Spit Delaney's Island (16 page)

She turned and let him see that her eyes were full of tears, tipped up her
chin at him accusingly. There is no end to the cruelty you can expect to
suffer at the hands of a heartless son, she seemed to be saying, and if Babe
hadn't clomped up the front walk at just that moment he would have
found himself making all kinds of impossible promises. It was not easy for
a man like Halligan to meet those watery eyes or ignore that chin.

“I found an old geezer who's offered to take me out hunting,” Babe
announced, and threw herself into the nearest chair. “He called it shooting. What could you shoot around here?”

“Rabbits,” the old lady snapped.

And Halligan, too, found himself snapping at her. “They have no
cougars here,” he said. “Or elk.”

Babe Halligan looked from one to the other as if trying to figure out
what kind of nonsense she'd walked in on. Then she pulled off her rain-drenched sweater and started brushing her hair. “You'd think that bloody
sky would eventually rain itself out, but it goes on and on. Doesn't it ever
stop here? One old fellow down the road told me he's been turning the
hay in his field every day for three weeks now and can't get it dry enough
to put in haystacks.”

The old woman took the discarded sweater and hung it on the back of
a chair close to the stove. She heaved a sigh and opened the oven door. “The
sisters are after writing me to come down to the city and collect Polly's
things. I thought, if there's ever a time that car is idle, we could drive in
together.” It was clear from the way she said it that she expected either her
son or his bride to say it was a terrible idea and suggest she have the things
mailed or burned.

But Babe thought it would be great fun and insisted that they go right
away. She grabbed the wet sweater off the chair back and put it on.
“There's no sense sitting around in this gloomy place listening to the rain.
Let's go.”

The old woman looked at her daughter-in-law with gratitude but
frowned immediately afterwards, as if suddenly disapproving of such
recklessness. She pulled on two cardigans and a coat and was the first one
out the door. “It's easy to find,” she said. “And didn't Sister Angela tell me
she'd have the things near the front door?”

She sat in the middle of the back seat and talked steadily the whole way
down out of the hills and along the road beside the river. She told them
Cousin Polly had advised her to go to America if ever Brian married so
that she could mind her grandchildren, but she'd told Polly she didn't
believe Brian would ever find himself a wife. She told them William
Penn's father had lived in that castle near the bridge and hadn't he gone
on to become a famous man in America? Babe said that not all of America
was the one country, but the old woman went on to tell that Michael
Donegan's son in Chicago had got killed in a factory explosion and the insurance company had sent him a lot of money. He marched around like
gentry now, and had a taxi come all the way out from Macroom whenever
he wanted to do a bit of shopping. “If that's what having money will do to
a person I'll thank you not to take me home with you, as I understand that
everyone there is as rich as Michael Donegan.”

Halligan drove inside the iron gates of the home and parked near the
great oak door but he refused to go in. Places like that spooked him, he
said. And nuns made him nervous. He'd just sit and wait, thank you, just
don't be too long. It was probably even damper inside an old stone building than it was out here in the rain, and anyway he didn't suppose Cousin
Polly had owned so many things the two of them couldn't carry them.

“Occhh, Babe,” his mother said, heaving herself up out of the back seat.
“It's afraid of religion he is. Scared one of the sisters'll baptise him when
he's not looking.” She chuckled loudly and made a face at him through his
window.

Just as he dreaded, when they came back out a half-hour later two nuns
came with them. Babe had one of them by the elbow and was talking
loudly, making big gestures with the paper bag she held in her hand. The
old woman hurried ahead, dumped an armload of things in the trunk, and
then hurried back to bring them around to his side of the car.

“Sister Angela,” she said. “And Sister Mary Rose.” As if he had begged
to be introduced.

The taller one bent and put a hand in through the window for him to
shake. There was a pink flush spot high up on each cheek. “Ooh,” she said,
straightening. “And don't you see the resemblance, Sister Mary Rose? 'Tis
Polly all over again.”

The other, an older woman, squinted. “'Tis, 'tis,” she said. “The image
of her! The very image.”

Halligan's mother blushed, grinned with pleasure. “The eyes, I suppose.
He has the eyes sure.”

“Oh the eyes, the mouth,” Sister Angela exclaimed, and put one hand
on the old woman's shoulder. “You'll not be missing Polly so very much,
dear, with that one's face to keep her near.”

“She was very happy here,” the older nun said, bending down to speak
through the window. As if Halligan, having the silly old bat's eyes, would
be the one most interested. “'Tis a saint she was, to be sure. Never a harsh
word. Always a smile. Dear, dear Polly.”

“She is heaven's gain,” Sister Angela said, putting out a restraining hand
lest the other get carried away. “Come, Sister Mary Rose, let us not keep
these people. They have a long journey ahead of them.”

When Halligan had turned the car around, Sister Angela held up a
hand to stop him, then came close and dipped her head to the window.
“Monday?” she said, and the old woman leaning forward in the back seat
whispered “Monday” back.

Once they'd left the cobbled courtyard Halligan drove, silently, up the
river as far as the city park. Then he turned in his seat and looked at his
mother. “Monday what?”

“Leave her alone,” Babe said.

“What did that woman mean by whispering ‘Monday' past my ear?”

The old woman pointed her chin again, but this time there were no
tears. She opened her door. “I always enjoys walking through the roses,”
she said. And grunting, heaved herself out.

“Don't nag at her,” Babe said, glaring.

They got out of the car and headed in through the park gate after his
mother, but she had already got inside the circular labyrinth paths of the
rose garden. From the outside he stood and hollered at her: “Now what
have you gone and done, old woman?”

A row of men sitting with their backs against the grey museum wall
looked up, alarmed.

“Now what have you done? Come out of there and tell what you've got
up your sleeve now.”

The old woman had worked her way across nearer to the other side of
the garden and Halligan rushed around the outside edge to be closer. She
bent down to the roses, inhaling, smiling.

“You can't do that kind of thing just for your convenience,” he said.
“You have to have better reasons than that.”

“After my little visits with Polly, Tim Murphy always drove me down
here to this park. But this is the first time I haven't felt like an outsider,
even here.”

“It's your country,” Babe said. “It's your home. There's no reason to feel
like an outsider.”

Halligan felt himself nearly choking. “Never mind that!” he shouted.
“Just tell me what it is you and those nuns have cooked up between you.”

Babe sat back on a bench and stretched her legs out in front of her.
“She's going to start taking instruction.”

“What?”

“Shh. Keep your voice down. People are looking.”

“Let them look! What the hell kind of thing is that to do?”

Halligan's mother came out from behind the roses and sat on the bench
beside Babe. “Don't shout,” she said. “I'm an old woman, and it makes me
nervous to have all that noise around me.”

“A fine thing,” Babe said. “Scaring an old woman.”

“A fine thing, too, when a woman too old to know her own mind gets
sucked in like that.”

“Tch, tch, Brian my son. Don't I know my own mind the same as the
next one? Don't go blaming the sisters. 'Tis no idea of theirs at all.”

“Sold out is what you did. Sold out for the sake of belonging.”

The old woman gathered her coat together and fumbled with her thick
fingers at the button. “And what is it I've sold? What have I lost?”

Halligan was still muttering to himself about the feeble-mindedness of
old women when they flew out of Shannon a few days later.

When his mother was received into the Church, Babe, who had just
sold her hotel, suggested that they use some of the money to fly to Ireland,
but Halligan preferred to stay home and pretend it wasn't happening.
And anyway, he said, he was busy helping Matt build a Chamber of Commerce float for the First of July parade. When a coloured snapshot arrived
in the mail Babe said she'd never seen a bride so radiant. “She just looks
as if she'd washed all her loneliness and confusion off in the morning's
bath.”

“If she had a bath,” Halligan growled.

With the money from the hotel they bought the shop next to the bookstore and expanded into a book-and-record shop with an emphasis on the
faster-selling rock albums. They also put a down payment on a house high
up the hill overlooking the whole town, and Babe decided that thirty-three
was not too old to get pregnant. Halligan, to help pay for the house, began
to sell real estate in the evenings for a friend whose firm was expanding.
The day he made his first big sale, a thirty-acre farm, a letter arrived from
his mother saying how happy she was to hear she was about to be a grandmother at last. She'd put a tiny plastic crucifix in the envelope, for the baby
when it came. Halligan cursed and threw the thing in the garbage pail.
Babe, who had swollen up all over as if she were about to burst and rarely
left the easy-boy chair in the living room, laughed at him and asked him
what was the matter, was he scared there was black magic in the plastic?

Halligan's mother lived for another four years, and though she wrote
one cheerful letter to them every month up until the time of her death, she
never once visited them in Canada. Halligan didn't invite her. “She made
her choice,” he said. “Let her be happy with
them
, she doesn't need us.”

When the news of her death was cabled to them by the parish priest he
didn't bother to attend the funeral. “I wouldn't understand a word of it,”
he said, “a whole lot of nonsense.” And besides, he had discovered an old
man who just might be ready to sell a hundred-acre piece of waterfront
property which was ideal for subdividing, and if he took time to go gallivanting around the world someone else might get there first to grab it.
Land development was a cut-throat business, he said, and there was no
room in it for sentiment.

But listen, she thinks, it's nearly time.

And flutters, leaf-like, at the thought. The train will rumble down the
valley, stop at the little shack to discharge Styan, and move on. This will
happen in half an hour and she has a mile still to walk.

Crystal Styan walking through the woods, through bush, is not pretty.
She knows that she is not even a little pretty, though her face is small
enough, and pale, and her eyes are not too narrow. She wears a yellow
wool sweater and a long cotton skirt and boots. Her hair, tied back so the
branches will not catch in it, hangs straight and almost colourless down
her back. Some day, she expects, there will be a baby to play with her hair
and hide in it like someone behind a waterfall.

She has left the log cabin, which sits on the edge of the river in a stand
of birch, and now she follows the river bank upstream. A mile ahead, far
around the bend out of sight, the railroad tracks pass along the rim of their
land and a small station is built there just for them, for her and Jim Styan.
It is their only way in to town, which is ten miles away and not much of a
town anyway when you get there. A few stores, a tilted old hotel, a movie
theatre.

Likely, Styan would have been to a movie last night. He would have
stayed the night in the hotel, but first (after he had seen the lawyer and
bought the few things she'd asked him for) he would pay his money and
sit in the back row of the theatre and laugh loudly all the way through the
movie. He always laughs at everything, even if it isn't funny, because those
figures on the screen make him think of people he has known; and the
thought of them exposed like this for just anyone to see embarrasses him
a little and makes him want to create a lot of noise so people will know he
isn't a bit like that himself.

She smiles. The first time they went to a movie together she slouched
as far down in the seat as she could so no one could see she was there or
had anything to do with Jim Styan.

The river flows past her almost silently. It has moved only a hundred
miles from its source and has another thousand miles to go before it
reaches the ocean, but already it is wide enough and fast. Right here she
has more than once seen a moose wade out and then swim across to the
other side and disappear into the cedar swamps. She knows something,
has heard somewhere that farther downstream, miles and miles behind
her, an Indian band once thought this river a hungry monster that liked to
gobble up their people. They say that Coyote their god-hero dived in and
subdued the monster and made it promise never to swallow people again.
She once thought she'd like to study that kind of thing at a university or
somewhere, if Jim Styan hadn't told her grade ten was good enough for
anyone and a life on the road was more exciting.

What road? she wonders. There isn't a road within ten miles. They
sold the rickety old blue pickup the same day they moved onto this place.
The railroad was going to be all they'd need. There wasn't any place they
cared to go that the train, even this old-fashioned milk-run outfit, couldn't
take them easily and cheaply enough.

But listen, she thinks, it's nearly time.

The trail she is following swings inland to climb a small bluff and for a
while she is engulfed by trees. Cedar and fir are dark and thick and damp.
The green new growth on the scrub bushes has nearly filled in the narrow
trail. She holds her skirt up a little so it won't be caught or ripped, then
runs and nearly slides down the hill again to the river's bank. She can see
in every direction for miles and there isn't a thing in sight which has anything to do with man.

“Who needs them?” Styan said, long ago.

It was with that kind of question—questions that implied an answer so
obvious only a fool would think to doubt—that he talked her first out of
the classroom and then right off the island of her birth and finally up here
into the mountains with the river and the moose and the railroad. It was
as if he had transported her in his falling-apart pickup not only across the
province about as far as it was possible to go, but also backwards in time,
perhaps as far as her grandmother's youth or even farther. She washes
their coarse clothing in the river and depends on the whims of the seasons
for her food.

“Look!” he shouted when they stood first in the clearing above the
cabin. “It's as if we're the very first ones. You and me.”

They swam in the cold river that day and even then she thought of
Coyote and the monster, but he took her inside the cabin and they made
love on the fir-bough bed that was to be theirs for the next five years. “We
don't need any of them,” he sang. He flopped over on his back and shouted
up into the rafters. “We'll farm it! We'll make it go. We'll make our own
world!” Naked, he was as thin and pale as a celery stalk.

When they moved in he let his moustache grow long and droopy like
someone in an old, brown photograph. He wore overalls which were far
too big for him and started walking around as if there were a movie camera somewhere in the trees and he was being paid to act like a hillbilly
instead of the city-bred boy he really was. He stuck a limp felt hat on the
top of his head like someone's uncle Hiram and bought chickens.

“It's a start,” he said.

“Six chickens?” She counted again to be sure. “We don't even have a
shed for them.”

He stood with his feet wide apart and looked at her as if she were stupid. “They'll lay their eggs in the grass.”

“That should be fun,” she said. “A hundred and sixty acres is a good-size pen.”

“It's a start. Next spring we'll buy a cow. Who needs more?”

Yes who? They survived their first winter here, though the chickens
weren't so lucky. The hens got lice and started pecking at each other. By
the time Styan got around to riding in to town for something to kill the
lice a few had pecked right through the skin and exposed the innards.
When he came back from town they had all frozen to death in the yard.

At home, back on her father's farm in the blue mountains of the island,
nothing had ever frozen to death. Her father had cared for things. She had
never seen anything go so wrong there, or anyone have to suffer.

She walks carefully now, for the trail is on the very edge of the river
bank and is spongy and broken away in places. The water, clear and shallow here, back-eddies into little bays where cattail and bracken grow and
where water-skeeters walk on their own reflection. A beer bottle glitters
where someone, perhaps a guide on the river, has thrown it—wedged
between stones as if it has been here as long as they have. She keeps her
face turned to the river, away from the acres and acres of forest which are
theirs.

Listen, it's nearly time, she thinks. And knows that soon, from far up
the river valley, she will be able to hear the throbbing of the train, coming
near.

She imagines his face at the window. He is the only passenger in the
coach and sits backwards, watching the land slip by, grinning in expectation or memory or both. He tells a joke to old Bill Cobb the conductor but
even in his laughter does not turn his eyes from outside the train. One spot
on his forehead is white where it presses against the glass. His fingers run
over and over the long drooping ends of his moustache. He is wearing his
hat.

Hurry, hurry, she thinks. To the train, to her feet, to him.

She wants to tell him about the skunk she spotted yesterday. She wants
to tell him about the stove, which smokes too much and needs some kind
of clean-out. She wants to tell him about her dream; how she dreamed he
was trying to go into the river and how she pulled and hauled on his feet
but he wouldn't come out. He will laugh and laugh at her when she tells
him, and his laughter will make it all right and not so frightening, so that
maybe she will be able to laugh at it too.

She has rounded the curve in the river and glances back, way back, at
the cabin. It is dark and solid, not far from the bank. Behind the poplars
the cleared fields are yellowing with the coming of fall but now in all that
place there isn't a thing alive, unless she wants to count trees and insects.
No people. No animals. It is scarcely different from her very first look at
it. In five years their dream of livestock has been shelved again and again.

Once there was a cow. A sway-backed old Jersey.

“This time I've done it right,” he said. “Just look at this prize.”

And stepped down off the train to show off his cow, a wide-eyed beauty
that looked at her through a window of the passenger coach.

“Maybe so, but you'll need a miracle, too, to get that thing down out of
there.”

A minor detail to him, who scooped her up and swung her around and
kissed her hard, all in front of the old conductor and the engineer who
didn't even bother to turn away. “Farmers at last!” he shouted. “You can't
have a farm without a cow. You can't have a baby without a cow.”

She put her head inside the coach, looked square into the big brown
eyes, glanced at the sawed-off horns. “Found you somewhere, I guess,” she
said to the cow. “Turned out of someone's herd for being too old or senile
or dried up.”

“An auction sale,” he said, and slapped one hand on the window glass.
“I was the only one there who was desperate. But I punched her bag and
pulled her tits; she'll do. There may even be a calf or two left in her sway-backed old soul.”

“Come on, bossy,” she said. “This is no place for you.”

But the cow had other ideas. It backed into a corner of the coach and
shook its lowered head. Its eyes, steady and dull, never left Crystal Styan.

“You're home,” Styan said. “Sorry there's no crowd here or a band playing music, but step down anyway and let's get started.”

“She's not impressed,” she said. “She don't see any barn waiting out
there either, not to mention hay or feed of any kind. She's smart enough
to know a train coach is at least a roof over her head.”

The four of them climbed over the seats to get behind her and pushed
her all the way down the aisle. Then, when they had shoved her down the
steps, she fell on her knees on the gravel and let out a long unhappy bellow. She looked around, bellowed again, then stood up and high-tailed it
down the tracks. Before Styan even thought to go after her she swung
right and headed into bush.

Styan disappeared into the bush, too, hollering, and after a while the
train moved on to keep its schedule. She went back down the trail and
waited in the cabin until nearly dark. When she went outside again she
found him on the river bank, his feet in the water, his head resting against
a birch trunk.

“What the hell,” he said, and shook his head and didn't look at her.

“Maybe she'll come back,” she said.

“A bear'll get her before then, or a cougar. There's no hope of that.”

She put a hand on his shoulder but he shook it off. He'd dragged her
from place to place right up this river from its mouth, looking and looking for his dream, never satisfied until he saw this piece of land. For that
dream and for him she had suffered.

She smiles, though, at the memory. Because even then he was able to
bounce back, resume the dream, start building new plans. She smiles, too,
because she knows there will be a surprise today; there has always been a
surprise. When it wasn't a cow it was a bouquet of flowers or something
else. She goes through a long list in her mind of what it may be, but knows
it will be none of them. Not once in her life has anything been exactly the
way she imagined it. Just so much as foreseeing something was a guarantee it wouldn't happen, at least not in the exact same way.

“Hey you, Styan!” she suddenly calls out. “Hey you, Jim Styan. Where
are you?” And laughs, because the noise she makes can't possibly make
any difference to the world, except for a few wild animals that might be
alarmed.

She laughs again, and slaps one hand against her thigh, and shakes her
head. Just give her—how many minutes now?—and she won't be alone.
These woods will shudder with his laughter, his shouting, his joy. That
train, that dinky little train will drop her husband off and then pass on like
a stay-stitch thread pulled from a seam.

“Hey you, Styan! What you brought this time? A gold brooch? An old
nanny goat?”

The river runs past silently and she imagines that it is only shoulders
she is seeing, that monster heads have ducked down to glide by but are
watching her from eyes grey as stone. She wants to scream out “Hide, you
crummy cheat, my Coyote's coming home!” but is afraid to tempt even
something that she does not believe in. And anyway she senses—far off—the beat of the little train coming down the valley from the town.