Etta and Otto and Russell and James (11 page)

A
fter the local Co-op, Otto drove out to the Co-op in Bladworth and bought all of their
Canadian National
papers too, then on to Kenaston and Hanley and Dundurn, to all the towns along the once-railway and now highway. When it got too late for any of the shops to be open, he continued along the gas stations, which stayed open through the night. He only turned around once today’s papers had been replaced with tomorrow’s, pulling back into his own driveway in early pastel light. He carried three hundred and twenty-six newspapers into the kitchen over several trips, then went to the bedroom and slept better than he had in weeks, for once not awoken by a pressing bladder or a dry cough or a heartbeat running marathons in his dreams for hours and hours and hours.

When he did wake, it was midafternoon. He cleared a path through the papers into the kitchen and set about cutting while the coffee brewed. He clipped Etta’s picture out three hundred and twenty-six times. The first of these he set aside to post to her with his next letter. The next he folded and put in his pocket. The remaining three hundred and twenty-four he stacked into a pile, and put behind the cake stands, cooling racks, muffin tins, bread pans, and cookie trays in the very back of a cupboard.

He replaced everything carefully, perfectly, in front of the clipped pictures, orderly towers of tin and steel. Then he ate a cheese and raisin scone with last season’s raspberry jam and wondered what he could or should do with all the remaining newspaper. It was too much of one thing to not use for something. A waste to just throw out or burn. He took a pen and wrote in the white bits of the front-page photo of a man in a suit looking at the sky.

Uses for Newspaper:

1. Burning. (Not very useful unless want/need to make a very
big fire.)

2. Gardening. (Formed pots for seeding.)

3. Animal bedding. (Would need animals for this.)

4. Something else. (Art/sculpture/building things, maybe, etc.)

A big fire could be nice, entertaining, but this was dry season, and it could also easily get out of control. And even if it didn’t, people might see it from the highway and think there was a real fire, a problem fire, since it was dry season, and call for help. And then there’d be the fire department, a commotion. And, it was too hot for a fire now anyway. The smoke would hang in the heat like mist, over and into everything for days. Otto drew a line through option 1.

It was too late in the season for 2; that option would mean waiting, holding on to all the newspapers until next spring. But Etta would almost certainly be home by then and not wanting a kitchen full of paper, with newsprint stains on the floor, the counters, their hands. Otto drew a line through option 2.

Dear Etta,

Do you remember, five or so months ago, when the neighbor girl from the far side of Russell’s came round with her box of little guinea pigs? All the babies that were Just Too Much, according to her parents, according to her, that she tried to give us? I think her name is Kasia. Probably around nine years old, now. I went to visit her this morning. She was still in school, but her parents were around the farm and happy to see me. Yes, they said, yes, oh yes, we still have them. And yes, you’re welcome to them. Just one? You sure? Okay. They said I could pick, could go into Kasia’s room to where the cage is and pick whichever I liked, but I said, No, I’d really rather not, please. So they picked for me. A mostly brown one. Still small.

So. We’ve got a guinea pig now. I hope you don’t mind. They’re nocturnal, and so, it seems, am I these days, so I thought it might work out well. Some motion and noise around the house other than my own. It doesn’t have a name yet, but it will. I forgot to ask if it’s female or male, so I will choose something unisex.

And corn is looking good this year, and I think they eat corn.

I don’t know where you are, exactly, now, but I bet it’s close to Kenora. So I’m just putting SOUTHERN ONTARIO on this as a mailing address. It should get that far before it is returned back here. Then I’ll put it in a pile with the others. When you get home you can read and read.

Here,

Otto.

P.S. There’s a picture in here, of you, for you.

O
tto named the guinea pig Oats. Because it liked to eat them and parts
of it were the color of them and it was shaped a bit like the word, all round and
soft and squat. He ripped up the A and B sections of one
Canadian National
and laid the strips
as bedding in a mandarin orange crate left over from Christmas. In the crate he also
put a shot glass full of water, a sugar bowl full of oats—it would be a little while
yet until the corn was ready—and Oats the guinea pig. It immediately burrowed under
the papers. Okay, said Otto. I’ll see you later tonight, maybe.

Dear Etta,

Walter and Wiley have arived which is just great. They both look so strange in pressed and matching uniforms and with there hair cut by a real barber. But I suppose so do I. We all went swimming the weekend they arrived, in the Atlantic, and it was so long and wide they could hardly beleive it. Like the sky had droped into the ground said Walter. Yes exactly said Wiley.

But theyve only just arrived, and I’m just about to go. 3 days and 2 nights and then I’m on a boat in the morning. My first boat.

Etta, here’s the thing, I’m scared.

I wanted this so much and I still do but, I am. And thats all.

My love to Russell.

And all the others.

Otto Vogel.

P.S. En-closed is a picture. Its me in my uniform. One of the offitcial pictures they take and give us. They give us two. I’ve already sent one to mother so this one might as well be for you. In case your wondering what I look like without dust every-where.

W
hen Etta replied, she did not say,

You should be scared. If you could see the students I’m getting, the boys coming back, you’d be terrified. Though they’re big like men, they’re just boys with bits of them missing. Arms or legs or brains or souls. They squeeze into the desks next to the children and recite A–Z or 1–10 because it’s all they can do, now. They sit and look so much younger and so much older than they are.

They’re usually only back for a few days before their mothers or fathers or wives or sisters bundle them home, where things are more controllable, where it’s easier to dim lights and pull up covers; to run half a mile into the fields and open your mouth like an animal and howl and howl.

She did not say,

Only two days ago Thatcher Muldeen stabbed his right hand, between the pointer and middle knuckle, with a pencil during geometry and I try and try but the blood won’t come out of his desk’s wood finish. And Kevin Leary, back three weeks, used a small knife to cut the braid off the girl in front of him, and now he carries it in his back pocket at all times, ribbon side hanging out.

She did not say,

And yet, they keep going. They keep joining and leaving. All the boys, the
men. At the dances it’s just the women, the broken returners, and Russell.

She did not say,

And even though he’s too young, much, Owen has gone. His fair skin still letting the light through from behind, he’s so delicate. His hands shaking at his sides as he asked if I knew which crew you had been grouped with.

And, what’s more, she did not say,

The picture is on my table. I bought a frame in town. It’s wonderful not to eat alone anymore.

She did not say,

The only other pictures in my house are one of my parents and one of my sister.

She did not say,

You look more real in that photo than I remember you looking in life.

What she said was

Dear Otto,

We’re all scared, most of the time. Life would be lifeless if we weren’t. Be scared, and then jump into that fear. Again and again. Just remember to hold on to yourself while you do it.

Sincerely,

Etta

P.S. Thank you for the photo. I do recognize you, even without the dust. I enclose this year’s class photo, myself in front of the school with the students, as a reciprocal gift.

In the photo she is wearing a light dress with short cap sleeves, a close waist, and a pressed collar. Her best dress. Her smile is the biggest thing in the picture.

T
he photo was tugging away from Otto’s fingers in the wind, so he put it back in his heavy wool pocket. An inside pocket. He gripped the cool metal of the ship’s railing and threw up once more over into the gray water. It looked so much less blue now that he was on it.
Jump into that,
he whispered to himself. Left, right, front, and back, everywhere was water and only water. The boat treaded clumsily through it, the proximity of the rising sun the only hint at progress. You all right? said the soldier to his left, also throwing up. A boy from Montreal, a rich hesitance to his English.

Yes, said Otto. Salt and water and wind. Alive. I am Alive.

D’accord,
said the soldier.
C’est bon.
Me not so much. His face was the color of the water. He had, Otto saw, taken off his coat and left it on the ship floor, with his gun on top. Otto picked them up, draped the coat over his arm, warmed the cold gun between his hands.

This’ll be something, said Otto. I don’t know if it’ll be good or bad, but it’ll be something. He could feel his heart hard and fast like the first time he had coffee. Like this from the moment he stepped aboard. His hands shook.

Oui.
Yes, said the gray boy, before bending over the railing again.

W
hen their ship pulled ashore, seven days later, all of Otto’s hair had gone white, like the seafoam, like the bones of the fish they had every day for dinner and supper, all of it pure white.

I
would do a better job, said Winnie.

It was after school. Today’s class had been about cutting; making three-dimensional shapes out of two-dimensional drawings. Now Winnie and Russell were helping Etta clean up the leftover bits of paper littered between the desks.

What makes you think that? said Russell. There were little shards of white and blue paper stuck with static to his shirt. A better job than everyone? Than Otto?

Than most. Maybe Otto, maybe not.

Etta just listened, didn’t enter the dialogue. She held out the dustbin for handfuls or skirtfuls of scrap.

Go, then, go be a nurse.

I don’t want to be a nurse . . . you want me to go?

I want you to go if you want to go.

It wouldn’t make me crazy. I am not as delicate as they are.

Or as me—

Russell, you’re hardly delicate, inserted Etta.

Ha! Exactly, said Winnie.

Russell looked up from the floor to Etta. Something there. Hurt? Gratitude?

You know what I mean, he said.

Anyway, said Winnie, being a nurse is not the same. I know where to punch a calf to kill it, if it needs it. And hard enough. One punch.

Etta laughed.

It’s true.

I know, I know.