The Freedom in American Songs (14 page)

Despite certain past adventures and odd accidents I was an innocent person in the ways of alcoholism and certain infidelities and a host of other normal human behaviour. I had read far too many
Guideposts
and they had so thoroughly skewed my view of human nature that I ended up loving all the wrong people, especially at parties. I couldn't tell a thing about a person's real character if we were at a party. Maybe nobody could. But the house. The house was talking to me.
Get Gus Darling out of here
, it said.
Give him back his nine hundred dollars. Tell him the deal is off.

I did not want my house to be lonely. Grampa Bob's wife Rachel had arrived with homemade cheese puffs and was now visibly weeping on my husband's shoulder because she loved him in a way that she imagined I did not love him—Grampa Bob felt the same. I believe they wished they could keep Frank at their house because he is Herculean, and they were not happy that I was taking him away. Everyone at our going away party would miss Frank and Frank would miss them.

But the house, and the grey jays and the partridges roosting in the magical, huge silver birches at night, I would miss that, and it would miss me, though I am not lovable and apparently do not know how to love. I could not let the telephone caller with her urine-tainted couch rent my house, nor would I allow the compulsive liar in the world's best jacket, and no matter how much deep-seated and misplaced affection I had for Gus Darling, I could not let him set razor wire and rabbit snares all over the woods while he drank himself to oblivion and set the place ablaze and maybe even murdered or was murdered by Nathan depending on how clairvoyant Nathan might be on killing day. No. I had to put a stop to it, and I did. I went upstairs, took the nine hundred dollars from under the multi-head screwdriver in my underwear drawer, and placed it in Gus Darling's hand.

“I figured you were too much of a pussy to have me in your house,” he said with a charming grin as he took the money somewhat eagerly. I realized he might have stolen it from the cranberry business, and that had I not invited Gus Darling to our going away party and found out what he was really like, had I sacrificed my gypsy caravan to his projected swath of destruction, it would have been the last cent I'd have seen from him. “Did I scare you?”

“You wanted to scare me.” I was guessing but I continued. I do that a lot. When crazy people or bullies or manipulative people zero in I try to camouflage myself with guesswork. Sometimes I'm almost as clairvoyant as Nathan. “You'd like to try to scare me. Razor wire!” I laughed in Gus's face. “Squatter's rights!”

“Yes, Miss Violet Wainwright. Tell me that's not your real name. You look more like a Jenny Wren to me. Little Jenny Wren, like in one of them English poems. That's what I'm gonna call you. Tell you what. I'll take the money back but I'll hold onto it for you until you change your mind. It's yours. You won't rent this place to anyone else. Not in a hundred years. Not in a million years. No one wants a place built out of old two-by-fours and painted that colour and stuck hidden here in the woods away from everyone except that place full of lunatics beyond those trees. You're like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs up here. Only another Snow White would want to move here, and only if she had some very strong dwarves to help her with the firewood and the well and the chimney and all the things you have your big husband do for you—he's big and strong but he's not exactly interesting is he, Jenny Wren?”

“He's interesting enough.”

“Is he now?” Gus took a swig of his beer. “Yeah, I bet he's a real thrill. I bet he keeps you up at night talking about Wilton-forged super junior C-clamps and chimney flashing and gutters for your screen porch.” He looked at her and she looked back at him and they both knew this was true.

“No,” Gus carried on, “there aren't that many Snow Whites around any more. But there's one dwarf. There he is in the yard right now, married to that one-legged woman. But he's no good to you. You need me to look after this place, and I'm going to do that for you. You don't need to worry about a thing. I'll look in on it, and I won't let that delinquent Roddy Holloway come in here and piss all over the walls or steal the furniture, and I'll even plant a few cranberries down by the marsh. You should see how well cranberries would do in a place like this. You should have started a second career here yourself, growing a few cranberries. I'll do that for you. This house won't be lonely at all, Jenny Wren. Not with me around.”

“I don't think so, Gus. I think your number is up …”

Gordon Hullimer approached us. I had always imagined his particular black belt might have been like having a diploma from one of those correspondence schools that ask you to copy a line drawing of a dog in the back of a comic and mail it in as your entrance exam.

“He looks like a young radish about to explode,” said Gus. “You know them peppery little radishes? That's about as much hurt as he could inflict on anyone. A speck of pepper in your eye. Harmless. Irritating though.”

“I've called you a taxi, Mr. Darling. You'll be out of here, please, as soon as that taxi gets here.”

“I'm all right, kind sir.”

“You're not all right. You're drunk and you've insulted everyone at the party. I for one am so angry that I'm willing to pay the taxi driver myself to get you out of here.”

“No worries, I was just about to leave. I've got my truck.”

“You're a menace. A truck? You're so drunk you'd wrap your truck around the first pedestrian you saw.”

“Pedestrian?”

“A Shore taxi will be here in fifteen minutes.” Gordon Hullimer walked away. I knew we were a fifty-dollar cab ride from anywhere Gus Darling wanted to go.

Gus carefully placed his bottle upright in the grass and stood up.

“You're not getting in your truck.”

“I've only got one problem.”

“You're so drunk you can hardly stand?”

“I can stand just fine. And I can get home just fine. But I need you to do something for me, Jenny Wren. I need you to come down to my truck for a second.”

My problem is that even when I know things are really bad, and I should take a stand, I often do not take a stand. There is something gullible about me, something dangerously passive and stupid.

“Why do you need me to come down to the truck?”

“Don't worry. I won't eat you. It'll only take a second.”

“You can't drive like that.”

“No, no, no, you don't know what I'm talking about. Just come.”

“Wait for the taxi.”

“The taxi, yeah. I'll wait for the taxi. I promise. Come on. Come down to the truck and help me out for just a second. Get away from these losers and ne-er-do-wells and people who have no curiosity about anything. If a big purple moon rose over that mountain next to the ordinary gold moon, none of them would even notice. Hell if the purple moon ate the other moon and then ate them they'd keep talking to each other about the price of tables at Ikea. Come on. I've got something I want to show you.”

His truck was green but it did not have chrome like his father's truck. Gus's truck was comparatively modest. He opened the driver's door and sat at the wheel, which made me feel very jittery. I did not want Gus Darling driving down over our road in that truck in his condition.

“I want you,” he said, “to sit in my lap for a second.”

I did feel a frisson about Gus Darling, about all the Darlings for that matter, but even I knew it was not a frisson a person should heed, nor act upon in even the smallest way. I had, if truth be told, been in Gus Darling's father's truck a couple of times, and Finian Darling had called me long distance to tell me I meant the world to him, but that was before I was with Frank, with whom I was going away in less than a week to our new life far from here.

“No.”

“Come on, girl, do me this one last little favour.”

Some drunken scoundrels' laps are irresistible, that's all I can say. Gus's father had once told me his ancestors' bones floated underwater out beyond the Seal Rocks in Pencil Cove. The bones glowed in the weeds; they waltzed with flounder and cod that glittered like topaz and rubies. No Darling minded dying after the kind of life only a Darling knew how to live. No suburban graveyard for a Darling, and no tame, domesticated life either. Finian Darling said the word domesticated with a snarl. Both father and son strode around in brown and green fabric as if they'd donned the moss and earth that covered Pencil Cove, and they smelled like the ground of that place, the scent in cranberry blossom. I never saw either of them wear a primary colour. They wore only what Robin Hood might have worn, and I knew for a fact some of it was hand-stitched because I'd done a bit of mending on Finian Darling's leather sleeves, which might seem a bit servile but I know I am not the first to succumb to these romances of the Darlings. Gus had a woman, Stacey, who stayed with him long enough to have a little daughter. It turned out, Gus told me now, that Stacey had in place a court order stating that for him to see his little girl, Millie, he had to have this contraption put in his truck.

“You breathe into it, here, see, and it measures your blood alcohol, and if it falls under the limit you can work the ignition for me. You've only had one or two drinks, haven't you? Millie does it for me all the time and she's only three. She sits in my lap and blows into this thing and off we go, me and my little girl. I don't drive with Millie when I've had as many drinks as I've had with you today, mind. This is an exception. Come on. Make a little puff in here for me and we'll get out of here together. I'll take you down to Pencil Cove and I'll show you my grandmother's secret bakeapple patch. Cranberries are one thing, but bakeapples … you've never lived until you've tasted bakeapples from Pencil Cove.”

I did not tell Gus Darling that I'd already tasted bakeapples from Pencil Cove, that I'd lain down in the bakeapple bushes with his father, or that I also knew the whereabouts of his grandmother's secret blackberry patch, and her chanterelle patch, and the rose petal sachet in her cotton sheets whose scent I had breathed in the arms of his father while Gus's grandmother was out picking blackcurrants, which were my real favourite, and which grew in abundance on Pencil Cove's southwest banks. I might not know how to love people like Gordon Hullimer or Grampa Bob or Rachel or Norma or Trevor on his high horse, but I know how to love a place. I know how to listen to the voice of a brook and I know how to eat the kind of eels whose flesh in Pencil Cove is white and sweet when eaten with toast burnt over a clandestine beach fire. I know all these things, and I knew them as I sat in Gus Darling's lap in his old green truck, and I longed for that sweet white eel flesh and the blackcurrant musk and the high voltage connection with a Darling even if it was the son and not the father, and part of me did something terrible. Part of me breathed into that machine, the part that is seduced by places but not people, at least that's what I tell myself now, and off we careered down our hill. I remember that even as we began down the hill and I thought about how drunk Gus was and how this was an impossible, criminal thing I was doing, a thing that could never be forgiven, I imagined it would be easy to open the door and jump out before he ventured onto the main highway. I could open that door onto our little road, the safe road, the road back to my own life, and I could leap out easily. Our dog had done it once on the Witless Bay Line, and I had jumped out of a Volkswagen near Stephenville the time I'd realized my fishing companion, who was perhaps senile, had sparks showering from her tailpipe as we approached a biker-gang's encampment on the Hansen highway.

So I knew leaping was an option.

If I felt like leaping.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Acknowledgments

 

 

Thank you to my editor
, John Metcalf, for your unparalleled insight, intuition and expertise, and for the valuable time and support you have dedicated to myself and to other authors whose work you have helped bring forth. Thank you to Daniel Wells at Biblioasis for your editorial advice, kindness and diplomacy. Thank you to my agent, Shaun Bradley, for your clear vision, good sense, and strong advocacy. Thank you to my family and friends for your companionship and love. And thank you, dear reader.

I thank the editors of the following publications in which earlier versions of some of these stories appeared:

The Walrus:
Madame Poirer's Dog

Rattling Books audio anthology Earlit Shorts:
His Brown Face Through the Flowers

CBC's Brief Encounters series:
The Zamboni Mechanic's Blood

The Pottersfield Portfolio:
A Plume of White Smoke

CNQ: Canadian Notes and Queries:
You Seem a Little Bit Sad

 

Photo by Jessica Auer

 

 

 

Kathleen Winter
's debut novel,
Annabel
, was nominated for the Orange Prize, the IMPAC Dublin Award, the Giller Prize, the Governor General's Award and The Writers' Trust Award; it won the Thomas Head Raddall Award (2011) and an Independent Literary Award (2010); it was selected as a
New York Times
Editor's Choice for 2011, became a #1 Canadian bestseller, and has been translated around the world. Winter's first story collection (
boYs
, Biblioasis, 2007) also won numerous Canadian awards. Born in the UK, Winter now lives in Montreal after spending many years in Newfoundland.