Psyche (11 page)

It was not an atmosphere conducive to permanence of any kind, yet the shack, cut off from corroborative visual proof that it was part of a community as flimsy as its own four walls, seemed to have acquired a timelessness as immutable as the slag hills which sheltered it; offered a security that, though false, was nevertheless a sufficient protection for the three who called it home.

The mechanics of life at the shack were of the simplest nature, for both Butch and Mag, essentially lazy, did things the easy way whenever there was one to be found. Though their housekeeping was sketchy to the point of non-existence, they housed no fleas or other vermin, chiefly because the surrounding trerrain effectively discouraged such forms of life. The garbage, accumulating during the week in a convenient crevice in the slag, was burned on Sunday mornings, a pagan ritual observed summer and winter alike. This task, delegated to Butch, was one that he rather enjoyed. Paying cursory attention from time to time to an acrid column of yellow smoke, he would perambulate heavily around the circumference of the small valley he looked upon as his own. That it was his only by squatter's rights he had long ago forgotten, and he favoured its few barren acres with the benign approval a member of the landed gentry might have bestowed upon rich farm and wood lands.

“Come on, kid,” he would say, “it's time to walk around the propitty.”

The “propitty” boasted, in all, three landmarks, the shack itself just managing to dominate outhouse and well.

The outhouse, which embodied the sanitary conveniences of the establishment, stood some forty feet behind the shack. In fine weather it served its purpose well enough. From inside one could see a pleasant rift of blue sky through the air space above the door, and an inconveniently placed leak in the roof could be temporarily forgotten. In the winter, however, it provided a deadly pilgrimage postponed as long as was physically possible, the knowledge that at least the leak was frozen over proving of small comfort.

The well, from which they drew their water supply, was not far from the front door, and had cost more to drill than the price of the shack and everything it contained; the water table, lowered by the impermeable quality of the ground above, having been finally reached at a depth of sixty-five feet. The labour involved in cranking buckets up and down was one of the reasons why washing was considered a luxury to be indulged in only after careful and lengthy consideration.

The official “front door” of the shack, to which all deliveries other than coal and kindling were made, was the mail-box on the highway a quarter of a mile away. A forsaken scarcecrow, maintaining its lopsided balance by some unexplained miracle, its name long since erased by time, it was by its very loneliness an unmistakable sign-post to the truckers who laid their expected tributes at its single wooden foot. Deliveries of food were made four times a week, and new orders—often reduced to a terse ‘the same'—withdrawn by the truckers from the box itself. Once a week the Liquor Control Board parted with an offering consisting invariably of two cases of beer and two bottles of the best Scotch whiskey, for Butch and Mag concurred in the belief that ‘good stuff was easy on the guts'. These things came from the small mining town four miles away. Consumer goods such as clothes, household implements, and, in fact, every other item that ever found its way to the shack, came from further afield through the medium of a city department store lavish in its gifts of seasonal catalogues and monthly circulars. These advertisements were the
only mail as such ever to reach the mail-box. At one time there had been an occasional ill-written missive addressed to Mag, but now her sole link with the past was her own tenacious memory, and the department store stood alone as representative of what they vaguely spoke and thought of as the “outside”.

Mag, her own great weight a sufficient burden in itself, made the necessary excursions to this “front door” with voluble protests that began when she set out, and terminated only when she could again collapse, wheezing, on the couch where she spent most of her time. Psyche, on the other hand, looked forward to the visits to the highway with an eagerness that increased as she grew older. Nearly always they saw a car, sometimes more than one, sweeping briefly across their periphery, glamorous meteors on their way to or from the outside, following a road that Psyche saw as a never-ending ribbon stretched to infinity across space and time.

One day, after deep thought, she asked, “Mag, which way's the outside?”

Without hesitation, Mag pointed south. “Thataway.”

“Then where's t'other way go?”

“Nowheres in partic'lar, that I knows of.”

Psyche's level and surprisingly dark eyebrows drew together in a small frown of concentration. “Nowheres must be sorta like here.”

Mag cast a disparaging glance at the slag which pressed against the highway on either side, grim and forbidding even at high noon. ”Couldn't be no worse, anyway. Come on, kid, you're gettin' big enough to help tote some of these here things.'

Mag never made any pretense of liking anything about what was, pro tern., her home. On rainy days, after the housework was done—a chore consisting of a few idle flicks with a duster—she would settle down on the couch, and, a faraway look in her light-blue eyes, relive for Psyche's benefit her experiences before she came to the mines, dwelling with real nostalgia on such simple, and to Psyche unknown, pleasures as picking wild flowers and walking leaf-shadowed country lanes.

By the time she was seven Psyche knew every detail of these
reminiscences, if anything better than Mag did herself. A critical audience who brooked no deviation from the original text, she would interject corrections when she deemed it necessary, and demand that the answers to her innumerable questions be incorporated as part of chapter and verse.

“I ain't never known nobody with a memory like the kid's,” Mag told Butch. “She never forgets nothin' she ever hears or sees.”

Psyche was fascinated by all Mag's stories, but the ones she liked best were those that concerned her days in service when, first as general housemaid, and then as cook, she had worked for a family whose manner of living was beyond belief. Because Mag's vocabulary was nearly as limited as Psyche's experience, they hit upon a scheme, which afforded them both an equal pleasure, of illustrating these memoirs with the help of mail-order catalogues.

Seated on the floor beside the couch, her long thin legs tucked under her, a curtain of uncut hair falling forward over her face, Psyche would search well-thumbed pages for the article which was apropos at the moment. Nothing she could find was ever quite good enough, but this was to be expected, for Mag's past was clothed in all the splendour of King Solomon's court in its heyday.

Referring to the house in which she had worked, and in modest contradiction of the picture she had just painted of it, Mag would say, “It wasn't no palace, mind you, kid, but they did do things real nice. An honest-to-God Irish lace cloth when company came, flowers arranged real pretty for a centre-piece like, and them little glass bowls for washin' the hands in when they was finished eatin'.”

One winter's day when the slag lay deep buried beneath a covering of snow whose crystalline surface cracked audibly in a temperature of more than twenty below zero, Psyche laboured at producing a facsimile of this grandeur.

When Butch and Mag sat down to a table, not only cleared of its usual attendant clutter, but embellished with candles and carefully fashioned paper flowers. Psyche's eager expectancy was more than rewarded by praise which made up in heartiness for what it lacked in variety. However, when she produced, at the end of the
meal, brown paper doilies on which reposed jelly glasses filled with water, Butch failed her.

Seeing Mag's portentous wink, he knew that something extraordinary was expected of him, and, his low forehead a field fresh furrowed with perplexity, did the best he could.

Picking up the jelly glass in front of him, he drained it in one great gulp, and said, “Dee-licious, damned if it ain't.”

It was the first time he had wilfully drunk water for many years. He had exhibited gallantry beyond the call of duty, and it was not his fault that it was a mistaken sacrifice.

Butch had been a rookie on the police force when he met and courted the red-headed cook who lived within the circumference of his beat, but, try as she would, Psyche could not see him in uniform. A Butch with neatly combed hair, polished brass buttons, and shining shoes, was a vision which even her lively imagination refused to conjure up. Nevertheless, the knowledge that he had been a policeman, even if long ago, gave her a certain respect for him that she might not otherwise have had. The law in itself, however, together with all its official representatives, became fixed in her mind as well-meaning, kindly, and not particularly intelligent.

“Did he like being a policeman?” she asked Mag, curiously.

“Sure.”

“Then why did he quit bein' one?”

“He got flat feet,” Mag told her matter-of-factly.

Her own dramatic arrival at the shack was an anecdote to which Psyche was willing to listen as often as Mag could be persuaded to retell it. She was nine years old, and it was a hot autumn day very like the one on which she had come to the slag, when, to Mag's intense astonishment, she interrupted the story with a violence quite out of keeping with her normal behaviour.

“I don't wanna hear that one no more!”

“Why, kid—you always——”

“I don't wanna hear it, see!”

Mag was not entirely without perception. “You're thinkin' of the other side of it, ain't you, kid?” she asked gently. “You're thinkin' of the folks what left you here.”

Her mobile face unchildish and set, Psyche said, “I ain't thinkin' of nothin'.”

“You mustn't be that way about it, kid. You got folks right here who think a heap of you, and if there was others what didn't —well, it don't make no difference now.”

“It do so make a difference!” Psyche cried, and suddenly sobbing convulsively, turned and ran for the door.

3

L
OOKING
back, years later, psyche was to realize that she had, in many ways, been extremely lucky in her odd foster-parents.

She was always to remember them together as an inseparable unit, but Butch was the shadow where Mag was the active force and substance.

Mag was a woman who would have been strikingly handsome if she had not been so grossly overweight. Her forehead, beneath the never-dying flame of her untidy red hair, was broad and peaceful, her fleshy nose straight, and her generous mouth well-shaped. Her expression usually revealed both her easy-going kindliness and her complete satisfaction with a life primitive in its simplicity.

She was illiterate, and capable of a hearty vulgarity which a scrubbed intelligentsia would undoubtedly have found distasteful. Basically, however, she was vulgar in the classical sense only. She was one of the common people, and, unashamed of this, possessed an integrity which revealed itself in very real moral standards. Her conversation was often generously peopled with bitches and bastards, but, believing in God, she never allowed His name
to be taken in vain under her roof. When her normally dormant temper was aroused, she could, and did, throw moveable pieces of household furnishings at her slow-moving helpmeet; but marriage was to her, most truly, an Holy Estate, into which no third person might be allowed to wander with impunity. In her opinion adultery was the pastime of those already damned beyond any last-minute Judgement Day redemption. Slovenliness, drunkenness, gambling and fighting, all these were frailties to be accepted with benevolence; but tampering with the truth, the careless acquisition of another's property, and cruelty or oppression visited by the strong upon the weak, were sins undeserving of any lenience.

Her father had been a God-fearing Baptist, who, while failing to transmit any lasting religious fervour to any of his twelve children, had by example as much as anything else bred in all of them an abiding respect for practising truth and honesty which they never quite outgrew.

Mag, lazy though she was, had a conscience that would not allow her to deny Psyche what were, according to her lights, the advantages of a proper upbringing. Her one great stumbling-block in the instrumentation of this worthy aim was that Psyche did not appear to need correction in any way. In a situation where temptations simply did not exist, she committed no crimes. Full of energy, always anxious to please, she not only did what she was asked to do but did it at once. With what appeared to be an inherent belief in individual rights, she never touched the few things in the shack which she was forbidden to touch, such as Mag's prized damask tablecloth which was used only on Christmas day. And when Mag roused herself from her lethargy sufficiently to walk the four miles into town to see a movie or ‘visit a while'. Psyche, far from being a nuisance, was, in these foreign surroundings, unnaturally quiet. She might well have been told to wash her neck, comb her hair, and refrain from slamming doors and swearing, but it would never have occurred to Mag to criticize these particular sins of omission and commission.

Finally, despairing of finding a concrete example for what she considered her most important lesson, Mag fell back on theory.

“Look, kid, if you was to take a nickel that was some person else's, would you be better off than you was before?”

“Sure. I'd have a nickel, wouldn't I?” Psyche answered reasonably.

“And what would you spend it on?”

“A choclit bar,” Psyche replied at once.

“It would give you a stummick-ache.”

“Why? T'other ones never did.”

“This one would, because you would be a thief and God would send you a stummick-ache for sure,” Mag told her triumphantly.

Psyche knew that a stomach-ache created expressly by the Lord to chastise one would be something to be avoided at all costs.