Spit Delaney's Island

by Jack Hodgins

  “It’s a start,” he said.

  “Six chickens?” She counted again to be sure. “We don’t even have a shed for them.”

  He stood with his feet wide apart and looked at her as if she were stupid. “They’ll lay their eggs in the grass.”

  “That should be fun,” she said. “A hundred and sixty acres is a good-size pen.”

  “It’s a start. Next spring we’ll buy a cow. Who needs more?”

  Yes who? They survived their first winter here, though the chickens weren’t so lucky. The hens got lice and started pecking at each other. By the time Styan got around to riding in to town for something to kill the lice a few had pecked right through the skin and exposed the innards. When he came back from town they had all frozen to death in the yard.

  At home, back on her father’s farm in the blue mountains of the island, nothing had ever frozen to death. Her father had cared for things. She had never seen anything go so wrong there, or anyone have to suffer.

  She walks carefully now, for the trail is on the very edge of the river bank and is spongy and broken away in places. The water, clear and shallow here, back-eddies into little bays where cattail and bracken grow and where water-skeeters walk on their own reflection. A beer bottle glitters where someone, perhaps a guide on the river, has thrown it—wedged between stones as if it has been here as long as they have. She keeps her face turned to the river, away from the acres and acres of forest which are theirs.

  Listen, it’s nearly time, she thinks. And knows that soon, from far up the river valley, she will be able to hear the throbbing of the train, coming near.

  She imagines his face at the window. He is the only passenger in the coach and sits backwards, watching the land slip by, grinning in expectation or memory or both. He tells a joke to old Bill Cobb the conductor but even in his laughter does not turn his eyes from outside the train. One spot on his forehead is white where it presses against the glass. His fingers run over and over the long drooping ends of his moustache. He is wearing his hat.

  Hurry, hurry, she thinks. To the train, to her feet, to him.

  She wants to tell him about the skunk she spotted yesterday. She wants to tell him about the stove, which smokes too much and needs some kind of clean-out. She wants to tell him about her dream; how she dreamed he was trying to go into the river and how she pulled and hauled on his feet but he wouldn’t come out. He will laugh and laugh at her when she tells him, and his laughter will make it all right and not so frightening, so that maybe she will be able to laugh at it too.

  She has rounded the curve in the river and glances back, way back, at the cabin. It is dark and solid, not far from the bank. Behind the poplars the cleared fields are yellowing with the coming of fall but now in all that place there isn’t a thing alive, unless she wants to count trees and insects. No people. No animals. It is scarcely different from her very first look at it. In five years their dream of livestock has been shelved again and again.

  Once there was a cow. A sway-backed old Jersey.

  “This time I’ve done it right,” he said. “Just look at this prize.”

  And stepped down off the train to show off his cow, a wide-eyed beauty that looked at her through a window of the passenger coach.

  “Maybe so, but you’ll need a miracle, too, to get that thing down out of there.”

  A minor detail to him, who scooped her up and swung her around and kissed her hard, all in front of the old conductor and the engineer who didn’t even bother to turn away. “Farmers at last!” he shouted. “You can’t have a farm without a cow. You can’t have a baby without a cow.”

  She put her head inside the coach, looked square into the big brown eyes, glanced at the sawed-off horns. “Found you somewhere, I guess,” she said to the cow. “Turned out of someone’s herd for being too old or senile or dried up.”

  “An auction sale,” he said, and slapped one hand on the window glass. “I was the only one there who was desperate. But I punched her bag and pulled her tits; she’ll do. There may even be a calf or two left in her sway-backed old soul.”

  “Come on, bossy,” she said. “This is no place for you.”

  But the cow had other ideas. It backed into a corner of the coach and shook its lowered head. Its eyes, steady and dull, never left Crystal Styan.

  “You’re home,” Styan said. “Sorry there’s no crowd here or a band playing music, but step down anyway and let’s get started.”

  “She’s not impressed,” she said. “She don’t see any barn waiting out there either, not to mention hay or feed of any kind. She’s smart enough to know a train coach is at least a roof over her head.”

  The four of them climbed over the seats to get behind her and pushed her all the way down the aisle. Then, when they had shoved her down the steps, she fell on her knees on the gravel and let out a long unhappy bellow. She looked around, bellowed again, then stood up and high-tailed it down the tracks. Before Styan even thought to go after her she swung right and headed into bush.

  Styan disappeared into the bush, too, hollering, and after a while the train moved on to keep its schedule. She went back down the trail and waited in the cabin until nearly dark. When she went outside again she found him on the river bank, his feet in the water, his head resting against a birch trunk.

  “What the hell,” he said, and shook his head and didn’t look at her.

  “Maybe she’ll come back,” she said.

  “A bear’ll get her before then, or a cougar. There’s no hope of that.”

  She put a hand on his shoulder but he shook it off. He’d dragged her from place to place right up this river from its mouth, looking and looking for his dream, never satisfied until he saw this piece of land. For that dream and for him she had suffered.

  She smiles, though, at the memory. Because even then he was able to bounce back, resume the dream, start building new plans. She smiles, too, because she knows there will be a surprise today; there has always been a surprise. When it wasn’t a cow it was a bouquet of flowers or something else. She goes through a long list in her mind of what it may be, but knows it will be none of them. Not once in her life has anything been exactly the way she imagined it. Just so much as foreseeing something was a guarantee it wouldn’t happen, at least not in the exact same way.

  “Hey you, Styan!” she suddenly calls out. “Hey you, Jim Styan. Where are you?” And laughs, because the noise she makes can’t possibly make any difference to the world, except for a few wild animals that might be alarmed.

  She laughs again, and slaps one hand against her thigh, and shakes her head. Just give her—how many minutes now?—and she won’t be alone. These woods will shudder with his laughter, his shouting, his joy. That train, that dinky little train will drop her husband off and then pass on like a stay-stitch thread pulled from a seam.

  “Hey you, Styan! What you brought this time? A gold brooch? An old nanny goat?”

  The river runs past silently and she imagines that it is only shoulders she is seeing, that monster heads have ducked down to glide by but are watching her from eyes grey as stone. She wants to scream out “Hide, you crummy cheat, my Coyote’s coming home!” but is afraid to tempt even something that she does not believe in. And anyway she senses—far off—the beat of the little train coming down the valley from the town.

  And when it comes into sight she is there, on the platform in front of the little sagging shed, watching. She stands tilted far out over the tracks to see, but never dares—even when it is so far away—to step down onto the ties for a better look.

  The boards beneath her feet are rotting and broken. Long stems of grass have grown up through the cracks and brush against her legs. A squirrel runs down the slope of the shed’s roof and yatters at her until she turns and lifts her hand to frighten it into silence.

  She talks to herself, sings almost to the engine’s beat “Here he comes, here he comes”—and has her smile already as wide as it can be. She smiles into the side of the locomoti
ve sliding past and the freight car sliding past and keeps on smiling even after the coach has stopped in front of her and it is obvious that Jim Styan is not on board.

  Unless of course he is hiding under one of the seats, ready to leap up, one more surprise.

  But old Bill Cobb the conductor backs down the steps, dragging a gunny sack out after him. “H’lo there, Crystal,” he says. “He ain’t aboard today either, I’m afraid.” He works the gunny sack out onto the middle of the platform. “Herbie Stark sent this, it’s potatoes mostly, and cabbages he was going to throw out of his store.”

  She takes the tiniest peek inside the sack and yes, there are potatoes there and some cabbages with soft brown leaves.

  The engineer steps down out of his locomotive and comes along the side of the train rolling a cigarette. “Nice day again,” he says with barely a glance at the sky. “You makin’ out all right?”

  “Hold it,” the conductor says, as if he expects the train to move off by itself. “There’s more.” He climbs back into the passenger car and drags out a cardboard box heaped with groceries. “The church ladies said to drop this off,” he says.

  “They told me make sure you get every piece of it, but I don’t know how you’ll ever get it down to the house through all that bush.”

  “She’ll manage,” the engineer says. He holds a lighted match under the ragged end of his cigarette until the loose tobacco blazes up. “She’s been doing it—how long now?—must be six months.”

  The conductor pushes the cardboard box over against the sack of potatoes and stands back to wipe the sweat off his face. He glances at the engineer and they both smile a little and turn away. “Well,” the engineer says, and heads back down the tracks and up into his locomotive.

  The conductor tips his hat, says “Sorry,” and climbs back into the empty passenger car. The train releases a long hiss and then moves slowly past her and down the tracks into the deep bush. She stands on the platform and looks after it a long while, as if a giant hand is pulling, slowly, a stay-stitching thread out of a fuzzy green cloth.

  Other People’s Troubles

  In those early years, it seemed that she often dressed in green as pale and just as gentle as the wild mint patch growing not too far from the house. Oh, they would tease her for it; first he (born Barclay Miles but called Duke then for riding the haywagons like some kind of royalty) and then Dora and Mary too—all her children—saying maybe she was blind to any other colour and afraid of wearing red by mistake, which was her only hate, but saying it beyond her reach for safety just in case this once she didn’t want to laugh.

  The wind too was green, in the metal-flake poplar leaves up against the sky. Those poplars, twenty feet tall now or more, were planted near the house when he was born, and measured out his life in the slow uneven growth of unseen rings. All his life long they were growing, were stretching, were gauging time as strong and just as sure as any clock dong-donging on a mantel shelf.

  In that certain year, the poplar’s tenth year to the sky, they arrived at the end of a long pale spring and moved on forward into summer, knowing right away that it had to be a hot one. They could sense an orange-sky summer without trouble, for even in June they could walk all the way to the spring without once having to step on the planks, and soon—too soon—the long grass growing down the centre of the driveway started turning copper from the sun. The adults looked out at the farm and then at each other and said, “There’s bound to be a fire season this year.” Then he, too, looked out at the farm and then at the girls and said, “There’s sure to be a damn fire season this year,” because they knew even then that when the logging camps closed down and their father stayed home, the farm was far more work than fun.

  One day Momma touched his shoulder. “You kids stay out of trouble for an hour or two,” she said, because Mrs. Baxter’s husband was killed fighting fire and she was going over there.

  “Yes,” he said. “I guess I know how to behave.”

  “Then keep an eye on Dora, who doesn’t know.” Which was true, too, because Dora with her size would just as soon climb a tree right to the highest branch as not, and then holler for help down.

  “What can you do for dying?” he said.

  “I can try to make it easier by taking cakes over and this pie and by just talkin’ a little to her. Which is just about all anybody can do when a woman loses her husband in the woods.”

  But the woods didn’t close that summer. A fire burned all down the side of Whistler Hill and Eddie Baxter died under a falling tree and they did not close. The shallow wells dried up in the valley and cattle drooped and still the logging camps did not close. “They aren’t going to close,” his father said. “Them big-time managers off to California or Hawaii don’t give a damn about safety, and one of these days a spark will fly and the whole mountain will go up in smoke.” He had to take his turn once a week staying behind until dark watching for sparks.

  How do you watch for sparks is what I want to know. Do you crawl around peering under logs and things smelling for smoke or do you sit up on a stump like a squirrel watching all? Or do you curl up somewhere to read a book until the light is too poor to see by?

  Watching sparks was not the only thing his father found to complain about that summer. For reasons known only to himself (kept in, like everything else he thought, as if sharing would mean losing too) he objected to the way Momma was called on so often to help people out in their trouble. While she was doing the dishes—he did his best talking when her back was to him, it seemed, perhaps taking strength from the absence of the cool level eyes that could look in too far for comfort—he studied his hands first, dry and hard and cracked, and then said, “For a change you could stay home with your family where you belong and let someone else go.” Without even halting the motion of her hands she said, “What can I do? They ask me to come and what can I do about it?” He said, “That’s it,” and she said, “Yes,” and he said, “What is it about you that everybody comes crying to you with their troubles instead of someone else? Why does it always have to be you taking on other people’s troubles for them?”

  So she shook the soap from both hands and turned to him, saying as she wiped the hands on her apron, “I do what I can. Sometimes it seems there is nothing anyone can do, but they say they prefer to have me there to anyone else, so I go. If you have a strength the others don’t have, you just have to share it a little so the weak won’t suffer any more than they have to. There’s little enough I can do but I do what I can.”

  What she could do they never learned. What strength she had for others she kept secret from them. There she stood, steady as a fence post and about as tall, and not one person in the house had ever seen just whatever it was she did when she went out of the house to fix the messed-up lives of other people. So he decided right there, in the half-second it took her to turn around again and plunge her hands down in the hot water, that no secret in the world is strong enough to be kept for ever, and before much longer went by he would relieve her mind of the weight of all that private knowing.

  And just as if she knew his thoughts and was every bit as anxious as he was to share that knowing, she gave him his chance not more than two days later, came up to him while she struggled into her coat on the hottest day of July and said, “You got nothing better to do than stirring up mud wasps with your feet?”

  He pulled his bare feet away from the tap and drew them under him on the bottom step. “Not much,” he said.

  “It would be too much I suppose to expect an almost-ten-year-old boy to get the idea all by himself that he could be out hoeing or maybe carrying wood.”

  “Never thought of it,” he said, “but if that’s what you want.” He drew his feet out again and almost stood up.

  “Never mind,” she said. “I guess I should know by now that the only things boys think of by themselves is food and trouble and usually they’re the same thing. Come with me.”

  “Where we going?”

  “Nev
er mind that too, just wash up and come on. What have I got this coat on for, in this weather?” She took her coat off (new that Christmas and green as grass like everything else) and threw it over a chair, then dived into her bread drawer and took out two loaves of bread she had baked yesterday. “That’s all I’ve got in the house,” she said, and then he had to run to catch up before she got to the garage.

  He settled himself back in the car seat and prepared himself. He imagined her walking into a house of sorrow where women wept softly and then making them coffee and cooing words of sympathy. He imagined black dresses and flowers and whispering. But no amount of imagining in the front seat of a car would have prepared him for what did happen.

  Because she did not walk in. She stopped the car in front of Sandy Melville’s house and left him sitting there while she went up the hard dirt path to the door and put the loaves of bread there on the step. Then she came back, slammed the door hard, and sat waiting.

  Quickly the door of the little house opened. Emma Melville, with half her face the colour of a ripe plum, her body wrapped up in a long housecoat patterned like a tree, peered down at the bread, then up at the car, frowning, until she recognized the car or Momma sitting there behind the wheel as if she just never quite got away in time, and beckoned them in.

  He would rather stay in the car, he said (meaning it now) but no, she pushed him ahead of her down that path just as if she needed him this time and couldn’t go alone. She pushed him right in that front door, past a huge wood stove with a reservoir at one end and a line of washing above, past a flowered chesterfield strewn with magazines, and shoved him into a red-and-white wicker chair. He picked up a magazine with a naked woman on the cover and opened it.

  “Sit down,” Momma said.

  Emma Melville stood in the middle of the room with the two loaves of bread in her hands. She looked as if bread was the one thing in this world she did not know what to do with.