by Jack Hodgins
But this was one uncoupling that would not be soon forgiven.
First he hired a painter to come into the mill and do a four-foot oil of her, to hang over the fireplace. And unscrewed the big silver 1 from the nose to hang on the bedroom door. And bought himself a good-quality portable recorder to get the locomotive’s sounds immortalized on tape. While there was some small comfort in knowing the old girl at least wasn’t headed for the scrapyard, it was no easy thing when he had to bring her out on that last day, sandblasted and repainted a gleaming black, to be taken apart and shipped off in a boxcar. But at least he knew that while strangers four thousand miles away were staring at her, static and soundless as a stuffed grizzly, he would be able to sit back, close his eyes, and let the sounds of her soul shake through him full-blast just whenever he felt like it.
Stella allowed him to move her Tom Thomson print to the side wall to make room for the new painting; she permitted him to hang the big number 1 on the bedroom door; but she forbade him to play his tape when she was in the house. Enough is enough, she said. Wives who only had infidelity to worry about didn’t know how lucky they were.
She was president of her Lodge, and knew more than she could ever tell of the things women had to put up with.
“Infidelity?” he said. It had never occurred to him. He rolled his eyes to show it was something he was tempted to think about, now that she’d brought it up, then kissed the top of her head to show he was joking.
“A woman my age,” she said, “starts to ask what has she got and where is she headed.”
“What you need is some fun out of life,” he said, and gathered the family together. How did a world tour sound?
It sounded silly, they said.
It sounded like a waste of good money.
Good money or bad, he said, who’d been the one to go out and earn it? Him and Old Number One, that’s who. Hadn’t he got up at four o’clock every damn morning to get the old girl fired up, and probably earned more overtime that way than anybody else on this island? Well, was there a better way to spend that money than taking his family to Europe at least?
They left her mother behind to keep an eye on the house. An old woman who had gone on past movement and caring and even speech, she could spend the time primly waiting in an armchair, her face in the only expression she seemed to have left: dark brows lowered in a scowl, eyes bulging as if in behind them she was planning to push until they popped out and rolled on the floor. Watching was the one thing she did well, she looked as if she were trying with the sheer force of those eyes to make things stay put. With her in the house it was safe to leave everything behind.
If they thought he’d left Old Number One behind him, however, if they thought he’d abandoned his brooding, they were very much mistaken; but they got all the way through Spain and Italy and Greece before they found it out. They might have suspected if they’d been more observant; they might have noticed the preoccupied, desperate look in his eyes. But they were in Egypt before that desperation became intense enough to risk discovery.
They were with a group of tourists, standing in desert, looking at a pyramid. Cora whined about the heat, and the taste of dry sand in the air.
“It’s supposed to be hot, stupid,” Jon said. “This is Egypt.” He spent most of the trip reading books about the countries they were passing through, and rarely had time for the real thing. It was obvious to Spit that his son was cut out for a university professor.
And Cora, who hated everything, would get married. “I can’t see why they don’t just tear it down. A lot of hot stone.”
Jon sniffed his contempt. “It’s a monument. It’s something they can look at to remind them of their past.”
“Then they ought to drag it into a museum somewhere under a roof. With air conditioning.”
Stella said, “Where’s Daddy?”
He wasn’t anywhere amongst the tourists. No one in the family had seen him leave.
“Maybe he got caught short,” Jon said, and sniggered.
Cora stretched her fat neck, to peer. “And he’s not in the bus.”
The other tourists, too, appeared uneasy. Clearly something was sensed, something was wrong. They shifted, frowned, looked out where there was nothing to see. Stella was the first to identify it: somewhere out there, somewhere out on that flat hot sand, that desert, a train was chugging, my God, a steam engine was chugging and hissing. People frowned at one another, craned to see. Uneasy feet shifted. Where in all that desert was there a train?
But invisible or not it got closer, louder. Slowing. Hunph hunph hunph hunph. Then speeding up, clattering, hissing. When it could have been on top of them all, cutting their limbs off on invisible tracks, the whistle blew like a long clarion howl summoning them to death.
Stella screamed. “Spit! Spit!” She ran across sand into the noise, forgetting to keep her arms clamped down against the circles of sweat.
She found him where in the shrill moment of the whistle she’d realized he would be, at the far side of the pyramid, leaning back against its dusty base with his eyes closed. The tape recorder was clutched with both hands against his chest. Old Number One rattled through him like a fever.
When it was over, when he’d turned the machine off, he raised his eyes to her angry face.
“Where is the line?” he said, and raised an eyebrow.
“You’re crazy,” she said. “Get a hold of yourself.” Her eyes banged around in her bony head as if they’d gone out of control. There were witnesses all over this desert, she appeared to be saying, who knew what kind of a fool she had to put up with. He expected her to kick at him, like someone trying to rout a dog. Her mouth gulped at the hot air; her throat pumped like desperate gills. Lord, you’re an ugly woman, he thought.
The children, of course, refused to speak to him through Israel, Turkey, and France. They passed messages through their mother—“We’re starved, let’s eat” or “I’m sick of this place”—but they kept their faces turned from him and pretended, in crowds, that they had come alone, without parents. Cora cried a great deal, out of shame. And Jon read a complete six-volume history of Europe. Stella could not waste her anxiety on grudges, for while the others brooded over the memory of his foolishness she saw the same symptoms building up again in his face. She only hoped that this time he would choose some place private.
He chose Anne Hathaway’s Cottage in Stratford. They wouldn’t have gone there at all if it hadn’t been for Jon, who’d read a book on Shakespeare and insisted on seeing the place. “You’ve dragged me from one rotten dump to another,” he said, “now let me see one thing I want to see. She was twenty-six and Shakespeare was only my age when he got her pregnant. That’s probably the only reason he married her. Why else would a genius marry an old woman?” Spit bumped his head on the low doorway and said he’d rather stay outside. He couldn’t see any point in a monument to a woman like that, anyway. The rest of them were upstairs in the bedroom, looking at the underside of the thatched roof, when Old Number One started chugging her way towards them from somewhere out in the garden.
By the time they got to Ireland, where they would spend the next two weeks with one of her distant cousins, Stella Delaney was beginning to suffer from what she called a case of nerves. She had had all she could take of riding in foreign trains, she said, she was sure she’d been on every crate that ran on tracks in every country of Europe and northern Africa; and now she insisted that they rent a car in Dublin for the drive down to her cousin’s, who lived about as far as you get on that island, way out at the end of one of those south-western peninsulas. “For a change let’s ride in style,” she said, and pulled in her chin to show she meant business. She was missing an important Lodge convention for this. The least he could do, she said, was make it comfortable.
The cousin, a farmer’s wife on a mountain slope above Ballinskelligs Bay, agreed. “’Tis a mad life you’ve been living, sure. Is it some kind of race you’re in?”
“It is,” Stel
la said. “But I haven’t the foggiest idea who or what we’re racing against. Or what is chasing us.”
“Ah well,” said the cousin, wringing her hands. “God is good. That is the one thing you can be certain of. Put your feet up and relax so.”
She knew about American men, the cousin told them. You had to watch them when they lost their playthings, or their jobs, they just shrivelled up and died.
Stella looked frightened.
Oh yes, the cousin said. She knew. She’d been to America once as a girl, to New York, and saw all she needed to see of American men.
Spit Delaney thought he would go mad. He saw soon enough that he could stare out this farmhouse window all he wanted and never find what he needed. He could look at sheep grazing in their little hedged-in patches, and donkey carts passing by, and clumps of furze moving in the wind, he could look at the sloping farms and the miles and miles of flat green bog with its brown carved-out gleaming beds and piled-up bricks of turf and at the deep curved bay of Atlantic ocean with spray standing up around the jagged rocks until he was blind from looking, but he’d never see a train of any kind. Nor find an answer. Old Number One was in Ottawa by now, being polished and dusted by some uniformed pimple-faced kid who wouldn’t know a piston from a lever.
“We’d’ve been better off spending the money on a swimming pool,” Stella told the cousin. “We might as well have flushed it down the toilet.”
“That’s dumb,” Cora said. She buttered a piece of soda bread and scooped out a big spoonful of gooseberry jam.
“Feeding your pimples,” Jon said. He had clear skin, not a single adolescent blemish, nor any sign of a whisker. Sexually he was a late developer, he explained, and left you to conclude the obvious: he was a genius. Brilliant people didn’t have time for a messy adolescence. They were too busy thinking.
“Don’t pick on your sister,” Stella said. “And be careful or you’ll get a prissy mouth. There’s nothing worse on a man.”
A hollow ache sat in Spit’s gut. He couldn’t believe these people belonged to him. This family he’d been dragging around all over the face of the earth was as foreign to him as the little old couple who lived in this house. What did that prim sneery boy have to do with him? Or that fat girl. And Stella: behind those red swollen eyes she was as much a stranger to him now as she was on the day he met her. If he walked up behind her and touched her leg, he could expect her to say Get lost mister I got work to do, just as she had then. They hadn’t moved a single step closer.
I don’t know what’s going on, he thought, but something’s happening. If we can’t touch, in our minds, how can I know you are there? How can I know who you are? If two people can’t overlap, just a little, how the hell can they be sure of a god-damn thing?
The next day they asked him to drive in to Cahirciveen, the nearest village, so Jon could have a look around the library and Stella could try on sweaters, which she said were bound to be cheaper since the sheep were so close at hand. Waiting for them, sitting in the little rented car, he watched the people on the narrow crooked street. Fat red-faced women chatted outside shop doors; old men in dark suits stood side by side in front of a bar window looking into space; a tall woman in a black shawl threaded her way down the sidewalk; a fish woman with a cigarette stuck in the middle of her mouth sat with her knees locked around a box of dried mackerel; beside the car a cripple sat right on the concrete with his back to the store-front wall and his head bobbing over a box for tossed coins.
The temptation was too much to resist. He leaned back and closed his eyes, pressed the button, and turned the volume up full. Old Number One came alive again, throbbed through him, swelled to become the whole world. His hands shifted levers, his foot kicked back from a back-spray of steam, his fingers itched to yank the whistle-cord. Then, when it blew, when the old steam whistle cut right through to his core, he could have died happily.
But he didn’t die. Stella was at the window, screaming at him, clawing at the recorder against his chest. A finger caught at the strap and it went flying out onto the street. The whistle died abruptly, all sound stopped. Her face, horrified, glowing red, appeared to be magnified a hundred times. Other faces, creased and toothless, whiskered, stared through glass. It appeared that the whole street had come running to see him, this maniac.
Stella, blushing, tried to be pleasant, dipped apologies, smiled grimly as she went around to her side of the car.
If her Lodge should hear of this.
Or her mother.
The chin, tucked back, was ready to quiver. She would cry this time, and that would be the worst of all. Stella, crying, was unbearable.
But she didn’t cry. She was furious. “You stupid stupid man,” she said, as soon as she’d slammed the door. “You stupid stupid man.”
He got out to rescue his recorder, which had skidded across the sidewalk almost to the feet of the bobbing cripple. When he bent to pick it up, the little man’s eyes met his, dully, for just a moment, then shifted away.
Jon refused to ride home with them. He stuck his nose in the air, swung his narrow shoulders, and headed down the street with a book shoved into his armpit. He’d walk the whole way back to the cousin’s, he said, before he’d ride with them.
She sat silent and bristling while he drove out past the last grey buildings and the Co-op dairy and the first few stony farms. She scratched scales of skin off the dry eczema patches that were spreading on her hands. Then, when they were rushing down between rows of high blooming fuchsia bushes, she asked him what he thought she was supposed to be getting out of this trip.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “Tomorrow we go home.”
Spit Delaney had never travelled off the Island more than twice before in his life, both those times to see a doctor on the mainland about the cast in his eye. Something told him a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Europe ought to have been more than it was. Something told him he’d been cheated. Cheated in a single summer out of Old Number One, his saved-up overtime money, the tourist’s rightfully expected fun, and now out of wife as well. For the first thing she told him when the plane landed on home territory was this: “Maybe we ought to start thinking about a separation. This is no marriage at all any more.”
He stopped at the house only long enough to drop them off, then fled for coast, his ears refusing the sounds of her words.
But it was a wet day, and the beach was almost deserted. A few seagulls slapped around on the sand, or hovered by tide pools. Trees, already distorted and one-sided from a lifetime of assaults, bent even farther away from the wind. A row of yellowish seaweed, rolled and tangled with pieces of bark and chunks of wood, lay like a continuous windrow along the uneven line of last night’s highest tide. Far out on the sand an old couple walked, leaning on each other, bundled up in toques and Cowichan sweaters and gum boots. The ocean was first a low lacy line on sand, then sharp chopped waves like ploughed furrows, then nothing but haze and mist, a thick blending with uncertain sky.
There was no magic here. No traffic, no transformations. No Kanikiluk in sight. He’d put ninety miles on the camper for nothing. He might as well have curled up in a corner of the old gas station, amongst the car parts, or sat in behind the wheel of his tow truck to brood. The world was out to cheat him wherever he turned.
Still, he walked out, all the way out in the cold wind to the edge of the sea, and met a naked youth coming up out of waves to greet him.
“Swimming?” Spit said, and frowned. “Don’t you tell me it’s warm when you get used to it, boy, I can see by the way you’re all shrivelled up that you’re nearly froze.”
The youth denied nothing. He raised both arms to the sky as if expecting to ascend, water streaming from his long hair and beard and his crotch, forming beads in the hairs, shining on goose-bumped skin. Then he tilted his head.
“Don’t I know you?”
“Not me,” Spit said. “I don’t live here.”
“Me neither,” the youth said. “Me and some other guys been cam
ping around that point over there all summer, I go swimming twice a day.”
Spit put both hands in his pockets, planted his feet apart, and stretched his long neck. He kept his gaze far out to sea, attempting to bore through that mist. “I just come down for a look at this here ocean.”
“Sure, man,” the youth said. “I do know you. You let me use your can.”
“What? What’s that?” Why couldn’t the kid just move on? You had to be alone sometimes, other people only complicated things.
“I was waiting for a ride, to come up here, and I come into your house to use the can. Hell, man, you gave me a beer and sat me down and told me your whole life story. When I came out my friend had gone on without me.”
Spit looked at the youth’s face. He remembered someone, he remembered the youth on that hot day, but there was nothing in this face that he recognized. It was as if when he’d stripped off his clothes he’d also stripped off whatever it was that would make his face different from a thousand others.
“You know what they found out there, don’t you?” the youth said. He turned to face the ocean with Spit. “Out there they found this crack that runs all around the ocean floor. Sure, man, they say it’s squeezing lava out like toothpaste all the time. Runs all the way around the outside edge of this ocean.”
“What?” Spit said. “What are you talking about?”
“Squirting lava up out of the centre of the earth! Pushing the continents farther and farther apart! Don’t that blow your mind?”
“Look,” Spit said. But he lost the thought that had occurred.
“Pushing and pushing. Dividing the waters. Like that what-was-it right back there at the beginning of things. And there it is, right out there somewhere, a bloody big seam. Spreading and pushing.”
“You can’t believe them scientists,” Spit said. “They like to scare you.”
“I thought I recognized you. You pulled two beer out of the fridge, snapped off the caps, and put them on the table. Use the can, you said, and when you come out this’ll wash the dust from your throat. You must’ve kept me there the whole afternoon, talking.”