Once We Had a Country

by Robert Mcgill

“It was a hard sell getting her to come up here. You know how she feels about cops. I don’t want her taking against the place.”

  “But she’ll see what they did to the seats.”

  “Oh. I guess that’s right.”

  She dislikes seeming to correct him. His face always gains such a downhearted expression when she does. It happened one time after he pronounced “peony” the wrong way and she mentioned it didn’t rhyme with “macaroni.” In March, after he told his father about dropping out of law school, he wore the same chastened expression for a month. Now she studies the shape of his eyes, his mouth, willing him not to take things personally. He holds still, apparently aware of her gaze, until finally he starts to squirm and laugh as if her eyes are tickling him.

  On a whim, she slides her fingers into his lap.

  “Why hello there,” he murmurs. But she can tell he isn’t into it.

  “You okay?” she says, drawing back her hand.

  “Sure. Still a bit wound up, I guess.” He reaches over to squeeze her leg. “It’s only a few more miles. If Brid and Pauline aren’t there yet …” He flashes her a grin.

  “Oh, really,” she says, brightening. “Tell me more.”

  “Maggie, I’m a gentleman,” he says, feigning indignation.

  “Then tell me what it will be like on the farm,” she says. She doesn’t want him stewing over what happened at the border.

  “Aw, we’ve talked about things plenty, haven’t we?”

  “I want to hear it again.”

  He takes a breath and smiles. “Well, it’s going to be amazing. Up here, there won’t be any war or election, and we’ll get to make the rules ourselves. At first, we’ll help Brid and Wale look after Pauline—it’ll be four parents for one kid. Then, after Dimitri and Rhea turn up with their boys—” He breaks off. “You know all this. You really want to hear it?”

  She nods, but she has a thought. “Wait a second. Let me get the movie camera and the tape recorder.”

  He looks surprised. “Now? We aren’t even there yet.”

  She’s thinking that the border wasn’t the right way to start, but maybe with the camera they can have a second chance.

  “Pull over,” she says. “It won’t take more than a minute.”

  “The turnoff’s only a mile away.”

  “Yeah, but I want to get started right now.”

  The first shot follows the camper van down a country road as its tires swim through the heat haze. Next, the camera gazes out from the passenger-side window, capturing clusters of bungalows, rows of grapevines and peach trees with the sun strobing between them. The scene is tranquil but the camera shaky. There’s the low thrum of the vehicle’s engine and, from outside the frame, the sound of Fletcher’s voice.

  “America’s too far gone to save,” he says. “The land’s polluted and the politicians are corrupt. They send the army to slaughter kids halfway around the world, then order up the National Guard when people protest. In this country we’ll do things differently. We’ll live peacefully and fairly. We’ll get people from all over, people who want to escape the city, who are sick of the crime, the rat race, who want their children to breathe clean air. The farm will let us provide for ourselves. We’ll grow our own food and sell what we don’t eat. Eventually we’ll make enough money to buy the place. It’ll be a life we could never have in Boston. We’ll be a model for everyone.”

  The camera pans away from the landscape and across the dashboard before settling on his face. When he turns toward the lens, he crosses his eyes and blows a kiss. There’s the sound of some unseen object bumping against the microphone.

  “How was that?” he says. “Hey, why don’t you drive and I’ll film you?”

  “It’s okay,” says Maggie. “Let’s keep on the way we are. I’m just getting the hang of it.”

  She films him until they leave the highway for a gravel road. Then she puts away the camera, wanting to see properly what’s ahead. There’s only one other house along the half-mile stretch, a mobile home with a gated lane. Soon afterward they reach a dead end and the driveway to the farmhouse. The building is red brick with gabled dormers and a broad porch. An overgrown lawn sprawls in all directions. Fifty yards behind the house, countless rows of cherry trees begin.

  “Fletcher, it’s gorgeous,” she says, and he beams.

  Once he has brought the camper to a stop, they exit on their separate sides, Fletcher stretching out his long legs, Maggie pulling her dress away from her body where it clings. For a time they stand there looking at the house. Then they exchange a loud, playful kiss and start up the porch stairs. At the door, he pats under the welcome mat, but there’s nothing to be found.

  “Maybe Brid and Pauline got here ahead of us,” he says.

  “There’s no car,” she points out. “Wale, maybe?”

  He hollers Wale’s name. No one answers, so he goes around behind the house while Maggie lights a cigarette and retreats down the steps to take in the place again. The roof is missing a few shingles, and the eavestrough is held up at one end by a loop of wire. In the middle of the lawn, an old wooden sign reads Harroway Orchards. At the entrance to the driveway there’s a mailbox on a post, and beside it stands something obscured by the shadow of a tree. When she looks closer, she realizes it’s a man. Tentatively she waves at him, but he doesn’t seem to notice her, only starts along the gravel road toward the highway.

  From behind the house, there’s the sound of breaking glass. Fletcher doesn’t respond to her calling, so she stamps out her cigarette and starts after him. A moment later the porch door rattles open and there he is, licking a cut on his hand.

  “First order of business,” he announces, “replace the back window.”

  When she goes to examine his wound, he dips and catches her just above the knees, lifts her off her feet, and heads for the door.

  “It’s not like we got married,” she says, laughing. With a grunt, he carries her across the jamb and sets her down.

  Inside, the foyer is dim and cramped. On the left, a wide staircase leads to the second floor; on the right, there’s a corridor with a few nails protruding from the walls. He starts searching for a light switch, but she takes his hand with a wink and leads him upstairs. Pink roses stare from the wallpaper as they ascend. At the top, Fletcher takes delight in pointing out the hardwood floor, the rectangles of natural light falling from open doorways.

  As he pulls her into the first room, there’s the smell of stale booze and something burnt. Then she sees the mattress in the corner. It’s scorched in the middle and stained at the far end. A pile of sheets lies beside it, singed and streaked with ash. The only other furniture in the room is a dresser that has been emptied of its drawers, which sit on the floor filled with food wrappers, empty beer bottles, and cigarette butts.

  “Was it like this when you checked out the place?” she asks. Maybe she should have taken the time off work to come up with him after all.

  He shakes his head. “Somebody must have found the key. Probably just some kids.” With an anxious look, he starts for the hallway.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To check the other rooms. If they trashed the house—”

  “Hey, we’ll manage.” She grabs his hand to pull him back. “You said it was a fixer-upper, right?” If the whole place is in bad shape, he’ll want to clean it up right away, and then there won’t be time for the two of them.

  She gives him a long kiss. When she feels his hesitation, she kisses him again.

  “Brid and Pauline will be here soon—” he says.

  “Exactly,” she replies. “We don’t have much time.”

  He slips a hand under her dress; she reaches for his belt. A shoe comes off, then his glasses. Once his jeans are around his knees, she draws away.

  “What is it?” he asks.

  “Turn the mattress over.” She removes her bra from beneath her dress and tosses it at him. “I’ll be back in a second with sheets.”

  In
the camper, she consults her packing list, then finds the bedding in the box assigned to it. When she returns to the bedroom, Fletcher’s lying naked on his stomach across the mattress, the afternoon light filtered by blinds. She spreads a sheet over him like a fisherman casting a net. It billows and parachutes onto him, pushing the air across his skin, making all the little hairs along his arms and legs stand on end before the fabric settles. The blinds move in and out against the window screens.

  Lying beside him afterward, she remembers another time, another shabby house in the early summer sunlight. Eight years old, she enters the living room clothed head to toe in white, her dress wrinkled from the ride home, the knee-high stockings starting to itch and her father across the room in his easy chair, watching television. Over the carpet she runs to him, the veil scrunched in her hand, torn off as soon as she escaped Gran’s station wagon. Maggie launches herself onto his lap and turns herself around so they can stare at the set together.

  “How’d it go, little girl?” he asks. “Say your lines all right?”

  She nods and kicks off her shoes, then starts to recite the words again under her breath. He lets her go on awhile before shushing her, and they both fall into the rapture of the screen.

  “One day will you come to church with us?” she asks after a time.

  “You know the answer to that.” He sounds pained and says no more. Her father has told her he went to Mass every week when he was a boy so now he doesn’t have to go. That’s how it works, he says. Gran was disapproving when Maggie repeated his words, but now that Maggie has taken Communion, perhaps she too will be given a choice. She imagines having to decide and can’t make up her mind. If it were only up to her she’d stay home, but her father says it’s good that she keeps Gran company, even if he seems sad each Sunday morning when Maggie kisses him goodbye.

  “Get your old man a beer?” he says.

  Without a word, she jumps down and runs for the fridge. Today, as she received Communion, she was made to understand that something had changed forever. It seems this ritual will remain, though, Maggie bringing him beer and changing the channel when he asks. Sometimes she would prefer a book, but her father never reads. He says books only tell you about the past; it’s TV that keeps you up to date. Side by side each evening he and Maggie sit before the set, eating their dinners from foil compartments on trays. When they visit Gran next door, she makes wry comments about scurvy and the Children’s Aid, and then Maggie’s father buys apples or grapes that sit on the counter gathering dust until the house grows lousy with fruit flies. There are times when Maggie herself wishes for some kind of change in their routine—a friend to stay over, dinner at a restaurant—but her father appears content, though he has no hobbies and doesn’t travel, hardly leaves the Syracuse city limits. He never complains about clerking at the Public Works Department. It seems he wants nothing beyond the silent hours of Maggie’s company in the living room, and the worst way in which she could betray him would be to ask for more herself. Sitting with him in his easy chair, she puts the veil back on and flips it side to side, watching the television grow clear and shrouded by turns.

  It wasn’t until her childhood was over that she realized she’d been desperate to get out. Her father must have sensed it sooner, the way he turned against her once she got to college. Then she spent half her money on long-distance calls from Boston, close to tears, trying to make him understand without saying it outright that he shouldn’t take it personally, she just didn’t want the same things he did. Except now he’s in Laos, and what the hell does she know about what he wants? Maybe if she understood his desires she wouldn’t be so angry with him.

  When she lies in bed next to Fletcher, he’s not so different from how her father used to be. She’s pretty sure that nothing would make him happier than for the two of them to remain there for hours. Sometimes she can take pleasure from listening to him as he flatters her with compliments that are, in her eyes, demonstrably untrue. Now, though, as he begins to doze beside her, the prospect of Brid’s arrival makes her restless. She can’t stop picturing the other rooms, imagining floors littered with used needles and broken glass. Brid won’t stand for such things. Even though Fletcher introduced the two of them only a few months ago, Maggie knows enough to realize that. Brid has been Fletcher’s friend for years now. She’s older than he and Maggie are, almost thirty. She has organized protests and founded a health food co-op, and on top of all that, she’s a mother. She’ll want the house to be safe for her daughter. Maggie gets out of bed and starts to gather her clothes, hoping that Brid and Pauline have been delayed, that there might still be an hour in which to tackle the worst of whatever’s waiting.

  The next room along the hallway is unfurnished and undisturbed. Fletcher told her the house’s previous occupants left things behind when they moved out last year, but the other bedrooms are mostly barren too. Then, upon entering the bathroom, she smells something putrid. She doesn’t have the courage to investigate, so she goes downstairs and checks out the living room. It has a couch, a glass-top coffee table, and an armchair. Empty bottles lie scattered across the floor, and on the wall someone has spray-painted a peace sign.

  The kitchen is at the back of the house, hot and airless, with a Formica table and a few chairs. Two of the walls are clad in dingy paper; the others are exposed fieldstone that might be attractive if there were fewer cobwebs hanging from it and the mortar between the stones weren’t crumbling. A little ridge of broken bits along the floor looks nearly geological. In the mud room off the back, the window that Fletcher smashed reveals an expanse of grassy yard with a wooden outhouse to one side. Farther on, the cherry trees wave in the breeze as if beckoning her, but she wants to get a start on things before Brid shows up. Maybe she can clean the kitchen at least. When she goes to the sink and tries the tap, it shakes violently, then vomits brown water that eventually runs clear.

  With a box of cleaning supplies from the camper, she returns to the kitchen and begins to scrub the counter. After only a few seconds she’s brought up short by the faint rotten-egg odour of natural gas. Sniffing around the stovetop, she can’t locate the source. She’s on her hands and knees, poking her nose behind the oven, when she hears Fletcher enter from the hallway.

  “Did you see the mess in the living room?” he says. She backs out and finds him standing there in only his jeans, holding a paper bag from the van. “By the way, don’t drink the water. We’re supposed to boil everything until the well has been tested.”

  She frowns and shows him her palms, already dark with grime. “Can you smell gas? There must be a leak.”

  He takes a whiff of air, then shrugs. “A little gas odour’s normal in these old houses.”

  “We should call somebody. You said Morgan Sugar would cover repairs, right?”

  “Sure, if it comes to that. I was hoping we could handle most stuff ourselves.”

  He rummages through the bag in his hands until he’s found a package of licorice sticks. Then he sits at the table and starts eating one of them, gazing meditatively at the ceiling while Maggie opens and shuts cupboard doors with a bang. Whoever lived here last, they haven’t just left furniture. There’s a Mason jar full of paper clips, along with some dishes that make a set only insofar as every one of them is chipped. The shelves are littered with mouse turds, and the first drawer she opens slides off its rails, then refuses to go back on. Something foul is encased in a bag at the bottom of the freezer, welded to the interior. She squirts disinfectant and gives it a few swipes with a sponge while Fletcher goes on chewing his licorice.

  Her head starts to hurt. She should stop and sit down, but a voice in her mind insists that she gave up everything to come to this place. She quit teaching, broke her lease. She let her father go to Laos by himself; she let him call her every name in the book before he left. Also, taking over the farm was her idea. For years she’d heard stories about people dropping out, moving to the countryside, living closer to the land, and it always sounded li
ke something she’d like to try. But she never did anything about it. In high school she didn’t even march for civil rights or against the war; she stayed at home with her father and watched the demonstrations on TV. At college in Boston she didn’t campaign for Hubert Humphrey, didn’t vote. She kept her head down and studied. Fletcher has said it was the same with him back then, always playing it straight. Now they have a house of their own and two hundred acres of fertile earth. They have a chance to catch up with the times, and she doesn’t want to miss out.

  But her head is throbbing. It’s the gas fumes, must be. She slumps against the counter and massages her temples.

  “Probably there’s no point calling the cops about the mess,” says Fletcher. “They’d just bawl us out for leaving the key under the mat.” He looks up. “Hey, what’s wrong?”

  Before he can come over to her, a car horn honks and she starts upright. The floor’s filthy; the thing’s still stuck to the bottom of the freezer.

  “Go,” she says, waving him out of the kitchen. “She’ll need help.” He touches her cheek before he leaves.

  She wipes down the kitchen table, then makes her way to the front of the house, smoothing back her hair. Through the screen door she sees slim, blond Brid standing in profile beside her Toyota, eyes hidden behind sunglasses, hands on hips, and shoulder blades jutting behind her like the stumps of wings. Pauline’s still in the car, strapped into her safety seat and dandling a doll on her knee, its curly flaxen hair very like that of the girl.

  As Maggie steps onto the porch, she hears Brid remark to Fletcher, “You haven’t even unpacked the van yet? What have you two been doing?” A smooth blend of innuendo and condemnation.

  “Aw shucks,” says Fletcher in a fake Southern drawl, slouching with his hands in his pockets.

  “What took you so long?” Maggie calls out. “Border trouble?”

  “Are you kidding?” Brid replies. “The guards were so polite, it was like I was doing them a favour by entering the country. The holdup was at the grocery store.” She points to a clutch of bags in the back of the Toyota. “You know this place has a two-dollar bill?”