Nights Below Station Street

by David Adams Richards

  “Milly, roll over and play dead. Okay, now roll the other way. Okay, now sit up – okay, now speak, no don’t really speak – but speak, with your paws up. Okay, now scratch fleas, now kick your hind legs up.”

  Then, bored with this, she would rummage through the fridge and take out a number of things, setting them on the table. Now and then she would look at her father quizzically as if wondering what it was he would be doing. Joe couldn’t write very well and so often printed out his applications.

  “What does the A say, Joe?” Adele would snip, chewing on an apple as the snow fell over the oil barrel outside.

  “The A says Angus, Delly. My middle name.”

  “Ha some foolish; boilermaker mechanic – what’s that?”

  “That’s what I am–”

  “H’m?”

  “Well,” Joe said almost apologetically, “I was a millwright when I worked at the mines, and I worked in the woods, and I was a diver when I was in the navy – so I guess I’m not just a boilermaker – but that’s the application I’m filling out.”

  “Pretty poor job, is it?”

  “No, Delly, it ain’t such a poor job – this job, if I get it, is eighteen thousand.”

  “Then you won’t get it.”

  Joe, his sandy red hair receding, and his shoulders sloped down, shrugged. His black heavy pants came over unlaced work boots.

  At certain times Adele would go downtown after school, carrying her books in her folded arms, her tam down over her ears, and would see him going into the unemployment office or coming out of it. The streets would be wet with dirty snow, and boys would call to her as she passed. Each time she saw Joe downtown she was scared he was going to be drunk, and would pretend not to recognize him.

  One day she saw him talking to Vye McLeod. Vye was standing with some groceries in his arms, and looking in the other direction as Joe explained something. There were pencils, pens, and punch-board tickets in Joe’s pocket. His shirt was opened and his chest hair was exposed to the wind. Adele, who was meeting Ruby and Janet, ran into Zellers and stood behind a coat rack so Joe wouldn’t see her.

  The winter before, Joe managed to get some welding, and two or three times he’d come home with a flash. When he did, he would come home and lie on the couch, and Rita would put tea bags on his eyes. He had sideburns that were cut off at the centre of his cheeks, his cheekbones were large and his face was massive. At times he grew a beard.

  He would lie there with tea bags on his eyes, and every now and then he would take them off, blink, and say:

  “I’m still blind – who are you?”

  “Terra.”

  “Terra – how are you, darlin?”

  “Fine – why do you have tea bags up on your eyes, Joe?”

  “Cause I’m blind.”

  He would lie on the couch with a look of complacency and two tea bags bulging out of his eye sockets, as Rita took a measuring cup filled with water and watered them down to keep them soggy.

  He would just lie there with tea bags on his eyes, and try to get as comfortable as possible.

  During the day the house was always open. Children from further away used it as a resting point on their way to and from school. People came in to stand and talk. Rita took care of other people’s children. It was not unusual to see her carrying about more than two at a time. Children from Skytown below them, or Station Street above, would parade through her doors any time of day. It was unusual not to see three or four kids waiting around the sunlit metallic kitchen table, still in their coats and boots, waiting for Milly, or more often than not, just talking to Rita. Rita would walk about the house all day long, half undressed, picking kids up, and setting them some place else as she walked, smoking a cigarette, and talked to them without taking a breath.

  “Milly, wipe your nose – wipe it; here we go – now blow, blow, not so hard, you’ll walk around unbalanced and deaf for the rest of your life.”

  “Byron, Evan told me you scored a goal last night – well, I have it marked down.” Here she would go to the kitchen drawer and take out a scribbler, in which she kept a record. “Well, that’s one goal and two assists. Last year at this time … let me see.”

  “I had fourteen goals last year at this time,” Byron would say, with a shift of his arms. Byron was Myhrra’s son. As he talked with Rita, he would disperse the younger children with a karate chop, or grab their cheeks in his big pudgy hands and try to make their lips look like guppies.

  At home, Byron had his own recreation room where he raised tropical fish in five tanks. Sometimes he would charge admission to the rest of the children to watch him feed his snakes. Sometimes in the summer Myhrra would leave him for the weekend and tell him to go to Rita and Joe’s. Then she would leave twenty dollars on the counter for spending money. Their trailer was at the top of the lane, and from where he sat on the hammock he could see everything that went on. He would laze in the hammock, eating ice cream with a bored expression on his face. Children would gather around him watching the ice cream disappear. He would tell Milly to rush home and make him a ketchup sandwich. He would then ask Evan to eat the crusts of this sandwich, and if he didn’t eat the crusts he would not be allowed to stay in his yard.

  Evan always left the yard, and Byron seemed to get angrier than ever when he did. Bits of bread lay under the hammock as he stretched out like a beetle in a cocoon. Sometimes Milly said that she would eat the crusts if he wanted her to, since it was just a game, but Byron would look at her, shielding his eyes from the sun, and tell her he wasn’t interested in what she ate.

  Rita then took charge of them all. People pawned kids off on her from all over town. Five would be sitting on a couch yelling and screaming, two more would be sleeping, and Rita, throwing socks and underwear over her shoulder, picking up a load of wash and resting her chin on it as she carried it towards the basement door, would have to step over two or three sitting on their bums on the kitchen floor. She would have to keep picking them off the counter as she slogged off to do another wash, and she would be heard screaming at them and telling them to stop putting their arms in the toilet.

  “No you didn’t – marked in red, see.” She’d hold the scribbler up.

  Then at times Joe would be laid up because of his back and she would have to tend to him.

  “Goddamn it all, Joe, you’re not getting out of that bed!”

  “I have to see about Mrs. Burke’s furnace –”

  “If you get up – I’ll punch you in the goddamn head.”

  Half the time Rita wore black slacks with the zipper broken and pinned with a big white safety pin. Her shirt was missing some buttons, and her hair was tied at the back and hung in a ponytail. Her breasts were large in proportion to her body.

  She’d grown up down river. She went away for a while after graduation – to the teacher’s college – but she left without her diploma. That was fifteen years ago. She had gotten married in the fall, fifteen years ago, and ever since then she did housework for other people, or took care of their children.

  When she did not have children to keep, she would sometimes go out and work cleaning house for Gloria Basterache, or for two or three other women on the river.

  Myhrra was doing all she could to get Byron to stop saying he was going to go and live with his father – and she took to bribing him. She would make milk shakes for him in the morning, and fudge to take to school. She would send away for books on tropical fish. And one night when his supper wasn’t french fries, hamburgers, and Coke, he ran into his bedroom and knocked over one of his tanks. Later that night, while he slept, Myhrra in her blue jeans, and with her eyes still made up, was down on her knees picking up the fish. For the first time, Myhrra was beginning to think of getting married again.

  She worked at the Central beauty salon downtown, and would keep trying to get her regular customers to come in more often. She’d take her number directory out and call them.

  “Mrs. Whalen – hair must be getting long, is it?”
Then she would pause, listen, rub her nose, while Byron sat over in a chair watching her listlessly, and she kept her hand up ready to shoo him away. “Listen, why don’t you come in for a cut –”

  Pause.

  “Well… no I don’t think it’s too early… you’ve not been in in a while … no I didn’t hear that … well that’s just the … yes … isn’t it… and he did, slapped her mouth off over a dill pickle … yes of course I knew he was as crazy as a bat in a bottle, but I never knew he’d go snakie over a dill pickle … come on in tomorrow and we’ll talk all about it… I have a surprise for you … oh … new boyfriend … well maybe new boyfriend – Vye McLeod; we’ll see if it’s for real or not … no no, it’s okay then if you can’t make it.”

  Byron would sit there listening to her while he looked about bored and intolerant. He would haul a mouse out of his shirt pocket and kiss it, or he would suddenly squeak his shoes loudly on the floor to get her attention, and when she looked at him he would say under his breath: “Get the christ off the phone. You are making a damn fool of yer-self.”

  Myhrra had almost gone to university. In fact she had her father haul her trunk out to the car and drive it to Fredericton. But then she decided to marry Mike, and she wanted to so badly nothing could prevent her. Her parents even tried to bribe her, but it didn’t work. They said that if she just went to university for one year she could marry him and they would give her the best wedding ever. But there was something about the doorknob. As she stood in her room almost acquiescing, she heard the rattle of her father’s keys to the dry cleaners, which he always carried in his pocket. It was the rattle of those keys along with the way he turned the doorknob. She had a chair propped up against it, and was standing in the centre of the room with a shoe in her hand, and her nose was running. It was the way the doorknob turned that made her marry Mike.

  So once she married him nothing could have been less unusual. The little wedding took place with fifty guests. Everything was done the exact way it had to be done, and she was Mrs. Mike Preen. And her father had to go back to the university, go to the Registrar and see about getting her tuition back, and then haul her trunk down the steps of the women’s residence and take it back home. And yet, just when that happened, there was such a finality about everything that she wished she had not gotten married, and she wished she had listened to her parents. She wished she hadn’t seen the doorknob turn in just that way.

  Mike liked to kick her in the bum and slap her around then. And she started to dye her hair and go downtown and hide on him as he went looking for her in his Monte Carlo – the very car that she had liked so much she now hid from.

  Sometimes she saw her ex-husband but they always ended up fighting. Since her divorce, she had been alone now three years. At first she didn’t think she would be alone at all, but her friends seemed gone now and all the years had trampled over other years, and seemed to have gone by. She had lost her teeth in an automobile accident when she was twenty-two. She had never gotten used to that, and she was afraid to smile.

  She had been a beauty queen at the annual exhibition and later she had gone on a trip – and what a trip it was. They saw Seaworld and Captain Marvel. And she thought she would always go on trips and see things. But now that was fifteen years ago. A train went by in the morning and one in the evening, and she had gotten so she would run to the back door and look at it. The trailer was close enough to the tracks that it shook. And her pains bothered her – she had a sore kidney, and sometimes when she thought she had to pee she didn’t at all.

  They were all young that night when she got into the car accident. Her friend Leroy flew out of the windshield and landed on the asphalt. There was a smell of burnt tin, and in the distance part of a broken windshield. When they found Myhrra, she was jammed between the front seat and the dash, still singing. Her mouth had been cut – so even now she had a little scar. They took her to the hospital and she was laughing hysterically. She was talking to Leroy – and he was sitting up, lighting nurses’ cigarettes, and comforting everyone else about him. And then he grabbed Myhrra and began to dance. Later that night he went into a coma – and he died. After the accident she had trouble and peed the bed. After she was married her husband used to make her wear plastic pants, and for a while he would sleep in a chair over near the door, with the blanket up over him.

  It was boredom that drove Myhrra to become a hospital volunteer this winter. She went there and visited the sick, brought them magazines and read their letters to them. The magazines themselves were two or three months old. Some of the letters had been read before. Some of the people were catheterized, and lay silently under the lights. Some would grow weaker from one visit to the next. And some would look at her suspiciously, and be angry about something.

  Dr. Hennessey did not approve of the volunteer program, which was new. He was an old man who looked at her sternly and scared her every time she went there. He’d been in the war, and yet in his manner there was such an overwhelming sense of kindness that she could not be upset with him for long.

  His hands shook, and his feet clomped about from one room to the next. He walked about the hospital cursing under his breath, with a nurse following him. People were generally frightened of him. He got into an argument with one old fellow who said he liked it when the volunteers dropped by to see him.

  “Well, you shouldn’t,” Dr. Hennessey said.

  “Why not?”

  “Just because you shouldn’t like them – you should want to be all alone rather than have them coming by.” “You don’t like them, doctor?”

  “Sure – sure they’re the very best, boy – the very best.”

  And with that, he cut off his conversation and walked down the hall, breathing heavily, smoking in the nonsmoking sections.

  “Myhrra,” he would say to her, “you should go home.”

  “What do you mean – I’m scheduled to sit with Mr. Salome.” And she would haul out a list and show him. He would take the paper, look at it at arm’s length and say:

  “Well, perhaps – but he’s asleep – and mostly dead – and perhaps it’s best if you just go home now.” Then he would smile and say: “I like your new patent leather shoes.” And clumsily she would look up at him in the dark, and clumsily he would walk away.

  Over everything in town rose the hospital, the station, the church, and the graveyard. Below, the river rested, beyond the woods and through the centre of town. Old buildings were being slowly replaced, being torn away, their steps faded, their pane-glass windows looking glib in the winter light.

  As time went on, the doctor felt less a part of things and more by himself. Some days he would see as many as one hundred patients and find himself being rude to almost everyone. Things were changing. Now, nurses coming out of university talked about units of time, and time-units per patient. This not only bothered the old doctor, but made him sceptical of everything. He found it more and more irritating as he went on his rounds. He didn’t like the nurses or the nurses’ union, and had no love for unions in general. In a strange almost impractical way the nurses liked him a good deal, and not because he was overly kind in his comments. He went about declaring things. He declared that people should be shot if they pestered him about prescriptions for “little” ailments; and whenever a “disaster” happened with his sister-in-law Clare, he would say: “Did a disaster happen? Well, good.”

  The doctor bothered those he most loved, and argued with those he most cared about, but was obsessively polite with those he didn’t like. With Clare and Adele, for instance, he always argued. No matter what Adele said, he would contradict. One night last fall she and her mother came down to the community centre to play bingo. Adele looked as tiny as ever with a big rainbow-coloured hat on her head. There was a fierce wind against the top of the trees, the pastures were trampled and the wagon roads already covered in snow. Below, the river widened into the bay; they could see the outside of barns, and in the houses they could see lights.

&nb
sp; Since it was November, he began to talk about Armistice Day. Adele stood near them, listening.

  “The world’s going to blow up and there’ll be another world war by next year,” she said, sniffing.

  “I hope so,” the doctor said, looking at Adele, with snow suddenly blowing down from the trees, while Rita stood alongside them.

  “Well, I support peace – and at least everyone else in the world is in for peace, except for a dozen or so who are into war,” Adele said, holding onto her rainbow-coloured hat, and speaking up as if to be heard over the wind, and the outside door of the community centre banging.

  The building was an old schoolhouse that they’d put on skids and had hauled down here a few summers before. Then Joe and a few of the men redid the inside and put a foundation under it. They had built an outdoor arena so the children wouldn’t have to skate on the river, and they had horse-haulings behind it, where a team of horses was made to pull heavier and heavier loads. For some reason the doctor avoided horse-haulings until the last moment and then came over to stand by the fence and drink rum. Everyone considered the doctor a drunk because he drank with them – which they thought a doctor would not do unless he was a drunk.

  “I’m not in for peace at all,” the doctor said. “Peace won’t do anything to help the world, as a matter of fact it will not do a thing – and we shouldn’t be putting a lot of stock in it.”

  Then, with his face red and his head nodding to everyone who went past him, he got angry. Rita smiled and the doctor became troubled. First, because this was the first bingo Adele had come to in the evening and she was all dressed up, and her knees were shaking from the cold night wind while the bulb over the door cast light on the frozen grass. Second, because she had won a prize and held it in her tiny hands. Third, because Rita had told her not to be rude, when the doctor felt he was as obstinate as she was.