“That’s okay, fine, I’m listening.” He liked this from a woman, when she let him know what was inside her. “Talk as much as you like, Tena.”
She smiled, shook her head. “I can’t read faces anymore. But I can read voices. There’s a lot in a voice if you listen, even a quiet one like yours. Something as simple as a smile. You’d think nothing of it, you smile when you feel like it, when you’re with someone. But a smile asks for a reaction. Doesn’t it? I could feel myself smiling, I was so conscious of it. It was like I had to do it, reach out that way. But you don’t smile at someone who isn’t likely to smile back, do you? I began to feel a little simple, that half-smile hanging on my face, like schoolgirls draw on notes and letters. I quit doing that. I listened hard. I know now if there’s a smile in a voice or not, and I wait to hear it. Would you read something to me? Clement’s tried but he gets
flustered, and he doesn’t have the time anymore. But what am I saying? Neither do you, you have a store to run. I’m sorry.”
“Shane’ll hold the fort. Anyway, I’d like to make the store selfserve, you just grab what you need and leave the money on the counter. No, I’ll read to you, Tena, of course I will. I used to read to my students. I got the lazy ones to remember something, maybe, or at least I kept them awake.”
She took a book from a counter drawer and held it out to him. He leafed through it, an anthology of poems, well-thumbed. “You have favourites here, I see,” he said, opening at a bookmark.
“Is it Anne Wilkinson’s? Clement left the mark in there. It’s for a day like this.”
Lauchlin read slowly. He hadn’t in years and he was tentative, shy under the intentness of her listening, so focused upon him, and he wanted to do it well. He let his voice find its way for a few lines until the rhythm of the language took over,
In June and gentle oven
Summer kingdoms simmer
As they come
And flower and leaf and love
Release
Their sweetest juice,
he gave it some force and volume and the domestic atmosphere of the kitchen seemed to recede,
Then two in one the lovers lie
And peel the skin of summer
With their teeth
And suck its marrow from a kiss
So charged with grace
The tongue, all knowing
Holds the sap of June
Aloof from seasons, flowing.
The lines came home to him as he finished and he felt himself blush foolishly. She seemed to be looking past him, somewhere else. He noticed the refrigerator’s hum, the
scree
of a hawk high outside.
“That’s lovely, thank you,” she said. “Some lines I can remember but I could never hold a whole poem in my head. I didn’t need to, once.”
“What about Braille?” he said. “I don’t know anything about it, of course, only a man in Sydney who could read it like a demon.”
“I couldn’t go through all that, learning it. If I were young I might. I wouldn’t have the patience now, I couldn’t sit down for it. It’s not what I want. It’s so…blind. That must sound silly.” She took up her teacup, turned it in her fingers. “It’s nice to have your company.”
“Do you ever mind being here alone, Tena? I suppose you did at first,” Lauchlin said.
“I was fearful for a time. But I got over that. I don’t mind. In the day, at least. Lorna Matheson over the way visits, and Alan her husband looks in on me sometimes. Good for gossip, they are. But I wouldn’t have them at the poetry. You can be alone anyway, even with people, when you’re blind, or so it seems at times. Just me, among voices. Oh, I have visitors, women from town. But some of them pity me, they don’t know it, but they do. They think me helpless. I used to knit, Clement has two sweaters I did for him. My dad made me my first needles out of sucker sticks when I was little. Later I could work the needles fast without even looking at them, but when I lost my sight, I couldn’t knit at all. Funny, isn’t it? Why should that be?” She turned her head suddenly toward the window where the first blooms of black hollyhocks swayed in the wind, a little crazy in their floral lushness. “That’s Clement’s pickup. I thought he’d be milling until dark.”
Lauchlin hadn’t heard the truck but he did now, its door opening and slamming. “Shall I put the book away?” he said. He didn’t want Clement to see he’d been reading poetry to Tena, as if it were unmanly somehow, or too intimate, and it disgusted him to think like that. But he placed the book in her outstretched hand and she set it aside.
“Lauchlin, how’re you now?” Clement looked tired, his dark-green work clothes patched with sweat stains, mud on his shoes and the knees of his pants.
“I brought Tena a tape to try out,” Lauchlin said. “I was just leaving.”
“How is it, Tena? You like it?” Clement kissed her forehead. “You got a bit of garden on your face,” he said, wiping off the smudge of dirt with his thumb. He opened the refrigerator and plucked out two bottles of beer.
“I’m sure I’ll like it, when I get the chance to listen,” she said, touching her cheek. “You’re done in the woods already, are you?”
“Damn it, no. We broke another blade. Cooper forced a log through it. We were supposed to have a spare in his truck, but there isn’t, of course, he probably sold it, that’d be like him, or never bought it in the first place, and here I am driving all the way home to get one. Lauch, have a beer with me, it’s hot, we need it. Tena, dear, I have to get back soon. Everything all right? You need me to bring you anything? I’ll be home for supper but a little late.”
“I’ll fry you a steak when I hear your truck. Bye, Lauchlin. Thanks for the tape and everything.”
“I can get you others,” he called back to her from the doorway.
“Could you? That would be fine.”
Clement led them across the yard which contained all the activity now, there was nothing of a farm about it. Clement used the old outbuildings for storage, equipment pressed against the dirty, broken windows, odd bits of lumber. Years back, structures that would have been visited daily—the milk house, the wagon shed, the little pig
barn or chicken house—but now they sat isolated, untended, thick weedy grass crowding and rotting their sills. Without animals, without crops, the hay was useless and Clement ignored the fields, laced with scrub trees, with bullthistle and goldenrod, raspberry canes, entwined with vetch and ever more tangles of wild roses.
They stood just inside the shade of the stable door, the humid gloom behind them, warm smells of sawdust and spent oil, rubber, gasoline. “You know,” Clement said, after a long swig of beer, “I want to tell you something. I trust you, Lauch, but it’s just between us. Nobody else, not Tena for sure.”
“For sure,” Lauchlin said. “Nobody.”
“That partner of mine…” He rubbed his face briskly with his hand, a habit that reminded Lauchlin of a schoolboy when the answers wouldn’t come. “I could hammer him good if I wanted, if it comes to that. I’m too damn big for him and he knows it. But there’s something underneath him, eating away. He’s a man of resentments, they go way back, long before me, but I guess I dredge them up some way. I don’t know just what to expect from him anymore.” Clement looked toward the house where Tena could be seen in the window, her blonde head bowed over the sink, framed by blue curtains. “Sometimes I wish I could just wave to her,” he said, almost whispering, “when I see her like that.
“Anyway. I told Cooper this morning he wouldn’t get a cut from this job. He owes me too much. We eat our lunch and he doesn’t talk. That’s the way he is, he don’t talk, he simmers. Then later he flings an axe, not right at me but in my direction, just flung it, and me with my back to him. I mean it just wheels through the air, it’s not like he fired it expertly or anything, but Jesus, a double-bitted axe, could have opened me up like a chicken, and us miles from a hospital. I yanked that axe out of the ground, I couldn’t believe it, the head was a good three inches into the sod. Are you nuts or what? I said to him. It got away from me, he says, staring at me like he hadn’t done nothing. You
ever see his eyes? There’s a queer chill to them. And what in Jesus’ name were you doing, I says, practising for the hammer throw? You aiming for the Olympics? He wouldn’t say a word more, went back to work, if you could call it working. I was shaking, believe me, I could hardly talk.”
“You’re right about the eyes,” Lauchlin said.
Clement drained his beer and tossed the bottle behind him into the old hay. “I’m thinking I should trim his sails but I told him to go home, get the hell out of my sight. There’s something deeper about him, inside him. Busting his nose wouldn’t do it. I’d have to kill him. He thinks that I can’t, that I won’t.”
“Of course you won’t, but break it off with him,” Lauchlin said. “How could he be worth all this?”
“We’re into this little milling business on the side and we got to work our way out of it. That’s what I tell him every day. I put up the seed money. I peddled a fucking lot of fish to put it away, a little here and there, and he’s never come through for what he owes me. There he is in a new Ford pickup. Don’t mention it, though, none of my goddamn business. He still expects a cut of what we make but I’m holding it back now. I’ve carried us. We did a stand of pine up at Gordon Adam’s but it’s more in the red than the black, what with the hours put in, supplies, repairs. Where does he get off firing axes at me?”
“Maybe he thinks he’s an Indian. Does he have Power?”
“Power?”
“A kind of supernatural strength, even magical, mystical.”
“Only with a weapon in his hand. No magic in that boy.”
“Take him to court then.”
“For what?”
“Sue him for what he owes you and break it off. You can prove what he owes?” Lauchlin glanced at the house. Tena was gone from the window.
“You’re damn right, yes I can. I’ll look into that, yes. I’ve had enough. He was the idea man, but most of the money and sweat is mine. What a deal. He’s from out west too, you know, not far from Moose Jaw, thereabouts. That’s how we struck it up like, that connection. Not much to go on, is it?” Clement swiped sawdust off his shirt. He squinted at the sky. “I’m tired of this, Lauchie. I’d like to take off and get drunk, right now, like I used to. But I can’t. I can’t come home that way anymore. So, back to work.” Clement ducked away into the dark barn and Lauchlin heard him tossing metal aside, swearing under his breath.
Climbing into his pickup, Lauchlin scanned reflexively the contours of the mountain, the clouds above it, thin and stilled in the heat. The strait narrowed down behind their land, the mountain face rose up steeper, looming in its density. There was no reason to wonder about the condition of the
Slios
road, but it did pass quickly through his mind, how long since he’d been up there. He’d driven up there with his father, just a boy helping him deliver groceries and supplies in the old pickup, his dad would let him drive the easy stretches. They’d take the ferry across to Little Harbour at the western end of the mountain road and his dad would put him at the wheel part of the way before the road got steep, past some good land where a family of Rosses had four farms. The road wasn’t so bad in those days, Jimmy MacLennan cut timber up there then and persuaded the government to keep it up, but when he left and came back to St. Aubin, it deteriorated. Its highest point was closed to cars now, the road too rough with little spring-cut gullies, and from rain carrying away the clay, exposing slippery stone, you could slide into the ditch, or worse where it was a long way down. It did not yet matter to him who might travel that road, only a detour now, or under what circumstances, one end to the other, from the Trans-Canada near Glen Tosh to Little Harbour where it started, and on east over the dangerous section along the
Slios,
levelling down gently, past where his grandparents’
farm had been, rejoining the Trans-Canada again near the bridge to St. Aubin. For Lauchlin that afternoon, the mountain was only landscape, forested and mute, the sounds of the farms, of people, that had drifted over the water on calm days when he was young, were gone. What other memories Lauchlin had of that road, he did not call up on this summer day as he backed his truck around and slowly headed down the driveway, because he saw Tena at the back door looking his way and he quickly raised his hand to her without thinking, then grinned apologetically, as if she could see that too. But he tapped the horn once and was sure he caught her wave just before she disappeared from his mirror.
HIS MIND HAD DRIFTED
back to that poem, to the sound of it in the kitchen, Tena attentive and still, when he recognized Cooper’s truck stopped at a slant by the gas pumps. He was talking to Shane, Shane shaking his head no. Lauchlin couldn’t hear anything until he shut off the engine and jumped out. Cooper turned that stare on him as he had up in the backland.
“What’s going on?”
“Ask
him,
” Shane said.
“I come back to get the gas you owe me,” Cooper said evenly, though his eyes were burning. “Your kid here is too saucy for his own good.”
Lauchlin stepped up to him. The man was clearly worked up, had been nursing this grievance for the past two days, and he was the sort who’d never let it go, inflamed as he was now against Clement.
“Like I said, we pumped you what you asked for.”
“I almost didn’t make the top of the mountain she was bucking so bad. Did I ask for that? Did I?”
Lauchlin knew he should end this before it turned worse, the gas was due him, yes, but he couldn’t bring himself to admit blame,
not yet, not to this man. “You seem to have a hell of a time with that mountain.”
“It’s not the goddamn mountain. It’s you people, jerking a man around like you do.”
There was a gleam of blank hatred in his eyes and Lauchlin flinched from it, it seemed so exaggerated, misplaced. Later Lauchlin could not remember if he himself had mistakenly started it, he might have put his hand on Cooper’s chest, just lightly as he was about to speak, to tell him, Okay, I’ll replace the bad gas you think I sold you, he wasn’t sure anymore because it happened so fast, and probably he would never have stuck himself so close to Cooper’s face anyway if he hadn’t just come from Clement’s, with a fresh vision of an errant axe wheeling through the air, but he saw the man’s lips tighten and he knew instinctively that a fist was coming and he slipped his head aside just enough, Cooper’s knuckles ripped across his ear as he caught Cooper with a short blow to the ribs that made him grunt. But that was all the boxing. Cooper seized him around the neck, tried to throw him down and they wrestled in a clumsy circle, locked together, their shoes tearing up the gravel, and Lauchlin began to panic in Cooper’s smothering embrace, so attuned was he to his stuttering heart, it drained his concentration, his breath was coming short and he opened his mouth wide, Your nose your nose! Lou Nemis used to yell at him in sparring, Don’t breathe through your mouth! Cooper sensed that slight slackening and slammed him back against the door of his truck, and where once Lauchlin would have sprung back and caught him cleanly with a right hand without even thinking, easily he could have cut him down, but now he thought, I don’t want to give out in front of this man, I don’t want to collapse to my knees like I did that afternoon, clutching my chest like a ham actor, he isn’t worth that humiliation, that risk. Lauchlin stood with his back against the warm metal of the truck, panting, a fist cocked, and Cooper seemed willing to settle for
that. He gave Lauchlin a sharp snort of contempt, a sound Lauchlin had heard before when he was young, in the schoolyard, at a dance, a party, in the gym—a man suddenly unsure if he can beat you, and just as glad he doesn’t have to find out, not at the moment.