Once More with Feeling

by Méira Cook

  Riley Tergusson not only took every request seriously — although naturally he was obliged to deny them all — he also took it upon himself to return calls regarding claims to the winning tickets of the annual Moose Lottery. It was anybody’s guess as to what exactly the Moose Lottery was, but it was pretty clear that all Tergusson’s callers were anxious to secure a stake in it.

  “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,” he’d say when he got a customer on the line. “Numbers sound right. Congratulations on the numbers, sir. Yup, seems like you’ve got yourself a winning ticket, pal. It’s just — no lottery this year,” he’d announce. “On account of what happened up at Grand Forks. You didn’t hear? You’re kidding me, right? That’s Grand Forks, North Dakota?”

  “Huh.”

  His regret was sincere even if his cover story was dodgy. But in Tergusson’s opinion a good story trumped verisimilitude every time. It was one of the many conflicting creeds he lived by.

  Sometimes the problem was declining moose numbers, sometimes roving wolf packs whose penchant for snacking on a tasty moose shank compelled them to patrol the outskirts of towns and small cities.

  “You don’t want to get between a wolf and his dinner,” Tergusson would say. “Cooling windowsill pies, household pets, even kids,” he’d explain.

  At other times he’d turn officious, citing vague but pressing bureaucratic reasons for the cancellation of that year’s Moose Lottery. Systems failure, computer shutdown, budget cuts.

  “Don’t even get me started on climate change,” he’d say.

  “Moose are in decline,” he’d say. “Numbers are falling fast. Some sort of internal parasite, brain fever, bone rot. Ever heard of antler, hoof, and mouth?” he’d inquire.

  Sometimes he’d go the whole hog, throw caution to the winds, and expansively declare the entire moose nation an endangered species, a bewildered herd drumming their blurred hooves on the edge of extinction.

  “That’s dead, pal,” he’d take pains to qualify. “When they’re gone, they’re gone for good.”

  “Like whitetails,” he’d say, although when Bernie pointed out that white-tailed deer were plentiful in these parts, a downright nuisance, he’d shrug. Give ’em time, was his attitude.

  His ace in the hole, though, his lucky eight ball, the one that always came up “Yes You Can!” was Canada.

  “Damn Canucks closed the borders,” he’d say. “Herds of moose trying to get out. Moose droppings all over the place. They’ve had to rename the Peace Gardens.”

  “Hah, Poop Gardens!” he’d chortle. “Good one!”

  “You know those animal rights activists are trying to get ’em refugee status? Yeah PETA,” he’d allow darkly. Taking umbrage at those goons the way he always did, convincing himself of what he’d only just invented. Tergusson couldn’t countenance their interfering ways.

  “Ah, well,” he’d concede. “I guess somebody has to look after those poor dumb beasts. The moose, I mean. Not the dingdongs from PETA.”

  “Sure they do,” he’d say. “Holy guacamole, you think moose just roam through border control? Ever heard of electric fences, ever heard of security barriers, ever heard of long-range surveillance techniques?”

  As always, Bernie’s father had rhetoric on his side. Rhetoric and his listener’s apparent willingness to ride shotgun in the runaway vehicle of his conviction, his visionary account of the ground-pawing moose hordes sequestered in the frozen hinterland. Stranded, heartbroken. Also, and perhaps mostly, Riley Tergusson counted on a certain dumbfounded “you mean to say-ishness” based on arrogance, pie-eyed American gullibility, and geographical ignorance.

  “No, that’s Mexico,” he’d say, rolling his eyes in delight. “Canada’s up, Mexico’s down. Canada’s moose, Mexico’s unregulated labour practices and illegal immigration.”

  “You heard me right, old timer,” he’d say. “Damn Canucks think they control the world. Just because they’ve got the Queen’s ass on their twenty-dollar bill.”

  “Yeah, but you got to fold it right, buddy,” he’d say. “Let’s see, you got twenty dollars on hand?”

  So far no American in the history of the State of Maine Department of Licensing had ever had a Canadian twenty-dollar bill on hand, but Riley Tergusson was always happy to be the voice-over in the described video called Punked.

  “You fold the two halves of Her Majesty’s face together,” he’d say. “Right over left, then under.”

  “It’s a question of perspective,” he’d say. “If you locate the sweet spot and then fold into the crease you turn the royal kisser into ass cheeks.”

  “No offence to our nation’s figurehead,” he’d say. “I mean, God bless Her Majesty and the twenty bucks she rode in on.”

  “Who knows?” he’d say. “Trying to reason with these people’s like pissing up a rope. Seems like they want all the goddamn moose for themselves. Seems like they got more on their minds than the thrill of the hunt or the taste of prime rib moose steak.”

  “What am I implying, mister?” he’d say. “No implication. Stands to reason, though.”

  Appealing to reason was like catnip to Tergusson’s inner tabby. It settled him, made him dozy and expansive. In fact, it was usually at this precise point in the story that her father would abjure reason for implication, the heady switchback of slander and slander’s swoopy nosedive into libel.

  “Ever hear the one about the Saskatchewan farmer who couldn’t walk straight?” he’d ask. “Heh heh, neither could his sheep.”

  It had the opposite effect on Bernie, however. Whenever her father appealed to reason, she took an involuntary step backward. Held her breath and looked to the heavens where volleys of Canada geese were honking like truckers, perhaps in response to her father’s lame joke. When the geese and their raucous humour finally disappeared, the neighbourhood fell silent.

  Still gazing from the window, Bernie noticed how trim and well-tended Magnolia Street looked, even in the rain, even at this tail end of the season. The householders had long ago raked their leaves, bedded their perennials, and planted their spring bulbs. In her time her mother too had secured windows and bedded perennials, raked leaves and put in her spring bulbs. It was Theresa’s way, which was also the city’s way, to choose these small pragmatic habits of acclimating to the cold that was a-coming. Bernie saw that the tree band kids had already been through the Heights, inoculating the trees against Dutch elm disease and the idealism of the city planners who’d loved elms so much that they’d planted great unprotected avenues of them. Even the city forestry crews had come and gone, singling out a diseased elm here and there, tagging its trunk with a splash of orange paint. When she was little she’d imagined the marks as skull-and-cross-bones, as emblems of death.

  “It’s just nature,” her mother told her. “To everything there is a season.”

  She was either quoting the Bible or a folk song she’d once sung to her daughter. Who could say? Theresa was as complex as the next person and twice as smart.

  Her father was still going on about illegal border crossings on the part of renegade ungulates and Bernie shut her eyes for a moment, resting her forehead against the cool glass of the window. When she opened them again she was just in time to catch the last of the Canada geese arrowheading their way into unrestricted skies, south of the border but no passport required.

  * * *

  That winter the American president would call for a ban on Muslims entering the United States and refugees would begin striking out for Canada, making their way across frozen fields and unaccustomed terrain. When Bernie discovered a Somali refugee hiding in one of the unfinished outbuildings, she thought she was seeing things, experiencing a holy vision just like her namesake, Saint Bernadette, had done. But he was just a freezing man gazing up at her from a corner of the shed where he was huddled, his head on his knees. Outside it began to snow again.

  So m
uch snow, Bernie thought, the phrase snagging in her mind briefly before the man closed his eyes and receded once more into his darkness.

  Bernie and her friends rushed him to hospital then set up an impromptu refugee station at the nunnery. They had been struggling all year to create a sustainable garden but it was simply too cold for too long. Now they could create something better, more enduring: an underground railroad that would usher refugees to safety. Bernie herself undertook to drive their communal van down to the border every morning.

  The border was only a couple of hours away but sometimes there was blowing snow on the highway. High winds and low visibility. The van’s heater was unpredictable, either blowing gusts of hot Chinook-like wind in her face or refusing to engage. Overheated or shivering with cold, weary with squinting down the highway or jumpy with nerves, her stomach sloshing with too much thermos coffee, always hungry, Bernie would idle in the van on the outskirts of Emerson. Through the deep freeze of February and on into March, she waited to pick up fleeing refugees. The stragglers, the stumblers, the frostbitten men limping through thigh-high snow in their sneakers, the women carrying children on their backs.

  Bored and cold, dangerously sleepy, Bernie would droop over the steering wheel, stamping her feet to keep warm. Where were the moose? she wondered. Her father’s imaginary herds stampeding for the border, galloping toward freedom. Or at least the freedom to be hunted down and shot. She hardly knew anymore whether she was thinking of the refugees trying to get in or the moose trying to get out. It was all a lottery, she decided, too cold to make sense even to herself. The border hovered somewhere up ahead, across frozen white fields, and Bernie would wake with a jolt, believing she’d heard footsteps. Hoofbeats.

  Tergusson had finished telling his favourite joke about the Saskatchewan farmer and his sheep, so he started right in on another. He had an endless supply, Saskatchewan being the unfortunate butt of an entire country’s lame-assed joke. Bernie often speculated that her father just liked shooting the breeze with other seniors, ancient cranks and codgers, contrarians to a one. They were the only folks who called the customer hotline, since they cherished a belief in personal service and appeared to have no idea that permits, hunting licenses, and tickets to the annual Moose Lottery could be purchased online. Blurred vision and trembling fingers were a factor. And the phone calls he returned were usually answered, often on the first ring.

  It seemed that Tergusson had finally gone through his call-back list, ticking off every Barnum-inducted sap with a flourish. He was signing off on his last call — Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin — with an impromptu shtick on the subject of free trade, customs regulations, and the importation duties on edible wildlife feces.

  “Schmuck,” he said as he put down the receiver.

  “You’re taking advantage of them, Dad,” Bernie said, who the hell knew why.

  “You’re right,” Riley Tergusson said. “There’s this hole in me that can’t be filled.”

  Tergusson’s masterful plan to conceal the truth of his inner emptiness by pretending to lie was a double feint. Sure he was empty inside, hollow as a well, but he was also full of it. He could city hall it all the way to the pearly gates, although once he got there he’d likely provoke Saint Peter on the issue of border tariffs.

  In the year after her mother died, Bernie sometimes glimpsed the pathos beneath her father’s knuckleheaded pranks and merry ways. But not often — pathos was only a couple of frames in the stop-go motion picture of her old man’s life, barely registering.

  It was still raining, the rain blurring the windows, giving the world a half-finished, improvisatory look. Tergusson had evidently completed his call-backs. He took a resonant sip of coffee and leaned back in his chair.

  “What happens when we die?” he addressed his daughter. “Explain.”

  For some months now, her father had been receiving pamphlets from the Milford School of Continuing Education, his age and his retail profile apparently placing him in a demographic that veered, ever so subtly, toward mortality. If Bernie were to hazard a guess at the potential overlap between Riley Tergusson and the pleasures of the unexamined life, she would imagine a couple of Venn diagram circles neatly looped one over the other. But her father was a fighter, a brawler. He would not give in to the apparent meaningfulness of existence. Parody, as always, was his ally. As a result, Tergusson had begun to couch his conversational gambits as bullet points in a glossy brochure aimed at retirees:

  Come Study Comparative Religion With Our World-Renowned Experts! Discover the Great Existential Bugger All!

  Who’s That Hiding Behind the Curtain and Talking Through a Megaphone? A Musical Journey!

  Why Do We Spell “God” With a Zero in the Middle? An Inquiry!

  Bernie wanted to offer her father solace, but was it her fault she’d grown up without a scrap of religion? Religion was the bone that had been fought over and then gnawed clean by her parents. By the time she came along it wasn’t even a bone of contention anymore.

  “Does the soul continue after death?” her dad said. “Discuss.”

  “Dead is dead, Riley,” Bernie said, quoting her mother.

  “Ay yup, she were a spitfire,” Tergusson conceded. The further in time he travelled from the fact of his late wife, the larger she loomed in his memory. It was the opposite with an automobile, he’d once taken the trouble to explain to his daughter, objects in the mirror appearing larger than they did in real life. Or, how about this, he offered: you’re driving away from someone and they’re standing there in your rearview mirror, waving goodbye. Most of the time they shrink, shrink right down to a tiny rectangle of goodbye and good luck. But your mother now, she was no shrinking whatchamacallit.

  Violet, he meant. But Tergusson could never remember the names of flowers. All his analogies, all his examples and rationalizations and expressions of love were car related. And about as accurate as the odometer on a secondhand pickup at the local Ford dealership. But he’d had a lot of experience in driving away, so Bernie took him at his word.

  “I’m thinking, though” — Tergusson kept his head down as if addressing his coffee — “What I’m thinking, kiddo, is would it be so crazy? Soul-wise, I mean.”

  Bernie thought that it would be and said so.

  “Huh. Was I that bad?”

  It was a rhetorical question, often advanced by her father, but she answered anyway. Her answer was in the affirmative but she took her time for once, sketching in some of the eternal pains that Tergusson’s renegade soul might be expected to suffer on its journey of redemption.

  “If such a thing as a soul exists,” she finished up, “which let’s hope it doesn’t.”

  It wasn’t that her dad was an evil man or even, all things considered, a bad one. He hadn’t gone and killed anyone, as he’d be the first to remind you. He wasn’t a drug lord or a child molester or a Ponzi schemer. He wasn’t a rapist or a slave trafficker or a lawyer. Most of his shenanigans weren’t even illegal.

  “Illegal per se,” honesty prompted him to add.

  All he was, when it came right down to it, was brash. Bold. Some might say shameless. Shameless was what his wife had called him, using the word as a mirror rather than a club. A bright, showbiz-y mirror lit up by vertical rows of bulbs in some long ago matinee idol’s dressing room.

  “That’s why your father takes such a good photograph,” she’d once explained to Bernie. “He doesn’t know enough to say cheese when some fool points a camera at him.”

  Saying cheese was Theresa’s version of plastering on the old shit-eating grin, the beggar’s cringe. Tergusson could no more say cheese than uncle. What he usually said, under photographic circumstances, was “Hurry up, idiot” or “Are you done yet?” Bernie hadn’t picked up a camera in years.

  Tergusson was still going on about the broad range of mortality courses on offer at the Milford School of Continuing Educa
tion, of which there appeared to be a surprising number. Less surprising perhaps, given the mean age and average blood pressure of their targeted audience.

  “Nirvana or Nihilism?” he pretended to read. “Compare and Contrast.”

  “Worms versus Vultures: A Comparative Study of Bodily Decomposition. Provide Examples.”

  “This’ll Be the Day That I Die: The Prophetic Voice in American Folk Music of the Seventies,” he finished off. “Some Singing Required.”

  Up until now Bernie’s father had never shown the slightest interest in dying; his plan was to live forever. He ate red meat twice, sometimes three times a day if you counted beef jerky; took half and half with his Froot Loops; and liked to add salt to everything, even coffee. Shaking the salt cellar vigorously over a plate of bacon and fried eggs was his only form of regular exercise, and macaroni salad was his vegetable of choice. Still, he remained hearty and had beaten his austere, clean-living wife in the mortality stakes, although it was possible that the vindication he felt was seasoned with grief. Bernie was no expert reader of her father’s more delicate feelings.

  “Miss America,” he’d called his late wife, out of love Bernie hoped and not satire. But she had her doubts. For the truth was that Theresa Tergusson, née Revoir, had been neither beautiful nor American.

  “Because of the pie,” her father replied when his daughter finally asked him. Tergusson had met the woman who would become his wife in a Salisbury House on Boxing Day. “Eating pie,” he explained succinctly. He refused to elucidate, as if even such a perfunctory explanation was too revealing. An unnecessary egging of the marital pudding. All he would say was that when he’d first met his wife he didn’t know that that was what she was.