The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (45 page)

Flora’s life up to now ought to have prepared her for what eventually happened with the guinea pigs. It had been a hard life, beginning with the death of her mother when Flora was barely a year old. Flora’s father was what in these parts is often called a rough carpenter, meaning that he could use a hammer and saw well enough to work as a helper to a bona fide carpenter. Usually he was the one who nailed together the plywood forms for making cellar walls and then, when the cement had set, tore the forms apart. During the fall and winter months, when it was too cold for cement to pour, the bona fide carpenters moved to interior work, which required a certain skill and a basic fluency with numbers, and Flora’s father was always among the first in the fall unemployment line.

There were three older children, older by one, two, and three years, and after the mother died, the children more or less took care of themselves. They lived out beyond Shackford Corners in a dilapidated house that appeared to be falling into its own cellar hole, an unpainted, leaky, abandoned house heated in winter by a kerosene stove, with no running water and only rudimentary wiring. The father’s way of raising his children was to stay drunk when he was not working, to beat them if they cried or intruded on his particular misery, and, when he was working, to leave them to their own devices, which were not especially healthful devices. When Flora’s older brother was six, he set off one of the blasting caps that he found near the lumber camp a half mile behind the house in the woods and blew one of his arms off and almost died. When Flora’s only sister was eleven, she was raped by an uncle visiting from Saskatchewan and after that could only gaze blankly past your head when you tried to talk to her or get her to talk to you. Flora’s older brother, when he was fourteen and she thirteen, sickened and died of what was determined by the local health authorities to have been malnutrition, at which point the remaining three children were taken away from the father and placed into the care of the state, which meant, at that time, the New Hampshire State Hospital over in Concord, where they had a wing for juveniles who could not be placed in foster homes or who were drug addicts or had committed crimes of violence but were too young to be tried as adults. Four years later, Flora was allowed to leave the mental hospital (for that is what it was) on the condition that she join the United States Air Force, where she spent the next twenty years working in the main as a maid, or steward, in officers’ clubs and quarters at various bases around the country. She was not badly treated by the Air Force itself, but numerous individual servicemen, enlisted men as well as officers, treated her unspeakably.

Despite her life, Flora remained good-naturedly ambitious for her spirit. She believed in self-improvement, believed that it was possible, and that not to seek it was reprehensible, was, in fact, a sin. And sinners she viewed the way most people view the stupid or the poor—as if their stupidity or poverty were their own fault, the direct result of sheer laziness and a calculated desire to exploit the rest of humankind, who, of course, are intelligent or well-off as a direct result of their willingness to work and not ask for help from others. This might not seem a particularly enlightened way to view sinners, and it certainly was not a Christian way to view sinners, but it did preserve a kind of chastity for Flora. It also, of course, made it difficult for her to learn much, in moral terms, from the behavior of others. There was probably a wisdom in that, however, a trade-off that made it possible for her to survive into something like middle age without falling into madness and despair.

Within a week of having moved into the trailerpark, Flora had purchased her first pair of guinea pigs. She went into the Catamount five-and-dime looking for goldfish, but when she saw the pair of scrawny, matted animals in their tiny, filthy cages at the back of the store, she forgot the goldfish, which by comparison looked relatively healthy, despite the cloudiness of the water in their tank. She built her cages herself, mostly from cast-off boards and chicken wire she found at the town dump and carried home. The skills required were not great, were, in fact, about the same as had been required of her father in the construction of cement forms. At the dump she also found pieces of garden hose she needed to make her watering system and the old gutters she hooked up as grain troughs.

Day and night, she worked for her guinea pigs, walking to town and hauling back fifty-pound bags of grain, dragging back from the dump more old boards, sheets of tin, gutters, and so on. As the guinea pigs multiplied and more cages became necessary, Flora soon found herself working long hours into the night alone in her trailer, feeding, watering, and cleaning the animals, while out behind the trailer the pyramid of mixed straw, feces, urine, and grain gradually rose to waist height, then to shoulder height, finally reaching to head height, when she had to start a second pyramid, and then, a few months later, a third. And as the space requirements of the guinea pigs increased, her own living space decreased, until finally she was sleeping on a cot in a corner of the back bedroom, eating standing up at the kitchen sink, stashing her clothing and personal belongings under her cot, so that all the remaining space could be devoted to the care, housing, and feeding of the guinea pigs.

By the start of her third summer at the trailerpark, she had begun to lose weight noticeably, and her usually pinkish skin had taken on a gray pallor. Never particularly fastidious anyhow, her personal hygiene now could be said not to exist at all, and the odor she bore with her was the same odor given off by the guinea pigs, so that, in time, to call Flora Pease the Guinea Pig Lady was not to misrepresent her. Her eyes grew dull, as if the light behind them were slowly going out, and her hair was tangled and stiff with dirt, and her clothing seemed increasingly to be hidden behind stains, smears, spills, drips, and dust.

“Here comes the Guinea Pig Lady!” You’d hear the call from the loafers outside McCallister’s News & Variety leaning against the glass front, and a tall, angular teenager with shoulder-length hair and acne, wearing torn jeans and a Mothers of Invention T-shirt, would stick his long head inside and call your name, “C’mere, take a look at this, man!”

You’d be picking up your paper, maybe, or because McCallister’s was the only place that sold it, the racing form with yesterday’s Rockingham results and today’s odds. The kid might irritate you slightly—his gawky, witless pleasure, his slightly pornographic acne, the affectation of his T-shirt and long hair—but still, your curiosity up, you’d pay for your paper and stroll to the door to see what had got the kid so excited.

In a low, conspiratorial voice, the kid would say, “The Guinea Pig Lady.”

She’d be on the other side of the street, shuffling rapidly along the sidewalk in the direction of Merrimack Farmers’ Exchange, wearing her blue, U.S. Air Force, wool, ankle-length coat, even though this was May and an unusually warm day even for May, and her boot lacings were undone and trailing behind her, her arms chopping away at the air as if she were a boxer working out with the heavy bag, and she was singing in a voice moderately loud, loud enough to be heard easily across the street, “My Boy Bill” from
Carousel
.

“Hey, honey!” the kid wailed, and the Guinea Pig Lady, though she ignored his call, stopped singing at once. “Hey, honey, how about a little nookie, sweets!” The Guinea Pig Lady sped up a bit, her arms churning faster against the air. “Got something for ya, honey! Got me a licking stick, sweet lips!”

If you already knew who the woman was, Flora Pease, of the Granite State Trailerpark out at Skitter Lake, and knew about the guinea pigs and, thereby, could guess why she was headed for the grain store, you’d ease past the kid and away. But if you didn’t know who she was, you might ask the kid, and he’d say, “The Guinea Pig Lady, man. She lives with these hundreds of guinea pigs in the trailerpark out at Skitter Lake. Just her and all these animals. Everybody in town knows about it, but she won’t let anyone inside her trailer to see ’em, man. She’s got these huge piles of shit out behind her trailer, and she comes into town all the time to buy feed for ’em. She’s a fuckin’ freak, man! A freak! And nobody in town can do anything about ’em, the guinea pigs, I mean, because so far nobody out at the trailerpark will make a formal complaint about ’em. You can bet your ass if I lived out there I’d sure as shit make a complaint. I’d burn the fucking trailer to the ground, man. I mean, that’s disgusting, all them animals. Somebody ought to go out there some night and pull her outa there and burn the place down. It’s a health hazard, man! You can get a disease from them things!”

One September morning, after about a week of not having seen Flora leave her trailer once, even to empty the trays of feces out back, Marcelle decided to make sure the woman was all right, so she stepped across the roadway and knocked on Flora’s door. The lake, below a cloudless sky, was deep blue, and the leaves of the birches along the shore were yellowing. There had already been a hard frost, and the grass and weeds and low scrub shone dully gold in the sunlight.

There was no answer. Marcelle knocked again, firmly this time, and called Flora’s name.

A moment later she heard a low, muffled voice from inside. “Go away.” Then silence, except for the breeze off the lake.

“Are you all right? It’s me, Marcelle!”

Silence.

Marcelle tried the door. Locked. She called again, “Flora, let me in!” and stood with her fists jammed against her hips. She breathed in and out rapidly, her large brow pulled down in alarm. A few seconds passed, and she called out, “Flora, I’m coming inside!”

Moving quickly to the top step, she pitched her shoulder against the door just above the latch, which immediately gave way and let the door blow open, causing Marcelle to stagger inside, off-balance, blinking in the darkness and floundering in the odor of the animals as if she’d fallen in a huge tub of warm water. “Flora!” she yelled. “Flora, where are you?” Bumping against the cages, she made her way around them and into the kitchen area, shouting Flora’s name and peering in vain into the darkness. In several minutes, she had made her way to the bedroom in back, and there in a corner she found Flora on her cot, wrapped in a blanket, looking almost unconscious, limp, bulky, gray. Her hands were near her throat, clutching the top of the blanket like the hands of a frightened, beaten child, and she had her head turned toward the wall, with her eyes closed. She looked like a sick child to Marcelle, like her own child, Joel, who had died when he was twelve— the fever had risen, and the hallucinations had come until he was out of his head with them, and then, suddenly, while she was mopping his body with damp washcloths, the wildness had gone out of him, and he had turned on his side, drawn his skinny legs up to his belly, and died.

Flora was feverish, though not with as high a fever as the boy, Joel, had endured, and she had drawn her legs up to her, bulking her body into a lumpy heap beneath the filthy blanket. “You’re sick,” Marcelle announced to the woman, who seemed not to hear her. Marcelle straightened the blanket, brushed the woman’s matted hair away from her face, and looked around the room to see if there wasn’t some way she could make her more comfortable. The room was jammed with the large, odd-shaped cages, and Marcelle could hear the animals rustling back and forth on the wire flooring, now and then chittering in what she supposed was protest against hunger and thirst.

Taking a backward step, Marcelle yanked the cord and opened the venetian blind, and sunlight tumbled into the room. Suddenly Flora was shouting, “Shut it! Shut it! Don’t let them see! No one can see me!”

Marcelle closed the blind, and the room once again filled with the gloom and shadow that Flora believed hid the shape of the life being lived here. “I got to get you to a doctor,” Marcelle said quietly. “Doctor Wickshaw’s got office hours today. You know Carol Constant, his nurse, that nice colored lady who lives next door? You got to see a doctor, missy.”

“No. I’ll be all right soon,” she said in a weak voice. “Just the flu, that’s all.” She pulled the blanket up higher, covering most of her face, but exposing her dirty bare feet.

Marcelle persisted, and soon Flora began to curse the woman, her voice rising in fear and anger, the force of it pushing Marcelle away from the cot, “You leave me alone, you bitch! I know your tricks, I know what you’re trying to do! You just want to get me out of here so you can take my babies away from me! I’m fine, I can take care of my babies fine, just fine! Now you get out of my house! Go on, get!”

Marcelle backed slowly away, then turned and walked to the open door and outside to the sunshine and the clean fall air.

Doctor Wickshaw, Carol told her, doesn’t make house calls. Marcelle sat at her kitchen table, looked out the window, and talked on the telephone. She was watching Flora’s trailer, number 11, as if watching a bomb about to explode.

“I know that,” Marcelle said, holding the receiver between her shoulder and cheek so both hands could be free to light a cigarette. “Listen, Carol, this is Flora Pease we’re talking about, and there’s no way I’m going to be able to get her into that office. But she’s real sick, and it could be just the flu, but it could be meningitis, for all I know. My boy died of that, you know, and you have to do tests and everything before you can tell if it’s meningitis.” There was silence for a few seconds. “Maybe I should call the ambulance and get her over to the Concord Hospital. I need somebody who knows something to come here and look at her,” she said, her voice rising.

“Maybe on my lunch hour I’ll be able to come by and take a look,” Carol said. “At least I should be capable of saying if she should be got to a hospital or not.”

Marcelle thanked her and hung up the phone. Nervously tapping her fingers against the table, she thought to call in Merle Ring or maybe Captain Knox, to get their opinions of Flora’s condition, and then decided against it. That damned Dewey Knox, he’d just take over, one way or the other, and after reducing the situation to a choice between two courses, probably between leaving her alone in the trailer and calling the ambulance, he’d insist that someone other than he do the choosing, probably Flora herself, who, of course, would choose to be left alone. Then he’d walk off believing he’d done the right thing, the
only
right thing. Merle would be just as bad, she figured, with all his smart-ass comments about illness and death and leaving things alone until they have something to say to you that’s completely clear. Some illnesses lead to death, he’d say, and some lead to health, and we’ll know before long which it is, and when we do, we’ll know how to act. Men. Either they take responsibility for everything, or they take responsibility for nothing.