Blasted (14 page)

I began to rise to go to him, but Queenie put her hand on my arm. “Let him be for now, Ruby.”

We listened to the ragged sound of his footsteps, heard his bedroom door slam shut.

“I hate it when he does that,” I said.

“Me too.”

“Gramma used to go all tight-lipped.” A lump bloomed in my throat.

“Periodically she'd get out the paint, touch up the cupboards and baseboards. That was all she ever did about it. Except once,” I said. “I remember her looking at him flying around the kitchen, kicking away, and she folded her arms and said,
Me son, if you could only see how foolish you look, you'd perish on the spot from shame
.”

I began to giggle, and Queenie joined in. “Oh, my,” she said. “What did he do?”

“Retreated to his corner in the living room. Utter defeat.”

“It's only his way of not hurting people when he's angry,” she said, wiping her eyes.

“You don't mean he used to go after
people
?” An image washed over me, a barstool slung at the Slug, screaming, smashing bottles.

“John's got a temper like our father had,” Queenie said. She pulled a package of cigarettes out of her purse and lit one, sighing. Her red-lacquered nails tapped on the table. “I remember – after your father was born – he would have been about four, I think. He was a strange child.” She inhaled again, looked toward the back door. “He was sat up on the woodpile in the linny, back there, it was winter. Crouched on the woodpile like a little monkey. Your grandfather came in from work and Neil hissed at him, he did. I was in the kitchen visiting with your grandmother, I saw it. And your grandfather took a fright at this thing and he swiped Neil off the woodpile with his arm, one great sweep of his arm. Neil went flying but he never cried out, only hit the floor, and then he looked up at John and he laughed. I'll never forget it. It sent my blood running cold. But your grandmother went to the… Neil or… well, she picked him up and she said,
If you ever lay a hand on my son again I'll kill you.
That was the end of that.”

“That… that's a strange sort of story, Aunt Queenie.” My guts were cold, and I glanced at the back door, half-expecting to see something there, in the linny.

“That's why he kicks at the walls I think,” Queenie said. “Hard on the paintjob.” She jabbed out her cigarette. “Well, I better get going.”

“No, no, you don't have to go – you shouldn't be driving anyway. You can stay over, I'll sleep on the couch…” I was babbling, afraid, all at once, of being alone. She looked at me.

“Our family,” she said, and stopped, looking down at the ruins in the ashtray.

Silence stretched. “What?”

She looked back up at me, held my eyes. “They try to get to you through the things you love,” she said. “Or the things you long for – things you've lost, what you've left behind. Remember that. Pieces of yourself you've left behind.”

“Our family…?” But I knew that family wasn't the “they” she was speaking of.

“That's how they do it.”

“Who's
they
, Aunt Queenie?”

Queenie didn't answer; she just kept gazing at me, her chin cupped in her palm. I hadn't noticed before how black Queenie's eyes were. Black like deep water and as empty of words.

CHAPTER 9

The next morning dawned clear, and despite the wind coming off the sea it felt like spring. I heard Grandpa leave the house before I'd even thought about getting out of bed. Memories of the night before drifted, strange and insubstantial. Something about Queenie, and Grandpa gone to bed in a rage. The funeral. What marks had that left on him?

I got up, and in a burst of sleep-deprived, hung-over energy, began to clean. I tore open all the windows and started re-sweeping the floors. There's not a female alive who would've dared tidy Gramma's house were she still there. There's nothing she hated more that some other woman “
helping
, putting everything in all the wrong places. Keep your hands to yourself, ma'am!” Moving about her kitchen now felt disloyal, yet liberating. She'd been so fixed, stern, so different from Queenie; that great-aunt of mine actually
talked.
My grandparents had never told me stories of the family, never talked of the past.

I placed the four kitchen chairs upside-down on the table so I could sweep beneath. Clean air, and the sounds of seagulls and sparrows, the damn pigeons nesting in the overpass, filled the damp old house. At eight-thirty the bird noises were swollen by the shrieks and laughter of children on their way to meet the school bus, just up the road. I'd stopped taking that bus when I was in grade two, after a hellish week when my mother, a substitute teacher, taught at my elementary school (named St. Mary's after the demolished church on the Southside). I had hated the bus anyway. All crowded together in that bus-smell, fending off cruelties – I'd rather walk, I told my parents.

I dragged out Gramma's rag rugs and hung them on the line, beating them with the old wicker carpet-beater until the dust flew. Then I donned a pair of rubber gloves and started on the windows: outside first, all the ones I could reach, then inside to continue my good works there. On the sill of the kitchen window at the back, something lumpish stuck in the dust. I pried at it until it came off, leaving a clean oblong on the painted sill. It was a cake of Purity hard-tack, bread hard as a rock, and had evidently lain there a long time. Strange, for my grandmother was an organized housekeeper – not an antiseptic freak, but orderly. I shrugged, and was about to throw it in the garbage when something made me hesitate – a memory, a bit of the old lore. I stripped off my rubber gloves and went up the stairs to my room. It was the only other room in the house with a window that faced back, directly onto the Hill. There, on its sill, lay another cake of hard-bread.

I sat down on my little bed. Bread, coins and salt – talismans, tokens of the human world that kept you safe from the Others. I hesitated, then stood and carried the little cake downstairs. I swept them both into the garbage. The scent of cold rock, of invisible caves and sweet decaying grass, poured off the Hill through the open windows.

It was after eleven when the sun rose high enough to banish the shadow of Hill and overpass from our little hollow. I'd taken a break, munching on some cold tuna casserole when I saw Grandpa pass the window and heard him thump into the linny. I smiled as he entered the kitchen.

“What do you think you're doing? I've never been so ashamed in all me life. The windows open and blinds up and all. Have you no respect?”

He seized one of the kitchen chairs from the table, banging it on the floor. “Leave things be!”

He went to the living room; I heard him slamming windows, releasing blinds and tearing curtains across the glass. More thuds attested to similar activity upstairs. I got up and closed the kitchen windows, pulling the gingham curtains to, my vision swimming. I heard him come down the stairs and bang out the front door, leaving the house again. I went to the door and peered out the little window. He was heading across the footbridge at a tremendous pace, going to Bar Open, I supposed. Anything to avoid the sight of me.

The chair he'd placed on the floor was the one in which Gramma had habitually sat. Best line of sight to the back door, the Hill; back to the wall. He must have thought I was trying to clean her out of existence.

The next three days went by in a blur. Grandpa and I rarely spoke. I patched together meals from the mercy-food and we ate in silence. Every evening we drank ourselves numb in front of the TV. One night he got so drunk I had to help him up the stairs to bed. Some hours later I woke frightened out of sleep – strange noises came from down the hall, from his room – it took a moment before I recognized the sound as crying. Stifled, choked, unused noises, so lonely that I couldn't move. I just lay on my back while tears leaked out of my own eyes and trickled into my ears. “Until death do us part,” I kept thinking, an endless round.

In time the noises stopped; I found the strength to get up and go to his room. “Grandpa?” He was curled on his side like a child, his breathing slow and regular. “Grandpa?” I said again. He rolled over onto his back, and began to snore. I walked in, a little unsteadily, and pulled the covers up to his chin before stealing back to bed.

After a few days the food situation started looking sketchy, so I went grocery shopping, defiantly taking a cab to and from the store. That night for supper I cooked a nice meal, roast beef with all the veggies I knew he liked, potatoes and turnip and parsnips, roasted in dripping. I guess my Betty Crocker act made him feel mellow; after supper he started talking to me.

“I see you leave your window open nights.”

“H'm,” I said.

Grandpa shifted on the wooden chair. “It would be better if you didn't.” I wasn't feeling merciful. “Didn't what, Grandpa?”

“Leave it open,” he snapped, swinging around and meeting my eyes in a blaze of irritability. But there was something else there too, a plea.

“I like the night air.”

“It's not safe.”

“I sleep better with the window open,” I persisted.

Grandpa chewed on his lip a while. “Look,” he said at last, “I'd feel better in my mind if you didn't.”

I held myself back. We sat silent for the longest time. Then he moved as if to rise, and I spoke.

“What about the hard-tack?”

He paused. “What about it?”

“Would that make you feel better too?” When he didn't reply, I sharpened my voice. “To keep it on the windowsills?”

Grandpa coughed, his long limbs tangled together, making him look like a gangly teenager. Then he got up, opened a cupboard, and rooted around. His hand emerged clutching a package of hard-bread. Without looking at me, he put a cake on the kitchen windowsill. Then he handed the package to me.

“I'll take that as a yes,” I said.

“Put a cake in your jacket pocket too. For when you go out.”

Other than that conversation, we barely spoke. Grandpa drenched himself in TV, and sometimes disappeared out drinking. Myself, I became suffused with a dread of leaving the house. I'd had spells like this as a teenager. I only ever felt this way in my grandparents' house. A drifting, light-as-air paralysis overlay something else, something frightening, and on past visits home it had always sent me screaming back to the city, to my life. Such as it was; I'd never even had a place I took seriously as a
home
. I'd never increased my centre of gravity by moving in with someone, let alone by having kids of my own – God forbid! – the idea of bearing a child made my very womb cramp.

The loneliness must have been too much, for I found myself more than once in the beginning stages of the ritual. I'd come to in front of a mirror, my hair half braided; or I'd realize I was standing in the middle of a room, one shoe off, marking with my eyes the circumference of the circle I'd have to traverse. I even whispered her name the requisite three times one particularly lonely night, followed by the yearning directive. I was in the bathroom, having brushed my teeth, my eyes tight closed, and as I finished whispering
Shanawdithit, Shanawdithit, Shanawdithit, come!
my eyes flew open. A woman stood behind me, reflected in the mirror. I whirled, heart pounding, and saw only my own image wavering in the old window glass. When I turned back to the mirror, the second figure was gone. That's all it was, had to be, simply myself, doubled.

In bed that night I entered into furious debate with myself. I was acting like a crazy person. I had no right to call this dead woman's spirit. As a lonely child, maybe, it was understandable, but… But I was as lonely as I could ever remember being, and the little game had made me feel better. It wasn't, I told myself, like I was hurting anyone. Shanawdithit is dead, she isn't real. Dead people aren't real.

I watched my grandfather caress the back of that chair, Gramma's chair, every evening, like he was inviting her spirit to come in and sit down.

One late afternoon, slouched over a cup of tea, I realized that the TV wasn't on. This was strange enough that I went and looked, but there was no sign of him in the living room. “Grandpa?” I called up the stairs. No reply. I started upstairs, suddenly scared. “Grandpa? Where're you to?”

Calm down, he's probably in the can. In the five seconds it took me to get to the top of the stairs I was utterly convinced he had keeled over, dead as a doorknob. I flew to the doorway of his bedroom, and there he was, kneeling on the floor and very much alive. White paper squares were spilling out of a shoebox behind him, and more dropped out of his big hands. He froze and glared at me.

“What are those?” I asked.

“What do they look like?”

“Photos?” I took a step forward.

Grandpa sighed ostentatiously, and gave up trying to hide the stuff from me. “Yes, they're photos.”