Elizabeth and After (7 page)

His eyes were closed. The way they’d been the night Carl told him it was over with Chrissy. When his eyes had opened again, he’d started shouting that Carl was cursed like every McKelvey—cursed to drink and fight and lose or kill his woman and Carl should be thankful at least that he’d had a daughter and not a son.

Now William McKelvey put his newspaper down and reached into his fishing vest for a package of cigarettes. His hands were shaking.

“Liver,” McKelvey said. “Liver, kidneys, pancreas, stomach, gall bladder—the whole thing.” He squeezed the package open, managed to extract a cigarette and get it into his mouth. “Like it’s one big septic tank in there, right? Pour shit in one end, clean water flows out the other.” He reached into another of his pockets, found a Zippo, flipped it open and watched the flame dance while his hand trembled. “Then it gets plugged up, right? Doesn’t work any more. Put shit in one end, shit comes out the other. Or alcohol. You’re supposed to wake up the next morning sober. I wake up like this, only worse. Takes two weeks before I can walk a straight line.”

“You lost the habit,” Carl said. “Good thing or you’d be dead.” His father’s face and eyes were tinged with yellow. The
way they’d been when he’d collapsed and the doctor had told him to quit drinking or he’d be dead in six months. McKelvey, being McKelvey, had circled the day on the calendar and kept on. At the end of six months, the yellow had turned orange and he was staggering around the farm like a walking cesspool. Carl had come down one morning to find his father lying on the kitchen floor, panting like a cow in labour.

“Coffee,” McKelvey had commanded.

Carl had made him coffee, put it on the floor beside him. Then he’d taken down the bottle of brandy and set it beside the coffee. “Go ahead. It’s fifteen minutes before I have to go to work. If you die first I can get the day off.”

“Fuck you,” McKelvey had said.

That was when they still had the farm. Or what was left of it. All the stock gone except for one bull and the few cows it serviced to give them some calves to sell for beef. A couple of tractors they spent most of their time repairing so they could get in enough hay to winter the cattle.

“You should have seen this place in my father’s day,” William McKelvey would say. At some point, Carl didn’t know how or when, his father had lost it—
it
being the ability to get up every morning and make the farm a farm instead of a mass of unpredictable vegetation and broken machinery, the ability to go out there and do whatever had to be done instead of wandering about the countryside, a bottle in his pocket, or sitting at the kitchen table tied to his coffee pot and the newspaper. “I could have done it with her,” McKelvey told Carl, and Carl first thought he meant if Elizabeth had lived. Then he realized that McKelvey meant not only her presence but her cooperation, he meant he could have done it if she’d stayed at home instead of going out to work—he could have done it if she had done it for him.

“You want coffee?” The door had opened and a girl was standing beside them holding a tray with two full cups, containers of sugar and milk. She was short, black-haired, almost pretty, and she was smiling down at McKelvey.

“Meet my boss,” McKelvey said complacently. “Her name is Moira and I mostly do what she tells me.”

“My father,” Carl said, nodding at McKelvey.

“One of my favourites,” Moira said. She had a quiet voice and as she set down the tray Carl could almost see her judging him, trying to make sense out of the fact that not only was William McKelvey his father, but he William McKelvey’s son.

Carl McKelvey looked out at his truck. Being born William McKelvey’s son was like being born with a limp or a blind eye or a birthmark on the face.
“I
‘ll be seeing you,” Carl said. He stood up and started across the lawn. Now he was really back. Carl McKelvey, the McKelvey boy, another fuck-up McKelvey whose fists moved faster than his brain, always ready to lash out or wrap themselves around a nearby bottle; after everything that had happened he was back and pretty soon he’d probably either be in jail or in hospital. One certain thing: he had a long way to go before he’d be splayed out like his father on a fat wooden chair with a pretty girl to pat his head and bring him coffee.

Later that night, his first in the Balfer place—trying to drive out the ghosts with the smell of cooking, the sound of his own voice, his boots on the floor, the disorganized pile of possessions he was unloading into the centre of the living room—he wondered how it would be to have a woman here, what kind of wild echo that woman’s voice might find in the empty rooms.

The truth was, thinking about women he had never met was a way of avoiding Chrissy: the way she’d looked opening
the door to him, her eyes larger, more liquid than they used to be; her tawny hair cut shorter; her lips pale, full, lips he’d kissed for the first time on a New Year’s Eve, kissed while he was stealing a dance with her from Fred Verghoers, kissed then kept his lips on hers through the whole song and when it was over they were sealed together, run into one another like melted candles.

More than three years had passed since, following the last and worst fight with Chrissy, he had driven to the army surplus store in Kingston, bought himself a giant cardboard suitcase, stuffed it with the contents of the bottom drawer of the big maple dresser Chrissy’s uncle had given them as a wedding present. Three
long
years, he would say in those imaginary conversations he had with himself or Chrissy, rambling interviews he would conduct while driving his truck or punching holes for new trees in the grainy soil of the forest floor. Three
long
years, he would say, the
he
who believed fate, alcohol and an uncontrolled temper had set him and Chrissy on separate roads, roads that would converge as soon as his sins were atoned for, the devil bottle put aside, the temper mastered by calm reflection on the pulse of the universe, or failing that, the fact that its main victims were himself and his daughter. But no matter which of his various selves held the floor, those years
had
been long, and the more time that passed the more cut loose and adrift he felt, unable to remember being in sight of shore, unable to remember if shore existed or if its memory was merely invented to give geography to his loneliness.

After leaving Chrissy he moved into a half-finished lakeside cottage with Ray Johnson from the lumber yard. They’d played together on the West Gull Junior Hornets for a couple of years before graduating to the Hornets proper—two-thirds
of a second line where he provided the speed, the determination and sometimes the craziness it took to get the puck to the net where Ray could always be found holding off the enemy with his elbows.

Chrissy had told him that she was sick of his drinking and that now he could drink all he wanted. He had wanted to drink a lot, or at least enough to make a bridge across darkness to sleep and to make him sleep deeply enough that he didn’t wake up until light.

Eventually that bridge crumbled and in the middle of the night sleep would desert him. Those were the times he had gone to bed hammered but woke up even drunker. So nauseated he could no longer lie still, he would get to his feet only to lose his balance on the way to the bathroom, bouncing off the walls, grabbing furniture to keep from falling on his face. Trembling and feverish, breathing the darkness to keep himself alive, he would turn stone-cold sober while thinking that if he actually
did
manage to drink himself to death not a single person in the universe would think anything except that Carl McKelvey had got what he wanted.

“You ever hear of Socrates?” Chrissy had once shouted at him and he had immediately thought of the picture of the white-bearded man in the fat russet book she used to prop up her lamp at university. “He said all knowledge is self-knowledge. If that’s true you don’t know dick. Did you ever think of that?”

Chrissy had been bending over the couch, trying to change Lizzie. Carl snatched Lizzie away and yelled that Chrissy was “about as much mother as a half-ton truck.” Seeing her fury, he thought he’d hit the nail on the head but afterwards, repeating it to himself, he wondered exactly what he had meant. And then for some reason he asked himself how much mother
his own mother had been. All this while holding Lizzie in the crook of his arm, swaying on his heels like a boxer about to bounce off the ropes, hurtle into the centre of the ring swinging. Hurricane Carl.

Lizzie was crying.

“Give her to me.”

“No.”

“For Christ’s sakes, listen to her cry. Can’t you tell you’re scaring her? Or is that how
your
father was just scaring the piss out of you to make sure you’d end up like him?”

He was holding Lizzie, petting the side of her face, drawing his finger along the soft skin under her chin. She stopped crying, reached up with both her hands to grab at his finger.

“She’s not scared of me.”

Chrissy just shook her head and went into the kitchen. A few minutes later she came out and said, “Lunch,” her voice high and chipper, absolutely fake. Lunch. And he’d taken Lizzie into the kitchen and sat at the table eating scrambled eggs and toast while Chrissy fed Lizzie in her rabbit-decal-covered high chair, talking to both of them in her high fake voice as though she were some weird kind of television hostess who had invited them onto her program for a meal.

When Lizzie was born, Fred was the first to send a present; most men wouldn’t even
think
of such a thing, Chrissy had noted. And every time there was a dance or a party and Fred had a new girlfriend, Chrissy was the first one to get introduced. “Still burns, still yearns,” Ray had said to Carl about Fred, and sometimes Carl would catch Fred giving him the look, as though taking his measure.

By the time Carl had been living at Ray’s long enough to start feeling like his father, Ray told him Fred had ditched
his latest cheerleader, the one he’d been parading around all summer, and had moved in with Chrissy in the house on the Second Line.

T
HE DAY
C
ARL
M
C
K
ELVEY RETURNED
was the day Ned Richardson went to pay a call at Allnew Building Supplies. He parked under the big maple and slid over to the passenger seat of his truck so he could comb his hair in the visor mirror. Part of the passenger seat was patched with strips of red plastic tape which was the final chapter of another story—the sad tale of Ned Richardson and Lu-Ann Bolger. Once romantically entangled in what he considered an almost-marriage, Ned had lost Lu-Ann over an unfortunate mistake with an axe. He’d had the axe in the truck because he’d been limbing the cedar bush that morning. When he and Lu-Ann drove to town they had such an argument about her cutting her hair that when she slammed out of the truck and marched towards the hairdresser, temper coincided with carelessness: he took the axe from behind the seat and buried it right where she’d been sitting. Even as the axe made a satisfying slice through the simpering beige leatherette, Ned regretted it.

When Lu-Ann returned she saw the stuffing oozing out of the slit like ten inches of last year’s shaving cream. “You expect me to sit on that? What happened?”

“I was going to fix it after you apologized,” Ned said.

“How’d you do that anyway? Take an axe to it?”

“I guess,” Ned replied.

“I’ll say,” Lu-Ann said, slamming the door and walking away, as it turned out, for ever. Ned had waited a few seconds, for his dignity, then went over to the hardware store and bought a roll of red plastic tape—the kind you put on your bicycle or jeans to be visible in the dark. He fixed the seat, then stood in the street waiting for Lu-Ann to come back.

That had been a few weeks ago. Now the only thing he could call his own was this truck. Which wasn’t much for a Richardson, Ned considered, especially given what he’d one day have. But that would be then. This was now. Now he was twenty-three years old and so broke his wallet felt thin in his back pocket. So broke that he was sitting on his taped seat, combing his hair and using his spit to wipe the dirt off his face so he could ask Fred Verghoers for a job.

“Come on, shitface,” Ned encouraged himself, then slid out of his truck and marched towards Allnew. His heart was going like a machine gun. A Richardson walking into Allnew to beg for a job. If Luke could see him. Ned only had to imagine the contempt twisting his father’s lips to keep on.

Fred Verghoers was on a stool behind a large counter. He was wearing the red and gold vest all the employees had, except that Fred’s had a little white strip that read
MANAGER
sewn onto his pocket.

Fred was looking something up for a customer—Arnie Kincaid, the insurance man. Arnie was about a hundred and twenty years old.

“I wanted to talk to you,” Ned announced. Arnie’s big frog eyes opened up behind his glasses.

“Hello, Ned,” said Arnie. “How are you doing?”

“Pretty good,” Ned said.

“You doing some building out at your uncle’s?”

Why did Arnie Kincaid need to be here? The last thing Ned wanted was Fred to be reminded that he already had a job. Not exactly a job, more like a sentence; because of the various ways he’d disgraced himself at home he’d been exiled to his uncle’s farm to play nursemaid to old Alvin.

Fred was looking at him curiously. It was now or never.

“I came in to see if you were short someone,” Ned said. “Being the summer. I wondered if you’d have room for someone to help out.”

Fred rose to his feet. His big shoulders bulged out of his vest, his broad tanned arms were folded. Since he had declared for reeve, Fred talked as though someone was writing down his pronouncements.

“I don’t know,” Fred said, sounding surprisingly undecided. Ned’s heart jumped with hope. He couldn’t have believed he had that much hope inside him. “I guess not. We’re okay for now.”

Ned flushed. “Billy Boyce told me you were looking for someone.”

Fred turned away but kept talking, his voice again amazingly uncertain. “I might have been looking for someone who could handle the work. Someone reliable.”