A Hard Witching (8 page)

That reminded Lavinia, briefly, of another joke, something about watching your dog run away for three days. But she did not tell it. She was listening to Jack, thinking, Maybe I wasn’t looking, all those years. Maybe it was there. All that time. Maybe it was me.

Thinking, Bigstick, Manito, Willow Bunch.

Jack leaned toward her across the table, so close she could see those lakes had little yellowish pockets of light, shifting like water lilies. Like trout. “Tell me,” he said again, “tell me you don’t miss it.”

Two weeks after the wedding, she packed up the few dishes and odd bits of furniture she’d collected, helped Jack load it all into his truck and they headed east, making a quick stop at the pancake house so Lavinia could drop off her uniform and pick up her final cheque.

“Never thought I’d see the day,” one of the girls said.

“Yeah,” Lavinia said. “Well.”

She spent the first few months setting the old farmhouse in order—rearranging kitchen cupboards, sweeping out closets, even putting a row of petunias and marigolds in the freshly weeded patch beneath the south kitchen windows, carrying water to them in an old ice cream pail every evening.

Her mother was thrilled. “My daughter,” she said, “come back to the fold.”

Her father simply gloated. “Got yourself a nice place here,” he’d say, looking around. “View of the Sand Hills.” He’d say it each time they came.

And at first she kind of thought so, too. It was a nice place. The red-painted outbuildings, the neat white farmhouse which, though small, was bright and had a tiny veranda round
the back where she could imagine them sitting on rare windless evenings, sipping coffee, listening to the crickets and watching the light slip off the land.

Now, a little more than a year later, they had yet to sit there in the companionable silence she had imagined. Jack, she realized, never sat. He just moved from one task to the next, evenly. When he stopped, he slept. Determined to make the best of it and to entice him, too, she’d tried sitting there one evening on her own, pulling out two kitchen chairs. But she felt guilty and then angry, watching him cross and re-cross the yard well into dusk. Ignoring her. Making his point. And so she’d dragged the chairs back inside, sat instead looking out the kitchen window where at least he could not see her. Sat looking at those red buildings slowly darken and sag. Wondering why she hadn’t noticed before how they all seemed to tilt slightly in one direction from the constant assault of wind.

Homestead, he’d called the farm when they first met, a place he could not possibly leave. “They can put me six-feet-under right back by the barn. Suit me fine.”

Homestead.

At the time, it had made sense to her. Such a beautiful word. Endearing. And she’d thought, quite stupidly, He could make me love it.

The ringing of the hammer against the truck engine stopped, and in a moment Lavinia heard Jack’s heavy bootfalls coming across the yard. She wiped her face again, pulled on her coat and quickly slipped back through the leaves. But he was already standing there, her spade held loosely in his fingertips.

“I had to pee,” she said, though there was no real reason why she should explain. He looked down at the near-empty
bucket. “Ground’s hard,” she added. “On account of the frost.”

She held out her hand for the spade, thinking he might drop it there in the dirt. It was hard to tell with Jack. Moody. But he just nudged the bucket with the toe of his boot and handed her the spade.

“Going to Schecters’,” he said.

Lavinia had not been to Ray Schecter’s place since that once before she and Jack were married, not long after Ray’s wife had been taken back to the hospital in North Battleford for the third and possibly final time. Lavinia had never met her.

“She’s a schizo,” Jack had explained amiably as they rode over in the truck. “You know what that is, a schizo?” Before she could answer, he reached across and squeezed her thigh. “That’s a schizophreniac.” He tapped his forehead beneath his cap. “She’s not right.”

Lavinia plucked gently at the dark hairs on the back of his hand and he pulled it away. “What do you mean,” she asked, “not right?”

He rolled the window down and adjusted the rear-view mirror, though there was nothing to see behind the truck but a cloud of dust. She turned anyway, just to check.

“She’s mental. What more do you want to know?”

“I mean,” she said, “how did it happen?”

“How should I know? She’s a schizo. They’re probably born that way.”

Lavinia frowned and looked out the window, out over the brown furrows of fallow fields that looked as if they’d been raked by enormous fingers in smooth and continuous patterns. The familiar monotony of colour, the unvarying shape of the
land. The way you could never get out of that sun, or that wind. It could make anyone crazy.

“What’s the matter now?” Jack said.

“Nothing,” she said carefully. “It’s just, that doesn’t sound nice, calling her that. A schizo. It sounds … disrespectful.” But disrespectful was not what she meant. She did not know exactly what she meant, only that the word grated on her.
Schizo.

“Oh, for Christ sakes.” Jack shook his head, tipped the brim of his cap lower. They hit a particularly hard ridge on the dirt road (on purpose, Lavinia thought) and the truck jumped, jolting her on the seat so hard, her teeth clacked together.

Up ahead, Schecters’ place sat neatly on a small rise, the house at the highest point, the outbuildings sloping gradually away, as if sliding almost imperceptibly downhill, though the word
downhill
was in itself a gross exaggeration.

“Anyway,” Lavinia said, “it doesn’t matter.” She rested her hand on his arm.

“Okay,” Jack said. “Okay. Forget it.”

They rolled past the house, and Jack pulled the truck to a stop outside the hog pens. Ray was already there, leaning across the railings. Lavinia reached for the handle, but Jack said, “Won’t be long,” and slammed the door, crossing the yard in long strides.

Lavinia sat in the hot cab, feeling close to tears, Ray’s presence a few yards away the only thing keeping them in check. Over nothing, she thought. That was the worst part.

She watched Ray look up as Jack approached, lift one hand in a half-greeting and lean back
away from the pens, his T-shirt pushed up a little over his belly. He shook his head at Jack, jerked a thumb toward the pens. “Sonofabitch,” he said, and shook his head again. She watched as Jack hooked his long body across the rails, then leaned back, too, tipping his cap away from his forehead. “I’ll be goddamned,” he said. Then he turned suddenly and waved to Lavinia. “Come on,” he called.

Ray nodded at her as she stepped up to the pen.

“See that?” Jack said, pulling her close by the sleeve of her shirt.

At first she saw nothing but a large, spotted sow, curled sideways in the mud.

“What?” she said.

“There,” Jack said, pulling her closer.

She leaned across the rails, peering over to where Jack pointed.

“Only one left,” Jack said. “Christ, Ray, that’s a goddamn shame.”

It was the blood she noticed first, a rusty brown colour smeared across the sow’s muzzle, then the one piglet squirming between its mother’s speckled hind end and the pen boards.

“What?” she was about to say again, but Jack said, “Nature’s way, I guess. It’s a Christly shame, but there ain’t much you can do about it.”

“Nature’s way,” Ray said. “Shit.”

Lavinia looked up at Jack, and as she did, realized with a terrible, heavy feeling in her stomach what they were talking about. She stepped back from the pen—lurched back, she knew, though neither Jack nor Ray seemed to notice. It was one of the things she found hardest of all, living there on the farm with Jack—getting used to the ugliness all over again, the blood and sudden deaths, the way a headless body could race oblivious, as if fleeing for its life. The smell of it all.

Ray took off his cap, slapped it against the rails. “Guess I should try and get that last one.”

Jack shook his head. “Be a cold day in hell before you’d catch me in there. She’ll chew your nuts off.”

Ray put his cap back on and kicked a clump of mud from
the rails. “Yeah,” Lavinia heard him say as she walked quickly back to the truck, “guess you’re right.”

She slammed the door and sat there in the cab, hot, thinking, You bastard. Why would you show me that? But she already knew.

Toughen her up. City girl.

She jammed her spade now into the dirt and rubbed her shirt between her breasts where a line of sweat trickled toward her belly. Her armpits were wet and itchy and had a rank, oniony smell, although she’d bathed the night before and dusted on talcum. She thought, with disgust, I am rotting from the inside out. Jack had noticed, too, rolling away from her last night and twitching into sleep. She’d lain there in the darkness, pressing the palms of her hands into her belly, willing the sickness away. She’d prayed a bit, too, a kind of Hail Mary, what she could remember of it. But she must have fallen asleep partway through because she didn’t remember getting to the end. When she’d awoken, she’d thought, That’s a sin. It must be. It must be worse to start a prayer and not finish than to never pray at all.

By the time Lavinia had filled a bucket, the sun was high and the frost had turned wet on the earth. Mud had caked to the spade and to her rubber boots. She was so thirsty, her tongue felt swollen and heavy in her mouth. When Jack left her standing in the corn, she’d watched for a while as his truck disappeared down the road. Then she removed her coat and shirt and worked in her bra. Though the air was still cold, sweat collected
beneath her armpits, and even working slowly as she was, she was forced to sit frequently on an upturned bucket to rest. The surface of the earth was damp and soft, but underneath it was still clenched with frost and she had to stomp hard on the spade to gain even a couple inches of depth. She thought she might go back to the house, rest a while and then come out again when the earth had warmed. Jack would likely be at Schecters’ all day, maybe that night as well. And she could always hear the truck coming anyway. She planted the spade into a mound of dirt and lugged the full pail to the house, stopping every few feet to rest.

The clock in the kitchen showed just shy of noon. She washed her face at the sink and rubbed it dry with a dish towel, then drank four mugs of water so fast it trickled from the corners of her mouth. Now, a few minutes on the couch was all she needed.

But once she lay down, she realized she could not sleep. She kept thinking for some reason about Ray, about his wife, trying to imagine what she looked like. She’d asked Jack once.

“Christ,” he’d said, rubbing the back of his neck, “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “She’s blonde.”

“Pretty?”

“I don’t know,” he said again. “I guess so. In a way.”

Lavinia could not imagine Ray with someone who was pretty. But as soon as she’d thought it, she felt bad.

“What’s she like?”

“Christ, Lavinia, I don’t know. What do you keep harping on her for all the time?”

“Just curious, I guess.” Then she added, “He must miss her, living there all by himself.”

“He goes to see her,” Jack said. “He visits her. All the time.”

Lavinia wanted to say, “Would you? If it were me, would you visit all the time?” but instead she said, “They didn’t have kids?”

“Not that I know of.”

She was about to ask, “Why not?” when Jack said, “Enough, already. I don’t want to talk about her.”

At the time, she hadn’t thought it an odd thing to say. But later, she’d wondered about the intimacy of what he’d said. Not “I don’t want to talk about it,” but “I don’t want to talk about
her.”

And she’d felt angry and embarrassed and unreasonably jealous. She knew it was stupid. Still, sometimes she thought about Ray’s wife quite a bit, tried to picture her face, her hair. What shade of blonde? Long hair, or short?

Later, Lavinia sat wedged between Jack and Ray on the truck seat. Ray spread himself out, knees apart, one arm across the back of the seat behind her. They both reeked of sweat and liquor, but what was worse was that Lavinia could still smell her own rotting odour.

Jack was driving fast, swerving sometimes in the soft ridge of gravel at the shoulder. Lavinia clutched the edge of the seat, wishing she’d learned how to drive a standard, dizzy and hot, sick with the careening motion, the smell of them all, bumping against each other at every jolt and turn. She wished she had stayed home, but that would not have been possible. Jack was in high spirits when he and Ray returned from Ray’s place that evening, jovial. He would have coaxed, cajoled and, finally, become annoyed with her if she’d refused. Besides, getting out now and then wasn’t so bad. It was just this nausea. And the thirst. She wished she’d brought something to drink. She wished a lot of things.

Jack fiddled with the radio, found the country station he liked.

“So,” Ray hollered over the music, leaning in too close to her ear, “ever been to a carnival before?”

“No,” she said, turning slightly away from the sour yeast smell of his breath.

“You gonna keep that to yourself, you miser?” Jack eyed the bottle wedged between Ray’s thighs.

Ray passed it across her, banging his elbow accidentally into her mouth as they hit a pothole. She rubbed her tongue across the inside of her lip, could taste a bit of blood where the skin was ragged.

“I’ve been to a few,” Ray said, oblivious. “Been to that fair in Saskatoon, too, the big one.”

Jack took a long drink from the bottle, passed it back to Ray. “You never been out of this county in your life.”

Lavinia looked at him quickly, thinking, His wife’s in North Battleford. He goes there all the time. You said.

Ray tried to manoeuvre the bottle to his mouth but kept getting jolted, his arm flailing in mid-air. Rye splashed out on Lavinia’s sleeve. “In sixty-eight,” he hollered. “Before I was married.” He screwed the lid clumsily back onto the bottle. “Was something else.”

Lavinia shifted her weight on the seat, reached behind to adjust the sharp end of a seat belt clip that was digging into her back. She would have liked to put the belt on, but there was no way to do it without their noticing. She thought, If I have to die, don’t let me die like this. Not in a graceless twist of metal.