Liberty Street (24 page)

But what if it is Silas Chance's cap? If so, there's only one way it could have got into Saul's possession: he had been there when Silas died. Had he come across Silas on the side of the road, injured, maybe dead, and done nothing? Or was it worse? Had he caused the injury? Had he hit Silas on purpose? Either way, he'd taken Silas's cap, and now it was a souvenir to give to a buddy on his wedding day, like a set of antlers—only worse, because he thinks it's a joke. They all think it's a joke.

She lies on the bed and tries not to panic about where she's found herself. Everything will be okay in the morning, when these people are gone and the house is quiet, but she knows—knows now, without a doubt—that she is no more in love with Joe Fletcher than, say, the man who picks up the milk cans from her father's dairy. If she were still in high school and Joe Fletcher were her boyfriend, she would break up with him. How many times had she listened to the girls in her class talk about breaking up with their boyfriends? They were madly in love one day and breaking up the next. She thinks about the word “engagement” and how she had dismissed that step as unnecessary. Now she sees the sense in it. She lies on the rough blanket in the dark, listens to the sounds of the party coming from the kitchen,
and tries to convince herself it's just her, she's just being Frances.

She wants to go home. Right this minute. Run away from this house and these coarse people, this nightmare, which now includes Joe, because whatever had happened to Silas Chance, he knows. Whether he'd been there or not, he knows. The way Joe had tossed the cap into the living room as though it were insignificant, as though that life—the life of the man to whom the cap belonged—didn't matter.

She could do it. She could climb out the bedroom window and run. But where to? And is she making it all up, panicking for nothing? She tries to remember if there were initials in Silas's cap that day she'd picked it up off the floor and handed it to him. She can't remember—but how could she? She was just a child. She rolls into a ball and holds her stomach, feeling sick, trying not to throw up, and somehow she manages not to. Tap, tap, tap on the wool blanket, and somehow, in spite of the noise in the kitchen, she falls asleep.

She has no idea what time it is when she wakes up and hears noises, whispered laughter outside the bedroom door. The door opens and in the light from the living room she sees Joe being shoved into the room by a crowd of people. He's naked, except for his socks and his undershorts.

Someone pulls the door closed again, and Frances sits up in the dark. Then the whooping starts, and the banging, metal on metal, pots and pans, a pounding on the bedroom door. Outside the house, someone starts a vehicle and drives it up to the bedroom window and honks the horn, over and over again. The vehicle lights cast wild shadows through the plastic blind. Frances can feel her heart pounding, the way it
does in dreams where you're being chased. She can see the shadow of Joe's near-naked body stumbling toward her.

“What are they doing?” she says to him, shouting over the noise.

Joe climbs onto the bed, searching for her. When he finds her, he pulls her to him. At first she clings to him, terrified by the noise, but when he begins to kiss her, saying her name over and over again, breathing on her with his boozy breath, she tries to pull away, becomes frightened of him too. “What are they doing?” she says again, “Why are they doing this?” She knows she sounds hysterical, and when Joe begins to pull at her dress, she becomes hysterical, thrashing under his weight, fighting like a frightened animal. She hears someone yell something like, “Go at 'er, Joe,” and then raucous laughter.

She bites Joe hard on the arm and claws with her fingernails at his back, but he doesn't even seem to notice. It isn't until she screams as loud as she can, right into his ear, and jams her fingernails into his cheek, raking down, that he realizes she's fighting him. He stops and sits up and slurs, “What's wrong?” She pulls away and wraps herself as tightly as she can in what she can grab of the wool blanket, and then Joe rolls over on his back and is still. Frances puts her hands over her ears to try to block the noises still coming from outside the door, the window, everywhere, until gradually they stop. She hears the kitchen door slamming as people leave, and one by one the vehicles start up and drive out of the yard.

Finally, it's quiet. Dark. Joe's breathing sounds desperate, as though he's fighting to stay alive. Do people die from drinking too much? She doesn't know whether to hope he lives or dies. She lies awake all night listening to him, and
as the sun comes up and the room grows light, she can see him stretched out on his back with his socks still on, still breathing. He'd managed to get only one leg out of his undershorts, which are now wrapped around one white thigh, and his hands cup his testicles. She can smell the alcohol and stale aftershave.

He's disgusting
, she thinks.

She creeps from the bed and opens her suitcase and begins pulling things out, dropping them in a pile on the floor. At first she tries to be quiet, afraid Joe will wake up, but when she realizes he isn't going to, she stops caring about the noise she makes. She goes through the suitcase and the boxes, throwing things out onto the floor until she finds what she wants—her faded jeans, clean underwear, a T-shirt, her Keds, her grey kangaroo. Once she's changed into her favourite clothes, she picks the blue dress up from the floor and takes it to the kitchen. On her way through the living room, she sees that someone has moved the cap to the coffee table and draped it on top of a beer bottle. The sand candle is on the coffee table too—the candle and Silas Chance's cap.

In the kitchen, she finds some scissors and a carving knife in a drawer, and she sits in a chair by the stove and cuts her dress to pieces. The stove is still warm from the fire someone had lit the night before. It takes her an hour to cut up the dress. By the time she's done, it's a pile of velvet strips on the kitchen floor. And then she returns to the living room and snatches the cap off the beer bottle, and she takes the scissors to it too, not really seeing it—
Silas Chance's cap, it has to be
—as she struggles to cut through the tough canvas band, just a blur of green and black, not wanting to see the initials of a dead man's name. When she's done what she can
with the cap, she isn't sure what to do with the pieces. She lifts the plate on the stove and sees there are still embers, so she adds kindling and gets a fire burning, and then she spends the next hour throwing scraps of fabric in, along with blocks of wood. As the fabric burns, smoke begins to build up in the kitchen because the flue isn't set right, but she doesn't care. She doesn't care if she burns the whole place down. When the last of the scraps are in the stove, she puts the plate back on and finds her jacket and goes outside and follows the trail into the bush. She sits on a rock that rises out of the dew-damp grass, shivering in the cold air, the smell of rotting poplar leaves round her. She wants to go back in time—just twenty-four hours would do—and call off the wedding, tell her mother that she was right, that Joe Fletcher is not the man for her, he's too old, too rough, and he knows horrible crude people. Tossers. Are these the kind of people her mother ran away from in England? If so, Frances knows why. When she sees Joe's dog watching her from the edge of the meadow, she calls him and he comes to her. She feels sorry for him that he belongs to someone who named him Dog.

Hours later—judging by the sun, it must be mid-afternoon—Frances hears Joe calling her name. The dog's ears prick up and he starts to trot off in the direction of the house, but when Frances calls him back to her side he comes, and he stays with her even though he keeps looking at the house. Eventually, Frances decides she can't stay in the meadow forever.

When she opens the kitchen door she finds Joe cleaning up. He has a healthy fire going in the stove, and the smoke from her fire has mostly cleared. She isn't sure what she'd expected to find, but it isn't this. Maybe she'd thought
he would be dead, lying on the bed in nothing but his socks. At the very least, she'd thought she would find him with his head in his hands, or maybe over a bucket. His hair is wet and he looks as though he's showered, even though there is no shower. He has scratches on his cheek where she'd dug in her fingernails. She wonders if he remembers she did that.

“Quite a mess they made here, eh?” Joe says when he sees her in the doorway. He says it as though the party and the cap and the terrifying pot-banging circus were nothing out of the ordinary, nothing to apologize for. “They like to go hard, that crew. They don't mean any harm.”

He pours hot water from a copper reservoir into the kitchen sink, carries glasses and empty bowls from the table, and drops them into the soapy water. There are several saucers on the table, all of them filled with cigarette butts, and he empties the butts into the stove and adds the saucers to the dirty dishes. He begins to collect empty beer bottles and stack them in boxes by the door.

“You'll get used to them,” he says.

Did she have any desire to get used to a single person who had been in the kitchen the night before? No. Not one person. Not even Joe Fletcher. She stands in the doorway and watches him as he walks from the stove to the sink, from the sink to the table, back to the sink.

“What's wrong?” he asks.

Does he really not know? Does he not remember? How they had all drunk themselves stupid and laughed as Joe tossed Silas Chance's cap like a toy? How he'd climbed on her and groped at her like an animal?

“Where did Saul get that cap?” she asks. She wants to ask,
also,
Am I married to a man who could have come forward all those years ago, when the police and Silas's sister were searching for someone—anyone—who knew what had happened
?

Joe says, with his back to her and his hands still in the sink, “Close that door there, will you? You're letting in the cold air.”

Frances steps inside and pulls the door shut. She wishes that she hadn't destroyed the cap so she could hold up the proof, wave it in his face. She says, “I burned the cap and threw it in the stove. It was half mine, I guess, since it was a wedding present.”

He's refusing to look at her. Guilty, she thinks—guilty and relieved that the proof is now ashes. She's done him a favour. He says, placing a bowl in the drying rack, “Don't feel bad on my account. Although it beats me why you'd want to burn it. It was just a joke.”

She goes to the bedroom then and lies down again on the wool blanket. She hadn't slept all night. She's exhausted, and cold from sitting outside for so long. When she hears Joe come into the bedroom half an hour later, she pretends to be asleep. He stands over her, says her name a few times, and then leaves, closing the door after himself. When she's sure she will be alone for a while, she really does fall asleep.

It's dark when she wakes up. She smells something cooking. She gets up and goes to the kitchen, where Joe has a stew ready and the table set for supper. The kitchen smells good, but when Frances sits down to eat, she finds she has no appetite. She sits at the table saying nothing, and Joe clearly doesn't know what to do. Finally he says, “That was kind of a mean trick. Don't let it bother you.”

Frances doesn't understand.

Joe said, “We did that on their wedding night, years ago. Ginny and Saul's. Payback, I guess.”

Frances thinks,
He's telling me this so I'll believe everything is all right.
She picks up her fork and has a bite of stew and a chunk of potato, and she thinks there is a possibility that things could be all right—that the cap is not Silas's, that she'll never see those people again, that Joe will turn back into the man who'd taken her to the movies, the one she'd wanted so badly to sleep with. But it's a slim possibility.

After supper, she goes to the bedroom again, and eventually Joe comes in and sits on the edge of the bed in the dark. He reaches out his hand to touch her, but she pulls away from him and rolls herself into a little ball in the wool blanket, still in her clothes. She remembers how she'd decided she was in love with Joe Fletcher, and then doubted herself, and then convinced herself she did love him. What was wrong with her? Now, it seems, she's decided once and for all that she doesn't love him, and it's not just because of the cap. She could convince herself that the cap belongs to Saul. It wouldn't be that difficult—much less difficult than convincing herself she can stay here. She should ask Joe what Saul's last name is, but she doesn't. She doesn't mention the cap again.

She stays in Joe Fletcher's house for eleven days. She does not let him touch her. He's patient for the first few days, and then he becomes surly. He doesn't force himself on her, but he's sarcastic when she won't undress in front of him and changes into her pyjamas in the bathroom. He calls her a baby, says he thought he was marrying a woman but got Daddy's baby instead. She decides she has to leave. There's no other solution. When she tells Joe this, he doesn't
argue. He carries her cardboard boxes and her suitcase out to the truck and drives her home. She takes the presents from the wedding with her, predicting that her mother will want to return them, but she leaves the presents brought by Joe's friends. She also leaves the Bible Martha gave them. He can deal with those. She carries the sand candle on her lap again. They don't speak at all on the way, not a word.

When they arrive at the dairy farm, Joe stops on the approach and unloads her suitcase and boxes. Frances can't look at him. She risks a glance when the last box is on the ground and Joe is lifting the tailgate to close it. She sees that he has something to say and she fears that he is about to beg her to reconsider.

He's not. She meets his eye and he says, “What did you think? That you could try me out, go for a test drive and then say thanks, but no thanks? Well, go to hell, Frances. I'm glad to be rid of you. I should have listened to Martha.”