Smoke (22 page)

The rest of the way across he held himself noticeably erect. He wore the white fedora as he approached the border guards with a pulse so violent that it pumped through his cells like a neighborhood bully, though he passed, as many outlaws have and will, by saying less than intended and looking as if he knew exactly where he was going. His dead father's pistol was strapped to his leg like a last resort.

Crossing a border as one person and arriving on the other side as another wasn't as hard as he expected. Even the ache faded with time. The rootless ache of a sapling pulled up and out of the earth. Motherless. Fatherless. What will become of me, he had wondered so long ago. Who will know me any more? Luckily, time had answered those questions, age and experience had arranged for replacements. Alice had become family. Medicine his only constant. Smoke was a second chance.

Now, all these years later, he holds a thick roll of gauze in his hands. His wristwatch indicates that it's almost midnight, a New Year, and the moon pours across the village as he winds the white bandages around his chest as if he is a living mummy. Around and around, under his arms, behind and across his back, again around the front, flattening his body into streamlined position. Secured down with a pin. Each morning while he dresses he goes through this same liberating routine. He runs the tap, drinks a glass of water to relieve his stomach, and unwinds by humming along to the guttural, back-of-the-throat voice coming through the transistor radio on the other side of the door.
It's Ooon-ly Make Beee-lieve!

Doc John stares into the small glass hanging on the water closet door and notices how each new day has sunk more wrinkles deeper into his face, the old crater. He reaches up and runs his bulbous fingertips across the sprig of whiskers poking out his chin. He is sure the human body is an atlas of the future, at least a compass pointing in the direction of unconquered territory. Already tuberculosis, polio, diabetes are better under medical control. Yet what of rarer conditions, those that also plague the mind and spirit? He can imagine all manner of illness wiped out with new medications. Limbs and organs eventually replaced. Skin harvested and grown back, and because he can think these things he is sure they will be possible in time. He believes in progress as strongly now as when he'd been a much different person. More so. For initially, under his father's instruction, he practised medicine in order to heal—correct, comprehend humanity—but now he knows he's also become a doctor so that he might better understand himself.

His heart
thud thuds,
his lungs lurch with each breath and his abdomen swells and burns the more he thinks about the past. What if he'd been born in another time, another place? The idea quickly leaves him. A passport is all he's ever needed to be happy—his coats and shirts and shoes, his hair and his handshake—passports. He regards his warped reflection and remembers something Alice said when he told her he was looking into a new surgery for Buster, a procedure that could remove some of the scars. “Only God,” she said with an uncharacteristic measure of doubt in her voice. “Only our maker can unmake us.”

He rinses the sink once more and makes sure no blood stains the basin. He pats his hands dry on a towel and walks out of his small washroom, grabbing his coat and hat from the hat tree beside his desk, unlocking the door and looking out through his office onto the front veranda. Off across Main Street and into the village the river runs chilled under its icy layers and reminds him how precious this life, how short. He breathes deeply knowing that this winter is to be his last—the end is already stinging in the moist air. There is new urgency now as the pain in his abdomen is sharper than yesterday and his lungs struggle to accommodate each new breath. He looks up at the awnings. For the first time since they bought the house, he wasn't well enough to hang lights. The church bells ring on Palmer's Hill and he stares out at the blackness. His neighbours, many of them his patients, sleep in houses all around. So many characters, he thinks. Even in one small village. More than will ever be counted.

SEED, PLANT AND PRAY

The Lions Club holds a spring fling to raise money for the sesquicentennial. Large clusters of balloons tied with baling string are hung at the entrance to the town hall. Green and pink bristol board cut into a row of miniature tobacco plants is taped across the door. As a member of the United Church Women's Association, Hazel Johnson has volunteered to manage food for the event and to round up contestants and register them for Miss Tobacco Queen, 1959. She cannot locate Jelly Bean anywhere.

Hazel is wearing a brown polyester pantsuit with an elastic waist and matching sleeveless top—pale orange with a darker orange collar. Her only makeup is a pinkish-orange lipstick—nearly fluorescent. “We've got twelve dishes coming,” she announces when she finds Alice by the food table. “I don't know about Isabel's ambrosia though. Apparently she insisted, but it's always runny as the river.”

Alice sets their finished quilt down along with a stack of raffle tickets and an empty fish bowl. She is dressed in a peach knee length dress with white buttons and matching shoes. “Mind your language,” she says as Tom breezes past.

Both women cut across the hall to where Walter is stationed in the corner with his record player and a stack of LPs and some 45s. An ashtray sits on the table, his lit cigarette burning. He steps around the front of the table, plugs the cord of his player into the wall socket and sets the arm and needle down on the black vinyl disc.
Wake up, little Susie …
He lifts the cigarette to his lips.

“Evening, Alice.”

“Evening.”

“I wanted him to come in costume,” Hazel says. “To get the spirit of the thing going. I suggested the Lone Ranger but he refused.”

“Should've asked me to come as Tonto, dear. Jay Silverheels is from Six Nations too.”

Hazel bristles. She quickly turns her attention to the far end of the room, scrunches her face like a sock monkey's and marches off across the hall and through the swinging double doors of the kitchen.

Walter replaces his cigarette in the ashtray, leans across the table and cups his mouth.

“I do love getting under her skin.”

“You shouldn't tease,” Alice wags her pointer finger. “She means well.” Secretly, though, Alice is glad for Walter's good and open nature. Hazel's sanctimonious air is the one thing about her friend that she has a hard time tolerating. Alice rummages through the stack of records, tapping the toe of her shoe. “I don't know any of these singers. I must be getting old.”

“This band's playing now.” Walter holds up an album cover. “The Everly Brothers.” He waits for the song to end and then sets another of their records on the turntable. He drops the arm and needle of the player on the disc and it makes a scratching, static sound before the instruments play. Alice stares out at the empty dance floor as the melody drifts over her—
All I have to do is dreeeam
… Oh what on earth is keeping John? She scratches her right palm and resolves that if he doesn't show up within ten minutes she'll slip back to the house and check on him.

Soon others begin arriving and milling about the food tables. Gladys and Herb Peacock, the Claxtons, Tom's hired man Simon. Hank arrives in a buckskin jacket and coonskin hat. Alice moves to greet Gladys and Herb as if it's a wedding reception and she is the mother of the bride. She feels a bit racy in heels. She ordered the shoes from Brantford after finding a screen star wearing them in one of Hazel's gossip magazines.

George Walker arrives in his usual blue overalls, carrying a large bowl for cherry punch. He stops to admire the food—sugar cookies decorated with orange and yellow sprinkles, date squares, chocolate cake and cream pies. Len Rombout and his wife, Lorraine, tag behind with Susan carting a dish of orange and marshmallow Jell-O salad. Susan places the dish on the table and moves to join the other girls over by the corner where they're lining up to bob for apples. She'll sneak a cigarette first chance she gets. Hazel attends to filling George's bowl with water and mixing the instant punch crystals. The scent of a freshly baked yellow cake wafts through the hall. George barrels towards Alice at the music stand.

“Why that smell must be your fault. Not a woman for miles can fix a dessert as good as yours.” He leans in and kisses her on the cheek and then shakes hands with Walter. George smells of a strong Castile soap masking pig shit.

“I hate to disappoint you George, but that's nothing more than a Betty Crocker mix.” Alice smiles, guessing that the men won't know who Betty Crocker is. George and Walter exchange a look and then, catching on, George pretends he's been pierced by an arrow.

Hank approaches and soon he and George are thick into conversation.

“My boar cost two hundred dollars last year,” says George. “Came from a litter of twelve. Made a hundred pounds of gain on three hundred and twenty-five pounds of feed.”

Hank whistles. “You got a bargain there.”

“Sure did,” nods George. “You know, I been raising purebred Hampshires since high school, but ever since I tried my first production-tested boar, a Minnesota No.1, I seen a profit. Drove down to Indiana for him. Best decision I ever made. Changing keeps 'em all strong.”

“Too many boars are really scrubs,” agrees Hank.

“I could still use your help. Any time. Gotta ear-notch them now. And those rail-fence cribs really need fixing.”

Ivan enters the hall with sisters Gail and Doreen Manning hanging off his arms like dogs on leashes. The girls are led across the dance floor together, each assuming that she is the lovelier. Isabel follows closely, carting Lizzie in one arm and a full bowl of ambrosia in the other. Seeing her, Tom strides across the room, lifts his daughter gently and swings her high into the air. She giggles and kicks her legs about. Just as Hazel pokes her head out of the kitchen, Isabel removes her jade green coat with the fur collar to reveal a tight red dress with flashy gold sequins sewn on for trim. Isabel McFiddie doesn't even know how to sew for goodness sake, Hazel thinks. But that won't stop a woman like her, no it certainly won't. Not even a twister would stop her from parading around like a Jezebel!

Hank glances around the room searching for a dance partner. Maybe he can make Susan jealous. The Manning girls are spoken for and besides he took Doreen to see a flick in Tillsonburg once, years ago, because she'd practically asked him to, and she smelled like his mother's perfume, and wasn't much fun. She talked too much,
yammer yammer
all through sundaes at the dairy bar and then
yak yak yak
all the way to the movie where she pushed his hand away three times in a row in the dark of the theatre. He knew she was teasing though, so he kept up the pressure and eventually she relented. Anyway, it doesn't matter; it's Susan he is set on—her brash indifference and powerful guard, and those long, long legs that she sometimes shows off in skimpy shorts during summer.

“Give her up,” Buster keeps telling him. “You're out of contention.” This drives Hank to threaten his younger brother physically, but now as he scans the hall for Susan, doubt seeps in through his every pore. Sometimes she is friendly with him and other times she is formal and dismissive, even on their one date. He's been waiting for her to make up her mind, and for what? Maybe Buster is right. Maybe Susan isn't worth the trouble after all.

Hank makes his way over to the food table and pops a coconut macaroon in his mouth. He notices Jelly Bean leaning against the wall all pale and white and fuzzy in a periwinkle dress and white angora sweater. She is the same height as Susan, although he has to admit that Jelly Bean
is
better stacked. She has none of Susan's grace or boldness though and that's what he goes in for. Finally, Susan steps out onto the dance floor to do the hop with Donny and the others, and Hank is sure all over again.
Mine
. He appears at Jelly Bean's side with a paper cup full of punch.