Agassiz Stories

by Sandra Birdsell

  Mr. Pankratz cleared his throat noisily. The women began to nod. “Yes of course, isn’t she lovely?” someone said quickly.

  “More than that. Every bride is lovely, but Truda is right, she is beautiful,” my mother said as I ran from the yard crying.

  “Well, missy, what was that scene all about?” my mother asked. She removed her hat and set it down on top of the china cupboard. The cupboard stood in the centre of the dining room instead of its usual place against the wall beside the chimney. The linoleum had been ripped up from the floor, revealing the rippled floorboards beneath. Light filtering through the curtains made the air seem granular and grey. I imagined I could see molecules dancing in front of me. My mother had gone visiting after the wedding. As she set her hat down, a splash of gold sunlight rested on her cheek.

  “A curtain,” my mother said, not waiting for my reply. “Imagine. I think it was one of the things I sent over there.” The floorboards groaned suddenly beneath our feet. A crack zigzagged up the wall behind her head. She frowned uneasily. My father had come home and gone into the basement to work. For weeks he’d been jacking the house up in an attempt to level the floors. Easy does it, he said. And little by little, the warped, twisted house was being straightened. The house groaned and china plates shivered in the cabinet. A chunk of plaster broke loose from the ceiling and scattered on the floor. “Oh Lord,” my mother said. I was about to turn from the sight of it when my mother’s hands flew up in front of her face. She shrieked. The china cupboard wobbled forward, dishes sliding together. Her shriek rose above the sound of shattering china as the cupboard crashed to the floor.

  My father came running and stood in the doorway, red-faced and panting. “Is everything all right?” he asked.

  My mother folded up and crumpled to her knees. “Is everything all right?” she cried. “Look, look at what you’ve done,” she said and raising her hands to the cracked walls, the crumbling ceiling, she began to cry.

  My father stepped forward and then flung the crowbar he’d been carrying across the room. “It was an accident, for God’s sake, Mika,” he said. “It’s only dishes. I thought it was something serious.”

  My mother’s voice cracked. “But it was all I had,” she said. “It was all I had left.”

  My brothers and sisters stood gaping. I left the house. My mother’s cries were as birds’ wings churning the air about my head as I ran down the road. Breathless and chilled, I leaned against the red barn, my back warmed by heat trapped in the weathered boards. I waited until the china scraps were gathered and scattered into the garden and the cabinet thrown on top of the heap of rubble in the back of the yard. I waited beside the red barn until I saw them later on, before my sister came calling and searching for me. The wedding couple walked among the trees in the park in their wedding clothes, two pale ghosts moving among the purple shadows, a flutter of silver and white. The following day, in the heat of high noon, they stood beside the road, waist-deep in the bobbing yarrow, holding hands, and smiled at me. Another evening, I saw them out by Horseshoe Lake while thunder rolled over the cattails and the air hung thick with the scent of a storm. And one night as I watched from a window in my tall narrow house, the groom held the bride’s veil high as they walked up and down the streets of town and no one laughed. Below them in the flood-littered park, for a fractured second, among the toadstools a lady slipper glowed, singly and silent.

  FALLING IN LOVE

  get off the bus and I stand beside the highway at Jordon Siding, wondering what to do now. I’ve come to a dead end. Stopped by the reality of a churned-up landscape. For shitsake, as Larry, the past-love-of-my-life, would say. Today, in late June, while the fields around me are growing towards harvest, I am empty. I’m split in two. One part of me can think, what are you going to do? And the other is off somewhere, wandering through empty rooms, bumping into dusty furniture, hoping that this may be a dream. And that Larry is still here.

  “I’m sorry you didn’t know, ah,” the bus driver searches for the correct word. Am I Miss or Ma’am? He pushes his cap back onto his chunky, sandy head and glances down and then away from my breasts which nudge out against Larry’s denim shirt. No, I’m not wearing a bra. His glance is at once shifty and closed as though he, too, is guilty of betraying me. And immediately, I’m glad that at least I have not made the mistake of being pregnant. Grateful that I never gave in to those odd flashes of desire to make love without a contraceptive, to play a kind of roulette game with sex.

  “Didn’t they tell you when you bought the ticket that the road was under construction?” the bus driver asks. His eyes take in the shoebox I carry beneath my arm, tied closed with butcher string, air holes punched in it so Satan can breathe. A going-away present from Larry, a black rabbit. He has taken off, Larry has, has flown the coop and left me with the rabbit and one measly shirt to remind me of him. Larry, I’m remembering you in the briny smell of armpits.

  I remember this morning, the acne-faced girl in the coffee shop at the bus depot in Manitou saying something about having to go to Winnipeg and then back south to get to Agassiz. But my mind wasn’t paying attention. I was aware instead of her squinty mean eyes enjoying the lapsed state of my affair. Larry Cooper is wild, I’d been warned, and he’s lazier than a pet coon. And I told myself that they were just jealous. There are no callipers wide enough to measure the scoured sides of my stupidity. This year, I have learned something about the eternal combustion engine, about love.

  Before me, where I should be making my connection with another Grey Goose bus that will carry me thirty miles east across farming country to Agassiz and back into the bosom of my family, the road is a muddy upheaval of rocks, slippery clay and topsoil. Under destruction. The whole world is under destruction. Larry used the word ‘dead-end’. And so he has turned the other way, headed down the highway to Montreal to work in his brother-in-law’s car rental business.

  If you love someone, let him go, Larry’s mother said. And if he comes back, he’s yours. Whatever you do, don’t take this thing personal, okay? Larry’s like that. Every spring, he takes off. Spring fever, it’s in his blood, she said. And then she evicted me.

  “You’d better get back on the bus and make your connection in Winnipeg,” the driver says and it’s clear from his tone that he’s decided I’m a Miss which gives him certain authority. I’m aware of faces in the windows looking out at me, slight amusement at my predicament. I see in the window my greasy black hair tied up into a ponytail, Larry’s shirt, my jeans held at the waist with safety pins because I have lost ten pounds. My luggage is an Eaton’s shopping bag.

  When I woke up and discovered Larry missing, I didn’t worry at first because he often went out riding before dawn. He liked to be alone in the early morning. Larry liked to watch the sun rise. He’s out ripping off truck parts, you mean, his mother said, raising an artfully plucked eyebrow and flicking cigarette ashes into her coffee cup. But she didn’t know Larry the way I thought I did. He would come back to me, crawl beneath the sheets, hairy limbs still cool from the early morning air, breath minty and sweet, and he would wind himself around me and describe the colour of the sun on a barn roof, or the distinct clatter of a tractor starting up. On such a morning, he brought Satan to me because he said its shiny black coat, its constant nibbling reminded him of me. On such a morning, he came home and invented a gadget that cooked weiners electrically. He stuck wires into each end of the weiner, plugged it into the wall and instant, cooked weiner. Another morning, he was inspired to try to build a more effective water pump.

  I lay in bed waiting for Larry, looking up at the new ceiling tiles overhead. His mother let us live rent-free in those three rooms above the butcher shop if we fixed the caved-in ceiling. I liked the suite the way it was when we first moved in, sawdust and shavings ankle-deep on the floor, ceiling slats dangling free, the lone lightbulb suspended by a single twined wire. It was early Canadian Catastrophe. It reminded me that when I met Larry, I was sitting in the hotel caf
e in Agassiz, between jobs, waiting for the world to end. For a year, I’d had the feeling that a bomb was going to drop and that would be the end of us all. For this reason, I left school. I was filling in time, waiting, and then Larry walked in and I thought that if the bomb fell that day, I’d rather be dead with him than anyone else.

  But Larry wouldn’t live with a caved-in ceiling and when he’d fixed that, he enamelled the kitchen counters black. And the paint never quite dried and if we let a dish stand on it overnight, it became permanently stuck there. And then I went crazy and hand-stitched curtains for the windows in the front room. Larry nailed Christmas tree lights onto the wall above the couch and we made love in their multicoloured glow. We made love every single day for six months.

  I waited for Larry to return and listened at the same time to the rats thumping about in the butcher shop below, dragging bones from the bone box. (I never minded the rats, I figured they worked hard for what they got.) Above me, near the ceiling, a shaft of light came through the small window, spotlighting Larry’s note taped to the closet door. I knew before reading it that Larry had left me. I have this built-in premonition for bad news. As I reached for the note, I could smell Larry, like alkali, dry, metallic, in the palms of my hands. And scattered in the sheets were his c-shaped blond pubic hairs. I read the note and it was as though a thick, black, woollen hood had fallen suddenly into place over my head.

  Two days later, Larry’s mother dropped by. She told me to get out of bed. She wanted her sheets back. She had me clean out the fridge. I have brought along the leftovers of our relationship in the shopping bag. Lettuce for Satan, a dimpled, wilted grapefruit and one beer. And resentment, which is a thick sludge clogging my chest. If Larry, by some miracle, showed up now, I would jump on his skinny back, grab hold of his blond hair and wrestle him to the ground. I would stomp on his Adam’s apple.

  “Forget it,” I say to the bus driver. “I’m not going all the way to Winnipeg. Just forget it.”

  He laughs. “I don’t see what choice you have.” He puts his sunglasses back on and I can see myself in them. And it seems to me that he, along with everyone else, conspires against me. That I have never had a choice.

  “You looked at my ticket when I got on. Why didn’t you say something?”

  “I thought you knew.”

  I pick up the shopping bag and begin to walk away. “Well, I didn’t. And I’m not spending three bloody hours on the bus. So, I guess I’ll walk.”

  He blocks my way. “Whoa, Agassiz is thirty miles away. And it’s going to be one hot day.” He scans the cloudless sky.

  Larry, you creep. This is all your fault. “What’s it to you whether I walk or ride?”

  The driver’s thick neck flares red. He steps aside. “Right. It’s no skin off my nose. If you want to walk thirty miles in the blazing sun, go ahead. It’s a free country.”

  The bus roars down the highway, leaving me in a billow of hot sharp-smelling smoke. The sound of the engine grows fainter and then I’m alone, facing that churned-up muddy road where no vehicle could ever pass. Thirty bloody miles. God-damn you, Larry. I hear a meadowlark trilling and then a squealing rhythmic sound of metal on metal. It comes from a BA gas sign swinging back and forth above two rusting gas bowsers that stand in front of a dilapidated wood-frame building. Jordon Siding garage and store. Eureka. A telephone. I will call home and say, guess what? No, I’ll say, it’s your prodigal daughter, to get them thinking along charitable lines. I have seen the light. But all that is another issue, one I don’t have the energy to think about. Plants fill the dusty store window and off to one side, a tiny yard, freshly laundered clothes flutter from a clothesline.

  I enter the dim interior and feel surrounded. The atmosphere is dreary, relentlessly claustrophobic. It’s a typical country store and yet it reminds me of old things, of fly-specked calendars, lambs and young girls in straw hats smiling with cherry-painted lips, innocent smiles. And me pulling a toboggan through the streets of Agassiz each New Year, collecting calendars, trekking through the fragile blue sphere of a winter night that seemed to embrace all ages so that as I bumped along ice and snow I thought, years ago, someone like me was doing this, may still be doing this. But at the same time, I felt the world dangling like a bauble about to shatter on the floor. I went to the garages, grocery stores, the bank. I needed many calendars because during the coming year each time a month ended, I wrote messages on the backs of the spent time and hid the messages in the garden, in flower pots, beneath stones, for people from another world to discover when I would be gone. A fly buzzes suddenly against the window, trapped between the foliage of the plants and the glass. Beyond, a counter, glass casing, but there’s nothing inside it but shelf-lining, old newspapers.

  “Hello, anyone here?” I call in the direction of the back rooms behind the varnished counter where I imagine potatoes boil in a pot, a child sleeps on a blanket on the floor while its mother ignores my voice, sits in an overstuffed chair (the type Larry and I inherited with our suite, an olive green, scratchy velour couch and chair), reading a magazine. What is she reading? I wonder. I look about me. No telephone in sight.

  Outside once again, I face that bleak landscape and begin walking in the direction of Agassiz. I face the sun and walk off to the side of the road, following the deep imprint left behind by one of the monstrous yellow machines that sits idle in the field beyond. Why aren’t there any men on the machines? Why aren’t they working today? I begin to feel uneasy. The sounds of the countryside rise up and Satan thumps violently against his box in answer. Around me stretch broad fields dotted with clumps of trees. In the distance a neat row of elms, planted as a windbreak, shade a small farmhouse and outbuildings. Overhead, the flat cloudless sky, no perspective, I cannot gauge distance. It’s as though this is a calendar picture of a landscape and I have somehow entered it, Except for yellow grasshoppers sprinting up before my feet and the tireless hovering of flies above the ditches, there is no movement anywhere. I turn around. The garage is still the same distance. I can turn back and wait for a car and hitch a ride to Winnipeg. I could go back to Manitou. But it seems to me that I have been set in this direction, that it’s inevitable. I walk for an hour. Satan continues to struggle. I stop to rest, lift the lid off the box a crack and push wilted lettuce through to him. I sit down, take Larry’s note from my shirt pocket and unfold it on my knee.

  Dear Lureen,

  I’m sorry if you got your hopes up. Like the song goes, you always hurt the one you love, the one you shouldn’t hurt at all. That’s life. But this town is a dead-end. You know what I mean. I think I’ll take my sister up on her offer.

  You are okay. Don’t think I’m leaving because of you. I know you will get over me. Anyway, if it works out, I’ll send you some money. I might send you enough to come to Montreal. I’ll see. It just depends.

  You can have Satan. I don’t trust my mother to look after him anyway. Once, she forgot to feed my goldfish and they all turned belly-up. Notice, I am leaving you my denim shirt because you liked it so much.

  Tell the old lady not to get in a sweat.

  Luv U,

  Larry.

  Whatever you do, Larry’s mother said when he introduced us, don’t get married. A cigarette dangled from one corner of her mouth and she squinted at me hard through the blue smoke. She was blonde like Larry and I thought that at one time she must have been beautiful, you could see flashes of it sometimes when she wasn’t being sarcastic. I’m only telling you for your own good, she said later when Larry was out of the room. He’s like his father. Lazier than a pet coon.

  Larry was not lazy. He could pull the head off a motor, ream out the cylinders, do a ring and valve job in two days flat. I’d tell him I wanted to go to the dance at Rock Lake and he’d rebuild the transmission that afternoon so we could go. He opened the housing, called me down the stairs to come and see the giant cogs, how the gears were supposed to mesh. And I couldn’t help think that the combustion engine is a joke, or at
least a hoax perpetuated on man to keep him busy tinkering so he can’t think about what’s really happening. Wheels moving wheels, moving pulleys, moving more metal and so much motion for so little effect, arms, lifters, valves, wheezing breathers, springs, filters, cylinders, shoes, things pressing against other things, grinding, particles of chewed-up metal sifting into other important parts. God, it was overwhelming. Faulty timing, a coughing, farting engine, a rotten swaying front-end, screeching wheelbearings, all these problems Larry and I faced and overcame in six months.

  Okay, Larry, I said, wanting to say, this is silly. There has got to be a much simpler way than the eternal combustion engine.

  Internal, internal combustion engine, he said, and anyway, you are paid not to think, but to do. So, okay, I played the game. I soaked bolts and other metal shapes in my dishpan, brushed them down with Varsol, removed grease with a paring knife, had them looking like new. I learned how to install brushes in a generator. I took it apart in my lap. I thought the copper wires were beautiful. And then, that what I was doing was important. That maybe I’d like to have a part in the running of the internal combustion machine. And the next time Larry complained about having to wash his feet with his socks on, maybe I’d let him ride bareback for a while. Maybe the two of us could open a garage?

  Larry flicked the end of my nose with a greasy finger and said no way would he put in four years getting his papers just to satisfy some government-hired jerk who had never taken apart anything more complicated than a Zippo lighter.

  And always, we made it to the dance on time. That night, we’d be cruising down the highway, eating up the miles to Rock Lake, radio turned up full volume, Larry driving with two fingers and reaching with his other hand for me, naked beneath my sundress. And the gears would be meshing and the motor singing, the timing tuned just right and the radio playing all our favourite hits. And Larry would squeeze my breast and say, hey, honey bunch. Remind me to slow down long before we get to the corner, okay? I got no brakes.