by Unknown
Somebody else—not Wayne—pulled her up and wiped her face with the hem of the dress.
"Keep your mouth closed and breathe through your nose,"
Mrs. Monk said. "You get out of here," she said either to Wayne or to Rory. She gave all of them their orders in the same voice, without sympathy and without blame. She pulled Rhea around the house to her husband's truck and half hoisted her into it.
Rhea said, "Billy."
"I'll tell your Billy. I'll say you got tired. Don't try to talk."
"I'm through throwing up," Rhea said.
"You never know," said Mrs. Monk, backing the truck out onto the road. She drove Rhea up the hill and into her own yard without saying anything more. When she had turned the truck around and stopped, she said, "Watch out when you're stepping down. It's a bigger step than a car."
Rhea got herself into the house, used the bathroom without closing the door, kicked off her shoes in the kitchen, climbed the stairs, wadded up her dress and crinoline, and pushed them far under the bed.
Rhea's father got up early to gather the eggs and get ready to go to Hamilton, as he did every second Sunday. The boys Spaceships Have Landed.
were going with him—they could ride in the back of the truck. Rhea wasn't going, because there would not be room in front. Her father was taking Mrs. Corey, whose husband was in the same hospital as Rhea's mother. When he took Mrs.
Corey with him, he always put on a shirt and a tie, because they might go into a restaurant on the way home.
He came and knocked on Rhea's door to tell her they were leaving. "If you find time heavy, you can clean the eggs on the table," he said.
He walked to the head of the stairs, then came back. He called through her door, "Drink lots and lots of water."
Rhea wanted to scream at them all to get out of the house.
She had things to consider, things inside her head that could not get free because of the pressure of the people in the house.
That was what was causing her to have such a headache. After she had heard the truck's noise die away along the road, she got out of bed carefully, went carefully downstairs, took three aspirins, drank as much water as she could hold, and measured coffee into the pot without looking down.
The eggs were on the table, in six-quart baskets. There were smears of hen manure and bits of straw stuck to them, waiting to be rubbed off with steel wool.
What things? Words, above all. The words that Wayne had said to her just as Mrs. Monk came out the back door.
I'd like to fuck you if you weren't so ugly.
She got dressed, and when the coffee was ready she poured a cup and went outside, out to the side porch, which was in deep morning shade. The aspirins had started to work and now instead of the headache she had a space in her head, a clear precarious space with a light buzz around it.
She was not ugly. She knew she was not ugly. How can you ever be sure that you are not ugly?
But if she was ugly, would Billy Doud have gone out with her in the first place? Billy Doud prided himself on being kind.
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But Wayne was very drunk when he said that. Drunkards speak truth.
It was a good thing she was not going to see her mother that day. If she ever wormed out of Rhea what was the matter—and Rhea could never be certain that she would not do that—then her mother would want Wayne chastised. She would be capable of phoning his father, the minister. The word "fuck" was what would incense her, more than the word
"ugly." She would miss the point entirely.
Rhea's father's reaction would be more complicated. He would blame Billy for taking her into a place like Monk's.
Billy, Billy's sort of friends. He would be angry about the fuck part, but really he would be ashamed of Rhea. He would be forever ashamed that a man had called her ugly.
You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.
She knew she was not ugly. How could she know she was not ugly?
She did not think about Billy and Wayne, or about what this might mean between them. She was not as yet very interested in other people. She did think that when Wayne said those words, he used his real voice.
She did not want to go back inside the house, to have to look at the baskets full of dirty eggs. She started walking down the lane, wincing in the sunlight, lowering her head between one island of shade and the next. Each tree was different there, and each was a milestone when she used to ask her mother how far she could go to meet her father, coming home from town. As far as the hawthorn tree, as far as the beech tree, as far as the maple. He would stop and let Rhea ride on the running board.
A car hooted from the road. Somebody who knew her, or just a man going by. She wanted to get out of sight, so she cut across the field that the chickens had picked clean and paved Spaceships Have Landed.
slick with their droppings. In one of the trees at the far side of this field, her brothers had built a tree house. It was just a platform, with boards nailed to the tree trunk for you to climb. Rhea did that—she climbed up and sat on the platform.
She saw that her brothers had cut windows in the leafy branches, for spying. She could look down on the road, and presently she saw a few cars bringing country children into town to the early Sunday school at the Baptist Church. People in the cars couldn't see her. Billy or Wayne wouldn't be able to see her, if by any chance they should come looking with explanations or accusations or apologies.
In another direction, she could see flashes of the river and a part of the old fairgrounds. It was easy from here to make out, in the long grass, where the racetrack used to go round.
She saw a person walking, following the racetrack. It was Eunie Morgan, and she was wearing her pajamas. She was walking along the racetrack, in light-colored, maybe pale pink, pajamas, at about half past nine in the morning. She followed the track until it veered off, going down to where the riverbank path used to be. The bushes hid her.
Eunie Morgan with her white hair sticking up, her hair and her pajamas catching the light. Like an angel in feathers. But walking in her usual awkward, assertive way—head pushed forward, arms swinging free. Rhea didn't know what Eunie could be doing there. She didn't know anything about Eunie's disappearance. The sight of Eunie seemed both strange and natural to her.
She remembered how on hot summer days, she used to think that Eunie's hair looked like a snowball or like threads of ice preserved from winter, and she would want to mash her face against it, to get cool.
She remembered the hot grass and garlic and the jumping-out-of-your-skin feeling, when they were turning into Toms.
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She went back to the house and phoned Wayne. She counted on his being home and the rest of his family in church.
"I want to ask you something and not on the phone," she said. "Dad and the boys went to Hamilton."
When Wayne got there, she was on the porch cleaning eggs. "I want to know what you meant," she said.
"By what?" said Wayne.
Rhea looked at him and kept looking, with an egg in one hand and a bit of steel wool in the other. He had one foot on the bottom step. His hand on the railing. He wanted to come up, to get out of the sun, but she was blocking his way.
"I was drunk," Wayne said. "You're not ugly."
Rhea said, "I know I'm not."
"I feel awful."
"Not for that," said Rhea.
"I was drunk. It was a joke."
Rhea said, "You don't want to get married to her. Lucille."
He leaned into the railing. She thought maybe he was going to be sick. But he got over it, and tried his raising of the eyebrows, his discouraging smile.
"Oh, really? No kidding? So what advice do you have for me?"
"Write a note," said Rhea, just as if he had asked that in all seriousness. "Get in your car and drive to Calgary."
"Just like that."
"If you want, I'll ride with you to Toronto. You can drop me off and I'll stay at the Y unti
l I get a job."
This was what she meant to do. She would always swear it was what she had meant to do. She felt more at liberty now and more dazzled by herself than she had last night when she was drunk. She made these suggestions as if they were the easiest things in the world. It would be days—weeks, Spaceships Have Landed.
maybe—before everything sank in, all that she had said and done.
"Did you ever look at a map?" said Wayne. "You don't go through Toronto on your way to Calgary. You go across the border at Sarnia and up through the States to Winnipeg and then to Calgary."
"Drop me off in Winnipeg then, that's better."
"One question," said Wayne. "Have you had a sanity test recently?"
Rhea didn't budge or smile. She said, "No."
Eunie was on her way home when Rhea spotted her. Eunie was surprised to find the riverbank path not clear, as she was expecting, but all grown up with brambles. When she pushed out into her own yard, she had scratches and smears of blood on her arms and forehead, and bits of leaves caught in her hair. One side of her face was dirty, too, from being pressed against the ground.
In the kitchen she found her mother and her father and her Aunt Muriel Martin, and Norman Coombs, the Chief of Police, and Billy Doud. After her mother had phoned her Aunt Muriel, her father had stirred himself and said that he was going to phone Mr. Doud. He had worked in Douds when he was young, and remembered how Mr. Doud, Billy's father, was always sent for in an emergency.
"He's dead," said Eunie's mother. "What if you get her?"
(She meant Mrs. Doud, who had such a short fuse.) But Eunie's father phoned anyway and got Billy Doud. Billy hadn't been to bed.
Aunt Muriel Martin, when she'd got there, had phoned the Chief of Police. He said he would be down as soon as he got dressed and ate his breakfast. This took him a while. He dis-liked anything puzzling or disruptive, anything that might
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force him to make decisions which could be criticized later or result in his looking like a fool. Of all the people waiting in the kitchen, he might have been the happiest to see Eunie home safe, and to hear her story. It was right out of his ju-risdiction. There was nothing to be followed up, nobody to be charged.
Eunie said that three children had come up to her, in her own yard, in the middle of the night. They said that they had something to show her. She asked them what it was and what they were doing up so late at night. She didn't recall what they answered.
She found herself being borne along by them, without ever having said that she would go. They took her out through the gap in the fence at the corner of the yard and along the path on the riverbank. She was surprised to see the path so nicely opened up—she hadn't walked that way for years.
It was two boys and a girl who took her. They looked about nine or ten or eleven years old and they all wore the same kind of outfit—a kind of seersucker sunsuit with a bib in front and straps over the shoulders. All fresh and clean as if just off the ironing board. The hair of these children was light brown, and straight and shiny. They were the most perfectly clean and polite and pleasant children. But how could she tell what color their hair was and that their sunsuits were made of seersucker? When she came out of the house, she hadn't brought the flashlight. They must have brought some kind of light with them—that was her impression, but she couldn't say what it was.
They took her along the path and out onto the old fairgrounds. They took her to their tent. But it seemed to her that she never saw that tent once from the outside. She was just suddenly inside it, and she saw that it was white, very high and white, and shivering like the sails on a boat. Also it was lit up, and again she had no idea where the light was coming Spaceships Have Landed.
from. And a certain part of this tent or building, or whatever it was, seemed to be made of glass. Yes. Definitely green glass, a very light green, as if panels of that were slid in between the sails. Possibly too a glass floor, because she was walking in her bare feet on something cool and smooth—not grass at all, and certainly not gravel.
Later on, in the newspaper, there was a drawing, an artist's conception, of something like a sailboat in a saucer. But flying saucer was not what Eunie called it, at least not when she was talking about it immediately afterwards. Nor did she say anything about what appeared in print later, in a book of such stories, concerning the capture and investigation of her body, the sampling of her blood and fluids, the possibility that one of her secret eggs had been spirited away, that fertilization had taken place in an alien dimension—that there had been a subtle or explosive, at any rate indescribable, mating, which sucked Eunie's genes into the life stream of the invaders.
She was set down in a seat she hadn't noticed, she couldn't say if it was a plain chair or a throne, and these children began to weave a veil around her. It was like mosquito netting or some such stuff, light but strong. All three of them moved continuously, winding or weaving it around her and never bumping into each other. By this time she was past asking questions. "What do you think you're doing?" and "How did you get here?" and "Where are the grownups?" had just slipped off to some place where she couldn't describe it. Some singing or humming might have been taking place, getting inside her head, something pacifying and delightful. And everything had got to seem perfectly normal. You couldn't inquire about anything, anymore than you would say, "What is that teapot doing here?" in an ordinary kitchen.
When she woke up there was nothing around her, nothing over her. She was lying in the hot sunlight, well on in the morning. In the fairgrounds on the hard earth.
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"Wonderful," said Billy Doud several times as he watched and listened to Eunie. Nobody knew exactly what he meant by that. He smelled of beer but seemed sober and very attentive.
More than attentive—you might say enchanted. Eunie's singu-lar revelations, her flushed and dirty face, her somewhat arro-gant tone of voice appeared to give Billy Doud the greatest pleasure. What a relief, what a blessing, he might have been saying to himself. To find in the world and close at hand this calm, preposterous creature. Wonderful.
His love—Billy's kind of love—could spring up to meet a need that Eunie wouldn't know she had.
Aunt Muriel said it was time to phone the newspapers.
Eunie's mother said, "Won't Bill Proctor be in church?"
She was speaking of the editor of the Carstairs Argus.
"Bill Proctor can cool his heels," Aunt Muriel said. "I'm phoning the London Free PressY'
She did that, but she did not get to talk to the right person—only to some sort of caretaker, because of its being Sunday. "They'll be sorry!" she said. "I'm going to go over their heads right to the Toronto Star!"
She had taken charge of the story Eunie let her. Eunie seemed satisfied. When she was finished telling them, she sat with a look of indifferent satisfaction. It did not occur to her to ask that anybody take charge of her, and try to protect her, give her respect and kindness through whatever lay ahead. But Billy Doud had already made up his mind to do that.
Eunie had some fame, for a while. Reporters came. A book-writer came. A photographer took pictures of the fairgrounds and especially of the racetrack, which was supposed to be the mark left by the spaceship. There was also a picture taken of Spaceships Have Landed.
the grandstand, said to have been knocked down in the course of the landing.
Interest in this sort of story reached a peak years ago, then gradually dwindled.
"Who knows what really happened?" Rhea's father said, in a letter he wrote to Calgary. "One sure thing is, Eunie Morgan never made a cent out of it."
He was writing this letter to Rhea. Soon after they got to Calgary, Rhea and Wayne were married. You had to be married then, to get an apartment together—at least in Calgary—-
and they had discovered that they did not want to live separately. That would continue to be the way they felt most of the time, though they would discuss it—living separately—
a
nd threaten it, and give it a couple of brief tries.
Wayne left the paper and went into television. For years you might see him on the late news, sometimes in rain or snow on Parliament Hill, delivering some rumor or piece of information. Later he travelled to foreign cities and did the same thing there, and still later he got to be one of the people who sit indoors and discuss what the news means and who is telling lies.
(Eunie became very fond of television but she never saw Wayne, because she hated it when people just talked—she always switched at once to something happening.) Back in Carstairs on a brief visit and wandering in the cemetery, looking to see who has moved in since her last inspec-tion, Rhea spots Lucille Flagg's name on a stone. But it is all right-—Lucille isn't dead. Her husband is, and Lucille has had her own name and date of birth cut on the stone along with his, ahead of time. A lot of people do this, because the cost of stonecutting is always going up.
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Rhea remembers the hats and rosebuds, and feels a tender-ness for Lucille that cannot ever be returned.
At this time Rhea and Wayne have lived together for far more than half their lives. They have had three children, and between them, counting everything, five times as many lovers. And now abruptly, surprisingly, all this turbulence and fruitfulness and uncertain but lively expectation has receded and she knows they are beginning to be old. There in the cemetery she says out loud, "I can't get used to it."
They look up the Douds, who are friends of theirs, in a way, and together the two couples drive out to where the old fairgrounds used to be.
Rhea says the same thing there.
The river houses all gone. The Morgans' house, the Monks'
house—everything gone of that first mistaken settlement. The land is now a floodplain, under the control of the Peregrine River Authority. Nothing can be built there anymore. A spacious parkland, a shorn and civilized riverbank—nothing left but a few of the same old trees standing around, their leaves still green but weighed down by a diffuse golden moisture that is in the air, on this September afternoon not many years before the end of the century.