by Terry Griggs
She had her reasons. She was lousy with cause. A woman alone in the country, unprotected, with a child asleep in an upstairs bedroom. A child she may have even loved, who knows. Don’t look at me. Not my affair. I was more an adjunct to her story, like a distant, irritating fixture on the house, a loose drainpipe that rattled in the wind.
She stood by the window, watching, one hand at her side, thumb ranging nervously over her cuticles, her nails, extremities to which in calmer times she paid more focused attention, painting, buffing. Lunulae never obscured by the incremental drift of dead skin. A slender hand, pretty, unlike her mother’s more manly, squarish one, and unlike mine, spidery and busy, fingers twitching as I slept. A fair amount of damage had been caused nonetheless by her more delicate hand. If her marriage was a cage, she knew her way around its latch.
A woman’s story, then. Inconsequential, no one wanted to hear it. Although it had made the rounds of town, gaining in girth, accruing some fantastical features. Her history had become a garish, hopped-up lure that might easily have drawn a carload of drunk, out-of-control males down our road, bouncing in the ruts and potholes, fishtailing on the loose gravel.
But this car that turned off the main road and headed down ours was more measured in its approach, its driver cooler than cool. If that can be determined from a motoring style. Actually, quite a lot can be determined, as she well knew. Cars in the country were how you identified people. Get yourself a new vehicle and for days you’ll go unacknowledged, suspected of being a stranger until someone winkles you out.
Minutes before, my cousin Nile had flashed past on the main road in his black Buick, heading deeper into the country, having bagged some willing-enough girl at a dance or the bowling alley. Even at that distance and with only the headlights to go by—the Buick’s body smudged into the night—Mother knew who it was. She had to smile then, for somewhere along the line she had acquired a taste for bad news, the only kind Nile knew how to deliver. She’d consider the girl, silent in the seat beside him, a young body skin-tight with desire, and may have envied her. Short-lived envy. (I’m only guessing.)
Our road was a good half mile long, so she had plenty of opportunity to observe the car’s progress, its steady creeping approach. She would have watched it turn, where Nile’s car had not turned. She’d been expecting it—clearly—yet its appearance startled. It had broken into an atmosphere of expectation that had grown unreal. Her fear accelerated, or her excitement, depending. Ruling out Saturday night joyriders, her snooping family, vigilantes, and complete losers out tooling around, it had to be either him—or him.
What was it about her? On the whole, I was smarter, funnier, faster on my feet, and much better company. These are not attributes anyone should undervalue (I also had a sharp eye and packed a penknife), but those headlights were aimed directly at her. They were coming for her and I was powerless to stop them, being stopped myself, immobile as scenery, a dead weight sunk in unknowing.
During the civilized, waking hours, I’d been known to stand in front of the door, arms stretched wide, blocking her exit. The first time I tried this amused her, in a complicated sort of way, of which I hoped shame formed a large part. After I’d pulled this stunt a few more times, she was less amused, but the complication remained like a rat in my hair that wouldn’t untangle.
“Hero, let me through. I’m going to town, all right? Shopping?”
“Can I come?”
“Sorry. Next time.”
“There’ll be one?”
“Of course.”
“Where’s Dad?”
“Having a nap, don’t bother him.”
“He’s sad, I’ll cheer him up.”
“He’s tired, leave him be.”
“Are we getting our new house?”
“I don’t know, now please move.”
We needed a new house because she broke the old one trying to find her way out. No one needed a wrecking ball with her around—she was our very own Wonder Woman wrenching the panelling off the walls with her bare hands.
It didn’t matter if she went to town without me. Not much. The empties were stored under the sink and it was more agreeable to take my time draining them. Healthier, too, seeing as I’d chugged a floating butt or two on more hurried raids. If allowed to go, I would have to be the anchor of the expedition, her parole officer, her personal scold—a glum functionary reminding her of what’s what. There was always, always the chance that she wouldn’t come back (and she hadn’t said which town, had she?), but keep going on and on, exploring her own uncharted and expanding universe. We were never free of that possibility. I didn’t see her as being overly useful or necessary to have around, but Father didn’t need the grief.
“How could I have been so bloody stupid?” he had asked, dismayed. Indeed, looking as though he’d received a dunning blow to the head.
I knew a rhetorical question when I heard one, and so did she, incredibly. At least she had the good grace not to say, “Yes, how could you have been?”
I also knew that when your trust in someone doesn’t work out, when it flips around and hits you in the face, it’s called stupidity instead of good faith.
Father had been bilked by a contractor, a veritable city slicker, one part jester and two parts concentrated slime. He’d been taken to the cleaner’s. The deal had been preceded by drinks, laughs, plans. The plans? The realization of my mother’s dream home, but it was a very bad dream.
“A marble floor in the living room, would you like that?” Father slipped his arms around her. (How could he?)
“Morland,” she laughed. “Marble?”
How many times did he want to be the town’s laughingstock? What’s he trying to build her? I overheard my grandmother muttering to herself. A mausoleum?
“Two limestone fireplaces, one in the living room and one down in the rec room.”
Great. He could display his horns on one of the mantels.
“We’ll need some new furniture, I suppose, but Morrie I don’t see how we can. . . .”
A long, protest-stopping kiss. Disgusting. She was probably carrying a disease. A tapeworm that would slide out of her mouth into his, swim up to his brain, and tie it up in a fancy bow. A gift for the contractor.
The new house was to be built closer to town so that she wouldn’t feel so isolated, so far from the hot hub and the gossipy goings-on that didn’t remotely interest her. I knew she’d rather eat pins than go to a euchre party or attend a meeting of the Women’s Institute. For this I couldn’t blame her.
A real fishwife wouldn’t speak, would she? Wouldn’t give away her secrets, wouldn’t know our language, a creature netted and pulled out of another element entirely.
She had a soft, young voice, honest and clean. She didn’t nag, I’ll say that for her. She seemed happy enough. So what was the problem? Why did she have to stand at the window and stare so hungrily and helplessly out, like some elderly soul whose life had vanished utterly?
She wouldn’t know exactly who was driving down our road, which of the two, that was the thing.
Work on the new house stalled at the foundation, a giant’s empty grave that filled up with darkness at night, or some scurrying, luckless animal that tumbled in. A mucky floor, piles of sand, ripped bags of cement, abandoned tools. Hard to imagine it turning into what Father had envisioned: a beautiful house, an enticing house, the envy of all. It was more like a failed fallout shelter.
A family on the other side of town hadn’t gotten much further with their place, either. They ran out of money—or will—for they had slapped a tarpaper roof overtop of their concrete block walls and moved in, contentedly enough, or simply resigned to living in a hovel. Father always had to comment on it when we drove by, shaking his head, incredulous—“Look at that place, look at it.” But now he wasn’t saying too much. He never seemed to sleep, but got into the car after supper and drove
off.
The contractor sent us a box of presents from Mexico. A donkey piñata for me, a silver bracelet for Mother, a gay, wide-brimmed sombrero for Father. Embarrassed for us all, Mother chucked her bracelet into the lake.
Father believed in the blood warmth of a home. He could smell dinner cooking in the fancy new oven, saw me sailing across the marble floor in my sock feet, heard laughter not grounded in anything nasty. (Better not invite Aunt Faith over, then.) He dreamed of giving her a fabulous place—Home & Garden standard (skip the garden)—an interior so satisfying that she wouldn’t need, or want, to go out. Ever. Wouldn’t even put a foot out the door to see what the weather was like. But that other one, the man creeping down our road (it could be him) came from the outside, and was made of outside stuff, and had nothing at all to offer her except the outside.
“I honestly don’t know what he’ll do, if he finds him.”
Unprecedented, Mother confiding in her sister-in-law, Auntie Viv. She was that desperate.
“Don’t worry,” said Auntie Viv. “He won’t do a freakin’ thing. That scumbag deserves to have the shit kicked out of him, mind.”
“He’s been gone for two whole days. That’s not like him, he’s never done that before.”
I could almost hear Viv thinking, So it’s your turn, eh, sweetheart? But having gained unprecedented access here, Viv knew better than to plug up this trickle of inside news with sarcasm or home truths.
“He’ll kill him, that’s what. He will, I know it.”
“Morrie? Bah.” Viv paused, doing some more thinking on the subject. The boyfriend had gotten away with it, and Cousin Tony had gotten away with it, and God knows who else, but apparently her brother had recently rediscovered the location of his balls and the contractor wasn’t going to be so lucky. After all, losing a woman was one thing, but a bank account full of hard-earned cash was another more serious loss altogether. “Where’s he keep his rifles, did ya say?”
Everyone hunts. Recreational killing, it’s a rural thing. It’s also convenient: when the McFarland’s moved from their farm into town, they took the dogs out to the bush and shot them to save the trouble of taking them along. In the spirit of this, I whaled hell out of my piñata. I laid the donkey on the ground, smashed in its head with a rock, whacked it with a baseball bat, kicked it, gutted it. The candy that spilled out—a cardboard carcass hemorrhaging sweetness—I had no intention of throwing in the lake. I was determined to get something out of this deal, even if the candy had been licked by the lizard tongues of the Mexican children who had wrapped it so prettily in coloured cellophane. Licked, spat on, or worse. Who cares, we had already been poisoned.
My room in the new house would have been painted pink, like the inside of a lung (a kid’s lung). I wasn’t crazy about this scheme, but I still wanted the room. I wanted to sit inside my room listening to records, listening to my digestion, listening to voices in the living room kept low because the subjects being discussed were humdrum and not worth getting worked up about.
Balancing on top of the cement foundation, one foot placed squarely in front of the other, I moved around and around the nonexistent house, pretending to be hazarding an endless tightrope walk. Gazing through the transparent walls, I could almost see us in there. With some effort, and some will. What were we doing? Swimming aimlessly, or floating on our backs, unmoored.
The tellers at the bank would have all seen the fat cheque Father wrote for the contractor, the flourish of his signature swirling a notch out of control after too much Crown Royal, the serif on the butt of his name wagging like a dog’s tail. They probably passed the cheque around among themselves, eyebrows raised, lips pursed, no choice but to clear it. The money disappeared out of the account, out of our town, out of the country. Everyone knew. Tellers aren’t called tellers for nothing. (I’m not the only one around with loose lips.) The money was meant to pay for lumber, windows, doors, nails, shingles, marble, brick, insulation, wiring, bathroom fixtures, tiles, Formica counters, drywall, appliances, paint. Undreamy materials, including the sucky pink. Work on the house stopped dead.
Whether or not the contractor had also been stopped dead was a question she must have been asking herself as she watched the headlights approach. If it was him returning. A fifty-fifty chance. Could be her husband, gripping the steering wheel hard to keep his hands from shaking. Driving slowly because he’d been into the Crown Royal again, this time for the courage to strike a different sort of bargain. Or he was driving slowly because he didn’t want to arrive. Ever. As he neared the house, he would see only her silhouette as she stood at the picture window gazing out, a dark, flat, featureless woman. His shadow-wife, the ideal occupant of a never-never house.
So was it my father returning with another man’s blood on his hands, or was it another man, blood intact and piping hot, coming to get her? This man would at least be able to offer her a different form of humiliation. A house with a sickening roominess, the walls always receding, but the enclosure unmistakable.
I pictured Grendel’s own mother snatching up the silver bracelet from the bottom of the lake and slipping it onto her green wrist. Told you I was smart. Although I didn’t want to know everything.
Tormented by uncertainty, bound by it, she would not have been able to move from her place at the glass. She was fixed in her steady surveillance. But I couldn’t stand it, the unsettling house rumours had reached me, tweaking the bedcovers, pinching, pulling at my arms. Up, up. The curtains in my room were like reeds I swept aside, my window opened to the night. The long grass against my legs was wet with snake spit, the stones on the shore were cold underfoot, and smooth. I didn’t slip, but moved steadily on and away, whisper-quick. The leeches were dimly aware of me, the caddis worms, the crayfish, I was the brief tremor on their rooftops, a shudder of fear passing.
And on the road, the car moving like a dream toward the house, moving soundlessly, weighted with the unspeakable, a wraith of dust trailing behind, its driver and deliverer no concern of mine.
Far Cry
My mother played bridge—we all knew what that meant—and my grandmother had a bridge in her mouth, an otherworldly conveyance, a feat of engineering that repeatedly secured my escape. Just so you know, I wasn’t some lamebrained kid, but a linguistic opportunist. I fashioned my own understanding of what this bridge was for. Not, Oh-my-grandmother, what-big-teeth-you-have. No, this was not about choppers that were gross and even bigger (and grosser) when submerged and magnified in a glass of water resting on her nightstand. More this: open your mouth Grams, tell me a tale and I’m gone, self dissolved, bodiless surfing on an ethereal plane.
Not so for her, though. Her own life had begun to resemble a house in which more and more of the rooms were closing up. What remained in this equivalence of life = house? The kitchen, the porch, one crammed closet, a guest bedroom (she was the guest), and a small dark room at the very back that she could enter if she so wished. She did not wish. Her dead husband crouched there, waiting. The memory of him, mind, this is not some freezer story. She’d seen him enough in life and didn’t feel the need to refresh her own memory with a visit to the small dark room. But it was there, unlocked and available, unlike so many of the other rooms that had once constituted her life.
This may have been why she decided to build a shed. No metaphor this, but a real shed.
She already had one that housed the lawnmower, the snow shovels, the gardening tools, and the other practical outdoor paraphernalia. So a new shed for… who could say, she’d figure that out after it was built. Albertha liked the feel of fresh lumber in her hands almost as much as she liked gazing into a clean, empty bowl. Both served up potential, the provender of the possible.
Plans were drawn up at the kitchen table: exactitude has its joys. She twirled the pencil in her fingers, ran a thumb along the dental strafing her daughter had once given it. In grade school the girl had chewed her pencils so fiercel
y that the metal ends were mashed flat. The gnawed-off erasers had spent more time trekking through her digestive tract than they had rubbing out her many mistakes. Perhaps they had erased something essential during their fantastic voyage through her insides, something a nice girl needs. Considering what my mother later got up to, her savaged pencils were doubtless overlooked tools for personality assessment and prognostication. As a child, her mildness and compliance had concealed traits more socially acidic than anyone would have guessed. Teething never ends for some.
You didn’t have to explain to anyone why you needed a shed, or two for that matter. Equipment accrued, ditto sacks of seed, cement, rat poison, tar, wood for the stove, solvents, machinery all sizes, stacks of empty apple-baskets, lawn chairs, yard sale do-dads, useless stuff exiled from the house. Et cetera without end.
Albertha drove the truck to town, a beer tucked between her legs for the ride. The cop she passed on the way, and with whom she exchanged a two-finger wave, did likewise. She stopped at the lumber yard, then the hardware store, allowing the town’s knowledge of the shed’s existence to precede the actuality of the shed itself. A bee that consisted solely of buzz. Altogether she bought tongue-and-groove pine, plywood, a triangle vent, cedar shingles, soffits, two kinds of nails, stain (with a hint of blue in it), a door, and… glass. She wanted her shed to have a window. This raised a few eyebrows, but they settled down comfortably enough. A woman’s fixture, a window. Otherwise where would she put the curtains?
Albertha knew, of course, that there are occurrences entirely possible that fall within the realm of fantasy. She might win a lottery; she might learn to speak Mandarin; her daughter might decide to act like a proper married woman and not some horny adolescent. But she doubted it. On the other hand, she might really build a church, a shed of worship with a congregation of one. If she were inclined in that direction. Hardly the case. She figured that the Man Above already had His gnarled arthritic fingers stuck in enough earthly real estate. Could be God was real estate. If she wanted a building for the purpose of developing her spiritual side, there’d be no one to stop her from dragging a mat out to the shed and setting it up for meditation. Or yoga. (Corpse position, no rush.) Who knows, she might even get her head together like her neighbour Ray’s son did, or aimed to do, by hitchhiking out West and not returning until Ray’s own head was slowly coming apart underground. The boy had inherited the Doan homestead, one fallow field away—fallow except for the burdock, vetch, fleabane, ragweed, and lamb’s quarters. Kim Doan hadn’t sold up as expected, but continued to live there, presumably engaged in some pursuit other than sending corkscrews of cannabis smoke twirling through the cracks in the windows. As far as Albertha could tell, the only thing holding Kim’s head together these days was a tightly cinched ponytail.