Our Daily Bread (3 page)

And so this afternoon passed—grilled cheese and coffee and
Silas
Marner.
Around four, the wind rattled the door and she looked up again, frowning, but it was no one. Just the little Evans girl, Ivy, walking in the determined way she had, head down into the wind, gait longer than seemed possible, given the length of her legs. She looked over her shoulder once, quickly, and Dorothy was struck by her unhappy expression. The voices of other children skittered on the wind, but Dorothy couldn't make out the words. Ah well, none of her business.

Do you then expect that your mother would be glad to see you—that she would spread her mantle over you and take you up to heaven? Oh, if she were told that you were at the gate, she would hasten down to say, “O my sinning child, you cannot enter heaven. Into this holy place, nothing can by any means enter that
“worketh abomination or maketh a lie.”

You cannot—no, you cannot come!” If it were left to your own mother to decide the question of your admission, you could not come in. She would not open heaven's gate for your admission. She knows you would disturb the bliss of heaven. She knows you would mar its purity and be an element of discord in its sympathies and in its songs. The justice of God will not allow you to participate in the joys of the saints. His relations to the universe make it indispensable that He should protect his saints from such society as you. They have had their discipline of trial in such society long enough: the scenes of their eternal reward will bring everlasting relief from this torture of their holy sympathies. His sense of propriety forbids that He should give you a place among His pure and trustful children. It would be so unfitting—so unsuitable! It would throw such discord into the sweet songs and sympathies of the holy.

—Reverend Charles G. Finney, President, Oberlin College,
visiting preacher, Church of Christ Returning, September 29, 1852

Albert woke with his heart already pounding
. He didn't remember his dream, exactly. But it had been one of the bad ones. Some people tried to grab their dreams as they slipped under the surface of consciousness, but Albert pushed the spectres as far from his day-mind as he could. A smell remained, like gunpowder residue—acrid, but sweaty-dirty, like the breath of a man who has consumed sardines and creamed corn and beer—a familiar smell. He shook his head, blew out his lips so his breath sucked nothing of the terror back into him. The instant of waking was the only moment when one might consider Albert superstitious, when some remnant of his child-self lingered, before he stuffed it back down into The Hole, the solitary confinement of his unconscious.

Awareness of his queasy stomach and sawdust mouth slid in on the sunlight nudging through the hole in the sheet pegged over the window, even as the flickering horrors of his dream dissipated. The pillow smelled of mildew. Something crusty had dried on the blanket. He blindly reached around on the floor next to the foldout bed and found a bottle, empty.

Albert had been drunk last night. But not drunk enough. Yesterday was a shitty day. It had started off all right. Just another day with not much on his schedule except for chopping wood for the stove. He'd been using the ancient splitter near the main house when Dr. Hawthorne arrived around noon, his shiny target-red Volvo moving through the trees up the winding road to the compound. The kids appeared like tame squirrels from their various nooks and crannies, and flocked around his car. They looked like Third World beggars with their dirty hands out. Dr. Hawthorne, small and trim in his grey wool coat, stepped out of the car, his trousers tucked into rubber boots to protect them from the mud.

“Hey, now, you kids,” the doctor said, smiling a white smile under his thin, carefully trimmed moustache. “You're not looking for candy, are you? You don't want to rot your teeth, do you?”

“I'm loosing a tooth,” said Frank. “See?” He waggled his tongue against the wobbling incisor.

Brenda sucked on her fingers and looked up at the doctor with wide eyes. He bent down and lifted her chin with his long-fingered, girlish hands. “What's this? What's that around your mouth? Are you a dirty girl?”

“No,” said Brenda. She wriggled and turned.

“Impetigo. Look at those oozy blisters.” He let go of her face and looked at the rest of the children. “You'll probably all get it now.” He sighed and looked long-suffering. “Such a shame. Lucky I've got antibiotic cream. I'm not sure whether I should give you treats.”

“Yes, please,” the children said. “Please, please, please.”

“Oh, all right then.” Hawthorne opened the trunk of his car and pulled out a box of granola bars. The children grabbed, ripped off the wrappers and stuffed their mouths, not caring if they consumed bits of paper with the nuts and raisins and oats.

“Greedy guts,” said the doctor, pulling his black bag out of the back seat. He glanced at Albert. “Albert. How are you?”

“Good enough, I don't need your treats.” Albert spat through his front teeth.

“Glad to hear it. A man should be able to feed himself.”

Fat Felicity opened the door of the house, her hair in greasy hanks, her housecoat stained. “What's up, doc?” she laughed.

“That never gets old, Felicity,” said Hawthorne. “Thought I'd stop in and see how Carrie's getting along.” Carrie had had bronchitis and couldn't stop coughing. “Are you using the cough medicine?”

“Yeah, but we don't have much left.”

“You can't have gone through that already, Felicity. It's not recreational, you know.” Hawthorne climbed the steps.

“Tell that to Dan. You coming in?”

“I thought I might, for a few minutes.”

Griff climbed up the stairs behind him, smiling, gnawing on the last inch of his granola bar. The little boy plucked at the doctor's coat.

“You got more?” he said.

The doctor laughed and picked the little boy up, so that he straddled the man's hip. Albert watched him.
Carries the kid like a goddamn woman.
They disappeared into the house and the rest of the kids, looking for more handouts, followed them in. Albert finished chopping kindling and carried it back to his cabin. Cindy came through the woods wearing her nightgown, a hunting jacket and rubber boots. Her coat was open and her breasts swung braless. She was just a couple of years older than Albert and even though she'd had Ruby when she was seventeen, her breasts were still good. She had her hair up in a high ponytail.

“You seen Ruby?”

Albert jerked his chin in the direction of the house. “The doctor's in.”

“Huh. He bring any food?”

“Says Brenda's got impetigo.”

“Fuck. Again? Lloyd don't keep those kids clean.”

“What do you want Ruby for?”

“Give me a break, Albert. Ray's pissed she wet the bed again.” Ray was Cindy's dad. Cindy stomped off in the direction of the house to get Ruby.

An hour later she ran back, Ruby screaming in her arms. Dislocated shoulder. Thank God the good doctor was still around.

And now, this morning, with the memory of Ruby's cries in his head and the awful pop her shoulder made when the doctor yanked it back in its socket, Albert moved gingerly, cautiously, with full awareness that sudden movements could bring on vomiting. He made his way to the shelf where a gallon-sized plastic bottle of water stood. He raised it to his mouth, spilled some of it down his bare chest, corrected his aim and drank as though there was a leak in his stomach. The cold water made his belly cramp and he gagged, thought he would throw up, but didn't. Albert hung his head.

“It's not fair,” he said. Although, had anyone asked him what, precisely, was not fair, he would not have been able to say. Life, he supposed, although he knew better than to expect that. But there was a greater injustice. How hard he tried. All the effort he put in to being not like
them.
The Others. He did what he could. What more was expected of him? Why did he wake up in the morning feeling like the best thing ahead of him was a long jump and a short rope? Life asked too much. It ground a man down like sausage meat. He was doing his best. And he had dreams, just like anybody. And if his dream sometimes slipped into fantasy, of having a big house with a pool in the backyard—blue as sapphire, twinkling in the sun like silver and diamonds—with a room for each of the kids and a pretty little nanny, someone halfway between Mary Poppins and Jenna Jameson, then why not? It could happen. Look at all those hip-hop millionaires. They weren't educated. They didn't get breaks. They took what they wanted, constructed and bent the world to suit them. It took guts. It took will, was all. And Albert had guts. He had will. It took a lot of willpower not to do the things it was possible to do in a place like this, coming from the people he came from.

He should be fucking proud of himself.

But he wasn't.

He pushed the sheet away from the window, slowly. There was a break in the weather, one of those lovely not-quite-spring-yet days when the streams running down the hillside made a sort of tinkling music and the birds sang loudly, revelling in the possibility of avian romance and the smell of thawing earth was muddy and fecund. Albert put his hand against the glass. Warm, even. Hard to believe it was the same world as last night, when the wind had whipped the voices around the tree trunks as though lashing them to the bark, when the rain had banged on the doors like tiny fists, when the wet had dripped through the roof like tears and the chill had crept in through the chinks like an orphan.

Albert thought he'd sleep for another hour or two and then get the hell away from the compound for a few hours. Just give himself a mini-holiday. Movement in the clearing caught his eye. Eight-year-old Frank, Lloyd and Joanie's kid, was near the outhouse. He was still wearing his pyjamas. Blue ones, with flowers on them, hand-me-downs from one of the girls probably. He hit something on the ground with a stick; hit it hard, repeatedly, as if he was trying to kill it, whatever it was.

Albert let the sheet fall over the glass and fell back into bed with an arm flung over his eyes.

By two in the afternoon, the temperature spiked, and Albert flung open the cabin door to air out the musty mixture of bacon fat, cigarette smoke, stale beer and his own cooped-up body. He decided to vacate the mountain for the afternoon. No work. No field. No deals. A holiday.

As he drove through town he hung his arm out the truck window. The air smelled of mucky water and earth and the faint sweet twinge of decay from the clumps of slimy leaves cluttering the storm drains. It was the ideal day to hang out by the river, one of his favourite places—deep in the woods, beneath the old stone bridge, long closed to anything except foot traffic.

He parked by the road and walked in, boots squelching in the soggy earth. When he reached the river he lay in the sun on a great slab of jutting rock, and watched the swirl and suck of the deep eddies. The sun relaxed Albert's neck muscles and made his feet tingle and legs twitch and inspired daydreams. It wouldn't last. Flocks of small sheep-shaped clouds dotted the sky, prophesying more rain on the way tomorrow, but today, who cared about tomorrow?

Albert rolled his jacket up under his head as a pillow. The dark rock acted as a heat magnet and even in just a T-shirt and sweater, he was warm. He smoked a cigarette. He watched the clouds. He listened to the gurgle and rush of water around the stones. Soon the world would be a humid stinking soup, and the garbage piles on the mountain would fester and swell. Tempers would flare in the stew of summer just as they did in the locked-in freeze of winter. And with meth around, with The Uncles branching out into an entirely new product line, things at the compound were even more dangerous, even more unpredictable. He'd told the kids to stay the fuck away from the trailer. Meth cooks blew themselves up all the time and they often blew up their kids as well. He hated the over-crowded isolation of the mountain, all of them living like rats in a cage, eating their own young.
Don't think about it.
He flicked his cigarette butt into the river, closed his eyes and tried to let the day be the day, tried to keep the future out.

He was slipping into a delicious doze when a loud
gloop-plop!
in the water startled him. Not a fish. Heavy. Threatening. Instantly he was awake and crouching, looking for the source of the sound.

“Sorry,” said a voice. “I didn't see you.”

A kid stood on the top of the bridge. Skinny. Pale. With funny, heavy eyebrows. Hands in the pockets of baggy jeans. Too-big windbreaker.

“What the fuck are you doing?” said Albert.

“Nothing.”

Albert watched the kid. He looked familiar. Someone he'd seen around town.

“I just dropped a rock in,” the kid said, and he looked embarrassed.

“Big fucking rock,” said Albert. The kid had seen him start; did he think he'd scared him? He lay back against the rock.

“Bridge is coming apart.”

“You gonna tear it down single-handed?” No answer. “What's your name, kid?”

“Bobby. Bobby Evans.”

“Come here, Bobby Evans.”

The kid hesitated for only a moment and then scuffled down the bank. Once he made the rocks he was agile, sure-footed even with the untied sneakers. Albert thought he probably wasn't as frail as he looked. He rolled over onto one elbow and watched the kid approach. He could tell by the way he kept taking quick peeks at Albert, and chewing on his lower lip, that the scrutiny made him nervous. This relaxed Albert. When Bobby neared him the boy didn't sit, but stood, as though waiting for an invitation. Albert squinted up at him. “Aren't you supposed to be in school?”

“Yeah, well,” said the boy.

“You want a smoke?” said Albert, shaking a cigarette from his pack of Camels. He gestured the boy should sit.

“Okay, thanks,” said Bobby.

When he'd lit his own cigarette, Albert held his lighter out to the boy. Bobby puffed inexpertly, holding the butt tightly between his thumb and index finger. He coughed, and glanced at Albert.

“So, Bobby Evans, what are you doing out here?”

Bobby shrugged.

“Yeah, me too,” said Albert. “My name's Albert.”

“Nice to meet you,” said Bobby.

“Albert Erskine.”

“I know who you are.”

“Oh, you do, huh?”

“Sure. I seen you in town.”