October Ferry to Gabriola

by Lowry, Malcolm

  The grocer thought a long time, then he said: “H’mm. It’s like the element follows you around, sir.”

  “How do you mean it follows you around?…You’re damn right, of course.”

  “Like when you get worms,” said the grocer, wrapping Ethan’s purchase of two tins of orange juice. (It was extremely important that the grocer should think of him drinking that orange juice, as if he had no eyes in his head to watch him marching off afterwards straight across the street to the liquor store.) “Missis gets worms—fortunately she’s a very smart woman—preserves the worm. Damn big worm. Doctor congratulates her. Then he says: ‘Funny thing. I haven’t had a case of worms in five years and then—bingo!—five cases, all this afternoon, all different families. You’re the fifth,’ he says.”

  “Worms!” said Ethan. “God damn it, man, having your house burn down’s not like worms!”

  “No, I meant all these crazy fires, coming after yours—same damn thing, Mr. Llewelyn…We were burned out once, in Whiskey Creek, Saskatchewan. Moved to Swift Current, Saskatchewan. Place where there’d been no fires for donkey’s years. Soon as we get there—bang!—five fires, all in the same month—”

  “What’s that? Three bottles of gin? I can’t give you three,” said the man in the fire-scarred liquor store. “I will give you three though, since it’s you…Yes, fire,” he sighed. “Well, we were lucky. Compared with you, I’ll say…Don’t know how ours happened either…Hell, it’s like they say…It’s like the element follows you around, sir.”

  “Thank you.—Would you mind saying that again?”

  “Worst damn thing that can happen to a man.”

  Coming! The Wandering Jew.

  It had not been so unwise after all, insofar as anything he did could be said to be wise those days, and whatever his ulterior motives, to have insisted they stay at the Prince of Wales. Not only did the racket downstairs in the evenings help to drown the increasing noise of their own dissensions, or poor Jacqueline’s conniptions, when there were no thunderstorms to drown it, but the kind-hearted Madame Grigorivitch proved a tower of refuge and a sadly needed mother to Jacqueline, and Tommy too (who, since his father’s arrest, had not ceased to be the corpse’s mate, but now in a more literal sense; and was even in a kind of half disgrace, persecuted by his former friends, while supported by newer wilder factions, good or bad for him as it happened to be), who otherwise must have got completely out of hand. She was a mother on occasion to Ethan also, feeding him bottled beer in the kitchen on those nights he found it impossible to sleep, no matter how tight he was. Their conversation always ran as follows:

  “Are you by any chance related to a Russian movie director called Dovjenko, Madame Grigorivitch?”

  “I tink I muzz have know him as a little boy. Tink he is my cousin, perhaps.”

  “I saw this film he made and it was wonderful, when you forgot the propaganda. There’s this scene where someone had to kill his brother in a forest—”

  “Dovjenko Ukrainian peoples…Here, drink you beer.”

  “Now Dostoevski…”

  Then, comforted in a sort, he would return to Jacqueline, uneasily sleeping under her sedative, and lie quietly beside her in the dark…

  Chapter 19

  Fire Fire Fire

  AS ONE DEVICE TO send himself to sleep he tried reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Rarely did he get so far as “And deliver us from evil,” though when he did, he repeated this phrase many times. Starting again, the prayer became dislocated. For “Our Father which art in Heaven,” he would find himself saying something like “our fire which art in fear.” And out of the word “fear” instantly would grow fears; fears of the next day, fear of seeing advertisements, which he now seemed to in almost every newspaper, for Mother Gettle, at almost every street corner—in fact there were two hoardings on the main street, including the new one, and he could scarcely avoid seeing them—and there were always the tins of soup, in the grocery, to be reckoned with; fears of the next day’s ordeal, with people looking at him queerly on the street as if he’d been responsible for all the fires (or still loathsomely sniggering over his arrest), fear of yet another evening darkening to its end with a sense of guilt. And out of the fears grew wild hatreds, great unreasoning esemplastic hatreds: hatred of people who looked at him so strangely in the street; long-forgotten hatreds of schoolmates who’d persecuted him about his eyes at school; hatred of the day that ever gave him birth to be the suffering creature he was, hatred of a world where your house burned down with no reason, hatred of himself, and out of all this hatred did not grow sleep. In order to combat the mental sufferings of the day, and perhaps also to distract attention from his black eye, Ethan had now let his beard grow. So in daytime his anguish was swallowed up by another sort of self-consciousness, that excruciating consciousness of the beard. Indeed he was the beard. Even now in bed he was the beard. Our beard which art in beard walking down the beard. Give us this day our daily beard. And deliver us from beard.

  “You don’t think you’ll fool the Mounted Police with that foliage do you, Captain Llewelyn?” the chief of police greeted him heartily on the library steps, where they led down to the basement of the police station. “Ha, ha, ha!”

  “I wasn’t fixing to fool the Mounted Police, I was fixing to fool you, ha, ha, ha,” answered Ethan, always delighted at so much attention from the “Law,” at least when it was as avuncular as this. “How goes the ground lightning? Have you caught the roving arsonist?” He wasn’t so sure, now, on second thoughts, he would have liked what the chief of police had just said, had he not addressed him as “Captain.”

  “God damn. There is no arsonist, far as I can see. Oh, in cases like this, nearly always some crazy firebug springs up, takes advantage of the situation. Oh, we’ll catch someone setting fire to a house one of these fine days, all right…Yeah, but I’ve seen nearly as bad as this too one time…Antigonish.”

  “Antigonish?”

  “It’s the name of my home town,” said the chief indignantly. “Now you take these here polterghosts…Oh, I’ve been called out on them things too in my day.”

  Ethan lit a cigarette. It was imperative that the chief should not smell his breath, or think he had a hangover. He had acquired a cigarette holder now, perhaps for analogous reasons to the beard, but he didn’t fit the cigarette into it, just left it in his pocket. He hadn’t lit the cigarette either, for that matter, but now he did.

  “Poltergeists! Are you meaning to suggest my damn house was haunted?”

  “I don’t say that, Captain Llewelyn. No. But now take these here polterghosts. In Antigonish, say. I’ve had experience of these damn things. Bolts of fire, pianos jumping around, weights sprung out of the grandfather clock like pouncing serpints at my detective sergeant one time, and I don’t know what all. The priest sometimes seems to fix it up. Only you can’t pin this stuff down. Can’t arrest anybody, you know.”

  Ethan glanced round him nervously and seemed to hear himself saying: “Well, it couldn’t have been us, could it? Doesn’t there always have to be a little girl in the family when there’s a poltergeist?” Now what had he done with his cigarette? What if he should set fire to the police station? But there it was, smoking away on the steps. And the chief set his boot on it, as if absently. “Anyhow, what can lightning have to do with poltergeists?” he said. “Lightning’s responsible for half these fires, isn’t it?”

  “What do you make of it yourself?” the chief of police inquired, “as a Captain of Intelligence?” with, Ethan thought, a suddenly searching look. “You’re right. There’s no sense to it…There is usually a little girl, well, sometimes a little boy, connected with these things too, to begin with, now I think about it. That’s what that book I read said too. Some little girl suffering from this here shitzo-frenzia; what you call it. And then the whole town catches this here shitzo-frenzia, goes haywire—and God knows, Captain Llewelyn, this whole town’s got it too, if you ask me…Talking mongoose too, I read about…What t
hey used to call witches is just poker-ghosts too,” he added more formally.

  Ethan asked severely, feeling, however, a sense of horripilation, his hair prickling along his scalp: “It wasn’t a poltergeist or a witch short-circuited the battery of that car over there three weeks ago, was it?”

  “Ah, hells bells!” The chief, as though reciprocally, removed his cap and scratched his head. “It’s just one of them things. But I’ll be frank. I’ve got these polterghosts on the brain a bit, having had experience of them before like, in Antigonish. It’s them fires that don’t burn things up proper that get me down,” he went on, with unintentional cruelty. “Well, you might call it a kind of cower-dice.” The chief pronounced it to rhyme with price. “Now you’re a reading man, Captain Llewelyn, and I shouldn’t say this, because I’m a Catholic, but there’s a book in the library down there tells you all about it. One of these sickic investigators put me on to it. on yeah, I go down there to the library sometimes, when there’s nothing doing, chew the fat with Miss Braithwaite. You wouldn’t believe me, that damn place used to be a regular meeting place for drug operators. Smuggling the stuff across the border. Made me feel uneasy too, this goddam book…I ran in a husband and wife once for conspiring to commit arson for their insurance,” he went on, as Ethan shuddered, “and now sometimes I feel I did wrong. Put their little girl in too…It sure as hell upset me, this book…Me and the Missis were all set to win at the police whist drive that night, and after I read it I couldn’t keep my mind on the game.”

  “Who wrote it?”

  The chief assumed a literary air. “Just go down there and ask Miss Braithwaite for Ten Talents. That’s the name. She’ll fix you up. And tell her I sent you.” He hesitated. But seeing that Ethan was still waiting for an answer he added, in a slightly aggrieved voice, “Booth Tarkington.”

  “Booth Tarkington?”

  “I was real surprised myself. Used to read his Penrod stories when I was a lad. You ever read Penrod?”

  Ethan, shaking his head, reflected that all he knew of Booth Tarkington was the wonderful, if mutilated, movie of The Magnificent Ambersons, made by Orson Welles. “But I read somewhere a while ago the poor fellow was going blind,” he said.

  “Is that so? Well, that’s too bad…I was real surprised that he should have written such a book. Of course I couldn’t read it all, just glanced at it, like. Very different style from Penrod. Real deep stuff. But it sure gives you the lowdown on all them polterghosts. Well—”

  “See you in Antigonish!”

  Ethan, in fact, had been in the act of going down to the library too, not to read anything, or to get a book out, but simply to give the good impression locally that he had, so to speak, “gone down to the library.” Now the thought of the chief’s book deterred him: it seemed a bit too near the knuckle…

  Coming! The Wandering Jew.

  At the Prince of Wales he traversed the lonely Men’s side of the beer parlour and dropped into the kitchen to have a look at M. Grigorivitch’s dog. It was blue all right.

  That night the bandstand went up in smoke.

  “Christ! You begin to think you must walk in your sleep and do it yourself,” Ethan told the grocer.

  “Well, you just don’t want to let yourself get that way, Captain Llewelyn,” counselled the other in a kind tone, placing Ethan’s cans of orange juice in a brown-paper bag. “Two tins of Mother Gettle’s soup, you said?”

  God knows why he bought them! He wasn’t going to insult Madame Grigorivitch by asking her to warm the tins up, and Jacqueline and he had no, gas ring, fortunately. Presumably it had been his idea of, for once, “facing reality.” He dropped them into a garbage can.

  “There’s the devil in it,” he told the man in the liquor store, cautiously looking round for the Mounted Police. Fear may only be defeated by defiance or faith. The comfortingly crafty thought was also in his mind that if these fires really could be conceived of as being produced for “them personally,” then, perversely, they might be construed as the work of some really well-meaning intelligence, who had chosen this relatively harmless method of making him “rationalize” what had happened to the Barkerville. But his friend did not contradict him. In more senses than one: gin, since the day before, was unrationed.

  So, after a period of comparative restraint, were the recurring phenomena. A dirt-laden fog settled over the whole area of Niagara-on-the-Lake and Queenstown, causing hydroelectric poles to catch fire through short circuits and, as the papers said, “knocking out some electricity,” while even hydroelectric officials termed this fog a “strange phenomena.” And seventy-nine-year-old Mrs. Annie McMorran, the mother of the golf professional, who lived opposite the club house, watched with fear as a lightning bolt appeared to flash down her chimney and send a red-hot ball of fire rolling across her living room. Then Tommy dropped his own thunderstone down the chimney.

  “I know who did it, Daddy,” he announced delightedly one day, out of breath, having run all the way back from school to make this disclosure.

  “Who did what, son?”

  “Burned our house down, of course!”

  “What!?” stammered Ethan, aghast.

  “Oh,” said Tommy airily. “Small boys. They think you’re a Communist spy.”

  Ethan carefully and controlledly stubbed out the cigarette he’d been smoking in an ashtray beside him. “You know what W. C. Fields said when he was asked how he liked small boys, don’t you?” he asked.

  “No, what?”

  Now, confound it, Ethan had to search in all the other ashtrays in the bedroom for a smoking cigarette and on finding the cigarette he’d put out even feel the end of that to find if it was hot before he was sure it was the one he had put out.

  “No, what, Daddy?” Tommy repeated.

  “Boiled!”

  Though Ethan was instantly remorseful about this harsh jest, Tommy thought it the funniest thing he’d ever heard in his life, and after that their relations improved considerably. “We get on just like a house on—” Ethan said to Jacqueline.

  “Yes. Just like a house on.”

  That night lightning knocked out electrical power all the way from Niagara-on-the-Lake to Ixion. Electric company emergency crews worked all night restoring it. The fog, however, had moved away. Nonetheless the postmaster’s wife, she of the banana sandwiches and the Grape-up, reported that the lightning had knocked a telephone from her hand at eight fifteen the same evening. She spent the night with friends and when she returned found another bolt of lightning had smashed a wall plug to pieces. Jacqueline went to Ixion to see an aunt; the lightning burned out the motor on the 8 P.M. tram she was taking, delaying service for one hour while the crippled vehicle was towed off the line. Flashes of lightning blasted the local radio station off the air and damaged a service station. New violent unexpected storms began now at all hours of the day and night with rain, hail, and loud claps of thunder. Then the brigadier general “got his,” as he termed it, in much the same way as the postmaster’s wife. Only he received such a paralyzing shock from the telephone he was hospitalized for three days. Towering thunder-heads appeared in the sky, lightningless, went away again. Then, just as everything seemed normal once more, something stranger still happened, considering the comparative flatness of the land: a giant mud slide oozed down and buried one end of a power station between Niagara-on-the-Lake and Queenstown, which, according to the papers, would keep industrial plants normally served by the station on staggered working hours “for a considerable time.”

  It was true these last peripheral events did not so directly affect the Llewelyns. They were more affected by a decision Ethan took at this point. Though his driver’s license was now once more valid, having consulted Jacqueline when she was off guard, he sold the car. He wasn’t going to drive again, or let her drive either. Unfortunately, this sad commendable decision, for they loved the car, whose motive had really involved the final severing of their connections with Niagara-on-the-Lake itself, regarding which he
’d felt his will to act becoming more and more sapped, had the opposite of its intended effect. Instead of helping to free them, it was as if now he’d neatly imprisoned them. Indeed he couldn’t have erected a more formidable obstacle to the final winding up of their affairs here. There was no bus to Toronto. Telephone service was often impaired. In order to go by train, it was necessary first to take a bus to Ixion; two hours’ drive, then another three to Toronto itself. But there never seemed a bus to Ixion. A seaplane could have made the trip in five minutes, but there was no plane service. While the Noronic was tied up at the dock, “pending greater safety provisions.” There wasn’t even the old troop train any longer. Jacqueline now saw herself deliberately trapped in the Prince of Wales Hotel. She was; so was he. He saw it himself. He couldn’t take a hint. Obviously something more than the loss of their own house by fire, fireballs, the all-dreaded thunderstone, the very disorder of the heavens themselves, and whole divisions of polterghosts was going to be necessary to drive them out of Niagara-on-the-Lake.

  Chapter 20

  The Wandering Jew

  ONE EVENING, AFTER A bitter quarrel with Jacqueline on the subject, and walking with averted head through the beer parlour downstairs, he went off by himself to the local cinema to see The Wandering Jew. Or his beard went off by itself. It was the first show, the feature already half over. Nonetheless he had become so obsessed with the notion that, with his beard, he might have been taken for some figure advertising the movie itself it was at least ten minutes before he began to concentrate on the film. (Worse still, what if someone in the cinema should imagine he really were the Wandering Jew? Or, in some yet more complicated manner, imagine that Ethan thought himself the Wandering Jew, and what if he were the Wandering Jew—and what if the Wandering Jew were a Communist spy too! to see a film about himself?) “Subjectively”—it was a variation of the old idea which rode him—Ethan wondered if this wasn’t an almost universal experience, when life was going desperately, and you dropped into some lousy movie to get away for an hour from yourself, only to discover that, lo and behold, this movie might as well have been a sort of symbolic projection, a phantasmagoria, of that life of yours, into which you’d come halfway through. This old film, with its menacing, almost inaudible characters and clanking machinery of which you half knew the plot, and bad, sad music, its hero (oh, that beard on the screen didn’t fool the Mounted Police in Ethan, he knew who he was) going to his predetermined ruin, when to evade ruin was now your only hope, or you hoped it was: in fact you’d thought you were fractionally evading it by coming to the movie in the first place. And against such a predetermined doom, as against one’s fate in the nightmare, finally you rebel! How? when the film will always end in the same way anyhow?