Sweeter Life (2 page)

Upstairs in his room he picked up his guitar, an old Harmony archtop, and folded himself around it, breathing in the perfume of wood and lemon oil and, above that, the slightly sour tang of the pickup and strings. Quietly he fingered a few of his favourite songs, melodies he could count on to lighten his mood. He should have known better than to go out to the old place. Even at the best of times, it made him feel like a stranger in his own life.

When it was time for school, he found Ruby Mitchell sitting at the kitchen table with tea and toast, not really listening to the
CBC
. She was still in her housecoat but had her face on, such as it was. She was not his mother but his aunt. Most times that scarcely mattered.

“You were up early,” she said.

Cyrus looked at the wall clock and then back out to the rolling rows of apple trees. “Went down to the marsh with Blackie. Needed to do some thinking.”

She took a tiny bite of bread, marvelling that he could stand to be outside with a light jacket and nothing but a thin T-shirt underneath. It
was April, but the wind still carried the memory of winter.

The voice on the radio rumbled on about Nixon and the Paris Peace Talks, the Calley trial; and Ruby rose slowly and turned the damn thing off. Too depressing, really, an entire history of loss. All those young boys. All that bombing.

“I have to shop,” she said. “I could drive you into town.”

He made a grumbling sound and stared down at his well-worn Keds. “I’m up. I’ll walk. Maybe it’ll clear my head.” Then he grabbed an apple and moved to the door. But before he could make his escape she touched his shoulder, turning him around until she was looking into his pale blue eyes.

“Whatever it is,” she said, “will work out.” She slipped a folded piece of paper into the pocket of his T-shirt. Running her hand through the cool silk of his hair, she said, “Isabel’s coming for dinner. Try to be on time. I think she wants to give you the benefit of her sisterly wisdom.”

They both laughed at that, and he promised to be home for dinner. He was down the steps and halfway across the lawn before he dug the paper from his pocket. It was a blank cheque with her signature. Not from the farm account—those cheques were always calculated to the penny—but from her personal account, her “mad money” as she liked to call it, as if she had ever had an irrational moment in her life. Wrapped around the cheque was a sheet of her memo paper, wildflowers all along the border.

He looked at the house and shoved the cheque back into his pocket, trying to imagine himself in a new suit and tie. Then he turned and walked into the wind, his shoulders hunched, his head down.

RUBY WATCHED CYRUS
scoot out the door and away. Then she slipped into the laundry room off the kitchen and peered out the low windows to see her husband, Clarence, moving around in the packing shed, looking worn
out before the season was even properly underway. A brush with cancer was reason enough to feel tired and anxious, of course; but now he had something else to worry him. He was suddenly convinced that this boy who wasn’t his son had decided against a life on the farm.

Ruby had guessed as much the moment she set eyes on Cyrus wriggling in his mother’s arms. He was a softy, a cuddler and a dreamer. But Clarence, even with his college education, his history books and fancy magazines, never had a clue. That it had taken him all this time to recognize the fact gave Ruby no satisfaction. She was not one to gloat about such things—her gift for divination, her natural grasp of the heart’s varied languages. Rather, these talents made her more understanding of a husband torn by competing terrors: one, that Cyrus would someday soon walk away from the farm; the other, that he, Clarence, out of his love for the land and the solid kind of life it could provide, would say something, do something, to make this boy stay where he didn’t belong, deflect him from whatever true path might be revealed to him.

This fear of terrible mistakes, of stepping beyond one’s rightful duty, was something Ruby well understood. They had all made enough mistakes for one lifetime. And Clarence would be the first to admit he had made his share. It was laughable, when she thought about it, a man perfectly attuned to the slightest fluctuations in weather, to the rhythms of the agricultural life—and really such a sweet and intelligent man, who nearly every week had a thoughtful letter in
The Wilbury Gazette
—yet so completely out of sync with the nature of his loved ones.

Oh, he tried his best. Ruby had lost count of the times he had come to her seeking forgiveness, guidance, some key to the inner workings of family life. And no question, things had changed for the better. How could they not? They had all been caught flat-footed in the beginning. No time to prepare. No option but to just grab hold of each other and run like heck. In fact, it was only now, with Cyrus nineteen years old, that she and Clarence were becoming the kind of parents they should have been from the beginning. Small consolation for Isabel, who had bolted at the first opportunity. And no help at all for poor Hank.

Just the thought of Cyrus’s older brother made Ruby clutch the locket
around her neck and close her eyes, remembering the Owens’ lopsided house, the barn, the chicken coop that stood partway into the field. She remembered a day she had visited, had to be ten, twelve years ago. Riley was plowing concentric circles around the coop, and Catherine, Ruby’s younger sister, a tiny wisp of a thing, stared into the distance and said, “There are times, honest to God, when I could tear down that coop with my bare hands.”

It always hurt to see Catherine that way, the stooped shoulders and jittery leg, and Ruby knew very well her brother-in-law was to blame, not the chicken coop. For all his hard work, Riley often went at things in a complicated way. Most men did. It was what made them, at heart, so untrustworthy. And Riley’s fixation with that coop was a perfect example, she believed. Oh, no question, men like Clarence and Riley had only the best of intentions, but they too often attached meanings to life that no one else could decipher, causing no end of suffering for those who loved them. Ruby didn’t trust ideas or images or even figures of speech. Painting and poetry and philosophy—they all seemed to her a kind of madness, the kind of dizzying distraction that could only lead to trouble. She felt that people had lost their way in a multitude of reflections, when all they needed was to embrace the true and unequivocal love of Jesus Christ our Saviour.

A BONE-WHITE SKY
, a high, roaring mountain-bound wind that, inside the wall, they could hear but not feel; out on the court, someone bouncing a ball,
shoop, shoop, shoop
, regular as clockwork; around the yard the syncopated barks and wheezes of massed manhood, the here-and-there commotion of simple roughhouse. A vamp is all, everyone waiting for the note, that single soulful wail that would call them in—a blue note if ever there was one.

And when it came, when the siren sounded, they stopped—grey-suited, grey of face, some of them with grey hair, as if they had inhaled too much dust from this place and were, by degrees, turning to stone—then made their way across the loose gravel of the exercise yard. No one spoke; no one laughed. Some were edgy as blades; some polished to an alabaster sheen. For most of them, it was the saddest part of the day.

A stone archway connected the yard to the main quadrangle. There in the darker shadows, where three weeks before someone had been stabbed to
death, Hank watched his man pause a moment to tie his boot, Golden Reynolds acting like he didn’t have a care in the world. The others passed by without notice, but Hank angled across the archway until he and Goldie stood facing each other. They jostled a moment, like passing strangers on a busy downtown street, and only the most observant bystander would have noticed Hank pressing fifty dollars into Goldie’s palm, receiving in return a small portable radio in black leather, about the size of a Bible, which he tucked under his shirt.

“Batteries?” Hank asked.

And Goldie, a loose-limbed kid as slick as a whip, looked off into the distance and said, “Everything’s cool.”

Without another word, Hank continued threading his way inside the cold stone fortress, up granite ramps that had been rutted by the footfall of misery, down dank corridors and up three flights of metal stairs to his cell. His heart raced like a getaway car. He was asking for trouble. No music allowed outside of specified hours, and certainly no music allowed in the cells. Nappy Whitlock got himself ten days in solitary for the same thing.

Much later, after lights out, Hank worked up the nerve to take his new possession out of hiding. He crouched on the floor between the toilet and his bed. He uncoiled a thin black wire, at the end of which was a small plastic nub that he nestled in his ear. Then he turned on the radio and extended the long chrome antenna, tilting it this way and that. But all he got was static, un-differentiated mostly, here and there thickening into larger clumps of noise. The stone, he figured. Nothing could penetrate it. Fifty bucks shot to hell.

He tucked the radio inside his mattress where no one would find it. Then he rolled onto the bed and buried his face beneath his pillow. It was the racket he couldn’t stand. And the light. After all this time it still bothered him. He’d been a country boy once. He knew quiet. He knew darkness. He knew open ground and arching sky, and it was nothing like this. So after an hour or so of tossing and turning, he walked to his cell door and pressed his face against the metal bars. They felt cool against his skin. He could hear the guards playing gin on the second level. Closer at hand, Nelson Green’s whispered prayers for salvation were punctuated by the moans of Moe Fletcher, their primitive duet sung against a ceaseless
chorus of coughing and crying and the babble of sleep-talk.

The main cellblock was a perfect square, four storeys high, with twenty cells on each side, on each level. Each cell faced a narrow walkway the guards patrolled, a waist-high railing for safety, and beyond that a vast column of empty space. At any time Hank could see a hundred other cells just like his, with a hundred other stories just as sad. The prison was designed that way, he believed, to remind the inmates that they were nothing special. Like chickens in a pen, he thought. Doomed creatures.

The empty space beyond the railings, a good hundred feet across and four storeys high, magnified every whisper, every moan. Occasionally a prisoner in a lighter mood would test the distance with a paper airplane. Sometimes a bird got in and flew about the space in a panic, and the men would whistle madly, hoping to coax the stupid thing to their cells. About a year ago at morning roll call, Willie Brown, maybe thinking
he
was a bird, stepped out of his cell and said, “Oh, Lord,” then vaulted over the railing. It took them weeks to remove his stain from the stone floor below.

Hank wasn’t a jumper. Mostly he liked to stand at his door and peer into the middle distance and try to imagine a future for himself. What he’d figured out so far was that if he ever did get out of there, he might like to spend the rest of his days outdoors. A park ranger, maybe. Not too many people to deal with in a job like that, he guessed. Not a lot of stress. The kind of job where they could maybe forgive a man for what he’d done. A park ranger at the Grand Canyon, maybe. That sounded good.

So when he couldn’t sleep, this is what he’d do: he’d walk to his cell door and stand with his forehead resting on the iron bars. He’d peer into that open space until he could picture himself in the khakis and tan shirt, the big wide-brimmed hat and leather boots. As clear as something on TV, he would see himself sitting behind the wheel of a jeep, no other people around him, nothing at all except maybe a mountain goat picking its way along the edge to something green.

A SINGLE KILLDEER
led Cyrus all the way down to the Bailey bridge near the marina. The wind off the lake had gotten stronger, colder, and he had begun to regret his decision to walk to school. So when Sam Loach came
barrelling down the Marsh Road in his rusted pickup and stopped to offer a ride, Cyrus accepted.

“Seen Benny out there in your old man’s field,” Sam said. “Guess he figures to beat the rains.” He laughed, a wheezy sort of chuckle. “Ain’t one of us ever done that. Don’t know why he keeps on.”

Cyrus kept his opinion to himself. He didn’t much like Sam Loach or any of his family. They went about all things in a half-assed way, and that included their farm. There was no way Cyrus would criticize anyone in front of Sam.

The Loaches farmed the same kind of land the Owens had farmed: reclaimed marsh, dense and black. It wasn’t the best soil in the area. For that you’d have to go north of the ridge to sandy well-drained loam that stood up to a tractor even a few weeks after spring melt. Some of those farms to the north already had a few early crops in. By contrast, marshland, even with the tile beds and the pumps, held the moisture like a sponge. No one in fifty years had gotten all his crops in before the end of May. And even when you could get on the land, you were limited in the crops you could grow. The marsh never generated the kind of heat units you got north of town. It had never made anyone rich, that’s for sure. There wasn’t a single family out there who had ever amounted to a hill of beans.

This year, however, things had been different. The winter had been drier and the rains later than anyone could remember. A downpour had been predicted every day for more than a week, but so far not a drop had fallen. As a result, Benny had been on his tractor, getting his hopes up. More power to him, Cyrus thought.

Sam dropped him off at the main intersection of town. Each corner had its own bank and, since the centennial celebration three years before, a sorry-looking maple in a square cement pot. The shopping district stretched north, south, east and west of the four corners but nowhere near as far as the eye could see.

Because it was too early yet to head over to the school, Cyrus turned east onto Talbot Street. He walked past the china shop and hardware store. In front of the Vogue Theatre he stopped to watch Po Mosely.