Near Canaan

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  After my mother died, my father spent even more time in the workshop. Out of habit he made things for the house, things he would normally have presented to her. It was as though he forgot everything while working, and learned anew each evening of her death. Bewildered, he’d leave the objects on the dining room table, where I’d find them, and put them to use. For a while, his work proceeded apace; then it began to change. He had always worked steadily, finishing one thing before going on to the next. Now his pace was ragged, and his attention began to scatter; he’d begin several projects at once, turning his hand from one to the other, and never finishing any of them. Like Penelope, he ripped apart a project near completion, having decided late on a crucial change in the design. After he fell ill, he went out to the shed less and less, and finally quit altogether. It was now Jack’s kingdom alone, he its undisputed ruler.

  Jack still arrived at the house on Worth Street one night in three, stopping in to sit with our father for a few minutes before heading out to the workshop. He worked there until six-thirty, when Paula telephoned him to come home for dinner.

  Standing before the shed now, I could hear sounds from within, rhythmic scrapings beyond the planking; I pulled open the door and peered inside. The place smelled as it always had, that good clean wood fragrance. Dad’s unfinished projects had been pushed onto shelves, and Jack was bent over the bench which my father had customarily used, planing a length of wood. I stood on the inside steps and watched the curls of wood lifting up like brittle wings. Jack stopped planing, and ran his hand over the grain.

  “How’s it coming?” I asked.

  “Not bad,” he said, straightening up. “Some trouble with this junk, though.” He patted the wood under his hand.

  I walked over, and ran my hand over it.

  “Feels good to me,” I said.

  “Junk,” said Jack. “Won’t smooth down right. I should have known better. It was cheap as hell, though.” He smiled. “I’ll use a dark stain.”

  “What are you making?” I asked.

  “Stereo cabinet for Paula’s birthday,” he said. “Gonna put in some of those smoked-glass doors.”

  “She’ll love it,” I said.

  “She better,” he said, without heat, turning back to his work. All the time we’d been speaking, he’d not taken his hand from the wood. “Dad give you the house?” he asked, over his shoulder.

  “Yes,” I said, surprised. “Did he tell you he was going to?”

  “Naw,” Jack said, smoothing the wood with his palm. “I just figured.”

  “Does it bother you?” I asked.

  “Naw,” he said again. “Makes sense to me.”

  “You can still use the workshop,” I said.

  “Your bride won’t like that much,” said Jack. “Me tramping through her backyard every day. Likely she’ll be wanting to tame some of this wildness back here. Nope; figure I’ll move operations to my basement.”

  “You can take all this stuff,” I said, waving a hand to indicate the benches, the lights, the equipment; and then blushing at my own arrogance. Obviously, it was all Jack’s already.

  “Thanks,” he said, without irony.

  I watched him for a while longer.

  “Well, good night,” I said to his back.

  Back in the kitchen, I worked under the dim light, making supper for my father. Soft things, things he could eat, although he complained that nothing tasted right. I skinned some carrots, put water on to boil. The pots and pans I had known all of my life glowed with new meaning tonight. Yours, they said. Someday, all this will be yours. The cliché made me laugh a little, and then choke on the laughter. I stood over the sink with a potato in my hand, the water running cold over my fingers, choking and spluttering, the sound making a kind of rhythm with my father’s tormented coughing down the hall.

  And so it came to be that the house I occupied as a married man was the same house I grew up in. The workshop was emptied, one afternoon about a week after the funeral, Jack and Rupe and Andy Swann arriving to carry it all away in Jack’s pickup. I sat on the porch to watch.

  “Sonabitch didn’t tell about this,” grunted Rupe, passing by with Andy, moving a bandsaw. They stopped near the porch to rest. “Shit,” said Rupe.

  “Looks heavy,” I said, sympathetically.

  “Son,” said Rupe, looking me over, “twenty of you couldn’t carry this mother.” He nodded to Andy, and on the count of three they lifted again, and resumed their slow progress through the weeds.

  Joan stopped by that afternoon, and joined me on the porch. There we had our first argument.

  “I want to talk to you about something,” she said.

  There they were, the words I had been waiting to hear in some form all of this time. I hadn’t trusted the luck that had made Joan love me. Our courtship had been too smooth, too trouble free; it was with something like relief that I received her statement.

  “About the wedding?” I asked, stiffly.

  She nodded. “I think we should wait,” she said.

  “For what?” I asked.

  “Well,” she said. You’re ugly. You stutter. I hate you. “It just doesn’t seem right, so soon,” she said.

  I couldn’t speak for a moment, the panic and anger spreading in cold prickling waves from my lips, across my jaw, up to my ears.

  “Gil,” said Joan.

  “We’re getting married in two weeks,” I said. “That’s final.”

  “No,” she protested. “It’s not decent.”

  “Two weeks,” I repeated.

  “What would people say?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Well, I do,” she said.

  We argued like this for a quarter of an hour; I was surprised at the depth of resistance in my beloved. I had never had to struggle against her will before. Looks deceived: Joan’s weightless beauty disguised an awesome rigidity.

  “You’ve changed your mind, haven’t you,” I said, numb-jawed. “This is just a way to get out of it.”

  “Silly,” said Joan, squeezing my arm.

  “Then why?”

  “It doesn’t look good, that’s all,” she said, stubbornly.

  “Shit,” said Jack, from behind us. “Who cares how it looks?”

  He was standing just behind the glider, holding a beer; it was impossible to tell how long he’d been there.

  “Please, Jack,” I said. “This is private.”

  “I don’t care if y’all get married tomorrow,” said Jack. “And take it from me, Jack senior wouldn’t have minded none. He used to tell me, G.I. better marry that girl quick, cause he’ll never find another one can stand him.”

  “Jack,” I said. The words didn’t sound like my father’s; likely Jack had invented them himself.

  “Hope you can cook, Joanie girl,” Jack went on.

  “Some,” she said, giving me a sidelong glance.

  “Cause with what G.I. brings out of the kitchen, it’s amazing Dad and I weren’t laid into our graves long ago.” He tipped up the bottle and brought it down again. “I say go to it,” he said, and whistling, went on down the steps.

  “Damn him,” I said.

  “He didn’t mean anything by it,” said Joan. I peeked at her; she was looking intensely amused. “It’s just his way,” she said.

  “How come you know so much about my brother?” I asked her.

  “I know everything,” said Joan, taking my hand.

  We were married two weeks later, in a small ceremony with a weekend honeymoon following. I met Joan’s parents for the first time two days before the wedding; her father was thickset and irascible-looking. He shook my hand grimly.

  “She loves you, son,” he said. “And do you know why?”

  “No,” I said, startled.

  “You’re not supposed to,” he said, and whooped with laughter, while a baffled answering smile spread itself across my face. “We never know why our women love us,” he said, with a fond glance at his wife, a pleasant, obese woman who
bore little resemblance to Joan. “They don’t know why either. God keeps that little secret to himself.”

  Jack stood up for me at the altar, and Beth stood next to Joan. We had worried that having them both in the wedding party might cause awkwardness, but there wasn’t any. At the reception afterward, they danced together smoothly and politely, like people who have taken a liking to one another at first meeting.

  The relatives cleared out that night, and Joan and I drove west, to a little town by a lake. In the hotel room, we unpacked our things nervously, getting in each other’s way, apologizing like strangers. We had a swim, and then dinner, and then another swim. In the lake, we relaxed a bit, and I touched the water which dropped from Joan’s skin as though it were a part of her, and as desirable.

  Back in the hotel room, anxiety again descended, and we made foolish small talk.

  “Beth and Jack seemed fine,” said Joan from the bathroom, where she was undressing.

  “Yes,” I said, from the bed where I was lying, hands linked over my stomach.

  “I mean, all that speculation beforehand, about how Jack might punch Billy, or how Jack and Beth might have a fight at the altar,” said Joan.

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “The music was nice,” she said. “I didn’t know Eva could play so well.”

  “Neither did I,” I said.

  She came out of the bathroom.

  “For Christ’s sake,” I said. “You’ve got all your clothes on. What have you been doing in there?”

  “Don’t swear at me,” said Joan, dissolving.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I wanted to get up and go to her, to offer her comfort, but my nakedness now seemed ridiculous. I felt like a fleshy sacrifice, and I pulled the sheet up to my chest. With the movement, the irony struck me—wasn’t this the woman’s role, to cower under the bedclothes? But I could not move.

  Joan went over to the radio and turned it on, fiddling until she got ballroom music.

  “Honey,” I said, my voice breaking over the syllables. She kept her head down. I saw her trembling, and was suddenly unfrozen. I got up from the bed and went toward her, to where she was looking down at the radio. I turned her gently toward me and folded her hand over my shoulder, putting my arm around her waist.

  “What are you doing,” she said.

  “Dancing,” I told her.

  “But you’re—” she said, and bit her lip.

  “I know. Don’t look. Put your head here,” and I pressed it to my shoulder. She slipped her arm around my back. “Listen,” I said, as the music changed. “A waltz.”

  “You’re such a charmer,” said my wife, her words buzzing into my skin.

  We returned to Naples the following Monday, and on Tuesday morning I watched my wife dressing for work.

  Armed with her college degree, she had found herself a part-time position as a guidance counselor, over at the junior high school. She was nervous, fussing over what to wear until I had to laugh at her.

  “It’s not like typing, Gil,” she said. “I have to look responsible, capable, ready for anything.”

  “You talk like those kids are going to ambush you,” I said.

  “It’s not the kids I’m worried about,” she said. “It’s the administration.”

  “To hell with them,” I said.

  “Easy for you to say,” she said, frowning down at her stockings.

  “Let the little bastards cope without you for a day,” I said.

  She shook her head.

  “Call in sick,” I said. “Call in dead.”

  “Not funny,” said Joan, whisking neatly out of my grasp as she passed by the bed.

  “It’s inhuman,” I said. “It’s only been two days.”

  “I’m sorry, Gil,” she said.

  “Then stay.”

  “We need this job,” she said quietly.

  I winced. It was a sore point. I hadn’t found a job yet, and Joan’s was the only paycheck. I lay back in bed, passive now, and watched her pinning up her hair. She saw my expression, and correctly interpreted it.

  “You’ll find something,” she said.

  I pulled the blanket over my head.

  “Maybe you’ll find something today.”

  I rolled over.

  “See you at two,” she said, cheerily.

  “Bye,” I said, through the tufted chenille.

  I waited for the front-door slam before getting out of bed. I went to the window, and watched her walk down the path, thinking she might turn around, but she didn’t. She got into her car and drove away. I regarded myself in the window glass.

  “Hello, useless,” I said.

  “It’s those don’t-got-a-job blues,” said Jack, when I stopped by the garage later that day. I didn’t much want to see him, feeling the way that I did, but I was tired of dragging myself around town. I felt the need to see someone, anyone, whom I did not mean to ask for a job.

  “Maybe I should have stayed in the army,” I said.

  “Sure,” said Jack. “And hoped for another war.”

  “I don’t have any experience at anything,” I said. “They all want experience.”

  “Naw,” said Jack. “They just say that.” He wiped his hands with a rag, and pulled some coins from his pocket. Dropping them into the Coke machine, he said, “You got to be confident. Forget all the other stuff—look them in the eye and say, ‘Hire me!’”

  “How do I do that?” I asked, accepting the bottle Jack handed me. An opaque wisp of steam drifted up from its mouth.

  “Just say it.”

  “Say, ‘Hire me’? Just like that? They’d throw me right out.”

  “Yeah, but it would be great to see their faces.” He stoppered his smile with the Coke, lifting it high.

  “Maybe I should deliver the Chronicle,” I said.

  “And put Scottie Wilson out of a job? Nossir. This is what you do,” he said, bending to place the bottle in the wooden crate of empties. “Try one of the new places, the big companies.”

  “The ones over on the bypass?” I said.

  “Sure,” he said, belching. “They’re always looking for smartasses.”

  I found a place finally, at Devlin Company, the new commercial development firm located on a patch of land which had been pasture in my boyhood. It was a tolerable situation, but just that; as a paper-shuffler in the lowest ranks, I got to work in the basement of the huge low building, with a desk to myself and a half an hour for lunch. Imagine a roomful of desks under schoolroom lighting, identical sleek heads bent over files nine to twelve-thirty, and one to five. My job consisted of correlating the architect’s plans with the builder’s specifications, checking all cited measurements and stapling the mess together, to be passed along to a higher power. I suppose you would call what I did then glorified proofreading, but it was termed “entry-level management.” It was uninspiring and undemanding, and the salary was small. But it was no worse than the army, and the house was paid for; we were comfortable.

  We would have been all right even without Joan’s contribution, and I urged her to quit.

  But she loved her job. “It’s great,” she had said, at the end of the first week. “Nobody knows what I’m supposed to do, so they leave me alone. I can really talk to the kids.”

  “What do you talk about?” I had asked.

  “Oh, anything,” she said. “Why they hate school. What they’re afraid of.”

  “Sounds like you’re getting paid to talk,” I said.

  “Not talk,” said Joan, “so much as listen.”

  Now, “It’s only for a while,” she said. “Until we get lucky.”

  Lucky meant pregnant. We both wanted children right away; Joan had already accumulated various baby things, soft plush animals and diapers and a second-hand crib, all of which she stored in the room down the hall from ours, which had been my boyhood bedroom, and which we now designated the nursery.

  After some argument, I conceded, and Joan continued to go to work each morning, r
eturning home at a little past two o’clock, after which she would do the housework and prepare supper. School began early, and she left the house before me every morning. Before, I had always been the one to leave her, and I discovered that I disliked being left. But I gritted my teeth and said nothing; it would be a moot issue soon enough.

  Joan’s position had been so recently created by the school board that the town hadn’t the vocabulary yet to describe it. They referred to her as “that pretty new teacher over to the junior high,” or as “that one G.I. married,” and while she wasn’t made a fuss of, she seemed to be accepted. But her dealings with the students began to filter back to their parents, and there were repercussions.

  Earl Hawkins, who had worked with my father, approached me at the counter of the drugstore where I had stopped after work.

  “Hey, Earl,” I said, pocketing my change. “How’s Rosalee?”

  “She’s fine,” he said. “How’s your wife?”

  “She’s just fine,” I said.

  “She from somewhere up north?” he asked. “Ohio?”

  “Pennsylvania,” I said, surprised.

  “Look, G.I.,” said Earl. “I’m not one to poke around in other people’s affairs. But your wife is making that her business.”

  “What do you mean?” I said, taken aback.

  “What does she mean, that’s what I want to know,” said Earl. “What does she mean, calling my Robby an undertaker?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, honestly. (“I said underachiever,” said Joan later, when I told her.)

  “He come home real upset,” said Earl. “Saying she wants to talk to me.”

  “Well, that’s her job, Earl. Taking,” I said. “Care of the students.”

  “Raising Robby’s up to Rosalee and me,” said Earl. “I ain’t heard no one say we’re doing a bad job of it.”

  “I’m sure you’re not,” I said.

  “You tell your wife that Robby’s just fine. Lazy, that’s all.”

  “Why don’t you,” I said. “Tell her yourself.”

  “She’s got city ideas,” said Earl, shaking his head. “You know what I mean. You talk to her, G.I., you tell her we’re not stupid here.” He slewed his eyes around, then back to me. “I’ve heard I don’t know what-all, crazy things those doctors do to people. We won’t stand for it here.”