Street Symphony

1. Title Page
   
2. Book & Copyright Information
   
3. Dedication
   
4. Opening Quotation
   
5. The Hope Hat
   
6. Go, Dad, Go!
   
7. Dinosaurs
   
8. Woman at the Bar
   
9. Salvage
   
10. Aquarium
    
11. Street Symphony
    
12. Ash
    
13. Pandora's Egg
    
14. Falling Woman
    
15. The Healing Touch
    
16. It's Christmas, Eve
    
17. The Companion's Tale
    
18. If a Tree Falls
    
19. Shelter
    
20. Caffè Italia
    
21. Cinq à Sept
    
22. Acknowledgements
    
23. About the Author
    

© Rachel Wyatt, 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll-free to 1-800-893-5777.

This story collection is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Edited by Edna Alford

Book designed by Tania Craan

Typeset by Susan Buck

Printed and bound in Canada

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Wyatt, Rachel, 1929-, author

          Street symphony / Rachel Wyatt.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-55050-618-1 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-55050-619-8 (pdf).--

ISBN 978-1-55050-825-3 (epub).--ISBN 978-1-55050-826-0 (mobi)

I. Title.

PS8595.Y3S77
2015                  C813'.54                C2014-908236-3

                                                                                   C2014-908237-1

Available from:

Coteau Books

2517 Victoria
Avenue, Regina, Saskatchewan Canada
S4P 0T2

www.coteaubooks.com

Coteau Books gratefully acknowledges the financial support of its publishing program by: the Saskatchewan Arts Board, The Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the City of Regina and the Government of Saskatchewan through Creative Saskatchewan.

To my family with love always.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers —

That perches in the soul —

–
Emily Dickinson

The Hope Hat

“So about dying,” Ransom said.
“At least people seem to have stopped saying, ‘succumb’, ‘she succumbed’, ‘is succumbing’. It’s a very ugly word. And it’s no use pretending we’re immortal. We are all going to die. I’ve been thinking about the haecceity of death.”

“Hack what!”

“Haecceity. It’s from Latin,
haec
, this. That’s what it means, this-ness. The kind of absoluteness of something. What it
is
.”

“Will you please shut up,” Berta whispered.

A nurse came in and set a vase of flowers on the bedside table. The white daffodils had a subtle scent, but their pallor was deathly and death needed no reinforcement here in this room now. Jill stretched her hand over the bed as if to bless Lucy as she lay there leaving the world and causing disruption as she went.

Gerald said, “Anyone else want coffee? Tea? I think they close the counter at four.”

But at that moment an aide wheeled in a small trolley bearing a teapot and cups and cookies. “Our volunteers supply this for these times,” she said, and went out on soft feet. Gerald followed her and closed the door behind him.

“He can’t face it,” Berta said. “Not surprising.”

“I don’t know why he’s here at all,” Ransom said. “She wouldn’t want him.”

“There can be forgiveness,” Jill snapped.

Lucy breathed. She breathed. Sweet smell. They said. Try to speak. Tell. Words would come. Will come. Welcome. Two days. Must tell. Message. Important. Pictures. Wall water. Animal faces.

“She’s struggling to say something.”

“Fighting all the way.”

“She particularly asked that there be no fuss, a simple coffin.”

“We’ve only your word for that.”

“I’m telling you, and Ranse was with me at the time, weren’t you?”

“Let’s be quiet.” Ransom knelt down beside the bed and rested his head beside Lucy’s on the pillow.

Jill began to cry. Berta pulled at Ransom and he fell to the floor.

“She was about to speak,’’ he said.

Near. Light. Love. To say. To be said. Oh yes. White breath. Out. Breath.

It was just a hint of a whisper, but they all heard it. Berta was startled. She looked at the other two.

“She said, ‘I owe you’.”

“Who did she say that to? Who was she talking to?”

“To me,” Ransom said. “She saw my face and said, ‘I know you’.”

“Oh, very likely,” Jill replied. “It sounded to me like ‘I own you’.”

“Why in God’s name would she say ‘I own you’?”

“She damn well did owe
me
.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Berta.”

Jill poured out four cups of tea. “We should drink this. It’s a nice gesture.”

“Wait. Look. She’s making an effort. Speak to us again, love.”

Lucy was smiling as she sank into the fond white embrace of the water and the sheet and the light.

~ • ~

“It was too small.”

“They are. Green ones are bigger than ruby-throated.”

“If you say so.”

Ransom’s right hand rested on the wheel. His fingernails weren’t clean. His hands were rough. He’d want to impress on the others at the funeral that he was a worker dragged away from his saw and chisel to mourn his dead sister. His red shirt, he said, was a tribute to Lucy’s left-of-centre politics. Jill picked several leaves off his dark grey jacket.

Shock and loss affect people in different ways. Her own mother had baked continuously for two weeks after her second husband died, and the smell of banana bread still made Jill nauseous. Last night, to her surprise and disappointment, Ransom had gone out drinking with his friends, Zelig and Jay. Woken at three in the morning by their laughter and scuffling, she’d looked out the window and seen them fooling around with a tree branch.

Ransom hadn’t yet noticed the long, slow decline in their relationship, his and Jill’s, parallel to Lucy’s long, slow decline but quieter. He likely thought they were comfortable together and had no idea that his smug “If you say so,” was a nail in this particular coffin, the coffin that held nine years of living together, working together, sex and arguments. And then Jill felt ashamed, thinking
coffin
when Lucy was actually inside one, in the hearse ahead of them. She knew that she should be mourning, thinking only of the essential goodness of her sister-in-law, but was saving that till she’d told Ransom it was over, till this day of accepting condolences was done and till she could lift from her mind the trail of meanness that Lucy had left behind.

“Watch out,” she yelled as a truck appeared to be headed straight for them.

“Don’t do that,” he yelled back. “I saw him coming. You’ll get us killed one of these days.”

“One way to go.”

“I’m not ready yet, thank you.”

Jill had seen the smile on Lucy’s face and had felt, for one moment, envious. To her the smile represented “the peace that passeth all understanding”, if she was remembering her father’s favourite text right, as if Lucy had reached the heaven that none of them believed in but still hoped for. She wanted to walk into that place right now and leave behind the siblings’ squabbles, the widower’s hangdog guilt, and avoid the uproar that would ensue when she told Ransom she was going to move out of their basement studio and workshop. But after all, well, yes, there were good reasons to live. The biggest reason being six feet tall, dark-haired, slightly stooped, scholarly and sex-starved. His name was Salvatore, Sal for short.

It was suitably raining. The gardens were lush, the grass an emerald green.
You must like living here
, visitors always said.
It’s so beautiful
. But Jill longed for the summer heat of Ontario and the real winter of Alberta. This part of British Columbia was an indefinite, moderate place and she was tired of it. She wanted to go back to her profession instead of helping Ransom sell his wooden
works of
art
. There was a demand for teachers in Northern Quebec.
She touched her drab raincoat and thought of fur-lined jackets and caribou-hide boots, and heard Lucy’s ghost shouting, “Protect our wildlife.”

~ • ~

Berta decided that the only way
to cope with this day was to become a dimly smiling idiot. She wasn’t sorry she’d pushed her brother over. He deserved it both for many things before Tuesday and for things he might do in the future. He’d leant down to Lucy as if he had a right when in fact he’d done nothing for her in these last months except visit occasionally and ask her what it felt like to be dying, as if he were the correspondent for a journal called
Happy Endings
or some such thing. For the next few hours she would be benign and make sure that the atmosphere back at the house for those thirty or forty people who would come to share grief and neatly cut sandwiches was pleasant though muted. She’d decided not to wear total black; her navy pantsuit and pale blue shirt were sober enough. There was no need to make the day any darker than it was.

Sitting in the limousine with Gerald the faithless widower and Aunt Marie who never wore makeup but had for this occasion put on pink lipstick and blue eye shadow, Berta tried to meditate on her loss. People would use that strange phrase,
I’m sorry for your loss.
In reality, her bright, energetic, happy and recently rich sister had been gone for months. The shell of her had lain in the back bedroom going over past hurts and wasted hours and the love she’d lost. There’d been some good moments when she’d asked Berta to read to her from the books they’d enjoyed as kids. She thought about the money that might have been hers if her sister had been generous, and about the tall stack of hours they’d dribbled away in idiotic arguments before pain had taken over Lucy’s being.