Maclean (6 page)

So what should he say to Bill? Get yourself together. Stop drinking. Work steady. Get a good wife. Have children. Stay at home nights and listen to the radio. Or take your wife to a movie. Or work in your garden or your carpentry shop in the back shed. Go to church. Join a lodge. Be an upstanding member of the community. Live so that when you die, everybody will say nice things about you and give you a big funeral.

“You do have to wonder sometimes,” Henry said, “what life is supposed to be all about, now don't you.?”

“It ain't about anything,” Maclean said. “It ain't about a god-damned thing.”

“No,” Henry said. “There has to be a purpose to it. It just stands to reason.”

“Like God,” Maclean said.

“That's right,” Henry said. “Like God.”

Maclean dug at the moss-covered earth in front of him with the heel of his boot and uncovered a colony of tiny black insects, which went chasing around in the ruins of their world looking for somewhere to get back underground out of danger.

He looked out across the river at the climbing flame of red maple leaves behind the old school and remembered the first day he had gone there, setting out on a bright, summery September morning with Alice, who was already in Grade Four, a smart girl in school, pretty as pretty could be, with great, brown eyes and long, brown hair. (Once when he was little he said that he was going to marry her when he grew up, and his mother had laughed.) He had a bookbag and a slate that his mother had bought him early that summer so she could teach him his letters before he started school. Life was beginning for him, and he felt important and afraid, marching along the road beside Alice.

Other children strung out along the road ahead of them and behind, and a big old wagon passing them with a load of hay, and a man leading a little herd of cows across the road to a pasture on the riverbank, and the river flowing away beside them, and the town on the far side climbing its hill with the steeples and the town clock at the top, and this rock there too jutting out black from the bank of green, waiting for them to come and be sitting here today and waiting too for the time when they would all be swept away and forgotten.

7

MACLEAN TRUDGED, HEAD
down, eyes front, uphill past big old houses with oak front doors and bay windows, wide lawns and carefully weeded flower beds. It was the kind of street he didn't like walking on and only did when there was no other, even half-easy way to get where he was going, the kind of street that gave him the feeling of being watched by indignant ladies peeking out at him from behind curtains or through the wickering of trellises or gazebos, a shabby trespasser in their manicured world, a breath of undeodorized humanity from the alleys, a reminder even, in his skeletal lineaments and the evident fragility and brevity of his expectations, of the dust and mud and rot that all this tidiness was designed to allow them to forget.

At the crest of the hill, the big houses and the sidewalk abruptly ended, and the pavement gave way to a rough gravel road with ditches on either side, half-filled with brown, peaty water where beetles skimmed and tiny frogs kerflopped and vanished into the roots of the bordering weeds as he passed. Beyond a little buffer zone of uncut black firs, houses began again, but smaller and poorer now, some of them hardly more than shacks, on little lots cut out of the woods with unpulled stumps sometimes at the back and a general rawness of ground which gave the whole place the feel of being somewhere much further from the centre of town than it was.

Alice's house was on the right, half a dozen houses on and set back a little from the road so that it was hidden by the house before it. Maclean approached cautiously, close over to the right beside the ditch, watching for the first glimpse, if there was to be one, of Mitch's half-ton truck. The wonderful lightness of the early part of the afternoon had been driven away, leaving behind it something half way between drunkenness and hung-over sobriety. As he came up to the house beside Alice's, he saw that Mitch's parking spot was empty, and he swung out into the middle of the road and began to walk as best he could like a man drawn along by nothing more than a casual, summer-afternoon fancy for a little stroll.

Alice's house sat sideways to the road and consisted mostly of afterthoughts. When Mitch bought it, fifteen years before, it was just a bungalow, but as their brood of kids grew Mitch pushed out rooms this way and that and finally added to the original structure a second-storey with an almost flat roof which had to be shoveled all winter to keep it from collapsing.

Maclean crossed into the yard on a culvert of old railroad ties and made his way around to the back of the house. He mounted the steps to the kitchen door and peeked in through the screen. Alice had become a little deaf and hadn't heard him arrive. She was standing with her back to the door cooking doughnuts in a great pot of boiling fat on a black woodstove. There were pans and bowls everywhere, a cookie sheet with ginger snaps, a pan of johnnie cake, an uncooked pie.

Alice had undergone a succession of transfigurations since Maclean had gone off to the war. When he first came back, she was still a good-looking woman, not much different from the good-looking woman he had last seen when he left. Then after she had had six children, she became gaunt and worn and looked more like fifty years old than thirty-five. Then some years later, some female thing happened inside her, and she had ballooned in a couple of years to her present size and come to look the fifty she now was, only a different kind of fifty.

She was wearing an old, flowered, short-sleeve print dress, hoisted up higher in the back than in the front by her hips and streaked with sweat under the armpits and down the middle of the back. Her arms and legs were fat and white, her legs were pebbled with varicose veins, her hair was graying and thinning, hanging as straight and slack as a bunch of strings.

Maclean tapped on the screen door, first gently, then a little harder.

Alice looked back over her shoulder, and he caught the look of surprise, then, unmistakably, of aggravation as she recognized him. He thought of saying ‘hello' and then leaving, but he found himself already opening the door, taking off his cap, and stepping inside into the heat and the rich smell of frying doughnuts.

“I was just going by out here on the road,” he said, “and I thought I'd look in for a minute. I didn't get you at a very good time.”

“I can't stop these now,” she shouted, all flustered. “Once I got them started, I can't stop.”

“No, no,” he said. “I can see that. Don't you trouble.”

He fidgeted uncertainly at the door, wondering if he should go away after all, while Alice went on dropping in doughnuts, turning them, fishing them out, not looking at him, her movements abrupt and awkward.

“You gonna sit down?” she asked finally.

“Well,” he said, “just for a few minutes maybe, then I've got to be going.”

He edged past her, his cap in his hand, and sat in a chair by the window, where she could see him to talk to while she worked.

She leaned forward and stared at him.

“What have you done to your face?” she asked. “You ain't been in a fight?”

“I don't know,” he said. “Something wrong?”

He got up and looked at himself in the mirror over the sink. There was a bruise, black and blue, on the side of his forehead where he had hit it when he fell at the Black Rock, and a scratch down one cheek and some dirt on his chin.

“I was working down at Jim Gartley's stable,” he said, “and I bumped my head against one of the beams along the side of a stall.”

He ran a little water into a pan in the sink, washed and dried his face, and went back to his place by the window.

There was a teapot on the back of the stove, but Alice didn't offer to pour any, and she didn't offer him a doughnut either. He reflected that she probably didn't want to encourage him to stay in case Mitch came back from the store for some reason. Or one of the girls dropped in.

“Tomorrow's mother's birthday,” he said.

“Yes,” Alice said. “August 22.”

She lifted out another batch of doughnuts and shuffled her feet around on the floor.

“That's why I looked for the job at Jim Gartley's,” he said. “So I could buy her a little something.”

She looked hard at him. And so you could buy yourself some liquor, the look said.

“How long did you work for Jim?” she asked.

“Just an hour or so. He doesn't have a lot to do there, and I just rubbed down one or two of the horses for him. But I got enough for a present.”

“Well, that's good,” she said, and he could see she was beginning to relent.

She moved the pot of fat off the stove and started stirring something up in a big, brown mixing bowl that had been in the kitchen across the river for as long as Maclean could remember.

“Little Ruthie ain't been too well the last week or two,” she said, changing the subject. “Some kind of summer cold or somethin'. She ain't very strong that child.”

“I guess not,” Maclean said. “That's too bad.”

He remembered seeing Little Ruthie on the street once with her mother—a frail little girl with toothpick arms and legs.

“I always been scared of sickness,” Alice said. “Especially with kids. Ever since that awful flu, I always been scared. People as healthy could be on Monday and dead on Friday. Father nearly died of it. It was terrible. And the Skadgets. Just about that whole family. And Elsie, that big healthy girl you wouldn't have thought anything could kill. Remember?”

“Yes,” Maclean said. “I remember.”

It had been a long time since he had thought of Elsie.

Six o'clock in the morning. The middle of June. At the top of the hill, high above the river, a farmer had an acre of strawberries, and himself and Elsie Skadget and half a dozen others went up to pick for him to make a little money, a cent or two a box. He took them up in the back of his wagon. Halfway up, a mist hung on the hill, and they drove up into it like birds disappearing into the clouds. It was so thick they could hardly see the ditches beside them as they bumped slowly along, the horses labouring on the steep road. Then gradually the mist became bright with diffused sunlight, and suddenly they came out above it on the top of the hill, the sky overhead absolutely cloudless and so bright you could hardly look at it, and below them the great, snow-white carpet of mist stretching off to the hills far away west of the town towards the American border.

He sat beside Elsie in the wagon, and he could feel her hip soft against him, and he didn't know whether she wanted it to be that way or whether it was something she didn't even notice. It must have been 1909. The summer before he went to high school. Without having any idea what he meant by it, he had decided that he was in love with Elsie Skadget, and all that morning as they picked berries and the field grew hot under the sun, he tried to get himself a row next to hers. When they were close together, they talked, and he could remember Elsie's loud laugh and the way the other pickers sometimes looked at them.

Alice had put the mixing bowl on the table and had begun spooning out the dough in little blobs on a cookie sheet.

“Little Ruthie just loves peanut butter cookies,” she said.

“Yes,” Maclean said. “That's good.”

They lived, the Skadgets, on a weedy, two-acre farm on a side hill above the gulch that ran off into the forest from the end of the bridge. The mother was a big, strapping, slovenly woman who always smelled like sour milk, the father, a sad, little man who seemed to spend all day just sitting by the kitchen door watching the chickens. There were eight, maybe even ten kids, it was hard to keep track, and they lived in an unpainted, ramshackle house with only three or four rooms for all of them and not much to keep the wind from blowing through. On cold nights in the winter, people said, they used to bring two or three of their pigs inside to help keep them all from freezing to death.

“Mitch says that peanut butter is one of the best foods in the world.”

“That so?” Maclean said.

“Mitch says that if you was shipwrecked on a desert island, the very best thing you could have would be lots of peanut butter.”

Elsie Skadget was a year older than he was, and by the time he was thirteen, he began to have thoughts about her that his father would have horsewhipped him for. She wasn't pretty at all, not the kind of girl the poems seemed to be about, nor the kind that decorated the lids of chocolate tins, slim and bosomless, with rosebud lips and corn-silk hair, and skin as white as snow except for the blush of rose on the cheeks, and little oval faces, and delicate little hands. Elsie's mouth was wide and full, her hair black, a great, thick, crinkily mass of it, her skin blemished by chickenpox and by the middle of summer tanned as dark as an Indian's. Even at fourteen, she had heavy breasts and heavy woman's hips that rolled around inside her cotton dress as she walked and made butterflies under Maclean's heart whenever he found himself walking behind her on the road. The boys made coarse jokes about how repulsive she was, and he was too ashamed of what he felt and too young and dumb and blinded by his shame to see that they all lusted after her the same as he did.

All through the hot, heavy days of that summer, the thought of her was never far away, and in the evenings after his two or three hours of chores were finished, and on Sundays when to work was a sin, he usually saw her, along with the gang of kids they were both part of, swimming in the river by a little woodworking shop that had a ramp down into the water or drifting aimlessly up and down the road. Sometimes on Saturday nights, they journeyed the quarter mile across the bridge into town to walk the crowded streets, looking in store windows at all the things they couldn't buy.

“When they don't need me no more at home,” Elsie said, “I'm gonna come over here and git a job in one of them stores and buy me a dress just like that one there.”

“I tell Ruthie, ‘you want to make that girl eat more,'” Alice said. “She needs a little more flesh on them bones. It don't do no harm to be a little fat, Mitch always says, because then you got somethin' to live off if you get sick.”

Every year at the end of August, they held the annual exhibition at the park on the big island in the middle of the river, which suddenly became a magical place with a dome of light above it at night and the music from the carnival rides and shows drifting up to them across the water. They went one night, a little crowd of them. They walked around the exhibition sheds at first because they didn't have to pay to do that, looking at the same animals and vegetables they saw every day at home, waiting for it to get dark when the magic of the lights would be at its best before they went in to the carnival. They didn't have enough money to go to the shows, but they stood in the crowd at the front watching the outdoor acts intended to draw them in, fire-eaters and fat ladies and hootchie-kootchie dancers and jugglers. Near the time they had to go home, they spent their money on the rides, some on the Ferris wheel, some on the merry-go-round. As well as the pairs of gaudy horses, the merry-go-round had a gaudy, little wagon that Elsie rode around in by herself, waving at the crowd along the fence like a queen in a procession.

They went back across the bridge in a ragged single file because there was no walk for pedestrians, only the roadway so narrow you had to stand flattened against the railings when something wide was edging its way past something else that was wide. Without really admitting to himself what he was doing, he let himself fall behind, and Elsie fell behind too and walked ahead of him, talking away about the carnival and what she would have done if she'd had more money. He hardly listened, his heart pounding.

When they got to the end of the bridge, the others had all gone their ways into the darkness. He walked with Elsie along the little road that led up the gulch toward the Skadget place. They stopped in the darker darkness under a big maple, and he kissed her, a quick peck on the lips, and mumbled good night and fled away home.