No Story to Tell (8 page)

Being the entrepreneurial sort and not about to throw good money after bad, Mr. Graves had the works set up as a Lucky Dollar Super Special the very next day, hoping to mitigate his losses. But the townspeople had seen plenty of lettuce in their years and were wary of this pile painted with an unfamiliar hue. The old storekeeper tried all his angles—two for one, fifty percent off, buy one get one free; but he couldn’t entice them to buy. The housewives crowded around and poked at the pile. Picked heads up. Put heads down. But try as he might, they would not buy.

“What’s wrong with this here lettuce?” was the inevitable question to which the visibly infuriated proprietor replied over and over: “Nothing. Nothing at all. Just a natural variation of color due to the extra vitamins in it. Very, very healthy for you.”

But the townsfolk weren’t fools, and it wasn’t long before they’d determined the whole deviant lot had been sprayed with a toxic and probably banned pesticide. Mr. Graves, in a rare defeat, finally loaded the whole lot up and dumped it in with his pig. The pig, more than happy to oblige, gorged itself all night and promptly died, solidifying what the townsfolk had suspected all along.

“Hmm, now what on earth could that be?” Elliot leaned forward against the steering wheel and squinted into the distance. Victoria followed his gaze with mild disinterest. A lump, nondescript and gray, lay on the road ahead of them. Victoria’s stomach tightened. She hoped it wasn’t an animal struck by a passing vehicle—dead or, worse, left to die of its own accord. She almost prayed it wouldn’t be anything that would cast waves across the calm of their day. As the truck pulled them closer, she saw the object was not sprawled out like an animal but rather sitting upright, rounded like a rock, with a stick curved as a winding stream resting against its side. To Victoria’s horror and revulsion, it moved as the vehicle sidled closer to it, the gray blanket creeping back to reveal the haunted, toothless face of Mrs. Spiller, a worn black bible held tightly in her hands.

“Oh! Oh . . . it’s just that old Mrs. Spiller. Just go around her. She’s crazy as can be. Going to end up causing an accident one of these days,” Victoria hissed, drawing her face away from the window so she couldn’t be seen. Elliot put on his four-way flashers, pulled over to the side of the road and got out, either not hearing her words or choosing to ignore them. The truck, vacant without him, hissed her words back at her and, although she felt ashamed of them, it was justification that rose in her throat, not apology.

The Second World War had wreaked considerable devastation on several of Hinckly’s families, but on none with such a severe vengeance as Mrs. Spiller’s. Never the prettiest flower on the wall, her prospects of marriage had almost been given up for naught when a chance introduction to a second cousin once removed had salvaged her from certain spinsterhood and a barren old age. Twin babies were soon delivered and, to everyone’s amazement, they grew to be handsome boys, well mannered and polite.

Mrs. Spiller, already close to forty when the twins were born, realized she’d not get another go at motherhood. She guarded over them with ten times the paranoia of any first-time mother, resulting in passive and somewhat effeminate sons who were wholly unprepared for life and as naive as two beans sprouted in a greenhouse. Army recruiters, extolling the virtues of fighting for and possibly dying for one’s country, found in them a compliant cooperation eager to please. Their father was to drive them down to Fort George, where a train would pick them up and deliver them to who knew what fate. The boys could not contain their excitement, giggling and teasing each other about the fair-haired delicacies they envisioned tasting in foreign lands. Death was a strange word emitted from others’ lips, a dark horse so far in the distance its color was not yet visible. It was inconceivable to them that their lives might not lay in front of them but rather behind, and they strode forward under the banner of invincibility.

So often it is the humble and unaccountable things in life that alter the course of history, and for the Spiller boys a beer bottle carelessly tossed on the edge of the road proved to be every bit as deadly as the shrapnel that awaited them. The flat tire slowed them down by a good thirty minutes. Time, with its poltergeist hand, arranged for the train to run late as well, and it caught them full-square at an unmarked crossing, crumpling the truck under its carriage like a wad of aluminum foil.

A mother’s brain has no capacity to receive the news of the loss of her chicks, and for Mrs. Spiller the death of her boys, along with her husband, proved a load unbearable. From that fateful moment on, she’d become a nonentity trapped on the wrong side of death in a perpetual search for her family. She served up on the kitchen table huge meals that her flock of cats devoured convincing her that her boys had been home, and she’d only just barely missed them, again. And again and again.

Victoria watched as Elliot approached the old wretch, and she opened her window a little. She felt a little embarrassed for him, sure he had no idea what he was getting into. Mrs. Spiller had been known to fly into fits of rage, convinced somebody knew where her sons were but had conspired not to tell her. Other times she’d mortify people by bursting into uncontrollable tears, begging them with an inconsolable anguish to make her boys come home. It wasn’t right, the town agreed. She put people in awkward positions, disrupting everything from suppers to funerals. Should be locked up was the general sentiment felt but seldom expressed, Mrs. Spiller’s sister Doris being in strong disagreement with such opinion. Elliot walked toward her, speaking soft words Victoria couldn’t hear, his manner as calm as if he were approaching a skittish colt. Head cocked to the side, the old woman watched him like a crow; Victoria half expected her to fly up and attack him.

“Hello there, Mrs. Spiller. How are you today?” Elliot asked with a charming smile, squatting slowly beside her, taking her hand in his own and stroking it lightly. The intensity in the old face dropped, and Victoria realized for the first time it was fear and not hostility that hovered there. A black grin cut across her face, weak eyes searching.

“Oh . . . oh my. Is that you, Johnny Woodstaff? Is that you, son?” Her voice creaked and cracked like old stairs in a windstorm. Victoria opened her window further to catch her words.

“It’s Elliot, ma’am. Remember? Remember last week? I gave you a ride out to your sister Doris’s, and she gave you some carrots and peas from her garden—”

“Her garden! Doris has got her garden in already . . . in this weather? Why, that gal’s a bit of a dim bulb. It’ll all freeze sure as day, I tell you.” She stuck her fingers through the holes in her blanket and pulled it tight, shivering against an invisible cold, her rotted prune face contorting so violently that it looked like she would begin to cry, but she laughed instead, an old laugh from another time.

“Johnny Woodstaff, you little rascal you. You just teasing me again, ain’t you? Just like your pa, you is boy.” Her eyes grew serious, her voice low with concern. “How are your parents doing anyhow, Johnny? Your maw feeling any better these days?”

Elliot’s hand patted the top of Mrs. Spiller’s, echoing the soothing rhythm that she herself must have performed thousands of times over the years in nurturing up her young family. “There, there, Mrs. Spiller, don’t you worry yourself one bit. My mom’s feeling really well now. Better than ever she says.”

“Oh, well thank the good Lord. I’m so glad to hear that. She’s a fine woman your mom is . . . a very fine woman.”

Elliot reached out and fussed with the brown toque that had slid half off the gauzy white head, smiling at the compassion she still held for these folks who had been dead and gone already for years. “Here, let me help you . . . your toque is falling off. There, that’s better.”

“Why, thank you, young man. I was wondering why I was catching such a chill.”

“Can I offer you a ride somewhere, Mrs. Spiller? Over to your sister’s maybe?”

“Oh no, that’s very kind of you, Johnny, but I was just looking for my boys. Can’t find them anywhere and a big breakfast I made them, too. I called all over town, but no one’s seen ‘em. Gone like snow in summer they are. Have you seen them, Johnny? Did you see my boys?” She turned her face up to him, hands clasped in front of her trembling in the silent prayer that he would not say no. Elliot looked down, swept the gravel with his hand and picked up a small stick, snapping it between his fingers. His head began a slow-motion nod, and Victoria strained to hear the whisper of his words.

“I did, ma’am. Yes, I did. Not so long ago in fact.”

“You did! No teasing me now, Johnny. No teasing now.” A forgotten joy lit her face, erasing for a moment her pain, the black void of her mouth split in a magnificent hollow smile.

“No, ma’am. No teasing,” Elliot said, smiling with her, fully sharing this brief moment of lifting the cross that crushed her.

“And what did they say, my boys? Will they be home for lunch?” Her hand was wrapped around his wrist now like a claw, her eyes shiny with anticipation, eerie in one so close to death, like a cadaver awakened.

“No, not for lunch . . . so they don’t want you to go to any work, okay?”

“But they got to eat, my boys do. They’re growing boys, they are. They got to eat.”

“They will . . . they will. Don’t worry about them, ma’am. People are always saying they’re the best-behaved boys in the whole valley, always helping out. People are more than happy to make them a meal when they stop by so you shouldn’t worry yourself, okay?”

Mrs. Spiller sagged visibly under her blanket as if her muscles had simply given way, but she appeared serene, a look Victoria had never before seen on her face.

“Oh, they’re good boys, they are. Good, good boys. A blessing from above them boys are.”

“And they’re lucky to have you for a mom, too.” Elliot looked toward the sky as if struggling with himself. “They told me to tell you something else, ma’am.”

“What’s that, dear?” Mrs. Spiller asked in a small and immensely tired voice.

“They said I should tell you that . . . they asked me to tell you that . . . that they love you. Love you very, very much. More than life itself.”

“They said that, Johnny? My boys said that?”

“Yes ma’am, they sure did. And they said if I saw you I was to be sure and tell you.”

“Oh, that’s nice. They’re good boys. Such good boys.”

Elliot shifted his position and helped gather her to her feet, carefully keeping the filthy blanket wrapped around her despite the objectionable heat. “Can I give you a ride, now? Over to Doris’s maybe? You’re a long ways from town today.”

“Well, I don’t want to put you out of your way—”

“No, no. Not at all. We were going right past her place, anyhow. Won’t be any trouble at all,” Elliot enthused, although it wasn’t completely true as they’d already passed Doris’s farm and would have to backtrack several miles.

“Well, okay then, Johnny. If you’re sure I wouldn’t be too much a bother to you. I feel dreadful tired all of a sudden. Not as young as I used to be, you know. Sometimes I think those boys are going to wear me right out.”

Victoria joined in ambitiously, helping to arrange Mrs. Spiller in the cab as the old woman clutched her bible protectively against her chest. She touched the old woman’s hand and bade her good day, but her nerves recoiled sharply at the crepe-paper, blackened skin, and she pulled away. She’d done up her window so Elliot wouldn’t think she’d covertly tried to overhear his conversation, but the stench of death radiating out from the withered carcass so vividly assaulted her senses that she opened it again in self-defense.

“We’ll just take Mrs. Spiller over to her sister’s. Won’t take too long, okay?” Elliot looked down at the old woman, his face tender, obviously touched by the moment that had passed between them.

“Of course, no problem,” Victoria rejoined, eager to offset the coarseness of her earlier response. As they returned back down the road they’d just come, she listened quietly to the conversation taking place beside her, marveling at Elliot’s cheerful banter about events that had never happened and people he’d never known. Suddenly the old woman’s demeanor grew apprehensive, and she began to speak in hushed tones.

“She came out to the house.”

“Who did?”

“The gypsy. She snuck out to my house and stole some of my treasure.”

“Hmm.”

Elliot smiled Victoria a bemused glance over top of the toqued head. She’d heard the stories before as Mrs. Spiller’s deteriorating memory lost money then created a host of shady characters to explain away the loss of logic.

“I had it hidden. She must have seen where, sneaking around in the dark like that, peering in my windows. She didn’t think I knew she was there, but I did. The cats tell me when she comes around. They don’t like her at all. Gypsies frighten them something awful.”

“Were you having a nice walk, Mrs. Spiller?” Victoria said in an effort to pull the conversation back to reality.

Vitreous eyes stared back in disbelief.

“My goodness, I wasn’t out for a walk, my dear. I was looking for my boys!” And then quieter, leaning aside to Elliot she giggled, “Not a very crisp pickle that one. The very idea I’d come all this way just for a walk!”

She chuckled again, and Victoria noticed Elliot struggling to suppress a smile himself. What incredibly lousy luck, Victoria fumed silently. She looked at the folds of gray and the crackled onionskin face huddled close beside Elliot and greatly resented the presence of one who so obviously had overstayed her welcome in the present world. The urge to dispose of the stinking mass in a passing ditch sat deep in her gut, and she replayed the image over and over as they trundled along.