Once We Had a Country (21 page)

“I’m sorry.” His lips touch her cheek. “It’ll be all right. Come up to bed.”

“Don’t leave,” she says.

“I won’t,” he tells her. “I promise, I won’t go anywhere.”

In their room, he’s the only one who sleeps. Maybe it won’t be so bad. A few days of teasing, perhaps a few weeks. Dimitri will be the worst; he’ll never let it go. To hell with him. He and Rhea will leave soon anyhow. And what of Wale? He couldn’t really have gone to Laos. He’ll be back tomorrow—and even if he isn’t, so what? He and Brid were never really close, except in some toxic, mutually degrading way. Maggie wonders how many women there have been for him since Pauline was born.

Her shoulders and hips work themselves into the bed, casting a mould of her body in the mattress. The ticking from the alarm clock maddens her.

At sunrise, she goes to the playroom, where the un-spooled film still lies spread out like skein-work. She winds it back onto its reel, trimming the torn ends and taping them together. Once she’s finished, she can’t help herself; she places the film in the editor and finds the beginning of the scene, then plays it back. Eventually Fletcher enters the frame, removing underwear and socks before lying on the bed. She watches, telling herself she’s finding the end so she can cut out the whole sequence. When she reaches it, though, a tremendous fatigue comes over her and she returns to their room. For an hour she sleeps beside him, until nausea awakens her and she hurries to the bathroom, making it just in time.

A few inches of fetid water at the bottom of the pit prevent Gordon and Yia Pao from sitting down, forcing them to lean against the muddy walls when they want a rest from standing. Gordon’s beard is a tangle, and his skin is clean only in rivulets where sweat has washed away the earth. Yia Pao is worse. There are scabbing cuts all across his face and a gash on his forehead that won’t stop bleeding. In his arms he holds Xang, the baby’s clothes so stained as to have lost their former colour altogether. The little boy’s skin is jaundiced, his face covered in mosquito bites. Gordon yells in a rasping voice for the guards to come, while Yia Pao takes a piece of banana into his mouth and chews it, then removes a bit of the mush with his fingers and tenderly feeds it to his son.

“They must be dead,” says Gordon. “I’m going to do it.”

“Wait a little longer,” says Yia Pao.

“They’re gone. It’s been a day.”

“It could be a test,” replies Yia Pao. “They could be waiting up there to beat us.”

Gordon looks at his companion’s forehead. “They haven’t needed excuses for that.” He squints up toward the edge of the pit. “If we wait any longer, we’ll be too weak.”

“I’m already too weak,” says Yia Pao. “It could be miles to a village.”

“They must get their supplies from someplace close,” Gordon observes. “What if they don’t come back? Xang needs milk.”

“He won’t get it from the jungle,” says Yia Pao. But he holds Xang out toward the other man. “Take him. Take him and go.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” replies Gordon. “You’re coming too.”

“You’ll move more quickly without me.”

Gordon doesn’t budge, so Yia Pao pulls the baby back to his chest and offers a forefinger for Xang to suck on. “I want him to live. There are no more men in my family. My father, all my brothers, my cousins are gone. Xang’s the only one left.”

“You’re left too.”

“You don’t understand, Gordon. I wasn’t a good husband. I wish to be a good father.”

“You were a fine husband,” says Gordon. “You loved your wife, didn’t you?”

Yia Pao nods. “But when I returned from Vientiane to marry her, I had been to school, I had lived in the city. I thought myself better than her or my parents. I laughed at things she said. Then a bomb struck the village and took her.”

“Yia Pao—” Gordon begins, but he isn’t listening. Moisture beads and falls from the tip of his nose.

“Gordon, it was the work of your God. He was teaching me a lesson.”

Gordon is about to say something but only purses his lips.

“I didn’t learn the lesson right away,” says Yia Pao, “so the next bomb took my parents too. God is a stubborn teacher.” He lifts his head and stares at the white scar on Gordon’s neck. “Is it really from a war?”

Gordon flinches and averts his gaze, staring into the pool of water at his feet. A moment later he reaches up
to put his hand on a thick black root protruding from the earth just above his head. With the toe of his boot, he begins to kick into the wall of the pit. Once he has created a secure foothold, he hoists himself and starts to kick another. Yia Pao watches him rise. The only sounds are Gordon’s grunts as he labours toward the top, struggling to keep hold of the slick walls, and a rain of muddy earth falling into the water at Yia Pao’s feet. At last Gordon reaches the edge of the pit and lifts himself from view.

Yia Pao rocks the baby and stays silent. After a time, a shadow passes over his face. Then a length of nylon rope tumbles into the pit with a towel tied at the end to form a sling.

“I don’t see them anywhere,” says Gordon from above. “But they left the fire going. We have to hurry. Send Xang first, and then I’ll pull you up.”

The afternoon sun lords over the farm. A pair of jackrabbits grazing on the front lawn dart across the grass as Maggie returns from her walk. She has gone all the way to Virgil and tramped every street in the village without really taking in anything. She told Fletcher she would be an hour; it’s been over two, but she doesn’t care. She needed the time alone.

From the wrecking yard comes the rumble of heavy machinery and the screech of rent metal. Ahead of her, near the porch, Lambchop and Karl sit in a red Alfa-Romeo convertible looking impatient. As she approaches them, Fletcher steps out onto the porch with a pair of suitcases in his hands.

“Where were you?” he calls out. “You missed lunch.”

“I told you, a walk,” she replies, still focused on the suitcases. “What’s going on?”

“Karl and Lambchop are heading out.”

“Those suitcases are yours, aren’t they?”

Suddenly his attention is caught by a line of crows on a telephone wire near the road.

“I’ll come back soon,” he tells her. He says it like an apology.

Maggie stops in place. In her peripheral vision, she apprehends Lambchop and Karl easing out of the car, then disappearing around the corner of the house. Fletcher descends the porch stairs and walks over to her before setting down the cases.

“You were going to leave without telling me?” she says.

“No, of course not—”

“What were you going to do? Phone from Niagara Falls? From Boston?”

Fletcher refuses to look her way. “I want you to come with me. You could go back to school, start teaching again—”

She kicks at the ground and feels pain shoot through her toe. “Fletcher, you can’t do this. You can’t try running off and then ask me to join you.”

“I need some time to think. Don’t you see? Everybody else can stay, and—”

“Have you already checked with your father? Does everyone else know too?” None of what’s happening seems real. “I don’t understand what I’ve done for you to treat me like this.”

Fletcher stands blinking with his face toward the sun. “It’s not you. It’s that film! The whole place is poisoned now. I can’t stay, really I can’t.” He takes off his glasses to scrub at a lens with the corner of his shirt. Then he notices Karl and Lambchop hovering at the side of the house and waves them toward the convertible.

“I’m sorry,” he tells her. “I’ll be back, I promise.” When he moves to hold her, she shrugs him off, so he picks up the suitcases again and starts for the car.

“Wait!” she says. “Why do you have to leave right now? This isn’t the way to say goodbye!”

“Karl and Lambchop need to be back in Boston tonight. Please, Maggie—”

“Then drive yourself tomorrow in the camper. Don’t go now.” Karl and Lambchop are already in the car again, watching her. “You know,” she says to Fletcher, “I’m three weeks late.”

It takes him a few seconds to comprehend what she means. Behind him, Karl lays on the horn, and Fletcher yells at him to knock it off.

“It’s probably just stress,” he tells her. “You shouldn’t worry—”

Maggie kicks the ground again. “You’re heartless, you really are.”

“Christ, how can I be heartless when I’m asking you to come with me? Please let me go. Don’t you see? If you care about me at all …” His voice falls apart, and he bows his head.

Maggie gazes across the lawn, wanting to tell him everything at once, all she has kept from him lately to make
his life easier: Wale meeting her father; Gran’s phone call; Dimitri and the girl.

“All right,” she says. “If you have to go, go.”

He’s slow raising his eyes. “Really?” Some barrier in him gives way. Dropping the suitcases, he moves to hold her. “I’m so sorry, I really am, but—”

It’s the last word that makes her break free and rush toward the porch. Even when he calls to her, she keeps on going. Inside the door, she stops and hears Lambchop say, “You told her you’re coming back, right? Why’s she acting like such a baby?” With that, she runs for the stairs.

Sitting on their bed, she wraps her arms around herself, while from the drive come the sounds of the convertible being loaded. At one point Karl laughs. On an impulse, she leaps up and opens a drawer in the dresser. It’s empty. So is another, and another. She turns and notices an envelope lying on the windowsill. Before she can go to examine it, the car’s engine starts and there’s the crunch of tires on gravel. A line of reflected sunlight travels like an arrow across the bedroom wall. The noise slowly fades and vanishes.

“Y
ou okay?” asks Brid the next morning when Maggie enters the kitchen.

She nods, trying not to pay attention to the nausea that woke her, and pours herself coffee while Brid sits at the table brushing Pauline’s hair. A minute later, Maggie’s stomach leaps. She covers her mouth and flees the room.

It’s half an hour before she makes her way into the orchard. Long-fallen cherries lie squashed and puckered underfoot, crawled upon by yellow jackets. The brush piles wait for her at the ends of the lanes. Reaching the first one, she bends low to light a match. The flames spread quickly, and soon the air is plumed with smoke. She moves along a beaten-down path in the grass until her matches are exhausted and half a dozen piles are aflame.

From the barracks comes George Ray, running and shouting like a madman. “What are you doing? The whole orchard could go up.”

“It was on a list of jobs that Fletcher left,” she replies.

He shakes his head vehemently. “Too early. Everything’s tinder.” Even as he says it, sparks begin to meander into the trees. From one of the piles there’s a rifle shot of exploding bark. Above the crackle she hears the chorus of geese calling to each other, a phalanx of dark dots moving south.

George Ray enlists her help in dragging a hose across the orchard, then begins to spray down the piles. She stands watching him, fearful and curious. When the water meets the flames, there’s a hiss like static through giant speakers.

Eventually the flames abate and he takes up a place beside her, sweating in the cool air as the doused mounds smoulder.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I just wanted to get it all done.”

He pats her on the shoulder and tells her not to worry. When she returns to the farmhouse, Brid’s waiting at the mud room door in her bikini top, one of its straps askew to reveal the sear of a tan line. She smiles and extends an arm to draw Maggie inside.

“Good idea, kiddo,” she says. “Burn the place down.”

It takes an hour of seclusion in her room before Maggie thinks that she should have filmed the fires. There’s still time for her to record the ashes, maybe even a whiff of smoke, but when she goes for the camera, it isn’t there. Then she discovers it isn’t just the camera; all her reels are missing, including the one with Fletcher on the bed. She searches
the house and finds nothing. He’ll have destroyed the film by now. It isn’t right. Those reels weren’t his to take.

Twenty-four hours and no phone call from him. There’s just the single page of writing he left for her in the envelope, a list of instructions laying out in legalistic prose what to do while he’s away. George Ray Ransom’s contract is to be extended until the thirty-first of October, and only Margaret Dunne and Brigid Garland shall continue in the employ of Morgan Sugar. Fletcher listed dozens of farm chores too, with no suggestion of when he might return.

At lunch, Maggie breaks the news that there’s no more money forthcoming. Dimitri says it doesn’t matter because he and Rhea are heading back to Cambridge anyway. Everyone else is furious; almost unanimously, they vow to pack their bags. Jim and Sarah won’t even look Maggie in the eye, as if it’s her fault. They don’t seem to care when she tells them Fletcher will be coming back soon.

Most go that evening, the rest the next day. Nobody expresses regret or concern for her well-being, and no one asks her to accompany them. Their hearts are already bent on some other place. Part of Maggie wants to cry out, “Wait! I could be pregnant,” but they’re a pack of mutineers. After each round of goodbyes she circles through the house picking up relics forgotten or forsaken: clothes, books, homemade jewellery, toys. In the playroom, she stares at the blank wall, waiting for it to present her with some revelation.