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Prism international 17:2 / Fall 1978
Prism international
181 Pages
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PUIS international Fall igy8 .00 Special Canadian Under jo's Issue II international Special Canadian Under jo's Issue II Editor-in-Chief DONA STURMANIS Associate Editors MARGARET COE DON DICKINSON KICO GONZALEZ Editorial Assistants HAL GRAY ROBERT J. RANKIN TERRY THOMAS Managing Editor HAL GRAY Secretary HAL GRAY Publicity ROBERT J. RANKIN Advisory Editor GEORGE MCWHIRTER international A JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY WRITING This is the second of our two special PRISM international issues devoted to Canadian writers who are under thirty years of age. The first, PRISM 17:1, contained mostly poetry, and this issue, 17:2, contains mostly fiction. It has once again been our editorial policy to publish our contributors for their strengths of craft and original style, and to be as representative as possible of their work. Enjoy. DONA STURMANIS Editor-in-Chief » CONTENTS VOLUME SEVENTEEN NUMBER TWO FALL 1978 Bruce Byfield Two Poems 8 Brian Bartlett Tent by the Sea 10 Stephen Boston The Erosion of Privacy in the New Age or Caged on a Stage with No Place to Hide 23 Danny Feeney Two Poems 36 Terence Byrnes Getting the Hang of It 39 Mark Frutkin Two Poems 5i Barry Dempster A Large K in Kill 53 Paul Gotro Two Poems 65 Levi Dronyk Baxter Jack 67 Sean Hearty Three Poems 76 Tove Ditlevsen Fear 79 Kevin Irie Three Poems 85 Lesley Krueger The Songs of Anna Marten 88 A. Labriola Silent Films (poem) 97 Beth Powning Mothers 99 Nicholas Mason-Browne Memoir (poem) 107 Dave Richards Husband and Wife/Gratten/1927 108 Erin Moure Three Poems 118 David Sharpe In Another Light 121 Barbara Rendall Parental (poem) 126 Robert Sherrin Best Falling Dead 127 Martin Reyto i Two Poems 132 Donna E. Smyth The Temptation of Leafy 136 Betsy Struthers Two Poems 145 Joel Yanofsky Ghost Stories 147 Notes on Contributors 177 Books Received and Recommended: Canadian Under-30 Authors 180 PRISM international, a journal of contemporary writing, is published twice- yearly at the Department of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C. v6t IW5. Microfilm editions are available from Xerox University Microfilms, Ann Arbour, Michigan, and reprints (Vols. 1-5) from the Kraus Reprint Corporation, New York, New York. PRISM international now appears twice-yearly in the Spring and Fall. The cost of single issues is $4.00, one year individual subscriptions $7.00, two year subscriptions $13.00, three year subscriptions $18.00. To libraries and institutions: one year subscriptions $10.00, two year subscriptions $15.00, three year subscriptions $20.00. Our gratitude to the Canada Council and the University of British Columbia for their continued support. PRISM international would like to acknowledge the kind assistance of the following individuals and organizations in the compilation of the two Canadian Under-Thirties issues: Clark Blaise; Fred Cogswell; Dave Godfrey; Ralph Gustafson; Dennis Lee; Rudy Wiebe; the League of Canadian Poets; the Writers' Union of Canada; and the Creative Writing Programmes at the University of Toronto, University of Victoria, and the University of Ottawa. Bruce Byfield / Two Poems A SUMMER SINGLE Yes, I have walked the way of beaches, stared, pretending not to stare when blue-smeared eyes opened deer-wary. When each body's bared in lotioned ease, I've eyed across breast-rise and knotted on nylon-bound loins I passed, blood wilding on the bottlecap-bright sands. Then every shadow has seemed couple-cast except my own. From tideline I've toed fast past those sprawled back on grass, hands spread on hands, and empty as an echo, found cement, my unmingled heat unspent. STOOD-UP (A Poem for a Voice) Twilighted reek in a blood-rugged hall — my drumming fingers bring no one before the door. Walled whispers. I wait, wait for the okaying eye, weight down left foot, right foot. Secret as thieves, I nudge the doorknob around — locked. Did I board an early bus? You woman. You witch. Bitch. The door's swatted flat-handed. I fling down the hall. I stretch on a bench, bored as a cat. I put a page of my book away. The letters are calm, so calm! I go needle and thread through streets, stare out of stores not to miss her. I should go ask the neighboring gay, I should stab at her blinds with a stick. Why am I circling, circling her rooms like the sun? Why am I something she'd rather wipe off her feet? I eat a peach. I eat pizza, I knock again, knock again until the skylip leeches the sun away and I wander home, home in darkness like undeveloped film. Brian Bartlett Tent by the Sea As soon as his father's car disappeared in a cloud of dust, Henry dropped his folded puptent onto the grass and looked through shadows of trees past a bank down over the long pale beach to waves breaking onto the sand. The grey-green ocean was just close enough that he heard it murmuring. Even when he hit his thumb while pounding a peg into the ground, he kept smiling. Dropping the rock he shook his hand, thinking as if the skinned knuckle were someone else's, Blood — what a nuisance. Sparrows scrambled under the trees at his back. Quickly he picked up the rock and drove in the other pegs, which sank smoothly into the rich-smelling earth. Inside the tent he emptied a knapsack throwing his cans of stew and beans, frying pan, flashlight and grey paperback along one wall. Having picked a site with no other campers either way for two sites, he heard nothing but sparrows stepping on leaves as he changed into his bathing suit. Hot sand flowed over his bare feet as he walked towards shore, the sound of the ocean like a slow enormous beast coming closer. Across the half mile afternoon sunbathers were scattered rather than mobbed, Thank God. A few yards from the sea he stretched out his towel, buried his glasses in sand and lifted his arms over his head. He began running and tried not to howl as the Fundy cold hit his ankles, then his knees, then his stomach, then his chest. Submerged he soon felt warmer, his long hair floating back so freely it felt like a crown of fine sea grass. When he broke surface he drifted on his back, blinking at the cloudless sky. Even salt water trickling into his mouth tasted good, tasted even better when the past week flashed by his eyes: writing grade 11 Departmentals in a humid packed gym he had stabbed his hand with a compass point to stop dreaming about the beach, and promised himself A weekend by myself, away from all this! Now 10 waves lifted him high and low, wrestling and embracing him. Though he was half blind without his glasses he saw drenched kaleidoscopic patterns wink all around him where sunlight and water met. Only when he headed back to his tent did the cut sting again, so he sucked it to clean away the salt. Back in his T-shirt and cut-off corduroys he walked jauntily through a stand of spruce to the canteen, where a man wearing a baseball cap was turning a hamburger on a grill. As he rested his arms on the counter Henry asked, "Got a box of Band-Aid's?" The man reached into a shelf and tossed a white box onto the counter. "Tentin' here with friends?" he asked, chewing bubblegum. "Naw — by myself." Noting the price scribbled on the box, Henry pulled change out of his pocket. "Come to check out the honeys by the sea, huh?" the man asked, taking the money. One of his front teeth was missing. "I see lotsa guys like you all summer — come here and try to start up somethin' with every honey in the campgrounds." "I — huh, I hadn't thought of that." "Sure you hadn't, sure you hadn't." As Henry clutched the box of Band-Aid's and left, the man called, "Good huntin'!" The rocks of the parking lot under his sneakers made sounds as harsh as his anger. That man was like his father's friend who always asked how many girls' names and numbers he had in "the little black book," as if everyone in high school worried about nothing but messy kisses in back seats of cars and had never heard of the gods Poseidon and Triton. His father's friend and Gaptooth back there didn't know a damn thing about pitching your own tent for the first time, all the shackles that threw off. As he reached the path the noise of gravel stopped and again he walked silently over spruce needles. Back by his tent he sat on a tree stump and put a Band-Aid on his thumb, then piled together paper from his knapsack and sticks from under the trees, started a fire in the cooking pit of his site and twisted open a can of Irish stew. Within minutes the stew bubbled and spat in the frying pan. Hunched on the stump watching sand lolling down to the sea and the sea lapping up over sand, he ate stew and a grape jam sandwich. Insects fell onto his skin and clothes and he looked at them closely before calmly brushing them away. By 7:30 he was thirsty. When he reached the canteen the man was off duty and to his relief a woman — Gaptooth's wife? — served him without speaking. With a box of chocolate milk in his hand he 11 passed through the trailer park, glad his parents had never dragged him around in one of those miniature wheeled suburban houses. Trailers! He wanted to throw rocks at them and run away, laughing. Beyond the campgrounds a tall young woman in a peach-coloured bikini was strolling along the edge of the forest, her sleek black hair dripping and her rounded hips gently swinging. She seemed to be talking to something held up in her hand; he stared, seeing it was a large dried starfish. If there weren't a legend about a girl communing with starfish, there should be. Maybe he would write it. It took an hour to figure out the intricate forest trails. All hidden, ovenbirds and spring peepers chanted tirelessly. More campers than he'd expected were taking walks, especially young couples, the trails so narrow only two campers could walk abreast on them; whenever he met a couple coming arm-in-arm or hand-in-hand he stepped down and pressed against trees, as if backing against the wall of a narrow hall, to let them pass. Giggling or whispering or silent, they all seemed to him unaware and blundering. One trail led to the river, which was no wider than a brook that close to the sea. After the deepening darkness of the trails, by the river the purples of violets, oranges of dead ferns and whites of bunchberry blossoms almost stunned him. He rubbed his hands in them until his palms were lightly painted. // / was a dog I'd roll around in these colours. It was hard following the river down the rest of the way without a trail and with scratchy trees interlocked everywhere. Now the woods were almost too dark for him to see his feet, but after crashing through the last branches and sliding down onto shore he clearly saw his dirty white sneakers in the clean white sand. Around a bend from the swimming beach, here stones and boulders were more plentiful than sand. Starting back towards the swimming beach he climbed onto a rise of copper-coloured rock. A slender yellow-legged shorebird flew by with a fish in its bill. When he reached the highest level of the rock he walked to the edge, threw his fists in the air and let out the happy yell that had built up all afternoon. Ah-ah-ah-ayeeeee! In his tent he ate a devilled egg and crawled into his sleeping bag, keeping on his shirt to stop shivering. With the flashlight beamed on his book he started reading, struggling to care that Jack Durbeyfield discovered his family was once illustrious. Yet he liked the girls and women on their "club-marching" festival crossing town with willow wands and white flowers; he could almost hear Tess's dress swishing outside his tent though to almost everybody she was a fine and pic- 12 turesque country girl, and no more. Somehow she got mixed-up with the round-hipped girl holding the starfish, and his eyelids dragged. Once the flashlight was off he forgot both girls and felt he was back in the sea riding with the waves. "Danny, don't you dare take fig-bars for breakfast!" A woman's sharp voice somewhere outside. The top of the tent paler green, more in light, than the bottom. Tess and his glasses at his side. He tugged on his sneakers, hearing New York accents in those voices. "Dad, the tent's crooked!" called a boy. "Don, give me a hand here!" shouted a man. Squatting, he shuffled out of his tent. Square on all sides, their tent was as big as a trailer and partly blocked the sun. "Great," he muttered, turning toward the public outhouses. He heard the father shout, "Don, you can unpack later!" and saw a girl in sky blue shorts and blouse step out of the tent. Don? Dawn. Before hearing her speak he hurried away, knowing from experience girls his age always brought out the worst in any accent. After eating a can of pears he changed into long pants and pulled on a sweater, then again walked through the trailer park and forest to the dead end by the river, down along the river breaking branches and pushing aside boulders, out to the sea and the rock and around the beach where he watched gulls picking at corn cobs left from a beach picnic. Already he felt that walk in his bones as he'd felt other walks: from his family's home on the hill to favourite haunts downtown —■ the library, the movie theatre, the rink — back to home. Four lawn chairs now sat outside the large tent, the girl in the one farthest away — a sweep of light brown hair and a foot in a sandal. Crawling into his tent he heard the father say, "No film at that canteen. You'd think they haven't discovered photography in this part of the world." The girl still hadn't spoken. Maybe she's mute, maybe she's retarded he thought, pulling on his bathing suit. Good — then she prob'ly won't bug me. A girl's voice said, "Danny, quit picking your nose or I'll. ..." It was softer than the other voices; he'd made out only half the words but already heard music in that voice. Her voice stayed with him until he splashed into the sea, shouting as the cold hit him. It seemed not Fundy cold but Arctic cold and he became warmer only when a jellyfish floated by his face, a simple and almost translucent blob. Rocking in the waves he felt almost that simple himself. 13 At the canteen the man with the baseball cap chuckled, "Found any mermaids?" In his damp bathing suit he ate a cheeseburger on the stump outside his tent, then strolled along the beach almost as far as the copper-coloured rock. Here he could see no one except in the distance. On his towel he lay on his back, serene and drugged by the sun, caressed by heat rising off the sand. When a cool breeze rippled over him he shivered and recalled how in some movie he'd seen on the late show a Medieval man —■ crusader or monk — had stripped to a loin cloth, stretched out by the sea and testing his fortitude let icy waves lap over him. As he saw himself huddled in his puptent trying not to hear the New Yorkers he decided he must find out how it felt to be that monk/ crusader, and pushed on his glasses. On the shore he crouched where, when a wave reached that far, it scattered between, but not over his toes. Lifting off his glasses he lay flat on his back, his feet farthest out so the waves would reach his face last. The first waves curled along the edges of his body and seeped under his legs. Soon waves rose to the fronts of his legs and when one swept over his bathing suit, he jerked, groaned and curled up his toes tighter. What he was doing was so crazy he felt like laughing. A wave splashed all the way over him but he forgot to hold his breath and water rushed into his mouth and nose. He lifted and shook his head, coughing. Then something pulled at his hair. Rolling over he sat up, coughing. "Oh My God!" she cried. "I thought you'd drowned! What're you doing?" Turned around, he shaded his eyes with his hand. Her eyes were grey and wisps of brown hair sticking from under her bathing cap shook as she bent toward him. "Try — trying an experiment," he said, pushing hair out of his eyes. "Freezing . .. have to get back to my towel." They seemed exactly the same height as they walked up to his towel. She was carrying a sandal in each hand, jiggling them by the thongs. In the sand he huddled under his towel. "I — I saw this movie once, where a monk or something did that." "I thought you'd drowned!" she said, starting to laugh. "Sit down if you wanna." He tried to laugh but coughed, salt water stinging his throat. While she sat and crossed her legs, her drab one-piece bathing suit black against the sand, he dried his glasses with the towel. "Well thanks for checking on me. If most people saw a ... a corpse they'd be gone like a bat out of hell." "Guess I'm not a bat out of hell," she laughed lightly. She slipped one of her sandals against her feet, knocking sand from between her toes. "Your accent. New York — New Yawk — is it?" "Now don't make fun of my accent or I'll never rescue you again." "D'you come here every summer?" "Oh no it's my first time out of the country." Not wanting her to call the States the country, he wanted to peel off that bathing cap which made her look bald. "Oh no, here comes the Tasmanian Devil," she said, dropping the sandal. "Let's go in the water before he gets here." Over her shoulder her brother was approaching, swinging his arms high, a popsicle in one of his hands. Swimming with her was not like swimming alone. Even when he couldn't see her he sensed where she was, how close or distant, above or under water. Even when he knew she was yards away she seemed right next to him; a wave could have been her arm around him, a trickle of water her fingers. Paddling on her back she called, "Why're you camping by yourself?" "Cause I hate people!" he called with mock fierceness. She flickered near the surface of the water. "Am I people?" "You're Dawn!" "How'd you know? . . . been spying on us?" "You Yanks talk so loud!" "... hiding in the trees spying on us!" As they walked back up the beach she tugged off her bathing cap, releasing her wavy springy hair. Their shadows fell across the sand, one shadow nearly touching the other. Watching her blue-veined feet he recalled girls he had taken to movies, how he'd dropped the ticket before passing it to them or forgotten at the canteen what candy they'd wanted. If Dawn had been the girl those times she would have laughed, not stared at him glumly to pick up the ticket or said What's that? I don't like coconut. Their shadows touched on the sand, she was laughing; it seemed he had never heard a girl laugh before. Outside her tent she introduced him to her mother, who sipped ice tea in a lawn chair and said, "Isn't that nice, a local boy." Blushing under his sunburn he laughed weakly to cover his sudden anger. A local boy. Back in his tent he hurriedly dressed into his T-shirt and cut-offs and smiled when he remembered the mother, not Dawn, had said A local boy. J5 She was wearing her sky blue blouse and shorts. As they walked to the canteen and drank Cokes on a ridge above the parking lot her New York accent seemed as natural as the ovenbird voices last night. "I had a crazy nightmare in the car," she said as they sat in the grass. Her legs and arms were browner than his; her hair rose like a thicket framing her face but didn't touch her high brown forehead. "I was inside a giant washing machine — Dad runs a laundromat on Amsterdam Avenue, did I tell you? Whenever I saw someone I knew, they just whooshed by and disappeared in the suds." "I wish I had dreams like that. Mine are usually real boring, like about putting my shoes on the wrong feet." "Putting your shoes on the wrong feet! I'd rather have funny dreams like that than washing machine nightmares." They walked out to the hot black highway and started along the weedy roadside, careful not to brush against one another. While they watched dragonflies swerving over the floating logs of a swamp, he asked after a long silence, "You ever read much Hardy?" "Oh Hardy, I like him but he gets to be a fatalistic old bastard. I tell you what I really love — something like As You Like It. I played Rosalind in a school production we put on." "Yeah? Hardy's okay. For a fatalist." "Well I can't stand fatalists." "I'm not one," he said, not sure what one was. Throwing a stick into the swamp, he felt she was attacking his choice of books and maybe bragging a little about the Shakespeare acting. But when they were leaning on a rotted fence at a farm beyond the swamp, she pointed at his hand gripping the fence and asked, "How'd you bang up your thumb?" and he thought Those other girls wouldn'tve asked what happened if I took them to a movie with a cast around my neck! Back at the campgrounds she was limping. He was both afraid she had blistered her feet and excited she might have blistered them to be with him. As she hopped off the gravel up onto the grass he said, "You shouldn'ta walked all the way in those sandals." Among the spruces the young woman in a peach-coloured bikini passed them, murmuring to a starfish in her hand. Dawn whispered, "The Starfish Lady, she seems to be everywhere. The guy at the canteen told Dad she's a real nut-case, but wouldn't hurt a flea." "I didn't know she was that. I thought ..." He couldn't say the woman had seemed beautiful to him. They stopped by the rope he had tied between two trees outside 16 his tent. "Hey, your bathing suit fell in the grass," she said, looking down. She picked it up by the string and handed it to him. "Crappy clothesline," he laughed. Draping it back over the rope he still saw her fingers on the string. "Listen, ah, we're going to King Kong vs. Godzilla at the drive-in tonight," she said, fingering a button on her blouse. "You like to come? You might feel kinda dumb, sitting there with my mom and dad and kid brother. My mom wanted me to ask you." While he made his supper he couldn't stop thinking, "My mom wanted me to ask you" — I bet she made that up. "Okay, you guys sit here in front. My little lady and I'll take the back," Mr. Owen announced, putting his arm around his wife. Henry opened the door at his side and moved up into the driver's seat, high beams from other cars at the drive-in sweeping across his face like search lights. On the other side Danny raced up ahead of Dawn and she grabbed his arm trying to squeeze ahead until Mr. Owen called over, "Dan, you take the middle for this half, but Dawn has it for the second." "You scared of monsters?" Danny asked Henry once they were seated. "Only monsters like you," Henry said, grinning uncomfortably. Garbled sounds crackled from the speaker hung on the half- opened window near his ear. Soon across the screen buildings collapsed and mouths opened screaming, black and red colours ran and coagulated, the creatures thrashed around. Now and then Mr. Owen reached over the seat and sneaked his hand under Danny's chin, going "Rarrrrrrrr!" Henry was afraid Mr. Owen would do the same thing to him. Though Dawn was at the other end of the seat she seemed so close he almost believed his arm could encircle her, the space between them was nothing, Danny was nothing. Half way through the movie he volunteered to buy snacks and Mr. Owen handed him a $5. bill over the seat saying, "Canadian dough." As they walked back to the canteen over dusty ground he was finally beside her, breathing deeply as if fumes had been leaking in the car. Danny fell behind, walking backwards watching the screen. "It's funny." "Yeah, but Danny thinks it's scary." "I mean it's funny — sitting there with your family." "I told you so," she laughed, the sleeves of her white windbreaker flashing in the dark. 17 Having folded the bill into the size of a stamp, he now began unfolding it and tried not to think of what a classmate of his had said the morning after taking a girl to the drive-in: Sure had a good time, man, but I didn't see any of the fuckin movie. Bumping into her he said, "I'd rather be with just you." "Hey you guys!" Danny cried. "Look what Godzilla just did!" She said, "Yeah, families can be a drag." Both his hands folded the bill again. She hadn't understood him. He hadn't been talking about her family, he had been talking about her! Through the second half of the movie she sat beside him. When he held up his ketchup-splattered hands she handed him a kleenex, their fingers touching. Then he was afraid to move, afraid if he merely brushed her arm or leg he would throw himself against her. A few times Mr. and Mrs. Owen murmured and Henry heard sounds of a light kiss or two. He imagined Mr. Owen lying on top of Mrs. Owen on the back seat, both of them half naked. Dawn turned to him and said, "Good Hollywood culture for you." Noticing the keys still in the ignition he figured he should switch on the engine and speed away letting the cord of the speaker rip from its post. If he had a gun, he was sure, he would turn to each of them —■ the father, the mother, the brother — and blow out their brains, to be alone with her. Their hair was wet from a late morning swim with her family. The man at the canteen eyed the two and said to Henry, "Well well well, lookee here." On the ridge above the parking lot they sprawled in the grass, ate cheeseburgers and laughed about King Kong vs. Godzilla and other bad movies. After wiping their fingers in the grass they walked out to the highway, Saturday's traffic even heavier than Friday's. Whenever silence grew between them he stared at her sneakers or kicked rocks or poked at his clip-on sunglasses, she whistled almost imperceptibly or felt her ear or picked a piece of straw and nibbled it. By the farm as they sat on the fence he asked her for her birth date. "April 26 1953," she said. "A.D." "Hey, that's only two weeks before me!" The fence swayed under them as he turned to her. "We could have a birthday bash together. The Bash of the Century." "Then that's a date for next year. At whose house?" No don't laugh I mean it he almost shouted as she jumped off the fence. From the window of a passing car a grinning man waved at them ■—■ or only at her. "Lemme get on the outside. Better a car knock off my block than yours," Henry said, dodging around her closer to the pavement and nudging her toward the roadside weeds. "Big hero!" she laughed. "Like one of my friends back in New York. Once in a big crowd he pushed me ahead of him to get on the subway, then the doors closed before he got in." A subway. He had never seen a subway, let alone been on one. Poking at his sunglasses he heard A local boy and tried to picture her riding on rattling subways with grizzled winos and Puerto Ricans with tennis shoes bumping against her. But that vision slid away and the only New York he could feel was that of Miracle on 42nd Street, a merry city in winter; he saw her in twenty-floor department stores steering herself through crowds with such a frank calm face all the clerks waited on her first. At the swamp where dragonflies hunted silently, she lifted her blouse out at her neck and blew under it saying, "Pheww, I'm dying for a swim." Her blowing on herself made him stop feeling all the miles, six hundred, seven hundred, stretching between their homes. I'll cool you like that if you like. Minutes later when they were in the sea he knew: swimming alone with her was not like swimming with her family. They pulled themselves underwater repeatedly until the cold became bearable. Floating on his back he saw her blur of arms, legs and bathing suit. "I saw a jellyfish here yesterday!" he called. "96% water!" "What?" She swam so close her toes grazed his stomach. "A jellyfish is 96% water. Sounds like a lot, except we're 70%." "Where'd you hear that crap?" "Not crap, it's true!" "There's a giant jellyfish in the aquarium back home." Back home. "I'll have to see it sometime." "You — " She said more but a wave rose between them. Dressed again outside her tent he watched her come out in a yellow T-shirt and black shorts, slipping on her windbreaker. The crest of the windbreaker included the letters AT. "Look at the sky," she said, pointing up at dusky clouds rolling over them. "Now show me that path you were talking about." "I hope you're not expecting something special, it's really nothing special. If it rains at least the woods'll cover us." J9 Walking at her side through the forest he felt thirsty and wished he had detoured to a water fountain. If he kissed her by the river he would make a joke first, call her bumblebee because of her yellow and black clothes. A bushy-moustached man came from the other direction and stepped onto a log to let them pass but nobody else appeared on their way to the end of the trail. The river was darker than before, the sun now behind a cloud. Colours he had seen, of violets and dead ferns and bunchberry blossoms, seemed to have disappeared. Ugly grey bracken grew all over the side of a tree. He would kiss her by the sea instead. "It's a lot nicer when the sun's out." "It's okay. Look at those rapids." "I should wade in to see how deep it is." She touched his arm. "No you don't. You'd drown, you blockhead. I might not rescue you again." As he touched her arm her white windbreaker felt soft, sliding smoothly under his fingers. Like panties he suspected, shaking. "Okay, there's no path the rest of the way. Just watch where I step." Now she was behind rather than beside him. They walked slowly, halted and stumbled. Suddenly he realized she was looking at him from a foot or so away, at the back of his head, neck and shoulders. He tried to straighten his shoulders but a thin branch stung across his face. Whenever she said "Ouch" he was stricken with guilt and imagined her covered with scratches, bleeding down her arms and legs. Brushing needles off their clothes they walked onto the copper- coloured rock and up to its highest level. Waves beat heavily, bits of water flying in the air beyond them. "Good, it's not going to rain," she said. Turning, he looked sadly into the sun. "I kinda hoped it would rain." He laughed, "I saw us running through a storm." She was watching a gull riding on the air, hardly moving its wings. There was a tiny hook-shaped scratch on one of her legs. "Maybe it'll rain tomorrow." "Tomorrow," she began, then she bent to tie her sneaker lace as if it hurt her to speak, "tomorrow Dad wants to drive back through Maine by suppertime." He looked from her to the gull. "I'd just as soon stay but he's the boss." "Yeah. Yeah." Hard sunlight glanced off the rocks, clawing his face. More gulls flew by, cackling. 20 "I have to help Mom with supper," she said, standing. "Yeah." "You look mad at someone." "Mad? No." If he had put his hand over her right breast it would've covered the crest saying AT. Instead he grasped and squeezed her shoulder. "Promise to visit me when you're down our way?" she asked. "New York — when the hell am I ever going to be in New York?" His grip on her shoulder tightened. "You would have to be from some place like New York, wouldn't you?" "Whaddo you mean? What's the matter with my city?" she asked, pushing his hand away. "It's far from here," he accused her. "Well don't get mad at me." He jammed his hands into his pants pockets and began walking over the rest of the rock toward the swimming beach. "We're toasting marshmallows tonight," she said, following him. "That'll cheer us up." "Toasting marshmallows won't cheer me up." "I said don't get mad at me." They talked no more as they climbed off the rock and headed up the beach, hands in pockets. Their shadows, long and lurching, moved farther apart the closer they came to their tents. Two laughing young men in bathing suits were chasing a screaming young woman in a tight white top and shorts. She went on screaming and tossing as they carried her, one by the arms and the other by the legs, towards the sea. Waking, he felt without looking outside that the site beside his was empty. Yes he had heard them talking, canvas thudding and a car starting, and sluggishly drifted back to sleep. Now he reached over to his jeans and felt in the back pocket for the scrap of cardboard she had given him at the quiet marshmallow toasting. On his back he slipped on his glasses and read the pencil-scrawled address; one number could've been either 9 or 7 and he was afraid a mistake in a New York address could be fatal to a letter. When he noticed Tess at his side he almost laughed recalling A picturesque country girl. Walking to the canteen he heard girls' voices and all of them sounded flat and common. At the canteen he leaned on the counter and waited for the man to make his toast. "You had any luck with 21 the mermaids this weekend?" the man asked. "Saw ya with one here yesterday." Henry turned and looked toward the trees. "She was pretty cute," the man said behind him, pushing down a stiff toaster lever. "Now there's one sure way of figuring out the honeys here." The man's voice came closer until he was standing behind the counter. Henry turned and stared at him stonily. "You mosey over to any of 'em smokin' cigarettes on the beach and you start talkin' and, you know how they like blowin' big smoke rings. Well you sit close to one so's when you're talkin' casual-like you reach up your finger thisa way — " the man made a circle with the thumb and finger of one hand, and lifted a finger of the other hand " — and stick it through the smoke ring." The finger jammed into the circle. "If she laughs that means she'll go down for you, sure thing." "If she laughs. ..." Henry said aloud to himself. "Yeah," said the man, grinning. "... sandwich in my tent." "Hey!" called the man holding onto his baseball cap, when Henry was already out in the gravel. "You can't get me to make toast, then just run off like that!" "Eat the toast yourself!" Henry called, then he mumbled, "And choke on it for all I care" and broke into a run. Crossing the parking lot he was thinking If I write if she writes so what it will end then he wanted to laugh wildly at the man's startled face then he was thinking A batch of letters nothing but a batch of letters. Along the path sweat gathered under his arms and the sunburn on his legs itched. Outside his tent he pulled the scrap of cardboard from his back pocket, held it up in both hands and hesitated before letting it drop into the cooking pit. He hesitated again before falling on his knees, picking the cardboard out from among the ashes and sliding it back into his pocket. Below the sand water sprawled invitingly but he doubted if he would swim before his father arrived. The sea, he feared, would feel empty without her. 22 Stephen Boston The Erosion of Privacy in the New Age or: Caged on a Stage with No Place to Hide I was sitting alone in the big empty cafeteria full of empty booths and tables, piling the torn pieces of styrofoam coffee cup into a tower and wondering where everyone had gone. Perhaps they'd gone home for the weekend, or perhaps they were studying, but it being only the second week of term I doubted both. And now the only other occupants, a happy group clustered tightly at the distant other end of the room, were getting up to go, walking this way. I tried to keep my attention concentrated on the tower, but as they went by my booth I accidentally looked up to meet the gaze of a comical- looking guy with a crazy loping walk and an Afro hairdo. He stopped to lean over me, peering suspiciously through his dirty gold- rimmed glasses. "Engineering!" he said, pointing to the tower. I gave him a look that said he was crazy and he mouthed a laugh, making big goofy bobbing motions with the upper half of his body, which gradually subsided to a quick nervous nodding of his head as he stood back to light a cigarette. He made a long exaggerated reach to put the match into the ashtray beside me; it was as if he were trying to avoid disturbing the equilibrium of his sturdy stance. All his motions were like this, stiff and self-conscious, designed to give an impression of casualness and ease, but even the good humour and the trace of satire on his face failed to mask his anxiety. "Hey Chancy, you coming?" someone called from the doorway. He jumped to act surprised. "Wanna go to a party there, Major? he asked, toking noisily at the pinch of his forefinger and thumb. 23 1. "So guess who phoned today." "Who?" She was right to be excited: these days no-one ever phones when it's only me at home so she suspected it must be someone from the past. Someone nice. "Louise!" "No, not Louise. Chancy: Chris Prince." "Oh that's nice. What did he have to say?" "He's coming to stay for a few days — You're not pleased." "Sure I am, but I was never really ..." "He thought a lot of you. He was always under the impression that I stole you from him." "Oh we were just friends. He was cuddly and cute." "Well I'm looking forward to seeing him. I miss those old days, you know. Everything was so much more casual and easy. People were more tolerant, I guess." "And I suppose your life now is restricted and miserable." "No come on, Jennie. I didn't mean that." "That's what it sounds like. You're always talking about 'the old days', 'when I was at school', 'before I got married' or something." "Don't say 'always'." "You say it enough for it to seem like always." "That's just because you're so easily threatened. If you weren't so bloody insecure." "And no wonder I'm insecure the way you're always thinking that the best part of your life is behind you — before the part where I come in." "Sometimes — sometimes I feel that way." "It's more like I stole you from Chancy and all those other stupid assholes you used to hang around with." "Well I haven't had a real friend since." "Don't be ridiculous." "Name one." "Fred." "Fred's in Nigeria! He doesn't count." "But he exists, he's alive, he's your friend. And there's Charles, too." "Charles? Charles wouldn't like me half so much if you weren't thrown into the bargain." "Ohhh, I'm going to sleep." 2. She was wearing a camel skirt and jacket, a silky chocolate blouse open at her lean white throat, standing erect, strong, with a 24 busy intelligent look, refined but with a tough stance, her lean thighs parted so that they were outlined against the skirt. I had fallen into imagining myself next to her on a plane, savouring the tension of her coolness and distance, the small crisp sounds of her intimate movements when her eyes met mine and we had to look away, showing no more recognition than we'd give to the same old unchanging scene we see every day. But she turned back to look behind me, her gaze touching mine for a micro-second and then falling away to the street behind the doors where a tall, calm and efficient man would eventually appear to take her away in a clean tan Mercedes. She showed a flicker of impatience and then turned to watch the passengers coming through the gate from Chancy's flight. I recognized his loping walk while he was still well back in the approaching crowd. He flopped a casual wave in reply to mine but otherwise made no sign of recognition, just continued loping along, looking around him slow and bored — until he saw the woman in the camel suit. He gave a sudden jerk of surprise; she stared at him questioningly and then he mouthed a laugh: hanging his tongue out, making goofy bobbing motions with the upper half of his body. Amused, she shook her head and turned to watch him crossing the floor towards me, he wrenching his head around every few steps to look back at her. She shook her head again and with a big happy grin looked away to watch the passengers coming through the gate. As Chancy came up to me I could hear the wheezing of his otherwise silent laugh, but he hadn't yet really met my eye. "Well, well," I said to attract his attention. "Now there's a nice tight little cunt," he said looking back over his shoulder just as the woman ran to embrace a grey-haired, dignified old man who was bursting with smiles for her. "So," I said, "It's really good to see you." And he shoved his hand at me. It was trembling and clammy. He hadn't changed a bit; pretty much the same Afro, the same dirty glasses, and though now the lenses were tinted red, behind them were the same eyes looking as if they were about to drip with tears except for the same flickering grin that tried to deny it though somehow couldn't quite. I felt like hugging him but I didn't dare. "Good to see you," I said again. And he smiled and nodded as if to say, "Well naturally." 3. You have to go through the woods a bit to get to the house, along a narrow path going down the hill to the bay. That evening as 25 we came out of the trees onto the shore, the water was so still it looked thick and black like oil or jelly with solid gold bars flickering across the surface from the sun going down. And everything was quiet except for a gull far away and the sputtering of an old boat on the other side, and the gentle slurping and gulping of the water's edge; and Chancy's hacking cough as he marched along in front of me, marched solidly, head down towards the door of the little cottage that sits right at the water's edge. I had been looking forward to seeing he and Jennie meet again after all these years, but as we went through the door, she stayed standing awkwardly on the other side of the room trying to smile. She didn't run up to embrace him as she usually does with these visitors from the past, she just said, "Hello Chris." "Well Jennie," he said, dumping his backpack, "Long time no see." He sniffed hard, stretched, "Ohhhwahhoh, what a trip!" It was an awkward restrained movement during which he examined the floor from wall to wall. "I guess there'll be room for Old Chancy to crash here." "Sure," I cried boldly. "There's always room for you, Chancy." He laughed the goofy silent laugh again. "Well," he declared, "I've squeezed into some pretty tight places in my travels. This will be adequate." I made a little laugh. Jennie took a look at me and then looked away. 4. Jennie had taken care with the dinner. It was a complicated and time-consuming dish which she served with pride and enthusiasm, almost with glee. "Well Jennie, you're quite the cook aren't you," he said, watching her excitement. It sounded like a crack; she looked hurt, her smile blinked off. He laughed at her, wheezing with his tongue hanging out. "No no," he reassured her, "I'm sure it's eatable. But you don't have to go to trouble for me. After eating on the road it's going to be good just to have a home cooked meal again." And indeed he ate with gusto. After wrashing the dishes, Jennie went to read in the bedroom, I played a record I'd been wanting to share, and he sat down to write letters to friends. "I write a lot of letters," he said. "I've got a lot of correspondents. You don't mind me giving them your address eh, so they can send letters back to me." 26 "If you write so many how come you've never written to me," I said, trying to sound teasing. He coughed, laughed uneasily, "Well ..." "Who you writing to now?" I asked to let him off the hook. "Diane MacKenzie. You remember Diane." He licked a corner of his mouth, flicking his eyebrows suggestively. "Oh yeah." "A very fine lady. She's in Halifax now, doing her docky in phys. You remember Gordie." "Gordie?" "Gordie Melansen, used to hang around with Tod." "Oh yeah." "Well he's living with her now. A very lucky dude. Got a pretty good job, too: silly service. Set for life. Crashed with them for a coupla months. Now there's a pair of beautiful people." Lovingly, his hands trembling, he smoothed the paper he'd been writing on, sweeping away any dust that may have accumulated. Then after inspecting the page carefully, blowing now and then at stubborn stray specks, he took a deep drag on his cigarette and turned to gaze at the window which was dark by now, reflecting. "While I was there, Bull Shepherd came and crashed for a coupla weeks. Amazing dude." He looked at me with an intimate air, his eyes swelling with tears again but his mouth set hard. Suddenly he broke up into his goofy laugh again. "You wouldn't believe!" he wheezed. He lifted one cheek of his buttocks off the chair and farted loudly. "Good food, Jennie," he shouted at the bedroom door and then did the laugh again, looking at me as if we were in some mocking conspiracy. "I'd really like to see Old Bull again," he said after a while. "I'll have to write to him, tell him I'm back in old Can. That is if the posties can track the dude down. We had some good times. Now there's a dude to shake you up. He just doesn't give a fuck. A drifter. Just like me. Ran into him in the Auckland airport. Auckland! Auckland of all places. Amazing dude. Amazing. Everybody thought we were nuts, didn't know whether to arrest us or not: screaming and laughing and poking at each other. Shit. Now there's a trip for you." He glanced at the bedroom door and said, "You don't know what it's like. You oughta travel you know. You need that experience to grow. You just hang around here, don't you?" "Mostly yeah." "I bet you always do. Come on, Steve. Fess up." 27 "Well no, we did go away for a while last summer." "Oh I see yeah, I see: The World Traveller." He shook his head in disgust. "Where'd you go? Nanaimo?" I shrugged carelessly. "Come on, Steve. You can tell Chancy. Your old friend? Old buddy?" He hung his tongue out to laugh at me. "Went to Calgary," I said with a glance at the window. The truth is it was Red Deer to see my sister, but I didn't dare tell him. "Calgary!" he cried. "What a pissy town. What the hell d'you go there for? And you went with Jennie of course?" "Sure yeah." He shook his head with a grave look, "Doesn't count. You got to be alone, to be free, no ties." He brushed off his letter paper as if to dismiss me and then lifted his pen to write — lifted his whole arm off the table, far more motion than was necessary for the function: it was as if he were doing it so the people at the back of the theatre could see. But even after all that the pen didn't reach the page. He looked up at me over the top rims of his glasses, "You know everyone else from the Old U has done some serious travelling, Europe at least." "I've got other things to do," I said with a shrug. "I don't like travelling much anyway." "You get into it, Steve. And you really need it to relate these days, it's part of the common experience. I'm serious. And it'd do you the world of good. You and Tim Johnson. But he can't help it. Couple of kid's now." "Tim! How the hell is Tim? What's he doing?" "Yeah everybody wants to know about Tim." "Tim was pretty important to me. He helped me through some bad times." "Yeah," he said to the window. "Most people used to feel that way about him. He's working for some investment company in TO now." "Tim?" "Some big shot job pushing people around. And he wouldn't see me. Went to see him and he wouldn't see me. Margie always came to the door or answered the phone and said he didn't want to see me, didn't want to see anybody from Fred." He was shaking so badly he could hardly get a cigarette out of the package. "Tim?" "Tim." "Jesus he was always so — " 28 "Yup, but people can change." He smoothed his paper, lifted his arm. "Well I gotta finish this letter. Try to write a letter every day. Of course some days, (some very good days), you never get around to it." He made one goofy bobbing. "You go ahead with whatever you want to do there, Major. You don't have to entertain me. I know you feel you have to be a good host." The tongue hung out. "But just pretend I'm not here." It was a genuinely magnanimous gesture. He took a big lungful of smoke and blew it out into the room, followed it up with several short sharp puffs and another billowing lungful and then farted again, sniffed and went back to his letter. 5. "How long is he staying?" Jennie muttered under her breath as I slipped in next to her sleepy warmth. The tone of her voice was unsettling. "What's the matter?" She stirred uneasily. "I just want to know how long he's staying, that's all." "I don't know. He hasn't said yet." "Oh Jesus, Steve, he's planning on staying for months." "No he wouldn't," I said with an alarming lack of conviction. "He's not just visiting. He's settling in." "Let's not fight about it, OK?" I said turning away from her as if to sleep. And then to calm us both I said, "We won't let him stay that long." I tried to remember something which might reassure me that he didn't intend staying more than a week or so but my mind wouldn't settle to it. I listened to Jennie's breathing, waiting for it to take on her sleeping rhythm: if she felt easy enough to sleep then probably my alarm was exaggerated. "He's a gossip," she whispered suddenly, turning onto her back. "It's how he lives. Staying with old friends and telling them about their old friends. He's a travelling nostalgia show. He looks the same, he talks the same, he acts the same. He uses the power that whole group used to have to intimidate you. The whole travelling thing. And Diane MacKenzie." "Oh Christ, Jennie." "And you can bet when he leaves here eventually, he'll take the whole story to entertain his next victim, threatening in his insidious way. Look at the way he tries to destroy Tim. Tim probably couldn't stand him either and that's why." "But he's really suffering, you know," I said, trying to excuse 29 him. "I've never seen anyone so uptight. It must be agonizing. He thinks he's on stage you know. It's like he's got chronic stage fright." "So what you're saying is that you're not going to tell him to go when he starts driving us crazy." "Oh come on. He won't stay that long." "Oh Jesus, Steve" she hissed, tossing over into her falling asleep position. My legs broke out into a prickly sweat, my heart heaved, and from the living room where he had just turned off the TV came the shiny slithering sound of Chancy crawling into his sleeping bag. He let a loud tearing fart and an exaggeratedly grateful sigh, coughed, sniffed, coughed, sniffed and sighed again. To let the world know he was falling asleep now. 6. The next morning when I came out to eat breakfast, he was balled up on the floor. By the cleanness of the table I saw that Jennie hadn't eaten there, probably because she felt too self- conscious, and I wondered, guiltily, if she'd eaten at all. The sounds of my coffee cup and plate hitting the table were unusually loud. Chancy stirred. Although I felt sorry for disturbing him, I resented his sleeping — I'd been looking forward to his company over breakfast. To make things worse, I began to suspect he'd been awake all along (his body was too still, his breathing too shallow) and that he intended to lie there listening to my eating. In an urge I clumped my coffee cup down hard, too loud for anyone to sleep through. He looked up at me, feigning surprise. "What the fuck time is it?" he grumbled. "Ten o'clock." "Jesus." He flexed and crawled. "You want some breakfast?" He snorted. "Coffee's fine for me, Steve." He said it with condescension. "On the stove." Grunting, he lumbered into the kitchen. "Oh hoh! Real coffee! Real class!" Although he meant it was totally lacking in class, he meant it was bourgeois. "You didn't have to go to all this trouble for me. All I need's to get the old caffeine into the old system." He sat across from me and lit a cigarette. Guiltily I noticed he looked genuinely tired. "You know I was thinking," he said, suddenly awake. "I was wondering what you've got to write about. You just hang around 30 this same old place, never doing anything with your life. You'd do a lot better if you had something to write about." "Like what?" "Like a trip around the world." "I don't want to go around the world." "So you said. So I thought of making my diary available to you. Packed with lots of juicy adventure. Beats your life." "My life's not bad." "Well not meaning to be rude, Friend, but quite frankly your life ain't much. But now if you were to go through my diary, fixing up the incoherencies, the spelling, taming down the dialogue and stuff like that, then maybe we could get ourselves a bit of cash. And you'd get enough ideas to keep you going for fifteen years. I guarantee it." "Well . .. Have you tried doing it yourself?" "Just trying to help you out, Friend," he said with his hands in the air. "As a matter of fact I have considered doing it myself but — " He laughed to pull me into his confidence. " — I'm not very good at typing and stuff like that. Names need changing too. Some very personal stuff in there. Very personal. Wouldn't want to get the ladies mad at me." "You old dog." He hung his tongue out and did a bob or two. "Ahha. I knew it! You're jealous. Admit it, Steve, you'd just love to fuck the women I've fucked." "I don't know that." He pulled the knapsack across the floor and plucked from a pouch a packet of photographs. He looked at the packet proudly for a moment and then with a cluck of his tongue and a jerk of his head slid the photographs across the table. 7. It was mid-afternoon so the place was just beginning to get lively. The regulars were playing pool, making furtive deals as cool as they could, or staring glassy-eyed at nothing. Two old ladies clutching parcels to their laps, who had obviously wandered into the wrong place and found themselves too embarrassed to leave, hid their terror by gulping sherry faster than ever before in their lives. Chancy, seeing them as he came through the entrance, gave a hearty, silent laugh and even quietly slapped his knee before sitting down across from me. "Well how d'it go?" I asked him. 31 "Like I expected: nothing. There's not a job to be had in the whole damn country." "Yeah this isn't the best place to look. I didn't realize you were thinking of stopping here or I would've warned you." "Well why else would I've come, Stevey boy?" I looked across at the old women — one of them had managed to smile at something the other had said — and tried to find some distraction in wondering what the joke could be, but it wasn't enough to stop the slight turning down of the corners of my mouth. "Uh I guess I didn't think much about it. I was looking forward to seeing you." I looked away to avoid his eyes, tried to see if I could pick up on the games at the pool table, but with the corner of my eye I could see him bobbing back and forth. "Oh ho, I see, I see. You thought I was coming just to see you. Old Times." "Well no. I mean Victoria's a nice place." "If you like geraniums. Speaking of which I think they're getting to you, Friend." "Fuck off. You just said you were thinking of living here." He laughed again. "Oh ho. Now his feelings are hurt." "Nooh." "Hey, I'm just a drifter, Steve. I don't feel ties easily. I live the best I can on as little as I can and that means I depend a lot on other people to get me by. You know: put me up when the cash is low. So I'm pretty good at getting people to like me. I have to be — to survive." When I turned back to face him, his face was smug. He looked away quickly and with trembling fingers rattled a cigarette from his pack. Suddenly he broke up with a laugh again, "Looks like those two old dolls are getting to feel right at home." he said. 8. "Steve, he's driving me crazy." "Yeah, I know. He's a prick, a pompous, pious prick." "You'll have to get rid of him." "I don't know why it has to be me. It's you he's driving crazy. He's only just started to bug me." "Stephen." "Well goddam it, Jennie, you can't just kick him out. He's got hardly any money, he doesn't know anybody around here — he has nowhere else to go. And he's a friend, goddamn it. You can't just kick out a friend." 32 "Friends don't act like him. Sitting there with the TV blasting out the goddamn hockey game, and he knows how much we both hate the sound of it. And farting. Smoking incessantly. Making insinuations. He's got nothing but contempt for us. A friend! Shit!" "Yeah I know. But I keep hoping I'll get through to him." "What the hell for? He's not worth the trouble. The only thing that'll get through to him is getting kicked out. He doesn't think you have the guts, you know." "I think he's right." "You're just afraid of what he'll say. You're afraid he'll take a bad report to all those people you think are so great. That people will remember you as the one who kicked 'Chancy' out. You're so concerned what all those people will think. Why?" It wasn't a rhetorical 'why'; she expected an answer even though she knew I didn't have one. "Ninety-nine percent of them wouldn't even remember you if you were described in detail," she said. And it hurt like the truth. "But even if everyone of them could, even if they thought about you every day, what the hell would it matter?" I couldn't answer, my mind was struck dumb. "It just does," I said, "It just matters." "Oh for pity's sake," she spat, and rolled over to fall asleep. 9. Defiantly I prepared an enormous breakfast for myself; I even turned the radio on to listen to the news. And Chancy's scorn was dripping. But I didn't care. I chomped and slurped with a heart full of happy hate, and stared at Chancy's hands until they trembled so badly his coffee cup rattled when he touched it to the table. "What's bugging you, Chancy?" I asked suddenly, staring at him hard. He took a quick glance at me and said, "Oh lots of things bug me, Steve. Why?" "You're always shaking, you're always looking like you're just about to fall apart. Ever since I first met you." I felt exhilaration at the aggressiveness in my voice: that I would dare. "Sure I'm more nervous than the average. I admit that." He was boasting it. "Nervous!?" I snorted at the understatement. He shook some cigarettes out of the pack, but before he could reach the matches, I'd picked them up and lit one, holding it across the table towards him. He jerked backwards in exaggerated surprise. "Why thank you, Major," he said, but he was frightened by it. 33 "I'd say you were in a perpetual state of terror." He mouthed a goofy laugh. "Hey, what is this, Friend?" "And that laugh of yours," I said in an off-hand way, just an aside before stuffing my mouth with egg and toast. "What about my laugh?" he said, trying to make his defensiveness sound like an act. "Oh nothing," I muttered between chomps. "I mean if you gotta laugh, you gotta laugh someway, Friend. Who am I to criticize?" And I hung my food-smeared tongue out, wheezed a few forced ha-ha's and bobbed myself up and down just like he always does. 10. "So how d'it happen so fast?" she asked, cuddling a little closer. "Well right after I told him, he wanted to go and find a place. Jesus it made me feel bad. I didn't think he was going to take it hard as he did. It even looked like he might really cry at last. He was a bit pissed off too, but I don't care. I guess." "He must've known it was going to happen though. I mean he must know what he was doing." "I don't think so. I had to reassure him, right? I thought he was going to have a nervous breakdown right there in the street, so like an asshole I had to try and reassure him, tell him it wasn't him or anything, that it was us and our privacy thing. And he lapped it up of course and turned it back on me. You know what he said? He said: T know what it is! You and Jennie are too uptight to get it on when I'm right there in the next room listening.' " "What a prick. Anything so he doesn't have to face up to what a pain he is." "And I was going so good this morning. I had him terrified I think. I was really getting through to him, really shaking him up. And then I had to go all soft. Goddamn. So he got away." "Well maybe now that he's on his own he'll have to take a good look at himself." "Uh uh: he's not alone." "Oh no." "This couple needed help with the rent. They all seemed to get along so well even, that they said he could move in as soon as he wanted." "Do they know what they're getting into?" "They do by now. When we got there with his stuff (about three hours later — a couple of days earlier than they'd expected, I think) 34 he just walks in like he owns the place — which he does, I guess, partly. I mean he lives there and everything, but still . . . And they had the curtains closed, lying on the couch drinking wine. And he yells something. 'Howdy gang it's me again,' or something, and walks right in past them there on the couch and throws the curtains open and says, 'Let's get some light in here.' And then he slumps over to the kitchen area and starts banging all the cupboard doors and yelling, 'Where d'you keep the coffee there, Major?' " "Oh my God, Stephen." "I couldn't believe it." "Well what did they do? Didn't they say anything?" "Yeah. The guy told him where the coffee was. And Chancy made me a cup of coffee. 'Instant,' he says. T hope you don't mind.' Jesus." "Bastard." "Well I don't know. I guess I had it coming in a way. I feel like such an asshole. I mean I would've broken down and screamed for mercy if anyone had come charging into my home like that, but this guy seemed to think it was all normal and OK." "I bet she didn't." "Well I couldn't tell. She disappeared into the shower." "Yeah I think I would've too. And never come out." "I felt rotten. And I had to sit there and drink the coffee. I couldn't just walk out." "He wouldn't've cared." "He might've. Anyway this guy was so casual, so calm about everything. I had to sit there like a dummy feeling shitty while they talked — and you know what? Within three minutes they'd found a mutual acquaintance." "Well you're bound to get to know a lot of people when you travel a lot." "But I get the feeling that all those people know each other, that it's all a kind of family, you know. That it's a family." Jennie sighed. "Well I bet she won't like it. No matter who he knows." "I really don't know. I guess not. I mean: you can only hope." 35 Danny Feeney / Two Poems WHAT I FORGOT I know every depressing thing you could say to me all the words are in my mind signposts of my dead end nihilism I have, how you say, survived nicely, she has answered my letters, I am proud I met her when my speech was crazy, my eyes steely and my sex deformed against the greedy transfer of hands and morning papers and coffee Now I am not sure where nothingness fails me I break down every time in the doctor's office It's not mine, it's nothing at all, it's nobody's I say 36 Blood is an enemy of kindness, its stains are hard to remove I scrub and scrub but it changes and breathes and grows and the air gets heavy with ammonia and I gasp a last phrase I've been practising since I was ten but it's not the scene of my death not yet, I have wonders to perform, I see the sun bathes us all and still we are dirty with nicknames religions and paranoia Dear God, if I stood in a circle and prayed would it be your absence that saved me? 37 SUMMER EVENING FOR CECILIA players walk off to those gold-red clouds twisting near the edge of deeper dimensions twilight closes in, orange transparency dims a cheap stain cracked by long shadows shadows pausing, extending fuzzy borders that disappear neighbourhoods settling, lawn chairs folding dusk into packets the lighted room travels out an open window and down the greying avenue as dusty corners disperse among residences sound of one absent crying over newspapers and Oh for the nightly death of accomplished innocence I saw those tiny diamonds years ago, tumbling from the shaft of her eyes and down her cheeks she put on a jacket and took to the streets where players played knights and maidens sincere artists beneath the streetlights and isn't that her face in that pile of bloody paintings lying there like the wrecked face of an old dark woman? in the kitchen a name disturbs the cutlery I open the recent layers of night and seek that name one mysterious fife among so many 38 Terence Byrnes Getting the Hang of It i. Every Saturday, when the listener surveys had been tallied, one of the popular Top 40 stations in Miami declared itself the winner. The first month they lived in the city, they listened for the results each Saturday afternoon. They had followed the warm weather from Nova Scotia to Florida, having left windy Truro at night to find Indian Summer in Massachusetts the next afternoon. Two nights later, lost on an orchard-lined road in Georgia, Paul heard the distant voice of a Miami announcer suddenly wash in over the twangy hillbilly station that his father had chosen. When it washed out just as suddenly, his mother pushed all the tuning buttons in sequence so that the dial pointer scuttled across the band trying to receive the signal as though it were a homing beacon. They took the Collins Expressway into Miami Beach, where they learned from a short-sleeved motorcycle patrolman that Miami itself was miles to the west, on the other side of Biscayne Bay. They blushed and nodded gratefully, stunned at the idea that they had driven two thousand miles to the wrong city, and took the causeway to a motel on Biscayne Boulevard in Miami. The same afternoon his father arranged to sublease a house in Coral Gables. The square white note pad that the manager kept in the motel's phone booth was left covered with the rapid calculations of family accounts. The house sat on a street of meticulously bordered lawns dotted with dwarf banana trees, mango, papaya, and blanketed with the smell of jasmine. They felt like intruders. His mother arranged all their household goods in three front rooms, as if daring them to live outside the frugal orbit she had established. His father's truck, with its rusting Nova Scotia tags and spotty grey coat of primer, sat incongruously in their white gravelled driveway. Curious neighbours 39 on after-dinner walks would stop beside the truck to read the sign on the leaning plywood walls bolted to its bed. Watching them from the darkened kitchen, Paul could see their lips sounding it out as though either the words or the message were somehow difficult and foreign: D. McConnell. Carpenter and Roofer. General Contracting. On Saturday afternoon his mother would study the long column of houses for rent in the Miami Herald, referring all the time to a small map of the city she had borrowed from a neighbour. Some sections of the map had been neatly fenced off with pencilled boxes. Other sections were labelled "White." While he waited for the Help Wanted ads, invariably in the same section of the paper as Houses for Rent, his father would leaf through old copies of Esquire, Flair, and Look, which they had found in one of the unused bedrooms. He often ripped the pages when he turned them, as if the movement were too fine for his heavy wrists and fingers. His large hands were always at odds with the rest of his body, which had a look of almost hollow-boned fragility. In a baggy flannel work shirt, his chest seemed to be concave. His hair, as light and fine as a baby's, formed only a sparse fringe around the top of his head. His hands trembled. Setting a nail into a stud, he would jab at it with the hammer at the instant his shaking hand happened to be holding the nail perpendicular to the surface of the wood. All the same, Paul knew he was a good carpenter. When WQAM declared itself the winner on the fourth consecutive Saturday and WFUN, its competitor, was still on the air, Paul's mother decided that their competition was all somehow duplicitous. The listener surveys didn't mean anything. It no longer mattered if she were loyal to the station she had first heard in Georgia, then lost, then recovered in St. Augustine. The radio, she said, would have to do without her. She let Paul spend two dollars for batteries at Wal- green's so he could take the radio outside with him; she didn't want to hear it. At night, tired of hearing the same DJ's insistent voice as he lay in bed, he would slide the tuning dial over to another station's frequency, where one DJ had been broadcasting continuously for one hundred hours from a booth in a car dealer's parking lot. There was an anxious, angry edge to his voice when he boasted about the world records he was breaking and about his listeners who, he said, depended on him. He sounded like an inhabitant of some vivid, unrestrained and frightening world. Paul's father, walking past the bedroom at eleven ea.ch night would hear the radio and call, "Lights 40 out." Minutes later his mother would yell, "Put the damned thing off." In January they were still living in Coral Gables, and renting two rooms to a student from the University of Miami medical school. He had been a doctor in Cuba, he told them, but now worked as a janitor at the university, where he was also studying to pass the professional exams which would allow him to practice in Florida. Having a boarder gave them an almost giddy, proprietorial feeling. They moved around the house with an exaggerated sense of responsibility, ready to do anything their tenant might ask. But the young man never asked for anything and after a few weeks the back half of the house seemed as though it had never belonged to them. Paul would meet the boarder in the yard as they both left for school and in their surprise they would look at each other as though they were both trespassers. Paul met Mrs. Tannenbaum after answering an ad she had tacked to the bulletin board at the 7-11 store. She wanted a boy to do yard work. A stunted cabbage palmetto clung to the sandy loam in the centre of Mrs. Tannenbaum's back yard and he would hang the strap on his transistor radio over a broken frond on the tree so he could listen to music while pruning the spare, nameless shrubs that staked out the perimeter of her yard. Catching an occasional glimpse of her watching him through a half-closed jalousy, he would flex his arm muscles and try to look strong and tireless, working until droplets of sweat flew from his eyebrows into his eyes, making them burn with a sharp salt tingle. Then, turning to see if she was still watching, he would find her gone. He worked for a dollar twenty an hour and lunch, always a warm slice of salami on a single piece of bread. While he ate she talked to him. She was a widow. She was from New York. A whining sigh punctuated her sentences when she spoke about herself but she was stern and full of sarcastic humour when she talked about neighbours or relatives. She became as completely Floridian to him as white stucco or healthy brown skin. It was important to her that the blunt ends of table legs and the underside of chair seats be waxed every week. She gave him a footstool so he could reach the highest leaves of a rubber plant in the 41 screened Florida room to wipe them with a dark, citric-smelling oil which made them shine like plastic. Balancing on the stool, washing the walls and ceiling, he would look down and see that she had quietly walked into the room to watch him. Her floral Hawaiian muu-muu billowed from her sloping shoulders and flapped and undulated to the ground from her stiffly supported bust. When she leaned forward, the tired elastic at the neck of her dress would let the material droop, amazing him with the few full drops of perspiration which formed a wet and perfectly circular pool in the concave slope between her breasts. As she stood up, the dress would close about her again and exhale the cool smell of camphor-ice. After he had worked for three weekends it seemed impossible that Mrs. Tannenbaum could find anything more for him to do. When he arrived at her home from the bus stop, carrying his tools in a canvas duffle, she invited him to sit in the Florida room and gave him a cup of tea and a sweet roll. Then, with a rush of explanation she told him that she had seen some palmetto bugs outside, but there were none inside and "even the best houses down here have them." He had seen these dark cockroaches running from the light in the kitchen at home. They were as long and dark and thick as a cigar butt. Stepped on, their hard shells sent a shudder of sickening vibration through the sole of his shoe and up his leg to his stomach. To get rid of them, exterminators covered entire buildings with light fabric and pumped in gas until it inflated, making the house look as though a billowing orange balloon had landed on it. "Just find out where they are and do something," Mrs. Tannenbaum instructed him. "You know," she said, reaching for a can of Raid under his wicker settee and putting it down beside his tea cup. Outside, not knowing exactly what to do, he searched underneath hedges and checked for entrance holes along the concrete foundation and in window frames. At the rear of the yard he found a book-sized slab of concrete raised just above ground level. He pried it up with the blade end of a pair of pruning shears and pushed it aside. A thick army of palmetto bugs moiled around the bottom of the concrete box it had covered, coming half-way the height of a water shut-off valve inside. They churned like an agitated mass of dark molasses, spilled over the sides of the box and disappeared into the stiff grass. Jumping from them, he fell and then scrambled to his feet, spraying insecticide into the grass in a defensive circle around himself. 42 He retreated to the centre of the yard but the palmetto bugs had all somehow disappeared. When he nudged his pruning sheers with the toe of his shoe, a dozen more ran from their disturbed cover. He carefully picked up the open duffle bag, shook it, and hung it from a palm frond beside his radio. He heard a Cuban sternly reading an announcement on the news. The Cuban said his name was Jose Cardona. He said the Cuban Revolutionary Council had launched an attack on Cuba at a place called Bay of Pigs. Paul turned the volume up. His mother was working in a box factory in Little Havana just off Flagler, and a week before had brought home the news that all the Cubans were drawing their vacation pay, "and that means there's going to be something with Cuba." He and his father had listened respectfully to what seemed like romantic and even clandestine information. Neither of them had thought of what it might be that was going to happen in Cuba. They couldn't even agree on the direction in which Cuba lay off the American mainland. He looked back at the house and saw Mrs. Tannenbaum watching him through the jalousy. The slats snapped vertically shut and Mrs. Tannenbaum appeared at the side door, waving a bamboo fan and holding a glass dripping with condensation. "You did something out there?" she asked. "Didn't you?" When the Cuban medical student announced that he was moving out at the end of April, Paul felt an urgent need to ask him about the invasion — to describe it, confirm it, anything. It was as if, after his mother's disillusionment with the radio, it had redeemed itself by reporting something that could be verified. In May, the rooms at the rear of the house were as empty as they had been before. 3. An ad appeared in the "Personals" and in the "Help Wanted" sections of the Miami Herald: "Anxious to Succeed? Young Men 13 to 17 Wanted for Sales Positions. Income as great as your desire to get ahead." He was in a third floor office in Northeast Miami. The building faced south over the shabby grey frame houses and tenements of Brownsville to the business district, almost a hundred blocks away. The view from the office window was partially blocked by an air conditioner that shuddered occasionally as it worked to keep the small room overcooled. He tried to be inconspicuous about reaching 43 into his suit jacket pocket to recover the sheet of mimeo paper with his instructions. Across the top of the page someone had hand- lettered, "From the Desk of Nick Pappas." Beneath that, it told him where and when to report for work and said he should memorize a short sales speech which began, "Hi! Do you have a telephone?" He waited uncomfortably with six other boys, none of whom wore suits or even jackets. Tongue shaped shirt tails, which they wore outside their jeans, lay in their laps like short aprons. One boy, a Negro, wore a white shirt that had acquired the spotty grey pallor of an overbleached kitchen rag. Another boy, with scented dark hair and a light purple shirt was obviously a Cuban. Apart from his general appearance, Paul recognized the heavy, square glasses frames which all Cubans seemed to wear. Two of the boys talked quietly. When the air conditioner clicked off, their whispers echoed lightly in the high-ceilinged room. A young man walked into the room from an inner office. He was wearing a beige suit with large buttons and a yellow tie with grey diagonal stripes. "A short interview," he announced, crooking his finger at the boy with the white shirt and the Cuban. The boys glanced at each other with expressionless faces and slowly followed the man's clicking footsteps into the hallway. "I bet that's gonna be some interview," a boy said. "It's the U.S. Space Program," said another. "Coon to the moon by June." Their sudden laughter stopped when the young man returned from the hall. He led them to a meeting room with four rows of folding chairs arranged in front of a low wooden platform. The unfinished plywood walls of the room were decorated with framed slogans and warnings. The largest read, "Never Use the Word Free." Paul took a seat at the edge of the room and recited the sales speech to himself. The young man stepped up onto the wooden platform. Paul could see the perforated violet panels on the tops of his shoes. "I am Mr. Pappas," he began, "and my father wants me to work on his sponge boat in Tampa." He let his hand dangle at the wrist, stared down a snicker from one of the boys, and showed them a large sapphire ring in a gold setting. "But I don't have to do that, you see. I worked my can off and in a couple months I had something like this to show for it." The boys, who were almost equally spaced in the room, like alternating squares on a checkerboard, leaned forward to look. "And the way I got this is the same way you're gonna get it. You 44 sell the magazines that we buy discount subscriptions to, and if you sell more than three mags to one customer, you pick up extra PM." One of the boys put his hand up. "PM is Prize Money. But you're stupid, right? You don't know how to sell a life preserver on a sinking ship." He waited for their laughter. "To get you started, we paid a consultant to write this sales speech for you, and you all know it, right? And if you don't, think fast." He pointed at Paul after dramatically sweeping his arm across the room. "Let's hear it," he said when Paul stood up. "But the jacket and tie have gotta go. We don't want to scare anyone off. The image is boys, not salesmen." Paul took his jacket and tie off and blankly recited the sales speech. Sitting back down, he realized that even the seat of his pants was wet with perspiration. "Next," Pappas called. Each recitation was more enthusiastic than the previous one, as though they drew courage from each other's mistakes. "OK," Pappas said. "Anyone who doesn't know the speech washes out. If your customer doesn't have a telephone, he can't afford to be buying subscriptions. Any paperwork we have to do on the freeloaders gets billed to you." He handed around booklets of order forms. "Let's do it," he yelled, with practiced enthusiasm. The distance between the boys shrank as they leaned together to talk. Paul edged in closer to the group so Pappas wouldn't notice him. He wanted to leave but the noise the others were making seemed to hold him in its centre. Outside, they crowded into Pappas' car, a black Thunderbird that drew exaggerated gasps from the boys. While he drove, Pappas told them about his career as a door-to-door salesman. He said, that to close a sale, he would offer to trim shrubs, water gardens, dust the furniture, "Or even," he said, "to give the lady of the house a quick feel and a bang while her old man's out. I used to have a hell of a time explaining to my old lady how I got rug burns on my knees from selling magazines." The boys' laughter was quick and shrill. "But if you try it, you'd better know what you're doing. Nookie don't pay for subscriptions." Pappas drove the boundaries of each boy's territory and let them off one by one. He let Paul off last. " I think we'll watch you today," he said. "Help you out until you get the hang of it." Paul stopped at a corner house and knocked lightly on the door. 45 The street was a bare new development of concrete bungalows. No one answered the door. Before he had reached the next house Pappas drove along side the curb and hailed him. "Don't give up to easy," he advised. "Knock once, wait a minute, and then knock again twice as hard." Pappas pulled away and Paul returned to the first house to bang on the door. There was still no answer. At the second house he could see a woman watching television in her Florida Room. When she came to the door, he raced through his speech. Surprise filled her face. She wrinkled her forehead and turned one ear toward him as if he had a slight speech defect that could be overlooked by an attentive listener. When he finished he realized he'd forgotten to start off by asking her if she had a telephone. "That's stupid," she told him. "What do I need magazines for?" and she closed the door without further sign of annoyance, as if she had just turned off a radio. When he reached the end of the street, where the Thunderbird was already waiting, he had tried eighty houses. Pappas, combing his hair in the rear-view mirror, signalled for him to get in. "You're too tall and stiff," he said. "I wouldn't open my door if I saw something like you coming up the walk. Not only that but you've got an accent or something. Where you from anyways?" "Hialeah," Paul lied. Pappas let him off on an older street that ended abruptly in the parking lot of a white frame church. This time, Paul tried to look cheerful, walking across lawns instead of using the sidewalk, and smiling all the way through his speech. A few bored faces listened to him, thought for a moment, excused themselves to check with a husband or wife, and then came back to apologize. Some people would tell him no, but not close their door all the way, as though they wanted to let him know they were willing to be talked out of it. Seeing their indecision, he could think of nothing more to say, and left quickly for the next house. Pappas still hadn't come back by the time he worked his way down to the church. He rubbed spit on the knuckles of his right hand where the skin was worn off. He followed a tile path to the presbytery behind the church and knocked on the rattling frame of the screen door. A short man, bald, but with hair curling out of his nose and ears, answered. "Hi! ..." "I'm sorry, but I can't buy anything." "This is an unusual offer." 46 "I'm sure I couldn't afford it." "Just hear me out." "Please don't make me be rude." "Maybe you'd like some yard work done?" Paul wondered if he should wedge his foot between the door and the frame. "I don't have time to listen to you." "Hi, do you have a telephone?" "No, I don't." Again, Pappas waited for him at the curb, the dark car running at a fast idle to power its air conditioner. Two of the boys were already squeezed into the narrow rear seat. One had sold four subscriptions and the other, eight. "I thought you might have had something going at that last place," Pappas told him. "Good luck and brains is what it takes to get something like this," he said, hitting the steering wheel with the palm of his hand. "Some people just never get the hang of it. Everybody's a loser at something, you know?" 4. Sleeping in late on Saturday morning was a mistake. By nine- thirty or ten the heat would have lapped up the stairs to their second-floor apartment, filled the room like a heavy liquid, and pressed wetly on the eyelids of anyone still asleep. Getting up in the heat always seemed to signal a day in which it was impossible to wake up or to shake off the night's dreams. "You should've got me up early," Paul heard himself saying as he woke up. He pushed himself up on his elbows, looked for his mother, and realized that she had called him from another room. When she appeared at the bedroom door, he waited for her to turn away before getting up. He pulled chinos and a white T-shirt on over his sticky skin. They had three upstairs rooms and a kitchenette in a duplex with cracking pink stucco walls and a red tile roof. The landing at the top of their stairs was screened on three sides, but the corrugated plastic roof was half broken away and sometimes, thumbnail-size tree frogs with tiny fingers that ended in small knobs would drop from the overhanging persimmon branches and fix themselves to the outside of the door. When his mother called again, Paul walked impatiently past her and pushed the screen door open. He found one frog clinging to the screen. Its back glistened such a perfectly gemlike green that 47 he couldn't imagine why his mother was afraid of them. A house lizard, clumsy-looking without the two inches of tail it had lost in a territorial battle, slipped through a tear in the screen as he approached it. He threw the frog back into the persimmon leaves. "There had best be nothing left out there," his mother warned through the door. "Makes me feel like I'm walking through the bloody jungle." As she walked down the stairs he could see that the weight of her small purse was enough to unbalance her shoulders and give her the hunch-backed look of some old women. Strands of hair clung to the back of her sweaty bare neck. In his bedroom, he reached under the mattress and fished out a pack of Luckies. The cigarettes were flattened into ovals and threads of tobacco hung loosely out both ends. He took one and tapped it on the crystal of his watch to pack it as he had seen boys at school do. Someone had told him that you liked either Camels or Luckies and hated the other. He hadn't had the chance to try Camels yet. As he smoked, he was careful to exhale through the open window. It was the beginning of summer vacation and he hadn't been able to find work, so he had promised his father help loading CBS block and used brick on the truck later in the day. Except for cabinet work, his father had said, Florida's houses didn't need carpenters. Just masons, plumbers and exterminators. Riding with his father, Paul had seen most parts of Dade and Broward counties and he was beginning to feel some mastery of it all. He knew that people his father's age called Fort Lauderdale, "Likkerdale," but if he called it that in the presence of adults, they would look at him as though he had cursed. Brownsville, the monotonous and decayed Negro part of town in the northeast was "Nigger- ville." People who lived in the string of Keys south of the Florida peninsula were known as "conches," after the large, spiralling shells that sometimes washed up on the beaches. He had a good brown tan, wore loafers, knew that the sharp green burrs which grew on Florida's sandy lawns were called "stickers," and he was careful to pronounce "grease" as "greeze." East of Hialeah, his father pulled off the road at a corner everyone called "The Slave Market." Fifty or sixty men perched on a long wooden corner fence or sprawled in its shade on the ground. A larger truck had already parked in front of them and a thin white man wearing a construction helmet walked the length of the fence, point- 48 ing at some of the men and jerking his finger back in the direction of the truck. The men he chose clambered over the rail siding around the bed of the truck. The tops of their heads bobbed up and down between the slats. "Go get one," his father said. "But I don't want one that stinks." Paul turned away quickly to hide his feeling of surprise — selecting workers was a man's job. He knew that the trick to choosing one was to not walk the length of the fence as though he were canvassing the stalls at a market. That way, the men chosen might think there was something special about themselves and ask for a higher wage. Instead, he quickly pointed to a slim, sweating young man with a black silk kerchief tied around his forehead as a sweatband. The young man hadn't appeared to be paying attention but the instant Paul signalled, he pushed himself away from the fence. "Dollar an hour," Paul said, surprised at his own feeling of confidence. They worked through mid-afternoon selecting and loading bricks from a bulldozed pile of rubble beside a ruined Motel sign. Though the bricks were used, the labour of breaking off chunks of mortar that adhered to them combined with their attractively weathered look gave them a high resale value. The man Paul had picked worked in a preoccupied and distant way, stopping only to untie his sweatband and squeeze it dry. When the truck was loaded, they paid him and drove him to an apartment building in Brownsville. As they slowed for a traffic light, the man leapt out the back and slapped on the side of the truck to let them know he was gone. "I have to see if a jackpost I set up to level the floor in these niggers' house has settled," Paul's father said. Paul looked at him and saw that his face was the colour of a rash. He now wore thin cotton work shirts which clung to the sweat on his chest and back, revealing shoulders which slumped protectively forward. "It's just a dirty crawlspace where this buck keeps his tires," he said, sounding as though he were speaking to himself. They turned at 17th Avenue and then turned again onto a road that had once been paved but was now just a gravel bed with broken slabs of asphalt lining its shoulders. It looked more like a Northern street than any Paul had seen in Miami. The houses were frame with shingled sides, some surrounded by broken or tilting wooden fences. If the houses had ever been painted, it was with primer or whitewash only so the finish had a thin, dusty look. Red maple and a few small elms lined the sidewalks. They stopped at a house with clapboard siding that was full of holes where the knots had fallen out. 49 Paul stayed in the truck to watch the tools in the open back. He put his feet up on the seat in his father's place behind the steering wheel and leaned the back of his head against the window. He closed his eyes and listened to the voices outside — high-pitched sudden whoops of laughter and funny, breathless name-calling. He sat up and opened the window. A light-skinned girl was throwing a muddy volleyball against the clapboard house and successfully intercepting it on the first bounce before either of the two boys she was playing with could reach it. It was hard to tell her age. Her breasts were full and they swelled and bounced as she ran. He stared at her, trying to catch her eye, but she seemed not to notice. They played at a frantic rate until one of the boys picked the girl up around her waist and held her, struggling and laughing, until his friend could retrieve the ball. Back on her feet, the girl faced the truck and bent over, putting her hands on her knees and breathing noisily until she caught her breath. When her chest stopped heaving she walked toward the truck. He nervously searched out the window on the other side of the cab to see if she was walking to meet someone who might have come up on him from behind. "You got something on your mind?" she asked through the open window. The cab was small and he felt trapped. The girl put her hands on her hips and waited for an answer. At this close range he could see that she was not really a girl, that she was a woman much older than him. "I was just watching." "Well I don't like to be watch like that. What you doin' here anyway?" "I'm waiting for my father. He's doing some work in that house." He looked for the two boys who had been playing with the volleyball. They weren't even watching. They ran to the rear of the building, passing the ball back and forth. "That your father? Well he a crook. That floor look like a old mattress. It uneven." She stepped back from the truck and walked away, her hips twitching with anger. He wanted to yell at her and tell her she was wrong but he felt that if he tried to call out, he would choke on his tongue. He sat upright, rigid with embarrassment, until his father appeared from behind the house. The knees of his pants were caked with dark mud. For a long moment he looked unfamiliar, like a sunburned tourist, a complete stranger. 50 Mark Frutkin / Two Poems MUSEUM Within their etched armor the samurai warriors have melted down into a quaint suggestion of dust within his embroidered silk robes which blinded peasants with the sewing, the emperor himself has lost his face in the air, has given the beat of his heart to the distant murmur of a stream within their sheaths the swords turn to rust disuse and dissipation, where once light was sharp reflections only clear spirit remains. 5i GIVING BIRTH Constantly giving birth to your own heart as if it held a life of its own, allowing it another heart within this heart and somehow living on the emptiness left behind like the inside of a bell that was rung once and will never quite grow entirely silent, only ever more subtle ever more delicate music and the heart you give each moment listens to its drum and hears a pulse within its pulse a more distant and subtle music like a heartbeat in a womb and each birth gives birth to a space a slightly ringing and generous emptiness. 52 Barry Dempster A Large K in Kill July 19, 1976 There comes a time when all the excuses in the world are shown to be what they really are: avoidances, illusory words as phony as slugs in a dime machine. Lying to oneself in this day has become an addiction. The succinct pain I feel in the back of my head proves it to me. Repression is like a rock in the softest part of the skull. Marjorie Hamilton Melzer is a human elision. Something has been left out of her. God did not pronounce her alive in the proper, foreseen way. He said: "Get up Marj and reap hell in some man's nest. Peck at his soul until it drains and collapses like a beach ball." The day is about as hot as a giant barbecue. All morning the sweat runs down my forehead, splits at the start of my eyebrows and taking two parallel paths, it trickles into the corners of my mouth and makes me thirsty. Still, this afternoon I have to finish the Sudbury article and at four, there's a group meeting. I will stick to the orange vinyl of the session room chair and have to peel myself away like tape come five o'clock. Hell. Something has to give but Lord knows, it's not going to be me. July 20, 1976 She sits across from me chewing her food with words. Carrots are transformed into gossip, steak is turned into questions about the office, orange jello made to resemble answers about the mechanics of the house. All the while her feet are tapping against the wood of the dining room floor and her fork and knife, harmless dinner utensils, are wielded in the open air like anxious hands in a classroom. "And you'll never guess what happened after that," she says and proceeds to transfigure a simple piece of bread into an outrageous tale about her mother. 53 It was the way she ate that first attracted me to her, back in '65. We'd sit in the campus restaurant while I shoved greasy piles of french fries into an obviously uncouth mouth. She never complained or even seemed to notice, she just sat there chatting with me, fingering each chip as if it were a thin piece of ice. Actually she sucked her meals. Food disappeared down her throat, with no real motion of chewing or swallowing. So damn graceful. The first time we made love I insisted she eat a bagel afterwards so once again I could marvel at the neatness; the noiseless, motionless, wonderful way she had with sustenance. But no, it wasn't all the food's fault. It never is. One bright sunny day I woke up and rolled over, preparing to plant a rose-kiss on her pink cheek and there she was: lips parted like a hole in the ground, snoring like a tractor, the face of a farmer's wife or a gotten-up actress in a rural play — not the vision of Marjie, the sweet girl I married. I fell out of love like a meteor and the pit created was the size of a suburb. From then on things have been getting worse. Erosion and other atrophies. Tonight at dinner, I almost threw my fork across the table — aimed at her heart. Poor Marjorie. She thinks everything is bliss. July 21, 1976 Alright, it's not all Marjorie's fault but before anyone gets out their automatic label machine, let me say I've been as faithful as a nun. When my libido starts a two-step, I rein it in like a horse and shove it in the stable. So now I'm tired of cold oats and perfunctory brushings — I want to trot. Amy Billingham is the newly appointed product manager for the magazine group. Often, with my copy of Mining Mirror under my arm, I walk into her office and discuss ads, hoping to convey a lifetime of desire in the words "aluminum" or "gravel pit." We sail over Sudbury together with heatwaves rising from the tip of our toes and going who knows where? As I said, I am faithful. Today Amy came to see me. Dressed in a black velvet suit, white blouse unbuttoned two or maybe three pearl buttons, she was smashing. I wanted to applaud. "What can I do for you?" I said instead. "I thought we could talk about the back of your book, next issue that is." "Of course," I said. "Perhaps dinner one night. I'm a great cook. I live down at the 54 beach by the racetrack." She tossed her mane of blonde hair and the air was showered with gold. "Love to," I said, my hooves quivering, my nostrils opening and closing like doors. "See you then," she said, stepping out of the office with, I swear, a smile on her rear. Forgive me Marjorie of my memory: mellow Marjorie. I will either have you stuffed or sold to make glue. July 22,1976 The pain in the back of my skull grows worse. Last night, at three a.m. I was sitting on the hard shut surface of the toilet bowl counting the squares on the black and white tile floor. Five aspirin were melting in my stomach and shooting their mysterious rays over my body, until finally they'd find the right spot. The base of my head beat like a bongo drum. At three-ten a.m. the ghost of my mother came into the bathroom. She was wearing one of her flowered housedresses, a red apron and didn't look any the worse for wear considering twelve long years under a marble tombstone. "I told you to shop around for the right girl. Miss Fancy Ass at work may be the one but you've already sewn yourself into a potato bag so to speak." Her voice reverberated off the white walls and the stone of the bathtub and sink. She could have been God in disguise. "Give me a break," I pleaded. "If I'd only lived, I could have told you little Marjie Parjie would have soured. The girl's a grape. You should have picked a nut, a walnut, they don't go bad." "I'll divorce her," I said, leaping up from the toilet. "She's Catholic. She'll fight you to the death. Anyway you'd have to pay so much alimony, you couldn't afford new socks." "Alright, I'm trapped," I said, waiting for an answer, a solution, motherly advice. "You can say that again," she said chuckling and disappeared up the hot water faucet. I sat back down and although my headache was gone, I felt no better. Even with the door closed I could hear Marjorie in the bedroom snoring down the walls, so I did what thousands of unhappy husbands do — I curled up on the very edge of the bed and dreamed dreams of another woman, in my case Miss Fancy Ass or Amy Billingham. 55 July 23,1976 "You don't love me the way you used to love me," she whined. Her eyebrows arched and her mouth coiled into a pout. "Nonsense," I said burying my face in a pork chop. "You hardly ever kiss me on the mouth," she said holding up one finger, "and I could count the number of times you touch my body on the hand of a war amputee." Up went another finger. "Not to mention you never buy me little love gifts." The third. "Or brag about me in the company of friends." The fourth wagged in the air like a flag. "And in the fifth place, you never talk to me during dinner." Her entire right hand waved in front of me. "Move it," I said, "or I'll bite it off." "Why ..." She gasped and clutched her throat. "How dare you?" The meal went downhill from there. Tears ran over her heaps of mashed potatoes like butter, swilling on the bottom of her plate. I was locked out of the bedroom, forced to sleep on the couch but worse than that, in the middle of the quiet night, Marjorie stole into the living room brimming full of apologies. I feigned unconsciousness and was gone early in the morning. July 24,1976 We went to the Roxy as a "kiss-and-make-up-treat." Being an old movie buff, taking me to a film is a form of penance. Marjorie made sure I was comfortable and brought me a cup of soggy popcorn. The first feature, Joan Crawford confined to bed listening in on her own murder plans, passed over my brain like a light breeze. I was not in the mood. Solutions to the problem of Marjorie kept buzzing about my head like bees. As of yet, none of the stingers were viable. The house lights came up and I listened to Marjorie gushing over Joan Crawford's eyebrows. They went back down again. The last film was Dial M For Murder. It started slow, Ray Milland only steps away from having a lost weekend and Grace Kelly auditioning for the role of a princess. But as the story unrolled, the plans inside of me caught on to a snag in the reel. Soon I was planning Marjorie's murder one step ahead of Milland's scheming over Kelly. The phone. The hired killer. The perfect alibi. And there was no Robert Cummings in our life. We left before it finished. I had no inclination to see how it turned out. I could tell from the apple blossoms in Kelly's cheeks that she 56 would prevail but Marjorie has no petal skin and she is as pale as snow. No heroine at all. July 25, 1976 We showed up at Toby's party a bit earlier than invited. Toby and I grew up together the best of friends and remained so. I took him into the bathroom and told him everything. "What do you think?" I asked. I was anxious because what he would say mattered enough to make me change my mind if he thought I was being foolish. I figured that murder is something like an idea for a Broadway show. You've got to test it out on those you trust to see if it will ever survive the previews. "It's that serious?" he asked. Toby got rid of his wife years ago by telling her he had chronic V.D. He prides himself on that coup but really the girl was as troubled as he was to end the union. "Sure is." "Then go ahead. I back you all the way. I never liked Marjorie anyway." We put our arms around each other and the secret is locked between us. "Where do you think the best place is to find a hit man?" I ask. "Geppy," he said. Geppy's another buddy, works for the Mob, in fact his father was one of the founding members. "Yeah Geppy," I said. July 26, 1976 I have nightmares of being gunned down in front of Italian fruit markets, tumbling amongst the overripe bananas and mouldy oranges, tomato blood on my heart. I wake up and find that I'm shaking. No matter. I slip Marjorie into the dream in the place of myself and slowly go back to sleep. July 27, 1976 "Geppy, it's me," I whispered into the phone. I'm in a booth with "Suck me off, here's my number" sort of things scrawled on the walls like scars. There's a smell of urine somewhere around my feet. "Whose you?" Geppy asked. "Me," I said reluctant to give my name. The plan is in motion. Every precaution has to be taken or like Ray Milland, I'll be molder- ing away my time in some unromantic prison cell. "Well whose me then?" he asked. 57 I searched the baggage that's kept in the corners of my brain and came up with, "Remember Delores Machavelli and the time we tied her up with her own skipping rope just to have a look at her underpants?" A short silence. "Toby, old boy," he said. "The other, the other," I said. "Oh Michael, it's you. How are you buddy?" "Shhh," I hissed into the phone. Outside the booth, only inches from the glass, a policeman was balancing himself on one foot, picking gum off the sole of the other. "I've got a job for one of your men, a serious job. Can you meet me?" "Sure. How about the Spaghetti Factory for lunch?" "No, not in public, somewhere quiet." We decided on High Park by the zoo, near the buffalo pen and by two o'clock in the afternoon I had the names of four professionals to choose from. I took the subway home feeling like a weight were being lifted from my fourth finger left hand, everything normal except for the faint traces of bison mixed in with the bad subway air. July 28,1976 Tonight I dream about plain-clothed policemen. I'm standing on the busy corner of a noonday street where I will meet all four of the applicants. They'll be recognizable in white trenchcoats and out-of- date fedoras. But as the hour approaches I count ten such men and I know that six of them have badges instead of hearts, pistols shoved into their pants in the place of other things. I make motions of going up to several of them but no words are exchanged. Each one stares at me wilfully until I back down and slink away like a cat. When I wake up in the first indistinct moments of morning I decide not to meet anyone on a crowded street. I stick to High Park and unattractive buffaloes. July 29, 1976 I confided my plan to Amy during our initial lunch and the outcome was supper at her place, by the beach, next door to the racetrack. We made love to the echoes of hard feet on equally hard ground, the booming voice on a loudspeaker and ultimately the applause of the crowd. Near dusk I slipped on the noisy frame of a streetcar and got off at the entrance to the Park. The green trees and grass were turning black for the night, Grenadier Pond was putting on its dark lid. I 58 ran through shadows and shadows of shadows, down the hill and into the zoo. Hurrying past the bear compound, the mountain goat's fake hills, I turned the corner and there in front of the hulking shapes of smelly buffalo, stood the man. I walked past him once, then twice, just to be safe. He was wearing a grey trenchcoat and a hat of indiscernible colour. "Strawberry cream," I said — the password, fortunately something you don't hear too often. "Yeah," the man answered. "Has Geppy filled you in?" I asked. "Yeah." "Are you game?" "Yeah." "How much?" "Your money, right now," he said and I felt the fist of a gun in my ribs. I emptied my pockets like a customs agent rifling through a bag and was left there, emptied. It was with heavy heart I arrived home and climbed in beside the black mass of Marjorie under the sheets. July 30, 1976 The next two potential employees I met together, each one as protection against the other and we met in daylight, at the beach. Not too far from us Amy was sitting in the sand making giant castles with her bare feet. She was the lookout. The first man was huge, a Brink's truck of a man. He breathed so heavily, the sound of the waves were almost drowned out. And the second one was thin as a straw, nervous, picking the fingernails on one hand with the other one and then alternating every minute or so. "Experience?" I asked. "Not much lately," the fat man said, " but the flesh is willing." "And you?" I asked the thin man. "Let's see," he said counting furiously on his fingers. "Three cats, one racoon and a wino down on Church Street." "I want her strangled with the telephone cord," I said and watched for reactions. "Oh I couldn't," the fat man said. "Their eyes always bulge out of their sockets and the damn tongue pops out like a slab of meat. It's sickening. And most times they turn blue, as blue as the water out there," he said pointing out at the grey polluted lake. "No, it's poison for me or nothing." 59 The thin man listened, still fidgeting madly. "I want to push her out the window, please?" he pleaded. "I like to see them fall, please, could you let me?" I tried to explain and the fat man left, trundling up the beach like a whale. Finally I shook the thin man off with a flick of my wrist and a quick apology and started towards Amy who by now was almost buried in sand. I felt a weight on my shoulders and as I went down, I saw the thin man's bird face, eyes raging like pots of boiling water. "If it's strangulation you want, it's what you'll get," he mumbled and put his skeleton fingers around my neck. Air escaped me and I couldn't find the words to cry out. For what was probably only twenty, thirty seconds I thought I was dead, then the thin man loosened his grip and fell to the side. Amy was standing above him, launching good swift kicks to his side. "How dare you," she said between blows. With her help, I made it back to her apartment where she pampered me, rubbing my neck and back muscles until I was able to relax. I was almost myself again in time for the first race. July 31,1976 I met the fourth man at the Spaghetti Factory at high noon when the place was packed full. We took a table in the centre of things so that my back was pressed up against the back of another man. Safety in numbers. The man across from me was small, rat-like, with a long crooked scar on his right cheek. His eyes looked like two black bubbles. There was no emotion behind them. He was as blank as a wall. "Did Geppy brief you?" I asked. I sat imagining every danger possible in rush hour restaurants. A fork in the heart? A bullet in the belly? Would anyone hear? I thought of shushing the place with a long sombre finger but I didn't. Anyway, Amy was at another table, mere feet away, just in case. The man nodded and said: "I want a clear five thousand. Half now, the rest when the job's done. You don't know my name and I don't want to know yours. When it's over, it's over. I'll take my money and be gone. No hassles." His scar twitched as he talked and I couldn't help but be impressed. "I want her strangled, you know. By the telephone cord. I'll phone to get her into the living room and the rest is left up to you. When you're finished, hang up on me." "Okay," he said. 60 "You'll do it?" I asked, still wary. "It's a deal." He held one of his small hands across the table and we shook on it. "You're quite the professional," I said as I was paying the cheque. "That's right," he answered. "A killer with a capital K." For one quick moment his eyes flared up and the bubbles burst into deep, angry pools, then just as suddenly, they formed again and everything was back to normal. August 1, 1976 Amy and I lay in bed, a beam of stray moonlight fallen across our chests. Our talk was lazy, our bodies quiet. I told Marjorie I went to Sudbury for a day or two. When the night was perfect and the bedroom heavy with predictions of sleep, I rolled over on my side and pressed close to Amy. "Soon my darling," I whispered. "Very soon." K Day: August 2,1976, 6:30 p.m. "There's a board meeting after dinner," I say to Marjorie, spooning fruit salad between my words. There really is one. I arranged it. "Oh that's terrible," Marjorie says, "and you just came back from that horrid Sudbury. I had plans for tonight." "Can't be helped," I say, biting into a cherry. "It's the business that pays for this house, for all your comforts. We have to make concessions to it, don't we?" Marjorie nods and I think that I've silenced her until I feel her foot climbing my leg, rising up into my loins. "Tickle, tickle," she says seductively and winks at me. "No time," I say bluntly and get up from the table. I kiss her goodbye and tell her to go to bed early, that tomorrow night we'll go out on the town. The hot night air cleans the taste of her lips from my lips. She dwells over the bananas in a fruit salad and I sigh thankfully as their flavour melts away in the dull blue evening. At the corner I stop and turn around, looking at the square sunlight that hits the front window. "So long Marjie," I say. "Good riddance." 7:15 p.m. I meet the man out front of my office, on the street. I tell him where to find the rest of the money that's hidden in the house and give him last minute instructions. He is not to make a move until all 6i the lights are out and then he is to phone my number and let it ring three times. I will grab it just before the fourth and act as if the party has hung up. Then, feigning concern, I will phone Marjorie while in the company of my business associates and I will pretend the phone is never answered. The deed will then be done and getting one of the men to drive me home, I will stumble onto the dead, bug- eyed, long-tongued, blue figure of my wife — Marjorie. 9:35 p.m. The phone rings. I'm in the middle of a sentence and I finish it, extend it until the end of the third ring and then I pick the phone up. "Hello," I say and hear the click, then the busy signal on the other end. "Jesus, you'd think people would ring more than three times." All of the men agree with me and the meeting continues. Five minutes go by and I say, more to myself than to any of the men, "Hope it wasn't my wife. She's not feeling too well tonight." They all reassure me blandly and Tom Nixon of Lace and Leather Magazine says: "Give her a call and see. We all need a stretch." "Good idea," I say and pick up the telephone, begin dialing. My heart is slamming against my ribs like a loose screen door in the wind. I feel a bit faint, shivers of fear or anticipation rising from my stomach up into my head. I nearly swoon. The phone rings once. Twice. Three-four-five-six. Seven. Halfway through the eighth the bell is cut off and I hear Marjorie's sleepy voice saying, "Hello." I am as quiet as a dead man. I hear Tom Nixon in the background saying: "No answer huh?" but I ignore him. There is the sound of a struggle in my ear, bangs and whimpers crawling up into my brain. My conscience is almost on fire. There is one loud, tortuous crash, a strained scream and then I hear my wife's voice saying, "Gordon Chamberlain!" Gordon Chamberlain? In her last throes of life she utters Gordon Chamberlain. There is another crash and then a man's voice in the distance cries out: "Marjorie Hamilton, oh no." And the phone goes dead. It is an amputated limb still bleeding in my hands. I drop it into its cradle and Tom says: "My God Michael, you look as if you just heard the stock market crash." I stammer something fortunately inaudible and then in a louder voice I say: "There was no answer, I'd better get home." Tom offers to drive me but I shake my head and dash out the door. I fling alibis aside like extra coats. The night is too hot. 62 10:15 p.m. There are lights on in the living room and from farther down the street, I can see the reflection of the kitchen light on the backyard bushes. I creep closer to the front window on my hands and knees until I reach the brick of the house and slowly raise myself and peer through the curtains. Marjorie is sitting on the sofa, animated as a puppet, chatting away to someone in the chair across from her, whose face I cannot see. She doesn't have a trace of seriousness about her so I gather the stranger is not a policeman. Gathering up my courage around me, I creep to the front door and slip my key quietly in the lock. Before I am even halfway inside, I can hear Marjorie's voice buzzing on like a fly. "So then I knew it would never work unless I could persuade you to give up that nasty habit you had of chewing tobacco." I step on a floorboard that groans back at the sole of my foot. "Is that you Michael?" I hear the couch springs squeak and Marjorie comes walking out into the hall. "Come here Michael," she says, her voice full of excitement. "There's someone I want you to meet." The rat of a man with bubble eyes sits in the living room chair. "Gordon Chamberlain, my husband and vice-versa. This is the man I almost married before I met you," she says to me. "He just dropped over tonight after my not hearing a peep from him for thirteen years. Imagine that." I shake his hand and then bend down to the coffee table and rifle through the pages of Saturday Night where I had hidden the remaining two-thousand and five hundred dollars. It's gone. When I look up, he is smiling an empty-eyed smile. "It's uncanny how we met again," Marjorie is saying. "Just a minute." She bustles off into the kitchen. "Where's the money you fool," I demand. "Forget it," he says. "Anyone who wants to kill Marjorie Hamilton is a snake in my books and it costs you nowadays to be a snake." "I'll call the police," I say, hoping that he, like a bird, might run at the mention of a cat, even if the cat is a phony one. "And we'll go down together." Marjorie comes scurrying back into the room with a tray of tea and Christmas cake left over from the winter. "I'm so glad you came home early," she says to me. I glare at the man and he glares back. I blink. He blinks. He is 63 my mirror reflection. I warn him with my eyes. He warns me with his. "I said I was glad you came home early," Marjorie repeats. "I'm not home," I say and with one last dual glare, I head back for the door. "You're not home?" she asks and giggles. "Not for long," I say, opening the front door. "Where are you going?" she asks, following me. "You haven't heard my story yet." "I'm going to the race track," I say and as the door is shutting behind me, I hear Marjorie saying: "Such a strange man. It makes me wonder sometimes if perhaps I didn't marry the wrong man." Their laughter follows me up the street and gets on the westbound bus with me. I retreat — winded from defeat. 64 Paul Gotro / Two Poems SPIDER IN THE SUMAC The bamboo chimes hang silent, not feeling the sumac or the webbing stuck to the tree's reddening leaves. A spider, stretching a tapis of silk onto the landscape — a tragimonotony of movement, to and fro, up and down — holds the sumac and the chimes like the dropped note of rain in its weaving. A passer-by will see the creature, hideously spinning, or feel its web stuck on their face in the dark — not the effort or delicate measurement, spinning, winning, from branch to branch between the chimes. The spider will be gone. The sumac remains, the bamboo chimes hanging from its branches, singing softly of dragons. 65 GOOD FRIDAY This is the day I wait by the window for three o'clock, For a tree to be split by lightning. This is the day that sits me by the window to drink coffee and smoke. I think, at times, of the church: My son has asked to go. The doors, I say, are made from the wood Of a tree split by lightning. They are large and too hard to open. No one needs two fathers. There is too much understanding in his face: His mother warned me: The world, you say, Is what he sees. At 3:01, The saloons will open. I glance at my watch And blow a smoke ring against the window. Watch it break against the cool surface. 66 Levi Dronyk Baxter Jack He watches the fishermen. They point to where He is near the top of a fir tree. He jumps, soaring toward the water spreads His wings and shrieks. He levels parallel to the sea and His talons find their mark below the surface. On His return to the tree He sweeps over the boats and the fishermen cover their heads with their arms. As He tears at the pink flesh He considers His next assignment. A city job, another citizen on the brink of disaster, He supposes, more violence than that research job. The research into the feasibility of the saxophone replacing the harp as the Official Instrument. His tedium in testing the horn was far from complete when he was recalled. He faintly resented but soon dismissed the lost opportunity of perching on a tall bridge, of wailing into the heavens until They released their harps to fall through the clouds. Baxter Jack is insomniac. Insomnious Baxter Jack hasn't slept, not ever. There he is, easily seen from down below. Any time, night, day, they can see him sitting on the window ledge in his room on the top floor of the Marble Door Hotel. His former friends, they're all former friends now, have torn down the line they'd used to send up food and written messages. Crowds now come to watch Baxter Jack sit. His former friends are nervous looking up at him. They're all acrophobiacs; their stomachs turn when they see him sitting on the window ledge, see him sitting there dropping chocolate chips out of the window and stretching out at arm's length to follow the fall. IT'S OKAY I'VE SEEN MYSELF FALL eagle comix presents THE GENTLE SUICIDE He lets the salmon half-skeleton slip from His grasp and watches it fall to the beach. The gulls converge. Charting His course He flies, 67 wide-winged rises to a designated point, and now gliding to the roof of the Sylvia Apartments. To begin with, He checks His work order: Baxter Jack. Possible suicide. Respond kindly but without interference if possible. Impossible, He thinks. Next, he tests His sight, noting on a moving target, silk tie, mauve, silver pin; pink shoes, red laces, three ends frayed, six eyelets on each shoe. Baxter calls down to the woman. He usually cultivates indifference but he seems to recognize the girl from Bible School. She is or isn't, he decides, and sees her now as the first tourist of the day. Sitting there, he pops five or six chocolate chips into his mouth, lets them melt into a thick sauce and adds a marshmallow. He eats; looking below him, not at the woman but at a cathedral; real or imagined, an open-air church. He sees the walls covered with murals of Hell and is fascinated by the variety of shades of orange. The studied faces floating in fire. Heads of Lenin, Hitler and Stalin. DEATH IS INSTANTANEOUS No it isn't; Baxter Jack considers death. There's a microsecond of inconceivable pain, Baxter Jack guesses, if you pass out on the way down the impact is dreamlike, but hurts twice as much. The Hungarian is happiest at night. He tells himself he'll be dead by morning. Half alive only, with desire, he follows women. He watches men and women enter buildings and tries to memorize the faces of the women before they disappear. Visualizing parades of women, all in evening gowns; women with thick lips; lusty eyes and red tongues. Rows of them with backs arched, waiting for and expecting love. In bed, the Hungarian lays awake. He caresses his own face and promises himself he'll never shed tears over the whole business. Then he sleeps. The Hungarian looks expensive in a rayon shirt, silver suit and maroon shoes. He drives his equally maroon Thunderbird car to the Marble Door Hotel. Finding a spot and staring at the woman with pink shoes he knows that more will come. They came yesterday and he'd plunged his head into a huge cleavage. She'll be back, he thinks, with the other teasers, with their sister, mother, nurse and guardian angel complexes. I'll tell them, he muses, that they belong in movies, that their souls burn in their eyes and that their minds open mine. Come on, just a little suck, he pretends, you're beautiful like Rita Hayworth, come on. Bitches, his thoughts crawl up the wall of the Marble Door and he shouts, "jump you dumb bastard why don't you jump?" 68 WHO ARE YOU Arrivals. On bicycles, in wagons and buses and on roller skates. Coming to save, condemn, condone, exploit, pity, love, hate, pray for, draw pictures of and sling stones at Baxter Jack. Two distinct opinions; soon the chanting begins. DON'T JUMP DON'T JUMP DON'T JUMP DON'T JUMP DON'T DON'T DON'T JUMP "honey, i could have his ass, i mean, give him some heavy loving" JUMP JUMP PLEASE JUMP JUMP PLEASE JUMP JUMP PLEASE JUMP "he should accept the precious gift" 'Jesus, enter his heart and save him from the eternal..." "he doesn't want to jump, can't you see, he wants to sleep" "what! one shot, he's down" 'it doesn't matter who you are if you understand who that is" "you might grow up to be Prime Minister" "i caught a bus, 20 miles" "ssshhh" "he's so young" "that's better" "big deal, i'm on holidays" "ten bucks, wanna bet" "i knew him in Sunday school" 'let's go sit in my car': 69 The Neville twins. Their age is 210. Between them they've witnessed several drownings and a dozen hangings. Lately, they're most visible on the suicide circuit; today, among the jump crowd. Brother John is being dragged down the street by his big dog Rum. Brother John can't keep up to his animal. The dog stops at the Ukrainian perogy peddlar's stand, flapping his long tongue for a handout. By stopping abruptly, the dog Rum sends his master staggering, and finally to a fall with loud cracks that are various bones breaking. ARE YOU DEAD The perogy saleswoman wheels her cart into the crowd. Big Rum dog sniffing behind her, dragging his fallen master past Brother Mike Neville, busily rehearsing children with sling-shots. Brother Mike fails to notice Brother John; they never loved each other anyway. "Okay kids, on the last is enough you fire." "Don't think it'll go that far mister." "It will it will. "Now, ready, 1 2 3 go. "too much too much too much is enough enough enough is too much of enough and enough of too much is enough of too much is enough, Fire." Stones bounce off the Marble Door, hardly close enough to threaten Baxter Jack, and as they deflect into the anti-jump faction, Sri Ohm Jr. steps forward. "Please, your attention, ladies and gentlemen, thank-you. "Consider friends. Our brother, he is not our brother, we are not his keeper. "He must not be influenced by anything he hears. Yet, neither be influenced by his thoughts and desires. Desire not think not. "To find truth his mind must be free so that he may find truth. And then he will find God. God is not g-o-d. This is my truth. Not yours. It is not his. "To find his truth he must be free of fear, examine fear and it ceases to be fear because he is no longer afraid of it. "When you say jump or don't jump he is afraid and no longer free. Truth discontinues and therefore God." STOP YOUR HEART Speeches continue. A reformed drug addict manages to pull the finger out of his nose and the thumb from his ass. A local politician explains the fiscal responsibilities of death, but less effectively than 70 the undertaker who reads from the brochure of special rates. An unemployed train conductor claims to have ridden in a U.F.O. The saleswoman is breaking records. Only sauerkraut perogies remain. Potato and potato/cheese are sold out. All the popcorn vendors are out of stock. New ice cream wagons keep arriving while more budget conscious families are spreading picnic lunches where ever there's space. "Popsicles and Ice Cream Sandwiches," is the cry as Max Soulbrethern addresses the crowd. "Sinners! Sinners open your heart to the light. My brothers. My sisters. Heathens! Pagans! Blasphemers! Wake up! "Rejoice in the spirit of Jesus Christ who died for your sins. Open your eyes. Brothers and sisters open your eyes . . . Jesus .... is coming. Open your hearts let us pray. Jesus saves." Safeway Saves You More. The maroon Thunderbird is parked in the supermarket parking lot. The backseat is a mess. Seat cover loose, red shoe laces, silver suit jacket and the torn pages of a soiled sex manual block the Hungarian's passage into the body of the woman who went to Sunday school with Baxter Jack. "Oooh god this is wrong," she moans as the Hungarian tastes the skin behind her knees. "Ooommff, yummm," the Hungarian attempts to swallow her kneecap. Tedium. The roof is hot and the rhetoric makes Him weary. He is not amused and resists the impulse to rip the Hungarian's scrotum wide open. From what He sees there is no reason for Him to interfere. Baxter Jack is not in danger. Scanning the scene below, He focuses attention on the sketchbook of the illustrator from eagle comix* Serious collectors are busily framing each of the six illustrations behind plates of no-glare glass and Baxter Jack splits a banana down the middle, fills it with strawberry jam and sprinkles on pinches of icing sugar and cake candies. He wipes his chin with the yellow peel and tosses it out the window in hope of some slapstick entertainment. Baxter Jack finds slapstick boring, and therefore believes it might put him to sleep. The skin lands near the perogy wagon and the sales- * We at eagle comix offer our subscribers journalism with a minimum of words. Words are usually titles. Last week's issue pictorially depicted the prison riots with six separate illustrations on pieces of birch bark. Each illustration was titled. For example, *6 was entitled ON TRIAL, in bold-face over the painted picture of prisoner and guard shackled together. 7i woman steps from behind it to chase that Rum dog away, again, and slipping on the banana peel lands in the midst of NewLife Dance Traffic as it prepares for an interpretive rendering of the traditional dance of the flaming asshole. DANCE ME TO SLEEP The Hungarian is succeeding. His white ass appears and disappears from view. "Oooh, get off me," says the woman who sat next to Baxter Jack at Pentecostal Bible School. Tears come. "We made bowls out of popsicle sticks," she sobs as she hears the advertisement, "popsicles and ice cream sandwiches," and the Hungarian sucks the tear droplets from her face with a cocktail straw. "Baxter chewed the sticks," she groans, and remembers how Baxter Jack dropped moist splinters down the front of her blouse. She still loves him and wants to marry him. Her shame is unbearable as she seeks the Hungarian's mouth and sinks her teeth into his lips. The illustrator from eagle comix accepts the story of Baxter Jack as a challenge. I face two equally dull possibilities, she reasons, that he'll jump and that he won't. She decides that her format, in any case, must be unique. The design on the apron of the Ukrainian saleswoman, who's sitting up against her cart nursing scraped elbows, draws the illustrator's attention. Of course, she thinks, hollowed-out eggs. She rushes off to call her editor, but has to speak to the publisher instead. "Of course it's impossible," she screams into the telephone, "so was 60,000 pieces of birch bark. Why do you think you can charge $5,000 a copy asshole? Okay? Yeah, I can get it all on one egg. Okay? Yeah, it should break by midnight. Shit, how am I supposed to know? Yeah, bye." She slams the receiver, a loud noise comes from the maroon Thunderbird and NewLife Dance Traffic leaps into action. The assholes flame in the soft dusk light. The preparation, was painful. Asbestos insulation, the large funnel. Now the chance of overheating. Fearless, they dance in three circles, like a circus, each ring encloses a spectacular solo performance of splits, dips and flips. The crowd diverts its collective stare from Baxter Jack, and is stunned by the blazing energy of it all. I DON'T WANT TO GO THERE 72 Away from the fire and cheering, another circle forms, the society of Baxter Jack's former friends. Determined to end this pageant, the acrophobiacs are divided; some feel that sleep is the answer, while the rest insist upon death. "You used to be his best friend. He'll forgive you and let you in. Then you can push him." "That's murder. I ain't going up there." "Why don't you go sweet-talker? Maybe you'll talk him into jumping." "I say push him off." "Yeah, push him off." "You go." "You go." "Up there? You crazy or what!" "Somebody go." A bowl of cumquat halves in white wine. Baxter Jack savors one with loud smacks. Lifting the bowl to his mouth. The dance was great, he thinks as he now watches the paraplegic martial arts demonstration. To jump? It makes him shiver. He drinks some more. I JUST WANT TO SLEEP "Ah'g'p'n'psshh'mm" "What? Who said that?" The Hungarian. Crazed. His rayon shirt blood-stained. Lips fat and hurting. The acrophobiacs are repulsed and back away. His eyes spill danger after them. He slams a fist against the side of his head and it improves his speech. "P-push himmm!" He is disturbed. More people arriving, and He fears the pro forces outnumber the anti-jumpers. He considers his options. To go down and put the fear of death into all of them would not accomplish anything. They'd soon return. I have no choice, He decides. "JumP Jump Jump" I DON'T WANT TO "Jump Jump Jump" The Hungarian spits blood at the acrophobiacs. They run away. Slowly, he moves toward the Marble Door. "Jump Jump Jump" I ONLY WANT A DREAM 73 "Jump Jump Jump" He spreads His wings, "iiiiiiilllllHIIIIEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeee." The windows of the Sylvia shake, then shatter. Baxter Jack. The crowd is silenced. A devout follower of Max Soulbrethern is ecstasized with fear and allows his piss to puddle on the street. The perogy saleswoman crosses herself, again and again. The Rum dog begins to howl and is joined by screamers whose efforts are terribly feeble in comparison to the original one. No one leaves. He draws Baxter Jack's eyes to the roof of the Sylvia. Baxter Jack sees nothing. Blinded, he closes the book he's reading. He sets aside the mustard coated celery stalks. Baxter Jack yawns and is surprised by it. Penetrating deeper into Baxter Jack with His warm stare. He hates His job as He pierces Baxter Jack's brain. The book drops. The crowd gasps. Baxter Jack falls asleep. AM I DREAMING YET They look up and see him sleeping on the ledge. There he is, with sleep, the gentle suicide. Relief. They think it's over. No hard feelings on the part of anyone except the Hungarian. He waits, watching while the crowd tip-toes away. Sensing His work isn't complete, He guards Baxter Jack, and also tries to define the uneasiness within Him. It's within My power to know, He considers, but I'm not all knowing. I have worked thousands of jobs; this one is not over. His eyes remain fixed to the ledge. The Hungarian skulks along the outside wall of the Marble Door. Eases through the entrance, past the elevator. He creeps up the stairs. Fat lips now trembling; footsteps, one floor, another after another to Baxter Jack's floor. Creaking down the hall to Baxter Jack's door. "Yeah, 850 dozen should do it. Try to have them all drained, okay? What? Yeah, it's a drag he fell asleep. Sure, sure, just drain those eggs. I know. Look, I'll stick around. I need one of him sleep- ing..." "Oh-Pin Da Door," head screams, twice-filled with murder. The Hungarian smashing it open with his head, feet, fists and knees. I MUST BE DREAMING The illustrator from eagle comix sketches. Phone booth offers an angle where Baxter Jack appears to be squeezing his head between his thighs, she grins, he's blown himself to sleep. Before that crude image cements itself another comes bursting in, he's falling. 74 I MUST BE He examines His alternatives. Already, He's frozen time, leaving Baxter Jack suspended in the air, the illustrator wide-mouthed in the phone booth and the Hungarian wild-eyed at the ledge. His choices are narrowed to four. i. to not interfere; to let time resume so that Baxter Jack falls to his death; to hit head first so that the skull cracks along the seam and his brain spills as his spine splits perfectly down the length of his back. 2. to interfere; let the Hungarian join Baxter Jack in a race to the bottom of the Marble Door. 3. let them exchange places; the Hungarian in space, Baxter Jack in the telephone booth and the illustrator on the ledge. 4. to fake it; to somehow demonstrate the magic that immortalizes victims and sells subscriptions. He decides. Time begins. The Hungarian completes the follow- through of pushing Baxter Jack out the window and the illustrator attempts to give sound to the horror she feels. He slaps the air once and steals the scene. In a flash He's holding Baxter Jack by the ankles. His wings drive a small storm behind Him as He ascends. Banking above the Sylvia He takes Baxter Jack further into his mouth. His size doubles as he blows by the window ledge and picks the Hungarian's sockets clean. Baxter Jack is visible from waist to head as He grazes street level and tears the door of the telephone booth with the tip of a wing. She feels His mercy and only Baxter Jack's head can be seen as He climbs once more, climbing and still growing. Stopping high above the city, again His wings extend, and His shape is outlined in hot white light. And then nothing, only night. The illustrator partially recovers and begins work on the design for this week's feature. Painted eggs representing the transformation of Baxter Jack, from insomniac to what the subscribers will meditate over as they sip morning coffee after bringing eagle comix off the front porch. 75 Sean Hearty / Three Poems I LOCK YOU WITH THESE WORDS I lock you with these words into the Christian hump. Your silence will eat at the hinge at night when the moon rages. I force you with this bread to the meated mast. Your mouth will heat the lip of the crutch when breath is still. I damn you with this wine into the blooded form of your womanhood. 76 MY WOUND IS AN ACRE My wound is an acre if I count the sun Where I fuse my nerves' dead ends; If I fire the lemoned light That stings the soft eye; If, in eye, I find the kiss. My heart is a prism if I smash the glass Where I stain the lover's lip; If I plague the singed stream That wets the moist brain; If I mesh the corded blood. Your youth is a spectre if you hold the bowl Where you stock the shining bees; If you suck the foreign fruit That stumps the green tree; If you pardon the sweet saint. Your hand is an engine if you plough the womb Where you bury the rich coin; If you storm the forged mind That clouds the new beast; If you stumble in the dark. Our hair is an anchor and we bruise the roots Where we folded all music's prince. 77 WHEN SKIN DOES WASTE TO FINGER When skin does waste to finger Gods bleed the father stone. When the parent star turns fruit The wasp at raw earth sucks. When, like the mothered fawn, I skid the first-lapped lake, Then frost's first seasoned sting Punishes the child in shade. Then the strapped skies strip the bird, Feather the sea-sand's matter. Then mermen, through the clay hero, Stun the tumbling bee into my hair Where I wax the father's sockets. When does skin waste to finger? The first sleep's deer is dead. All since all the child's first river Ribboned round the rocks, Turned sour in the weather. 78 Tove Ditlevsen, Denmark Translated by Elin Elgaard Fear The bed creaked and, frightened, she stared at the ceiling. Then she placed the coffee cup very carefully in its saucer, prevented it from chinking against the spoon. The bed had a different creak to it when he was awake, different from his turning in sleep. But sometimes it did not creak at all, which was almost the worst. This had been going on for three years, and she never had time to remember what it had been like before. He was a proof-reader. Worked nights. When he came home in the morning his face immediately showed her whether there had been misprints in the paper; sometimes, however, he did not read it till he got up. He was terribly angry with her when there were misprints, and, really, it was a shame, she thought, when after all he did his job so conscientiously. She always took great care to think of him in a nice correct way. But once in a while — like now, for instance — when he was awake, she did think of how cosy it would be if somebody came along, somebody to talk to. In the beginning, Henny would pop in occasionally, as she had always done. Henny was her sister, and she lived nearby. But although they were very careful, talking very low, the bed had creaked all the time. The wakeful sort of creak, and Henny said, "The way sounds carry here!" And they'd started to whisper. Then he had shouted to them there was no need to whisper, he couldn't sleep anyway. And she was always glad to see Henny go. Better so. Actually, she would like to have a cat. Cats are company, and quite soundless. One day, when he was in a good mood, she would ask him if she mightn't have a cat. She looked at the ceiling again. Completely quiet now. Was he asleep? She moved one foot a little, wriggling her ankle. She got too little exercise. Once, they had always gone for walks in the afternoon, or on Sundays. Now he stayed in bed Sundays, too. It was an old 79 bed. It was more run-down than hers, against the opposite wall: he didn't care for the 'marital' bit. She bent down to pick up a thread from the floor. She never cleaned the house till he had left. She accidentally banged her head against the table, making the spoon chink against the cup. The blood shot to her forehead, her heart galloped. How clumsy she was! No matter how careful, always some mishap or other. Why hadn't she left the thread alone? The bed creaked. "Drinking coffee again, are you?" he shouted. "Oh dear," she shouted back," did I wake you? I was only having a drop from this morning." "I could hear you take the lid off the tin," it boomed through the ceiling. "Drink away — all the coffee you like. No need for those idiotic lies." She stood rigid, the cup in her hand. She was about to take it to the kitchen. She listened — if more was to follow. The echo of his voice kept ringing inside her, and she could not move till it faded. Now her heart beat normally again. The bed creaked violently a few times, in triumph. She went out there, put down first the cup, then the spoon, then the saucer. He had been quite truthful: he didn't mind her drinking coffee. He was really quite good-natured. It wasn't his fault that he slept so lightly. She decided to pay Henny a visit. She'd often decided that, hardly ever carrying it out. She liked her sister's children very much, even if they were terribly noisy. She found it hard not to believe that disaster must be the result of so much noise. As a kind of counterweight, she always started whispering. And Henny would laugh, saying she was getting honest-to-goodness weird. Henny said it was Arthur who made her cranky by lying up there creaking all day. But where else should he be? Henny was really quite unreasonable. Uncertain, she took a few steps toward the door. "Where you going gadding about now?" he shouted. Her hand went to her heart. Her throat suddenly felt so dry. Then she cleared it. "No," she screamed. "I was just going to put my shoes on." "But they clatter," he roared, and she could hear that his patience was well-nigh gone. She made a tremendous effort: if she didn't shout at the top of her voice, he declared it impossible to hear her. Otherwise his hearing was excellent. "All right — I won't wear them, then," she shouted, in despair. 80 Sat down at the table again. No sound from upstairs, and ten minutes passed in an ominous, listening silence. Then the silence was broken by a low, comfortable snore — one of the safest in her world of sounds. She stretched her stiff limbs, making joints give. Smiled and rubbed her hands together. It would be at least an hour before he woke up again. It was feasible to get to Henny's and back in an hour. She was alone too much. Once, people came to their place, just like any other home. Her mother had sat back in that chair, her brother on the sofa next to his wife. All went well for a few hours. Then, gradually, he would grow silent. They'd speak to him, and be answered by monosyllables only. She never knew how it happened, but suddenly they couldn't breathe. They spoke in low voices, as if some accident had happened, threw little anxious glances his way. Then they left, left her standing there with far too much food for two people. And with a feeling of having committed a crime. When she came back in — after a nervous, whispered goodbye in the corridor, he'd already fallen asleep in his wing-back chair. When he woke up, he'd be very surprised to hear of their having left. He, too, had had a few friends: a couple of young bachelors who'd sit for whole evenings at a time, attentive to everything he said, while she put out beer for them and collected the empty bottles. They themselves rarely spoke. Truth to tell, they'd been a bit afraid of him, no doubt. She didn't know why. But all this had taken place on another planet, as it were. She'd only think of it when he slept. While putting on her shoes and coat — very carefully, very quietly — she also thought of the child they ought to have had. Of course, she was too old now (soon thirty-five), but when they were young. But already then — on an even more distant planet — there would be long between one time and the next. Only seldom, in darkness and deep silence, would he get the better of his aversion. Afterwards, he had been sort of angry with her. It was never mentioned between them. She disengaged the catch before opening the door: he could always hear its little 'click'. Out in the street, she looked both sides and then, narrow and spectre-like of figure, half-ran the fifty paces to her sister's place. The two children ran into her arms. "Dear me!" she said, touched; "but it IS a long time ago. And I haven't even brought you anything." And they took her hands, dancing with her, round and round, till 81 she got out of breath, sat down laughing, clapping a hand to her mouth as if she'd gone too far and if he could see her now! "I'm off again at once," she told Henny, who was pregnant again, her eyes so merry and warm. "I only nipped across because he was asleep, so I thought — " "Yes yes," Henny said, "now sit down. Do calm down, dear. Keep your hands still." And the room was so light; that was the sun's doing. There was a sewing machine, clothes lying about everywhere, and she didn't know at all why, but suddenly she burst into tears. Then she blew her nose with a mighty blare and couldn't help laughing out loud, couldn't make herself stop. "Oh," she said, "it gives me a stomach-ache. It's true, Henny: it's sitting somewhere in my stomach now. It's downright bubbling with it." And why! there were tears in Henny's eyes, too; and she came up to put her arms round her; something like an ice-crust melted, making her inside soft and light, a moment she would remember forever. She'd never experienced anything so strange. Here she was, just visiting her sister, whose husband he could not stand, because there was so much noise and laughter around him. "Now, listen," Henny said, "it can't go on like this. He's scaring the wits out of you. Don't think we haven't got eyes." "But — " she was speechless, indignant, and she must go — "but, dearest Henny," she said. "What do you mean? I'm just a bit nervous. He doesn't do me any harm, you know. It's just all that night work. Poor thing, he sleeps so badly in daylight. And if only I had a cat — " Now she was babbling. There was really no sense in dragging a cat into this preposterous accusation. She ought to put Henny in her place, and then she did go on, anyway, without taking Henny up on her nonsense: "Just a small kitten, a soft and warm kitten, which would pun- very quietly. It would just lie there, Henny, in my lap, purring all day. Couldn't you get one for me?" "Have you asked him?" "No, but I was going to, this very day. I'll go home and ask him right away. You really mustn't think I'm afraid of him — " She stopped. Her eyes darted about the room. She was listening inside herself. He was awake. She felt it through walls, through oceans, through three years of tense alertness. She flapped her arms 82 a little as if to get out of the chair quicker. The sun hurt her eyes. She longed to sit at the table, listening toward the ceiling. She longed for the sound of the bed creaking. She could not bear to be without that sound. Her heart beat wildly. "I'm sorry," she said to Henny, and "goodbye, children" to the invisible small figures dancing in the sun's rays. And Henny shouted something behind her, but the wind bore it away in the opposite direction. And "yes yes" she shouted back, "yes yes". And if only everything turned out well this one time, and God knows, she thought, I'll never demand a cat if only he's gone to sleep again. If only he isn't awake. She took off her shoes on the outside mat, creeping sideways in the door, as if it would make less noise, the less it was opened. Then she stood rigid, a pillar of salt, in the doorway to the living-room, for there he was, the paper spread before him, propped on the coffee cup. Infinitely slowly he raised his head, let his eyes run up and down her, as if he had never seen her before. "Well," he said impassively, "has there been an accident? You look that way." "No." She took a step toward him, stopped. "I — I was just over at Henny's place for a bit. I thought you'd be asleep — " Her voice trailed off, broke. "I heard you go right enough," he said, again immersed in the paper. She stared at his Adam's apple. It was going up, down — up, down. If only it would stop. If only something would stop. She'd be happy if he would keep his Adam's apple still. "I'd like —■ I mean —- wouldn't it be fun to have a little cat?" "They're smelly," he said, irritated. "You shouldn't let her stuff your head with such nonsense." "No." She hung up her coat in the wardrobe. Then she sat down carefully in her usual chair, at pains to take up as little room as possible. He was reading the advertisements. His face was terrible. Worse than when there were misprints, it seemed to her. She oughtn't to have gone. By always staying in the house, she averted something horrible which was always just on the point of happening, something she was always expecting, something which, daily, minute by minute, she pushed back in its place — the way a wall will crash on you, if you don't push all your weight against it. 83 The clock struck six. He folded the paper neatly, regarded her in silence a moment. "There were no misprints," he said slowly. "Oh, thank God," she said, "thank God! Now, just you forget about that cat, Arthur. It doesn't matter. They smell nasty. You're quite right. I'll just go and start the potatoes off." And she tripped into the kitchen, with a vacant smile, and small, deprecating gestures flailing the air, as if to ward off imaginary flies. She dared not think of what might have happened if, on top of all, there had been misprints. 84 Kevin Irie / Three Poems CROW IN FLIGHT Caught among a snag of trees one crow hooked upon a branch snuffed to silence, still as coal then two black sickles strike the air: a volt of leaves, the branches whips that flail and toss and topple numb while flung and funneled up to break the clouded surface to the sun the crow ascends beyond all sight and wears the sky for feathers 85 THE IRON HARVEST They cut the wheat the wind rolls them eastward more and more the sun flounders through a grey smoking cloud a dull red hole Into the iron jaws the rats are harvested socket, spleen and tails like stalks the rabbits torn the rodents pulped swallowed by the raving bowels a tunneled reaper they fill its hollow vein with blood Brown hands gather the summer's tinder the earth erupts then returns to itself 86 METAMORPHOSIS The ice is a knife twelve inches long that cuts through itself a thousand crystals: the wind enters like a stranger to where it once erased autumn's scars from the ochre earth On his face blood etches itself like scratches of frost Death cleaves his body like butcher's meat fingers fall toes peel off like gloves leaving husks of skin and agonised holes His coat tatters and blows like the ragged wings torn and abandoned by a mutilated bird the winter laps his burial slowly his body floats in a solid pond he sees everything: his eyes are hailstones and the wind rolls his head like some strange tumbleweed across a prairie of untrodden snow 87 Lesley Krueger The Songs of Anna Marten Them funny kids is going out somewhere tonight, you can see what they're up to. The daughters-in-law is running back and forth between the trailers and the house, their hair getting fluffier and their mouths getting redder, oh my, red, like their cheeks too. The sons' hair, ain't much of that left, but what there is gets darker with goo slap-slapped on the head. Only the grandkid sits still, swinging her legs until it comes to me that she ain't going out too, so I winks at her, seeing as how we're in this together. One of the daughters-in-law, she comes over to the chair where I parked myself after dinner and she says to me, she says, "Granny, we're going to a movie at the Odeon tonight. Would you look after Alice?" So I nods at her and says, "Su-ure. Where you say you at?" "The Odeon downtown," she says. So I leans back and listens to the leaving noises while Alice sits there dealing solitary to herself at the kitchen table. "Pheum, pheum pheum pheum," the car starts with that big son of mine giving it the gun and then it quietens down and I hear Gertie, she hates me calling her that, she says, "Rudy, you know where we're going now, do you?" And he says to her, "Shut up Gert," so I can almost hear that nice wife of his, that Doris, move and whisper to Gertie, "Sorry, sorry." They drives off, but not before I gets me an idea from Gertie. They bring me presents each summer when they come from the Coast, them funny kids towing their trailers. Rudy and Doris, they bring me sheets and towels, linen sheets what feel nice against an old body. Gertie and Harold, they brings perfumes in big fancy bottles. Now most of them I likes, makes the old girl feel like a bite of mint. But this year, phew, this year they brings me this awful crap, phew, I open the bottle and think I make better smells farting. So when they leaves me alone I pours it down the toilet, phew phew, 88 and then thinks I should fill it up with something so Gertie's feelings won't be hurt. I starts to fill it with water and then I get me an idea and asks old man Olaffson when I gets the chance to get me a mickey of rum. So he brings it and I pours out the water and pours in the mickey. I ain't supposed to drink. Ingrid don't approve, Rudy don't approve, Doris don't approve, Gertie pretends she don't approve and Harold he don't give a shit, but he's agreeable to the rest. But I likes my nip and it don't hurt no one and old man Olaffson secures it from the liquor store. So anyways, my idea is to get that rum and that Pepsi from the fridge and these pennies from the jar and have me and Alice a fine time. I look over at Alice, there she sits playing solitary, and I says to her, I says, "Alice, you like to play a real game of cards?" "Sure Granny," she says to me. "We play rummy," I says, and rolls the 'r' on my tongue Swede- fashion, the way I rolls the rum. She grins, that one, and I creaks out of my chair with my voice going, "Unh, unh," without me even telling it to. Alice, she watches me, she don't move to help not because she ain't nice, but because it don't occur to her yet that she should. Quiet, she only does what she thinks and not what other people expect. I look at her and I think, Were I like her back when I were i o, 11 ? I always think that, but I was never sure until the other night when I were sitting in the kitchen and them kids was watching the television in the front room. Alice, she's out there on the back porch and after a while, she forgets I'm here. So she starts leaning out into the warm night wind and sings sudden-like in a little open voice, "Oh stars you are so pretty. Oh stars you are so fine in the sky, in the sky. I like you stars, friendly stars, do you like me?" And then she stops and breathes heavy thinking of me in the kitchen, but she don't know I'm back in the Old Country, singing in a low voice to the linden trees. They sure was pretty, them trees against a fine blue sky, the wind pushing through them with slow- moving fingers. And I think, I was like her once. I used to sing. And that's something. So she gets a Pepsi from the fridge, the kid do, and a couple of glasses Rudy got from the gas station on the way up. She puts them on the table and gets an opener and opens the Pepsi, fffzzzzit. Then I says, "Alice, get Gertie's bottle of perfume from my bedroom," and she brings it back to me and I pours a shot into my glass and she says, "Granny, you can't drink Auntie Trudy's perfume. It'll make you sick." But I laughs in this deep old lady's laugh and I says, "This 89 here ain't perfume now. This is rum." And so her face opens up in this big grin which reminds me of the sun coming out on a wide flat field. She hangs onto the back of my chair and sort of kicks it, thump thump, oh that rattles the bones, but she don't know yet. So I gives her a shot in a glass with a funny-looking dog on it and I hits us both with Pepsi. I leans back, that hip of mine I done broke last winter protesting like a barn in a windstorm. Alice, she deals the cards and then takes a gulp of her rum. "Faugh, cough cough," she says, and then has some more. Her cards is in a neat pile. Were I that neat? I don't — And then it comes back to me. Me in the Old Country, little little with long skirts what hide my legs. My hair is blonde, white-blonde, Swede-blonde, and it tickles my neck with soft curls. I is sitting inside learning to knit, darn. Neat rows, lining up straight. I like those for a time. Then I goes outside to the fields, many years running. Planting, tending, picking, sometimes in between stealing them little ears of corn that taste so sweet they make you float off with the wind. Them years I talk in different words, words that jump and race like Alice-songs. I sing to the fields, the trees, the cow — she's a friend — to the little kids in cradles. Then I sings to the little kids in graves, sometimes that happened too. Kids don't croak so easy these days. Alice, she born so early in the old days she croak for sure. Then the mother she would have cried and folded away all the little clothes until the next time coming and the pa, he makes the box and digs the hole. Doris, though, she cry plenty anyways, do I remember this correctly. Maybe because she knows Alice is going to be the only one. Gertie don't have none, though, like Ingrid, not a one there neither. Alice she's the only grandkid and that old man, he would have hated no one having a boy and the name dying. So what's so hot about Marten anyways, I asks. That Alice, she's fit to end us all. Su-ure she is. Look at that pile of pennies by her elbow. She been saying "Rummy," "Rummy," "Rummy," like she got the hiccoughs. She been beating the old lady, she's drinking her rum, gulp gulp, and I pours her another shot of the stuff and belches. I grows up on that farm happy. Sure I was happy, running free. I don't have to worry and see things get done. There's always someone standing behind me to make sure they do. And that's a whole measure of freeness to have that, so when the wind calls you can go running. 90 Do this one run? I never seen her. But cooped up in them old cities running ain't worth much. You just end up at places like you started, passing more places like the ones at the beginning and the end with feet pat-patting against the hardness. I think I see her mind go running sometimes though, as she sits singing. Singing, singing. How I sang. That's how Samuel said he first seen me, singing over the fields. I were 16 with big hips, big tits and lips and shoulders, a Swede farm girl made for working the earth. He were new thereabouts, walked down to his uncle's place, the third son hired out to make do. Ya he were big and wide with hard blunt moves that made him stand out among the poorer bent folks. Yet he were gentle and knowing too, that Samuel, when he felt private alone with you. He told me things and said he liked my songs and married me when I were going on 17 in the Old Country still. He still makes me tender, that Samuel, old woman going on 75 though I be. He calls up memories of teeth and long waved hair what is gone, leaving me with damn old falsies what click and a grey scrub- brush on my head. That Samuel though, he had one bee in his bonnet. He would go to America, even though I find out there's a kid on the way. Now I don't think of saying nothing contrary because Samuel, he's like my ma and pa gone, he stands behind me to make sure things happen proper. But for the first time I see this means not just freedom to run, but ropes to tie you to others' ideas, and I wonder how you has both at once and cries. And rummy, here I got a rummy old fool woman sitting here in her memories. I don't see it right away and gets one of them hot- cold hits of fear in the forehead what says, "Woman, you old." And I gets this bad picture in my head of that hospital what I went to last winter with that hip, where they sit in memories and shit and that's all. And I think then, Anna Marten, you never gets lost that way. You keeps a hold of yourself old girl. And for a while I were scared to remember, until I get scared thinking of everything else too. You try thinking of what's in the newspapers and magazines and you get scared just cause you don't understand a lot of what's there — you must of missed something somewhere along the line and what's that say about you, then? You get scared too after a while watching the boob tube, since you start thinking, how them pictures get there? Just like you think, that phone, where the voices coming from? And you gets scared of your own past and a present you don't understand and after that you gets scared of your own 91 future. So many things you don't know. What does happen to a body when it croaks? And you get touchy and jumpy and Ingrid says in her long-distance phone voice, "Rudy, I just don't know how to handle Mother after her hip. She's one big bundle of nerves and she's wearing my nerves to a frazzle." And you sits there thinking, how can I tell you Ingrid but what I'm scared to die, you'd be so embarrassed. So there's a while when I just sits and pulls myself together. I thinks, I got to live my life in little pieces what is easy to chew. I got to bring my vision in, thinking in parts and not letting the old brain go leaping and jumping and getting scared. I'm strong, ja, I'm a strong old bugger of a woman and I does. Have another drink, Anna, varsagod. Tuk, don't mind if I do. I wins, I is on a winning streak and that kid, she's pleased. She don't like winning so easy against her old Granny. To show how pleased she are, she takes one special penny she's been touching all night off her pile and she says, "Granny, here's a real neat penny for you. It's old. I like it." And I peers and squints at it, but even with my glasses it's pretty fuzzy, so I asks Alice to read it to me. And she looks at it again and says, "Nineteen twenty-eight. I like them from the twenties. That's a long time ago and you don't see many around. Some from the thirties." Her sentences is short but her words run on long. The rum is getting to her and I says to her, I says, "Kid, I were born in 1885. What you think of that, eh?" And she nods. "Sure I remembers 1928. Nineteen twenty-eight? I remembers a long time before that. We had a farm in the Old Country and me a little girl. And then a married woman with a bun in the oven." She looks at me sideways and grins. She knows. "And then I is a married woman with a bun in the oven on an old boat in 1904. We is crossing the Atlantic." Crossing the Atlantic in a puke-ship of sick Swedes. Tall white and yellow people with green faces heading for America. I move among them, the sick Swedes and Norskas, cleaning up and tending. I am 19 and considered long time gone a woman. "You and Grandpa Marten were coming to Canada, Granny?" the kid says, her head on the side. I is slightly surprised. "No, me and old man Samuel. Samuel Samuelsson." She don't know. Them funny kids, them asshole kids with their grown-up secrets. They make her grow up and think it's a shame to marry twice if they carry on like this. Makes an old woman want to heave. Funny 92 kids. What they think if they find out I only marry once, not twice, and then not to their pa? "Samuel Samuelsson, sure. He's my first husband. Big Swede. We go to America. We get off the boat and he talks Swede and no one understands us, only pushes us into lines, into more lines, stamp stamp us and we is on a train with most money gone and the other Swedes, they say Minne-sota." And we sticks to them and talks, me with the other young wives and him with the men. They say, Samuel Samuelsson, you want to be a big farmer, you need more train money to go to Canada. You stop in Minnesota, you work in the mines, make money and go. So we go to Minnesota, bun pops out of the oven the second day on the train. The other women help. I remember making my body rock to the train, that's all. Minne-sota. We settles down in a town with other Swedes. Other Swedes help us get a house, not with a boob tube like I got now, didn't have them, a little house outside town. That Samuel, he gets a mine job and I stays home, tending the baby and the house and the garden, happy. Singing? I sang. I is happy with that baby, nursing it, singing to it. Other Swede women come to me, we make shy talk of strangers, but I don't need them. I sing to my baby in old songs, new songs following the pattern of the wind, the drop drop of the rain. So when this new sound comes from the mine one day, I is rocking the Johan baby and singing to it and it seems quite right to make up a song of toot toot toots. I joggle him and sing toot toot toot and laughs and I swear but that he smiles, that baby do, and that's why I don't believe the wives when they run and tell me there's a cave-in come to the mine. I sits and laughs and rocks my baby in the sunlight and it's only when they brings him in broken and black that I starts this scream and I do say I ain't never heard anything like it before and since and I never want to neither, no I don't. But what's that noise now? There it are. Me singing in a deep old lady's voice in rocking sad Swede words. The kid she's half listening, eyes closed, and I stop like she done in her song to the stars. Who told that old voice to start singing, eh? And she opens her eyes and says to me, "Teach me some Swedish swearwords Granny," before she falls onto the table. Clean cold passed out. I passed out after the old man died. Then I come to and me and an old woman we laid him out and buried him. And then, I forget how, I get a job as a cook on a farm for a widowman and his hired help. I take that kid John along and he starts growing up in the 93 healthy farm air. Sometime when he is about two I start singing to him again and sometime when he is about five he dies, Johan baby, that John kid, he up and dies on me. And now I know I can't stay in America no more, so I takes my bit of money and I catches a train to Alberta where I got an aunt and she got a son and a farm. They says I can cook, the old lady's getting wobbly, and I can cook there. They're round about Drum, down south, and I takes a train into town and walks to the Marten farm. I can do these things now. I has to. Nobody's standing behind me to help me out if I muffs it. I muffs it and I go hungry and I go underground. Somehow I don't want to croak yet. My teeth is fine and my hair is strong yellow waves and I is 25. Well that farm is some farm for sure. They has two quarter sections of fine land and the wheat has a way of running and bending in the wind what makes it look like the hills is bowing. We have a big vegetable garden what I tends and weeds and some chickens and pigs and milk cows what I milks. There is cats all over the barn, small quick-moving cats with slippery eyes and ears half gone in the winter freeze. I names them and they follows me and Peter, he's mad, them cats is supposed to be hungry barn mice killers, I probably likes mice too. But I growed up on a farm and I pats the cats and knows not to feed them. I only feed him and he can shove it up his rear end, which is a way of talking I learned on the last farm with the widowman, who used to pat my round Swede ass. Ja Peter, Pete. He was a funny one, sometimes into a bottle, which is where I learned this. Later I come up to his room at night when he's liquored up and find him on his knees praying. "God, please keep them ghosts away." So I laughs and he starts up and I says, "So you believe in ghosts, Pete Marten?" And he says, "I ain't sure if I believe in ghosts now nor in god neither. But I figure if there is ghosts, there is a god too, and if I asks him, he'll keep the ghosts away. But if there ain't no god to answer my prayer, there ain't no spooks neither, so I'm safe there too." He spoke so serious I didn't know if he were joking. Later I finds out he weren't, later when his mother dies, later when I becomes his sorta wife, and that story sums up for me the whole of Peter Marten. Crazy coot. Stooperstitious, no practical sense, believes in omens. You thinks god spends all his precious time sending omens to Peter Marten. Pete, sell the farm, move to Grande Prairie, to Calgary, to Edmonton. Buy a car Pete, sell a car, try to make a quick profit, god says. Peter sees a cloud shaped like a horse, it means this. A cow 94 pisses upwind, it means that. God spends so much time sending Pete Marten messages, he never has time to work things out. But Pete Marten, he's so helpless, I stand behind him, behind them three kids, fixing up the ends of things. That Pete Marten though, he gets liquored up and he bashes us around any number of rooms, although he's mighty sorry afterwards. I'm sorry too, and bruised, and I washes his back with warm soapy water and thinks, poor little man, you won't ever understand why, will you? And until you do, you won't ever make things work out. And so we lives, and so we lives. Harold, he's too young to go to the first war, too old to go to the second, but Rudy he goes to the second, to Dieppe. They never talk about the war and I never know, until I start reading them books and magazines after my hip. And then they frighten me like nothing ever frightened me before, because I think, I never understood those wars. But even if I did, there was nothing I could do about it anyways. And here's me thinking and being superior to the old man because I got it into my head that if he knew what was going on, he could have handled things proper for both of us. He couldn't, though. Not alone, not with me bitching and screaming, with everyone else saying, Peter Marten, that head- in-the-clouds fool. Maybe he knew somehow there weren't never nothing he could do on his own. Maybe those really were omens, bad omens, always bad, showing what would happen if we didn't all believe. And so one night I prayed, "Dear god, if you are there, please keep Pete Marten away from me, if he is there, because I couldn't stand having to face him knowing he was right." And me 74, thinking this. And me, 74. That old man, he died in '48. Cancer got him and he stank lying dead. Ingrid, her husband were dead too, from the war, and she got a pension and we got this little house. Part of a house, actually. We share it with other families and they make noises, noises now, late though this be. What noises? Traffic noises outside, walking noises upstairs, kids hot summer night-time yells. Alice snores quiet at the table. Her mother, that Doris, she says the kid's got to have her adenoids out. Her cheek's in a pile of pennies. All careful I move her special penny over by her nose. Least I think it's the right one — feels old, worn like me. I leans back, creaking. Hear more noises. What they be? An old deep scratching. What's that? Me singing another Swede song. Ja, and a "Pheum pheum," from outside. Voices, and there's that Doris talking soft yet high in words that carry through the 95 night. They catch up in my song, bending through it, and I change the tune so her words fit. I make that Doris sing, ja, and close my eyes. Then that Rudy, deep bear voice, and I gather it into my Swede song too. Harold, Gertie, Harold, Gertie, and my song brings their words in with a jumble of Swede and English. They marry during the thirties, those two, and Doris and Rudy too before he goes away to war and my song is sad since they have but one kid between them. This Alice. She sleeps, her face in the pennies and her glass in her hand with the fingers on that dog's nose. So I throw something about stars and a few Swede swearwords into my song just to fit her in too. And those funny kids in the hall they quit talking, even Gertie who don't quit talking ever, except when someone mentions that time when she were in the hospital in '42, which was when she got rid of a kid. I'm singing, they're quiet, all bunched up out there. Then that Doris she comes into the room and she looks at me and at Alice and she says, "What Granny, what?" while I sit back in that chair singing. Then Rudy walks in behind her and picks up my glass and has a sniff and I put the bear back into my song for him. Doris she grabs the glass and has a sniff and shrieks and my old lady's voice lifts up as far as the old body'll let it go. Then Ingrid shrieks and Gertie shrieks and I start laughing an old lady's rasp and Gertie shrieks again and I say, "Tell us about your operation in '42, Gert," and she shrieks again and Harold says "Mo-ther." Ja, and there goes that song again, jumping in Swede risings and fallings as Rudy looks at me disgusted and picks up the kid and throws her over his shoulder. She belches, I belches louder for effect. "Mo-ther," Harold says, he says to me. I leans back even farther, as far as an old body can, my eyes closed and that song walking around me. Then I opens my eyes and winks at Rudy and he can't help but half grin back, that Rudy, and wink too. I belches. We're all in this together, I thinks, all of us, and my voice swells to catch them in a ringing Swede song rising high on the night wind. 96 A. Labriola SILENT FILMS Tih Minh (1919), take me into The vast house, through the listening rooms, With ornamental tables, the carved staircase, And the portraits of limp women, sleeping Let me touch all the sobs of their breasts, Like a beloved assassin Burdening anguish, moaning voluptuous hymns To the polished skull On the table, shatters of stillness Inset with burning shells The pearls which drown their eyes, Drown us in wakening horror With statues murmuring The faint greed of paranoia Lift the skin of time To find the disquietening sleepers And the flowering shells of solitude They wear like hysterical bouquets Early, I was the Skeleton (man or woman) At the scented feet of the voluptuous Theda Bara Whose anthropomorphic body Was/is as corrupt as the Isotta-Fraschini of the murmuring 20's Imagine her body, now dead, as the automobile Delirium or the bird descending To pick clean my bones with tremors of doom I touch the jewelled asp adorning Her breast, memory and desire, Beyond dark, or forbidden love I am talking about remorse The chimerical destroyer, desperately In love with the man-eater 97 We'll take our place among photos of Garbo In Wild Orchids (1929), in the sleeping city Or the immeasureable garden, we'll be like Garbo And the beautiful Robert Taylor in Camille Or the World War I lovers: Cooper and Hayes As poisonous as the same glance that went between them Or the drowned eyes of child-women Lillian Gish, May McAvoy, Mary Pickford (1927) All the bee-sting lips and dreaming eyes, now silent Yet all these mirrors shatter Glamorous lipstick on a cigarette or a glass We come to it now, Especially the lips of Heddy La Marr And one thing is certain Their angelicism without genius or love Lurks and limps with death itself In the presence of that desire, Silent, they sink through boredom, The stinking shadows of Error and Fame And they do not touch my darkening soul Fluttering like a moth To the flaming of nightmare Or the despair of old films And do not touch me when we leave the house Waste and empty When my body, too, is a spice bowl Like Betty Grable's, A pomander of broken promises 98 Beth Powning Mothers Gavin and his mother watch the goats coming up from the alders. Mists drift across the hillside beyond the pasture. The air smells of damp earth and balsam. Behind them a house trailer crouches against the grey sky. Tar paper on the goat shed roof glistens dully. Gavin sits on the top bar of the fence. It is a cedar sapling and springs slightly under his weight. He grips it, leaning forward with his rubber boots on the lower bar, and watches the goats intensely as they straggle up over the greening field. Their submissiveness makes him feel powerful. His eyes are cowlike, too big, like his teeth, and his head. He hunches awkwardly, knobby wrists bare below the frayed cuffs of his denim jacket. He glances over his shoulder at the mother collie. She is huddled on straw, chained to her hutch by the diesel tank. She never takes her eyes off Helen and Gavin. Even from here, he can see their whites, sorrowful, accusing. He glances at his mother. She is studying the hillside. Her face seems rumpled, slightiy, with anxiety. Gavin feels important. Five children, and none of the others had even bothered to offer to stay home and help her search. "Wha'd she want to drap the pup off there for, anyway, Mum?" Helen moves suddenly, as though startled. She is strong, stocky, but there's an apologetic expression on her face, a look of hidden refinement, and an apologetic set to her shoulders, as though she's not quite accepted, or believed, what she's become. Her hands are shoved into the pouch of a grey sweatshirt and Gavin knows they are clenched into fists, hidden in there. She stands with one leg forward, the knee bent. She shakes her head slightly, rapidly wipes her nose with the back of her hand. Her eyes drop automatically to the goats coming out of the grey silent landscape. 99 "Just jealous, Gavin," she says lightly. "Wants all my attention." "She musta known that was the very one," he says, outraged. Helen nods simply, not looking at Gavin. "Old bitch," he adds explosively, and looks evilly over his slouched shoulder at the dog. The collie is still staring down at them. She seems to writhe forward inside her fur as she feels his scorn. The goats are almost to the gate. Their small hooves tap fastidiously on the hardpacked soil, on bits of yellow straw. Mist settles on their coarse brown and black coats and the hair is bristled along their spines. They seem aggrieved. Old Molly's bag drags on the ground, blue veins bulge, the goat waddles and stares at Helen with unfeeling yellow eyes. The herd jostles together vaguely. A bell clanks, a tail lifts and droppings rattle to the ground. There's a heavy jouncing thud as a truck hits a pothole in the dirt road, and Gavin grins at his mother. But she seems almost not to know he's there. She's staring back at the hill again. She is composed, her face is serene. But she's like a child, innocent of her transparency, not realizing how the crow's feet, the downward lines around her mouth, the forward jut of her jaw, even the wisping of her greying hair, reveals the anxiety that underlies and supports the composure. She squints hopefully as though she can see something moving. A breeze stirs her baggy doubleknit pants, she puts her hand to her bare throat, gathering the collar of her sweatshirt. "Cold, Gavin, eh?" she says without looking at him. She speaks lightly, as though nothing is ever as bad as it seems. Gavin's eyes slide sideways at her. He's afraid sometimes of her cheerfulness. The goats huddle around the gate. They wait in unquestioning stances, a head up staring at Helen patiently, Old Molly's freckled white ears drooping, her lips fumbling at the straw. Gavin swings his legs over, jumps down importantly. "Mus' take them in now, Mum." Helen looks at the herd. Her eyes widen slightly, become vacant, her lips tighten as she stares at the ground, at the eighty black and white ivory hooves. She nods, then lifts her eyes and stares at Gavin with the same expression. "You take them in Gavin. I'm ..." she glances at the trailer. The mist looms nearer, the ragged maple trees by the road have become indistinct. "... I'm just going to have one last little look." ioo Gavin's mouth opens. He turns jerkily, looks at the goats. "But...." "I know, I won't be long," she says quickly. She seems almost embarrassed. Then Gavin feels smug. "Hokay," he says exuberantly, and slides back the top bar. "This way, ladies!" Helen disappears surprisingly quickly, a vivid figure plunging down the hill at a half-trot, her arms out for balance, her hands in fists. She can feel the muscles at the backs of her legs as she goes up the old logging trail once again. It is so steep she climbs with her toes pointing out. Her insteps feel the scrabbly wet soil through her rubber boots. Red beech saplings thrust through the soft layer of decaying leaves. There are white violets, innocent in their tiny delicacy, of footsteps, tractor tires. At the top she stops, leans against a spruce tree. Her fingertips grasp the grooves of rough bark, she puts her other hand on her chest and feels her heart thudding. Under the mist, nothing stirs. Leaves are limp, the trees fade back, their trunks become like columns of smoke that might drift away, and there is a sound of dripping, a smell of wet leaves, soil, spruce resin. A thrush drops five notes into the quiet, the sound hovers, trembles, fades away. . . . the children have no notion of the way the front wears thin, the way she and Donald build it again and again, when the requests for shoes, hockey sticks, hairpins, records, fall like hail on their precariously renewed stock. But it will never be otherwise. Never. Never. The pups were born yesterday, purebreds, worth seventy dollars apiece ... the pup had lain in her cupped hands limp and soft, sleeping trustingly. Helen, kneeling alone in the pen, in the sunfilled barn, quiet save for the sudden fluttering thuds of sparrows against the window, had felt a desire for the pup that startled her with its force, its boldness. She had sat back on her heels and traced the pup's neat skull with her finger. It would not desire her, or possess her, it would not be inseparable from her, she would need neither to hide nor to give .. . the mother dog had whined, wormed away from the sucking puppies and nudged her head under Helen's hand, and Helen had risen onto one knee, stroking the dog absently and gazing at the pup as though something unstoppable had suddenly stopped. .. . 101 Helen pushes off from the spruce tree and goes on up the trail. She walks with one hand on her waist, she is limping as though there is a stone in her boot, and yet she is unhurried. "Here pup," she calls, calmly, as though the pup might be following her. There's a feeling of space, the mist becomes denser and whiter, she hears a hoarse croak and the soft rushing of feathers as a raven flies over the clearing she's come to. The road still winds ahead, but it is no longer an alluring path. R.aspberry canes are starting up through moss, stumps rise from a tangle of grey slash on either side of her. She stops again. She sniffs and wipes her nose, she hunches her shoulders and stands irresolutely listening. Hair strays over her forehead and she tucks it back vaguely with a finger whose knuckle is baggy and holds garden soil in its creases. And then her hand drops onto the top of her thigh and rests there while she pauses expectantly, hopefully, and yet hesitantly, as though Donald, children, chores, are gathering behind her as naturally and relentlessly as the dusk. She turns suddenly off the trail. She is picturing Donald's face as she grasps a dead branch, pulls herself up onto a fallen tree, stands looking over the slash and then drops awkwardly into the grey branches. They are like the curved backbones of bleaching animal carcasses, they crackle under her boots and she plunges through to the moss that grows softly underneath. A branch scratches her cheek, she has to stop to pull a twig from her hair. He is incredulous, his eyes are squinted in a mocking leer, he's grinning, yet she imagines his uncertainty. He's half-afraid of the part of her he has never understood. And she could not explain it even to herself. The feeling of anger, of loss, of longing, is unfamiliar and yet demanding and more powerful than all her impulses of control. And it pushes her through the slash as though she is thigh deep in snow, caught in a sudden storm and heading desperately towards home. But it is hopeless. After awhile she stops in the middle of the slash. The woods are silent, as though listening to her frantic crashing. She rubs her forehead, looking down and breathing deeply through her nose. Her eyelids are heavy with sweat, her shirt sticks to her back, her hair is lank with mist and exhaustion. Her emotion gathers to a point. She closes her eyes and presses 102 hard with her fingers, imagining the small black mother collie slinking stealthily, swiftly, with animal sureness to the most inaccessible spot in the woods, with the pup dangling from her jaw, its paws flopping helplessly, its tiny muzzle pointing towards the ground, innocent and secure in its mother's grip. Helen's arm drops suddenly, she looks up as though relinquishing a pointless anger. She seems to stop, all over. Her search ends. It is a familiar feeling, the simple, patient cessation. She has accepted, again, and again, and again. She has stood before defeat quietly, all her life. The mist wreathes over the grey boughs. Half-furled ferns are bent, glistening. Far off a thrush calls and its notes seem clarified by the silence. Then she sees the pup. She doesn't move. She stares at the small black body lying under a branch that curls over it protectively. It is as though she has to see it without recognition, she has to look away again as though going on with her search, calmly, while her mind tells her what she's seen. Then, cautiously, she looks back. The little black body is exactly the same, it is perfectly motionless. She looks away, looks up at the white sky. Her legs are braced apart, her boots press against the broken branches. She closes her eyes. A muscle twitches in her cheek. She stares down to her left, down towards home, down off the hillside. She nods very slightly, seeing nothing, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. Suddenly she turns and thrashes across the scattered debris. She stumbles, catches herself, whispers something to herself, stops to tug her sweatshirt from raspberry prickers, looks sideways, her face strained, her eyebrows lifted and tense with bitter disappointment, the struggle not to care and helplessness before sadness. She kneels next to the pup. It lies on its side. One eyelid is partly open, there's a viscous glisten. Its head lies back heavily, its paws and legs are flung out, it is like a pup deeply exhausted but there's no rise and fall of ribcage, its body has been abandoned. She strokes the pup. Her hand on its flesh makes one leg pull up stiffly, makes the eyelid lift, slightly. For one brief moment she allows herself to remember the moment of the pup's birth, when it had turned its head blindly, trustingly, 103 out of the iridescent slime. And afterwards, when it had fallen asleep close to its mother's pink belly. Then she lets it go. Her hand goes on stroking the cold, dewed fur. She sits quietly, feeling the mist settle on her hair just as it settles on the ferns, the moss covered rocks, the black fur of the pup. She knows they are down there, waiting. The mother dog, Gavin. Yet the trailer seems far away, a remote place of heat and exhaustion and senseless movement. Her hand goes on stroking the pup, but as she stares at it something drains out of her face, out of her body, sucked away with the coming dusk as though tendrils reach up to her, all the way from beyond the woods, and the alders, and the pasture. When Helen reaches the edge of the pasture, she sees Gavin sitting on the fence up at the top, waiting for her. He is whistling. He's not waiting anxiously but he stares with childish incuriosity over at the neighbour's barn, where cows are filing through a doorway. He seems to be holding himself carefully, as though full of some surprise that he doesn't want to spill before she gets there. His face is a pale spot up there, and behind him the mist makes the light from the trailer windows soft and blurred, like candlelight. Night is crouched in the mist, ready to spring down on them. Helen walks through the shallow brook at the bottom of the pasture. The water eddies around her boots, the tone of the water changes, rushes chockily, pebbles roll and rattle. She walks up the pasture like a nun, her hands clasping her forearms so that her fingers are tucked inside the sleeves of her sweatshirt. She doesn't pause, she walks steadily, looking at her boots coming up, up, and up, and up. Beside her, there are beads of mist on the page wire fence, the fenceposts are dark. Soggy bits of yellow lichen grow on their tops where the maul frayed them. She glances up briefly and sees Gavin, watching her now, and she looks down again without waving, as though she's holding something frail and fragile to her stomach. "...find it?" She pretends not to hear. Food and beds and broom and dust- mop and socks and boots and cat dishes and money and mud and gravel and holes. 104 "Did ya find it." It is a demand. There's a familiar leap inside Helen. Irritation, and the quick quenching. She's closer now and she looks up. He looks unsure, one leg is reaching down, groping for the next rung, his arms holding all his weight as he starts to come towards her and yet holds himself back. "Yes," she says quietly. The word hurts. "What?" He's down now, he comes along the path running a stick along the page wire, click-a-click-a-click-a-click. He comes right up to her, he turns and walks along next to her. She feels his smallness, his leechlike closeness, his trusting insistence. "Mum, didja find the pup?" They're at the barway. Helen takes her hands out of her sleeves, slowly, without looking down at Gavin, and crosses them on the top bar of the gate. She looks up at the dog house under the diesel tank. The mother dog has not moved, it's as though she's been poised all day waiting for Helen to discover her guilt and now her body quickens as her eyes meet Helen's. "I found the pup, Gavin," Helen says quietly, but not lightly. Her voice is edging towards harshness. Gavin looks up at her sharply, then looks at her arms on the fence. Then he glances up at the dog because Helen is looking that way, but he looks back at her, as though he needs an explanation but doesn't dare ask, and isn't sure why he's suddenly afraid. Helen leans forward and looks directly at the dog. "It was dead," she says, distinctly, across the tumbled timbers and the wild rose bushes. The dog convulses into a sitting position. Her mouth opens in a collie smile, and she pants. One paw comes up. Then she barks, once. It's a mute plea for understanding, for forgiveness of an act as incomprehensible to the dog as the need which prompted it. Helen looks away, shakes her head impatiently, not wanting to see the dog's pathetic eagerness, not wanting to admit her own understanding and angry sympathy. She shoots the top bar back, feeling her harshness turning subtly to irritation. "Old pest," she says sharply. Gavin is looking up at her. "Come on," she adds, waiting for him to hop over. 105 She goes on ahead of him. "Dead because her mother was a . . . " She hears the quick flap of Gavin's boots. "Just a little pest," she adds quickly, looking down at his black head. Gavin breaks into a trot, runs ahead of Helen and then turns, facing her in the path. Helen has to stop. The hillside is a darkening hunch against the sky now. The world is close around them, sheds, old tires, figures moving across the windows, the smell of the chicken yard. She pushes her fingers back through her scalp. The backs of her legs feel hot, hollow. She stands with one leg forward. Her body feels heavy and yet rugged with childbearing, with animal handling, with wood splitting. With endurance. "Just a nuisance, that's all, wants all my attention," she says again, beginning to feel ashamed. "Mum," Gavin demands. His big head is forward, anxiously, his mouth is open and she can see his teeth and his hands hang out of his sleeves and they're clenched into fists. "I milked all of them," he says importantly. The game begins again, with its familiar rules. Helen, gazing at her son, out of her tiredness and her disappointment, feels their intricate demands start their push and pull inside her, filling the painful place of emptiness. She crosses her arms. The crow's foot wrinkles deepen beside her eyes, which have become gentle even though her mouth still pulls down at the corners from weariness and failure. "You never did." His face seems to open, his anticipation is rewarded. "Even Molly!" "Not Molly." She follows him as though his jauntiness, his pride, pulls her against her will. The light is on in the barn and she steps over the rotting sill, looks down the row of bony backs, smells molasses, sweet hay, hears jaws crunching. Gavin touches Old Molly lightly with his stick and looks at Helen as though he does not see who she is, and yet he knows her better than anyone else ever will, and needs her more. "I milked her, Mum," he says. And her desire for a simple love fades away as silently and stealthily as it came. 106 Nicholas Mason-Browne MEMOIR We used to live in cargo lifts. This was in Shanghai. Sometimes we tried to hear the pigeons pecking at bread-crumbs above our heads, but never did. Curled up in tea chests, we picked the straw out of our hair and wondered if it were the Chou Kingdom or the Han Dynasty, or if people still read "Dream of the Red Chamber", but couldn't decide. One of us talked endlessly about the Civil Service examinations. Another went mad and thought he was a lacquered bridge in Canton. In the end, we died. Our skeletons were like straw. The fog-horns went on hooting. 107 Dave Richards Husband and Wife Gratten (1927) Gratten shuddered and put his hand over his face. Everyday there was something. Everyday. In the morning she'd walk along the hallway, and he'd hear her voice and Janet's saying 'Yes Mrs. Gratten' long before he rose. Her face was soft toward him, to the idea of him, her flesh graced her nightclothes. There was a close scent of reclining bodies when he woke. In the morning she'd walk along the walkway. He'd think about the grove, about the day she signed her shares in Gordon's store over to her brother. Yet everyday there was something. "I'll take him fishing some other time," he said, softly. She didn't answer. He didn't watch her face. Whenever he looked at her face he'd be reminded. Twice she'd given him money, and twice he'd done something with it. This morning too when she'd looked at him in the kitchen and nodded her head quickly it made him flush. A feeling passed like cold stone and he wanted a drink. "You tell me how you were brought up," she said. Her voice ached in the evening air. "You tell me how you were brought up — hiding behind your mother so your father wouldn't beat you — and everything else — and then you have children — and you let some man take Ernie fishing." "He's not some man," he said. "He's my foreman — I'll get him to do what I damn well please — outta yer Goddamn childhood because ya had everything, because ya had that safe sorta life that let ya graduate, and I grew up without one cent to rub against the other." He shuddered and raised himself on his elbow. They sat behind the front veranda screening. Across the lawn there was a light rigged to a pole and a swarm of flies under it. They heard the Bay. The tide was full now. This afternoon Samual had hurt his right arm placing the last timber, but he'd taken the mower into the yard and pushed it along with his left. His right arm hung limp out 108 of his shirt and Gratten had watched him from the bay window, but he didn't want to go out to him. There was something frantic in the way he pushed the mower, his eyes narrow and hard as if he wanted to be rid of something. Then Amanda went out from the kitchen and told him to stop. "Maybe you should come back tomorrow," she said, "and finish it then — there's no sense straining yourself." He kept pushing the mower as she spoke. There was a smell of cut grass in the air and Gratten began sneezing. Samual looked up and saw him staring out the bay window and he turned the mower around and went along another row, close to the house. The grass was moist when it was cut and clotted the blades, so it must have been hard to push. Gratten watched him. Amanda came in and said: "Daryll why don't you tell that man to go home — his arm's all bruised." "He's got a mind of his own," Daryll said. "He hasta come and ask me for time off — I don't go running out to him and tellin him to take it off." Samual flipped the mower over with his left arm enabling him to clean the blades better. "Please Daryll?" "Please yerself," he said. "He won't quit fer you he's not gonna quit for me." "You're his employer." "I've got nothing to say about that." Samual lifted the mower upright. Again he strained along another row. Daryll put a cigar in his mouth and watched him. Now and then Samual would look toward the window. When he saw Daryll he'd spit and push harder. He shrugged and looked along the dirt roadway. It was almost dark now, and he looked into the darkness and tried to remember the map of the sou-west where his men cut. It'd been hot all day but now the breeze was cool and smelled like rain. Far along the shore a light gleamed and far off shore on Fox Island another light echoed and rotated. She clicked her tongue against her mouth. Out of all this — out of her Goddamn childhood, he thought, out of her birthday parties with Margaret Hitchman, knowing Max Aitken and Bennett and the rest. If he had a cigar he'd start choking so he didn't bother. Yes, too he wanted another drink but he didn't bother. "I'll take him fishin some other time," he said. 109 Why did she bring that up? His father'd burned his hand on the stove when trying to catch him, but he could run faster than his father ever could. But his father'd burned his hand and wanted to beat him. He tried to punch him, but he hid behind his mother — and his aunt started crying. His mother smelled of holy water — it reeked in her clothing, a scent somehow like a graveyard because his grandmother had been doused with holy water in her casket. He shrugged coldly and tapped his shoes on the veranda flooring. Lester was supposed to bring their sister down in a week or so and then perhaps Amanda would have some company. For some reason he remembered the way his brother walked when he was a child — that day they were scampering along the wharf with the smell of peeled timber in the spring air. Out of her Goddamn childhood, he thought to himself, out of her safe childhood, one good thing to the next and gossiping about each other, and parties and the whole Jesus bit — going to Halifax for a year when she was fifteen, and Margaret Hitchman off to Boston. I was in the woods when I was fifteen ha yes. He smirked again and belched. The thought of what he'd done for himself made him belch. He knew she didn't like it so he prolonged the belch and raised himself on his elbows. If he looked at her she'd stare at him, shake her head and click her tongue against her mouth. Her mouth was soft and saddened. The smell of her auburn hair in the heat would make him forget. He lit a cigar and inhaled deeply, smiled and looked across at the water. Though things hadn't been going so well at the mill he was sure next year or the year after everything would be like it had been in the early years when his men would cut for ready buyers; because it'd been good in the earlier years he was sure it'd be good again. In the early years when he wasn't so sure of himself, and didn't know how to talk to his men or to the buyers, or to men in the same business as himself, everything had fallen into place —- now that he knew exactly what to do and how to do it nothing seemed to be right. He thought of Hitchman in his wheelchair in a white room, with mush at the corner of his mouth, with his kindly yet arrogant smile and his flesh cooled. It cooled in the breeze from the Bay, and from inside himself. "My father was a good man," he said, "so you don't haveta go railin off about him." "I never mentioned your father," she said. "What are you talking about?" no "I'm talkin about what you were just talking about —- my family — I know what in hell yer old man called us when you were about to marry me — oh yes, yes I overheard what yer old man said." "What did he say?" He could see her profile in the darkness, the one bulb far across the lawn, her smooth face twitching and hear a swarm of flies against the veranda screening. It didn't bother him if she was angry. Out of her whole childhood she probably never had one cause to be angry. She probably felt because they had a little money it entitled her not to be angry or anything else. He knew that was not true but he wanted to think it. He rubbed his hands on his pants. The way she kept a house — even in that way. She'd not once leave anything alone. The children were always immaculate, their hair combed, their heads washed, their clothes pressed. Sooner or later she'd have to learn the truth about the way things stood. He rubbed his nose, snorted and spit through the screening. "He called us all riffraff," he said calmly. "He did not," she said. "He never said any such thing — you know it as well as I — he never said anything like that, who do you think helped you when things were starting — who do you think — " "You know as well as I," he said picking her up, still calmly, "You know as well as I it was to help you, not me — he was ashamed of who you decided to marry — wouldn't one of the Bryans a been better for you, wouldn't Kerry Donald Salome be better for you." "That's not true." "Go way," he said. "He never mentioned one thing — he's dead now and can't defend himself can he?" "Kerry Donald Salome," he said. "For over a year with you it was Kerry Donald Salome — wasn't it. Too bad." "Daryll." "Fish run in schools don't they," he laughed. He knew his breath was sharp and his eyes almost closed. And he knew if he took one more draw from the cigar he wouldn't be able to catch his breath. Someday he'd go to a doctor about losing his breath like that. But the doctors here knew nothing, so he'd go to Montreal. He still believed if his father'd gone to Montreal he wouldn't have died. Though at the end he couldn't talk or move. "Don't say it," she said. "I'm saying nothin," he said. "I wonder where Kerry Donald Salome is now?" 111 "Daryll," she said. "Fish run in schools," he said. "Though he smelled like a woman and walked like one — and talked like one even — yes he even talked like one, and you for a year — " "Daryll," she said. "My father liked you." "Your father liked nobody — some he didn't like because they weren't good enough — like the Grattens — and some he didn't like because they thought they were better than he was." "Daryll," she said. "And so he set his goal on Kerry Donald Salome, before I came back, of course — though Kerry Donald Salome had other intentions — and everyone knew it, I knew of what he was, fish run in schools. Now that's yer old man — that was his idea of a match, and yours too, your idea for a great life, with a man that couldn't stop smelling like a woman." "I've heard it all before Daryll," she said. Her voice wasn't pleading. It was sad, and the smell of cologne on her flesh was sad. His breath was rapid, his nostrils opened and he smelled rain in the wind. When he'd begun speaking his voice was calm, but now it wasn't. Nor was it loud. It was raspy, reminding her of his blotched forehead and spotted back. He saw her jerk about in her chair and knew in a moment she'd get up and go into the house again, and he'd be alone. Though he never wanted to be alone, not in the twilight — the road and hedges almost dark. Yet nothing was to be done. Perhaps too it was all so much simpler. The flies batted themselves against the veranda screening, and under the yard's bulb, were black. He snorted and spit into the screening again, and tasted alcohol on his lips. "I don't mind," he said. "Daryll for God's sake," she whispered. He could feel her trembling. "I came out to rest for five minutes, for five minutes." "If you wanta go in go in — rest in bed," he said. He waited. It was motionless. She didn't stir. He could see her face painfully expressionless, blunt, staring straight out into the darkness — a scent of fouled seaweed and rotted planking. "I don't mind," he began, his voice once more calm, and almost reassuring — as if they must discuss something now, expiate something between them. "I mustn't say I don't mind but it doesn't bother me — it never bothered me a'tall what people thought a me — I don't come from those type a people who are always interested 112 in what people think. But what I mind is how can people fall for people and go chasing them around — like Kerry Donald Salome." "Nobody chased him around," she said. He didn't look at her. He knew by the way she spoke just the way she looked, and he'd no need to stare at her. Mosquitoes drenched in his spit fumbled in the screening. "Every Goddamn day for a year — every day. And the thing is he never earned any money — he was one of those sons a whores like the Aitkens and the Bryans, the people who I shined shoes for — one a those Goddamn useless people who never had a thought in his head about earning money — but just went day in day out because his old man was a Salome — and you people couldn't get enough a him." "He was a friend since I was eight years old — and he never said a word about you — never. He always thought a lot of you." "I'm sure he thought a lot of me," he snorted. "Smelled like a woman, and walked like a woman. Yer old man now." She stood. The chair creaked and he paused to catch his breath. He didn't want her to go in, but he couldn't stop speaking. Out of her whole Goddamn past he thought, out of her whole Jesus past, not once does she understand anything. Kerry Donald Salome. He kept grating his teeth together so she'd hear the sound. His cigar had gone cold in his hand, and his hand twitched. It wasn't jealousy. It was someone having splashed water on him and it'd be hard for him to catch his breath. The way Lester walked when he was a child along the timber butts. His mother dousing them with holy water and picking her teeth with a splinter from the woodbox. "He never had any property — nor was he intelligent, but your old man especially your old man thinking of him as if he had earned his own money, and was intelligent." "He was intelligent," she said. "Go in," he said. The veranda floor creaked. His hand wouldn't stop twitching. "Go in," he said. "Go in." His voice was loud, and he couldn't help it. She wouldn't answer him now, and he knew it. "Every Sunday for a year after we were married there he'd be sitting next to you at the table — his hands folded at grace — eh — his hands folded at grace." He laughed and tried to thrust the cigar through the screening, "And of course yer old man pleased as hell that you talked to him more than me about poetry and everything else — none of ya havin an idea what you were talking about." She'd turned from him and was walking toward the door, "An I "3 tolja that more than once — the lot a ya — the whole Goddamn lot a ya —- him especially — " She went to go inside but the door opened and Janet came out. Amanda looked at her and then at Daryll. When Daryll saw her he stopped speaking, muttered a little and raised himself on his elbows. He searched in his pockets for another cigar, found the tie-clip and began to rub it patiently between the fingers of his left hand. "The kids are in bed," Janet said. Her voice was straightforward, as if there was nothing wrong and she'd not heard him yelling. Daryll grunted again and looked to his right, away from them. Janet smiled. "Are they covered well enough?" Amanda said. "Yes Mrs. Gratten — I think so," she smiled, and there was something strange about the smile, Amanda thought, and the way she stood in the dark. "Perhaps you can go into my room and get the quilt," she said. "Put it over Caully. It'll probably be cold tonight." "Yes probably — probably be cold," Daryll said. Janet looked over at him and smiled rapidly, though he wasn't looking in her direction. "Did you tell them a story?" she said. "Yes ya better tell them a story," Daryll muttered. "Tell them two stories." "Yes —■ Ernie wanted stories about fish," Janet laughed. "I don't know why — the little bugger didn't catch any," Daryll said. "I'm going for a walk," Amanda said. "I'll just be a while — so you can stay until I get back." "Of course" Amanda turned and went down the walkway, and Janet returned inside, and Daryll watched his wife's shadow in the darkness, with a queer strutt to it becoming finally immersed, part of the hedges. He'd go to the study and have a cigar and another drink, and tomorrow he'd go into town, just to be away from the first guests that'd be arriving. He lifted himself from the chair and went inside. The house was shadowed and retained the warmth from the day — a moist clinging warmth. He could feel his pulse along his temples and hear his blood. The furniture was dusted and orderly, but it had the stigma furniture has that sits in an empty house for a long while. He went to the top of the first landing and stopped at his study 114 door, rubbed his hand across his brow and waited, feeling sweat in the thinning hair at the top of his forehead. Across the hall the light was on, the door ajar. Janet must be getting the quilt he thought, and he thought too that Ernie hadn't caught any fish. They'd held the supper so that if he came back with even one trout they might fry it for him. When he did come in there were fly bites on his white cheeks, with white down at the side of his ears. His cap with the blue ribbons had fallen into the pool and Emmett had to wade for it. The ribbons had become spotted and dirty. He turned to go downstairs again — where the children slept, to open the door and look in on them. "Outta her Goddamn childhood," he muttered slowly. "Couldn't let him wear anything but caps and ribbons." He moved from the study door and was about to descend the stairs, without really thinking why he had to go down and look in on them, or if that was his intention at all, when he saw Janet move from the corner of the room toward the mirror. The door was opened just enough so that he could see her standing in front of it, at the side of the mirror looking at her reflection. It startled him for a second because he'd not been thinking of her, and the hallway was dark — and also his father-in-law had died in that room five years before, a gigantic man who'd spent his last days sitting in a rocking chair and staring out the window. A coldness swept over him and he shook his head. He grabbed quickly for the tie-clip, but when his hand touched it he suddenly realized how silly it was and took his hand away. His shirt was still unbuttoned and a spot of light shone on his belly. His mouth opened a little. First she did nothing. She just glanced at her reflection. She carried the quilt over her left arm and was about to turn away from the mirror — and he was about to say hello if she came through the door, when she stopped once more and put the quilt down. She looked at the bottles and jars on the dresser, began picking them up and reading the labels. Her dress was cut low and she rested more on one leg than the other. He could see her examining the labels — but he didn't think this unusual. And even when she took the top off Amanda's perfume, put some on her finger and touched it to her throat, he thought nothing. She smiled slightly, swayed a little, with one leg ahead of the other and opened a jar of cream. This too she sampled. He opened his mouth to breathe, the air was dead with the heat. He turned and went softly to the bottom of the stairs because he didn't want her to come out with him standing there, and yet all this time he thought of nothing. "5 When he reached the bottom of the stairs the light went out in the bedroom. He turned just as softly and started up the stairs again. It was dark — the stairs and the landing. One floor-lamp burned in the livingroom. For some reason he pretended he didn't notice her coming down the stairs. She was whistling to herself and he kept his head down, his fingers on the tie-clip. The things he must do in town tomorrow went swiftly through his mind, and like always he saw himself doing everything at once, from laughing with Peter to going out into the yard quietly to observe his scalers, to going to the train station to talk to the signal men. "Oh Mr. Gratten," she said suddenly. "You scared the breath outta me." He looked up quickly and was startled himself. His mouth twitched and he could feel the blood going from his face. There was the familiar scent of Amanda's perfume and lotion in the heat. She stood on the step above him, but he'd been climbing the stairs without looking up and he'd one foot on her step. He didn't realize this at once. He stared at her and tried to keep his mouth from twitching. Her breath was quick and short, his right leg pressed against the inside of her left. "Getting the quilt were you?" he said, for something to say and his voice sounded odd. She smiled and he could see her face clearly. "Yes," she said. "Mrs. Gratten wants Caully covered." "Making him into a sissy," he said, again for something to say, and again without knowing why, or even wanting to say that. She smiled and nodded slightly. His mouth twitched and felt dry. She put her hand on the bannister and he moved to the side feeling her thigh against his leg. "Yes," he said. "I grew up myself without one blanket let alone four." He laughed clumsily at this and drew around her. "Do you want me to put it on Mr. Gratten?" she said, without moving. "What?" he said absently. "The quilt — do you want me to put it on?" The fabric of her dress touched his stomach and she made no movement. "Put it on —■ yes put it on, do what she says — do what she says." He went by her, up the stairs and into the study where he closed the door. He didn't know why he'd tried to sound rude to her just then, but he could still feel where the fabric of her dress touched his belly. He smiled slightly, went over to the desk and sat down. The blood had returned to his face and there was a cool breeze through 116 the window and he could hear Bay sounds. He found a cigar and lit it and without trying to think of anything remembered his wife's strutt across the darkened lawn. "Where'd she be off to this hour?" he thought absently. When he thought of his wife a queer sensation filled him, almost as if someone were sticking him with small invisible pins, yet something which gave him no pain. And, no matter how he tried, he couldn't think of his wife without remembering Janet, standing in the bedroom with one leg slightly ahead of the other. He flinched and tried to catch his breath. "Yes, yes," he said finally, looking about the study. "At least I've made something of myself eh?" 117 Erin Moure / Three Poems PULLING THRU (for Paul) Sometimes the invisible pulls all its blankets away from us. If only it would stop. Last night, I saw you on the lake pulling your brother thru a hole in the ice. What lake, you say. From grey water into your arms, the familiar greeting between brothers, between good men. Snow pounded around you, ridiculous image of white, skies open like a grey bird, & you moving. Whole forests of words. You always wanted to leave like this, the city & its stalled seasons, leave Main Street & build a house, somewhere, or in Hope. Dommage, dommage, but in my dream there were no houses, only you & your brother & the monstrous dance of winter, now — you are singing, your brother stiff with cold, still in your embrace; you are remembering a whole childhood to him, together, kissing his shocked head. Into his ear you feed twenty-year-old bread, old doorways, sour rats, a continent, more & more cabbages! Finally he nods, mouth twisted open to laugh, his hand clenched upon yours: he pulls your arm, rowing it wildly — he takes you with him across the ice, rowing your faint lives, gladly, like brothers! 118 FOUR ROOMS, HOPE, SONG My brain a carburetor leaking thru all the four rooms of the heart. A man lies in hospital, the woman beside him waiting, full with language, her eyes eating his drugged face, his fingers stuck with glue, grab the sweaty bed. My brain a carburetor ticking thru all the four rooms of the heart. Doors open & close unnecessarily. A man walks in, says he is jesus, takes off both shoes. My brain a shoe ticking blood thru all the four rooms of the heart. At a table in one of the rooms sits a man, he laughs a bit, shuffles paper thru his fingers. He knows four card tricks perfectly. He knows he has a soul, & waits for it. When it arrives, it will stoop to remove intravenous tubes, sit at the table. They will talk together about films, violate each memory, eat cooked meat from skewers, play jazz. The landlord will be offended. Doors open & slam without permission. The heating bills in this building are high, & no one pays them. My brain a carburetor sticking. The man in hospital still alive, moves thru all the four rooms of the heart. In one of the rooms, a man sits, laughs at bit. He hears his soul in the hallway. "9 PREHISTORY In the pale light of the refrigerator, a man singing has as much right as a cabbage. It is nearly three in the morning & he peers down his stomach in the cold atmosphere, the door open. There is little to eat, some jars alone, no glasses to drink, no puddings, newspapers, animals holding their young up for the photographer in the spring. Just a man in the cold region, his toes curled, naked, watching the light in the gross heart of the machine. Already he has phoned hospitals, the police, & received no information. The possible ended, he sings about what has been proved. About subways, by-pass operations, any other road to the future, where his voice is, where everyone is satisfied or at least talking about it — 120 David Sharpe In Another Light i A jet wind, the Tramontana, flooded the Spanish village of Cada- ques and discovered every wire's whistle and whipsound, every shutter's shudder. In the gleam of last day, the gale called up the speech of countless creatures and engulfed two gleaners as they gathered wood for a room turning black as sky, sticks for a sucking, blowing fire run pallid and chill. The gleaners searched under a dark ash sky where smokeclouds turmoiled off the moon, a white coal touched with wind. Each time the ember lost its light, they caught their breath and eyes rose suddenly ancient, worried and wordless in the cave of their faces. Fire of night, they prayed, survive the storm . .. and each time, the moon burned uncovered and strong. A candle flamed in the window of their apartment where, one more time, they denied the electric light that had replaced their eyes with lightbulbs. Two weeks ago, they first pulled the switches and sat vested in the violet and gold of candles, coated in cold, and watched for other powers. — Look — cried one gleaner — the moon is a well in the west, cloudy water within. Sunlight cut an edge from the dusk, a sickle so slim that the Atlantic, the clouds of North America, and the noon Pacific tricked out with earthly light the whole of the face hidden occult from the sun. The dragon of the dark side, the yin releasing the tail of a full moon, was caught in his complement and performed secrets in a blue light. Eyes left their orbits and fell free. — A porthole — the other gleaner added — with a shine behind its rim. 121 ■—■ Lens into light beyond our black tarp universe — shouted the first into the gulp of the wind. Cool and fanatic, moonlight smoked in the rocky basin where sea- water flowed, where, by day, sun lifted the Maritime Bar from the beach and details swam declared and common. On the ridge above the church of Cadaques, above the erosions of rock and canvas at the villa of Salvador Dali, the two radar domes of an army base waited to be lifted, ready and moonwhite. There would be contact in the heavens that night. The limb of the west was rising, reaching to the new moon, and the moon was descending to a lunar landing somewhere near the U.S. Army, a bubble sinking onto rock. -—■ It's a spotlight balloon, it is, hauled tight above the hill by its upward surge against the cable. —■ Yes, I see a man playing the line. Look, he runs the silk bulb on a slant along the sky — They paused beside a slabrock fence, olive trees bending in the weight of a wind as thick as snow. Sticks like frozen arms gestured from their sides. When the ridge above Cadaques coupled into the moon, roundness retracted like landing gear. The Pyrenees with hooks of metal docked the earth to a black-ice sky and the wind guided outer space to the Mediterranean. —■ Igloo — said the coldest one — glow of oil lamp through the ice, tunnel door bright. —• No ■— answered the other, frigid with first fear — that moon is the protoplasmic head of a creature, peering. Quick, we must return. It drops in stealth behind the outcrop. The gleaners ran beside the Mediterranean through astral winds whirled like galaxies as the universe expanded and sucked heat from the center. This low pressure system in the cosmos, this cyclone of stars, pulled at their flesh until they felt they must radiate away like the molecule masses from the aboriginal ice cube. From birth, as moisture onto a seed, they had condensed to rain on the earth and 122 run, just as the earth itself had grown as a hailstone in primitive clouds. Panic collected in their cold muscles like energy into first matter and they fled precipitate in a storm, fearing evaporation. Banggg ... flashback ... bang. The wind is lifting a round ball, hitting it hollow, solid, against a pole. Banggg. The light from a narrow sun is green. Bang. The rope whines as — bang — another swing begins — Bang — the pole bends, splinters — BANG — the body fallls. Oxon is born. In a column by an empty road stood Spanish power poles. Lines of sparks flexed and popped in the wet wind as beings, being from Electron, passed messages on naked wires. The poles burst out, gesticulating and spastic, and stopped the gleaners as they approached. One stood stiff above them, a monolith guard with the galaxy behind, the stars flecks in the black marble night. The gleaners watched aghast, pole after pole, wires walk the land. Ahead, light in the village buzzed in tubes and bulbs, cosmic night cut sixty a second with electric moonshine. 123 Oxon discovered the gleaners and pulled them by the neck back from the live wires and out over the bay. Air billowed beneath and feet rose over head in a long, giddy fall. Up under stars, a solar wind parted hair from faces. Two pale infants in a pure night, their eyes opened like mouths, and legs streamed behind. Higher over the Pyrenees, the faces fed and the bodies angled in crosswinds. When the last of sun cleared the upper reaches, the gleaners were returned to the almond trees of Cadaques. Overhead, a new horizon, the Milky Way, levelled for them like a sea. They stood on the road with sea-legs, a galactic sense-of-balance rocking unsteadily on earth while previously flat constellations sank in a suddenly deep sky. Each star gelled at some different, distant depth, and three-dimensionally below their feet, they pin-pointed through the dirt and rock, the sun. They felt the whole deck of earth roll as the underside gathered light; shallow warmth spread across the inner heat of its pit, weightless heat on hot pig iron. The gleaners re-entered their apartment with arms of fire and were guided to the hearth by a new organ, a flesh button protruding from drop-jawed faces, from the smooth flank of brow that now covered their mundane eyes. Behind a fairing, a sensory dome, they advanced in another light while electricity wept in the switches of the wall. Firelight sprayed its warm blood through the room, blood on Danish sofas, disconnected lamps, the lintels of the door. Ears rode the Tramontana as it bellowed in the hearth like a trumpet. All around this eye of the electric storm, the lights of the village searched the newly born. Inside, the gleaners sat rarefied on the abyss of a rug, space cases, one hand clapped to headside, ears ringed with the songs of celestial spheres. Their brains were faced with thin and rampant populations of thought, but a core, a boss ball of core, filled silent the center and that slow meld of heat and rock, the mind majority on which they stood, made peripheral the jubilations of sunlight, the squirming of power through forms, the hesitations of night. Their skin quaked. Their earthen shoulders shook. Faults opened their rock to the light 124 and many of their people died. In their spines, they felt the golden chain of being, pulled. When the gleaners attended the fire, elemental clocks chimed in the flames as sticks released like springs their wound and wooden light. They gazed with another eye on geoflex: time synclined in stupendous steppes. They watched the fire aquaflux: change swelling with interval, eroding in lifetimes. And aeroflex: winds and weather variable, sudden the systems as the crow flies. Then, in flashes of pyroflux so fast they strobed the dark, the gleaners viewed the galaxies that fell like snowflakes in their headlights: constellations of worlds and Romes and homes suspended in their storm by the instance of a glance. 8 In a windless mist, the sun like the back of a plant raised a day-glo pleasure dome, amanita orange. Magic and incandescent, the atomic head lifted and blazed, a sunspore exploded from the soil of the earth. The gleaners slept beside the black slag of the fireplace as the mushroom mounted higher in secret, fungus silence. The songs from far Sea broke against their vacuum and, like the wind, died. Out of their brows, the flesh button rose into the open, a solid tide flooding into space. The organ expanded, folded its surface beneath, and when a perfect bulb shone sunlit above the gleaners, a shudder severed the growth. Floating, Oxon left behind the rough cinder where the gleaners lay. Later, in the dusk of the apartment, they turned on the lights. !25 Barbara Rendall PARENTAL Downstairs, we think of you Above, curled mouselike Around a simple dream. You sleep, And we rest in the curve Of your done day — All those direct delights Brought round once more, Tucked in. Later, on the way to our own sleep, We stop to give you One last grazing touch, For luck, Before we cut the darkened house adrift — And find you Upright, Cocked and wide-eyed, Nose to nose with your own patch of night, Sheets clutched in your tiny fists Like knowledge, Riding out the wrong side of the light. 126 Robert Sherrin Best Falling Dead I am the best falling dead. I had come round the house with a purpose. I was not there to steal flags or range trucks in rows by the side stoop. I was not there to find long legs behind the hollyhocks or look for mystery by the apartment block with the white shingles. I was there to fall dead. At that time death came from every side. We all seemed to understand that. All of us. You: the girl with the hair pale as tears whose parents fought in the summer in the upper room while you and your sisters cried in the shade, watching me cruise past on your bicycle. You didn't need it. You were begging for silence. And it always came, didn't it? There was always a great calm at the end of the afternoon, you and your sisters exhausted by the crying and yelling. On those days there was always a huge dead area between your house and the neighbours'. They would sit on the far sides, the leesides of their homes, out of the sun, out of the wind and the turbulence of your parents' relationship. No one asked about the boxes beside the garbage cans. But I looked. All broken: lamps, pictures, bits of paper, letters, a china doll, a bottle. I hoarded things but I didn't hoard those. I left them as I found them. Moved myself quickly to the store across the street where most bought jaw breakers and root beer popsicles. I bought the little wax cowboys with the coloured water inside and bit their heads off. Or you: the boy who threw stones. Who stood with your oversized heart bulging from your chest like a humped spare in the fender well of a car. You stood on the gravel path between the houses and you waited for the children to pass on their bicycles, in their wagons, on their trikes. You squatted there with that heart of yours like a pounding fist. You hated that thing in your chest but you wore it with pride, dared us to put our ears to it, to hear the whispering blood. We were told it must not be exposed to the sun yet you went shirtless 127 in the summer, strutted through the neighbourhood and chased the girls, made them touch it, saying, I'm stronger than anyone, I will live forever. But you were the one who was taken from the streets every day by your mother and sent to bed for the afternoon. She was painful to watch as she walked into the heat and sought you like a thin hound does the fat hare or the ground hog. She hunted you down and hauled you from our midday conferences in the shade of someone's tree or the cool darkness of an underporch. Took you away. Said to you, COVER IT UP, IT ISN'T A TOY. Did away with you until after dinner. Loved you too much and feared you more than we ever would. So you watched and you waited. Watched as the boys backed their wagons out of their sidewalks in mimicry of their fathers pulling out of driveways. You waited with your arms raised and levied your toll: touch my heart. Each driver, each little boy in his red flier, each girl on her first CCM moved slowly past and touched you. They passed on, down the thin gravel road, their tiny convoy raising a chimney of dust in the prairie air. Gone before you like pioneers, leaving you to your stones and the few of us whose parents could not afford bicycles. Or you: the boys who dressed in women's clothes, who gathered in my basement and sorted through the rag bin, setting aside the skirts and removing our pants. Pushed our genitals back and pranced about saying we were pretty. We dressed well and we dressed often. We walked in a circle and sat in a circle on the cool concrete. We sipped at our imaginary tea. We asked for more sugar, please. We touched hands and talked about our husbands: how strong they were; how rich they were; how much they loved us; how our children were disobedient and we were forced to spank them. Some of us washed their mouths with soap. Some of us locked them in their rooms. Some of us yanked them like kittens by the neck, took them yelling and kicking from the dinner table and pushed them roughly to their mattresses, said to our little ones: YOU EVER SAY THAT TO ME AGAIN, MISTER, AND I'LL WHIP YOUR BACKSIDE TIL I CAN FRY EGGS ON IT. And we always left them alone to cry. That's our way. Our civilized mama's way. Our civilized papa's way. We don't humiliate our little ones, we educate them. Some of us hit them on bare buttocks with a leather belt and sometimes they didn't cry. But we were good mamas. We talked about babies and how messy they are. We said we never struck our 128 children unless papa was there. We needed only the words: WAIT UNTIL PAPA GETS HOME. Our torture was simple. After our tea we did our makeup, didn't we? We pursed our lips. We patted our cheeks. We brushed our hair. We went to the bathroom together and sat with our dinks hidden even though we made only water. We felt so good, so clean. We patted each other on the backside. We called ourselves after each other's mothers: ROSE, SYLVIA, EVE, NETTIE, KAY. And we would stroll, wouldn't we, boys? We would walk up the broad hot street, where the tar moved underfoot like something nearly alive. People stared at us, laughed at us. But we walked, calm and erect and gestured a great deal. We said: My dear, isn't it terribly hot? Have you seen my boy, Garson? Oh I wear this only on special days. My husband is very rich, you know. He drives the big white one. All the way to the playground where the activities ceased as we came face to face with real mothers who came to us and asked where we got our fine clothes and asked us if we wanted their children. Some turned from us and led their little boys and girls away. They were the ones who didn't laugh. They were the ones whose boys had shiny wagons and pants with creases and shoes with laces the same length. They were as afraid of us as we were intrigued by them. We took their swings, made magestic patterns with our fluttering rags in the afternoon. LADY BUG, LADY BUG, FLY AWAY HOME. YOUR HOUSE IS ON FIRE AND YOUR CHILDREN ALONE. We worked at staying alive by dealing with death. We put fire crackers in bottles but that happened only once a year. We made guns of clothes pins and rubber bands. We walked out to the sheets of ice in the late winter and watched them tilt with our weight, felt them sag with our passing, saw the water seep up to surround our gumboots. Most of us were strapped when we returned home for daring to walk the ice where children were lost each year when the sheets gave way and they sank into the ice water and mud and the wheatroot that strangled like wet silk. We were so beloved that we were whipped to cool our passion, to learn the ways of our families. And we tried. Didn't we? All of us. You, the blonde whose parents parted when your youngest sister left home. And you, the boy with the heart outside your chest. And you and me, the ones who dressed as Rose and Sylvia and Eve and Nettie and Kay. Did we not? We hunted through the neighbourhood for friends. We met be- 129 hind the apartment block with the white shingles and we played Death. We took ten deep breaths and held the last, allowing ourselves to be grasped from behind by the strongest and our chests squeezed until we lost consciousness. We slipped away so early, so often. We would surround the dead and await their return. They all came back. One would rise from the grass, her legs and arms taut with the sensation of nowhere. Another, you, the one who was Nettie when I was Rose, rolled over the steel pedals of a bicycle as you returned and displayed no cuts or bruises. I returned always with a rush of heat to my head and galaxies under my lids. I came always to my feet and staggered with my arms waterwheeling in the air too thinned by summer to support me. We were the soldiers of our street. We were the fliers with ring twitter and the sappers with hollow ear. We were those who came back, we were the echoes of our fathers' voices when they said, HE WAS ONE OF THE GOOD ONES WHO DIDN'T MAKE IT HOME. And then we fell dead. We came, all of us, girls and boys alike, bursting from the shade into the white of afternoon and met the sweep of machinegun fire. The gunner was only yards away and he panned over us, pumping round after round into the still air, each shot drumming away through the canyon of houses. No one saved us. No one tried to. We wanted to go. We wanted to be like Mom who yelled from the back porch and fell down the steps; who smelled like gasoline when we reached her and told us to BUZZ OFF! as she made her way inside. We wanted to be like Dad who swung wide into the driveway and went away in the fall with a gun and came back with geese that bled from the eyes and were plucked under bare bulbs, their urine overpowering as it was squeezed into basins. We wanted to be the mamas and we wanted to be the papas. The ones who lived among the smell of a fired Zippo and the touch of nylon stockings. We went into the withering bullets with leaps and cries of delight. The girls went first, crumpling to earth, hands to chests, their nipples like yours or mine, tasting of the same salt because we tried and we knew. Then the boy who had been Sylvia with a bullet to his head and much yelling and thrashing. Then the boy with the large heart who had evaded his mother to join us, tripping, stumbling, clutching his throat, falling to his back, the little mound glinting, the skin a tight bony white. Then the blonde girl who had stayed low but finally found herself skidding into the grass, hands clutching at 130 her flat little belly, flopping away to one side like a nearly living thing derailed at last. Then Kay with one to the lungs. And me. Finally me. Me at last. A pattern through my chest but my legs churning though the body was finished, the mind failing. I went to my knees but moved ahead. I came to a halt, still kneeling, wavering, trying to raise my hand like the soldiers always did. Like everyone wanted to. And the gunner looked at me through his clouds of cordite and the rippling of echoes and pointed the barrel at my face. He touched the trigger and I fell away into the sweet grass, my head at your feet. And things went silent because that was a rule. No one breathed because that, too, was a rule. We yearned for the looks of our elders who would say we were the good ones who didn't make it. That, too, was a rule. We recalled every war film and western we had ever seen and like the shotgunned hero we lay as still as we could because it was important to be as real as possible in that world. Finally I was touched. The gunner had risen and walked to me and tapped me on the shoulder. He gave me the word: best falling dead. And walked on tapping the others, bringing them back to life, me moving into position as the new gunner who would mow down the next wave. We all fell and we all rose to fall again. And we laughed, didn't we? We were happy, weren't we, because we thought we could do it all our lives, forever. 131 Martin Reyto / Two Poems ESCAPE before long, we were all thinking about escape: someone said there'd be a boat with jewelled oars, water-spiders would dart on two straight ripples from the bow. every day, there were our faces, time-eaten, peering down the wharf with onyx eyes while the spiders lay still, resting on the water as we did on chances, possibilities. then sometimes wars were fought by the mammoth clouds, they ate each other with jaws tailored precisely to each other's sizes, shapes. decisions were constantly made, and one man always heard a sound like singing. children captured unknown insects, brought them home, where they shrilled all night in a bottle. 132 why of course we'll all get out of here someday, our expectant dances make the stars brood, now so many people lie cradled like relics in soft wool, invisibly attended to; escape must have come to them like the shards of a mirror, but with hands that reached and quietly drew them aside. I myself had this dream last night: a fish lay in the water like a silver arc, like the moon playing at being a fish. I shot an arrow into its side and it leapt high, it was sunrise, then it was a boat with glittering oars and finally a bird which ate the sky with one shriek. Awake, I am surrounded by those who remain. their eyes are onyx agate, amethyst; they touch me with words, with a whispered fugue. 133 AS THE COSMIC EGG I was lost for centuries, elephants played soccer, finding my naked form forsaken and rotund on the savannah by that time I resembled a crystal ball dropped by alien civilizations again and again on the revolting grasses by that time I'd consumed entire cities countries, continents and still and still you may pick me up in the palm of your hand, I'll flower there index poverty on this wracked skull index meteorology: lunatic budgie-snatchers skulking around Woolworth's with empty shoeboxes, eyeing the cages wear me, wedged tight between their brains and spines under their coats I have sucked up curious toddlers their mothers their nights, their beds, their houses, 134 oh the playgrounds and the and the streetcars they took to get from there to here and it is and it is I who move their dirty old hands to the cage door make them dip in merge their gray wrist-bones and gray hands with a blue-green chattering and tweeting universe: I became a crystal ball, aggressive reflector, planted in a mountain I sucked up Pompeii I filmed it over, inside out, it was holocaust in reverse, and my dreams were profuse with antlers and children and holidays. J35 Donna E. Smyth The Temptation of Leafy — Leafy! The voice was so loud it woke her up. It was that loud. — Here I am. What you want? Silence in the trailer. Only Sarah stirring in her sleep at the sound of Leafy's voice. Only hush and hesitation of spring wind against the window where the flap of plastic had come loose and she'd meant to fix it but hadn't got round to it. Later on when the sun came up it might be warmer but now it was chilly, shivery under the sheets. Grey light before the dawn. Where did the voice come from? Second time it had happened and she couldn't remember a dream to go with it. Nobody'd get up at this hour, unearthly hour, to play a trick, would they? Leafy turned, trying to find the warm spot where she'd slept before the voice. She called softly — Sarie! Sarie dear, come and keep your Mama warm. Instantly the goose blinked out of sleep. Bright blue eyes fixed on Leafy, a gentle throat noise, almost a honk, greeted her — C'mon up here, Sarie. Leafy patted the side of the bed. Sarah was so well trained she never clambered up without an invitation. Better than a dog, Leafy bragged to the neighbours who had long since ceased to bother her about the goose. In the beginning though, they'd tried to interfere like folks always do. Fellas like James Thurston saying to her every second week — Leafy, it's time you done away with that goose. Five years is more than any bird got a right to expect Leafy reared at him, she was that mad she was seeing stars in broad daylight — Who you tellin' what to do, James Thurston? I knew you when you was a tadpole — no bigger than the blink of an eye. And I knew your father before you. Worst little hellion in Hants County! 136 The young man shuffled a little but held his ground. He muttered — But it ain't good sense, Leafy. You keep a goose too long, all the goodness goes out of her. — Look at that bird there. You tellin' me there's no goodness left in her? And they both looked at Sarah who preened herself in the sun, white and glossy she was, long-necked graceful. A very goose of a goose and gentle as a lamb. She'd only attacked once — a stray dog, mutt of a dog who'd snarled at Leafy when she was out collecting. Ordinarily Leafy wouldn't have minded, she had a way with dogs, but this one looked mean. Leafy backed away slowly, searching out of the corner of her eye for a stick. A rush of feathers burst out of the bushes and a hiss like doom, like a dozen snakes. Neck stretched out, wings beating the air, Sarah flew at the dog like an avenging angel. The mutt hesitated for the fraction of a second and then turned tail and fled, yelping like he'd seen a ghost. Years later the memory of it still tickled Leafy's fancy. She turned solemnly to James Thurston — You mean to tell me I should do away with a goose who saved my life? 'Course the boy didn't have a leg to stand on. Nobody did when it came to Leafy's goose and after awhile they took it for granted — wherever Leafy was, Sarah went with her, untiring, unflagging goose guardian of a dozen years and more. Sarah seemed never to get old. In the summer she followed Leafy like a puppy up and down the roadside ditches where the beerbottles lay, amber jewels in the sun. Leafy collected assiduously, had only curses for the new-fangled tin cans which weren't worth a plug nickel. Weekends were the best time, 'specially Sunday mornings after Saturday night's screeching around. Sunday mornings when the sun filtered through the leaves, sending shadows dancing, and the jays cheekier than weekdays, flashing blue past her. Once that preacher boy down the road, Marks was his name, he tried to convince Leafy to give up this Sunday collecting and go to church —■ Mrs Lutz, you got to remember that you're getting on. At your age you should be thinking of making your peace. ■—■ Peace? What good did that ever do a body? 'Sides, I got plenty of peace right here. ■—- Your peace with God, Mrs Lutz. Remember, God sees all things. Leafy cackled, she couldn't help it 137 — Preacher, God and me ain't been on talkin' terms for a long time. The young man —■ they were all young men these days — laughed nervously. Leafy could see he wasn't much of a one for a joke. Had a high flutey voice like a woman and a belly like he was pregnant. Soft brown eyes behind glasses. Earnest. He cleared his throat and began again — That's what I mean, Mrs Lutz. Doesn't it bother you to think about. .. about... — Dying? That what you mean? Gravely he nodded. It was plain that dying bothered him some, even brought out the sweat in tiny drops on his forehead —- Yes. We must all make our peace before we go. — If God don't like me the way I am, it's too late for either of us to do anything about it. Way too late. Leafy gathered up a wad of spittle she'd been forming in her mouth and spat it out neatly beside the preacher's shiny shoe. He gulped — Mrs Lutz, I'm only trying to help you. — The Lord helps them what helps themselves. Ain't that right in the Bible, preacher? — The sin of pride, Mrs Lutz, the sin of pride. You have an account to settle with God. — Well, let Him come and settle it then. I'll be waitin'. Next Sunday she returned to her collecting as usual. The preacher boy drove past on his way to church and Leafy waved from the ditch but he didn't seem to see her. She shrugged. Nice boy but a Christian. When the burlap sack was full, Leafy sat down for a smoke, measuring out the tobacco carefully so's she didn't waste any. Sarah settled in the long grass beside her, tramping it down till it was a sort of pocket into which she wiggled her bottom till she was comfortable. With her neck outstretched, her beak just touched Leafy's skirt. Leafy began as usual — Sarie dear, see here, we two got what most folks want. Only they don't know it. Most folks never know what they want. Leafy puffed meditatively, squinted at her cigarette. Preachers couldn't tell a body half what you needed to know. She tapped Sarah's beak lightly — There's a kind of love between the creatures. Holy love, I call it. Came to that a long time ago, so long ago you wasn't even an egg. Love between folks, now that's all tangled with hurtin' till the hurtin' gets bigger than the lovin'. You follow me? 138 Sarah's eyes opened with the question, she watched Leafy lovingly. The goose followed every inflection of thought and voice with a kind of intelligence Leafy never doubted. When things were flowing good like now, mellowed by a quiet smoke in the sun with a full sack of empties to be traded in on Monday, Sarah seemed to know and rejoice with Leafy. She'd sidle closer until, absent-mindedly, Leafy'd put out a hand to stroke the soft feathers. If a goose could purr like a cat, Sarah would have purred. In fact Leafy swore she did purr, not out loud but with a body hum that vibrated through Leafy's fingers. Hum of goose contentment. When things didn't flow, when they got knotted up with kinks and twists under the inexorable grey of sky, white of snow, with Leafy's small trailer rocking in the bitter wind, then Sarah watched anxiously as her mistress paced the patch of linoleum, pattern worn to a sheen. At such times Leafy waved her arms like a preacher —■ There's a mistake, a mistake in livin'! God's cruel, Sarah! Cruel to make us, cruel to make such a wind it bites holes in the trailer. Sarie dear, you're the only one who hasn't left. My first man, he beat me. The second one left. Then they came after me, sent those social workers after me. Animals know — the creatures do know. You crawl into a hole to lick your wounds. But folks won't let you, no sir, they won't let you. Have to be pryin' and meddlin' till the day they die. I spit on social workers! I spit on men! I spit on the lot of 'em! The rum in the bottle on the table was working its way down inch by inch. Leafy stopped ranting to swallow, sat down in the one chair at the table. Drunk — carefully rolled a cigarette and smiled at the goose — Come to Mama, Sarie. There, there, don't be scairt of the old woman. You're the only one who understands me, God's truth you are. Kids they see me — you know what they do? Run away. Scairt. Think I'm a witch. Maybe. Maybe. Kids ain't what they used to be. Up here, Sarie dear. The goose was lifted to Leafy's lap where she settled like a cat. Leafy stroked feathers and sang ■—■ "All things bright and beautiful, All creatures great and small" Another swallow of rum, contemptuous wipe of the mouth with the back of the hand —- Hah! What about the ugliness, Sarie? What about the ugly and the dirt and the lonely? Who made them? You tell me that an' you're r39 a wiser bird than I. God, God! If He was to come down here tonight, I'd call Him to account! That I would! By early morning the wind had died to a winter-cold stillness. Two bars of the electric heater reflected red in the semi-darkness of the trailer. Empty bottle on a table burnt with cigarettes forgotten. Asleep like an old woman, Leafy's mouth was slack except when she called out of her dreams, subsided back again. Asleep like a goose, Sarah's head was tucked underneath her wing. It often seemed to Leafy that it might have been that winter or the next and then it was summer, last year's or this one, and the seasons changed but life didn't change. Sarah didn't change either. Each year she was a little plumper, more serene. When she was twenty years old, by Leafy's calculations, she was no longer as spry as she used to be but then neither was Leafy who couldn't decide whether she herself changed or did not change. She marked time by the neighbour's kids growing up and those kids having kids. It all went on changing and not changing at the same time. And more and more Sarah seemed to know what Leafy was thinking until it got so's sometimes Leafy forgot Sarah was a goose or maybe forgot whether or not she was an old woman. On this particular morning then, with grey light becoming pink, Leafy confided to Sarah — Sarie dear, did you hear the voice? It was that loud I nearly jumped out of my skin. Sat bolt upright like a scairt rabbit. I must of been dreamin'! This big voice — never heard a voice like it — it says: Leafy! Leafy! If those kids come back to play tricks, I'll tan their hides! Sarah snuggled closer on the blankets, her head touching Leafy's arm. When she was younger, the goose would be up at the crack of dawn nudging Leafy with her beak so's to be let out to do her morning business. But nowadays Sarah was inclined to doze and drowse in the early morning light, 'specially on spring mornings when it took the sun awhile to warm the damp grass. And Leafy drowsed with her, muttering still about her dream, fingers pushed into the downy under Sarah's feathers — Leafy! Leafy's eyes flew open. Was she awake or dreaming? —■ Sarie, did you hear that? — Leafy! Leafy trembled. It was not inside nor outside, that voice, it was both inside and outside. Not a voice. Leafy forced herself to answer 140 — What you want? And she ducked, half-expecting a cuff from an unseen hand. — Do you love me, Leafy? Leafy groaned ■—■ I dunno, I dunno! Oh God, is it the accountin' already? Damn that preacher — I got to get the place cleaned up. She shoved back the blankets, swung her legs out and looked around the trailer for the first time in a long time seeing it as if for the first time. As if she was a meddling neighbour come in to find out what happened to Leafy Lutz. She saw a table littered with dirty dishes, crumbs, bits of crust, newspapers. A floor filthy with dust and dirt trod into uneven, colourless linoleum. Cobwebs hanging, festooned the rusty trailer ceiling, draped over the two lanterns. Once white sheets a dingy grey against skinny old legs roped with veins. Leafy saw it all and cringed. Sarah was the only white and shining thing in the place — Leafy! — I hear you! I ain't deaf. Now Sarah woke up, looked expectantly at Leafy. Almost time to put her outside. Leafy grabbed the goose and hugged and hugged — Sarie dear, it's the Lord. He' come for me like the preacher said He would! — Do you love me, Leafy? Frightened, Leafy clutched Sarah to her. Too late now for excuses, lies, regrets over small cruelties, large trespasses. Leafy moaned, rocked back and forth with Sarah — I dunno! I dunno! What's love? The voice was silent. Did it expect her to know? It wasn't fair, it wasn't. She was just Leafy Lutz, an old woman alone in the world with her beloved goose. How could she know anything? The answer didn't come slowly but was there all of a sudden. It hit Leafy like a punch in the gut, leaving her breathless and doubled up with pain. She cried aloud — No, no! You can't mean that. It's not right! The voice refused to argue. But she felt it suspended around her, waiting. Sarah nudged her shoulder, wanting reassurance —■ Sarie, human flesh an' blood ain't stood by me like you! You're all I got left. Sarah honked gently, seemed to agree. She searched the woman's face with a grave goose look. Seemed to say — I'm yours, Leafy. Do with me what you will. 141 The voice spoke again. This time it was small and still, not like a voice at all — Leafy, do you love me? It was the softness that broke her. She was all set to rear and fight when it came so small and clear like a child's voice. Then Leafy knew — Everything it means, don't it? Everything. That's love. The first rays of sun lit upon her like a hand. Leafy shrugged off the comfort. She was still struggling — She's the only one I got! Why'nt you go to James Thurston up the road? He's got plenty. — Leafy. ... The voice sounded like her mother years ago when Leafy told a lie and got found out. Her father would have belted the life out of her, her mother just looked like she was sorry for Leafy. Leafy couldn't stand nobody feeling sorry for her. She stood upright and said to the voice — I know. I know what has to be done. Then, softly to the waiting goose — Come along, Sarie dear. Leafy stepped into the rubber boots by the door, slipped into the old coat she'd found some five years ago dangling from a highway sign. Sarah was so close behind Leafy almost stepped on her when she opened the door. Outside was spring warm and clear, the kind of morning light that hides nothing. A week of this weather would bring out the may- flower buds. She and Sarah would take some lunch and head down the old logging road behind the trailer. .. . — Leafy! The voice recalled, recollected her. Followed her. Insistent. Leafy answered — Alright. Don't rub it in. I know, don't I? Sarah had squatted in one corner of the weedpatch Leafy called her garden. Doing her goose business. Then she waddled towards Leafy, slowly, enjoying the sun. The whiteness of her glowed, her eyes were finest blue. Such a perfect goose of a goose. One hand in her pocket, Leafy squatted —■ Here, Sarie, Sarie dear. The ritual was always the same. Sarah came with dignity to the outstretched hand, ate the offered corn with a certain elegant restraint, not greedily, not hastily, but as if it was her due. Leafy patted 142 her all over, feeling the solid little body, the powerful wings and curved, proud neck — What a fine bird you are! The finest in the world! Sarah's look was trusting, loving. Leafy's voice broke — Sarah, for what I am about to do, may you forgive me. She rose quickly then, determined to have it over with. Behind the trailer, to the left, was a little shack where she kept the tools and the ax for the wood. Leafy was particular about her tools — a shovel, a pitchfork, a hammer, bucksaw, screwdriver, pliers, ax. She kept them hung up, each in its own place, oiled and clean throughout the winter. Sharpened each fall before they were put away. The ax was always sharp for splitting kindling. Every year James Thurston brought her two cords of wood but he didn't make them up as carefully as his father had — too much slabwood. And every year he offered to split the kindling for her and each year Leafy refused. Sarah followed Leafy to the shed door but stayed on the threshold. When she saw Leafy with the ax, the goose immediately started in the direction of the chopping block. Always the same routine. Leafy walked slowly, she felt a hundred years old. She felt it was time to die. She took out more corn from the pocket and sprinkled it on the block. Sarah pecked each piece quickly, daintily. Leafy put one hand on the goose head, held it so that the neck was stretched across the block. The ax was in her other hand —-Sarie, I'll give you a decent burial. My darlin' Sarah! Now the goose head twisted so that the eyes looked straight at her. Eyes dark with fear. Sarah knew. Leafy sobbed, lifted the ax —- Leafy! The voice arrested the sun-glinted ax hanging in mid-air. Leafy swung around, furious — Go away! Leave me alone! She rushed to the slender young birch by the side of the shed and began to chop blindly, strongly. A white gash opened in the trunk, white with a lip of green where the inner bark was. The ax bit deeper, harder. Again and again. Slowed. Thudded. Stopped. The tree didn't exactly fall, it was too thin and green. It bent over, wood sinews severed. It was dead. Leafy shook her fist at the sky —• There! Are you satisfied? Are you? She fell to her knees on the frozen ground, tears salty on lips, fingers. Forsaken. The very word cut into her, left her shivering and alone. It was time to die. 143 Soft nudge at her shoulder. Leafy looked up into Sarah's eyes. The goose made a loving honk noise deep in her throat. Leafy could scarcely dare to believe — Sarie, you mean it? You forgive me? Goose head rubbed against her like a cat. Invited caresses. Leafy held the goose to her and crooned — There ain't a creature in the world as precious as you. Then she frowned at the so-innocent looking sky — You stay away from me, you hear? Creatures love, they know what it means! Sarah rested her head against Leafy's shoulder. They knelt there a long time, woman and goose, in the spring sunshine between the double-bladed ax and the dead tree. THE END 144 Betsy Struthers / Two Poems THE DIFFERENCE In the big field on the hill overlooking five farms and a pocket of forest: He peoples the blue air with ideas sits, leaning forward, hands stressing points in the pattern Behind his dark glasses flash fight bulbs. And I lie back listening insects hum over my lips clouds cartwheel across my horizons sun melts me into ground rhythms. He thinks. He could be anywhere. I must point out for him both hawk and lady bug. 145 THE POET A big man he rocks on the edge of the kitchen chair cradles poems in his awkward hands these fascinate me If I lay mine against his palms, my fingers would not reach his knuckles in his songs hands become birds broken by windows the fingers pale caterpillars denied chrysalis 146 Joel Yanofsky Ghost Stories All things considered it would be a perfect day to do God's work; a perfect day to share God's everlasting love for mankind. Mother once said there would be days like this and there are. The sky is bright and blue and cloudless. The grass is green and wet from last night's rain. Orange leaves are spread out generously on the lawns and sidewalks like birthday icing. It is autumn's last sad recollection of a vanished summer. On the whole a perfect day to soothe sinners with the offering of salvation, to convince the doubtful, to renew the tired and the confused. Two teenage girls, soberly dressed, breathing rapidly, twitching and excited, begin their door-to-door mission. "We have come," they announce confidently, humbly, persuasively "to speak to you of God's purpose." "I'll give you God's purpose," a strained voice mutters. An aluminum screen door opens for a moment, pauses, as if caught in reflection or in a moment's hesitation, and then slams shut into its aluminum slot. The lady of the house walks away mumbling something about nuisances and fanatics and takes no notice of the azure sky. She is busy: her youngest child cries, the television blares and the refrigerator hums threateningly. Spirituality has gone the way of all things in suburbia: towards noise and gossip and tedium. The street is unkind, and particularly unkind to strangers. The cracked concrete sidewalk trips pedestrians and pilgrims alike. Stray footballs, frisbees and children are formidable obstacles. Fat suburban women are irked at the idea of having to go to the door for no better reason than salvation. "I'm sorry," they say sarcastically, (married to bald tired husbands, they are masters of sarcasm) "but I gave at the office." Some people dislike confrontations of any sort and when the doorbell rings they pretend that they are not at home. A moving blind, a flickering lamp or a bobbing head usually gives them away; still 147 they crouch beside their front bedroom window until their solitude is secure. Their transparency has become more than a way of avoiding things and people, it has become a fact. Undaunted, the young girls continue (Oh to be young and Christian!) realizing by the names on the mailboxes — Weinstein, Yampolsky, Rosen — that they are in among the Pharisees and that they have somehow stumbled upon a challenge which is two thousand years old. They are insulted, ignored and turned away from each door. Predictably no one cares. One girl clutches at the crucifix around her neck not so much for her own sake as for the sake of those people who refuse to listen. The other girl bends to tie her shoelaces. No one here wants to know anything. Mr. Morris, our next door neighbour and self- appointed community leader, has a joke, he says that we are happy: miserable the way we are. In his serious moments, Mr. Morris wears light blue leisure suits — which he swears by — plays golf, on Saturday mornings, in his backyard, chain smokes, believes in mankind and insists that we must, indeed, have to, assimilate, integrate ourselves, Jews, Semites, into the French, Quebecois, Catholic society, way of life, or else we will, in the future, one day, be in serious, profound trouble and distress. He comes by his redundancy, his wardrobe and his atheism naturally. Although everyone suspects that he is right no one ever listens to him. Whenever he would begin one of his long speeches at our house my mother would tell me to go on with whatever I was doing just as if he was not there. It was not hard. Inevitably, Christian forbearance stands up less well among Jews than among any other non-believers. (Precisely, Mr. Morris's point.) History probably has examples. The girls become irritated and bitter: they will attempt one more door and then be sure to write us off as a race. My doorbell rings and frankly I welcome the interruption. I welcome all interruptions. Although my interest in my own salvation has decreased over the past two years, there was honestly a time when it was the only thing that I considered important. I wrote long, agonizing stories about my perpetual loneliness; and I was almost singularly concerned with the salvation of my lost soul and the satisfaction of my neglected crotch. I expected very little from life (I still do) but I did expect a great deal from God and women. The one delusion, the one fairy tale left me, was that I would find God, figuratively speaking, under a woman's skirt. Like Jack finding the Golden Goose. That, in fact, there was a woman wandering about, shadowy and vague like an 148 angel or a dream, who would save me spiritually and sexually, who would end my doubts, forever. Things, being things, have changed now. It's not that I'm less lonely or deluded, it's just that I'm tired of waiting. Still, I am willing to listen, to, at least, negotiate. (Particularly, with teen-age girls.) Finally, truthfully, — an old schoolteacher, named Turpin, who is probably dead now, once told me that no matter what I wrote, I should always be truthful — I am eternally grateful for anything which separates me from my room and my typewriter. My room has become a jungle: there are dark neglected corners where things have begun to take root. Blank, crumpled sheets of paper, tangled clothing and books are scattered about the floor. Those books that have found their way to the shelves rest upside down. My bed is a chaotic jumble of sheets, pillows, blankets and pyjamas and I am reluctant to replace a familiar mess with the mess that would result if I tried to make the unmade bed. Now, I may never learn to make my bed properly. My dusty gray underwood stares at me with its forty-two eyes — not including the back- spacer — disappointedly. You see, though I try, there are no stories left for me to tell. Only recollections: images, colours, shadows, alternately bright and dull, one on top of the other, jumping in and out, side to side, up and down, in my mind, like figures in a Chagall painting. No stories. No sensible plots. No full-blooded characters. Just ghosts. The memory of my mother's cancer has placed an unbearable weight upon me, for now everything outside of the truth seems frivolous and unworthy of my attention. Mr. Turpin was an old gray man, a former evangelist, who quoted seventeenth century philosophers, and cried in class. His hands trembled and his nose was always red. For months he wore the same brown suit until it became so wrinkled that the shape of his body was completely hidden: from the front he looked like a clown, from the back he looked like a discarded candy wrapper. Mr. Turpin liked me because I was the only boy in the class — girls can be smart without being devoted — who had any regard or affection for words. People like us, he said, are a vanishing breed. He would often keep me after class so that he would have someone to cry for and, sometimes, not knowing exactly why, I cried with him. He told me once, in the strictest confidence, that his wife had begun visiting him again. Not knowing quite what to say I had said congratulations. But he quickly shook his head and said that congratulations were not in order, that his wife had been dead for thirty years. "She comes to me at night," he whispered, "her hair and her eyes are black, her 149 skin is white like waxpaper and she curses at me. She blames me for her death. She says that I bored her to death . . . Later we drink cocoa and talk about my death." Mr. Turpin was eventually relieved of his duties by the P.T.A. — who debated for weeks how he had ever been hired in the first place — and the last words he said to me were the words of Baruch Spinoza (he thought that I would appreciate Spinoza because we were both Jewish): "A free man thinks of nothing less than of death and his wisdom is a meditation not of death, but of life." He winked and, gratefully, I never saw him again. He was content with his apparitions and his meditations. "We are here to talk to you about God's purpose." They speak quickly, in unison, in what is definitely a take-it-or-leave-it tone of voice. They stand, hands near hips, legs apart, like linebackers, ready for anything. Poor girls, have my neighbours given you a bad time? I don't like them either. They are harsh and inconsiderate and a little ignorant. Jews, obstinate, unbending, hiding in their houses and ghettos, have always made it difficult for Christians to spread the word of God's love and mercy. We hid, kept to ourselves and remained unconvinced. Mrs. Wooden, who lives across the street, has not left her house for as long as I have lived here, except occasionally to pounce on a trespassing baseball or football. Mostly, she sits near her window smoking and only her head, round as a pumpkin, and the collar of her paisley housecoat are visible. As children we imagined that she was a witch or some kind of disembodied Goblin and we threw rotten apples at her house late at night. In the morning she telephoned our parents to complain and our parents told her that she was probably mistaken — that it couldn't have been us. I discovered later that she had been in Dachau and that she had black indelible numbers on her forearm. Sometimes at night I would hear her screaming and I would hear her husband, frustrated and tired, trying to comfort her. (His burden, his indelible mark.) Now that there are no young children on the street and no balls rolling onto her lawn, she shuts herself up in her room, afraid of German soldiers and Polish informers, the Avon lady and well- meaning teenage girls. Hiding from those who seek to destroy her as well as those who seek to save her. "Yes," I said, "I would love to hear about God's purpose. Please come in. Sit down. Won't you?" They come in, unsuspiciously, gayly, like young Hugh of Lincoln skipping through the Jewish quarter, their scrubbed pink girlish faces gleaming. After all, they are the kind of people who expect the best 150 from others — (I, on the other hand, expect the worst and am, therefore, never disappointed) who expect tolerance and kindness from others. And when the rest of the world turns out to be something less than cheery and decent they are noticeably angered, intolerant, filled —■ a lingering vestige of their old testament origin — with a wrath and vindictiveness worthy of good ol' Jahweh himself. Ready to bring down the sword of righteousness upon the capped heathen head. But now the slightest indication of kindness and encouragement returns them to their old even-tempered optimistic selves. I, in my boredom and typewriterphobia, am a genuine human being, while all the others — my hiding uncooperative neighbours — are aberrations, exceptions to an otherwise hopeful, God-loving world. I am a good audience and to me they could speak, at length, of the resurrection, the sermon on the mount and the golden rule. Really, I have no time for this bit of religious entertainment. There is work to be done. Debts to be repayed. Ghosts to be mitigated. The past creeps up on me like a vaudevillian hook and my performance upon this present stage is limited. I am needed backstage where ancient male characters in wide brimmed black hats and long black coats, where frail, tired women in white sheets and antiseptic hospital beds appeal to me, in Pirandello fashion, for sympathy, for immortality. For some kind of sensible death. A parade of crippled bodies and wronged faces will not rest in me until some sense is made of their suffering. And there is no sense in any of it. And I am not up to such a task. I am no story-teller. I wish only to be left alone. I wish only to converse quietly with my tender-hearted, angelic proselytizers about God's true benevolent purpose. They sit carefully on my mother's green sofa, their thin legs crossed just below their knees. Both girls are dressed carefully and simply in white blouses, black skirts and saddle shoes. (Evidently, they are on the same team and it appears that their effort will be a concerted one.) It has been years, fads, children and jokes aside, since I have seen anyone wearing saddle shoes and it's perhaps the single article in their uniform which is both silly and touching. While the soles of their shoes are worn and discoloured from rain, ashphalt and gum, the tops of their shoes are bright and polished and new. Bottom and top, these shoes were made to last. Italian leather and sporty canvas could never see the days these shoes have. Looking down at their feet, I sit close by, perpendicular to them, in an old re-upholstered chair 151 in which, I fear, I am sinking. The house seems somehow older than it is. Ours is the only red-bricked house on the block. It was my grandfather's wish. All the other houses on the block are white-bricked and pretty while ours is dark and somber and older. My grandfather insisted that a house have character and maturity. Repairs are needed, but put off. The brown patches on the lawn, the dying shrubs, the cracked walk, and the door, blackened by a year of fickle weather, dust, slush and hand prints, all will have to wait for spring. Inside, the carpets, the furniture, the wallpaper have become ancient in only two decades. I must have entered and re-entered each room a thousand times and though they have changed over the years it is impossible to picture anything ever having been different. Everything is in its place, the same as it has always been with a single exception. I am a good host as well as a good Samaritan and I ask my guests if they would like anything to drink. Coffee, tea, milk, juice, coke, wine, gin. They graciously decline. They shuffle, businesslike, through their briefcases, each taking out a handful of beige pamphlets. (Something tells me that they do not consider themselves guests.) I wait patiently ■—- patience being a virtue and the only one that I can manage — and after a few moments of silence and throat-clearing, they look at each other and the older (I assume) taller girl begins her prepared speech. "If you have not already guessed, we are Jehovah's Witnesses. The Jehovah's Witnesses are a Christian pros — a Christian sect founded by Charles T. Russell. The name is adopted from the Bible, from Isaih —" "Isaih?" "Yes, Isaih. 43:10: 'Ye are my witnesses . ..' We have con — uh members all over the world and our pamphlets are published in seventy-eight languages including Polish and Zulu." 123 Her friend continues: "Do you long for a better world, one of justice and truth, free from sorrow, hatred and war?" I did not answer. I know a rhetorical question when I hear one. (Besides, my longings are best kept out of this.) "Do you want to live at a time when genuine peace and love prevail among people of all races?" From the Poles to the Zulus. I like the way this girl speaks. Her face is not pretty, but her voice is clear and fragile. Like glass. To do this, to confront strangers, to become an imposition in order to help people, she has more courage than I could ever gather. More courage and less common sense. I also like the way her nose twitches when she speaks and the way her uncrossed leg dangles and swings like a pendulum. Her breasts are large 152 and round and seem somehow separate from her small body and her soft voice. As if they had minds and moods of their own, enthusiastic, bouncy, welcoming like old friends. "Then we can help you! I mean the Jehovah's Witnesses can help you. Using God's word, the Bible, as our authority, we point out the clear evidence that the present wicked system of things will soon end, destroyed by God. But we also announce the coming in of a righteous new order." The doorbell rings several times; ringing out the old and ringing in the new. "Excuse me." I pull myself out of my chair and walk to the door. There is no one in front of the house. I check the back door and there is no one there either. I return to my chair. "I'm very sorry. Please continue. I can't imagine who it could have been." The younger girl continues exactly where she left off. "There under the rule of God's kingdom, his heavenly government, people will enjoy — " "Actually the doorbell rings alot by itself, it's the craziest thing. Nothing to worry about though." Apparently by the impatient look on their faces and the anxious tap of their saddle shoes I am the only one worried. They want to get on with it. The basic difference between us is in direction. They are straight-ahead and I, I am off to the side somewhere. "I'm sorry, I guess I interrupted again. It was probably just Elijah looking for a glass of wine. You see, at Passover, we — "I smile, but they don't get the joke. Some day, some one will understand my allusions. "Excuse me, again, please go on." "Thank-you. There . . . there people will enjoy life forever in true peace, health and happiness on a paradise earth." There is a short pause as I wait to see if they are both finished. They are. For the moment. Evidently, it is now my turn to express some feeble doubt. "That's all well and good," I say, impressively, rabbinically, scratching my beard, hoping to interest and not offend them, for if they should leave there is nowhere for me to go except back to my typewriter. "But this idea of a paradise earth, well, I don't know ..." What would Zeyda say? Me, sitting here, all education and charm, talking theology with two shiksas. Not even pretty shiksas at that. Jehovah's Witnesses of all things. What would Ma say? On bright mornings, after late parties, my head ringing from too much beer, my mother would make me coffee and eggs and matter-of-factly question me about the type of girl I had met. By "type" she meant "were they Jewish?" I would become angry or amused, depending x53 upon my mood, and she would drop the subject. Once, walking downtown, I was approached by a red-haired Mormon, tall and lean. He offered me a booklet and I accepted it, being something of a collector of fanatical literature and also being somewhat afraid of tall, lean people. Later when my mother found it on my desk, she disposed of it. She said that it was an accident, that she was just tidying up, but I guessed otherwise. She was just protecting me from the gentiles and the fanatics. It is a Jewish mother's responsibility. Who will protect me now? Her anxiousness about my associations was a type of faith, in itself, a faith in my continuance, in my future. "It seems to me that the dichotomy between the present wicked earth and the future paradise earth is a half-truth. There is only one world, after all, God's world, the one we have, wicked and beautiful as well. First of all, we should have, if we give any credence to the Buddhist and Hindu conception of karma samsara or re-incarnation, as our first goal — though it shouldn't really be seen as a goal per se — escape or release from the mundane, painful world — wicked, I don't think, is a fair description — and even if we cannot obtain that goal in this lifetime or in the next, perhaps some time. Each of us being bodhisattvas, really, in the ultimate sense." Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. I must break my habit of trying to fascinate people — friends and strangers both — with my muddled, enthusaistic interpretation of Eastern religion. Their faces are blank, as blank as the Buddhist pantheon. (That is the Hinayana school, I believe.) Or even worse, as blank as the sheet of paper I had earlier rolled into my Underwood. The sheet of paper I had been staring at, before they came, for what seemed like nine years. (Like Bodhidharma staring at the wall of that cave in China.) Finally, the sheet of paper I have no wish to return to. "On the other hand, who is to say that there could not be, one day, a paradise on earth. Why shouldn't the dead, the good dead, of course, all pop out of their graves and walk the earth one day? They practically do it now, don't they?" There is no reply. I can hear them breathing, exhaling their confusion and disapproval, inhaling a new found patience and desire to save me from myself. I chant to myself: OM. Trying to transport myself out of the awkwardness I have created: OM. They look at me, oddly, like a hungry cat eyeing a bird. We sit, the three of us, in spiritual contemplation of the silence, knowing, in varying degrees, that God is out there somewhere, either waiting to be found or late arriving. 154 The doorbell rings. Elijah, no doubt, has come to my rescue. I walk to the door and there is no one there. Hanging in the living room, next to the vestibule, there is a portrait of my grandfather, drawn in pastels, by a rather inadequate and inexpensive artist. The portrait was copied from his photograph, several years after his death, and had been intended as a happy remembrance for the family, but neither the gay colours nor the artist's singular aptitude for simplification had succeeded in hiding the sadness in his dark, immigrant eyes. No doubt, an inherited sadness. The sadness of the race. A truthful sadness which I will never know. Not even now. The eyes, in contrast to the artificial lines and shadings of the face, seem almost alive, like in the old Hollywood B movies where the painted eyes are removed so that the villain can spy, unseen and invisible, upon any intruders. My grandfather stares at me. He understandably, invisibly disapproves of my two evangelical shiksas. He blinks. When my mother died, eleven months ago, old relatives with beady eyes, walking into the house to pay their respects, forgetting to remove or even wipe their October-stained shoes, commented almost immediately upon how much I resembled my grandfather. My great aunt sprayed s's in my face and remembered her elder brother to me. "Yankel, did you know, you are the sphitting image of Matas when he wash a boy. The shame walk, the shame build, even the eyes are the shame . . . You didn't know him when he wash a boy, did you? No? A finer boy, a finer brother you shouldn't want to know from. I'm telling you if you are half the man he wash, one tenth the man, then you'll be bleshed, your family will be bleshed, your children will be bleshed ..." Her lisp was unbearable, like a leaky faucet, but I stood patient, wet-faced, listening to the stories of my grandfather's youth. She told me the happy stories. I remember the others. Almost as soon as I sit down the doorbell rings again. Several times. The sound is familiar. I rush to the door — understanding how Pavlov's dog must have felt — hoping to catch someone running away, but there is no one in sight. I step out on the porch calling, "Who's there? Is anybody there?" There is no answer, of course, because there is no one there. When I return to my seat, my guests are noticeably perturbed. Their enthusiastic twitches have developed into nervous ticks. The younger girl holds her nose. My anxiety about the probable faultiness of the doorbell or the possible presence r55 of an unseen visitor is contagious. The younger girl sneezes. I think that they are worried about me. They stare at my face, which has grown white with the rushing back and forth, and say that I look like I have seen a ghost. "Nonsense," I laugh, "there is no such thing." They smile, but I can tell that they are uneasy. Their small flat bottoms wiggle restlessly, uncomfortably. My mother's plastic sofa cover quietly shrieks as the girls settle themselves. They recross their legs on the other side, above the knee. The scuffed toes of their shoes point to heaven. "We really have to get that bell fixed." They both nod. They are now entirely in favour of such a reparation. The day is made up of small mysteries which we somehow manage to ignore or explain away. In turn, our lives are made up of larger mysteries which are harder to explain. The girls regain their composure and the younger girl speaks, intently, devotedly, to her partner. "Beatrice, won't you please continue?" Beatrice continues. "If you desire to be with the great crowd who will be standing before God's throne, serving him day and night, in the post Armageddon era, now is the time to prove to Jehovah that your service will — " "Isn't that pronounced Jahweh. I was always taught — " "Yes. Jehovah. It's the same thing . .. Now is the time to prove that your service will be, not half-hearted, not lukewarm, not on and off, but without let-up. It is not up to each of us to question or to wonder why, it is up to each of us to serve." Both girls with the mention of the "great crowd" and the "post Armageddon era" become much more animated. Their pale, patchy complexions become coloured, red and bright like the sun at twilight. Beatrice, although she is still reciting a speech, is ignited, absolutely fired by the consequences of what she is saying. Her dull green eyes widen, her drab blond hair seems to sparkle as if she had been magically transported into a Clairol commercial, her slight bosom heaves and her legs uncross. She is leaning forward, speaking only to me, offering me, alone, the ecstacy of divine awakening. "The love of Jesus is in me," she says, "and paradise is right before you, all you need do is hold out your hand and embrace it. God loves you. He loves you so much that he gave his only begotten son to the cross. Imagine the greatness of that love, greater than all the love man has ever felt, in all his centuries." Yes indeed. Something stirs inside me and, God knows, it's not my soul. For a moment, for more than a moment, flat-chested Beatrice begins to look good to me. I feel myself rising, almost out of my old sagging chair, prepared to travel through purgatory, through the inferno of hell, with my homely, aroused Beatrice. Now. 156 The time has come. But I do nothing. What can I do? Except swallow and sit quietly with my hands folded over my lap. In my first year of College I fell in love with a girl — her name was Rachel, I think — who eventually fell in love with someone else. (Conveniently, I have forgotten his name and most of his face.) Rachel and I shared an English class. "Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence — Apostles of Love?", and we spent hours together rummaging through WOMEN IN LOVE searching for womb images. We berated Jude for his obscurity and his uncertainty. "Jude's tragedy," Rachel said, "was his inability or reluctance to communicate his feelings. If, right from the beginning, he had only told Sue that he loved her, if he had been confident and determined, then surely things would have turned out better." I added that Sue had some problems of her own. Rachel agreed, but still placed the responsibility with Jude. "What about class bigotry?" I asked. She agreed again, but said that what Hardy was trying to say was that man must shape his own destiny. "Men must make things happen!" she declared triumphantly. I disagreed. "Hardy is saying precisely the opposite. He is saying that man cannot shape his own destiny. He is saying that man is powerless when confronted with circumstances that he can neither control nor understand. The tragedy — if you want to call it that — is that each person is locked up inside his own skin and the Jailkeeper has, out of spite or a twisted sense of humour, laid down the key just beyond our reach. We are alone and helpless in everything. In our desire, in our pain, in our faith, and finally in our death. We accomplish nothing, except death." She laughed, tossing her brown-haired head back, looking her prettiest when she laughed, and said that I was an awful cynic. It was at that moment that I thought, maybe, she liked me, even loved me. It was at that moment that I thought, in her, I had stumbled across what I had always been looking for. I carried that thought with me for several months and though I never actually did anything about it, every shrug of my shoulders, every twist of my head, every inflection of my voice, were my own clever tricks of seduction. Everything was planned ahead. Nothing, on my part, was spontaneous. It was all done with the sole purpose of sweeping her off her feet, but unfortunately, I only succeeded in knocking myself flat on my face. One spring day I saw her get into a red sportscar with a tall blond young man, and as I watched them drive away, I believe that something 157 in her manner, something in her eyes, seemed to say to me, "Fool, you missed your chance!" Beatrice speaks louder, almost screaming into my ear, for I have been distracted. She has been fighting the battle for my soul without me. I have not been listening. The gospel has gone in one ear and out the other. I apologize. She continues: "As it says in Collossians 3:23,24: 'Whatever you are doing, work at it whole-souled. Whole- souled as to Jehovah, and not to men, for you know that it is from Jehovah you will receive the due reward of the inheritance. Slave for the master, Christ.' " "Of course, that's true," I say. The girls are pleased. They believe they have made some kind of impression on me. "But it is not easy." "Yes we know that it is hard, but with determination, confidence and faith one can accomplish anything. The harder the struggle, the more gratifying the victory. After all, God helps those who help themselves." "No you don't understand." And they don't and can't. Even their best words, their most sincere, well-meaning words seem vulnerable and hollow to me, vulnerable as balloons. Their best appeals, their best twitches and gesticulations fall around me like blunt spears. "Please try to see my position. It is not a question of difficulty or struggle, you see, for some people, people like me, it is just not possible." My grandfather was a strong, handsome man. I am not a bit like him. He loved his God so dearly, so completely that now I am ashamed and envious. I have never been and will never be whole- souled about anything, about God, or women, or my writing. He came to Montreal from Kiev around the turn of the century. He left Russia because he was a Jew and he came to Canada to find wealth, freedom and religious tolerance. My grandmother's family came to Canada from a small village in Rumania. They, too, came to escape persecution and to find prosperity, but instead of finding prosperity, my grandmother and grandfather found each other and they were married in 1920. My grandfather fell in love with my grandmother the very first time he saw her. "I knew," he used to say, "that I was going to marry her. Of course, she didn't know any such thing, she was afraid of me and who could blame her. Everytime she turned around there I was, this small dark young man, dressed all in black except for my white shoes — the ones I wore to synagogue — follow- 158 ing her about like a cocker spaniel. Finally, I went to see her father, your great-grandfather, and I asked for permission to speak with his daughter. Do you know what he did? He threw me out on my ear, that's what he did. But I came back, every day, every single day, for a month, until he realized that the only way I would leave him alone was if he let me see his daughter. So for his own sake, I was allowed to see her .. . Your grandmother was beautiful. She had long brown hair that she pushed up on top of her head and held there with hundreds of pins and berrettes. Her eyes were wide and brown and she had a figure like an hour-glass ..." He would pause, for a moment, remembering, I suppose, that he was speaking to an eight- year-old boy, or perhaps just remembering. "She didn't like me after she met me either. She said that I annoyed her, she said that I was conceited and, in those days, it's true, I was. There wasn't anything I couldn't have, not if I wanted it bad enough. People were not going to walk all over me. In Russia, I had seen my father and my grandfather beaten and spit on, and that was not going to happen to me. Life was not going to pass me by, not if I could help it, and your grandmother was not going to slip through my fingers. I waited for her to fall in love with me and she did. When you are young there is time to wait. . . and when you get older there is never enough time." Zeyda, I am sorry for having let you down. I know how you must feel. I think I know. I can see it in your eyes. In the yellow photographs. I am sorry for not being like you. For giving up so easily. But it all comes to the same in the end, doesn't it? Whether you fight the pain and the suffering or surrender and accept it. It all comes to the same. No one ever wins, really. My grandfather was almost rich. He owned a fruit store which was three times the size of the only other store on the block, which was another fruit store owned by a man named Steinberg. My grandfather lost most of his money and the store when my father contracted polio. Mr. Steinberg, incidentally, expanded. There were other stories about how the money vanished. My grandmother, who did not trust banks, kept all the money in an old cedar chest, in brown and green paper bags, and my grandfather's two younger brothers would borrow, and often forget to return, as much as they needed. When times were bad it was the cedar chest that kept my great uncles going. Gratitude, however, was never their best quality. Today, family and cedar chests are forgotten as if the two were synon- omous. My great uncles are busy cutting each other's throats. They are both very close to being millionaires. (Rumour has it.) They 159 manufacture paper bags and their grandchildren drive red Porsches. I, on the other hand, inherited the cedar chest. I only see my rich relatives when someone dies, at which time they appear, looking reasonably sympathetic, reminisce for five minutes and leave, waving a fleshy hand, always saying: "If there's anything you need." It pleases me to think that they, like Claudius, are, or will some day, be haunted by guilt. I hope, now, that their ears are burning. (I suppose this means that I will have to squeeze a play out of my abandoned typewriter, yet another task which I am not up to.) My grandfather died in our house, lonely, betrayed and widowed. His heart stopped beating. Early in the morning, from the bathroom, I heard a single gasp. Not sad or angry or sonorous enough to make up for a lifetime of disappointments, just a single gasp. I was too young to understand. The human heart, like any machine or emotion, love not withstanding, can only endure so much — so much irony and unfairness. That final beat of the heart must be the realization of the senselessness of repetition, of going on. The furnace gasps and groans like an old man awakening. It is doing its job, sensing some imperceptible, invisible coldness. Slowly like tea dissolving in a glass, odd inexplicable noises filter through the house. Things that go bump. It is only partly amusing. The roof strains and creaks as if a heavy weight had been placed upon it. The wind whistles through the eaves and bangs against the aluminum siding. The glass in the windows rattles. Also, the doorbell rings every fifteen minutes. We — Beatrice, Rosalind and I — are used to it. I find the way they ignore trivial details attractive. It is just like a woman to look past things that don't really matter. Beatrice goes on talking, using the ringing bell as a punctuation mark, while Rosalind ties her shoes and pulls up her socks, folding them just above the ankle. Beatrice and Rosalind have talked for two hours now and feel certain that they are making some kind of progress. I warn them that they are probably wasting their time — I have become fond, though still confused by their strange zeal — seeing as how I am a circumcised Jew and will, for better or worse, stay that way. The Jehovah's witnesses, they say, encompass all things, all traditions, all faiths. Besides, they inform me, there are many cases of Jewish people remaining Jewish and also devoting themselves to Christ and the Watch Tower movement. I am curious. Will my long-lost prepuce be refunded. They assure me that whatever I have lost will be returned to me, within reason. "I'd like to see that," I say. Thank 160 Jehovah, they don't understand me. The sun has disappeared. The blue sky has turned gray, noting, I guess, my changing mood. Summer never existed. It is late afternoon and I am hungry and drowsy and restless and a little bit giddy. The girls, on the other hand, are fresh. No thoughts of food, sleep or masturbation. (Oh to be young and Christian!) I am beginning to feel that I am keeping them unnecessarily, under false pretences. They like me and I am feeling guilty. Beatrice said, laughing, that there is hope for me yet, and Rosalind shyly whispered that I was a nice person, an unusual person. This whole thing, after all, is just an evasion for me. Perhaps I should let them go, let them go on to other people who are a little more lost and a little more willing to be found. However, there is no way to be politely rid of them, so I wait and listen. "One day," Rosalind says, "and that day is coming soon, I know it..." "Yes. Soon." Beatrice murmurs. I hope so. "... the glory of God's justice and mercy will be revealed. If only we fill our lives with sacred service we can have the assurance of being among the happy crowd of Armageddon survivors who will rejoice to continue such service day and night before God's throne after the great tribulation is finished . . . Jesus will walk the earth once again." Downstairs there is a thump, perhaps not a loud thump, but a thump nonetheless. Then the unmistakeable sound of footsteps. My heart seems to slip a bit as if it was resituating in my chest. I think someone has entered the house (at last, they have been lurking and banging about for hours) either through the garage door (did I forget to lock it?) or the back door or a loose window. Beatrice and Rosalind did not hear anything. And I do not intend to frighten them with something that might just be my imagination. (The doorbell has been enough of an adjustment for them.) Anyway they are too concerned with a general Armageddon to worry about a local one. It could be burglary. The neighbours, around here, have taken to stealing or borrowing anything that is not nailed down. Clothespins, charcoal, rakes, bald tennis bells, suntan lotion, apples, lawn chairs, but these are only and specifically outdoor capers. They would not come into the house, I know that for a fact. Ever since my mother died they have avoided this house as if it were haunted. I see them walk by and avert their eyes and I know that the idea of death, the proximity of death, frightens them, reminds them, I suppose, of 161 their own inevitable end. And as far away as they can physically stay from the unsurprising, natural facts of death, the better. In the movies the hero or heroine always gets up to investigate odd noises or unusual occurrences, but I have no wish to know. It is not particularly fear, but more like laziness or an attempt at indifference which holds me in my chair while possible strangers ransack the house. If someone has intentions of taking our appliances and then my life, I have no great desire to stop or even startle them. If the angel of death has found his way in through my garage (stained only with oil and mud, no trace of lamb's blood) then he will have to come and get me, I am not going to him. If it is someone I have known, or will know, at one time or another, then, no doubt, they will find me and deliver the message which has brought them here at this time. Of course I am acting irresponsibly. Like a child hiding from the bogey man. I am letting my imagination get the best of me. Granted, these noises are inexplicable, but must I always have explanations for everything? As a child living in a decrepit apartment in the city I stared each night, before sleep, into a black, ragged hole across from my bed. Phantoms, witches and vampires creeped in and out of that hole and creeped in and out of my sleeping and waking without explanation. Often my mother would carry me from my bed and let me sleep on the carpet in the living room, and with eyes half- closed, grown-up legs stepping over me and Jack Parr talking on the TV., I would feel safe. Burglars don't break into occupied houses in broad daylight. Convicts don't generally escape to the suburbs. And ghosts are only in the mind, they don't actually rattle chains and pace back and forth in finished basements. So I tell myself, "Jake," (at times like this I call myself Jake) "It is nothing to worry about and that is explanation enough." "What a wonderful prospect is before us if we continue to render sacred service to Jehovah in a whole-souled way. If we freely allow God to enter into our lives and our hearts not as an intruder but as a long-expected guest." Rosalind's voice is warm and quiet and, for a time, it carries me away to a softer, safer place. It is an instinctive voice, the voice little girls use to comfort dolls, the voice women use to tuck children into bed. Rosalind's motherhood will be a wonderful thing. Little witnesses, blanketed and cradled, wearing white booties and sockettes and disposable diapers, fed on mashed spinach and bible stories. The conception I am less sure of. "Free your imagination for a moment. Imagine all the wonderful possibilities. All our dreams come true, all our hopes fulfilled. No more disease or war or 162 hatred or death. The good shall be awarded immortality and eternal happiness and the dead shall rise up and walk the earth again. Reborn. They will be rewarded for their service and their suffering. All pains and wounds will be healed. All questions will be answered. The dead will even be repayed, so to speak, for their death, Just imagine it ... " When there is no hope left you feel free and empty all at the same time. They tell you that you must be practical, that you must face the facts. The outlook is not good, not good at all. There is no use pretending anymore. Life, then death catches up with you. And waiting for rewards and justice, waiting for explanations is just time spent waiting. In the hospital, waiting for my mother to die, I was always angry. It seemed, then, that the anger would never subside. A rage that I had never experienced before grew and spread inside me like a malignancy. I hated everyone, the smug doctors, the loud nurses and the stupid orderlies. I hated the screaming senile women and the indifferent elevator operator — with his nightly joke to the doctors about life being a series of ups and downs — and I hated most of all the curious visitors. I saw them looking, the sideway glances from the hall, the averted eyes, and the concealed expression of fascination. What a shame, they whispered, how awful. Still, it happens every day. Every single day. What can you do? Each time I heard the cold tiled floor squeak I imagined that someone was coming to look, to take notes, to have a sad story to take home with them, and I would guard the door to my mother's room. All the hatred and the anger I felt I would gather and put into a stare which, usually, succeeded in discouraging the tactfully curious. There were others who continued to stare. (An old female patient who constantly wandered the halls looking for her Daddy and Sidney asked me why I was standing in the doorway. When I ignored her, she pinched my arm and said, "Why are you hiding Sidney? You can't hide him forever, it's only a matter of time until I find him, you know?" As she walked away the strings of her hospital gown loosened, revealing her flat, wrinkled bottom. Sensing the draught, she farted nonchalantly. I remember laughing.) Visitors in hospitals cannot help but stare into strange rooms. I know I have done it myself. I don't know what we want or expect to see, but looking is a necessity, even if it is the quickest, most regretted glance. Most glances are regretted. At one point the three other beds in my mother's room were empty. I was aware of five women who preceded my mother 163 into death, who survived my nightly visits, but who had vanished like ghosts the next afternoon. Their empty beds were presided over by young nurses with armfuls of white linen who tucked in corners and replaced pillow cases, meticulously, with invisible effort. These girls removed every trace of life or death, making it seem that undisturbed bed sheets were the supreme, most artistic accomplishment of any hospital. It is the hospital's policy to put on a pretence of immortality. When someone dies, an inconspicuous bell rings which only the staff can decipher, and the doors to each room are closed. No one is permitted in the hall. The body, covered by a fresh white sheet, is wheeled to the closest waiting elevator and is delivered to the basement. A moment later everything is back to normal and it is hard, for the average patient or visitor, to realize that anything at all happened. There is no possible repayment for death. All the sugar-coated heavens and frilly paradises, all the consolation prizes, cannot begin to compensate for the indisputable cruelty and indifference of God. I imagine. "Repayment. Bullshit. So to speak." I am passionate, for a change. My bitterness has been appearing, disappearing and reappearing in my mind all afternoon and finally it materializes in words. I would like to do a little proselytizing, convincing of my own. "Where I would like to know, where was the justice and the mercy in my mother's death? I will never understand why she died, not if I live to be a hundred. Why she died the way she did? Why I had to watch? I prayed, you know, at the beginning, I prayed for her recovery and then, when there was no hope left, I prayed for her to die. And my prayers came to nothing. Covering my head, fasting, lighting candles, crossing my fingers, God, these things we do for nothing." "We didn't know." Beatrice says. Beatrice and Rosalind are surprised by the intensity and the suddenness of my outburst. They look at each other. Uncomfortable, coughing and fidgeting, they wait for me to continue. But I have already said too much. There is no sense in burdening others. There is no sense in pity. Or in conversations. Making my sorrow into some kind of cause or banner makes it only more absurd. Words are vain. Inconsequential. Elusive. Vanishing into space like the bubbles children blow into the air for a game. After a long, awkward silence, Rosalind speaks: "God has many ways of testing us, Jake, we must learn to accept his will." 164 "Still, that doesn't tell me why." "Why?" He did not have an answer either. All he wanted was forty-five seconds of my time. Just forty-five seconds. Every Friday afternoon, before the sun sets, young rabbinical students — orthodox Jews — gather, along with an old Cantor's Bakery truck, at a local shopping centre and attempt to herd groups of wayward Jews (like me) into their truck so that we — the wayward Jews — can put on the long neglected tephilim. "Why?" I asked again. "Because it's a mitzvah, a good deed, because you owe it to God." He answered questions well for a person who was not prepared for questions. You see, most people ignored him. Most young boys, his own age, tripped him and threw his black hat in the mud. "I don't owe God anything." "You owe him your fife, don't you? He gives you life, doesn't he?" "Granted. But he also takes it away. I figure that way we're even. I don't owe him anything and vice versa." "You are stubborn and bitter, I imagine." "Just honest, I think." "Bitterness is a mask for disappointment. Tell me, on what day were you born?" "What has that got to do with anything?" "Are you going to fight with me or are you going to tell me?" "Are you going to tell my fortune?" I knew that he was trying to change the subject, but I was interested in his concern with me personally. When I told him that I was born on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest of Jewish holidays, the day of Kol Nidre, he smiled, held a single lean finger up in front of his eyes and said, "You see, underneath all your fancy notions and ideas, there is a genuine holiness. Yes, I believe that I saw that right away." My prophet. He knows all. He sees all. Touched by the almighty hand of Jahweh. That accounted, I suppose, for both his arrogance and his persistence. "The Jewish soul," he went on, "is sometimes like an unpolished diamond, covered over with dirt. It must be processed and cleansed and shaped so that its purity and glory may shine through ..." Rabbinical platitudes and cliches. He had learnt his craft well. The type of thing I have heard a score of times before and since at weddings, bar mitzvahs and fun- nerals. (Always followed by a joke of some sort and a meal of some 165 sort.) Still, I must confess I liked the fact that he could or thought he could see through me and that what he saw, after all, was a pure Jewish soul. Tell me of myself brother and we will talk of spiritual things, of unworldly things, of irrelevant things. We will leave no needle unthreaded, no nit unpicked. I argued, persisted, for argument's, for persistences' sake. "We see things from different points of view. You see, in me, a lost soul. And I see, in you, an untruthful soul. Your God can never be my God, never again anyway." He angered quickly, heating up like Moses faced with the Golden Calf, and shook a stafflike finger in my face, but he said nothing. This is what I wanted most of all, to anger him, to shock him — to destroy his complacency, his security, his faith. To change his life, as he, wanting me, just minutes before, to put on the tephilim, had wanted to change mine. We will be brothers yet, if not in our faith, then in our bitterness. But he calmed himself. He would have patience with me — poor lost lamb that I was —■ the patience of old put-upon Job. "Of course," he explained, "there is only one God." I suppose I should have expected that. Quite predictable. He smiled. Scroll yellow teeth smiling, beardless, blemished face smiling, six thousand years of wisdom and monotheism in his smiling eyes, his sad smiling eyes. After all, he was toying with me. He was younger than I was — a mere adolescent — but more convinced, more confident, more assured than I could ever be — me with all my fancy notions, with my introduction to Zen Buddhism, with my university degree. "One God," I said, "for justice and mercy. One God for indifference and destruction. Perhaps both the same. Perhaps my friend, you are right." He winced at my backhanded concession. "God gives man free choice. It is man who chooses to do evil, to sully himself." More cliches and platitudes, pre- and post-dinner comments. Dressed in an old black hat, a worn black suit and a partially concealed fraying, yellow scapular, clothes which have been handed down from one generation to the next, he speaks with words that have also been handed down, that are also worn and yellowing. Remnants of a forgotten, phantom race, a disintegrating race — disintegrating in mindless, heartless forgetfulness. He wanted simply to wrap me up in his words and his tephilim. He touched my arm and I pulled away. The next time, he held my arm firmly, like a wrestler 166 applying a half-nelson, and said, "Come. Put on the tephilim. What can it hurt? It'll only take a minute. It will be a mitzvah!" He paused, then continued, almost reciting, "On the hand (he stroked my left hand) as a memorial of His outstretched arm; upon the head (he touched my head with his index finger) over against the brain thereby teaching that the mind, whose seat is the brain, is to be subjected to His service. Blessed be He. Come." He stroked my cheek. His hand smelled of onion and fish. His eyes were glazed and his voice was hypnotic. He looked eagerly at the empty bakery truck and said once again, "Come. You want to come. Come." I pulled away again. This time completely. Inside I was on fire screaming. "Let go. Let go of me you dirty smelly Jew. Let go. I could never be like you. I never was like you. You are old and forgotten. You are a liar, as all ghosts and phantoms are, as they must be. It can never be again like it was, whether we like it or not and you will not trick me into your illusion . . . Please let me go. You will not catch me up in your dead wrappings, your dead ideas, your dead faith." He tried again to hold my arm, but I was beyond his reach. As I walked away, he called to me in a quiet, controlled voice. "You wish to forget, but you can't. You can never forget who you are and what you are. Never." The fire inside me lasted, as do all fires inside me, only a moment, extinguishing as quickly as it had ignited. I realized then that it was my lot to always know what I cannot be and to never know what I can be. He was wrong, really, I am not trying to forget, I am trying to remember. Who ever broke into the house has either left or settled down for the remainder of the afternoon. It is, as they often say in westerns, too quiet. No good will come of this quiet, Kemosabi. The shadows, the doorbell, the telephone, the furnace, the plumbing, the creaking timbers and the shivering aluminum are all plotting something. Waiting their opportunity. I must remain alert. Beatrice and Rosalind are crying, real tears for me. Oblivious to irony and metaphor, they are concerned only with my sorrow and my bitterness. They offer sympathy. A cure, a solution. Just like women to be preoccupied with concrete reality, when a terrible abstract danger threatens. They regard me as yet another of Christ's lost, motherless children. Suffer the little children, etc. I am, indeed, short and round-faced (cute, so I have been told) and infantlike and they want to hold me to their respectively ample and insufficient bosoms. I have learned to separate, to distinguish love from pity in a woman's eyes 167 and although pity does not last, it has its momentary advantages. On the whole, though, women are a mystery to me. They wander in and out of my life like bad memories, never staying very long and never offering very much in the way of spiritual or physical rewards. A friend, whose success with women is surpassed only by his ignorance, told me once that women are like buses, if you miss one, there'll be another along any minute. (Unfortunately, my schedule has been running a little behind lately.) "One hundred per cent confidence, Jake," he explained, "that's all it is. If you just let them know who the boss is, they'll treat you like a god-damned god, I mean it. Faith in yourself, that's what it is. If you got faith and a good line then you've got it made, man. Let me tell you, more ass than a toilet seat." I am no longer angry. I have, in fact, misbehaved in front of my guests and I apologize. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have bothered you with my personal problems. We hardly know each other. Anyway, it has nothing to do with what you came here to talk to me about. You have to believe what you have to believe, I know that. And I — " "Don't apologize, Jacob, please don't apologize." Rosalind's voice is gentle and maternal. Beatrice blows her nose compassionately. "We want to help you, we really do. Don't you see, Jacob, that we must have faith. We cannot wrestle with God's will as if it were something we could twist and shape so that it turns out the way we want it to. Faith, Jacob, is the only way." I would have given anything for it not to have turned out the way it did ... We — my sisters and I — watched and waited. My mother lay quietly, opening her eyes now and again to see if we were there. We did little things for her, but we were no longer sure that we were helping. She lay helpless, hopeless upon the white antiseptic bed sheets like Job upon the ashes. She wanted only to clear her throat. "If only I could ..." The words were barely distinguishable. It had become a task for her to speak and a much greater task for us to hear, to comprehend. Life ends like this with no one hearing, no one understanding. Her finger pointed to her throat. There was nothing we could do except hide the blood she spat. A futile attempt to keep everything white and hygenic and bloodless. The blood was everywhere. Endless, internal, eternal. We peeled off clumps of blood from behind her lips and from her tongue and there was blood in her phlegm and in her urine. As her face and fingertips became pallid, 168 almost transparent, showing the veins blue and visible, everything around her became marked with blood. The bedsheets, the blankets, the pillow case, unattached tissues, bits of cotton, disposable cups, and my hands. (Blood is not indelible. A little water and soap clears us of this stain.) That night, for some reason, I did not want to wash my hands but I did, having no choice, for it is perhaps in the performance of these small habits that we are most alive. There was nothing that we could do. We could only calm her and lie to her. Stroke her forehead and kiss her cheek, like a mother comforting a sick child. (Irony of ironies.) The doctor was in and out like a Jack- in-the-box and uttered six words from the medical profession, "Make her as comfortable as possible." Brilliant advise. Thank-you doctor. She did not die in my arms as I wanted, as I feared. She died alone in her sleep. The telephone rang with the news at six o'clock in the morning. Answering the phone was unnecessary, we knew what it was, we had expected it. The cord is cut, again. Life is a succession of disentanglements and partings. She disappeared, not like a shooting star or a television magician, but slowly and softly like a dissolving spirit. Still dissolving. My mother's life waned like the flame of a candle. Weakening. Wax people, that's what we are, wax people, burning ourselves out. Separate moulds, fading, forgotten impressions, flickering shadows on the wall. Death is an end. Life, a continuance. In a way, a betrayal. I go on so easily, so effortlessly. I forget so readily. In sum a sad story girls. Sadder than most, but just one of many. My memory is sharper, perhaps, than even I thought. But this is, all things considered, a restful afternoon and I have allotted this time for catching up on my memories. Or having my memories catch up to me. "We want to help you, Jacob," Rosalind repeats, placing her hand on my knee. Beatrice blows her nose again, even more compassionately. "Is there anything that you want to talk to us about, Jacob, anything at all?" Beatrice says nasally. They have become too serious. I like to regulate my own seriousness, turning it off and on like a faucet and they are too touched by all of this. Their saddle shoes are off the carpet, poised, expecting some enormous revelation. These girls have learned to live for, to wait for breakthroughs and miracles and I have learned only that things continue much the same way as always, and changes are minor and 169 for the worse. It is in their nature — young, Christian and fanatical — to be serious, passionate and moved. It's not that I doubt their sincerity, it's just that I wonder about their actual understanding of my situation. They think me strange in my pain and unusual in my confusion, when, in fact, it is their joy and certainty which is foreign. Incomprehensible. Anachronistic. I could not and would not want to make this clear to them. It is comforting, even for me, to know that there are still people like Rosalind and Beatrice around. When they leave, if I allow them to leave, they will be unchanged, I can promise that. And I can be grateful for small mercies. "People," Beatrice resumes, realizing that there is nothing I want to talk about, but that there is still much that she wants to say to me, "ask too many questions, that's the problem, it's part of the mistake we all make: asking questions. Look at you, Jake, all you can do is keep asking questions that you have no answers to, that there are no answers to. Why this? Why that? Jake," she looks directly into my eyes when she speaks and when she says my name it is as if she has known me all my life. It's hard to understand why, but she cares. Circumstances which would strike other people as distant and unimportant elicit the opposite reaction in Beatrice, she is moved to real, honest-to-goodness sympathy and concern. Taking, like Jesus, the cares of the world upon her. She has, in her, the makings of a misguided, misunderstood martyr. And that, above all else, invalidates her sales pitch. "Why ask at all? You want to believe, I know you do, otherwise you wouldn't have let us in or let us stay, otherwise you wouldn't be as angry and as bitter as you are. Can't you see that you are going against your own nature like a river that stops flowing or a waterfall that stops falling." Rosalind excuses herself to the bathroom. I offer guidance, but she assures me that she will find it. She makes two wrong turns and walks into the linen closet before she happens upon the correct door. Smiling back at us, relieved and safe, she enters and carefully locks the door behind her. "Ultimately, it is a journey we must all make, from doubt to faith, from opposition to acceptance. For it is in the acceptance of God that our doubts are ended. The slate is wiped clean. Our sins, our regrets, our worldly pre-occupations are all forgotten, erased. We are given a new chance to start over, to begin again and it is only through God that anyone can have such a chance. You can have it, Jake, if you would just stop struggling, stop this crazy tug-of-war you're caught up in." Rosalind rejoins us and asks Beatrice what happened. Beatrice nods. Rosalind glances at me and, unable to nod, I shrug my shoulders. I 170 know it is, at best, a neutral gesture, but it is the most I can manage. The plumbing grumbles like a primitive, vengeful God. For seven days after my mother's death there was an endless, handshaking parade of well-wishers, unknown relatives and insincere bastards through the front door and out again. The doorbell rang continuously. They came to pay their respects. Like debtors. They came, I suppose, to wipe the slate clean. One more person they would not have to think about. Death draws out relatives like vultures. Those who couldn't make it to the house sent donations and cards and food. And more food. (The Judaic cure-all is food. Life is hunger and when you are no longer hungry, then you are dead.) And all the time I remember expecting my mother to walk through the door, apologize for the mistake, and politely get rid of all of them. "Our deepest sympathies ..." "What can we say?" "Sorry." "What can we do?" "Sorry. So sorry." "So very sorry." One thing I will say for them they certainly were sorry. But not surprised. Aunt Matty said that she had seen the writing on the wall. She had known, for a long time, that it was inevitable. "She never smoked a cigarette in her life. Can you believe it? Well how is anyone to know about these things." Mr. Morris added, holding his yellow index finger to his temple, flicking his ashes on the carpet, "Not once did I see her smoke. Well what are you going to do?" He shook his head incredulously. Cousin Mildred whispered to her sister Florence that this was an old story and then proceeded to update those gathered around her, like girl scouts at a fireside chat, about imminent deaths in the family. "Remember Sid, Jerry's brother-in-law, a big strapping man, a little slow in the head, it's terrible, he's wasted away to nothing. Howard and I went to visit him in the hospital the other night, God, it was awful. His wife says that it's like he's disappearing right in front of her eyes. It makes me shiver to talk about it. Howard says that he used to weigh about two hundred pounds and now I'd be surprised if he even weighed half that. I tell you it's killing everybody these days and with all the research and all the brainy doctors nobody knows why. A plague on us. Howard says it's got something to do 171 with the cells. You'd think by now they'd know why. The worst thing is the way it eats you up ... oh ... I hate to even think about it." Our rich relatives waved from the doorway and called out, "IF there's anything, anything at all, you need, don't hesitate to call..." Uncle Manny wanted to go out and get complete chicken dinners, not just separate pieces, but complete chicken dinners with gravy and french fries and cole slaw and bread and napkins and aluminum trays and plastic forks and paper cups so that everyone could eat in one motion, with no fuss. He wanted to know if there was a place nearby where he could get complete chicken dinners and not separate pieces. Mrs. Wooden smiled from her window. Her round face smirked like a halloween pumpkin. For one night, she did not care who saw her. Tonight, she had survived. The Rabbi, dressed in a beige suit, wearing a beige, brown- trimmed fedora, came to the house on the first afternoon of the shiva to direct the Mourner's Prayer or Kaddish. (Although he had never met my mother, such a first night appearance was included in his fee.) For some, as of yet, unknown reason, he focused his attention on me, asking me first if I knew the Kaddish. My reply was no. He told me not to worry because, really, it was simple to learn. He then asked me if I spoke or read Hebrew. Again I said no, qualifying my answer by saying that I had forgotten almost everything that I had learnt. He said, in that case, that I could read the phonetical spelling. "Perhaps we could run through it once, just to see how it goes. What do you say?" I was quiet. He spoke the strange words softly, gently, pushing the words towards me like a salesman sure of his product. "Yisgadal Ve'yiskadash Sh'mey Rabbo Be'ol'mo ..." "I don't think that I want to say any prayers right now." It had never occurred to me that I would be called upon to say anything. Over the last two months I had prayed enough and it seemed that mocking myself with still more prayers would not serve any useful purpose. It had also never occurred to me that I would be obstinate, for the hatred and the anger that I had felt in the hospital just days before had mysteriously vanished, leaving me intact — a little relieved and a little unsure of how I was supposed to feel. Still the Hebrew words would not come. As a small child, restless and fidgety, in a subdued, silent synagogue I had laughed at the funny sounding words. As a boy, studying for my bar mitzvah, the complicated pronunciations had frightened me. Now something inside of me was, 172 successfully, fighting back the words and whether I liked it or not, there was nothing I, personally, could do. "But you must. Let me explain. There will be a minyan, of which you will be a part, and then, along with your father and your mother's brothers, you will say the Kaddish. It has always been done that way. You are not expected to say it alone, or, for that matter, to be perfect. Just do the best you can." "No." I shook my head slowly, almost sadly. "I'm sorry, I can't." "But it's your duty ..." He pleaded with me. The simplicity of the afternoon, of the procedure of sympathy and prayers, now in question, he looked dazed like a stunned boxer. He removed his jacket, unbuttoned the collar of his shirt, rolled up his sleeves and pushed his hat back on his head. He leaned over me and moved his lips in an exaggerated way. 'U'vchayey De'chol Baiss Yisroale Ba'agolo Uvisman Koreev Ve'imroo Omaine. It's easy. Try." "No, I won't." "Ah ha, now I understand." He smiled wisely, looking like a man who had solved a riddle. "Joseph, the living must go on living. We cannot question the ways of the Lord. Life is hard, in time you will learn that you cannot turn away from God when something goes wrong. I know how you feel now, but you will get over it, you must. Everyone does. Put your faith in God. Our God is all that we have." His hands, as they squeezed mine, were cold and his eyes were indifferent. He had said these words before, in a similar situation and I was frightened because I knew that what he said was true, in a way perhaps that he did not mean it to be. The living do go on living, something like this — chatter and chicken dinners. I would get over it. I would forget. Everyone does. "There is no point in blaming God," he continued, "or in struggling with His will. We have no way of understanding his justice and mercy. 'Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do? deeper than hell; what canst thou know?' " He was right. Again, sadly, in a way that he, perhaps, could not understand. Sadly, in a way perhaps that only I could understand. "Now, repeat after me: 'Yisborach Ve'yishtabach, Ve'yispoar —' " "No." "Yisborach, Ve'yistabach, Ve'yispoar, Ve'yisrowmam, Ve'yisnasey "No." i73 "We can't go on like this all night Jonathan, please try. 'Yisborach, Ve'yistabach, Ve'yispoar, Veyisrowmam, Ve'yisnasey, Ve'- yisadar, Ve'yisallay, Ve'yisallal, Sh'mey De'koodsho, Be'rich Hoo 9 99 "Yis bor ach Ve yis ta back Ve yis po ar . . . " I repeated the words, pronouncing each syllable exactly. My heart tightened, halted like a child about to utter his first forbidden word, his first curse. My hands were clenched at my sides and my body was rigid. I yielded only the words and those words he, having some unexplainable strength, tugged out of me. I finished the Mourner's Prayer praising God and cried thinking about my mother's death. My sister asked me if anything was wrong and the Rabbi, standing above me, his hands on my shoulders, my shoulders back against the hard uncomfortable chair, said, "No, he'll be alright now." "Jake, we have to be going, it's getting late." "Yes, we must be leaving now." On to other doorbells, no doubt. I suppose it is our opposite fates to ring doorbells which no one will answer and to answer doorbells which no one has rung. On to other non-believers or perhaps just home to supper. After all, angels and missionaries have to eat too. (My sisters and my father will be home soon expecting supper — the supper which I have neglected to put in the oven. "You're always forgetting something or other," they'll say, more frustrated than good-humoured.) Outside the afternoon settles into a usual suburban complacency. The sun occasionally comes out of hiding from behind a white blanket of cloud, but quickly fades, making all of its appearances brief and theatrical like Macbeth's kingly apparitions. Occasionally, the wind stirs and the sky darkens, threatening rain, but the threat remains just a threat. It is naturally cold outside and artificially warm — the furnace begins to groan again — inside. All things considered it would have been a perfect day to sit and brood, to reminisce, to stare at blank walls. The street is making preparations for twilight and eventual darkness. The giant streetlamps hum and buzz from inside their silver-metal bodies, cars drive by with their parking lights on, and mothers call their children in for supper. The children hesitate and whine suspecting, correctly, that they will not be allowed out again. Dogs return home voluntarily, cats are corralled, and everything and everyone moves towards the day's final meal. The house is hungry, too, grumbling like an empty stomach, soon it will be filled with familiar people and its odd noises and 174 lonely mysteries will be buried under the din of television sets and dishwashers and people re-telling the events of their day. The hunger is general. "Won't you stay for supper, Beatrice, Rosalind? Please? I would really like both of you to stay. It's no trouble really. My family will be home soon and I'd like you to meet them." The invitation is reckless. First of all there is not enough supper, second what supper there is, is cold, third I'm not sure I would like my family to meet Beatrice and Rosalind. I'm not sure that I would know how to explain. Perhaps I only want them to stay because I am afraid of the hole their leaving will certainly create. Or reveal. "No, we can't really, we must go. Roz?" They both rise at precisely the same time, their skirts stick to the plastic sofa-covers and for a moment it looks as if the plastic will not let go of them, but with an embarrassing squeak, they free themselves and walk to the doorway. They are actually leaving. I follow behind and find, on standing, that my left leg has fallen asleep. "It will be alright in a minute," I say, stumbling and rubbing my thigh. "Something like this always happens to me when I sit in that old chair. I don't think it likes me." "You shouldn't sit in it then," Rosalind suggests. "Tradition." Beatrice stops in the vestibule and glances at the portrait of my grandfather and asks who it is. "My grandfather. I'm supposed to look just like him." I hold my head erect, turning it to one side and then the other, allowing the girls to make their own comparison. They are surprised and say that they never would have guessed. "When he was younger, I have photographs of him when he was younger." "Jake, we really must be going." They pause, near the door, their bodies gravitating towards the doorhandle, not knowing quite how to leave, not knowing quite how to sum up their stay. A summary will be expected. Required, no doubt. I do not envy them the task. "The afternoon was spent in unsuccessful conversation. Prospect of conversion or continuing interest, unlikely. Possibility of return in the future, not recommended ..." Approaching twilight, the loss of light, the shadows on the wall bring out the feeling of desperation in me. I want to beg them to stay and I don't know why. People like Rosalind and Beatrice do not give up easily but their departure now, despite my invitation that they stay, is a sign of their giving up on me and although I do *75 not want to be changed, to be summarized as a victory, I do not want to be abandoned either. I would just as soon leave the matter open for discussion. Rosalind shakes my hand firmly, as if she were never going to see me again. Cold hands, warm bosom. By wanting too much, we can miss out on a great deal. Beatrice holds out her hand for me to shake and I hold it in mine for longer than I should. Awkwardly we gaze into each other's eyes. More like strangers than lovers. If they leave now it will be like they were never here at all. If they stay we may not accomplish anything, but at least they will be here and you never can tell ... "Jacob, let go." I release her hand and apologize for the last time. As they are leaving Beatrice tells me that I should get the doorbell fixed. "It's such a waste of time," she smiles "having to get up every two minutes and run to the door for nothing." "Yes, I know." 176 Notes on Contributors Brian Bartlett lived all of his early life in New Brunswick but has been in Montreal since 1975. A poetry chapbook, Cattail Week (Villeneuve), was published this year. Other poems have appeared in such magazines as Queen's Quarterly and The University of Windsor Review. Fiction is published in The Fiddlehead, Quarry, The Atlantic Advocate, and Best Canadian Short Stories: igy8 (Oberon). Two stories were listed in Martha Foley's Best American Short Stories, 1973, and 1974. Brian was born in 1953. Stephen Boston has had fiction published in The Fiddlehead and Stories from Atlantic Canada. He lives on Brentwood Bay in B.C. Bruce Byfield is 20 years old and lives in Coquitlam, B.C. He runs seven to ten miles a day, and studies English and Communications at Simon Fraser University. Terence Byrnes is a student in the Graduate Creative Writing program at Concordia University in Montreal, studying with Clark Blaise. He is from Verdun, Quebec. Barry Dempster has recently received a Canada Council grant. His stories are forthcoming in The Fiddlehead, The Dalhousie Review, The Westerly Review, and The Texas Quarterly. Levi Dronyk works as a technician at BCTV, writes record and concert reviews for Monday Magazine, and takes 4th year fiction workshop at the University of Victoria. He's been previously published in the 1976 and 1978 issues of From An Island. Levi was born in Two Hills, Alberta in 1949. Elin Elgaard was born in Denmark in 1950, and came to Calgary in 1971. In 1976, she obtained her degree in English Language and Literature, after going back and forth between Canada and the home university in Aarhus, Denmark for summer orals. She has had several stories of her own published in Canadian and American literary magazines 177 since 1972. She now lives in Sackville, N.B. with her husband. The story she has translated here, is by Tove Ditlevsen, a major Danish poet and prose writer who committed suicide in 1976. Over three decades, six collections of her stories and poems were published, drawing richly from the milieu of Versterbro, the poor area of Copenhagen where she grew up. Danny Feeney lives and writes in Kitchener, Ontario. He is eighteen years old. Mark Frutkin has appeared in such magazines as The Fiddlehead and Canadian Forum. One book of poems, Opening Passages, appeared in 1977. Mark is from Wolf Lake, Quebec. Paul Edmond Gotro, 26, attends the University of B.C. where he is taking his degree in English and Creative Writing. His work has been published in New: West Coast, event and The CBC Hornby Collection, and his first book, Spider in the Sumac (Fiddlehead), will appear in 1979- Sean Patrick Hearty was born in 1956 in Luanshya, Zambia. He is a landed immigrant who received his education at Langara College and the University of B.C. A resident of Vancouver, he writes poetry, music, plays, and paints. Kevin Irie was born and lives in Toronto, Ontario. He attended the University of Toronto where his first poetry acceptance was by a campus periodical. This is his first national appearance. Leslie Krueger studied political science at the University of B.C. and edited The Ubyssey, 1974-75. She worked as a reporter for the Vancouver Sun, and later as a short story producer for CBC's As It Happens. She's been writing fiction for five years, has a novel finished, and a story accepted by The Tamarack Review. A. Labriola teaches drama in Toronto, but lives in Oshawa, Ontario with his wife and two children. Poems have appeared in Canadian Forum and Amazing Grace. He is working on a novel and a collection of short stories. Nicholas Mason-Browne is a Vancouver, B.C. poet. Erin Moure, 23, will have her first book of poetry, Mechanisms of the Lost Heart, published by House of Anansi in 1979. Other poems have appeared in magazines like Canadian Forum, Waves, Branching Out, and in the anthologies Storm Warning 2 and A Government Job at Last. She lives in Vancouver. 178 Beth Powning, 29, lives in Sussex, N.B., and has had short stories published in The Antigonish Review, The Canadian Fiction Magazine, Quarry, The Fiddlehead, Wascana Review, The Atlantic Advocate, Anthology of N.B. Women Writers, and C.B.C. Anthology. Barbara Rendall writes and lives in Lumsden, Saskatchewan. Martin Reyto was born in Budapest in 1949 and emigrated to Canada in 1956. He has since lived in Toronto, Halifax, Austria, Israel, and is now back in Toronto again. His poems have appeared in The Fiddle- head, Matrix, and Quarry. Dave Richards has had three books published by Oberon Press: The Coming of Winter (1974), Blood Ties (1976), and Dancers at Night (1979). This excerpt is from his novel-in-progress. Dave is 27 years old and lives in Newcastle, N.B. David Sharpe is originally from Penticton, B.C., and was educated at the University of B.C. and the University of Alberta. He has an M.A. in English. Poems and stories have been accepted by event, Quarry, Boreal, Waves, Green River Review, and The Canadian Fiction Magazine. David currently writes and gives readings in Toronto. Robert Sherrin is currently completing his second novel on a Canada Council grant and putting together a collection of short fiction. One novel has already been published. Stories and poems have appeared in Canadian Fiction Magazine, The Capilano Review, Quarry, and The Canadian Short Fiction Anthology (Intermedia). Donna E. Smyth has published short stories internationally and in Canada. One of her plays, Susanna Moodie, is in the repertoire of Mermaid Theatre, Nova Scotia's touring theatre company. She is co-ordinating editor of Atlantis: A Woman's Studies Journal, and teaches English and Creative Writing at Acadia University, Wolfville, N.S. Betsy Struthers lives in the country near Peterborough, Ontario. She is 27 and has been writing seriously for just over a year. Her first two published poems have appeared in The Fiddlehead. Joel Yanofsky was born in Montreal on September 26, 1955. His B.A. in English Literature is from McGill University, 1977, and he is currently studying for his M.A. in Creative Writing there with Bharati Blaise. 179 BOOKS RECEIVED AND RECOMMENDED: CANADIAN UNDER-30 AUTHORS Quotes from the books were selected for descriptive purposes. Bowering, Marilyn; One Who Became Lost; Fiddlehead Poetry Books, igy6; 72 pages. Other books include The Liberation of Newfoundland (1973, out of print) and The Killing Room (Sono Nis). Three of these poems have appeared in The Malahat Review, All Alone Stone, and Branching Out. Marilyn Bowering was born in Winnipeg in 1949, but she has lived most of her life in British Columbia, where she received her B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Victoria. "Most of the poems in this book reflect her residence in Greece and in the Queen Charlotte Islands." Di Cicco, Pier Giorgio, editor; Roman Candles; Hounslow Press, ig?8; 85 po-ges: An Anthology of Poems by Seventeen Italo-Canadian Poets. Those under thirty included are: Saro d'Agostino, Alexandre L. Am- primoz, Antonio Iacovino, Antonino Mazza, Mary di Michele, Mary Melfi, Tony Pignataro, Ed Prato, Filippo Salvatore, Mike Zizis, Vin- cenzo Albanese, and Pier himself. "... a collection of poems by Canadian poets of Italian birth or background. Their sixty-five poems are expressive of the Italo-Canadian experience." The editor, Di Cicco, was born in Arezzo, Italy in 1949, has published five collections of poetry, and since 1976, has been Associate Editor of Books in Canada. Parkas, Andre, and Ken Norris, editors; Montreal English Poetry of the Seventies; Vehicule Press; 150 pages. Anthology of poems by 22 Montreal English poets, eight of whom are under thirty: Guy Birchard, Andre Farkas, Laurence Hutchman, Bob McGee, Anne McLean, Stephen Morrissey, Ken Norris, Marc Plourde. Three or more poems from each author, comprehensive bibliographies and biographies. "However, through this anthology, it is hoped that something is made clear: that there is a sacred geography of Montreal ... in this anthology its contours, rhythms, invocations, and spirit are celebrated." 180 Gaysek, Fred; First Scratches No Blood Eye Down; Fiddlehead Poetry Books, igjy; 40 pages. His first collection. Born in Canada in 1953, and a student at York University in Toronto, "Fred Gaysek feels that the poems written after the works of established writers are not mere imitations but contain his own statements and are his own poems." Kishkan, Theresa; Arranging the Gallery; Fiddlehead Poetry Books, igj6; 35 pages. Her first collection. Some of these poems appeared in The Fiddlehead, Introductions from an Island, and Quarry. Currently attending the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island, Theresa's desire is "to write a truly West-coast poetry ... like Emily Carr, the West coast has something very special that I would like to be able to articulate." Leckner, Carol H.; Daisies on a Whale's Back; Fiddlehead Poetry Books, igy6; 60 pages. Some of these poems appeared in Montreal Free Poet, Salt, Intercourse, and Booster and Blaster. Selections from her novel Rosie, have appeared in Canadian Fiction Magazine. Carol, 30, studied Creative Writing at Sir George Williams University, and is involved in various literary activities around the Montreal area. This book consists of works between 1969 and 1973, and was originally printed in 1974. "Carol H. Leckner's poems ... are personal statements made by what may be termed a star witness (albeit a young star) possessing a vision of rock-core nature and human nature." {John Richmond, The Montreal Star) Mcllwain, Sandy; And Between Us the Night; Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 27 pages. Sandy Mcllwain is currently getting his M.F.A. in Creative Writing in Vancouver, B.C. Melfi, Mary; The Dance, The Cage, and the Horse; D Press, ig"j6; go pages. Born in Italy, in 1951, Mary Melfi graduated from Loyola College and McGill University. Poems have appeared in Waves, Antigonish Review, and other magazines. She was awarded Ontario Arts Council Grants in 1974 and 1976. West, David S.; Poems and Elegies igy2-igyy; Fiddlehead Poetry Books, igy8; 72 pages. Also author of Franklin and McClintock (Intermedia, 1977). Some of these poems have appeared in Canadian Forum, CVII, The Fiddlehead, and the University of Windsor Review. 181 OU€D€C F€MINIST WRITING ROOM OF ON€'S OWNL is pleased to announce the fall publication of a special issue on Quebec Women Writers. It includes translated selections from "the most important literary event of recent times ...LA BARRE DE JOUR, nos 56/57, entirety devoted to the writings of women." - Emergency Librarian Authors featured are Monique Bosco, Cecile Cloutier, Nicole Brossard, Louky Bersianik, France Theoret, Madelaine Gagnon, Genevieve Amyot, and others. Interview with Michele Lalonde. An informative historical survey article of women writers in Quebec, "Voices of Discovery and Commitment." Reviews. And more. Order now for this double issue:$4.00. Bulk rates are available on request. Available from: Room of One's Own 1918 Waterloo St Vancouver DC V6R 3G6N -QU€D€C F€MINIST WRITING IRVING LAYTON - "ONE OF THE BEST LITTLE MAGAZINES IN CANADA" A LITERARY TRI-ANNUAL Interviews, Articles, Fiction, Poetry, Graphics, Reviews. WAVES, Room 128, Founders College, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Downsview, Ontario, Canada, M3J 1P3. NAME ADDRESS Cheque enclosed for (please check) I—I Nonsubscription: Please supply. I—I Subscription: Individuals for Libraries for . copies @ $2.00 per copy. years @ $5.00 per year. . years @ $6.00 per year. Back Issues — Vol. 1-5 — $30.00 a set. Back Issues Prism 2:4, Summer 1961 This issue features poetry of Alden Nowlan, David McFadden, Lionel Kearns, Phyllis Webb and the then high school student, Roy Mac- Skimming. Fiction includes work by Jacob Zilber, Henry Kreisel, Alden Nowlan, Avis Worthington and Wayson S. Choy, whose story later was selected for publication in The Best American Short Stories of 1962. $4.50 Prism international 7:2, Autumn 1967 A mix of North American writers and Europeans. Fiction by Alden Nowlan, Jack Matthews and Georg Britting. Poetry by Germans Gunter Grass, Karl Krolow and Gottfried Benn, and Canadians Irving Layton, Ralph Gustafson, Robert Kroetsch and Elizabeth Gourlay. Paul Valery also appeared. $3.50 Prism international 10:3, Spring 1971 An issue featuring translations of many of Europe's leading writers. Poetry by Bertolt Brecht, Theo Florin, Vincenzo Cardarelli, Pierre Soupault, Stanislaw Jerzy Lee and Henrikas Nagys. Fiction by Gidtav Meyrink and two Americans, Henry H. Roth and Kenneth Bernard. Cover and graphics by Canadian poet and artist Pat Lane. $3.00 Prism international 14:2, Summer 1975 Poetry by George Bowering, John Ditsky, Robert Bringhurst, Rienzi Crusz, Ian Slater and David Bissonette. 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