The Seary Line

by Nicole Lundrigan

  The Seary Line

  NICOLE LUNDRIGAN

  The Seary Line

  a novel

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Lundrigan, Nicole

  The Seary line : a novel / Nicole Lundrigan.

  ISBN 978-1-55081-248-0

  I. Title.

  PS8573.U5436S39 2008 C813'.6 C2008-903101-6 ©

  2008 Nicole Lundrigan

  Cover Design & Layout: Monique Maynard

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  We acknowledge the financial support of The Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing activities.

  We acknowledge the support of the Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation for our publishing activities.

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.

  Printed in Canada.

  for

  my father,

  John Lundrigan,

  a true character.

  chapter one

  Midday on a Tuesday afternoon, in the hallway of a weathered clapboard farmhouse, a man called Uncle waited outside a heavy wooden bedroom door. He did not lean against the doorframe or slouch. Instead, his shoulders were square, jaw clenched, shoed feet amply spaced on a braided rug lying askew on the floor. Uncle had been standing there for nearly two hours, had missed his morning tea and soon would miss his lunch. As the heat in the house climbed, he noticed the odour of leftover salt fish and potatoes, the dish of diced onions that had been abandoned on the kitchen counter. His belly rumbled, though he could not consider eating. He was much too preoccupied with the tension that had settled in the muscles around his skull.

  Uncle turned his head to look out of the window at the end of the hall. Beyond the smudged glass, he could see Eldred Wood, holding the smooth handle of a hoe, trenching up a row of young potato plants. He was wearing a pale cotton shirt, and Uncle knew it would be buttoned up to the neck, cuffs snug around his wrists. The sun was strong today, likely burning the back of his bent head, his thin neck. Uncle had told him not to work during noon hour, but this was the only time Eldred would venture outside when the weather was fine. He was panicky over his shadow, claimed it followed him relentlessly. “Well, yes,” Uncle’s wife had once joked as she folded her arms across the cushion of her chest. “They do tend to do that.” Eldred Wood never smiled.

  If they had spoken of it, both Uncle and his wife might admit it had been a mistake bringing Eldred to live with them so many years ago. They might admit that fact even more readily today, at this hour. Though no good came from dwelling on it. Eldred was a man, after all. “And he did what men do best,” Uncle’s wife repeated frequently. Whenever Uncle reflected on this, he always felt a slight disgust, a slight shame.

  The doorknob turned, and Uncle’s head snapped around. Through a crack, he saw the faded eye of his wife, peering towards him, skeptically. She squeezed her round body out of the room, opening the door no more than necessary, and clicking it shut just as quickly. In that moment when the door was ajar, Uncle saw a naked leg, stubby and smooth, dangling over the edge of the bed. Damp earthy warmth taunted his face.

  “What! You’re still here?” Her words were clipped, like sharp slaps to Uncle’s ears.

  When she stood before him, he smelled the layer of tainted air that had wrapped itself around her, caught in her hair, her clothes. Slaughter came to mind, the scent that rose up when he was rinsing away the blood, stubborn bits stuck to the hard floor of his barn. For the second time today, he resented his sensitive nose, wishing its capabilities had diminished in turn with his soggy sight, his chalky mouth.

  He tried to shrug, but he had stiffened. A shrug would have been insignificant anyway. How could he tell her what raced around inside his head? Worried that the worst might still happen. Angry that, likely, it already had. How could he tell her that he had grown old and complacent? That this was his fault, his fault. And more horrible than anything else, in a dark fold of his mind, he firmly believed he had planned it all. He had brought that woman here, introduced the two of them, in hopes that this very thing might happen.

  “Go,” she commanded. “Do something.” Her hands were behind her, still gripping the doorknob.

  Uncle stared at his wife. Her dull hair was disheveled, skin on her plump face shiny. An extra button on the front of her dress was undone. He noticed a trace of red currant jam at the corner of her mouth, still lingering from a rushed breakfast. As if she had read his mind, her tongue darted out, swabbed the sticky spot, and then retreated. She looked indignant. They had been married fifty-three years.

  “You’ve nothing to do? Imagine that. A farm to run, and nothing to do.”

  Her cheeks flushed, and he hoped she would regret chiding him. Though that was unlikely. Regret involved sentiment, and any notion of that had dried up, withered ages ago. For the most part, she hardly seemed to notice him anymore. He had become a nudge in the morning, a white plate opposite her own, a steaming cup of milky tea perched on the wide arm of a chair. She had been living around him for so long now. So, so long.

  He remembered her whistling when she was a young girl. High and shrill, it was like the raucous screech of a sailor who was happy to be on solid ground. The first time he heard it, he was walking down the lane beside the Gill sisters’ house, and spied a young girl, a cousin he’d guessed, working in the garden. She glanced over at him, smiled, then pursed her lips and resumed her work – and her whistling. She was pretty, in a homely way, but it was the whistling that caught him. He adored it. Went so far as to suppose he was charmed by it. Maybe cursed by it, for all he knew. It caused him to break solid promises he had already made.

  How funny, his remembering this now, though the recollection sparked nothing within him, no desire to reclaim her, even touch her. Living together, mixing air and breath, that seemed personal enough.

  “Go, then. Watch for Miss Cooke. She should’ve been here an hour ago.”

  Ah yes, Miss Cooke. Was he trying to trick himself into thinking he had forgotten?

  When his wife reentered the room, he could hear moaning followed by a never-ending string of “Lord Jeesus, Lord Jeesus, Lord Jeesus.” The occasional “Mother Mary” thrown in for good measure.

  Uncle’s ears burned, and he felt an unpleasant twinge move through his body. As he exhaled, his empty stomach rolled over again, and he pushed his fist up underneath his ribs to calm it. Then, shuffling his feet, he managed to move away from the bedroom door and make his way to the back of the house.

  On the painted stoop, he reached for the rails, gripped them. No sign of her. Miss Cooke. She would come through the wooden gate at the top of his property, wind her way down through the shivering field of tall grass. Her gait would be purposeful, a no nonsense sort of stride, and he imagined the grass shying away from her slender body. Uncle knew she would be wearing her weekday dress – the yellow one, a smattering of something blue, maybe flowers, gathered at the waist.

  A breeze came around the corner of the house, and his throat asked for a cold drink of water from his well. He considered offering one to Eldred. Did the man know what was happening? Or did his thoughts end at the bottom of his hoe, where metal touched soil? Uncle felt a pang of jealousy for that simplicity. His mind was slipping too, no doubt, though not in the ways he had anticipated. He had always been something of a dour
man, but had recently grown prone to folly. Prone to dreaded introspection. He should stop, but could not. Apprehension had overtaken him, and he spent valuable hours every day standing stone still, trying to undo the considerable mistake he had made decades ago.

  While he waited, he watched a trap-skiff out in the harbour, laden with barrels of flour for the general store. Moving swiftly across the water, it was decisive, doing the job it was meant to do. Then Miss Cooke appeared on the hill, his hill – he knew she was there before he saw her. In her arms, she held a clutch of fabric tied up in a knot. His hand surprised him, when it lifted, waved slightly to her like a friend might. He was not offended when she did not return the gesture.

  Before he could commit her to memory, she was beside him. Time had been kind to her, even though her nose and earlobes were significantly larger, the fine skin on her chin now loose. Her hair was shiny white, and if she had faced him directly (which she didn’t), he might have said she had a welcoming lean. No doubt, she had grown into a beautiful old woman. An honest spinster. Uncle could not deny that any other state of union for Miss Cooke might have killed him.

  Though her body had aged, her voice was just the same. He heard it only for an instant when she said his Christian name. As quickly as she spoke, he locked those two syllables away. Knew he would replay them time after time when he was still, when he was silent. He thought she wavered when their old eyes met, and he considered that she was building up to their meeting as well. How long had it been? An easy number to recollect. Fifty-three years.

  Once she was well inside his home, Uncle’s knees buckled, and he collapsed against the sun-warmed door. He was light-headed, overwhelmed by the weight of emotion within him. Joy and sorrow. Looping, weaving. Mending. Tearing apart. Many, many strands of both. And these strands had nothing to do with the fact that right now, in the home where he had lived his entire life, a child was being born.

  “How bad is it?” Percy Abbott asked as he sat knee to knee with his wife Delia at their kitchen table.

  “Not too bad,” she replied. “I don’t think.”

  Percy took her hand in his and sighed. Another mishap, just enough to make him teeter. He wiped his sweating face on the shoulder of his plaid shirt, then noticed the skinned rabbit lying on a wooden cutting board beside him. Its furry paws were removed and pushed off to the side. One desiccated black eye stared up at Percy. She didn’t listen to me either, it seemed to say. Didn’t heed a peep. With his elbow, Percy nudged the board, re-orienting the dead rabbit’s gaze.

  Now holding her hand up to the light, he saw the tip of her index finger, firm and ready to burst, offering up a blistering heat. A spider web of redness threatened to take over her palm.

  “Can you move it?”

  “Not since this morning.”

  “Jesus, Del. Why did you hide this?”

  “Don’t yop my head off,” she snapped.

  A rush of air from his nostrils.

  “I didn’t hide it exactly,” she continued, eyes focused on the calico fabric of her dress. “You just didn’t notice.”

  There you go, he thought, turning it around.

  “Did not,” she said flatly.

  He chose not to respond.

  Percy knew something was wrong when she met him at the door. He arrived for his afternoon lunch, but there was no steaming tea, no plate of squares or bread on the table. Not even a dry cracker to calm his cranky belly. Instead, she was standing in the doorway, holding her hand against her chest, chirping through a nervous smile. “You’re going to be mad.”

  “Not again, Del. Poking around in my shed.”

  “I wasn’t, then. I was. . .I was cleaning.”

  “Poking around.”

  “Okay. Poking around.”

  “Again.”

  Only last winter, he had found her trapped there, unable to move. He’d been cutting wood most of the day, but when fat snowflakes began to sift down through a darkened sky and the air grew dense, he decided to haul his sleigh out before the path was erased. When he arrived home, the house was strangely quiet, the fire low. He called to his wife, but she didn’t answer. All of the rooms were empty. Lonely. For a fleeting moment, as he sat down in the kitchen, he had the notion that his wife may have left him, and he glanced about for a scribbled note.

  Then, from the window over the kitchen sink, he saw his shed, the colour of blooming poppies, permeating the storm. Brazenly, it called to him, Come take a look.

  Sure enough, she was there, hunched over his lathe, head and neck twisted like a chicken’s just before the snap.

  “Percy? Hand me the sickle, will you?” she said in a relaxed voice, as though the scene were somehow banal. Her arm stretched out behind her, pale fingers wiggling. “Can you pass that to me? I can’t quite get it.”

  He reached around her, felt her hair, a gnarled mess coiling a length of wood, firmly secured in the lathe. Then, stepping back, he roared, “Sickle! A sickle! I got half a mind to hand you the scythe.”

  Her hand crawled up over her shoulder, and she tugged at her shawl, covered up her head. The whole works began to shake, and he could hear her muffled crying. He paced back and forth in the tiny shed, hoping his anger would scatter with each livid scuff of his boots.

  That morning, he had fixed a piece of knotty pine in the lathe, taken it down using the barrel of an old gun as a roughing gouge. When he left it, the newly formed spindle was still jagged, hitching onto his sweater when he brushed his arm against it.

  He could just imagine what had happened. Tentative at first, she would have pressed the treadle slowly with her buttoned boot, and pressing it again, she might have leaned her face closer to feel the sweetly scented wind rising up from the dry wood. Then her hair would have fallen over her shoulder, and in a shocking instant, her head would crack downwards with a sudden awful force. Astounded foot like ice on the treadle.

  He stared at his wife’s backside and thought about her hair out loose like that in the middle of the day. Unpinned and unbraided, a nighttime style. Bedtime. The more he thought about her handfuls of hair, the harder he scuffed his feet along the worn wooden floor. Some part of him felt slightly sick, as though an unspoken confidence had been broken.

  Then to find her in this most vulnerable position.

  Certainly most men would think her stupid, might even strike her as though she were an errant animal. He shuddered at the thought of a bruise on her fair skin, and for the moment, his anger was outweighed by relief – that he was her husband, that he was the man coming upon her like this.

  “What a mess,” she mumbled, and her feet danced slightly. “I don’t know what else to do. I’ve tried everything, but I’s stuck. I’ve near scalped myself, I yanked so hard. Cut my hair, Percy, for God’s sake. Cut it.”

  “That I won’t.”

  She moaned. “Please, Percy. I’s frozed, right down to the bone, been out here now God only knows how long. And. . .and. God, I don’t care what you thinks of me no more, if you don’t cut me free this instant, I’s going to. . .I’s going to lose my water all over myself.”

  Percy paused.

  “For God’s sake, have pity on me,” she squealed.

  He bent over her, released the tailstock, and pulled up on the piece of wood. Once freed, she bolted from the small room, darted up the slippery path through the woods towards the outhouse. Percy watched her, and even though his heart was still beating against his chest, he couldn’t help but smirk. Bounding over the icy hill, the unfinished spindle offered its own form of punishment – a whack to the backside every time her springing feet touched the frozen ground.

  Inside their home, he stoked the fire and waited for her to return. She never spoke when she entered the room, but sat in the chair beside him. Not a flinch as he began to untwist the wood, loosen her hair, snipping scattered stands. The tangle looked worse than it was, and in only minutes, wood and woman were separated.

  She rubbed her neck, then stood, smoothed her apron. “How
about I put that soup on the stove. Warm our bones?”

  My bones is plenty warm.

  Her cheeks glowed with his unspoken scolding, and she turned away from him, walked to the back stoop.

  Percy was bewildered, wondered why she was so unsettled. After all these years of marriage, her landscape was familiar, but the earth beneath was always a surprise. Didn’t women have their place? A place that had nothing to do with their husband’s livelihood? A safe place: kitchen, church, vegetable garden, bedroom?

  Then again, how was he to know? Percy had grown up with a silent father and four brooding brothers, and he understood nothing of the desires of a woman. Who was he to tell her what to do? Did he really have that right? He was uncertain, and hadn’t said a word whenever she hovered in the doorway, lingered beside him as he worked. But soon, she began slipping in while he was away – his mallet might be in a different location, the dusty planer cleaned, a piece of furniture shifted. He was a precise man, and he noticed these things.

  Delia returned with the frozen soup. Percy watched her hold the frosty pot to her abdomen with one hand, rub the other hand over it, a glitter of frost falling onto her skirt. And he was bewildered no more. Children. A child, even. Missing from her life. That would have changed everything. He had failed her.

  “As the man–” he began, then coughed, reached for a handkerchief in his back pocket. His voice was like a wilted plant, and inside his head, he could hear his brothers mock his softness. Oh, have mercy, little Percy. He cleared his throat, then continued more forcefully than intended, “As your husband, I forbid you to ever go in there again. It’s no place, no place for a decent woman.”

  He remembered her wincing when he’d said the word “decent.” But the sting didn’t last long. She had responded soberly, “If I hadn’t gotten stuck, you’d never have known.”

  Percy shook his head, released the memory, tried to focus on Delia’s finger. He laid her hand back in her lap, patted it, and stood. In the porch, he poured water in the basin, lathered his hands with a swipe of dark lye soap. A fly landed on his forearm, and he turned to see a tear near a nail in the screening on the door. An open invitation. He made a mental note to repair it next chance.