BY THE time I reach the museum in the morning I’ve rehearsed my apology so many times and worked myself into such a heightened state of preparedness that when I come through the door to find, quite unexpectedly, two museum-goers, and they say hello, I can manage no more than a grunt. It’s Mrs. Lorne Marleyfoot, Eunice to some, school trustee and mother of Donald Marleyfoot, the local Conservative Party M.L.A. Eunice is with her daughter Altha, last year’s Gopher Days Queen, elected in a classic come-through-the-middle manoeuvre when her two rivals fell into disfavour for privately making dirty accusations about one another involving, in the case of Mary Loots, sympathetic connections with “eastern anti-beef groups,” and in that of Mary Elkins, questionable sexual orientation. The Marys denied both the accusations and the making of them. Neither knew what had hit her, they used to be such friends. What had hit them, of course, was Eunice Marleyfoot.
“Well, let’s try again,” says Eunice. “Good morning, Mr. Raymond.”
“Yes. Good morning to you Marleyfeet.” I leave them with the historical photo albums and stride on into the “Homesteader’s Kitchen,” looking for Karen. Her purse sits on top of the wood stove. When I hear footsteps coming up the basement stairwell, I lean casually against a table laid out with twine-tied bundles of dried plants and flowers “used in making teas and remedies,” as the sign says, and as she appears in the kitchen I reach back and grab one of the bundles and offer it, bouquet-like.
She ignores it, stares fiercely at me.
“I knew you’d show up. In your own time.”
“Can we speak, Karen?”
“I’m just a little busy now.” She makes her way out to say hello to the guests. I follow.
Eunice has a question about one of the photos. She’s tapping her finger on a seventy-year-old shot of the pool hall on Main.
“You’ve written here that this building is the only original building still standing in town, which would make it the earliest, but in fact the earliest is the little building attached to the Pioneer elevator. It used to be the government titles building.”
“I see,” says Karen.
“But it’s been moved and built onto,” I say. “It doesn’t count.”
“It certainly does count,” says Eunice. “We don’t want a pool hall as our oldest building.”
“Essentially what you’re talking about is oldest original lumber, not building.”
“Well, I won’t pretend to see any sense in that statement.”
“Of course not,” says Karen. “I’ll look into the dates and change the text if there’s been a mistake. Thank you for pointing it out.”
Through all of this, Altha has stood by, looking practised, if a bit tired. Now she announces she’s going upstairs to look at the “Early Wares” display. Her mother completely ignores her and she heads on up the stairs.
“I’ll come by next week to see how you’ve made out.” Eunice inclines slightly to Karen, whom she no doubt sees as a shirker.
“It’ll be nice to see you.”
“That pool hall has been trouble all these years,” she says. Then, as if looking for something she’s misplaced, she begins bobbing her head in several directions.
“There’s an original spittoon upstairs,” I offer. Karen glares at me.
“Where’s my Altha?”
“She went upstairs.” As Eunice turns away, I point to the stairway with the dried flowers I’m still holding for some reason. Several dozen little yellow seeds fall into Eunice’s hair. She doesn’t notice. I don’t point it out. Karen massages her brow with her index finger.
“Those tar soaps up there are still the best thing for psoriasis,” I say. Eunice casts back a look as if to say she doesn’t know how something like me could have been produced in this town. When she’s disappeared Karen asks me to leave.
“I thought we’d agreed to talk.”
“I have a job to do. I don’t need you to complicate things here.”
“You haven’t even let me say I’m sorry yet.”
“You have a professional suicide wish, you know that?”
“I huh?”
“Eunice is on the school board, you know.”
“Yes?”
“There’s a pattern to your behaviour.”
“What behaviour? Look, Dewey said it would be okay if we used his house at lunch.”
“Used it for what?” She doesn’t alter her bearing an inch. She’s gonna blow any second.
“I’ll fix you up some lunch.”
Now she stabs her finger towards the front door, then heads upstairs.
I follow again.
Straight past the roped off “Bathing Room” with its tub partially hiding the pretty much unmentionable chamber-pots and on by the “Child’s Bedroom” with its assorted and ghastly-eyed wooden dolls, I find the three of them in a room cluttered with a miscellany of collected house junk. They’re gathered around a table.
Eunice and Altha are looking with genuine curiosity at a mystery display. Karen studies their faces and smiles, even after I pull up. The sign beside the table asks, “Do You Know What These Are? Many of our exhibit pieces are donated by the families of original prairiemen and women. Often, even the families of these western developers don’t know what they’ve had passed down to them, and neither do we at the museum. If you have any idea what these objects might be, please tell us so we can tag the pieces accurately.”
On the table are a miniature winch device the size of a belt buckle, what looks like a few feet of yarn wrapped around what looks like a large wooden elf’s shoe, and a piece of torn and stretched leather on top of which are four variously sized metal rings.
“I know what this is,” I say, pointing to the rings.
Karen detects danger and says, “Toss.”
“Can you guess, Altha?”
She studies the rings.
“Can I touch them?” she asks Karen.
“Of course.”
She picks up the smallest ring and rubs it.
“Any guesses?” I ask.
“It’s smooth,” she says. “Maybe they’re earrings.”
“They’re solid though, and a little big for earrings. What about you, Mrs. Marleyfoot? I bet you know.”
“They might not be earrings but they’re certainly some sort of … adornments.”
“Go ahead and pick one up.”
“No.”
I pick up the whole arrangement and spill the rings into my hand, then hold up the leather.
“It’s a condom!” I announce. “An early-days one!”
Eunice looks at the leather and opens her mouth but nothing emerges.
“You mean for a horse?” asks Altha.
“No.”
Karen says, “You’re making this up. He’s making this up.”
“I guess you’ve never known a true prairieman, Karen.”
“Stop,” she says.
“They used it thusly.” I pick up the elf’s shoe and poke it into the leather, which does, in fact, form quite naturally into a long, roomy pouch. To my surprise, the thing looks as though it might actually do the job. “Then you slip the ring on like this to hold it down. It’s loose here but then things would tighten up some. I can’t really show you with a shoe.”
Eunice is quite obviously in need of something. Karen takes her by the elbow and ushers her to the stairs, which they negotiate together. Altha stays behind a second and reaches over to give the sheathed elf shoe a little squeeze. She smiles.
“I feel like Mother doesn’t always tell me things,” she says. “I still don’t know what happened with that Gopher Queen stuff.”
“That was just too bad. I don’t think anyone blames you, Altha.”
“Yes they do,” she says. “But I’m glad we came by this morning. I don’t think Mother expected to … learn anything.”
I listen to her go downstairs and out to the car. I hear Karen saying goodbye. I hear her come back in and shout up, “Get out of here now.” I think momentarily of Marcie. When I don’t respond, she comes up and I tell her I’ll hang around all day venturing opinions unless she agrees to make time for us to be alone. I brandish the shoe, and we make an arrangement.
Around four-thirty I hear car tires move over the Texas gate and from the window I watch her turn into the laneway, stop her little Maverick and unfold herself from the seat. She’s changed into jeans and a white cotton shirt. She looks west down the river and into the hills, where the shadows are growing. The engine will be ticking, and then it will stop and she’ll think to herself, This is the quietest place in the world. I leave enough time, then go out to meet her.
“I suppose you expect me to comment on the view.”
“I’d invite you for a walk but the mosquitoes would suck your eyeballs.”
“Is that pleasant?”
“After a certain point. Come on in.” She fetches a leather case from the front seat. As I turn to the door she moves in behind me and pulls me around by the elbow, skipping her focus up from my t-shirt collar to my eyes.
“I’m really glad I could come,” she says, but she doesn’t look glad. She looks scared.
“Okay,” I say. “Good.”
We tacitly settle on the kitchen table as neutral ground. I have something I want to show her. Last night I hit a short stretch of despair and a half bottle of corn mash and drove back over to the Nash house, this time with a flashlight. I came back with a natural buzz and a little drawing I’d made.
I show Karen the spiral pattern. From centre to outside it moves counter-clockwise. The lines are formed by pictographs.
“The next question is, whose pictures?”
“I don’t get it. This is a drawing of a drawing?”
“It’s a Plains Indian calendar drawn on a skin of some sort, probably a buffalo skin. Certain tribes marked the passage of time by noting a single event each year in story or pictures, a memorable event. But there might be a few count-makers in any tribe and they wouldn’t necessarily record the same events. The result is a sort of unofficial tribal history.”
“Is it valuable?”
“As an artifact it would be. I just want to know who made it, who it belongs to.”
“And why it’s in your neighbour’s basement.”
“That might be hoping for too much.”
“Aren’t there any natives or archaeologists around here who’d know?”
“I’m the local expert. And that, as you see, is a sad matter.”
Without occasion she gets up and goes into the living-room and I find myself staring at her jeans. They’re old and a bit frayed, and serviceable in every way that counts. She angles out of view and next I hear her rummaging through my cassettes. I’m left with my little drawing. I guess I expected she’d be a bit more charmed by it.
She returns as Neil Young starts up in the next room.
“You think the calendar’s connected to your brother somehow?”
“Maybe. That pendant sure seems likely to be. I’d just like to find his hideaway, that grave he talked about.”
“Whatever for? There won’t be anything magical about it.”
“Except it’s a specific place to be. It gives location to things. I don’t have much connection to him.”
“Well, if you’re so determined to get a fix on your family, then I have something for you.”
She pulls her briefcase up onto the table. It’s an executive model. I can think of no reason why Karen should own one. Gold lettering. Genuine cowhide. What we make of things.
Inside the case is a small box she found in the museum’s basement containing photos from the town’s early years. They haven’t been tagged or identified in any way but she showed them to her mother, who recognized herself in a schoolclass shot as a girl of eight or nine. Karen points out her mother. There’s more.
“She says this one over here is your mother.” A little girl with thickish features, smiling at me. “I thought you might like to keep this. Keep the whole box if you want. She said your dad would be in that picture too somewhere, and your Aunt Cora, but she can’t remember who’s who. Why don’t you ask your aunt? … Toss?”
It’s the smile I’m unprepared for. In the few photos I’ve seen of her, my mother is never smiling, and beyond that, is curiously expressionless. Although I might have attributed her countenance to any number of things, I always imagined the cause was a great, coursing sorrow, what might have been called melancholy at the time, a state pre-existing her life with Marius. All of this surmised from a few of Cora’s old photos and the one picture of her I own. It was taken on her wedding day, on the steps of the Anglican church. She’s standing just ahead of a black-suited Marius. She looks entirely alone. Nothing about her except her dress suggests she’s a bride. The date is scratched into the negative in a childlike scrawl in the bottom right corner—1946.
“Thank you. I will keep this. Thanks.”
“Are you upset?”
“It’s just … you wonder what happens to a person, a little girl.”
“Your aunt doesn’t know what happened?”
“No. My dad might’ve had some idea but I didn’t know how to ask him.”
I get up and open the fridge and stare inside for a few moments. I thought my drawing might interest her, but mostly it was a conversation piece, and that’s how she may have intended the photo. But it occurs to me that it could be an avoidance tactic, though I don’t know what it is she wants us to avoid, unless it’s sex. Then I realize what a boob I can be when left to my own thoughts.
I bring two bottles of beer back to the table.
“Toss, don’t mind me but sometimes it seems like you let your past matter more to you than your future.”
“Did you want a glass with that?”
“It’s just, I don’t know where you’re heading. Long term or even minute to minute.”
“You know what I think is the saddest thing in the world, Karen? It’s that lives come and go and nothing marks them and no one remembers.”
“So you’re trying to recover lives. There’s a lot of … the forgotten around here.”
“And in a few years, Mayford will be gone and we won’t matter to anyone either.”
“I suppose you’re right,” she says. “Cheers.”
Things lighten for us a bit when I field what is now the third phone call since I got home this afternoon from people asking me if I want to join their “search party” tonight, and wanting clearance to be on my land. This time it’s Morely Pearson, the gym teacher. He says he knows there’s no monster but he feels better after unloading at the wind a few times. I tell him no thanks and please stay off my land though it’s nothing personal. A few days ago I would have said the only common feeling around here was desperation, but now something else has taken hold. Lucky for me I have another pursuit.
Karen’s now positioned herself on the living-room floor with her back on the couch.
I say, “It used to be safe to howl at the moon down here. Now it’s likely to get you killed.”
“People are just generally scared.”
I sit above and beside her. Something awakens in me for the first time in years, not just attraction but a kind of scheming intention. This is both shameful and amusing.
My hand ventures forth onto her hair. She leans her head back against it and we exchange pressures. She tilts straight back and smiles up at me.
“What happens when this happens?” she asks.
“Just familiar blood principles taking over, I guess. Diastolic, I believe.”
“You know, when you don’t have something stuck in your mouth you’re not a completely unattractive man, Toss.”
“Yeah, well, same goes.”
“You have a nice body.”
“I’m not real good at this compliment thing.”
“Aren’t there any features you like?”
“Okay, um. Your posterior can really turn a phrase.”
She’s laughing by now so I start to try again but she puts her finger to her lips and silences me. She turns and sits on her knees and runs her hands up to my back pockets and pulls me down with her onto the floor. Mr. Young earnestly believes a man needs a maid. I feel I should turn him down but there’s no leaving now. She rolls me onto my back and raises herself on top of me in a kind of coming-attraction move and I feel the weight of knowing what can happen in a short time away from voices. Then our mouths are together. I’m vaguely aware that I’m holding her too tight. Hands run up my shoulders to my hair and she leads me by pulling lightly one way or another. We move ever further from words and the descriptions of things; almost from an awareness of the shapes we take.
I was thinking that sex is more powerful when it’s not a foregone conclusion and then I dozed and now I hear her frying something in the kitchen. It’s the top of some hour or other because the CBC is bringing me other-worldly news when I least want it. In Peru the Shining Path has taken to shooting tourists to kill the trade and weaken the economy, such as it is. It’s hard to imagine Marcie’s life leading to any such end, but she does tend to go out of her way to find trouble. I telepath her a warning and wish her the protection of a jungle’s worth of wood-carved animals.
Grub turns out to be blade steak I’d been planning to marinate. When the chewing gets tough for us I blame the cut on Dewey and praise the sustenance to be had from simply not eating alone. Half-way through I think to haul out a Burgundy and rinse the dust from two wine glasses.
“I never knew anyone who talked like that during sex,” she says.
“Like what?”
“All that explorer’s journal stuff—all that ‘mighty river’ and ‘God’s paradise’ and ‘behold the curious humped beast’ stuff.”
“Very funny. I must’ve flashed on the Parry Expedition.” God help us where we learn our love talk. One winter night outside a high-school dance I found myself in the back of a friend’s Charger with an out-of-town girl who shared with me the tender age of sixteen and all the charms she had so far gathered, and though her name escaped me even then I remember that in mid pitch and sway she sang out a chant of “Tossy, Tossy, hot and saucy,” reducing me to a burger-joint menu item. This was more distracting than offensive, but she almost ruined our moment.
In my reverie I catch only the end of Karen saying something about “coming up with some intentions.”
“I’m sorry, I missed that.”
“Please stay with me, Toss. I’m just working up to this.” She focuses behind me, a few seconds on something, a few on something else. We shunted onto another track here when I wasn’t paying attention. And we’re barely moving, it seems. Little of the loverly world so abrades me as slow revelation when I know the full disclosure will likely hurt. It’s like having to watch a striptease of the living dead.
She stands and collects our plates, though I haven’t finished yet, takes them to the kitchen counter and returns.
“What’s the biggest secret you’ve ever kept?” she asks.
“This won’t be easy, will it?”
“You’ve never asked me why I didn’t come back home all those years.”
“Some people don’t. It’s not that unusual.”
“Don’t you want to know why?”
“I do now.”
“All right.” She dips her head once, then looks at me point-blank and begins. “You know I went to university in Vancouver. That’s where I met a guy named Kenneth. He was friends with a girlfriend of mine and her gang. They used to run drugs back and forth across the border, or that’s what they said, and it made sense, but Kenneth wasn’t really a part of that. I think he just bought a lot of stuff. But anyway we started up together and were pretty hot for a while, travelling all over on his parents’ money, he was a FURK, a fucked-up rich kid from Toronto, and then after two years we came to our senses about each other. I realized he was a jerk and he realized I knew it. By the time I started my third year we’d definitely split up, though I still saw him once in a while, but only maybe three or four times all summer. And then, of course, I found out I was pregnant. I knew I’d have the child and that I didn’t want anything to do with Kenneth, that it was my baby and not his because he didn’t want one or care about raising one.
“When I told him he threw a tantrum and practically got violent when I said I was going ahead with it and I didn’t want to give it away. Eventually his solution was to set up a little fund I could draw on for as many years as I didn’t hassle him. This was the best I could hope for, so I agreed and dropped out of school to find work and then have her. I wasn’t even nineteen years old. Mother came out for a few weeks after the baby to help me with her and to tell me my dad didn’t want me coming home any more. He didn’t want anything to do with me, and he didn’t want anyone in town knowing about Wendy.
“At first I was willing to go along with his wishes, he was the kind of man who would be absolutely crushed by shame, though I wasn’t completely stupid—I knew it meant I’d have to cut myself off from Mayford and my friends here—but I was young and thought I didn’t have a choice. Anyway, Mother did have a choice. She and Dad—it was like this huge crisis in their marriage—but she stood up for me and told him I was coming home sooner or later and better not to show up in town some day with a ten-year-old daughter nobody knew about. And so I sent out birth notices. I put some friends up in Vancouver and they met my little girl, and Wendy and me made a life there. I brought her out once when Dad was alive, and for his funeral, and once since.”
“How did he take her being here?”
“He was ashamed.”
“Even—”
“Not of me or Wendy. He knew Wendy by then, they’d been out to visit us, but when we came here, one day the four of us were downtown and he went out of his way to introduce Wendy to everyone he could, like he could never make up for how he used to feel about her, and me.”
“How did she handle all the attention?”
“If she didn’t know how to feel, she watched me, and I acted like I couldn’t be happier. And a year later he was dead and I hadn’t found a way to tell him I forgave him.”
By the end of her story she’s almost convinced me she can speak dispassionately about this part of herself, but the truth is that she has kept a secret for years. Not her daughter, but her regret. I can’t help but wonder why she’s telling me, or at least why she’s telling me now.
“You haven’t mentioned her much, Karen. You told me she was eighteen and lived with her boyfriend. I’d like to know more.”
“Yeah, but it’s like … it’s not just as easy as describing her. I’d have to describe our whole world out there, and I just don’t know how.” She hurries these last words to get to a point. “But that isn’t why I’ve told you all this.”
“You want me to know how much you owe your mother.”
She nods slowly. Apparently I’ve drawn the right lesson.
I get up to make some coffee. If I were to be honest with her, I’d say her whole story has the feel of an ultramontane fable, for though I know all about elaborately guarded secrets and regrets, I stupidly and selfishly pretended Karen didn’t have an impassioned, peopled history. And one so far from my imagining. I’ve never known drug runners or anyone who wanted to be called Kenneth instead of Ken or Kenny.
As I bring our coffees to the table she produces one more photo and sets it before me. It’s another school picture, this one a standard head-and-shoulders shot. The girl’s blonde and bright-eyed, with a gap in her front teeth.
“She’s looks … alert. Why not bring her out again?”
“It’s not really her sort of place. She likes meeting people but I don’t have many friends here. Everyone’s either left or, you know, they think of me as sort of an outsider. We’re just sort of polite. We catch up on each other in about ten seconds.”
From where I’m sitting I can see into the living-room. The bottom two-thirds of the stairway is visible. It occurs to me I’m sitting just where Marius sat bleeding the day Alan shot out the car windows.
“So Karen.”
“Yes?”
“What does it mean?”
“What does my telling you this mean? It means I’ve confided in you about my dad. It means I must trust you. Surprise.”
“No. We’ve never talked about what your having a daughter means. For us.”
“We haven’t been an ‘us’ yet, Toss. We’re working on ‘us’ now, tonight.”
“Now that we’ve had sex?”
“No. Now that you know about … me.” She returns Wendy’s photo to her wallet and drops the wallet into her case. She stares at the handle. “Do you have any secrets, Toss?”
“Is there something you expect me to confess here?”
“Oh Christ.” She gets up and heads for the door. I don’t know how we ended up here but there’s no looking back on our alexandrine path.
As she leaves I call out, “I’m sorry! I just don’t get this whole sharing deal!” and I detect an exasperated sound before the door closes.
So the day ends badly, but then what is the reason we overvalue endings? Even minor departures stir a fear of finality, every leaving a small death. We seem to be rehearsing something. When I’m laid out on the couch with the CBC fading in the background, I calmly perceive that I’m only a little worried about Karen and our spat, and in fact, due to a law of counterbalance, would rather disturb some older ground. I think about forced exits. They’re everywhere around me and, just now, I understand how someone might come to believe a heart shows well in its surviving a life of narrow escapes. Anyone my age has witnessed and been party to much hardship, and some of it is very nearly unbearable, though if we’re lucky it is so only for a short time, but I’ve never understood what exactly a breakdown is, for instance, and I’m not sure if I’ve ever witnessed one. I remember feeling in control of myself in the days after Marcie left, but there’s no denying that my behaviour changed in a quiet sort of way. I quit fishing. I took a road trip on impulse. But my condition then was a case of common sorrow, an affliction that excluded all others. If anyone had broken, it was Marcie, with her crying and her duck toss. And yet even violent destruction can pertain to a coherent pattern. She was a victim of attrition. She wanted to move to a city because she feared a mundane life. She could bear children but not the thought of raising them. She had learned from her mother’s mistakes. She feared regret and contentment equally. She had found the age and place of extreme removal. She tried to escape without leaving, and then she left.
Some nights you can hear a car move miles away and the sound of geese far above.