In those not so long-ago winters, the father of the house, or an uncle or son, slept on the kitchen bench behind the stove, which he left at least once during the night to replenish the firebox. When the wood supply was low, the tender of the stove moved upstairs to sleep with siblings or wife and children under handwoven wool blankets and quilts of rags, and, sometimes, sleigh blankets piled on top. Because a small child’s arm, straying from under the covers, could freeze overnight. But the stove man or woman could not escape the next morning: the rafters rimmed with frost, ice in the teakettle, potatoes rock-candy hard. The cloud in her face as stiff cold fingers held a match to some bark or tangle of dry twigs – there was rarely newspaper to hasten the task.
Those first winters before Eric laid cushions of pink fiberglass on the attic floor and hired a contractor to punch holes in the century-old siding (wooden polka dots falling to the grass, honey-brown on one side, yellow flaking on the other) and blow cellulose between the walls, he and Jenny wore parkas and tuques to come downstairs in the morning. Used a blowtorch and scraps of tarpaper, sometimes, to ignite wood that was too wet, too green to warm the room where the stove stood, let alone the rest of the house.
And the wind. It bore through every hole, the gaps between floor and baseboard – some whittled by generations of mice, the spaces where the putty had fallen between the ancient glass and the rotting window frame, the electrical outlets. They covered the windows with plastic, closed off rooms and hung blankets over door openings. On some days their small quarters fomented the restlessness and irritability known as cabin fever but when it was this cold they were in survival mode. They stayed close to the stove, left the cupboard doors open under the sink to keep the pipes from freezing, ate nourishing foods and drank tea by the fire.
Karl and Denise’s place, being much smaller, was easier to heat. But they had other troubles. Their cabin was a twenty-minute trek by snowshoe off a bad road. They had no power, no phone and no running water. And Denise was pregnant. They went out once a week: one Thursday it was to pick up Karl’s unemployment cheque and the following Friday to mail the report card that stated No, he had not worked, started a full-time job, attended a school or training course and Yes, he was ready, willing and capable of working each day. On those days they sometimes visited Eric and Jenny.
They are playing Auction, a card game that Denise has taught them. The men against the women. It’s so cold that she does not remove the ironic second-hand Kelly-green snowsuit she wears everywhere, just unzips it down to her waist. Denise is a local girl, which makes her exotic to their social circle. She has long dark-red hair, Carly Simon lips, heavy breasts on the shelf of her big belly. Eric thinks she is beautiful. Even in a snowsuit. Even pregnant.
‘Nana used to make a big batch of porridge and empty it in a clean drawer,’ she says as she picks up the kitty. Unlike the others she does not need to stop talking in order to make up her deck. The game, Karl says, is in her DNA.
‘Next morning she’d cut it up, right in the drawer, and everyone just grabbed a piece.’
‘They ate it cold?’ Jenny says.
‘She had to do something.’ Widening her eyes. ‘Imagine, thirteen kids!’
‘There were twelve in this house, apparently,’ Jenny says. ‘Must have stacked them like cordwood when it was time to go to bed.’ She turns over the deuce of spades.
‘That’s a saucy little card,’ Denise says.
Eric imagines the phrase tumbling down generations of card players. A grandmother playing in a Cape Mabou farmhouse with the lamp turned low to save on oil. A bachelor uncle in a coal-town tenement.
‘Tell them about the neighbours,’ Karl says.
‘My mother’s neighbours when she was growing up? Eighteen kids. The mother was an Aucoin (‘O’Coin’) from Margaree. Every morning she parked herself in front of the stove to make flapjacks. She poked them through a wire above the stove and when the kids came down the stairs they’d grab a couple and that was their breakfast.’
‘You’re making that up!’ Jenny says.
‘True as I’m sitting here!’
Denise’s joyous honking laughter, even when her tales are on the dark side, as they are that day. Gleefully, she tells of week-long binges, of dead drunks falling asleep with their forearms on top of the wood stove, didn’t feel a thing, of an uncle and his friend ‘on the booze hard’ fetching the bucket of frozen homebrew from the basement of the company house, breaking the beer into chunks with a poker, melting it on the electric stove.
Jenny had cooked spaghetti before they went back to their cold cabin. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to spend the night?’ But no, the houseplants would freeze if they didn’t get a fire going. And the poor cat.
‘I wish Karl wouldn’t smoke inside,’ Jenny said after they had gone. She was clearing the table of plates and cutlery.
Eric lifting a bottle to the light ‘I know …’ tilting the last of the wine into his mouth, wiping the dribbles on his chin.
‘You’d think he’d try a little, with Denise pregnant.’
‘—’
‘God those stories were sad.’
‘Hmmm?’
‘Denise’s stories. The one about her uncles hacking away at the frozen beer. It’s so desperate. I don’t know how she can laugh about stuff like that.’
Eric shrugged.
‘Don’t you think?’
‘Winter’s a hard time. Look at us. Maybe it helps to laugh.’
‘I guess …’
He followed her to the counter and put his hands on her hips.
‘Leave those,’ he said, sliding one hand up to her breasts. ‘We’ll do them tomorrow.’ He nuzzled her nape, kissed the top of her shoulder. ‘Let’s fuck,’ he said.
* * *
Around midnight he came down to put wood in the stove. Poked and teased the fire. Hovered over the tentative heat, waiting against hope for a blaze (was there ever a sweeter sound?) so that he could add another log and close the damper. But all he heard was the hissing of wet wood. He got a drink of water from the tap. Looked out the window at the starlight on the snow.
Jenny’s weight on him, her breasts and belly and the flannel of her nightie. Her mouth and hair. His cold hands cradling her cold buttocks. There was a box of condoms on the floor, but it must have been shoved under the bed and he was loath to get up, turn on the overhead light (there was no outlet to plug in a lamp), kneel on the cold linoleum to look for it.
‘Are you sure?’ Jenny had whispered in his ear.
They had been having the baby conversation. He and Claire had jumped over that one, gone straight to the divorce conversation. So it was his first time. Jenny wanted a child. And with Denise pregnant it had gotten worse.
His senses swimming. With wine, with want, with the memory of Denise’s beautiful lips and breasts.
You couldn’t really call it a decision.
THE STORY OF BLAISE AND WENDY
Once upon a time there was a young man from Cape Breton who took a bus all the way to Chapleau, Ontario, to plant trees for the summer. With him was his best buddy Gordie, also in his second year at Saint Francis Xavier University. Ten eleven twelve hours a day they worked. Wearing heavy planting bags they raced through the clearcuts, stooping every few yards to drive a shovel, then a tree seedling, into the ground. It rained and it snowed and it rained again. Then the blackflies came. In the morning, they crawled, aching all over, out of damp smelly sleeping bags into damp dirty clothes. Their only pleasure was loading up the eight thousand calories their bodies needed every day. Planting is piecework and they didn’t make any money at all until they got the hang of it. But then they became fit and strong and tough and they made lots. On their day off the foremen took them to Chapleau to wash their clothes and buy liquor and cigarettes. They were like Vikings coming to town.
When the planting season ended there
was still almost a month left before classes. Gordie missed his girlfriend, he wanted to go back to Cape Breton, but Blaise didn’t feel like going home just yet. He took the train to Sudbury to visit his cousin Michael.
Michael worked at the Copper Cliff smelter. He had a brand-new car and his own apartment. Every morning he ate a bowl of cereal and filled his lunch can with ham and cheese sandwiches and packets of sugar tarts. Blaise never heard him leave. When he opened his eyes the sun was high and it was hot. The apartment was quiet in that strange way of other people’s homes. There was something sterile and unnatural about the silence. He ate toast with Cheez Whiz and drank a glass of Coke. He listened to Michael’s records, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Bryan Adams and April Wine. Then he went out. Past the theatre and St. Joseph’s Hospital, where he would later work, to the library where he read the newspapers to pass the time. Sometimes he tried out the guitars at Prom Music; one of the tree planters had taught him how to play ‘The Needle and the Damage Done.’ Then he’d have a hot chicken sandwich and a Boston cream pie at the bus stop counter. He knew that his birth mother was working at Kresge’s when she got pregnant. He lingered there too, imagined her serving a Coke to his father. He did not wish to know his father’s name. Nor would he have wanted to meet him. But to see his face, yes, he would have liked to see his face. Some of the names on the stores he recognized as being Jewish and he wondered, going by: That man with his hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth on his heels in the doorway. He’d be the right age. This one with the pencil mustache and the suspenders … As he walked, he kept thinking that there was something for him here, in the city where he had been conceived.
In the evenings, they went out in Michael’s new Dodge Dart. They drove to the Big Nickel, which stood on a hill like Jesus’ cross on Golgotha. Then they went to the Coulson and drank draft beer. On their way home the second night Michael said, ‘Show you something cool.’ And he had taken Blaise to the Inco slagheap, which at night ran down the hill like a river of fire.
‘Cool,’ Blaise said.
Blaise had only planned to visit a few days. But Michael said the Northern Lights Folk Festival was that weekend – he should stay. He said it was really cool. You sat outside on the grass and drank beer and listened to the music and looked at the pretty hippie girls dancing. So he stayed. On Friday night they found a spot on the grass in front of the main stage, right behind two girls sitting on a striped blanket. One of the girls was dark and plump with a ski-jump nose and the other was fair and plump with round, bare white shoulders. Every so often, the fair girl would turn around and scan the crowd as if looking for someone and her eyes would slide over him. He smiled at her once and she smiled back. She had very blue eyes and a really nice set of boobs. It took a long time to get dark. Between sets he and Michael began to talk to the girls.
‘Blaise!’ the blonde girl said. ‘What a cool name!’ (She was dismayed when she learned that it was not spelled B-l-a-z-e.)
After Colin Linden came on, the dark girl lit a joint and after taking a few puffs she turned around and passed it to Michael. Then the blonde girl lit one. Blaise moved up a little. His lips were dry after the joint, but Michael had a wineskin full of Concord wine and he and Blaise and the girls each had a pull. The fair girl – her skin was glowing silver like the moon – choked on the wine and it ran purple down the front of her top. She wiped at it with her hands, laughing and then hiccupping and laughing some more, and the wet fabric clung to the curve of her breasts.
Valdy came on and sang, ‘Play me a rock and roll song.’ Blaise was singing too, but inside. It was crazy but it was like he was the song. And the people around him, well, he felt as if he had known them all for a very long time. By the time Willie Dixon and the Chicago All Stars began to play – after a long interval where there was something wrong with the sound system and the emcee didn’t have any more jokes or sponsors to thank – the fair girl was leaning back against Blaise and both his hands were flat on her midriff, tucked up under her breasts. The air was warm, warmer than the air had any right to be at that time of night. There was no wind. Beneath him the round earth felt gentle and kind. The moon and the stars blessed him with milky silver and the music spilled over all the people and splashed up again, filling all the spaces between them.
BACKSHIFT
A northwest wind was howling at the window and hurling rain against the glass. But that’s not what was keeping Annabel awake. She rolled onto her right side (she never slept on her left it was bad for your heart her uncle Lauchlin had not followed that advice and died of a heart attack when he was fifty-two), bent her knees and adjusted the pillow. She looked into the darkness and sighed. And that’s when it came to her: Father MacAulay! He’d know what to do. Why on earth hadn’t she thought of him right away? She’d get Curly to drive her there first thing in the morning she could even go to Mass – she hadn’t been on a weekday in a long time, and that way Betty Jane MacPherson wouldn’t see her going into the rectory (when she wasn’t in her front window she was on the phone telling people who she saw going in and out).
Yes. That’s what she’d do.
If only if only if only it were all a dream. She’d wake up tomorrow and tell Curly about it and he’d chuckle and say, ‘You were working backshift again.’ Nettie MacGillivray’s face popped into her head. It was thinking of Jane MacPherson, whose sister she was, that had brought her to mind. And also the fact that a long, long time ago, when Annabel was still in high school, Nettie’s eldest daughter Barbara had married a Protestant. It had been the talk of the county, chiefly because of how Nettie had reacted, which was by having a nervous breakdown. Some saw this as proof of her piety, but those who knew about Nettie’s ‘little problem’ (liquor) thought it was a convenient excuse to hit the bottle. Annabel had been more ambivalent, her conviction that it was wrong to marry outside the church tempered by Romeo and Juliet, which the English nun had made them read that year. She couldn’t help feeling sorry for Barbara. Now of course it was Nettie she sided with. Poor woman, she thought. The disappointment she must have felt. And the shame. Because of course it reflected on the parents. Especially the mother, whose duty it was to raise good Catholic children. She rolled onto her stomach, pushed the pillow up against the headboard, settled and re-settled an arm and then a leg, careful, each time she moved, to nudge Curly just a little. But he slept on.
‘I can’t sleep,’ she said finally.
‘Hmmm …’
‘What?’ Annabel said, raising her voice.
‘Wha – What is it?’
‘You said something.’
‘Okay,’ he mumbled. He rolled away from her, taking the blankets with him. She yanked them back.
‘I can’t sleep,’ she said.
Curly sighed. ‘Try some hot milk.’
Hot milk was Curly’s grandmother’s cure for insomnia. It had never worked for Annabel and he darned well knew it. She was just about to tell him this when he pushed off the blankets and rolled out of bed. Her first thought was that he was going downstairs to heat up some milk. But he just went down the hall to the bathroom.
‘I want to go see Father MacAulay tomorrow,’ she said when he came back into the room.
‘Okay.’
‘We can’t let him go ahead with this.’
‘—’
‘He’s not even twenty-one.’
‘I know, I know. Can we talk about it in the morning?’
‘And he’s so far away. We could talk some sense into him if he was here. Maybe we should go to Sudbury, I –’
‘I want to sleep, Annabel.’
‘Your son is about to ruin his life and all you can think of is sleep!’ She began to cry.
Curly was silent. They continued like that for a while, she crying and he not saying anything. She heard him sighing, and then yawning and fidgeting so she knew he wasn’t sleeping. But then he was still, and she was back to st
aring at the darkness alone.
The trouble had started in August when instead of coming home after his layoff (Annabel had fantasized about the reunion since April: maybe he would surprise her, knock on the door, and she would see him standing on the step, her beautiful, beautiful boy) well instead of that Blaise had decided to go to Sudbury to visit his cousin Michael. A week had gone by, then another and a few days. And then his call one night to say he was taking a year off he had a job at St. Joseph’s Hospital making deliveries ‘here’s Michael’s address can you send me my clothes and my records?’
‘But you’re going back to school,’ Annabel said. She was confused.
‘I’m taking a year off,’ he said again.
A year off? What on earth was that? She had not liked it one bit. Had cried as she went through his dresser drawers (and found a marijuana cigarette inside a balled-up pair of socks) and washed and ironed his t-shirts and jeans. They had heard from him only twice after that: once to ask them to send him his last paycheque when it came from Chapleau, and the second to say that he had moved into his own apartment, he would send them the address later.
The address never came. So it was a surprise tonight to get his call – how her heart thrilled at the sound of his voice – with the news that all was well, the job was pretty easy; he had a van and he delivered stuff and everyone was nice to him and guess what he was getting married.
‘What do you mean, married?’ Annabel said. She had looked at Curly, sitting at the end of the table eating the bowl of cornflakes he liked to eat before bed.
‘He says he’s getting married!’
‘Married!’ Curly said, bits of milk and cornflakes flying out of his mouth. On the phone Blaise was saying there was no need to come they were just going to the courthouse –
‘Let me talk to him,’ Curly said and she gave him the phone and stood beside him. Listening. She was just sick. And then it hit her.
‘He’s getting married at the courthouse!’ she said to Curly but he waved her to be quiet.
Lucy Cloud Page 4