Myhrra was doing all she could to get Byron to stop saying he was going to go and live with his father – and she took to bribing him. She would make milk shakes for him in the morning, and fudge to take to school. She would send away for books on tropical fish. And one night when his supper wasn’t french fries, hamburgers, and Coke, he ran into his bedroom and knocked over one of his tanks. Later that night, while he slept, Myhrra in her blue jeans, and with her eyes still made up, was down on her knees picking up the fish. For the first time, Myhrra was beginning to think of getting married again.

She worked at the Central beauty salon downtown, and would keep trying to get her regular customers to come in more often. She’d take her number directory out and call them.

“Mrs. Whalen – hair must be getting long, is it?” Then she would pause, listen, rub her nose, while Byron sat over in a chair watching her listlessly, and she kept her hand up ready to shoo him away. “Listen, why don’t you come in for a cut –”

Pause.

“Well… no I don’t think it’s too early… you’ve not been in in a while … no I didn’t hear that … well that’s just the … yes … isn’t it… and he did, slapped her mouth off over a dill pickle … yes of course I knew he was as crazy as a bat in a bottle, but I never knew he’d go snakie over a dill pickle … come on in tomorrow and we’ll talk all about it… I have a surprise for you … oh … new boyfriend … well maybe new boyfriend – Vye McLeod; we’ll see if it’s for real or not … no no, it’s okay then if you can’t make it.”

Byron would sit there listening to her while he looked about bored and intolerant. He would haul a mouse out of his shirt pocket and kiss it, or he would suddenly squeak his shoes loudly on the floor to get her attention, and when she looked at him he would say under his breath: “Get the christ off the phone. You are making a damn fool of yer-self.”

Myhrra had almost gone to university. In fact she had her father haul her trunk out to the car and drive it to Fredericton. But then she decided to marry Mike, and she wanted to so badly nothing could prevent her. Her parents even tried to bribe her, but it didn’t work. They said that if she just went to university for one year she could marry him and they would give her the best wedding ever. But there was something about the doorknob. As she stood in her room almost acquiescing, she heard the rattle of her father’s keys to the dry cleaners, which he always carried in his pocket. It was the rattle of those keys along with the way he turned the doorknob. She had a chair propped up against it, and was standing in the centre of the room with a shoe in her hand, and her nose was running. It was the way the doorknob turned that made her marry Mike.

So once she married him nothing could have been less unusual. The little wedding took place with fifty guests. Everything was done the exact way it had to be done, and she was Mrs. Mike Preen. And her father had to go back to the university, go to the Registrar and see about getting her tuition back, and then haul her trunk down the steps of the women’s residence and take it back home. And yet, just when that happened, there was such a finality about everything that she wished she had not gotten married, and she wished she had listened to her parents. She wished she hadn’t seen the doorknob turn in just that way.

Mike liked to kick her in the bum and slap her around then. And she started to dye her hair and go downtown and hide on him as he went looking for her in his Monte Carlo – the very car that she had liked so much she now hid from.

Sometimes she saw her ex-husband but they always ended up fighting. Since her divorce, she had been alone now three years. At first she didn’t think she would be alone at all, but her friends seemed gone now and all the years had trampled over other years, and seemed to have gone by. She had lost her teeth in an automobile accident when she was twenty-two. She had never gotten used to that, and she was afraid to smile.

She had been a beauty queen at the annual exhibition and later she had gone on a trip – and what a trip it was. They saw Seaworld and Captain Marvel. And she thought she would always go on trips and see things. But now that was fifteen years ago. A train went by in the morning and one in the evening, and she had gotten so she would run to the back door and look at it. The trailer was close enough to the tracks that it shook. And her pains bothered her – she had a sore kidney, and sometimes when she thought she had to pee she didn’t at all.

They were all young that night when she got into the car accident. Her friend Leroy flew out of the windshield and landed on the asphalt. There was a smell of burnt tin, and in the distance part of a broken windshield. When they found Myhrra, she was jammed between the front seat and the dash, still singing. Her mouth had been cut – so even now she had a little scar. They took her to the hospital and she was laughing hysterically. She was talking to Leroy – and he was sitting up, lighting nurses’ cigarettes, and comforting everyone else about him. And then he grabbed Myhrra and began to dance. Later that night he went into a coma – and he died. After the accident she had trouble and peed the bed. After she was married her husband used to make her wear plastic pants, and for a while he would sleep in a chair over near the door, with the blanket up over him.

It was boredom that drove Myhrra to become a hospital volunteer this winter. She went there and visited the sick, brought them magazines and read their letters to them. The magazines themselves were two or three months old. Some of the letters had been read before. Some of the people were catheterized, and lay silently under the lights. Some would grow weaker from one visit to the next. And some would look at her suspiciously, and be angry about something.

Dr. Hennessey did not approve of the volunteer program, which was new. He was an old man who looked at her sternly and scared her every time she went there. He’d been in the war, and yet in his manner there was such an overwhelming sense of kindness that she could not be upset with him for long.

His hands shook, and his feet clomped about from one room to the next. He walked about the hospital cursing under his breath, with a nurse following him. People were generally frightened of him. He got into an argument with one old fellow who said he liked it when the volunteers dropped by to see him.

“Well, you shouldn’t,” Dr. Hennessey said.

“Why not?”

“Just because you shouldn’t like them – you should want to be all alone rather than have them coming by.” “You don’t like them, doctor?”

“Sure – sure they’re the very best, boy – the very best.”

And with that, he cut off his conversation and walked down the hall, breathing heavily, smoking in the nonsmoking sections.

“Myhrra,” he would say to her, “you should go home.”

“What do you mean – I’m scheduled to sit with Mr. Salome.” And she would haul out a list and show him. He would take the paper, look at it at arm’s length and say:

“Well, perhaps – but he’s asleep – and mostly dead – and perhaps it’s best if you just go home now.” Then he would smile and say: “I like your new patent leather shoes.” And clumsily she would look up at him in the dark, and clumsily he would walk away.

Over everything in town rose the hospital, the station, the church, and the graveyard. Below, the river rested, beyond the woods and through the centre of town. Old buildings were being slowly replaced, being torn away, their steps faded, their pane-glass windows looking glib in the winter light.

As time went on, the doctor felt less a part of things and more by himself. Some days he would see as many as one hundred patients and find himself being rude to almost everyone. Things were changing. Now, nurses coming out of university talked about units of time, and time-units per patient. This not only bothered the old doctor, but made him sceptical of everything. He found it more and more irritating as he went on his rounds. He didn’t like the nurses or the nurses’ union, and had no love for unions in general. In a strange almost impractical way the nurses liked him a good deal, and not because he was overly kind in his comments. He went about declaring things. He declared that people should be shot if they pestered him about prescriptions for “little” ailments; and whenever a “disaster” happened with his sister-in-law Clare, he would say: “Did a disaster happen? Well, good.”

The doctor bothered those he most loved, and argued with those he most cared about, but was obsessively polite with those he didn’t like. With Clare and Adele, for instance, he always argued. No matter what Adele said, he would contradict. One night last fall she and her mother came down to the community centre to play bingo. Adele looked as tiny as ever with a big rainbow-coloured hat on her head. There was a fierce wind against the top of the trees, the pastures were trampled and the wagon roads already covered in snow. Below, the river widened into the bay; they could see the outside of barns, and in the houses they could see lights.

Since it was November, he began to talk about Armistice Day. Adele stood near them, listening.

“The world’s going to blow up and there’ll be another world war by next year,” she said, sniffing.

“I hope so,” the doctor said, looking at Adele, with snow suddenly blowing down from the trees, while Rita stood alongside them.

“Well, I support peace – and at least everyone else in the world is in for peace, except for a dozen or so who are into war,” Adele said, holding onto her rainbow-coloured hat, and speaking up as if to be heard over the wind, and the outside door of the community centre banging.

The building was an old schoolhouse that they’d put on skids and had hauled down here a few summers before. Then Joe and a few of the men redid the inside and put a foundation under it. They had built an outdoor arena so the children wouldn’t have to skate on the river, and they had horse-haulings behind it, where a team of horses was made to pull heavier and heavier loads. For some reason the doctor avoided horse-haulings until the last moment and then came over to stand by the fence and drink rum. Everyone considered the doctor a drunk because he drank with them – which they thought a doctor would not do unless he was a drunk.

“I’m not in for peace at all,” the doctor said. “Peace won’t do anything to help the world, as a matter of fact it will not do a thing – and we shouldn’t be putting a lot of stock in it.”

Then, with his face red and his head nodding to everyone who went past him, he got angry. Rita smiled and the doctor became troubled. First, because this was the first bingo Adele had come to in the evening and she was all dressed up, and her knees were shaking from the cold night wind while the bulb over the door cast light on the frozen grass. Second, because she had won a prize and held it in her tiny hands. Third, because Rita had told her not to be rude, when the doctor felt he was as obstinate as she was.

In the mornings people would come to his house to be treated. And Clare would take their Medicare numbers and make appointments. They would sit along two benches in his office, and he would come in through the other door, peer at them, and wave his hand to someone to follow him in.

“Don’t be shy with me,” he would be heard telling an Indian woman from down river. “I mean I’m just feeling for the baby’s head. It’s dropped down but it’s not in position yet – so don’t go driving about bumpy roads so you’ll go into labour – no it’s not for a while yet. …”

Then he would wash his large red hands, and come out again, his eyes piercing through his thick glasses:

“Make her another appointment for next Thursday,” he would say.

Every now and then Gloria Basterache would come in about some complaint. Everyone could tell that she made the cross old man nervous; because whenever he gave her a check-up he would call Clare in with him.

After supper he would go to the hospital.

Some nights he would go in and out of the hospital three or four times. No one ever knew what floor he was on, where he was going to. If Dr. Armand Savard was in the hospital, Doctor Hennessey would go in and out glumly. If Dr. Savard or Dr. McCeachern got together – both youthful, both in high spirits – the doctor would become more and more glum.

Savard and McCeachern thought the old man was like this for a variety of reasons. They supposed he was like this most of all because no one paid any attention to him anymore – not like they paid attention to themselves. The treatments he prescribed a lot of times were no longer valid. And their lives were so much better organized than his. Besides, Armand felt the old man was prejudiced against the French, and often waited for him to show his hand in that regard. Savard would look over at McCeachern, or someone else, and say: “The war – the war.” And amid muffled laughter, he would tap his forehead.

When he went home to his sister-in-law Clare, whom he could never tell he loved so she’d ended up marrying his brother, he complained to her that everything was different and he may as well retire. And then in the same breath, as if holding it against himself, he would berate all people who retired, and he would say also that retirement was only the mandate of the young, which she, sitting in her plaid skirt and bobby socks, did not understand. Since his brother had died, they lived together in the same gigantic old house, built like many of the other old farmhouses, below Madgill’s garage. It sat back off the road, on the left of the power-line, with green shutters, and an old porch that had three or four faded wicker chairs. There was a barn. There was some wood. There was a nailed-down coal chute, with metal stripes crossing it. The doctor’s office was on the right-hand side facing the road. He had treated the whole roadway for thirty years.

Nothing was the same now, he would tell her, and yet he would say everything was the same and not one thing was different. Was it not the same thing with his nephew Ralphie as with him, and was it not the same with Vera, his niece, as it was with everyone else. Ha. Then almost spitefully he would shake his head so you could see the space between his grey hair and the collar of his shirt, and the light casting off from the snowbanks relegated to the evening air. He would take some chewing tobacco and clamp it down between his back teeth, and then he would spit.

“How do you mean?” Clare would ask.

“I mean, everything is the same and always has been and always will be,” he would say, walking away.