Agassiz Stories

by Sandra Birdsell

  He turned from the window and went into the basement to take the last load of clothes from the washer. The house was still. Above him he could hear Truda in the faint cracking of floorboards as she prepared for bed. He set the basket down at the foot of the stairs. He took the rifle down from its rack and sat down on the stairs with the gun across his knees. He shouldn’t have said that, Maurice told himself, thinking of the doctor’s words. That was not professional. He shouldn’t have said that. And then he thought that he should write it down, the words the doctor had said in his office, so that they would know it hadn’t been his idea entirely. He set the rifle aside, searched through his shirt pocket for a pencil. In the furnace room was a box of things kept for the visiting grandchildren, chalk and a chalk board. He took down a half-bottle of scotch from the top shelf, uncapped it and drank deeply. He found the chalk, went back to sit on the stairs.

  He felt light-headed. When he lifted his hand to write, he saw two hands. I, Maurice Ovide Lafrenière … he would write his statement on the wall. When he thought of Henry Roy and his full year of dying, he knew what he should do. To thine own self be true. Take his own good advice. I, he willed his fingers to write, but they wouldn’t do as he wanted. Instead, he saw a jagged thick vertical chalk line on the cement wall. The chalk snapped. Truda was home. She would still be awake, hear the noise of the gun. He didn’t want her to be the one to find him.

  He lay beside Mika in bed. No moonlight shone in the window and it was totally dark in the room. He lay looking up at the ceiling, seeing nothing. To thine own self be true. Who had said that? Phrases, sentences, words that he’d picked out of the air all these years, formed by others. He had used them over and over without really knowing in what context they’d been said. He’d used words to build an image, not to express himself. Well, it’s too late to start now, he told himself. To be, or not to be? To sail a boat, or not to sail a boat? No sail. Put an Evinrude on back of that baby and you won’t catch me this summer. He closed his eyes, opened them again. He sensed that hand reaching to touch him lightly between the shoulder blades. He tried to find some shape to the room in the darkness. He had always been one to stalk a noise down in the night and call to it, who’s there? Who’s there? Through the window and pressed against the sky, he saw the bent shapes of branches reaching in the violet sky and he felt locked behind the windowpane, looking out, unable to move, feeling a hand about to touch him in the centre, near his heart.

  His breath quickened and heat spread across his body. Oh God, he said, and Holy Mother, Jesus Christ. He began to run. He ran along a worn path, familiar to him, running, running. He caught sight of something buff-coloured off to one side of the path. He stopped dead, caught it up to himself knowing instantly what it was. It was his mother’s moccasin, red beads, torn, bedraggled, pitched out of the house by unfeeling people. He clutched it to his breast and his grief rose in his throat. The smell of the soft leather was like his hands, like the smell of wild rabbit. Suddenly, a pinpointing of light pierced his head, a camera shutter opening and closing, and the bubble of his desire broke free and floated out into mainstream. Tears ran down the sides of his face into the pillow.

  “Mika.” He felt her beside him, warm. He willed his leg to move into hers, to wake her. It was pinned to the bed. He was wrapped tightly by fear, unable to move. He began to fight against it. Move, he instructed his arm and struggled to lift it off his chest. Sweat ran down his forehead. He felt the presence of something, someone standing beside the bed, watching his struggle, waiting for him to give up. Move, he told his legs and strained against the blankets. He saw the soft glow of light in the hallway as Truda opened and closed her bedroom door.

  “Truda.” He heard footsteps going down the stairs. He fought to raise his head. His tongue was locked in his head.

  “Maurice Ovide Lafrenière, is that you, or isn’t that you?”

  “It’s me,” Maurice said. Twigs snapped. He turned. It was his uncle, Old Man Desmarais.

  “I’ve been looking all over for you,” the old man said.

  “Is it you then, who’s been following me?”

  Desmarais swept the navy toque from his head, spit into the bush. “You’re a hard one to track,” he said.

  “What do you want?”

  “I’ve come to take you to your people.”

  At last. Maurice felt the wind inside him die. His heart grew calm, slow. He clasped the old man’s shoulders.

  “Father, Father,” Truda called. “Can you hear me?”

  There were sounds about his head, a swarm of mosquitoes, humming. He slapped at them.

  “Air. Lafrenière, can you hear us?”

  He should tell Truda, don’t worry, you won’t be alone. Do what you need to do. “Go away,” he said in French. “I want to go home.”

  “What is he saying?” Mika cried.

  Maurice felt the break coming. He felt the heavy earth slide downward as the dike gave way. “How will we get there?”

  “Water, of course,” the old man said.

  “Of course. The river.”

  The canoe was waiting. Maurice stepped down into it, felt it rock gently. He knelt in the bow facing the river and picked up the paddle.

  “You must speak English,” Mika said. “We can’t understand you.”

  “Father,” Truda cried. “Oh Brian, he’s slipping away. I can feel it.”

  The canoe rocked sharply as Desmarais pushed off and they floated out from the shadows into the dazzling light of sun on water. Maurice dipped the paddle and pulled gently. They moved forward silently. Behind him, he heard a harsh cry. It was the call of the blue herons. He turned and saw them, hundreds, rising from the water, necks pulled in tightly, iridescent beads dropping from their blue wings. Maurice felt the air moving as hundreds of wings fanned.

  “Grab hold,” Desmarais said. Maurice dropped his paddle. He saw it slipping away in the water and thought to reach for it. He would turn around, speak to them all one last time.

  “No, no,” Desmarais said. “We’ll lose the birds. Grab hold quickly.”

  “But I —” I didn’t fill in the forms.

  “Now.”

  Now. Maurice reached, caught hold of a scaly, rough bird leg. Blue wings fanned about his head, struggled against his weight. He felt the bird’s mighty strength in his hands. It faltered, climbed, and then he was skimming across the top of the water, weightless, free, upstream on the river, through its loops and curls out, out to the broad mouth where the colour of the water beneath him changed and the muddy silt settled to the bottom and there stretched before him the endless blue of the giant lake.

  THERE IS NO SHORELINE

  name in a newspaper. Menace to Society. Betty has been kneeling on the floor in the youngest child’s bedroom, wrapping onion soup bowls and earthenware mugs into newspaper and placing them into a large trunk that sits on the braided oval mat in the centre of the upstairs bedroom. The items are new. They are surprises to be discovered when the youngest unpacks. It’s a tradition. All her children expected, looked for the surprises. There are many shipping labels on the trunk. Labels of places she has only read about in newspapers or in the meagre pleading letters she’s received from each travelling child. She reads the newspaper. Menace to Society. It’s the name the judge has bestowed upon a man. It’s like an axe splitting wood, she thinks, and is curious. Her long pale fingers unwrap the paper carefully, iron it flat against the rug. It seems that she gets all of her news this way, down on the floor as she is slipping a sheet of newspaper beneath the cat’s dish or lining the bottom of a boot tray, or else when she is packing or unpacking the paraphernalia that her four grown children have acquired and carted in and back out of the house on their many excursions into adulthood. It seems, too, that the news she reads on the floor among the bits of dried cat food or muddied shoes is more surprising, more interesting. Menace to Society. Then she reads the man’s real name. It catches, like a hook meeting an eye, bringing two pieces of fabric together
. She has that kind of memory. She thinks that it’s compensation for her lack of travel, her inability to go forward, this instant recalling of the past. It’s a trick that she doesn’t understand or even want. She can be walking through a crowded store or driving home from the supermarket and a smell or a sound or a name read in a newspaper will suddenly put her back inside a time. And she can reach out and touch the sides of that time, hear the voices of it, the music, she can smell the air.

  She is behind the counter in the drugstore, refilling the slots with cigarettes and feeling the blister on her heel brought about by a pair of new red shoes. She silently curses her friend, Del, for persuading her to spend the money on them. The bell above the door jangles. She turns. A man approaches the counter and scans the cigarette slots. Smoke from his cigarette curls up into his heavy locks of blond hair. It appears as though his hair has been shellacked into place into a studied careless arrangement across his forehead. He wears the type of white T-shirt that her father wears beneath his barbering shirts, but that men are beginning to wear now with blue jeans.

  “Players Plain.”

  She slides the package from its slot and hands it to him. His knuckles are cracked and rough-looking with black grease imbedded in the chapped skin. A mechanic. His hands are like Frank’s hands. I could never let hands like that make love to me, she tells herself. She wouldn’t be able to stomach the smell of waterless hand cleaner or oily rags, or the smell of heavily greased hair on the pillow beside her. If she did, it would be against her will. She has vowed: never again, against her will.

  The man rolls the change across the counter and then goes over to the payphone, walking with a slightly bow-legged swagger. Betty kneels, slides open the counter door and begins to rearrange the giftware inside. Two pale eyes meet her own through the glass casing. A child’s mouth, pressed against the glass, resembles a snail climbing up the inside of a jar. Saliva dribbles down the showcase. Except for the pale eyes, the child is an exact replica of the man.

  “Hey, come on, I’ve just cleaned that,” Betty says.

  His eyes shift sideways towards the man at the payphone, looking for protection, but the tongue remains on the glass.

  Bribe him. She takes a two-penny sucker from the can on top of the counter, comes around the showcase and holds it out before him. His mouth pops loose from the glass, a grubby hand snakes forward and the sucker is gone. He wears a faded Mickey Mouse T-shirt, overalls which button at the legs and crotch, but the buttons have pulled loose and the overalls hang open like a skirt, exposing his ballooning plastic pants beneath. He scratches at his arms. Betty notices the bites on his arms. Some are the size of nickels, others of pimples.

  She turns from the sight quickly. She doesn’t need to feel sorry for him. So she goes over to the coffee bar instead and slips off the offending red shoes and feels sorry for herself. They cost twenty-five dollars. She has two jobs now. During the day she works as a filing clerk in the basement of the city hospital, next to the room where they conduct post-mortems on corpses. Evenings and Saturdays she continues to work at the drugstore. She’s sorry she purchased the shoes because she means to save every penny she can. It’s important for survival. She wants to move out, away from this city, away from her past and from Frank, who has given up on his dream to become a country western singer and is now a machinist for a bus manufacturing company. This thick-lipped and heavy-lidded Frank who looks slightly Mexican is filled with excruciating desire to screw and make a family.

  The child follows Betty to the coffee bar. He stares at her stocking feet. Just then, Rose, a middle-aged woman who runs the coffee bar, comes up from the basement, red-faced and puffing slightly from the stairs. “Well, well,” she says. “Look who’s here. If it isn’t Mickey Mouse.”

  The child pulls the sucker from his mouth and replies indignantly, “Me Rocky, not Mickey Mouse.”

  “I should have known. You have big muscles. No wonder they call you Rocky.”

  The child’s father hangs up the receiver. He swaggers over to the child and scoops him up awkwardly against his chest. “He’s called Rocky after Rock Hudson.”

  Rose ploughs forward the way fat people think they’re entitled to. “I should have known. He’s a handsome little devil. Just like his dad. I’ll bet his mom spoils him rotten.”

  “He doesn’t have a mother.”

  “Oh.” Rose’s expression is one of instant extreme concern. It makes Betty uncomfortable. Rose glances at the child quickly, leans across the counter and whispers dramatically, “What happened?”

  The man meets her halfway across the counter. A smile forms on his blunt features. “She left me for a Harley-Davidson. What are you doing after work? I need a babysitter.”

  “Comedian,” Rose says when the door closes behind them. She has offered concern and been scorned. “I’d of left him too. And did you see that kid? He was crawling with Lord knows what. I’ve never seen a kid so dirty. If there was one thing about my own, they were always clean. Not dressed in the best, but clean. There’s no excuse for dirty.”

  Rose wears green or navy stretch pants with elastic waistbands to accommodate her fluctuating size, and loose flowered blouses to hide her pot belly. She smells of underarm deodorant. Betty doesn’t mind that Rose takes pride in being ordinary, a carbon copy of most of the middle-aged women in the neighbourhood. But what she minds is that Rose lacks imagination. And people without an imagination can’t see beyond their own experiences. She has not made the error of confiding in Rose.

  Betty thinks that women talking about their children all sound the same. She goes back to the cigarette counter. She is anxious to arrange her counters, wipe the casing once again, count up the cash and be gone. She’s to meet Del and the two of them will go to a travel agent’s office to look at travel brochures. Betty doesn’t know where she’s going to travel to. She just knows she’s leaving. Del, whose parents are in the armed services and who has lived all over the world, has the knowledge she needs. She leaves the drugstore. Her destination is a small park that fronts on Portage Avenue.

  The day she began going to the park, Rose had been angry with her. “Why start hanging around that place?” Rose had asked. “What’s the big attraction?”

  Betty couldn’t explain that Rose’s company was beginning to make her feel claustrophobic. “It’s outside, that’s the big attraction. And I’m only going to eat lunch there; in my books, that’s not hanging around.”

  “I can think of better places,” Rose said. “You never know what could happen.”

  Betty was weary, anxious to have something happen. City people exaggerated. Betty doubted that there was real violence in the park because when she sat out on the veranda at night smoking a last cigarette, she listened to the kids who hung out there. Theirs was a phony bravado. They made her smile, they were so innocent.

  “You sound like my mother,” Betty said, knowing how to appease Rose. To Rose, life was a series of jobs that had to be done and Betty was one of those jobs. Even the recent adjustment to widowhood had been a chore Rose had tackled with determination. Rose had convinced Mr. Garvey to hire Betty, Against His Better Judgement. Experience had shown him that teenaged girls were unreliable, he said. They never worked as hard as they could and left shortly after the first paycheque or steady boyfriend. But even though Betty had proven otherwise, Rose still worried that any deviation from the established routine might be an indication that Betty was slipping and going the way of all the young women that they had hired and then Mr. Garvey would be able to say, I told you so.

  Rose dropped a sandwich and coffee into a paper bag with the same resolute efficiency with which she ran the coffee bar in Garvey’s Drugs. “Listen here,” Rose said. “I know what I’m talking about. Don’t forget, there was a stabbing in that park only last weekend.”

  “A stabbing, hah. Someone cut their hand. The newspaper said it was self-inflicted, a game of some kind.”

  “Some game. They called an ambulance, you call t
hat a game? I’ll bet the city picked up the tab too. Let them bleed, I say. Play with matches, expect to get burned.”

  “Just like Home Sweet Home.” Betty took the bag from Rose. “Look at it this way, I’m giving you something real to worry about for a whole hour.”

  “Get out of my sight,” Rose said. “As if I haven’t got enough.”

  Despite Rose’s anger, she went to the park. She entered the quiet greenness and immediately it was cooler. There was a large rock garden in the centre of the park with castor bean plants in the middle of it. Her mother had attempted a rock garden once, but her mother was impulsive and hadn’t thought it through first or planned it because she’d arranged the garden beneath a tree and nothing would grow in the shade. Gravel paths wound through the park from the four entrances and came together in the rock garden. Betty wiped dust from the bench before she sat down. She faced Arlington Street, the street where she lived. The sun tilted slightly in the west and made the houses on the street look more distinct. The houses had sharp edges, black shutters against white siding. Geraniums in windowboxes, motionless in the heat, were red splashes against the white houses. The house where she’d lived the past five months had an enormous graceful veranda which sloped down over her window in the front of the house like a grey umbrella. She realized with a start that the house was an attractive one, probably one of the nicer houses on the street. When she walked across that shiny, grey-painted veranda, passed between the white fake pillars and descended the wide jute-carpeted stairs, she saw her surroundings as though they were part of a photograph, a picture in a magazine.

  Nothing seemed real to her. I am getting up and going to work, she recited. When she walked the two blocks to the drugstore, she counted the number of steps it took to get there. I am going home from work, she recited. She took her dinner from the oven where it was kept warm for her and ate it in her room. She was the only woman boarder. She heard the voices of the other boarders in the dining room as they played their daily cribbage games with the landlord. They talked about baseball scores and women. Or else she sat on her bed with her hands in her lap and watched the kids who ruled the park. They were her age. They wrestled each other to the ground and spat at people who walked by on the sidewalk. When she went to bed in the room at the front of the house beneath the grey veranda roof, she sometimes heard scrapings against the side of the house and saw shadows at the window. Or she heard water running in the toilet upstairs when someone forgot to jiggle the handle. She heard occasionally the sound of glass breaking in the night or a leather strap meeting flesh when the landlord pounded sense into the landlady. Nothing about the last five months seemed real to Betty. But she was beginning to wake up and her desire to get out and away from the drugstore was indication of it.