Poached Egg on Toast (2 page)

At the south peak, he held the binoculars to his eyes, wondering, the knowledge of Zeta at the door still in his memory. She was there, yes, but he saw William, too. William, the eldest. Darkness had fallen around him. William had forgotten to take out the ashes, bring in the coal. A bitter winter night, and William was in bed.

“Don’t wake him,” Zeta said. “I’ll do it myself. He’s only nine and he has school in the morning. Let him make a mistake.”

But no, if William hadn’t been made to dress and go out to the barn in the dark, he’d have forgotten again. Wouldn’t he?

Zeta drew her lips together, looking helplessly at Willy’s back. She held the storm door open to give the child light, though she and Clayton and William had known that the coal bin would be in blackness at the end of the yard.

Oh, Willy, do you still have nightmares about standing on the steps, falling into that pool of fluid darkness?

Clayton allowed the binoculars to fall back on his chest. William was in his thirties, thirty-six, thirty-seven; Clayton could not remember which. What had he seen? He climbed down and went back to the tractor, and drove to the south field. He inspected his fences along the boundary of the clay road, and spent the rest of the day doing repairs.

In the morning, Zeta stood at the door looking out after him. He had slept in the attic again, but not restfully. There was something wrong and he did not know what it was. He drove down to the old barn, climbed the ladder and again lifted the binoculars towards the house. He was shocked when Zeta stepped suddenly into focus, pointing a pistol at his face. She aimed, but did not pull the trigger. Instead, she turned towards the poplar and aimed at it. Then, at the stoop from which she hung the clothes. Then, at the birdhouse. Smiling, she turned quickly and went back into the house.

Feeling weak and perspiring, Clayton realized that she could not have seen him. From the ground below, he could not even see the back door. What had Zeta been doing? What was it about her that had changed so startlingly since he’d left her a half hour ago, standing at the back door like a shadow of his stricken conscience? He remembered that in the glasses her lips had been moving. Singing! She must have been singing. He thought of her smile as she’d turned to go inside. A self-satisfied smile, undisturbed. And her brisk step. He had not seen her move that quickly since before Maureen had left to marry Johnny Cheney from down the road. Johnny was a good ball player but not much good at anything else. Zeta had wanted to open one of the old cabins for the wedding. They had invited Reverend Orland and a few neighbours back after the ceremony. Zeta made lunch and served it on the open cabin veranda, and Maureen and Johnny stayed on and honeymooned in the cabin. No money to go anywhere else. Clayton still held some of the pain he’d felt when he’d driven down to the cabin after leaving the church and had seen what someone had strung up on the veranda post as a joke—a pair of ladies’ violet-coloured panties. Probably one of Johnny’s ball-playing friends. Clayton had ripped down the panties and thrown them into the back of his truck. No joke. Not for his Maureen.

Clayton climbed down and stood on the cliff before the doorless, gaping barn. His boots smothered some of the early wild strawberries at his feet. Zeta’s little get-together for Maureen had been awkward, a failure. The half-dozen cars had to be driven across the fields to get there, and the occupants had stood around, cheerless in Sunday suits and ties, on the raw wood of the veranda. Maureen and Johnny posed for a camera in the long grass on the cliff, a rough surf behind them. And the veil Maureen had sewn herself lifted beautifully, in one quick swoop of wind, and blew out to sea. Seven and a half months later, their son had been named Clayton, after him.

But Zeta. What was she up to? He turned to walk back to the creek where he had left the tractor and, as he did so, his ears caught a smart cracking sound, sharp as a rifle shot. He searched the horizon for signs of whales, but could see nothing in the rolling sea. One had probably breached, or smacked its huge flukes against the water. He would not have mistaken the sound.

When Clayton returned to the house for lunch, Zeta served him and sat in the rocker by the stove with her cup of tea. Hardly a word passed between them. She was so like the uncommunicative woman he had left at the door in the morning, he did not,
could not
ask about what had intervened. He had not, after all, been meant to see. She would accuse him of spying.

After lunch, he went upstairs to check the bureau drawer, where he kept his .38. It was there, but it looked as if it hadn’t been touched for years. Unloaded. He replaced it in the drawer and went downstairs to have his nap on the kitchen sofa.

While he slept, he dreamed. He dreamed that he had gone to Honest Albert’s—the Island Furniture Warehouse—and that Albert was trying to sell him a sofa. The colour was apple green.

“It’s just what you need for your naps, Clayton. I tell you, Zeta will love it in the kitchen.”

Albert kept pushing Clayton towards the end of a long, low room that was barnlike and musty. Sofas and daybeds were stacked there, and an enormous SALE sign hung from the ceiling. Beneath that, on the floor, was a black coffin filled with nickels.

“It’s the hottest sale this Island has ever seen,” Honest Albert said. He was laughing and wheezing, and kept pointing to the coffin.

“Put both those big hands of yours into the box, Clayton, and pull out as many nickels as you can carry.”

Clayton hesitated. He took a deep breath and dug both hands deep down until he touched the bottom of the coffin. He came up dripping nickels, and emptied his hands of them onto a spotted cloth which Albert had spread out over an Arborite table. The two men counted the nickels—two hundred and thirtythree.

“Not bad, Clayton! That’s more’n anybody’s got yet. You did all right for yourself. Let me see a minute—that’s eleven dollars and sixty-five cents off the price of the sofa. Zeta’ll be some proud of you.”

When Clayton drove home with the sofa in the back of the truck, Zeta was standing at the back door with the .38.

“You’ve been made a fool of again, Clayton,” she shouted. “You’re a damned fool.”

She took a shot at him and missed. She took another and he ducked behind the sofa that was halfway off the truck. She filled the sofa full of bullets until the gun clicked, empty, and then she began to hum a little tune and turned to go back inside the house. Maureen and Willy and Latham were standing under the poplar, watching.

“Don’t you think you’ve slept long enough?” Zeta said, standing over him. “I’ve got work to do in here.”

Clayton looked down at the sofa, but it was a faded blue-grey and the only holes in it were the ones where the springs stuck through. He got up, and splashed water on his face at the kitchen sink, and went back out to the tractor.

In the morning there was a cool, light drizzle, and Clayton went out in his shirt sleeves to work on the road. A cloud cover hung low over the surface of an indifferent sea; the waves were the darkest blue. Apart from Clayton and an occasional screeching gull, there wasn’t another living thing in sight. He thought of Latham who had always loved every living thing. Latham, second son, released from the bondage of being eldest.

Latham and Maureen had been outdoor companions to each other throughout their childhood. Following the tracks of the dune fox, sitting silent for hours in the cove watching the great blue heron. Latham had been one to scramble around shore, overturning rocks, collecting shells and sand saucers, trapping what he could in tidal pools, examining, sometimes bringing his finds home to raise in the aquarium he kept in his room. Clayton and Zeta had never worried about Latham around the water because he had been born with a second sense for it, a fearlessness that neither of the others had. But he was easily hurt in other ways. One time, he’d caught a hermit crab that had made its home in a moon shell, and he kept it as a pet. It had been doing badly and Latham had suspected it was dying, but couldn’t let it go. He’d come to the door of his parents’ room in the night, holding two narrow pieces of wood he had nailed together.

“If the crab is dying,” he said, “I have a cross ready The only thing is, I love it dearly.”

After it had died and been buried under the roots of the poplar, Latham came to their room in the night again, and stood by their bed. Clayton and Zeta had been making love. Clayton was angry at first, not knowing how long the child had been standing there.

“Dad,” said Latham. “I’m having trouble sleeping. I hear the spirit of my crab crawling around the aquarium. It’s clacking against the glass.”

What could you tell a child like that? What did Latham tell his own sons?

Clayton filled three more deep-pitted ruts in the road, but his mind kept going back to the rotting barn, to Zeta and the .38. He took the binoculars from the edge of the wagon where they’d been hanging, and headed back to the spot where he’d been the day before. Crazy. He must be crazy to spy on Zeta. For it could not be called anything else. He climbed the ladder and walked the beam, admitting to himself that spying was exactly what he had come to do.

But he felt a safety, a surety, hidden away up there in the peak of the barn. For a long time he just sat, looking out into the Gulf. The clouds were breaking up and the sun flashed through linear folds of sky. As if they, too, were pleased, the whales suddenly began their songs, echoing far, far out. Clayton held his binoculars to his eyes and saw a large herd, moving and playing, keeping close. They were turning lazily, spouting through the haze. The sounds drifted past as if the whales were swimming just below him, beneath the cliff. He knew there had been a time when they would have come this close, but that would have been in his grandfather’s day, when his grandfather had been a boy, scoping out the whales. Clayton had heard the stories often enough during his own boyhood.

Far off, the humpbacks called to one another with eerie repetitive cries—long, low echoing sighs and high-pitched squeals. The herd noises rolled in as patterned bursts of sound, followed by long silences. Clayton did not focus his glasses on the house. He felt peace such as he had not experienced for a long time, and he climbed down the ladder and went back to work, trying to hold that peace around him.

The next morning, Clayton managed to stay out of the barn, but when he woke from his after-lunch nap, he went directly there, climbed the south peak and raised his glasses to see if Zeta had come out of the house. He had scarcely looked at Zeta across the lunch table, so anxious had he been to get away from her to see what she would do. Now, he was startled, frightened, unprepared, as he caught sight of himself running across his own visual field, running and calling for Maureen. Yes, it was he, Clayton. Looking everywhere for Maureen, who was lost. He was at the picnic fair and the boys were with him and they were small. Clayton was younger, had dark brown hair, more of it than the hand now knew against the familiar scalp as he felt instinctively for it there.

He was running everywhere, looking for Maureen. Although the fair was held at the exhibition field in town where the local farmers shopped, Clayton saw not a single familiar face. Where could she have gone? Zeta had told the children that morning to stay with their father, not to get lost. After the pony rides and the outdoor tightrope walk, he had taken them to a new event, the pig races, which had been held in the livestock building. But the event had not been what he had expected—greased pigs and tumbling overgrown boys in overalls, slipping and sliding and laughing. No, there had been a small narrow stretch of cement floor around which metal chairs had been placed in rows, and here he had sat with the children, waiting. A truck backed in through the parting crowd and stopped at the end of the row of chairs. A man stepped out and called to some of his boys to give him a hand. They unloaded eight of the puniest, most frightened, squealing piglets that Clayton had ever set eyes on. And then, on cue, eight local girls, all contestants in the fair’s Beauty Contest, came forward, awkward and shy and disgusted, but each determined, Clayton could see, to get through this initiation rite, which could lead to a year’s reign over the other seven. Each girl slipped into a pair of overalls, and each pig had a leash snapped to its collar. Although the girls were supposed to hold their charges in their arms to await the starter pistol, the legs of the pigs kept shooting out from the girls’ grasp, and the pigs and the pigshit were flying high. By the time the gun went off, the girls were smeared from the neck down and the pigs were criss-crossed and tangled, their leashes knotted and uncooperative. Yet, somehow, in their fright, two of the pigs managed to cry their way diagonally up the marked area of floor, prodded and pulled by their own Beauty Queens. The other six pigs ran helter skelter in all directions, and were cowering behind booths and under chairs. Two of the girls were crying. Clayton made a move to get the children away, but saw that Maureen had already run out of the building.

“Stay here!” he shouted to William and Latham. Too sternly? Their small round faces stared up at him. “Don’t move until I get back.”

He ran all over the grounds and found her, finally, perched in the crotch of a tree, sobbing against its bark.

“They were mean to the pigs, Daddy,” she yelled, accusing him. “They were cruel to those pigs.”

When Clayton got her calmed down, he carried her back to the building where his boys were standing in the doorway, looking out. He gave them each a dime and sent them across the path for a soft drink, and they wandered ahead, confused and hazy-hot.

Clayton rubbed his eyes. He had come up here like an old fool trying to spy on Zeta, and now for the life of him he did not know why he had come or what he’d expected to see.

“He who digs a pit for another will himself fall into it,” was one of Zeta’s favourite expressions, and now it repeated itself in his head. He had been surprised all through the years of his marriage to discover in Zeta a part of self that was unbending, that would never yield. And powerful as he sometimes thought he was, he had never been able to budge that core of Zeta.