Читать книгу Providence Island - Gregor Robinson - Страница 9

| Chapter 3 |

Late June. In the fading light of dusk, Phil Havelock and I walked through the bush and fields to the Applewoods’ farm. Walking wasn’t as fast as taking the canoe because you had to skirt the tamarack swamp, but we were in no rush. Besides, it had been a dry winter and spring; the creek was low, and we would have had trouble paddling all the way.

Phil Havelock was almost three years older than me. His family, along with the Applewoods, was one of the last in the area that still farmed. They had a few sheep (at one time the district had been famous for its lamb), chickens, some cattle, and several fields of hay. It was a relative of theirs from whom my father had bought our house. The Havelocks had mixed feelings about my father, partly because the land had been sold out of the family, and partly because they would have liked to sell their own place. All the descendants of the original settlers who had shoreline — the last of the land grants were made as late as the 1890s — had been steadily selling off to summer people, but it was almost impossible to sell land that was back from the lake, pockets of arable interspersed with granite outcrops and swamp. Finding my father had been something of a coup.

Phil and I often caught frogs and crabs for bait and fished in Sucker Creek. “Why don’t you go fishing?” my father used to ask. “Boys like fishing, don’t they?” He never accompanied me. He swam poorly.

“How come your dad don’t swim?” Phil asked me. “He fuckin’ English or something? What happens if he falls out of the canoe?”

To my knowledge my father had never once ventured out in the yellow canoe.

When we were younger, Phil and I would build rafts and pole our way up the creek past the Applewoods’ farm and as far as the haunted house, the old Allen place, looking for bait. We would hunt for snakes in the pipes and cavities of the Applewoods’ pump house — there were supposed to have been huge squirming nests of them there years before, tangled balls — but we never found any. We didn’t know then that the snakes were only there from November to June; they migrated to the fields and riverbanks in summer.

Sometimes my aunt let us take the outboard — “Three and a half Jesely horsepower,” said Phil, taking a drag on his cigarette. We fished in Merrick Bay, along the inland shore, by some of the islands, or out by the cribs, the ruins of an old steamboat pier that teemed with sunfish, bass, and yellow perch. Or in the haunted lagoon.

In an abandoned drive shed in the corner of the farm property, Phil had amassed a collection of magazines: Popular Mechanics, car magazines, and what he called “nudie” magazines. Earlier that afternoon, while we flipped through these for the hundredth time, sharing one of his father’s beers and smoking his father’s cigarettes, Phil took out his wallet and showed me his condoms. This time he opened one of them. The skin of a long, white worm.

“You put this thing on your dick so she won’t have a baby, see?”

What did I care about babies?

“Know what else you can do with them? Make party favours.” He began blowing it up. I examined the package. “Take one,” said Phil. “I got millions.”

“I haven’t needed one lately,” I said. The foil package was wrinkled and bent. It looked about twenty years old. I didn’t believe he had millions.

“You ought to try it with a piece of liver,” Phil said. “Feels like the real thing.”

“How do you know what the real thing feels like?” I asked.

He smirked. “I know, believe me.”

Life in Merrick Bay always seemed to me to be more about birth and death than did life in the city. In the city I was cocooned, insulated; in Merrick Bay I saw things I could never have imagined. Phil and I watched through a slit in the barn door as his father slaughtered a calf. He held an axe, concealed behind his back, as he patted the calf on the head. Then, a lightning-like flash of sunlight on the blade, and he brought the axe around and over his shoulder in an arc and hit the animal on the head with the flat end. The calf bucked forward on its knees and collapsed. Mr. Havelock took a knife from his pocket and slit its throat. He tied a rope to the calf’s left rear leg, threw it over a beam, and hauled the carcass up to let the blood drain out. Afterward, in the compost pile, Phil stabbed through a garbage bag to the glistening mass of innards with a pitchfork. These images later became associated in my mind with other things.

I remembered the day the year before when Mr. Applewood died. Mrs. Havelock stood at the back door of the farmhouse, both hands to her face. The people of Merrick Bay thought of Mrs. Havelock as a sweet woman married to a stick. She was involved in the Women’s Institute and was often away at meetings or visiting the sick and infirm, and when she was home, she never stopped talking. Mr. Havelock said little. He was a secret drinker: he kept a twenty-four of Dow in the basement and a fifth of Crown Royal in the garage. He would lurk in the yard with a broom with which he chased away the chickens while Mrs. Havelock prattled on. But on that day she was, for once, silent.

Mr. Havelock and Donny, the Applewoods’ silent foster son, ran toward the pickup. They had ropes, crowbars, and the chain saw. Phil stood beside the truck.

Mr. Havelock turned and yelled at him: “No, absolutely not. You stay here. Show the ambulance the way when it comes up the road.”

The pickup roared away, leaving a cloud of dust settling over the pale grass of the farmyard. Phil and I stood still until the truck was out of sight. Then we ran back toward Sucker Creek. We shoved the yellow canoe into the water and paddled upstream as fast as we could.

“What happened?” I asked Phil. “What’s going on?”

“You’ll see.”

After we passed through the tamarack swamp, the creek broadened to a wide bend and the land suddenly seemed to open up — a clearing in the forest like a secret garden. The Applewoods’ farm was out of place there: neat fields, a perfect green barn, and, on a small hill in the distance, a white frame house with green trim. By a stand of poplars, between the creek and the field closest to the old pump house, we saw a group of figures. We saw the Havelocks’ pickup and other cars driving across the fields. As we drew closer, I spotted a tractor overturned in the grass near the trees, one of those oddly thin Massey-Fergusons with the front wheels close together, the kind of tractor people used to scythe grass or plough vegetable gardens. And then the immense roots of a poplar tree that had toppled over, pulling itself loose from the spongy bank of the creek. We scrambled ashore. Through the leaves I saw a hand, palm to the sky although the man lay on his stomach. The hand was faintly blue. The man’s eyes, half-open, were still bright. The trunk of the tree had missed him, but a large branch lay across his back. The branch looked as though it were just resting on Mr. Applewood, that he might stand up and brush it aside. It had crushed him to death.

The buzz of a chain saw. In the distance I saw Mrs. Applewood with her arms around the neck of a girl. Marjorie Applewood. She had dark hair and large dark eyes that shone with tears.

Now, with Mr. Applewood gone, the farm was beginning to slip. The front gate was off its hinges and the lawn at the side of the driveway was going to seed with dandelions and plantain. There was a harrow with grass growing through the tines and a couple of old cars up on blocks — a common sight along the back roads of the district, but incongruous in front of the Applewoods’ still bright green barn.

The cars were Donny’s: junkers that he brought home and sold in bits and pieces to garages and body shops. When Mr. Applewood was alive, Donny had to keep the cars out behind the barn. Donny was the Applewoods’ foster child, had lived with them since he was four years old. Some people said he wasn’t quite right in the head. I thought he was just quiet. Scary quiet.

But Phil Havelock seemed to understand Donny, and he knew people like Chicklet, too, who lived in the district year-round and attended the high school at Iron Falls, and the big Indian from Parry Sound that everyone called Spook. Phil and his friends went to bars — the Shalomar, just beyond the village, or the Golden Dragon, down the highway. Phil was almost nineteen, but he looked about twenty-five. He was six feet tall and had a dark beard. He was starting to go bald. He had deep wings and a bare spot on the back of his head the size of a silver dollar, and the beginnings of a paunch. Phil was working around the farm that summer and helping his father look after the summer places. In September he would even have to pay rent, which I thought was very strange. The good news was he had his driver’s licence.

We’d been sitting in the Havelocks’ kitchen, listening to Phil’s mother talk. She talked endlessly about the families in the district and what they were doing: the MacNabs, the Aults, the Reeds, the Merricks, what was left of them. And the Applewoods, especially the Applewoods, poor Marjorie and Donny — not quite right in the head, if you asked her — and now the father dead and all, and the mother starting to go just a little funny, too, and the older brother gone to study art in Toronto.

“Art school. Can you imagine? Someone from Merrick Bay, an artist?” she said. “Although I’m not surprised, really. The mother has brains. And look at the job his father did on the barn, God rest his soul. But how can they afford it — that’s the question I ask myself.”

And then she’d mentioned the party.

“What?” said Phil.

“A party,” said his mother, “at Marjorie Applewood’s. Supper, next Thursday. It’s going to be a barbecue. Hot dogs. All the Coke you can drink!”

“Shit,” said Phil, rolling his eyes. “Miss Goody-Goody has a fucking tea party.”

“Philip Havelock!”

“Pardon my French, Mother. I’ll wash my mouth with soap.”

The reason for the party was that the Applewoods had rented out the farmhouse and would soon be moving into another smaller place nearby, and to mark the finish of the school year for Marjorie and her friends. In the end, Phil had agreed to go and had dragged me along.

When we arrived and I introduced myself, Marjorie blurted, “I know who you are. You’re Ray Carrier. Your father brought the old river house from Phil Havelock’s uncle. I met you at the Havelocks’ place when I came to deliver honey, last summer, and once at Ault’s store. I work there mornings, helping out Charmaine. You were there with your aunt, carrying boxes out to the car.” She spoke these words all in a rush. Then she paused and touched my wrist. She turned toward the barbecue. “Here, help me light this stupid thing. It keeps going out.”

It was a small party. Besides myself, Phil Havelock, and Marjorie and Donny Applewood, there were Chicklet and his sister, who lived on a farm down the road; Henri LaTroppe, who lived in a room above the Shell station in Merrick Bay and had arrived at the party on a motorcycle; Monica and Clarrisa, two giggling girls from Marjorie’s high school in Iron Falls; and Charmaine Ault from Merrick Bay, whose mother owned the general store. Chicklet used to say, “Know what? Charmaine Ault?” He would make a pumping gesture with his right hand and provide sound effects by working the chewing gum in his mouth. He always had gum in his mouth, his name was Jerry Reed, and everyone called him Chicklet. He had bright darting eyes and a brush cut. “Yeah, you try to touch her hooters, she thinks it’s real bad, like the devil’s going to get her? So she rubs it for you just to keep your hands off of her.” He would speak in a breathy voice — “Oh, Ray, it’s so big. Oh, Ray, let me look after it for you. Let me stroke it. Here, Ray, hold these,” — and stick out his chest to imitate Marilyn Monroe.

Chicklet and Phil and I used to horse around in the stream where it pooled beside the old hen house at the back of our garden. The creek bed was red clay; you could duck-dive underwater and grab handfuls of it, make ashtrays, paperweights, and little bowls. One time Chicklet made a figurine, with great round breasts, long nipples, and an enormous penis. He placed it, temple-like, on the back of the bird feeder.

“What is it?” I asked.

“A fertility god. Someone around here’s going to get pregnant. Maybe Aunt Beth.” He began a fertility dance around the bird feeder.

An upstairs sash clattered open. Aunt Beth called out: “Jerry Reed, what on earth are you doing?”

“Keeping the cougars away,” said Jerry.

“There aren’t any cougars around here,” said Aunt Beth.

“It’s working!” said Jerry.

Donny Applewood (several years older than even Phil and Henri LaTroppe) lurked in the background sucking a beer. He wore dirty jeans, black boots, and a black T-shirt with a package of Export “A”s tucked in the sleeve. He was pasty-faced, and so thin his chest was concave — six feet tall, but he couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and forty. He had greasy hair, a wispy goatee, and acne. He’d once thrown a brick at Mr. Applewood, cut him for seven stitches. He used to mark his place in the dirty books he read with old razor blades so the teachers at the high school would cut their fingers when they tried to snatch them away from his shirt pocket. As I passed to get more kindling, he raised his bottle and said in a low voice, “Beer?” He never addressed anyone by name.

After the hot dogs, Marjorie put some music on and tried to get people to dance on the porch. She came down the wooden steps to where Phil, Chicklet, and I skulked in the shadows. She took Chicklet and me by the hands and led us to the porch. Chicklet was to dance with Monica. He turned to me and rolled his eyes.

The record that Marjorie had put on was a slow one, and she sang softly along with the words. Her breath was hot in my ear.

Why does the sun go on shining?

Why does the sea rush to shore?

Don’t they know it’s the end of the world,

’Cause you don’t love me anymore.

Marjorie leaned in and put her hot hands on my neck. I could feel the curves and hollows of her body. She smelled of lilac-sweet perfume and sweet perspiration.

“What does it mean, Ray?” she asked, turning her face up to mine. “Why does the sun go on shining?”

“Christ, I don’t know,” I said.

Footsteps behind us: Donny had left Phil and Henri LaTroppe out by the barn to guard the case of beer. He crossed over to the swing couch where the other two girls were sitting.

“Want to dance?” he asked Charmaine Ault.

“No, thanks,” said Charmaine.

“Oh, come on, Char,” said Marjorie. “It’s a party. Dance with my brother. He doesn’t bite.”

“That’s not what I heard,” said Charmaine. She stood up and rolled her eyes, “Oh, all right.”

Marjorie Applewood whispered in my ear, “I write poetry.”

“What about?”

“About your mother. You know. Dying.”

“My mother?”

“About airplanes crashing and horrible fires in the woods, houses burning down, people drowning. Death. About my father, I write about that, too. And, of course, love.”

She took me by the hand and led me upstairs to her room. We sat on the bed. She unlocked the drawer in the side table and took out a black school scribbler. Her arm touched mine as we sat on the bed and she showed me the neatly printed pages. I was finding it difficult to concentrate on the poetry — the beer, the warmth radiating from Marjorie Applewood’s skin, the down on her arms. The short skirt that had ridden up her thigh. The bed. My erection.

“Do you miss your mother?” she asked.

“Sometimes, I guess.”

“You’re not like the people around here. You know that, Ray, don’t you?”

We leaned toward each other. The walls of the room were blue. Her lips were red. I felt the brush of her tongue.

But then through the calico curtains — hazy headlights: an automobile fast up the drive. I heard the sound of spitting gravel. The car lurched to a stop on the lawn, beneath a dim light high on a telephone pole. A maroon Buick station wagon. The sound from the car radio drowned out the record player on the porch.

“Who’s that?” one of the girls downstairs asked. Marjorie raced down the stairs, leaving me holding the scribbler.

Three people piled out of the back seat of the car: two boys and a girl. One of the boys was fat. They were tanned. They wore pastel Bermuda shorts, button-down shirts, and loafers without socks. They were drunk and laughing, waving their beers around.

“Get back in that car and move it.” Marjorie stood by the open passenger side door, hands on her hips. “Who do you think you are? You can’t just drive up and park on the grass. And turn that radio down!”

“I thought this was a party,” said the fat boy. He leaned against the car, grinning stupidly.

But someone did turn the car radio down. From the window of Marjorie’s bedroom, I saw that two people were still in the car, the driver and a woman beside him. I couldn’t see her features, but she had her arms folded across her chest and she didn’t look relaxed. The driver opened his door and put one foot out, but he remained seated, smoking a cigarette.

“Turn out those headlights!” someone yelled from the porch.

“So, it’s a party. Who invited you?” Marjorie said. “And on top of everything else, your friend is being sick.”

Sure enough, behind the station wagon, the other boy (Radley Smith, I would learn was his name) was bent over, throwing up in the petunias. The girl who had got out of the car went to tend him, although she kept her distance. The faces of the two who remained in the car were shrouded in darkness.

Phil and Charmaine came out of the shadows and into the light cast by the lamp on the telephone pole.

“It’s Jethro and Ellie May!” said the fat boy, laughing again. He drained the rest of what looked like a Budweiser — the long-necked bottle was exotic — and threw it into the darkness behind him.

“Watch your fuckin’ mouth, fat boy,” said Phil.

From the porch, Chicklet yelled, “Turn out those headlights! We can’t see a damn thing up here.”

“All right, you go out there, right now, and pick up that bottle,” said Marjorie, pointing to the dark field.

“Oh, yeah, right,” said the fat one. “Like I can see in the dark?”

Henri and Donny materialized out of the darkness by the barn. Donny was carrying a crowbar.

“What…?” said the fat one, standing up straight. Even the boy who had been vomiting stood, watching Donny.

Henri stopped at the edge of the circle of light. Donny loped past the front of the car. He raised the crowbar and swung it down hard. The sound of breaking glass shattered the night.

The driver bolted from the car. “Jesus Christ!” He moved toward the front of the car. He was tall and he looked strong, but Donny had the crowbar. “Look,” he said, waving his hand at the darkness. “How are we going to see to get out of here?”

“Your fucking problem,” said Donny. He raised the crowbar to smash out the other light, but the woman in the car reached across to the driver’s side and switched it off. That was when I saw her.

Donny lowered the crowbar and faded into the darkness. The girl in the car shifted over to the driver’s seat, started the engine, and backed carefully off the lawn. She leaned toward the open passenger door. “Come on, Jack. Let’s get out of here.”

While the fat boy and Radley Smith scrambled back into the car, the tall boy came forward into the pool of yellow light where Marjorie still stood. He looked down at the scars the tires had gouged into the lawn, the broken glass from the headlight.

“Sorry about the grass,” he said. “I guess the broken light means we’re even.” He held out his hand and smiled at Marjorie, a toothy grin. “I’m Jack Miller. You must be Marjorie. We really were invited to your party, you know. My sister and I.” He gestured toward the car. “We’re out at Providence Island. Your mother —”

He stopped mid-sentence. I suppose he didn’t want to sound condescending. After the death of her husband, Mrs. Applewood had started doing a little work for some of the summer people, including the Millers. She had asked Mrs. Miller if Jack and Quentin would like to come to her daughter’s party. Mrs. Miller would have wondered how she could say no.

I had met Jack’s brother Stephen once when he chased Phil and me when I was about thirteen. We used to throw milkweeds in clumps of earth at passing cars from the bluffs above the highway. Sometimes a car would stop, and we would run into the woods. One time a man in a convertible — he would have been about eighteen years old then — screeched on the brakes, jumped from the car without opening the doors, and ran up the bank. Phil headed for the underbrush, while I ran across an open field. I heard the man panting behind me — then he leaped through the air and caught me by the foot; he grabbed me by the shoulder, turned me over. He was about to hit me, but when he saw the split in my lip from the fall, he held back.

“What’s your name?” He was red in the face and panting. “The police will be by your house later.”

“No appetite?” asked my father at dinner that night.

“What have you been up to?” Aunt Beth asked. “How did you get that cut lip?”

The police never came. The next day in Phil’s cellar we smoked a couple of his father’s Export “A”s and split one of his beers.

“You know who that guy in the fuckin’ convertible was?” asked Phil. “One of those Miller assholes.”

“Who are they?”

“Who are they? They only own pretty near the biggest fuckin’ place in the islands. That’s who.”

That had been my first meeting with the Millers. The man in the convertible was Stephen Miller, Jack’s older brother. Seven years later he was killed in Vietnam, near the Cambodian border.

There was a squeaking in the ceiling above us. Phil’s father was home, back from one of the summer cottages he looked after. We heard him stop dead in the middle of the room. Sniffing the air, Phil motioned me not to speak. We carefully buried our cigarettes in the dirt of the basement floor and rolled the empty beer bottle along the pipes under the water heater.

The kitchen door opened, throwing a beam of light down the wooden stairs.

“Boy, you down there? Jesus Christ, answer me!”

Mr. Havelock started clumping down the stairs. He was a gnarly little man with red hair. Years of work on the farm and then at the gravel pit had given him a stoop, but he could move quickly. He held his broom above his head like a sabre. As soon as I saw his feet on the stairs, I ran for the ladder that led to the cellar door and the yard. I heard him as I left: “Goddamn it, boy, I told you to stay out of my beer,” and the sound of the broom as he swiped at Phil.

“I’m sorry,” Jack said to Marjorie. “Sorry we’re late. I shouldn’t have brought my friends along. I thought it would be a bigger party.” He looked toward the house, to the little group standing around the porch steps and on the lawn, the boys clutching their stubby brown beer bottles.

“Come on, Jack,” said the girl. “Let’s go.”

Because of the run-in with his brother, I had known about Jack and the Millers, known about Providence Island — that it was there, like the other summer places — but it had had nothing to do with me. Now I’d seen them: drunk and tanned, carelessly dressed in their expensive clothes. They were around my age. Hard to believe. Jack was supposed to be some kind of schoolboy hockey star, headed for Harvard or Cornell.

What they must have seen, I couldn’t help thinking — hated myself for seeing it, too: the gate off its hinges, the overgrown drive, Donny’s wrecks up on blocks in front of the barn. As they neared the house, they would have seen a few people dancing to a tinny record player on the porch, mosquitoes and moths fluttering around the yellow bulbs. Donny, Phil, Henri, and Jerry Reed in their jeans and T-shirts. Charmaine Ault: perhaps they would have recognized her from the store where some of the people from the islands and the summer places had accounts. Charmaine and her famous sloppy tits. And Monica and Clarrisa, hiding in the shadows, giggling. Watching.

Marjorie Applewood didn’t hide. She stood on the lawn watching the red tail lights vanish into the night.

I watched, too — hidden in the upstairs window.