We finished the barn chores together in companionable silence. I watched Eddie out of the corner of my eye, kicking myself for acting like a scientific observer, but I couldn’t help it. I wanted to know how stoned he was. He wasn’t chuckling to himself or muttering, which was a good sign. I watched his large, capable hands as he milked Donna Summer and Julian of Norwich, George’s two best producers, whose yield of high-butterfat milk sometimes bordered on the amazing. Long ago, George and I had established that the goats tended to give more milk if you sang to them while milking—a phenomenon that wouldn’t stand up in a lab study, perhaps, but certainly proved itself when we experimented, logging the daily production carefully and noting which songs affected which goats in a positive way. Eddie sang a Hawksley Workman tune to the goat named Donna Summer, and Julian got “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”. I joined in on the gospel tune in harmony, and old Julian, cavernous of belly and hairy of chin, gave us almost two pounds of milk. Eddie had a pleasant tenor voice and wasn’t shy about using it, unlike most teenaged boys.
“Are you planning on breastfeeding?” Eddie said as we carried the full milk pails up to the dairy house. I almost swallowed my tongue. Not, I would venture, a remark that Eddie Schreier would come up with unless his inhibitions were altered. However, it wasn’t as if he was asking out of prurience—he seemed genuinely interested.
“I haven’t really thought about it much,” I said, “but I probably will. Breastfeeding makes sense—I mean if the body produces the stuff, it seems a shame to waste it, hey?”
“It’s just that the Family Studies teacher was talking about it the other day,” he said. “She said that kids who are bottlefed end up getting earaches and stuff because there’s, like, natural antibiotics in mother’s milk and not in formula. Just thought you should know.” I was amused by his concern, and rather touched. This was something I did know, actually—during the first few days after a goat bears her kids, her udder is full of rich, yellowish colostrum—chock full of antibodies and nutrients that milk-replacer doesn’t have. That’s why George always let new kids nurse for a couple of weeks before starting them on the instant milk-mix. It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment, though, that I, being a mammal, would be manufacturing colostrum myself. I had a sudden and profound flash-forward, imagining a heavy, warm bundle in my arms, its lips suctioned onto my nipple. It was weirdly sexual, and I could feel myself blushing.
“Hey, Polly, you want me to come sing to you when it’s feeding time?” Eddie said, leering and waggling his eyebrows. “It might boost your yield, eh?” Yep. Definitely stoned.
I cuffed him across the head with my free hand, almost spilling the bucket of milk.
“That’s exactly why some people call it dope, Eddie,” I said.
Three
Plan any holidays or trips well in advance and try to avoid long-haul flights in the second half of pregnancy. Planes can be very cramped, and the pressurized cabin can cause swollen feet and discomfort even in non-pregnant passengers.
-From Big Bertha’s Total Baby Guide
I joined Susan, George and Eddie for dinner. Becker was still away in Calgary, and I had not heard from him directly, except for a brief message sent to Susan’s email account from an Internet café.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Pls. Fwd to Polly
Date: October 25
Dear Ms. Kennedy,
I would have called, but there was no point, as Polly doesn’t have a phone up in her cabin, and I didn’t want to put you to the trouble of trying to find her. My father passed away yesterday, and the funeral is on Saturday. Please tell her I will be back in Laingford on October 31.
Sincerely,
Mark Becker
How’s that for a nice intimate note? Second-hand, no less. “Have some compassion, Polly. He’s just lost his father,” Susan had said, seeing my reaction.
“It’s not that I don’t sympathize with him in his grief,” I had said. “I just wish he’d sent something a little more personal, that’s all.” Anyway, I asked Susan to send a message back with my condolences, which I assume she did.
I would have liked to have met Becker’s father. What’s that Oscar Wilde line? “All women become like their mothers, that’s their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.” That may very well be true, but I’d never had the chance to check it out, as Becker’s mother had died three years previously. Now that Becker was an official orphan, like me, his resemblance to either of his parents, in terms of temperament, could only be a matter of hearsay. However, I suspect that many men resemble their fathers to some degree. Becker hadn’t talked about either of his parents much, and I hadn’t felt comfortable pressing him on the subject, as I’d made it quite clear that I wasn’t interested in discussing my own. I’d made a careful study of his parenting techniques, though, the previous summer, when his son Bryan had stayed with him for a week while his ex was away on a trip. I wasn’t pregnant at the time, but I was considering marrying the guy and had put him under the powerful lens of the Polly-scope.
Bryan was a cute kid, as kids go, and obviously devoted to his father—almost pathetically eager to please him. Becker had appeared to be a loving father, too, but there was a hard edge to him in his dealings with his son—a kind of no-compromise sternness that made me wonder if his own father had been a trifle strict. What I did know about Becker Senior (Edward) was that he had been born somewhere in England, the only son of an air force captain. He had been evacuated to Canada during the Second World War and sent to live with a family on a farm near Calgary, which was where he met Becker’s mother. I figured that if Edward had undergone the trauma of being sent away, alone, at a tender age, to a foreign country, it might well have left him with some parental/abandonment issues and rendered him undemonstrative.
There you go—a canned psychological assessment of a man I’d never met, patched together from scant information extracted from his son. Edward might have been the most doting, adoring father in the world, of course, but now I’d never know. Becker hadn’t appeared terribly eager to take me out to Calgary to meet him. He’d said it was because his father had never forgiven him for divorcing Catherine, Bryan’s mother, and still treated her as his daughter-in-law. “We’ll have to ease him into it,” Becker had said. “It would help if I could introduce you as my fiancée, and not just my girlfriend.” Which, as you can imagine, had turned into a bit of a tiff, as that felt an awful lot like pressure from my perspective.
It was Eddie’s night to cook. He was pretty good at it, having been in the culinary arts program at Laingford High since Grade Nine. Susan, George and I sat in the living room, enjoying the scent of frying garlic emanating from the kitchen. He was bashing around in there, singing a Shepherd’s Pie tune and obviously having a great time. I know what that’s like—cooking when you’re slightly stoned is wonderful fun.
George was sitting in his favourite chair next to the woodstove, puffing on his pipe and scratching the tail feathers of Poe, his pet raven. Poe had been around forever—a massive creature, far more intelligent than Lug-nut could ever hope to be. The bird perched on the armrest of George’s chair, emitting little croaks of pleasure as George fiddled with his nether regions. Poe would never let me do that. The bird was picky when it came to human contact. He obviously considered George a kind of honorary raven, but the rest of us were roadkill as far as he was concerned. He had perched on my shoulder a couple of times in the past, a distinction that always made me feel grateful, but if you were smart, you’d never reach out and kind of offhandedly pat his head. At least, if you did, the term “off-hand” would become painfully literal. Luggy and Rosie had the sense to give him a wide berth, and anyway, the two-legged person throwing food around in the kitchen was far more interesting to them than the malevolent creature by the fire.
“There’s some snail-mail for you as well, today,” Susan said, getting up suddenly and going out to the bureau in the hall,
where the day’s post was stacked in a wicker basket by the door. She had been completely bewitched by the computer age and seemed to take great delight in dissing Canada Post, which I found rather unfair. After all, getting an email message from somebody isn’t half as much fun as receiving a mysterious envelope, bedecked with stamps (especially if they’re foreign) that you have to open physically before you can find out what’s inside. For me, real mail is like getting a Christmas present, all wrapped up in sparkly paper and lots of tape, whereas email is like someone saying “here” and handing you an unwrapped widget with the price tag still on it. No comparison.
Susan returned with a large manila envelope, a fat one. “Looks like it’s from the U.K.,” she said, obviously intrigued. It would have been mean to wait until I got home to open it, so I didn’t. I knew what it was about, anyway, though I hadn’t told anybody yet.
As I’ve mentioned, I’m a puppet maker. That’s my job, or at least that’s the way I make my living, which perhaps doesn’t mean the same thing, these days. I don’t do the nine-to-five dance, I spend a great deal of time staring off into nothingness (we artists call that “conceptual development”), and my skills, though specialized, allow me to squeak by with the minimum of mainstream interference. I build commissioned puppets for theatre companies, mascot costumes for sports and corporate organizations, and marionettes for fun and profit. All this is one of my main reasons for living as I do, in a log cabin in rural Kuskawa with little in the way of modern conveniences—I don’t need ’em, and I can’t afford ’em. It’s a fine life, although it had occurred to me since acquiring a passenger that my income needs might be due for re-examination. Maybe I’d have to start churning out cutesy, mass-produced hand-puppets and selling them at Kuskawa craft fairs to help pay for diapers and strained carrots. O joy, o bliss.
Back in June, I’d seen an article in The Puppetry Journal, a trade magazine I subscribe to, about a big, international puppetry conference planned for February, taking place in Canterbury, England. It sounded truly amazing—with speakers, workshops, displays and performances, a whole week of it, and I had fantasized about going. The article had mentioned that there were a few subsidized spots available for those professionals in the field who might have something unique to bring to the event but didn’t have the cash to make the journey. Normally, I don’t go in for stuff like that, my theory being that my work, while adequate and solid in its way, wasn’t of the calibre to win any awards, so why set myself up for disappointment? However, in this case, I’d felt a weird surge of High Self Esteem, and acted quickly before it went away. I called up my friend Dimmy Cox, a photographer, who had agreed to prepare slides of some of my best pieces, in exchange for the construction of a slightly risqué puppet-portrait of her ex-boyfriend. I’d packaged up the slides, along with my resumé, written a fulsome letter explaining why I simply had to attend the conference and sent it off to the organizers in Canterbury. It had been a busy and difficult summer, and by the end of August, when I hadn’t heard back from the conference people, I’d assumed that I hadn’t made the grade.
I explained all this to Susan and George, while holding the heavy envelope in my lap, weighing it experimentally and tapping it with my fingers as if I might somehow divine what it contained by osmosis.
“So—why don’t you go ahead and open it?” Susan said.
“It’s probably just a bunch of promotional material,” I said. “You know—sort of ‘sorry we can’t sponsor you, but here’s some incentive stuff to make you feel even worse about not being able to afford to come.’ ”
“Blessed are they who expect nothing, for they shall not be disappointed,” George intoned.
“Well, considering that you’ll be seven months gone by February, and as big as a house, you shouldn’t be travelling, anyway,” Susan said. Uh-oh. She’d just used the dreaded “s” word. Shouldn’t. Ought not. Mustn’t. Can’t. May not. Prohibited—not allowed. She recognized her mistake at once as my eyebrow shot up into my hairline and George made a little wincing sound, as if he’d been pinched.
I refrained from comment and opened the envelope.
Congratulations, Ms. Deacon, the covering letter said.
On behalf of the organizing committee for the Canterbury International Puppetry Festival (CIPF), I am delighted to inform you that you have been selected as the recipient of the Mary Chambers Memorial Bursary, an award which will cover your flight, registration and accommodation at this year’s event.
We were enormously impressed with your work and hope that you will be able to bring a few samples with you and perhaps facilitate a workshop on construction techniques. Please let us know as soon as possible whether you will be attending, and we can work out the workshop details, arrangements for your flight and so on.
I do look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Phyllis Creemore,
Special Guests Committee Chair
“Hot damn,” I said. “I’m going to Canterbury.”
Four
Stress and worry do not in and of themselves harm a developing baby, but if you are not taking proper care of yourself, it could potentially be harmful. If you are so stressed you are not eating properly, then you may not be able to supply all the nutrients baby needs to grow properly.
-From Big Bertha’s Total Baby Guide
All the retailers in Kuskawa manage their holiday decorating themes according to the principle of persistent overload, and it had been Hallowe’en at the Cedar Falls FoodMart since they took the Thanksgiving turkeys down on October 9. On the 31st, my friend Ruth Glass and I were there, buying last-minute ice and Clamato juice for Rico’s Hallowe’en party. My friend Rico Amato runs an antique and collectibles place out on the Cedar Falls highway strip mall. The party was a new thing—Rico had in years past gone in drag to a local gay-friendly resort to howl at the Hallowe’en moon, but the place had gone belly up during a booming tourist summer (go figure), so this year he was having friends over.
“That cute Brent seems to be working out,” Ruth said, referring to Rico’s new roommate. We were wandering in the bakery aisle, whose shelves were bursting with jack-o-lantern cupcakes and bat-shaped cookies. Ruth brushed away a fake spider’s web, which was dangling from the “Scary Bargains” sign and tickling her nose. She was enjoying the quiet of being back home, I think. Ruth’s band, Shepherd’s Pie, had been on tour to the Maritimes to promote their fifth CD, Clear Cut Laundromat, and she looked tired.
“Well, they’ve only been sharing the place a month, and the Royal Doulton’s still in one piece, so that’s a good sign,” I said. “You think we need more candy?” I was hefting a big bag of miniature chocolate bars that I’d scooped from a bin marked “Last Chance, Mom and Dad!” I’d already seen one harried parent-type rush towards the bin, make a grab and rush away again, like a seed-frenzied sparrow at a backyard feeder. But I wasn’t thinking of trick-or-treaters, to tell you the truth. It was just that I wasn’t drinking or smoking, so dammit, my baby was gonna have to put up with a night o’ chocolate.
Ruth shot me a sympathetic grin. “We could always eat what’s left over,” she said and tossed the bag into our cart. Then she rolled her eyes at something she’d seen over my right shoulder and muttered “Incoming.” I turned around just in time to prepare myself. It was Donna-Lou Dermott, dressed like a chicken.
“Well, hey, girls, don’t you just looove Hallowe’en?” she said. She carried a wicker basket full of eggs—her own—(well, the ones from her hens, I should say) and was apparently on her delivery route. Her chicken suit was remarkably inventive. She’d wrapped herself in some kind of quilt batting and then she must have gone at it with a pair of scissors and a hairbrush, producing a tufted, feathery kind of toga. She wore an orange, cardboard beak on a piece of elastic, like an oxygen mask, pulling it down to speak so it hung like a wattle under her chin. Her face was painted bright yellow, and she wore a pair of yellow rubber gloves.
“I just ran this up o
n my Singer last night,” she said, “and I can’t tell you how many compliments I’ve had today.”
“Fowl and fair,” Ruth said, which only made Donna-Lou blink a bit.
“It’s nice to see you, Ruthie. Are you still writing your songs?” Donna-Lou said.
Ruth, who hasn’t been called Ruthie since high school, smiled gently, which is more than I would have managed. Shepherd’s Pie does about as well as any other popular Canadian folk band these days, which is to say that they’ve been profiled in Saturday Night and Maclean’s magazines, have won some Juno Awards and occasionally get some airplay on the CBC. “Ruthie” was a fairly big name in certain circles, but not, I guess, in Donna-Lou’s.
“Yep, still doing my thing,” Ruth answered. “Nice to see you, too, Donna-Lou. You still in the egg business?”
“Well, I should hope so,” she said, affronted. Her feathers sort of ruffled, and I took note, thinking I would give quilt batting a try as puppet-hair. It seemed to have a kinetic life of its own. “Somebody’s gotta keep food on the table,” Donna-Lou went on. “Otis decided to seed the back field with hemp this summer past, and got a good crop, too, but the government confisticated it for some reason, just before harvest, so we didn’t make no profit at all.”
I resisted the urge to correct her grammar. “Hemp? You sure it was the legal kind?” I said.
“Well, Otis said it was, but I kinda wonder about that, now. He didn’t get arrested or nothing, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle Page 78