“Oh, Aunt Irene! What about Henry McIntyre?”
“You know what I mean, Libby,” my aunt grumbled. “No one under the age of forty. You be sure to write to your friend Margaret Pacey this week. On second thought, I’ll send Margaret’s mother a note, to outline the rules for your stay.”
With so many people overseeing my life and the faithful Ernie guarding my door, how could Aunt Irene not rest easy?
“And one thing for sure,” she decided. “You are to see about getting a telephone. Have them send the bill to me. If I can get away, I’ll come down myself and spend a few days. Just till I know you’re all right.”
It was, I suppose, the price I had to pay for my freedom. I was determined to make it on my own. And not just for the summer either. “I’ll be fine, Irene. You know I will. I was the one who looked after Alex. Remember?”
She knew that was true enough. Growing up in the little house out past the place where the road from Pinkney Corners ends, most days I’d come home from school to find Alex in another world, the one she shared with the characters in her novels. Without a word, I would collect the dirty coffee cups and dried crusts of toast from around her typewriter and take them to the kitchen.
Eventually, Alex would look up from her writing and see me. “Oh, my,” she’d say, lifting her mass of hair, stretching her arms over her head and smiling fondly, “is it that time already?”
I remember how she used to come to lean against the door frame between the front room and the kitchen, her hands easing the pain in the small of her back, watch me dig the dishpan from under the sink, fill it with hot water and sprinkle in the soap flakes. “You’re a good girl, Libby,” Alex would say. “What would I do without you?”
While she started supper, I’d trudge upstairs, through the dustballs in the bedroom, and pull the covers on the bed up over the pillows, giving them a quick swipe to smooth them.
Before my grandmother died, Nan had been the one who had looked after us, who had showed me how she could turn a shirt collar to give the garment new life, how to darn a pair of socks and how to plant radish and carrot seed together to avoid having to thin the carrots later.
My Nan and grandfather had bought the house and the one acre of land that sloped gently down to the river when they came out from back north, after they were married in 1912. In Pinkney Corners, what people referred to as “back north” was any place on the road map higher than Highway 7. My grandfather was a railroad man, a hard worker I’ve been told, who walked all the way to the roundhouse six days a week. He died before I was born.
Besides looking after her family and a huge garden, Nan had worked at the local canning factory in season, peeling tomatoes. She had prided herself on keeping a clean house and on always being thrifty. She had stocked up on tins of fruit and vegetables from the canning factory, dented tins with no labels. The only drawback was that, just when you were expecting creamed corn, you’d find you’d opened a tin of blue raspberries. Meals were sometimes full of surprises.
With Nan gone and Alex immersed in her writing, the garden became neglected, overgrown with chicory and wild mustard. The most Alex and I ever planted would be one or two uneven rows of beets and carrots. But one day, Alex saw an ad in the paper asking for people willing to grow cucumbers for a pickling company. My mother decided that this was a way to make a few extra dollars and keep me, once school was out for the summer, outside in the fresh air and sunshine.
To earn the best money at the sorter, the cucumbers had to be picked when they were exactly the right size. Alex hadn’t counted on how quickly these things could grow with just a little rain. Almost overnight, they could go from “not quite ready” to “way past perfect.”
At first, all the hoeing to keep the weeds from between the rows and the squatting in the blazing sun to harvest the prickly cucumbers nearly finished us. But on good days, there’d be one or two lumpy, burlap sacks waiting out by the road for the man, whose name was Eddie, to pick up and deliver to the sorter.
Once in a while, Alex and I went along with Eddie for the ride. I enjoyed watching the process at the sorter, how our little cukes bounced merrily along the conveyor after the man had emptied the sacks onto it. Immediately, he would pluck one or two of the bigger ones and toss them aside while Alex and I tried to look innocent, as if we couldn’t imagine how those big fellows had ended up in the sack.
Once we got the hang of it, we had good crops for three years running and made enough money to buy a few extras—new mattresses for our beds and a polyester-filled comforter with matching curtains for my room.
Maybe, I thought now as I packed my things into the old cardboard suitcase at Irene’s and prepared to go home, I could grow cucumbers this year myself. Should I start by getting in touch with Eddie, or with the people from the pickling company? Would there still be time to sow some seed when I got back home? The land hadn’t been worked in years. Could I ask Mr. McIntyre to run over it a couple of times with his cultivator?
But, wait a minute. I sat down on my bed abruptly, the lid of the suitcase flopping shut. There was something wrong with the picture in my head. Something about Eddie, wasn’t it? Then it began to come back to me, the day Alex and I had walked all the way home from the sorter. It was a scene I had managed to forget.
After unloading the cucumbers, Eddie had backed the pickup truck into the shade of a large tree. When the sorting was finished, he and Alex had gone up to the truck, ready to leave; but I had asked them to wait while I got a drink from the outside tap.
There was no one in the cab of the truck when I got there, but I heard voices from beyond the open door on the other side. Opening my door, I looked across the seat and saw Alex and Eddie engaged in some kind of struggle. There was a loud slap, and Alex looked up, her face red with anger.
“Get out of the truck, Libby,” she ordered, her eyes flashing.
“What?”
“I said get out. We don’t need a ride.” She strode around to my side, and I hopped down.
“What do you mean, we don’t need a ride?”
My mother grabbed my arm and slammed the door behind me. “We do not need any favours from Mr. Hackett,” she stated. And we had walked all the way back home.
The pickup truck had swirled past us before we were onto the main road, covering us both in dust. My indignation at having to walk home was nothing compared to Alex’s at being taken advantage of.
I don’t remember how we sent our cucumbers to the sorter after that. I do remember that Alex had returned the new curtains she’d bought for the front room to the mail order office the next day.
The bus ride back to my home seemed to take forever. I had forgotten there were so many stops between Toronto and Pinkney Corners. To pass the time, I studied the other passengers as they disembarked, one by one along the way, creating lives for them in my head. I pictured a family of clamouring youngsters waiting for the tired-looking woman in the print dress, who carried all the brown shopping bags. And a raven-haired sweetheart for the handsome man with the suit jacket hanging on his thumb over his shoulder. His shirtsleeves rolled up over his forearms, he swung jauntily down off the bus. Then all I could see was the top of his head as we pulled away again.
I climbed down at our corner, not wanting to walk all the way back from the cigar store which acted as the bus terminal in town. It was a warm late afternoon at the end of June. The trees and bushes along the roadside were lush with summer. I felt exhilarated, light as air. I didn’t even feel the weight of the suitcase. “I’m home,” I wanted to tell every leaf and branch, every creature I came upon—the doves who flew, startled, from the dust, the turtle who dawdled across my path, his tail leaving a shallow trail between the prints of his claws, as he headed for the riverbank.
My lilac hedge, the flowers dried and the colour of rust, crowded the edge of the road, almost hiding the house from view. “Hello, little house,” I said. The blinds in the two front windows were pulled halfway down, as if it had clos
ed its eyes. Or maybe, now that I was here, it was just opening them.
I stepped across the small front porch, heavy with vines that promised a riot of purple clematis, and reached for the screen door. No, not yet, I thought. I wanted Ernie and I to do this together, the way I’d imagined it. Leaving the suitcase on the step, I went on up the road to fetch my dog.
Ernie, my old friend, was lying in the sun on the stones at the side door of the McIntyres’ farmhouse. He raised his big head and watched me approach for a few seconds. Then, recognizing me, he scrambled to his feet and limped his way up the driveway towards me, tail wagging. The winter had worsened the arthritis in his hip, but otherwise, he was his same old silly self, all tail and slobber, his sides matted with black hair.
Mrs. McIntryre came out with an empty laundry basket and headed for the clothesline before she spotted me. “Why, I do declare! Here you are. Elizabeth.” She set the basket down. “Henry and I were just talking about you.” The screen door opened a second time and Mr. McIntyre emerged. “Here she is, Henry.”
Henry McIntyre gave me a wide grin and slipped his arms under his suspenders, adjusting them over his plump middle. “You’re back, are you? Did you go into the house?”
“No, I came here first,” I said, happily. “Came to get Ernie.” I rubbed the wide, hard place between the dog’s ears. “Thanks so much for minding him. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to repay you for his board and keep.”
“Shaw! Don’t mention it,” said Mrs. McIntyre, flapping her hands. “He’s such a loveable old thing. Good company for Rex, too.”
Henry McIntryre motioned with his head toward the truck. “Come on, then. I’ll take you back up in the pickup,” he said. This couple had always been people of endless charity.
“Oh, you don’t need to,” I told him. “We can walk back.”
The farmer let down the tailgate on his truck, regardless. “Here, boy,” he summoned. Ernie sprang up as if he were a pup.
“You don’t need to...” I began again.
“Henry’ll drive you,” Mrs. McIntryre stated. “See you back here for supper.” She closed the door of the truck on my protests.
“I’m okay, really.” This was no way to start off my life of independence. “I packed a lunch for the bus, and I’ve brought food for my supper, for the dog too.”
“It’s like this, ’Lizabeth,” said Henry, backing out of the lane. “The wife and I wanted to warn you about something first.” My pulse quickened. “Seems like someone broke into your place while you were gone.”
I felt as if the floor had just dropped from under me. “Who? Who broke into my place?”
“Don’t know. I’ve been keeping an eye on it for you, like you asked. Everything looked good last time I checked.”
“So how do you know?”
He raised himself slightly to get more comfortable behind the wheel. “I set some traps around for the muskrats this spring ’cause I could see where the little rascals had been digging things up a bit. But, lo and behold, last week when I was cutting the grass out behind, I saw the lock on the back door had been smashed. Don’t know how long it had been that way.”
I was speechless as he continued, taking his time. “Everything looked okay inside. Might’ve happened during the cold, because whoever it was used some of the stove wood from the pile out back, chopped some kindling. But then, you’d think I’d have noticed the broken lock before now.
“Anyhow, I went into town and dropped by the cop shop, asked Mert to take a swing out by here. And I bought you another lock.” He glanced over at me. “Whoever it was, a drifter most likely, has moved on.”
“Thank you for the lock,” I said, weakly.
“We found boot prints in the dried mud around the privy. We had heavy rain the end of May, so it could’ve been then.”
I nodded. “The water’s off inside. They’d have to use the outhouse.”
“Well, it’s on now,” he told me. “After we got your aunt’s letter I came over and got things running again. Turned on your electric for you.”
We bounced into the lane at the side of the house. Ernie was yelping with excitement, running back and forth the length of the truck box.
“Mert said you should take a look around,” Henry advised as he eased his girth out from under the steering wheel. “Be sure nothing’s missing. Like I said, everything looked okay to us.”
From here, I had to agree. Nothing appeared any different. As I climbed down, I could see where Henry McIntyre had cut the grass, grown to hay during my absence. It lay in long rows down to the river’s edge.
Mr. McIntyre opened the door and we entered through the back kitchen, following a trail of muddy footprints into the house. Going through to the front room, I unlocked the front door and swung my suitcase inside, feeling the rush of warm, sweet air.
After a quick inspection, it appeared to me that the intruder had confined his living to the kitchen, where the cookstove would have provided the only source of heat. There was an oil burner in the corner of the front room, but Alex and I had used the last of the oil, and Irene had seen no reason to refill the tank that sat at the side of the house.
The room across the hall from the kitchen had been my grandmother’s bedroom. During her own final illness, Alex had hired someone to convert part of it to a tiny bathroom. Everything there and in the big bedroom upstairs was just as I had left it.
“I guess it was a good thing Alex and I didn’t have much worth stealing,” I remarked, rejoining Henry McIntyre in the kitchen. I had taken Alex’s portable typewriter with me to Toronto, where it would remain until Irene could bring it and the rest of my belongings down sometime by car.
“We had a little radio, and Alex’s publisher gave her an electric frying pan once,” I remembered.
“Isn’t that your radio on the counter there?” observed Henry. “Better check that the fry pan is still here.”
I rummaged in the cupboard under the sink. “Probably the only thing we owned that’s worth more than fifteen dollars,” I remarked, withdrawing the shiny appliance.
“There you are; just like new,” declared Henry McIntyre with satisfaction.
“No wonder,” I said. “Every time Alex tried to use it, it blew a fuse.”
“Place probably doesn’t have heavy enough wiring,” the man surmised. “So, what d’you think? Seen enough? Come back with me now. Your dog is right at home at our place.”
“No, thank you,” I said. “We’re going to stay here.”
He frowned. “Tonight?”
“Tonight and every night,” I vowed.
Henry McIntyre hesitated. “Are you sure?”
“I am.” There was no doubt in my voice, and being a man who knew his own mind, he respected that and left a minute or two later in the truck.
I had never considered the possibility that someone might break into my house. But some stranger with mud on his boots had tracked up the linoleum and used my firewood, not to mention the outhouse. I could very easily mop the floor, but I looked askance at the daybed beside the stove. How many nights had some stranger stretched himself out there to sleep? And how did I know if this person had cooties, or worse?
I pulled the mattress off the daybed and turned it over. Then I swept and mopped the floor. While I waited for the linoleum to dry, I sat on the back step and pondered my situation.
I decided I didn’t have to let this incident take the edge off my joy at being home. Whoever had entered the house, uninvited, had not destroyed anything that I knew of, except the padlock. He didn’t seem to have been a thief. It could even have been some poor stranger seeking a roof over his head during a storm.
I had a sudden picture of that person, a woman now, trudging along the road through blinding snow, clutching her threadbare coat to her throat, discovering the opening in the hedge—the promise of a house! But there were no lights on inside, she realized; no one was home. She couldn’t move a step further. She must have shelter. My imagination
provided the peace of mind I needed. If I thought about it long enough, I might even imagine she had left me a note somewhere, apologizing for having to break in.
I roused myself. This place was where I wanted to be. And this was where I would stay. Ernie was standing knee deep in the lazy river, his intelligent head cocked to one side, contemplating frogs. I could tell he was glad to be home.
Later, when I was upstairs putting sheets on the bed, I heard a truck in the driveway. Henry McIntyre had returned. Ernie went clattering down the stairs, barking furiously, but he became an old marshmallow when he saw who it was and that Mr. McIntyre was carrying a bag of table scraps for him.
“The wife’s upset I didn’t bring you home for supper,” Henry announced. “Sent you down some grub and insists you come and use our spare room.” He drew a basket across the seat of the truck towards him.
I assured him again that everything was fine.
“You aren’t nervous about staying here?” he asked, scratching the top of his head with the hand that held his cap.
“No, I’m not. We know that the break-in happened months ago. How long’s it been since anyone needed to light the woodstove?”
“Well, they couldn’t use your stove with no electric,” he pointed out.
I took a deep breath. He was not going to dissuade me. “Tomorrow Ernie and I are going into town to see the Paceys. Margaret Pacey was my best friend. They have lots of room at their place, and I could stay there if I really needed to.”
Resignedly, Henry McIntyre handed me the basket containing something wrapped in tea towels. “Well, this here plate’s still hot,” he said. “There’s some milk here too. I didn’t bring you much, ’cause I didn’t check your fridge out yet.”
“It works,” I told him. “I plugged it in, and it’s humming away in there.” Even if it hadn’t worked, Nan’s old icebox still crouched in the corner of the back kitchen. I’d just buy some ice somewhere if I had to.
When Alex had finally replaced the icebox with a second-hand Frigidaire, it was not because we needed it, but because ice was no longer delivered to our door. The iceman had been a regular caller when I was little. I used to wait at the front gate for him, knowing he’d ask me to watch his horse while he carried the chunk of ice into the house. The obedient animal never moved from the spot where he’d slowed to a halt.
Finding My Own Way Page 3