Algoma (7 page)

Gaetan placed a hand on the top of her head and kissed her cheek. He smelled of smoke and gin and moved around the room like he was underwater or on the moon. Slow and heavy steps.

He stood at the counter and made himself a cheese slice and butter sandwich, a sure sign he’d had one too many drinks after closing.

“I bought you something,” he said. “I know what you’re thinking. Don’t worry, it’s from a second-hand shop.” He could feel Algoma bristle at the thought of “new.” He cut his sandwich in four and shoved a piece into his mouth. Mid-chew, he placed a small silver flask on the kitchen table and stood back with his arms spread wide like a ring master’s. “Ta da!”

Algoma picked up the vessel and turned it around in her hands. “Barry,” she said, reading the name engraved into the flask.

“You’re a bartender’s wife,” Gaetan said, as if it were a call to the priesthood or military. “You should never have to pay for your own drinks.”

“I don’t go to bars,” Algoma said. “Just your bar.” She ran her thumb over the engraving. Had Barry been someone’s best man? Maybe he’d lost the position. Maybe he’d slept with the bride.

“Well, The Shop then,” Gaetan said.

“I don’t drink at work.”

“Fine,” he barked, annoyed by his ungrateful wife. “At home then.”

Gaetan shoved another sandwich quarter into his mouth and leaned back against the counter. Algoma shook her head and went into the living room. She got down on her hands and knees in front of the liquor cabinet and searched through the bottles, quickly finding what she was looking for. She sat back and poured gin into Barry and took a drink.

Gaetan laughed appreciatively. “See, there you go. That’s a good girl.”

Obediently, Algoma took another drink, and sighed. She raised her flask. “Here’s to Barry.”

Like most things in her life, Algoma’s husband was a hand-me-down, a cast-off from one of her sisters. One she’d happily taken.

Algoma was fifteen the first time she’d met Gaetan. Although money in a family of nine was tight, Richard and Ann scrimped and saved every year until they had enough to hire a landscaper to trim the trees. Landscaping and church were two of their priorities, and they preached both to their children. Every year, the trees were sculpted into two perfect orbs, as they had been for as long as anyone could remember. The annual pruning meant that despite their age, they were not very tall. The foliage, however, was incredibly dense, with near perfect coverage. At night, the trees looked like two planets caught in one another’s gravitational pull. The style of pruning was not unique to the Belangers, so it was easy to spot which families in town were going through hard times. The branches of their trees grew unchecked.

Not a landscaper by trade, Gaetan was known to take odd jobs around town. He had no fear of heights and came with his own equipment. Most importantly to Richard, Gaetan charged less than anyone else. He was young—eighteen—and trying to make a few dollars to get him out of Le Pin; however, there were days when he’d accept a case of beer in return for an afternoon’s work.

On his first day on the job, Gaetan arrived at the house and parked his red pick-up truck on the front lawn. Only equipped with a wooden ladder, a pair of pruning shears, and a small hatchet, he set about his work without letting anyone know he’d arrived. For three afternoons, he scrambled through the branches, which he pruned like a Lilliputian hairdresser, until the trees were perfectly shaped and Richard was happy.

During those three days, Bay had watched Gaetan from the living room window, her forehead pressed up against the glass, leaving behind a greasy oval smudge of make-up. She watched intently as newly cut branches fell to the lawn below. It was like he was taking apart a puzzle and littering the yard with its pieces. Bay begged her father to let her give Gaetan his pay at the end of the job. Richard saw the economic advantage of having an amateur landscaper in the family and obliged. He patted her on the back. “Wear something nice.”

“Can I borrow the car for this weekend?” she asked.

“As long as you fill the gas tank back up.”

Like her mother, Bay knew it was only a matter of time before she got what she wanted. She was already planning ahead for her first date with Gaetan. She’d seen his truck, and decided her father’s would be better.

On the last day of the job, Bay, dressed in an ankle-length cotton skirt and white cotton blouse, breezed out onto the front lawn and smiled demurely in a way that she was not. When Gaetan noticed her, she lowered her eyes, laughed, and passed him the money. He stuffed the bills into the pocket of his jeans without looking to see how much was there.

“Tell your dad thanks,” he said, his face flushed.

Bay beamed and neither one of them spoke or made motion to move.

Algoma watched the exchange from her bedroom window. A hand on her hip, she tried to cock her head the way her sister did. “Hi, I’m Algoma,” she said. “Oh, my name? It’s Algoma. Call me Al. No, Allie.”

By the weekend, Gaetan was seated beside Bay at the Belanger dinner table, accepting helpings of Ann’s scalloped potatoes and trying to remember everyone’s names. By Christmas, his name was penciled onto a strip of masking tape in the coat closet. There was a strip of tape for each family member, lengths of heights and dates rising like cattails; however, by spring Bay had grown bored with her amateur landscaper. She sought the company of another semi-professional: the man her father had hired to fix the roof. She liked the way the word shingle rolled off her tongue. “It sounds like the name of a cocktail,” she said to her twin, Port.

After Bay broke up with Gaetan, Algoma found him sitting on the front porch, an untouched beer tucked between his knees. Richard’s attempt at an apology on behalf of his daughter.

“She broke up with me,” he said. He was staring at the trees he’d trimmed the year before. He could see where new growth had exploded from his rough cuts.

“She does that,” Algoma said. She sat down beside him, so that their thighs touched. He was warmer than she had expected. A small furnace.

“The shed door broke off its hinges this morning. Could you take a look at it?” she asked.

By the weekend, Gaetan was back at the Belanger dinner table, this time sitting next to a different sister and he knew everyone’s names. Within the year, Algoma—only seventeen years old—was pregnant with the boys, their future decided.

Algoma could hear Gaetan snoring in the bedroom. His shirt was abandoned on the floor in the hallway.

“Goddamn it,” she whispered.

She picked up his shirt and emptied the rest of the gin in her flask down the sink. She turned off the lights, grabbed the blanket from the couch, and walked into the boys’ old room to sleep.

______________

1:01 p.m. 3°C. Wind S, calm.
Fist-punctured ice puddles.

For the moment winter had retreated. An unusual warm front. Heavy drifts of snow had shrunk back to reveal blankets of wet fall leaves and vast mud flats that made it nearly impossible to walk anywhere off the sidewalk or street. Once robust snowmen were now pitiful lumps of misshapen snow the kindergarteners kicked at with their bright neon boots. They ruthlessly stomped on the half-rotted carrots, tossed the charcoal eyes into the ditch. The rest of the kids had abandoned their thick winter coats and wandered around the schoolyard dressed only in long-sleeved shirts and snow pants. The school was surrounded by a pool of melted snow and ice. Icicles dropped from the edge of the roof and shattered on the asphalt. It was a season in between.

Ferd knew the weather wouldn’t last. Nothing ever did. Winter would arrive again, and in full force this time. It would feel endless. For half of the school year the hallways were filled with the musty smell of damp wool, pools of melting slush, and wet socks. Come spring, when the students peeled their layers of sweaters and long johns, they’d hardly recognize one another. Pale versions of their fall selves.

Standing on the curved grassy hump of earth that flanked the east side of the school like a boomerang, Ferd watched his classmates from a safe distance. The bell rang. Lunch was over. He turned and walked in the opposite direction of the school. He wasn’t going back, not today. Today was not a good day. Reminders of Leo faced him at every turn.

One of his brother’s coloured pencil drawings was still stapled to the wall beside the gym, the edges curling inward, his name printed in dark block letters in the bottom right-hand corner. There was the framed photo of him the school had put next to the volleyball trophies in the school’s trophy case. And the empty brass hook he’d left behind that no one would use because it was “bad luck.”

Ferd stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jeans (Leo’s jeans) and walked toward the woods. The school, like every other building on the east edge of town, was flanked by forest that was hundreds of kilometres deep, only stopping for the northward-swooping St. Lawrence River.

Several times a year, teachers and students were given a show: a rogue red fox, moose, or porcupine lumbering across the schoolyard. If a black bear was spotted in the area, the children were put under lockdown and forced to eat their sweaty sandwiches at their desks in silence until the threat had passed, although secretly they were always looking outside, trying to spot the animal that would allow them to go home early if it attacked student or teacher. They could only hope.

Once Ferd crossed the baseball diamond, he saw the familiar trailhead behind home plate. Large tree roots criss-crossed the path like varicose veins, worn smooth and silvery from decades of use, years of students skipping classes, their non-marking rubber-soled shoes wearing the bark smooth. He walked along the trail for a long time until the roots became ragged again and the path narrowed until it was little more than a suggestion. The crushed cigarette butts disappeared behind him.

After a half hour of walking through dense wood, breaking branches, clambering over fallen trees, and hopping muddy patches, Ferd arrived at his destination: a thin iron-stained creek that looked like a gash in the earth. Only the edges of the creek were still frozen. He admired the leaves that had been frozen into the ice and were now being slowly released. When he tried to pull one free, it ripped apart in his hand. He dropped the piece he held into the water and watched it slowly float away.

“Say hello for me.”

The decomposing remains of a blue jay lay beside the creek. Ferd skirted the clutch of bones and feathers and pulled off his backpack. He was sweating and his shoulders ached. He unzipped his pack and dug past his textbooks, his uneaten lunch, until he found a small black canvas bag that held his tools: an assortment of pens, markers, paper, cards, twine, and tape. From his collection of cards, he chose a thick, creamy wedding invitation with gold lettering that he’d stolen from his teacher’s desk. Her desk was such a mess she’d never notice, or at least not right away. The RSVP card was still lodged inside. Apparently, she hadn’t made her decision yet. An old boyfriend maybe? Ferd tried to imagine the bride in her puffy white dress and the groom in his tuxedo standing side by side, both stiff as wedding cake toppers.

He used a red Sharpie to cross out the writing on the front of the card—Rebecca & Jean-Francois: Our Special Wedding—and flipped it over so he could write on the back.

Dear Leo…

Ferd’s breath left him in small white puffs. He couldn’t think of what to write next and his hand was beginning to cramp. In the short time he’d been at the creek, the temperature had dropped. The sky was moving fast, the clouds like icebergs being moved by an invisible current. The trees groaned with the effort to remain standing. He wished he’d brought his jacket.

If Ferd were to remove the salutations to Leo from his notes and replace them with dates, his notes could easily be mistaken for diary entries. In his notes to his brother, Ferd talked about this day, what he’d had for lunch, the homework he’d been assigned, the weather, or what he hoped their mother was making for dinner. He wanted Leo to know that he was waiting for him to come home. He wrote so Leo wouldn’t miss a thing—not one thunderstorm or fried egg sandwich.

Ferd had been sent back to school two weeks after watching his brother go under the ice.

“It’ll be good for you,” Algoma said, but what she really wanted was the house to herself so she could cry without looking at the face of the boy she’d lost.

The first mistake the school made was to leave Leo’s desk, which sat directly in front of Ferd’s, empty in tribute. His unfinished science project and pastel-coloured notebooks still inside. Nobody would touch them.

Ferd kicked Leo’s desk repeatedly, a persistent rattle that ended a lesson on multiplication tables. Instead of removing the desk, the teacher removed Ferd from class. He was sent home with a note that stated he was invited to move to the other grade seven class to help him adjust to his new circumstances, a note his parents never received.

Ferd’s new teacher struggled with his mercurial moods, his sudden outbursts, fits of laughter, and breakdowns that, by the end of the day, left her hands shaking, her nails chewed down to the quick. Unsure what to do, she waited for Ferd’s grief to slow from a waterfall to a trickle, but it remained constant. Thunderous. After March Break, she moved him to the back of class, close to the door, and counted down the days until the end of June.

In September, Ferd was introduced to his new teacher: Ms. Chantal Prevost. A recent university graduate, Chantal had blunt blonde Betty Page bangs that she cut herself and a predilection for Mary Janes, whatever the weather. She’d moved north from Montreal to put distance between herself and a failed relationship. A broken engagement. Now, she found herself living above a Chinese restaurant and sleeping on a single mattress the landlord had offered her. Chantal was often at school earlier than she needed to be and stayed longer than anyone else, often waving the janitor off.

From the first day of class, Chantal took to Ferd. His wet brown eyes. His tight suspicious mouth. She spoke in even tones around him, as she might to a strange dog. Firm, but not rude. She showed interest in his work, but did not praise him overly. Soon, he was calmer, but his lingering grief remained.