"If you’re willing, Mother," he says in the darkness of their back bedroom, one hand working up her nightdress. A thousand times, five thousand times—"If you’re willing, Mother." The words have worn a groove in her consciousness, she hardly hears them. And afterwards there’s silence, like falling down a hole, or a kind of grunt that she takes to be satisfaction.
"Shall we marry then?" These were the words of his marriage proposal delivered some twenty-five years ago, the phrase riding upward in a way she found disarming. At that time he had been less than one year in Canada, eight months working in the old granite quarry at Lac du Bonnet near to where her father farmed; his Orkney accent was pronounced and exceedingly harsh, though she fancied she heard something softer beneath it. He walked her home from a prayer meeting at Milner’s Crossing. It was a warm April night with stars spread thick across the sky. She felt she could gulp the clean air in like a kind of nourishment. This was the third time he had walked her home, and she knew—and he knew—that he was entitled to ask for a kiss. Out of curiosity she assented.
His upper lip, moving quickly, too quickly, grated against her mouth and cheek. And then he spoke: "Shall we marry then?"
His presumptuousness moved her, it was so childlike. She had an urge to laugh, to tease him—she knew how to be merry in those days—but his face was too close.
"What do you say, then?" he pressed her. His features were covered over by darkness, but she felt his warm breath on her neck, and it weakened her terribly. She readied herself for words of tenderness.
"I make a good enough wage," he said, "and I work regular."
This was true. She could not contradict what he said. She never did learn to contradict what he said. He had a particular way of putting a thing that disallowed contravention. The new ice box, for instance. He had written away for it, secretly sent an order in to Eaton’s Mail Order, and now it occupied a corner of the kitchen.
Suddenly it was there. Months earlier, for reasons of economy, he had refused to consult Dr. Spears about the lump behind his ear, and then he had to go and waste eleven dollars on an ice box, eleven dollars plus shipping. The neat metal plate attached to the ice box door said "New Improved Labrador Ice Chest." She had never asked for such a thing. She watched him on that first day run his fingers over the smooth wood and polished hinges, and against her will thought: those same fingers have touched me, my naked body.
Such thoughts are more and more with her. Her brain has been running wild these last months. She is a woman whose desires stand at the bottom of a cracked pitcher, waiting.
Even now, hanging out the wash, she is faint with longing, but for what? Embrace me, she says to the dripping sheets and pillowslips, hold me. But she says it dully, without hope. Her wash tub is empty now, an old wooden vessel sitting there on a piece of outcropping rock. The sky overhead is wide and blue; it makes her dizzy looking up. She feels a tweaking in her nostrils, and reaches in her apron pocket for her handkerchief. The smell of washing soda affects her, makes her want to sneeze. "I am not willing," she says inside her head. "I am no longer willing."
It is three o’clock already, she judges. She will dispense with weeding the garden for today. If anyone asks, her husband or one of her sons, she’ll blame the heat. Why put her health at risk under a strong sun like this? She’ll seek out the coolness of the front room instead, the tapestry chair in the darkened corner. She’s done this before, unable to stand up to this sorrow of hers. Her prized star of Bethlehem sits rooted in its china pot; she likes to study its gray-green leaves for secrets. The wallpaper, too, holds her attention with its rows of flowers, its browns and pinks alternating and repeating. The little beveled mirror in its oak frame sends back her image, her flattened-down hair and her eyes, hot as stones in her head.
"I love you," she heard young Cuyler Goodwill say to his immense, bloated wife, Mercy. "Oh, how I love you and with all my heart."
It was an early evening when she heard this declaration, a Monday like today. She had been standing beside the Goodwills’ kitchen door, a basket of early lilacs in her arms, a neighborly offering. (In truth, she finds it hard to stay away; the houses of the newly married, she senses, are under a kind of enchantment, the air more tender than in other households, the voices softer, the makeshift curtains and cheap rugs brave and bright in their accommodation.)
The Goodwills’ kitchen window was wide open to the fresh spring breezes. They were at table (she could see them clearly enough)—Mercy on one side and Cuyler on the other, the white tablecloth and the supper dishes as yet uncleared.
Light from the doorway fell on my mother’s broad face, giving it a look of luster. My father was leaning toward her, his hand covering hers. The two of them, Clarentine Flett thought, might have been the subject of a parlor picture, a watercolor done in tints of soft blues and grays.
My mother, as I have already said, was an extraordinarily obese woman, and, with her jellylike features, she was rather plain, I’m afraid. It’s true her neighbor, Mrs. Flett, glimpses a certain prettiness behind her squeezed eyes and pouched chin, but the one photograph I possess, her wedding portrait, tells me otherwise. My mother was large-bodied, heavy fleshed. My father, in contrast, was short of stature, small-boned and neat, with a look of mild incomprehension flitting across his face. It can perhaps be imagined that among the men of the community coarse jokes were made at his expense.
With all my heart, Mrs. Flett heard him say to my mother. He seemed exhausted by the utterance, leaning back now in his chair.
With all my heart. This was the sort of phrase that lovers in books invent. Love talk, sweetheart talk. The poetry of rapture. Occasionally Clarentine Flett has read cheap novels—hiding them from her husband who would think them time-wasting—in which people speak to each other in soft ways, but she had never suspected that such pronouncements might be uttered in the houses of ordinary quarry workers in a village such as Tyndall, Manitoba. Nor had she imagined the enrichment of voice or tone that could be brought to these offerings. "Oh, how I love you," Cuyler Goodwill said to his wife Mercy, crying out to her with a pitch of entreaty which Clarentine Flett has been unable to wipe from her remembrance. It’s been with her all spring, raining down on the dry weave of her daily comings and goings. It’s with her now as she stands beside the clothesline, sneezing and blinking in the brilliant sunshine and fighting a temptation to withdraw for the afternoon.
And then an idea comes to her. She would boil up a kettle for tea and invite Mercy to come across and share it.
Yes, a nice pot of tea, Clarentine Flett decides. And she’ll take down the best rose tea cups, Royal Albert, that belonged to her mother, and while she’s at it, she’ll set out a plate of jam biscuits.
Women need companionship—that was the very thing Dr. Spears was fussing her about. Maybe that was all that was the matter with her, nothing but loneliness, not the unhappiness of life itself, but only a seasonal attack of loneliness. And Mercy Goodwill, the poor dear young soul, was lonely too—Mrs. Flett knows, suddenly, that this is true. She divines it. Never mind Mercy’s secret hoard of tenderness and the soft words her young husband pours into her ear, never mind any of that. She and Mercy are alone in the world, two solitary souls, side by side in their separate houses, locked up with the same circle of anxious hunger. Why had she not seen it before? This is what’s been keeping Clarentine Flett close to home these last weeks, away from the Mothers’ Union and the Needlework Auxiliary, away from the possibility of a few days’ visiting in Winnipeg; she cannot bear to travel outside the ring of disability that encircles the two of them, herself and Mercy Goodwill—a pair of Christian sisters uniquely joined.
Something must at last be done, and she will do it; she’ll knock on Mercy’s door this very minute and call her over. She’ll make the tea light and sweet the way Mercy prefers it. And she might—she feels suddenly bold at the thought of an afternoon tea party, the sort of tea party Dr. Spears’s wife might have with Mrs. Hopspein, the Quarry Master’s wife—she might, after a cup or two, ask Mercy to call her by her Christian name. "Why don’t you call me Clarentine," she’d say. "I wouldn’t mind one bit, I’d welcome it, in fact.
We’ve been neighbors these two years now. Why, you’re like a daughter to me, that’s my feeling, and if you could only bring yourself—"
But this is the moment when her reverie is interrupted. She hears a voice, a man’s high-pitched yipping, and looks up to see the old Jew stumbling toward her across the garden.
It’s hard nowadays to talk about the old Jew. It’s a tricky business.
The brain’s got to be folded all the way back to the time when the words "old Jew" could be said straight out: old Jew; here comes the old Jew.
And there he was with his dirty black clothes flapping in the heat, his hair all wild and strange about his head. He wears a hat of some kind, shredded and filthy and pushed to the back of his skull.
His cheeks, high up under his eyes, are brown and wrinkled as walnuts. The long eroded lines of his face are seamed with dirt, either that or it’s the queer foreign tint of his skin.
His horse, poor creature, stands by the roadway, tied to the little bent aspen by the side of Mercy Goodwill’s door. Trust him to tie up carelessly like that when he might have chosen the fencepost just as well. And that wagon, all broken down and shabby, so that it hardly deserved to be called a wagon, the way it rattles, and creaks as it jerks along its way, scattering the very crows in the fields.
His arrival is everywhere dreaded, for almost invariably he asks for the refreshment of coffee or a swallow of cold water, and then there are the cups and glassware to be scalded after him. Traveling in winter, in the remote countryside around Arborg where the Icelanders have settled, he often dares to beg a roof for the night.
Bedding, then, will have to be produced, and boiled the next day, and the windows opened wide for airing. He carries into those clean, frugal households the stink of garlic, onions, mildew, and unwashed skin. The buttons and bootlaces and needles he sells, though hard to come by, are scant compensation for the risk of bedbugs and vicious unnamed diseases. His tongue is thick and sour, his eyes bewildered. He wheedles. He addresses every woman in the region as "meesus," their husbands as "meester." To the young men in the boarding houses he sells filth. He might be forty years of age or sixty. He carries a selection of pills and lotions, pocket knives and small toys, tobacco and hard candy, all poison.
He looks no person in the eye. It’s said he helps himself to fresh eggs from the hen houses, pinches tomatoes from gardens, slips teaspoons under his coat and carries them off. He reaches forth a black hand and pats young children on the head, catching them before they can run away, discomfiting their mothers and fathers.
He can be seen on back roads putting a whip to that poor nag of his. He shuffles up to doorways and knocks in a way that is obsequious and yet demanding. You hear that knock and you know who it is. His gait is damaged, a slow uneven shuffle that calls up memories of old-world contagion. Yet here he is on a July afternoon, running raggedly toward Mrs. Clarentine Flett, who stands beside her clothesline—her banner of bedsheets and towels—like a figure burned into a wood panel.
He grabs first at the sleeve of her dress. Instinctively she pulls away, gasping, protesting, but of course he grabs again, this time catching her roughly by the wrist. His face is screwed up with sorrow, and he’s sobbing, wailing, "Meesus, meesus," his face so close to hers she can smell the rankness of his breath and body.
"Come, meesus; meesus, come."
The voice is demented; it has the creak of terror in it, too highpitched for a man’s voice, and the words nothing but gibberish. He has no more than three teeth in his head—she registers this with something like awe. A sore blackens his upper lip. Clarentine Flett, pulling herself away from him, feeling faint with disgust, is unable to take her eyes from that dried scab, which she unaccountably longs to reach out and touch.
He refuses to let go.
"Come, meesus."
She is made queasy by the roughness of his hand on her wrist, but the sight of his thready coat sleeve, and the way his pale arm shoots out beyond its length, gives her pause.
It is an ordinary man’s arm, Mrs. Flett observes, and it is only mildly grotesque, not that different really from her husband Magnus’s arm as it slips free of its underwear casing on a Saturday night and plunges into the scum of soapy water—exposed, scarred, knotted with veins, tightened with exertion, yet surprisingly, touchingly, womanlike.
She wonders—and all these images of hers crowd together in the space of a few seconds—wonders if the old Jew might possibly have relations somewhere in the neighborhood, a roof, a warm stove, a bed of his own to return to. If so, he might also have a woman’s body next to his under the bedclothes, and a sack of loose blue flesh between his legs like every other man. These thoughts are repellent, she must shift her gaze to what is wholesome and good. And a name, of course he must have a name, you can’t enter this country and become a citizen without a name. Two or three names perhaps. Unpronounceable. Unspellable. Someone would have given him those names, but who?
These questions rush at her, depriving her of air. At the same time, overlapping like an eddy of fresh water, comes the thought of her darkened front room, the armchair with its cool felt seat cushion, the way the green tapestry cloth is worn away at one corner, and how careful she is always to keep that corner turned from view.
The old Jew hangs on to her, and with his other hand gestures wildly in the direction of Mercy Goodwill’s kitchen door. "Meesus sick," he manages, "sick, sick," and finally she understands.
The ground between the two houses is uneven, full of rocks and roots and tufted grass. They run together toward the open doorway, awkwardly, bumping up against each other, the old Jew’s fingers never once letting go of the woman’s wrist.