by Connie Gault
On the way into the little town she passed a car cemetery, half a dozen rusted-out shells abandoned beside the glittering pile of a nuisance ground. Her rented Ford was the only licensed, roadworthy vehicle in miles, but she angle-parked anyway in front of the Addison Hotel, one of the few buildings left standing on the main street. She turned the engine off and rolled her side window down and listened for any sound of life. She imagined a dog barking but didn’t hear one. The smell of dust wafted into the car. She got out, leaving the door open. Nothing to see, up or down the wide street. She’d forgotten how small the buildings were in a prairie town. Even the false fronts on the two that sat across from the hotel, wide apart like a mouth missing teeth, barely reached the height of a normal one-story. One of them advertised itself as The Modern Department Store; neither had been painted for decades and the boards had silvered with age. Weeds grew right up to their doors. The two grain elevators beside the railway tracks appeared to be in operation, however, and telephone poles – or power poles, she didn’t know which they were – marched down the street, stringing wires across the blue sky. Hadn’t she gone far enough for one day?
She knew at once it was the same couple. They were nothing if not distinctive, might have been the two skinniest old people she’d ever seen. Between them, they had barely enough flesh to cover one set of bones. They came to the door together, and she knew it was because nobody had knocked for a long time. They leaned forward, sharp shoulder blades bent in permanent protection of their hollow chests, and peered at her. They said the hotel wasn’t open. The man said he was sorry. She didn’t have the heart to ask if they’d let her stay anyway, even though she suddenly felt she would be ill if she continued on. She forced herself to breathe slowly and deeply. It was only nerves; she knew that. The woman must have seen her distress; she asked if Elena wanted to use the bathroom.
“Oh, no,” she said. She remembered the state of the bathroom the night she’d stayed here, and backed down a step. The old woman was staring at her. She looked at the old man instead. “I’m sorry for disturbing you,” she went on quickly. “It was foolish of me. Obviously you’re not open.”
“We’re leaving soon,” the old woman said. She was staring, still, as if she would take something from her if she could. “End of the month,” the old woman said. “We’re packing up, moving out.”
“This town is history,” the old man said. The old woman squeezed his arm. Like a pair of skeletons, the two of them, pleased with themselves for breathing. They didn’t recognize her, of course; she was only one of many girls and women who’d spent a night in one of their rooms and moved on. They waited in the open doorway while she went down the last steps. She turned when she reached the street and said, “I stayed here years ago.” Blurted it out. They looked startled. They tipped their heads politely, but what was there to say? She shrugged her shoulders to acknowledge it and avoided looking at them before she drove away.
At the intersection she noted the time. It was just after three o’clock. She was right on schedule; if anything, she would arrive earlier than she’d intended.
You didn’t find the town, Ruth said right into her ear when she turned the car in the direction of Trevna. She could see her standing in the middle of her kitchen, revelling in the moment. Off the face of the earth, she said, triumph in her voice. Gone.
“Odd kind of dress,” Pansy said while they watched the car turn onto the highway. “Must be the new style.”
It was possibly the first time Merv had heard the word “style” fall from Pansy’s lips. He thought it was a good sign, a forward-looking trend potentially developing late in her life. And then he had a Eureka moment. “Yes,” he drawled. “I’d say she’s very chicken fashionable.” He waited. “Chic ’n fashionable?”
Pansy pretended to be ignoring him. She pretended to be examining the length of Main Street and at its end the foundation stones of the torn-down Lutheran church.
“What?” he asked, slipping his arm around her. “You think I’m repre-hen-sible?” He chucked her under the chin. “C’mon my little sugar plum, admit it, I re-coop-erated.”
“You slay me,” she said.
He jumped back and regarded her with admiration. “Hey good for you, love. S-lay? We’re back to the egg. Egg-squisite, isn’t it?” He let her deliver a disdainful look. “Give me a kiss, dear, and I’ll quit.”
She kissed him. They both went and had a nap after that.
Bill hadn’t planned to stop anywhere along the way, but when he saw the sign for Addison, he couldn’t resist turning in. He was pleased to see the hotel still there, slumped like an old cardboard box at the far end of their main street. He pulled up right where he’d parked almost thirty years before, and sat with his engine idling. He still had the top down and although the day was warm, he could feel the cool air of night around him. He remembered Elena had waited for him in the car when he’d gone to knock on the door. And then she’d asked him something about the stars.
He was about to drive away when a face appeared in the grimy downstairs window, the nose almost pressed to the pane. He couldn’t believe it; he recognized her. It had to be the same cranky woman. Then the front door opened and there was Scrawny stepping out as cautiously as you might on a gangplank over a violent ocean.
“Merv,” Pansy called, but he’d already gone out the door. And then the fellow got out of his car. Big, fancy car, the colour of blue old ladies liked to knit into baby booties, a convertible, no less. And of course Merv wouldn’t have the sense to get rid of him. He was yakking away to him on the steps. Christ, now he was inviting him in.
“Two visitors in one day,” he was saying, ushering the man into the office.
He came right over to her with his hand out so she had to shake it. Said his name. It meant nothing to her.
“Bill here stayed with us one night,” Merv said.
It was on the tip of her tongue to say nobody ever stayed two, but she didn’t like to talk to strangers.
“Have a seat,” Merv said and the fellow took a chair.
“I was telling Bill not too many stop here in Addison, anymore,” Merv said.
Pansy snorted.
“So it’s quite the coincidence, having two in one day. I was telling him the lady who just come not an hour ago also said she stayed here one night. And then – see, I recognized him. I didn’t know from when, but I knew he looked familiar, and then I thought, Jeez, that woman looked familiar, too. And then he says he stayed here with a young woman.”
“It was a long time ago,” the fellow said.
He must have seen the look on her face. If he’d lived with Merv all these years, he’d be looking the same. Merv could spout six reasons off the bat for whatever he was wishing, and he wasn’t even trying to convince you it really happened so much as to make you wish along with him that the world really could unfold his way.
“I’m pretty sure it was her,” Merv said. “People don’t change that much you know, and I recall bringing the two of you breakfast in bed. We didn’t do that often, here. It’s hard to believe, though, isn’t it? Cripes, the two of you must be on the same wavelength.”
Pansy snorted again. All she could think about, and see in her mind’s eye, was the two Berger kids who’d tried to talk to one another with two empty tin cans and a big long string. It had worked best when they shouted.
“No, really,” Merv said, “I bet she started wondering about you, eh? And that’s why she’s here. I can tell you she doesn’t live around here because she was driving a rental. A two-tone brown Ford, Bill,” he added, looking significantly right at him.
“I guess that would be some fluke, eh?” the man said.
“No, it wouldn’t,” Pansy said. “She wouldn’t think you’d be here. Nobody would think anybody would be here.”
The fellow only laughed as if she’d made a pretty good joke and looked on her like he’d just remembered she was his favourite aunt. He was making himself at home, sprawling back in his cha
ir like he’d grown up here, watching the business along with them since he was a freckle-faced kid. “Did she say where she was headed?” he asked.
“No,” Pansy said so sharply it was clear they both expected her to say more. But she didn’t.
“You didn’t see which way she turned when she left?”
“No.”
He sat back in his chair and smiled at her. “You don’t still have a cat?” he asked.
“Imagine you remembering that,” Merv said.
“Those Christly cats,” Pansy said. “We’re too old to look after anything but ourselves.”
Let them think it was a coincidence, Bill thought. The old fellow was having fun with it. He went on chatting with them about their health and their upcoming move to Pioneer Villa – which might as well have been called Heaven on Earth, they were so happy to be going there – and all the while the old woman sat up straight in her chair with her arms crossed in front of her, clutching her own old elbows, reminding herself not to tell him which way Elena had turned. It didn’t matter to him; he knew he’d find her. He had a map and now he knew the colour and make of her rented car. The old man was getting agitated, though, and finally after some hemming and hawing, he excused himself and pulled his wife out of the office, obviously to confer.
Bill leaned back in his chair and looked up to the ceiling and pictured the room upstairs, the way it was when they’d walked into it, the dim light, the cheap furniture, the small bed with the permanent gully down the middle. He remembered her beside him in the bed the next morning, how soft and weak she’d been. She hadn’t wanted him to know it, was afraid to show it, he figured. He’d puzzled over her behaviour, taking everything she did and said to be a comment on him. He wondered if she could have been as beautiful as he remembered. His eyes had often followed women in the street, looking for her. Two or three years after she left him he was still doing it, and even once in a while after he was married he’d glimpse a slim figure like hers at the end of a block, turning the corner, maybe, walking out of sight, and he’d have the urge to go after the woman, just in case.
He could hear the old couple hissing to one another behind the closed door. Then the knob turned. “Wipe that grin off your face,” his teachers used to say when he was a kid, and he remembered it in time to look neutral before they walked back in.
When he got to the intersection he knew which way to go, but he didn’t know where the farm was, only that it was somewhere between Addison and Trevna. It would be an hour’s drive. The map was spread out on the seat beside him, held down with his shaving kit, though he didn’t need it anymore. He could ask at a house or two along the way until he found her. He was driving a Lincoln, this year’s model, not as splendid a vehicle as the old roadster, but she’d see it coming. That’s as far as he’d let himself think except to remember he was bald, nearly bald anyway, nothing but a rim of sandy hair left on his head. His wife had said it was okay; he had a good-shaped skull, she said, but he hadn’t looked in a mirror for a day of his life, since it started thinning, that he didn’t remember his mother saying (he must have been all of five years old at the time) that red-headed men lost their hair early.
LAWSON
My mother got it into her head that my dad was coming back. She wasn’t senile. She was barely sixty and fully enjoying her life and she said it just like that. “I’ve got it into my head your father might be coming back.” Something had made her think he was returning to Saskatchewan that very day. She thought other people knew about it and had decided they shouldn’t tell her. “There’s gossip going around,” she said.
“Have you had a letter from your father?” she asked right away, as soon as I stopped by to visit before getting my groceries. We never talked about my father. She hadn’t mentioned him to me once, not once since the day he left Gilroy. I was pretty sure she hadn’t mentioned his existence to anyone on earth since that day, and I’d been proud of her for that. I had (privately, mutely) extolled her for that. Of all the qualities that made me look up to her, the first was that she was strong; nobody trifled with her.
“I have never had a letter from him.”
“I have reason to believe he’s going to show up today.”
“Show up today? Today? Where?”
“Here.”
“Why? Why would you think that?”
“On the five o’clock train,” she said.
“It’s been thirty years.”
“Twenty-eight.”
“Right. Okay. Really, Mother?”
“Of course I may be mistaken, but when old friends start getting evasive, I’ll tell you, something’s going on.” She stood up and then, I suppose, didn’t know why she had. An excess of emotional energy, likely, had brought her to her feet. “I don’t know, Ruth, to be honest,” she said. “But in case he is on that train …”
I thought I knew what was behind this, why her old friends had been acting evasive; they’d been talking about her behind her back. They’d heard about Elena Huhtala. It was only natural that Valerie would have told a friend or two, not only about the visit but about the story behind it, and gossip that provocative travels fast, and invariably gets embroidered on the way. I didn’t intend to explain; nothing would have induced me to say a word about Elena Huhtala to my mother.
Lawson was not much bigger than Gilroy had been, but my mother’s house wasn’t near the train tracks, and there was no station, just a platform by the grain elevators. I didn’t ask her how my father would know to get off here, how she thought he’d know where to find her if he did come back. I also wondered why she was so sure he was coming specifically to see her. He might, for example, have thought of returning to see me. But really, I didn’t for one minute believe he was coming. It hadn’t occurred to me for ages that he ever would.
“It’s not likely, is it?” I said.
She didn’t answer that, didn’t like the question and didn’t like me making my voice gentle when I said it. You would not call my mother a hopeful person. I don’t think I ever saw her look as if she was anticipating something unless she was play-acting it to amuse a child, the way you do, pretending to expect one thing and then, when the opposite occurs, affecting great surprise. Sufficient to my mother was the moment she was in and the hand she was dealt. I really think she saw hope as an affront to her God and the reality He’d created. She was motivated by belief.
“I’ll come back after I get my groceries,” I said. “If you want me here.” It would mean I’d be late getting home and late getting supper on the table, and she knew it and thanked me. I held back my sigh. It wasn’t new between us that my mother expected much of me and I rose to her requirement. She had named me Ruth for a reason and I was every bit as loyal as my namesake, but when I thought of the biblical Ruth, I always pondered the fact that “ruthless” is the word that has survived.
I shopped at Scott’s, of course. The new store was bigger than the one in Gilroy had been, although not as big as the Co-op down the highway in Central Butte, where the majority got their groceries. Scott had to keep longer hours because of that, but it didn’t bother him. The store was his life.
“How is your mother?” It was the first thing he said to me every time I came in, even if he’d seen her that morning. Then, no doubt, we’d have to go through the entire family, each brother and sister, since none of them had remained in the district and couldn’t speak for themselves. I’d worked for Scott for several years and had clerked for him off and on since Leonard and I were married, too, when he’d needed extra help, and in spite of my fondness for him, his little tics irritated me. My mother used to say of Olive, his wife, that she thought she was one of the elite because she lived above the rest of us over the store (we called it The Emporium because of her), and Scott sometimes employed the same upper-class assumptions, in spite of his innate humility. Oh, how complicated we all are, I thought as I browsed the shelves for Corn Flakes and such. And Leonard was so much like him.
How was my mothe
r? A good question, and not one I was going to answer out loud. Nor, apparently, was I going to think about it much, because Scott was alone in the store, and we had to chat about the crops and the harvest and the weather. I wondered, as we talked and I picked up canned baked beans and dish detergent and set them into the cardboard box beside the other necessities of life, if he didn’t have any under things on his mind, any fires that ran underground and never stopped burning. I’d tried to put out one of those fires that morning. I’d called Bill Longmore. I wasn’t at all sure of what I was doing and I hung up a couple of times before the phone started ringing. It was likely wrong to call him, even though I’d told him I would if I ever heard any news. I knew his wife had died after her long illness and he’d been alone for more than a year. I heard his voice get hopeful, and I wasn’t doing it for him. I didn’t ask him to do anything, but I let it sound as if she might need somebody and I could hear him thinking it might be him. He was the kind of guy who responded to other people’s needs. If he thought he could be a help to her, he would try. All the time we were talking, I worried that if he did head out to find her, it would end badly for him. It had been on my conscience ever since and it made me feel like picking a fight. That wasn’t going to happen; you didn’t fight with your father-in-law, not in my world. I was saved from any confrontation, anyway, when the Milton brothers came in, gabbing nonstop, as they always did, as if they’d just accidentally bumped into one another on the street, and didn’t see each other every hour of every day and (some said) sleep together at night. They did interrupt their conversation long enough to say, “Scott,” in unison.
“Boys,” he said.
They didn’t get far into the store. They stopped by the window, gesticulating and spouting such wisdom as, “What goes round, comes round,” and “History repeats itself.” I wondered about this applying to my own situation. Could I take it as a sign that I was hearing such phrases said? But that was a dumb kind of logic; my father had never returned, he had never written to us, he had never shown the slightest interest in our existence – so if he did show up today, it wouldn’t be a case of history repeating itself, it would be a case of a miracle occurring in Lawson, Saskatchewan. While I finished my foraging, the Miltons got well into their most recent theory that Khrushchev and Kennedy were going to start a third world war, and more than history was repeating itself.