by Jack Hodgins
“Well,” Mrs. Wright said. “As soon as we see how many stitches John Porter is going to need in that hand we can get busy and haul your calf out.”
Mr. Porter levelled his cool green eyes to hers and held out both his hands. “There’s not a thing wrong with it,” he said, and showed her they were exactly the same, not a bump or a scrape.
“Then get back under that truck with the rope and hitch it good and tight. This calf may disappear from sight if we don’t get a move on around here.”
And it had slipped a little. It looked to Mrs. Wright as if it had dropped a few inches farther into the well, probably from kicking and banging with its back feet. It puffed and snorted from the effort of hanging there, its white eyes running wild, waiting for help.
“It’ll be bloated,” Mrs. Starbuck said. “We may have to puncture it.”
“Don’t be silly,” Mrs. Wright said. “They get bloated when they’re on their backs. This one’s just scared, and probably scraped up a little. Bull or heifer?”
“Bull. It’s marked for fall slaughter.”
Mr. Porter got into Mrs. Wright’s pickup and started the motor. He drove ahead slowly until all the slack in the rope had been taken up, then he eased ahead while the two women and the girl watched the rope tighten around the calf’s chest.
“Wumph,” was the noise the calf made, and Mrs. Starbuck screamed. “Stop! For Christ’s sake stop the truck. You’ll break him in half.”
Mr. Porter stopped the truck and came back to see what was wrong. Mrs. Starbuck was down on the ground with her arms around the calf’s head. She looked as if she were trying to pull it out of the well all by her herself. “You can’t do it that way,” she said. “It has to go up. Up. Pulling it along like that will only break its bones.”
Mrs. Wright would like to have kicked her out of the way, a big heavy woman like her down there acting so immature. “I’m sorry, Edna Starbuck, that my pickup doesn’t fly so I could pull your stupid calf up the way you want.”
“Don’t you stupid-calf me. You come over here to help and end up running the whole show, bossing everybody. Maybe there’s something wrong with your eyes, Millicent, but most people could see that if you drag a calf along the ground out of a well something’s going to snap.”
“I think it already has,” Mrs. Wright said. “I think your mind has snapped. If you could just see yourself right now, you look like a know-nothing bohunk straight off the boat. Screaming and hollering like a fishwife. Get up on your feet.”
“All we need is a pulley. To hang up in one of those trees. We could run the rope through it.”
Mrs. Wright hardly ever raised her voice. When she did she suffered for it a long time after. She thought of what Percy Larkin said about her being a little fox terrier, yapping, but she pushed the image aside. “Get up,” she said. “Get up. Get up. Get up. John Porter, you drive that truck ahead. We’re getting that calf free.”
Mr. Porter looked from Mrs. Wright to Mrs. Starbuck and then backed off. “We better all just cool down and do some thinking,” he said. “We’re not getting anywhere this way.”
“Then I will,” Mrs. Wright said. She marched over to the truck, got in, and put it into low gear. If Mr. Wright were here he’d just shake his head at the way they were carrying on. If I acted like that, he’d say, where would we all be? If a lawyer acted like that, what a mess we’d have.
Mrs. Starbuck shrieked. As Mrs. Wright let the clutch pedal out and felt the truck begin to move she glanced out the back window and saw her lifting Mr. Porter’s axe. She swung with both hands well over her head and brought it down on the rope. The truck leapt ahead and stalled.
Mrs. Wright was tempted to start the truck up again and drive home, just drive straight out of here with rope dragging behind like a tail and leave the stupid woman to solve her own problem. But it wasn’t in her to leave a job undone. She got back down to the ground and turned to give Mrs. Starbuck a piece of her mind.
Mrs. Starbuck was facing her with the axe held up once more over her head. She’s going to kill me, Mrs. Wright thought. She’s going to throw that axe and it will land right in the middle of my chest and kill me. She dragged me over here to help her with her calf and now she will slaughter me in cold blood.
Mrs. Wright had never before seen such hatred as there was in the woman’s eyes. In that stunned second they were staring at each other Mrs. Wright had a vision of her husband visiting Mrs. Starbuck in jail and offering to be her attorney.
Then Mrs. Starbuck brought the axe down square on the calf’s forehead, raised it and brought it down again. The head dropped forward between its forelegs, chin on the ground, and shuddered. Pink froth bubbled from its mouth. Mrs. Wright couldn’t help but think of the way Edna Starbuck, halfway across the field, had stopped with her head down as if to say I just can’t go on, just like that calf.
Mrs. Starbuck raised the axe again. She hissed. She looked at Charlene Porter cowering under a fir tree, and at Mr. Porter with one foot ahead as if he wanted to come closer and take his axe away, and at Mrs. Wright standing at the side of her pickup truck wishing there were some way she could write all this up for the paper and knowing she couldn’t. Then she said “Go home” to them, hissed it at them as if they were a herd of balky cattle. “Get out of here. Leave me alone.”
Mr. Porter lifted his hat and put it back on again. Then he stepped up and released his axe from Mrs. Starbuck’s grip. His daughter put her hand in his and they started walking up past the stumps and blackberry bushes towards home.
Mrs. Wright didn’t move. She wasn’t budging. She trained her eyes on Mrs. Starbuck’s and held them steady. No screeching fishwife was going to beg her for help and then tell her to go. She stared straight into those two round eyes until Mrs. Starbuck looked away and sat down beside her dead calf. She took her baseball cap off and ran it under her nose and wiped her forearm across her eyes.
“Edna Starbuck,” Mrs. Wright said, “I think you must be insane.” And she swung around to get back inside the cab of the pickup truck.
By the time she had the engine started Mrs. Starbuck was at the window. Her big face, a brighter red now than ever before, shone through a smear of tears. “Don’t tell Mr. Wright,” she said.
Mrs. Wright stared. She knew there were people who were afraid of her husband but it had never passed through her mind before that Mrs. Starbuck was afraid of anything. “He wouldn’t be interested,” she said. “You can do whatever you want with your own livestock.”
Mrs. Wright wanted to go home. What was she doing over here anyway, with all the work she had to do at home? “Step back,” she said, and when Mrs. Starbuck had taken her hands off the truck she started up the hill away from the well, away from that calf, and rode the bumps and hollows with impatience. At the barn she was careful to close the gate behind her. She didn’t even want to think how much trouble there’d be if Mrs. Starbuck’s cattle got off her farm and out onto the road, stopping traffic and eating up other people’s lawns.
II
Charlene was already sitting on the verandah chair and watching the gable of Mrs. Starbuck’s house when her father came up out of the bush and headed across the orchard towards her. She leaned ahead, elbows on her knees, and rested her chin in the palms of both hands so she wouldn’t be tempted to glance his way. Here, though the verandah roof hid her from the sun, she felt as if the warm heavy air she breathed had just been exhaled by someone else.
Out in the front yard hot air wrinkled upward from the short green orchard grass, making the apple trees and plum trees seem to waver a little, as if they’d been dipped in water. Along the path that led to the picket gate and the gravel road, the oyster shells were a white so harsh that it hurt her eyes to look. A big lazy cat, somebody’s stray, stretched and settled to sleep at the base of a honeysuckle bush.
Charlene sighed at her father’s approach. She had run ahead and left him on the trail up from the back of Mrs. Starbuck’s farm. Well, let him walk alon
e if he couldn’t be bothered to do any more than he had to help Mrs. Starbuck. She was in no mood for new disappointments.
Ordinarily Charlene would have stood up to anyone and defended Mrs. Starbuck, would have said her behaviour back at the well just showed she was upset about something and didn’t realize what she was doing. Charlene liked to see the best in everything if she could. And anyway, she guessed Mrs. Starbuck had earned the benefit of a thousand doubts. But after yesterday, when she discovered not quite by accident what that woman had kept locked up in her attic for who knows how long, she didn’t feel quite so sure.
Because she knew now; the secret was out: and oh, how she wanted to tell someone about it! Her father; anyone. Back there she had been aching to walk right up to Mrs. Starbuck and say “I knew. I saw him!” Maybe then she might have been given some kind of explanation.
She did not want to believe it. Not any more than she wanted to believe what her eyes had let her see Mrs. Starbuck do to that poor calf. Because after all, Mrs. Starbuck had lived next door and been the only grown-up woman in her life, her closest friend, for two years now. And besides, hadn’t her father taught her to think of people, all people no matter what they did, as made in the image of God? For nearly twenty-four hours she had been trying her hardest to insist that Mrs. Starbuck, despite all the evidence that seemed to be piling up against her, was still the same perfect woman she’d known all along, totally incapable of such ugly behaviour. But it wasn’t working; she’d been betrayed.
When she was concentrating like this, thinking hard, her blue eyes looked as if they were rocketing through the air, ninety miles an hour, drilling two straight holes through space to another world. It was what her father called her furious face, put on like a mask whenever she didn’t want to look at him.
And yet she saw. Though her eyes and her mind were on that fake-brick triangle beyond the fence-line alders, she saw him approach. He was not a big man, not heavy and tall like some, but he walked as if he were unaware of this fact, put each foot in turn out too far in front—as if he had all the leg in the world to use—then had to withdraw it and set it down closer than he wanted. As a result, he came across that orchard in quick jerky movements like a machine. He reached up and yanked the peak of his cap down almost to his eyes and ran his free hand over his beard.
To show he was angry.
“I thought I knew that woman,” he said, when he’d reached the step in front of her, “but I guess you never really know anybody else.”
And disappointed too, just as disappointed as she was, though he still didn’t know the half of it.
She could remember only one time when he had got mad—furious mad—and that was when her mother had gone off to live in the Queen Charlotte Islands with a used-car salesman. Charlene was only five years old then, so a good nine years had gone zipping by with no more than just the odd hint of that old fury. It took a lot to get him worked up.
Her mother had been pretty: small with black black hair and blue eyes snapping. A turned-up little nose that belonged on a girl, not a woman. And Charlene (how she hated that name! She wanted to be a Miranda or Lorene at least) was probably not going to be the littlest bit pretty, though maybe people who were content with large blue eyes wouldn’t notice. Her hair, bleached almost white already by this year’s sun, floated in soft fine curls around her head.
“Nothing but temper,” Mr. Porter grumbled. “Just plain bad temper, like a kid throwing a tantrum and bang there goes a yearling bull.”
“Not temper. That was something else, I don’t know what.”
Another yank on the front of that cap, and he started up the steps. “Spoilt-rotten temper. I saw a man once, beat his son almost to death for throwing a tantrum about something or other.”
“And whose temper was worse?”
“What surprises me,” he said, using his handkerchief to wipe the back of his neck free of sweat, “is how she thinks so much of those cattle and then can turn around and knock one on the head.” He turned in the doorway and stood with the outsides of his wrists pressed hard against the jambs, his favourite trick. “If they’re so much better than my Holsteins how can she do a thing like that?”
Charlene didn’t know anything about cows. A Holstein looked the same as a Hereford to her, except for its colour. She knew her father raised his for the milk and Mrs. Starbuck raised hers for the meat, but she didn’t really care. What was a cow when there were people who were so much more important and interesting?
Her father took one step ahead onto the verandah and let his arms rise, by themselves, until they were level with his shoulders. He looked at her as if he expected applause.
“That doesn’t prove anything,” she said. “That doesn’t prove a thing, except make you look like you’re planning to ascend.”
Mr. Porter looked out, first at one horizontal arm, then at the other. “You could be right,” he said, and let them drop to his thighs. “A pure case of expectations fulfilled.”
“A kid’s game,” she said, and looked away.
But did not miss his look. She’d hurt him, and driven him inside to eat his lunch alone.
He’d recover. He always did. He didn’t even know about the mess she’d unearthed, but when he did it wouldn’t frighten him a bit, he’d have an answer for that too. Sometimes it was discouraging to see how he could so easily handle just about any situation you could hand him. But right now Charlene was ashamed to tell him she didn’t know what to do with the discovery she’d made yesterday.
Because yesterday afternoon she had gone calling on Mrs. Starbuck. To pod peas again, perhaps, or just to talk. Or maybe just to be there and listen to the summer sounds in company.
But there was no sign of Mrs. Starbuck at the house. The door was open to the flies and no one answered her call. Back at the barn, she thought. Because her funny old car was home, like a fat brown chicken sunning itself in dust. Back in the fields maybe, admiring her cows. While flies and neighbours can step right in and take over.
And did. Just one step in at first, to see if Mrs. Starbuck’s boots were inside the door, to listen for footsteps in the bedroom or upstairs. Then a second step to be sure. She wasn’t being nosy yet. Mrs. Starbuck had always made her feel at home.
But had never taken her upstairs. The steps were worn in the centres, covered with rubber treads. And upstairs (just her head above the floor at first, as if expecting someone there) was a huge sewing room, a treadle machine in the very centre, surrounded by heaps of cloth and paper patterns, boxes of clothes.
Clothes for who? she wondered, and moved on to discover a small shirt and pants. Boy’s clothes. Some new, some old and patched, some not even finished yet.
This far into forbidden territory already (listening hard for sounds of Mrs. Starbuck’s return below and ready with an excuse: “I was sure I heard your voice upstairs but it must’ve been wind”) she tried a door and opened it and looked into the other half of the upstairs floor, unfinished, a storage room for old books and magazines, a broken table, an old-fashioned mirror.
Nothing else. Not a thing else except a hole in the ceiling and the slightest sound, no louder than a page being turned, a leaf being stirred. She walked on the ceiling joists across the room to the ladder, set the ladder upright, and climbed up until her head was above the hole.
“Mrs. Starbuck, what are you doing way up here?” she said, but saw nothing. A black triangular room under the rafters. She had seen cages this shape for brood hens, to hatch their eggs.
Then she saw something human huddled up against the farthest wall.
She crept forward on her hands and knees, heart pounding, knees itching from the sharp pieces of ceiling insulation between the joists. About half way across the space she stopped and concentrated all her energy into her eyes, trying to see clearly through the half light and pick out features in the face that looked back. It was a boy. “Well for heaven’s sake, why did you want to scare me like that?” A boy in shirt and jeans, hunch
ed against the wall. “What are you doing up here anyway?”
But he didn’t answer. When she lifted her hand to move forward a bit more he made some kind of hissing sound at her and pulled his feet right up under himself, hid his face from her sight. Then she put her hand down, unseeing, into a dish of cold food.
And fled. Scrambled back to the hole and rushed down the ladder, hoping to make it outside before she was sick.
Which was another one of her failures. Being sick, she told people, who could never understand anyway, was against her religion. She could remember her father being sick only twice in her life and both times he was able to snap out of it in a very short while. She had learned all the principles, knew how, but it always seemed harder for her. And failure was worse when there was someone like her father around.
Charlene and her father were the only members of their religion in Cut Off. There was no church in the nearest town, either, but this didn’t matter too much as the weekly lesson was published and they could study it at home. “And maybe it’s better this way,” Mr. Porter said. “We can try practising it every day instead of saving it up for an hour-long session on Sundays.” He taught her all she needed to know, a definition of man: God is Truth and Love, and man his perfect reflection. His perfect idea. Each lesson was different but eventually came around to the one essential point, that every human being is a spiritually perfect idea, incapable of sickness or inhumanity or fear.
For a long time as a little girl she didn’t know that not everyone thought this way. She believed it and practised it and saw its results but had no idea that while she was trying to see the people around her as perfect despite their actions they were seeing her, in return, as anything but. “A smart-alec brat” was what a mother of a friend called her. Because she had said, when she wasn’t allowed to visit the friend who had a cold, “I won’t catch it, maybe he’ll catch my health.” The mother had turned almost purple at that. And an old man, once, hacking away with his allergy, had called her a snot for having the nerve to say “If you’d only stop believing you’re sick.”