The expression frozen into the dead man’s face was one of determination. His nostrils were packed with wads of cotton, making his nose his salient feature. When he’d been alive, his predominating feature had been his eyes, blue as snow when the sun has just dipped into the winter horizon. He always seemed to be looking beyond into something that was invisible to others. Even at the hotel in town, where he once walked late at night to sweep rubble from the parlour floor, his blue eyes contemplated a scene beyond the smoke-filled parlour, something amusing to make him stop sweeping and chuckle suddenly, or something sombre and dark which he would take to the cottage with him to think about while he puttered in his flower garden. But his pale eyes no longer looked into the ridiculous or the profane. They were opened, staring up at the rafters which were strung with bundles of dried basil and sage leaves and spirals of flypaper thickly coated with the husks of insects.
Outside the cottage, an old woman sat on a bench and leaned against the narrow slats of the porch. The back of her head was almost level with his where he lay inside on the couch beneath the screened windows. She looked like a lizard sunning itself in the early morning on a moss-covered rock. She didn’t wear her dentures and so her caved-in mouth made her nose jut forward from her face and her chin recede into her neck. She sat shapeless and colourless with her sun-spotted hands idle in her lap. The narrow slats of the porch wall pressed into the woman’s fleshy back but she didn’t notice. She was listening to the wind passing through the screens in the windows above her kerchiefed head. She thought that the sound of it was not a hopeless sound. It was the same sound as the river rushing along its course to its irrevocable end in a larger body of water. The wind had come early that morning, before the sun, and had drowned out the fluttering sound of her husband’s breath struggling to free itself of the liquids in his lungs. She blinked rapidly and folded one pudgy, spotty hand overtop the other.
She scratched at her ankle with her slippered foot. The town was so still that she could hear the humming of electricity in the wires along the road and the sound of blood rushing in her veins. Birds cried as they circled the air above the river. Get up, she told herself. Put on your workboots and go into the back garden and pull the potatoes. All summer she had plucked beetles from the leaves and squashed them between her fingers. She had banked the plants with mounds of black dirt. Now is the time to pull the potatoes, she thought and then she caught herself. What am I doing? My husband is dead and I think of potatoes. But the idea of work to be done was restful. Instead of jumping up and running to the potting shed to take the bushel baskets down from the wall, she would rest. There was still time to sit. The town hadn’t begun to stir and the doctor had yet to come and administer the six o’clock injection of morphine. She had this time of grace before she needed to accept the finality of her husband’s stiffening blue-white features.
She bent down and picked at a loose thread on her plaid slipper and watched with fascination as the chain stitching unravelled. She looked about for a place to put the unravelled thread. She gathered it between her fingers and rolled it into a ball. She leaned back against the porch and through the slits of her half-closed eyes, she watched the sun rise. It was a fireball that swept from north to south above the trees that lined the river bank below. Back and forth it wheeled. She sighed and ran her tongue across her shrunken gums to erase a sour taste that nestled there like the orange sprinkles of beetles’ eggs on the underside of a potato leaf. If only Eve hadn’t sinned, she thought. Then there would have been no beetles to squash between her fingers or weeds to be hacked away. Because of Eve, each time her monthly bleeding had stopped and she’d been pregnant, she’d faced that nine months with dread, longing for a way around the curse. But there was no path around the pain of childbirth. You had to go through it before you could experience relief. It was all part of the curse, she told herself, beetles attaching themselves to her potatoes, childbirth and the silence in the porch.
She stared unblinking at the fireball above the trees and rolled the thread between her thick fingers until it was moist. Then she let it drop to the ground. She bent over, searched the other slipper for a loose thread, found one and pulled. What was worse for her now, she wondered? Loose threads or twenty-eight jars of watermelon pickles?
She saw them suddenly, the jars lined up on the shelves in the cellar, side by side, shining with the inner glow of the pale pink fruit, jewel-like and perfect. Of all the times he had to choose to die, it would be this time when the cellar was fall of preserves. Yesterday he’d asked her for a dill pickle and she’d refused because they weren’t sour enough. What did it matter whether the pickles were sour enough or not? What did it matter? Watermelon pickles or not watermelon pickles? What does anything matter now, she asked, but felt saddened by the look of her slippers. The tongues had been loosened when she’d pulled at the threads. They made things too cheaply. She forced her plucking hands to lie still in her lap. What am I to do now? she asked herself. What am I going to do with twenty-eight jars of watermelon pickles? She recited them:
two dozen peaches in heavy syrup
three dozen quarts crabs
two and a half pints pears
fourteen jars plum jam with wax seals, seven with tops
one dozen two-quart sealers dills
And I couldn’t even give him one.
The fireball climbed higher in the sky. The sound of the wind changed. It carried within it another sound. It was the sound of dried corn stalks when her skirts brushed against them. It was the sound of a man’s hoarse whisper, urgent.
“Anna.”
“Yes, what is it?” she asked. She had always promised herself that if an angel should speak, she would say, here am I, Lord.
“Water. Please. I want a drink.”
She rose from the bench slowly. She climbed the three stairs. She entered the porch and passed by the bed of the dead man without looking at him. She went over to the treadle sewing machine where there was a tumbler and a jug of water. She tried to lift the jug. Her hands were two spotted stones dangling uselessly from the ends of her arms. She knew her husband was dead. She’d pulled the plaid blanket up around his chin and felt the unyielding heaviness of his cold arms when she’d placed them beneath the blanket. Could it be grief that caused her to hear voices where there should be none?
“I can’t lift the jug. You don’t really need water, do you?” Dried leaves stirred on the windowsill where his potted plants were lined, now just brown stalks in hard earth, neglected because of his illness. It was as though her words had lifted the leaves into motion.
“Ahh,” his voice was expelled slowly. “Why would I ask you for water if I didn’t need it? I’m so very hot.”
The snake of fear uncoiled in her chest. Hot. He was hot? “Where are you?” she asked. She had warned him and warned him. All through the long night she had read the Bible, first the Psalms and then the New Testament, and had come to the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, when the sun first sat upon the trees. Send Lazarus to touch the tip of my tongue, she had read. The flames torment me. For those who didn’t believe in a real hell, this was the place they should look, she was going to tell him and then noticed the absence of his rattling breath. She’d set the Bible aside, gotten up swiftly and knelt beside him and listened. His nose had stopped bleeding and the cotton wads in his nostrils were stiff with dried blood.
All night long he’d plucked at the cotton with his nicotine fingers and his sin had glared in the early morning light as she knelt beside his cooling body. His stained fingers were evidence of his sin, his habit of slipping into the potting shed every hour to roll a cigarette. The indelible yellow stains were proof of his imperfection. Where are you, God had asked Adam and Adam had answered, I hid because I was afraid; and that was what he’d done too, shutting himself away inside the potting shed to smoke his cigarettes, as though God couldn’t see. She’d knelt and prayed that God could overlook this one thing, but she doubted that He would. She saw
her husband’s nosebleeds, his coughing and spitting of blood as judgement of guilt. She’d warned him every single day for sixty-two years that this could happen.
“Where I am is not your concern,” he said.
“Just so. Don’t blame me if you’re hot. What more could I do? I bathed you every hour. Now tell me, what else before I go? The potatoes are ready for pulling.”
He looked past her with his steady contemplative blue gaze. He looked into each far corner of the porch and then up at the dangling spirals of flypaper. “What else? A smoke. Mother, make me a cigarette.”
She was beyond anger. There was an immense sadness flooding into every part of her large body. “The body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. You would defile it with nicotine, even now?”
He sighed. He closed his eyes. His mouth was cracked from his fever. He ran his tongue across his chapped lips. She wondered if she should dip a hanky into the jug and moisten his lips for him and then she remembered that he was dead and she was standing there talking to a dead man and he was answering her, which was as far as she was willing to go, because he was not an angel.
“I never told you this,” he said after a short time.
She stopped breathing.
“Never mind. It doesn’t really matter.”
“What? What?”
“It’s nothing. I was going to say something about the way you look. But it doesn’t matter.”
She looked at herself. There was nothing wrong with her appearance. She felt comfortable in the shapeless dress. She dressed in the manner fitting for an older Christian woman. Nothing between mid-calf and the neck was revealed. She even wore heavy cotton stockings during the summer.
He was casting stones at her to draw attention away from his own wrongdoing. “I’m running here and I’m running there,” she said. “You make yourself sick, I have the running around. I wonder what you would look like if you followed me through the day? And what else? I stayed up and prayed for you all night. The girls come every day and I do the cooking. I haven’t had time to fix my hair for three days and so I wear the scarf.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“What then?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Say it.”
“I meant that — oh, I don’t know if after sixty years it helps to say anything about it, but — you’re too fat.”
“I?”
He nodded his silver head.
She slammed the porch door behind her. Her slippers smacked loudly against the stairs. She suddenly hated the colour green. He’d painted the bench she’d sat on and the platform that held the rain barrel on the south corner of the house facing the potting shed and the three steps leading into the porch, the same vivid green as the fruit trees. He had never asked her, what do you think of green? Do you think green would be a fair colour? He’d never asked her whether she thought fruit trees across the back of the garden were a good thing. The first thing she would do would be to walk into town to the hardware store and buy a can of paint. Grey or brown, or something the colour of a potato beetle. And who would have to bring in his glad bulbs for winter storage? She would. Even though her vegetable garden had been placed in the back field farthest from the rain barrel and beneath the fruit trees (wood ticks in spring and three part rows of corn lost to the shade of the fruit trees) and even though his flowers had gradually taken over half of the vegetable garden, she’d never complained. A continual dropping on a very rainy day and a contentious woman were alike, the Bible said, and that was not her sin, being quarrelsome. Not that it would have helped to complain. Complaining would have just sent him into his faraway expression more often or into the potting shed. She would bring his glad bulbs in and she would also bring in the potatoes.
She sat back down on the bench and let her hands fall into her lap. She half closed her eyes once again, lulled by the sound of the wind in the screens. Even so, she told herself. Watermelon pickles or not watermelon pickles, what does it matter? Once more she viewed the sun through half-closed eyes. It became a fireball that jiggled and darted off to the right. She felt the warmth of it in her broad cheeks. If she could turn her head right around, the fireball would make a full circle around her. She turned her head as far as it would go. The fireball followed. She turned her head the other way and heard the clatter of clay pots knocking against each other in the potting shed.
“And listen here, Father,” she said. “And not only that. I told you and told you it wasn’t a good thing to feed that cat. It’s back here again. It’s knocking over your plants. And who’s going to have to clean up that mess, I wonder?” Hah, let the cat reach above the door where he hid his papers and the tin of tobacco and let the cat form a cigarette for him. That was what tobacco was good for. It was good for animals only. Poison for stray cats. She searched about in her dress pocket and found a peppermint candy. She rolled it about her mouth. She felt some of the tension begin to leave her body as its sweetness was released and slid down the back of her throat.
“Mother. Oh, Mother. Are you still there?”
“I am here.”
“Make me a cigarette, Mother. Just this once.”
“Never. I won’t be a part of you willfully harming your body.”
“But you do it yourself. You’re harming your body with food.”
She withdrew the diminished peppermint from her mouth and examined it closely. “That’s foolishness,” she said and put the candy back into her mouth. “God gave us food. If we didn’t eat, we’d die.”
“You refuse to make me a cigarette?”
“I refuse.” She wouldn’t have that on her conscience. She’d never made it easy for him. She hadn’t permitted him to smoke his weed in the house. She was positive that he had her to thank for his eighty-one years. I have fought the fight, she told herself, I have won the race.
“In this case, I must obey God rather than man,” she said and smiled gently, a toothless innocent smile. She waited for him to reply but heard instead the sound of a car moving slowly up the road. Six o’clock already. The fireball danced crazily. She arranged her skirt to cover her knees. The doctor’s car entered the lane slowly and came to a halt. He got out of the car and walked across the yard and stood in front of her.
“Look,” she said, and pointed to her feet. “My slippers are coming apart. They make everything too cheaply in this country.”
“Nothing lasts forever,” the doctor said. “Tell me, did Mr. Thiessen have a good night?”
“A good night, yes.”
He was short and squat, wide enough to block out her view of the sun. She didn’t like this man because even though she had never seen him smoke a cigarette, or smelled tobacco on his clothing, she suspected that he did smoke because he’d never reprimanded her husband for smoking or advised him to stop.
“And how about you?” he asked. “How did it go yesterday? Did your daughters come over and help out?”
“They come over every day,” she said. “It’s a little extra work cooking meals for them. But I don’t mind.”
“It’s unfortunate at a time like this, but we do have to eat, don’t we?”
“That’s what I told him. God intended that we should eat.”
He shifted his black bag from one hand to the other. “Some more than others.” Then he set the bag down on the bench beside her, opened it and took out the stethoscope. “I may as well have a look at you too, while I’m here.”
“There’s nothing the matter with me.”
“Give me your arm, please.”
She held up her arm. He felt for her pulse. He frowned. He placed the stethoscope against the pulse in the crook of her arm, listened for a few moments and put the instrument back into his bag. “I’m not fussy about the sound of that,” he said. She caught a fleeting glimpse of the syringe of painkiller that he’d come to inject into her husband’s thin veins.
“Well,” the doctor said. “Tell you what. It might be a good idea to have one of your daughters br
ing you into the office for a checkup. Do you think you could arrange that?”
“The potatoes are ready for pulling.”
“The potatoes. I suppose so. But couldn’t you get someone to do it for you this year?”
She stared at him.
“Well, never mind. We can talk about it later. I’ll just have a look in on Mr. Thiessen right now.”
“He’s in the porch.”
She heard the sound of his feet as he walked up the three green stairs. She heard the porch door squeak as it opened and closed. Her time of grace was over. She got up from the bench to follow the doctor. She heard the sound of pottery breaking in the potting shed.
That cat. She would have to go and chase that animal away before it broke every last one of her husband’s pots. Why didn’t he think of those things? He fed the cat and left her to take care of the consequences. She took the broom down from its clasp on the wall beside the rain barrel. It was the outside broom, used to sweep dust and snow from shoes and for chasing animals. She raised the broom and walked lightly along the pathway to the potting shed. She was looking at the bottom of the door for the cat to come scooting out and then she would lower the broom. She saw her husband’s shoes first. He was wearing his brown walking boots. Then her eyes travelled up the length of him until his blue eyes looked straight into her own.
“You! I thought it was a cat.”
He’d pulled the cotton wads from his nostrils and his nose was back to its normal size. He wore his tweed cap low onto his forehead and his black serge jacket, the one he wore when he went to work at the hotel, was buttoned neatly. He clutched two earthenware pots, one inside the other, to his chest.
“Don’t worry,” he said finally. “I cleaned up the mess.”
She lowered the broom and stepped to one side as he pushed past her on the narrow path. She caught a glimpse of a flash of yellow inside the pot which he held to his chest. It was his tobacco tin. He’d hidden his tobacco and papers down inside the earthenware pot.
Agassiz Stories Page 10