Читать книгу One Large Coffin to Go - H. Mel Malton - Страница 6

Pregnant women who continue to smoke cannabis are probably at increased risk of giving birth to low birth weight babies, and perhaps of shortening their period of gestation.

-From Big Bertha’s Total Baby Guide

One of the big chores in the spring, if you’re a wood-burning person who doesn’t want to pay $85 a cord, is to go out in the bush and cut it yourself. If you’ve really got it together, you’ll already have a year-old supply drying in your woodshed while you’re cutting the next. If you’re me, you meet up every spring with a local guy called Ethan, promise him a half-share of what you take together and then hope for a good drying summer, because you’ll be burning it in six months’ time.

My winter’s wood was still lurking in the middle of George’s west acreage, where Ethan and I had stacked it in April. (George had said “take what you want—there is more than enough for us all.” He cut his own in the valley, closer to the farmhouse.) Aunt Susan suggested that I might want to order my winter fuel from the Tucker brothers (“Wood R Us”) and have them deliver it, to save me having to haul my own out of the bush.

“I’ll help pay for it, Polly,” she said, “if the cost is what concerns you.” But it wasn’t the price, it was the principle of the thing. Anyway, I told her, there’s no way the Tuckers’ truck, an enormous diesel monstrosity that belched black smoke and weighed several tons, could make it up the steep, narrow footpath that led to my cabin. While the prospect of driving George’s tractor into the bush and loading up the ancient, wheeled wood-cart a dozen times didn’t exactly thrill me (it never did), I figured the exercise would be good for me.

Eddie showed up to help, which was kind of him, although I suspect he might have been given some unavoidable incentive for doing so by Susan, his guardian. Eddie was eighteen by then—a big lad, whose early years had been peculiar and difficult. His mother lived in a psychiatric facility in North Bay, and his father was out of touch, living in sin somewhere in the States with a Biblical literalist. After his home was broken, Susan invited him to stay with her, and she mothered him the way she did me—without the silent “s” at the beginning of the word.

Eddie arrived as I was preparing to load the cart for the second time. My dogs were snerfling around in the undergrowth, which had taken a hard frost the night before and probably smelled wonderful. It was the frost that got me off my duff and into winter-wood-mode. I’d had a fire going for a couple of days already, using some leftovers from last year, but I knew that the demon bailiffs of procrastination were hovering nearby, polishing up their collecting jars and laying bets about the weather. It hadn’t snowed yet, but it would soon.

“It’s me, Polly,” Eddie called, as Lug-nut announced his approach with a gentle, “familiar-two-legs-at-nine-o’clock” kind of bark. Luggy is the senior dog in our pack, a sturdy male mongrel with yellow eyes and a shaggy coat like a bad wig. Rosencrantz, a yellow Lab puppy with more pedigree than wit, looked up in surprise. When she saw Eddie, she made up for not hearing him earlier by firing off a long series of high-pitched, yappy sounds.

“Rosie! That’s enough!” I sounded a tad hysterical, even to myself. Eddie pretended he hadn’t noticed. It occurred to me suddenly that, by winter’s end, I would be coping with a whole new spectrum of unnerving, high-pitched noises, human ones, and shouting back wouldn’t be allowed.

“Susan said to follow the sound of the tractor,” he said. “But I heard the engine stop as I was coming up the hill. Is it stalling out again?”

“It’s running fine,” I said. “I just don’t see the point in running it when I’m not using it. It stinks, and it’s noisy.”

“Yup,” Eddie said, grinning. “Like a baby, right?”

“Smartass.” That was far too astute for an eighteen-year-old, in my opinion.

“No, really, I know about the noise part because we’re doing the Ready or Not Tot unit in Family Studies right now,” Eddie said.

“The what unit?”

“The Ready or Not Tot. It’s like an automatic baby with a computer inside that we each have to take home and look after for the weekend. You know, to scare us off making real ones. Robyn had it last week. It was pretty loud.”

“It cries?”

“It’s programmed to act like a real baby,” he said. “It starts, like, crying at four in the morning and doesn’t stop unless you press a button on its back, and sometimes that doesn’t work, and you have to walk with it till it stops.”

“Sounds delightful,” I said.

“Yeah, and the worst part is that it keeps track of what you do. Like if you ignore it, or throw it against the wall or something, the chip inside records it, and you flunk the unit.”

“Has anybody actually done that?”

“I doubt it,” Eddie said. “It’s too real, man. Even its neck, if you don’t support it right, sort of clicks, and you know you just lost a bunch more points.”

“Sounds like a video game.”

“Maybe. Not as much fun, though.”

“Have you had your turn yet?”

“Not for a couple of weeks,” he said, then grinned again. “You wanna babysit for me, to get some practice in?”

“I might just do that,” I said, seriously considering it. It would be interesting to see how the dogs reacted to the creature, for one thing. “Is that allowed?”

“Yes, as long as we pay the going rate to whoever we get to look after it. We’re supposed to take it everywhere we go. The girls get off on it, I think, but the guys usually hibernate when it’s their turn and stay home that weekend. Especially the guys on the hockey team.”

“I can imagine. And I guess it would be worse with a real one, eh?”

“Yeah. Like if you had it right now, where would you put it?” Good question, I thought. He sounded more like Susan every day.

“In one of those carrier things on my back, I guess,” I said, after a moment’s thought.

“What if it was a real one, a newborn?”

“If it was a newborn, I wouldn’t be in any shape to haul wood, and you’d be doing this by yourself,” I said. “At the going rate, of course. Thanks for coming.”

“Oh, no problem. I helped last year, didn’t I?”

“You did. Ten bucks an hour still okay?”

“Nah. Let’s do a straight trade—I’ll do this and you babysit for me sometime that weekend.”

With Eddie’s muscle and my pressing need to prove myself capable, if pregnant, we had all my wood hauled, stacked and tarped in five hours. The way I figured it, I’d have to agree to adopt his wretched automatic baby for a whole month to pay him what he was owed, but he seemed quite content for me to be in his debt.

After we put the tractor and cart back into George’s drive shed, I helped him do the evening milking, which was his official farm chore. George kept a herd of Nubian dairy goats in the century-old barn behind the farmhouse. When I’d first moved back to Kuskawa from the city, I’d been the goat-hand myself for a couple of years, in exchange for the privilege of living in the cabin. Now I paid George a nominal rent, and Eddie was the goat-guy. I’d felt usurped to begin with, but got over it eventually. I missed the daily interaction with the animals, though. Goats are placid creatures, generally, and a dairy barn is a nice place to be. The sound track in your typical goat barn is a mixture of rustling hay, contented moans and bleats from the female residents and the occasional comical burp from Pierre Trudeau, the sire buck. In the summer, you get the burble and twitter of the barn swallows, and in the fall and winter, a rabble of chickadees lurks by the back door, looking for a handout. The barn smells of grain, warm milk and hairy goat musk (which is not at all unpleasant, in spite of what those mean-spirited anti-goat propagandists claim).

I was in the middle of filling the mangers with fresh hay when I caught a whiff of something sweet and familiar, but definitely not barn-based. I looked up to see Eddie leaning casually against the back door, surveying the hay field and smoking a joint. I’d known it would happen eventually. I am a recreational user of cannabis myself, and while I try to be discreet in the presence of those who aren’t, I don’t consider it a state secret. Eddie had probably figured me out long since, although I had never smoked in front of him. Now here he was doing it in front of me, and it disturbed me more than I cared to admit.

He turned around before I got to him and smiled in that wary, defiant way that young people do when they’re making a statement about something.

“I would offer you a hit, but you probably shouldn’t,” he said.

“You’re right, I shouldn’t,” I said. “Have you smoked around Susan yet?”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Just wondering. She won’t like it.”

“I figured. You don’t either, obviously.”

“Well, I can’t say I’m delighted, my friend. But I could hardly give you the business when I smoke the stuff myself, could I? I may be older than you, but I’m not a hypocrite.”

“You’re not smoking it these days, though, right?”

“Right. I’m not drinking either, and I’m trying to cut out coffee, because I’m told that stuff is not good for kids, one of which I happen to be incubating. But I suppose you’re not a kid any more, are you?”

“Not technically.”

“You’ve done all the growing you plan to do?”

“Jeez, Polly, you’re not going to say it’ll stunt my growth are you?”

“Far be it from me. But if you smoke a lot of it, you’ll get lethargic and forgetful and asthmatic.”

“And if I smoke a little of it?”

“You’ll laugh at movies you’d hate if you were straight, and you’ll think up great ideas that will disappear like smoke if you don’t write them down. But you’d better respect the hell out of it, because if you don’t, you’ll wind up doing something stupid. It’s illegal, don’t forget.”

“I know that.”

“Good. You don’t smoke tobacco, do you?”

“Hate the stuff.”

“And booze?”

“The occasional beer—you know that, Polly. I’m not an idiot.”

I sighed—a long, heavy one that I felt all the way down to my boots. “Okay, Eddie. Interrogation over.” He had pinched the joint out soon after our conversation had begun and stashed it in an inside pocket. “Just please, please be careful with the stuff, okay? Treat it like birthday cake or chocolate truffles—nice on special occasions, but if you use it all the time, it loses its magic.”

We finished the barn chores together in companionable silence. I watched Eddie out of the corner of my eye, kicking myself for acting like a scientific observer, but I couldn’t help it. I wanted to know how stoned he was. He wasn’t chuckling to himself or muttering, which was a good sign. I watched his large, capable hands as he milked Donna Summer and Julian of Norwich, George’s two best producers, whose yield of high-butterfat milk sometimes bordered on the amazing. Long ago, George and I had established that the goats tended to give more milk if you sang to them while milking—a phenomenon that wouldn’t stand up in a lab study, perhaps, but certainly proved itself when we experimented, logging the daily production carefully and noting which songs affected which goats in a positive way. Eddie sang a Hawksley Workman tune to the goat named Donna Summer, and Julian got “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”. I joined in on the gospel tune in harmony, and old Julian, cavernous of belly and hairy of chin, gave us almost two pounds of milk. Eddie had a pleasant tenor voice and wasn’t shy about using it, unlike most teenaged boys.

“Are you planning on breastfeeding?” Eddie said as we carried the full milk pails up to the dairy house. I almost swallowed my tongue. Not, I would venture, a remark that Eddie Schreier would come up with unless his inhibitions were altered. However, it wasn’t as if he was asking out of prurience—he seemed genuinely interested.

“I haven’t really thought about it much,” I said, “but I probably will. Breastfeeding makes sense—I mean if the body produces the stuff, it seems a shame to waste it, hey?”

“It’s just that the Family Studies teacher was talking about it the other day,” he said. “She said that kids who are bottlefed end up getting earaches and stuff because there’s, like, natural antibiotics in mother’s milk and not in formula. Just thought you should know.” I was amused by his concern, and rather touched. This was something I did know, actually—during the first few days after a goat bears her kids, her udder is full of rich, yellowish colostrum—chock full of antibodies and nutrients that milk-replacer doesn’t have. That’s why George always let new kids nurse for a couple of weeks before starting them on the instant milk-mix. It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment, though, that I, being a mammal, would be manufacturing colostrum myself. I had a sudden and profound flash-forward, imagining a heavy, warm bundle in my arms, its lips suctioned onto my nipple. It was weirdly sexual, and I could feel myself blushing.

“Hey, Polly, you want me to come sing to you when it’s feeding time?” Eddie said, leering and waggling his eyebrows. “It might boost your yield, eh?” Yep. Definitely stoned.

I cuffed him across the head with my free hand, almost spilling the bucket of milk.

“That’s exactly why some people call it dope, Eddie,” I said.