The Freedom in American Songs (2 page)

She delicately disengaged.

“That last girl,” he said, “received twenty dollars a visit.”

She forgot Mrs. Ruby's bag of shavings on his floor and when she got halfway down his path he came out, holding it outstretched, and when she reached for it he held on a second longer than needed, but he let go and she was free again, on the road away from his house, and did not look back, though she knew he stood there. Around the bend she felt relief to have escaped. Alders full of snowbirds lined the road, then thick grew the spruce and fir. There were little hiding places in the thickets; places where secret boulders for sitting on lay in mounds of emerald moss, and very small glades where you could listen to snowbird songs, and where different kinds of bushes grew, like the flame tree that had fiery leaves all summer and autumn and lay now in a crowd of tumbling branches that had the colour of the leaves in them, but muted so you could hardly see it.

On the hill's seaward side rose a funny, cleared hump with a few short spruce dotted on it like children playing
Mother May
I
; motionless only because you were looking. Marianne looked away so they could move again, then whirled back on them. But they were too clever to let her catch them. They were good.

She remembered to look at the rose and its bud that had cracked into existence on the road. Near them lay a giant upturned root, like a crazy sun-wheel. There was Mrs. Ruby's house, across the road. Marianne saw no smoke—was she in? You had to go around the back since they closed the store down. Over the gate to Walter's cabbage garden ran a clothesline with cup towels on it. The store sign lay near the back door:
Ruby's Store
painted in black and green. It looked too new to be lying on the ground, the paint twinkling. Marianne knocked. A huge cat hunched on the gatepost, motionless. The head of Mrs. Ruby peeped around the door; scrawny, curious and bedraggled as a murre hatchling.

“Are you not up yet, Mrs. Ruby?”

“Yes child, we're up, come in. What were you doing over in Ralph Carlyle's house?”

“How did you …”

“Never mind, come in, child.” Mrs. Ruby wore a bright yellow blouse with black and brown zigzags that looked like buildings falling down. Walter sat at the table eating a chicken leg. The kitchen was full of cooking smells, the woodstove crackling and throwing waves of heat. Leo, the grown son, fried fish and onions in a cast iron pan.

“I've brought you a few shavings …”

“Well look, would you believe it, Walter, what the girl has brought, and her with no way of getting wood.” She flung the shavings on top of her woodpile without ceremony.

Walter, thin and ancient, appraised the armload. “Good splits they are, too.” He returned to his drumstick.

“Yes, very good ones they are too,” parroted Mrs. Ruby. She brushed her hair at the mirror by the back door and it was as if a dandelion clock had brushed its fluff. Then she took a mop leaning in a corner, threw a teacup of water over it, and mopped a spot on the floor, sending bread crusts clattering. Marianne had never seen anyone mop a floor with a cup of water, and looked to see if this act surprised Walter, but it did not.

“We're waiting for Sister Jean to come from town with the laundry. Here, Walter, take that off—you don't want Sister Jean to see that dirty old thing.” Mrs. Ruby brought an Adidas sweatshirt out of another room. “Put this on.” She rived his sweater off and pulled the new shirt over his head.

Once it was on, he kept being startled by the three white stripes down the sleeves. “I keep thinking,” he confided to Marianne, “they're on the floor.”

Mrs. Ruby spied the pan of fish and onions crackling on the stove without Leo, who'd gone upstairs.

“He goes up and leaves the pan on!” She thudded over to shake it around with a knife. It sizzled loud. The pieces of fish shone in chunks from the dark thickness of the pan. “Come look at the new calendar in the mail from Sister Jean's friend Sister Amelia in Ecuador. Marianne, come over, look!” Illustrated Bible stories. Moses and the burning bush. Jesus alone and palely loitering in limpid gardens, his beard ethereal. A verse on the back said take life one trial at a time.

“People had whiskers all over their faces at one time,” said Walter. “All you could see was a bit here and here,” he pointed at two spots above his cheekbones, “and their two eyes. Dirty-looking.”

Mrs. Ruby made a quick pounce at him across the table. “Don't go saying that, Walter. Her boyfriend has a whisker.” Her eyes were bright for battle.

“I'm not saying they should do anything about it or that it's right or wrong. I'm just saying they had them like that, the whiskers. And it's dirty-looking.”

“He's only got a small moustache,” Marianne interjected. She felt inadequate. Mrs. Ruby started talking about her other new calendar, hung over the stove, from her son in Norway. Ice, snow, coloured wooden houses.

“No different from here,” ventured Marianne.

“Sure ‘tis no different from here,” Mrs. Ruby snapped at Marianne's sentence like a trout at a worm then spat it back. She monitored the window for signs of weather, on account of Sister Jean navigating the roads. “Come over and look,” she told Marianne. “See how it's coming over that dip in the mountains.” Marianne looked out at a silkscreen of wooded hills dark in the foreground but becoming whiter with each hill. Soon the whiteness drew close, huge flakes nosing up to the steamed-up window like white moths.

“You hang your cup towels,” complained Mrs. Ruby, “and expect them to blow fresh, but the line comes down a bit and that old tomcat, look, rubs and rubs himself all over them. Here …” she gave Marianne tea in a new gold-rimmed china cup out of the good cabinet in the other room, and thrust slices of homemade bread toasted on the woodstove. “And cake, I've only got this bit left over from Christmas …” a thin piece, spiced and fragrant.

“Mr. Carlyle, the man who lives by himself, he …” Marianne wanted to ask about his thirteen Christmas cakes, but Mrs. Ruby interrupted.

“What in the name of God do you want to be tangled up with him for? Gerald—tell her.”

“Leave the girl alone, Margaret. Let her visit whoever she wants.”

“Talk about dirty-looking! It's a wonder he never …” but the door blew open and Sister Jean came carrying bags with coat-hanger hooks sticking out of their tops and the bundle somehow took up half the kitchen. She gave Marianne a conspiratorial look—Mrs. Ruby is
old
but we are not—but Marianne did not want to become part of the conspiracy.

“I'd better go,” she got up.

“Child,” protested Mrs. Ruby, “you're welcome as the flowers in May …” but the protest was a ritual. The kitchen was too full. It was bursting with heat and laundry and the kind of trivial, pent-up arguments that scurry under kitchen tables and hide behind the tea tin and the biscuit box. Mrs. Ruby ducked behind the door that led into what used to be her old shop and came out with a plastic bag knotted at the top and bulging with tins and boxes. “Here,” she slid it across the floor to Marianne.

“What's in it?”

“We'll talk about it later. Go on.”

On the road, in the falling snow, she peeked in through the knot. Spaghetti, beans, a jar of strawberry jam, and something else, rolled up … Marianne unfurled a corner and looked into the blue eyes of Jesus on Sister Amelia's calendar from Ecuador.

She took the shortcut through a field littered with mussel and winkle shells and crusts of urchins upturned like cups and full of meltwater reflecting the sky. She imagined beaks drinking from them. One tree grew in the field: the blackest spruce in the cove. In summer you always saw Ezekiel Vardy's black pony standing under the boughs. The spruce looked lonesome without the pony. She climbed over the fence and navigated the crumbling bank to the stony beach.

The beach was all green glass globules, polished, and mother-­of-pearl cracked in winter, and magic lantern figurines made of bits of fish spine—the vertebrae. She slipped shells and bones in her gloves and climbed the boat-littered wharf, past the shredded flag in the yard of a new bungalow in whose driveway two men were fixing a truck. The flag had half its maple leaf when she moved here last spring. Now the leaf was gone, and so was all the white part. All that was left were shreds of the red bar close to the pole, and the red had faded to pink.

“Been shopping down on the beach,” one of the men observed.

“Yes. Lots of bargains down there.”

“How's Tom's place? That old roof hasn't fallen in on you yet? Marion, isn't it?”

“Marianne, yes.”

“Well girl, if you need a few shingles nailed on, give us a call.”

“Thanks.”

“Remember that, now. Don't be a stranger.”

Hens pecked around his boots. A soot-black rooster with a scarlet comb strutted resplendent in the snow. Farther up the hill glowed the dormant flame tree. It made Marianne think of the burning bush page in her new calendar. Snow had settled in white fingers over the fingers of the roadside spruce and fir, an endless pattern of shapes like hands; white snow-fingers settled against dark spruce and fir fingers; hands on hands—the trees' only chance to be caressed all over—how they must love it.

The headlands had turned white and reflected beams of white light on the calm sea. All the fence posts were edged in a soft white layer like icing, and whiteness filled the air. Everything was still. She came up over the hilltop and stopped in the road.

My smoke is white
.

Her fire, burning in her absence with Ezekiel's birch and her dry kindling, rose thick and pure white, into the cove's own whiteness. Her smoke had never done this. Now hers was no different from her neighbours'. As thick as the smoke of the Silvers next door was hers, which until today had made a pathetic trail next to the Silvers' thick, proud plume.

Her gloves' fingers were full of bits of shell and bone. It was hard to hold Mrs. Ruby's shopping bag. She knew exactly where to hang her new calendar: the same place Mrs. Ruby hung hers, up over the woodstove looking down on the kitchen. She headed for home and her underwear drawer where she kept her two-inch nails and a small hammer, and marvelled at this day that had decided to let her in, when it could have lowered the latch on its gull-white door and quietly turned her away.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Christmas Room

 

 

“Come down,” Mrs. Halloran
begged Marianne, “and give me a hand with my wallpaper.” A rule of the cove was that you had to redo all your walls before Christmas, either with a new coat of paint from Lundrigans or with wallpaper.

This would be the second Christmas since Mrs. Halloran's husband Leonard had died. He'd lifted one end of a two-by-four to be sawn for the new McDonalds in St. John's, and he'd had a massive heart attack. Marianne, sitting on her picnic table playing her guitar, saw the priest get out of a maroon limousine. He was not the local priest but came from down the shore. He looked like a skeleton. Mrs. Halloran had been baking three lemon meringue pies, and they burnt black.

“I was going to bring you up a bit,” she'd told Marianne, “but now I don't know when I'll ever get to bake them again. I may never bake another lemon pie. I made them for him. He loved them.” The following October Marianne had come from a walk to the pond and found a wedge of lemon pie quivering on her kitchen table.

But these days Mrs. Halloran wore her blue sweater with rust-coloured stripes and blotches of paint on its elbows. Every day she put on her black pants that had grown patches of knobbles. She no longer combed her hair except when she went to mass and bingo, and her perm stood in little periscopes that had corners instead of curls. There were pieces of wallpaper caught in it now. Leaning against the couch, amid scraps and curls of wallpaper, was a garbage bag full of Christmas presents.

Even after two years here, Marianne was not sure how Mary and Margaret and Mary-Margaret and the other old women of the cove viewed Mrs. Halloran, but she had an idea that Mrs. Halloran lived differently from the others, and that it had something to do with ambition and money and maybe pride. Nothing could have induced any of the Marys or Margarets, for instance, to go out on the main road on a frosty night in a headscarf and rubber boots, and hitchhike to bingo in Admirals Cove. This was a thing Mrs. Halloran did regularly in the hope of winning enough to get her to Florida again, as she had done after her jackpot ten years ago. The other women did not appear to have more money than Mrs. Halloran had, but they kept old ways that meant they did not need as much, whereas Mrs. Halloran uttered a never-ending lament about all the things she wanted but could not have: modern things one bought in the new superstores on the outskirts of St. John's. Marianne's house was behind Mrs. Halloran's, and Mrs. Halloran did not keep the distance from Marianne and her city ways that the other women kept, so Marianne found herself in Mrs. Halloran's orbit more often than she herself might have arranged. She had come here to live after a joyride with a friend who was a painter, a visit during which the red willows and foam-drenched bird islands had seduced her into fleeing the city and renting a fisherman's house in the cove. This land responded, she thought, it leant toward you and if it did not exactly talk to you it confided something, and offered a surprising level of companionship like a trustworthy person who did not rattle on about trivialities. Even now, as the cove prepared for Christmas, its green meadows retained a bright and profound glow as from lit cloth.

“You have lots of shopping done,” Marianne said, eyeing the bag of presents that rested on the couch near a pair of giant swans, hoping the topic might lift the sorrowful little hoods over Mrs. Halloran's eyes, but it did not.

“Laura have all those presents bought,” said Mrs. Halloran. Laura was her daughter. She was in town for the day with her husband Stuart and their little girl, Patty. “I have none. Not a one. Can't get to do anything. I've no money. That's all I can do about it.”

The giant swans were made of brittle plastic that came from the 1950s before anyone knew how to make plastic supple. The plastic was black, the molded feathers sprayed gilt. Under the swans lay a pair of landscapes, each with a white cloud, a caribou moss foreground and glitter-topped mountains with trees made of real birch bark. Against these leaned Saint Anne holding the infant Virgin Mary, a sacred heart of Jesus, a photograph of clipper ships in Boston harbour, and a school photograph of Mrs. Halloran's foster son Jody, clasping a captain's wheel. From the couch cushions dangled a board decorated with nails in the shape of a bridge, silver thread strung from nail to nail, glorious like the Golden Gate, except for a dubious area near the bottom where thread had escaped the general symmetry and gone meandering around the wrong nails. Pinned to it a red rosette proclaimed First Prize. Some teacher in Fox Cove School must assign a similar project every year, Marianne thought, because everyone had one somewhere in the house. She had also seen the Railway Engine, the Airplane, and the Ship.

The wall over the couch remained covered in paper that had brown, orange and cream stripes, and so did the window wall facing the islands. The wall with the door in it had been newly papered, but the fourth wall fascinated Marianne.

“No money for nothing now around here, supposing I was to sell my own bedclothes and dishes,” said Mrs. Halloran with great pathos. “I've a mind to call up Junior Etcheverry and take him up on his offer to sell him my sods.”

“Your sods?”

“The sods over there on Leonard's bit of meadow he used to graze his horse on.” She nodded past the curtains toward the headland that spoke daily to Marianne, where early winter sun lit the russet sorrel.

“The grass?”

“I'm already after selling his horse, and that money is spent. I wonder would Leonard come down from heaven and murder me? Supposing heaven's where he is, and not … Jesus, Mary and Joseph what kind of badness do I be thinking about my own husband … I can't be selling his sods. There's a thing Leonard never would have allowed.”

Marianne suspected Leonard had forbidden lots of things that were done here now with festive zeal. She watched Mrs. Halloran unroll and match a length of paper with the last piece she had hung. Before her listlessness, Mrs. Halloran had possessed a lovely smile. Now her eyes were always wet. She was too young to get the Canada pension. Laura had just given up her job selling Avon because they'd wanted her to hurry too much. Stuart had a heart condition and payments to make on the car. He could not shovel snow or lift anything.

“Do you mean you can sell grass off a meadow?” Marianne had not heard of such a thing. Was it, she wondered, like the woman in the O. Henry story who sold her luxuriant hair?

“Jody wants a snowsuit for Christmas. He needs one. I'm after putting two loads of his clothes in the dryer today where he was in the woods and came home soaked to the skin.”

Mrs. Halloran folded the length of wallpaper where it met the ceiling and tore a notch near the skirting board. She sliced it with a knife that had a bone handle and a crescent blade, and dipped the cut piece in the bucket of warm paste Marianne had carried from the kitchen. Together they smoothed the paper over the former layer of velvet paper, which sopped up the paste and showed through the orange blossoms. Mrs. Halloran stood on a chair and cut surplus paper with a pair of scissors she said wouldn't cut butter in July. Marianne had no wallpapering experience. The fourth wall was half covered in rough green paper with a smooth gold pattern of zigzags and pagodas. Another strip—not the brown, orange and cream stripes, and not the new wallpaper all cream with orange blossoms, and not the velvet wallpaper—revealed green and violet windmills. The rest of the fourth wall was covered in a sheet of false brick facade.

“Laura bought that brick board when I was away this summer. I don't like it a bit. It cost forty-six dollars a sheet. I'll have to get the hammer now, and get those nails out … Jody!”

Jody had come in from the woods and sat in the living room eating a bag of chips and watching a movie about American soldiers in Vietnam.

“If you believe in bad luck,” the commander told his soldiers, “that's what you're going to get.” The commander was noble and flinty and the soldiers were going to be transformed by him in the next two hours into heroes, whereas now they were cowards and children.

“What, Mom?”

“Where's the hammer?”

“I don't know!”

“You don't know nothing, you don't.”

“What?”

“Never mind, I'll get it myself.”

“Mom, what's wrong with you?”

Mrs. Halloran pried out the finishing nails. Marianne picked more nails off the carpet. “Stuart left those there when they were putting this up,” Mrs. Halloran said. “Now where are we going to lay this? … Jody!”

“What?”

“Come here 'til I asks you.”

“What do you want?” He stood in the doorway.

“Where am I supposed to lay this to?” She stood with a sheet of the faux brick facade.

“I don't know. The shed's blocked and the door's frozen. Can't you lay it down in the room somewhere 'til I finds a place for it tomorrow?'

“No, I cannot.”

“What about the room where you keep the sawdust?” Marianne said. That room was off the porch. The sawdust cost a dollar a sack at the sawmill. Mrs. Halloran used it as litter for her eight cats.

“I don't know what about that,” said Mrs. Halloran.

“She's blocked as well,” Jody said.

But Mrs. Halloran lifted the huge sheet through the doorway anyway. Marianne helped. They put it in the sawdust room, between Jody's bike and the tool bench.

The removal of the false bricks exposed other wallpaper edges at the end of the adjoining wall, like pages of a book. Marianne counted nine, and beyond that her fingers could not reach.

“What this room really wants is wallboard,” Mrs. Halloran measured a new piece of orangeblossom paper, “to make it level. I'll put some up next winter if I live that long, please God.” Marianne saw all down the years, Christmas after Christmas, layer after layer, until Mrs. Halloran stood in the centre of a Christmas room hardly any bigger than herself, putting up new wallpaper. Then Mrs. Halloran would have to lose weight so she could fit into the Christmas room, to paper it. She would go on a diet, and she would get smaller and smaller, until finally she would turn into the caraway seed in the centre of a jawbreaker.

And the jawbreaker would not go unsucked. Obviously there was an insatiable beast of some kind, because the Christmas room of Mrs. Halloran was not the only one of its kind in the harbour. The shore was full of houses that had rooms in them that were just like Mrs. Halloran's Christmas room. And it wasn't just the Christmas rooms either. As Mrs. Halloran wetted the orangeblossom wallpaper, she was waiting for banana-coloured paint on the bottom half of her kitchen walls to dry, and the top half was covered in wallboard Laura had just painted white since the brown looked too dingy. Across the road, at Thomas and Mary's, they were waiting for Harold Luby to come over with his sparkle gun to fire sparkles over the swirls of stucco his brother Stephen had applied with a trowel the previous week. Mary was trying to get her family to let her get red and silver sparkles this time. Over at Marg and Alfie's next to Thomas and Mary's, they were putting new canvas on the kitchen floor and tiles on the hall ceiling. And once everything was done, the talk would be of what really should have been done, and what should be done as soon as possible to perfect things. Satisfaction was always just a sheet of aspenite out of reach. Or a sheet of floor canvas, a roll of carpet, a roll of wallpaper, a length of molding, or some Barker tile. It was always something found in sheets, preferably sheets that could be rolled up; that was the missing link between the women of the shore and happiness. Marianne decided it was because you could afford a sheet of wallboard or a roll of wallpaper, whereas you might not be able to afford the beautiful homes that appeared on television, especially the soap operas, where faucets were solid brass, bathtubs were oval and embossed with lilies.

The women of the shore did not go outside except to hang their washing, go to mass, or get groceries. So they did not see the wildflowers Marianne saw. New wildflowers appeared all spring and summer long, until by August there were wild roses, yellow wild peas, blue wild peas, forget-me-nots, chuckley pear flowers, and, in Marianne's garden, her favourite flower, sweet william. Could Mrs. Halloran really mean to sell the grass and all its little wildflowers off her dead husband's meadow?

“I might go over after we're finished this,” Marianne said, “and pick some of the sorrel on Leonard's meadow, if you don't mind.”

“Sorrel?”

“It's a wild plant. The leaves are pointy with two spurs. I put it in soup. It adds a sour taste.” Putting wild plants in food was something Marianne knew set her apart as a bit of a wing nut in the cove. But she'd been looking at the sorrel and thinking how it had grown, and now if someone was going to somehow take away the grass …

“Sour? Them tall ones with the heads you can rub apart like red powder?”

“Yes.”

“Sallysuckers, we called them, when we were young. We didn't put them in any soup though. We ate them out of our hands. Hungry, we'd devour anything. We were never in the house in those days, even when we were older, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. Even for awhile after we all got married. I don't know what happened to us.”

“You and Mary and Margaret?”

“Outdoors all the time, yes. Myself and Mary and Marg. With our bamboo fishing poles. We'd go to Spur Cove Pond and we'd get the biggest kind of trout. One summer Mary and Marg were both pregnant. I used to have to climb up in the trees to fetch their hooks. We were different then. We're all big now. Skinny? How skinny were we, especially Mary, and you know how big she is now. I brought a baking powder cake one day, a great big one, and Mary sat by the pond and ate that whole cake. I didn't want any. But she could eat the works. My what a laugh we'd have then, the three of us in at that pond, with me crawling around up in the trees.”