Circus (15 page)

“I assumed they would move out with the previous owners. I assumed that they were employed by the previous owners and that my purchasing the property would terminate their employment. That seems to me to be a fair assumption.”

“I guess things don’t work here like they do in Toronto.”

Karen has been suspicious of Karl Kinder from the beginning, when she drove up to the local real estate agency and discovered that the real estate company ads – featuring a photo of Karl with his too-big smile and his slicked-back hair and the slogan “The Only Man for the Job” – were everywhere because he was literally the only person who worked in the town’s only realtor’s office.

“I wish I could laugh at your joke.”

“I’m not trying to be funny, ma’am. They worked for Mr. Samson Jacobs and then for Mr. Jacobs’s son and his wife, the landowners before your good self. Those brothers have been there since nobody knows when. It’s their home. Anyway, they take care of the grounds free of charge, so you won’t have to trouble yourself with the maintenance.”

Karen can see the brothers now through the large picture window of her new kitchen. They seem to be shearing the sheep’s bottoms while awkwardly cuddling each other. “Listen, Karl. I want this situation dealt with. I don’t care how you do it, but you have to get them out.”

“Mrs. Schmidt, why don’t you just go on down and introduce yourself properly? They’ll be happy to see you. They really are nice fellas. Also, if it’s not an impolite question, what were you going to do with that enormous flock of sheep yourself?”

Seeing that the conversation is going nowhere, Karen hangs up on Karl and punches the door of the refrigerator. The stainless steel turns out to be unforgiving. As she nurses her throbbing fist, opening and closing her hand to make sure that all of her fingers still work, Karen wonders for the umpteenth time since she pulled up to the house in the moving van this morning how she wound up in this godforsaken place. It’s true she had felt pent up in the trendy Liberty Village loft where she and James had been living since they got married, so once they knew they’d be moving to rural Northern British Columbia with James’s promotion, she hadn’t thought much about the precise geography of their new home. She had simply imagined that she would grow proportionally with her new house,
like one of those foam capsules from the Dollar Store that, dropped in water, blooms into a toy dinosaur. As it was, Sally and Jackson shared a bedroom, and she had devised more systems of organization for papers and toys and kitchen stuff over the years than she cared to count, because for all its sleek lines and its post-industrial design aesthetic, their downtown condo wasn’t terribly practical for a family of four. What was most upsetting was having sex in silence while the kids slept in the open loft bedroom above. It had become a ridiculous mime show, and James’s face contorted with a pleasure she couldn’t hear was one of the saddest sights she could imagine.

The dream home she had imagined floated by itself on a generic prairie landscape, like a giant unmoored houseboat with only her family on it. When she travelled west on her own three months ago to find a house,
this
house, she had looked out this window and seen the world as though it were a Rothko painting: broad strokes of blue and yellow-green. A single sheep wandered into the tableau and made an endearing ornamental bleat. When she peered out at the fields and couldn’t see their edges, she felt a rush of openness, as though the pastures were as deep as they were wide. The house was finished perfectly: the kitchen cupboards were robin’s egg blue with small round knobs, and Sally’s room had a secret door at the back of the closet that was sure to delight her. There was a quaintness about the town itself, the way it had just one of everything – one gas station, one grocery store, one pub – that initially seemed pleasingly minimalist. She had failed to notice the wind turbines along the highway on the drive from the centre of town to the property, because she’d
been distracted by the buffalo waddling about the farm in their big, slow way, nudging one another and lying down like sleepy, picture-book giants.

She runs her hand across the butcher-block countertop in the middle of the south-facing kitchen, tracing her fingers over what had seemed on that first house-hunting visit like acres of prep space. Somehow, the room is smaller than she remembers.

When they finally arrived at the house, Jackson leapt gleefully from the van and pointed at the sheep plodding about the pasture in the distance.

“Mum, are those
our
sheep?”

“No, sweetie, they’re … Well, actually, I don’t know who they belong to, but they’re not ours.”

“I’ll take care of them! I’ll take them for walks!” Jack was pumping his fists with excitement.

“You don’t take sheep for walks, Jack,” Sally weighed in. “They do their own walking.”

“I bet they feel baaaaaad,” said Jackson. Just as Sally began to laugh so hard she sounded like a love-sick donkey, Karen saw the shepherds for the first time, ambling across the pasture behind the sheep. “Okay, guys. Inside! Time to explore the new house!” She kept her voice deliberately bright and clear as she squinted into the distance to make sure she wasn’t hallucinating the brothers.

To finally arrive on the otherwise unspoiled rural property she had fantasized about for months and was so relieved – overjoyed, even – to have found, only to discover the land (though not the house itself, thank God) already inhabited by crazy old men, to find trespassers in her idyll, to find herself
in a real place that could be located on any map, with its own sleazy realtors – well, it all seems like an especially cruel joke. She isn’t sure what her husband will do when he hears about the problem, but as she watches one of the brothers adjust his suspenders while the other leans precariously against his shoulder, she picks up the phone, dials their old number, and waits to find out.

Willie was six-foot-two and wore large plastic-rimmed glasses with perpetually foggy lenses that often fell halfway down his nose. His neck was bent like a swan’s and his clothes hung in a billowing way off his emaciated body. His hair was a salt-and-pepper cloud hovering above his head and this gave him an appearance of calm that his short temper did not bear out. George, on the other hand, was an exceptionally small man whose stature seemed to vary with his mood. At his tallest and most confident, he stood at about five-foot-six, though most of the time he appeared to be a petite five-foot-three. He wore the same sized work pants as Willie, the difference between their physiques somewhat corrected by the complicated system of suspenders Willie had devised to hold the pants up. The pants were purchased at the local Peavey Mart in the same aisle as the steel-toed boots and flannel shirts that the two men also wore. These garments were made of the kind of canvas that delivered so thoroughly on its promise of durability that the shirts and trousers gave the impression that they would outlast the men who sported them.

Willie was the older of the brothers by three years, and although he had lived a marginally longer life and had been given certain advantages that George never received when they were growing up, it was generally assumed that George was secretly the wiser of the two, having an outgoing way about him that made him seem like the natural leader. This was unexpected not only because George was the younger brother, but also because his blindness had him literally following Willie’s every step. There was, however, something about his smallness and his certainty that made George the one who took charge, and after all, he hadn’t always been blind, just as his brother hadn’t always been deaf.

Willie’s hearing had disappeared overnight. There was no logical explanation. He went to bed one night shortly after his fiftieth birthday and woke up the next morning entirely deaf. His only medical intervention into the problem was to have George drip tar into his ears every so often, which is what they did when a sheep had an infection or a wound that needed cauterizing. Needless to say, this didn’t do much for the deafness, but it did produce in Willie a feeling of pleasant seclusion inside the newly sealed chamber of his own head. George’s affliction was much slower. His vision grew gradually worse over several years until, by the time he was sixty, he could no longer recognize objects or walk in a straight line. It was difficult to say which was harder to bear, slow deterioration or rapid trauma, but the brothers were stoical in this as in all matters, and considered themselves darn lucky, in any case, to have each other.

“Sweetheart, there’s something the realtor neglected to mention about the house.”

“Oh? Oh.” James steels himself for news of rotten foundations, blocked plumbing, a flooded basement.

“There are two old men living on the property in that old shack down by the pasture.”

“What, you mean homeless guys? Or wait, what did Sally tell us is the politically correct term now? Urban outdoorsmen. Although I guess it’s not so urban there. Outdoorsmen? That doesn’t sound right.”

“Not exactly. Apparently, they’re shepherds and they take care of the grounds and the animals. Apparently, they’ve been living here for a long time. Possibly even their whole lives. They look as if they might be related. Brothers?”

“Okay, now you’re making this up.”

“Honey.”

“So we’re just supposed to … what? Ignore them? Accept them? Befriend them? What is the right thing to do here?”

“Kick them out!”

“Are they really going to bother you that much?”

“Me? What about us? Our kids? You? We don’t know these men at all and they look like they’ve done their share of living. You know what Sally’s like. She’ll be down there with muffins from her Easy-Bake Oven and friendship bracelets for them before the week is through. Anything could happen, James.”

“Should I catch a plane tomorrow? I can probably finish tidying up here tonight.”

“I guess? I really don’t know what to tell you. I had some stern words with our friend Karl and he didn’t seem to think there was a problem.”

“He says they’re okay?”

“Sure, but should we really be trusting his moral judgment at this point?”

“What do the kids think?”

“They haven’t seen the shepherds yet. They’re too busy playing police station. I think they’re still a touch weirded out by the move, but I’m doing my best here.”

“Fair enough. Okay. I’ll let you know when I have a flight.”

Speaking to James instinctively makes Karen relax her shoulders from their previously garbled stress-posture. After all, there is bound to be some kind of solution to the problem, and James is good at dealing with crises. For the first time in several years, Karen considers going out to the liquor store to buy a bottle of whiskey so that she can sit in her new kitchen and drink a glass on the rocks.

After a few minutes of savouring the imaginary zing of alcohol and the bliss of ice on her tongue, Karen opens her eyes and notices a worrying quiet about the house. She leaps out of her chair and bounds up the stairs two at a time to check on Sally and Jackson, suddenly feeling in the base of her throat a worry that she knows will not go away until they are all settled and the shepherd situation is resolved. The relief she feels at seeing the two of them asleep, curled up on a double sleeping bag, still wearing their shoes, is so powerful that it makes her sink to the floor. She kneels there for a few minutes, wondering if she should wake them for dinner since they haven’t
eaten since lunch, but her body is cold in the way that comes only with total exhaustion. Once she starts to yawn she can hardly stop her eyelids from shutting. Karen lies down on the sleeping bag, snuggles between her children, and falls asleep.