A Beauty (25 page)

My father by now had spent enough time on me. Someone had asked to see him after supper. That meant a poker game and only the baby didn’t know it. He stood up and I slipped off his lap as effortlessly as a crumb, just brushing my cheek against his cotton shirt before I lost contact. I adjusted the black patch more firmly over my eye, but I think he didn’t notice. Maybe he was already out the door before I drifted around the table, picking up cutlery and stares and a noodle of warm saliva from the baby as I pried the spoon from his strangely appealing fingers. But it didn’t matter that my father had left, or that my mother continued to slam things in the kitchen. Children will believe many things if you let them. Sometimes they will even believe that they are important, that you are important, that we’re all so important something in the universe cares what we do. Just thinking about it, I gave the baby my little finger in place of the spoon. Neil was the baby then. His warm, wet fingers gripped my finger and tethered me.

“Ruth,” my mother said. “You’re daydreaming.” She pulled Neil out of the high chair. He tried not to let go of my finger, but the suction was broken. I took the cutlery into the kitchen and began drying the dishes that lay piled on the wet tea towel. Although he was already gone, I pretended my father went by and tapped my nose on his way out for the evening. I vowed, as I watched him walk out the door (stooping as he went through, because he was always taller in my imagination), to wear my eye patch every waking hour of the day, to go around town with one
eye covered and the other wandering until the bad eye learned to focus better and see further than the good eye ever had.

That night I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t even lie down. I sat straight up in the bed I shared with my sisters until every single soul in the house except for me had fallen sleep, and then I slipped out of bed.

A clear night was waiting for me out in our yard. The stars were glinting like a million bucks. I lay down flat on my back on the damp grass and stared at them. I recalled the grand sweeping motion of my father’s arm, as he’d indicated how they’d looked sweeping across the sky. I heard his voice again, and the background clashing of pots and pans. I lay there feeling the dew rise through my nightgown, and I thought about the stars falling, at the bottom of their arc, all of them plummeting down at once and landing on me like hoar frost, like a fairy-tale quilt, like a shroud fit for an important, astral kind of person. I thought it would be perfect to die right then.

3

W
hen the past returns, it doesn’t give warning. It happens suddenly, like this: I didn’t think I’d ever see her again, and then one morning, late in August, she drove into our yard. I know it was late in August, nearly September, because we’d started combining.
Com
-bining, we said. I don’t know why we gave it that pronunciation, maybe to distinguish it from com
bine
, although the term must be derived from that verb, since a
com-
bine performs three harvesting activities at once: reaping, threshing, and winnowing. Yes, the combine is a wonderful machine; it cuts the grain, it separates the grain from the chaff, and it spews the chaff out the back. It’s modelled on any animal eating, digesting the nutrients, and excreting the waste, but being a machine, it’s noisier in the execution of its business than any animal would be, and lumbers and lurches over the land, and kills things unlucky enough to be living in its path.

Most of the time in the early years of our marriage I drove the grain truck, but once in a while Leonard let me take the combine, although never near the road where neighbours could see the shaky rows or the skips I left behind. And that was a shaky kind of
happiness, sitting where he usually sat, vibrating on the loose seat, gripping the steering wheel, mesmerized by the whine of the auger and the clatter of the header, my eyes on the restless wheat ahead of me and the stalks flipping through the blades. The sun bore down on me, the wind whipped my hair, dust and fumes went up my nose, but it was glorious, driving the monster, gobbling up the wheat and the sky in front of me. All was gold and blue, like a Roman Catholic’s idea of penitence (this a concept inherited from my Presbyterian mother) until I turned into the sun and saw what dust could do to it, transforming it to a fireball in front of my eyes.

But most of the time I drove the truck, rumbling over the field at the exact speed of the combine, while the grain poured out of the chute and the dust roiled over the cab, and the pile of wheat grew in the back, and I’d be sweaty and filthy and itchy by the end of the day, and I’d climb up the back of the truck and run my hands in the cool grain, cool as water to the hands.

This fall that I’m remembering, I wasn’t needed much in the fields; our sons were old enough to drive, and it was left to me to provide the hefty meals they had to have, and I was grateful, or so I told myself. I had much to be grateful for.

My daughter saw her first and came slamming into the kitchen. “Mum, there’s a lady in the driveway.” A lady, I thought. I went to the door in time to see her getting out of her car. She did look like a lady, like a city woman, a fish out of water, a bit stunned by all the sudden oxygen. I knew it was her right away, though – she couldn’t have been anyone else. Valerie stuck close to me. She was our youngest, thirteen that summer.

Elena Huhtala stood by her car in our typical bare prairie farmyard (one tractor tire filled with earth and spouting marigolds; otherwise no colour, anywhere), her hand still on the open car door, and with that vague, quizzical, city look on her face, she
said, “I’m looking for Gilroy.” As if there must be some joke, right? Because a whole town couldn’t just vanish, could it?

“Elena Huhtala,” I said.

“Yes?”

Valerie slid up against me so our sides were touching. I put my arm around her. I didn’t speak right away, too much oxygen in the air for me, too, just then. But there was plenty of time, and I remembered that about Elena, how she always gave the impression she had plenty of time, and you had plenty of time, and even that the whole world was somehow timeless. She just waited, one hand on the top of the open car door. And what was it that hooked you into waiting with her? Her motionlessness, her silence? The fact that she would wait? Or was it just that she was so attractive, so appealingly symmetrical and slenderly graceful, so watchable. You would not be able to help yourself. Standing with your arms crossed (barricading that organ we consider tender), you’d be drawn to her.

“I like your dress,” Valerie said, out of nowhere.

She was wearing a sleeveless shift dress with many colours in an unusual geometrical flower pattern. Her arms and legs were tanned.

“Come in,” I said, and turned back to the kitchen. I threw some coffee into the percolator and she and Valerie sat down at the table. I kept my back turned towards them until my hands were as calm and still as hers were. When I joined them, I said, “I’m Ruth.”

“Davy’s girl,” she said, nodding as if she’d already figured it out. I thought maybe she had. I still had to wear the thick-lensed glasses not too many have to wear.

“
Girl
,” I said. I’d turned that perennial age: thirty-nine. Then I remembered that she was older.

She almost smiled that almost-smile that made her famous in Gilroy long ago, that sad-edged smile.

“So you didn’t find the town.”

“It can not have disappeared?” she asked in her slow way, separating the words so they had a strange, melodramatic weight.

“Off the face of the earth.”

“There isn’t a sign. Not even a sign.”

“That’s right. Nor a stick nor a stone. Anything that had any value got carted away, and everything else they burned to the ground.” I looked into her face, trying to see more than the perfect bone structure, trying to see what it was that was different about her, besides the fact that she was older, and wondering if she was seeing the question I wasn’t asking, the one about my father. If she saw it, she ignored it.

“The store,” she said.

“Yeah, the store. Gone.”

“Where did they go? The Dobies?”

“You remember the name.” (And my father? I suppose you remember him?) But Valerie was squirming in her chair. She looked about to pump her hand in the air the way kids do in school to get the teacher’s attention, and it occurred to me there would be parts of this conversation that would surprise her; she was still an age she could be surprised by adult behaviour. “I married Leonard,” I said. I don’t think I’d ever said that out loud before. I hadn’t needed to say it; we lived in a place where everyone knew us. “This is our daughter, Valerie.”

“Valerie,” she said. “That’s pretty.”

“Val,” Valerie said.

“And do you have other children?”

“Two boys. Older. They’re in the field with their father. They just started combining.” They were quite far from the house today, I remembered with some satisfaction.

“And his father and sister?” she asked, her head at a concerned angle.

Her hair was a lighter shade than it had been, I noticed, more ash than the former taffy colour, and it had been smoothed and styled. And that dress – it had been chosen to hide as well as to enhance. She’d become careful. Bad luck does that to women. Life does it. But we had a conversation to carry on, and it was so polite, so easy, this little social conversation, like a genteel game of badminton, played outdoors on the grass in a summer breeze, and I didn’t care if she was sad, if her life had turned out badly, if disappointment had dogged her steps since the last time I set eyes on her. She meant nothing to me. “Oh, Scott moved down the road to Lawson,” I said. “He runs the general store there. Franny lives in Winnipeg, married a bank inspector.”

Valerie started humming “Heart of My Heart,” an old song and an old family joke. She jumped up and went to the cupboards, still humming. She hadn’t picked up on the undercurrents of the conversation. Yet. A grin fought at the corners of her mouth as she brought the mugs and cream and sugar to the table.

“You can have a cup, too, if you want,” I said, and she blushed and stopped humming.

“Everett, Franny’s fiancé, used to board with us,” I tried to explain. “We moved into the manse after Dad left. The town council gave it to Mother, rented it to her for a dollar a year.” I stopped there.
After Dad left
. So matter of fact, as if she’d had nothing to do with it. And then I was proud of that. It was old, old baggage, after all; it was a long time ago, and anyway, she could hear the steel under my words; I could tell by the wary way she watched me she’d feel the poke of the knife if I got it out. “The manse was empty, anyway,” I went on. “The town never could afford a minister, and of course Mother couldn’t pay the rent on the house we were in.” That made her look away. No, she didn’t want our eyes to meet over that little declaration. “They had to
do something with us,” I said. “Luckily, the manse was big enough she could take in boarders. The school teacher, the occasional salesman. And the bank inspector whenever he came to the district – Everett – even though we didn’t have a bank in Gilroy. He liked Mother’s cooking. He used to telegraph ahead. Called her Mrs. Gilroy and he’d telegraph he was coming and ask her to make stuffed heart. It was his favourite.”

There was a little pause. I thought it was fitting.

“How is your mother?” she asked.

That took nerve, I figured, but I was up for the game. “Oh, fine, just fine,” I said. “She has a nice little house in Lawson now, lives alone and I think she likes it.”

“And Mrs. Knoblauch,” she said. “I suppose she is no longer alive. She would be – well, over a hundred.”

Oh, yes, well over a hundred. Stone cold dead and in the cold, cold ground. And I remembered Elena standing in Mrs. Knoblauch’s backyard, and the sun setting, and the cool, quiet room that had been waiting for her, just for her alone. “Why are you here?” I asked. Valerie gasped. I’d spoken more harshly than I’d intended.

Elena didn’t seem to mind. “I am on my way home,” she said. “Well, hardly home.” She blinked and cocked her head, as if she’d heard a tiny bell we couldn’t hear. Maybe she was testing the idea of that word,
home
, wondering if she knew what it meant. “I had the idea I would like to see the farm where I grew up. I haven’t been back since I left years ago – and on the way I decided to stop and see Gilroy. I was so astonished. It’s on the map and I didn’t see how I could have missed it. The land is so flat, you can see forever, but I drove up and down the grid roads, thinking it must be just over the next rise. I’ve been driving around here for an hour. And then I thought, when I saw your driveway, well, why not stop and ask.”

“Well.”

The conversation stalled for a moment. I thought now she might mention my father. I was pretty sure she was thinking the same thing; she was staring hard at the floor. But then Valerie spoke up. “You want to make sense of the past,” she said, and it sounded so earnest, the way only a child’s voice can sound, we both turned to her and she blushed again.

“When Elena was in Gilroy,” I said, “she was in the business of telling the
future
.”