Once We Had a Country (24 page)

Inside is a cardboard box, and in the box is a letter along with a little statue made out of fired clay. Maggie turns the
figure over in wonder. It’s a long-haired woman eight inches tall, muddy brown and unglazed, mounted on a short pedestal of rough cement. The limbs are stubby, the body shaped in such a way as to suggest the woman’s wearing a robe. Thick lips have been painted on her face, and there are black dots for eyes, while a hairline crack runs around her waist. The thing looks crudely made, and Maggie’s surprised that it survived the journey intact. Setting it down, she turns to the letter and begins to read.

The first time she reads it, she’s barely taking in the words. Then she checks the parcel and sees it’s postmarked August 14, a week before his missed phone call to Gran. So the letter proves nothing about whether he’s all right. There’s no hint of anything to come, no mention of trouble, unless she counts the reference to Yia Pao falling in with bad company.

Carrying the letter and clay figure to the kitchen, she sets them on the counter and dials Gran’s number. A man picks up. It’s Uncle Morley, and he turns sarcastic when he realizes it’s her, calling her the prodigal granddaughter.
Then he says Gran has been sick. Just a stomach bug, but she got dehydrated. She’ll be out of the hospital by tonight, and the family is taking good care of her; Maggie shouldn’t worry her little head about it. He asks if she wants to leave a message, and she says no, desperate to get off the line. She’ll try again tomorrow when Gran’s back home.

With the phone returned to its hook, she picks up the statue and takes it to the living room. When she was a girl, she and her father had a ceramic likeness of Saint Clare atop their television set, because it was said that placing one there was supposed to improve reception. Now she tries perching the clay figure on top of the silver TV. It takes some time before she can get the balance right. If Brid were here, she’d make some remark about hopeless superstitions, or perhaps she’d simply say that whatever gets them PBS is fine with her.

That evening, George Ray doesn’t come to dinner for the second night in a row. Looking out from the mud room door, she can see his silhouette pass back and forth across the barracks window. She should tell him that Brid has left, that it’s safe for him to enter the house, but she stays inside and eats cold cereal standing up, then returns to cleaning. When she goes to the bathroom, she begins to close the door behind her before realizing she doesn’t have to. Leaving it open, she keeps an ear out for the telephone or a car in the drive. Right now Fletcher might be with Cybil. They could be eating at some fancy restaurant. He might
be sleeping with her. Maggie should go and make a pass at George Ray to get even. No, it’s a petty thought. Besides, why does she think she’d have any more luck than Brid?

It’s midnight before she gets into bed. Her chest hurts, her skin’s clammy, and she needs a cigarette. Sleep comes not as a drop into oblivion but as a glass plate slipped over consciousness, distorting the world. Something left undone—she can’t remember what, and she’s panicked at forgetting. A voice in the attic, low and hostile. What did it say? A train about to leave, too many people, her baggage lost. Searching on a beach littered with stranded fish. The train disappearing across the sea.

When she wakes, it doesn’t feel like waking because it hasn’t felt like sleep. Her forehead’s slick with sweat. She tries to stand and her stomach revolts, her legs buckle; she just makes it to the bathroom in time. Stumbling back to bed, she pulls the sheets around her and shivers. It’s hours before she floats to the fever’s surface, and this time she has only reached the hall when the sickness overtakes her. Somehow she has the energy to clean it up. Then she sits in the bathroom and shakes awhile, weeping for herself, for her reduction to the status of a suffering thing. She should call somebody, but whom? George Ray? No phone in the barracks, and she couldn’t make it out there on her own like this. Fletcher. What could he do? It’s the middle of the night. There’s no one.

Twice more she tries to rise, and each time nausea sends her into heaves, trying to expel something that isn’t there or can’t be dislodged. Her throat burns, and there’s a film of bile on her teeth. This is what it means to be alone. No
one nurses you. No one finds your body till they come to read the meter. Then Fletcher will have to return and deal with the aftermath.

The first light of morning slices through the blinds. Someone knocking on the front door. A dream? There it is again, faintly penetrating the fever’s gauze. She tries to call out, but her voice fails her. Pray, Maggie, pray. All the nuts and oddballs turn to prayer as a last resort. She doesn’t need a miracle, just a bit of strength; it doesn’t seem too much to ask. Even God must lose patience, though, with those who call only in their hour of need, not to worship but to bargain, despite their bad credit, proffering devotion in return for His love. It’s her father she wants. Not the man from the last months, intimate only with God. She wants the father from her youth, who stayed home from work when she was ill and sang to her. He’s the one who should be next to her now.

As if in answer, she hears a noise. Footsteps on the stairs. Imagined saviours and tormentors approach her bedroom door. Brid or Fletcher, or Lydia Dodd and her red-haired cousin. In the end, it’s George Ray who speaks her name.

“I’m sick,” she tells him.

He comes to the bedside and places a palm on her forehead. “How long have you been lying here?” he asks, but her throat is too parched for her to reply, and besides, she isn’t certain of the answer. When he goes to leave the room, she reaches for him, afraid he won’t come back. A minute later he returns with two Aspirins and a glass of water. He helps her to sit and feeds the tablets to her, tilting the glass carefully to her lips. Then, after another trip
to the bathroom, he lays a wet face cloth over her brow and sits next to her until she falls asleep.

When she awakens, it’s the afternoon, the face cloth is newly cool and moistened, the water glass refilled, and the fever has broken. She thinks of God. She didn’t actually pray, she wants to tell Him. He can’t claim any credit for this. She can’t be held in hock for the mere invoking of a name.

Still too woozy to get up, she stays in bed. At some point she sees George Ray in the doorway, and with a heavy arm she beckons him. He enters with porridge and juice on a wicker tray.

“Sweet of you,” she croaks, trying to sit up.

“What else could I do?”

“I’m not very hungry,” she warns, but she manages a few bites. The cold juice stings and soothes her throat at once.

By the time it’s dark again, she feels well enough to be bored. He helps her to the living room, holding her elbow on the stairs, then brings down her bedding so she can lie on the couch and watch television. The Olympics are over. She ends up dozing on and off through an interview with the prime minister about the Canadian election. Every so often George Ray stops by to sit with her.

“Brid’s gone,” she says to him at one point. “You and I are the only ones.” He nods. “Fletcher will be back next week.” At this he nods again, if more slowly, and she wonders what he’s thinking, though she can’t bring herself to ask.

Eventually he leaves and television too grows dull. On unsteady legs, she enters the kitchen to find him bent over the cast iron skillet on the stove. The smell of frying liver turns her stomach.

“Don’t worry, it’s not for you,” he says, seeing her face. “Your dinner’s still to come. This is for him.” He gestures to the table. At first she doesn’t see anyone, but then there’s the flick of a tail and she perceives the slate-grey body sitting on one of the chairs. It watches the stove intently with two black and yellow eyes like blots of dark vinegar in oil.

“Is that John-John?” she says, amazed. The cat doesn’t move at the name’s utterance. She has only ever seen John-John streaking from the Centaurs’ car, and later among the grainy shadows of her film. This cat looks rougher for wear than the one she remembers; the tip of its tail is bald like a rat’s, and when it jumps down to rub against her, it favours one of its hind legs.

“Don’t know any John-John,” says George Ray. “I call him Elliot.”

“Where’d you find him?”

“He found me—scratched at the barracks door two nights ago.” George Ray gives the liver a stir.

“I doubt you need to cook that,” she points out. “He’d eat it raw.”

“He likes it better this way.” George Ray removes the skillet from the stove, cuts the liver into pieces, and deposits it on a plate. The cat meows loudly as it’s set before him. Maggie’s unable to take her eyes off the creature and resists an urge to pick him up. When she looks back to George Ray, he’s dicing an onion.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“Making your dinner.”

“I can do that,” she says weakly. She doesn’t have the energy to protest as she should.

“You’re sick. Sit and talk to me if you like.”

So she sits and they talk, although George Ray does most of the speaking, as if he knows it will be easier for her just to listen. He tells her of the skunk he saw scuttling around the corner of the barracks yesterday, the first one he has seen after seven summers working in this country, although he’s smelled the creatures often enough. He talks about how the knots in the trunks of cherry trees remind him of faces, so that he thinks of them as people living in the orchard, from the crone near the wrecker’s wall to the little boy in the back corner. Maggie’s still too lightheaded to take in properly what he’s saying, but it’s pleasant listening to him. He doesn’t make any allusions to Fletcher’s absence. He doesn’t lay bare his neuroses, demanding to be accepted. He doesn’t dump his troubles on her, whatever they may be with a wife and children a thousand miles away. She catches the scent of the garlic he’s frying and bursts into tears.

“I’m sorry,” she says, wiping at her eyes with her sleeve. “It’s just that you’re being so nice to me. I can’t remember the last time someone was so nice.” As she says this, she thinks of the day Fletcher presented her with the projection wall in the playroom. It seems like years ago.

George Ray offers her his handkerchief. “You should remember I’m getting paid,” he says. As far as she can tell, there’s no irony in the statement.

“Please don’t say that. You shouldn’t diminish it, especially when—when I know you prefer it on your own.”

He stays silent awhile, and for the first time with him today she feels awkward. It’s as if her words are floating
between them, material things he’s inspecting for their stress points and defects. She doesn’t like it.

“Do I prefer it on my own?” he says. “I don’t know. It goes with living here.”

A motion across the kitchen catches her eye. The cat has licked its plate clean and lazily walks away, stretching its legs one by one.

“You told me you were learning to be alone,” she says to George Ray.

“Yes. It’s a long lesson.”

“Has it been so bad, all these years?”

He shrugs. “At the Beaudoin farm there were a dozen men. I was almost never on my own.”

“Wouldn’t you rather be with them?”

For this question he needs no time to consider the answer. “Sometimes on Saturday nights I still go with them to St. Catharines, watch them drink and get chatty-chatty with the girls. That’s enough for me. My wife worries about Canadian women, but it’s living with a lot of men that ruins you.” At the mention of his wife she thinks she detects an uneasiness, as if he has suddenly remembered where he’s standing.

From the other side of the room comes a retching sound. Elliot, né John-John, is hunched over, neck outstretched. He brings up a stream of undigested liver. George Ray makes a face like it’s to be expected.

“He did the same this morning.”

“Poor thing,” she says. “Maybe it’s because he’s vegetarian.”

George Ray gives her a quizzical look, then goes over
to pick him up. Elliot seems unconcerned by what has just transpired, and he tolerates the attention only a few seconds before pushing himself away. George Ray sets him down and retrieves a rag from the sink to clean up the mess.

“Too much throwing up today,” he says.

He feeds her rice with peas, her stomach handling it better than she feared. After dinner he goes back to the barracks and the cat mews at the door to be let out. She’s tempted to keep him inside; what if he should disappear again? There’s no litter box in the house, though, so reluctantly she opens the door and watches him trot off, tracing the perimeter of the backyard by slinking next to hedges and fences until he reaches the barracks. Eventually the door opens, and perhaps it’s only her imagination, but as the cat’s admitted, it looks as though George Ray steals a glance to see if anyone else is there too.