Once We Had a Country

by Robert Mcgill

  Brid stares at him with skepticism. “You get new marching orders from Daddy today?” When Fletcher doesn’t reply, her look grows sharper. “So your old man’s under the impression that we’re here to make his company a profit.”

  “Technically, that is why we’re here …” He breaks off and looks grim.

  There’s an ache in Maggie’s gut. Gathering herself, she turns to Brid and finds her staring back as though waiting for Maggie’s intercession.

  “Fletcher’s dad understands we’re doing things our way,” says Maggie, trying to sound measured and reasonable. “He knows eventually we’ll buy the place from the company. Until then, though, Morgan Sugar’s paying our salaries.” She knows very well that Brid has already been informed of these facts.

  “Fine, so we’ll get the workers,” says Brid. “Those draft dodgers from Toronto—”

  “I’ve talked to them,” says Fletcher. “They can’t come for at least a month.”

  Brid heaves herself back in her chair. “Okay then, big shot, tell us your plan.”

  Looking at them with a wary eye, he says, “There’s a programme up here. Government run, migrant workers. Pretty easy to arrange.”

  “You’re kidding me,” says Brid. “What, Mexicans?”

  “Jamaicans.”

  “Oh, even better.” She helps herself to a cigarette from a pack on the table. Maggie has a sense that right now Brid and Fletcher strongly dislike each other. This fact should soothe her somehow, but instead there’s an intimacy to the whole thing that’s excruciating.

  “The workers fly up, stay the season, fly back,” says Fletcher. “It’s a lot cheaper than local labour. Plus, you know, it puts money into the Jamaican economy—”

  Brid smiles an awful smile and shakes her head in disbelief. “You are fucking kidding me.”

  “It would just be till we’re off the ground.”

  Maggie hates the beseeching way in which Fletcher says it. Is this why he asked Brid to join them here—to earn her approval? She doesn’t even care about the farm. She’s only come up for the sake of her daughter and her AWOL boyfriend.

  Maybe Maggie shouldn’t be so judgmental, though. It isn’t like she has spent her own life driven by idealism. Even now, her urge is to leave the table, take the Super 8 camera outside, and have some time alone. She’s already starting to imagine what that would be like when she realizes Brid is staring at her.

  “You’re not even paying attention, are you?” says Brid.

  “No, I’m listening.” She turns to Fletcher, but he only sits there sharing Brid’s quizzical expression.

  “So what do you think, then?” Brid asks her.

  “I think—” she begins, not knowing what she thinks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “For Christ’s sake.”

  “No, wait.” She can’t just leave it at that. This place needs to be a success. “We should try Fletcher’s plan. I mean, we wouldn’t be forcing anything on the Jamaicans, would we? They want to work up here. And we could pay them better than minimum wage. We could even help them stay in Canada.” As she speaks these words, it sounds like a plausible arrangement, especially considering she’s devised it on the spot. But Fletcher looks troubled.

  “Now hold on,” he says. “There are rules, for one thing, and paying them more money kind of defeats the purpose—”

  “What is the purpose, though?” she asks. “I mean, I thought we’re trying to create something fair and equal here.” At this, Fletcher’s face darkens and Brid beams. “I know you’re trying to do that,” Maggie adds hastily. She feels herself sinking. “So if you think your solution is the best idea,” she says with a sigh, “we should probably just go ahead with it.”

  “Oh, Maggie,” says Brid. “You were doing so well.” Rising from her seat, she turns to Fletcher. “Do whatever you want. Honestly, the only thing I care about is that we buy a TV.”

  Fletcher laughs without humour until he realizes she isn’t joking. “I thought we agreed on no television.”

  “Sure, except the kid’s bored out of her skull. Speaking of which, where’s the playroom you promised?”

  “I told you, as soon as Wale gets here—”

  “Yeah, well, that’s the other thing. If he doesn’t show up next week, Pauline and I are going back to Boston.” In the mud room, she scoops up Pauline and carries her outside.

  Neither Fletcher nor Maggie looks at the other. Brid’s cigarette burns in the ashtray between them. He reaches out and mashes it.

  “Thanks for all your help there.” He speaks the words with a smile, but she can see that he’s hurt.

  “I said we should go ahead with it, didn’t I?”

  He lowers his gaze, then pushes his chair back and leaves the room. A few seconds later she hears his footsteps on the stairs. She can’t believe it. Instead of following, she snatches up a broom and dedicates herself to sweeping the kitchen.

  From the second floor there’s banging and the scraping of heavy objects. It’s too much. Finally she goes up, telling herself she has to vacuum the hall, and discovers he has shut himself in the unfinished playroom where Pauline found the dead birds. He has even taped a piece of paper to the door that reads PLEASE STAY OUT. Fine, then; she’ll go back downstairs and leave him to it.

  An hour passes before she hears the door open, then the sound of his footsteps. When he appears, his torso and arms are speckled with white paint and his face gives no sign of anger.

  “Come with me,” he says. “I want to show you something.”

  Upstairs, the sign has been removed from the door. The space inside is empty aside from an assortment of painting supplies, along with a card table in the middle that holds some large, angular object hidden by a bedsheet. Three of the room’s walls are still covered in green wallpaper, but the fourth is bright white.

  “Why did you paint just one wall?”

  “Close your eyes,” he says. When she does, she hears him switch off the overhead light, and then a motor grinds into life. When she looks, a beam of light is crossing the room, illuminating eddies of dust. On the newly painted wall is an image of Fletcher, supine in the outbuilding he’s taken to calling the barracks, lifting and lowering a barbell above his chest. There’s no sound except the clack of film through the projector. She remembers framing this scene through the camera’s viewfinder, yet still she isn’t quite able to accept its return in colour and big as life.

  “What do you think?” he says, arms circling her waist. “It’s your own projection room. Now we can watch everything you shoot. We’ll make you our documentarian.”

  “It’s wonderful,” she replies, and means it. But then she thinks of Brid and feels queasy. “This was supposed to be a playroom,” she points out. “Brid won’t be happy—”

  “It can be a playroom too.”

  Maggie’s eyes remain focused on the wall, watching the past version of him as he shows Pauline how to make a muscle. When the film ends, Fletcher goes to the projector and flips a switch so that it begins to run backward. He grins as, on the wall, he and Pauline start once more into their motions, now reversed.

  “I thought you were angry with me,” admits Maggie.

  He squeezes her tight. “I’m sorry things have been heavy. You’re so good to me. I don’t have the means to repay your goodness.”

  He speaks so softly and with such affection, it takes her a moment to wonder why he shouldn’t have the means. She tries to look him in the eyes, but he avoids her gaze.

  “Things are never going to work, are they?” he says. “Christ, I don’t want to be hiring Jamaicans, but what else can we do? Ask my father to fork out more cash? Maybe Brid’s right—I’m just a rich boy playing up here to avoid the war.”

  “Forget Brid,” she replies. The harshness with which she says it seems to disconcert him.

  “Oh, it’s not her fault. She comes from a really fucked-up family. That sort of thing messes with your head.”

  “You ever thin
k—” She tries to sound lighthearted. “You ever think she has a crush on you?”

  “A crush!” he says, and kisses her neck. “Don’t worry, baby, she’s not my type.”

  Maggie puzzles over his response. She seems particularly fortunate to have ended up living with two people so sure they’re not each other’s type.

  On the screen, the film still runs in reverse. Pauline walks backward from the bathroom to the playroom, approaches three dead birds on the windowsill, and points to them. Then she and the camera retreat down the hall, arriving at a place where another dead bird lies broken on the carpet. Eventually, like magic, it leaps into Maggie’s waiting hand.

  Maggie draws a sharp breath.

  “What is it?” says Fletcher.

  On the wall, the bird is now in Pauline’s cupped fingers and the girl’s crying, tears streaming from her cheeks back into her eyes.

  “You didn’t show this to Brid, did you?” Maggie asks. “I haven’t told her about the dead birds.”

  Fletcher promises not to say anything, and the two of them stay holding each other as the film winds back to its beginning: the sequence of objects left behind, the glimpses of the outhouse and the decrepit living room. Finally the end of the film flaps against the reel and the wall becomes a slate of light. Once he’s turned off the projector, they make their way to the bedroom. When they emerge and descend sheepishly to the kitchen, Brid and Pauline are already eating dinner.

  “At it again, huh?” says Brid.

  After the meal, while Brid’s tucking in Pauline, Maggie takes the scissors and Scotch tape from the kitchen to her new screening room, turns on the projector, and runs it until she reaches the scene with the birds. Very carefully she cuts it out, then tapes the remaining film back together. It seems too easy, but when she runs it again, her taping job holds; the film simply moves from the previous scene to the next. She’s glad, but somehow she can’t quite bear the thought of throwing away the excised strip, so she rolls it up, goes to the bedroom closet, and nestles it in the pocket of her winter coat.

  Her first camera was a Kodak Brownie Starflash, black plastic with a built-in flash gun, the socket for the bulb haloed by a silver dish above the lens. Her father gave her the camera for her tenth birthday, even though Gran told him the thing was too grown-up for a girl her age. Thereafter Maggie took revenge on her grandmother by repeatedly skulking through Gran’s house and lying in wait until the old woman came into range. Then Maggie pressed the button and a smack of light caught Gran full in the face. Gran shrieked exquisitely every time, her howls of indignation following Maggie across the lawn during the scamper home, the camera on its strap swinging against Maggie’s breastbone with a pain she accepted as her due for such wickedness. Each time she thumbed through a packet of newly developed photographs, she took a special pleasure from the shots of Gran’s face drained of colour, garish, poorly framed, her expression somewhere between terror and outrage.

  The rest of the photographs were always of Maggie’s father, because at that age Maggie assumed that photos had to be of people, and because taking pictures of him was so simple and satisfying. Those moments when she held him in the viewfinder were the only times she could look at him without feeling overwhelmed by the melancholy in his eyes.

  What the camera never showed was the long scar on his neck from a piece of shrapnel when the Nazis almost got him in the war. Maggie had seen the scar only a few times, and the story wasn’t one her father liked to tell, so she’d been left to read about D-Day on her own and picture the invasion, the rough sailing and frigid waters, the hours of bleeding before a medic finally arrived to help him. The history books described it as one of the most important events in American history, yet her father never marched in the Veterans Day parade, and the scar was his only ribbon. He hid it behind high collars or under scarves that made him look like Roy Rogers with a beard. When he went out, people stared; it was no wonder that, except for his job, he mostly stayed at home.

  Fletcher was different. He needed to be out among others, even if he didn’t always seem to enjoy it. In fact, sometimes in Boston when she sat with him and a group of his friends at a restaurant, watching him fidget and blush with embarrassment at others’ joking, she wondered if he’d committed himself to such sociability on a self-made dare. Or perhaps he thought that spending time with people, talking politics and ideas, was expected from a young man of his standing.

  She met him on the opening night of The Go-Between, when she sat down in the empty seat next to him, a stranger. They were both on their own. Later he teased her about that, said she must have had her eye on him from the start, but in truth there were no other seats. At that point she often went to the cinema alone, needing an escape from the stress of teaching but not wanting to watch television because it reminded her too much of home. As a girl she had never really gone to movies. Now she discovered they weren’t like TV at all. There was no coyness about them; they showed you everything. She had watched McCabe and Mrs. Miller. She had seen Klute and Shaft. She had seen Carnal Knowledge and come out amazed that such things were shown in public places.

  After the final credits for The Go-Between, Fletcher turned to her and asked what she thought of the film. There was a bashfulness about him that made her decide he wasn’t a creep, so she replied that she’d liked the novel better, though she admired Julie Christie’s performance. When he observed that not too many girls went to the movies Friday night on their own, Maggie told him she wasn’t by herself. He was taking her out for coffee, wasn’t he? It was the most daring thing she’d ever said.

  The first time he invited her back to his apartment, they didn’t make it to the bedroom. Afterward, lying there still naked on the couch, he asked whether it was all right if he turned on the television, because there was a show he wanted to see about the Pioneer 10 spacecraft that NASA was launching soon. He said it would be the first human-built thing to leave the solar system. Maggie said she didn’t mind and pretended to watch along with him, but her eyes went around the room, taking in the bust of JFK on the bookshelf, the framed poster that showed Earth from space.

  “Hey, look,” said Fletcher after a time, and she glanced back to the TV screen. They were showing the golden plaque the scientists had affixed to the side of the spacecraft, hoping that one day an alien race would learn about humanity from the information engraved there. It had hieroglyphs detailing the composition of hydrogen and the Earth’s location, and then there was a stark, plain image of a man and woman standing a few feet apart. Neither of them wore any clothes. The man’s hand was raised in greeting, and Maggie tried to imagine being so confident in her nakedness that she could wave at someone like that.

  “Maggie, they’re us,” said Fletcher, sounding pleased at the idea. She looked more closely and saw the woman’s hips were as wide as her own, while the long, straight hair was more or less the same. But the man was stockier, more muscular than Fletcher, and he wore no glasses, had no moustache. Although Maggie didn’t say it out loud, the couple wasn’t them at all. It was only her and some man she’d never met.

  One morning not long after their discussion about migrant workers, Maggie looks through the mud room window and sees Fletcher walking back from the orchard with a dark-skinned man in a checkered shirt and an orange woollen cap. Crossing the lawn to meet them, she apprehends that the man’s older than they are, maybe thirty-five, with pockmarked cheeks and short hair touched by grey.

  “Maggie, this is George Ray Ransom,” says Fletcher. “George Ray works a little way from here, at the Beaudoin farm.”

  “Nice to make your acquaintance,” says George Ray. His voice has a Caribbean lilt and a slightly ironic edge.

  “We’re going to steal him away from his employer at the end of the month,” says Fletcher. Turning to George Ray, he adds, “Then you’ll stay with us for the rest of the summer, right?”

  George Ray nods his assent. From the studied ease with which Fletcher speaks, she can tell that George
Ray has made a good impression on him, and that Fletcher is eager in turn to seem knowledgeable and self-possessed. Of George Ray’s opinion about Fletcher, though, she gains little sense. When she asks him what he thinks about the place, he looks toward the orchard for a long time.

  “Needs plenty of work,” he declares. “Three, maybe four seasons before you turn a profit.”

  “That’s a conservative estimate,” Fletcher adds quickly. “If we get more people, there’s a lot we can do even before next season.” George Ray says nothing to contradict him, only taps the ground with the heel of his boot as though to dislodge something from the sole.

  When she leaves them and re-enters the house, she finds Brid standing in the mud room by the window.

  “Handsome devil,” says Brid. “You find out if he’s single?”

  That afternoon, Maggie goes for a walk along the gravel road, thinking she might glance next door to see what’s going on there. She has decided the thin girl’s father must own the wrecking yard, and she imagines seeing him out on the lawn with his daughter. She imagines introducing herself, making the girl squirm a bit. It’s a silly fantasy, and Maggie doubts she could pull it off without embarrassing herself. When she reaches the gate for the wrecking yard, she turns toward the mobile home only for a second, trying to be surreptitious.

  There’s no one on the lawn, but in the driveway sits a truck that bears a striking resemblance to the one driven by Frank, the gas repairman. Then a man in an undershirt, jeans, and a baseball cap steps out from the building. It takes Maggie a moment to recognize it’s him. From his clothes, and from the unselfconscious way he lets the door slam behind him, she realizes this is his home. Frank is their next-door neighbour. He must be the girl’s father, too. Maggie returns her eyes to the road and hurries back toward the farmhouse.

  Once she’s out of view and can relax again, her bewilderment turns to irritation. If the man lives next door, why did it take him over a week to come and fix the gas? Why wouldn’t he introduce himself as their neighbour? Then she remembers: he thinks they’re hippies. He must want nothing to do with them.