Duet for Three (2 page)

THREE

Aggie has been listening to her heartbeat. Sometimes she has to be careful about that, sometimes it takes off like a lumbering old workhorse, heavy and graceless, thundering too fast for its weight. It's usually when she reaches for something just a little too far away that this happens, or when she tries to climb the stairs without resting at every other step.

Looking down, puzzled, at her body, she wonders just where in there her heart is hidden, how far inside it is, beating out against the flesh. Once it was right up near the surface, but that was when she was young and slim. Memory is a damned irritating thing. She knows she was that girl who had that agile body, but now there's so much knowledge and experience wedged under her belt along with all the cakes and cookies that it can't be interpreted with innocence, which is the quality she feels it must have had at the time.

Either innocence or ignorance. Maybe both.

It is stupid for a woman her age to be homesick. What kind of eighty-year-old woman thinks of home as a place where she hasn't lived for sixty years?

She would not, after all, go back; did not, when that was a choice. It must be the girl she misses, not the place.

Foolishness. Dangerous foolishness, too. It doesn't do, to go wandering off on tangents. Some people get off the track and can't get back. Old people can make it a habit. At her age, sharpness is all.

There are goose bumps on her arms. She ought to be in the kitchen, where it's warm, instead of in the chilly front room. She might bake something to keep warm. Life and heat are always contained in kitchens; more so, however, in the days of woodstoves. That was real fire, up close, not like an electric stove, which merely glows. Back then, people faced up to flames, aware of the fires of damnation.

Those men and women, those Scottish Presbyterians, among them her grandparents who died before she knew them: they came to this new country, and maybe it was what they were looking for, or maybe they were just tired of the travelling (although they abhorred laziness), but they settled down on rocky land. Pretty enough, acres of bush and little unexpected streams, small hidden lakes, but the rocks! Maybe they sought out stones, though, in search of the harshness that toughens the soul.

In any case they cleared the bush and picked the stones and loaded the rocks and, waste not want not, built them into fences. Fences around little farms, maybe a hundred acres or so. They had no grand schemes, no ideas for staking out huge properties. Content and, she thinks, likely gratified to struggle.

Hardship and struggle were their morality, their grey road to heaven. Evangelists in their dour way for the ease of an afterlife that had to be earned. The greater the suffering, the labor, the duty performed, the greater the reward: making their trades with God.

But she was only a child there. Maybe her memories are too much about their rules, not who they may have been. She has wondered since what their views were, for instance, when they went upstairs at night, wives and husbands, to their small, dark, musty bedrooms. Did passion and tenderness flow out of them then? Did the women wrap arms around the men's shoulders, and stroke their hair in the night? Did they whisper tender or erotic words to one another? Aggie cannot, still, imagine any of this happening with those prune-moralled men, but who can tell? She knows it is not unusual for people to take odd twists in the dark.

Certainly something happened up there. Did the women lie still and grimly accepting, alert to their duty to produce farm labour in the form of strong sons and daughters, in much the way that downstairs it was their duty to produce quantities of jams and pickles? Did the men, shutting their eyes against sins of the flesh, simply thrust children into the bodies of their wives?

Surely not. There was tenderness and fondness: the way her father would come in from the cold after doing the chores and touch frigid fingers to the back of her mother's neck while she sat darning socks, making her shriek. Her mother would laugh and slap at him with the socks. Aggie knows quite well that children cannot tell what goes on between their parents. They see, as June so often proves to her, only what suits them, and only from their own perspective.

Children, even daughters who are almost sixty years old themselves, are selfish creatures where their parents are concerned.

In daylight, the men were big and had rough hands and red skin, with veins purpling in their cheeks. (Not, of course, from drink, but from hard work done outdoors.) Looking at the fathers, one saw the sons. The progression of aging, like the rules, was built in, so that whatever age they were, they appeared the age they would become.

And by God there were rules to cover every possibility. Playing cards was not permitted. The men could smoke pipes but not cigarettes. No one drank or swore. Gluttony was frowned on, but a hearty eater praised. Then there were particular standards for the women and the girls.

Sundays were days of profoundly boring rest. Dressed in their best clothes, families drove to church by horse and buggy. Home again, they were to sit quietly contemplating the glories of a creator who specified a day of rest in an endless round of labor. In church and at home they thanked God for His blessings, that He gave them what they had, endlessly, to work with. Aggie viewed God at the time as another Presbyterian Scot, bearded, frowning, judging and stern. Most of the men looked like that, for that matter. The only difference with God was that He was much older, more like a grandfather.

Ruggedness, since it was what there was, became a kind of beauty. A great rock in the middle of a field might mean heavy labor for men and horses struggling to remove it, but it was also grand. It was like the word of God, firm, weighing people into the earth. There was no romanticism about this, the way Frances sometimes speaks of buying a hundred acres or so up north as a kind of retreat. It was survival, and so both desperate and reassuring.

Aggie had an older brother, an older sister, a younger sister, and two younger brothers. They are all dead now. They were all sturdy and young, and now they are all dead. This still astonishes her, when she thinks about it.

The boys worked in the fields and the barn; the girls worked out there too when they were needed, but mainly in the kitchen, where they prepared to feed the boys, fed the boys, and cleaned up after feeding the boys.

Oh, the meals! Mounds of potatoes, thick fatty slices of beef, homemade bread with homemade butter, jugs and jugs of milk, huge serving bowls of carrots and peas, wide wedges of fruit pies, apple and rhubarb and raisin. In the house where Aggie grew up, the kitchen windows were always steamed, the table was either being set or being cleared, and even in summer the woodstove blasted heat for all the cooking and the baking. The boys sweated over cows and crops, and the girls sweated over the stove. But they all sweated.

For a time, they went to school, learning enough to read, add, subtract, and write simple sentences. The rest was foolishness. Also, they were needed at home. Aggie raced her brothers home from school until it was time not to go any more, falling breathless and dusty into the kitchen. Her older sister, Sylvia, told her it wasn't nice, a girl running like that. Her little sister, Edith, three years younger, was pretty and pudgy and couldn't keep up with either Aggie or the boys. Both Sylvia and Edith were plumper than she. No one would have dreamed she would die looking the way she does.

Out of school, they ran through the fields, their legs scratched by whipping weeds and coarse grass and sharp grains. The one who was caught was thrown down and tickled. Aggie was the one who would not beg the others to stop.

The work in the kitchen was hardest at threshing times, when there might be twelve or fifteen men to feed, great lashings of food required. But even so, she could creep away for a while, slip out behind the barn and watch the horse-drawn wagons pulling up, piled with hay, dust motes flying in the sun as the crop was pitched into the great mows in the barn. It was the smells that drew her: the fresh horse droppings baking in the sun, the sweat on the skins of the men and the horses, and the sweetness of the hay. Then back in the kitchen would be the steam.

“Oh Aggie,” her mother said, shaking her head, “where have you been?” And sometimes, “I don't know what'll become of you.” Still, she praised her stubbornness, and her wits. “Nobody'll get the best of you, my girl” was her praise, and “Don't you get thinking you're too smart” was her warning.

Who could know that elsewhere, in cities maybe, there were people dancing and drinking champagne? Who, if they had known, would have failed to call it sin?

On alternate Saturdays the horses were hitched for a trip to town. Here, there seemed to be elements not necessarily accounted for in the rules.

There was a spastic youth who wandered up one side of the street and down the other, arms jerking and twitching, sometimes chased by children throwing small stones or calling names. People avoided looking at him, as if what he had could be caught with a glance.

Or there was a big, shabby, heavily pockmarked, dirty man, leaning against a store, swaying a little, eyes closed, or standing at the side of the road shouting crazy things at people going by. “Oh, for goodness' sake,” Aggie's mother would murmur, tugging at her children, directing their attention away.

And there was a woman who might be glimpsed on the street. It was a wonder to catch sight of her, like a flashing good-luck pebble in her tight, bright dress, make-up, and shoes with too-high heels. Oh, here was sin in the flesh, although Aggie couldn't have put a name then to the sin. But something exotic and unmentionable that made her mother reach forward and tap her husband on the shoulder and say, “For heaven's sake, won't this horse go any faster?”

There was something bad about these people. Even the spastic boy must have done something, since God had marked him down for such special punishment. “Never mind,” said her mother. “Pay no attention.”

Not that Aggie wanted to have limbs that twitched, or to be drunk and crazy, or to wear too-bright, too-tight dresses on the street. She did wonder, though, how these people got that way, what they'd done to get there. But righteousness was on the side of blindness. Like June, who shrugs and says, “God's will.” June says, “You ask too many questions, Mother. Things aren't so complicated if you look at them the right way.” Aggie's mother said, “Hush now, you don't need to know such things.”

Otherwise, her mother and her daughter aren't much alike. Aggie suspects June's faith of being a crutch and a judgment. She suspects June of depending on God to carry out her dirty work.

Her mother's belief, on the other hand, given the harshness of its rules, was reasonably kind.

Aggie was only a child in the First World War, when her older brother, who was named for their father, went away. She remembers him proud, strutting in his uniform, before he left. And she remembers her parents sitting alone in the front room for a while one evening, and then her father coming into the kitchen and telling them, “Young Will's been killed.”

He went upstairs alone to bed, his footsteps sounding strange and slow and heavy. Their mother sat alone behind the closed door to the front room. They finally put themselves to bed, lying whispering in their rooms upstairs. As far as they could tell, their mother stayed silent and alone in the room below.

But she had breakfast on the table for them the next morning, and if her skin seemed stretched and tight, her eyes were dry. She kept going. That is what Aggie remembers mainly about her mother: she kept going, always, until she abruptly had a stroke and died on the kitchen floor when she was sixty-eight.

Aggie's own grief at her brother's death was a child's. The war was so far away, it was a kind of romantic myth, and death and injury were heroic and grand. She understood, from the way he'd worn his uniform, that he would have been brave. What struck her was that people could simply vanish.

It was so strange and remote a death that it must have been hard, for its very mysteriousness and distance, on her mother; not anything like falling out of a hay mow or drowning in a pond, which was the sort of death that could at least be grasped.

But she continued to say, “God's will be done,” or “God knows what's for the best,” and seemed to believe it. She was not angry at God for the death of her son, or for the unrelenting hard work, or for the fact that all her hard work never was rewarded with prosperity.

Did she accept events so quietly because she anticipated a reward in heaven, or did she put a distance between herself and misfortune by placing God in the middle, fielding pain through Him? Whatever, her faith seemed comforting, which is a good deal different from June's, as far as Aggie can tell.

Oh, she is old, she is old, and her mind trails off here and there.

People say, “Those were the good old days, when right was right and wrong was wrong, and people took pride in what they did,” and there's a softness in their voices, a nostalgic drifting in the eyes. That sort of thing annoys Aggie, who knows perfectly well the good old days were hard work and narrow rules and necessity.

So many changes, although no doubt this is the boring litany of the old.

Still, it is extraordinary to have gone from outhouses to lavish bathrooms, two and three to a house. From pumping water from wells to flicking taps. From woodstoves to gas ranges, and from root cellars and dark cool basements and ice boxes to freezers and refrigerators. From horses to cars, and then to airplanes and jets and rockets. From the punishing day-long labor of cooking and cleaning and laundering to a few moments of pushing buttons.