Wind Tails

by Anne Degrace

  At the wedding, the pungent perfume of hundreds of flowers eclipsed the headiest scents worn by the oldest of old ladies; everyone in town came, if only to see the spectacle of someone actually marrying Evelyn Sallaway: after all, Evelyn was an odd duck at the best of times.

  Evelyn loved the way Bryce would kiss her forehead as he left for work, saying: “Now stay close, my little rosebud.” Every Friday, when Bryce came home, a new, fresh bouquet would appear on the table in the hallway, just by the door.

  Evelyn hoped for children, little flowers she could nurture, but time passed, and none came. For a while, Evelyn was content to keep house, but you can only dust the mantle so many times. She tried hobbies: macramé, paper tole, coppercraft. After a while, there were bits of paper stuck everywhere in the house, knots in everything. The copper gave her a rash. “Volunteer work?” suggested Bryce. So Evelyn joined the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire, but the thrift shop made her sneeze. She tried the Hospital Auxiliary, but got migraines every time she went into the building.

  She was heading for the library one afternoon— another visit to the craft section, 745.5, she had it memorized—when she saw the young woman with the large packsack hitchhiking along the side of the road.

  Evelyn thinks about her now, as the yellow rambler crests a hill, the valley opening up in front of her. Just a little while ago it had been raining here as hard as it had been that particular day; Evelyn had felt sorry for the girl, and pulled over. The young woman, when she got into the car, looked positively drowned. Everything about her hung: straight, wet, black hair, dripping blouse, long skirt soaked at the hem, lace-up boots. Her packsack had drawings on it—peace, love—all bleeding in the rain. Normally, having somebody so wet on her clean upholstery would upset Evelyn, but that day she felt her heart race, her pulse quicken at this complete— stranger—in her car, somebody about whom she knew nothing. Somebody who came from somewhere else. Somebody who was going somewhere else.

  She drove towards the edge of town, and as the rain came down around them the girl told Evelyn all about herself as she dripped on the seat of the car, and Evelyn listened, enraptured. She was going to meet up with friends at a big concert just south of the border. “It’ll be really far out.”

  Evelyn thought she meant far out of town, so she told the girl she could only take her to the city limits. The girl didn’t ask why, just told Evelyn that was “cool,” which confused Evelyn, it being quite a warm day despite the rain.

  When Evelyn’s passenger explained about the bands that were going to be there, Evelyn wondered aloud at the notion that anyone would be grateful to be dead, and when the girl explained it more clearly, Evelyn told her gently that perhaps they should see someone who could help. She told the girl about the doctor she went to every week who listened so nicely.

  When, at the edge of town, the girl thanked Evelyn and told her she was beautiful, Evelyn felt warm all over. “Peace,” the girl said as she got out, and Evelyn thought that was such a nice thing to say. As she pulled into Garry’s Gas & Grub to turn around she realized she had driven past the town’s limits, past the limit Bryce had given her, and that nothing bad had happened. When she looked at the odometer she saw she had travelled exactly thirty miles, and so it was then that thirty miles became Evelyn’s new limit.

  The next time she picked up a hitchhiker—Ray, who was going to work on the new dams—she asked for a postcard. “That’s all I ask,” she told him before she pulled back onto the road from the shoulder. “You agree to send me a postcard when you get to where you’re going, and I’ll give you a lift.” She felt powerful, even a little dangerous, making this demand, but Ray looked at her for a long moment, and then: “Sure, ma’am,” he said, and Evelyn believed him.

  She never told Bryce about the postcards she kept in the back of the recipe card file in the kitchen. The Peace Tower; the Grand Canyon; a Venetian gondolier. On the back of a postcard of a hydroelectric dam, the words in block letters read: HERE’S THE POSTCARD YOU ASKED FOR. RAY.

  Sometimes, they didn’t understand, or appeared frustrated that she would only take them such a short distance. But once they were in the car and Evelyn told them about Bryce and the flowers, by the time she would pull over to drop them off they would promise to write. And they all do: Ray has been sending her postcards now for two years, even though she only ever asked for the one.

  Evelyn, driving along the secondary highway, sees an old house just off the road that looks as if it hasn’t seen paint in fifty years. It reminds her of the old fellow she picked up once, himself looking as dusty and neglected as that house. He started riding the rails during the Depression, he told Evelyn, and just couldn’t settle down after that, even when times got better. Sometimes he follows the rail lines, other times it’s the highway. “Been across the country fourteen times,” he said. The postcard he sent her said “St. John’s Newfoundland” across the top. Saltbox houses in deep yellows, rich reds, electric blues, colours like the richest of flowers. Big Ben, Peggy’s Cove, a postcard showing a man and a trout that reads in red script: Gone fishin’—in Lake Okanagan!—they are equally exotic to Evelyn.

  She strove for normalcy as she kept her secret. By day she went driving, looking for hitchhikers. She would ask them where they had been, where they were going, their futures stretching ahead like the road in front of her. Every evening she’d be sure to be waiting by the door for Bryce to come home from work, the house clean, dinner in the oven. Fridays, after he came in and kissed her on the forehead, Evelyn would take the fresh flowers and replace the old, careful to remove every leaf and petal in the new arrangement that wasn’t absolutely perfect. She’d carefully place the vase— daffodils in spring, carnations in the winter, iris, gladiolas, yellow roses—on the hall table and then she’d fix him his drink, and sit, hands in her lap, while he told her about his day.

  Then, two weeks ago, Evelyn was driving by Frederico’s at noon and saw her husband eating lunch with a girl she had never seen before. “Oh, that’s just Brenda,” Bryce told her later. “She’s taking over at reception for Charlene while Charlene’s looking after her husband. You know, the fellow who had the accident at the mill,” and he started talking about how the mill has been getting lax about the safety regulations, and how there’ll be an investigation for sure, and then it was time for Evelyn to take the casserole out of the oven.

  A few days later Evelyn was cleaning out Bryce’s pockets to take his pants to the drycleaner, and found a hotel receipt. “I loaned my pants to Percy when he spilled coffee over his. He had an important meeting with the mayor, but I was just going to be behind a desk all day, so we switched,” Bryce told Evelyn. “That must be Percy’s receipt.”

  Evelyn thought nothing more about it.

  But then came the day he wasn’t home for dinner. In the past, if he had to stay late, he would always call. But this time dinner was dried out in the oven when Bryce hurried in, apologizing, telling Evelyn about a call, and emergency that kept him overtime, and then he stopped what he was saying and looked at the hall table. It was Friday. A tulip petal had fallen from the bouquet. The flowers were wide open, the way tulips are when their time is past, like open hearts. One touch, and they fall apart.

  He had forgotten.

  Evelyn pulls over to the shoulder. She takes a tissue from her handbag and dabs at her eyes, and then takes out her sunglasses, protection against the bright sun on the wet highway, and to hide the redness she’s sure is there.

  “No matter dear,” she told him then. “It was a silly custom. These are perfectly good for another day.”

  He had taken her hand and spoken as if to a small child. “There are times when we come to a crossroads,” he began, but she thought, suddenly, of the lamb in the oven. “Oh dear!” she had cried. “There will be nothing left of it!” and rushed to the kitchen, leaving her husband standing in the hallway.

  When Bryce went to work Saturday morning—this morning, she realizes as she sits in the
Rambler, hands worrying the hem of her knitted yellow suit—Evelyn got into the car with no thought other than to visit the library, walking by the falling petals on the hall table as she reached for the front door. She wasn’t sure that bobbin lace mightn’t be just a bit too finicky for her after all. Perhaps there was something else in the library, something different. But when she approached the building, hand on the turn signal, her fingers didn’t move. She drove past. Kept going.

  And now she is here.

  When she picks up the long-haired boy with the forget-me-not eyes, she starts to tell him she can only take him thirty miles, and then stops herself. The rules have changed. “Where are you going?” she asks him, and when he tells her about the wind, she starts to laugh. She doesn’t ask him to send her a postcard, this boy without a destination. “What a lovely thing,” she tells him. “To follow the wind.”

  The hitchhiker explains how the wind has been changing all day, sending him in all directions. How the road is dry in one spot, then, a mile down the way, wet, as if the weather is playing tag, or hide and seek. This, too, delights her, and she feels lighter than she has for some time.

  But when they reach the intersection of two roads, Evelyn pulls over. In her mind are Bryce’s words: a crossroads. She doesn’t know which way she should go. And there, she begins to cry. She has forgotten all about the boy, who sits, waiting.

  She tells him about everything: about Bryce, and the girl in Frederico’s, and about the flowers. When she runs out of words there is a moment or two of silence and then he gets out of the car, and she thinks he’s going to try to get another ride; she doesn’t blame him. But she sees he has left his packsack, and so she waits, looking ahead at the stop sign, thinking now that she’ll have to hurry if she’s going to be back in time to be standing there in the hallway, dinner in the oven, when Bryce gets home from work. It’s what she is supposed to do, where she is supposed to be. After all, Bryce looks after her. She has travelled farther than she ever has. What was she thinking? And then she remembers.

  She tilts the rearview mirror down to see her face, to see what she might look like after so much crying, and sees, in the mirror, the boy she has picked up walking back up the highway towards the Rambler. In his hands is a bouquet of wildflowers from alongside the road. Black-eyed Susans. Purple Vetch. Daisies. All sparkling from the recent rain. The bouquet fills his arms, leaving his shirt wet. He lays it beside her on the passenger seat, and Evelyn smiles as the car fills with colour.

  “There are flowers everywhere,” he tells her. “Maybe you should follow the flowers.”

  He waves as he heads off down the road heading east, following the bend in the treetops where the wind blows them. Evelyn looks west, and as far as she can see, in the ditches along the road, are flowers. They look as if they go on forever.

  2:15 p.m.

  Egg salad on white

  There’s the bite of tire on gravel, and as Jo turns, the slightest rise of dust, now that the parking lot is beginning to dry out in the heat. Pulling in is a yellow Rambler, the colour of butter. As the dust settles, it appears to fall around the car rather than on it, leaving it beaming in the sunlight.

  Jo watches the woman in the car look at herself in the rearview mirror, adjusting her hair, her sunglasses, her white plastic earrings. The hair is white-blonde, arranged in a soft helmet, cut precisely at the level of each tiny earlobe. The glasses are large, and match: white frames, circular in shape. The pantsuit is pale yellow with white buttons, its polyester knit wrinkle-free as the woman steps from the car, placing white pumps neatly on the gravel.

  By the time the door opens Jo has the coffee pot in one hand, cream in the other, but the woman asks for tea. She settles herself at the counter, setting her sunglasses and handbag neatly beside the salt and pepper, while Jo pours hot water into the metal teapot and sets it down in front of her, wanting, oddly, to spill some, to see the amber stain break up the relentless sunbeam of this customer.

  “Special today is egg salad,” Jo tells her, thinking of the yellow-and-white mixture in the refrigerator.

  “That will be lovely.” She tilts her head sideways, making Jo think of a small yellow bird. “What pretty hair. What’s your name, dear?”

  “Egg salad. Right,” says Jo, not answering. She ducks into the kitchen where she begins slapping the egg mixture on Wonderbread.

  “My name’s Evelyn,” the woman calls through the window.

  There’s a beat in which Jo knows she’s supposed to offer her own name. Through the kitchen window she watches while the woman opens her handbag and begins extracting postcards, laying them on the counter in a precise manner. The result looks like a patchwork quilt. She carefully adjusts this arrangement so Jo can set the sandwich down, and then looks up, waiting for Jo to ask about them. “My collection,” she explains, while Jo tries to think of something to say. She extends her hand, and Jo takes it. What else can she do? There is no pressure when their hands meet; it’s like shaking hands with a butterfly. “Evelyn,” she says.

  “Yes, you told me.”

  “Oh, did I?”

  Her eyes seem just a little wider than is natural; Jo can see the whites at the top. The effect is slightly startled and a little frozen, a deer caught in the headlights. She appears to be waiting.

  “Umm. Jo.”

  She makes Jo think of a flower about to drop its petals, just past blooming. Jo looks at the postcards. Has she been to all these places?

  “You’re wondering about my postcards, I can tell,” she says.

  It’s been a weird day all around. “I really have work to do.”

  “This is the Lion’s Gate Bridge.” She slides the postcard towards Jo. “Have you been there?” Jo shakes her head. “Neither have I,” she says. Her fingers brush the image of a cruise ship passing under the bridge. “It’s going to Alaska. Can you imagine? And this—this one is one of my favourites.” She picks up a postcard almost tenderly. It’s Victoria’s Butchart Gardens; it says so in yellow angled script in the corner of a photograph of walking paths and flowerbeds.

  “Where did you get all these?” Jo asks, because clearly she has not been to these places.

  She leans forward. “Hitchhikers,” she whispers. Now she’s holding up a postcard, an aerial view of Niagara Falls, a Canadian flag on the upper right corner. Her voice has a soft lilt. “There were two of them, a boy and a girl, oh, not much older than you,” she begins. “Brad and Susan. They were going there to get married. Isn’t that wonderful? See? They’ve signed it, here.” She points to the signature with a manicured finger. To Evelyn, thanks for the lift, it reads.

  “This one came from Wayne. Oh, he was a one, I’ll tell you. Tattoos everywhere. Well, everywhere I could see. He told me he’d just completed his time in prison, somewhere on the coast…I don’t remember where, exactly. What for I’m sure I don’t know.”

  “I should get to work.”

  “Of course you should. What am I thinking? I never think. That’s what Bryce tells me.” Evelyn’s eyes fill with tears.

  Now, Jo can’t leave. She doesn’t know what to say, or do. Evelyn is rummaging in her handbag, looking for a Kleenex, Jo thinks, but the handkerchief she extracts is embroidered with delicate flowers. There are tears falling on the top of the Wonderbread. She hasn’t touched her sandwich or sipped her tea.

  “Maybe you’d feel better if you ate something,” Jo manages finally.

  “It’s just that I don’t know where to go. I don’t know where to go, now.” Evelyn begins picking up the postcards, one by one. “I mean you, you have a home here, right? You have a place to come home to every day. I had a place, too. Every day, for eleven years.”

  “I don’t live here. I’m just staying here for now.”

  Evelyn looks at Jo, doe eyes wide. Jo can’t help it: she widens hers in spite of herself, and then blinks a few times. “It’s just for now,” she tells Evelyn.

  “You must have parents. A home. Someplace to go back to.”
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  “Not really.”

  “You’re so young,” Evelyn says, wistfully. “You have your whole life ahead of you. Do you know, I’ve never been anywhere. This is the farthest I’ve ever been.”

  Evelyn might look a little wilted, but she doesn’t look all that old to Jo. The postcards are in her hand, as if she’s forgotten they are there. Jo takes them from her and fans them out.

  “Close your eyes and pick one,” Jo tells her. “It’s a game my dad used to play with me, when I collected animal cards in bubble gum packs. Whatever I picked, he said I could have as a pet.”

  She chooses the Butchart Gardens. Good, Jo thinks: it’s someplace she can drive to. “Now, that’s where you’ll go. I think there’s a map under here.” Jo is sure she saw one in the box under the counter earlier. Sure enough, there it is on the bottom, a B.C. road map.

  “You can keep it.” Cass will never notice.

  She tucks the postcard and the map into her handbag, and then fans out the other postcards for Jo like a deck of cards.

  “Now you.”

  The card Jo picks shows a giant, happy potato. Welcome to Maugerville, N.B., it says. On the back a careful hand says: I made it home. Appreciate the lift. Guy Robideau.

  “Thanks,” Jo says, handing it back. “It was for you, anyway.”

  “What kind of pet did your father give you?”

  “Pet?”

  “When you chose an animal. Did you get to have a parrot? Or a monkey?”

  “It was just a game.”

  Evelyn looks disappointed. Then she brightens, and picks up the plate. “Do you suppose I could have this wrapped? To take with me?”

  Jo wraps the untouched egg salad sandwich in wax paper. Evelyn carefully counts out a small pile of quarters, one dime, a nickel. She pats the little stack, picks up the map and the sandwich, then reaches over and touches Jo’s wrist. “So many kind people,” she says. “First, there was that wind boy who gave me the flowers, and now you’ve given me a map.” She laughs, an odd little trill. “I like games.” She tucks the sandwich in her purse. “Would you have an extra pen in that box of yours? I’d like to write down the address here. I could send you a postcard.”