by Joan Boswell
Had I seen her before somewhere? On the streets of Ottawa? Or Montreal? You’re a little too old for this, I thought. That red hair came out of a can, and though she was lithe and smooth, wrinkles etched the corners of her eyes.
She was good though, as she cycled around, dropping balloon animals into little laps, juggled balls and eggs and finally knives. An acrobat too. And persuasive. She got two men to squat down and persuaded another onto their backs, making a platform for her to put down a special mounting block, where she placed an upturned pail and balanced herself on one foot on top of the whole mess, twirling flaming sticks above her head.
The third guy, volunteered by his children, was reluctant, but she talked him into position with a relentless barrage of gentle mockery. “Come on my man, not afraid of a little thing like death, are we? I’m not afraid of death. Who here’s afraid to die?” she asked the crowd, without pausing for an answer. “If I die, you’ll find me up there for sure at heaven’s gate, busking away for St. Peter, and how could he refuse an entertaining girl like me?”
Spinning the fire five feet up, she started a Bob Dylan rasp of “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” with a special smile for me when she got to the line about a lawman can’t ever be free.
That was when I saw the half smile on April’s face. I could tell she was thinking hard, and that next thing she’d have some theory about what she was seeing, the patter, the attitude or maybe a metaphor of busking as the performance art of life, because we’re all banging for attention at some gate. But I never found out what it was, because the next moment her hand on my arm turned into a vice, and she said, “My water just broke.”
“He’s going to be okay.” I told her. They’d moved her from recovery to a regular room. “His breathing has stabilized; so has his heart rate. But they’re keeping him under observation.”
Her hand in mine seemed smaller than ever.
“Intensive Care?”
“Yes.”
“So they’ve got to still be worried.”
“He said it was just precautionary. If everything stays the same, they’ll move him out soon. Maybe even tomorrow.”
After that we just sat quiet for awhile. She looked exhausted but wide awake, like she’d just climbed a mountain and needed to take in the view.
“I hardly got a look at him, Tony. Just that he’s got dark hair.”
“Oh, he’s handsome,” I assured her. “He’ll have your hair, I bet, and dark eyes and from me . . .”
“Don’t tell me he’s got that nose of yours.”
“ ’Fraid so.”
“Poor thing.” Finally, a smile. “Maybe you should make those phone calls.”
“Okay,” I said, “but they’ll be asking his name.”
“I’ve got an idea about that . . .”
“Thought so.”
“. . . but it can wait till morning.”
It was three a.m. before I got home and fell into bed, where I didn’t really sleep. Just tossed from thought to thought in the tangled sheets of a long, eventful day. Baby boy Aardehuis bumping up against a busker yelling above my head: “Are you afraid of death?” Which changed in the half sleep to birth. Are you afraid of birth? Carr and his “congratulations on the boy.” The boy I’d last seen curled in sleep just like his mother, small red face peeking out from under cover.
Then for a long time I thought about kids and how you care for them, and because of Glen Wylie’s barn, remembered how some people didn’t.
A long ago summer Sunday afternoon at the little man-made beach where all the farmer tans displayed themselves on the St. Lawrence shore. Mothers sitting in a huddle of folding chairs gossiping and shaking sand out of towels. Playing in the water with Glen Jr. and the sister who might have been ten or eleven, older than us for sure. Barbara? Brenda? No, it was Bonnie. A pretty girl with long loose hair and a smile she hid behind her hand because of a dead grey tooth. Back then, I’d thought Glen’s dad was a great guy, full of laughs, much preferable to my own father who, to my deep mortification, clumped along the beach in wooden shoes. I was trying to pitch Glen Jr. into the water from my shoulders when Mr. Wylie took over and gave every kid who wanted one a glorious toss into the waves that seemed to fly forever.
Then Bonnie, next in line, laughing, jumping up and down, turned a cart wheel in the water out of pure bubbling excitement. Somehow a long arm flung out wrong sent a splash up into her father’s face, or maybe she hit him, and I’ll never forget how he turned in an instant from laughter to rage. From father to monster, bending over the cringing girl with a look I didn’t see again until it was on the face of a guy outside a bar in Port Rose, my first posting. A guy smashing his wife’s teeth with a bottle of ale.
The scariest thing was how Bonnie knew right away that she had to run. She was used to this.
Hard to say how many of the other bits of memory came from that one afternoon. My mother rubbing lotion on Bonnie’s legs, frowning at the scabs, two parallel brown stripes on her calf. The pale and shrunken Mrs. Wylie looking away.
I remember the car ride home because I broke one of those unwritten but understood family rules, which in our case was don’t talk about how you feel. But I needed to ease the shock of that moment in the water when a nice man had terrified me, so I circled the problem, talking out of the back seat to the backs of my parents’ heads saying: “Glen’s dad gave us lots of throws. He was fun. He got real mad at Bonnie. She must have hit him.”
My mother broke a rule too: no talking about the neighbours. Maybe it didn’t count because she said it in Dutch, just looking straight ahead as if daring my father to disagree. “Er moet iets gedaan worden,” she said, “Voor dat iemand in het ziekenhuis beland.” I understood enough: something had to be done. Before someone ended up in the hospital.
“Such a man should never have children,” Dad said.
Now, twenty years later, I wondered what my mother had done. Maybe called the Children’s Aid, maybe then, or after the wife took off. Was that why Glen and Bonnie, with her neglected teeth, were removed the same year Wylie built his third extension on the barn?
Hard to sympathize with a man like that. The most I could do was feel bad for his cows, dying in the biggest bonfire of the year. A barn fire is fast and frightening; a sight both terrible and beautiful, and I was almost sorry I’d missed it. It reminded me of the flames in the square last night, twirling above the head of Flame Sucker Bob. You could acquire an appetite for fire. Any chance he might have hankered after a bigger blaze?
Then I came wide awake, remembering Pete Walker facing Glen Wylie across a litter of spilled food. Fifteen years ago at Armagh Collegiate, Pete Walker’s nickname had been Pyro Pete. Earned with an outhouse and a chicken coop and finally a drive shed up in flames. That had got him caught and probation.
But all that was in the past. Wasn’t it? Pete was my age now, a thirty-one year old dad, starting his own business, working hard. Pyro Pete was history. Wasn’t he?
At six-thirty, I gave up pretending to sleep and hit the phone. My staid Dutch mother and her quiet happiness. Eamon O’Connor, April’s excitable Irish dad, who ran through forty-nine ways he’d get here from New Brunswick by the end of the day. My brother Mike.
Everyone wanted the play-by-play, weight and a name. They got a Reader’s Digest summary, six-pounds-four, and “April’s got something up her sleeve.”
“She would,” said Howard MacNeill, the last call and my oldest friend. Howard owns the hardware store, runs every other organization in town and just became a Volunteer Fireman. “You hear about Wylie’s barn?” he said.
“Yes.”
Long silence.
“What is it, Howard?”
“John Kozak was downtown at that busker thing last night,” he said, naming another fireman. “At the scene, he mentioned Pete Walker had a dust-up with Wylie.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah. Nobody said anything, but you could tell they were thinking.”
It took
no trouble at all to imagine those big guys carefully avoiding eye contact, everyone of them thinking of fires long ago. Thinking maybe Pyro Pete was back. Also thinking he’d shown no signs for years, and now half of them played pickup hockey with him. They’d look away so they wouldn’t be seen thinking that a guy they liked might have put a match to a barn and a herd of cows.
“Did Carr twig?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Thanks for the heads up.”
Too early for the hospital, but I wanted to get moving, wanted to see April and the baby, so I drove slowly and took a detour past Wylie’s farm, all the way wondering what to do about the possible return of Pyro Pete. If Kozak had kept his mouth shut, it might have been possible to do a little quiet checking on my own, see where Pete had been last night, hopefully keep that history where it belonged, back in time. But the whole Volunteer Fire Department was already on that page. Was it better for Pete if Sergeant Carr knew the whole story, and we proved he was in the clear?
“Glendale’s Aberdeen Angus” said the sign by the farm gate, but it leaned askew, as if it had been clipped by the fire trucks.
There was a cruiser parked near the smouldering ruin, and Sergeant Carr stood beside the farmer, two hunched figures, hands deep in their pockets, staring at the wreck. I joined them in the viewing, and in the frosted morning our breath showed up white against the charred timbers and blackened concrete.
“Fifteen of the best,” said Wylie. “Brucedale’s Jennie, Maryann, Kathleen, Emily . . .” His face had the caved in look of a man about to cry, and there was a singsong to his voice, like he was reciting the names of lost relatives. But I couldn’t help but be pissed off that he’d used Emily to name a cow.
Sergeant Carr said, “The only thing I found this morning was this bit of rag ripped on the gate down there.” He held up a scrap of pale blue denim, jacket weight. “Might have been there an age anyway. Might mean nothing.”
“I know who done it,” said Wylie, beating me to it. “Ask your boy here. That Pete Walker used to set fires. I knock over his goddamn wiener stand, he comes and burns my barn.”
“Huh?” Carr looked lost. I gave a quick summary of the confrontation on main street, also Pete Walker’s old fondness for fire setting, emphasizing that all that had happened long ago. “Those guys never lose the taste.” Carr turned toward the cruiser with a springy stride. “I’ll find out what he was up to last night. If we’re lucky, we’ll have this put away.”
Still early at the hospital, I detoured toward the cafeteria and breakfast. Coming out of Emergency, I bumped into Flame Sucker Bob and Circus Daisy, Bob sporting a big gauze bandage over most of his forearm. Daisy, wearing normal clothes, sweatshirt, jeans, backpack dangling from one shoulder, looked more than ever like someone I ought to know.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
“The show got a little out of hand,” the flame sucker grinned. “Occupational hazard.”
“Experimental new stunt,” said the redhead.
You had to wonder if Bob’s new stunt involved strictly performance fire. If he was another guy who would never lose the taste. If he didn’t enjoy flames so much, he mightn’t once in a while be tempted to set a really big bonfire.
“What time was that?” I asked. “I had to leave the show early.”
They grinned at each other, and for the first time Daisy’s smile showed a row of perfect teeth. “Just at closing. The grand finale. Good thing he fried himself and not me.”
Closing would have been nine, nine thirty. Plenty of time to find a target out of town.
“Then I brought him here, and he spent the night waiting for a doctor.”
They did both wear the rumpled, weary look of people who’d spent the night in waiting room chairs. While I wondered who she looked like, Bob asked, “Hey, is there someplace decent to eat this time of day?”
“Cafeteria,” I offered.
“No,” said the redhead. “Sam’s will be open. Let’s go down there.”
I remembered then, what had jarred last night in her patter; the mention of Sam’s. “They changed the name to the Two by Four.”
“Eamon,” said April. “I’d like to call him Eamon, after my dad.”
“Don’t you think he needs a few consonants?” Really, I was so pleased to find they’d sprung him from Intensive Care, I could hardly pay attention.
“So put some in the middle.” She bit down on her lip, looking tense and shy, a look I hadn’t seen before, and I realized she was nervous.
“Amen Aardehuis . . .”
“Tony!”
“It sounds fine. Really, it’s great. I like it, and even if I didn’t, I couldn’t say no to you. Not after what you went through yesterday.”
The bedside phone rang, and instead of a congratulating relative it was Carr, looking for me and sounding pissed off because Pete Walker had been playing pool all night with three guys who would swear to it.
“Too bad,” I said, but I was smiling when I hung up.
Then I lifted the small flannel wrapped person out of his plastic case and carried him over to the window for better light. “Eamon Aardehuis. That’s your name, kid.” Holding him, my hands felt huge. “And if you hate it when you get to high school, you can blame your mother.”
“Tony . . .”
I looked out the window and saw Daisy and Flame Sucker Bob crossing the parking lot. In the cold October breeze, she stopped to pull a denim jacket out of her back pack. A denim jacket with a chunk ripped out of the right arm.
Things don’t usually click like that, all at once. That she’d known about Sam’s, but not the new name; four traffic lights instead of five. That Circus Daisy was from Armagh, and that was why she looked familiar. That she’d never lost the habit of hiding her teeth. That once she’d had the same grey tooth as Bonnie. That she was Bonnie. That she’d burned her father’s barn and the animals he’d cared more for than his children.
I held Eamon up to my face and smelled the newborn smell of his dark hair, felt the heat of his skin next to mine and watched them climb into a beat-up van that would certainly fail a safety check. The thing shook into life, puffing out a dark exhaust.
I thought about unwanted children, holding Eamon, who hadn’t exactly been wanted. Not looked for, anyway. I thought about welted legs and a town with an unpaid debt. I thought about a burned barn, and I thought about revenge.
Eamon gave a powerful little wiggle and sneezed. “I feel sorry for the animals,” I told him. “But not for him. What do you think? Think we should just let her go?”
He looked up at me with eyes that would likely be as dark as his mother’s. Blinked what might have been agreement, might have been telling me what I already knew. The First Annual Thanksgiving Armagh Busker Festival was already over. They’d be moving on, crossing the border, heading south. But there was no need to rush. There’s always more time to think than you might guess.
Cecilia Kennedy lives and writes in Brampton, Ontario. Her Tony Aardehuis stories have appeared in The Grist Mill and in Storyteller, where she won the Great Canadian Story contest for both 2001 and 2002. She is working on a mystery novel in which Tony finds his first dead body.
There’s No Business Like Show Business
Pat Wilson
From under his lowered eyelids, Lex surveyed the group in front of him. The usual assortment, he thought. A couple of cripples leaning on their crutches, some old bird in a wheelchair, two or three middle-aged women weeping loudly, and a tall, gaunt man who looked like he was at death’s door.
Lex felt a tightening in the pit of his stomach. Billy wasn’t there! Maintaining his posture of deep prayer, he ran his eyes along the row in front of the platform. Where the hell was Billy? Just as the tightening began to coalesce into a gut-wrenching throb, Lex saw Billy hobbling up the centre aisle, leaning heavily on his crutch and hanging on to the arm of Charlene. Billy’s golden curls glowed in the light. His luminous blue eyes were fixed on the cross st
rung up over the back of the platform, and at each step, he moaned softly as if in deep pain. He was the perfect picture of a suffering child. Hard to believe he was nearly thirteen! Then Lex’s gut spasmed. Charlene had that look again! Her eyes, hot with longing, were fixed, not on the cross, but on him. Even from the distance, Lex could see her hips swaying provocatively, straining against the skin-tight fabric of her skirt.
The pair arrived at the front of the platform and jostled their way between two of the women. Lex hoped Charlene wouldn’t get sidetracked tonight. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, she disrupted the whole flow of his performance. That time in Abilene, she’d taken advantage of being up on the platform, and instead of following the script, had pressed herself against Lex. Fortunately, few realized the lasciviousness of her embrace, but Lex was all too aware of her hand insinuating itself down the front of his white pants. That time, Lex was able to pass off her passionate advances as “loving zeal” inspired by the Holy Spirit.
Lex decided he’d better move fast while the crowd was still hot from his hellfire-and-brimstone-you-better-get-saved sermon. They stood a chance to lift a good offering here, well into the thousands, that is, if Billy and Charlene did what they were supposed to do without any improvisation on their part.
He headed for the middle-aged women first. One tap on their foreheads, and he could count on their going down like felled trees. It was always a good opening act.
“Heal!” Lex bellowed, smacking the flat of his hand against the forehead of the first woman. Right on cue, down she went, to be adroitly caught by Joe and an usher, then discreetly laid out with a small blanket over her legs. Lex proceeded along the row. As each woman went down, the audience shouted “Amen” and “Praise the Lord”.
He could feel the growing pulse of excitement in the crowd. They loved it when people were slain in the Spirit. It meant things were going to happen; that this was going to be a holy-hallelujah-one-hell-of-a-meeting; that the Spirit was moving and anything could happen.