six@sixty

by Mark Anthony Jarman

  We are all sad, feeling that, though we are together, we shall soon be apart for good. No one is angry. The level of disaster that has befallen us makes it seem impossible that any one person could have caused it. Walking through the zoo, we feel the dignity of companions in tragedy. We are not defeated, even though certain things are almost over, almost behind us. There is a sense in which I find this deeply satisfying. This is the way all life should be, I think, wishing only that Susan could go on dying, that my husband could go on leaving me, that we could forever be dispensed from living our humdrum lives — that desert of emotion.

  We pause to smoke a joint at the bison pen, where the huge, lumbering beasts stand with their faces to the wind, chewing their hay. Susan and I are reminded of the day we watched the bull gore the woman from Saffron Walden. We have avidly followed Ruth Hawking’s subsequent career in the papers — she has been arrested once for shoplifting and twice for reckless driving leading to minor accidents. Susan, always so restrained, gets the giggles whenever she sees these announcements. She says, “That woman the bison gored is still alive!”

  The zoo bison look ungainly and alien, which they are, left over, as it were, from another time. The fences, the baled hay, the feeding rick, and the low zoo buildings in the background, all contribute to this sense of dislocation. Except when seen attacking women, they are somewhat boring. They produce in me, for example, only a mild anxiety, a feeling that things aren’t right, that there is much to be guilty for.

  I look at Danny and say to Susan, “You know, he’s not such a bad guy. I haven’t been a very good wife to him. ” Susan starts to laugh. She gets hysterical and has to sit down on the cold ground. My hand is tangled in her coat pocket so that I fall down with her. Our laughter startles the bison, which glance warily in our direction.

  Danny comes over with the baby to see what’s wrong. Susan tells him what I said, that I haven’t been a very good wife. Danny grins. He says, “That’s an understatement. ” “That’s what I said,” says Susan, snorting with laughter. “Poor bunny, ” I say. “I’m sorry. ” He hands me the baby and helps us up. Tenderly, he pulls Susan’ s coat together at the throat and tucks her scarf in.

  She watches. She soaks things up through her eyes. She stares at Gabriela for hours on end, hungrily absorbing every whim and turn of emotion. As she gets closer to the end, everything but the child becomes superfluous. “I don’t want to forget her,” she says. (What she means by this is a mystery about which I cannot bear to question her.)

  About an hour before Susan dies, she opens her eyes and says to me, “Well, here we go.” Her lungs begin to fill up, her breathing grows shallower. She makes a horrible bubbling sound in her chest, which I suppose is what they used to mean by the phrase “death rattle. ” Her mother holds her head. I sit on the bed, clutching Susan’s hand.

  Soon she is breathing air only into her throat. Then I think she must be dead, but her mouth keeps opening as though she were still breathing. It opens once or twice by reflex. I think this time she must really be dead. But then her chin moves once more and I feel a tremor in her hand. I say, “Go, baby sweetheart. It’s okay. I’m here. You can go and not be afraid because we’re here with you.” Finally, she is dead, though I am not certain when the borderline was crossed, only that she is on the other side. Her mother lets her down and starts, through her tears, to sing a lullaby.

  Susan’s head is thrown back and slightly to the side, her mouth open. I recognize the pose. I’ve seen it in old paintings — it is the moment when the soul escapes through the mouth on its way to become a star. That’s an outdated mythological reference, I know, a leftover, like the bison. But I haven’t got anything else. It just looks like that.

  I go to see Ruth Hawking. (Her husband’s name is in the new phone book.) This is a little pilgrimage for Susan. But Ruth is gone. She left him with the kids and flew back to Saffron Walden. Her husband, a lonely, harried man, tells me, “She had a difficult time adjusting to life in Canada.”

  He invites me in, but has nothing more to add, and I leave after a few awkward minutes. (“Men!” I say to myself.)

  3

  I go to Medicine Hat for a visit. I like the area. All of a sudden, it strikes me that I really want a place of my own just outside of town where the dry chinook winds blow endlessly in the caragana and nothing stops the eye. I take Gabriela for a drive to look at real estate. (I get a list from a broker.)

  Communication is now possible, up to a point. We stop at a roadside table to eat our picnic lunch. I take out a ball of yarn and begin to teach her the Cat’s Cradle. I don’t really know how to make a Cat’s Cradle myself, but I have brought a book and there is plenty of yarn. She is a reserved and intelligent child with Susan’ s eyes. Watching my fingers fumble with the yarn, her face becomes a mask.

  I say to her, “There are certain things you have to know. Suicide is not an option. Life is always better under the influence of mild intoxicants. Masturbation is healthy, the sooner started the better. It’s a sin not to take love where you find it. That is the only sin. I have photographs of your mother. ”

  photo: Bill Gilduz

  DOUGLAS GLOVER’s bestselling novel Elle won the Governor General’s Award for fiction and was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His stories have been frequently anthologized, notably in The Best American Short Stories, Best Canadian Stories, and The New Oxford Book of Canadian Stories. In 2006 Glover was awarded the Writers’ Trust of Canada Timothy Findley Award for his body of work. Follow Douglas Glover at the online magazine Numéro Cinq, where he is publisher and eminence grise.

  Fiction by Lynn Coady

  Hellgoing (2013)

  The Antagonist (2011)

  Mean Boy (2006)

  Saints of Big Harbour (2002)

  Play the Monster Blind (2000)

  Strange Heaven (1998)

  “The Three Marys” previously appeared in the 1999 anthology Home for Christmas: Stories from the Maritimes and Newfoundland and originally, in a different form, as part of Lynn Coady’s 1998 novel, Strange Heaven, both published by Goose Lane Editions.

  Up in the hospital’s teen lounge were bruise-eyed thirteen-year-olds who sat with IV skeletons behind them, cutting holes into folded pieces of white paper for gluing the shapes together to make bells, candles, and holly. Once these were finished, the craft lady would string a piece of gold thread through the top, because they were to be sold at the Christmas Craft Fair — all proceeds going to the Hospital for Sick Children — as tree ornaments.

  Bridget was there, too. She and the rest of them from Four South — the Psych Ward — were being forced up daily to create their own individual masterpieces. Byron complained about it. He said it was hideous and “Dickensian” to force these children, who uniformly wanted to lie down and die, into the lounge to listen to Burl Ives and toil on a felt-and-glitter production line. Nurse Gabby told him that a lot of the children found doing crafts to be therapeutic.

  “What about those of us who don’t find it therapeutic, but a sadistic torment?”

  “Some people don’t know something will be therapeutic until they try it,” Gabby soothed, shooing the herd of them into the elevator.

  If Bridget got any pleasure from seeing Byron hacking a swastika out of green felt to the tune of “Holly Jolly Christmas,” it was only when she looked at him alone, and not at the others sitting in a row with them at the long table. The sight of them made her think that he was right. Dying children shouldn’t be expected to make Christmas ornaments out of felt. People would buy them at the craft sale and put them on their trees: Look! An actual dying child made this manger. We understand it was cystic fibrosis. And here’s our leukemia candy cane. And we got this wreath from the Indian reservation.

  There was no denying that some of them probably did enjoy the diversion, or were at least being diverted by it. One translucent fourteen- year-old — whom Bridget, with her new-found expertise, would have diagnosed as anore
xic, but later learned had full-blown AIDS — had a particular flair for the decorations. She could even twist the felt in elaborate ways to give the finished product a three-dimensional effect, and the craft lady would always hold her latest creations up for everyone else to be inspired by and talk about the new dialysis machine or surgical laser it would help the hospital to buy. The girl would sneeze, picking up another wad of felt and eating glue off her fingers.

  Bridget was another of the craft lady’s stars. Sick of the felt and glitter, she had been looking through some of the lady’s craft books and come across what looked like a fairly easy method of making lovely, ornate snowflakes simply by curling strips of white paper and gluing them together. She soon found out that it wasn’t easy to do at all. It was extremely intricate work, and it took Bridget four days of her teen-lounge time to complete the first one, which by all accounts was a masterpiece. The craft lady exhorted her to come up with at least five more before the sale, so Bridget began taking her work downstairs to the ward with her. The snowflakes required tremendous concentration. Bridget worked on them every spare moment, which in her present mode of existence meant practically all the time. Gabby and Dr. Solomon could not have been more supportive of this new interest, Bridget’s first and only interest since being admitted.

  It seemed to make Solomon all the more certain that her decision to send Bridget back home for the holidays was the right one. For the first time since informing Bridget of her discharge, on report of the snowflakes, Solomon came round the ward to view Bridget’s handiwork.

  “These are just lovely. ”

  “Ya want one?”

  “I’d love to have one. And maybe you could donate a couple for the ward’s tree. ”

  “Take your pick.”

  “Thank you, Bridget. You’ve got a wonderful eye. I’m sure you’ll do very well in pottery. ”

  “Pottery,” said Bridget, looking up.

  “Have you enrolled at the college yet?”

  “No. I guess I better do that, eh?”

  “I would think so. It must be getting rather late. ”

  “Yeah, I’ll do it. ”

  “Are you looking forward to going home?”

  “Oh, I dunno. ”

  “I’m sure your family will be glad to have you back. Your Uncle Albert especially. ”

  “Albert doesn’t even live with us. ”

  “Oh!” The doctor moved her electrolysed eyebrows slightly. “I was given to understand that he did. He was so insistent you be sent home. ”

  It was because Albert liked for people to be where they goddamn well belonged. He had been harassing the entire ward ever since Bridget’s arrival. Gabby told her this. Gabby had related that sometimes he would call up on the pretext of wanting to speak to Bridget and instead take the opportunity to blast whichever nurse had picked up the phone.

  “Hello, Four South. ”

  “Is Bridget Murphy there, please?” Polite, older-male-relative voice.

  “Yes, if you’ll hold a . . . ”

  “Well, Jesus liftin’ , when are you fag psychiatric sons of whores gonna let her out of that hellhole?”

  “Would you like to speak to Bridget, sir?”

  “I’d like to speak to her all right. I’d like to speak to her sitting in her own goddamn kitchen is where I’d like to speak with her, but I can’t do that until you bastards decide to turn her loose — as if she’s some kind of Jesus menace to society or something. ”

  And the nurses, being psychiatric nurses, wouldn’t be as quick to respond in the same way that someone else in the same situation might — namely by hanging up on the raving old fart. They were psychiatric nurses who had been trained for every eventuality, and this sort of thing they were eternally ready for. The family was a volatile thing. The family — usually the organism responsible for the child’s internment in Four South in the first place — could not normally be expected to comprehend why one of its number would need to be there. Bridget gathered that phone calls like Albert’s were more or less par for the course in Gabby’s line of work. Leaning back into the chair and lighting a cigarette, whichever nurse was on shift would robotically switch into a mode of soothing rationality once the first note of hostility reached her ears.

  “It’s not that she’s a menace to society, sir, that’s not the case at all. It’s just that she needs a bit of sheltering right now. ”

  “Shelter she can get from her family!”

  “No, obviously not, or she wouldn’t be here. ”

  “What the eff is that supposed to mean?”

  “I only mean that your daughter has come through a hard time, and often, following events as overwhelming as a pregnancy and adoption, a young woman will need a period of . . . hibernation, if you will . . . ”

  “She’s not my goddamned daughter. ”

  “Oh. To whom am I —”

  “This is her uncle, by god! Albert Patrick Murphy!”

  “Well, Mr. Murphy, we do appreciate your concern —”

  “Yah, well, you may as well appreciate me hole for all the good it does.”

  Bridget often thought her uncle must be unique. He was the only man she knew who saved his temper for strangers rather than his family and friends, and not the other way around. When she’ d lived with him and Bernadette in the late summertime, Albert would curse at the TV news and its single mothers (“welfare sluts”), simultaneously leaning over to pour Bridget more tea and berate the little bastard who was her undoing.

  “You’re a good girl,” he would tell her over and over again. “You’re a good girl and a goddamn smart girl and no little puke from Home Hardware is going to mess up a future as bright as yours, good girl.” Bridget tried for a couple of minutes to envision it, a future as bright as hers.

  Her father was a craftsman. Once, he had worked for the government, had practically run the town at one point, but residents soon became appalled at the kind of upheaval he was constantly trying to achieve. He had wanted to build a senior citizens’ home, for one thing. He had wanted “Causeway Days” — the spring festival — to attract more tourists, to entail more than a five-float parade down the main street, two of which were furnished by the mill, three of which were no more than locals in toilet-paper-decorated pickups with signs on the front reading stuff like “Jimmy Archie’s Lumber ” or “Come to Dan Hughie’s Garage. Two for 99 on O Henrys.”

  Bridget’s father had also wanted some kind of musical event other than the traditional bagpipe contest that had led him to refer to the festival as “Catkilling Days” during an interview at the local radio station. Many residents had been offended. They were proud of the bagpiping contest. It was one of the many things that made the community unique. They found Mr. Murphy to be overbearing and unduly aggressive. One day her father came home late from a meeting and announced, “Piss on ’em. They can play the bagpipes until their foolish lungs implode. I hope they all go deaf as me arse. ” And he went downstairs to work on his craft.

  Woodworking was his craft. He called it that, but it was really more like art. Nobody dared suggest this to him. Once a TV station out of Halifax had called him up to be on some program about Maritime folk art. “I’m not some kind of dope-smoking hairy-faced fruit, ” was what he’d said. “Unlike you and yours.” Television was television to her father — Halifax no different from Los Angeles. “Ar-teests,” he’ d spit, whenever the subject came to mind, making flitting gestures with his short, yellow fingers. “Arse-tits is more like it. ”

  So her father was a craftsman of wood. He drove off into the hills every Sunday to pick choice pieces. He especially liked the trees that had some kind of disease that made the trunks bulge monstrously out in places, as if gourds had become lodged in there somehow. Her father would take the diseased trunks home and carve all sorts of faces into the bulges. If there were a lot of bulges, the effect was very much like that of a totem pole — caricatures of bulbous-nosed hobos and sailors replacing those of owls and wolves and raven
s. Big-nosed, heavy-lidded men’ s faces were one of her father’s specialties.

  At other times, he would come home with what appeared to be an average piece of wood, spend a few hours sanding and varnishing it, and then present it to the family — a smooth, polished piece of wood.

  “Whaddya think of that?”

  “It’s really nice!”

  “Do you see what it is?”

  “Um. A fish?”

  “It’s a wolf’s head. See, there’s its snout. By god, nature does the work, I just bring it to the fore.”

  Mr. Murphy also delighted in any chunk of wood that bore a passing resemblance to parts of the human anatomy. He stole a pair of Bridget’s mother’s shoes once to put on a branch that had been uncannily like a bum and a pair of legs — right down to having little protrusions where the feet would be. This was where he hung the shoes. Bridget’s mother got mad because they were good shoes, but he wouldn’t let her replace them with a pair of old slippers or anything. He referred to the artifact, for some reason, as Mrs. MacGillicutty, and pretty soon, after he had returned gleeful from the woods one day with what he said was a husband for Mrs. MacGillicutty, Bridget’s mother wouldn’t go down to his shop any more.