Inland Passage

by Jane Rule

  It was a long speech for Canchek. He walked over to the collapsed septic tank and dragged it over to his van.

  “I’ll take this to the dump on my way to get the pipe,” he said.

  “You can fix it then?” she asked.

  “Sure, today,” he answered and smiled at her slumping relief.

  Judith had had her frugal lunch before Canchek returned, knowing he would have stopped for a man’s lunch with his mother, a woman Judith had never met. Mrs. Canchek spoke only enough English to call her son to the phone or say when he would be back. As far as Judith knew, she never left the place, a well-made log cabin in a clearing as neat and bare as a table top between meals. Canchek did their shopping. Occasionally Mrs. Canchek could be seen behind the high deer fence around the vegetable garden, hoeing, drab kerchief around her head, skirts to the ground, a peasant in a painting. There were neither chickens nor dog to keep her company. The only sign of companionability was a bird feeder outside what was probably a kitchen window. No one was ever invited in.

  Judith did not go out at once to greet him. She stayed at her own kitchen table and watched him work, shoveling new trenches away from the uncovered septic tank, like fingers stretching away from a palm, down hill. It was hot now, and, though the tank had been emptied, the soil he dug in must be putrid with clogging waste. Yet he was taking time, like a man not reckoning the hours, to sift what good bulbs he found and pile them for her to replant in the restored bed. As son to woman, obedient to her love of flowers, though there were none in his own beaten and swept yard. Was he, in fact, good to his mother? Or did he go home and sit sullen with the burden she was to him and let her bring him servile offerings?

  The phone rang. Judith let it ring six times before she answered it.

  “Outdoors, were you?” her husband asked, his dictating cheerfulness always freshly insulting her.

  Judith wanted to answer truthfully, but instead said, “I’m digging out the septic tank with Canchek.”

  “My God, Judy, martyrdom doesn’t have to go that far. Surely, the man is paid enough—If I recall the last bill correctly—to do it himself.”

  “I wanted to save the bulbs,” she answered defensively.

  “Buy more; buy a carload.”

  Is there any point? Is there going to be a next year, she wanted to ask him, but she didn’t.

  “One of the reasons Canchek’s so expensive is that he’s too cheap to buy himself machinery. Is he out there with a shovel? I bet he is.”

  “He says it’s the only way to do it properly,” Judith answered.

  “Once a shit shoveler, always a shit shoveler. Is he going to get it done by the week-end?”

  “He said he’d be finished today.”

  “Good. I’ll be down then, tomorrow.”

  “Driving?”

  “No, I’m beat. I’ll take the early train.”

  He didn’t ask her to meet him any more than he would ask to come down. At first, she had canceled whatever other plans she had made either to go out, which he wouldn’t want to do, or have friends in, because she didn’t trust herself to keep up the facade with an attentive audience. Lately, she had not made week-end plans, a time she spent either in relieved loneliness or in nervous dread that this would be the last time. By now, she was equally afraid that he would decide to re-establish himself in their life or end it.

  Canchek was now kneeling, replacing the terracotta tiles he had dug up. It would have been no use or terrible use to have had a son, if not materially bound to her as Canchek was to his mother, still guilty to leave her as his father had done before him. People said it was harder for a man to leave when there were children. Was it? Sometimes Judith imagined her husband regretting his refusal to be a father, easier to leave her in children’s distracting company than alone. But that allowed him some concern for her feelings. He didn’t want to know she had any.

  Canchek was now laying the long black perforated pipe along a trench, his feet planted on either side, walking backwards. She envied him a task to be absorbed in, then remembered the stench of it for a man whose only known pleasure was sailing, the freshening breeze taking him far out from shore until salt purified the odors of earth and the far horizon promised nothing, nothing at all.

  He was standing at the back door.

  “Have you got a bucket?” he asked.

  His eyes were darker than they had been in the morning, as if they had absorbed the color of earth. He had put on a sweat band. It pressed at his hairline, forcing his hair to stand up like a dark crop.

  She found two buckets and went out with him to gather stones from the pile he had found. A wheelbarrow would have been more efficient, and there was one in the garden shed, but she did not want to think her husband’s thoughts. A breeze had come up from shore with the faintest bite of autumn in it, cooling the afternoon, making their harvesting of rock easier. Sometimes he stopped to shovel dirt over the rock they had strewn, leaving her to haul by herself, and alone with her own job she felt more companionable with him, as if he accepted a simple partnership.

  It was nearly six o’clock when they finished, the light nearly gone. She washed out the buckets while he collected scraps and tools.

  “May I get you something?” Judith asked. “Coffee? A cold drink?”

  “Fill her up as soon as you can,” he said. “I’ll cover her up tomorrow, some time before dark.”

  She nodded but waited, keeping the question between them.

  “Her,” he said finally, nodding his head in a homeward direction.

  An apology, an excuse. Was that how her husband left his woman with that grunted female pronoun and a nod in the direction of the sea? Perhaps Canchek preferred a mother to a woman with more ambiguous needs and motives. Nothing bound him really but his acceptance of the bond.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’m so glad it could be done.”

  “There’s always a way to do it right,” he said.

  Canchek had not returned by the time Judith left to meet her husband’s train. There was still an hour of daylight. To defend Canchek, she wanted him to have come and gone before she returned. For herself, she wanted him to be there when she got back, she couldn’t say why. Canchek could not prevent anything from happening or make it happen, a dark figure in the dusk, shoveling.

  “He doesn’t look quite human,” her husband observed out the kitchen window, pouring himself a drink.

  “He said yesterday, ‘Man’s the only animal that doesn’t like his own smell.’”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” her husband asked.

  “Just that, to him,” Judith answered.

  “To you?” her husband asked, and she heard in his tone what she had been waiting for, hopefully, then dreadfully, for months.

  “A reason for being civilized?” she suggested mildly.

  He took a long drink and set the glass down. There wasn’t a trace of summer in his face, of sea or earth. He was bleached with tiredness. She couldn’t offer him anything either. He had, in his own house, helped himself.

  “I’ve appreciated it,” he said flatly.

  The months’ long fuse of her fury sputtered up toward an explosion right behind her eyes. The second before it ignited, Canchek’s fist on the back door banged it out.

  “She’s done,” he said.

  “Come have a drink,” Judith’s husband suggested, humanly enough, “after a stinking job like that.”

  But Canchek had turned away quickly after his announcement and was gone. Judith stood in the doorway, looking out at the buried tank, its now secret fingers also properly rock-and-earth-covered, the surface carefully raked to prepare for bulbs, the old ones Canchek had saved and the carload her husband wanted her to buy. They would camouflage and be nourished by man’s “smudge and smell,” which Canchek, and perhaps all men, called by the name of “she,” as they did ships which would bear them away. Judith turned back to her husband.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  �
��You’re welcome,” Judith answered, seeing him for the first time in months as clearly as she saw Canchek, but this man was her husband, at home.

  THE PRUNING OF THE APPLE TREES

  “HE WANTS TO MOVE back in,” Edna said to her friend Dorothy over a diet Pepsi.

  They sat in Edna’s backyard, a patch of flat ground scarred by an abandoned sandbox and a half collapsed dog run. By the garage there was a cracking, grass-threatened square of concrete, poured by enthusiastic amateurs as a basket shooting court only a few years ago. Half of the now derelict vegetable garden had been sacrificed to it. Two aging and neglected apple trees had survived, and here and there minor attempts had been made at clean-up and restoration. Some rather hard-done-by snapdragons bloomed dustily by the fence, and there was a young azalea bush by the back steps, but much remained to be done to make the yard the grandmotherly retreat it could have been.

  “Did he say why?” Dorothy asked.

  “She’s too young for him, too demanding. She doesn’t do his laundry.”

  “He didn’t actually say that!”

  “No,” Edna admitted. “He said he missed the children. I said, ‘I do, too.’ He doesn’t even remember they’ve all gone.”

  “Did he say he missed you?”

  “His courage failed him,” Edna said, laughing. “What do you suppose is the matter with me? I can’t even be angry with him.”

  “You don’t want him back after all this time, do you?” Dorothy asked.

  “Oh, he’d be like something to wear to a party, on the positive side.”

  “At my college reunion last year, the woman who was the star of the occasion had divorced her husband, got a whopping settlement as well as alimony, and now her ex has moved back in with her, but she won’t marry him again. She likes it just as it is being the lady of the house with a star border.”

  “Are they happy?”

  “Obviously, she is,” Dorothy said.

  “Charlie has never asked for a divorce,” Edna said.

  “You’re protection, after all,” Dorothy said. “Men don’t want to remarry any more than they want to marry in the first place, do they?”

  “I guess not,” Edna said.

  She had not been bold enough to trap Charlie into marriage. She’d begun to talk about traveling, maybe even innocently until she discovered how angry the idea made that normally mild mannered young man.

  “You girls!” he had said, in real fury. “You don’t worry about careers or saving money. You just work a while until you’ve got enough to take off, and then you say men have all the freedom.”

  “Would you like to travel?” she asked him.

  “That’s like asking would I like a million dollars. Who wouldn’t?”

  It wasn’t for Charlie a desire but a taunting impossibility, like being a famous athlete or the prime minister.

  “What would somebody like you get out of it, anyway?” he asked later. “You haven’t even mastered another language.”

  Charlie was mastering French as well as studying to pass examinations to become a chartered accountant. Edna was more touched by his seriousness than offended by his scorn. He was quite right really. She hadn’t the ambition to master anything.

  “I could go to England,” she suggested.

  “You’d never figure out how to cross the street, never mind the money.”

  “There’s this tour of Scotland, Ireland, and England,” she persisted.

  “It costs two thousand dollars!” he said, outraged.

  “Well. I’ve got two thousand dollars.”

  “That’s nearly enough for a down payment on a house.”

  “So?”

  “If you think you can go off on a trip like that, blow all your savings, and then come home and…and dump yourself on me…”

  Edna focused again on her friend Dorothy and said, “He married me for my money,” and laughed. “Two thousand dollars! Mind you, in those days it was nearly enough for a down payment on a house…this house.”

  They both turned to look at it, a comfortably aging large stucco box.

  “You could get a couple of hundred thousand dollars for it now, do you know that?” Dorothy asked.

  “I suppose so,” Edna said.

  Charlie hadn’t left until the mortgage was paid, just after his fiftieth birthday.

  “A hundred and sixty dollars a month, the payments were,” Edna said. “You couldn’t rent a room with that now.”

  “You don’t have to have him back, you know,” Dorothy said. “You’re not obligated. Five years is a bit long for these casual affairs modern marriages are supposed to accommodate so easily. It’s even legally desertion by now.”

  “The war separated some people nearly that long,” Edna mused.

  “The war!”

  “Charlie’s older brother was in the war. He said to me once, not long after Charlie left, he thought that was maybe what was wrong with Charlie, that he’d just never been anywhere or done anything.”

  “Who has?” Dorothy asked. “Gus and I went to Palm Springs once, and he didn’t like it.”

  “Oh, Gus!”

  “Well, he’s no more of a stick-in-the-mud than Charlie used to be. I tell you, I watched him pretty closely for a while there,” Dorothy confessed.

  Edna didn’t say that she’d watched Charlie, too. To this day she didn’t know whether Joan had caused his diet or the diet Joan. Edna had, of course, been pleased that he was losing weight though finally he looked haggard rather than healthy. She had even suggested a holiday, somewhere in the sun where he could show off his new trimness and at the same time get some color back into his face.

  “Accountants don’t take winter holidays,” he’d snapped. “You should have married a lawyer if you wanted a winter tan.”

  She didn’t say it was his vanity rather than her own she was trying to cater to. Charlie wasn’t ordinarily a bad tempered man. Only great strain or risk made him rude as he was when he had proposed. Edna did not realize he was working himself up to another kind of proposal, and not to her.

  “What’s so unfair,” Dorothy said, “is that they do all the things they claim to hate once they find someone else, liking going out to dinner or mowing the lawn. Gus has a friend who baby-sits his woman’s kids while she goes out to a movie. They aren’t even his. His own he wouldn’t even take to a movie.”

  “Charlie was a pertty good father. He doesn’t see any of them now.”

  “Well, he’s not shameless, but that’s not much good to the kids, is it?”

  “They’re at an age where parents are chiefly an embarrassment anyway. I wouldn’t be surprised if the boys don’t secretly a bit admire him, ‘Look what the old duffer had the gumption to do.’”

  “Oh, no!” Dorothy said. “Maybe they don’t write or phone as often as they should, but those are loyal boys, Edna.”

  Loyal. That’s a word she would have used to describe Charlie for all those years. What on earth did it mean? That she could count on him not to make rude remarks about her cooking in front of the children or guests? Well, she could, but what she meant was something more like standing by her or the kids, no matter what, really no matter what.

  “They get it from their father,” Edna said.

  “Don’t be sarcastic about your own kids.”

  “I’m not,” Edna said. “I could just as easily call Charlie as either of the boys if I ever needed anything.”

  “But you don’t.”

  “No,” Edna said. “I haven’t asked Charlie for anything, but he saw the kids through college even if he didn’t see them, and he sent me the same housekeeping money even after they left until I sent some of it back. I couldn’t eat like four horses.”

  “So now he can afford to take her out to dinner. Doesn’t that make you mad?”

  “Not any more. If you want to know the truth, I didn’t exactly feel sorry for him. I felt guilty.”

  “Now that’s the living end!” Dorothy said. “It’s all your fault, r
ight? You bought the wrong underwear. You gave him ring-around-the-collar. You didn’t flatter him more than ten times a day. How many times do you have to tell a man that bald is sexy?”

  “I never flattered Charlie. It’s the one thing we fought about. He was so easily flattered by anybody. His head was just like a balloon. One little puff of hot air, and you could see it begin to swell. We argued about it so often we couldn’t be bothered finally to go over it all again. I’d say, ‘Don’t be so easily flattered by the world,’ and he’d say, ‘Don’t be so easily offended by it.’ And then we’d laugh.”

  “Gus is one great arguer. All he ever says is ‘Period.’”

  “So maybe I should have.” Edna said.

  “Should have what?”

  “Told him what a great guy he was.”

  “Now’s kind of a hard time to begin,” Dorothy suggested.

  “We’d both die of embarrassment,” Edna said.

  “What did you say to him?”

  Edna stared out into the apple trees. “I didn’t.”

  He hadn’t, of course, said anything at all about Joan except that he wasn’t any longer living with her, and it was petty of Edna to want to know why, who left whom, for all the day-dreaming reasons she had spent the first two years of their separation concocting. Anyway, she knew perfectly well Charlie hadn’t left Joan. Charlie hadn’t left Edna. She’d thrown him out. She hadn’t even given him that impossible option, “Choose!” Nor bothered with the rhetorical question, “How could you?”

  There was nothing for him to explain to her then or now. It was his stupid vanity. And had that changed? Not likely. Faults like that got worse, not better. Unless, of course, Joan had taught him a real lesson, been the selfish bitch Edna had prayed she was, really hadn’t done his laundry.

  “Do you know what I can’t stand about any of this?” Edna demanded of Dorothy. “Everything I’ve thought and felt for the last five years is so ordinary, and that’s awful.”