“That’s why I looked for the job at Jim Gartley’s,” he said. “So I could buy her a little something.”
She looked hard at him. And so you could buy yourself some liquor, the look said.
“How long did you work for Jim?” she asked.
“Just an hour or so. He doesn’t have a lot to do there, and I just rubbed down one or two of the horses for him. But I got enough for a present.”
“Well, that’s good,” she said, and he could see she was beginning to relent.
She moved the pot of fat off the stove and started stirring something up in a big, brown mixing bowl that had been in the kitchen across the river for as long as Maclean could remember.
“Little Ruthie ain’t been too well the last week or two,” she said, changing the subject. “Some kind of summer cold or somethin’. She ain’t very strong that child.”
“I guess not,” Maclean said. “That’s too bad.”
He remembered seeing Little Ruthie on the street once with her mother—a frail little girl with toothpick arms and legs.
“I always been scared of sickness,” Alice said. “Especially with kids. Ever since that awful flu, I always been scared. People as healthy could be on Monday and dead on Friday. Father nearly died of it. It was terrible. And the Skadgets. Just about that whole family. And Elsie, that big healthy girl you wouldn’t have thought anything could kill. Remember?”
“Yes,” Maclean said. “I remember.”
It had been a long time since he had thought of Elsie.
Six o’clock in the morning. The middle of June. At the top of the hill, high above the river, a farmer had an acre of strawberries, and himself and Elsie Skadget and half a dozen others went up to pick for him to make a little money, a cent or two a box. He took them up in the back of his wagon. Halfway up, a mist hung on the hill, and they drove up into it like birds disappearing into the clouds. It was so thick they could hardly see the ditches beside them as they bumped slowly along, the horses labouring on the steep road. Then gradually the mist became bright with diffused sunlight, and suddenly they came out above it on the top of the hill, the sky overhead absolutely cloudless and so bright you could hardly look at it, and below them the great, snow-white carpet of mist stretching off to the hills far away west of the town towards the American border.
He sat beside Elsie in the wagon, and he could feel her hip soft against him, and he didn’t know whether she wanted it to be that way or whether it was something she didn’t even notice. It must have been 1909. The summer before he went to high school. Without having any idea what he meant by it, he had decided that he was in love with Elsie Skadget, and all that morning as they picked berries and the field grew hot under the sun, he tried to get himself a row next to hers. When they were close together, they talked, and he could remember Elsie’s loud laugh and the way the other pickers sometimes looked at them.
Alice had put the mixing bowl on the table and had begun spooning out the dough in little blobs on a cookie sheet.
“Little Ruthie just loves peanut butter cookies,” she said.
“Yes,” Maclean said. “That’s good.”
They lived, the Skadgets, on a weedy, two-acre farm on a side hill above the gulch that ran off into the forest from the end of the bridge. The mother was a big, strapping, slovenly woman who always smelled like sour milk, the father, a sad, little man who seemed to spend all day just sitting by the kitchen door watching the chickens. There were eight, maybe even ten kids, it was hard to keep track, and they lived in an unpainted, ramshackle house with only three or four rooms for all of them and not much to keep the wind from blowing through. On cold nights in the winter, people said, they used to bring two or three of their pigs inside to help keep them all from freezing to death.
“Mitch says that peanut butter is one of the best foods in the world.”
“That so?” Maclean said.
“Mitch says that if you was shipwrecked on a desert island, the very best thing you could have would be lots of peanut butter.”
Elsie Skadget was a year older than he was, and by the time he was thirteen, he began to have thoughts about her that his father would have horsewhipped him for. She wasn’t pretty at all, not the kind of girl the poems seemed to be about, nor the kind that decorated the lids of chocolate tins, slim and bosomless, with rosebud lips and corn-silk hair, and skin as white as snow except for the blush of rose on the cheeks, and little oval faces, and delicate little hands. Elsie’s mouth was wide and full, her hair black, a great, thick, crinkily mass of it, her skin blemished by chickenpox and by the middle of summer tanned as dark as an Indian’s. Even at fourteen, she had heavy breasts and heavy woman’s hips that rolled around inside her cotton dress as she walked and made butterflies under Maclean’s heart whenever he found himself walking behind her on the road. The boys made coarse jokes about how repulsive she was, and he was too ashamed of what he felt and too young and dumb and blinded by his shame to see that they all lusted after her the same as he did.
All through the hot, heavy days of that summer, the thought of her was never far away, and in the evenings after his two or three hours of chores were finished, and on Sundays when to work was a sin, he usually saw her, along with the gang of kids they were both part of, swimming in the river by a little woodworking shop that had a ramp down into the water or drifting aimlessly up and down the road. Sometimes on Saturday nights, they journeyed the quarter mile across the bridge into town to walk the crowded streets, looking in store windows at all the things they couldn’t buy.
“When they don’t need me no more at home,” Elsie said, “I’m gonna come over here and git a job in one of them stores and buy me a dress just like that one there.”
“I tell Ruthie, ‘you want to make that girl eat more,’” Alice said. “She needs a little more flesh on them bones. It don’t do no harm to be a little fat, Mitch always says, because then you got somethin’ to live off if you get sick.”
Every year at the end of August, they held the annual exhibition at the park on the big island in the middle of the river, which suddenly became a magical place with a dome of light above it at night and the music from the carnival rides and shows drifting up to them across the water. They went one night, a little crowd of them. They walked around the exhibition sheds at first because they didn’t have to pay to do that, looking at the same animals and vegetables they saw every day at home, waiting for it to get dark when the magic of the lights would be at its best before they went in to the carnival. They didn’t have enough money to go to the shows, but they stood in the crowd at the front watching the outdoor acts intended to draw them in, fire-eaters and fat ladies and hootchie-kootchie dancers and jugglers. Near the time they had to go home, they spent their money on the rides, some on the Ferris wheel, some on the merry-go-round. As well as the pairs of gaudy horses, the merry-go-round had a gaudy, little wagon that Elsie rode around in by herself, waving at the crowd along the fence like a queen in a procession.
They went back across the bridge in a ragged single file because there was no walk for pedestrians, only the roadway so narrow you had to stand flattened against the railings when something wide was edging its way past something else that was wide. Without really admitting to himself what he was doing, he let himself fall behind, and Elsie fell behind too and walked ahead of him, talking away about the carnival and what she would have done if she’d had more money. He hardly listened, his heart pounding.
When they got to the end of the bridge, the others had all gone their ways into the darkness. He walked with Elsie along the little road that led up the gulch toward the Skadget place. They stopped in the darker darkness under a big maple, and he kissed her, a quick peck on the lips, and mumbled good night and fled away home.
“But them other kids of Ruthie’s, they ain’t fat nor nothin’, but they’re just as healthy as can be,” Alice said. “It’s funny, ain�
��t it. Just no reason.”
“No,” Maclean said. “I guess most of the time there isn’t.”
They were sitting on the ramp by the woodworking shop, Elsie in a bathing suit she had made out of an old dress, which when wet, clung to the shape of her nakedness beneath.
“Why don’t you come up to our place after supper,” Elsie whispered to him, “and we’ll go for a walk.”
The summer sun still high and hot. They walked up along the edge of a field full of yellow stubble where the last hay had been cut. Two of her younger brothers trailed along behind them further down the hill. One of them ran out into the field waving his arms, and a flock of blackbirds—grackles, starlings, red wings—rose and swirled in a great corkscrew of motion above the hillside and came down again further away. The boy ran after them, and the other boy followed.
They climbed a cedar rail fence, he first, Elsie after, bending over, her breasts hanging loose inside her dress, laughing her hoarse laugh, knowing very well what he was looking at.
“Now her sister Mildred’s kids is all just little butterballs,” Alice said. “It must have somethin’ to do with heredity.”
A corner of the next field. Wild grass, buttercups, daisies, devil’s paint brushes. The black birds swirling again overhead. The voices of the boys fading away, further off down the hill. Lying close together, finding her naked under her dress, watching her violent fit, unknowing and terrified at first that something awful, something fatal, was happening to her. Later on the way home, overwhelmed with guilt and the fear that his father would find out and horsewhip him or drive him from the house. Sin will always be found out. The righteous can always see it in the faces of the unrighteous as plain as if they were branded.
“Mildred’s husband Frank, now he ain’t big, but his mother was a big woman if ever there was. Mitch says people take after their grandparents more than their parents”
“Maybe so,” Maclean said.
A few days later, they met again at their spot on the hillside, and two or three more times after that. Then in the fall, he went across the river to the high school, feeling clumsy and awkward, the only one in his class there who wasn’t a town kid. He was only there a year and a half, but it was enough to make him feel ashamed of what his classmates might say if they knew he had a girlfriend like Elsie Skadget.
Then the war came and later the influenza.
It arrived in George County a few months after he came home from England, first one or two people coming down with it, nobody yet hardly knowing what it was, then more and more, and the atmosphere of terror gathering like that of the Black Death as people started dying when the winter came. People not going out any more than they had to, wearing a whole witch’s cupboard of crazy charms.
The Skadgets got it in the middle of the winter, and lying around in that ramshackle house with the wind blowing through it, every one of them died except the mother and one boy. Elsie was one of the first. Too many people were dying for graves to be dug in the frozen ground, so the undertakers collected the bodies in a barn on the edge of town after the funeral ceremonies, and in the spring there were dozens of buryings. The Skadgets were all lowered into the same grave in plain, wooden coffins on a rainy day with the water running down the piles of raw earth onto the coffins in the bottom, where a field mouse had fallen in the night before and drowned.
His father had watched all the dying with fierce satisfaction. It was God’s judgement on the wicked and the lazy. Then he got the influenza himself, the only one in the house to get it, and nearly died. But the judgement of God, who is a just God, visits his wrath not only on individuals but on their houses. Many were the children whose sins God has punished through the father.
That awful house of self-righteousness and rage as the winter of 1918 dragged toward spring. Sleet, then snow again, then rain that froze on everything. The roads so covered with ice that you could hardly stand up on them, then so deep in mud that a horse would sink to its fetlocks with every step and give up and just stand. Sometimes with all that mud and death, it seemed to him as if he was back in Flanders. Then the ice breaking up at last at the end of April and the first flowers of spring coming up in the woods. And all the while, more and more of the boys dragging home with their wounds, outer and inner, from the trenches.
At the table Alice was rolling little doughnut balls around on a plate of sugar.
Maclean eyed the cooked doughnuts.
Alice caught the look.
“Them doughnuts is cool now if you want one,” she said curtly as if giving an order.
“Thanks,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind.”
He picked out one that had exploded a little in the hot fat and had a thicker, rougher crust on one side.
If he had never gone to high school, he might have married Elsie Skadget and had kids and never gone to the war. And if she had married him, or even if they were just going together when the influenza came, fate might have taken a different road so that she didn’t die.
Once he and Henry had one of their long talks on the porch at Drusilla’s, and they decided that if even one little thing happened differently, then all sorts of other things would happen differently too. For example, on his way into town, a young man might stop along the road to admire a butterfly and six hours later get killed by a car whereas if he hadn’t stopped to look at the butterfly he wouldn’t have been stepping onto the street just at the moment when the car was arriving and might have gone on living for another fifty years. He might have gone on to be married. Children might have been born. Other lives lived. All because of a butterfly.
It makes you think, as Henry said.
“Do you remember,” Maclean said, “the time the bunch of us walked out to Lake Kintyre to have a picnic? Us two and the Nickerson girls, and Elsie Skadget and one of her brothers.”
Alice eyed him over her shoulder, and didn’t answer at first, searching maybe for the memory, or maybe not wanting it.
“Yes,” she said, finally. “And Sadie and Billy Sprague.”
“And Harry Noles,” Maclean said and wondered if maybe he shouldn’t have mentioned Harry.
“Yes,” she said. “And Harry too.”
Late July. The road along the little wooded valley dusty and shimmering. The brook that ran beside it so shallow it seemed hardly to be moving at all, as if it were nothing but a network of standing pools among the rocks. The chokecherry bushes along the road heavy with fruit and swarming with robins and blackbirds. The smell of the evergreens on the sides of the valley drifting down through the heat. And the crowd of them tramping along, the boys in caps, the girls in wide-brimmed straw hats with ribbons—except for Elsie Skadget, who had an old straw hat of her father’s all raveling away along the brim.
Alice was still taller than he was, slim and straight. She walked with a long, swinging stride beside Harry Noles, and he remembered her laughing. Once she ran away, and Harry chased her up the road until she ran out of breath, and they both stood at the top of a little rise waiting for the rest to catch up.
Where the road skirted the shore of Lake Kintyre before vanishing away into the deep forest, there was a stretch of green and a narrow beach of rounded stones. They sat there in a line on the edge of the green and ate their sandwiches of jam and cheese on homemade bread and looked across the lake at the forest rising up over the hill on the other side. Alice had taken an interest in poetry and once read aloud at the school closing, and she had brought along a book, hoping maybe that Harry Noles would see her as a sensitive and intelligent soul.
“I wandered lonely as a cloud,” she read, “that floats on high o’er vales and hills.”
Funny that so small a thing could be so great an adventure that he had remembered it all his life when there were now whole years that he couldn’t remember one thing about.
What year was it? 1906 maybe. It must have b
een just about then that Alice finished Grade 8 and father made her leave school. Perhaps that was what reading the poetry that day was about.
“I wandered lonely as a cloud,” Maclean said.
“What?” Alice asked, looking up from the stove.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Ain’t you gonna eat that doughnut?”
“Yes. Yes, I am.”
As she went on stirring furiously at something in a double boiler, he slowly ate his doughnut and looked around at the great clutter of cooking gear and fended off as best he could the sense of exile that threatened to assail him.
He became aware that more of the port he had drunk at the Black Rock had begun to work its way through. He wondered if he would be able to make it back to the boarding house without being caught short and decided not.
“I wonder,” he asked, “if I could use your bathroom.”
8
MACLEAN PEEKED OVER the top of the bathroom curtain at the back yard. A chicken coop, a little vegetable garden, at the back, a dense stand of fir trees unmoving in the afternoon heat, reminding him again of that long-ago morning when Alice at one of life’s awful crossroads had read Wordsworth to Harry Noles. Inside, on a set of shelves beside the washbasin, an arrangement of domestic clutter. Surprise soap. Toothbrushes. Hair brushes. Hair curlers. A pile of neatly folded towels. A shaving mug. A shaving brush. A safety razor. The furnishings of a settled life where a man might lie of an evening in a tub of hot water and read and float away from the troubles outside.
He looked at his face in the mirror. The bruise on his forehead was getting bigger and turning an even uglier shade of black and blue.
When he first moved to town, he boarded at a nice house on a nice residential street. It belonged to a couple, Bob and Clara, who took in only one boarder for the sake of a little extra money and maybe also for a little extra company now that their children had all moved away. Big elms and maples all around. A lawn out front that he mowed for them sometimes. A big garden that he used to help Bob weed in the evening, talking away about this and that, Bob asking him sometimes about the war and him telling the usual, well-sanitized lies.
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