Once We Had a Country

by Robert Mcgill

  “Jane and June,” repeats Maggie, unable to disguise her disbelief. “How old are you?”

  “Ancient,” says the red-haired girl, and laughs.

  “So you’re old enough to be smoking and drinking that stuff,” says Maggie. She feels stupid saying it.

  “Smoking?” says the red-haired girl. “What’s that?”

  “What’s drinking?” says the other one, pronouncing the word as if for the first time. Raising the beer bottle to her lips, she takes a long slug.

  The red-haired girl regards Maggie with a severe expression. “You must be confused. Maybe it’s sunstroke. Maybe you’ve gone senile. How old are you, anyhow? Fifty?”

  Maggie feels her face burn. She thinks of telling them she’s twenty-four, but she suspects that for them twenty-four might as well be fifty.

  “My dad said you people are hippies,” says the thin girl.

  “They can’t be,” says the red-haired one. “Hippies aren’t so square.”

  “You going to rat us out?” says the thin one, and the red-haired girl shoots her a disapproving look, as if she has broken the rules by asking a straightforward question.

  Maggie shakes her head. “That’s not my job.”

  “Then quit staring and beat it, will you?” says the red-haired girl. She raises the joint to her mouth and puffs, looking Maggie straight in the eye.

  Without another word, Maggie starts off toward Virgil again, furious with them and with herself. Bested by a couple of teenagers. They must be the ones who got into the farmhouse, who spray-painted the peace sign on the wall. Maybe the first night it was one of them at the bottom of the stairs. She shouldn’t let them carry on like that. She should go back later and talk to the father.

  Or maybe they’re right. Maybe she’s just square.

  Curtains of grey sky are gathering on the horizon when she reaches the highway. The wind picks up; lilac bushes buck and toss by the roadside. A gust wrenches her hat from her head, lifts it over a fence, and sends it loping across the pasture beyond. Instead of chasing it, she presses onward.

  Eventually she reaches a small church with a steeple and thick stone buttresses. The sign out front says it’s Catholic, and she thinks of going in but can’t fathom why she would. It begins to rain. Within seconds, torrents of it are bouncing on the asphalt so hard they seem to jet from the earth. With a hand shielding her face, she looks toward the distant roofs of the village, then back at the church. Lightning and thunder explode together. She runs toward the front doors.

  Inside, a crucified Christ watches over the altar and a few rows of pews. A pale light penetrates the water streaming down the windows, while a stained glass Saint Francis preaches to the birds, his eyes childlike and angled toward heaven.

  At first she remains near the entrance, wringing out her hair and tugging loose her top where it lies against her midriff. Then she passes into the sanctuary, her gaze rising to the dusky ceiling with its rafters and arching ribs. Rumbles of thunder are the only sound. She walks up the aisle, slowly pausing at the altar to cross herself before proceeding past the baptismal font and back down along the far side. The wooden floor is neither painted nor varnished, but the upholstery on the kneelers looks newly plush, and someone has gone row by row through the pews to space the prayer books evenly.

  At the confessional along the wall, she stops.

  “Father?” she whispers, pushing aside the drape. There’s the barest of murmurs from the storm, along with the drip of water from her skirt. She steps inside and kneels. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. Father? Is there really no one there?” With her knuckles she raps on the panelled wall.

  “Piss off,” she says quietly. “Goddamn,” she continues with more volume. “Shit-cunt-asshole,” she exclaims, then feels idiotic, no better than those girls.

  From outside the booth, there’s a noise like a door closing. Cocking her head, she calls out a hello. When there’s no response, she pulls back the drape and scans the building. All is still. Beginning to shiver, she makes her way toward the front door, stopping at an alcove where a few votive candles stand beside a collection box. She bends over in search of something with which to light them. As she does, a voice booms out.

  “You, girl! Get away from this!” A thin, balding man in a cassock is hurrying toward her. He looks almost forty, with thick, angry eyebrows. “You have no shame?” His accent is clipped, Eastern European. He turns and shouts, “Lenka, call police station.” A woman with a beehive piled atop her head has appeared in a side door by the altar and gives the barest of nods.

  The priest reaches for Maggie and grabs her by the arm. Instinctively, she tries to wrench loose of his grip.

  “What did I do?” she cries.

  “You know what you do.”

  “I don’t know! I really don’t!” Her skin’s still wet and she slips away. Reaching to seize her, he fastens onto a strap of her top. It rips loudly, freezing them both. Then he lets go and steps back.

  “I only came in here to pray,” she says, holding the strap in place with one hand. “It was raining!” But when she turns to go, he blocks the door.

  “Where do you come from?” he asks. “You are one of the draft dodgers at Harroway.” He speaks these words carefully, whether out of some difficulty in pronouncing them or with a particular disdain for such people, it isn’t clear.

  “Who told you that?” she demands.

  “The man with you,” replies the priest with a tight smile. “He speaks to storekeepers in Virgil. This place is the same as everywhere, people like the gossip.”

  “We’re not draft dodgers,” she says. “We’re working for the Morgan Sugar Company.”

  The priest seems uninterested in this distinction.

  “Stealing is serious thing.” He raises a handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his brow. “Authorities send you back to U.S.A.”

  “Father, it’s a misunderstanding. I’m Catholic, really! My dad’s a missionary.” The priest’s face remains stern. “Oh, never mind!” With her free arm she gestures toward the alcove. “Tell me what I was stealing. Candles?”

  “You hide something behind your back.”

  Reaching around, she pulls out her letter. The ink has bled so that the name and address are illegible. As she goes to offer it for his inspection, the wet paper wilts in her hand.

  “For my grandmother,” she says.

  He doesn’t take the letter from her. Instead, he gains a frustrated, almost disappointed look. “Three times this year they break into collection box,” he mutters. “You must understand.” Turning away, he walks down the aisle, glowers at the woman with the beehive as he passes her, and disappears into the other room.

  The woman approaches Maggie with halting steps. “I apologize for my brother,” she says in the same accent as the priest’s. She has a slender white neck and pale lips almost indistinguishable from her skin. “You startle him. This parish is very little, yes? Friday mornings nobody comes; church for him is like part of rectory.” She turns her palms outward to indicate that this is unfortunate but not to be helped. “You are from U.S.A.?” Maggie nods. “My brother and I, we are from Czechoslovakia. You are Catholic? You will come to Mass? Oh, but look!” All at once she seems to have noticed that Maggie’s hand is holding the strap of her top. “From him? Is terrible, he will apologize. Stay here, I get pin for you.”

  Without awaiting a response, she goes down the aisle and vanishes through the door. From the other room comes the noise of her and the priest arguing. Maggie listens awhile, then hastens away. Across the church’s front lawn she goes, splashing through the soaked grass like a child let out from school. The rain has stopped and the road glistens. She runs along it in the direction of the farmhouse, dogged by the wet slap of her sandals, one hand holding her top’s broken strap while the other is clenched around the waterlogged letter to her grandmother. After a time she realizes there’s no point carrying the thing, it’s ruined, she’ll have to rewrite it, so she squeeze
s the envelope into a ball and throws it into the ditch. It floats away on the runoff and seconds later disappears into a culvert.

  The first confession she ever made was to murdering her mother by being born. For some reason Maggie’s father blamed himself for the death, but Maggie was the one who’d gotten stuck coming out. At nine years old she admitted this before the priest in Syracuse, stunning him into silence, and later that afternoon she told Gran too. Then Gran smacked her across the ear.

  “It was your mother’s doing, no one else’s,” Gran declared.

  Maggie was tempted to argue, but she had to be careful. Gran owned the house in which Maggie and her father lived and, although no one ever said as much, Maggie felt certain that if she were to fall from Gran’s good graces, Gran wouldn’t hesitate to throw them out. The house was right beside Gran’s, built for Maggie’s father when he gained a wife, and a pregnant one at that, a girl who refused to live with Gran and insisted she have a home to herself. Gran said the girl had showed some nerve, three months out of high school, expecting to be given the Taj Mahal. Even when Maggie was young, she suspected there was another side to the story, but Gran’s was the only one she heard. Her father never talked about it.

  Gran didn’t speak about Maggie’s mother so disparagingly when Gordon was around. In his presence she didn’t speak of her at all. There was a rule against it, unspoken but as fixed as the other rules in Maggie’s life: that she must attend Mass with Gran; that Maggie’s father would never come with them; that Maggie was to pray each night for the conversion of Russia and never to read at the table. Gran said only Protestants did that. Maggie wasn’t to enter her father’s bedroom, either, although this was a rule she’d created for herself. She had made it after Gran told her that he had always wanted a lock for his bedroom when he was a boy, and Gran had refused to humour him, so when finally he’d gotten a house of his own, the first thing he’d done was to install a bolt on the bedroom door. As far as Maggie knew, he never actually used it, but she decided to honour the principle behind the thing.

  Another rule was that on Friday nights and no others, Maggie and her father ate dinner at Gran’s. Those evenings Gordon never spoke unless his mother addressed him first, and then he responded with the fewest possible words. The rest of the week he didn’t set foot in his mother’s house and Gran didn’t enter theirs, though the homes were separated by not even a fence, only a shallow, grassy depression that lay dry most of the year. If Gran needed to talk with him, she telephoned. This she did at least once a day, and although she was the only person who ever called, Maggie’s father always said hello as if he didn’t have the foggiest notion who it could be. It seemed the case that as long as his mother was out of sight, he forgot she was a few yards away. He forgot that she owned his house, that she had gotten him his job. He seemed truly to believe there was just him and Maggie in the world, along with the ghost of his dead wife knocking about in the unlit rooms.

  Sometimes Maggie liked to think her mother had merely run away, and that one day on a long car trip across America, Maggie would come upon her singing in a lounge or serving hamburgers at a diner. The problem with this fantasy was that Maggie could remember the first day of her life. She remembered lying with her mother at the hospital, the bright lights above them and the antiseptic reek from the floors, the apple-cheeked nurse hovering in her bleached uniform. Maggie remembered the soft scratch of the blanket around her and the warmth of her mother’s hands. She even remembered the exact moment when life passed from the fingers and a cold stiffness settled in. Gran told her this was nonsense and foolishness; no one could remember that far back.

  “Your mother was a selfish, stuck-up girl,” said Gran. “And the mouth on her! Never when Gordon was around, mind you. In his eyes she could do no wrong. She had him right beneath her sticky little thumb.”

  Her father thought otherwise. He said her mother was a cherub and an angel. But he and Gran didn’t have this argument in person, only through Maggie and the opinions she reported to each of them in turn, passing from house to house with her cargo of second-hand speech. She ran between her father and Gran like an electrical cord, crackling and throwing sparks, thrilling at how the things she said could make the two of them come alive.

  “My mother wasn’t selfish,” Maggie told Gran one afternoon. “She was an angel and a cherub!” It was so easy and pleasurable to be contrary when Maggie was articulating someone else’s thoughts. If they were her own, she’d never speak with such recklessness or conviction.

  Her father had stopped going to Mass after her mother died. Gran disapproved of this decision, if that’s what it was, but Maggie accepted its wisdom. For her quiet, introverted father to stay away from that place, with all its words and people, seemed natural, even necessary. She was sure that if he was ever forced to go, some disaster would strike from which he’d never recover.

  Maggie told her father only once about remembering her birth. As she spoke, his expression grew glazed and terrified. For this man whom she loved more than anything, the loss of his wife was still a scabless wound. Seeing it plainly on his face, Maggie slaughtered her mother once more, this time in her mind, and silently vowed never to mention her again.

  When she arrives back at the farmhouse, she’s still trying to decide what to tell Fletcher and Brid. If she reports her encounter with the two girls, Brid will probably say she’s a prude and needs to loosen up. She doesn’t want to tell Brid and Fletcher about the priest and his sister either. They’ll want to know why Maggie entered the church in the first place, and they won’t believe it was only because of the rain.

  She’s halfway up the drive before she notices the mud-spattered truck parked by the house. It bears the logo of a gas company, and for a moment she feels a sense of relief, until she spots Fletcher on the porch, shirtless, arguing with a bald man in a blue uniform. As she draws nearer, she makes out a crest on the outfit that says his name is Frank. He has a slumped, wizened face with bloodhound eyes, and he keeps his forehead lowered in Fletcher’s direction like a bull preparing to charge.

  “I told you, thirty bucks,” she hears Frank say. “I’ve got overhead.”

  “You’re kidding me,” replies Fletcher. “There’s no way I’m paying more than fifteen.”

  “You want me to unfix that leak?” the man says.

  As Maggie reaches the porch, Fletcher gives her a look, and she knows she should stop to take his side, but she passes by him into the house. Upstairs, she grabs her purse and counts out bills, then flies back down and pushes them into Frank’s hand. He examines her for a moment, making her realize what a sight she must present. Her wet skirt is as filthy as his truck, the broken strap of her top tied together in a clumsy knot.

  “Hippies,” says Frank with a shake of his head. He waits for a rebuttal, but neither Maggie nor Fletcher obliges him. “Bet you’re Americans too,” Frank says. Fletcher crosses his arms and stares at the money in the man’s fist. At last Frank grunts and sets off down the porch stairs in the direction of his truck.

  As he drives away, Fletcher turns to her in bewilderment. “Why did you pay him?”

  “You looked so helpless,” she replies.

  He appears about to protest, but then he draws her into his arms. “He would’ve come down to twenty,” he says.

  She knows he’s right; ten dollars makes a difference. It’s good of him to care about such things, especially when he’s probably never had to haggle in his life. She’s about to tell him so when he tenses against her, fingering the knotted strap on her shoulder.

  “What happened to this?” he asks.

  “It broke.” She can’t bring herself to tell him about the church. Not about the girls either. “Where are we at with money?” she asks instead. “It’s only been a week.”

  “We need to talk,” he replies. There’s an unsettling gravity in his tone.

  “Okay. But I need to change first.”

  When she comes back downstairs, there’s no one in th
e house, so she makes her way to the front lawn where the camper is parked. A stick of incense burns on the dashboard, and Pauline sits at the fold-down table, a daisy chain lopsided on her head, conducting a tea party with her doll. Across from her, Brid in her sunglasses and bikini throws clothes and toys into a burgundy suitcase.

  “Heard the gas is fixed,” says Brid when she sees her. “C’mon, honey, let’s skedaddle.” Pauline sets down her cup and saucer with care before climbing out of the vehicle. Brid starts after her, then sighs and pivots back to the suitcase. “Just a second, I haven’t taken La Evil yet today.”

  Maggie frowns, not understanding, even when Brid pulls out a bottle of pills.

  “You know, Elavil,” says Brid. “Wonderful stuff. Keeps you from sticking your head in the oven. Hard on the eyes, though.” Momentarily she lowers her sunglasses. “You thought I wore these just to look hip? Wale calls it La Evil, as in, ‘Sufficient unto the day is La Evil thereof.’ ”

  Maggie says nothing while she waits for Brid to swallow her pill, only thinks of what has just been so casually revealed. Then they carry on into the house with Pauline singing ahead of them. When they enter the kitchen, Brid’s all jagged cheer, calling out, “Hey handsome!” to Fletcher where he sits at the table. She dances her fingers playfully over one of his shoulders, but he isn’t in a playful mood.

  “We need a new plan,” he says, his voice sounding self-assured even as his hands grip the edge of the table. “The way things are going, we’ll never get anything done. We can’t spend Morgan Sugar’s dough forever.”

  “It’s barely been a week,” says Brid. “That’s a little quick to have blown the bankroll.” She sends Pauline off to occupy herself in the mud room, then sits next to Maggie at the table. “Besides, I thought the whole thing was a stitch-up between you and your father.”

  “The company still expects to see something for its money,” says Fletcher, “and I promised we’d have at least eight working bodies from the start.”