‘Good dog,’ he said, and patted his head.
A woman came out of the bus.
‘His name is Ed Sullivan,’ she said.
‘Friendly,’ Curly said.
She invited him inside.
Two small children – he could not tell if they were boys or girls, sat in the bus driver’s seat, their hands on the big steering wheel. Their faces and necks were speckled with blackfly bites. A pregnant woman stood at a little bench in front of a camp stove, spooning Nescafé into a mug.
‘You’re just in time for coffee,’ she said. She filled the mug with hot water and handed it to him. Curly didn’t drink coffee except on Sunday morning before church. But he took it anyway.
‘Want milk in it?’ she said. Thinking it would be goat milk he said No. But it was canned.
‘Honey?’ she said, holding up a jar. He shook his head.
A man with a leather headband climbed aboard. He was a wiry energetic-looking man, about the same size as Curly, and was wearing bell-bottomed leather pants. He had a hunting knife in a sheath at his hip. This must be the one people called Wild Bill, Curly thought. There were two men named Bill at the commune; the other was known as Mild Bill. This Bill, the wild one, drove a motorcycle and was said to have been in the Hell’s Angels. He’d been banned from the Whycocomagh Legion for fighting and there was a story that he’d gone after someone with an axe (another hippie passing through who had been too friendly with his woman).
These days Wild Bill was a mechanic at the Esso and a volunteer firefighter. He had married a girl from Strathlorne and they had a couple of kids. His picture was in the paper every time there was a dart tournament. But the name Wild Bill had stuck to him. Mild Bill was gone. He had been caught selling dope a short time after Curly first went to the commune. One of the pregnant women took the rap for him and after it got sorted out the two of them went back to Ontario. They had all gone eventually, some of them owing money. But not to Curly, he took cash only, never credit. He had sold them three things: a truckload of old windows for the greenhouse they wanted to build, some used bicycles and a load of firebricks for a pottery kiln.
And now the fellow Kim was back. He had called Curly from Girlie MacNeil’s place a few days ago. He wanted him to go to Blues Mills with him to pick up a cow. November, Curly thought. Bad time to buy a cow. If he didn’t have hay he’d better get a move on. There was no going up that road once the snow came. Kim would have to carry the hay up the hill on his back, or on a toboggan if he had one. Unless he had a Ski-Doo. Chookie might have hay, though. He could pick it up tomorrow if Kim wanted. He’d ask him.
The road to the old commune had never had ditches or culverts so the fall rains had dug deep channels across it. Curly couldn’t see any recent tracks, and driving into the yard the only vehicle he saw was up on blocks. The bus was still there, though. The back door hung from one hinge and wild rosebushes grew up against it. There was no greenhouse that he could see. Smoke came out of the chimney of one of the twin A-frames. A woman came to the door. She had short curly blonde hair and a big toothy smile. She was wearing a blue maternity smock with pale yellow polka dots under a white cardigan. Kim soon appeared. After they shook hands, he pulled an empty bread bag out of his coat pocket and slipped it on his right foot before putting on one of his rubber boots.
He had talked all the way to Blues Mills. He had made a barn out of the other A-frame. Had a little hay but not enough for the winter, it would be cool if Curly could pick some up for him. He had bought two sacks of potatoes from Lauchie. Apparently a person could get all the nutrients they needed eating just milk and potatoes. His girlfriend wanted to learn how to make cheese, did he know anyone who could teach her? The baby was due in April.
The Guernsey turned out to be a good-looking animal. A little old maybe, but she still had some good years in her. There was just one little problem: she had never had a collar and never been led, just went in and out of the barn by herself. As soon as she felt a rope around her neck she took off like a bat out of hell. Kim was holding the other end of the rope and it was almost comical to see the big burly man bouncing behind the cow across the yellow humps of grass. But Curly wasn’t laughing. When the runaway reached the fence, she turned around and came galloping back to the yard. Curly and the farmer were standing beside the tractor and they jumped out of the way when they saw her lower her head like a bull. She drove her forehead right into the grill of the tractor. Blood spurted into the air: she had broken off one of her horns.
What Curly would normally do in this situation is wipe his hands and get back in the truck. There were plenty of other cows around, no point getting stuck with a pack of troubles like this one. But Kim had made the mistake of paying for her before she was loaded. They had no choice but to take her. Somehow Curly had grabbed the noose, somehow he had managed to pull the cow up the plywood ramp and into the truck.
When Kim got in the passenger seat Curly saw that his face and clothes were splattered with blood. As his own probably were.
‘Looks like we were butchering (‘bootchering’),’ he laughed, wiping his face with his sleeve. ‘I can cut off the other horn when we get to your place. Get it over with.’ Kim didn’t answer. Curly set off for the commune. The darkness fell early this time of year. Soon they were all alone on the dark road. Kim remained silent and Curly didn’t turn on the radio. Every now and then they heard the cow lose her footing on a turn and bump up against the side of the box.
Kim broke his silence as they began to climb the rough road to the commune. He was hoping to buy the property from the other owners, otherwise there was no point improving the place. Bill Pelletier (Wild Bill) was all for it but Kevin had become a Hare Krishna and Liz had moved to Jamaica. He didn’t know if he could pull it off.
There was a weak light in the window of the A-frame – candlelight Curly guessed. Then it became bright: when Kim and his girlfriend came out they had a Coleman lantern. The woman held it up while the two men got the cow into the second A-frame. Curly didn’t offer to cut the other horn.
The light was still on in the kitchen when Curly drove up to the house. He knew that there would be a plate in the warming oven for him but he was too tired too eat. He’d put it in the fridge and go to bed. He cut the engine and got out of the truck. Stretched his arms over his head. Sighed. In the dark porch he stepped out of his boots.
He opened the door.
THE PERFECT PLACE
Dark. Not even the line of gold around the door that means her mother is still up. Lucy looks into the darkness and listens. She often woke in the night like this, and sometimes she’d hear voices and stirrings on the other side of the wall. Once she thought it was early morning and she went to her parents’ room holding one of her teddies and said ‘What are we doing today?’ and her father laughed and said ‘It’s still nighttime’ and that he and Wendy were just going to bed. So she had learned to wait.
But now that her father is dead she does not hear any talking at night unless Wendy is on the phone. But sometimes she hears crying. She lies very still then. Even her breath does not move. It’s the only thing she can do.
One night Lucy is watching television when she realizes that she has not seen Wendy for a while. A scared feeling comes over her. She looks in the kitchen, the bathroom. Sees the lights are on in her bedroom, the door is ajar. She pushes it open. Her mother is sitting on the bed with their photo albums. There is a box of Kleenex beside her. A pile of used tissues. Her eyes and nose are red.
‘I’m looking at pictures of Daddy,’ she says. ‘Will it make you too sad to look at them?’
What is too sad?
What happens when people are too sad?
Wendy stands a second pillow against the headboard and they sit side by side with their legs splayed out. Lucy has seen these pictures many times. Her father would point to the people in them and say, ‘Who’s that now?’ and she
would answer Nana. Grampie. Donalda. John A. Many of the pictures feature a baby: sitting in a stroller with her father crouching beside her; on Santa’s knee or her face full of birthday cake. The baby is supposed to be her. But Lucy doesn’t believe it. She’s not a baby: she is Lucy-MacLeod-four-years-old and that’s that.
In the album Wendy is holding tonight there are no baby pictures. Only Blaise. His hair short. His face dark on one side, bright from a campfire on the other. Teeth shining white. Beer bottles on a picnic table. The green camp stove. In another one he and two men are walking ahead on a trail. He had turned to wave at the photographer.
‘He’s saying goodbye to us, Lucy,’ Wendy says. ‘Look, he’s saying goodbye.’
They examine the photo together – her father’s curly hair, the baseball cap. The smile on his face, the one he had when he was goofing off. Wendy takes her in her arms.
‘Lucy, Lucy, what are we going to do?’
When people are too sad they cry when they think they are alone. They cry while they are doing the dishes. While they watch television. When people are too sad they drink wine and lie on the couch and don’t answer the phone.
They don’t want to play Barbies.
There was talk of spending Christmas in Moncton with Aunt Holly and Lucy was worried. The last time they were in Moncton, her two cousins had locked her in the basement while Wendy and Holly went to the corner store to get a movie. This was a long time ago, maybe last year, but Lucy has not forgotten. So she is relieved when Grandma says she doesn’t want to go to Moncton for Christmas: ‘Every single time I go there I get stuck in a snowstorm.’
Wendy sits in the armchair with the Christmas catalogue on her lap. Lucy perches on the armrest with one arm on her mother’s shoulder. On the other armrest there is a pad of paper and a pen. They are making a list for Santa. Lucy has circled some of the items in the catalogue with a pen but only because Wendy asked her to. What she wants isn’t in there. She wants a giraffe for Christmas. A real one. She likes their spots and those little bobbly things on their head. Wendy doesn’t think the giraffe would fit in Santa’s sleigh. ‘And it’s from Africa, it would freeze on the way over. What about this nice play kitchen?’
‘Will Daddy be here for Christmas?’ Lucy says.
Wendy sets the catalogue on the floor and takes Lucy down from the armrest. She looks right into her face. She’s so close that Lucy can see the little white-blonde hairs on her upper lip.
‘Lucy. Sweetie,’ she says. ‘Daddy’s not coming back. He died, remember?’
‘Is he still dead?’ Lucy says.
Wendy’s friend Andrea visits from Toronto.
‘Go away for Christmas,’ she says. She has black hair and eyebrows and her voice matches her bright red mouth. She wears a fur coat and rubber boots, multitudes of scarves and bangles and necklaces and rings.
‘You like this one?’ she says to Lucy, and gives her the necklace with the black-on-silver letters that spell Elvis. Lucy knows who Elvis is. Grandma has a statuette of him on the bar in her rec room in MacFarlane Lake. But Lucy is not allowed to play with it.
‘Wendy. Honey. This is crazy,’ Andrea says. ‘You can’t spend the winter here alone after losing your husband. Winter’s depressing enough for God’s sake … You have some insurance money. Go! Go somewhere that doesn’t remind you of him … I know just the place … Go on sick leave … Sublet the apartment …
‘I’m telling you, I know the perfect place.’
THE PINK VILLA
An airport with three walls, open to the dense dead-fruit smell of the night, the rich exhalations of motorized vehicles and fecund growth: Trinidad.
Lucy stood on the cusp of this new world, next to where there should have been a wall, and shivered with interrupted sleep. In one hand she clutched the pale pink teddy bear her grandmother had given her after her father died, and in the other, an airsickness bag which held an airplane bread roll wrapped in a napkin, the fancy stir-sticks Wendy got with her drinks and the book that Andrea gave her at the Toronto airport.
Wendy was talking. Wendy was always talking. Sometimes Lucy heard her and sometimes her talking ran off her like rain.
‘I guess we’re stuck here for three more hours. What will be do, Lucy Cloud? Read a book? Eat? Are you hungry? I wonder if anything is open. Probably not. I still have those peanuts. Want some? I suppose we could sleep, but I’d hate to miss the plane. But you can sleep. Maybe I should go find the bathroom first. Isn’t this cool? We’re not in Kansas anymore!’
After they landed, the people in the airplane had split up into two groups: the white people like them, looking tired and serious and a little scared, and the joyous brown people. They carried big shopping bags and retrieved overstuffed gold and green vinyl suitcases and bulging taped-up cardboard boxes at the baggage carousel. They opened them up and moved things from one bag to another and put on some of the clothes. And then they all left. But not Lucy and Wendy; they had to wait all night for the airplane to Tobago. ‘Make me a picture,’ Lucy said. Wendy sat her on her lap and started to draw a picture on her back with her finger.
‘That’s Mammy Rabbit, this is her little bunny tail’ (here she always tickled her) ‘and these are her big ears’– Lucy felt soft furry ears on one shoulder blade and then the other – ‘And these are her eyes and her cute little pink nose …’
When Lucy woke up she was holding her mother’s hand and they were in a line of people outside. The sun was glinting off something big and white. She squinted. It was an airplane. Were they going home? But her mother said No, it was the plane to Tobago, and Lucy was disappointed.
The clouds outside the little window were also big and white. Lucy and her mother had never seen such strange clouds. They stood up in the sky, big pillowy white columns crowned with sunlight.
After they landed, a taxi took them very fast down a curvy green road. All the car windows were open and Lucy was not sitting in a booster seat or wearing a seatbelt. They swerved past pedestrians, cars blasting music, rickety roadside tables with colourful offerings. The driver stopped for a goat, climbed a steep road, turned a sharp corner. Lucy threw up.
She does not think much of the place so far.
The clouds are not the only strange things in Tobago. The trees, the shrubs, the houses, everything is different. Even the moon. Not even in a storybook has Lucy seen a moon hanging upside down. It comes out right after supper. Just like the people, who suddenly crowd the streets, the yard, the steps of Miss Emelda’s house. ‘Miss Melda!’ they call from the bottom step (no one ever knocks on the door here) and Miss Emelda comes out and sits on the veranda like a fat queen and everyone laughs and talks but mostly they laugh. This too Lucy finds odd. What do people find so funny?
She hears laughter early in the morning when it’s still dark outside. It’s the men who do the roadwork. She hears their laughing voices outside the window, the thwack of their cutlasses attacking the grass, the roosters calling to each other. She snuggles up against her mother and falls back asleep. Wendy is always gone when she wakes.
Lucy sits on the veranda eating a pomme cythère. Watches the people going by. The children in blue and white uniforms. More men with cutlasses; farmers going to their gardens in the jungle. The postmistress. Miss Esther. Some of them say ‘Mornin, mornin’ to her. Some of them wave.
Sometimes she walks to the seawall. Far, far away is the head of a swimmer. Her mother. Lucy heard Wendy say to Elvira that the deeper the water, the easier it is to swim. ‘As if the sea holds you up.’ Another time she said that if she had to do herself in, she would jump in the ocean and just swim and swim.
At the black and white seawall Lucy follows her mother’s head, her hands, one then the other, flashing silver out of the grey water. She looks out for fins.
Jordan TT is the one who told her about the sharks. They feed at the fish dump by the fishermen’s shed. Righ
t where Wendy swims each morning.
‘Not the best place to swim,’ he says.
But when Lucy tells her mother about it, she just shrugs and says, ‘Bah. As long as you don’t have blood on you.’
Jordan TT has only one eye because when he was three years old his brother stabbed him with a pair of scissors. By accident. He sells grapefruits and mangoes and lemons. And coconuts that he steals from Miss Emelda’s trees.
‘Very sweet,’ he always says of the lemons.
Jordan TT can’t read, maybe because he only has one eye. But he knows all the news. Who thieved what during the night. The boat full of cocaine the police found. Then he laughs. In the sea he looks like a dolphin, the water flowing off his smooth muscular back in glistening sheets.
Sometimes he brings his little cousins with him – Julian, Rose, and Adela and their baby sister Petals. They sit on the steps of the veranda, taking turns holding Petals. When Wendy says it’s okay they swarm inside the apartment. They touch everything: Lucy’s colouring books, her seashells, the nameless cotton-candy pink bear with a bell in its ear that Grandma gave her before they left. (Wendy thinks she should call it Petals but Lucy doesn’t want to.) The children fill the house like a flock of busybody birds. But as soon as Wendy says it’s time to leave they fly.
‘My God those kids are well-behaved!’ Wendy says. Unlike Lucy, she means. She likes to tell everyone what she overheard Miss Esther saying about Lucy to Miss Winona. ‘She’s rude, and has no manners whatsoever.’ And then she laughs.
So Lucy waits at the black and white seawall for her mother to come back from the sea, wet and happy from swimming with the sharks.
After breakfast they go to Front Beach. They never bring anything with them – no towels, no food, no water. Just the secret feel of her bathing suit under her shorts or dress. They walk a long time on the shady road. There is a mango tree halfway up and sometimes there are men sitting underneath it. They are watching the sea. Even while they talk, their eyes keep flicking back to the water.
Lucy Cloud Page 10