Elizabeth and After (2 page)

The white Pontiac! There was a ghost worth catching. He’d first seen it when he was out for an afternoon apple pie and coffee at the Timberpost. Something about its tilt made him think that his own old Pontiac—a gold-orange dinosaur he’d long ago sold for scrap—had somehow wound its way back from wherever it had been, got itself painted, then settled in Luke Richardson’s car lot to wait for him.

Unable to believe such a gift, he’d approached it slowly, telling himself that if the upholstery was the same mesh polyester, the steering wheel faded on the left side by sun and sweat, the corner of the glove compartment bent where he’d had to pry it open with a crowbar…

But this ghost Pontiac had upholstery of gleaming white leather, a white suede-covered steering wheel, a glove compartment that resembled a strongbox. This Pontiac was lower to the ground, equipped with twin stainless-steel exhausts, hood and fenders shaped in expensive aerodynamic curves. This Pontiac was no ghost, it was a bomb—a white bomb—and underneath that hood was most likely some kind of fuel-injected V-8 nuclear power plant that would send the car smoking along on the oversized tires that bulged out from beneath the fenders.

McKelvey wished he’d woken up an hour earlier. He had his old car keys with him, not the exact ones but copies he’d made before selling it. Just in case. Of course this was a different car. But those manufacturers were cheap bastard fools and his key slid unresisted into the lock.

No one was watching. He pretended to be looking through the window as if he, seventy-six-year-old William McKelvey, had won the lottery at five in the morning and decided to spend it on this bomb that had a price of $34,999.99 crayoned in red wax onto its windshield. The key was in the lock and now he tried to turn it. No luck. No matter how carefully he jiggled, it wouldn’t work. Then, just because he was a stubborn old ass and he hadn’t gotten out of bed for nothing, he tried the passenger door. The lock yielded with a smooth oiled click. McKelvey opened it, leaned across to release the driver’s side. He walked around the car and let himself in. Being surrounded by the white bucket seat was like sitting in a cloud of whipped
cream. He took the key and carefully, a tiny wiggle at a time, hardly daring to hope, inserted it so-slow-slowly into the ignition. “Please go,” he said, twisting it. The engine caught immediately, a deep and powerful purr.

Two seconds later he had adjusted the driver’s seat to accommodate his long legs, reversed out of the lot, turned the corner and was cruising down Pine Street, fat tires humming in tune to the engine’s low growl. His foot barely touching the accelerator, he floated past the cop shop, then the Brewer’s Retail at the edge of town. The light made a narrow red-yellow band along the horizon and the car was skimming towards it; then gravity and impatience grabbed his foot and rammed it to the floor. The big Pontiac rocketed forward, pinning him back like an astronaut in his seat. McKelvey was laughing. Again he stamped the pedal and this time the bomb exploded, shooting him over the hill and into the sun.

After a few miles he turned off the highway and stopped to wipe the price off the windshield. As the sound of the engine drained away, a nearby crow cawed; its sharp wild call tore through the air and McKelvey looked up to see the bird gliding to rest on the top branch of a dead elm. “Good morning, crow,” he said. The crow looked down at him, startled, then flapped away cawing into the morning sky. McKelvey began winding his way through the back roads, his window open. The air here was sweeter than town air could ever be, the grass thick and tangled, the maple and oak that lined the fields heavy with their brilliant loads of green, the rising light.

He rounded the corner that the swamp flooded every spring and suddenly his chest filled up with a terrible homesick feeling he wouldn’t have known he could still have. Even before the house, his eyes went to the sign. It was centred in front of
the row of pine trees he and Carl had transplanted one day when Carl was just six years old and happy to go anywhere with his father in the big pick-up. That summer Carl was always playing in the truck, jumping in and out of the box, trying to climb into the front seat to get at the radio. Evenings at twilight McKelvey would find his son stretched full length in the truck seat, baseball glove clutched like a teddy bear to his heart, listening mouth open and mesmerized to the country music flooding through the oversized Motorola AM/FM McKelvey had hung beneath the dashboard of his old Ford.

RICHARDSON REAL ESTATE
, the sign read. Big black letters against a green background with a telephone number beneath. At the side of the front yard, near the road and where the bugs were always the worst, was a set of swings that hadn’t rusted yet.

The house. Like the Pontiac it had turned white: the straight polished gleam of its new aluminum siding taunted him like the echo of a two-handed slap. “Tastefully renovated” was how the ad described it. Reading the description of his old farm had made him so angry he blushed.

“Country waterfront jewel,” he had read aloud, sitting on the porch of the R&R. “Century home.” He remembered hanging from his father’s huge hand as they wandered through the house for the first time. The damp musty smell of the wet basement rising through the rotting pine-planked floors he
would eventually replace with hardwood. The peeling mildewed wallpaper. The windows with more spiderwebs than glass.
Waterfront jewel … rural playground … safe swimming in Dead Swede Lake
. He’d cut the advertisement out of the newspaper, put it in his fishing vest, then kept pulling it out to see if it was still true—like a love letter or a bottle of rye that knew how to fill itself in the dark. A couple of days later the Pontiac had appeared.

A black chain was draped between the gateposts. He undid it, drove in, put the chain back in place. He cruised slowly down the driveway, approaching the metal-clad box that had once been his house with all the caution due an enemy fortress, continued past the kitchen door and parked behind the chicken coop so the car wouldn’t be visible from the road. The sun was fully up now, sending brilliant shards of light from the new aluminum windows, the shiny metal door, the white siding. It was amazing that they could buy a man’s life like this, then turn it into a tin box looking like it needed to be kicked in.
Century home
.

This was as far as he had planned: to get the car, drive it to the old farm, park where he couldn’t be seen.

But now he was at the house itself, at the doorway he had passed through so many tens of thousands of times. Despite everything they’d done to the outside of this tastefully renovated waterfront jewel, he could feel his mouth forming into a stupid grin, his eyes closing as though inside this bizarrely deformed memory-house his youth was waiting to be stepped into again like an old coat miraculously converted into a handsome new garment. He was sweating and clinging to the brass handle of the new door with its matched metal-vinyl self-hung casing. He was wishing he was back in bed at the R&R
listening to the news and the birds squabbling in the feeders. If only Elizabeth would suddenly appear.

The thought of Elizabeth steadied him. He straightened up, looked at the white panelled door with its half-ring of half-moon peek-a-boo windows. Like the swings, the siding, the newly shingled roof, the door made him wonder about the people who’d lived there. Of course they had ripped out the old hand pump in front of the house—a man couldn’t even get a drink of water without going inside. He turned away from the house and went to the chicken coop. The electric meter was still there. He threw the master switch. The previous owners had used the coop for storing wood and at one end of the small woodpile they’d left a splitting axe. It had a long hickory handle, the varnish still unworn, and a good solid weight that swung like a comforting pendulum as he limped back across the grass towards the new door.

His shoes were soaked through with dew and he had a sudden memory of himself as a boy, a day like this, barefoot in this very grass, grass so wet he could feel the juice squirting between his toes as he ran.

The rotting wooden steps had been replaced by poured concrete. McKelvey positioned himself carefully, stiffened his bad knee, swung back and then torqued his two hundred and forty plus pounds into low gear as he powered the butt end of the axe into the gleaming brass handle. The lock gave way but when the door swung open McKelvey saw not his nostalgic old kitchen but a great sweep of whiteness that looked like an oversized bathroom in search of a piss-pot. White tiles, white counters and stove, white-enamelled sink, white walls and ceiling, even a white ice-making refrigerator.

McKelvey went to the sink and pulled hard on the new tap. It shot out a thick stream of water that ricocheted off the
bottom of the sink and into his face. The telephone rang. A loud old-fashioned bell that started his heart racing and for a moment he was sure that if he picked it up he would hear Elizabeth. For the first time in a decade, he could remember her voice: dry, affectionate, yet with a built-in twist that announced—or was it insisted?—that between her and every other living being was a space that could never be crossed. Then he wondered if the telephone meant someone was calling who had reason to expect an answer. Frightened, he grabbed the axe and bolted outside.

By the time he was back in the comforting whipped-cream leather of the driver’s seat, had the big motor purring and awaiting his orders, his stomach was going again. But instead of returning to the road, he drove into the heart of his old farm, going between the barns to pick up an old tractor trail that wound between the fences of two hayfields, through the
vintage maple bush
, down into the swamp between the maples and the lake. The trail was long unused, the hay uncut, and as he eased the car along the overgrown track between the fields, there were moments when the clover and alfalfa obscured his view before swishing beneath the bumper. In the deep shade of the maple bush the grass was shorter but two or three times he had to stop to remove a fallen limb. Each time he stepped out of the car he left the motor running, afraid that any unguarded moment of silence might drown him.
Safe swimming
. At the edge of the swamp he stopped and threw in the axe. Here the old trail turned soft and boggy. When the wheels started to spin he slowed to a crawl and then, just to see what would happen, he tried accelerating through it. The big tires whined briefly before the car began to settle. He opened the door. The wheels were half sunk into the mud.

McKelvey grabbed the roof and hauled himself to his feet. His knee locked and he had to massage it again before he could limp around the car and
assess
the situation. Thirty years ago he’d dumped a few loads of sand to keep this stretch of swampy track out of the water. At the time he’d thought about solving the problem for eternity by mixing in some gravel and ditching the sides so the water could escape. But that would have been an extra week’s work. Better just to use the road in late November, after the fall rains, when the frost was in the ground and a thin crust of snow lay on top. He would load up his chainsaw and drive back in the old truck with a couple of sandwiches and a thermos of coffee. A few hours later he’d have enough wood to spend the rest of the day splitting and stacking.

Now the leaves were thick and green. And even though the sky was clear and the sun high, there was a ripe marshy smell.

Mud had spattered the car’s fenders and doors. McKelvey got onto a dry spot behind the trunk and opened it to search for a shovel. Not that he would have used it.
“Nyet!
Absolutely forbidden,” Dr. Knight had decreed. “No physical exertion. No exercise. Nothing a pregnant woman wouldn’t do.” This last had mystified McKelvey since Elizabeth, when pregnant, had done all sorts of things, many impossible for him even when his knee worked, his heart hadn’t needed a valve job, and that tractor tire around his gut had been just a few extra layers of muscle, beer and bumbleberry cake.

There was a loud crack. A porcupine that had hoped to scramble unseen up a young maple came crashing through the branches and landed in a juniper bush a few feet away. As it began to waddle off, McKelvey felt something release in his lungs, as if for the last eight years at the R&R, without his even knowing, his breath had been blocked. Now the swamp smell
broke down into the odour of rank ferns, beaver shit, fast-growing marsh grass, spruce pitch, maple bark, decomposing bullrushes, frog breath, honeysuckle, a dozen, a hundred, a thousand different messages that crowded and fluttered through his brain like swarms of moths released from a long-closed trunk. He began to hear the peepers, the frogs, the crackling footsteps of the porcupine, the movement of bird wings through the air, the mud bubbling around the Pontiac he’d taken from Luke Richardson’s lot.

He reached into his fishing vest, broke off a hunk of cheese with his fingers, wrapped it in salami. He repeated this until the supplies he’d taken from the R&R were used up and the anxious edge in his stomach had settled into a dull digestive warmth. He realized the phone had spooked him out of inspecting the rest of the house. Maybe the bedroom he’d once shared with Elizabeth now had a four-poster with a canopy. The old parlour with wallpaper that had been peeling for sixty years might be a haven warmed by a fireplace with a marble hearth. Or have, built right into the wall, one of those wood-stoves with glass doors through which you could contemplate the fire and remind yourself of the days when you were a Neanderthal roasting up a nice chunk of hairy elephant.

McKelvey found a few dead branches and pushed them into the mud under the tires for traction. He climbed back into the car. His shoes—heavy and caked with the slick clay-rich mud—attached themselves to the floormats, which he considered might be useful under the wheels if the wood didn’t work. Brute force was for the young and the brainless, those whose bones were still green and pliable. Now was the age of wisdom and cunning. He switched on the motor. It gurgled enthusiastically. McKelvey pushed the accelerator to the floor.