BAD FAITH. EVEN THE PAPER SAID SO, WITH A PICTURE of their barn, and the old horse.
Then there were phone calls by many young female students to Eva and Torrent’s home, calling them racists and bigots and thieves. They didn’t even care that it was little Polly who picked up the phone.
Eva tried to hide. Sometimes she put her hands over her ears and put her head between her legs and would yell “Go away!” At nothing.
She would sit in the barn for hours sometimes, when he was away with Polly, looking at the clean, brilliant lines of work that had enticed no buyer and found no home. She remembered talking to him about the boys in her night class, how smart they were, how she spoke about going on a trip, and maybe just leaving him and Polly behind. How women were no fools now. That was her line. Women are no fools now. She could abandon her child and have no guilt. Why she had wanted to treat him like this she did not know, except he had frustrated her life—and she had just found it out. She ridiculed him in front of others, especially other men, and it humiliated him. She had said many terrible things to him over those many months, and now it came back like sharp spikes being driven into her head as she remembered verbatim.
“We’re no fools now,” she had said.
“I never thought you were a fool,” he said.
“Oh, but you did. But Professor Raskin says I’m smart. He says men take advantage and sometimes the woman is far smarter than the man—lots of times.”
“I would agree.”
“You would agree?”
“Of course I would.”
“Well, I never thought you would.”
“That’s because you listen to Professor Raskin more than you ever listened to me.”
“That is not fair,” she said. “No, that is not fair, and far as I’m concerned I never had one friend—never one—in my life, and you have about a million. I am always alone, trying to figure things out—trying to decide what I should do to change my life.”
“What about that friend—that man you went to see just before we were married to talk to. Was he your friend?”
“Yes—he was and I just went to talk and explain something,” she said.
“There is no other woman I ever had to explain anything to,” he said.
“A bully,” she said. “That’s what I think you are at times—and I’m tired of being pushed about by a bully.”
And she ran upstairs.
Suddenly, for some unknown reason, Eva Mott got sick and was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. People were now saying what a terrible life Eva Mott had with Torrent Peterson.
But there was one little thing she had done. In order to facilitate her meetings with Professor Raskin, she would give Polly sleeping pills in her milk. Then with the child asleep she would carry her to her bed, lock the big front door, and when Torry was away, sneak to her lover’s house. Then coming home she would lift the child from the bed and put her in the cold bath to wake her before her husband got home. This made her own life a misery, a misery now of both cooking sherry and pills, and Torry didn’t know what was wrong.
“You are acting crazy,” he said to her one night, when he came upon her sitting in the loft of the barn, with her legs dangling over.
“Yes, and I will cut my wrists and everything else if you don’t watch it—wait and see,” she said.
In August he and Gordon Hammerstone were hired to pour bulldog lime into the tailings pond north of Riley Brook.
At night he would sit in the hot cabin, and down over the long hill Riley Brook glimmered like a bracelet in the twilight sky, and birds cheeped out their evening songs, and the smell of tar and roofing tin permeated the old cabin, while the Coleman stove cooked their meal of baloney, beans and potatoes. There they would sit with a pungent mug of tea, and large slabs of brown bread, while the four-wheeler, battered by trees along the windshield, covered in loose lime, would sit silent in the half-overgrown yard, like a bludgeoned animal, while the wagon that they dragged behind was loaded with the morning lime bags. That is, the last load was the load for the next morning.
With his socks off, his feet looked a mess. Huge burns covered them, and where the tibia in his left leg had been soldered there was and always would be a grey displacement, the bone protruding almost nakedly out against his skin, and the calf muscle of his leg almost gone. His arms huge, dark, the hands large, lay across his knees, and he stared silently at the coming night. The flies were terrible and the bulldog lime shrank his boots and lime and sweat burned his skin, so that both ankles had open sores. When Gordon saw that he said: “You can’t stay out here working—it’ll ruin your feet.”
“No, it’s okay. I only have to think I am doing it as I should have done before, for Eva and Polly. I will pay the money back over time, and they will not take my house.”
“Do you have any money left?”
“I have eighteen thousand. I never did any work on the barn—I put it away for Eva. I’ll make him an offer. Take that, and take the rest over five years.”
“Okay. But will he go for it?”
“Not in the slightest,” Torry said. “I was wanting it for Eva’s education—I had kept it a secret for that,” he said, and smiled again. “But I think I have to make an offer of some kind.”
Gordon Hammerstone, a Mi’kmaq man who said little but knew much more, knew Torrent had been placed into this abyss—this purgatory—by his own wondrous naivety.
The naivety of Torry was seen earlier in the year when Gordon noticed him on the back road, making his way with little Polly in the sunset. He walked on crutches with the cast on his leg, the little girl walking beside him as the last of the sunlight shone on the road beyond.
Oscar had offered to sell the pistol for what he might get, but Torry said no, he didn’t need the money.
The pistol that Byron Raskin had traded and that Oscar now possessed.
But long ago Mel Stroud decided with his girl Henrietta Saffy that they would simply steal it. He spoke about it so much he made her crazy. When they drove anywhere he spoke about it. He even took her to a gun show in Maine and was elated talking to gun dealers.
“Worth almost a million,” Mel told her. “I can sell it to a dozen people and then we will be free. Free, Henrietta. Just a simple theft from a simpleton, and we will be free.”
That, and their trip to the river to do so, was now being planned.
She already knew he got money from that Raskin man. She simply had no idea how much.
But at times she thought to herself:
“Why do I deal with such boring cunts?”
Torrent came home. He was about to make the offer to Professor Raskin when, checking their account at the credit union, he discovered that the eighteen thousand was mostly gone.
He asked Eva about it. He thought she might have given it back to Professor Raskin. But she wouldn’t answer.
At first, for two days, she said nothing. She kept her head down as she ate, she took her plate into the porch. She ran and hid outside.
“I didn’t do anything whatsoever with it.”
“Well where is it?”
“You could have spent it and not known.”
“That’s not true. I had it saved for you and your university. But I was going to offer it to him.”
“Oh I see—well then, you didn’t want me to go.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course—it was for your tuition for four years. But you and I know we are facing ruin here.”
He finally found it out. Benny Mott, deep in debt to Household Finance for the new recreational trailer, had asked his daughter for the money. She wrote him a cheque for a promissory note two weeks before.
“He couldn’t sell a pair of socks—he’s an idiot.”
“Don’t call my father an idiot. I never called Oscar one.”
“You called him everything but.”
They would now certainly lose the house and the field and barn. He told her this as he stood at the sink. He told her this and stared past her at the wall. Her face turned almost to ash. She tried to think of what to say. That she had kept Polly on pills, that she didn’t know what to do, or why she had done that for her father. That she had lost who she was, and who she was supposed to be. That she wanted to ask forgiveness and did not know how. But she said none of this.
Above them dark was coming, the trees blew and night descended. Shadows played behind her. All suddenly seemed ethereal and ghostly as she stood in her summer dress and bare feet, the underside of her toes reddish.
“I am sorry,” she said, “I am sorry. He’s my father.” Then she added: “You never wanted me to go to university anyway and to become educated. You were afraid I would leave you, because I’m smart, so don’t say anything about the money for that there!”
She ran into the living room and turned the television on, picked up a magazine, and kicked a cushion.
The eighteen thousand he had put in a separate account for that very reason seemed to be held against him. And so the little promissory note was now under a magnet on the fridge.
They did not speak the next day.
When he came out from Riley Brook the next week he told her there was a job at Zellers that she must apply for.
“Zellers?” she said. “No—I can’t work at Zellers. I will not work there.”
“But if we are going to get out from under it, you have to—just for a year—six months to a year. And then I promise university it is.”
He said a Toomey woman who worked there who was a cousin of his could get Eva a job.
“But I am not like her,” Eva said. “No, I am not like her. I am like other people.”
“What other people? Eva, what other people are you like? She is a kind, good-hearted soul who knitted a suit for Polly. Who are you like?”
“Just other people.”
“Who are you like, Eva? All your life you are embarrassed by me.”
“That is not true. I read where men like you are too sensitive because you are too emotional and don’t understand women’s rights. And I read that there is a left-brained person and a right-brained person, and I am on the side of equality and women’s rights because I am on the most sensitive side.”
“Women’s rights? Does that mean you don’t have to be kind enough to say hello? You have friends and they don’t speak to me and you get your picture taken, and you go to dances and dance with men, and I sit at a table and watch you—and they feel sorry for you—but not fucking one of them could pull you from the water when you fucking drown.”
“Is that all you think of?”
“No. I think of all kinds of things. I think you put on airs to impress people who look down on me.”
“I didn’t put on airs—not even a smidgeon of an air.”
“Well, who are you like?”
“I’m like Clara is who I am like.”
“No—no, you aren’t like Clara, Eva. I am sorry, but you are not like her. You are not as kind as her, you don’t have as big a soul. And you have to work at Zellers. it is the only chance we have to save the house. You have to help me save our house! It is the only way we have now.”
She tried to think, she got flustered, then she said as if weakly inspired: “Not as good as Clara—no, no. But Professor Raskin doesn’t want the money back from me—he only wants it from you—not from me. So I could get a student loan and still go to university.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean he told me when it all blew up, I don’t have to pay. It’s what he told me.”
“But I have to pay?”
“But yes. And because he says men like you always take advantage, and he is not like that, is what he says. He says that to me, that it’s your debt!”
“But not yours?”
“No.” She started to cry. “I don’t have to pay. I could still get a student loan and go to university and live in my own room in town and everything. And see Polly on the weekends.”
“And the money your father took?”
“Dad is willing to pay you back.”
“Oh. Your father is willing to pay me back?”
“Yes.”
“That is so nice of him.”
She thought for a second, and then relying on her ability to deflect whatever was said, a well-established strength she had, she said peevishly: “It was your loan, and if you were greedy enough to take it, what am I supposed to do? Why did you spend it all on yourself, which is what my father said you did?”
He looked at her stunned. “Except for the eighteen thousand,” he said.
His hands lay on the table. The skin between his thumbs and forefingers on both hands were burned raw, and two blisters had formed on his thick neck. His hands, deeply painful, started to shake. He wanted to hit her, but he did not.
“Well if you want to know what it was, Mr. Raskin said to me too, he says you did all of this for yourself. Professor Sackville said if you were any kind of husband you would have given me half of it to go to university last year. But you didn’t—so I think you just saved that money not for me but as a contingency in case all yer plans went awry and you had to take off somewhere. But now you say it was for me. ’Cause I don’t know what yer plan was. I just know everyone says you are being greedy.”
“When did they tell you that?”
“They just did—over time kind of let me know. They didn’t belt it out all at once. But you used it all for yourself and your cabinets! Mr. Raskin told me to go to women’s studies and everything and see Ms. Sackville and everything, and start my own life and everything—knocked up at nineteen by you, only because I felt I owed you because you saved my life, and then and there you came inside me—so I want a new start. Mrs. Lampkey gave me her placemats and everything—ha, can’t even read right.” She looked at him startled, her face in astonishment at what she just said. She always called Albert Mr. Raskin, even now. She could not think of calling him anything else.
Torrent looked down at the table ashamed. Deep, deep shame flooded him. And she never told Professor Raskin that he had put money aside. That is what was so revealing. She had not told them that he had loved her that much because he must be the reason for her disloyalty.
“He will take the house,” he whispered, almost crying (she had never seen him cry, even when his head was cut open by Shane Stroud’s rock). But not to her—he whispered it to himself.
She looked at him, and turned to run. She ran all around the room, looking for something, grabbed her purse and then ran up the stairs.
“And don’t come in my room!” she screeched. “And I shouldn’t have given you what I gave you last night, a blow job and everything like that there. And don’t you think I ever will again! Go to Clara if she is so nice. So whatever I did weren’t none of my fault and if I was roped into doing something—well I won’t tell you what—it weren’t my fault!”
“That’s a goddamn lie—you know that’s a lie. Who started that lie?”
“I am only saying it is what people are saying so don’t yell at me for saying it back.”
“It’s a lie about her. She is the kindest person I ever met.”
“Kindness is as kindness does is what I say.”
He had to drive back to work, and Gordon was waiting for him outside, pretending not to listen to the squabble, but digging at the dirt with his feet.
“Listen,” Torrent said, going to the door. “Next year—next year you can go to university.”
“I don’t care if I ever never go. It’s just a dream. Like my father you are, the same. But everyone said I should go this year, this year, and they said I should have gone last year, and be a lawyer, which is what I want to be and put men in jail—and don’t you think I won’t. I’ll put a good batch of them right in jail for what they do around this place.”
“Yes, well, your father should be in jail for taking my money.”
“It was my money too,” she screeched. “That is the big problem. You never thought it was my money too. Mr. Raskin, he said to me that he thought I would have some say in everything, so I end up with nothing at all.”
“Go to university, I don’t give a damn. Leave Polly—you have been wanting to do that for months.”
She didn’t answer. She began to sing under her breath, which she always did to ignore something painful. So he simply turned and went back down the stairs.
Torrent was gone. The Raskin brothers had asked him to drive a load of asbestos down to the shipyard in Saint John.
Something strange came over Eva that night. It was this. She could only be with the bright, glittering people, the people who were concerned, if she left him. That is what the people wanted. She knew that. And Torrent knew it too. There would be no debt for her if she left. And maybe the debt for him would be relieved as well if they just got rid of the awful house. Or say she just left—perhaps all would be forgiven him. For his biggest crime involved the trapping of her.
Also if she left there would be nothing to stop her from finding out who she was. The word had gone out that she was both beautiful and hoped for better, and had tried to start a business with her husband who did not care for her. That is what she hoped they would all realize. Her expression now was always one of sadness and regret, and an attempt to be happy.
Over the last year and a half she actually saw her life as dark and hopeless. The house they lived in was still unfinished—the walls of one whole room were covered in sheets of stapled plastic. He had no time because he was always doing other things. Now he was disabled.
She did not know how it happened—well, of course she did. She took three of her sedatives and a glass of wine, left the house alone, walking, and then remembered she was at Mr. Raskin’s cottage again. She was in the doorway by the kitchen, and a woman was sitting in a seat—she did not know it was Mrs. Raskin, Albert’s mother, who had come to record her songs and get in touch with Joni Mitchell. Eva was talking to someone—it wasn’t Albert, it was Mrs. Raskin’s male companion, a wispy-haired gentleman with soft, well-rehearsed manners, and she, Eva, had pissed herself. It had run bitterly down her leg. How had that happened? She had tried to get to the bathroom. Mrs. Raskin looked scared and worried—she kept asking Eva if she was the girl. What girl was she?
“Oh yes, Professor Raskin and I are real close,” she remembered saying. “If you only knew how close. Two peas in a pod.
“Yes, he accepts me as a person. I will owe nothing. It’s not my problem. Professor Raskin just has to come forward and tell the truth—tell the truth and I will be paid off. Eighteen thousand and then we will see. Professor Raskin and I have a whole bunch of secrets. It’s almost like a secret love, if you want to know. I sometimes simply wear a pair of shorts—just shorts and top—just to please him. Yes, and the real culprits will be taken care of, let me tell you. And Professor Raskin and I will go away—and maybe get a movie of it made over in Hollywood, it’s that important a story. For there is criminals, and I’ve come here to tell you I’m the one who knows who they are.”
She did not know how horribly she was upsetting the now elderly woman, who couldn’t comprehend who this girl was, or why her son had to tell the truth. You see, what was unknown is that Carmel was worried the police would come. She believed she would have a visitation of some kind.
Now she was alone, and scared. And thought that this was the girl.
“Can’t you see you are bothering Mrs. Raskin,” the man said. “Perhaps you should go.”
And then Eva remembered pee running down her leg. But she only remembered this the next morning. The shame was unbearable, and she wanted to die.