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Authors: Alan Cumyn

After Sylvia (8 page)

BOOK: After Sylvia
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“You have to think your way out,” he repeated. “That's the most glorious way.” He thought for another moment. “Captain Volatile never screams for help.” And he puffed out his chest and looked as if he might leap over the trees any moment to impress her.

“Our lives are in danger and all you can think about is comic books!” Eleanor muttered.

They all stood silently. Owen tried to open his eyes as wide as possible to take in what little light there was. The snow helped. It didn't really seem so dark after all. The trees emerged from the shad­ows and took form. He could see everyone's breath in vapor clouds that rose and disappeared above their faces. Even Sylvester stayed quiet for a time. And there seemed a heaviness to everything, like the snow weighing down all these limbs, and the way sound was muffled in the forest, swallowed by the cold air and the sad carpet of winter.

And then, slowly, surprisingly, the outline of the haunted house made itself known to him.

They were standing quite close, in fact. Suddenly it seemed so obvious that it was hard to imagine they had missed it. Owen looked at the faces of the others, but they didn't, see it, even though they were looking straight at the tired, snow-draped frame, the crumbling walls and vacant windows.

“There it is,” he said quietly and pointed exactly where they were all looking. Then, as if he were conjuring it, they saw it for themselves.

“It was right here all the time,” Andy said.

“Is that it?” Eleanor said. “Is that what we've been walking all day to see? I froze my face for this crummy little wreck of a house that's more trees than anything else?”

“It doesn't matter,” Andy said in disgust. “You wouldn't appreciate it anyway. Let's go home. At least now we know the way.”

“No, we came this far,” Eleanor said stubbornly. “Let's see what's so special about this stupid place.” And she marched off the trampled trail and waded through the hip-deep snow.

The old house looked desolate and lonely to Owen, as if time had been leaning heavily on it. Part of the roof at one end had fallen in, and trees that Owen hadn't noticed before were now growing out of several of the windows. It didn't look safe to enter.

“The door's locked,” Andy called out to Eleanor. They were all following now. “You have to go through the window.”

Eleanor put her hand on the doorknob anyway and pushed hard. The door opened and she stepped inside.

“Watch out for the hole in the floor!” Andy yelled, running after her into the house.

“I don't want to go!” Sadie said suddenly.

“It's all right,” Leonard said, and he took her arm. “She's very nice — for a ghost.”

Inside, the light was eerie. Everything was covered in snow and shadows. Eleanor and Andy had both managed to walk around the hole in the floor. Owen and Leonard and Sadie walked around it, too, and approached the red couch, which was where it always was, in the middle of the room. Eleanor and Andy were sitting on it now, quite close together, as if drawn there magnetically. It, too, was full of snow. Owen dusted off a section and sat down carefully, and then all five of them were on it. Owen gazed up at the snowbound forest through the rafters above his head.

He looked around to see where the Bog Man's wife might be. Maybe in the winter the house got so cold and lonely that she went somewhere else.

Owen heard a low whistling in the trees and a rubbing of branches against something.

A voice came then, soft as falling snow. It was hard to make out. Owen had been shivering but now he felt like he was sitting beside a fire. He couldn't follow the words exactly. They sounded normal and yet not usual at all, as if spoken in a foreign language or a dream.

There was the voice, and the silence of the air sifting through the forest — which was in itself a sound, Owen realized. And the sound of snow being quiet, and of the haunted house bearing the slow weight of time. The more he listened, the more he heard — a slight scratching, a tree perhaps giving in, finally, to a dreadful itch, and then the sudden staccato of something, maybe a mad woodpecker knocking after frozen insects. And he heard his own breath sliding in and out, a little furnace of heat and activity in the midst of all this cold and stillness.

Owen let go his loon call then. It started low and soft and warbly, and slowly took over his throat and chest and shook the flimsy walls of the haunted house until it felt like loose snow was being shivered free. The others stayed where they were and just listened.

Later they walked home together in silence. Andy was apparently not interested anymore in scaring Eleanor and Sadie, and Eleanor said nothing about the house being boring or ordinary or somehow not worth the hours of cold marching.

At Christmas dinner Horace muttered over how the little paper skirts Margaret had made for the turkey legs were interfering with his carving, and Leonard spilled cranberry sauce on the pure white tablecloth. The silver of the cutlery shone in the candlelight and turkey gravy pooled in the mashed potatoes and buttered squash, and little bits of cork floated in the adults' wine glasses. Uncle Lorne drank three glassfuls and agreed to whistle for them all. He filled the house for a time with so many birds that Owen felt like he might have been back in the woods. Margaret wore a red dress that Owen had never seen before, and she kept her apron on during dinner. She never seemed to settle in her seat, but was constantly moving back and forth between the dining-room and the kitchen.

So many things were the same as every other Christmas, and yet so much was new as well. Even after everyone else was finished, Owen's plate remained nearly full. Not because he wasn't hungry, but because he was so busy just looking at all that was new and old. They had never had Eleanor and Sadie and Lorraine for Christmas before, yet now it seemed perfectly natural that they would be there. Lorraine seemed so happy, even though she was fatter than Owen had ever seen her. She wore a purple velvet dress that might as well have been a bed sheet, it was so floppy.

“I remember when Eleanor was a baby,” Lorraine said, helping herself to more mashed potatoes. “She wouldn't sit still for anyone, and at Christmas dinner I had to march up and down the hallway singing nursery rhymes while all my guests served themselves.”

Owen looked from the belly of Lorraine to Eleanor's blushing face, from the face to the belly, and the belly to the face. It was just like looking at the snow on the trees until the trees had turned into the haunted house. Right before his eyes Lorraine and her fat belly turned into something else.

Something else indeed.

Finally Owen began to laugh. The more he looked, the funnier it got, until he was sobbing up against Leonard and clutching to keep his head above the table.

“What's so funny?” Margaret asked, but Owen couldn't say it. His eyes were full of tears.

He writhed and wriggled at people's feet like some animal possessed by a giddy fever. And the more he fought, the harder it was to gain control. His body became a shuddering mass of gasping laughter. Leonard, too, succumbed, and Sadie, and it spread through the room until Owen wondered if the table would be overturned.

“Whh..hh..at are we... l.ll…llaughing about?” Margaret sputtered, but Owen couldn't trust himself to speak. Lorne had collapsed on the sofa and Andy and Eleanor were puddled together by the television set and even Lorraine was clutching herself and leaning against the doorframe as if she might fall over.

“It's...it's...nothing,” Owen said finally. And through the teary slits of his eyes
he watched his aunt Lorraine holding herself — herself and her secret baby — and felt as if the whole world was jiggling in their joy.

Calendars

MICHAEL
Baylor came back from Christmas holidays looking nervous. At a Junior Achievers meeting in front of the class he announced that everyone had to sell calendars to raise money for the trip to Japan. The calendars came from Michael Baylor's father's company and showed different classic tractors from years gone by January featured a delicate 1940 John Deere Model H painted green and yel­low. A girl in a straw hat and clothing unsuitable for farm work sat on the metal driver s seat trying to look comfortable. February was a 1929 McCormick-Deering perched like a bull on a hill, the front wheels spread wide and dark body sil­houetted in the sun. March was a yellow 1939 Farmall A with bright red wheels.

Michael Baylor said that if they sold the calendars for five dollars each, then only four dollars would go to his father to cover his costs and that would leave one dollar per calendar for Japan. “If we all pledge to sell a hundred calendars,” Michael Baylor said, “then we would raise two thousand six hundred dollars for the trip.” He also said that his rather was president of the Good Neighbors Club, and they would donate fifty cents for every dollar raised on the calendar sale. He made a quick calculation and then announced a final fundraising figure that seemed so large, Owen thought they would be able to go around the world several times on it.

The class was silent for a while. Finally Dan Ruck said he didn't even
know
a hundred people.

“You don't have to know them to sell them calendars!” Michael Baylor said. “Just go door to door. It won't be hard. These calendars will sell themselves. In fact, you don't need to limit the sale to one per household. These are collectors' items and some people will want to buy several.”

Miss Glendon said she wanted to get on with her lesson. “Why don't you call a vote, Michael, to see if people agree to sell these calendars?”

“We
have
to sell them,” Michael Baylor said, “if we want to get to Japan!” He looked around the room like he was daring anyone to vote against the calendars.

The vote was called. No one put up a hand except Michael Baylor. Owen fingered the sample calendar nervously.
Beauties of the Ages
it said on the cover.

Owen raised his hand.

Soon others raised theirs, and then almost everyone was voting to sell the calendars.

Each student took a hundred home in a box. Owen hid his in the bedroom closet and tried to work up the courage to ask his rather for help in selling them. But that evening he found Horace sitting in his favorite chair, his face hidden behind the newspaper. Owen could tell from the snapping sound of the turning pages that his father had had a bad day.

So Owen waited until Friday when Horace was usually in a better mood. When Horace got home late in the afternoon he threw his tie on the chesterfield and ruffed up Sylvester's fur in a happy way. Then when he was reading the paper he joked about an article about a chicken with two heads and no feet. “Sure would have trouble crossing the road!” he said. Then he looked at Owen.

“How was your day?” he asked. “You look like the prison bars are closing in all around.”

Owen screwed up his courage.

“I was wondering,” he said, “if you could drive me into Elgin.”

“What for?”

“I have to sell calendars. It's to go to Japan on the class trip,” Owen said.

“I thought you lost that election,” Horace replied. His voice was suddenly sharp as wire, and Owen wished he hadn't brought it up.

“Yes, but —”

“Show me these calendars.”

Owen brought the box down from the bed­room and opened it for his father.

“Tractor calendars!” he said with that special note of delight that Owen knew to dread. “You'd be lucky to sell two of these. You'll just be wasting your time.”

Owen went to Margaret to ask if she would drive him into Elgin. But Horace followed him into the kitchen.

“You'd do better if you sold the
tractors
door-to-door!” he said.

“What's all this about?” Margaret asked.

“His class thinks they're going to Japan!” Horace said sharply.

“Didn't you plant some idea like that in Owen's head?” Margaret asked.

“But he wasn't even elected,” Horace said.

It was strange for Owen to see his father whirling like this, saying something one day and then the opposite another.

“These are just young kids!” Horace said. “How do they think they're ever going to get to Japan?” Horace looked at Margaret straight over Owen's head. “Do you know what he wants? He wants me to drive him all the way to Elgin. After I've been working all day! Do you know I've been to Elgin twice already this week? People in Elgin don't buy anything! I can tell you that for a fact. And these ridiculous calendars...”

Owen retreated to the bedroom and closed the door. He felt like he was caught so tight under a giant s foot that he could hardly breathe.

Before dinner his mother took him aside. “You know that your rather has to sell things every day,” Margaret said. “It's a difficult life and some days don't go right. He didn't mean what he said.” Owen could hardly look up at her. “I called Lorne,” she said finally. “He'll take you to Elgin.”

Lorne arrived in the truck after dinner. Owen snuck out the back with his box of calendars so that Horace wouldn't ask him where he was going.

On the dark ride to Elgin, Owen tried not to think of what he would say if he happened, by chance, to knock on Sylvia's door.

He thought about explaining to Sylvia that he had written her a Christmas card but had forgotten the stamp. He still had the remnants of the card, without sparkles, in a drawer underneath his socks, and wondered now if he should have brought it with him to present to her in person. Better late than never.

“Where do you want to start?” Lorne asked him when they got to Elgin.

“I don't know,” Owen said.

They drove down the main street. The gears groaned and the truck had a bad habit of veering into the wrong lane when Lorne looked too hard at the buildings and signs. Then he would turn the wheel violently in correction, and Owen had to hug the door to keep from getting an elbow in the face.

He peered in the darkness to try to see the street names. He saw Lansdowne and Sellwig and Tuttle and Ramsworth, but nothing that started with a River.

Lorne let him off on Bunton Avenue. Owen didn't carry the whole box with him, just a few calendars. He walked up one long, snowy lane and mounted the front steps. The house looked old and dark, like a trap.

Owen pressed the ringer and stood back. He turned around to make sure that Lorne was still sitting in the truck in case he had to make a run for it. Who knew what kind of murderer was living behind that door?

But there was no answer. The house was deep in gloom and silence. Owen rang the bell again, just to be sure, and then a third time because he was pretty certain now that no one was home.

Just as Owen turned away, the door opened and a woman older than dust hissed at him, “What do you want?”

She was hunched almost double, with one shoulder knotted to just below her ear. Her hands looked like gnarly tree roots wrapped around a cane.

Owen stared at her in a panic.

“Well?”
she spat.

“I need to go to Japan!” Owen blurted, and he waved a calendar at her.

She looked at him with hatred. “Catch my death because of you,” she said, then disappeared behind the gloomy door.

Owen ran back down the lane and vaulted into Lorne's truck.

“Let's try another street!” he said urgently.

Lorne drove him to one called Maple Grove. The houses looked friendlier and had snowmen in the front and scatterings of Christmas lights, even though Christmas was over. Owen decided to try the house with several hockey sticks stuck in the snowbank lining the driveway. He rang the bell and lifted himself on tiptoe to peer into a round window on the door. Instantly a light went on in the hallway and he could hear footsteps approaching.

He heard barking, too.

Suddenly the little round window in front of his face was filled with the snarling teeth of a killer dog. When the door opened a few inches, the teeth filled the gap level with Owen's throat.

“Don't mind him. He's very friendly,” a man's voice said. Owen could see a big hand straining to hold the dog's collar. “What can I do for you?”

Owen mumbled something about Japan, and tractors, and a calendar.

“A what?” the man said over the snarls and barking. “You'll have to speak up.”

Owen tried to show him the 1939 yellow Farmall A, but the man wasn't able to open the door wide enough to see.

At the next house Owen was invited in by an old man who was very interested in the calendar. He used to be a farmer in the area, he told Owen. His hands shook while he talked, as if he were sitting on top of an old tractor in full throttle.

“You know, I used to have one of these,” he said, looking at June's model. “I bought it new in 1926, I think it was.” Then he looked at it some more. “No, no, it was ‘24 and I borrowed the money from my uncle Mort.” He looked at Owen, the sagging skin on his throat shaking like a turkey neck. “Or was it Uncle Bart?”

He had pictures of his own tractors, which he got out to show Owen. The album was all black and had a thick cover with wide pages filled with old snapshots of many different pieces of farm machinery.

“This one here,” the man said, “I bought at the start of the Great Depression, when everything was cheap. But I never had more trouble with a tractor. I swore this one had a will of its own. It was like a donkey let loose from the gates of hell. There was one time I got stuck in a ditch, and when I got off to try to free the wheels this demon lurched suddenly —”

The hands sped forward. Owen jumped.

“— and then I was trapped, you see, right beneath the wheel. Good thing it was muddy. I had a little room to slide and slither. And I was pretty thin back then.” He looked to Owen like a bundle of sticks now. “I tried to sell her,” the old man said. “But back in those days nobody had two nickels to rub together. If we didn't grow our own food we would've starved. Don't know what people would do now if those days ever came back. Hardly anybody lives on a farm anymore.”

Owen said that he lived on a farm. Lorne honked the horn outside.

“So you're up at five milking the cows and doing your chores?” the man asked.

Owen said no, it wasn't that kind of farm. “We just live there,” Owen said. The man went on to tell him all about the work that he had to do starting when he was four years old. He fed the chick­ens, and when it was thirty below the chickens came in to take over the spare bedroom.

Lorne honked the horn several more times and Owen thanked the man for looking at his calendar and telling him such interesting stories. The old farmer had stories of other tractors he had owned over the years, and Owen had a hard time making it out the door.

Back in the truck Owen said to Lorne, “I heard there were good families living on a street called River-something.”

“That's a strange name for a street,” Lorne said.

They drove around some more. Owen saw several houses that looked like they might need a tractor calendar, but he felt shy now and wasn't sure whether he should try them. It was getting late and he had sold exactly no calendars. He really wanted to try Sylvia's house, if he could find it. Lorne drove near the river but the streets were called Hainsworth and Meadowfare and Beamsbrook.

Finally, on a hill quite a distance from the river, was Riverside Place.

“1837 would be a good house to try, I think,” Owen said.

“Really?” Lorne said.

He drove them slowly down the street until 1837 stood out like a beacon drawing Owen out of the truck and down the walkway to the front door.

It was a new house with shiny sides and an enormous garage. Somewhere in the back, Owen knew, was a swimming pool — frozen over possibly into Sylvia's own personal skating rink. At that very moment she might even be spinning like an Olympic skater in a fuzzy blur of impossible beau­ty. She had probably grown taller than him and wouldn't want to be disturbed.

Owen gazed back at Lorne in the truck. His uncle was looking at him to see what he was going to do.

So he tried to find the ringer. He searched all over, then finally opened the screen door and rapped with his knuckles. The sound seemed to be swallowed by the night.

Owen knocked again much louder, and then louder still, and as he stepped back he saw the doorbell lit in red right in front of his eye.

Before he could ring it, the door opened, and Owen looked up at Mr. Tull.

“Good evening,” Owen said formally. Then he cleared his throat. “I wonder if I might have a word,” he said. He meant to pause and prepare himself to explain about the tractors and Japan. But his mouth kept moving. “With your daughter,” he said.

“With my daughter?” Mr. Tull said in surprise. “Does she know you?”

“I think so,” Owen answered. He thought of trying to correct his mistake by somehow indicating, briefly, the depth of his undying love. But he had no idea how to begin.

“Sylvia!” Mr. Tull called and stepped back from the door. Mr. Tull invited him in and asked his name.

“Owen Skye.”

“Owen Skye,” Mr. Tull said, rolling it around in his mouth as they stood together in the hallway. “That sounds familiar.” Then he called out again, “Sylvia! There's an Owen Skye to see you!”

The house was enormous with white carpeting everywhere he could see, clean as fresh snow. The walls were white, too, and the ceilings had sparkles like gleaming frost. In the living-room was a fireplace ringed with shiny brass that nobody had kicked a dent in yet or even smudged. Nothing looked banged up or peeling or cracked or used in any way.

BOOK: After Sylvia
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