Wind Tails

by Anne Degrace

  Genevieve’s mother would drop her at our house on her way to work. I would still be in my pyjamas in front of my cornflakes, our Airedale sitting at my feet looking for a handout, and Genevieve would be already dressed in her kilt skirt and matching leotards, her fine blonde hair in twin barrettes. As my mother dressed me, “Your mother must get up early to get you all dressed and ready,” she said to Genevieve.

  “Oh, I dress myself,” said my friend, and my mother raised her eyebrows at me while I shot a look at Genevieve. I liked my mother’s no-nonsense fingers at the buttons of my blouse; I liked the way she pulled up my tights and gave me a little pat on the behind as if to say: everything is in place, now, just as it should be.

  By the spring of that year it was clear that something was not right with Genevieve. She was losing weight; she bruised easily. There were visits to the doctor, and then there were stays in the hospital. I heard my mother talking on the phone about a bone marrow transplant.

  “What’s a—” I looked for the word “—bone marrow?”

  “It carries blood and oxygen. It’s something you need to have working well in order to be healthy.”

  “And Genevieve’s isn’t?”

  “No darling, not right now.”

  In kindergarten, we all made pictures to put up in her hospital room. I made a painting of a teepee, bright suns on the outside like the one in the corner of the picture.

  At Christmas, Genevieve got an Easy-Bake Oven. We’d seen the commercials on television, during the breaks between Razzle Dazzle and Beany and Cecil. We talked about the things we could make with an Easy-Bake Oven, imagined wedding cakes with pink and white icing. For Christmas, I received a paint set. It was a good set, with lots of colours and three sizes of brushes, but it wasn’t an Easy-Bake Oven.

  “How come Santa brought Genevieve an Easy-Bake Oven, but not me?” I asked my mother.

  “Oh, darling…” she said. Genevieve was back in the hospital. If she wasn’t going to be able to play with it, I thought I should be able to.

  In January, just before my birthday, my mother sat beside me on my bed. My room was yellow, like the sun I painted in my picture for Genevieve, and I remember looking at the walls that always made me feel happy when I’d wake up in the morning.

  “Genevieve has gone to Heaven,” my mother told me. Later, I overheard her talking about the funeral. When I asked about it, “a funeral is no place for a child,” she said.

  “I want to say goodbye to Genevieve.”

  “She’s gone, honey. You wouldn’t see her anyway. She’s already buried in the cemetery, beside her father. It’s just a service.”

  Later, I came home from school to find Genevieve’s Easy-Bake Oven on the kitchen counter. It looked smaller than I thought it would. The spoons were small and plastic, and the round cake pans were barely the size of my palm.

  “Genevieve’s mother wanted you to have this,” my mother told me.

  “Did Genevieve want to give it to me?”

  “Of course, dear. That’s what she would have wanted.”

  I opened the first package of cake mix. In it were tiny oval things I thought might be some kind of nuts, but as I pushed one with my finger, it curled up.

  “Oh!” said my mother. “Weevils!” and she swept the bowl away and tossed the powder in the garbage. “It’s too old,” she explained. “It’s past its shelf life. When that happens, sometimes things get bugs growing in them.”

  “Like Genevieve in the ground?” I asked. I was curious. It’s what kids at school were saying.

  My mother gave me a look. “Let’s open this package and see if it still looks good,” she said.

  I poured the powder into the bowl and used the tiny cup to measure out the water. I watched through the window as the heat from the sixty-watt bulb made the mixture in the pan rise. When I took it out, I touched the top with my finger, watched the tiny indent spring back to life. Then I cut a wedge.

  “Here, Genevieve.” I held it out to the air. After a while, I set it down on the counter. I thought that maybe she would only come if I went away, that maybe now that she was in heaven, she didn’t want to be seen. I thought that for a long time, and would sometimes speak to her when I was playing in the backyard, in case she was out of sight, listening. I don’t remember when I stopped doing that. I know I never said goodbye.

  Shortly after my mother sat with me on my bed and told me about Genevieve, I heard her talking to one of her friends, the phone pressed to her ear as she looked out the kitchen window, unaware of me standing in the doorway. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose a child,” she said.

  Well, now she’s lost me. I never told her about the baby. I never said anything about what I saw. I went back later that night, when I knew Eamon would be at the bar, Dad still away on business, Mum at her bridge club, and packed up what I could. I called from Lethbridge and told Mum I decided to drop out of school, since I was failing anyway.

  “What will your father say?” she said, but the alarm in her voice sounded false. As for Dad, he’d had less and less to say anyway, since Mum started working, and, I suppose, since I stopped being a little girl. And he was away more and more.

  Dad.

  He would bounce me on his knee when I was small. I must have been about four; it seems to be my earliest memory. This is the way the gentlemen go, gentlemen go, gentlemen go…Gallop! Gallop! Gallop! I would squeal as I was bounced around, but the best part was the way the farmers went on their pretend horses, hobbledy-hoy all over the place, me slipping and laughing, Dad catching me and then tickling me under my armpits. Mum would tell Dad to stop: he’d get me all excited, and then who would have to deal with me? I never knew what that meant.

  Once I asked Dad if I was adopted. I was sitting with him on the front porch and he was playing with my hair, whispering “carrots” in my ear, like in Anne of Green Gables, my favourite book that year. Neither he nor my mother had red hair.

  “Adopted?” he laughed. “Why would you think that, my little plumber?”

  Dad called me Josephine the Plumber, a joke I never understood until I found out she was a character in television ads for cleanser, white overalls, hair in a kerchief, red-painted fingernail wagging. When I protested—I must have been twelve or so by then—he laughed. “Plumbing is a noble profession,” he told me. “Whatever you decide to do in life, make sure you have one good, saleable skill. Learn to cut hair. Or type. Then you’ll never be without work.”

  Of course, Dad thought I’d go to college, on to university, become a journalist, a teacher. But as for a good, saleable skill, I guess waitressing fits the bill. If Dad knew where I was, if he knew what had happened, what would he think? What does he think now?

  I’m sure Mum never thought she wouldn’t hear from me again, her voice coming through the payphone receiver like she was on the other side of the country. She never thought I wouldn’t come crawling home when I’d had enough of low-paying, dead-end jobs and Kraft Dinner. She was angry with me for taking off. She was angry that I didn’t want to tell her where I was. She was angry when I asked to speak to Dad, and told me he was away on business. I told her I was between places.

  “Well, you’re an adult, I suppose. You’ll do what you do.”

  “Yes, that’s right. And you’re supposed to be an adult, too.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” She sounded annoyed, and not nearly as worried about me as I wanted her to be. She’s my mother, after all.

  “It means you’ll do what you do.”

  I’m thinking about all of this, the ketchup container suspended in midair, when I hear a car pull into the parking lot.

  Behind me, Cass stops humming whatever is in her head from the radio. “Jo? Soup’s done. There’s just sandwich stuff now. I’m heading into town.” I hear the back door slam at precisely the same moment as the car door opens.

  I think about Cass’s box, her photographs, the people in her life, the stories she’s accumulated. Th
en there’s Pink and his story. Will I see him again, I wonder? Or is that just the end of that story: an intro, nothing more. We cross paths with people all the time, never sure how a chance meeting may alter the paths we travel ourselves.

  I have the coffee pot in hand as the old woman steps out onto the parking lot gravel.

  Second wind

  The sharper the blast,

  The sooner ’tis past

  — Proverb

  “Folks are too polite,” Eunice always says. “They don’t ever say what they’re thinking, and they pussyfoot around, talking to everyone else but the person who really needs to know. That’s the worst thing in the world, thinking someone thinks one way of you, then finding out later they think something else altogether. Burns me up. People need to tell the truth.”

  Eunice knows a thing or two about truth. Raising three boys on her own during the Depression, her husband gallivanting around who knows where, truth was all you had some days. She’ll tell you her boys grew up knowing what’s what.

  “I had to be strong, that’s all there was to it,” she’ll say, wagging her finger, keeping you in your chair. “I had to speak my mind; there was no time for pussyfooting around a subject.”

  What she won’t speak of is her husband, Edmund, who left not long after Bobby was born. Not anymore, she won’t. She won’t tell you about how they met, him sneaking under the tent flap when the Chautauqua came through town, only to come up right beside her where she sat watching the acrobatics. She won’t tell you about how he made her laugh, right from that moment, how his clowning charmed her, made her see everything in a sort of twinkling light. How, when Bobby came seven years after Charlie and that made three boys, he laughed and told her now he had a juggling act. That he’d have to run away and join the circus, and take his three bouncing boys with him. She won’t tell you about how, when he did leave, he didn’t take the boys, but he did take the elephant girl, the two of them packing up a halfday before the travelling circus pulled up stakes.

  The neighbours watched as Eunice’s boys grew up and began to find ways to stay away from home: Stuart got on at the mill when he was barely fourteen, most of his wages coming home to add to the money Eunice made bookkeeping for the gravel company. Charlie never told Eunice that basketball kept him out after school most days; she thought he had a job delivering papers, and Stuart gave him a little money to bring home to prove it. Eunice didn’t approve of sports— anything fun being a waste of time—nor would she ever subscribe to a newspaper, a waste of money, and a bunch of liars anyway. But Bobby had no luck finding work and, quietest of the Currie boys, was unable to lie to his mother. “You telling the truth, boy?” she’d ask, his chin viced between her thumb and forefinger. Paralyzed by fear, he could do nothing to cross her.

  But then Bobby fell in love with Sylvia.

  “I remember the time he invited that little snippet Sylvia Bruneau over for dinner,” Eunice will tell you, with so much acid in her voice you won’t know where to look. “I never liked for any of my boys to be smitten with a girl. Makes them lose their heads.” Of course, whatever Eunice thought about men in general, those boys were all she had.

  This particular day Eunice tells Bobby as he heads for school: “You can eat that leftover beef stew for supper. Stuart’s working late, and so is Charlie, extra route or something. I have a Ladies Auxiliary meeting at the church.” But when Bobby opens the door late in the afternoon, Sylvia’s small hand in his, the smell of roast chicken strikes him right in the face. Has he got the day wrong? There is nowhere to go; Eunice has heard the door and here she is, heels sharp against the hallway linoleum, tea towel in hand, ready to tell her boy to go wash up. But who is that she sees, hanging back in the shadows?

  “Ma, I’d like it if Sylvie could stay for chicken,” Bobby musters.

  Eunice looks over Sylvia, her white ankle socks and her pink cardigan. Sylvia extends her hand.

  “So pleased to meet you, Mrs. Currie,” and Eunice thinks: well, she’s respectful, anyway. So she says yes, she supposes there’s enough for one more and turns back to the kitchen, thinking she’ll ream her boy out later for being inconsiderate, bringing a guest home without warning. She doesn’t like surprises. Bobby looks nervous, she thinks, but then, he’s probably gaga over this silly girl; Eunice will have a few words with Bobby about that, that’s for sure. She pulls the chicken out on the rack for a final baste, thinking as she does that she can’t remember when any of her boys brought someone home. It’s when she realizes that she wasn’t supposed to be home that the fat misses the bird and hits the hot oven door, spitting. The pain on her wrist is knife-hot.

  Bobby and Sylvia sit in the living room, side by side on the couch.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I didn’t know.” In his mind he can see the evening play out the way he had hoped it would; his palm tingles when he imagines his hand cupping her breast through her soft cardigan.

  “I want to go home,” says Sylvia, but he puts his hand on her arm. “No, please,” he says. “It’s better if you stay.” Maybe, he thinks desperately, it will be all right. “Maybe you could offer to help in the kitchen?” Knowing, as he said it, that it was like sending the maiden into the dragon’s den. “I’m sorry,” he says again.

  She feels the tremble in his touch, leans forward to kiss him on the cheek.

  That’s when the tea towel comes down, crack! across the back of the couch.

  “You’re just like your mother!” Eunice hisses as Sylvia recoils, eyes wide. Bobby has his hands in the air, palms out, as if to ward off the tidal wave that is his mother, but there is no stopping Eunice. “Carrying on the way she does with that gypsy with the knife cart every time he comes through town. That Eyetalian fellow walks through the streets ringing that bell pulling that wagon, looking like he hasn’t bathed in a week. Everyone knows what’s going on except that dingbat of a father of yours, but no surprise since he’s got less than half a brain upstairs. So don’t you come in here with your ways and your wiles and go after my Bobby!”

  Eunice says the last words to empty air. There is the shudder of the front door, followed by the slam of Bobby’s bedroom door. He refuses to come out for dinner. Serves him right, she thinks, as she eats roast chicken alone, fork stabbing at its flesh. She’s not hungry anymore, but she eats every scrap on her plate, stabbing, chewing, swallowing. She leaves Bobby’s plate on the table; he can have his dinner cold for breakfast.

  The boys grow up and move east. Stuart works the docks in Halifax Harbour; Charlie opens a corner grocery store in Moose Lake, and Bobby winds up a drunk somewhere in Toronto. They are as far away as they can get. Every year or two she’ll get a postcard, a few stark lines. Sometimes she’ll get mention of Bobby, Charlie down to Toronto for a weekend. Bobby says hello is the closest she’s got to news of her youngest.

  “Heard from your boys, Eunice?” asks Blanche Fowler in the hardware store.

  “Mail’s slow,” she answers. “Don’t know what’s with Canada Post, used to be next-day delivery, now it costs three times as much and takes a coon’s age to get across town,” Eunice says. “Don’t know why we pay taxes if we can’t even get a decent postal service.”

  The house is empty without the boys. She hates the sounds it makes as it settles, hates the tick of the clock. She hates the sound of her own heels on the hard linoleum. Against her better judgment, she gets a phone. That’s what she tells the man behind the desk when she orders its installation. Against my better judgment. She doesn’t say: perhaps Stu will call. Or Charlie, or Bobby.

  The phone is black. It has a presence, and she likes that, just as she likes the heft of the receiver in her hand. Eunice gets a party line; it’s cheaper.

  “Long-short-short is your ring,” the man behind the desk tells her. “You’ll hear the phone ring for others on the line. That won’t bother you, Mrs. Currie?” She is about to demand to know how he knows her name, and then she remembers she wrote it down on the papers in front of him.
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  “We’ll see,” she says.

  When the phone rings the first time, echoing around the walls of the hallway, it’s not her ring, but she picks it up anyway, her hand pressed against the mouthpiece. She recognizes the voices at once. It’s Mary Popoff talking to Blanche Fowler.

  “…Eunice Currie in Henderson’s Hardware yesterday. What she was wearing? God only knows what century she thinks she’s living in,” says Blanche.

  Somebody guffaws.

  “Not that she’s trying to impress anyone. Oh, I felt sorry for her when that husband of hers left, but she’s made damn sure nobody else would ever come sniffing around, didn’t she? And she was still a pretty thing back then. But now…well, you know how she is. At cards the other day we were talking about what she said to Brenda Spencer, and you know, everyone at the table had a story just like that.”

  “Hard to imagine her ever married, least long enough to produce those three. Does anyone even remember that husband of hers? No wonder those boys lit out like they did. But then, none of those Curries were worth a lead penny. What gets me is how stuck up she is, that mouth going off at the church bazaar committee meetings, like she knows everything. If she makes that thing she calls an upside-down cake again, I’ll throw up.”

  Eunice hears Blanche giggle. “Well, that’s what it looks like, anyway—something the dog threw up. My kids won’t go near that place, say she’s a witch. No, it’s not nice, but she’s earned it, hasn’t she?”

  There’s a pause, and Eunice holds her breath.

  “We’ll just have to go on being nice to her, Mary, that’s all. That’s what Reverend Johns says, and we’ve all got to be on that committee.”

  “Well, try not to sit beside her, that’s my advice.”

  Eunice goes to the next meeting. She plans to confront them, and she takes along her cane in case she needs to use it. She’s not above defending herself. But when she gets there, the Reverend is addressing the ladies, and Eunice has always liked him. And as usual, Sally Symonds, Mitzi Brunfeld, and the others are polite, even respectful, and she thinks that maybe she misheard, somehow, that maybe it’s just Blanche and Mary, going on the way two women do, sometimes… Until Blanche asks her if she was going to make her upside-down cakes again this year, and Eunice sees the knowing smiles bloom, and she feels the momentary softness turn granite. But when she turns to speak, the pain in her side makes it hard to think straight. It’s a good thing she has a doctor’s appointment in—yes, in a half-hour, and, feeling shaky, she asks the Reverend if he might be kind enough to drive her there.