Wind Tails

by Anne Degrace

  “Why would anyone do that?” Buck asked when the patrol picked him up for questioning. “There’s plenty of work already, no need to make more.”

  Someone had come forward, Buck learned, reported seeing him sneaking out at night. It wasn’t true, but it meant a bonus for them, and, his reserved demeanour taken for unfriendliness, he wasn’t much liked.

  In jail for a year, Buck would walk by another inmate and feel like he’d been doused in something black, tarry. He’d want to go shower but they saw him as a troublemaker and wouldn’t let him. He began to feel as if his skin were crawling with vermin, things he couldn’t get off, and he started brushing at himself all the time, unaware he was doing it. After two years in a mental hospital, Buck stopped seeing things.

  Afterwards Buck got work in construction, working for a cousin of the only guard to befriend him. When he met and married Angela, a gentle, patient woman, he figured the worst was over. He named their boy Talus after his father, even though by then Buck hadn’t spoken to him for years. As the boy grew, Buck never said a word to him about the family business. Never talked to him much at all, he’s come to realize.

  Apple never falls far from the tree, does it, Buck thinks now as he stuffs the map into the glovebox in the truck, feeling the wind pick up, the drops falling harder. He watches as a white Austin drives by, its driver so short as to be hardly visible above the wheel. Deer, he thinks, as he notes the telltale concave of dented hood. They can take you by surprise, the way they jump out like that.

  Now, Buck’s son Tal lives in Vancouver, working the stock market. He’s done well for himself; he has an uncanny ability to sense a good investment, and so far as he knows it’s a little math, a little savvy, some horse sense and a good hunch. Unlike Buck, for Tal, the gift seems manageable.

  Yet when Angela died a few years ago—cancer, just like Buck’s mother—Buck never saw it coming. Like a tap, he thought at the time: on and off, off and on, no saying, anymore, how, or when. Here he is now, Angela gone and Tal married and with a boy of his own. Buck, alone again, settled into cabinetry, working in apple, walnut, maple. He always did love a good wood, the way you can hear the music in it.

  When his father’s letter found him, Buck knew before he opened it.

  “You’re here,” Talus said from his bed when Buck arrived, like he’d been gone a day or two instead of forty years. “It’s time we talked.”

  Talus, in a flood of words, recounted thoughts and memories, dreams and disappointments. He talked about their gift, without ever naming the thing. He told Buck he hadn’t gone out witching in over two years, even though folks from all over still called him on the old phone in the hallway. He showed Buck the topographic maps, marked with Xs, and then names: Peters. Williston. Nedelec. The hand was shaky, and Buck recognized the blue ink from the fountain pen Talus always kept. A Waterman, part of the family joke.

  The neighbour down the highway, Mrs. Schupmeyer, came in once a day. Buck remembered her, recalled she’d come to the farm as a new bride not long before Buck hit the skids. She’d been on that farm all those years, she told Buck, buried a husband and a son, had a daughter and son-in-law living there now and a mess of grandkids, but still she had time for Talus.

  “Oh, I don’t mind,” she assured him. “If it wasn’t for your father…”

  Buck saw, for the first time, a man with a talent to find the thing people needed most. “It’s the root,” Talus told him not too long before the morning he didn’t get up. “It’s what we’re made of, water. You remember that.”

  The morning after his father was buried Buck headed for the closest farm Talus had marked on the map. He didn’t know if he could do it, but he drove out there anyway. When he knew for sure where the water was, he looked at the map, just to see. Talus never even left the house by the time the Thompsons had called him, but the spot he’d marked was the same as the place where Buck was standing.

  Buck sits in the cab of the truck listening to the drum of the water outside. He watches the rivers snake down the windshield, but his mind is in the field, in his hands the pull of a forked stick. He puts the truck in gear.

  There’s a figure on the road looking soaked through. Buck pulls over; nobody should be out in rain like this.

  “Oh, man, thanks,” says the hitchhiker when he climbs inside after throwing his pack in the back.

  “Sorry about the water.”

  Buck looks at the puddles pooling on the seat, and then at the young man who grins at him through dripping hair.

  “A little water never hurt anything,” Buck says.

  He pulls back onto the road and into the liquid grey morning.

  10:55 a.m.

  Soup of the day

  “I suppose we’re all looking for something. Water’s as good a thing as anything to look for, I reckon.” The balding man picks up the water glass from the counter and holds it up, the liquid distorting one sky-blue eye as he looks through it.

  Jo has brought him today’s soup—vegetable beef— and a roll, and he warms his hands over the steam while his coat, on the chair, creates a small lake on Cass’s worn linoleum floor.

  “Looks like you found it,” Jo says, and he laughs, setting the glass down. Outside, the rain falls in sheets.

  “This hitchhiker I picked up earlier said the same thing, when I told him that’s what I was doing—looking for water. I told him I could take him about forty miles, and then I was turning off. I had an appointment at the Nedelec farm this morning. Do you know it?”

  Jo shakes her head. “I haven’t been here very long.”

  “Well, as it turned out, there’s just too much water.” He waves towards the wet day. “When the rain stops, I’ll go back. Wasn’t expecting this downpour out of nowhere like that.” Then he laughs again, as if at himself, shaking his head.

  “What about the hitchhiker?”

  “He didn’t seem to mind where I let him off. ‘Going with the wind,’ he told me.”

  Jo waits for more, but he’s digging into his soup. She looks out at the rain, thinking about how wet Pink must be getting. After a while Cass comes out of the trailer, sticks her head in the back door of the restaurant, and asks Jo if she’s okay. “Fine,” Jo tells her. “If it’s quiet, then, I’ve got a few things to do.” Jo knows this means a nap. “Call me if it gets busy.”

  The guy is looking a little drier when he asks for a warm-up for his coffee. He’s gazing at the rain as it drums the gravel in the parking lot.

  “Any idea when it’s supposed to let up?” Jo asks, for conversation’s sake.

  “In about twenty minutes,” he answers.

  “You sound pretty sure.”

  “Just guessing.”

  Lunch prep is done, soup’s keeping warm on the stove, so Jo starts filling the sugar dispensers along the counter from the big jar. There’s one lid she can’t budge, so he reaches out a hand, offering to help. There’s an index finger missing.

  “Woodworker, once,” he says when he sees her looking at it.

  “Like, tables and chairs?” The sugar dispenser is open, now, and Jo fills it. Together they watch the white grains pour like water.

  “Useful things. And, I hoped, beautiful things. I like the way the wood sings, when you find the tone.” He sips his coffee. “Once, I made a violin.”

  It’s pouring outside; they are alone in the restaurant, a glowing oasis in the wet grey day. He settles onto the stool like a chicken on a nest and continues.

  “I loved building it. The curves, the grain. The way it came to life under my hands. I had a mentor, an old luthier who guided me. It’s quite an art.”

  “So that’s what you made? Musical instruments?”

  “Just that one. What happened was, as it began to take shape, the music got too loud. I mean, I could imagine all of the people who would play it: I heard scales and fiddle tunes and symphony parts. At first, it was beautiful. But after a while I’d just walk into the workshop—just open the door a crack—and there�
�d be this—onslaught of sound, all at once.”

  “In your head?”

  He touches his chest with the stump of his finger. “In here. I had to give it up. Stick to furniture. You can have too much of a good thing. Chairs, tables; they say things too, but they’re a lot quieter. I made that violin just after my wife died, you understand, herself a musician—played the violin beautifully—and I suppose I was building it for her, in my own way. I think she was trying to tell me something.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  Buck gazes out at the diminishing rain. “Neither do I, exactly. But after my wife’s death, and then my father’s, well, it brought a lot of things home, both those deaths. I just needed to make a choice about what to pay attention to. I never realized I had a choice.” He swirls the coffee in his cup thoughtfully. “Then the trees of the wood shall sing for joy, for the Lord has come to judge the earth.”

  Jo rolls her eyes. A religious nut. Great. She turns to head for the kitchen, but his voice continues, and it doesn’t carry the tone of a sermon. She leans against the back counter and crosses her arms.

  “From the Bible. I don’t think I have it quite right. But I remember it because of the trees of the wood singing. I like the idea of that. I think of all that clean water, covering the earth, washing away evil, and imagine afterwards whole forests, singing together.”

  The sky lightens; over the treetops, there is the slightest trace of sun through the clouds.

  “But mostly, it makes me think that if you pay attention in the right way, you get the really good stuff. Trees singing. Or the sound of roots growing, or flowers opening. Things people don’t normally see or hear.”

  Through the clouds, the sun breaks, flooding the parking lot with warm light. Jo looks at the clock. Not quite twenty minutes has passed.

  “When I was six I had an imaginary friend,” Jo offers, surprised to find the memory arise so suddenly. “Her name was Linda, and she had a blue dress. I would meet her at the corner—she was always standing there when I came out to play—and I knew she would always be my friend, no matter what.”

  “Yes. Well. I guess we all conjure things, one way or another. Friends. Excuses.”

  “But she was real. Whatever my mother said when she would laugh about it with her friends—like it was the cutest thing that I had this friend that nobody else could see—as far as I was concerned, she was real. I still remember our conversations, although it seems to me that I led the play; that our adventures were made up by me. The thing is she’s still real to me. I can see her, the way the sun would light up her blonde hair.” Jo is looking out at the wash of sunlight across the wet ground. “I always thought, if I had a girl, I would call her Linda.”

  “To you she was real. That’s what matters.”

  “Yes. She was.” When Jo was told, in the labour room, that her baby was a girl, she had to bite her lip to stop from saying the name.

  He looks at her thoughtfully. As if, Jo thinks to herself, he knows what’s in my head.

  “I think that whatever happens to you, whatever you see or feel, it’s real enough—that’s what matters.” Jo, finding herself rambling, shakes her head slightly. “I think the thing to figure out is why. You know, what the point is.”

  The soup bowl is empty, and now he’s draining his coffee, fumbling for money in his pocket. He pauses and studies her, thoughtful.

  “What is the point?”

  Jo looks across the road at trees swaying in the wind, like some spindly gospel choir. “I don’t know. What you were saying, maybe. To learn to hear the trees sing.”

  He gives her an appraising look. “I’d better be going. Thanks for the soup.”

  By the time he’s opened the door, the puddles are sparkling mirrors; it’s almost too bright. From a rent in the clouds beams of sunlight slant downwards. God’s Fingers, Jo has heard them called. In the sudden warmth of the sun the wet highway begins to steam, and it is into this that the old truck turns.

  Pink

  When the wind shifted, the man in the grey truck—a dowser, he said he was—had dropped Pink off at the junction. There is a derelict gas station, pumps gone, but the canopy that covered them is still standing. Pink leans against the support columns and watches the rain come down in sheets.

  He hadn’t had to ask what a dowser was. When the well dried up for the second summer in a row, Stan said they needed to find a better source on the property. Who knows what’s going on under the ground, small seismic upheavals we don’t really feel but that shift things in a major way. That’s what Stan said: “Stuff going on behind the scenes, son, all the time. We just carry on blind and hope we can adjust.”

  At the time, Pink thought he was talking about underground water, but as he watches the rain he wonders if maybe Stan wasn’t talking more generally. It was about that time Nora’s sister Lillian had died of a brain tumour—quite suddenly, although she had been complaining of headaches and dizziness for some time.

  “There she was looking after the kids and Walter, volunteering for this and that, being a good wife, mother, person, and there was this evil thing growing there all the time,” young Elvis heard Nora say to Stan after dinner. Elvis was in the kitchen making a sandwich, something he’d taken to doing an hour after they had finished eating. He just couldn’t seem to fill himself up these days. Growth spurt, Nora had said, and as Elvis spread peanut butter, he thought about good growth, and bad growth.

  Sandwich made, he stood, leaning against the doorframe, plate in his hand. Their backs to the kitchen, Stan had his arm around Nora on the couch, an intimacy Elvis seldom saw.

  “Eat at the table please, Elvis,” Nora said without turning around, her voice a little muffled.

  Now, Pink wraps his arms around himself against the damp chill and thinks about Nora’s down-to-earth, pragmatic view of life, death, and the necessary logic of eating at the table when you’re fourteen years old with a body changing so fast as to be awkward in its new dimensions.

  “If you can do something about a situation,” Nora would often say, “then do it. If you can’t, then live with it, don’t gripe, and try to see the good in every situation.”

  Elvis, plate still in hand and sandwich untouched, listened while Stan reminded Nora: “You always say it, yourself. We all have to go sometime.”

  “Don’t you tell me what I say,” said Nora, and she began to cry, great wracking sobs. Elvis, embarrassed, slunk to his room with his sandwich and ate it sitting on his bed. In the morning, when he asked her how she was feeling, she laid her hand on the side of his face, but didn’t answer.

  The dowser came on a Saturday a couple of weeks after Lillian died. Nora had carried on doing the things she usually did, but seemed, to Elvis, to be just a little numb. When he asked Stan if she was okay, “Just working things out behind the scenes, son,” he said. “We just need to give her time.”

  Nora watched from the front porch while the dowser paced the property with a forked piece of willow. Stan and Elvis stood in the yard, a respectful distance away.

  “He can really find water with that thing?” Elvis asked.

  “That’s what everyone around here says. He’d lose his reputation pretty quick if he couldn’t.”

  “But do you believe he can?”

  Stan looked at Elvis. “You’re almost as tall as me, son. How the heck did you do that?”

  Elvis grinned and straightened, making himself taller.

  “I believe he’s a cheaper bet than drilling in a dozen places,” Stan said, finally.

  After marking the spot, the dowser shook hands with both Stan and Elvis, making Elvis feel like an equal rather than a kid. He liked the man for that, and liked him better when the dowser approached Nora where she leaned on the porch railing, her thoughts held close as they had been so much lately.

  “Mrs. Preston,” he nodded to her.

  “Yes,” Nora said, coming back from wherever it was she had been. “Thank you for coming.”

  It ha
d been still until then, but now a breeze started up, blowing a wisp of hair across her face. She tucked it behind an ear, and then seemed to collect herself: running both hands across her head to smooth her hair, straightening the cardigan where it draped across her shoulders.

  “Everything passes,” he told her.

  “Thank you,” she said again.

  It was the sort of meaningless thing you’d say to anyone who’s lost a loved one, Pink muses now, and easy enough for a person to look at another and intuit a sadness there, with all the clues present: the listlessness in her carriage, the absence of a smile. But for some reason, it was the right thing to say to Nora at that time, because she brightened in the days that followed, and came back, slowly, to her regular self. Had Stan or he said the same words, Pink doesn’t think they’d have had the same effect. What was it about the words of a stranger that held more meaning?

  “Lost his wife a year ago. Didn’t work for a long time,” Stan told Elvis much later. The two had the new well cover removed and were breathing the cold damp smell from deep inside. “Glad he’s back, though.”

  The rain has stopped, the sky visibly brighter, now. From beneath his feet, the bleached smell of old concrete, no hint of the gas that once filled tanks under the ground. He wonders about Jo, the waitress. What was it about her that intrigued him so much? Something there, something behind the scenes he couldn’t see.