by WD Clarke
Ed switched off the little recording machine, with its tiny, proprietorially-sized cassette tape. He had arrived in Enterprise. He turned left onto County Road 3, and then right onto the Tapley 1∕4 Line, towards her family farm, which still bore the title El-Mar Holsteins, an amalgam of the Christian names of her deceased parents, stout Elmer and stern Martha.
A trio of dappled border collies happily saluted him halfway down the long gravel drive, and herded the Peugeot into a little parking area nestled at the centroid of a triangle formed by the large Century tin-roofed brick farmhouse, a haybarn, and a battered, tan trailer home. A childishly hand-painted sign by the trailer read, in black letters on white plywood, Dr. Agnes Hume, dvm.
He got out of the car and made towards the trailer’s front (and only) door. One of the Border Collies came sniffing pleasantly around his legs, so he stopped, went down on one knee, and began to rub the dog’s neck and back, and scratch the inside of its ears.
—Good boy, he said, that’s a good boy, yes, you like that, don’t you, yessssss.
At this the dog went down on its right side, and lifted its left front leg, so as to offer this obliging stranger access to its scratchable chest.
—Yes, yes you are, you’re a goooood boy, yes you are! said Ed, in a sentimental tone which he reserved only for domesticated animals.
—She likes you.
Ed spun around, his heart leaping sympathetically to those unexpected, casually uttered words. Agnes’ head was poking out of a tiny window at the eastern end of the trailer.
—She isn’t keen on most men, she continued, but she likes you.
—That’s a good sign, said Ed, not knowing what else to say.
—I’ll be right out, said Agnes. Then she whistled loudly, her thumb and index finger in her mouth, and called out: Maaa-aaaxxxxx!
And out from the barn scampered his old friend, followed by a goat, and then a rooster. Ed felt like he was in some kind of children’s book all of a sudden, and expected that around any corner he might find a lamb lying down with a lion—or pigs discussing, not, as Orwell thought, the extremely relative egalitarianism of life down on the liberated farm, but whether Reddy Fox had been hanging out in the henhouse, and whether Clarabelle Cow had been calving or not.
Max paused, briefly, recognised just who it was that was waiting for him, and then doubletimed it over to his master’s side, licking him repeatedly on his stiff upper lip and still-quite-painful nose, all-the-while bashing a nearly hairless tail back-and-forth.
—Ouch, Maxxy-boy, careful with daddy’s nose, said Ed, hugging the dog around the neck from the front, and pulling him to his shoulder with the crook of one arm while he used the other to affectionately pat his lower back.
The rooster and the goat had stopped at a respectful distance, and were by this time turning away, no doubt to give Max and his master a moment alone, when suddenly 2 young boys, warmly if a bit raggedly dressed, burst from the trailer and ran together across the barnyard, pausing briefly at the front porch of their house to grab a pair of hockey sticks, then recommencing their sprint, up over a low rise just past the barn.
The trailer door then opened once more. It was Agnes, in overalls, rubber boots and a dirty, ratty brown-on-grey wool sweater. She looked unbearably beautiful.
—Sorry, I was on the phone, she explained. A farmer on the 4th line has had 2 of his pigs die in the last 24 hours.
—What from? asked Dr. Ed.
—Internal haemorrhaging. It happens every so often with the growth hormones, it’s not clear why. Though 2 in a day is a bit much … Anyhow, well, how are you, Ed?
—Can’t complain, he said, a bit stiffly. Um, Max looks good.
—He’s fine. I sent a biopsy on the tumour to the lab not long after your wife dropped him off, but don’t worry, it came back yesterday, unequivocally negative.
—That’s a relief, he said truthfully. Hey, those are sure 2 cute kids you’ve got there.
—Thanks. There’s 2 more off at school and a little one asleep here in the trailer.
—Wow.
—Yeah, it can get a little crazy at times.
—No doubt, he said. Um, uh, Agnes, there’s something or rather someone I need to talk to you about.
—Would you like to come in for a hot drink or something? she said, nodding interrogatively towards the house.
—Um, sure, sure, he said.
—Just let me fetch the little princess, she said, and briefly went back inside the trailer, re-emerging moments later with a plastic, double-handled Moses Basket.
Soon Ed was sitting uncomfortably on the very same settee he had sat upon 27 years ago. It had been re-covered of course, but it was no more inviting now than then. Her parents had long since departed this earth, but he still felt cowed and insignificant in this room, this room which had borne so little evidence of time and change, this well-wrought room. The piano was in precisely the same location as it had always been, and the one-dim-bulb overhead light had stubbornly persisted with (he would not be at all surprised to hear) the same damn, dim Byronic persistence. The silver tea service was still in its pride of place, still unused, still shining like silver.
—Do you take sugar now? Agnes asked.
—Just cream, thank you, he said, his voice as stiff with (internally and externally) imposed rectitude as his back. He didn’t normally drink coffee in the afternoon, and would pay for it later, but the available alternatives were either a dandelion-chicory coffee plagiarism, or herbal tea, so the choice was obvious.
She handed him his mug and he took a sober, careful sip.
—It’s about Ted, isn’t it? she asked, with much less tension in her voice than he would have imagined.
—Yes, partly, yes.
—And the other part.
—Nothing important really. Just personal … things, personal-slash-professional, he amended. But concerning Ted, have you… ?
—We’ve met a number of times, she said. He looks a lot like you, Ed.
—Hard luck for him, he said, attempting, successfully, to make the both of them laugh and thus relax a little.
—Not at all, she said. But he has a lot of anger, Ed.
Ed went on to relate to her a few recent, pertinent anecdotes concerning the matter, and then the baby started crying. Agnes rose to fetch it a bottle, and he noticed that his feet & underarms were sweating profusely. This is getting to be a bit much, he thought, resolving to pull the parachute here in the next 15 minutes, at the outside.
—Where is your, husband? he asked when Agnes returned.
—At the Winter Fair, with one of our bulls, she said, obviously more comfortable answering this question than he was asking it. Intuiting that Ed thought it was time for ‘The Talk’, but also sensing that he was too uncomfortable to pursue this line of questioning further, she offered: We met when I was studying to be a Vet. I was an immature Mature Student; Brian was 10 years younger and an Aggie, and very, very serious.
—Kind of like someone we know, he said ruefully.
—I waited a long time for you, Ed, she said, suddenly.
—I know, he lied, feeling pressure in his eye sockets but, engaging his deep reserves of resolve, and displaying, he was certain, nothing.
—It’s Ted’s wish that the three of us … get together sometime, she said.
Agnes always had had this way, he thought, of taking what seemed at first like great conversational leaps sideways, but which in hindsight always somehow managed to take you to the heart of the matter. It had always unnerved him in the past, this talent of hers, but, back then, becoming unnerved had always felt, so, so very pleasantly tolerable. It had always felt like she was taking him on this perilous but vital journey to—to the centre of the earth.
Now, however, his fight/flight sensors were preparing the countdown to liftoff.
—A dinner or something? That would be good, he said in a tone of voice that made her suddenly silent, which then placed him in the position of having to
continue. I’ve never, he said, felt able, at all, to deal with it. So I haven’t, I’ve dealt with it by not dealing with it, for half my life, more, and so … and so I don’t really have anything deep to say. Except, and I haven’t used these words even in my own head since they sent you away, except that what happened didn’t break my heart so much as … negate it. It sent me down an entirely different road, gave me a, completely different set of—priorities—than we had.
—Yes, she said, looking at him intently, sadly-but-calmly, now.
—Yes, but, he said, not sure of what he was going to say next. He tried to do an internal scan, to see what it was, if anything, that he was ‘feeling’, besides a desire to rush away. He wanted more than anything, he thought, just for once in this conversation, to maybe prepare his words and think before speaking, but he found, whether inside or merely ‘inside’, only an inscrutable opacity.
—Ed, she said after a moment, with, he thought, earnest compassion in her voice, don’t worry. This isn’t, or shouldn’t be, about us dredging through the past….
(And oh, how he simultaneously desired, and dreaded, the dredging.)
—But then, she continued, I suppose in a way it kind of has to be. The important thing, I think, is that Ted wants us both to be a part of his life, in whatever capacity life allows us. And that means we have to be, indirectly anyhow, a part of each other’s, too.
He rose instinctively.
—Don’t worry, Ed, she said, life has a way….
—Of not working out, he said.
—Perhaps. Perhaps you’re right. But perhaps not.
A strange feeling of déjà-vu came over him.
—Other than that, I’ve no great insights to offer myself, she said.
—The past is always present, he said, handing her his half-empty coffee mug. If, that is, we choose to live there.
—That doesn’t mean that it makes slaves of us, she said, advancing as he retreated towards the door.
—I don’t know about that, he said.
—Well, I’m not so sure either. But when Ted made contact I felt … grateful, some kind of….
—Resolution approaching? What’s that charlatan Jon Bradshaw calling it now? ‘Closure’? He has the New Age morons eating that up.
—Some kind of opportunity offering itself, to me, to do good somehow, she said.
He wasn’t buying any of this, he decided, in a bit of a panic, backing a few steps closer to freedom.
—I’ve, I’ve got to go, he said. But, dinner with Ted sometime is fine, really, he added diplomatically. Actually, I’m meeting his wife tomorrow night myself, taking them to dinner.
—That’s good, she said.
—We’ll see, he said.
—Ed, she said, it really, it has been really, really good to see you again.
His back&side-stepping had finally brought his hand to the front doorknob.
—Yes, was all he could say. He opened the door, straddled the front step, felt cool air rushing past him into the house. Or heat escaping.
—Ed? she said, could you hold on just a minute? I forgot….
And she dashed across the yard, into the trailer & out again, put a small blue & white cardboard box into his now-gloved hand as she breezed past him, saying: —Drops for Max. Then she was back inside the kitchen, opening the refrigerator.
—Organic eggs, ours, she said when she returned. And goat’s milk. For you and Max, and Dora, of course.
—She, she’s gone, he said.
—She’ll be back.
—Did she say anything, when she dropped Max off? And how did she find you? Was it through Ted?
Agnes didn’t answer, but enfolded both of his hands in her own, and squeezed them. She said, finally:
—She loves you, Ed.
Balls, he thought, but he half-smiled back.
—The baby’s crying, he said, a fraction of a second before it began to. This unnerved him more than anything that the preceding 72 hours had yet brought to pass. Just being near her had always made him do/say/think things like that. He shuddered inwardly. Bye, he said.
—Take care, Ed. I’ll see you soon.
—Sure, I mean, that would be great.
—Maaa-axx! she called, and over the top of the little rise over which the 2 boys had previously disappeared came Ed’s dog, tongue hanging and eyes smiling, 3 happy border collies in tow, thinking he must be home.
27
Empty
In My Dream you are not yet 16, and I am never quite there. You are always off alone with your dog, transfigured by sunlight that has broken through the clouds, at the edge of the forest of sugar maples, the forest your grandfather planted. I call to you across a field of alfalfa that’s destined for silage, but I’m always too far away.
It’s always summer, and when I meet up with your father he always points to the sky, and warns me to warn you. That’s when I begin to run. You are always visible, but you never get any closer, and you can never hear me, no matter how much I shout.
The dream never varies; it always lets me get halfway across the field before it lets me in on the joke that’s on me, before it tells me that it is in charge here, that it isn’t even my dream, that it’s dreaming you up out of nothing, that it’s dreaming me.
And that’s when I always give up, stop running, fall to my knees and pray, not to Jesus or to G-d the Father, but to Our Mother, to Mary, for forgiveness. But she can’t hear me either.
Then the last thing I always see before I wake is your face in close-up. You’re safe inside the house now—I can see that in my mind’s eye—safe in your mother’s care. But I’m still outside, on my knees in the middle of the field.
Then, from sky to ground and then outward along the ionized path of the leader stroke at 3 times 10 to the 8th metres per second: silence.
Ed stopped the recorder, stopped the car, took the miniature cassette out of the unit and placed it into a prepaid special delivery envelope that he’d brought along and which was sitting on the passenger seat. He found a pen in the glove compartment and set down, in block capitals, the address.
Mrs. Dora Blanchette 1216 Boutelliers Point K_____town, ON
He never could remember that damn postal code.
He went downstairs to see what all the barking was about. Max was at the front door, his head and tail both wagging, but to different rhythms, almost as if they were attached to 2 different dogs.
There was no one there, but someone had left a gift bag on the porch, with a short note taped to it:
Your wife asked me to drop this off for you Wednesday. Sorry it’s late.
—Anna
Anna. Anna? Dora had been seeing a therapist named Anna, against his wishes, on and off, for a couple of years, but he’d thought she’d stopped all that.
One thing Dora hadn’t stopped, apparently, was spending: immediately on returning home he’d anxiously done his best to make sure she was all right, and had reconnected with the good people at Colonial Credit, with the remote possibility still tugging at the centre of unreason in his brain that she had somehow been the victim of some kind of foul play, and that it was the wrongdoer who was enjoying the New York spending spree, and not Dora. But of course, it couldn’t have been; the police would have broken it to him long ago, and an amiable chat with Colonial’s Jennifer, whose tell-all computerized tracer yielded such predictably reassuring, money-haemorrhaging results (an unfinalized authorization for the Waldorf Astoria, hideously large restaurant tabs for such telltale spots as Nuit Blanche, Mono/Culture, Café Spliff, Sprezzaturas, Nights of Malta and MyMomsPlace, tickets for Andrew Saltpetre’s latest bloated spectacle Down And Out In Paris, London, and Rome, and a charge for an Air France booking so far beyond the pale, so far into the tropopause, that it could only have been for a last minute seat on the Concorde) that Ed felt his body actually relax, for the first time in days.
He’d settled in for an evening of ‘mind’-less decrepitude on the Tube, something he hadn’t done
in years, simultaneously watching the current affairs programme The Medium Is The Massage and, using the Picture-In-Picture function, the tv movie Tv Movie, starring Nina Hagen. It didn’t even cross his ‘mind’ (so intrigued by these programs was he) to wonder why he didn’t think too much about that one mysterious credit card charge for 1500 U.S. dollars, at something called the Venckman Women’s Clinic.
It was just 11 when Max’s barking had forced him downstairs, and so Ed missed out on the lead story on the local news: the identity of the body discovered Wednesday was released today by the chief of police—local housewife Mary MacDonwald was found to have taken an overdose of an unidentified narcotic, but her husband is blaming her anti-depressant medication, Confixxor, and is launching a civil action against the makers of the medication, pharmaceutical giant Neutraceutical. In a prepared statement read by his lawyer, John MacDonwald alleged that Confixxor had ‘radically altered’ his wife’s personality and had ‘induced bouts of extreme paranoia’. A spokesperson for Neutraceutical declined comment at this time. In other news, after several false starts, it appears that winter is finally on the way….
Ed stood for a few moments on the front step, gift bag in hand. Its contents were unusual: a tin of Chock Full O’Nuts coffee, decaf, and an unsigned Get Well Soon card, inside of which was a business card, the reverse of which bore a handwritten date and time: Monday, January 3, 1994. 9 a.m.. The front of the card read:
Lennox & Addington
Practice in Family Counselling
He looked up into the sodium brightness of the streetlight, and, unmoved, spied a few stray flakes of snow. He went back inside.
He could, he supposed, probably endure a few sessions of marriage counselling without visibly throwing up. Dora had, he conceded to Max as he poured out some kibble into the dog’s bowl, some possibly legitimate concerns. Fine. As he stuck the business card to the refrigerator door with a magnetized picture of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, he resolved to put it out of his ‘mind’. But then, hey: it wasn’t quite the same as the one reproduced on the notepad holder, was it? He removed the fridge magnet to go and compare, and the business card dropped to the floor.