by Anne Degrace
There’s usually a pen on the counter; Jo is sure that she had one, but now she can’t see it anywhere. She ducks down to rifle through the box. There’s a red pencil; that will do. As she stands up she hears the slam of the screen door and there is Evelyn, stepping into the Rambler.
Jo sets the pencil down beside the tomato paste can, the one that, up until a moment ago, held three plastic flowers.
Jo
My great aunt Bea was another crazy lady. My mother called her eccentric. My father explained that she was “one of the whisky aunts,” three in all, who never married but lived together, and liked their drink. Warner, their brother, married Lucy, my grandmother.
In a way, Evelyn reminded me of Bea. Maybe it was her wide eyes. I remember visiting her after her sisters had passed away, there in the old house they had shared. I must have been about ten. My mother wanted to convince Bea to move into a home.
“She can’t take care of herself anymore,” I heard my mother tell my father. “She’s getting stranger and stranger.”
She was right. As we came up the walk to the old, two-storey house I loved, with the stained glass and the big front porch, I noticed something odd about the windows. From a distance, they looked as if they were filled with something grey and textured, like a wasp’s nest. Then, as we got to the step, I saw they were bits of paper, and I thought maybe they were articles she’d cut out and taped to the window. But as we reached the porch, “Oh, my God,” said my mother. In every window were hundreds of eyes.
She must have cut them out of magazines and newspapers, maybe even books. In the big bay window off the porch: eyes. In the smaller, parlour window: eyes. In the half-moon window in the door: eyes. Long-lashed eyes that may have once advertised mascara; wrinkle-lidded eyes, and the round eyes of babies; eyes that looked familiar, maybe a movie star I couldn’t quite place; eyes that were not human: a horse, a monkey, a kitten.
We hadn’t yet knocked when the door opened. Mum had no words, for once. She held out the bag she carried containing the groceries we picked up on the way.
“Oh, I don’t need all this!” Bea told us. “I’m not eating so much these days, you know.”
“Why are there eyes everywhere, Aunt Bea?” I asked. My mother looked at me sharply, but I remember she seemed relieved that I’d asked the question.
“What eyes?”
“In the windows.”
“Oh. Those.” She laughed, as if she was embarrassed, and then looked at them as if she’d never seen them before. Looking from inside the open door you could see the print on the backs of the cutouts.
“Why, it’s so I can keep an eye on things, of course!” And she gave me a little wink, as if the whole thing was done just for me.
As my mother and Aunt Bea had tea at the kitchen table, I wandered the house. The light was dim because of all the paper in the windows. Backlit, each pair of eyes were superimposed with type, some with other photographs. In places, light poked in tiny fingers between the cutouts. On the National Geographic on the coffee table was a photograph of a young woman wearing a red headscarf. Her eyes were missing. At her bookshelf, I pulled out a book at random, a novel by a woman whose name I don’t remember now, but I do remember that the author photograph on the flyleaf was also eyeless. Upstairs, I stepped into the bathroom, my favourite room in the house because of the huge clawfoot tub I’d been allowed to have lengthy bubble baths in when I was small. I sat on the toilet and looked at the door I’d swung shut behind me when I came in. On the full-length mirror that hung there: eyes.
When I came back into the kitchen, my mother’s voice had risen an octave. “You can’t live like this, Bea!” she was saying.
“Like what, Joyce?” Aunt Bea’s hands were folded in her lap. My mother, distraught as she was, looked like the crazy one.
I asked my father later, when my mother was on the phone with her brother strategizing the removal of Aunt Bea, why she had to leave her house.
“When you get old, things start to go,” he said, but he looked doubtful even to me at ten years old.
“What things?”
“Being able to look after yourself.”
I didn’t know what to answer. But I could remember that, except for the eyes, the house was clean. Aunt Bea looked healthy; she didn’t look like she was starving or anything. Mostly, she looked happy.
Later, when the old house was sold and most of Aunt Bea’s furniture had been crammed into the tiny two-room suite in the Home, we came to visit.
“They won’t let me have my eyes,” she grumbled. “It’s lonely here without them.”
The windows did look empty without Aunt Bea’s cutout eyes. It seemed cruel to me that they refused my great-aunt this small indulgence: it was her room, after all.
When we were ready to leave, she gave me a book of animals, something someone had given to her. It was a childish sort of book for a grown woman that now I realize was because people thought she was becoming more childlike, the way old people sometimes do. My mother had gone ahead to speak to one of the attendants when Aunt Bea pulled me back inside.
“It’s always good to have someone to keep an eye on you, dear,” she told me, and tucked a piece of paper into my pocket. “You know, eyes are the windows to the soul.” She looked into my eyes. When I looked back, I saw not the eyes of an old woman, but the eyes of a baby. I don’t mean the eyelids, or the soft, wrinkled skin: just the eyes themselves, blue-grey, round. Innocent. “When you look in someone’s eyes, you are closer to God.”
We picked up my father from work and drove home. Sitting in the back seat, I took the pair of eyes from my pocket and looked at them. The eyes that looked back were the eyes of a very old woman. I kept the book for a long time. Every page was intact: crocodiles, cockatiels, three-toed sloths: every one had both of their eyes. I often wondered if she meant for me to start my own collection.
Funny, I haven’t thought of Aunt Bea for ages. She’s been dead for years. Now I wonder if anyone is watching out for me. My mother wasn’t; my father might have, if he’d opened his eyes enough to see what was happening. I have a child I’m not watching out for, who I have left in the care of people I hope will be better watchers than I would have been.
If I had looked into my daughter’s eyes, what would I have seen there?
Archie
I come up over the rise and there’s Bob coming the other way. Slow right down, of course. There’s nothing like the sight of a cop to make your foot come off the gas like you’ve stepped on a hornet. Little farther along and there’s that hippie kid thumbing the other way, same way as the wind’s blowing this very moment, sure enough. Hmmph, I think. Wind’s been all over the map today, like it can’t decide what it’s doing. Start off sunny, then wind out of nowhere, blowing all over the place, but cooling things down some, then a rain so hard it’d drown a fish, and now it’s sunny again. Wouldn’t be surprised if it snowed. Crazy mountain weather. Whole day’s been a little strange, if you ask me. I keep going, foot off the gas. You just never know.
I start thinking about this wind thing. Growing up back in Wood’s Harbour—when I was a teenager—we used to play this game, all of us piling into somebody’s old car and we’d play left-right-straight-ahead. All of us—might be six of us—in the car would take turns telling the driver which way to go whenever we’d get to a crossroads or a turn of some kind. The game was better if the fog was right thick. The point was to get lost, which wasn’t always easy since we knew the roads pretty well. But we did manage to get ourselves turned around once or twice, and there we’d be, end of a dirt track and up against a beach of silver sand as fine as talcum powder and the same colour as the fog around us. If the tide was out and we’d walk a little ways, you couldn’t see the car, either. You’d think you were all covered up in a grey blanket. Sometimes I’d ditch the guys and walk out so’s I couldn’t see them. Just me and all that grey. You could imagine no school, no job, no chores, no nothing.
Thing is, being lost
is only good when it’s because you want to be lost. Maybe the wind thing is a little like that.
As I pass the rest stop there’s a lady in yellow tying plastic flowers onto the antenna of her car. She’s dressed nice, like she’s going somewhere. The tailwind from the rig pulls a flower free. Glancing in the rearview, I see her catch it on the updraft.
Pink
Pink stands on the road’s shoulder feeling tired: the adrenalin rush when he took flight, the risk he took with the cop, and the bizarre time that followed, then the lady with the flowers, and now here he is, standing on an empty highway in midafternoon, feeling like the day should surely be over for all that’s been in it. Insect sounds in the roadside brush are a soothing lullaby, and Pink can feel his eyelids want to close.
A cat emerges from the brush. Pink wonders if the cat might once have belonged to the fellow in the cabin the Mountie had described; she’s skinny, and looks feral, but when he crouches down she runs to him and leans her small weight against his leg, purring. As Pink strokes the tabby fur, running his hand along her spine, catching her tail as it lifts to meet his hand, he thinks about another cat, and another time.
Elvis was thirteen that year. He’d never learned to shoot, and Stan had let it go, eventually, to both Elvis and Nora’s relief. Instead, Stan began taking Elvis fishing, something they both grew to like. Campfire evenings, Stan would tell the boy about his own childhood, his father quick with the strap, but quick, too, with praise.
“Scared the crap out of me sometimes, but he taught me how to do things well,” Stan told Elvis. “No half measures.”
Cleaning their catch, Elvis did his best to do it right, to make the cut straight, clean. Stan put his hand on the boys head, ruffled his hair affectionately, and Elvis basked in the moment, feeling as if Stan really was his father.
As Elvis became a teenager he’d get through his chores, anxious to get together with Kevin, which, more and more, involved talking about girls and smoking stolen cigarettes. To Elvis, Kevin seemed vastly knowledgeable, and worldly.
They were sitting behind the back shed, blowing smoke rings and laughing, when they heard Stan yelling for Elvis. Quickly, they butted out the rollies that were cracking and sparking anyway.
“Gotta go,” said Kevin.
“No, come with.” Elvis tried to keep the pleading out of his voice. When Elvis was with a friend, Stan was often more relaxed, even jovial. “Please.”
When Kevin and Elvis reached Stan, he was standing with a shovel at a scrubby spot at the far end of the corn patch, just before the field gave way to woods. The house, with laundry flapping on the line outside, stood in the far distance. Elvis could see Nora pin a sheet on the line, and although he couldn’t see from this distance, imagined her humming through a clothes peg in her teeth, the way she often did. As he squinted, she turned to go inside.
“Need you to dig a hole,” Stan was saying through his cigarette. “Right here.” He handed Elvis the spade.
“What for?”
“The question isn’t what for, son. Should be how deep? That’s all you need to know.”
Elvis cast a glance at Kevin, who smiled sympathetically, then quickly arranged his features back to seriousness. “How deep, sir?” He asked.
“Don’t need two for this, Kevin.” He looked at Elvis. “It needs to be this long,” he held out his large hands, “this wide, and this deep. If you hit rock before two feet, start over. Do it well, now. No half measures.”
He left, then, striding across the lawn. Kevin looked at Elvis. “I’ll help,” he said. “It won’t take long. You go first.”
The ground was hard, and there were a lot of rocks. It took four tries to find a spot where they could get down far enough, taking turns and sweating.
“What do you think it’s for?” asked Kevin.
“Probably caught some poor animal in a trap, a skunk or something.”
“Wouldn’t he just throw the body in the woods, then?”
“I guess that would attract coyotes, and they’d go for the chickens. I don’t know. Sometimes I think he just makes me do stuff to make some kind of a point.”
Kevin leaned on the shovel. “What the heck kind of a point could this be? A whole afternoon wasted digging a stupid hole?”
“You didn’t have to stay.”
“You asked me to.”
“So, go, then.”
Kevin handed the shovel to Elvis, then, and headed back up the path that cut through the woods to his own place with a backwards wave. The hole was deep enough anyway, Elvis figured. He thought of Nora, maybe a glass of lemonade.
But here is Stan striding back across the big yard, carrying something in a bag. It’s about the size of a cat, and Elvis thinks: skunk, because that makes the most sense. But then Elvis sees it move, and knows that Stan wouldn’t be carrying a live skunk in a bag. When he reaches Elvis, he points to the bag.
“That was the last batch of kittens in this place,” Stan says, pointing to the squirming bag. He’s referring to the six kittens just weaned from the cat Elvis had begged to keep last winter; it had wrapped itself around his legs one afternoon on the way home from school, mewing winsomely. Promised to look after it himself, but he’d been so busy…
“Sick of them smelling up the place, spraying, screwing, fighting, yowling.”
Elvis stares at the bag. Ginger, named for the yellow undercoat beneath her tabby stripes. Stan reaches his hand in, yelps, and then withdraws it, bloody scratches. This time, when he hauls out the cat by the scruff, claws slash at air.
In a moment, the cat is in the hole, which Elvis has managed to dig two feet down. No half measures. She’s scrambling to get up, but Stan has one foot over the hole, pushing her back. Elvis turns to Stan, his mouth open, wordless. That’s when Elvis sees the raised .22.
The shot is quick, catching the cat across the back of the small head, between the ears. There is the arch of the body, then the cat leaps twice more in a futile escape attempt, the moment of panic greater than the mortal blow. Elvis’s breath is stopped in his chest, and around him, a roaring.
“Fill it up,” Stan tells him, throwing the bag on top of the twitching body.
Pink, at the side of the highway, picks up the cat, feels her bones under her fur, absorbs the vibration of its purr through his shirt. What sort of lesson was he supposed to learn? To look after things? He has never made sense of the incident, choosing, instead, to bury it in the same way he has buried the cat: deep enough to keep the coyotes out. As long as he avoided that part of the yard, he could keep it there. And yet, in a stray tabby on a mountain road, here it was again.
The cat bats a paw playfully at the soft hair on his chin. Gently, he puts her down on the shoulder. “Sorry. Can’t take you with me,” he says. There is no traffic, and Pink sees, down the road, a sign he recognizes as pointing to a rest stop. Someplace to take a nap, maybe. He starts walking, and the cat follows anyway, as if knowing this to be salvation, if only she can love enough.
Ill wind
Except wind stands as never it stood,
It is an ill wind turns none to good.
— Thomas Tusser (c. 1515–1580)
Carson hasn’t stopped driving for hours. When he finally does stop, at a pullout picnic site on some mountain pass, he feels as if his bladder is about to burst. It’s all he can do to get his fly unzipped, and so when he’s peeing against the signpost advertising a roadside café somewhere up the way, his back turned to the highway, the gushing arc of urine is quite visible to the woman in the yellow rambler who drives by, waving gaily at him while he looks, trapped in the moment, over his shoulder. His hands, when he zips up, still display a tremor. To his horror, when he looks down he sees there is a spatter of dried blood across the back of his right hand.
He spits on it, rubs it against his white dress shirt. Then, appalled by the pink smear, he takes off his shirt and stuffs it into the ash at the bottom of a rusty metal box intended for family barbecues. He sits on the p
icnic table, shirtless, head in his hands while above him the afternoon sun approaches the tops on the trees. Not far away, the hot car engine settles. He is just grateful to not be moving. He has been driving for hours, his gas tank now almost empty.
Carson startles when he hears a sound behind him. As things come back into focus, he realizes the sight he must be: dress pants, Italian leather shoes, dishevelled hair, shirtless. The hippie with the backpack doesn’t seem to notice.
“I was napping over there,” he points to a grassy patch off behind another picnic table. “No rides.” He pauses to appraise the Jaguar with the Washington plates and whistles. “Which way are you going?”
Carson shakes his head.
“You okay?”
“Yes. No. I can’t give you a ride.”
The hippie backs away, eyes wide, a nervous smile on his face in which Carson can see the expression he, himself, must be carrying. “Hey, man, no problem. Just asking.”
A sob escapes Carson’s lips. He didn’t know it was in there.
“Hey. You okay?” says the hippie again, and now Carson is sobbing in earnest. His words, when he begins his story, begin as runoff and expand to landslide, tumbling debris down a mountainside.
The education of Carson Weymouth Jr. began when his father decided to teach him a lesson in commerce. Everyone in Carson’s grade three class was talking about the new Action Comics, and a hero with special powers called Superman. Carson asked his father for money to buy the issue he’d seen at the store, the issue on which a man in a red cape was picking up a car. He told his father how all the kids wanted it, and he wanted to be the first to own one. As he said this, he knew his father would approve of his drive to be first.