change.

  — Oh Cleopatra. You old swayback. Four kids have altered me. The stretch marks look like little silver worms in parallel processions across my belly and thighs. My breasts aren’t bad, and at least my ankles aren’t thick. Mac said once he liked the color of my eyes, greenish-grey. But there used to be a slight hollow on the side of my buttocks, a little concave place that showed when I wore a tight skirt, and he liked that, too, and it isn’t there any more. Filled in with the slow accumulation of flesh. Not flesh. Fat. F.A.T. I can make the hollow be there again momentarily if I tense my muscles. But who is going to go through life remembering to hold their tight muscles in, just so they’ll have an attractive ass?

  Stacey slops on some more perfume. The gin is gone. She puts on her housecoat and tiptoes downstairs to refill the glass. She returns, sits on the bedroom chair, smoking, no longer looking in the mirror.

  — Why doesn’t he get home? I want him. Right now, this minute. No, I don’t. I want some other man, someone I’ve never been with. Only Mac for sixteen years. What are other men like? It’s just as bad for him, maybe worse. He looks at the girls on the street, all the young secretaries stepping lightly, the slim fillies of all the summers, and his face grows inheld and bitter. I want to comfort him, but can’t, any more than he can comfort me, for neither of us is supposed to feel this way. Except that I know he does. I wonder if he knows I do? Sometimes I think I’d like to hold an entire army between my legs. I think of all the men I’ll never make love with, and I regret it as though it were the approach of my own death. I’m not monogamous by nature. And yet I am. I can’t imagine myself as anyone else’s woman, for keeps. What does Mac do when he’s on the road? He doesn’t sell vanilla essence every evening, that’s for sure. God, I’m unfair. Are the small-town whores so glamorous? And anyway, it’s only my conditioned reflex. I don’t worry that much, whatever he does out there. It doesn’t seem all that earth-shattering. It’s jealousy, baby, admit it. He can and you can’t. So okay. But apart from that angle, I’d like to be on the road. Not for anything but just to be going somewhere.

  Mac on the road, soaring along as though the old Chev were a winged chariot, through the mountains and the turquoise air, into the valley where the rivers run with names like silkenly flowing water, Similkameen, Tulameen, Coquihalla, the names onmaps, clear brown water over the shifting green stones, where the pine and tamarack and the thin spruce trees stand a little way off, blue-green and black-green needles dry in the dry gold air, where the tall barbed grasses are never touched or cut but remain eternally high with their pale seedheads like oats bent in the light wind that blows always, where it is sun all the way in the fields of purple fireweed where only the bees make their furred music.

  Stacey knows it is not like that for him. He does door-to-door. Nights, it is motels on the fringes of towns, gaudy dusty shacks with names like Rainbow and Riverview and small neon signs announcing Eats and Vacancy, where drowsy Alsatian dogs sprawl on the gravel driveways and the proprietor’s kids throw stones at one another, and the cars rocket past – ching! ching! ching! – like a roaring clock recording the minutes, and the rooms are scantily clad in imitation furniture, the table covered with burn scars and wet beer bottle circles, the floor buckling linoleum, and the shower that dribbles lukewarm water unpredictably. Days, and it is all doors, knocking and waiting, and flint-faced females who imagine their unappetizing virtue to be in peril, so slam.

  — He never talks of it. He won’t. He refuses. Last week a man knocked at my door, a young man with amber eyes pale and circular behind magnifying glasses. He held out a pamphlet in half-apologetic offering. Safety in Time of War. Ragged crimson letters like rising flames. I did a double take and saw the smaller letters underneath. God’s War of the Last Day. Oh, that war. He was a Redeemer’s Advocate. I nearly closed the door quickly. But then I didn’t. He was in the living room for an hour and a half and I thought he’d never go. It can’t be good, to have a door slammed in your face.

  Drabble’s, as well as being a purveyor of vanilla, lemon and orange essence, peppermint and raspberry extract and maple-type flavoring, also handles a wide selection of sprays – Forest Petal House Freshener, Silk Brocade Hair Spray, Pink Cross Athlete’s Foot Spray, Angel-Breath Mouth Freshener, Honey Blossom Garbage Tin Spray, and others. Mac has been doing the circuit for Drabble’s for seven years. He took it on immediately after he stopped selling encyclopedias.

  — He was doing okay, in encyclopedias. He never lost his job. He quit. He kicked himself for it afterwards. Listen, Mac, you did right. He’s never mentioned it since, but I’ve never forgotten the night he told me what happened.

  Mac, in a one-room flat above a store, near the docks. Going through the spiel. You, too, can travel to London, England, or Paris, France, or the frangipani-perfumed South Seas, through these spectacularly scenic pictures in Once-Over World, given free with every contract for a full set of encyclopedias, agreeable monthly or weekly terms. And the guy who was picking up the pen to sign was a pensioner, old retired logger, who wanted to see the picture of Piccadilly, London, where he’d once gone on leave in 1917 from the trenches. Mac suddenly grabbed the contract and tore it up, telling the old guy he needed encyclopedias like he needed a hole in the head, and there was a public library only a few blocks away. The old guy was furious, cheated. So much for gesture. But Mac went back to the office and quit, anyway.

  — At that precise moment, didn’t I have to go and get pregnant? I shouldn’t have. It was my fault. We were both a little stoned the night it happened. I thought I’d put the damn equipment in, but next morning there it was on the floor beside the bed. After I was certain, Mac didn’t say a word. He went to work for Drabble’s, which was the first job that came along. Was it then he started to go underground, living in his own caves? If I mentioned the possibility of trying something else, looking around for another job, h
e’d only say I’m not complaining, am I? I couldn’t very well say Yes, but it seemed he was, in some way. I kept saying I was sorry, which must have got pretty boring for him. I was sorry, and yet I wasn’t, too. I feel the exact same now. How can I regret Duncan, who isn’t like any other person on this earth? When Duncan was born, Mac came to see me, and didn’t ask about the baby at all, simply said You okay? I guess it was terrible for him. It was terrible. But it was his kid, too. It wasn’t immaculate conception. Well, he took on the responsibilities, Stacey. What more do you want? After a while business picked up in the spray and flavor trade, and Jen was born, planned.

  Stacey in yet another hospital. Mac, handing her two dozen yellow chrysanthemums. Hey, a girl, eh? You did well. Stacey taking the flowers, smiling at him, suddenly knowing how late it was, unable to care at all what he said or thought about the new child. They’re beautiful, Mac, the flowers. Glad you like them. Yes, they’re lovely – thanks a million. That’s all right. Everything was all right. Certainly. Of course. She held Jen in her arms and thought of Duncan.

  — Well past midnight, Mac gets home. Stacey wakens and hears his key in the door. He climbs the stairs slowly, his footsteps sounding to her like those of her father, like Matthew’s footsteps on the front steps on Sundays, seventy-four years old.

  — Mac, for Christ’s sake, you’re forty-three.

  But when he switches on the light in the bedroom, and stands in the doorway, Stacey cannot see that he has changed all that much in sixteen years. He is still as lean as ever, and although his auburn hair has darkened, he has lost none of it. He is still handsome to her. The main change is in the webbed lines around his eyes and on his forehead.

  — Worrying about how to support us? If I could only go away and leave him alone, take the sword off his neck. Would he want me to? No good saying he chose me and the kids. He didn’t know what he was getting himself into, just as I didn’t. Mac – let me explain. Let me tell you how it’s been with me. Can’t we ever say anything to one another to make up for the lies, the trivialities, the tiredness we never knew about until it had taken up permanent residence inside our arteries?