‘There’s nothing we can do about it. Now. Do you want the crib out of the attic or not?’
ALEC AND JOHN A
Annabel had twin older brothers who lived on the family homestead in Blue River. Their names were Alec (‘Elleck’) and John A (‘Juh-nay’). Alec had never left home. John A had worked away for many years, mostly in the hard-rock mines of Northern Ontario. Neither man had married.
The brothers had the ruddy faces and tobacco-tinged white hair of elderly redheads but where John A was soft and round, Alec was thin and hard as a spade. Which wasn’t fair at all, John A said. He just had to look at a plate of biscuits and he got fat whereas Alec could stuff himself and never gain a pound.
‘He must have a tapeworm,’ John A said every time the topic came up, and he would launch into a story about the tapeworm his great-uncle Ambrose had ‘it was five feet long and his mother had made it come out by sitting him in a pan of porridge.’ John A’s stories were not unlike tapeworms themselves. On and on they went, a convoluted blend of the fantastic and the mundane, which he further complicated by starting them in the middle instead of the beginning. As he seldom related his stories to anyone but his twin brother he had lost the habit of prefacing them, making it difficult for listeners to know whether the events he described had occurred two weeks or two decades ago. The point of his tales was equally hazy. If it emerged at all it was at the very end, when some of the pieces (sometimes) came together.
Alec told stories, too, but with his fiddle. Whenever there were visitors important enough to sit in the parlour, he stood up – sometimes he needed prompting, sometimes he didn’t – and took down the fiddle case from its place on top of the piano. John A would roll his eyes then. ‘Here we go again,’ he’d say. His hand on the side of his mouth, shielding his loud whispers from Alec. ‘Thinks he’s Scottie Fitzgerald.’ But after his brother had tuned the instrument and begun to play, he was always attentive.
On a summer day that Lucy will one day think she remembers, because of the photograph, and because John A will bring it up almost every time he sees her, Blaise was doing the rounds with his new baby daughter. Friends and relatives were admiring her and saying doesn’t she look like Curly or Cousin Phyllis and any number of good-looking relatives and trying to get the blessing of her smile. They put quarters into her little mitts so that she would always have plenty of money.
In the picture the three of them sit on the dark green couch in the gloomy parlour that would never change. Wendy is wearing a purple skirt made of thin Indian cotton and she has two braids the colour of hay on either side of her round pink face. Blaise has a loose pale blue shirt and soft, soft eyes. His curly hair is longer than it was in high school. Lucy sits on Wendy. She is wearing a white sleeper with red cuffs and feet. On her face is a goofy crooked smile. The photo had been taken before Alec got up from the sunken musty seat of the armchair to get the fiddle case. John A would have been showing off in front of Wendy, telling some confusing story she wouldn’t be able to follow. And she, Lucy, would have been looking around with interest, her head bobbing on its fragile stem as Alec rosined the bow and tuned the instrument. She must have kicked her little red heels and waved her fists.
Perhaps if Alec had started out with something sprightly, a reel or a strathspey, things would have turned out differently. But he chose a slow air. As soon as the first strains rose from the instrument Lucy began to cry. Wendy tried everything: bouncing her up and down on her knees, walking her in the kitchen and on the porch, but Lucy would not calm down until Alec stopped playing the fiddle. John A laughed and laughed. From that day on there was no child he loved better than Lucy MacLeod.
BLACK ICE
Annabel had baked a fruitcake, a gumdrop cake and six kinds of fancy cookies. She’d embroidered Wendy and Lucy’s names on the white fake-fur cuffs of two new Christmas stockings and spent many hours choosing presents in the catalogue. She washed the walls and ceil-ings and floors of the kitchen and parlour and convinced Curly to buy a balsam fir in West Mabou. Curly thought this was going too far, he usually just got one in the woods back of the house, but Annabel insisted. It was to be their first Christmas with Blaise and Wendy and the baby and she wanted it to be perfect; the beginning, she hoped, of a yearly tradition: all of them sitting in the same pew at Midnight Mass (surely Wendy wouldn’t object to that); sleepy little children opening their gifts under the tree; everyone playing board games or going sledding on Christmas Day while she basted the turkey …
But there was another reason she wanted everything to go smoothly.
She plotted every step of the undertaking, anticipating possible obstacles, coming up with solutions. The girl was almost two now, old enough to stay with her grandmother for a couple of hours, even overnight if Blaise and Wendy wanted to go to a dance in Cheticamp or something. Donalda, although she didn’t know it yet, was key to the operation. Because Annabel would need a drive and Curly, she knew, would flat out refuse to do it. The plan was this: some time after Christmas Annabel would say, casual-like, that she and Donalda wanted to do some visiting – ‘Why don’t we take Lucy with us? Aunt Bib hasn’t seen her yet.’ – and Blaise and Wendy needn’t come, they’d be bored visiting all these old ladies … Or something like that. Then she and Donalda would drive to the rectory and ask Father MacAulay to baptize the child. She would have to hope he’d be there: she couldn’t exactly make an appointment. She didn’t even know if he could do it without the parents’ permission. It was hard to get that kind of information without creating suspicion. In her old catechism she had read that even a layman could perform a baptism if a person was in danger of dying. Well. Wasn’t everyone in danger of dying from the moment they were born? That was the backup plan.
On the twenty-third of December Blaise’s car spun on some ice near Edmundston, barely missing a tractor-trailer. Wendy had been driving; Blaise said she wasn’t used to black ice, apparently they didn’t have any in Sudbury. No one was hurt but Wendy was so shaken that they decided to spend the night at a motel even though a storm was coming and the roads would be worse the next day. And they were. Blaise and Wendy arrived home late and exhausted for Christmas Eve dinner. Midnight Mass was out of the question.
Christmas Day was good, even though Wendy didn’t accompany them to church, but on Boxing Day both she and Lucy came down with the stomach flu. Wendy blamed it on the well water, which Annabel thought was insulting, but she’d had an even worse thought: What if it was food poisoning? What if her dressing hadn’t been cool enough when she stuffed the turkey?
And then. Why-oh-why did she have to open her big mouth about Blaise’s hair? He had let it grow since the summer; it was now a big frizzy puff like the black people on TV, and it had been bothering her since he first walked in the door. (And she didn’t like that he didn’t tuck in his shirts anymore, just let them hang outside his pants it looked sloppy.) It had turned into a big ugly argument with Curly not taking her side it made her so mad – didn’t he mind that his own son looked like a hobo? – and it had ended with Blaise taking off with Wendy and Lucy for the rest of the day. At least Wendy had the good sense to stay out of it. This was nothing to Wendy, Blaise would tell his mother later, her family were always fighting, but Annabel was embarrassed and she didn’t know how to make up for it except by baking a nice big ham with scalloped potatoes and biscuits while they were gone, the only time she could have gotten away with Lucy had she played her cards right.
She thought about it a lot after they left. Thought of that saying about the sins of the father being visited upon the son. Except in this case it was the sins of the grandmother. She had failed the girl. If something happened to her while she was still unbaptized she would always blame herself. It ate and ate at her. So on the following Sunday she asked Curly to take her to Mass early so she could go to confession. She wanted to get Father MacAulay’s opinion and, she hoped, his reassurance.
But when the grille o
f the confessional slid open that morning, it wasn’t Father MacAulay she could make out through the lattice but a priest with white hair. Then she remembered. Father had told them he’d be in Dominion visiting his family the Sunday after Christmas and that a priest from Antigonish would fill in for him. Right away she knew that it was a sign: God wanted her to just let it be. She felt a great relief sweep over her.
As the priest lifted his hand to make the Sign of the Cross she recognized him. It was Father Benoit from Havre Boucher whose hair had all gone white by the time he was twenty-five. He was one of those modern priests, he liked to give hugs and wear jeans and his wavy white hair was a little too long for her taste. Poor Blaise, she thought, she had been hard on him. Even the priests had long hair nowadays. She crossed herself.
‘Bless me, Father,’ she said, ‘for I have sinned …’
ROCK PAPER SCISSORS
Baby Sheila is so big she takes up half the bed.
‘Why don’t we put Baby Sheila on your rocking chair. She’ll be right here beside you, it won’t be as crowded,’ Wendy says.
‘No,’ Lucy says. Her teddies take turns sleeping with her, two at a time. They all get the same allowance, too, which Turtle keeps for them in her zippered pouch: everything even-steven. She puts Baby Sheila back against the wall.
Wendy looks cross. ‘Now there’s no room for you in the bed!’ she says. ‘And poor Fuzzy … He’ll be squished all night.’
‘Where is the meat on animals?’ Lucy says. It’s something she’s been wondering about.
‘It depends on the kind of meat.’
‘Ham,’ she says. Ham is her favourite. Especially the one her grandmother in MacFarlane Lake makes, with sweet gooey slices of pineapple on top.
‘Ham is from pork. That’s another word for pig.’
‘Porky-pig-porky pig-porky pig,’ Lucy sings, rocking her head on the pillow.
‘Shhhh! Time to sleep.’ A peck on the cheek and her mother is already at the door, switching off the light. Her dark shape against the dimly lit hallway.
‘How do you get it off ?’ Lucy says.
‘What?’
‘How do you get the ham off the pig?’
‘The butcher does it. Now go to sleep.’
A few days later. Maybe a week. Wendy walks in after work with two bags of groceries. ‘Look what I have,’ she says to Lucy, setting a rotisserie chicken on the table.
‘The potatoes are in the oven,’ Blaise says from the couch.
‘Oh good. I’m starving.’ Rushing past Lucy, forgetting to kiss her.
‘But first I have to pee.’ Her voice trailing off. ‘Any beer left?’
The smell of the roast chicken, even under the plastic. Lucy’s fingers lift a corner of the soft greasy wrap, touch the gleaming gold-and-brown skin of the leg (she always gets one and Wendy and Blaise play rock-paper-scissors to see who gets the other).
Leg. She looks down at her own legs. Then back up at the chicken’s. Chicken. Hands gripping the side of the table, she raises up on her toes to get a better look. It could be a chicken. If a chicken lay on its back and had no head or feathers. Behind her, the sound of her father’s cane on the kitchen tiles. He was the one who told her. That no, meat did not come off the animal like milk or eggs. That in order to become meat, the animal, in this case the chicken, had to die.
KRAZY KARPET
That year it began to snow in November and it never stopped. Wendy wanted to hire Reggie Pilon, he had a blade on the front of his truck and lived just down the street and was reasonable but Blaise said he wanted to shovel, it was good for him, it got him outside. So after every snowstorm he went out with the metal scoop (the shovel was for the steps and Wendy did those before she went to work). He worked at it bit by bit. Sometimes it took him two days to clear the driveway and Wendy had to park the car on the street.
There was so much snow that winter that after a while there was nowhere to put it. Blaise piled it against the shed in the backyard and it got so high that one day he said to Lucy, ‘Let’s make a slide.’
They work on it when they’re feeling strong.
Lucy is sitting on the floor in front of the couch. She is pulling a pale blue sequined tube gown up her Barbie’s legs and hips when the telephone rings.
‘Hi Baby Doll.’
‘Hi.’
‘What’re you up to?’
Lucy shrugs.
‘What are you doing, Lucy?’
‘Playing Barbies.’
‘What’s Daddy doing?’
Shrug.
‘Is he sleeping?’
Her father is lying on the couch with his hands crossed on his chest. But his eyes are open.
‘No.’
‘Can you tell him to take the spaghetti sauce out of the freezer?’
‘Okay’
‘Make sure you don’t forget.’
‘—’
‘Bye-bye, sweetie pie.’
When she comes back from the living room her father is sitting up. ‘I’m feeling really strong today,’ he says. ‘What about you, Lucy MacLeod?’ Lucy bends her arm the way he showed her, making a fist and twisting it out. He touches the bulge on her upper arm and says, ‘Good.’ Sometimes he’ll stay sitting on the couch a little longer, his arms crossed over his knees, his head down. But today he gets up, goes into the kitchen and puts the water on to boil in the electric kettle and the big soup pot. ‘Do you need to pee?’
Lucy shakes her head.
‘Maybe you should go anyway,’ he says and she hoists herself up on the toilet and sits with both hands on the cold seat. Back to the kitchen where Blaise stuffs the cuffs of her pants into her socks and then she sits on the floor and pulls on her snow-pants and her jacket and tuque. Stands while he zips up the coat, wraps a scarf around her face and tucks her mittens under the cuffs of her sleeves.
Outside she pulls the scarf down from her mouth. The air smells like the collar of her mother’s coat when she comes home from work. She climbs up the steps her father carved one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight, drops on her behind, and slides. Whee! she says. Because that’s what her mother always says going down. It’s not as slippery as the last time so she gets the Krazy Karpet and climbs up again. Sometimes her father comes to the window and they wave at each other. After a while she hears the creaky screen door. Her father holds it open with his foot.
‘Stand next to the fence,’ he says. A cloud of steam comes out with him. He empties the kettle of hot water on the slide and it boils up into the air. As soon as he’s finished Lucy runs to touch it. Under her wool mitten it’s as slick as a Popsicle.
‘Beauty,’ Blaise says. ‘Now for the test drive.’
She watches him climb up the snow steps. He stands at the top and sings, ‘I’m the king of the castle!’ Lucy sings back, ‘You’re the dirty rascal!’ Then he sits on the red plastic carpet with his knees up and pushes off with his gloved hands and down he goes, disappears into the space between their house and the Kramers’, and she runs to the front yard where she knows he’ll be, up against the snowbank, grinning.
But he’s not.
On this day her father is lying in the middle of the white street and there’s a car stopped crooked in front of him. The door is open and the driver, a man, is outside yelling. ‘You fuckin’ crazy?’ he says. Then he leans against his car the way her father sometimes does, against the table, the counter, the wall. As if he has lost all his strength.
When Lucy tells Wendy about it at suppertime, her mother puts down the forkful of spaghetti she has just finished twirling against her spoon. ‘Jesus Christ, Blaise, what were you thinking? It could’ve been her on that toboggan.’
From her bed that night she hears them talking about it again.
‘Too bad he braked. Would have been a quick way to go.’
‘Blaise.’
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The sound of a siren on television.
‘Blaise, come on.’
‘—’
‘You have to get out more, go to your group. When was the last time you went to your group?’
‘I’m tired of the fucking group.’
‘You should call Michael, go see a hockey game or something.’ Her father’s slow clumsy step in the hallway. Her mother’s voice.
Louder now.
‘Well, think of Lucy, then. She needs you.’
Novena to Saint Jude and the Sacred Heart of Jesus: May the Sacred Heart of Jesus be adored, glorified, loved and preserved throughout the world, now and forever. Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us. St. Jude, worker of miracles, pray for us. St. Jude, help for the hopeless, pray for us. Amen A.M.
SLEEPING WITH STRANGERS
Annabel was sitting on the couch looking out the living-room window regretting that she hadn’t brought her knitting with her. There were no needles or wool in the apartment and no place to buy them here except the mall. She couldn’t go there by herself, she’d have to take a city bus, and didn’t want to ask Wendy for a drive. Poor Wendy, she had enough on her plate.
She had been in Sudbury three days, no: two. Had come from Cape Breton by train, a long trip made even longer by the passengers a few seats behind her. She didn’t know which one irritated her more: the man who talked all night or his seatmate, whose too-soft voice prevented her from hearing both sides of the conversation. She didn’t think she had slept at all, but she must have because suddenly it was bright morning and they were going by black plowed fields and big silos. She sat up. Her bladder was full, one of her arms was numb and her cheek, when she smoothed her new perm away from it, was corrugated with dried saliva. She looked around self-consciously, wondering what kind of spectacle she had offered the other passengers while she slept. Looking across the aisle she saw that the old couple was gone (the woman had slept slack-jawed, her toothless mouth forming an O) and a pale lanky young man now occupied the seat. A woman in a long skirt came out of the lavatory with a toiletry kit, her hair brushed and her lips glossy. A teenaged girl looked out the window, her knees drawn up under the blue train-blanket. A boy ate from a bag of potato chips. Some people were still contorted in the positions sleep had found them: faces collapsed against the window, sock feet or behinds sticking out into the aisle. One of the conductors came through the car and Annabel thought, ‘The things he must see in the run of a night.’ She waited in line for the lavatory then walked to the snack bar to buy tea and a muffin. She set them out on the little tray on the back of the seat in front of hers and spread the paper napkin on her lap.
Lucy Cloud Page 6