Spit Delaney's Island

by Jack Hodgins

  Halligan’s mother found Babe’s loud enthusiasm upsetting, and asked him to make up excuses to get her out of the house. As long as her daughter-in-law was inside she tended to stare off into space and answer only his simplest questions, but when Babe was off in the car exploring the countryside or talking to people in the village or tracking down some historic spot mentioned in the tourist brochures, the old woman told her son that life had got much worse even than she’d feared.

  “’Tis a trial just to be getting out of the bed in the mornings,” she said, “and wondering what is the point of it at all when there is only yourself to talk to.”

  “Come now,” Halligan said, “I don’t believe that none of your neighbours ever drop in to visit.”

  The old woman’s eyes shifted away. “Oh, they’re in and out of the house all day long like a lot of magpies. But there isn’t a one of them that’s a relative. What is a woman without a family?”

  She had indeed deteriorated, Halligan saw to his horror. The skin of her face had dried and shrivelled, her messy hair was so thin he could see patches of scalp, her whiskers were like silver needles hanging above her lip. The little kitchen, which on his last visit was whitewashed and spotless, now looked as if she had decided to leave dirt and food and pieces of clothing just wherever they happened to lie until she should die and escape them all.

  She stood at the stove, one thick hand pressed against her back. “I took to visiting my cousin Polly but she died. Tim Murphy drove me down to the city once a week in his lorry so I could visit with her. Addled-headed as she was, at least she was related. But they sent word up last week that she’d dropped dead in chapel. Poor old thing. And now what have I left?”

  Suddenly Halligan felt angry. “What you have left is the rest of your life to do with as you please. You can sit around feeling sorry for yourself if you want, but you’ll have nobody to blame but yourself.”

  She turned and let him see that her eyes were full of tears, tipped up her chin at him accusingly. There is no end to the cruelty you can expect to suffer at the hands of a heartless son, she seemed to be saying, and if Babe hadn’t clomped up the front walk at just that moment he would have found himself making all kinds of impossible promises. It was not easy for a man like Halligan to meet those watery eyes or ignore that chin.

  “I found an old geezer who’s offered to take me out hunting,” Babe announced, and threw herself into the nearest chair. “He called it shooting. What could you shoot around here?”

  “Rabbits,” the old lady snapped.

  And Halligan, too, found himself snapping at her. “They have no cougars here,” he said. “Or elk.”

  Babe Halligan looked from one to the other as if trying to figure out what kind of nonsense she’d walked in on. Then she pulled off her rain-drenched sweater and started brushing her hair. “You’d think that bloody sky would eventually rain itself out, but it goes on and on. Doesn’t it ever stop here? One old fellow down the road told me he’s been turning the hay in his field every day for three weeks now and can’t get it dry enough to put in haystacks.”

  The old woman took the discarded sweater and hung it on the back of a chair close to the stove. She heaved a sigh and opened the oven door. “The sisters are after writing me to come down to the city and collect Polly’s things. I thought, if there’s ever a time that car is idle, we could drive in together.” It was clear from the way she said it that she expected either her son or his bride to say it was a terrible idea and suggest she have the things mailed or burned.

  But Babe thought it would be great fun and insisted that they go right away. She grabbed the wet sweater off the chair back and put it on. “There’s no sense sitting around in this gloomy place listening to the rain. Let’s go.”

  The old woman looked at her daughter-in-law with gratitude but frowned immediately afterwards, as if suddenly disapproving of such recklessness. She pulled on two cardigans and a coat and was the first one out the door. “It’s easy to find,” she said. “And didn’t Sister Angela tell me she’d have the things near the front door?”

  She sat in the middle of the back seat and talked steadily the whole way down out of the hills and along the road beside the river. She told them Cousin Polly had advised her to go to America if ever Brian married so that she could mind her grandchildren, but she’d told Polly she didn’t believe Brian would ever find himself a wife. She told them William Penn’s father had lived in that castle near the bridge and hadn’t he gone on to become a famous man in America? Babe said that not all of America was the one country, but the old woman went on to tell that Michael Donegan’s son in Chicago had got killed in a factory explosion and the insurance company had sent him a lot of money. He marched around like gentry now, and had a taxi come all the way out from Macroom whenever he wanted to do a bit of shopping. “If that’s what having money will do to a person I’ll thank you not to take me home with you, as I understand that everyone there is as rich as Michael Donegan.”

  Halligan drove inside the iron gates of the home and parked near the great oak door but he refused to go in. Places like that spooked him, he said. And nuns made him nervous. He’d just sit and wait, thank you, just don’t be too long. It was probably even damper inside an old stone building than it was out here in the rain, and anyway he didn’t suppose Cousin Polly had owned so many things the two of them couldn’t carry them.

  “Occhh, Babe,” his mother said, heaving herself up out of the back seat. “It’s afraid of religion he is. Scared one of the sisters’ll baptise him when he’s not looking.” She chuckled loudly and made a face at him through his window.

  Just as he dreaded, when they came back out a half-hour later two nuns came with them. Babe had one of them by the elbow and was talking loudly, making big gestures with the paper bag she held in her hand. The old woman hurried ahead, dumped an armload of things in the trunk, and then hurried back to bring them around to his side of the car.

  “Sister Angela,” she said. “And Sister Mary Rose.” As if he had begged to be introduced.

  The taller one bent and put a hand in through the window for him to shake. There was a pink flush spot high up on each cheek. “Ooh,” she said, straightening. “And don’t you see the resemblance, Sister Mary Rose? ’Tis Polly all over again.”

  The other, an older woman, squinted. “’Tis, ’tis,” she said. “The image of her! The very image.”

  Halligan’s mother blushed, grinned with pleasure. “The eyes, I suppose. He has the eyes sure.”

  “Oh the eyes, the mouth,” Sister Angela exclaimed, and put one hand on the old woman’s shoulder. “You’ll not be missing Polly so very much, dear, with that one’s face to keep her near.”

  “She was very happy here,” the older nun said, bending down to speak through the window. As if Halligan, having the silly old bat’s eyes, would be the one most interested. “’Tis a saint she was, to be sure. Never a harsh word. Always a smile. Dear, dear Polly.”

  “She is heaven’s gain,” Sister Angela said, putting out a restraining hand lest the other get carried away. “Come, Sister Mary Rose, let us not keep these people. They have a long journey ahead of them.”

  When Halligan had turned the car around, Sister Angela held up a hand to stop him, then came close and dipped her head to the window. “Monday?” she said, and the old woman leaning forward in the back seat whispered “Monday” back.

  Once they’d left the cobbled courtyard Halligan drove, silently, up the river as far as the city park. Then he turned in his seat and looked at his mother. “Monday what?”

  “Leave her alone,” Babe said.

  “What did that woman mean by whispering ‘Monday’ past my ear?”

  The old woman pointed her chin again, but this time there were no tears. She opened her door. “I always enjoys walking through the roses,” she said. And grunting, heaved herself out.

  “Don’t nag at her,” Babe said, glaring.

  They got out of the car and headed in
through the park gate after his mother, but she had already got inside the circular labyrinth paths of the rose garden. From the outside he stood and hollered at her: “Now what have you gone and done, old woman?”

  A row of men sitting with their backs against the grey museum wall looked up, alarmed.

  “Now what have you done? Come out of there and tell what you’ve got up your sleeve now.”

  The old woman had worked her way across nearer to the other side of the garden and Halligan rushed around the outside edge to be closer. She bent down to the roses, inhaling, smiling.

  “You can’t do that kind of thing just for your convenience,” he said. “You have to have better reasons than that.”

  “After my little visits with Polly, Tim Murphy always drove me down here to this park. But this is the first time I haven’t felt like an outsider, even here.”

  “It’s your country,” Babe said. “It’s your home. There’s no reason to feel like an outsider.”

  Halligan felt himself nearly choking. “Never mind that!” he shouted. “Just tell me what it is you and those nuns have cooked up between you.”

  Babe sat back on a bench and stretched her legs out in front of her. “She’s going to start taking instruction.”

  “What?”

  “Shh. Keep your voice down. People are looking.”

  “Let them look! What the hell kind of thing is that to do?”

  Halligan’s mother came out from behind the roses and sat on the bench beside Babe. “Don’t shout,” she said. “I’m an old woman, and it makes me nervous to have all that noise around me.”

  “A fine thing,” Babe said. “Scaring an old woman.”

  “A fine thing, too, when a woman too old to know her own mind gets sucked in like that.”

  “Tch, tch, Brian my son. Don’t I know my own mind the same as the next one? Don’t go blaming the sisters. ’Tis no idea of theirs at all.”

  “Sold out is what you did. Sold out for the sake of belonging.”

  The old woman gathered her coat together and fumbled with her thick fingers at the button. “And what is it I’ve sold? What have I lost?”

  Halligan was still muttering to himself about the feeble-mindedness of old women when they flew out of Shannon a few days later.

  When his mother was received into the Church, Babe, who had just sold her hotel, suggested that they use some of the money to fly to Ireland, but Halligan preferred to stay home and pretend it wasn’t happening. And anyway, he said, he was busy helping Matt build a Chamber of Commerce float for the First of July parade. When a coloured snapshot arrived in the mail Babe said she’d never seen a bride so radiant. “She just looks as if she’d washed all her loneliness and confusion off in the morning’s bath.”

  “If she had a bath,” Halligan growled.

  With the money from the hotel they bought the shop next to the bookstore and expanded into a book-and-record shop with an emphasis on the faster-selling rock albums. They also put a down payment on a house high up the hill overlooking the whole town, and Babe decided that thirty-three was not too old to get pregnant. Halligan, to help pay for the house, began to sell real estate in the evenings for a friend whose firm was expanding. The day he made his first big sale, a thirty-acre farm, a letter arrived from his mother saying how happy she was to hear she was about to be a grandmother at last. She’d put a tiny plastic crucifix in the envelope, for the baby when it came. Halligan cursed and threw the thing in the garbage pail. Babe, who had swollen up all over as if she were about to burst and rarely left the easy-boy chair in the living room, laughed at him and asked him what was the matter, was he scared there was black magic in the plastic?

  Halligan’s mother lived for another four years, and though she wrote one cheerful letter to them every month up until the time of her death, she never once visited them in Canada. Halligan didn’t invite her. “She made her choice,” he said. “Let her be happy with them, she doesn’t need us.”

  When the news of her death was cabled to them by the parish priest he didn’t bother to attend the funeral. “I wouldn’t understand a word of it,” he said, “a whole lot of nonsense.” And besides, he had discovered an old man who just might be ready to sell a hundred-acre piece of waterfront property which was ideal for subdividing, and if he took time to go gallivanting around the world someone else might get there first to grab it. Land development was a cut-throat business, he said, and there was no room in it for sentiment.

  By the River

  But listen, she thinks, it’s nearly time.

  And flutters, leaf-like, at the thought. The train will rumble down the valley, stop at the little shack to discharge Styan, and move on. This will happen in half an hour and she has a mile still to walk.

  Crystal Styan walking through the woods, through bush, is not pretty. She knows that she is not even a little pretty, though her face is small enough, and pale, and her eyes are not too narrow. She wears a yellow wool sweater and a long cotton skirt and boots. Her hair, tied back so the branches will not catch in it, hangs straight and almost colourless down her back. Some day, she expects, there will be a baby to play with her hair and hide in it like someone behind a waterfall.

  She has left the log cabin, which sits on the edge of the river in a stand of birch, and now she follows the river bank upstream. A mile ahead, far around the bend out of sight, the railroad tracks pass along the rim of their land and a small station is built there just for them, for her and Jim Styan. It is their only way in to town, which is ten miles away and not much of a town anyway when you get there. A few stores, a tilted old hotel, a movie theatre.

  Likely, Styan would have been to a movie last night. He would have stayed the night in the hotel, but first (after he had seen the lawyer and bought the few things she’d asked him for) he would pay his money and sit in the back row of the theatre and laugh loudly all the way through the movie. He always laughs at everything, even if it isn’t funny, because those figures on the screen make him think of people he has known; and the thought of them exposed like this for just anyone to see embarrasses him a little and makes him want to create a lot of noise so people will know he isn’t a bit like that himself.

  She smiles. The first time they went to a movie together she slouched as far down in the seat as she could so no one could see she was there or had anything to do with Jim Styan.

  The river flows past her almost silently. It has moved only a hundred miles from its source and has another thousand miles to go before it reaches the ocean, but already it is wide enough and fast. Right here she has more than once seen a moose wade out and then swim across to the other side and disappear into the cedar swamps. She knows something, has heard somewhere that farther downstream, miles and miles behind her, an Indian band once thought this river a hungry monster that liked to gobble up their people. They say that Coyote their god-hero dived in and subdued the monster and made it promise never to swallow people again. She once thought she’d like to study that kind of thing at a university or somewhere, if Jim Styan hadn’t told her grade ten was good enough for anyone and a life on the road was more exciting.

  What road? she wonders. There isn’t a road within ten miles. They sold the rickety old blue pickup the same day they moved onto this place. The railroad was going to be all they’d need. There wasn’t any place they cared to go that the train, even this old-fashioned milk-run outfit, couldn’t take them easily and cheaply enough.

  But listen, she thinks, it’s nearly time.

  The trail she is following swings inland to climb a small bluff and for a while she is engulfed by trees. Cedar and fir are dark and thick and damp. The green new growth on the scrub bushes has nearly filled in the narrow trail. She holds her skirt up a little so it won’t be caught or ripped, then runs and nearly slides down the hill again to the river’s bank. She can see in every direction for miles and there isn’t a thing in sight which has anything to do with man.

  “Who needs them?” Styan said, long ago
.

  It was with that kind of question—questions that implied an answer so obvious only a fool would think to doubt—that he talked her first out of the classroom and then right off the island of her birth and finally up here into the mountains with the river and the moose and the railroad. It was as if he had transported her in his falling-apart pickup not only across the province about as far as it was possible to go, but also backwards in time, perhaps as far as her grandmother’s youth or even farther. She washes their coarse clothing in the river and depends on the whims of the seasons for her food.

  “Look!” he shouted when they stood first in the clearing above the cabin. “It’s as if we’re the very first ones. You and me.”

  They swam in the cold river that day and even then she thought of Coyote and the monster, but he took her inside the cabin and they made love on the fir-bough bed that was to be theirs for the next five years. “We don’t need any of them,” he sang. He flopped over on his back and shouted up into the rafters. “We’ll farm it! We’ll make it go. We’ll make our own world!” Naked, he was as thin and pale as a celery stalk.

  When they moved in he let his moustache grow long and droopy like someone in an old, brown photograph. He wore overalls which were far too big for him and started walking around as if there were a movie camera somewhere in the trees and he was being paid to act like a hillbilly instead of the city-bred boy he really was. He stuck a limp felt hat on the top of his head like someone’s uncle Hiram and bought chickens.