by Terry Griggs
She tried not to hurry it, took it step by measured step. Once the gravel had been delivered—and a load of bullshit with it—she chose the site, backyard near the spruce, as far as possible from the house. As one day latched onto the next, she dug a base, packed in the gravel, levelled the skids, assembled the floor, raised the walls, installed the roof framing, shingles, siding, door, window, hardware. At night she dreamed it out of the ground, walls alive, moonlight-thin, a faintly shimmering blue, more ball gown than shed. All told, the indulgence of constructing it, roofing it, staining it, proceeded like a dream. Not a single hitch slowed her down. Especially not the insignificant hurts that were part of the process, the slivers, the skinned knuckle, the barked and bruised knee. Finished, it shone with her pleasure and satisfaction. The oiled and squeakless hinges were as bright as gold; the doorknob, breeze-buffed, a cool thrill to twist. Her creation was unpretentious and handsome, herself as architecture, built to last.
Ray, her old neighbour, would have admired her handiwork, and her husband, old what’s-his-name, would not have. Her bookends, her male brackets. Not that the opinions of the dead pertained. Forget them, she had a shed for shouting in. Not that she had anything to shout about outside of the shed itself. Fine then, a shed for silliness: she could fill it to the brim with acorns, or cabbages, (no kings). She could torch it and keep its ashes in a jar under her bed. Although she didn’t think that having endured the privations of the Depression, the War, motherhood, and widowhood, granted her the mad luxury of doing something so wasteful and pointless. Her amateur theatre for bad ideas, then. How about nabbing herself a hostage, for the hell of it, no one would ever guess. That young English teacher from the high school, say. The one who taunted the girls—certain girls—with what they would never attain, but also never forget.
English teachers can be a bloody nuisance. She’d have to remember to warn Hero (that’s me!).
Her short, uncombed hair stood up in front, a quiff of white; her unharnessed breasts did not. Yeah, yeah. She shrugged off the compressing expectations that came with her age and stepped into her newly risen shed, unencumbered. And as yet unencumbered with any true idea of what to do with it.
She had killed her husband, naturally. That’s how she viewed it. The power of the spoken word. A confessional then? She shrugged this off, too. Didn’t a confessional imply guilt or contrition? It hadn’t been a shrivelling, black-hearted curse that had finished him off, nothing premeditated. And if anyone had an evil eye—or tongue—it had been him.
Albertha surveyed the interior, which was perfect, and breathed in the leftover sawdust smell, the raw wood, the stain, the latex paint, the nostril-tweaking vinegar fumes from the cleaned and newsprint-polished window. (Rubbed some slithering politician’s face on it, making him do honest work for a change.) Her beautiful and precisely hung window. She smiled to think of the Bedard brothers from down the road, ‘redecorating.’ They’d painted right overtop the dead flies and wasps on the sills because they couldn’t be bothered brushing them off. Or, more likely, it hadn’t occurred to them to do so. Following this same logic of convenience, they’d recently dragged some dozen or so chickens into their living room to slaughter them, figuring it would be easier to do the job there. Men had different ideas of what a home was for.
She awarded herself a good long congratulatory look through her new window. Her gaze lighted across a field that used to be planted with corn one year, beans the next. Beans were better for keeping an eye on Ray, but a field of corn you could get lost in. Her gaze lingered on a clump of jail-break phlox, circled a granite boulder that had ancient squatting rights—too venerable to be routed—skimmed like a dragonfly over the split-rail fence, and landed on a decrepit Chevy Impala pulling into the Doan’s driveway. Ray’s old car. She realized then that what she had here was not so much a vista, a frame for the greenery, the sky, a solitude-puncturing hole on the world, as a one-program TV station starring Kim Doan. (Give a boy a girl’s name and no wonder he can’t get his head together.) Curtains might be called for after all.
She wouldn’t have minded seeing Ray step out of that car, but instead got the default option. Ray decomposing probably looked better than his son did now. Kim, skinny and skittish, whittled to premature middle-age, but dressed like a kid in cuffed jeans and a HAIR T-shirt (not the penitential kind). Arrested development in more ways than one. A wonder, frankly, that he managed to lug such a big case of beer into the house.
Albertha stepped back from the window, did a turn in her studio, her study, her undefined space. Her thought bubble filled with oxygen. Philosopher’s shack, kitchen sink school. Institution of lower learning. Oldster’s playhouse.
Heartbreak hotel.
A writing room? But then, hadn’t she read recently that no one lives in the country anymore. No one worth writing about, that is, only bumpkin zombies in plush vests picking the corn out of their teeth with screwdrivers. Aesthetics, style, eloquence… can’t keep that down on the farm. Edgy rural fiction, not a chance. Forget it then.
A waiting room.
She patted the wall, considered the floor. She could bring an armchair out, a carpet, footstool, some magazines, a bottle of whisky. Her reading days weren’t over—horrible thought!—but they had been sorely filled. She had read and read and read to her dying husband. He had taken to books in his illness, although not to any other never-too-late passions that might have helped them both.
He had claimed that his eyes were failing him, although when reading to him they fastened on her as sharply as they had ever done. (The only failure evident in them, she suspected, was her.) Green eyes, heart-stopping embedded in a young man’s face, and heart-stopping in an old one, but for different reasons.
Middle of the night—any time she was in the middle of anything—she’d hear him call from the downstairs sitting room where she’d set up his sick bed. He made a sound like a baby, a distant but piercing wail that hooked directly into her middle and made her jump. He needed another hit of morphine, followed-up by another flank of words to suck some life from. Literature as transfusion. Not that he’d tolerate the words that any living writer had pulled together; he wanted to hear the voices of the dead. Dead but still lucent: Dickens, Hardy, Thackeray.
“Joyce?” she’d asked once, brandishing a volume of stories snatched up from a box of books their daughter had dropped off.
“No damn females,” he rasped back.
A childish trick, but she’d enjoyed it.
“Trollope?” she said.
He glared at her.
Not that Albertha minded the chore. Much better than sitting by listening to his breath guttering out, the wrenching exorcism of what remained. She had a flair for reading aloud. Her voice soft where required, or soaring, expressive, dramatic, but never soppy, never slipping into a bog of sentiment. She meant every word, she got involved. He watched her intently during the whole performance. Did he listen? She wondered. This verbal medicine may simply have been a substitute for something else unrendered over the years.
They did have years banked, not all bad.
There were times, true, when she had refused to open her mouth at all because her tongue felt burned, blackened with some news from the outer world she couldn’t bring herself to deliver.
She heard a noise, someone calling. Company? Somebody dropping by to check out the shed? Spare me. They’d come soon enough, and her land art (so there!) would have to revert momentarily to what it wasn’t: a utility shed. Whereas a livelier eye might see a retirement home for skunks, an ant mansion, a B&B for Martians. Who’s to say? In essence, it was one big uncrackable naught. (And not symbolic. Leave that for English class. I stood warned.) Why else call it a shed if definition didn’t run off it like rain?
Not near, that noise. Albertha glanced out the window, let her look stray across the way again (habit), and damned if she didn’t see her own daughter striding up the Doa
n’s driveway, pushing her flash new bicycle, calling Kim’s name, her tone gay and reckless. She propped her bike against the side of the house, calling louder, shameless, letting everyone in the township know her whereabouts and her intentions. She scampered up the back steps like a squirrel, a pretty squirrel, and let herself in without knocking. Her bike fell over, clattered to the ground. Careless.
If confronted, Albertha knew, word for word, what her daughter would say: Christ, mother, we’re friends! I’ve known Kim since forever, haven’t I? Remember? Get a grip.
Get a grip? In lieu of a handsome silk tie, Albertha supposed her daughter would have to get a grip on that ponytail of his, yank him this way and that, bring him to his knees, flip up her skirt. With any luck, she’d jump on the worthless bastard and flatten him.
He’d wounded his dad. Ray had longed to hear from him, a word or two would have done. He pined for the boy. People had to stop asking about him. There’d been no cause for the silence that she knew of. Ray hadn’t been the kind to lay a hand on him and the mother had been decent enough while she was around. His son had never caught them—Albertha and Ray—rolling around on crushed cornstalks in the middle of the field, because it had never happened. Sometimes Ray would give her a shout and a wave from his tractor, but that wasn’t the dictionary definition of infidelity. (Dignity in distance, right?) Not that she could have convinced her husband otherwise. Not that she tried. He had some grievance against their neighbour in any case, involving land and fences, a perceived wrong that he’d nursed until he had made something palpable and irrefutable of it.
He could easily build something out of nothing, although nothing you’d want to take shelter in.
How do you deny that you’re not involved in a wrong without sounding like you are? And if you’re simply thinking about it, then you’re equally guilty. No, no confessional for her.
Her daughter had slipped almost effortlessly out of Albertha’s body, slick as a little animal, and as a soapy baby in the bath had slipped squirming and giggling out of her hands, and now, lithe and smooth-skinned, had slipped with ease into Kim Doan’s arms. Who was the careless one?
For a time, life burned in two pairs of eyes, one reading, one watching. She sometimes wondered if he were trying to take her with him and the ongoing sentences were the link, the cord he’d use to tug her through, headfirst into oblivion. A strand of understanding did seem at times to stretch between them, although one fabricated by others.
One night she tried extemporizing. She wandered off the page’s margin and away, filling in boldly with a line or two of her own, then more and more brazenly, a story beginning to build about he and she and him, but he caught her out. (No Joyce she, no Michael Furey resurrected in a pronoun.) He had been listening. He grunted, surprised and annoyed, and so, before he got into it, she picked up where she’d left off, toed the line as written. But he wasn’t satisfied: she’d ruined it. He made a choking noise, a series of choking noises, ugly, desperate sounds. His fury wordless, but fully expressed. Exhausted, sleep-deprived but not sorrow-deprived, she snapped the book shut. She raised her head to glare back at him, to challenge him—she controlled this show after all—and saw that he was looking straight through her. Green eyes, heart-stopping in a dead man. After weeks and weeks, he’d heard enough, or had enough. Had enough of her certainly, but it felt like unfinished business all the same. No ending, she couldn’t bear to reopen that book.
When she stepped out of the shed—spy sanctuary, hidey-hole—Albertha looked askance at the back of the house where the small dark room would be if the small dark room were real, if there were a bridge that one could cross from the known to the unknown.
Whatever her shed’s function might be, it took up a fact’s worth of space. It stood solid and grounded, enclosing a silence.
So consider this, Hero: Rely on a bridge made of words and odds are you’ll eventually fall to your death.
Unwhisperable
Our house not only magnified sound, but translated it, added a spin to it, juiced it up for effect. Call it a storey-teller. This had much to do with the resonance of hardwood, the layout, and malicious acoustics. So you had Father cracking leftover Christmas walnuts in the kitchen and me upstairs hearing him crack open skulls—leftovers from some war other than the annual tinselly one. How could it not catch my attention, this bone-crunching and splintering racket, left lobe collapsing into right—logic veering recklessly into creativity—nut meats exposed? Precisely the sort of thing I was after: booty from the interior.
However, descent into the kitchen would only bring disappointment. When had it ever brought anything else? Except toast. A man standing with his gut pressed lightly into the aluminum edge of the counter, wearing new, airmail blue, still-creased from the package Christmas boxers, chewing contemplatively as he stares out of a window as unrevealing as a night-black stamp, before him an absurdly high mound of walnut shells, irreparably broken, while the house remains intact, but groans and creaks and carries on from the effort.
I couldn’t go down to check anyway, as my curiosity was reputedly in remission.
Having spent a tad too much time looking for trouble, and succeeding in the quest, the household authorities had strongly advised a hobby. Which is why I was spending this precious, yet too-slowly dissolving evening of my life rustling through a five-and-dime store package of stamps, a starter philately set, trying to work up… what? Enthusiasm? Far too much to hope for. Likewise tepid interest, or mildly asphyxiating boredom. The diversion at hand appeared only to be diverting me into a mood disorder, dragging my robust personality over the borderline. Basically, my efforts were concentrated on not slitting my wrists and bleeding all over the Queen’s face or on any other worldly postage-worthy icon. What I really wanted was to read the letters onto which these paper scraps had once been affixed. I would have liked that very much, regardless of the quality of the contents. I wanted news of the world, the inner world of who thought what, and who did what to whom, and how much it hurt, and what happened then.
Not that I needed letters generally. Walls had ears, and ours had ears as big as laundry chutes. Confidential information whispered in an upstairs room reliably resulted in a dump of dirty laundry at your feet. I may not have collected much dirt from the clandestine goings-on in Malaysia or Hong Kong, but I had acquired a respectable heap of the local product. I offer here some samples from my varied collection.
My Aunt Faith. You’d never guess to look at her that she, rigid of mind and body, had an outward bound uterus whenever she sneezed. How she coaxed it back into place had yet to be disclosed, as this is not the sort of slippage a woman wants to discuss with anyone, including herself. Theoretically, and if only out of self-interest, knowledge of the infirmities of others should make us more sympathetic, but in Aunt Faith’s case, I was all for presenting her with bouquets of ragweed or gift bags bulging with particulate matter. In my view, her tongue, and possibly her soul, needed that pessary far more. Beyond the subject of her restless maternal organ, she was not shy about confiding to anyone who would listen the details of her recent near-death and out-of-body experience.
Two months back, she slipped on the stairs at her place and down she went. On the way, she not only saw the Lord, but He caught her essential self in His arms, while they both watched her material self roll like a log to the bottom. Thereafter she claimed Him to be, not only The Saviour, but her personal saviour.
(The Lord, I’d begun to notice, no longer operated as much by stealth as He had once done. Not only that but He had enlisted an expanding and highly annoying PR team. Get this, I buy a bag of wax lips from Park’s Variety and Mrs. Park, a grown woman, tells me about being so exhausted the night before that she barely got her prayers said before falling asleep. I care? Sly proselytizing, that’s all.)
(Good chance Mrs. Park has a disease more degenerative than religion that’s making her tired. I’ll enquire, delica
tely, tease her hidden ailment out, although physical failings aren’t my main area of interest.)
Faith’s fall was said to be my cousin Nile’s fault. He’d left an empty on the top step, or at least didn’t claim otherwise, didn’t try to shift the blame onto his dad. Nile didn’t give a shit, not then or at an age usually described as tender. Made of tough stuff, he’d entered the world as hardtack, Teflon-coated, and no wonder, his mother apparently indestructible. She came to at the bottom of the stairs, reborn, and with a bonus set of saucepan-sized bruises on her rear. The Lord’s thumb prints.
According to my Auntie Viv, Faith herself was as drunk as a lord at the time (the only lord in attendance) and being too blotto to break any bones, she bounced, rubberized, the entire way down. She’d likely left the empty on the step in the first place, letting Nile take the blame, plus a crack on the head. He didn’t care. If his mother had died in the fall, whether he cared or not would have been his to know. But, seeing as Faith got reborn out of the deal, the crack on the head was probably more for show. They smacked each other around on a regular basis, there being a kind of dumb-show vocabulary to it.