A Beauty (12 page)

As for my wishing, and the house I wanted to live in, that house existed. It had pictures on the walls and shelves full of books and other attributes I hadn’t yet seen or guessed at. It was a small bungalow at the edge of town, where I thought I could have a room to myself, a cool, quiet room where I could be alone. I had chosen the house, but I hadn’t been invited in.

Probably I was conscious of looking lonely, out there alone on the bare prairie, moseying along on a hot day when anyone with brains bigger than a grasshopper’s would have found some shade; probably I was hoping to make the impression of loneliness if anyone went by and noticed me.

I’m sure it was the very moment Elena Huhtala stepped down from the car that I looked up in the opposite direction, and got stopped. I had to stop because way down at the end of the tracks, where they met at the horizon, a big whiteness was headed my way, a big, luminous, opaque whiteness. It looked almost as if an old-time steam engine was barrelling towards me, but whatever it was, it was bigger than a head of steam. It took up most of the horizon. For a few absurd seconds I thought snow was coming, but it was August, and so hot my clothes were drooping; it couldn’t be snow. I didn’t see how it could be dust either, on a day when, unusually, there was almost no wind. And it was much too white to be any dust I’d ever seen; it was the opposite of the dark billows we’d got used to in recent years that were our topsoil blowing away.

I thought I should run back to town and warn people. But warn them of what? I looked up into the sky, where the sun pulsed crazily, as if it wanted to break through, and couldn’t, and I realized the white cloud was no longer in front of me; it
had already enveloped me. The air all around me glittered with suspended phosphorescent dust.

It was a trek from the highway into Gilroy and the sun was getting stronger every minute. A pink strip appeared where Elena’s wavy hair parted and along her pretty nose. The deodorant she wore went slick under her arms. Small rivers trickled down her ribs under her thin dress. And her poor young feet! Rubbed raw, especially at the heels where grit from the road met the moist skin.

The town was smaller than it looked from the highway. It was nothing more than a hamlet, just one row of false-fronted boxes along a wide main street and a few scattered, unpainted houses. The whole of Gilroy boasted four trees and none of them had grown yet much higher than Elena Huhtala’s head. She could hear her own footsteps like whispers over the gravel, the kind of whispers gossips use. The place looked deserted. Almost everyone had gone inside to escape the afternoon heat as best they could. Then she saw that there were a couple of witnesses to her arrival. Two men stood in the open door of the garage opposite the general store – the only store in town – and smoked lip-wet roll-your-owns. They stood up a little straighter when Elena Huhtala appeared on the road that ran slantwise from the highway to meet up with Main Street. Men often stood up straighter when they saw her; it was simultaneously a sign of respect and disrespect, and it meant she had to walk without limping while avoiding looking their way. She stepped up to the wooden sidewalk in front of the store and stopped to take a breath. She put her hands up and shook out her hair. She wiped her face with her fingertips. The best she could hope for was to smudge the sweat, the powder, and the dust together. Ignoring the men, she peered down at herself, checking that the buttons on the
front of her dress were done up, and snuck a look at the wet patches under her arms. She sat down on the bench in front of the store and brushed at her shoes.

The storekeeper in Gilroy was a tall man who stooped as much as he could to make up for having to look down on others. His name was Scott Dobie. He had a wife and two daughters, one of whom worked in the store, and a son named Leonard who farmed just out of town and helped him with any heavy jobs. Leonard happened to be stacking egg crates in the storeroom the day of Elena Huhtala’s arrival, and when he heard the screen door squawk and then slam shut – a sound that was hardly unusual – he put his thumb through a shell. Usually a towel hung by his father’s butchering apron, but his father had walked off with it less than a minute before, so Leonard came out, into the store, at the moment she walked in, blinking the way everyone did in the sudden dimness.

The Dobies’ store was much like other stores of its kind. It had an oiled wood floor, and the penetrating smell of that oil mingled with the smell of the round of cheddar on the counter and the smell of brown paper and string. For a place designed to sell merchandise, it was subdued, and nothing about Elena Huhtala looked subdued. Her brown dress might have appeared modest on the hanger, but it didn’t look modest now. Her hair might have been combed that morning, but it was messy in a most alluring manner now. No matter what she wore, or how she presented herself, Elena Huhtala was made to stand out in that store, and Leonard’s eyes went right to her.

As soon as she saw him, she blushed. Her hand went up to her cheek and she lay the hot flesh against the cooler backs of her fingers. As if she’d read his mind. Because just looking at him, anyone could tell he was a serious person. He was a person whose
regard you would want, whose esteem you would crave before you even thought about it. As for Leonard, he waited for some guy to follow her in, some city guy who was kicking his tires outside, or getting refuelled, or just sitting back in his car being glad he didn’t live in this town, while she came in for whatever it was she needed. But he was wrong. When she reached the counter she asked if they might need a clerk.

Scott thought she looked about fifteen and he felt sorry for her. He had nothing for her, and there were no other businesses in the town that employed women except the café that was run by the Chows and the hotel that was run by the Ridges. Neither needed staff. He told her he didn’t think she’d find work in Gilroy. She didn’t say a word, just bowed her head.

Later, much later, Leonard admitted he would have crossed the store and knelt at her feet at that moment, if he could have acted according to his desire. He would have stroked the film of dust from her shoes. He would have laid his head against the modest brown dress and asked for her hand in marriage. He was the district’s most eligible bachelor, the best pitcher in southern Saskatchewan, and one of the nicest guys you’d ever meet, and he would have knelt on the oiled boards in front of his father and declared his love and given all his worldly possessions to touch those shoes, that dress. In fact, he did nothing. Self-preservation kept him standing back, immobile, while she walked to the door.

Scott opened the flap that blocked off the counter from the rest of the store, and went to the window to look out. Leonard took up the towel and wiped off his thumb. He had to rub at the nail to get the clinging egg yolk off. He thought about going back to the storeroom and getting back to work, but he set the towel down where he’d found it, and went to join his father at the window. They stood there together with their arms crossed, the
way they often did, waiting for something unusual to happen on Main Street. Now that something unusual had happened, they didn’t know what they were waiting for.

Elena sat on the bench outside the store and wondered what she could possibly do next. The two men who’d been watching her from the garage across the street were still standing there. They didn’t have much else to do, hardly anyone bought gas anymore. Most people who still owned a car had put it up on blocks. So they held up the walls except when one or the other of them went inside and brought out a mug of coffee or a dripping cup of water. Elena was thinking she’d have to go over and ask for some when one of the men, Walter Dunn, it was, started across the street with a cup in his hand, one of those shallow old speckled enamel cups that makes coffee cool quickly and water taste colder than it does in anything else. It was a wide, unevenly graded street that Walter Dunn had to cross, and it was quite a feat for him to get to her without spilling the water. He concentrated on doing it, partly because it wasn’t easy and partly to keep from looking too anxious to make Elena Huhtala’s acquaintance.

If you were making a huge meringue and had gone overboard and beaten the egg whites dry, and then walked into the bowl – that would have been like the air that day, all glossy-dusty around us. Up above, the sun pulsed and pointed its long fingers down. It appeared to be trying to reach us and not with the intention of doing good. I wasn’t the only one to notice that sun and find it scary. I passed Sammy Appleby’s shack and the old bugger, as we
always called him, was lying on his back on the sofa he’d dragged out into his front yard, staring up, and down the lane Aunt Lizzy Ridge was on her knees in her garden, looking up. Once you saw that sun trying to eat its way towards you, it was hard to stop looking at it. You couldn’t see that sun without thinking something was going to happen.

Then I spied the stilts. I knew who they belonged to, Dutch Egan, and he’d dropped them in front of Jack Newton’s house while he went in to see Harold. He wouldn’t care if I used them. I’d have them back before he missed them, anyway. I grabbed the wooden poles in both hands and stepped up onto the blocks, first one foot, then the other, and then I teetered off wildly down the road. Well, who wouldn’t? I’d had no opportunity to learn how to use them, and it was like having someone else’s long legs grown under mine. And no feet to balance, either. I started at great speed and went faster as I went further. The little houses rocketed past, looking smaller than ever because I was taller. I fell off when I reached the corner.

I was doing better by the time I turned onto Main Street. I had the stilts almost under control and wasn’t travelling quite so fast. I saw Walter Dunn a ways in front of me walking like an old man with a cup in his two hands, but then the sun broke all the way through the cloud cover and flared right into my eyes.

Walter saw me, too, coming straight for him, but he just naturally assumed I’d stop for him. And I would have stopped or at least swerved aside if the sun hadn’t struck me in the face. There wasn’t a kid in Gilroy who hadn’t been taught to make way for an adult. And Walter was a man on a mission. He was also just about as solid as thirty years could make him, and I was an eleven-year-old girl. I flew off the stilts in one direction and my glasses flew in the other. The first thing I thought of was my glasses. If I knew anything for certain, it was that those glasses
of mine were expensive. Not as expensive as the operation the doctor wanted me to have on my bad eye, but way more than my parents could afford to replace.

Walter made a big fuss. After all, he’d spilled the entire cup of water. If I’d been a boy, he’d have sworn at me. Since I wasn’t, he bit his tongue, picked up my glasses, and helped me to my feet. My glasses were okay. They weren’t even scratched. Walter didn’t care. He started dusting me off, a bit roughly it seemed to me. I thought I might mention it to my mother; my mother wouldn’t put up with anyone bothering her girls. But I forgot. I stopped thinking about Walter Dunn and my glasses and the stinging parts of me that had hit the gravel when I fell. Even the idea of my own importance, which was fairly constantly on my mind, fled right out of it, because just then I saw Elena Huhtala sitting on the bench in front of the store.

Shining. Oh yes, shining. Light curled in the waves of her hair; her bare limbs gleamed. I could hear Walter Dunn hustling back to the garage, behind me, for more water, and I could hear Bob Newton laughing at him. She didn’t so much as smile. She acted as if none of it had anything to do with her, as if she was only sitting there as the first step to getting someplace else. But I’d grown up expecting maternal solicitude from anyone who’d graduated to womanhood, and I went to her, holding out the hand I’d scraped when I fell, nursing the wound and trying to squeeze out a tear or two.

“Yes?” she said. She glanced from my hand to my face. Her eyes were the lightest hazel, with golden flecks that made them almost the same colour as her hair.

Walter came out of the garage then. I knew I didn’t have much time. I shoved my hand at her. She took it lightly in both of
her hands. She turned it this way and that and pulled the fingers back so the drops of blood swelled at the base of my palm and the stone chips embedded in the flesh stood up.

“I see accidents,” she said. And she rose to receive Walter and his cup. I plunked myself down on the sidewalk at her feet, looking up in time to see her pass the cup back to him and wipe her mouth with the back of her wrist.

“You looked thirsty,” Walter said. He looked gormless. That was an expression of my dad’s, meaning dumb, and Walter surely fit the bill. Utterly besotted, and forgetful of the fact that he was overweight and still unmarried at thirty. Well, maybe not forgetful of that.

“Thank you,” she said, like she might have been the Queen, or Wallis Simpson, even better. “I was thirsty.” She had a charming way of talking, breaking up the words almost like she was singing.

“Well,” Walter said. He looked down at the cup and turned it round and round. Suddenly he thrust out his hand. “Walter Dunn,” he said.