“I think it’s legal up to about twenty weeks,” I said. “But it’s not an option I’m interested in.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“Is that what you want?”
“Polly, did you make your decision to have this baby on the spur of the moment?”
“Of course not! I thought long and hard about it—oh. I see what you mean. Sorry.”
“Yeah. Well. Give me some time, okay? Do you want another game? You won when I scratched on the eight.” We played another couple of games that night. During the first one, Becker played hard. He missed dozens of shots by over-hitting them. On a small bar-table, you have to caress the cue ball, encourage the kiss of the spots and stripes and woo the gentle tock and click and thump that comes from the perfect angle. You can’t shoot good pool mad. He calmed down and concentrated after that, and it wasn’t until the drive home that he brought the subject up again.
“This puts a new spin on the marriage question, doesn’t it?” he said. He had asked me to marry him back in August, just before we got distracted by our mutual involvement in a municipal corruption scandal. We arrived at some pretty clear answers in the scandal case, but the matrimonial issue was still open. I wore his ring on a chain around my neck, not on my finger, and I hadn’t given him an answer yet.
“I guess it does,” I said.
“You wouldn’t want to deal with a newborn in that cabin, Polly. You don’t even have running water.” That was the crux of the matter—the thing that was weighing on my mind far more than the unknown and alien things that were happening to my body. I live in a small, one-roomed building on the edge of a goat farm in rural Kuskawa. I’d moved there from the city to get away from noise and crowds and the corporate imperative, so I could pursue my craft, which happens to be puppet-making. I loved it there, and I didn’t want to move. Not for Becker’s sake, not for anybody’s, and certainly not for the sake of what in bleak moments I considered my personal parasite. It’s true there was no running water, but the well had performed its function perfectly for the five years of my residence. Granted, there was an outhouse, and it was a tad chilly in the dead of winter, but the pioneers had survived in spite of having to poop in an ice-house, and so had I. I didn’t need hydro—I had oil lamps and candles and never had to worry about whether or not I could pay the power bill. My lifestyle was perhaps unconventional, but it hadn’t done me any harm. In fact, I was far healthier living the way I did than I’d ever been in the city. I got lots of exercise, chopping wood and hauling water, I never caught colds, I ate vegetables grown right there on the farm, and in the dead of winter I kept my place at an even 16°C by running the woodstove at full bore. I wore lots of sweaters in the winter months, and in the summer I could wander around half-naked if I wanted to, provided the bugs weren’t too bad. We discussed these points in the Jeep, driving north through the October night.
The downside to all my arguments, as Becker rather roughly pointed out when we got to the farm, was that pioneer babies, reared in circumstances similar to mine, often had a nasty habit of dying.
The night was clear and cold, and there was no moon. We stood for a few minutes, looking up. There are times when that monstrous black expanse, splattered with stars like spilled Christmas glitter, is far too big and beautiful to be real. This was one of those times. Orion was beginning to creep into the sky—my favourite winter constellation—the big guy with his splayed legs and mighty sword. I’d always considered him the harbinger of comfort, of cosy evenings curled up in front of the fire with a hot toddy while a storm howls outside. Now he seemed threatening, his sword pointing to my cabin on the hill, reached by a path that would be thigh-deep in snow by mid-February. In February, I would be seven months pregnant. I would, I imagined, be heavy and perhaps bloaty, with thick ankles and shortness of breath. Would I able to strap on my snowshoes and haul groceries from the driveway of my landlord George’s farmhouse up to my place? Would I have the energy to chop wood for the fire and carry it inside?
Now we come to a thing about me, which some people probably know already. If someone tells me I can’t do a thing, if they suggest that I would be an idiot even to think about it—well, I generally decide there and then to try. The alternative chilled me to the marrow. What? Knuckle under to the North American happy-baby dream of plastic cribs and Pampers and formula and washing machines and automatic everything, inside a hermetically sealed and overheated box with carpets and padded corners, baby-proofed and squeaky clean? Expose my child (there, I’d said it) to the poisonous influence of TV, the stinking breath of air conditioners and the banal subliminal coax of FM radio? No fear. I’d rather raise it in a tent.
“Do you want to come in and say hello to Susan and George?” I said. My aunt Susan lived with George Hoito—the goat farmer whose cabin I rented—in the old brick farmhouse that had been there since the original homesteaders had got tired of roughing it in the cabin and perhaps losing babies down the well. Becker agreed to visit for a while, and we found Susan by the door with a “Did you tell him?” expression written across her face in bold.
“I know about it,” Becker said right away, thereby banishing any chance of a pleasant, uncomplicated chat. Within moments, Becker and Susan had launched into a gang-up-on-Polly session that lasted well over an hour. Becker wanted me to move into his condo in town and gestate in comfort and convenience. Susan, who knew me well enough to know that threats and pleading would fall on ever-more-stubborn ears, simply suggested that if the toils of winter at the cabin got to be a bit too much, I might consider moving in with them for the final month or two. George, who sat and smoked his pipe (in defiance of Susan, who told him it was not good for the baby), listened and watched me very closely.
“Polly will do what she pleases,” he said towards the end. “You know this is true, both of you, and while your alliance is encouraging, you will not be able to change her mind.” Susan and Becker had never really liked each other—Susan had an instinctive distrust of policemen, born of her activist history. To Susan, civil disobedience was a duty, not merely an option, and she had been arrested more than once in her youth. Becker said she made him uncomfortable. Aunt Susan was as close to a mother as I had—my parents having been killed in a car crash when I was ten. She could be fierce in my defense, could Susan, and although Becker had risen in her estimation after she was told that he wanted to marry me (rather than merely toying with my affections, as she called it), she was still perplexed as to why we were attracted to one another in the first place. Most of my friends seemed to wonder about that, actually.
Becker had by then, I suppose, cemented his position regarding the baby. Susan had worked him up into a froth of righteous indignation, which is not his best party-piece. If I wanted to have the baby, he said, he wasn’t about to be un-supportive. After all, he was the father. (Not “after all, I love you”, but then he would never say such a thing out loud in the presence of George and Susan. Heck, he still hadn’t managed to say that out loud in the presence of me.)
“I love being a father,” he said, referring to Bryan, his eight-year-old son from his first marriage, who lived with his ex-wife in Calgary. “And I’m willing to give our child everything I have, Polly. We’ll talk about this some more—soon, I hope, but I hope in the meantime you’ll think about someone other than yourself for once.” He kissed me before he left and told me he’d take me out to lunch in a day or two. But that didn’t happen, because the next day he received a phone call from his ex-wife, telling him to get his butt on a plane because his father (who lived in Calgary, too) had had a heart attack. I didn’t see him again for three weeks, by which time I was picking names and thinking about how much winter firewood I would need to keep my growing belly warm.
Two
Pregnant women who continue to smoke cannabis are probably at increased risk of giving birth to low birth weight babies, and perhaps of shortening their period of gestation.
-From Big Bertha’s Total Baby Guide
My winter’s wood was still lurking in the middle of George’s west acreage, where Ethan and I had stacked it in April. (George had said “take what you want—there is more than enough for us all.” He cut his own in the valley, closer to the farmhouse.) Aunt Susan suggested that I might want to order my winter fuel from the Tucker brothers (“Wood R Us”) and have them deliver it, to save me having to haul my own out of the bush.
“I’ll help pay for it, Polly,” she said, “if the cost is what concerns you.” But it wasn’t the price, it was the principle of the thing. Anyway, I told her, there’s no way the Tuckers’ truck, an enormous diesel monstrosity that belched black smoke and weighed several tons, could make it up the steep, narrow footpath that led to my cabin. While the prospect of driving George’s tractor into the bush and loading up the ancient, wheeled wood-cart a dozen times didn’t exactly thrill me (it never did), I figured the exercise would be good for me.
Eddie showed up to help, which was kind of him, although I suspect he might have been given some unavoidable incentive for doing so by Susan, his guardian. Eddie was eighteen by then—a big lad, whose early years had been peculiar and difficult. His mother lived in a psychiatric facility in North Bay, and his father was out of touch, living in sin somewhere in the States with a Biblical literalist. After his home was broken, Susan invited him to stay with her, and she mothered him the way she did me—without the silent “s” at the beginning of the word.
Eddie arrived as I was preparing to load the cart for the second time. My dogs were snerfling around in the undergrowth, which had taken a hard frost the night before and probably smelled wonderful. It was the frost that got me off my duff and into winter-wood-mode. I’d had a fire going for a couple of days already, using some leftovers from last year, but I knew that the demon bailiffs of procrastination were hovering nearby, polishing up their collecting jars and laying bets about the weather. It hadn’t snowed yet, but it would soon.
“It’s me, Polly,” Eddie called, as Lug-nut announced his approach with a gentle, “familiar-two-legs-at-nine-o’clock” kind of bark. Luggy is the senior dog in our pack, a sturdy male mongrel with yellow eyes and a shaggy coat like a bad wig. Rosencrantz, a yellow Lab puppy with more pedigree than wit, looked up in surprise. When she saw Eddie, she made up for not hearing him earlier by firing off a long series of high-pitched, yappy sounds.
“Rosie! That’s enough!” I sounded a tad hysterical, even to myself. Eddie pretended he hadn’t noticed. It occurred to me suddenly that, by winter’s end, I would be coping with a whole new spectrum of unnerving, high-pitched noises, human ones, and shouting back wouldn’t be allowed.
“Susan said to follow the sound of the tractor,” he said. “But I heard the engine stop as I was coming up the hill. Is it stalling out again?”
“It’s running fine,” I said. “I just don’t see the point in running it when I’m not using it. It stinks, and it’s noisy.”
“Yup,” Eddie said, grinning. “Like a baby, right?”
“Smartass.” That was far too astute for an eighteen-year-old, in my opinion.
“No, really, I know about the noise part because we’re doing the Ready or Not Tot unit in Family Studies right now,” Eddie said.
“The what unit?”
“The Ready or Not Tot. It’s like an automatic baby with a computer inside that we each have to take home and look after for the weekend. You know, to scare us off making real ones. Robyn had it last week. It was pretty loud.”
“It cries?”
“It’s programmed to act like a real baby,” he said. “It starts, like, crying at four in the morning and doesn’t stop unless you press a button on its back, and sometimes that doesn’t work, and you have to walk with it till it stops.”
“Sounds delightful,” I said.
“Yeah, and the worst part is that it keeps track of what you do. Like if you ignore it, or throw it against the wall or something, the chip inside records it, and you flunk the unit.”
“Has anybody actually done that?”
“I doubt it,” Eddie said. “It’s too real, man. Even its neck, if you don’t support it right, sort of clicks, and you know you just lost a bunch more points.”
“Sounds like a video game.”
“Maybe. Not as much fun, though.”
“Have you had your turn yet?”
“Not for a couple of weeks,” he said, then grinned again. “You wanna babysit for me, to get some practice in?”
“I might just do that,” I said, seriously considering it. It would be interesting to see how the dogs reacted to the creature, for one thing. “Is that allowed?”
“Yes, as long as we pay the going rate to whoever we get to look after it. We’re supposed to take it everywhere we go. The girls get off on it, I think, but the guys usually hibernate when it’s their turn and stay home that weekend. Especially the guys on the hockey team.”
“I can imagine. And I guess it would be worse with a real one, eh?”
“Yeah. Like if you had it right now, where would you put it?” Good question, I thought. He sounded more like Susan every day.
“In one of those carrier things on my back, I guess,” I said, after a moment’s thought.
“What if it was a real one, a newborn?”
“If it was a newborn, I wouldn’t be in any shape to haul wood, and you’d be doing this by yourself,” I said. “At the going rate, of course. Thanks for coming.”
“Oh, no problem. I helped last year, didn’t I?”
“You did. Ten bucks an hour still okay?”
“Nah. Let’s do a straight trade—I’ll do this and you babysit for me sometime that weekend.”
With Eddie’s muscle and my pressing need to prove myself capable, if pregnant, we had all my wood hauled, stacked and tarped in five hours. The way I figured it, I’d have to agree to adopt his wretched automatic baby for a whole month to pay him what he was owed, but he seemed quite content for me to be in his debt.
After we put the tractor and cart back into George’s drive shed, I helped him do the evening milking, which was his official farm chore. George kept a herd of Nubian dairy goats in the century-old barn behind the farmhouse. When I’d first moved back to Kuskawa from the city, I’d been the goat-hand myself for a couple of years, in exchange for the privilege of living in the cabin. Now I paid George a nominal rent, and Eddie was the goat-guy. I’d felt usurped to begin with, but got over it eventually. I missed the daily interaction with the animals, though. Goats are placid creatures, generally, and a dairy barn is a nice place to be. The sound track in your typical goat barn is a mixture of rustling hay, contented moans and bleats from the female residents and the occasional comical burp from Pierre Trudeau, the sire buck. In the summer, you get the burble and twitter of the barn swallows, and in the fall and winter, a rabble of chickadees lurks by the back door, looking for a handout. The barn smells of grain, warm milk and hairy goat musk (which is not at all unpleasant, in spite of what those mean-spirited anti-goat propagandists claim).
I was in the middle of filling the mangers with fresh hay when I caught a whiff of something sweet and familiar, but definitely not barn-based. I looked up to see Eddie leaning casually against the back door, surveying the hay field and smoking a joint. I’d known it would happen eventually. I am a recreational user of cannabis myself, and while I try to be discreet in the presence of those who aren’t, I don’t consider it a state secret. Eddie had probably figured me out long since, although I had never smoked in front of him. Now h
ere he was doing it in front of me, and it disturbed me more than I cared to admit.
He turned around before I got to him and smiled in that wary, defiant way that young people do when they’re making a statement about something.
“I would offer you a hit, but you probably shouldn’t,” he said.
“You’re right, I shouldn’t,” I said. “Have you smoked around Susan yet?”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Just wondering. She won’t like it.”
“I figured. You don’t either, obviously.”
“Well, I can’t say I’m delighted, my friend. But I could hardly give you the business when I smoke the stuff myself, could I? I may be older than you, but I’m not a hypocrite.”
“You’re not smoking it these days, though, right?”
“Right. I’m not drinking either, and I’m trying to cut out coffee, because I’m told that stuff is not good for kids, one of which I happen to be incubating. But I suppose you’re not a kid any more, are you?”
“Not technically.”
“You’ve done all the growing you plan to do?”
“Jeez, Polly, you’re not going to say it’ll stunt my growth are you?”
“Far be it from me. But if you smoke a lot of it, you’ll get lethargic and forgetful and asthmatic.”
“And if I smoke a little of it?”
“You’ll laugh at movies you’d hate if you were straight, and you’ll think up great ideas that will disappear like smoke if you don’t write them down. But you’d better respect the hell out of it, because if you don’t, you’ll wind up doing something stupid. It’s illegal, don’t forget.”
“I know that.”
“Good. You don’t smoke tobacco, do you?”
“Hate the stuff.”
“And booze?”
“The occasional beer—you know that, Polly. I’m not an idiot.”
I sighed—a long, heavy one that I felt all the way down to my boots. “Okay, Eddie. Interrogation over.” He had pinched the joint out soon after our conversation had begun and stashed it in an inside pocket. “Just please, please be careful with the stuff, okay? Treat it like birthday cake or chocolate truffles—nice on special occasions, but if you use it all the time, it loses its magic.”
Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle Page 77