Given

by Susan Musgrave

  “Come on in, come,” she said, smiling at the cracked moon mask Hooker held in his hands, her brown eyes flecked like crumbled honey. She looked pleased to see him, but Hooker’s eyes had gone black. He glanced at Vernal, then at me. “Seen Toop?” he said, refusing to look at his sister.

  “I sure miss that dog. He never visits me anymore,” Grace said.

  Vernal and I followed Hooker inside, hesitantly. A teapot and a matching set of cups and saucers sat next to a bowl of sugar with silver tongs on a table that looked as if it had been laid for afternoon tea with the late Queen Mum. The cups were thin and veined, heady with Victorian roses. Grace leaned forward to remove a syringe from a water glass.

  Al, who was not wearing any clothes either, sat hunched over the table, getting ready to fix. I tried not to look at him, my eyes moving around the kitchen instead, stopping at the handcrafted sign over the electric stove saying, “Welcome Friends”.

  Grace said she’d just made tea, and asked if anyone else would like a cup. Vernal tried not to look at Grace’s body while Hooker focused somewhere beyond the “i” in “Friends” dotted with a bullet hole.

  “I made tea?” Grace repeated, making it sound more like a question this time. “Don’t anyone go. Please?”

  Hooker cleared a space on a couch — the maroon cushions, once dark as pig’s blood, faded to pink except for a few places around the upholstery studs — and told us we might as well sit. I squeezed onto the couch between Vernal and a pile of Bride magazines. A coffee table had another syringe and a length of rubber tubing in the middle of it, and a pamphlet from Social Services on how to breast feed your baby.

  I saw, out of the corner of my eye, Baby-Think-It-Over, lying twisted in a corner, wires spilling from his gutted body, a pillow covering his head. All his lights, it was evident, had gone out. Grace, who no longer wore the giant key around her neck, kept glancing at Hooker, then smiling anxiously across the table at Al.

  Al scowled, then lowered his eyes into his lap. Both his hands, one holding a hypodermic needle, disappeared under the table.

  Grace looked at him, hopefully. “You all right, hon?” I had been too distracted at first by Grace’s nakedness to notice her resemblance to her brother. Even though her skin was paler than his, she had all Hooker’s dark, uneasy restlessness, and something else besides. She draped a blanket over Al’s shoulders and asked Vernal what he took in his tea.

  “Just sugar, please,” Vernal said.

  “One lump or two?” Grace asked.

  Al sat with his hands under the table staring numbly through the window. Grace asked him, for the second time, if he was feeling okay. “If you keep worrying about shit you’ll fuck up my high,” Al said.

  Al had more track marks than Grace had scars on her arms. Vernal asked Grace how the baby was doing and Grace said he’d been doing a lot of sleeping lately. She showed us the Moses basket she’d been weaving for him, from cedar bark cut into strips, soaked, boiled and beaten. “It’s harder to find the bark I need now because — where are all the cedar trees? They’re gone, all logged off. Miles and miles of nothing.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Al raise his teacup to his lips with one hand and then, as if he had decided swallowing wasn’t worth the effort, or he resented the attention Gracie was paying to the rest of us, spit out the tea and let the cup drop to the table. Even as the hot liquid scalded him, he didn’t lose his stunned expression.

  When Al and Gracie started fighting, Hooker said he was leaving, he didn’t want to get Al’s kind of blood on him. Grace began shouting that all Hooker had ever done was ruin her life. She said Al only needed unconditional love. “You can’t kill our love, Hooker,” she cried. “You can’t even kill it with all your hate.” Vernal went to comfort her but — I’d been watching Al’s face — I pulled him away.

  Vernal and Hooker walked ahead of me back to the hearse.

  “She’s high, she didn’t know what she was saying,” I heard Vernal say.

  “What that Al needs is an unconditional bullet in the head,” Hooker said.

  The rain had let up and the sun broke through again, the way it had at the Honour Site. Vernal’s mood had darkened since he’d set eyes on Grace. On the plus side, though, he hadn’t invited her to come and stay with me at the farm.

  Hooker said he had to stop at the Uncle’s to see if his dog had ended up there, and told Vernal where to pull in. He got out, said “right back,” and Vernal and I waited in the hearse until he returned, alone, five minutes later. “No dog. I’m not worried — wherever I end up, Toop always finds his way back to me,” he said. Vernal exhaled, as if he’d been holding his breath the whole time Hooker had been gone.

  We drove north through the village, past the fucked-up church draped in black tarpaulins held in place by scorched timbers, with “Painkiler” sprayed across the door, past a solitary memorial pole that stood ten feet from the tide line on the gravel beach covered with Styrofoam snowballs. Vernal made another stop at Matt’s Yaka-Way, the only store in the village that sold tax-exempt gas and cigarettes for anyone with a Status Card, and gave away free coffee and packages of flavoured condoms to everyone else. Most of the shelves had been given over to objects associated with killing, in particular fishing and hunting. I helped myself to “gratuitous” coffee while Vernal gassed up.

  When we were on our way again, Hooker said he’d get out at Dead End Road. “They call it that because it ends at the graveyard, eh?” He gave me another quick smile. “I like it there. It’s where you’ll find all the people I get along with best.” We left him, roadkill in hand, then drove back the way we’d come, through the village.

  The sun dropped behind the rain wall into the sea as we passed the lone totem pole. I asked Vernal why it had been raised so close to the tide line and Vernal said from what he knew of the case a judge had awarded Lawlor Moon’s wife custody of their only daughter, so Lawlor bought her a colouring book and some new Magic Markers and took his daughter to the beach. “He drowned her because he didn’t want anyone else raising her. Then he took his own life.” Vernal said the memorial pole had been raised on the spot where the Magic Marker pens had been found scattered amongst the stones.

  Further on I watched a fat, white tourist dog being humped on the road by a three-legged skinny dog half its size.

  “I had a teacher who used to say nature thrives in mongrels,” Vernal said, honking at the dogs, then giving up and driving around them. “It’s called hybrid vigour — if you want to create the strongest healthiest offspring you should mate with someone whose strengths are different from your own.”

  As we left the village behind Vernal tried to tell me why he felt responsible for Grace, how much he was to blame for her circumstances. He told me he had met Grace when he first came to the island and had encouraged her to move to Vancouver, to get into modelling, to make a life for herself. She made the move and then, walking home after an audition, in daylight, she had been raped. “You’ve seen the scars . . . her wrists, her throat. She tried to commit suicide after that. On more than one occasion.”

  Vernal seemed comfortable talking to me as long as we were in transit. Driving was an ideal time for intimacy, because it forced him to keep his eyes on the road, and he didn’t have to look at me.

  He said Grace started doing heroin again when she found out she was carrying the child of a rapist and because she kept failing at killing herself. She had promised him she was flying straight, because of the child, but he realized she’d been high again today when we’d arrived at the house, even though she tried to hide the fact, unlike Al, who had to fix in his penis, where he still had one vein left that hadn’t collapsed.

  As Vernal spoke I noticed the paper bag that had rolled out from under the seat. I opened it and saw a 26er of Silent Sam and a bottle of homemade wine.

  “Hooker must have forgotten this,” I said, almost too quickly, tucking the bag back where it had come from. It had to be Hooker’s — Vernal would neve
r, even in his worst moments, drink homemade wine. I suppose I should have thought it strange that Vernal didn’t ask what was in the bag, but this was symptomatic of our entire marriage. Any marriage, come to think of it. You learned to accept things, as if they had never happened.

  We drove home down the east coast road, so that I would be able to say it was official: I’d gone round the Bend. I questioned Vernal about Hooker — how he had lost his hand.

  Vernal said everyone on the island had a story. Some said he had been born without it, others that his hand had been wizened at birth and later dropped off. There was speculation that the injury happened in his teenage years, a rumour involving a homemade grenade and a car-bombing campaign.

  “That’s not all he lost,” Vernal said, keeping his eyes on the road straight ahead. Some people swore he’d gone to Vancouver and injected so much cocaine into his urethra that he got a hard-on for three days, then gangrene set it. “He’s supposed to have left the hospital minus five fingers, and his dick.”

  Vernal must have heard my small exhalation. He said he didn’t want to talk about Hooker anymore, he wanted to talk about us. Neither of us spoke until Vernal asked me if I thought I might ever come to love him again, the way I once did. I said I had already used up a lot of my mind thinking about the way things had been; I tried not to think about the future.

  “I just keep wishing there was something I could do. To make you feel, you know, better,” he said.

  Vernal had always tried to protect me from myself, from my own melancholia. I believe he was jealous of my moods, because they belonged to me, I owned them. It had been easier for him to control my ups and downs as long as there had been cocaine, but eventually the drugs, and what was left of our marriage, had run out. Vernal took my hand and said he was sorry. For what, I could only imagine. Our shared history of sorrow?

  The east coast drive was uneventful, no Honour Site, no dangerous curves, shrines or garbage dumps. No hitchhikers, either. Back at the farm I poured the homemade wine down the drain and stashed the bottle of vodka under my clothes at the bottom of a Chrysalis, then sat for what seemed like hours, staring at the patterns the rain made inching down the glass, seeing nothing beyond the pane. When I thought of Hooker’s mouth, his lips, his melting eyes, all the songs of lovesick devotion I’d ever heard came back to me then in one confused medley.

  Part of me wished I could love Vernal again, but love, I knew, never agrees to share your attention with anyone.

  Vernal put off returning to work until the last week of October, when he had to make his first appearance for Deacon Maplethorpe. He arranged to take the ferry to the mainland and fly home a week later.

  The current slogan at the Christian vegetable stand read, “I Brake For Jesus”, and reminded Vernal that the hearse’s brake shoes needed adjusting, and he asked me to book an appointment at Chubb’s. When we reached the ferry landing I let Vernal out, blew him a kiss goodbye, and drove back to town where I stopped by the Snipe to grab a coffee before going shopping.

  “What’s the difference between erotic sex and kinky sex?” asked Marg, before I’d taken a seat.

  “Erotic sex you use a feather, kinky sex you use the whole chicken,” she said, when I told her I didn’t know. I glanced over at the board. Today’s Special was Philosophical Chicken.

  “Basically it’s your chicken curry with your hardboiled eggs in it,” Marg explained, as a couple of sorry-looking tourists bundled in out of the rain.

  “They must have Christmas here, at least,” I heard the woman say, looking mournfully at the permanent-fixture tree.

  “It’s supposed to make you ask, which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Marg said; I eyed the couple dressed identically in yellow slickers with yellow gumboots and hats to match. The woman carried a child bundled up in a bright blue tarp.

  “It makes you think, don’t it?” Marg answered.

  The woman looked at Marg and asked if she was open. I could hear the frustration in her voice. Marg jerked her head towards the sign in the window but the woman said she had learned on this island that “Open” could mean anything. Marg, who always brightened at the prospect of new victims, said this was as close to being open as she was ever going to get. The man took off his rain hat and shook his head, spraying a halo of water. “We finally got that rain,” Marg added.

  The two huddled together as far away from the door (open, as always, to let the flies out) as they could, looking as if they expected to be served. I overheard the man say no one had ever heard of the word mañana on this island, “because people here don’t understand that kind of urgency.” The child began to fuss.

  “A baby, eh?” said Marg, as the woman got out a bottle to make formula.

  “He’s almost three and he’s still on the bottle,” the woman said.

  “Who isn’t?” Marg replied. “Every guy on this island’s weaned himself off his wife’s tit onto the bottle.” I took a sip of my coffee that tasted like tea. Marg asked if we knew why Jesus crossed the road, and the man in the yellow slicker said, “to get to the other god damned side where it wasn’t god damned raining?”

  His wife nudged him. “Take it easy,” she said.

  Anyone who knew Marg would have answered her question with a simple “I don’t know”, even if they did. It was just easier.

  “He was nailed to a chicken,” Marg said.

  The couple looked more despondent by the minute. The man asked Marg for the directions to the town where “that movie” had been shot. His wife said he hoped to photograph native islanders in their natural habitat.

  Before Marg could think of a reply, I told them they should stay on the Bend, the only road you could take, that it was a half hour drive, unless you got lost. The man said, “what do you have to do to get a drink around here?” and his wife told him to take it easy, again, that as he could see nothing was exactly speedo. “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”

  “Any chance of getting a hot drink, something to warm us up?” she asked Marg, trying to sound as if it made no difference to her one way or the other.

  “I got vodka,” said Marg. “You want something stronger, you get it up at the Brew.” She waved her hand at the window in what could have been any direction. “The church on the left as you’re leaving town?” She looked at her watch. “You’d better haul ass up there though. They close at noon — for an hour. Most everything around here does.”

  The couple discussed what to do and decided they’d stay and have regular coffee and a couple of the muffins, solid as doorknobs, that sat on the counter besides the TIPS jar, and a note saying “Help Put Talene Thru Collage.”

  “They’ll have to be to go,” Marg said. “We close over the lunch hour, same’s everybody else.” She paused when she saw the blank looks. “For lunch,” she added, shaking her head, as if to say some people had to have everything spelled out for them.

  Dis here little pig jet ta market,

  Dis here little pig be layin back in da cut,

  Dis here little pig had roasted beef,

  Dis here little pig had jack shit,

  Dis here little pig said, “Yo! Yo!

  Ah can’t find ma muhfo way home!

  I had hesitated before the meat counter at Natural Lee’s when I heard Rainy reciting her favourite nursery rhyme. I stepped back and she appeared, standing between me and an overkill of chicken. Her whole body, surrounded by a fine red mist, had collapsed, like her veins. She looked like a ghost whose body had been sucked inside out. Her head had become horribly misshapen, and she had six fat syringes jammed into her neck, as if to keep her brain connected to the rest of her body. She had pierced her eyebrows with so many silver rings she looked like a walking shower curtain rod. Her once brown skin was now the colour of burnt toast, and she was crying, thick brown tears that stank of vinegar as they trickled out of her eyeballs. Blood oozed from her neck where the needles pierced her skin.

  When she turned to face me her eyes remained fixed in
their sockets, the way a doll’s eyes do, then Frenchy materialized next to her. She had an elongated neck, and her wiry black hair, which she’d been proud of because it blunted the matron’s scissors each time they forced her to get a haircut, had been burned off. Frenchy’s birthmark, floating like a cumulus cloud across her cheek, (she called it her “ugly spot”) had been charred until it had become almost the same colour as the rest of her skin. If you looked hard enough you could still see the shadow of it, the way you sometimes glimpsed the new moon holding the old moon in her arms.

  A boy — hard to tell his age because of the hood of blood covering his face — had his arms cinched around her leg; wherever Frenchy walked she dragged him behind her. He was covered, from head to toe, in blood, and a feeding frenzy of flies. This be the HE Frenchy said, picking a bag of Fritos from a display, and tucking it under her shirt. When she spoke her bottom lip spilled down over her chin exposing her gums, teeth, and her tongue that she could no longer control.

  I decided not to buy chicken after all and wheeled my buggy into a ransacked SALE aisle. Frenchy hobbled beside me, talking non-stop as if we were two old mothers whose lives had taken different directions, coming together over the last of the year’s school supplies and Halloween novelty items, and the difficulties we had both faced raising children.

  This how it be when your kids die first, Frenchy said. When it your turn they come back and hang widju.

  I pushed my buggy towards the produce section, trying to guess what else Frenchy might filch — possibly the Ghostbusters lunch kit, dented on one side, or the box of Crayolas that had been opened and returned, for Rainy, who liked to draw. The damaged boy trailed after her, wanting everything he saw and striking himself in the face each time Frenchy told him no. Getting your dead kid back to raise for the whole of eternity, Frenchy said, was the worst part about being dead; the best part was you never had to be in a hurry. You could take your time getting anywhere because you’d already reached your goal. Being dead meant you got to enjoy the things you’d never had time for while you were too busy living your life.