Finding My Own Way (4 page)

The sound of a key scraping in the lock at the door of Irene's apartment woke me. In the living room where I lay on my studio couch-bed, I pulled the sheet up over my head and waited. Someone bumped gently against the door. There was muffled laughter and loud whispering.

“No,” Irene was saying, choking on a laugh. “You can't come in. Go away, now! Oh, wait a sec. Help me with this key.” More rattling and bumping.

I got up, pulling the sheet from the bed around me and trailing it to the door. I unlocked it from my side, and Irene and her companion almost fell into the room.

“Oh, Libby, dear, I'm sorry to wake you.” Irene drew her accomplice forward by the sleeve of his coat. “This is Barney,” she said, introducing a short man with a sweet face, who held his hat in his hands. “He's not staying, I promise. This is Libby, my niece, the daughter of my only sister. My dear, big sister, Alex. She died of cancer, you know.” Tears filled her brown eyes and spilled easily down her cheeks. “I promised Alex I'd take care of Libby. It was the least I could do.”

Irene leaned against Barney, causing him to stagger. Patting her and looking uncomfortable, he cleared his throat. “Okay now, Irene. You get some sleep. Else you'll be no good in the morning.” He bobbed his head at me. “Nice to meet you, Libby.”

I felt sudden sympathy for this little man with the apologetic smile. I could have told him just exactly how long he could expect to be around. But I was tired, and anyway I needed Irene on my side while she was weighing the pros and cons of letting me go home once school was out.

I think it was the news that I'd been exempted from my final exams that convinced Irene to let me go. She wanted to reward me and knew what I wanted most.

“This going-home thing will be on a trial basis only,” Irene insisted. “One day at a time.”

“Oh, thank you, Irene! Thank you, thank you!”

There were conditions. “I'm writing to the McIntyres, letting them know that you're coming. They can easily check on you every day. Maybe I should let your mother's friend at the newspaper, what's his name, Thomas, know too. And absolutely no male company past the front yard.”

“Oh, Aunt Irene! What about Henry McIntyre?”

“You know what I mean, Libby,” my aunt grumbled. “No one under the age of forty. You be sure to write to your friend Margaret Pacey this week. On second thought, I'll send Margaret's mother a note, to outline the rules for your stay.”

With so many people overseeing my life and the faithful Ernie guarding my door, how could Aunt Irene not rest easy?

“And one thing for sure,” she decided. “You are to see
about getting a telephone. Have them send the bill to me. If I can get away, I'll come down myself and spend a few days. Just till I know you're all right.”

It was, I suppose, the price I had to pay for my freedom. I was determined to make it on my own. And not just for the summer either. “I'll be fine, Irene. You know I will. I was the one who looked after Alex. Remember?”

She knew that was true enough. Growing up in the little house out past the place where the road from Pinkney Corners ends, most days I'd come home from school to find Alex in another world, the one she shared with the characters in her novels. Without a word, I would collect the dirty coffee cups and dried crusts of toast from around her typewriter and take them to the kitchen.

Eventually, Alex would look up from her writing and see me. “Oh, my,” she'd say, lifting her mass of hair, stretching her arms over her head and smiling fondly, “is it that time already?”

I remember how she used to come to lean against the door frame between the front room and the kitchen, her hands easing the pain in the small of her back, watch me dig the dishpan from under the sink, fill it with hot water and sprinkle in the soap flakes. “You're a good girl, Libby,” Alex would say. “What would I do without you?”

While she started supper, I'd trudge upstairs, through the dustballs in the bedroom, and pull the covers on the bed up over the pillows, giving them a quick swipe to smooth them.

Before my grandmother died, Nan had been the one who had looked after us, who had showed me how she could turn a shirt collar to give the garment new life, how
to darn a pair of socks and how to plant radish and carrot seed together to avoid having to thin the carrots later.

My Nan and grandfather had bought the house and the one acre of land that sloped gently down to the river when they came out from back north, after they were married in 1912. In Pinkney Corners, what people referred to as “back north” was any place on the road map higher than Highway 7. My grandfather was a railroad man, a hard worker I've been told, who walked all the way to the roundhouse six days a week. He died before I was born.

Besides looking after her family and a huge garden, Nan had worked at the local canning factory in season, peeling tomatoes. She had prided herself on keeping a clean house and on always being thrifty. She had stocked up on tins of fruit and vegetables from the canning factory, dented tins with no labels. The only drawback was that, just when you were expecting creamed corn, you'd find you'd opened a tin of blue raspberries. Meals were sometimes full of surprises.

With Nan gone and Alex immersed in her writing, the garden became neglected, overgrown with chicory and wild mustard. The most Alex and I ever planted would be one or two uneven rows of beets and carrots. But one day, Alex saw an ad in the paper asking for people willing to grow cucumbers for a pickling company. My mother decided that this was a way to make a few extra dollars and keep me, once school was out for the summer, outside in the fresh air and sunshine.

To earn the best money at the sorter, the cucumbers had to be picked when they were exactly the right size.
Alex hadn't counted on how quickly these things could grow with just a little rain. Almost overnight, they could go from “not quite ready” to “way past perfect.”

At first, all the hoeing to keep the weeds from between the rows and the squatting in the blazing sun to harvest the prickly cucumbers nearly finished us. But on good days, there'd be one or two lumpy, burlap sacks waiting out by the road for the man, whose name was Eddie, to pick up and deliver to the sorter.

Once in a while, Alex and I went along with Eddie for the ride. I enjoyed watching the process at the sorter, how our little cukes bounced merrily along the conveyor after the man had emptied the sacks onto it. Immediately, he would pluck one or two of the bigger ones and toss them aside while Alex and I tried to look innocent, as if we couldn't imagine how those big fellows had ended up in the sack.

Once we got the hang of it, we had good crops for three years running and made enough money to buy a few extras—new mattresses for our beds and a polyester-filled comforter with matching curtains for my room.

Maybe, I thought now as I packed my things into the old cardboard suitcase at Irene's and prepared to go home, I could grow cucumbers this year myself. Should I start by getting in touch with Eddie, or with the people from the pickling company? Would there still be time to sow some seed when I got back home? The land hadn't been worked in years. Could I ask Mr. McIntyre to run over it a couple of times with his cultivator?

But, wait a minute. I sat down on my bed abruptly, the lid of the suitcase flopping shut. There was something
wrong with the picture in my head. Something about Eddie, wasn't it? Then it began to come back to me, the day Alex and I had walked all the way home from the sorter. It was a scene I had managed to forget.

After unloading the cucumbers, Eddie had backed the pickup truck into the shade of a large tree. When the sorting was finished, he and Alex had gone up to the truck, ready to leave; but I had asked them to wait while I got a drink from the outside tap.

There was no one in the cab of the truck when I got there, but I heard voices from beyond the open door on the other side. Opening my door, I looked across the seat and saw Alex and Eddie engaged in some kind of struggle. There was a loud slap, and Alex looked up, her face red with anger.

“Get out of the truck, Libby,” she ordered, her eyes flashing.

“What?”

“I said get out. We don't need a ride.” She strode around to my side, and I hopped down.

“What do you mean, we don't need a ride?”

My mother grabbed my arm and slammed the door behind me. “We do not need any favours from Mr. Hackett,” she stated. And we had walked all the way back home.

The pickup truck had swirled past us before we were onto the main road, covering us both in dust. My indignation at having to walk home was nothing compared to Alex's at being taken advantage of.

I don't remember how we sent our cucumbers to the sorter after that. I do remember that Alex had returned
the new curtains she'd bought for the front room to the mail order office the next day.

The bus ride back to my home seemed to take forever. I had forgotten there were so many stops between Toronto and Pinkney Corners. To pass the time, I studied the other passengers as they disembarked, one by one along the way, creating lives for them in my head. I pictured a family of clamouring youngsters waiting for the tired-looking woman in the print dress, who carried all the brown shopping bags. And a raven-haired sweetheart for the handsome man with the suit jacket hanging on his thumb over his shoulder. His shirtsleeves rolled up over his forearms, he swung jauntily down off the bus. Then all I could see was the top of his head as we pulled away again.

I climbed down at our corner, not wanting to walk all the way back from the cigar store which acted as the bus terminal in town. It was a warm late afternoon at the end of June. The trees and bushes along the roadside were lush with summer. I felt exhilarated, light as air. I didn't even feel the weight of the suitcase. “I'm home,” I wanted to tell every leaf and branch, every creature I came upon—the doves who flew, startled, from the dust, the turtle who dawdled across my path, his tail leaving a shallow trail between the prints of his claws, as he headed for the riverbank.

My lilac hedge, the flowers dried and the colour of rust, crowded the edge of the road, almost hiding the
house from view. “Hello, little house,” I said. The blinds in the two front windows were pulled halfway down, as if it had closed its eyes. Or maybe, now that I was here, it was just opening them.

I stepped across the small front porch, heavy with vines that promised a riot of purple clematis, and reached for the screen door. No, not yet, I thought. I wanted Ernie and I to do this together, the way I'd imagined it. Leaving the suitcase on the step, I went on up the road to fetch my dog.

Ernie, my old friend, was lying in the sun on the stones at the side door of the McIntyres' farmhouse. He raised his big head and watched me approach for a few seconds. Then, recognizing me, he scrambled to his feet and limped his way up the driveway towards me, tail wagging. The winter had worsened the arthritis in his hip, but otherwise, he was his same old silly self, all tail and slobber, his sides matted with black hair.

Mrs. McIntryre came out with an empty laundry basket and headed for the clothesline before she spotted me. “Why, I do declare! Here you are. Elizabeth.” She set the basket down. “Henry and I were just talking about you.” The screen door opened a second time and Mr. McIntyre emerged. “Here she is, Henry.”

Henry McIntyre gave me a wide grin and slipped his arms under his suspenders, adjusting them over his plump middle. “You're back, are you? Did you go into the house?”

“No, I came here first,” I said, happily. “Came to get Ernie.” I rubbed the wide, hard place between the dog's ears. “Thanks so much for minding him. I don't know if
I'll ever be able to repay you for his board and keep.”

“Shaw! Don't mention it,” said Mrs. McIntyre, flapping her hands. “He's such a loveable old thing. Good company for Rex, too.”

Henry McIntryre motioned with his head toward the truck. “Come on, then. I'll take you back up in the pickup,” he said. This couple had always been people of endless charity.

“Oh, you don't need to,” I told him. “We can walk back.”

The farmer let down the tailgate on his truck, regardless. “Here, boy,” he summoned. Ernie sprang up as if he were a pup.

“You don't need to...” I began again.

“Henry'll drive you,” Mrs. McIntryre stated. “See you back here for supper.” She closed the door of the truck on my protests.

“I'm okay, really.” This was no way to start off my life of independence. “I packed a lunch for the bus, and I've brought food for my supper, for the dog too.”

“It's like this, 'Lizabeth,” said Henry, backing out of the lane. “The wife and I wanted to warn you about something first.” My pulse quickened. “Seems like someone broke into your place while you were gone.”

I felt as if the floor had just dropped from under me. “Who? Who broke into my place?”