A Beauty

by Connie Gault

  The women at the hotel had told her about the battle that had taken place here, and she could see marks on some graves that might well be bullet holes, but it was impossible to imagine how it would have been, to fight here some sunny day like today. Boys and girls – the troops were mostly young, in their teens and twenties – running from one headstone to the next, ducking behind them, shooting from behind them, shooting at one another, the booming of the guns, the panting, the curses, with the lake glimmering in the background and the clouds floating by, oblivious, overhead. The dead below, oblivious. Impossible to feel how it would have been to stand among the graves, afterwards, waiting to be executed. Or to hide behind a headstone and witness what was happening. Perhaps her father had done that, right here, where she was standing; perhaps he’d crouched here, at the outside edge of these old graves, watching. She sank down, herself, her hand on an old stone for balance, and looked out from behind it. She shut her eyes and heard birds chirping, not gunfire, not cries, birds.

  She walked down a country lane, alongside the lake, to the traditional smoke sauna, a little wood hut by the water. She reached it at four o’clock and found it ready for her. A note pinned on the door had her name on it and the time and the information that the bill had been paid by the hotel in Hämeenlinna. Inside was a towel and a switch made of birch twigs. More punishment, she thought, recalling the stocks, but she didn’t feel she was being punished; just the opposite. She felt thankful. She stayed longer than she’d thought she could in the sauna, sweating in the extreme heat so encompassing that it blocked out all thinking.

  After the sauna and a cold dip off the little dock, she sat under the trees, enervated. But it suited her to feel weak and tired and cleaned out and at the end of things. The tree branches lifted and fell, the shadows around her lifted and fell, the secretive leaves rustled. The name means woods or glade, she remembered. Maybe her father had been here; maybe after the battle in the cemetery, he’d run here and rested. She saw the very place for him to rest, in a hollow between two trees. It was a bright spot, covered in fine, dense, spongy-looking emerald green, dotted with yarrow and buttercups and ferns. She could see him lying there, the whole long length of him.

  Her mind went back to the cemetery and she imagined herself standing over a grave marked with a simple cross, down near the lake, imagined it belonged to her mother, that her mother was lying there under the quiet grass. She almost knew how it would have felt to have found it, to get that close to her.

  How beautiful this little woods. Above her was the speckled light she thought she remembered from childhood, the sun glinting through the branches of birch trees. Ah yes, they were birches. She sat for a long time at that spot. She thought about the quietness, about being alone. She sat with her hands lightly clasped and it seemed she’d completed the circle of herself.

  GILROY

  My daughter wanted to talk to me about our visitor. It was the evening of the day I walked to the railway tracks with my mother, and I wasn’t at my most patient. We were doing the dishes together, so the conversation took place alongside the clacking of plates as she dried two at a time and the clinking of glasses as she shot them into their rows in the cupboard shelves. She wanted me to give Elena a label of some kind, call her strange or extraordinary, pin her down in some way that would put her in her place as neatly as the knives and forks in the silverware drawer. She didn’t know that’s what she wanted. She searched for the questions to ask, the ones that would lead me to define Elena for her, and in doing that define me, which would in turn supposedly tell her something about herself.

  “She’s not like anyone I ever met,” Valerie said.

  I nodded as if that had been my observation too, as if I’d always thought there was no one like Elena Huhtala.

  “I wonder where she is now.”

  I wondered, too, where Elena was now, if she would have reached Trevna yet, if she would make it home. I had never been to that part of the province, but I could imagine the countryside; it wouldn’t be much different from here, a long gravel road between unremarkable fields and then the driveway, the huddled farm buildings, and Mr. Huhtala waiting there. Or maybe not waiting there. It had been a few months since I’d heard from him, and he had talked about dying in his last letter, not in the roundabout way most people do, but right out, because it was on his mind.

  Standing at the sink, I had my back to the table where Elena had sat the day before. I could feel her presence, still, in the room. “I did something wrong,” I said.

  Valerie stopped with a mixing bowl midair and looked at me over her shoulder. It was a somewhat unusual admission, I suppose. That was what the expression on her face said.

  “I’ve been writing to her father for years and I had a letter from him only a few months ago. I should have told her that. I don’t know why I didn’t. I should have.”

  “It was a secret. You kept it even from us. I mean, you never talked about him.”

  I didn’t know how to answer that. It seemed a pointless thing to have done. I didn’t think I’d done it deliberately.

  “It’s okay, Mum,” Valerie said.

  “He was alone. All these years.” I leaned against the sink. “I just thought it would be good for him to have someone keep in touch. I liked him very much, you know. I mean, I like him. He writes good letters; it’s as if he’s thinking out loud. Last time I heard from him he reminded me about something he told me long ago, about Finns who think they can predict their own demise. That’s how he puts it – demise. The thing is, they predict it so far in advance, it’s more … more inevitable than clairvoyant. But I think … well, it’s been hard for him.” I remembered Elena had said that. His life was hard. I hadn’t wanted to believe her that he’d let her think he’d killed himself, but now I thought anything could happen; you could never tell what someone would do.

  “Do you think she will go home?”

  “I hope so.”

  We worked away quietly for a bit, the old routine taking over. I started thinking once again about my phone call to Bill that morning, worrying about meddling in somebody else’s life, and reminding myself how unknowable Elena really was.

  “I hope things turn out okay for her,” Val said finally. She’d stopped drying and was watching my face for any telltale thoughts.

  “It would be hard to know what okay would be, for her,” I said. I don’t think I meant it quite the way it came out. I’m afraid, since Valerie grinned so conspiratorially afterwards, it must have sounded sardonic. I remember it clearly, that moment – the intimate, approving smile, and how briskly she hung up her tea towel and turned to me.

  “She’ll get what she deserves, I guess,” she said. As blithe as can be.

  I have to say I was startled. For one thing, it wasn’t how we talked about people; it wasn’t what we believed, that people got what they deserved, or that they should, and I thought we would have to have a talk about the complicated feelings a person like Elena could evoke. But at the same time it made me happy, her saying that. She was so obviously – if a little wickedly – on my side.

  She grinned again and gave me a little shove, her preferred method of showing affection lately, and then she was flying out the door, leaving me staring after her. Gone, I thought. I was still staring at the empty space in the screened window that had held her just a second before. The sun had set by then; beyond the door it was the time of evening called the gloaming in poetry and songs, not quite dark, a shadowy time, just right for thinking about people being gone.

  Driving home on the old back road after leaving my mother that afternoon, I’d known I was going to stop at the Gilroy townsite again. I parked on the bit of intersection that remained, as I always did. I got down from the truck and walked the few feet to the ditch. The wind had picked up and Ted Evans’s wheat came towards me in waves. It was quiet but for the usual sounds of the usual insects and the odd bird twittering the way they do, making it seem quieter than ever after they stop. I think I kne
w there was nothing for me there, but I stood for a few minutes watching the wheat heave like the ocean.

  After that I drove home fast, conscious of being late and having groceries to unload and supper to get ready. By the time I pulled into the driveway, the sun was getting low, and I hurried to do all that. Now I stopped tidying my kitchen and imagined myself stepping out of the truck and standing a minute with my hand on the open door, looking at our house the way Elena did the day she showed up, as if I had all the time in the world. I didn’t really see the house or the yard or the fields or the sky beyond, all of which would have been in the picture. I saw myself in the doorway with my daughter at my side. I saw it the way Elena would have seen it.

  TREVNA

  Now she was driving on a road she knew, a road she’d walked along many times as a girl. It hadn’t been paved, and much of the gravel had worn away; the packed dirt surface had been gouged into tire tracks. Her car was coated with satiny dust. Some of the land on the south side had been irrigated and was growing a vegetable crop she couldn’t identify; some of the fields were just pasture, divided from the ditches by sagging barbed wire. A green smell came in her open windows and she thought about the years when there had been no green, when the sparse grass had bleached to the colour of the hard clay underneath it, when the dried-out ground had split in long, deep cracks. She passed the Gustafsons’ farm, if it was still the Gustafsons’ farm, and remembered riding into Trevna with them, in their wagon. They’d had a little girl and a son; she’d sat in the back of the wagon, between them, not knowing she was on her way out of here.

  She pulled over to the side of the road and stopped the car. Her father’s land was just ahead, to the right. The house looked the same, the barn and outbuildings, the long driveway. The windbreak poplars had grown taller and some fir trees had been planted. The dugout was full of water that looked blue from this distance.

  He was sitting reading a book at the table in the window. Once in a while he scratched the side of his nose with his forefinger, and once in a while he appeared to look over at the old wood stove that gleamed across the kitchen, all shiny black iron and highly polished, curlicued chrome. Regularly, he turned a page. He was him, that’s what she thought, he was him in some way she’d forgotten or perhaps had never understood. So much older, but still he was the him that was her father. He didn’t know he was being watched. She was standing off to the side, but within his field of vision, and he would see her if he looked. Coming home from school, as a girl, she had done this. He’d be bent over some work and she’d sneak up on him, wherever he was, outside or in, to see the expression on his face when he looked up.

  She backed away from the window. Now that I know, she thought, I could turn around and leave. She did turn; she thought about leaving. She looked at her rented car and pictured it driving away, got it as far as the road, and then the field in front of the house drew her attention. Every pebble and blade of grass, every stalk in the stubble was lit as if on fire by the western sun. She had seen a prairie fire as a child. She’d watched it from the Gustafsons’ yard, where her father had left her while he went to help fight against it. The flames had raced over the neighbouring land, sounding like the wind. The men had worked for hours, digging trenches to confine it. Then all they could do was let it burn itself out. She’d had to stay past dark and even then she wouldn’t go into the house, so Mrs. Gustafson had come outside and stood beside her, eating a slab of bread and butter. The fire had almost died by then, but it still reeked; smoke and ashy flakes still drifted over them, and dozens of cow pies still smouldered in the blackened pastures. Like candles in the night, Mrs. Gustafson said, or like some of the stars had fallen. After a minute she tore off half of the bread and handed it over and Elena ate it.

  He hadn’t heard the whispers she’d overheard. At least he didn’t hang himself in his own barn. Somebody had done that, some other farmer who hadn’t been able to make a go of it, who couldn’t watch his animals starve, his kids take charity. They’ll find him in a gully one of these days, with his gun beside him. That was another. He hadn’t seen the pictures those whispers summoned. She leaned her back against the ridged clapboard and closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, it was to survey the glowing fields beyond the farmyard. Her father’s land had been harvested, so he must have had enough rain and sun this year to make up for the poor soil. Or maybe he’d amended it over time, growing pulse and things like that, as she knew he’d been advised to do. The garden was at the other side of the house, by the dugout. She supposed it would be doing well, if he’d kept it up. There would be vegetables to cook on that shiny stove.

  The linoleum shone, too, she observed, when she walked in. He looked up from his book.

  His long, deeply furrowed face expressed nothing. Maybe a mild surprise, at someone he didn’t expect walking into his house. His eyes, enlarged behind the reading glasses, looked cloudy. He removed the glasses, but she still wasn’t certain he could see well enough to recognize her, although he looked right at her and she was only a few feet away. She thought he must be getting deaf, or he would have heard her car pull up, the door open.

  “Isä,” she said. She sat down across from him. He put his glasses down on the table and gripped his book with both hands. The book trembled with his old man’s palsy. He stared at her, either unseeing or stunned, she couldn’t tell. He’d always been good at hiding his feelings.

  “It’s Elena,” she said.

  He nodded. He closed his book and looked over at the stove, the way he might have looked to a friend to help him. She looked at the stove, too. It had sat there for as long as she could remember.

  She turned back to him and said, “You look well.”

  He shook his head. She could see the side of his face, his mouth working. She thought he might cry and he would not want to cry, so she said, teasingly, “And the kitchen is very clean.”

  After a few moments, he said, “I have a housekeeper, these days.” He faltered, but almost managed to speak in his old droll way, looking up at her just at the last moment. He was grateful to her, she could see it in his eyes, the glimmer of relief. The pattern he’d set long ago would hold, he could rely on that. It would keep him safe, the way it always had, slightly mocking everything to do with himself.

  “Times have changed,” she said, and when he looked uncertain, she explained, “A housekeeper, no less.”

  “Yeah.” He sounded shy, as if it was an admission. Maybe he thought she was criticizing. There had been no hired help when she lived here.

  “That clock is new,” she said. It was a round disk embedded in a red plastic rooster.

  “Aggie bought it.”

  “Aggie Lindquist?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s your housekeeper?”

  “Yeah. Comes afternoons. Brings supper, cleans.”

  “She certainly does clean,” Elena said.

  He almost smiled. “What would people say if it wasn’t spotless?”

  A fly came to life and started attacking the ceiling light fixture, buzzing and bumping against it. The flyswatter hung by the screen door on a nail that had been pounded into that wall forty years before. It was a new swatter, though, of perforated red plastic. Elena was beginning to get an idea of Aggie’s taste. And Aggie was slyer than she was sometimes given credit for, she decided; there was more than a bit of the rooster about her father, still. What would people say, indeed, if Aggie spent a few hours here, and the house didn’t get cleaned? She took the swatter and waved it around a foot below the fly while her father watched her – how? As if she’d never left? As if he might not ever see her again? There was no telling. The fly retreated and crawled across the high ceiling, just far enough away to be unbothered by her. She followed it to the living room, which looked exactly as it had the day she left, sparsely furnished and uncomfortably overlaid with shadows. But sunlight splashed down the stairwell from the hall window above and in spite of Aggie’s efforts, dust motes float
ed up and down in the lit space.

  “Is it all right if I stay a few days?” she asked when she came back. He pointed at the squat refrigerator. It was new. Well, electricity was new, the sink and running water were new; the farm hardly looked prosperous, but the times had surely changed. The fly sat by the capital F at the beginning of Frigidaire. So he could see quite well out of those rheumy old eyes. She slapped the swatter hard and the thing dropped like a raisin to the floor.

  Driving east from the town of Trevna on her way to Maria’s for supper, Aggie Lindquist started musing about death and how unbelievable it was to think that the sun would go on shining and lighting the harvest dust above the fields when she was no longer here to love the way it looked. She had lost one of her old bachelors recently, and in the past two years both her parents had died, but it was Matti Huhtala who had led her mind down this path. The things he said to her. Most of the men wouldn’t talk about dying, but he, who spoke so little, had recently told her he was beginning to grieve for all he was going to lose. He hadn’t said it quite like that though. He’d said, A table lasts longer than the man who made it. Watching the clock, he’d said, It gets less before it’s gone. She was thinking how it would be, to feel like that. So she drove along, loving the occasional black-eyed Susans – they were easy to love – and then about twenty grackles flew over the road, dropping their shadows across the hood of her truck, and then she saw the car in Matti’s driveway and slammed on the brakes. She backed up for a better look. If she’d been a different person, if she’d been Maria, for instance, she’d have turned in even though she’d cleaned for Matti earlier and had already left him his supper. If he’d been a different person, too.