Spit Delaney's Island (14 page)

“What we need is a drink,” she said.

He didn't say anything to that, so she repeated. “What we need in this
sun is a nice cold drink of my homemade dandelion wine.”

This time she took his silence for agreement and backed on her hands
and knees down the slope of the roof. At the edge she hovered for a moment, swinging her foot around over the eavestrough in search of the ladder. Then she went down and told Roger to play softly from now on if he
didn't want a cuff on the ear, because Mr. Swingler was an artist and artists
need real quiet if they're going to get inspired.

From a cupboard she took down two of her best glasses (Momma had
never let her use them, preferring to do without rather than take a chance
on breaking one) and put them on a tray to carry them into the back bedroom, which had become her storage room. There was no furniture in the
room except the shelves she hammered together the same day she threw
out Momma's bed at last (smelling of medicine and anger and death) and
these shelves were filled with her homemade liquor. The one papered wall
was lined with bottles of blackberry wine and down along the window
wall there were twenty-five gallons of sake. The other two walls displayed
her specialty—dandelion wine.

She stepped over the empty bottles on the floor and took down a half-gallon of dandelion wine to fill the glasses. With the bottle held tight
against her breasts she listened for a minute to the music and hummed a
few bars.

What was going to happen to her she wasn't sure, but whatever it was
she was ready. Her heart pounded so hard she found it difficult to breathe.
She hummed three more bars of the music to quiet herself and said, “Glad
old girl, you got a real artist sitting up on your roof right now, good as
trapped, and all you have to do is play it right to have him begging.” She
drank both glasses fast and filled them again. She put the bottle back on
the shelf, picked up the tray, then changed her mind and put the bottle on
the tray too, beside those full glasses. With the tray held out in front of her
like an offering she marched out past the piano (saying “Play on, Roger,
play on” to her son, who would play all night if that was what she wanted)
and through the living room, right outside to the foot of the ladder.

“Coming up,” she said, and waited with one foot on the bottom rung
for him to come to her aid.

But she might have waited all day and night too for all the response she
got. So she balanced that tray in one hand and went up the ladder slowly
and carefully. When she had the tray balanced with one end on the top
rung and the other on the eavestrough she called out again, this time a little louder: “Even a genius can take time out to be a gentleman. Give me a
hand.”

He did, too. He came down front ways, a way she'd never dare, just as
calm as he might if the roof were flat, and bent to pick up the tray. For
perhaps a full minute she stared into his eyes and he stared back. They
were brown eyes, those rubber balls, and each one had its own road map
stamped in red on the white parts.

Maybe that's the sign of a traveller, she thought. Like spaced teeth.
Well, traveller or not, he'd just walked down a one-way dead-end street.
And unless he were a lot smarter than she thought, his travelling days
were over.

He picked up the tray and she followed him on her hands and knees up
that slope to the peak. Roger was starting in on something by Grieg. She
didn't know the name of it and never did like it much. She stomped her
foot again and it softened a little.

She sipped from her glass and let the wine slide down her throat slowly
and quietly. No matter what she drank she always drank it like a lady. “My,
that is good,” she said. “I think this is the best batch I ever made.” And she
sipped again, pursing her lips while she thought it over, then nodded as
she swallowed, as if to say Yes she was right the first time. She rolled her
eyes to the sky when the warmth started to spread itself inside her. “You
ought to have a wife,” she said.

“I
had
one,” he said, as if what she had asked about was a case of
measles.

“What'd you do? Walk off and leave her high and dry?”

Mr. Swingler pushed one hand back through his hair and dug all his
fingers into his scalp for a good scratch. “No, not that,” he said, and flicked
the dandruff out from his fingernails one at a time. “She stepped out onto
the road to flag down a bus and was too slow at stepping back. That bus
flung her through the air and left her draped over a barbed-wire fence like
an empty gunny sack.”

Big Glad raised her eyes to the mountain to compare it with his. He
wasn't granting it enough power. She coughed daintily into her hand to
show she was discreet, then said, “She buried near here?” as if she didn't
really care but if he wanted to tell her she'd be willing to listen.

“She's not buried anywhere. She wanted one of these here cremations.”

Big Glad never quite approved of cremations; there was something a
little bit primitive about the whole idea. She cleared her throat again.
“Well, even ashes have to have something done with them.”

He swung his head to look at her, perhaps to see if she could take it. “I
swallowed them,” he said, and picked up his brush again to go on with his
work.

Big Glad gulped at that, and swallowed too, and made a face. “Then you
must be crazy,” she said, and took another, longer drink from her glass.

“I read it in a history book,” he said, and with one more stroke the peak
of that mountain stood up, hard and true against the sky. “Some old queen
did it way back when. Mixed the ashes in a glass of wine and drank the
whole lot down.”

She wondered when he ever stayed in one spot long enough to read a
book but said nothing about that. Instead she asked, “Why?”

He lifted his head at that as if here was one question he had never expected. He thought for a while. “Why? It seemed kind of romantic to me
to keep my wife inside of me.”

“Did you ever think of what happened to what didn't stay inside you?”

Evidently he hadn't considered that and wasn't going to now. He went
on with his painting.

Still, she wished she had thought of that. It made her mad that she had
never thought of anything as smart as that. Not that she had ever had anyone to do it to. Her father had fallen down a well thirty-two years ago.
And Momma died so mean a person would have choked on her ashes.
There had never been anyone she'd cared that much about. She wondered
if anyone would ever drink her ashes.

And speaking of queer people, she had known a few too in her time.
“That reminds me of my mechanic,” she said, “the one who works on my
car.”

“That car,” he said.

“What's the matter
that
car?”

“I've been here more than an hour, most of the time sitting right up here
on this roof, and I still haven't seen that car you keep on talking about.”

“A car is not something you set up on a post like a flag for all to see. If
you'll just lower your eyes a little you'll see a gradge with door
closed
and
locked
. And if you'll just squint a little you might be able to pick out the
orange colour of it through the window.”

He looked, lowered his gaze and squinted against the sun, peered at the
little roof-sagging building she meant. “Orange,” he said, and picked up
his brush again. He painted a tint of orange on the sky behind the mountain.

“That's not the colour of the sky,” she said. “You're putting things there
that you can't see.”

“That's what I want to see,” he said. “That's what the picture needed.”

Big Glad refilled both the glasses from the bottle, though his was not
empty. “I guess a man could set up here every day of his life painting that
mountain and never paint it the same way twice.”

“I guess,” he said.

“I guess a place like this one here of mine is just exactly the right kind
of place for an artist. He could paint his whole life long.”

“Lady,” he said, “you're right,” and plopped that picture right into her
lap so she had to close her knees fast to keep it from slipping right through.

It took a full minute for his words to sink in. When she realized what
he meant she gulped another mouthful of her drink and said, “You mean
you
like
it here?”

He turned to her and carefully lifted his painting from her lap. “I knew
as soon as I came in sight of your house that this would be the kind of place
I'd like to live in the rest of my life. Just look at that mountain! I never
painted so good.”

But Big Glad wasn't wasting breath on pictures. “Mister Swingler,” she
said. “Are you telling me that you want to move in, to live downstairs with
me and Roger, to be a part of this family?”

He stopped admiring his own work long enough to look at her.

“Well, I think that's what I been saying.”

Big Glad sighed and sat back and folded her arms. “No man has ever
slept under my roof without taking out a marriage licence first.”

Mr. Swingler did some deep thinking about this. His eyes swung up to
take in that mountain again, and then down to the sagging garage below.
“I guess that makes sense,” he said.

“It's only fair to my boy.”

At the mention of her son they both listened to the sounds of Rachmaninoff again, sifting soft as sunlight up through the rafters of the house.
Mr. Swingler said, “Now if there is nothing else, you get down off this roof
and make yourself decent so we can go to town and celebrate.”

Big Glad hadn't worn her hat since Momma's funeral. It was a flat-brimmed straw thing, with a cluster of plastic berries at the front. She set
it on top of her head and looked in her bedroom mirror, pinching her
cheeks to bring back a little colour to them. Then she slipped off her shorts
and pulled on a black wool skirt. Again she admired herself in the mirror.
Somehow she didn't feel like a bride yet, but that was because it had all
happened so fast. Who would have thought this morning that before dark
she would have been proposed to?

She tiptoed past Roger (let him find out when they had that piece of
paper to show) and went out onto the verandah. Because Mr. Swingler
hadn't come down off the roof yet, probably putting some finishing
touches on that picture of his, she sat down on the top step to wait and
soon she began to shake through her whole body. She put her head down
to try and stop the trembling.

When Mr. Swingler came around the corner of the house and saw her
he said, “What's the matter with you?”

“We can't,” she said.

He put his painted mountain on her verandah railing. “What do you
mean can't? What else you been working on ever since I arrived?”

Big Glad was afraid to look up. All she could see was a wood bug working its way across the step. “But we hardly know each other.”

Mr. Swingler laughed. “Lady,” he said. “You made up your mind to
catch me the minute I walked inside your gate. I could've been a murderer
for all you cared.”

She looked up at him. She hadn't thought of that. “You could still be a
murderer. Or a thief or escaped convict. I don't know a single thing about
you.”

He winked at her and slid closer, one arm laid out like a broken wing
on her railing. “If we get the licence we'll have three days to wait before
we can make use of it. I guess by that time you'll know me pretty well.”

“And if I die,” she said, and swallowed. “And if I die, will you drink my
ashes?”

He looked hard at her and thought a moment. Then he said, “Miss Littlestone, after the first time there's nothing to it.”

At that Big Glad began to cry. She bowed down her hat, put her face in
her hands, and sobbed. After a while she felt better, because after all she
was a bride and brides do sometimes cry, and looked at Mr. Swingler, who
was holding out one hand like a porter waiting for a tip. “
Now
what do
you want?” she said.

He moved closer and bent down over her so that she could see those
road maps of his again. “If you'll just give me the keys to the garage,” he
said, “we'll be on our way.”

When Brian Halligan's mother telephoned from halfway around the
world in West Cork to tell him his poor old father had died, Halligan,
who never failed to make the proper expected gesture, offered to fly over
immediately for the funeral. “What rush is there?” her voice screeched at
him. “Haven't I waited fifteen years for a visit out of you? Little good you
can do the old fellow now.” So Halligan told her he would be there by the
end of the month: he needed that much time, he said, to find someone he'd
trust with the bookstore while he was away, and he wanted to get as much
use as possible out of his season's theatre ticket before it became out of
date.

Since moving to Vancouver Island, Halligan had made it his habit to
cross the strait as often as possible for plays and operas and poetry readings at the university. It was his way, he would explain down his long thin
nose at you, of resisting the logger and coalminer mentality of the island.
He was terrified of being converted to vulgarianism. But the few people
of the town who had noticed his existence at all dismissed his high-class
habits as simply a poor foreigner's attempts to feel superior. Not even his
carefully preserved English accent bothered anyone.

Because of the accent it was a surprise to learn that Halligan had been
born in Ireland. “Of Ascendancy stock, of course,” he said. His parents
had moved with him to England when he was only two years old. “'Tis no
country for Protestants any more,” his mother had flung over her shoulder as they left, but within a year she'd become so homesick for her little
village of Ballyvourney and for the black-and-white cows that grazed all
over the rocky hills around her house that she abandoned both her husband and her son to return and live by herself. The old man stayed on in
London with Brian where he built up a fairly good drapery business, but
as soon as the son had finished university and sailed for Canada, he retired
to his wife's cottage and spent the rest of his life (according to the mother's
letters) tending a single cow named Deirdre-of-the-Sorrows and talking
the ear off Jack Sugrue in Mills Bar. It appeared to Brian Halligan that his
parents had abandoned their past and joined the peasants.

Halligan's bookstore was on a short street that opened at one end onto
a view of the business core of town, so he was able when business was slack—which was most of the time—to lean his long frame in the open doorway and watch a good deal of what went on. Every weekday Matt Bickham, a fat little college instructor who had become Halligan's only friend,
dropped by after class to stand and help contemplate the scene. “It's a silly
town,” Halligan complained. “They waste their lives accumulating things,
grabbing and hoarding, fighting over bits of land and stabbing each other
in the back to get ahead. And if they have any spare time you'd never catch
them reading a book, they're off somewhere in the mountains shooting
animals or killing fish.” Matt Bickham, who didn't have an English accent
and so could afford to look at the underside of a question, said that the
town was only a hundred years removed from the frontier. “In a frontier
it's the business of the people to build houses and kill animals. No frontiersman had the time to sit around reading a book of poems. That'll come
later.” Halligan, sniffing, said that if it came much later he would have
starved to death waiting, because right now he was barely meeting expenses in the bookstore.

“Besides,” he said, “how can a college teacher like you make apologies
for ignorance?”

Bickham was a man who rubbed both hands up and down on his round
chest while he thought up his answers. He appeared to be watching a series
of pages turning in his mind's eye. There were times, though, when after
all his thinking he chose not to answer at all, especially when he could see
that Halligan had got up on what he called his “high English horse” about
one matter or other. He preferred, rather, to change the subject completely.

“My sister's in town again. The wife said to ask you around for some
supper.”

Halligan, of course, despised his friend's sister. He was a man who believed himself to have a high opinion of women, and could not forgive her
for failing to measure up to his notions. She owned a small hotel in a west-coast logging settlement, no place for any lady, and to make matters worse
she liked to talk about her weekend hiking expeditions and elk-hunting
trips into the mountains. He listened to her talk, always, with a pinch-nosed
disdain, which she never seemed to notice or, if she did, chose to ignore.
He did not, however, allow her presence to keep him away from a meal
cooked by Teresa Bickham, who was a beautiful woman with some experience in a French cooking school. Class was class and had to be appreciated wherever it was found.

Throughout his twenties Brian Halligan had expected that any day he
would turn a corner and bump into the perfect woman, who would immediately fall in love with him and become his wife. He knew that despite
what people called his affected distant air he was nearly handsome, that in
the carefully chosen clothes he always wore he looked like a man of quality. He knew too that he was a man of intelligence and that the only reason
he was not a financial success was that he refused to embrace the values of
the people he lived amongst. Several girls, some of them pretty, interested
him for a while: he took them to the local movie theatre, or walking on the
trails through the wooded park, or driving up the Island highway to dance
in one of the touristy seaside villages. But there weren't any who could be
invited to accompany him across the strait to an opera. A redheaded secretary named Kitty Kenary had very nearly caused him to fall in love, but
she had an infuriating habit of stopping in the middle of her sentences to
snort in her nose. By the time he'd reached his thirtieth birthday he was
convinced he'd be a bachelor all his life, poor and alone.

He was thirty-six and still poor, and still very much alone, when his
father died and his mother demanded his presence in the mountains west
of Cork. Two months after his thirty-seventh birthday, with the help of a
bank loan, he drove a rented car up the Lee Valley to Macroom and then
farther up the winding road to the mountain village where his mother's
house nested like a squat white hen between the roadside garden wall and
a high rock-strewn hill patchy with heather and stunted furze. The air
was thick with the sweet turf smoke from her chimney.

“Burning peat?” he said. “In this century?”

Which showed how much he didn't know of things, she told him. She
hammered dark brown bricks of turf down into the firebox of what looked
to Halligan like an ordinary wood stove standing under the chimney hole
at the end of the room which had once been an open fireplace. Then she
sat at the wooden table in her apron and rubber boots while they had a
“sup of tay” together. She looked, he thought, like someone who had tried
with all her might to copy the people he'd seen in the tourist booklets, just
so she could fit in.

“But I do not fit in at all,” she complained. “They won't let you fit in.”

“Except for those few months, you've lived here all your life.”

“I have, yes. And I could live here another hundred years and not
change a thing.”

Halligan went to the front window, set deep in the thick stone wall, and
peered out at the countryside. Across the road, beyond a fringe of trees, a
hill rose up like a perfect dome, criss-crossed with green hedges and
crowned with a heap of stones. “It's a wonder to me that you've stayed,
then, if that's the case.”

“I wouldn't know how to live anywhere else,” she said, and rattled an
open tin of cookies across the table towards him. “A fish out of water is what
I'd be in any corner they put me. There's some that's not meant to fit in.”

“Nonsense,” he said. “It's that church. They've chased everybody else
out but themselves. They've probably forgotten that it's possible to
be
anything else.”

“Hush hush hush hush hush,” she said, checking each of the windows
for hidden villagers. “You'll not speak of my neighbours like that.”

“But your family's been Irish for three hundred years! There isn't a
thing about you that seems English to me.” Not even her speech. She'd
gone peasant right down to her thickened tongue.

She raised one eyebrow, as if to say “That's all you know about it” and
poured more tea into her own thick mug. She had become an old lump of
a woman, he saw, wrinkled and dry. The skin under her eyes sagged in a
series of overlapping folds; her upper lip was covered with coarse black
hairs. Her teeth had been pulled out and replaced with a new set which
was too big, with white unnatural gums and black stains on the fake
enamel. For most of that first day she sat at the table, drinking tea and
talking about his father. Sometimes she stopped in the middle of a sentence to gaze out of the window for a while, and looked astonished to find
him still sitting there across from her when she shook off whatever memory had carried her away.

“'Tis sure by now you're a true Canadian, over there on your island.
You'll be finding the old land here a poor poor place beside.”

It was a fine beautiful island he lived on, he told her. Especially when
the dogwood trees were blooming or the pink arbutus bark was being
shed. But you wouldn't find a castle in your backyard there.

“And what is a castle now but a pile of stones and a handful of history?
'Tis not much value to the cows.”

She would not leave the house with him to walk through the village or
to show him the valley, which he had not seen since a brief visit in his university years. She was no tourist, she said. It would be as pointless as poking around in the familiarity of her own skin.

He walked alone in a soft almost imperceptible rain past the houses and
the few little shops in the village. Past the tall-spired church with its lawns
and flowers and past the dull grey fenced-in National School. The few
people he saw nodded shyly at him and glided by as silently as cats. The
famous friendly Irish, he thought, buttoning up his heavy coat. They
looked as if they expected him to bite. Or thought he'd come to spy.

He remembered St. Gobnait's shrine. On his last visit he'd crept up to
it silently, hoping to witness some pilgrim stand up from praying, throw
crutches or wheelchair into the hedges, and walk away. It had been a dis
appointment, of course; most of Halligan's expectations disappointed him
sooner or later. Nevertheless the little shrine had fascinated him and he
found himself, now, almost without conscious decision, leaving the highway and following the little road that crossed the narrow stone bridge and
led up the slope beneath the thick leafy trees. Smelling the harsh throat-burning odour of urine, he went on up past a farm where cows, standing
ankle-deep in muck, stared at him through their clouds of circling flies.

The shrine looked pretty much as he remembered it. On the high side
of the road a tall graceful statue of a woman stood amongst shrubs and
flowers by the doorway to the little excavated stone hut. Four white cups,
half filled with rain water, sat on the stones at the holy well from which,
he'd been told, pilgrims drank before kneeling to pray. The base of the
statue was cluttered with things: a dried-up wedding bouquet, a miniature
plastic doll in a cradle, a pen, a rosary, a half-dozen plastic statuettes and
crucifixes. Halligan smiled, and thought of the fun that would be made if
such a thing could be found at home. Plastic babies and wedding bouquets!

A little man appeared, suddenly, from within the walls of the stone hut.
He stepped out, leaning on a walking stick, his tiny red face cracked by a
wide gap-toothed grin. “Once a year,” he said. “On my birthday. I stop by
here to have a word with the man above. This is my eighty-first.” He put
his right hand out, pointed a finger. “I should be in the next world, long
ago, but I'm not in any hurry at all to get there.” He shook his head, held
up a finger as if to add: Aha, that was a good one! Didn't I tell you so! His
grey tweed cap was torn, his wide loose pants were spattered with mud
and cow manure.

At a loss for words Halligan looked up at the sky. White clouds were
moving past quickly, and bits of blue were opening up. “It's going to be a
nice day after all,” he said.

Again the sudden finger, the cocked head. “Oh, it's a fine day altogether.”

“Plenty of magpies around here.”

“There 'tis, yes.”

“And pigeons.”

The little man told him that St. Gobnait came down here in the seventh
century to found a nunnery right there, right across the road there in that
graveyard, in those old falling-down stone walls. He said that was the
saint's grave, that mound with the big slabs of slate on top, and that building beside the grave was a Protestant church.