22
OSCAR WANTED TO LEAVE ABOUT THIS TIME AND LIVE WITH a relative in Manitoba because he was afraid he’d insulted so many people that they would poison his well. That is, he had forebodings of his demise and just did not know where to place his cannons.
He tried to stay awake to vouchsafe this did not occur but it was often hard to stay awake days on end and he would slip into a coma sooner or later, sometimes on the porch, sometimes in his old Chevy truck, sometimes standing against the barn. There Torrent would find him, wake him, sometimes carry him into the trailer—a place he had lived in for years, a verity of boxes and crates and old metal tables, a two-burner stove, and un-level shelves and cupboards. A picture of Don Quixote on the wall.
“Thank you,” he would say. “Torrent, you’re an awful good young lad. Yes, a little glass of water, please, to take my pills—I am hoping to get off my pills someday. I miss her, son.”
“Who do you miss”?
“Mary Lou.”
“Dad, I know you do—but she is gone now—you have to realize it.”
“I know—and I’m a grandfather.”
“Yes, you are.”
“And how old is your little one today?”
“Today she is two months, Dad.”
“I mean exactly—”
“Sixty-seven days.”
“Sixty-seven days. And tomorrow she will be sixty-eight days.”
“Yes, she will.”
“Time passes.”
“Yes, it does.”
“I am sorry.”
“Dad, what are you sorry about?”
“I am sorry about how I treated you. I hit you—remember?”
“Don’t be—you treated me very well. I know that—does it matter if others don’t? Yes, you hit me—and yes, sometimes I did not deserve it—but sometimes I did.”
“Someday I will make it up to you.”
“You have nothing to make up.”
“Someday I will find out what happened to Arlo and Arnie—find out what happened to your mother—I will—I will.”
“You shouldn’t get so upset about it all. Time passes.”
“Time passes—that’s right. How old is she now?”
“Sixty-seven days.”
“You see, he was double fussy over his car.”
“Who?”
“Our Mr. Stroud—our mad engineer of human souls.”
“What about him?”
“Bothered me here for years, the man who committed crimes. Well, he loved his car—and one must take care of it here in the winter—and how worried he was about it stalling—outside after dark with a cold snap. So I went to the lad I bought the Massey Ferguson from, Mr. Benson, who is actually a German. He was captured outside of Caen and sent to the prisoner of war camp here in Minto. Some say he remained a Nazi, and complained that we didn’t applaud him for fighting against Stalin. So I went to see him. I thought about the car. They did not walk out there alone—someone had to have driven them.
“Benson told me Stroud took his car to Benson’s garage on two occasions within a day. He had the battery looked at, the antifreeze changed, the oil too. He kept worrying about the temperature, and kept an extra battery with him. He kept saying, ‘Is it really going to drop? It better drop.’
“ ‘Why?’ Benson asked.
“Stroud said he had two snares set for rabbits, and set them with the idea that the temperature would drop. ‘Poor little lonely beasts, I want them to die soon—hate to see things suffer.’
“The next day he came back his windshield smashed by a tree limb and mud and frozen ice over the side of his car. And his gas was almost gone,” Oscar said.
“Why might that be?”
“Because he kept turning the car on, warming it, waiting for something.” Oscar sniffed. “And he was parked in a hidden area—and he left that hidden area without turning his lights on and cracked his windshield on a branch.” Then he picked up his bottle of wine and poured a glass, looking out at the stony junk-filled yard.
“It makes me think of Shakespeare—”
“In what way, Dad?”
“There are no more devils in hell. They have all escaped to earth.”
Torry sat down beside him now, and put his arm around him for a moment. And Torry remembered when he was very young and the social worker came to take him away. The problem was, there wasn’t a clean shirt. All his shirts had Oscar’s big oily hand marks where he had given little Torrent Peterson hugs. But the only thing the social worker saw was soiled shirts, which proved Oscar didn’t love his son. Much like Ms. Sackville, she didn’t realize the hand marks were from hugs given over two days.
Torrent had that day come to leave off the coroner’s report about his mother, Mary Lou, which after all this time was available to her son.
As he left, Albert Raskin was driving by in his car with a remarkable-looking woman. He saw this woman toss her cigarette out and it lay on the branches. He went over and stepped on it, and put it out.
Mary Lou was three months pregnant. This is what Torrent learned from the coroner’s report—a complication with that pregnancy, a problem with insulin. It was perhaps in her weakened state a heart failure caused by insulin shock.
Two weeks later Oscar phoned him about the coroner’s report.
Before the phone call is recounted, something else must be.
Torrent was ecstatic, though hesitant and confused. Secretly if he searched his soul some spark about what was happening could signal disaster for him. But it was too mercurial for him to put his finger on, the pulse of it all too elusive and the thrill of something else too significant. They now had a little girl to think of. Her name was Polly.
Out of the blue there was a phone call, where Albert spoke of actually going into a partnership.
The day Albert went haying, the heat, the great horseflies, the terrible sharp sticks of hay that cut his arms, the sun that blistered his back, the heaviness of the bales, the undeniable thirst throughout the long, hot day—little did he know that haying was like this, he had only seen it as a youngster, in a pastoral setting with the sun going down, and the wagon topped with hay bales, hauled to the barn by some endearing vintage horse.
That day when Eva came out into the field with strawberries and bread at noon in a halter top and white shorts, did he say:
“Perhaps I need a bandage here—”
Torrent overheard him, and said nothing. And Albert held up his bleeding forearm. Though most of the men would have thought a cut such as his didn’t warrant it, Torrent asked Eva if she might take him back into the house.
“It is a beautiful place, a beautiful piece of land. I love how it lobs up to the trees in the distance, and then passes through giant pines down to Arron Brook on one side and the bay on the other. The kind I always dreamed of. Is it yours?”
“Maybe—if I marry him.” She looked at Albert and smiled as she taped the cotton around his arm.
“Torry?”
“Yes—Oscar gave him this land and he was building this house the day he rescued me—he ran down from here—no one else had the wits or the strength, though I know some of the youngsters were frantically searching for a boat.”
“I was there,” Albert said.
“You were where?”
“Well, at the beach. I saw—you.”
She looked at him quickly and blushed.
He looked at her quizzically, waiting for her to say more.
“Naked. Yes, I was—my top was gone, my bottoms was pulled down, so everyone could see.”
“You were very beautiful—well—it was a great moment for me—”
“For me too,” she said. “Torry was my hero that day fer sure.”
She wrapped his arm, with a shimmering whiteness of the cloth against his dark left forearm, and caught his blue eyes.
Eva felt a disquieting—a strange slight desire, with this, as he looked at her.
This was the problem. He was no longer who he had been, he was now who he was—and his good looks, which he had not had at sixteen, now having, were unmanageable to himself.
She also caught how he had looked at her house, which until that moment she had loved. Oh it was a beautiful house, with new hardwood floors. Still, there were things in it unfinished. One whole wall was left unfinished. He must have noticed that!
“Can I pay you?” he said, taking his wallet out.
“Go on—get out of here,” she snapped, and turned away, and to prove her mastery of the moment, moved with undeniable beautiful and sudden seeming submissiveness of her form to the sink.
The truth was, no one from the U.S.A. or England or anywhere else wanted to be here—they simply were here, found themselves here, found the hellish winters too long, the summers too hot and fly-infested, the people too coarse, the world too unsophisticated, and so every visitor, every speaker or poet who came to visit the university on those drab February days, these professors dressing almost identically, all with certain accents that did not match, would privately complain about why they were stuck here and why they should be somewhere else more important. Albert took up a love of baseball because so many of them had such, he listened astutely, complained about what they complained about, and sighed about what they sighed at.
He was seen most frequently with Ms. Sackville.
Ms. Sackville walked to class from the apartment she had moved into, covered with heavy black boots and scarf, a winter coat with the collar turned up. You would see her knocking on the Saint Michael’s janitor’s door, with a little quiet tap.
“You must transfer some of the heat you seem to have, through the pipes you seem to operate, to my room which seems to have none.”
More and more he and Ms. Sackville were known for their solitude, knowledge of the world and great intellectual defiance.
He loved the idea of being defiant. But more, he loved people saying he was.
The little tap on the door went on all winter; the little boot marks were seen in the snow, waiting for Albert in his proper Volvo to drive her home. The little office window was opened an inch, the little tea cup hanging by a thread from a brass hook and now and again her little notice that she, Dr. Faye Sackville, would be attending a meeting in Ireland. And the little sticky to Albert about the plight of Eva Denise Mott and her “arrangement.”
The concealed feeling both had, to free her from herself. “Think of how free she would be if we tore such terrible tethers away” was written on one sticky. He waited for those stickies almost every day.
And on another: “My plan is quite delicious. And if it frees her, I would never say—malicious.”
Albert had heard Eva Mott was studying for her graduation equivalency. And that meeting him had spurred her on to do so. So he had already succeeded. She had left school in grade twelve, had gotten married, as a way to escape Ben Mott. A few months ago they had a child, Polly.
Torrent, who knew nothing of these internecine machinations, told Eva he saw Professor Raskin one day at the wharf alone, staring out toward the far buoy, his hands in his pockets, his hat tilted back on his head. It’s as if that very stance signified a grand departure.
“Poor fellow,” Eva said. “He’s fighting his battle all alone. His uncles are so mean to the Indians and everyone else around here, bullies and thieves they are known for is what my teacher told me—and are polluting places, going around polluting all the places. And there is an ozone layer too, and they pretty well diluted that all by themselves. And he is not a polluter himself. He gives his money away to help the poor, that’s what all the students say! He is what you call altruistic—I wrote that word there down, to explain him.”
“Ah,” Torry said, nodding.
“I sometimes in my heart of hearts—not that it matters—wish upon a star that I were a student too,” she said, “and could learn from people like Professor Raskin—who is altruistic—for he would know so much.”
“Ah,” Torry said.
But he knew Eva knew nothing about the poor, knew nothing about the rich, knew nothing about polluters or those who fought for environmental laws. He had seen them on a dozen job sites already, they had harassed, and ruined equipment, and he felt that many of them demanded you listen to them while they did not listen to you, and knew themselves little or nothing of the world they demanded be changed. And they used the Indians’ plight to gain attention to themselves.
He was thinking of Dykes here—though he did not know who the old white-haired man with the crazy anger was, who now wore First Nations beads and chanted. All he seemed to do one day was go “Ahhhhhh” and point at Torrent who was busy digging a ditch for a small gas line.
“Ahhhhhhhh,” said Dykes. “Ahhhhhhhhhh.”
“Destroyer!” Dykes yelled, and those with him did as well.
They stood in front of road construction and jumped up on a front-end loader, and put him out of a job that day, when Eva was pregnant, and now some months later took the road; they yelled at oil trucks and a year later made sure their tanks were filled.
Torrent knew this because in the variety of jobs he had, he had had to face them. Eva wanted things to be nice—and as long as they were, or as long as she thought they were, in her own way, then she would be happy. Anything too unsettled, that made her less than happy. He knew she had to be happy. In fact when he got into an argument with another farmer one day—Torrent knowing he was right, knowing she knew he was right—saw her run back into the house, lock the door and stare out the window.
She couldn’t stand to have people not think she was perfect. She could not stand not to be liked. But Torry had never been liked—had always been alone.
So she took a ceramics course, she took a painting course from an artist I knew. She went to night school and talked very guilelessly about the world. In fact at times, during the evening after Polly was in bed, she would speak to Torrent about her life ambition, about what men and women were now doing, how they were now thinking, how terrible men had been throughout history, boiling people in oil and cutting their noses off, and how the teachers at night school were handsome.
“Oh not that handsome, Torry—it’s just that they know things.”
“What—things do they know?”
“Well, one of them was to Indonesia. I figure that’s something.”
“It is—yes it is.”
“Well that’s what I mean. And I found that out, well, from Georgina Preston, who left her husband and now goes with a supervisor and everything. She told me her husband was fine, but he didn’t have a romantic side is what she said, and a woman has a desire of the heart—and a desire of the head—it’s what I learned from her, she sits beside me in class—so I learned that from her.”
“You did?”
“Yes—so I spoke to Georgina last night and she comes up with that you are my desire of the head—you are and I will remain with you because of that. But there is a desire of the heart—a very secret desire of the heart is what a real woman searches for—and often never finds.”
“Well that is too bad.”
“Yes,” she continued, as she ate her supper, cutting her pork chop and thinking aloud, “yes, that is the women’s sorrow—I guess is what Georgina told me. Do you member Georgina, she was in that talent show last Christmas?”
“Yes, I know Georgina, she plays the accordion.”
“Yes—they call her Accordion George. Well I guess that is just as true for me. I mean a desire of the heart and a desire of the head.”
She looked up quickly and looked back at her plate, and cut her pork chop again.
“I guess,” Torry said.
“Yes—so many women suffer between the head and the heart. I have Polly and you and that is my head for sure—but somewhere is my heart.”
“Ah—well, you and Polly are my head.”
“How do you know that?” she asked, looking up at him and blinking.
“My heart told me so.”
These new theories, doctrines picked up in the labyrinth of current sentiment, were what separated her now from him, like an aura, a sheen around her temperament. It began to engulf her without her knowing she was being immersed. She would never have been dissatisfied until she was instructed to be.
And yes, the instruction was mainly from people who demanded she be dissatisfied.
Unknown to Torry she wrote Albert a letter:
I know you sometimes give money away sir—people said to me that—because you are in a fight for the little man—but I wouldn’t allow you to just give us money—I would only ask for a loan upon my soul to God. Don’t tell Torry I wrote or he would skin me but he is almost like an artist and it would be so good if someone could help him And you said you wanted to help the artists—so I send you this letter. Either that or we have to go out west to work.
He showed the letter to Faye Sackville. She read it, lighted a cigarette and looked up at him with wonderfully expressive dark eyes:
“Well, let’s do something for her, or she’ll escape and live a life of drudgery.” And she folded the letter and gave him a quick kiss.
So at that moment Faye placed her as being a greedy and backward country girl, just like those men she had seen at the airport, but with, as she said, “an exquisite shape.”
Then opening and reading the letter again said, “She thinks her husband is an artist.”
Sackville said he wasn’t to give money away—he was to loan it. It was simply preposterous to do it any other way. In fact she would recuse herself from the whole venture if he did.
“Your stepfather—well, he was oblivious most of the time—”
They came a few nights later, with an offer of partnership and fifty thousand dollars. This would all be done in haste. The partnership would be in the form of a loan—twenty-six thousand for the acres of oak and maple Torrent wanted along the ridge leading to Good Friday, and twenty-four thousand for the barn and supplies. They had to sign two documents. The first document spoke of advancing money for equipment and upgrading the barn, winterizing it, and bringing wood into a space to dry. The second document was for the land.
“Are you sure you want this?” Albert asked her.
“Oh yes sir.”
“A loan—it will be a loan then,” he said.
“Oh for sure.”
“Well, there will be little pressure—”
Then Ms. Sackville said that if by the end of fifty months this money was still not paid, the guarantor of the loan would be able to sell the property and the hardwood ridge as he saw fit to recoup any monies. That was the only stipulation, but it was nothing to be worried about. Fifteen pieces priced right would get the fifty thousand repaid, and all would be well. Twenty pieces and they’d begin to make real money.
Raskin was looking at her as if wondering if Eva was the right person to have this money. That is what she recognized, and she did not want to disappoint. She lowered her eyes and kept nodding, kept hoping to impress as much as possible.
“Okay, I will sign for him,” she said, excitedly. “I have a security number. I could call him—”
“Call him after you sign,” Sackville said amiably. She looked at Eva with bright and somehow gorgeous eyes that assumed a sudden liaison and a partnership. And her accent was so different, it felt like she was from a different world—it cut the air of the kitchen so.
Eva nodded, said, “Here I go,” and signed with her hand shaking. She closed her eyes and handed them the paper. “There,” she said, smiling with her eyes still closed, her eyelids fluttering slightly in the warmth of the evening room.
“You keep this, and have him initial it all. How many pieces can he do in a year?” he asked.
She tried to think, and she counted on her fingers, her eyes still closed, and when opening them saw Faye Sackville staring at her from behind Albert’s shoulder.
“Let’s say as far as cabinets maybe five, but desks and chairs too—maybe a half-dozen”—she exaggerated—“and his best is grandfather clocks.”
She knew Torry would never discuss his work with them. She was in fact doing all of this without his knowledge. She began to realize this, and felt queasy—no, she had not discussed this with him.
“Wonderful,” Faye Sackville said.
“Yes,” Raskin said, but he seemed dissatisfied.
Raskin was studying the contract. He looked at it, looked at her and said: “This too has to be signed—the bad faith clause—you have to sign here—just if something you told us was not really true. The rest I do not care about—the money will be paid when it is—but the bad faith has to be signed here, Eva.”
“Oh—it’s all true, sir—it is.” She looked frightened.
Sackville smiled and put her hand on Eva’s arm and stroked it. “Oh, we know—we know that, dear.”
So she had to sign again. Her hand shook again, she felt dishonest.
The day was coming to an end, the birds tweeted. There was the on-again, off-again sound of traffic, and the light was now fading in the windows, making the room duller with sudden diminishing bursts of evening sunshine.
Sackville reached out, put her hand on Eva’s shoulder and said: “Congratulations. Well done, young lady. You did it on your own. You took matters into your own hands. Did anyone ever tell you—you are very, very pretty. My God, you are a diamond in the rough.”
She blushed and stood before them rocking slightly back and forth with Polly in her arms.
“Oh, you are embarrassing her,” Albert said with concern. “She’s already had enough of us.”
She felt like sitting down on a chair and looking away from Professor Sackville.
Because in the awkward silence that followed they were examining her, examining every part of her, and wondering why she looked perplexed and sad.
Like so many things in life that are wrong, she told herself that it was right if looked at it in another way. Like the teacher who put his arm on her back and bent over her when she was writing her exam, took her pen from her hand, and holding his hand over hers, made a correction on her text, squeezing her hand as he did—and brushed her hair with his face, which she did not tell Torry about.
Then they left, they walked out, their somewhat special footsteps on her gravel. Matilda the sow lay on her side in some half-dried mud.
She hoped he would turn around and wave but he did not. She hoped she had not said something wrong. She hoped that the way he had turned that showed a sudden kind of victory over her whole life wasn’t real. She ran out to the porch trying to shake their hands. But they had gone.
She went into the little den, and sat at the window watching as they drove off. She waved even though they weren’t looking.
She realized quite suddenly that she had done something terrible. She had not even considered Torry or cared to let him know. Because she was frightened of what he might think.
Sackville knew something too. Far smarter than Raskin, she knew exactly how that lien would come into play, months before it did. That is why she smiled a beguiling smile when she sat in the car, reached over and stroked his cheek. She believed, here less than a year, she had bested them all. She simply did not know quite how the tragedy would unfold. If she had would she have stopped? In the years to come she often asked herself this.