Hag-Seed

by Margaret Atwood

  Creativity. Talent. The two most overused words in the business, Felix thought bitterly. And the three most useless things in the world: a priest's cock, a nun's tits, and a heartfelt vote of thanks. "Stuff your bust," he said. But then he relented. "Thanks, Lonnie," he said. "I realize you mean well." He stuck out his hand. Lonnie shook it.

  Was that actually a tear, rolling down the too-red cheek? Was that a quiver of the jowl? Lonnie should watch his ass with Tony at the helm, thought Felix. Especially if he keeps displaying such blubbery compunction. Tony would have no qualms; he'd crush any opposition, punish any hesitation, surround himself with thugs, lop off the deadwood.

  "Any time you need a recommendation," said Lonnie. "I'd be happy to...or...I understand there's a...maybe after a rest...You've been working too hard, ever since your, your terribly sad, I was so sorry, it's way been too much, no one should have to..."

  Lonnie had been at the funeral; at both funerals, Nadia's first. He'd been very upset about Miranda. He'd thrown a little bouquet of pink tea roses into the tiny grave, rather theatrically Felix had thought at the time, though he'd appreciated the gesture. Then Lonnie had broken down entirely, hiccupping into a white handkerchief as big as a tablecloth.

  Tony had been at the funeral too, the sneaky rat, in a dark tie and a mourning face, though he must have been perfecting his coup even then.

  "Thanks," said Felix again, cutting Lonnie short. "I'll be fine. And thanks," he said to the two Security men. "You've been helpful. I appreciate it."

  "Drive safe, Mr. Phillips," said one of them.

  "Yeah," said the other. "We're just doin' our job." It was an apology of sorts. They probably knew what it was like to get fired.

  Then Felix climbed into his unsatisfactory car and drove out of the parking lot, into the rest of his life.

  The rest of his life. How long that time had once felt to him. How quickly it has sped by. How much of it has been wasted. How soon it will be over.

  --

  Leaving the Festival parking lot, Felix didn't have the sensation of driving. Instead he felt he was being driven, as if blown by a high wind. He was cold, although by this time the drizzle had stopped and the sun was shining, and also he had the heat turned on. Was he in shock? No: he wasn't shivering. He was calm.

  The theatre, with its fluttering pennants and water-spewing dolphin fountain and outdoor patio and landscaped floral surroundings and festive ice-cream-licking playgoers, soon vanished. The main street of Makeshiweg, with its pricey restaurants and its pubs ornamented with the heads of archaic poets and pigs and Renaissance queens and frogs and gnomes and roosters, and its Celtic woollen-goods outlets and Inuit carving shops and English china boutiques, and then its handsome Victorian yellow brick houses with their occasional bed-and-breakfast signs, petered out into a string of drugstores and shoe repairs and Thai nail bars. Then, after a few more traffic lights, the carpet outlet warehouses and the Mexican food joints and the hamburger heavens of the strip mall on the outskirts were also left behind, and Felix was adrift.

  Where was he? He had no idea. All around him stretched rolling fields, the tender green of spring wheat, the darker green of soybeans. Islands of trees extruded their feathery or glistening leaves around the century-old farmhouses, their gray wooden barns still serviceable, their silos punctuating the horizontals. The road was gravel now, and not in good repair.

  He slowed down, looked around him. He longed for a den, a hidey-hole, a place where he knew no one and no one knew him. A retreat where he could recuperate, for now he was beginning to acknowledge to himself how badly he was wounded.

  In a day or two, three at the most, Tony would plant some lying story in the newspapers. It would say that Felix had resigned as Artistic Director to pursue other opportunities, but nobody would believe that version. If he stayed in Makeshiweg, ill-intentioned reporters would sniff him out, relishing the fall of the mighty one. They'd phone him, lurk in ambush, corner him in one of the town bars, supposing he was foolish enough to go into one. They'd ask him if he cared to comment, hoping to provoke some yelling from him, considering his irascible reputation. But yelling would be a waste of breath, for what would it accomplish?

  The sun was declining; its light slanted, grew yellower. How long had he been out here? Wherever here was. He drove on.

  --

  At some distance from the road, at the end of a disused laneway, there was an odd structure. It looked as if it had been built into a low hillside, enclosed by the earth with only its front wall showing. It had one window, and a door standing agape. There was a metal chimney pipe protruding from the wall, then elbowing upward, with a tin cap on the top. There was a clothesline, with a single clothespin still gripping a scrap of dishcloth. It was the last place anyone would expect Felix to land.

  No harm in looking. So Felix looked.

  He parked his car on the roadside, then walked down the laneway, damp grass and weeds swishing at his pant legs. The door creaked when he opened it wider, but a drop of oil on the hinges would fix that. The ceiling was low, with beams made of poles, whitewashed at one time, now spiderwebbed. The interior smelled not too unpleasantly of earth and wood, with a hint of ash: that was from the iron stove, with two burners and a small oven, rusty but still intact. Two rooms, the main room and another room that must have been the bedroom. It had a skylight--the glass looked somewhat new--and a side door, hooked shut. Felix unhooked the door and opened it. There was an overgrown path, then an outhouse. Thankfully he would not be reduced to the digging of a latrine: others had done that for him.

  There was no furniture apart from a heavy old wooden armoire in the bedroom and a Formica-topped kitchen table, red with silver swirls. No chairs. There was a wide-planked floor: at least it wasn't mud. There was even a sink, with a hand pump. There was an electric light, and, miraculously, it turned on. Someone must have lived here more recently than, say, 1830.

  It held less than the bare essentials, but if he could locate the owner, strike a deal, fix the place up a bit, it would do.

  By choosing this shack and the privations that would come with it, he would of course be sulking. He'd be hair-shirting himself, playing the flagellant, the hermit. Watch me suffer. He recognized his own act, an act with no audience but himself. It was childish, this self-willed moping. He was not being grown-up.

  But in reality what were his options? He was too notorious to be able to find another job; not one of equal stature, not one he'd want. And Sal O'Nally, with his hand on the treasure chest of grants, would subtly block any senior appointment: Tony wouldn't want a rival, with Felix outdoing the Makeshiweg Festival from some other vantage point. Tony and Sal, working together as they obviously had already, would make sure his head stayed underwater. So why give them the satisfaction of trying?

  --

  He drove back to Makeshiweg the way he'd come and parked in front of the small brick cottage that he'd sublet for the current season. Ever since that unthinkable stretch of time...ever since he'd no longer had a family, he'd chosen not to own a house. He'd rented the homes of others. He still had a few pieces of furniture: a bed, a desk, a lamp, two old wooden chairs that he and Nadia had picked up at a yard sale. Personal bric-a-brac. Things left over from what had once been a complete life.

  And the photo of his Miranda, of course. He always kept it near him, where he could look at it if he felt himself starting to slip down into the dark. He'd taken that picture himself, when Miranda was almost three. It was her first time on a swing. Her head was tipped back; she was laughing with joy; she was flying through the air; her small fists gripped the ropes; the morning light aureoled her hair. The frame around her was painted silver, a silver window frame. On the other side of that magical window she was still alive.

  And now she would have to stay locked behind the glass, because, with the destruction of his Tempest, the new Miranda--the Miranda he'd been intending to create, or possibly to resurrect--was dead in the water.

  Tony hadn'
t even had the decency to allow him to meet with the staff, the technical support, the actors. To say goodbye. To voice his regret that his Tempest would not happen. He'd been hustled off like a criminal. Were Tony and his minions afraid of him? Afraid of a general rebellion, a counter-coup? Did they seriously think Felix had that much power?

  --

  He called a moving company and asked how soon they could come. It was an emergency, he said; he needed everything packed up and stored as quickly as possible; he'd pay extra for the rush. He wrote a cheque to the owner of his sublet, covering the balance of the term. He went to the bank, deposited Tony's shitty kiss-off money, informed the manager that he would shortly have a different address and would notify them by letter.

  Luckily he had some savings. He could remain invisible to the world at large, for now.

  --

  His next task was to locate the owner of the hillside dwelling. He drove back out to the gravel road, then tried the nearest farmhouse. A woman answered the door; middle-aged, middling looks, of middle height, with neutral hair scraped back into a ponytail. Jeans and a sweatshirt; behind her on the linoleum-tile floor, a child's plastic toy. Felix's heart gave a tiny lurch.

  The woman crossed her arms and stood blocking the doorway. "I seen your car before," she said. "Up at the shanty there."

  "Yes," said Felix with what he considered his most charming manner. "I was wondering. Do you know who owns it?"

  "Why?" said the woman. "Not us. We're not paying no tax on it. That old thing, worth nothing. Left over from the pioneers or whatever, before they had any money. I told Bert it should've been burned down years ago."

  Ah, thought Felix. A deal can be made. "I have been ill," he said, which wasn't entirely a lie. "I need a rest in the country. I think the air would do me good."

  "Air," said the woman with a snort. "There's a lot of air around here, if that's what you want. It's free, last time I looked. Help yourself."

  "I would like to live in the little cottage," Felix said, smiling in a harmless manner. He wished to give the impression that he was dotty, but not too dotty. A loony but not a maniac. "I would pay rent, of course. In cash," he added.

  That changed everything, and Felix was asked to come in and sit at the kitchen table, and they got down to business. The woman wanted the money, she made no secret of it. Bert--the husband--couldn't make enough off the alfalfa and was driving the propane route to make ends meet, plus he cleared driveways in winter. He was away a lot, leaving her to cope with everything. Another snort, a toss of the head: "everything" included loonies like Felix.

  She said that folks had lived in the shanty off and on, the latest being "two hippies, him a painter, her whatever you'd call what shacks up with painters"--that was a year ago. Before then, a poor uncle of hers; and before that, an aunt of Bert's who was a few bricks short of a load and had to be put away. Earlier than that she didn't know, because it was before her time. Some folks said the little house was haunted, but Felix should pay no attention to that rumor, she said derisively, because those people were ignorant and it wasn't true. (She clearly thought it was.)

  It was agreed that Felix would have the use of the shanty, and could make whatever improvements he wanted. Bert would plow the laneway in winter so Felix wouldn't have to walk through the snow all the way up. Maude--the wife--would handle the cash, in an envelope every first of the month, and if anyone asked it never happened, because Felix was her uncle and was living there for free. She and Bert would supply the wood for the stove: their teenage son could haul it over on the tractor. She'd already figured the cost of that into the price. If Felix liked, she could do his wash for him, extra.

  Felix thanked her, and said they should wait and see. On his part, he stipulated that she not tell anyone about him. He was lying low, he said. He had his own reasons, but they were not criminal ones.

  She looked sideways at him; she didn't believe him about the criminality, but she didn't care about it either. "Trust me on that," she said. Oddly, he did trust her.

  They shook hands at the door. She had a tough grip, more like a man's. "What's your name?" she said. "I mean, what name should I say, in case?"

  Felix hesitated. None of your business trembled on his lips. "Mr. Duke," he said.

  It didn't take Felix long to discover that it was easy to disappear, and that his disappearance was borne lightly by the world at large. The hole his sudden absence left in the fabric of the Makeshiweg Festival was filled soon enough--filled, indeed, by Tony. The show rolled on, as shows do.

  Where had Felix gone? It was a mystery, but not one that anyone appeared dedicated to solving. He could imagine the chit-chat. Maybe he'd had a breakdown? Jumped off a bridge? The intensity of his sorrow when his little girl had died--so tragic--and then the way he'd immediately become obsessed over that frankly crack-brained Tempest of his, you had to wonder. But you didn't have to wonder very long, because for everyone doing the wondering, other, more pressing concerns would have flowed into the empty space left by Felix's departure, and the ripples of gossip must quickly have subsided. There were careers to be advanced, there were parts to be memorized, there were skills to be honed.

  Here's to the mad old bugger, he could imagine them saying in the Toad and Whistle or the King's Head or the Imp and Pig-Nut, or wherever else the actors and factotums of the Festival were in the habit of lifting a glass in their off-hours. To the Maestro. To Felix Phillips, wherever he is.

  --

  Felix moved his bank account to a branch in Wilmot, two towns away, where he also rented a post office box for himself. He was, after all, still alive; he would need, for instance, to file his tax return. Nothing would set the dogs on his trail so quickly as a failure to comply. Such was the minimum price to be paid for the privilege of walking around on the earth's crust and continuing to breathe, eat, and shit, he thought sourly.

  He opened a second bank account in the name of F. Duke, claiming this was a nom de plume. He was, he explained to the bank, a writer. It pleased him to have an alter ego, one without his own melancholy history. Felix Phillips was washed up, but F. Duke might still have a chance; though at what he could not yet say.

  For tax-paying purposes he kept his own name. Simpler that way. But he was "Mr. Duke" to Maude and Bert, and to their scowling little daughter, Crystal, who clearly thought Felix was a child-devourer, and to Walter, their surly teenage son, who, for the first few years--before he moved out west to work in Alberta--did indeed haul a few loads of firewood over to Felix's modest abode every fall.

  For a time, Felix tried to amuse himself by casting Maude as the blue-eyed hag, Sycorax the witch, and Walter as Caliban the semi-human log-hauler and dishwasher, in his own personal Tempest--his Tempest of the headspace--but that didn't last long. None of it fitted: Bert the husband wasn't the devil, and young Crystal, a podgy, stubby child, could not be imagined as the sylph-like Miranda.

  And there was no room for an Ariel in this menage, though Felix paid Bert--who was handy with tools--to add an extra electrical cable in from their farmhouse, alongside the surely illegal one that was already there. With that he could run a small heater on cold days, and also a bar fridge and a two-burner hotplate, though he could not have them all on at once without causing a blackout. He bought an electric kettle too. Maude estimated how much power he used and overcharged him accordingly. If the Maude family was anything in The Tempest, they were lesser elementals: a source of power, though not very much of it, he joked to himself.

  Apart from the envelope of cash that Felix delivered into the roughened fist of Maude on the first of every month, he had little contact with his landlords, if that is what they were. The Maude family minded their own business. And Felix minded his.

  --

  But what was his business?

  He made an attempt to avoid news of the theatre, and reading about the theatre, and thinking about the theatre. It was too hurtful. But his attempts were rarely successful. He found himself buying the local
papers, and even the ones from nearby cities, scanning the reviews, then ripping them up for fire-starters.

  During this early period of mourning and brooding he turned to the improvement of his rustic dwelling. The activity was therapeutic. He tidied up the inside space, swept away the cobwebs, got his few things out of storage and moved them in. With a little oiling and priming and a new rubber gasket, the hand pump worked. There was no mystery to the outhouse: it was functional, and so far not smelly. He bought a package of a brown granular substance advertised as being the right thing for outhouses and dumped some in periodically. He added a rug to the bedroom floor. He added a night table. The photo of Miranda perched brightly upon it, laughing with joy.

  Despite his pathetic attempts at domesticity, he slept restlessly and woke often.

  --

  He bought a few implements at the hardware store in Wilmot: a hammer, a scythe. He cut the weeds in front of the shanty; he cleaned the window and, more precariously, the skylight. He thought of digging a garden, planting some tomatoes or other vegetables. But no: that would be going too far. Still, he kept himself busy. He worked at it, this busyness of his.

  It wasn't enough.

  He went to the library and took out books. Surely he should use this opportunity to read all those classics he'd never made it through in youth. The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment...But he couldn't do it: there was too much real life, there was too much tragedy. Instead he found himself gravitating to children's stories in which everything came out all right in the end. Anne of Green Gables, Peter Pan. Fairy tales: Snow White, Sleeping Beauty. Girls left for dead in glass coffins or four-poster beds, then brought miraculously back to life by the touch of love: that was what he longed for. A reversal of fate.

  "You must have grandchildren," the nice librarian said to him. "Do you read to them?" Felix nodded and smiled. No sense in telling her the truth.

  But even this resource was exhausted for him after a while. He began to spend a reprehensible amount of time sitting in the shade, in a striped deck chair he'd found at a garage sale, staring into space. When you did that long enough you began to see things that weren't there strictly speaking, but this didn't alarm him. Shapes in clouds, faces in the leaves. They made him feel less lonely.