by Jack Hodgins
It passed through his mind to tell her she had no business going against his wishes when it came to bringing up the boy. But he was a strange kid anyway, and Gerry had always been uncomfortable with children. It was easier to let her do what she wanted with him.
When April went across to George Smith’s wedding (his second) and took Jimmy and the baby with her, he knew she would not be coming back. He wasn’t surprised when she didn’t get off the Sunday evening ferry. He didn’t even bother watching the ferries coming in during the next week. The only surprise was the sight of Aunt Nora getting out of a taxi the following weekend and throwing herself into the leather armchair in Gerry’s living room.
“My God,” she said. “It looks as if you could walk across in fifteen minutes but that damn ferry takes for ever.”
“Where’s April?” he said.
The wedding, she told him, was lovely. Because it was George’s second the girl didn’t try to make it into too much of a thing, but just as many people turned out for it as for his first. “He’s got a real dandy this time,” she said. “He’s not going to want to spend so much time at his precious pulp mill when he’s got this one waiting at home. She’s got outdoor teeth of course, but still she is pretty!”
Gerry said George’s first wife hadn’t been much to look at, but then George was no prize himself.
Then, suddenly, Aunt Nora said, “I think she’ll be asking you for a legal separation.”
“Who?” he said, stupidly.
“I told her she could live with me. There’s too much room in that old house for one person. I’ll enjoy the company. I remember Dad saying if a Macken couldn’t count on one of his own relatives in times of trouble, who could he count on? That little boy of yours is going to look just like him.” She stood up and took off her coat and laid it over the back of her chair. Then she took a cigarette out of her purse and lit it and sat down again.
“If you want to come back with me and try to patch it up, that’s all right.”
“Patch what up?” he said. “We haven’t even had a fight.”
But she acted as if she hadn’t heard. “I’ll tell you something, Gerry, you’ve got spunk. Maybe you’re the only real Macken in the whole kaboodle.”
“Ha.”
“And if you and April patch it up, if you want to live on the farm, that’s all right with me too.”
“Why should I want to live there?”
“It’s the family homestead,” she said, as if it was something he might have forgotten. “It’s where your grandfather started out. Where the family began.”
Gerry grunted and went to the refrigerator to get himself a bottle of beer.
“Well, somebody will have to take it over some day,” she said. “You can see what’s happened to the farm with just an old maid living on it. He never should have left it to me in the first place. Except, of course, it’s the best place for holding family get-togethers and I know if it was left to anyone else they’d never get done.”
“Look,” he said. “You got her and my two kids. Three for one. That sounds like a pretty good trade to me.”
“I just can’t believe you don’t care about those children,” Aunt Nora said. “Those two little boys. No Macken has ever abandoned his own children. It doesn’t seem natural.”
“Natural,” Gerry Mack said, and tilted up his beer.
But when she caught the morning ferry home he did not go with her. In fact, he was to make only one more visit to the Island, and that would not be until two years later when he attended his son’s funeral. Aunt Nora phoned him in the middle of the day to say the boy had drowned in a swimming accident. The Immediate Family was at the funeral, four hundred or so of them, standing all over the graveyard where Mackens were buried. He’d sat beside April in the chapel but when they got to the graveside she seemed to be surrounded by relatives and he was left alone, on the far side of the ugly hole where they were putting his son. Aunts and cousins were weeping openly, but April in their midst stared straight ahead with her jaw set like stone. She appeared then to have lost all of the slump that was once in her back. Even her mousey brown hair seemed to have taken on more life. When their eyes met she nodded in a way that might have been saying “Thank you” or might have been only a dismissal, or could perhaps have been simply acknowledging that she had noticed his, a stranger’s, presence.
Aunt Nora, afterwards, cornered him in her little living room. She seemed smaller now, slightly stooped, getting old. There were deep lines in her face. “Now,” she said. “Now do you see where your place is? Now do you see where you belong?”
He turned, tried to find someone to rescue him.
“This whole farm, Gerry, it’s yours. Just move here, stay here where you belong.”
And it was April who rescued him after all. She came into the room swiftly, her eyes darting with the quick concern of a hostess making sure everything was going well. “Oh Nora!” she said. “Uncle Morris was asking for you. I promised I’d take you to him.”
When the old woman stood up to leave, April let her gaze flicker momentarily over him. Her complexion against the black dress looked nearly ivory. Beautiful skin. She would be a beautiful woman yet. “George Smith was wondering where you were,” she said. “I told him I thought you’d already gone home.”
For several years after that Aunt Nora visited the mainland every summer to report to Gerry on his wife and remaining son and to tell him all about the weddings and reunions he’d missed. April, she told him, had taken over the last reunion completely, did all the planning and most of the work. And some people on the Island were listening to him again she said, now that he was only reading the news, once a day.
But she stopped coming altogether years later when he sold the seaside house and moved in with a woman far up a gravel road behind town, in a junky unpainted house beside a swamp. She had nearly a dozen children from various fathers, some Scandinavian, two Indian, and one Chinese, and her name was Netty Conroy. Which meant, Aunt Nora Macken was soon able to discover after a little investigation, that she was related to more than half the people who lived in that mainland town, not to mention most who lived in the countryside around it. It was a strange thing, she told The Immediate Family, but she still felt closer to Gerry Mack than to any of the rest of them. Perhaps it was because she, too, had had a tendency to cut off her nose to spite her face. Everyone laughed at the notion because of course, they said, Aunt Nora had always had everything just the way she wanted it in this world.
Every Day of His Life
“If that Big Glad Littlestone ever gets married,” some people said, “there won’t be a church aisle on the Island wide enough for her to walk down.”
“Poor girl,” the more sensitive said of her. “The size of a logging truck and almost as loud. Thirty-six years old already and still no sign of a father for that boy of hers.”
But Big Glad didn’t waste time on people’s opinions. Because here it was June again, which was her lucky month. It seemed to her that in all the years she had lived in this old house (measured by the life of that heavy lilac bush, covering half the yard) there had never been a June that felt so lucky. In the woods, all tangled up beneath the fallen hemlock slash, and hidden in the copper grass behind her place, the wild blackberries were ripening early and every day she found a brand-new patch to pick and fill her pail to make her wine. And the honeysuckle flowers all over the side of her house had never smelled so sweet.
But the early evening was the best time, the luckiest time. Every day that month, as soon as she had finished washing up her supper dishes and got Roger started at his piano practice, she came out onto the porch, stood breathing deep with her hands on her hips to take in all the scents the sun had stirred up during the afternoon, then walked out into her yard to water the tomato plants. And every day, too, she wore the same clothes: those little red sneakers, that same white bulging T-shirt, those striped knee-length shorts. And, of course, that was the way Mr. Swingler first s
aw her, in those clothes, in that garden, bending over her precious tomato plants, a sprinkling can in one hand.
What she saw first was a little round head that rode the top of the picket fence to the gate, then stopped and turned and looked at her, unblinking, perhaps trying to believe she was real. For a long time she stared right back. Then the gate swung open and a small bow-legged body carried that head down her path.
“Hey mister,” she said. “Get your feet off of my gardeshias.”
The little man hopped one step to the side and looked down at the flowers he had crushed. “Them ain’t gardeshias, missus, they’re geraniums.”
“It’s Miss,” she said and stepped back, for she was spraying water on her own foot. “Miss Littlestone. And I don’t know one flower from the other. When the logging camp closed down and they hauled all the other houses away I just went from yard to yard and pulled up what I liked.”
The man lowered his eyes again but they popped back up to stare at her. She waited for him to speak but he just went on chewing and staring. Those eyes looked like two painted rubber balls controlled from behind by elastic strings.
Well, she couldn’t stare back all day. She went up on the front verandah and picked a large red apple out of a box. “Have an apple,” she said, and held it out for him.
“No thank you,” he said. “The name’s Swingler. This time of year I wouldn’t say thank you to no man for an apple dried up and wrinkled as a old prune.”
“Not store-bought ones,” she said, and took a bite to prove it. “These are store-bought ones I got last Saturday in town. Must be grown in California or somewhere down there.”
“No thank you,” he said again, though she had half eaten it by now. For some time she stood there on that verandah, eating the apple, trying not to stare back at those rubber-ball eyes, and trying even harder to think of something to say. Her teeth started working around the core and she spat three seeds over the railing.
“That,” she said at last, with a slight nod towards the mountain off behind her house, “is the prettiest sight on this island.” She said this as if the mountain were fenced right into her own back yard and her name tacked on it.
The little man turned and put both hands on his hips to study the mountain, head cocked. “Not bad,” he said.
“Not bad?” she said. “You won’t see prettier.”
“But you don’t own it,” he said. “Nobody owns a mountain.”
This sounded like criticism to Big Glad, a reflection on her character. In a voice hard enough to show that no one walks uninvited into her yard and insults her, she said, “Where are you headed for anyway?”
“Paper mill,” he said, eyes still on that mountain. “Looking for a job.”
“Then you’re a little off course, mister.” She threw the core across the fence right from where she stood. “Took the wrong turn twelve miles back. Paper mill is on the coast; you’re headed straight into mountains. Are you walking?”
“Don’t see no taxi parked, do you?”
He said this without expression, certainly without sarcasm, yet it was too much for her. She drew back against the wall and folded her arms. “Well, I’m the only one lives in here, me and my son, and I got a car all right but I ain’t driving you all the way back to the highway. You got a long walk ahead of you.”
For answer he swung to look at her again and said, “Lady, you got the daintiest feet I ever seen.”
Now Big Glad knew this was the luckiest month ever. She crossed her ankles and stood with the toe of one red sneaker pointed like a ballet dancer. “Thank you, kind sir,” she said, and did a mock curtsey. Then she did a complete turn, on one foot, for him to see every side.
“Don’t mention it, I’m sure,” he said and jammed a cigarette into his mouth.
That he had a mouth she hadn’t noticed before. Now she realized that there was more to his face, to his body, than two painted rubber-ball eyes. The top half of his head came forward—forehead, eyes, nose—as if something behind were pushing on it. The bottom half, his mouth, his chin, slid away from her, sucked back as if he had swallowed his own teeth and half his jaw. In fact, she thought, if he’d just turn his head he’d probably have no chin at all.
Because he wore a pair of loose overalls and a plaid shirt so big the sleeves had to be rolled up to meet his wrists, she couldn’t tell what his body was really like. She guessed his age at fifty-five.
“Forty-seven,” he said. He lighted the cigarette and ground the match into the gravel of her path. “Born forty-seven years ago on my old man’s farm down near Victoria, lived every place on this island you could name since then. Never been in here before, though.”
“Me, I was born in this old shack. There’s been a new coat of paint on those shakes every year of my life. Only time I ever leave the place is to go to town, or when I go off for a month or two to cook in a logging camp up the coast.”
Mr. Swingler looked around the clearing, at the bare spots in the grass, the piles of old brick and overgrown lilac. “How come they all moved?” he said. “Why didn’t they stay right here like you?”
“Oh, as soon as the camp shut down they fell all over themselves to buy the same house they’d been crabbing about for years while they rented them. Then they hauled them out to the highway so they could watch the traffic go by. Front lawns the size of aprons. And for Saturday-night entertainment they sit at the front window and hope for an accident.”
“Why didn’t you move too?”
“Mister Swingler, that is a silly question. I like it here, it’s much better with all them people gone. Sounds of trucks and cars and brakes squealing can’t measure up to a squirrel’s chattering or a deer in the underbrush.”
Mr. Swingler did not say anything to that; he looked right past her. His chewing stopped. “What’s that?” he said, and the chewing started again.
“Where?”
“Behind you. In the doorway.”
Big Glad looked and there was Roger standing with his nose pressed flat against the screen door. “That’s my boy,” she said to the man, and, “Get your face away from that filthy screen,” to the boy. Then she said to Mr. Swingler, who had moved up to stand at the foot of the verandah steps below her, “He’s got plenty of talent, everyone says. Just ten years old, too.”
Mr. Swingler glowered at the boy as if talent was the one thing this world could do without. He scratched behind one ear for a full minute. “Talent’s all right,” he said. “But you got to have guts as well.”
At this the child’s face faded into the shadow of the room behind. Big Glad moved in front of the door as if to protect her son. The boards creaked beneath her.
“Roger’s all right,” she said.
“Sure,” he said. His gaze tried to penetrate the screen.
“They all say he’ll go far.”
“Sure,” Mr. Swingler said. He walked over to one side of the lawn. He came back with both hands in his pockets. “Where’s the best place for looking at that mountain?” he said, while inside the house the boy started finger exercises on the piano.
Big Glad came down off the verandah and took another look at the mountain. Maybe he had seen something she’d missed. “What do you mean?” she said. “That looks good from anyplace.”
He took the time to look at her as if she were a simple child. Then, lowering his eyes, he shrugged and turned his back to her. “I’m going to paint it.”
“Well, why didn’t you say you were an artist? The best view anywhere is right from the top of my roof. But where do you keep your paints and stuff?”
Mr. Swingler looked at the steep gable roof like an engineer estimating its strength. Satisfied with what he saw (Lord, he’d need to be, she’d had it all re-done just three years ago, before Momma died), he nodded, said, “Show me where your ladder is and get me a few pieces of paper and your kid’s water colours,” and turned again to the view.
Big Glad had her thoughts on that kind of talk but this time she kept
them to herself. Instead she asked, “Don’t you carry nothing with you? Artists are supposed to carry a knapsack at least, but you just rely on people having kids with water colours?”
“A toothbrush,” he said and without even turning to face her pulled a blue worn brush from one pocket. “And a razor.” And he pulled that out too, from the other pocket, and held them both up high in case there was something wrong with her eyes. Then he faced her. “Now if you’ll just show me where you keep your ladder.”
She did. She pointed to where it was lying in the long grass down one side of the house. Then, because she had never met an artist before—an eccentric one at that—she hurried into the house, excited, to get him his paper and paints.
He went up the roof first, holding the pad of paper and Roger’s Donald Duck paint set, and sat on the peak. She followed him on her hands and knees, carrying a glass of water and a pencil, cursing the tiny stones that cut into her skin and broke her fingernails. Then, puffing (Oh Lord, if Momma were alive she’d have another heart attack just at the thought of her daring), she sat beside him on the ridge facing the mountain and tried to make herself comfortable. “My goodness,” she said, “this is nice up here. A little hard on the rear end, though.”
Mr. Swingler braced himself by putting his feet wide apart. “You’ll have to be quiet,” he said.
She held her breath to please him and saw that he held the pad of paper on his lap, ready for action. The tin of paints was on the roof between his feet, one end propped up on a rock to keep it level. She heaved a great sigh and offered her face up to the sun as if here she was, ready for whatever was ahead. Let it happen, she thought, and planted her feet wide apart for balance, like him.
When she looked down again he had sketched in the scene with his pencil and was putting a light blue wash over the whole paper. She sniffed hard, said, “Just smell that lilac,” and folded her arms under her great breasts.
But Mr. Swingler wasn’t smelling flowers. Without even slowing the motion of his brush on that paper he said. “Can’t you get that racket to stop?”