by Joan Boswell
“Don’t be silly,” the wife said, handing me the last of the bones. “Why wouldn’t we?”
Lally looked at us, at the plate in her hands, then tilted her head for a better look at Gord. “You people slay me,” she said. Then she smiled her pretty smile and said, “I guess I could use some civilized company. Dinner tonight. I’ll cook.”
Bingo! Gord was thinking. Then Lally said, “Jim and Missus Jim, y’all come, too. I’ll make you a real Creole dinner.”
“Good enough,” says I, putting the bones in my pocket. “With four, we can get up a game of euchre. We aren’t The Big Easy, but we know how to have a little fun.”
“Euchre,” muttered Gord. “Hmmm. Maybe I’ll come by early, finish setting up that generator for you, Lal.”
“Why not?” she said cheerfully. “You could look at my skeet machine, too. The launch mechanism is off by ten centimetres.”
“I’ve been thinking about getting a generator,” I said. “We lost power for a week in last winter’s blizzard.”
“I don’t know why anyone with a woodstove needs a generator,” said the wife, and I knew I wouldn’t be getting one any time soon. “We’ll see you two tonight.”
I hardly recognized Gord when we got to the point that evening. He had on a clean shirt and a tie, and his hair was wet. He had an awful big grin, too.
“Got a little dirty working on the skeet launcher,” he said. “Lally let me take a shower and change before dinner.”
“Nice of her,” the wife said.
I noticed the skeet launcher on the floor by Lally’s side table. There was a screwdriver still in the barrel, like Gord had left off fixing it in a big hurry. It looked spotless to me, like all of Lally’s things, not a speck of dirt or oil.
“I didn’t quite get it the way I like it,” Gord said, then blushed. “The mechanism, I mean. Might have to come back tomorrow with a little doo-dad to get her up and running proper.”
“You don’t say,” said the wife.
Lally looked extra pretty. Her nails were a bright red, and her blonde hair curled within an inch of its life. She was dressed to the nines in a snazzy yellow suit that reminded me of Jackie Kennedy. Gord thought the getup was for him, but I got the feeling she just liked to dress up. It was the first time I saw her having fun.
Dinner was different, all right. Spicy like you wouldn’t believe. She even put spice in the rice, and a bottle of hot sauce on the table. Lally ate it down like it was ice cream. Gord made a go at it.
“What is this called?” he said, chewing slowly.
“Jambalaya.”
“Crawfish pie and a filet gumbo,” I sang. “’Cause tonight I’m gonna see my ma cher amio.”
Lally smiled again, and the wife smiled, too. “You old flirt,” she whispered. “Give Gord a fighting chance.”
We were a friendly party, four people sitting around the old pine table finishing dessert—the wife’s butter tarts, best on the island—and talking about the weather and the garden and the neighbors. We were just getting up a game of cards, me explaining trump to Lally, when the power cut out. The only light in the room came from the black candle in the corner. I hadn’t even realized it was lit.
“No problem,” said Gord, his face spooky in the candle’s flicker. “The generator will kick on in about ten seconds.”
Lally jumped up and grabbed her truck keys from the ring on the wall, tossing them on the table where the rest of us sat in the candlelight. I figured she was telling Gord to take a ride for his half-assed wiring, and I guess he did, too.
“Missing that doo-dad,” Gord mumbled. “To get the generator going.”
“Un-huh,” said the wife.
“Hush,” Lally hissed. “He’s right outside.”
That was when the kitchen door flung open, and a flashlight cut the darkness, shining into our eyes. I squinted at the silhouette of an army man, with an army hat and army boots and a big army gun.
“Your perimeter fortifications are pathetic,” said a voice with an accent like Lally’s.
“I let my defences down,” said Lally. She stood like a gunfighter, back straight, hands at her sides, fingers bent.
“You three at the table, let me see your hands,” the man said. We laid our cards face up on the table and fanned them out. Hearts were trump, and I noticed Gord had the left bower. It’s funny what sticks in your mind.
“Not the cards, you idiots.” The man swore. “Put your palms on the table.”
We put our hands on top of the cards and looked into the flashlight.
“They’re civilians,” said Lally.
“They’re collateral damage,” said the man. “I didn’t come all this way to neutralize one witness, just to leave three more.”
“There’s no need to neutralize anybody,” Lally said. “If I was planning to testify, I’d have stayed in New Orleans. There isn’t a REMOTE chance you’d get the needle now. Not the REMOTEST.”
The wife and I didn’t look at Lally’s remote lying on the table. We looked at Gord, hoping he wasn’t giving anything away. He wasn’t. Good old Gord was staring at Lally, his mouth wide open.
“This is your fault, Lally,” said the army man. “Why’d you run to the police?” He said po-lice, like in one of Gord’s movies.
“She was my mama,” Lally said, “and you killed her dead, Daddy.”
“Now Lally, you know the way things go.” The man’s voice was soft, the same voice I used to tell my girls the rabbits chewed up the pumpkin vine, and we’d have to buy a jack-o’-lantern from the store. “Your mama had no business putting the voodoo on me. Psychological advantage is the principal weapon in a soldier’s arsenal. I had to eliminate her.”
“You beat her for twenty-five years.” Lally’s voice was as bitter as his was soft. “One day you killed her. You lost CONTROL.”
That was when I lost control, too. I must have been crazy, carrying on like some hero instead of a retired dairy farmer from a little island. But I was mad as spit at this fellow who took other men’s wars out on his wife and his little girl, and I heard my voice say. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, mister.”
“Ashamed of myself?” he said, and I never heard a man so astonished in my life. “I’m a decorated war veteran. I served my country with distinction.”
“Tell it to the Marines,” I said.
“Now you are both out of CONTROL!” Lally said. “Now. NOW!”
The army man was turning the gun towards me, and I guess that should have been it, but the wife hit the remote control with her little finger. Click-click.
I’ve heard people say, “All hell broke loose,” but I never realized what they meant until that night. The skeet machine launched out the screwdriver end over end. I expect Lally meant it to be a diversion, but I must live right because the point hit the army man right in the eye. He screamed, and the old kitchen lit up like the fourth of July, sparking and popping and smoking, the machine gun bursting with bullets that flashed along the old tin ceiling. Lally kicked over the table, leaving the three of us behind it. I was glad I never bought that dainty, spindly-legged item the wife wanted from the furniture store in town. The thick old pine stopped bullets, or at least slowed them down, although the wife got hit in the leg and was bleeding like crazy. It was her scream that made Gord jump up to go for the gun. He took one in the shoulder and fell back down. He needn’t have bothered, because Lally pulled her shotgun off the rack and blasted both barrels smack into the army man’s head.
“So much for the element of surprise, Daddy,” she said.
The man looked dead to me, but Lally wasn’t taking chances. She kicked away his gun and frisked his body, pulling out handguns and knives and crazy-looking weapons I didn’t recognize. Then she used my suspenders to throw a tourniquet around the wife’s leg, pressed a tea towel on Gord’s shoulder and called the ambulance.
“She should have told us,” I said to the wife as her blood soaked through my fingers. “We could have helped her
hide better.”
“You old fool,” the wife said through gritted teeth. “She wasn’t hiding from him. She was waiting for him.”
Then I saw how Lally made her stand. She hadn’t lit the black candle to keep that bad man away. She wanted to draw him to her. She hadn’t made the old place a fortress, it was a giant booby trap, and she waited in it like the last sentinel, ready to use anything or anyone at hand when the final assault came. She had taken her old man’s lesson about the element of surprise to heart, and she did him proud.
I still think we could have swept it under the rug, most of it anyway, but Lally wouldn’t take the chance. She waited until the paramedics loaded up Gord and the wife, and I drove off with them for the ferry and the hospital in town. The island has its own ambulance, always ready to go for heart attacks and farm accidents and allergic reactions to peanuts. But the police have to come all the way from town, and Lally took off before they got there. I guess she slipped away in whatever boat her father used to sneak onto the shore. But what do I know? I certainly couldn’t tell the police anything helpful. I’m just a dumb yokel, overwhelmed by shocking events.
The wife is enjoying her stay in hospital. No one on the island ever got shot before, not on purpose anyway. She’s a celebrity, had her picture on the front page of the newspaper, and you wouldn’t believe the people stopping by. This afternoon Gord was in, his arm done up in a sling, and he gave me a ride home after visiting hours. On his dashboard he had a heart-shaped rock with an “L” carved on it. Gord doesn’t believe in voodoo charms, but I guess he figures what the hell, maybe it will draw her back. Good luck to him, I say. I wish it was that easy.
Kingston, Ontario, writer Therese Greenwood grew up on Wolfe Island, the largest of the Thousand Islands, where her family has lived since 1812. The region forms the backdrop for her historical crime fiction. She has twice been a finalist for the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Short Story. She is co-founder of the annual Wolfe Island Scene of the Crime Festival, online at www.sceneofthecrime.ca.
A Graceful Retirement
Cecilia Kennedy
On her first morning of freedom, Margaret woke at dawn, brewed a pot of coffee and, still in her nightgown, sat with a mug on the back porch step. Surveying the garden, she thought, this is where I’ll spend my time, then decided that the purple-blue delphiniums needed moving back behind the primroses. This is what she’d do. Every morning she’d sit on the step, breathing the mixed odours of coffee, damp earth and flowers, planning her next bit of nipping and pruning, trimming and moving, and when winter came she’d take a nice trip to England or France. Or maybe Italy.
Not behind the primroses.
The hectoring words arrived on a light breeze. Margaret shivered into her flannel sleeves, wondering how long it had been since she’d last heard the deep rasp of her husband’s voice, the nagging, the constant correction and fault finding. And why should it come back today of all days, the first day of deserved happiness? It had been a long haul since Des had died of a heart attack at forty-one, leaving her with three young children and no profession. But she’d managed. Got herself through university with the insurance money, taught school for twenty-five years, put her boys through school and even managed to save a bit on the side so that when this day came she’d have the chance to sit on a porch step feeling contented. Happy.
“Happy,” she said to the breeze. “Go away. I’ll be happy if I like.”
She had a house, books to read, and a garden. What more could she want? Des had planted that birch tree the day before he died, and now it danced silvery green in the morning sun, but he hadn’t lasted the way a tree lasts. He’d been like the day lilies along the north fence, in flower for a day, then gone. And thank heavens for that.
Later, on the first morning of her retirement, Margaret set out for a brisk one hour walk. She’d promised herself to stay fit. Trekking downtown to pick up the newspaper everyday instead of having it delivered; that was part of the plan.
The walking felt good. No knee problems like so many of her friends. Her legs swung in an easy rhythm, and her mind ran free. Margaret’s mind, she knew, had always been a disorganized place in which thoughts that managed to reach a logical conclusion always followed the most circuitous route to get there. As Des had been quick to point out.
“You’ve got a mind like a gerbil cage,” he’d say. “Head like a rat’s nest. Where common sense goes to die.”
“Shut up,” she told the memory. How she thought or let her mind wander was her own business now. Just like that novel she’d started reading last night. It didn’t matter if she finished it. Cheap beginning, insulting really, starting with the body laid out on page one. A big ugly hook meant to fish you like a pike, but once you got past that vulgarity you kept reading, partly because choosing another book meant climbing out of bed. Besides, by then the curious character with red hair, freckled hands and the Italian name had claimed the attention.
Just like Pat DiAngelo, from the second year of night classes after Des died. Pat DiAngelo (really Pasquale) had freckled hands. A jazz fan. They’d had coffee together a few times, but he was married, and that was that.
At the bank corner, she waited for the light to change and wondered how her mind had led her there. It was years and years since she’d thought about Pat DiAngelo. Decades.
The mind is a strange thing. Holds all sorts of bits and shreds, like a kid’s pillowcase at Halloween, reach your hand in and you never know what you’ll grab. Might be yesterday. Might be Pat DiAngelo.
The light changed. Should she stop at the Muffin Man? No, best to start with good habits. Get the newspaper, straight home, move those delphiniums. Behind the primroses.
When Margaret’s son Peter came the next day to take her out for a celebration lunch, she walked him first around the garden.
“Those are better in the back.” he agreed, looking at the tall blue purple stalks. Then he bore her away for Coquille St. Jacques at the Cafe de Paris, where he presented her with a gift in honour of her retirement, tickets for France. “From all of us.” he said. “It was Mike’s idea. John’s made the hotel reservations too. They wanted to be here, but...”
“Too far. I know,” she said, smiling at him across the red-checked tablecloth and white carnations. How she loved her boys. What a hardship it had been when the “don’t touch” phase had arrived, and she had to keep her hands from stroking their long arms or resting on the warm and vulnerable back of a grimy neck.
“How did I get to be so lucky?” she asked.
It was a line she’d repeated all their growing years. “How did I ever get to be so lucky?”
The boys had always blushed and skipped the conversation ahead two tracks. Just as Peter now filled her wine glass and changed the topic.
“You’re looking great,” he said, frowning at her over his lifted glass.
“What makes you so serious?” she teased.
“Nothing. It’s just, all that heavy gardening...you’re not doing too much?”
“Goodness, no.”
“But you’re retired now. You should take it easy. Don’t overdo it.”
She looked him over critically. He was getting a settled middle-aged look, even a few wrinkles, but surely that anxious frown wasn’t a permanent fixture. “What’s gotten into you?”
He shrugged. “It’s just these stories you read. Retire one day, heart attack, cancer, the next. I don’t want you keeling over into the roses. After everything you’ve done for us, you deserve some time to enjoy life.”
She laughed. “It’s men that happens to. They don’t know how to slow down. Anyway, I wouldn’t pick the roses for my death dive. I’d have scratches all over my face for the viewing.”
Her son refused to find that funny. “The guy I’m thinking of, Pat DiAngelo in human resources, he was like that. Just go, go, go. Always pushing.”
How interesting, to have Pat mentioned like this, when she’d thought of him just yesterday. She said, “I went
to night school with Pat. Greek philosophy of all things. Is Pat retired then?”
Peter shook his head. “That’s just it. He didn’t make it. Three months to go, and he died in his sleep last night. Family called the office this morning.”
“That’s terrible,” Margaret said, feeling a pang for the memory of those hands across a table and the wish she’d once felt to be held by them. “Proves my point though, doesn’t it? Men don’t know how to retire gracefully.”
“Maybe you’re right.” Her son made an effort to look more cheerful. “Maybe I’ll watch how you do it and take notes. Write up a guide for the newly retired: Chicken Soup for the Retiring Soul.”
“Oddly enough, I thought of Pat DiAngelo yesterday for the first time in years, and now you tell me he died last night. There’s a coincidence for you.”
“Weird.” Peter swallowed the last creamy scallop and signalled the waiter they were ready for dessert.
Later, still in her going-out-for-lunch dress, Margaret stopped at the garden centre for some bone meal and an extra bag of peat moss. While she wandered among the tempting flats of annuals and out into the rows of trees and shrubs, she thought how fragile it all was. She could be dead, like Pat DiAngelo. Instead, she was here, wondering if a pink Martin Frobisher were the best climbing rose for the back of the white garage. It could easily have been an affair with Pat, and how often she’d wondered if she’d made the right choice. And how strange that she’d think of him the day before he died.
Yet, on the whole, she found that comforting. Maybe we’re all more connected than we know, she thought. Maybe Jung was right, and there’s an unconscious we share, and maybe Pat was thinking of me for the first time in years, and maybe the energy of two people thinking of each other at the same time connects and creates its own energy. Maybe I’ll get one or two of these Saskatoon bushes to make the birds happy.
Two shrubs, a flat of impatiens and four new shades of day lily later, the clerk sent a boy out to load her purchases while Margaret watched, most of her mind dwelling on whether or not a hanging basket of trailing lobelia would work with the blue siding of the porch. It wasn’t until she tipped the boy that she really looked at him.