Читать книгу When Fenelon Falls - Dorothy Ellen Palmer - Страница 10

Mumsie sat me down on her visit last Sunday and told me point blank that Walter was the best I’d ever do for myself, especially now, so I should quit playing Missy Nose in the Air and put his ring on my finger right quick. Janie tried to stick up for me, saying she’d only accepted Kevin when she felt good and ready, but Mumsie interrupted, saying it was all very well for pretty girls to wait, but not a plain and getting plainer girl of twenty-three with a dainty younger sister who’s already tied the knot. ‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’ She looked right at me as she said it. ‘And damaged goods is exactly that – damaged for good.’

She’s right. She’s right. I know she’s right. Walter is a good girl’s dream. Short but darkly handsome (if you like pomade and thin moustaches), and forty is young, to be Accounts Manager that is, and the bank is so stable. Mumsie’s always saying if Granny’d had half a brain when she got off the boat from Inverness, she’d have done what she set out to do and gone straight to the city to marry her fortune instead of falling for a penniless boy farmer before they shouted, ‘Land, ho!’ (Mumsie knows something about penniless boy farmers, having fallen for one herself.) She’s always said that the only way her girls will make the same mistake is over her dead body, insisting that we should find a good catch in a bank or an oil company so we won’t have to have to get our hands dirty all day long like she does.

Kevin works his dad’s farm weekdays (Janie would never move to the city like me), and weekends he drives an oil truck. Not usually one for compromises, Mumsie approves. Kevin gave her a big felt banner, red and green with white writing. Mumsie said it looked just like Christmas! It had a smiling gas attendant in a smart uniform tipping his hat, ‘BA: The Largest Oil Company Owned by Canadians.’ She tacked it over the kitchen cupboard with the very best teacups and gave Kevin permission to marry her baby. Walter’s job is better than Kevin’s, so what am I waiting for? Her equal approval? Hell won’t ever get that cold.

Maybe if I put it down on paper, maybe then I’ll get some sleep.

I used to love writing in this diary, but here it sits, untouched since the night before: Thursday, October 14, 1954. ‘Tomorrow is payday. At lunch I’m going over to Eaton’s and I’ll buy those cream gloves with the sassy pearl buttons. See if I don’t! And a new umbrella, too, since Mr. Bad News (that’s what Mumsie calls the radio) predicts showers yet again. A girl mustn’t look bedraggled if she wants to get engaged!’ How pathetic! The Star says over 4,000 homeless and more than 80 dead! I should quit my quiddling. In that hurricane, I was one little puff of wind.

It had been raining off and on for days. I left without my breakfast and, to my eternal regret, without saying goodbye to Gladys. I was double guilty; I’d borrowed her locket without asking. I trudged up the hill from Pleasant Valley already drenched, vowing to get an umbrella and cursing, for the umpteenth time, at being so far out in the west end that it took a ridiculous forty minutes to get to work. I remember reminding myself that Gladys and I were in her grandmother’s trailer rent-free and that I should be grateful. (Yes, I should be.)

Despite the rain, the Long Branch streetcar arrived on time, but at Union I had to wait forever for the Yonge car. I know I should have taken the subway. It’s been open since March, running safely for a full six months. Mumsie scolds me for a fool but I can’t do it. I’m not going underground so the planet can collapse on top of me. I’m just not.

When Walter saw the sodden lump that was me, he said, ‘Late again, Miss Johnston? You’re not a Country Bumpkin anymore, my dear. Get a watch!’ I know he only said it to keep up appearances. Some tellers were in hearing distance – tellers are always in hearing distance – because later, during dictation, he reached under his desk and squeezed my knee. (Mumsie says to smile and let him. Once, but never twice.)

At lunch I headed over to Eaton’s. I could barely see the curb. I slipped, and out of the blue, who do you think appeared like Superman to save me? Angus! He said he was in town to check out a building on Yonge Street he’d be bricking next Monday and was on his way to ask me out to lunch. (Mumsie always says that what a man don’t know can’t hurt you, and besides I wasn’t officially engaged yet and that was Walter’s fault, not mine.) Angus was an old flame, but he was still my roommate’s brother, so we ducked into Eaton’s cafeteria, just like old times.

On the way back, the storm was much worse. He had to hold me up, and even then I nearly fell, three times in fact (and only once on purpose). When we reached the bank he asked if, considering the weather, I’d like a ride home. He had another errand and then would be heading west to see Gladys and drop off some of their mom’s preserves before heading north and home himself. A ride to my own door sounded heavenly. (It almost was!)

Walter kept me late. Around 6:30 he tipped his fedora and told me to be careful, saying it was ‘Positively heathenish!’ out there. (Mumsie says I should appreciate his education and stop wishing he talked more like normal people. Janie says I’d better keep him away from Kevin, who’d laugh in his face.) But there was good old Grade 10 Angus in the lobby, happily chatting up a Boy Scout peddling his wares for Apple Day. Angus saw me, grinned and loosened his tie. His pants were bulging.

We had to shove full force against the big bank doors and, once outside, could barely hear each other. We decided to go to Fran’s for a coffee until it let up. I made it up for him the way he likes it: three cream, no sugar. As impossible as it sounds, the rain got even worse. And the wind! It took forever to reach his car. (Back in high school, I called it Nessie, the Long-Lost Scottish Behemoth. I’d tease Angus, asking how a car that weighed a trillion stone could move at all!) I was so eager to get in that I sat on his mother’s strawberry-rhubarb jam, ripping the note to Gladys attached. I transferred it to the back seat and took its place. That big old front bench, as welcome as my own bed. That’s when Angus decided to tell me he had only one working wiper, and it was on the passenger side. He leaned over. ‘I can drive with my head in your lap, can’t I?’ He only said it to break the tension. When I pushed him off, he laughed.

We headed on to Lake Shore, and it was some slow going. And dark. (Black as Mumsie’s warning card, the Ace of Spades.) We talked a couple of times about getting off it, but were strange roads were any better? I know the devil you know is still a devil, but we couldn’t stop, not with only thirteen cents between us. There was a beat-up green Packard with tartan seats behind us that must have decided the same thing; he’d been there awhile. Angus called us a Celtic Crappy-Car Caravan. I smiled. So we kept going, slower than snails. We were all but home. (But I could hear Mumsie: ‘Forget close! Close only counts in horseshoes.’)

We got to Mimico Creek. We could hear water snarling beneath the car. In the flash of a second, you could see things floating by. It wasn’t my imagination. A hockey stick. A garbage can, then some boards and a bicycle. A furry thing. A man’s fur coat? A big fuzzy pillow? Angus said he thought it was a sheep. I said, ‘That’s ridiculous! The storm’s getting to you, Farmer Boy.’ That’s my nickname for him, the title of our Grade 4 novel, one of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. He grinned and played the part, ‘If’n you say so, little lady!’

As we crossed the bridge, the wind tensed like a wolf pack, poised to pounce. From behind us came a growl, then a crack. I turned. It was a tree, and I mean a full-sized maple tree, not a limb, careening after us, a tree on a hungry brown wave, licking the car behind us. Angus gunned it. He veered up the embankment and punched the emergency brake. Behind us, the tree swept south and disappeared, sank with a Packard caught in its crown. I screamed. I fought to open the door. Thank goodness Angus held me down until I came to my senses!

When he turned Nessie off, I kept begging him to put the headlights back on. I knew I was being a baby. It wasn’t entirely dark. For some inexplicable reason random lights flashed about like homeless fireflies. But Angus said no, it would drain the battery, better to use the army flashlight. Before I could stop him, he was clinging to the doorframe, inching back to the trunk. Mud lunged at his knees. When I pulled him back in, he graciously draped a blanket over my shoulders. Ever the gentleman. Huddled warm and safe, clutching a torch so big I had to use two hands, I remember thinking, ‘Thank God for country bumpkins.’ (How many city slickers keep Hudson’s Bay blankets and army flashlights in their trunks as a matter of course? We were raised to respect weather. We had to. We’d seen it kill. So much for us rubes. We weren’t drowning in their stupid subway.)

I don’t know how long it took. It felt like hours. I might have slept a little. The floor flooded. Angus said if it got any higher we’d have to take our chances on the roof. It got as high as my ankles would have been if they weren’t tucked into his lap. Then, in the dead of night, the wind and the water dropped. Angus murmured, ‘Thank goodness for small blessings!’ That’s when I cried. It’s one of the few things I ever remember Daddy saying. He said it about me. (Janie understands, but it’s the one part of this whole thing I could never tell Mumsie. I heard my daddy in his voice.)

Eventually we could see the embankment again. Less than twenty feet away, in water the ugliest shade of brown, things were still churning by, most of it unidentifiable debris. When it passed the wide beam of our flashlight, you wished you hadn’t seen it: a pressback chair, a baby’s crib. The worst was the dog. We heard him before we saw him, a spaniel surfing along the edge of the water, clinging to a set of stairs from someone’s front porch. Without thinking, Angus opened the window and whistled, ‘Here, boy! Come, boy!’ The dog jumped in, so close to the edge we were sure he’d make it, ‘You can do it, boy!’ A brown wave swept him under. ‘I killed him,’ Angus mumbled. ‘He’s dead because of me.’ What could I say to that?

At some point, we ate the apples. I remember wondering about the Scout, hoping he’d made it safely home. The water had all but receded when we saw a light in the east. Angus read my thoughts and said he hoped these wise men were bearing whisky. We giggled even harder when we saw it was a boat. Imagine rowing down the middle of Lake Shore Boulevard! They tied up to a telephone pole, expecting us to board, but Angus said no, he wanted to drive. They looked at his boat of a car and agreed to help him try. I paddled the accelerator as our Good Samaritans got sprayed with mud, rocking us from behind. (Just like the snowdrifts between the house and the barn, I told myself. Should be as easy as Mumsie’s Five-Minute Pie!)

We headed the last few miles skiing through swamp, driving right up over sidewalks and front lawns. Any path in a storm. I don’t think we ever said her name. (We should have figured that any hurricane that could wipe out bridges and swallow Packards could do a great deal worse to a rickety old trailer, but we were so cold and tired and just plain done that we weren’t thinking, period.) It was almost light and we were almost there when Angus joked that Gladys, being Gladys, had no doubt made a pot of hot chocolate, drank the whole pot, and made some more. We could all but taste it! That’s why the police cordon at the foot of Brown’s Line took us so much by surprise. Fire trucks. Ambulances. A policeman who said no, we couldn’t go farther. Angus jumped out. ‘Of course we can! She lives there,’ he yelled, pointing back at my face in the car. ‘She lives there with my sister!’

I’ll always remember the even look in that officer’s eyes. His voice so soft and slow as he gripped Angus by the shoulder, ‘Not anymore, son. Not anymore.’

He took us to the Red Cross truck. A nurse gave us coffee. I was taking my first sip when the officer said the storm had decimated the trailer park and all the little cottages around it and handed us a survivor list. No Gladys. We read it three times. No G. Campbell. He said the injured had been taken to St. Joe’s Hospital. No sister on that list either. No roommate. No best friend since kindergarten. But Angus stayed calm. Clear. Efficient. He gave his mom’s number, his work number, Mumsie’s number and my work number. He gave a description: Age twenty-three. Blond hair, five-foot-four, hazel eyes. Distinguishing features: Green cat’s-eye glasses. A chipped tooth, earned smiling all the way to the ground riding a two-wheeler for the first time, age nine. Occupation: Student, Lakeshore School of Beauty. He asked me what she weighed and I lied. (Mumsie told me later not to feel guilty, said it was the least I could do for poor Gladys, who’d always been a wee bit porky.) Angus shook the officer’s hand. And then he just stood there, looking out at the first silver rays of dawn. I had to call him back to the car.

Then he drove. Fast. Wild. Much wilder than necessary. To God-knows-where-but-I-don’t. Not home. To some back street in Mimico, some deserted factory parking lot too near the creek for my liking. He slammed to a stop and began to shake. He wouldn’t meet my eye. He jumped out, stood there lost, then opened the back door. I waited. Then I joined him.

Blood? Blood on his hands? No, preserves. He was eating it with his fingers. All five of them. Scooping sweetness as if he were starving. I wished he’d say something; I wished I could. He held out a finger, ‘Try it.’ I licked and he crumpled his mother’s note in his other hand. Then with two hands, he tore it to pieces. Jam looks even more like blood on paper. He began to cry. So I held him.

I held on when tears turned to kisses. When kisses deepened, I returned them. When his hands, hands that had been so professional on the steering wheel, so calm writing his sister’s name, so respectful shaking the officer’s hand, when those hands got mean, ripped my blouse and tore my skirt, I’m sure I asked him to stop. Sure but not certain. All I’m certain of is that as light crept into the car, not ten feet away, a shape slowly shifted clear. What’s that line in the Bible? ‘And the void became substance, became words.’ Something like that.

Maybe the floating shape had been a sheep because this shape was unarguably a cow, a very dead, very bloated cow, upside down in a factory parking lot in Mimico, a beast on her back with two feet pointing skyward and two broken beneath her. With jelly brown eyes, she watches me. When I should be sleeping, I watch her watching me. Dead eyes quiver with each thrust.

And this place isn’t any better. The only decent person in here is the night cleaner, an older man with the musical name of Carmelito Trigliani. At night he comes into my room, pats my hand and says notta to dwell on dark things. He says the sleepawalking comes froma da dark things. Thatta a wedding is justa da ticket! There’s a’nothing like a bella bride to cheera us up! (He talks like that, in exclamation points with anna accent!) He put his hand on my shoulder before the nurses wheeled me from my big red brick building to the small red brick building, the one with a rubber floor, ‘Trusta him, the doctore. He knows whatsa best.’

When Mumsie heard about the electroshock, she said, ‘Good, if we’re lucky a few thousand volts will solve all our problems.’ But I overheard her complaining to Janie. Mumsie kept insisting that it’s not her fault, that even a good cow may have a bad calf, that at least she got one daughter right. To my face she says that women have nothing but their bodies to bargain with, and now that I’ve played all my cards, the only sure bet is to put that ring on my finger, right quick. Janie nods. They’re all so certain they must be right. They’re all so right they must be certain. They take me on walks by the lake. To see water. The stupid cows.

But hurricanes have eyes. And that Hazel, she was one smart cookie. She took one look at Toronto the Good and what did she do? She flooded the subway. One of their precious tunnels collapsed. They think if they repair it quickly I’ll forget, but I wasn’t born yesterday. I was reborn in a hurricane; I’ve got second sight. I’m plugged into the quivering universe. She will be a girl. I will give her Gladys’s locket and Granny’s name. Will she ever see Inverness? I hope so. See, I’m not crazy; I don’t claim to know everything.

Here’s what I do know. As nasty as the rushing water of a hurricane is, it’s exactly the colour of the coffee we put to our lips every day. Dirt brown. Hurricane Hazel Brown. The taste of Angus – three cream, no sugar. Last week when he finally came to see me, and I got brave enough to ask him what happened, he looked at the ceiling. When I started to cry, he stared at the floor, ‘For Chrissake, my sister died. That’s it. That’s all. Enough said.’

So, I can swallow that for the rest of my life or I can spit him out and start clean. I should have said, ‘Angus, you taste just like what you are – plain old country cow shit.’

Mumsie says nice girls don’t swear, but I no longer qualify. I’m about to be a married woman. And Walter, when he proposed at my bedside yesterday, his hand thumbing my knee, assured me that grown-up wives with aspiring bank manager husbands to instruct them don’t have to listen to their Mumsies (especially not to Maladroit Mummified Maters like mine).