The dealing happens out on the old Locke place, across the tracks, just out of town. Everyone knows. Hans Mueller’s son, Kristian, is mixed up with it. The cars are lined up, the chimney smoking, the door of the trailer open. Kids come by at intervals. Jack Ramsay says they use an electric red and white Christmas candle in the grimy front window, to signal when they’re open, like a fish and chip shop. You go inside, they have a menu on the wall, all in code, and they take your order.
Alex told me he used to walk down that road when he couldn’t sleep, to try to clear his head, but he doesn’t go out walking after dark anymore. One night one of those young punks almost ran him off the road, threatened him with a baseball bat. They burned rubber in circles around him, laughing like hyenas, before gunning it to the highway. The RCMP say they’re watching. Maybe by satellite. We don’t see them here unless we phone them. GRCS, gravel road cops.
This oil painting is of the school the way it used to be. Tall glass windows, each pane a dozen squares of glass. I can remember when I sat and looked out those windows: watched storms; watched the magpies, jays, and hawks, the wind move the grass; watched gophers stand in their holes out on the ball diamond, the snow melt and water run through the streets of town in early spring. By the time I got to grade six, I had learned all I needed to of weather systems and aerodynamics, of prey-predator relationships and the properties of water. But now they have most of the windows closed in, the rooms lit with fluorescent tubes, all to keep out distractions.
This painting is of the Majestic hotel. It’s been here for a good seventy years. Annie’s father built it when he got out of the brick business in 1931, with the piles of discards he had on the old kiln site. Finished the fir doors himself, the door jambs and the wainscoting up the staircases inside. It proved a lucrative business in the thirties, people came from all around to drown their sorrows. When Annie took over the hotel in the sixties, she added the mail counter, mailboxes, and the coffee nook — just a table in the lobby. It’s probably the most beautiful building we’ve got in Majestic. The church is solid construction and the stained glass is nice, but the red klinker bricks of the hotel are hard to beat.
This painting is of the old brickyard — half of it reclaimed by the forest, poplar and wild rose growing through crooked piles of klinker bricks. The rough ovens are collapsed, but you can still see where they set the green bricks into the fire, bucked up the archways, shoved in the cord wood or coal. Technically this land still belongs to Annie, but she has no desire to resurrect it. I approached her once about fixing it up, making it into a little outdoor museum for the school kids, interpretive signs, walking paths, a footbridge over the old creek bed. But Annie said she preferred to let it go back to itself, the original footbridge dynamited in the thirties already.
This one here I call the Table of Truth — the coffee circle at the post office inside the Majestic hotel. You can see us gathered near the mailboxes. Everyone shows up for the mail: the old, the middle-aged, and the eagers (for eager beavers). There’s always one or two new-to-towners, cottagers or acreage dwellers wanting to live the country life. Most of the young farmers just walk right by when they see us with our mugs of coffee and our slow stories. “Got work to do,” they quip. Some you can entice to talk about the weather, their crops — for a quick minute — and then they take their leave.
Their time will come. Comes quick enough if you’re in farming: the markets drop; hailstones rain from the sky, pulverize young shoots; snow downs a crop. You can’t make the payment on your loan. You have to take that first town job. The wife leaves you. Everyone’s got his breaking point.
I can’t really do it justice, the feeling at the Table of Truth or the people’s faces on such a small canvas, but I’ve given each one something that marks them as separate.
See how Jack Ramsay wears a fedora, fawn in colour. The hat is unusual in these parts, but it fits his personality. He’s a geologist, born here, moved away, and moved back. A man of many worlds, a man of intellect. He’s at the age where he needs a cane, but he still walks pretty much everywhere.
That’s Buster Goodchild there with his pipe. He doesn’t smoke it anymore, but he still likes to chew on the old thing. Says it keeps his hands busy. Buster’s an old cowboy — Stetson, leather jacket — right down to the boots. Getting up in years. This bovine spongiform encephalopathy, BSE thing has hit all of us hard, but especially Buster. A surplus of livestock but no markets. The border, closed. When this does get sorted, ten years or never, it’ll be too late for him to make up the loss.
In this picture, all eyes are on the “new guy” in the circle. Bob Taylor’s lived here eighteen years, but he’s still considered new in town. It’s different than being born here, going through school together, marrying, birthing, taking over your people’s land. Scientists can read the composition of a skeleton like the rings of a tree. The minerals of a place lodge in your bones. It takes generations to belong.
You can’t tell from the painting, but Bob’s a tall, lanky fellow. Wears black horn-rimmed eye glasses, early fifties. Black hair combed to the side, a few strands of grey. Construction contractor. Moved here with his wife. Both commuted to work in the city for years. They were going to retire on that quarter section too, then she got ovarian cancer last year. Died. Just like that.
They’re debating land use — townies versus farmers. Hobby farmers versus the real thing. Acreage owners versus everyone else. The county plans to subdivide quarter sections, parcel them up into forty acre lots and sell them to the townies.
Land prices will skyrocket. Some don’t like the added cost of services, schools, the new paved roads that will be built, the traffic, the taxes that will have to rise. And all for what? Some will drive their kids to city schools anyways. The townies will be in a hurry all the time, late for work. It’ll be dangerous to move machinery along the roads.
In this picture, everyone’s watching Bob. He’s taken the family farmer’s side, though he rents most of his quarter section to Alex MacIver. “What about food production?” he’s saying. Some of the older ones would like the option of selling off pieces at a time, sort of like money in the bank or old age security of which there is none in modern-day farming. Though they won’t say so out loud, he’s got their attention. They wish they could be as idealistic. But then he’s relieved of all responsibility for practicality with his wife’s untimely passing and that rose memorial he’s got in mind.
And this one, I just finished. It’s St. Joseph’s, built in 1915, on a hill that runs along the west side of town. I’d been waiting on the church, I thought it might be bad luck to paint it before the For Sale sign went up. As if recording it for posterity might make the sale a certainty and jinx the scheme that’s afoot.
Now that the closing is immanent, I’ve been making quick sketches, mornings before the post office opens, the post office my only excuse to get into town most days. How to depict a place so ordinary that means so much? I’ll stop the truck behind the hotel or down the hill to the north, trying different angles.
It’s plain enough, white stucco with bits of glass stuck in the mortar. The foundation, though, is a thing of beauty. Built like a European fortress, five feet thick, quartz and granite erratics mixed with cement. Rocks from the fields — that is what holds it up. These fields, this earth, these farmers. A squared bell tower and brass bell but no steeple. The panes of stained glass, simple solid colours, letting the light and glass speak for itself. Douglas fir frame and siding. Local birch for the flooring.
It’s hard to show what I see. All the generations that have worshiped here. All the marrying and burying that has taken place. As the highest point of land, it’s the first building in town to enjoy the sunrise, morning light coming through the sanctuary, during Sunday Mass. The gathering place it’s become: parents dropping their little ones off to daycare every morning or the crowds that come out to our Friday night concerts: bluegrass, folk, and country. The annual fall supper. It’s a place of anima
tion.
And this is my latest sketch. From last night after the meeting at the hotel, a scene as I was driving home, in the poplars behind the playground at the school. Every branch of every living tree and the dead ones too, lined with birds, shoulder to shoulder. Must have been a hundred magpies calling at the tops of their lungs, croaking in an unrelenting lament, you’d think someone had died. Some were wheeling overhead and taking turns touching down as if to pay their last respects. I stopped the truck, took out my binoculars, and spotted one of their own lying on its back on the ground, legs in the air, the mourners looking down on their fallen fellow. Equal to any such show of feeling in humans. Was it felled by another bird, a hawk or a merlin? Was it school children playing a prank? I searched for a scrap of paper in the glove compartment, drafted quickly their half-leafy, half-stark silhouettes, and called it Magpie Funeral.
VERA
Almost every time I go into the shed to find a hammer, get an extension cord or a screw driver, I can smell the fumes. The other day, I wandered to the back corner, where I found a black-bound journal on top of a table next to the computer Mike uses to do the farm accounting. I opened it. It held sketches of the home quarter, of Majestic and its people. Most in black and white, some in the faintest wash of colours, some with the colours written in, prototypes for a painting. I set it back where I’d found it.
At first I was amazed. My husband, the painter! But then I shouldn’t have been. When I thought about it, I’ve always known how observant he is of people and of the land. Always walking around with an eye wide open to the world.
And there’s no need to say anything. Each of us has our need for an inner life, something private from the other. I hadn’t known I’d married an artist. Better than gambling or alcohol or another woman.
Farming is tough. I get a farmer at Emerg every couple of weeks complaining of chest pains, back pains, headaches, ashen in the face, hyperventilating. I do the initial intake before the doctor sees them:
Have you been under any stress lately?
How much alcohol have you consumed this week?
Have you had any recent losses?
How well are you sleeping?
They can barely talk.
We run them through the tests, put them on the treadmill, shoot them up with adrenaline. We order CT scans on their chests, send them to the city to get MRIS on their heads. Their vitals come back normal. Much of it is worry or just plain working too hard. Long days, short anxious sleeps. All day the body going. No help to be got. Everyone’s working double-time between home place and town, farm chores and second job, just to keep up.
If the problem persists, the doctor prescribes sleeping pills or antidepressants. The doctors here hand those out like candy. The worst cases get a prescription for Ativan. A tiny pill the shape of a house, square with a peaked roof. It’s so innocuous, it’s dangerous. Relief is instant, euphoric. The doctor doesn’t explain, only “When you feel an anxious spell coming on, take this.” Warns them not to operate any heavy equipment. When they run out, they invariably come back for more.
Alex MacIver was our most recent visitor. Alex is a cow and calf man. We have a lot of that around here. He presents every few months with chest pains. Calving season is the worst, February and March, up all times of the night, in all weathers. Out in the pasture looking for birthing cows, pulling calves, warming them up in the barn if it’s a cold night. Hundreds of cows too many for one man. Always behind with seeding and swathing and raking. Always last in the field with the combine.
“When was the last time you had a good night’s sleep?” the doctor asks him. He doesn’t remember. There’s nothing wrong with him, yet. Nothing that three square meals a day, rest, and some good hired help won’t mend. Calving season is pretty much over. On the way out the door, I help him with his coat. They’ll let me do that when I’ve got my uniform on.
“Get the rest of the crop in,” I say. “And sell a few head of those cattle, even at a loss. You’ll feel better.”
He clamps the baseball cap firmly forward on his head, barely meets my gaze, and walks out the automatic doors. He can’t afford my medicine.
3
FATHER PAT COLLINS
When I came here three years ago, that hotel, just down the hill from the church and the rectory, was staring at me every morning, and me just out of treatment and trying to stay sober. That hotel is one thing I won’t miss about this place. One of my parishioners — if you can call Annie that — she attends Mass but never joins in anything — is the proprietor. Then there’s Daisy who chides me for not telling her when there’s been a small unravelling in the seam or brocade of the ancient vestments. All so that she can mend them. They’ve been ratty for years. Checks them now after every mass. She runs some kind of kitchen linen business from home. And there’s Florence, the crazy pro-lifer who continually asks me to include a prayer for the unborn in the petitions at mass.
“The unborn aren’t the only ones suffering injustice!” I snap at her one Sunday. “Perhaps they have it better than the born.”
She is scandalized. Claps her hand over her mouth, exits stage right. Leaves me alone for weeks. Until the bishop calls and makes me apologize.
Nor will I miss Sunday worship or what passes for worship, their dogged faces looking back at me every week, begging for a word of hope. The lot of them, a knarled body worn down by loss after loss. The same hymns week after week: Holy God We Praise Thy Name; Holy, Holy, Holy; Ave Maria; Peace Is Flowing Like a River; and O Sanctissima. No one else seems to mind. When I ask Daisy, she says Thelma Cummins only knows six pieces outside of Christmas carols and that I should be glad she knows that, owing to the fact that piano lessons weren’t cheap and organ even more scarce and no one to teach either one now in sixty miles. So we have to make the best of it. Mrs. Graves, the original grade one teacher, taught Mrs. Cummins everything she knew — the notes on the right hand and the chords on the left. Thelma taught herself how to use the organ pedals before she married Tom Cummins. Six kids (and the church’s teaching on birth control to blame for that, she is sure to mention) doesn’t afford her any more leisure. She’s milked the cows and took suppers out to the field for prin’near forty years of an evening (Daisy’s words), spring seeding or fall combining, and can’t be faulted if she doesn’t have time to come to town to practice and learn new material, even as a grandmother. Besides she has arthritis in the wrists now.
In the three years I’ve been here, I’ve managed to teach them two new hymns, a cappella — which I had to patiently explain is Italian for “without accompaniment” — and I only managed the former because both tunes are in Latin and a couple of the old ladies remembered them from their childhood. Agnus Dei and Dona Nobis Pacem as a round. That’s about as cosmopolitan as it gets in Majestic.
I don’t say it to any of them, it’s not my place, but the way things are going with the drought and the feed costs and the low prices they get for their beef, pork, and grain, most of them will be out of business in ten years. The smart kids leave. The rest get stuck with the family debt. Big farming multinationals will move in here, take up the best of the land. Developers will sell off what remains as acreages to folks from the city. There won’t be anything left of Majestic as we’ve known it. There won’t be anybody left to go to church. Better that we prepare the people for the changes. The church will be the least of their worries. That’s what I tell the bishop.
I took this posting on the understanding that it wouldn’t be more than two years. That we had to face the demographics and that the bishop would do the right thing and close it. The sociologists, even the evangelicals, know we have to concentrate our efforts on the larger population centres, and get the most out of our limited resources, that being priests. Well, now that day is here.
“I know those people, Pat. Good people. Salt of the earth!” the bishop kept protesting. It took a lot of argument to keep him from reneging. It took the force of reality to argue him out of sentiment, to
show him he would not be doing anyone any favours. A Sunday afternoon tour of the district and town, what’s left of it, an inspection of the church, and a subtle but pointed request for financial assistance for repairs. He had to come around.
I don’t even know why the diocese is bothering to try and sell. It’s not worth anything. Plain country church. The best feature is its foundation. In my opinion, I told the bishop, we should just deconsecrate the thing and leave. Say the final prayers, say goodbye to the structure, give thanks for the years. Board up the windows, take out the glass, and take down all the religious objects. The only things of value, and even that, marginal.
“Now I know it’s been a hard slog for you out there all on your own, Pat, and don’t think I don’t appreciate it. I spent most of my priestly ministry in the rural areas. But we can’t do that. It’s a symbol, after all, of the body of Christ. We cannot just abandon the bride. We must make provisions.”
FLORENCE ENDERS
During Easter, the bishop came out to announce they were selling. First time he’d shown his face in years. No other reason. They haven’t been confirming the little ones here for a long time. He got up there in all his robes, his staff, his funny gold hat. They even dragged out a special chair for His Grace from up in the choir loft. I suppose so he could set his big bottom on it. He stands up there and tells the people “We’re” selling the church, in that royal We way, the diocese is selling. “We’ve had our consultation.” We the people. Consultation they called it, but the decision was already made. “Go home,” the suit ties and the clerical collars said like they have for forty years, “and pray for vocations.”
One evening in late March, the faithful who have been going for years, those baptized and lived their whole lives here, got up one by one and presented their case — while three suited-up administrators sat behind a table just below the altar, at the top of the aisle, and watched their Rolex watches. Parishioners were limited to five minutes. The parish council chair was given ten. Still the presentations took two hours.
The Death of Annie the Water Witcher by Lightning Page 3