Order of Good Cheer

by Bill Gaston

  They headed uphill to the municipal grounds. Silence grew quickly weird so he described how in summer when a cruise ship came in, this side of this street was crammed with vendors’ stalls, and though most sold six-inch totems and vacu-pak smoked salmon and little necklaces, some were colourful, like the old Norwegian guy in his seventies who wore spats and busked, playing hymns on his fiddle, ending each with a long baritone “Ahhhmennn.” And here was where a friend of Rachel Hadley’s — Magda? Magma? — set up a table under a “Wiccan Fortunes” shingle, and she read people’s lives with tarot cards, or by holding their two hands in hers. Andy had spent a few evenings beside her in the pub, and she hadn’t seemed, well, “wise.” Though how much wisdom did it take to read a face and say, “You’ve had it rough, but you can begin trusting life again,” to make you happy enough to part with twenty bucks.

  “It’s the closest thing we have to a farmers’ market,” Andy explained. “Except there’s no farmers, or vegetables.”

  “The tourists couldn’t cook vegetables back on their ship anyway,” Amelia instructed him, unsmiling, and Andy wondered if she was mean or if she really hadn’t understood his quiet little joke. He thought of her grandmother, and how genetic traits often leapt a generation.

  Enthusiasm stunted, he pointed out the spot where one vendor sold T-shirts, some with typical “I Survived Prince Rupert Rain” logos, but others with weird Photoshopped creations, Andy’s favourite being a monster, the Thing from the Fantastic Four, but with three heads: Bill Gates, the Dalai Lama, and Michael Stipe.

  “Do you have a favourite band?” he found himself asking her. Saying Michael Stipe’s name had made him feel contemporary, until he remembered R.E.M. had had hits before she was born.

  “A few, sure.”

  “Who?”

  “You wouldn’t know them, I don’t think.”

  “Probably not, no.”

  They reached the grounds where, in behind the antique locomotive, in a clearing of maples, stood a decent totem pole. Most poles got painted these days, but this was ash-grey untreated cedar, which was how they were in the old photographs and in Emily Carr paintings. The animals and faces depicted weren’t the usual ones either. Andy read the small plaque under glass and tapped it with his finger.

  “Eagle Person. The Uncle. White Marten. Split Person. Small Humans. Gitksan Crest.”

  “Wow. Look at The Uncle.”

  She pointed to a face that was the embodiment of goofy, one you could imagine Jim Carrey straining for. When Andy asked Leonard about Split Person, a carving that suggested two faces uncomfortably conjoined above and below, anticipating Picasso by centuries, Leonard eyed him dismissively and said, “White people don’t even know crazy.” Leonard went on to tell him about the ancient villages and their degrees of banishment for degrees of mental illness. There was a specific kind of permanent insanity ascribed to surviving a tipped canoe in winter.

  “Were you very close to your grandmother?” he asked Amelia.

  Amelia looked down, then squinted back up at the pole. “I don’t know. She didn’t seem to open up much. Couldn’t relate to . . . I don’t know.”

  “Couldn’t stoop to your level?”

  She picked her head up, smiling. “Exactly.”

  “There’s something about that generation that’s really stuck,” he said, insinuating that there was nothing stuck about his, and she could open up if she felt the need.

  “I guess. My granddad on my dad’s side is pretty cool. He’s really cool, actually. He’s a painter. Lives mostly in Prague.”

  “Holy cow. Prague. Prague’s the new Paris.”

  “You like Prague? I didn’t at all. It was all like dirty and rusty. And how taxis try and cheat you as much as they possibly can?”

  “Well, I’ve only read about it.” Read a lot about it, he wanted to add. Not that it would help his case that he knew their system of parliament, or Vaclav Havel’s brand of cigarettes.

  “But that’s not why I didn’t do the graveyard,” Amelia insisted. “I just don’t like the whole burial thing. It totally scares me.”

  “I’m not a fan either.”

  “The whole death thing really gets to me,” she added. “Her body lying there like that? It’s so unnecessary.”

  “I totally agree.” Maybe not totally. It was closure for some, seeing the body.

  “You know that like, North America’s the only place that does the whole embalming thing? You know Europe doesn’t?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What’s with putting preservative in your veins, and then burying you? I mean, it delays the whole ‘getting eaten by worms’ deal, but so okay what’s that about?”

  “Well exactly.” Though no one is buried alive, a primal fear. Only a hundred years ago the best-selling coffins came with an interior handle you could yank that made a little flag pop up and tell any passersby to please start digging.

  “You know they did an autopsy?” Her shoulders hunched, as if she was cold. Andy made a motion with his hand and they started walking back to the car. “She was old, old people die.”

  “They do.” But that explained her new ’do, which might be a wig. Someone had taken her brain out to weigh it and puzzle over Alzheimer’s. Andy pictured a brow-knit grad student toothpicking at a pocked brain, hunting aluminum.

  They walked down the hill. Andy could not help but steal glances at her mellifluous stride, and then he made himself not look.

  “So you get to see your mom dance much? When she was still dancing?” He pictured Laura on that stage in Vancouver, in a skintight, skin-coloured body suit, that odd and funny pas de deux with another female.

  “I was pretty small. She mostly, you know . . .”

  “Choreographs.” The other dancer ran her hands over Laura’s whole body, but always exactly an inch away, never touching, just followed the contour, intimate but always a perfect inch away. Laura smiling mildly, but still as a rock.

  “And teaches, yeah.” She shook her head, seeing something. “At home I watch her doing little moves, working on something. It’s amazing.”

  “You ever dance yourself?”

  Sharp-eyed, she laughed. “Of course not!”

  And here was his Mustang, Amelia waiting at her door. “So, you went to high school with my mom.”

  “Yes, I did.” He pointed his fat key and beeped it, and four magical locks rose.

  “She said it was really weird growing up here.”

  “We were pretty close,” he found himself saying at the same time.

  “No offence,” she said, smiling and pulling open her door, like she hadn’t heard him either.

  He drove them back up the hill, faster than necessary. He was afraid of her now. Her nose was so clean and perfect, and so was her hair, curled to suggest wind, even indoors. She felt like some kind of bright malignancy beside him. Partly because she was so pretty, and partly because she couldn’t communicate, at least not with him. But it was mostly because sitting in the seat beside him was something that Laura had made with her life. It had nothing at all to do with him. And he had nothing like this to show, for his years alone, that had nothing to do with her.

  HE STOPPED BY HIS place to check on his needles and the mussels and also because Amelia needed “a bathroom really badly,” which made him wonder if her standoffishness had actually been a holding in of urine, and he felt better about her, especially when she truly seemed to like his house. He dropped her back at the hotel to rejoin her mother, and when he called out the window, “See you tonight,” her quizzical and wary look as she walked away said she’d forgotten all about his party, and he decided to dislike her again.

  He headed home to tend the simmering base for the stew, add the prunes, and the mace he’d finally found. He would add the moose, if it was there yet. It was reflex that made him turn up his mother’s street. He approached her house and then just kept going, hoping no one saw him. He’d dropped in yesterday and had far too much to do for tonig
ht. He’d love to grab a nap but he had to dig the firepit, and ready the pine needles, and taste the hypocras. But as he motored past, he knew he was avoiding her and her house like one naturally flees the sick.

  Visiting yesterday he’d had a disturbing talk with her. Slumped on the couch, she wouldn’t even answer Doris’s wave as Doris tottered birdlike out the door, off to buy some “French red wine,” because that’s what Andy had suggested after she insisted she bring something to drink for tomorrow night. For food, he’d told her to bring an appetizer she’d never had before because sure, it was indeed sort of a theme party. He was asked what theme exactly, and Andy came up with, “It’s ‘let’s try something new.’”

  “Oh, I can’t think of an appetizer I’ve never had,” his mother had said, more to herself. Then, looking up to him, “Why would I think of an appetizer I’ve never had?” Then down again, looking strained and upset.

  “Mom, forget it. There’ll be lots of food. Don’t bother. Please. You’re tired.”

  “You look tired, Andy. And now this party. I worry about you.” But she gazed off to the side, worrying about something else.

  The mix was weird enough already, and now three old ladies were coming. The day before, he’d told Laura, innocently enough — but also, yes, trying to entice her further — that the party could be seen as a wake for her mother and then, naturally enough, Laura asked if her mother’s friends were coming. Andy said he would invite them, and now he had, and now they were. It felt so Old World to be inviting your mother to a party. Next you’d expect accordion players and a church pastor and kids smelling of lye soap, whatever that smelled like.

  What would happen when Drew got drunk and put on some growliest Tom Waits and cranked it? You don’t want to invite somebody only to drive them away. But for a dinner party, and theme party no less, it was turning into an unchoreographed affair. Some Leonard-relatives were coming whose names he didn’t even know. Drew and Pauline’s Chris might even come. What had happened was, when Andy phoned Pauline about serving bowls, Chris answered and, almost as a joke, Andy asked him what he was doing New Year’s. When Chris didn’t outright laugh or refuse, Andy described things a bit and Chris had grunted, sounding somewhat seduced by the concept of free wine as well as by the “we’re actually going to conduct a living sacrifice,” which Andy would say no more about. (What he’d meant was odori, which was more an experience of live sushi, and which would take place only if Leonard’s friend came through.) And Rachel Hedley was coming, with her girlfriend, and the way she said it did sound like girlfriend, and it was none other than white witch Magma, or Magda. Rachel had dropped a hint or two, it seems, and Andy had heard a rumour, and sure he’d had suspicions since way back when, but here it was. To think that he and Rachel had once talked, albeit dispassionately over tea, about getting married.

  “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to upset you,” Andy’s mother was saying, looking at her hands, “but Rita’s cancer is back. And they suspect her liver. It seems it’s lodged there as well.”

  “That’s — really sad.” It really was. “Is she — Is she coming tomorrow night?” Andy didn’t know what else to say, and why had she decided to tell him now?

  “Yes. But we might not make it all the way to midnight, dear.”

  “No, it’s great that you’re coming at all.”

  “We can cab it when she gets tired.” Perhaps envisioning their arrival back, she looked around her as if assessing. “Andrew, I just don’t know what’s going to happen now.”

  “To your house?” Andy gestured with a palm and his mother blinked deeply. He was going to ask something lame about finding another roommate, but obviously things had passed this stage. Her news about Rita sounded like another vacancy. This house was too big for his mother and Doris to rattle around in, and Andy had always thought his mother wasn’t much more than tolerant of Doris. But then she’d never seemed that fond of Marie Schultz either, and look at her now, all beaten up over it.

  “To me, Andy. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me.” She enunciated so crisply that Andy’s neck hair shivered and stood. She’d never said anything this raw to him before.

  “It’s a strange time,” he offered.

  “I just don’t know.” His mother looked frightened, and on the verge of a violent pout, like she might stamp a foot.

  It was here that Andy saw a sudden future rise up, fully formed. He knew that he must ask her to move back into their family house, and he knew that she must accept. And he realized how victorious Mrs. Schultz was in her hate for him, for somehow the woman had conspired with fate to come up with a perfect ironic finish: her dying meant that Laura was free to be in the world, while he, not her, would be the one in Prince Rupert looking after a mother.

  Andy waited for a maxim about death or the future, but none was coming. His mother gazed out the front window, which offered only some snow and the uniform trunks of what used to be a cedar hedge, now sizeable trees. One hand absently rubbed the couch arm, hard enough, he could tell, to scour the fabric’s texture into her palm.

  “You could move back to our place, Mom,” he said, and the proof that his suggestion was no surprise to her, and that she had already accepted it, was her unexcited gaze that didn’t rupture, and her rubbing hand that didn’t miss a beat.

  “It would be expensive,” she said, still pouty. “We’d have to suite it.”

  He knew she said this to save face, to make it seem like she was demanding privacy, protection from all the young ladies he would be bringing home. Saying it, she had never seemed older to him. Her hair looked dead, like fine brittle wood. A line of powder ended in the middle of a cheek. He could see in her acceptance of his offer the acceptance also of a new helplessness. For the first time, he saw the face of her coming decline, saw the route she would take into warbling uncertainty, and the fog she’d wander in stubbornly.

  “Mom, this party tomorrow? It’s for you and your friends too. It really is.”

  WHEN ANDY GOT BACK from delivering Amelia to her grieving mother, he saw that Leonard had indeed delivered moose. There was so much to do. He managed no nap, no shower even. People had been asked to arrive at six, and it began snowing at five. Andy was glad that, out back, he’d thrown a tarp over the firepit and small woodpile and two buckets of pine needles. Snow hadn’t been forecast; it had called for lots of rain and a good blow from the southeast. But for now a gentle snow. And when the first couple arrived — Rachel Hedley holding mittened hands with her Wiccan girlfriend Magda or Magma — the driveway and yard were white and pristine, and when he flicked his driveway spotlights and lit everything up, it wasn’t unlike a moonlit Christmas card.

  As often seemed to happen at parties, these first guests weren’t vital guests but fringe guests. Though he liked Rachel well enough he didn’t care for Magda (not Magma; he told himself to remember this time). After sitting with them for a minute in the living room, careful to show nothing remotely like surprise that the two women were “together,” Andy was glad he could bolt and attend to his list of chores. And the list was growing because time had become a factor: the curd pie needed testing, somehow, for doneness, and the moose needed poking with a fork. He did these things, as well as taste the stew again and add the salal berries, and yet more salt, then he uncorked the dozen bottles of wine to let them breathe (though he’d read that this perpetrated a myth, and that wine breathed properly only when sitting in a snifter-shaped glass), then he called Drew to see how many coffee mugs he could bring, but only mugs of solid colour, no patterns or goofy captions on them, like some Drew had, his Colbert “truthiness” mugs or melting-clock Dali series.

  “Why just solid?” Drew asked, sounding irritated but like he had to know. He’d been working the same shift as Andy.

  “It’s for wine, actually,” Andy said. “I want the closest thing to clunky goblets. Like, you know, the French used.”

  “I’ll bring my set of pewter quaffing vessels,” Drew said soft
ly, and because Drew did have that old, failed basement pub, stocked with who knows what, it took Andy a second to know he was being mocked. Andy didn’t tell Drew about the wine he’d bought, clearing out the store’s stock after consulting a map of France. The idea was to find something resembling what they actually drank in l’Habitation, to recreate the same buzz, to think and to feel like a confined French settler. He found a Château Rennes, after noting that Rennes was near St-Malo, where they’d provisioned the ship and sailed from. And the wine was organic, which sealed the deal, seeing how they didn’t know what a chemical was in 1606.

  Before hanging up, Drew remembered something he needed to ask and it was that Chris might actually come tonight, but could he bring a couple of friends. Andy said of course. He could hear in Drew’s voice a nervous amazement about the Chris possibility, though no thrill about the friends.

  Next Andy unboxed the candles and asked Rachel and Magda to help place them strategically about the main rooms. They were three-inch-thick and self-standing, all of them beige. He’d considered white too unnaturally pure, their effect suggesting a kind of holiness or sanctity. Beige gave more the sense of the rough-hewn, of impure tallow. Anyway the idea was to have a night lit as much as possible without electricity.

  As if on cue, with candles lit and electric lights freshly flicked off, three old women climbed out of the taxi at the head of the drive and, arm in arm, made their careful way down the slight incline, stepping high through the quarter-inch of snow. Once in, removing their coats to reveal they were dressed mostly in mourning black, they remarked on the loveliness of the candlelight, though Andy’s mother went instantly to any candles Magda had put on the floor, despite their being out of the way and not likely to be kicked over. “Sorry, dear,” she said, meaning Andy, “but these simply aren’t wise,” and she moved through the offending rooms quickly, knowing her house well, and found ledges and sills for them.