by Jack Hodgins
“What racket?”
“That kid of yours. That piano racket right below us.”
She hadn’t even noticed. Roger practised so much his noise had become part of the natural background for her. She had always thought there was nothing like music to calm the nerves. But apparently Mr. Swingler didn’t agree, so she stomped one foot hard three times on the roof and listened to make sure the message was understood.
It was. The sounds from the piano became so soft they might have been coming with the sun from across the woods.
“That was Rachmaninoff,” she said.
For a long time, for perhaps five minutes, she remained silent and watched him work. When the sun had dried the wash (he held the paper up as if to catch the rays that came at them horizontally across the tops of the firs), he began to work at filling in the colours of the lower slopes of that mountain. She couldn’t see how a paint brush would be able to put in all those black snags that stood like rigid hairs down the burned-off side, but that was his problem.
“What we need is a drink,” she said.
He didn’t say anything to that, so she repeated. “What we need in this sun is a nice cold drink of my homemade dandelion wine.”
This time she took his silence for agreement and backed on her hands and knees down the slope of the roof. At the edge she hovered for a moment, swinging her foot around over the eavestrough in search of the ladder. Then she went down and told Roger to play softly from now on if he didn’t want a cuff on the ear, because Mr. Swingler was an artist and artists need real quiet if they’re going to get inspired.
From a cupboard she took down two of her best glasses (Momma had never let her use them, preferring to do without rather than take a chance on breaking one) and put them on a tray to carry them into the back bedroom, which had become her storage room. There was no furniture in the room except the shelves she hammered together the same day she threw out Momma’s bed at last (smelling of medicine and anger and death) and these shelves were filled with her homemade liquor. The one papered wall was lined with bottles of blackberry wine and down along the window wall there were twenty-five gallons of sake. The other two walls displayed her specialty—dandelion wine.
She stepped over the empty bottles on the floor and took down a half-gallon of dandelion wine to fill the glasses. With the bottle held tight against her breasts she listened for a minute to the music and hummed a few bars.
What was going to happen to her she wasn’t sure, but whatever it was she was ready. Her heart pounded so hard she found it difficult to breathe. She hummed three more bars of the music to quiet herself and said, “Glad old girl, you got a real artist sitting up on your roof right now, good as trapped, and all you have to do is play it right to have him begging.” She drank both glasses fast and filled them again. She put the bottle back on the shelf, picked up the tray, then changed her mind and put the bottle on the tray too, beside those full glasses. With the tray held out in front of her like an offering she marched out past the piano (saying “Play on, Roger, play on” to her son, who would play all night if that was what she wanted) and through the living room, right outside to the foot of the ladder.
“Coming up,” she said, and waited with one foot on the bottom rung for him to come to her aid.
But she might have waited all day and night too for all the response she got. So she balanced that tray in one hand and went up the ladder slowly and carefully. When she had the tray balanced with one end on the top rung and the other on the eavestrough she called out again, this time a little louder: “Even a genius can take time out to be a gentleman. Give me a hand.”
He did, too. He came down front ways, a way she’d never dare, just as calm as he might if the roof were flat, and bent to pick up the tray. For perhaps a full minute she stared into his eyes and he stared back. They were brown eyes, those rubber balls, and each one had its own road map stamped in red on the white parts.
Maybe that’s the sign of a traveller, she thought. Like spaced teeth. Well, traveller or not, he’d just walked down a one-way dead-end street. And unless he were a lot smarter than she thought, his travelling days were over.
He picked up the tray and she followed him on her hands and knees up that slope to the peak. Roger was starting in on something by Grieg. She didn’t know the name of it and never did like it much. She stomped her foot again and it softened a little.
She sipped from her glass and let the wine slide down her throat slowly and quietly. No matter what she drank she always drank it like a lady. “My, that is good,” she said. “I think this is the best batch I ever made.” And she sipped again, pursing her lips while she thought it over, then nodded as she swallowed, as if to say Yes she was right the first time. She rolled her eyes to the sky when the warmth started to spread itself inside her. “You ought to have a wife,” she said.
“I had one,” he said, as if what she had asked about was a case of measles.
“What’d you do? Walk off and leave her high and dry?”
Mr. Swingler pushed one hand back through his hair and dug all his fingers into his scalp for a good scratch. “No, not that,” he said, and flicked the dandruff out from his fingernails one at a time. “She stepped out onto the road to flag down a bus and was too slow at stepping back. That bus flung her through the air and left her draped over a barbed-wire fence like an empty gunny sack.”
Big Glad raised her eyes to the mountain to compare it with his. He wasn’t granting it enough power. She coughed daintily into her hand to show she was discreet, then said, “She buried near here?” as if she didn’t really care but if he wanted to tell her she’d be willing to listen.
“She’s not buried anywhere. She wanted one of these here cremations.”
Big Glad never quite approved of cremations; there was something a little bit primitive about the whole idea. She cleared her throat again. “Well, even ashes have to have something done with them.”
He swung his head to look at her, perhaps to see if she could take it. “I swallowed them,” he said, and picked up his brush again to go on with his work.
Big Glad gulped at that, and swallowed too, and made a face. “Then you must be crazy,” she said, and took another, longer drink from her glass.
“I read it in a history book,” he said, and with one more stroke the peak of that mountain stood up, hard and true against the sky. “Some old queen did it way back when. Mixed the ashes in a glass of wine and drank the whole lot down.”
She wondered when he ever stayed in one spot long enough to read a book but said nothing about that. Instead she asked, “Why?”
He lifted his head at that as if here was one question he had never expected. He thought for a while. “Why? It seemed kind of romantic to me to keep my wife inside of me.”
“Did you ever think of what happened to what didn’t stay inside you?”
Evidently he hadn’t considered that and wasn’t going to now. He went on with his painting.
Still, she wished she had thought of that. It made her mad that she had never thought of anything as smart as that. Not that she had ever had anyone to do it to. Her father had fallen down a well thirty-two years ago. And Momma died so mean a person would have choked on her ashes. There had never been anyone she’d cared that much about. She wondered if anyone would ever drink her ashes.
And speaking of queer people, she had known a few too in her time. “That reminds me of my mechanic,” she said, “the one who works on my car.”
“That car,” he said.
“What’s the matter that car?”
“I’ve been here more than an hour, most of the time sitting right up here on this roof, and I still haven’t seen that car you keep on talking about.”
“A car is not something you set up on a post like a flag for all to see. If you’ll just lower your eyes a little you’ll see a gradge with door closed and locked. And if you’ll just squint a little you might be able to pick out the orange colour of it through the windo
w.”
He looked, lowered his gaze and squinted against the sun, peered at the little roof-sagging building she meant. “Orange,” he said, and picked up his brush again. He painted a tint of orange on the sky behind the mountain.
“That’s not the colour of the sky,” she said. “You’re putting things there that you can’t see.”
“That’s what I want to see,” he said. “That’s what the picture needed.”
Big Glad refilled both the glasses from the bottle, though his was not empty. “I guess a man could set up here every day of his life painting that mountain and never paint it the same way twice.”
“I guess,” he said.
“I guess a place like this one here of mine is just exactly the right kind of place for an artist. He could paint his whole life long.”
“Lady,” he said, “you’re right,” and plopped that picture right into her lap so she had to close her knees fast to keep it from slipping right through.
It took a full minute for his words to sink in. When she realized what he meant she gulped another mouthful of her drink and said, “You mean you like it here?”
He turned to her and carefully lifted his painting from her lap. “I knew as soon as I came in sight of your house that this would be the kind of place I’d like to live in the rest of my life. Just look at that mountain! I never painted so good.”
But Big Glad wasn’t wasting breath on pictures. “Mister Swingler,” she said. “Are you telling me that you want to move in, to live downstairs with me and Roger, to be a part of this family?”
He stopped admiring his own work long enough to look at her.
“Well, I think that’s what I been saying.”
Big Glad sighed and sat back and folded her arms. “No man has ever slept under my roof without taking out a marriage licence first.”
Mr. Swingler did some deep thinking about this. His eyes swung up to take in that mountain again, and then down to the sagging garage below. “I guess that makes sense,” he said.
“It’s only fair to my boy.”
At the mention of her son they both listened to the sounds of Rachmaninoff again, sifting soft as sunlight up through the rafters of the house. Mr. Swingler said, “Now if there is nothing else, you get down off this roof and make yourself decent so we can go to town and celebrate.”
Big Glad hadn’t worn her hat since Momma’s funeral. It was a flat-brimmed straw thing, with a cluster of plastic berries at the front. She set it on top of her head and looked in her bedroom mirror, pinching her cheeks to bring back a little colour to them. Then she slipped off her shorts and pulled on a black wool skirt. Again she admired herself in the mirror. Somehow she didn’t feel like a bride yet, but that was because it had all happened so fast. Who would have thought this morning that before dark she would have been proposed to?
She tiptoed past Roger (let him find out when they had that piece of paper to show) and went out onto the verandah. Because Mr. Swingler hadn’t come down off the roof yet, probably putting some finishing touches on that picture of his, she sat down on the top step to wait and soon she began to shake through her whole body. She put her head down to try and stop the trembling.
When Mr. Swingler came around the corner of the house and saw her he said, “What’s the matter with you?”
“We can’t,” she said.
He put his painted mountain on her verandah railing. “What do you mean can’t? What else you been working on ever since I arrived?”
Big Glad was afraid to look up. All she could see was a wood bug working its way across the step. “But we hardly know each other.”
Mr. Swingler laughed. “Lady,” he said. “You made up your mind to catch me the minute I walked inside your gate. I could’ve been a murderer for all you cared.”
She looked up at him. She hadn’t thought of that. “You could still be a murderer. Or a thief or escaped convict. I don’t know a single thing about you.”
He winked at her and slid closer, one arm laid out like a broken wing on her railing. “If we get the licence we’ll have three days to wait before we can make use of it. I guess by that time you’ll know me pretty well.”
“And if I die,” she said, and swallowed. “And if I die, will you drink my ashes?”
He looked hard at her and thought a moment. Then he said, “Miss Littlestone, after the first time there’s nothing to it.”
At that Big Glad began to cry. She bowed down her hat, put her face in her hands, and sobbed. After a while she felt better, because after all she was a bride and brides do sometimes cry, and looked at Mr. Swingler, who was holding out one hand like a porter waiting for a tip. “Now what do you want?” she said.
He moved closer and bent down over her so that she could see those road maps of his again. “If you’ll just give me the keys to the garage,” he said, “we’ll be on our way.”
The Religion of
the Country
When Brian Halligan’s mother telephoned from halfway around the world in West Cork to tell him his poor old father had died, Halligan, who never failed to make the proper expected gesture, offered to fly over immediately for the funeral. “What rush is there?” her voice screeched at him. “Haven’t I waited fifteen years for a visit out of you? Little good you can do the old fellow now.” So Halligan told her he would be there by the end of the month: he needed that much time, he said, to find someone he’d trust with the bookstore while he was away, and he wanted to get as much use as possible out of his season’s theatre ticket before it became out of date.
Since moving to Vancouver Island, Halligan had made it his habit to cross the strait as often as possible for plays and operas and poetry readings at the university. It was his way, he would explain down his long thin nose at you, of resisting the logger and coalminer mentality of the island. He was terrified of being converted to vulgarianism. But the few people of the town who had noticed his existence at all dismissed his high-class habits as simply a poor foreigner’s attempts to feel superior. Not even his carefully preserved English accent bothered anyone.
Because of the accent it was a surprise to learn that Halligan had been born in Ireland. “Of Ascendancy stock, of course,” he said. His parents had moved with him to England when he was only two years old. “’Tis no country for Protestants any more,” his mother had flung over her shoulder as they left, but within a year she’d become so homesick for her little village of Ballyvourney and for the black-and-white cows that grazed all over the rocky hills around her house that she abandoned both her husband and her son to return and live by herself. The old man stayed on in London with Brian where he built up a fairly good drapery business, but as soon as the son had finished university and sailed for Canada, he retired to his wife’s cottage and spent the rest of his life (according to the mother’s letters) tending a single cow named Deirdre-of-the-Sorrows and talking the ear off Jack Sugrue in Mills Bar. It appeared to Brian Halligan that his parents had abandoned their past and joined the peasants.
Halligan’s bookstore was on a short street that opened at one end onto a view of the business core of town, so he was able when business was slack—which was most of the time—to lean his long frame in the open doorway and watch a good deal of what went on. Every weekday Matt Bickham, a fat little college instructor who had become Halligan’s only friend, dropped by after class to stand and help contemplate the scene. “It’s a silly town,” Halligan complained. “They waste their lives accumulating things, grabbing and hoarding, fighting over bits of land and stabbing each other in the back to get ahead. And if they have any spare time you’d never catch them reading a book, they’re off somewhere in the mountains shooting animals or killing fish.” Matt Bickham, who didn’t have an English accent and so could afford to look at the underside of a question, said that the town was only a hundred years removed from the frontier. “In a frontier it’s the business of the people to build houses and kill animals. No frontiersman had the time to sit around reading a book o
f poems. That’ll come later.” Halligan, sniffing, said that if it came much later he would have starved to death waiting, because right now he was barely meeting expenses in the bookstore.
“Besides,” he said, “how can a college teacher like you make apologies for ignorance?”
Bickham was a man who rubbed both hands up and down on his round chest while he thought up his answers. He appeared to be watching a series of pages turning in his mind’s eye. There were times, though, when after all his thinking he chose not to answer at all, especially when he could see that Halligan had got up on what he called his “high English horse” about one matter or other. He preferred, rather, to change the subject completely.
“My sister’s in town again. The wife said to ask you around for some supper.”
Halligan, of course, despised his friend’s sister. He was a man who believed himself to have a high opinion of women, and could not forgive her for failing to measure up to his notions. She owned a small hotel in a west-coast logging settlement, no place for any lady, and to make matters worse she liked to talk about her weekend hiking expeditions and elk-hunting trips into the mountains. He listened to her talk, always, with a pinch-nosed disdain, which she never seemed to notice or, if she did, chose to ignore. He did not, however, allow her presence to keep him away from a meal cooked by Teresa Bickham, who was a beautiful woman with some experience in a French cooking school. Class was class and had to be appreciated wherever it was found.
Throughout his twenties Brian Halligan had expected that any day he would turn a corner and bump into the perfect woman, who would immediately fall in love with him and become his wife. He knew that despite what people called his affected distant air he was nearly handsome, that in the carefully chosen clothes he always wore he looked like a man of quality. He knew too that he was a man of intelligence and that the only reason he was not a financial success was that he refused to embrace the values of the people he lived amongst. Several girls, some of them pretty, interested him for a while: he took them to the local movie theatre, or walking on the trails through the wooded park, or driving up the Island highway to dance in one of the touristy seaside villages. But there weren’t any who could be invited to accompany him across the strait to an opera. A redheaded secretary named Kitty Kenary had very nearly caused him to fall in love, but she had an infuriating habit of stopping in the middle of her sentences to snort in her nose. By the time he’d reached his thirtieth birthday he was convinced he’d be a bachelor all his life, poor and alone.