by Joan Clark
“I knew you would come,” Hal says.
“Dad, oh Dad,” she says and locking her arms around him, she rocks him back and forth while the mantelpiece clock ticks relentlessly on. Claudia forgets her aunt is beside her until she hears Laverne announce, “Seven o’clock.” Claudia glances at her aunt sitting inches away, hands folded in her lap. Laverne does not return the glance and continues staring across the room. Following her stare, Claudia sees a pinkish blond-haired woman in a yellow sundress sitting opposite, her thighs spilling over the sides of the straightback chair. Now that Claudia has noticed her, the woman says, “I’m Corrie Spears, a friend of your father’s. I brought them home.”
“Them.”
“Yes. Hal and Miss Pritchard.”
“Brought them from where?”
“Main Street, in front of the Creamery, where your mother was killed.”
Killed. My mother was killed. Claudia knows that being killed is different from dying but she cannot work out in what way it is different. Later, when she can concentrate, she will try to work out it out. But not now, because now she must comfort her father and her aunt.
Laverne does not want Claudia’s comfort, what she wants is the comfort of being alone. Turning to her niece, she says, “Now that you are here, Claudia, I will go downstairs.”
“So soon, Auntie? I just got here.”
“Claudia, I’ve been sitting here a long time.”
“But you’ll be alone downstairs, Auntie. Why not stay upstairs with us?”
“I’m tired, Claudia, and I want to go to bed.”
“But you can go to bed in one of the spare rooms.”
“I prefer my own bed.”
Finally Claudia accepts the decision. She knows that once her aunt has made up her mind, she is not easily persuaded to change it. Claudia watches Laverne move like a sleepwalker through the dining room and kitchen and disappear behind the back-stairs door.
Downstairs Laverne wanders from room to room, barely recognizing the kitchen chair, the portrait of the burgomeister, the amber casement window, the checkerboard floors, the overhead beams, all of which were put in place with enthusiasm, effort and expense. But now that Lily is dead, the enthusiasm, effort and expense no longer matter.
Laverne was dozing in the Volkswagen, waiting for her sister to return with the ice cream when she was wakened by a blaring truck horn and screeching brakes. She looked over her shoulder and glimpsed her sister enter the crosswalk carrying two ice cream cones just as a red truck hurtled past. Laverne heard a thump, a screech, brakes squealing to a stop. Shattered by the deafening silence, Laverne sat upright and looked in the rear-view mirror. She saw cars stopping and strangers getting out to look. Alarmed by the sight of strangers, Laverne stayed where she was, hands tightly fisted, scarlet fingernails digging into her flesh. Directly ahead, she saw a black tow truck approach on the opposite side of the road. The tow truck stopped and Laverne saw Hal jump onto the pavement and run toward the crosswalk, crying, “That’s my wife! That’s my wife!” The sound of his cries frightened her and she sat in a trance of fear, afraid to leave the safety of the car, afraid that if she got out of the car, she would see the body of her sister lying on the road.
After a while the fat woman in the yellow sundress knocked on the car window and obediently Laverne rolled it down. “You had better come with me,” the woman said. “There is a taxi waiting to take you and Hal home.” The fat woman sat up front, Hal and Laverne in the back. And so they came home, to the place where Lily will never return. After they got out of the taxi, the three of them entered the house and went upstairs where they waited for the day to end.
But the day has not yet ended. Peering through the window, Laverne sees her Volkswagen parked in front of the garage. She never parks her car in front of the garage. Someone else must have parked it there. The placement of the car upsets her because it is not where it should be, beside the garage. And Lily is not where she should be, which is upstairs. Laverne is convinced that if she had not left these rooms today, Lily would be upstairs, the Volkswagen would be beside the garage and everything would remain the same. Laverne despises today and wants it to be over. But the day is hours from being over and she decides to bring it to a swift conclusion by swallowing one or two pills and disappearing into sleep. Laverne has a vial of sleeping pills set aside, but she cannot remember where it is. To help her remember, she gazes at the wall between the kitchen and pantry, which in the phantom twilight is an ugly, odious green and turning away, she searches the room and her gaze falls on the open bedroom closet door and she sees the suitcase and remembers: the sleeping pills are inside the suitcase. Laverne unzips the suitcase, shakes two sleeping pills from the vial she had been saving for her trip to Holland and washes them down with a glass of water. She does not undress but lies fully clothed on the bed.
Before she disappears into the oblivion of sleep, Laverne remembers that the fat woman said Matthew would be arriving tomorrow. Tomorrow, a new day and Matthew will take charge, he will see to it that the necessary arrangements are made. Reliable Matthew who drove the narrow winding roads of the Pyrenees to Niaux, where he guided Laverne deep into the mountain through the frigid dark. Laverne would never have taken this journey without his firm hand at her elbow, his other hand holding the tiny electric lantern lighting their passage along the slippery path through the maze of stalagmites while around them stalactites dripped onto the cave floor creating puddles of melted ice.
Following the wobbling line of tourist lanterns, she and Matthew walked more than a kilometre into the mountain when their guide instructed them to switch off their tiny lanterns and they waited in the shivering dark until he turned on a giant lantern. “Voila! Le Salon Noir,” he said, his voice echoing around the chamber and then! There were the paleolithic paintings which seemed as vibrant as when they were painted twelve thousand years ago: a bison outlined in black with a fringed neck and a curled tail, an arrow behind its shoulders, its spine and rump following the natural curve of the cave wall. On a plateau below the bison were life-sized horses with fringed manes and flowing tails; farther down the slope was a delicately horned ibex balanced on tiny hooves, and at the bottom a tiny animal, a weasel perhaps, stood on hind legs.
Laverne had not been able to make out exactly what their guide had said about the weasel, but that didn’t matter because it was not so much the animals themselves that impressed her; what most impressed her was the hunger for beauty and story that had inspired the hunter-artists to paint the walls of these subterranean rooms. The guide spoke in French Laverne understood, but she no longer remembers what he said. What she remembers, so many years later, are the paintings themselves, and the reassuring warmth of Matthew’s hand beneath her elbow as he guided her safely through the freezing dark toward the fading afternoon light.
From her place on the sofa, Claudia watches Corrie Spears limp between kitchen table and countertop, but unwilling to leave her father alone, she does not offer help. Claudia asks Hal when her brother will arrive.
“Trish said he is catching the morning flight from Halifax and will telephone as soon as he arrives in Moncton.”
“So he’s in Halifax tonight.”
“That’s what she said.”
Corrie appears with a tray and setting it on the coffee table, she hands Hal a glass of water and a paddy-green capsule. Hal asks what it is.
“The sleeping pill Dr. O’Donnell prescribed when he was here a few hours ago. He told you to take a pill at eight o’clock. It’s now almost nine.”
Obediently Hal swallows the pill. Corrie offers him the plate of gingersnaps. He shakes his head No. Tea? No.
“Claudia?”
“Thanks.”
Corrie hands her a mug and taking one for herself, settles on the straightback chair. “The doctor said to tell you there are enough sleeping pills for you, your dad and your brother. He wanted me to tell you that he would come by again in a couple of days.”
Claudia feels
the weight of her father’s head as he eases sideways against her shoulder. “Time we get you to bed, Dad.”
“Nobody gets me to bed. I will get myself to bed,” Hal says, but no sooner is he on his feet than a knee buckles. Catching him before he falls, Claudia guides him toward the hallway. She notices that someone, it must have been Corrie Spears, has closed the door to her parents’ bedroom. Hal hesitates in front of the closed door but his hesitation is momentary. “The purple spare room,” he says, and Claudia steers him to the bedroom her mother wallpapered with violets.
“Do you want help undressing?”
A gruff “No.” Even now, her father is prudish. The bedroom is stifling and Claudia opens the window. She kisses her father on the forehead, tells him she will be sleeping next door in the yellow spare room, and asks if he wants the door left open. Another gruff “No.”
Even though there are two closed doors between them and Hal, the women mute their voices. Claudia asks where her mother is.
“By now she would be at Alyward’s.”
Alyward’s Funeral Home. Claudia remembers bicycling past it on her way to the swimming hole at Sussex Corner.
“Not far from your father’s store,” Corrie says.
“Wasn’t she taken to the hospital?”
Corrie hesitates. It is too soon to go into the details. How much should she tell Hal’s daughter? “Well,” she says, “going by what happened to my husband, they wouldn’t have kept your mother long in the hospital.”
“What happened to your husband?”
“A backhoe ran over him.”
“That’s horrible,” Claudia says.
“I’m only telling you so you know I got some idea of what it’s like.”
“Who hit Mom?”
“Some reckless fellow driving a gravel truck way over the speed limit. The town is full of speeding young drivers. I didn’t get a look at him because as soon as the ambulance took your mother away, I brought your father and aunt home in a taxi.”
“Didn’t Mom see the truck?”
“I couldn’t say. I was on my veranda watching two girls through my binoculars, one of them Sophie Power’s granddaughter, and it wasn’t until I heard the truck horn and screeching brakes that I shifted the binoculars and saw your mother at the crosswalk with two ice cream cones she was carrying to her sister, who was parked in front of my house.”
“My aunt.”
“Yes.” The mention of Miss Pritchard makes Corrie uncomfortable and she shifts her bulk on the narrow chair. “If it’s all right with you, Claudia, I’ll be on my way. It’s been a long day.”
“Of course. I’ll call you a taxi.”
The women wait beneath the street light while bats swoop around them, veering away to avoid coming too close. Corrie observes that bats could teach the truck driver a thing or two but the remark is lost on Claudia, who cannot stop seeing her mother carrying two ice cream cones across the street. In the afternoon heat, the ice cream would have been melting. Did her mother hurry on that account?
Before shifting her weight into the taxi, Corrie says, “When your brother gets here, tell him to come see me. I was outside on the veranda when the accident happened. Mine is the brick house across from the Creamery. You could say I’m a witness, and your brother is a lawyer. Good thing you have a lawyer in the family. I had to hire one after Frank was killed.”
“You know Matt’s a lawyer?”
“Yes, and you’re a librarian.”
Claudia works in a university library but she is not a librarian and it embarrasses her that her father tells people she is.
“Your father often brags about the pair of you,” Corrie says.
Upstairs Claudia listens at the door of the purple spare room. Not a sound: her father is asleep and she is on her own. She does not want to be on her own, she wants to be with someone she can talk to, but there is no one to talk to. She cannot talk to her father and she cannot talk to Leonard who by now will be drawing in his study; no matter where he is, Leonard will be drawing. Claudia has never been inside his house, but she can picture where Leonard is because he has told her that most nights he draws in the study where he can keep an eye on the staircase. By this time of the night, Ruth will have shoved the day’s empty gin bottle beneath the back porch and if she hasn’t passed out in the living room, she might now be stumbling her way to bed. Twice Leonard has come home and found his wife at the bottom of the stairs. He did not carry Ruth upstairs to bed; instead he covered her with a blanket and placed a pillow beneath her head.
Claudia drifts into the kitchen and gazes at the untidy clutter on the countertop: the empty jars, pencils, elastics, a notepad scribbled with pork chops, butter, rice. Unwilling to erase her mother’s handwriting, Claudia casts around for something to do. When there is a death in the family, there are decisions to be made and duties to take on, but what are they? What did the Monahans do after Roger’s father and brother went out in a plywood boat to haul up lobster pots and never came back? Roger would have drowned, too, but instead of going lobstering with Pete and Darren, he and Claudia pedalled to West Quaco that night and made out on the rough grass beside the lighthouse. Claudia remembers the deceptive calmness of the night, the shimmering path of moonlight on the water, the way the waves licked the rocks with scarcely a spit of foam. In the morning the plywood boat was spotted, upside-down, drifting shoreward past the caves. No sign of Pete or Darren. For three days everyone in St. Martins who could swim or row searched the redrock shelving beneath the water, their only reward a drifting oar. A father and son, summer cottagers from Maine, suited up in diving gear and went down for a look. Twenty feet down, they found Roger’s father wedged between the rocks. Claudia remembers how relieved the Monahans were to have his body to bury and wake. Darren’s body was never found and eventually it was assumed that the Fundy tides had carried him out to sea.
Beneath the shopping list, Claudia writes Body. Her mother’s body is at the undertaker’s but she cannot stay there, she will have to be buried. Claudia writes Burial and beneath it, Funeral with a question mark—an avowed atheist, her mother had no time for rituals, what she called “stuffy procedures.” Even so, there will have to be a gathering of some kind. Claudia writes Wake. After Mr. Monahan’s body was found, an announcement appeared in the Kings County Record. Claudia writes Newspaper and puts the list aside. Making the list has exhausted her and resigned to waiting—she remembers the hours she waited beside Roger in the Monahans’ kitchen—she makes her way to the bathroom and then to the yellow spare room, the room her mother wallpapered with daisies before Hal insisted the wallpapering stop.
Paralyzed by grief, Hal has not changed position since coming to bed and he lies on his back staring into the dark, afraid that if he closes his eyes he will see Lily, broken and lifeless lying on the road. Did Lily see the truck coming? Was she terrified? Did she suffer? Hal tortures himself with these questions until he hears the reassuring sound of footsteps, the flush of the toilet, the groan of bedsprings as his daughter settles herself in the yellow spare room. With Claudia on the other side of the wall maybe he will fall asleep and forget he is alive, because that is what he longs to do—to forget he is alive.
II
Sophie Power is an early bird and by nine o’clock has bread dough rising on the stove and a batch of oatmeal cookies cooling. The heat wave has finally broken and a comforting rain patters the window. Sophie’s kitchen is directly below the McNabs’, same side of the house but a different shape, theirs being long and narrow and Sophie’s wide and square like the farm kitchen she worked in most of her life. By this time in the morning she usually hears Hal’s footsteps overhead, but not today. What she hears is her own voice saying: let them sleep. Sophie remembers that after her husband, Rolf, died, what she wanted most was sleep.
Shrugging on the scratched orange slicker she used to wear feeding the chickens, Sophie lopes downtown in size ten sneakers and an ankle-long cotton skirt, a wicker basket at the end of a monkey
arm. As usual she is the first one in the Dominion except for Mr. Franzin who is opening the till. “Hello, Mrs. Power,” he says. “Good to see the rain.” Sophie nods then tramps around the store. She has been in here so often she knows where everything is and in five minutes is at the check out with two chickens, a package of yellow-eyed beans and a dozen eggs. Mr. Franzin leans across the counter and says, “Terrible, what happened yesterday, terrible. We heard screeching brakes and went out on the sidewalk. We could see Mrs. McNab lying on the road. Some reckless teenager behind the wheel of a truck.” Mr. Franzin shakes his head. “Scandalous, what goes on in this town.”
“It is scandalous,” Sophie says and not another word. She refuses to tell Mr. Franzin what she knows: that her granddaughter Jill and her friend Trudy had just left the Creamery and were heading toward the park when they heard truck brakes squealing to a stop. She won’t tell Mr. Franzin, or anyone else, that the girls turned and walked a little ways back and that as soon as Jill got a glimpse of the body lying on the road, she ran home and telephoned Sophie. “She’s dead, Grandma,” she sobbed. “She’s dead.”
“Slow down, Jill. Who’s dead?”
“Your neighbour. That nice woman who lives upstairs. She was hit by a truck. She was lying on the road. It was awful, Grandma.”
Sophie heard the fear in her granddaughter’s voice, the fear that if it had happened to the nice woman upstairs, it could happen to her. “You had better come over,” Sophie said.
“I can’t, Grandma. I’m calling Mom.”
“But Carol’s at work.”
“I know, Grandma, but I’m calling her.”
“If Carol can’t leave work, you come stay with me. You hear?”
“Yes, Grandma.”
“All right then.” Sophie hung up the telephone. The conversation had exhausted her and she sat in the rocking chair waiting for her daughter’s call. Carol telephoned after she got home. She was upset. She had been at the front desk when Lily McNab came in after lunch for an X-ray and she was there when the call came in to send an ambulance to the Creamery. “I know how much you liked her, Mom,” Carol said. “Do you want me to come over?”