Elizabeth and After (6 page)

Lizzie had let her hand linger on his chin. She was trying things out and Carl wanted to make it easy for her. “See you tomorrow,” he’d said when she finally slid across the seat and opened the door. Watching her walk so unsure and lonely across the grass, he decided that tomorrow he’d go with her right to the door.

Carl had bought a pen with the newspaper, to mark any real-estate or job advertisements that might be useful. Now he found himself underlining parts of the personals.
Small handicaps okay. Any age. Education not necessary
. He lit a cigarette, began writing in the margin.

He was just considering what kind of bond he might have in mind when a shadow fell across his table. As he raised his eyes a big man slid into the booth. Luke Richardson. “Doreen told me you’re looking for a place to rent.”

Carl nodded.

Luke Richardson leaned back and squinted at Carl. “Your father used to take me hunting on the other side of the mountain. I knew the way but he knew the deer.” Carl remembered his father coming home one night and saying he’d spent half the day dragging a deer down the mountain. The shoulders of his jacket had been stained with blood and he’d smelled of wet fall leaves and whiskey.

The waitress brought the bill. Luke folded it up, put it in his pocket.

“There’s a place I could show you.”

“I’ll pay for the eggs,” Carl said.

But without answering him, Luke pushed ahead. “My treat, welcome home.” He stood on the sidewalk, adjusting his tie, his jacket, hitching his belt, surveying the street up and down. “My car’s over there,” Luke said, pointing to the dealership garage. “Needed an oil change. Should be ready now.”

Luke put his hand on Carl’s shoulder and Carl had to stop himself from moving. “You know, the Richardsons and the McKelveys go back a long way.” Carl, with the bigger man’s hand heavy on his shoulder, felt he was now being turned into a schoolboy, someone who could be lectured in front of the whole town. He was trembling inside and as Luke kept talking he had the sudden urge to grab his shirt and push him through the plate-glass window of the Timberpost Restaurant. “It can’t be easy, coming home,” Luke finished, then took his hand away and started across the street.

Carl watched Luke go into one of the bays, then come out with a mechanic who led him to a big black Cadillac. Soon they were driving away from the mountain and the hilly countryside Carl knew best towards the flatter farmland to the south.

“It’s out of town,” Luke said, “but I figured you wouldn’t mind. It’s furnished and looks good outside but it needs some work on the plumbing. You could handle that, couldn’t you?”

“Sure.”

“You just get whatever you need at the hardware store, put it on my account. I’ll give you a lease if you like it. Not for ever, but a couple of years. Give you a chance to settle in for a while.”

All the sideroads had been given signs and names. There were new houses, too; big bow-windowed homes with attached double garages and landscaped grounds with rock
gardens and large carefully tended lawns that looked like advertisements for riding mowers.

Luke Richardson drove slowly, like a man roaming about his own property. About five miles south of town he turned west along a paved sideroad. After a few more minutes he pulled into the drive of a green-painted clapboard house with one of his realty signs on the front lawn.

The house was smaller than it looked from the road; the downstairs had just a kitchen with an attached pantry on one side, a long narrow sitting room on the other. Cramped under sharply angled eaves were two bedrooms and a bathroom. The toilet was in the bathtub and someone had started to tear the sink out of the wall. “The plumbing froze here last winter,” Luke explained. “I got the repairs started but then the guy took off. You could finish. You might need to rip out the floor, too. You up to that?”

“Depends how fancy you want it.”

“Plywood, with vinyl on top. No use getting Italian tile and a Jacuzzi for this place.”

“What about the heat?”

“There’s a new furnace. I had it put in last spring.”

Luke showed him the kitchen, then the basement. It had a fieldstone foundation and the mortar between the stones was crumbling and riddled with ant tunnels. The floor was dirt with a drainage trench down the middle. The new furnace had rust along the bottom and a big dent on one side. “Took it out of another place,” said Luke. “Waste not, want not.”

Outside again, Luke took down the sign, then pointed out the eavestroughs that needed reattaching, the garden with its crop of nettles and burdock, the rust-fuzzy mower in the garage that could use a new roof if he got around to it. But all
the time Carl was trying to imagine himself there with Lizzie. What would they do all day? Would she follow him around the house while he soldered and hammered? Stand in the backyard and play catch with herself? Have picnics? When he got the tools for the bathroom floor, maybe he could make her a dollhouse. He’d built her one before, when she was just learning to crawl. She used to lie in front of it, peering into its empty rooms as though watching a movie of imaginary people.

When they returned to town Luke parked at the side of his car lot. “I suppose you’ll be wanting a job.”

“I thought I’d go back to the lumber yard. They’re usually short this time of year.”

“Boyce’s? Vernon died, you know. Took a heart attack eating one of those Mexican-spiced veggie burgers at the Kiwanis barbecue. Terrible thing. Then MaryLou sold out to the Allnew chain. Got a new manager, too. Your old friend, Fred Verghoers.”

Carl looked down at his hands. The lumber yard had been his plan. He’d always been comfortable with wood. In British Columbia he’d worked with a logging operation, piling underbrush and generally making things look pretty after the big chainsaws and tree cutters had done their damage. Cosmetic but not a bad way to get some thinking done. Over the last year he had developed a whole script for himself: back in West Gull he would start at Boyce’s yard, find some sources for buying good wood; then maybe he’d go in with Ray Johnson, start up a little side business making decks and screened-in porches; eventually he’d quit the yard altogether and he and Ray would have their own company putting up cottages and retirement houses. Just to think of it brought on the fragrance of newly cut cedar.

“Fellow came to me last year and asked if he could build this little addition.” Richardson pointed to a small matching extension at the end of the supermarket. Above the door was a sign:
THE MOVIE BARN
. “The girl who used to work the main shift just moved to Toronto. Pays almost as much as Allnew and you won’t freeze your fingers off in the winter. There’s a couple of high-school kids part-time. But you’ll be in charge, keep things organized. And in the winter it’ll be just you, except when you need help on holidays or busy weekends.”

They crossed to the real-estate office where Carl signed the lease. Then, unable to put it off any longer, he turned his truck towards the West Gull R&R.

During his last year in high school, when all the senior students were doing local history projects, Carl had chosen as his subject what would eventually become the R&R but was then still the Richardson mansion. The core of the structure had been built by Caleb Richardson, a blacksmith who arrived in 1837 in what was then the mere hamlet of West Gull. Lucas Richardson, the logging baron, was Caleb’s oldest son and Luke Richardson’s great-great-grandfather; he had a son, Lucas Jr., who took over the house and carried on the logging tradition, making his fortune cutting primal white pine so tall and straight it was sold at the Kingston shipyards for the manufacture of masts. In 1886 Lucas Jr.’s son, Allan Caleb Richardson, started the custom of throwing his home open to half the county every New Year’s Eve; the parties would be an annual event for exactly one hundred years.

Allan Caleb Richardson’s years in the mansion, years when its magnificence was well known to men in top hats and ladies in layered frocks, years during which genuine European paintings in gilded frames were added to the Great Hall, the dining
room furnished with a grand piano once owned by an Austrian prince, the kitchen expanded and refurbished with the latest in black cast-iron stoves, a special bread oven, sets of matching ceramic sinks half the size of bathtubs for washing the vertiginous stacks of dishes generated by lavish dinner parties, years that flowed from the dizzying heights of Queen Victoria’s reign down to the rat-infested trenches of the Great War—those years were West Gull’s idyll of peace and prosperity. In that golden age, logging and farming kept bellies full and money rolling in, barns and pastures thronged with sleek contented livestock almost begging to be roasted and laid out on the table, fields were green and fertile and milk foamed with butterfat. Photographs from that time still hang in the Great Hall, and the largest of all shows Allan Caleb Richardson and his wife, Eileen, in the midst of their grinning liquor-happy guests, gay and stout with the fat of the land, the muscle and sinew and blood of their hundreds of workers.

Then came the drumbeats of war. Colonel Sam Parker galloped across the country on his toy horse handing out his toy rifles, and of the 187 township men who went to war, half were sucked into the French trenches, chewed up by shrapnel and hunger, pickled in mud, shredded by bullets. The rest came home as they could. Arms or legs missing, metal plates in their heads, lungs scoured by mustard gas, the real and imaginary memories of their collective past transformed into a dark nightmare they would never stop dreaming. That, too, is recorded in the photographs: a small train at the West Gull station house disgorging groups of men in uniform. Some walked tall, others hobbled on crutches. On stretchers were two bandaged shapes who’d survived seven thousand miles of cart and sea and train in order to die at home.

From 1921 on, the photographs are organized into annual albums guarding memorable images from each year along with photos of the New Year’s party itself. As the years pass, the backgrounds begin to include automobiles, radios, electric lights, once an airplane in a field—the whole glorious parade of man-made splendours. In the 1940 album Carl found a full-page portrait of William McKelvey. Sixteen years old, raw wrists protruding from a suit that fit him six inches ago, lanky face still waiting for its flesh, he is caught with his eyes open wide, a startled wild animal with his thoughts wiped clean under the pressure of this historic moment. Another picture shows him more relaxed, posing with a few other youths who’ll soon step out to the stable to drink and talk about the one thing on their minds these days: this new war and whether it will end before they get sent there; this new war and whether it will be like that other one—the Great War—the war that left widows still young enough to take to the dance floor before midnight; the war that left a list of names so long it required ten minutes to be read out loud every November 11 at the Remembrance Day assemblies at their schools. They’ll drink and then they’ll drink some more and imagine themselves shot, gnawed and buried, nothing left but living ghosts who might come home to hear their names mispronounced by a bunch of kids who aren’t theirs.

After the final New Year’s bash, the Richardsons moved out of the old mansion into the new house Luke had built by the lake. Then following the instructions of his great-great-grandfather’s will, Luke turned it into the West Gull R&R, a monumental sarcophagus for the living where those who once danced became paying guests, music provided by an orchestra of pocked leathery lungs wheezing towards the millennium
accompanied by a chorus of drug-induced gurgles, moans and muffled cries from dreams of long-ago childhoods, memory buried deep in hairless skulls, mutating cells, dreams of nights when the forest held them and their skins were young and the cries they made were not desperate calls to a mouldy time now disintegrating in the soft cheese of their decaying brains, but cries and prayers to the gods of summer and desire.

Two of those lungs belonged to William McKelvey. Back from his big splash, the very picture of self-satisfaction and serenity, McKelvey sat on the porch of the West Gull R&R smoking a cigarette and staring into his newspaper. Everything on the street seemed frozen in place: the crystal sky, the massed leaves, the big mansions with their yellowing sheers tied open to the afternoon sun. As Carl approached, McKelvey struggled to his feet and started to speak before interrupting himself to cough. His hand rose to his mouth, the back thick with brown stains.
You are old, Father William
. “How’s the boy?”

“Not bad,” Carl said. “How are you?”

For an answer McKelvey spread out his arms so he could be inspected, then indicated that Carl should sit down in the chair beside him. “So. You’re back.”

“I’m back.”

“Visit the kid?”

“Saw her this morning. She’s grown. She says she comes to see you.”

“Christine brings her.”

Christine
. Once he’d called about Lizzie and she’d had to call him back. An hour later someone had shouted out to him, “Hey Carl, there’s a
Christine
on the phone for you.” And his heart had started to race as though it were ten years before and
Chrissy was going to talk in that hoarse little whisper she had when they were arranging to spend the night catting.

“How long you staying?”

“For a while,” Carl said. “Luke Richardson rented me the old Balfer place.”

“What about the old McKelvey place?” his father said. “He’s got his sign out front. Made me want to puke. They covered it in metal and now it looks like a white cookie tin waiting to be squashed.”