A Good House (36 page)

And Margaret had found a use for the old plot. Soon after the town council had invoked the new bylaw against any kind of private burning, tired of raking the leaves all the way down to the burn patch at the creek, she had begun to gather them onto the plot and put her match to them there, usually taking the trouble to sink a few chestnuts, listening like a kid for the hot pops in the smouldering piles. And almost every fall a small pack of neighbourhood kids who had smelled the smoke in the air would arrive with their rakes to help her, to watch her break the law, and when it was finished she would hand out quarters or, more recently, loonies, from her apron pocket.

It was her habit too in very late winter to watch from the kitchen window for the pond of brown earth that always appeared a week or so before the sun took the snow from the grass, and a little later, in the true spring, she watched as the plot became a mucky, muddy mess, a good measure of the rain they'd had, and, more enjoyably, a soft brown platter that drew the birds to worms.

Patrick had arrived on a May Friday afternoon with a second-hand wagon hitched to his newest Lincoln. In the wagon he had a Rototiller and a wheelbarrow, two bags of sheep manure and three of peat, and a bunch of long-handled garden tools, which were not made of ordinary steel but some kind of hard green plastic.

Margaret and Bill went out to the gravel driveway to meet him, and when he began to explain that they had discussed this the last time he was up, putting in a good garden, sharing both the work and the results, Bill insisted that he had no memory of any talk about a garden. “You talked maybe,” he said.

Unloading the tools while Patrick and Margaret set up a make-do ramp to get the Rototiller off, holding up the business ends of the shovel and the hoe and the fork for inspection, he proclaimed them too damn weird for words.

“No rust,” Patrick said.

When he asked just how much was all this going to cost him, Patrick told him, “Zilch, Dad. Father's Day.”

Patrick was fifty-eight. His very short hair had lost all traces of colour, it was no longer mottled but pure steely grey, and the creases on his face, deep rays of them back from his eyes and two sturdy grooves from his nose down to his jaw, were set, he could no longer erase them with a change of expression. He claimed he had earned the lines. “Those lines and a few hundred thousand more than you're worth,” Bill was fond of telling him.

This was one of Bill's steadiest rages, the amount of money Patrick made. “I cannot comprehend,” he announced one Sunday, “where all this money is coming from.” When Patrick talked about proportions, the high price of housing and cars and insurance and education and hospitals, Bill said the real problem was that people were being educated beyond their intelligence. “Can you tell me who's going to do the shit work?” he asked. “Can you tell me who's going to be satisfied living on the wrong side of the tracks?” When Patrick ignored him, left the living room for the kitchen, Bill raised his voice and made sure it carried. “If there ever is another war,” he called out, “no one will be willing to go. No one will be able to go, everyone's so blessed soft. Then we'll see where all this improvement got us.” He loaded everything he had on the word
improvement.

Patrick had held on to a squash player's fitness, which Bill said was a city fitness that fooled no one. He liked to remind Patrick, as he sometimes reminded other men, that his hands hadn't been dirty in thirty years.

After the unloading and a short visit in the kitchen and a beer for Patrick, Bill sat on the garden bench with his arms folded while Margaret walked the plot with Patrick to find and collect any bits of refuse. Margaret told Patrick if he came across a rare coin, it was his to keep but she'd take any diamond rings. The first thing she found was an ash-smeared length of tartan ribbon similar to the ones mothers used to tie into the hair of their pretty little girls. “I didn't chuck this out here,” she said, suspecting the birds. Within a few minutes she had picked up several bits of tangled wire, a half-buried pop can, and three good-sized spikes, old and crusted with rust, that must have been left behind when the fence had come down, soon after the war. Margaret knew that Bill and Sylvia had bought the house in part because of the picket fence, she had seen pictures of the kids climbing it, but when Bill got home from overseas he'd declared it rotten and pulled it down.

Patrick had found only stones, and when he said he guessed they were finished, Bill got up from the bench to walk every inch himself, to double-check them. On his second pass he found an open diaper pin with a faded pink head. As he dropped the pin into Margaret's hand, she told him it must have been extremely hard to spot.

“I'm going to put in corn and asparagus,” he said. “Nothing else.”

When Margaret insisted that she would like a few potatoes and some broccoli, he grabbed the strange bright green hoe and cut a line through the earth, marking a section off. “That's yours,” he said.

Patrick had found some ancient stakes in the shed and after he got the four corners established, he slit the bags of manure and peat and emptied them across the dirt with the new shovel. When he had it all spread he fired up the Rototiller. He slowly covered the ground once and then again, as if he'd read about this somewhere, at a right angle. Margaret brought him lemonade, his mother's recipe, made from a boiled concentrate and loaded with ice. She stood beside him while he drank it and said very loudly above the noise of the Rototiller, didn't the soil look rich and cared for?

Bill had decided to open the croquet set he'd bought at Canadian Tire for the great-grandkids. He pushed the loops into the ground at long intervals stretching down to the creek and then he got out a mallet and a few balls, dropping the balls randomly at his feet. When Patrick finally turned off the Rototiller, the absence of the sound of its whiny engine filled the yard with a slightly unnerving silence that was broken only by Bill's determined knocking of croquet balls toward the creek.

Watching his father swing the mallet, too hard, Patrick called out, “Are you winning, Dad?” Bill ignored him and Margaret shook her head, firmly. No jokes today. Then she helped Patrick load the Rototiller onto the wagon, and after they got it on and tied down, she led him over to the barbecue. The barbecue had been an anniversary present, from everyone, and it had not had a good cleaning since the ribbon had come off five years earlier. “I want you to show me how to thoroughly clean this thing,” she said, lifting the rain cover. “I'm not that anxious to get blown to smithereens. So what exactly do I disconnect?”

Patrick opened the lid. The barbecue hadn't been used much so it wasn't really that bad for char or grease but they watched together as several dozen earwigs paused on the grill and then quickly scrambled away from the daylight. Margaret leaned closer, counting as fast as she could. “Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen.” And then she said, “Maybe I'll get you to show me how to clean it another time.” As she bent down she recited the instructions. “Turn on the gas. Open the burner valve. Push the starter button.” Watching until she was sure of the flames, she closed the lid.

With the earwigs cooked, the three of them went inside for a supper of Margaret's recipes: whipped potatoes and jellied vegetable salad and baked beans and, Patrick's favourite, the thing he claimed to like better than anything, breaded pork tenderloin. After supper Margaret took care of the dishes while the men changed the filter on the furnace and then they all sat down to watch
Jeopardy!
together, Patrick and Margaret leaning back comfortably into their corners of the sofa and competing without shame, calling out the questions to the answers with either dead, but often conflicting, certainty or with wild, educated guesses.

“Oh, you two are smart,” Bill said. “You don't need to convince me.”

Halfway through the program he stood up and headed through the kitchen in a huff, calling back through the bang of the screen door that if they couldn't rouse themselves to get at the planting, he could do it himself. He said if they'd decided that this was his part of the work, that was fine, but he was going to get at it now while there was still some daylight left.

Patrick went out after him to tell him they had no seed, they were going to buy seed tomorrow. Hearing this bit of reality, Bill stopped at the garden bench and sat down hard. “There are days when I believe my brain is haywire,” he said. Then he dismissed Patrick with a sharp head-jerk toward the house, so Patrick left him there. He stayed until dusk, until Margaret took him his sweater. And then he got up and followed her in and climbed the stairs to bed without a word.

After a while, just as Margaret and Patrick were settling down in the living room for one of their tired, interesting talks, Bill came halfway back down the stairs and called out to them. When they came into the hall he stood over them and asked, “After you're gone, how am I expected to manage? I am without my best fingers, you know.” He held up his hands. “The tools seem not very heavy, but how lightweight can they be when you're the one doing the work?” Patrick told him not to worry himself over it, the tools were not heavy and would not get heavy, that's why he'd bought them. He said it would be fine. He said, “Go back to bed, Dad.” Bill turned on the stairs and started up, but they heard him, as he meant them to. “Get it all talked through, now. Talk it all through.”

*   *   *

PATRICK AND MARGARET
had been enjoying their little talks for some time. Some of the others seemed to be puzzled by this, as if Margaret was secretly teaching Patrick how to knit, or can peaches. It had begun soon after the morning they'd gone to the hospital together to see Mary, not long after Patrick had married Stephanie. Patrick's son Stephen had phoned him at his office to tell him about his mother's breast cancer, not before, but two days after Mary's surgery, which had been fast and major, a double mastectomy, and, without thinking, Patrick had immediately called Margaret, to let her know.

“Well, then we're going to go and see her,” she'd told him. “You and I. Today.” When Patrick hesitated, because he was not prepared, not quite ready with a legitimate defence, she didn't sit quietly on the other end of the phone as was her considerate habit. She spoke quickly and with not a hint of patience. “Not loving each other any more is no excuse.”

He had waited for Margaret at a window table in the cafeteria, drinking a tolerable cup of coffee and looking out at the ugly rooftops of the office buildings that surrounded the hospital, at the bright winter sky and the streaks of clouds, which were still so white above the filth of the city air. He knew many of the office buildings he was looking at but more usually from the street-level perspective of their elaborate, arched entrances, their heavy plate-glass doors, their hushed, serious lobbies. Although it should not have been, it was a bit of a surprise, and an offence, this complete absence of architectural finish to the rooftops. Looking at the flat gravelled surfaces and the blown garbage and the old chimneys and the air shafts and the filthy pigeons flying from one building to another, concentrating on the pigeons, counting the pigeons, fighting it off but not nearly hard enough, not hard enough to stop it, he remembered the warmth of Mary's breasts and her undiminished modesty about her breasts, which had been so unexpected and so beautiful and, a long time ago, twenty years ago, so heavy with the tracing of veins, with the blue-white nourishment that he himself had taken, more than once, carefully, listening in the midnight quiet of the house to the sound of her soft, patient laughter, like a mother's laughter, drifting above him, through his hair. He imagined the breasts now, disembodied. Carried away with other breasts. Burned?

To kill the image, and his one true hope for Mary was that it would never come to her, he pulled back hard to the cup of lukewarm, tolerable coffee in his hands and allowed himself to become doubly worried, about Mary and what this diagnosis might mean for her and for the kids, and about Margaret, who had turned seventy-five in the fall and was now driving alone on the snow-covered highway.

When Margaret sat down at the cafeteria table and began to pull off her gloves finger by finger the way she always had, he asked her to promise him that she wouldn't drive the highway any more. She did promise him and she'd stuck to it, as far as he knew that trip behind the wheel had been her last beyond the town limits.

Riding down to Mary's room on the elevator with a nurse who was attending to a hairless but still cheerful child on a stretcher, a boy who held his X-rays in his arms, Margaret told Patrick, “She won't want anything from you but your support. And you should be able to give her that with no disrespect to Stephanie.” And just before she pushed Mary's door open, with an obviously willed authority, as if this fight was now her own as well as Mary's, as if, three years after Paul's death, she had finally rediscovered some small part of her strength and was happy to see a chance to put it to use, she'd told him, “It's not always the death sentence it used to be. Mary can live through this.” And so she had, fighting like hell all the way, seizing her luck.

Now Patrick often found himself talking to Margaret. This too could be done with no disrespect to Stephanie, whom he enjoyed and loved with almost no reservation, partly for her solid and unheralded accomplishments as a lawyer, partly because she was full of lusty wit and shameless in the dark, and partly, and perhaps this was the largest part, because she had far too much respect for her own difficult history to launch an assault on his.

And when he did talk with Margaret, usually quietly over a cup of tea or a drink of Scotch, she never hesitated to make an honest comment if one came to her.

*   *   *

MARGARET HAD MADE
a big pot of tea. She had asked Patrick for an update on his son Stephen and he was telling her that Stephen had finally got on with the symphony, that he was at thirty the youngest French horn player the orchestra had ever hired and how proud they all were. “Whatever divorce does,” he said, “it does not diminish pride.”