Poached Egg on Toast

by Frances Itani

  She reached for her shoulder pack, curled up behind the dune, out of the wind, and had a slow, secretive cigarette. (Jay would not think she was sensual, smoking behind a dune.) Richard had lowered his head over his book and said, patiently, confidently—how could he be so sure?—”You’ll be all right. The next story will come. You’ve been writing stories for fifteen years. You’re between things.” Her friend Betsy—but Betsy was a lawyer, not a writer—had said, “You’ve always been the first to say that the worst place to be is between stories.” And then cackled and added her own, “Or between lovers.”

  Josie had been on the Island only once during the winter months, late winter at that. The year before last. A three-day conference called: What IS the Story? And being alone at the shore now, in September, the breakers whipping high, spume flying through the air, the red cliffs silent, silenced (being eaten away steadily, from below), made her think of the March day she’d left the company of her country’s writers, had taken the rented car and driven to the north shore—alone then, too.

  She’d been surprised at the red silt strewn through huge chunks of ice. But why surprised? The cliffs were sandstone, the sand naturally eroded, driven, frozen to unpredictable shapes and patterns. The vast floes of ice seemed, at the time, dirty, sad. House-sized chunks were tossed on their sides, battered against the cliffs (battering, battering at the woman. Would they come bursting, in their moment of ecstasy, through the wall?).

  Now, she walked an hour along the beach; rolled up her pantlegs, waded through fresh-water rivulets which emptied into the sea but were too wide to hop across, her bare feet cold, so cold they numbed, and after that, seemed warm. Her sandals were in the pack with one apple and the cigarettes. Uncertain Vs of geese trailing, overtaking her, flying into the wind.

  (Jay would never be able to tolerate the wind here. He’d phoned one day and was giving the customary report on his health: he’d taken his pills, cleared up the ear infection—for reasons unknown to him and his doctor, he was always getting ear infections—had gone to bed early, and then, had asked, “Now, am I not a good boy?” And she, “I’m not going to answer that.” Thinking, “Is it a mother he wants? I don’t need another son. Already have three of my own.” Betsy, who knew Jay, had said, “He’s a hopeless neurotic, Josie, for heaven’s sake!” And she, “That may be. But he’s my friend.”) Breaching. Moving, both forward and back. The human condition. The loneliness of the race, the species. Friendship interruptus. Friendship in various guises. Moments that eroded, from below. The red cliffs, falling, falling, into the sea. Massive irregular pieces of rock strewn like crumbled Walls of Jericho. Eaten away. Battered (Oh God, No, No!).

  But she wasn’t alone, after all. She climbed around the cliff, bare feet searching out shelves of rock, and saw, in a cove, two horses in the sea. One with a rider, bareback, holding the collar with his left hand, a short thick rope in his right. Dressed in waterproof pants and jacket, rubber boots. Every few steps, he slapped the horse gently with the rope. For the horse was dragging a heavy load, harvesting Irish moss, from the sea.

  A second man, in chest waders, walked into the waves with his horse, the two joined by a tether, though neither seemed to lead the other. They worked in unison; each knew what had to be done. The horse made a continuous figure eight, dragging the wide heavy scoop behind, a third man on shore upending it so quickly no pause was necessary to dump the load; the scoop landing right side up, the horse entering sideways, again and again, the cold sea that whipped its belly from below, white froth tossing at its neck, its tail dripping and bedraggled, its mane tangled and green as if slow moss had been growing growing creeping up into it through time. (Were the horses glad to go back to their stables? Were their bellies shocked by the frigid water?)

  Two farm trucks rattled over the rocks, making a run for it when the waves sucked out—Josie couldn’t see how they could have got down here below the cliffs. They loaded the moss between the board sides, the man on shore raking and then tossing to his right the unwanted kelp with his bare hands. And the wind: preventing speech, sound, thought. The only thing that existed was dogged motion, the rhythm of work. Horse and rider, pushing against high huge waves, entering them as if one animal had been fused from two. The sea a rusty brown because of the red sand churning. For there was no harvest without high sea. The moss a green deeper than could be imagined, suspended under the surface, washing in in in because of the contours of continent, this portion of continent that had shaped this cove.

  She thought of accusations that had drifted her way. That she was guilty of probing back, back, always further back. Her friends. One layer of reality skimmed close to the ground and this she insisted on facing, examining. Richard seldom looked at it, Jay wouldn’t look at it, Betsy came close. (Betsy asked her once, “Have you ever fucked in the back seat of a car?” “Front,” Josie had answered. And they’d started snorting and hooting. Their husbands’ eyebrows moving; the men had been deep in conversation of their own, and thought, but weren’t certain, that they’d heard the fringes of this one.) Yes, she sometimes faced that line across the earth with Betsy. But she freely admitted (and this itself was contradiction) that she lived largely in the world of her imagination. For how could she be a storyteller and not dwell in the land of her own creations? No single version of her fiction was the truth. She was a liar, like all the other storytellers of the world. Learning and relearning the ancient lessons of love and pain.

  The lodge was five hundred metres from shore. Its windows never stopped rattling in the wind. The last two evenings, Josie had sat in the big sitting room and watched retired couples come and go. (Families with children were not around, now that school had started.) What she noticed about these couples was their feet. They wore sensible shoes. All those respectable, sturdy shoes astonished her. Thick soles. Thick socks. Wide thick platforms. No bare feet. No risky heels. Nothing frivolous about this crowd, no sirree bob. And when she was upstairs in her room at night, staring at her blank page, she could hear first one and then another couple pause outside her room to inspect an antique in the hall. Here, too, the walls were thin, pulsing membranes.

  “Now what do you suppose this is, Mother?”

  “You’ve got me.”

  “A pitchfork?”

  “Don’t know. Read the sign.”

  “A bootscraper! Well for God’s sake! “

  “Now what do you suppose this is, Mother?” (Did all men mate with mothers? Would Richard, in his old age, call her Mother? If he did, she would leave him.)

  “You’ve got me. Read the sign.”

  “A pitchfork? No, a bootscraper.”

  “Well I’ll be damned.”

  “Now what do you suppose …?”

  This is life!

  (Her youngest son, pointing to an accident his puppy had had on the kitchen floor. “This is LIFE, Mom, this is LIFE.”) Those old couples continuing on down the hall at a run in their sensible shoes, following the tilt of the lodge floor, six inches to the south and east.

  She pulled herself up the cliff, having stayed too long in a crouch watching the horses loop their figure eights across the wet sand and into the waves. And like an image illuminated by lightning in the dark, saw, in its entirety, a flash of what had earlier eluded her when she’d thought about her one winter trip to the Island. Another fiction? Another lie? This would be her story.

  She had kept the rented car for the return trip, and boarded the ferry for the nine-mile crossing to the mainland. The ferry was, at that time of year, an icebreaker. Pack ice was still drifting in the Strait. Only two days earlier, another ferry had been locked in the ice for twelve hours—normally a forty-fiveminute trip. She’d left the car on the lower deck, and joined the other passengers in the sealed salon above, its huge windows sloping at an angle that allowed her to lean out and over the black sea below. And in the middle of the Strait, found that she was watching with two parts of herself, one frightened, one exhilarated, as the ferry entered pack ice
. Treacherous ice, which looked unyielding, but parted with a grating shudder as the vessel went over and through it, shimmying as if it, too, would break into pieces from below.

  The coyote appeared so suddenly, she wondered at what she herself was watching, a grey-dusky creature crazed and running running, first in one direction, then another, beside the ferry. Always the ice parting and breaking, the animal leaping across black open space, darting, finally, in front of the monstrous vessel—which had not altered speed—sure to be hit or drowned. But no. Passengers were running across the salon, cheering the animal when it appeared, wet and freezing, on the other side. A woman’s voice (the sombre, confident tones of someone not herself in danger, but who enjoys passing on news of tragedy): “Would be better for it if it had been hit. It’ll starve slow out here on the ice.” Of course, nothing would save this stranded creature, unable to go forward or back, water for miles on all sides.

  Far from the mainland, far from the Island, Josie could see how the animal felt. Caught between. And being between was about being alone. Between lovers, between stories, between friends, between the abstract and the concrete, between moments of safety and moments of danger, between moments of love and moments of despair. Between the bottom sheet and Richard (between the dash and the upholstery). Between the mainland and the Island. Open water. Adrift. Pack Ice. Ah, Sea.

  P’tit Village

  ÉTÉ

  It is whispered, Madame Lalonde, she asked the priest and he said, “No,” very firmly What does it matter to him that babies sleep in the same attic room, that children tumble over banisters, that they run through gangways pitching gravel at old Hervé, the policeman, when he rides past on his bike?

  It is whispered, Madame Lalonde …

  “No.”

  “Again.” Lips stretch thin and curl back over the news.

  “Poor Madame. What will she do with them all? And he. He’s no help to her, that good-for-nothing.”

  “He’s tired, poor man. C’est ça.”

  At dusk the cross on the hill is ablaze. You can see it for miles, from here, from there, from across the river. In daytime the children go to the top of the hill to look for blood, for miracles.

  Madame Lalonde’s is the last house on the dirt road that dwindles to grass and old tire tracks at the bottom of the hill. How that cross glows at night! The bulbs are replaced the very day they burn out. Or are peppered by the stones of hooligans. At night the cross carves its perpendiculars into Madame’s bedroom wall. Even from her bed, she can see it. That cross.

  Pitou lies on his side in the dusty road. It is dry, hot. Pitou has no energy. Get up, Pitou. Shoo. Leave him alone. What car ever comes here? Only the ice wagon, and Pitou has lots of time to move before that old nag gets here. Monsieur, he walks to rue Principale and takes the grey rickety bus to work.

  The children are playing in a field of goldenrod and blue thistles.

  Am stram gram

  Pic et pic et colégram

  Bour et bour et ratatam

  Am stram gram

  Pic!

  Amélie wants to go out, too. Not until the margarine is done. Knead the pellets till the colour bursts like shrapnel through the yielding bag. Pound it with your tiny fist, squeeze between the fingers. The colour spreads like a waxy orange a child might choose to paint the sun. Soon, the kneading is done; the margarine is uniform, harmless, yellow. Go out now, play, Amélie. Only till nine, mind.

  The siren will shrill at nine. Ah yes, the curfew. From the top of the town hall, the siren blows the children tidily off the streets. But it also injects excitement and fear into the hearts of the villagers. For if the siren wails and it is not nine o’clock, you go to your back stoop to look for smoke. There is no fire truck here. Only the bucket brigade. That, and the siren, to summon the villagers.

  Madame Lalonde has another mouth to feed. This one sleeps downstairs. Already, Madame and her husband have moved their own bed to the dining room. No more space upstairs. If you creep to their window at night, you can see them undressing. In the light of the cross you can see them. Madame Lalonde is tired. Her breasts hang down, always being pulled and tugged and chewed. The baby sleeps in the carriage. Amédée they call him. A good name. A hungry devil, too, she says. Monsieur Lalonde has a new job now. He wears a uniform. The children are proud; their father delivers Vachon cakes to the stores in the city. Now Monsieur revs the truck as he roars home, and Pitou has to pick himself up off the road.

  Amélie is outside with her small brother, Jacques. Monsieur Poirot the barber has just cut Jacques’ hair. Amélie has to go with her brother to make sure Poirot knows when to stop cutting. For Poirot keeps an extra bottle on his shelf. He also trades comics with the children when he’s through.

  Amélie and Jacques are returning home; it is seven thirty and they are leafing hungrily through the comics. The siren startles. Already? But it is not yet nine.

  A little crowd clusters at the window of Madame Lalonde. Amélie and Jacques push their way to look through the limp net of curtain. From the back, Jacques’ hair looks as if Poirot has turned a porridge bowl upside down over it.

  Through the dining room, through to the kitchen, they see their parents. Old Hervé is there, too. Hervé the policeman. It is his bike that lies on its side in the gravel. The younger children are spinning the back wheel, holding a cardboard to its spokes. Ra ta tah tat. There is something on the table, a baby, or a doll. A baby, yes, but this doesn’t look like Amédée. This baby is blue and lies very still. Hervé bends over it, breathing into its mouth. Nothing. There is no cry. Nothing. Hervé breathes again and again. The child is fixed like a china ornament on the table. Madame Lalonde wrings her hands. It is no use. You can tell by looking at her face.

  Make way! The priest has arrived. His shining black car thumps over the bumps in the road where grass has grown between old tire tracks. He stops in the puddle of gravel, an inch from Hervé’s bike. His black skirts swish as he walks to the door. “Leave the window, my children,” he says to the sober faces in the crowd.

  Poor Madame Lalonde. The cross has not even lit up yet, for the night.

  When everyone has gone, she dresses Amédée’s cold limbs in the gown in which he was baptized—he and all the others. It has been passed on all the way down from Joseph, the eldest. She stops for a moment beside the still bundle. The tears stream down her cheeks. She turns her head and spits on the scrubbed kitchen floor. Priest or no priest, there will be no other.

  When the weather is warm, Hector, the chip man, emerges from his winter cocoon and plants his white cart squarely behind the horse in front of the post office. Tassé runs the post office from the closed-in veranda of his yellow house. The mail truck arrives from the city; Tassé sorts the letters into the silver boxes that line his veranda. The villagers come and go, up and down the steps, stopping to chat with Hector, slapping his old horse gently on the neck.

  “Ah, Hector, back in business, you scoundrel. You’ve been getting fat all winter. Nothing to do but draw water. Come on, you dirty dog, give me some chips, and make sure you fill up the bottom, too.”

  Behind the murky windows of his cart, Hector scoops thick fries, fresh from the splattering grease, into the cones of waxed brown paper. The children put their nickels on the ledge and hold their breath while Hector adds extra chips on top. As they walk away they cross their fingers, hoping the vinegar will stay in the bottom so they can suck it out when the last chip is gone.

  When the mail traffic dwindles and the steps of Tassé’s post office are empty again, Hector knows it is time for supper. He taps the loose reins against the horse’s back, lets go, and the cart begins to wheeze up and down narrow side streets. The women run out to meet him, wiping hands on aprons as they hurry down the paths. They hold out their deep white crockery.

  “Lots of mouths to feed, Hector, fill it to the brim.” And dip their hands into the chips on the way back to their kitchens—after they’ve dipped into their apron pockets for the
coins.

  On Saturday afternoon the beerman comes. In the houses of the village, empties are stacked and ready. The beerman makes his rounds between two and four. Across the village you can hear the empties rattle and the children call, “Beerman! Beerman! La Bière!”

  Mr. Smith, too, buys beer. Quincy and Marlene have gathered the empties and have put them by the porch door. They watch the gravel road to see who will come first: beerman? iceman? milkman? The iceman arrives and carries blocks of dripping ice in his steely picks, all the way around the house, down the long gangway, through the back door. He bangs the block into the top of the icebox and pushes aside the small piece left over from yesterday, melted smooth as an ocean stone.

  At the front, on the road, his horse jerks and halts, jerks and halts as the children cry, “Whoaaaa!” The children shinny up the back of the cart to the slippery boards, and vie for slender ice chips to suck. Water drips through the wagon boards, leaving a chain of damp circles on the dusty road. The iceman returns and shoos the children away. He clucks to his horse.

  If it is a hot day, Mr. Smith buys buttermilk from Borden’s truck for his children. There is a picture of Elsie on the side of the truck—Elsie with the dancing eyes and curly horns. In August, Quincy and Marlene will be taken across the river to the Exhibition, and there they will see, year after year, the real Elsie the Borden Cow in her glittering stall.

  At last, the beerman arrives. Mr. Smith pays his money and then settles down on the front step with his neighbour, Ti-Jean. There they will stay the entire afternoon, arguing, waving their quart bottles, deciding once and for all who really won in ‘59. No matter who comes out ahead, Mr. Smith reminds Quincy and Marlene inside, later: “It’s ours by right of conquest! “ His hand sweeps in an encompassing gesture out towards the land beyond the window. Quincy and Marlene are not so sure. They have had their own skirmishes and are outnumbered, after all. Dubious victors, they have rushed into their house and looked back out through the curtains at the taunting, conquered faces.