Spit Delaney's Island (4 page)

Spit cannot bear to think where these people are going, where their
rides will take them. His mind touches, slides away from the boy with the
St. Bernard, sitting up against the back of that green pickup cab. He could
follow them, in his mind he could go the whole distance with them, but
he refuses, slides back from it, holds onto the things that are happening
here and now.

The sound of Stella's shoes shifting in gravel. The scent of the pines,
leaking pitch. The hot smell of sun on the rusted pole.

“I've left my phone number on the memo pad, on the counter.”

The feel of the small pebbles under his boots.

“Jon and Cora'll take turns, on the weekends. Don't be scared to make
Cora do your shopping when she's here. She knows how to look for things,
you'll only get yourself cheated.”

He'd yell
Okay
!

He holds on. He thinks of tourists filing through the National Museum, looking at Old Number One. People he'll never see, from Ottawa
and Toronto and New York and for all he knows from Africa and Russia,
standing around Old Number One, talking about her, pointing, admiring
the black shine of her finish. Kids wondering what it would be like to ride
in her, feel the thudding of her pistons under you.

He'd stand at the edge of the water and yell
Okay you son of a bitch,
okay
!

“It don't look like there's going to be any complications. My lawyer can
hardly believe how friendly all this's been. It'll all go by smooth as sailing.”

Spit Delaney sees himself get up into the pickup with the youth and the
St. Bernard, sees himself slide his ass right up against the cab, slam his hand
in a signal on the hot metal roof. Sees himself going down that silver-grey
road, heading west. Sees himself laughing.

He says, “My lawyer says if it's all so god-damned friendly how come
you two are splitting up.”

“That's just it,” she says. “Friends are one thing. You don't have to be
married to be a friend.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Spit says. It occurs to him
that he has come home from a trip through Europe and northern Africa
and can't remember a thing. Something happened there, but what was it?

He sees himself riding in that pickup all up through the valley farmlands, over the mountains in the centre of the island, down along the lakes
and rivers, snaking across towards Pacific. Singing, maybe, with that boy.
Throwing his arm around the old floppy dog's ugly neck. Feeling the air
change gradually to damp, and colder. Straining his neck to see.

“I got my Lodge tonight, so I better get going, it'll give me the day to
get settled in, it takes time to unpack. You'll be all right?”

Sees himself hopping off the green pickup, amongst the distorted
combed-back spruce, the giant salal, sees himself touching the boy goodbye, patting the dog. Sees himself go down through the logs, through the
white dry sand, over the damp brown sand and the seaweed. Sees himself
at the water's edge on his long bony legs like someone who's just grown
them, unsteady,

shouting.

Shouting into the blind heavy roar.

Okay!

Okay you son of a bitch!

I'm stripped now, okay, now where is that god-damned line?

I

Mrs. Wright's first thought when she heard all the racket coming from
somewhere over on Starbuck's farm was “Will it be something I can write
up for the paper?” She was paid twenty cents an inch for sending all the
news from Cut Off in to the weekly newspaper in town and nothing unusual missed her notice. More often than not her column was just a list of
weekend visitors, but she hoped some day to write up a story so exciting
they would print it on the front page under big black headlines, maybe
even with pictures.

When the noise started she was down on her knees weeding the rose
garden in front of her house. The July sun had just lifted itself above the
fir ridge across the highway and she wanted to get the weeding done before it beat straight down on her out of that stainless-steel sky. It was no
surprise to a woman like Mrs. Wright that the day was already the hottest
one yet; her well was getting low and she couldn't turn the hose on the
gardens or the front lawn without the risk of losing all her drinking water.
What else could she expect?

Mrs. Wright went up onto her back porch to see if she could find out
what was causing the noise, held a hand up to shade her face from the sun.
Not that she perspired, mind you; there wasn't enough of her to produce
a drop of sweat. But still, she suffered from the heat. A little stick of a
woman, hardly taller than her porch railing, she wore a mop of white hair
on top like an abandoned nest. Her skin, stretched tight over tiny bones,
was mottled and dry.

Directly in front of her was the one field she still owned, its hay freshly
cut and sold, and beyond the far fence there was one of Mrs. Starbuck's
fields with a few of her white-face cattle grazing. She could see, through
a gap in the trees, Mrs. Starbuck's house where Mrs. Wright had gone to
live as a bride with her first husband. It was a tall solid-looking house with
a huge poplar tree beside it and a rock pile not far away. The two high
windows that faced this way were blank squares in the sunlight. And far
on the other side of Starbuck's farm, right back against the jagged rim of
timber, was the white gable of Mr. Porter's house.

But not a person in sight. She got her ladder and leaned it against the
side of the house. Then she climbed up and stood on the red duroid roof
for a better look. In the distance, beyond the farmhouse and the barn. Mrs.
Starbuck was running this way, flapping her arms and carrying on, screeching sounds that weren't even words by the time they got as far as Mrs.
Wright's ears.

My God, woman, Mrs. Wright thought. If you could only see yourself.

But of course she couldn't. Mrs Starbuck was not the type to wonder
what kind of impression she was making. The first thing Mrs. Wright
would tell anybody about Mrs. Starbuck was that she was more man than
her husband ever was. Naturally, as long as he was alive she pretended to
be feminine, wore dresses and nagged at him and kept the house clean
enough (though not nearly as clean as Mrs. Wright had kept it when she
was Mrs. Left and lived over there), but the minute he died she put on his
old clothes, let her appearance just go, and started clearing land. In the
year since his death she'd logged off fifteen more acres, burned up the
stumps, and planted it all in hay and oats. She drove her tractor as if she
was born on one. And looked, Mrs. Wright couldn't help thinking, as if
she belonged on one.

Mrs. Starbuck had passed right by her own house and was starting down
her nearest field. Those precious white-face cows of hers high-tailed it off
in every direction to get away from her. Mrs. Wright was surprised she
hadn't stopped running to tiptoe through the herd so she wouldn't disturb
them. She always acted as if they were the only cows worth anything on
this whole island, and nearly had a heart attack when Mr. Porter's Holstein bull got through the fence. “If that black bastard ruins my herd,” she
told him. “I'll have your hide. I'll sue.”

Mrs. Wright judged people by what she saw. She had five good senses,
she knew, and that was all anyone was given for judging what was real.
And what she saw when she looked at Mrs. Starbuck was bohunk. She
hated to say it, she hated even to think it, because it was the ugliest word
she knew; but friend or not, it described Mrs. Starbuck. She was no immigrant (though Mrs. Wright had heard once that Edna Starbuck's parents
were born in Norway, which would explain her height, and perhaps even
her size—Scandinavians, Mrs. Wright had observed, often got heavy after
fifty), but just the same she dressed and acted as if she came from another
country where there wasn't much money around and no one had ever
heard of a thing called good taste.

Just look at her. How many normal people would come screeching across
the field like that in the middle of a July morning? She hadn't even thought
of driving her car over, or getting Mr. Porter to drive her. It didn't even
occur to her that the people going by on the highway—Americans mostly,
in their campers—probably thought she was crazy. All Mrs. Wright hoped
was that after so much commotion the emergency was worth while. She
hated to see people get all upset over nothing.

She sat down on the roof and waited while Mrs. Starbuck got closer.
She wondered what her first husband, Mr. Left, would think of the way
that woman ran their farm. He would probably faint from shock. She
already knew what Mr. Wright thought of it: “Nothing about that woman
surprises me,” he said. “If you told me she murdered her grandmother I'd
believe you, she's that foreign to me.”

And Mrs. Wright had to admit there were times when she thought the
silly woman ought to be put away. Society should watch out for people like
her, she said, but Mr. Wright just raised an eyebrow at the idea.

Everybody had had a good laugh when she changed her name from
Mrs. Left. People said, “You did it on purpose. You chose Mr. Wright just
because it sounded funny coming after Mr. Left and you probably don't
love him at all.” But they were wrong. Her maiden name was Baldwin
and all the time she was married to Mr. Left, much as she liked him and
thought he was a good husband, she still thought of herself as Milly Baldwin. And when her first husband was killed fighting a forest fire and Mr.
Wright proposed, it didn't occur to her that the shift in names was a
strange coincidence until someone at the wedding reception said “I guess
your third husband will have to be Mr. In-between.”

“Haw haw,” she said.

Her first husband was a good enough man. She had liked him for his
efficient masculine ways. But she had never been able to talk to him about
the things she could talk to Mr. Wright about. Since she'd married Mr.
Wright she'd learned how to balance the economy, reform the penal system,
control foreign investment, and wipe out welfare. He'd taught her it all,
and her greatest regret was that there was no one else she could tell it to.
She couldn't think of a soul in Cut Off who would know what she was
talking about.

Certainly, if she'd brought up foreign investment in front of Mrs. Starbuck the best she could expect to get was a blank stare. What did Mrs.
Starbuck know about anything beyond farming? Words like economics or
welfare recipient were lost on her, they were as foreign as the menu in a
Greek restaurant. Mrs. Starbuck probably didn't even know
one word
of
the other official language in her own country.

Mrs. Wright did. She wanted to help out the government and make all
those people back in Quebec feel good so she borrowed a French text from
the local school and started memorizing. She learned
un deux trois quatre
cinq six
quite quickly and decided she had a flair for languages.
Je regarde
autour de moi
(she could remember it even now). But she couldn't foresee
an opportunity to say things like that, even if Mr. Wright ever got around
to taking her Back East some time so she could try it out in a Montreal
restaurant. She sent away for a LEARN FRENCH AT HOME record and
it was in her stereo set right now, beside the Andy Williams album, waiting for her to have time to play it.

Mrs. Wright felt pity for Mrs. Starbuck. Imagine living in a bilingual
country and not knowing one word of the other language! The worst of
it was that Mrs. Starbuck wasn't even very good at handling English, let
alone something else. And if Mrs. Wright ever got so silly as to offer Mrs.
Starbuck her French book or record, the crazy old bat would probably say
something like “There's no Frenchies in Cut Off. Where would I use it?”
to show her ignorance and backwardness.

She climbed down off the roof and backed her pickup truck out of the
garage, ran it up beside the house, and left it idling in neutral while she got
out. The way Mrs. Starbuck was galloping across the field, waving her
arms and ki-eye-ing like an immigrant, she was sure they would be heading off somewhere in the pickup and thought it wouldn't hurt to be ready.
What would people do if they didn't have her to fall back on?

“What is the matter with you?” she called.

Mrs. Starbuck was halfway across the nearest field. She stopped running
but, instead of answering Mrs. Wright, put her hands on her knees and
stood still with her head down like that, breathing heavy, for a few minutes. Then she jerked upright and moved forward again, not running,
dragging her feet through the hay stubble as if she were ready to drop.

Dress like a woman for a change and you could move faster, Mrs.
Wright thought. But Edna Starbuck hadn't worn a dress in a year. Coming
up towards Mrs. Wright's fence now, she had on a too-large pair of man's
pants, heavy black gumboots, a plaid mackinaw, and a greasy baseball cap.
Except for her broad hips and enormous thighs she could have been a
man, somebody's old hired hand staggering across the field, drunk.

Mrs. Wright put her foot on the bottom strand of barbed wire and
pulled up on the next so there would be a space for Mrs. Starbuck to crawl
through without getting her clothes all caught up in the fence. Mrs. Starbuck fell through and lay panting on the grass at Mrs. Wright's feet. Her
baseball cap fell off and Mrs. Wright could see pink scalp through the thinning grey hair, plastered by sweat to her head.

“What's wrong?” Mrs. Wright asked. “What's happened?”

Mrs. Starbuck got to her feet and put her hat back on. She put one hand
on the chestnut tree and leaned all her weight into it. “One of my calves,”
she said, and paused a while to catch up on her breathing, “down the well.”

“Down
what
well?” Mrs. Wright shouted.

“Way out back, the dried-up one.”

It was proof to Mrs. Wright that Mrs. Starbuck, even if she could clear
land, wasn't capable of running a farm by herself. A man would have
checked that well to make sure it had a decent top on it. She knew the one.
She could remember her first husband putting a good solid cap on the top,
but you couldn't expect it to last for ever. That was a good twenty years
ago and wood does rot.

“Why didn't you get Porter over to help? He's closer.”

“I did,” Mrs. Starbuck said. “He told me to get you too. It'll take all
of us.”

“Well that's a surprise,” Mrs. Wright said. “I thought
he
could do anything. Why didn't you drive over?”

Mrs. Starbuck blinked. “I never thought of it,” she said. “Do you have
ropes?”

Mrs. Wright ran back to the garage and took down a coil of new rope
from a nail on the wall. When she got back to the pickup Mrs. Starbuck
was already inside, ready to go.

“Too bad my husband isn't home,” Mrs. Wright said as she started the
pickup moving down the driveway.

“Oh, I don't need a lawyer, just plain weight. Somebody to pull.”

Thank you very much, Mrs. Wright thought. But that was typical of
Mrs. Starbuck. She couldn't see that an intelligent person could figure out
a better way of doing things. She thought when a thing had to be done the
best way was always the obvious way—bull work. She probably couldn't
see any sense in a man like Mr. Wright existing at all, sitting in an office
thinking of ways to help people and never lifting a manure fork from one
day to the next.

“If it's just more weight you want. I can't see why you came to me.”

Mrs. Wright looked down at her little body perched like a child behind
the wheel. Her legs were so short her husband had had to wire thick
wooden blocks onto all the pedals so she could drive. Her arms were like
the thin scaly legs of a Rhode island rooster.

“You always sound and act like you're bigger and heavier than you
are,” Mrs. Starbuck said.

There was admiration in her voice. Mrs. Wright was sure of it. Mrs.
Starbuck, even though she was incapable of understanding a woman like
Mrs. Wright or carrying on any kind of intelligent conversation with her,
had always had a real respect. She'd always known, it seemed, that Mrs.
Wright was no run-of-the-mill, that she was a person with depth and
someone you could count on.