Ragged Company (4 page)

“Lady,” I go, “it is the plan of all fucking plans.”

I
ONLY EVER SEEN
one cold like this one. It came on straight across snow—the wind so tight and hard it blew along parallel to the ground. You could hear it. It didn’t so much scream across the flatlands as it whispered.
Pssst.
Sharp, slicing like a fingernail across silk. Many a man would tear up in the face of it. That’s what I remember. Big red-faced men, their eyes glistening wetly through the slits between their scarves and toques, their breath hanging like curly white beards in the fabric. They would huff and puff for air because that cold was so deep and dense it would suck the air right out of your lungs. It was a huge, everywhere kind of cold. They called it a “monster” cold. Monster because it was huge. Monster because it was unknown and fearful. Monster because it came in at night and monster because it killed things.

The cows. That was the first sign that things weren’t right. In that kind of cold you expect the stock to find shelter. Even a cow knows when the weather’s gonna turn, and even a cow would get itself to the barn. But I guess that wind blew it in so quick it
fooled everything. We found the first one about a half-mile out. I’ll never forget it. She was standing there leaned up against a rail fence looking like an old woman waiting for a bus. She stared at everything unblinking, her eyes red, the irises dulled with death, frozen open in surprise. The others were the same. Thirty of them. Not huddled together like you’d expect but spread about all loosey-goosey, frozen into place like statues with that dull look of wonder on their iced-over faces. That was one son of a bitch of a cold.

Just like this one. I thought about that as we made our way along the street. You could feel your nostrils start to freeze. Everywhere there were people hunched over against the cold, moving in a crazy armless trot, peering through slits in scarf and hat and hood. I could hear Digger mutter a curse and Dick ahead of me huffing away in short, sharp gasps. Amelia took it all in silence.

“Shoot me your cash and I’ll pick up,” Digger says when we reach the liquor store.

“Vodka,” I say.

“Yeah,” he says, “so what else is new?”

So we get to the theatre and pause on the sidewalk. All of us feeling out of place, out of sorts, out of the predictable patterns we live. We spend a few moments eyeballing each other. Waiting, I guess. Waiting for the brave one to pull the plug on this trip and send us all back to the alleyways, lanes, and doorways that we understand. But no one says a word.

Finally, Amelia nods at us. Just nods, and we head up the steps to the big glass doors. Digger shoots me a look that says,
Keep your eyes peeled,
and Dick moves a step closer to us all. Only Amelia seems certain, unafraid. She walks to the ticket window and says, “Four for
Wings of Desire,
please.” Just like that. Just like this was the kind of thing she did every day. Casual. She sounded casual, asking.

“Pardon?” the young guy in the booth asks, and I know we’re scuttled.

“Four for
Wings of Desire
,” she says again.

“Are you sure?” he asks, looking the three of us over.

“Yes, I’m sure,” Amelia says, still soft, still under control even though I know she knows the guy’s ready to call the cops. “Four.
Wings of Desire.
I hear it’s very good.”

“Ah, yes it is,” the young guy says, waving out the back of the booth. “I’ve seen it three times myself.”

“Three? Well, it must be good.”

“May I help you?” a briskly walking man in a red blazer asks twenty feet before he gets to us.

“Yes. Four for
Wings of Desire,
please,” she says again with a little wink at Red Blazer that surprises me.

“
Wings of Desire.
Yes. It’s in German, you know? You have to read the little sentences under the picture while you watch,” he says, coming to a stop five feet from us, giving us the once-over.

“I’m sure we’ll love it,” she says, reaching into her pocket and surprising the hell out of the three of us with a roll of bills the size of a good potato. Red Blazer’s eyes widen, too.

“Ah, yes, well, I’m sure you will, ma’am,” he says waving at the young man in the booth to do business with us. “However, I’m not going to have any trouble from you, am I?”

“Trouble?” Amelia says with an arch of one eyebrow. “Trouble? Feel much like trouble, boys?”

We shake our heads. Wordless.

“See? Way too cold out there for any of us to want any trouble in here.”

“Yes. Yes. Good. That’s good. Well, I hope you enjoy the film,” Red Blazer says and waves us past.

It’s like a scene from a movie itself. The four of us, clearly rough and tattered, walking slowly along this dimly lit corridor, our feet kinda scuffing over the carpet that sinks beneath us. No one says nothing. I don’t know about the rest but me, I’m shocked. Shocked by the sudden way the world you think you know can disappear on you. We move along this corridor where they got little signs telling you which picture’s playing in which room until we get to the next to last one that reads
Wings of Desire.
Can’t tell much from the sign, just a man’s face on a big blue background
and some kind of wings behind him. Me, I figure a good old-time war movie or even a romance about pilots. But we walk in and we just stand there looking. It’s a lot smaller than the movie rooms I remember. Kinda like a big living room with a dozen rows of seats and maybe a twenty-foot screen at the front. There’s no one there. Well, there’s us and one other old guy, looks about sixty, sixty-five. He’s all slicked up with a topcoat, hat, and a long looks-like-silk scarf. He one-times us from the corner of his eye but other than that there’s no reaction.

The three of us take to eyeballing each other, waiting on Amelia to tell us where to go. My choice would be one of the back rows nearest the far wall so we can see the usher coming. Kinda hunker down over there and fade into the background. That’d be my choice. But Amelia starts down the aisle and heads right into the same row as the old guy. Me ’n Digger give each other the look and follow right after. I figure it’s close enough to be in the same row as the only other guy in the theatre but Amelia slides right along and plops down two seats away from him.

“Hey, mister,” she says, “cold enough for ya?”

Well, I gotta give the guy credit. He was cool. Real cool. He just sits there, gives her a small grin, goes “Ahem,” and moves on over one seat. No drama, no over-the-top freak-out or nothing, just goes “Ahem” and slides over. Cool.

That would have been the end of it and harmless enough, I guess, until Amelia looks at him for a few seconds, goes “Ahem” herself, and slides over one seat too. Well, I about fell over. I figure now the heat’s gonna be on us for sure. This old guy’s gonna scurry off after Red Blazer himself and we’ll be back in the deep freeze again lickety-split. But the guy’s cool. He sits there, looks over at Amelia, looks over at the three of us standing there in the row like storefront dummies, nods once, looks at the screen, and starts playing with the buttons on his topcoat. That’s it. Just fiddles with his buttons.

Amelia nods at us and we kinda fall into our seats—Dick right beside her, me in the middle, and Digger at the end closest to the aisle.

“What the fuck?” Digger whispers to me.

“I don’t know,” I say.

And I sit back and look around and I can feel that feeling again. I feel dreamlike. But there’s no panic in it. No need to run away from this. Instead, it’s like that last light over the fields on the farm. The dividing line between day and night. That time when every sound you hear, from the cows mooing in the fields to the clink of the sink through the window to the creak of the porch chair you sit in, becomes another colour in the deep blue bowl of evening. Everything, even you, all huddled up against itself like you gotta hold yourself in or you’ll explode. That’s how it feels and for the first time in a long time, thinking of that, I don’t feel no big rush of sorrow, no big unstoppable wetness in the middle of my chest. Just okay. Just calm. And when those lights start to fade, slow and almost unnoticeable like falling into a dream, I let go, I allow myself to fall, sliding, sliding away from the monster cold beyond this place and into the soft, warm arms of the darkness.

T
HERE’S A SONG
in every board and nail. That is what he told me, my father. On those nights of my youth when the north wind would rise off the lake behind our house to rattle bony knuckled fingers along the eaves and shutters, I would cry. And he’d come to me. He would emerge from the darkness, silently, this monolith of a man that was my father. Listen, he’d say. Listen. The wind is coaxing them free again. They live in every timber, every stone, and every nail. Your people. Your ancestors. They’re with you, around you, watching over you all the time. That’s what you hear, son. Lullabies. Not ghosts or goblins or witches. Just songs. The wind sets them free to sing them to you. There’s a song in every board and nail in this old house and if you listen you can hear them. And he would stretch out his great length beside me trailing the faint aura of granite dust that always clung to him, and we would open ourselves up to the chorus.

In my child’s mind I imagined a fabulous music that would become the lullabies and hymns that eased me into sleep. When I woke he would be gone, off well before dawn to the granite quarry where he, like my grandfather and great-grandfather, had built the life that gave me mine. And my name: Granite Harvey.

The house itself was built of the selfsame rock they quarried. Large slabs laboriously placed three storeys high. The ashen face of granite was augmented by lively rows of chert, feldspar, and gneiss, their minerals adding an unencumbered glee to the austerity of pale stone. Each piece had been carried by wagon from neighbouring fields and shoreline. Even the roof timbers, eaves, and shutters were fitted and sawn from the felled trees of the ten acres it sat upon. In this way it seemed not so much to dominate the land as become a natural part of it. For years, I truly believed it had spoken. I believed that the rocks and timbers and nails whispered to me constantly. So that nights alone, reading in front of that huge fireplace, ancestors I had never met kept me company. Now, I shake my head and stare around the empty room.

Above me I hear Mac prowling. He was always a good prowler. It was what made him a good reporter and eventually a great editor. Always able to spot the hidden detail that turned a good story into an outstanding one. Now he was likely inspecting the house in the same way.

I was busy with the fireplace flues when I heard him heading down the stairs. “Fine wood,” he said, entering the room. “This whole place is built of really fine wood. Maple, oak, and just the right touches of pine and cedar in the baths. Someone really knew what they were doing, Gran. They don’t build them like this anymore.”

“No,” I said. “Great-grandfather built things to last.”

“Still, you know, there’s a great place for a sauna up there and a skylight or two would brighten it. Right now, it’s almost Gothic—all that
Wuthering
gloom and cold.”

“Are you kidding? You should have heard the fight I had just to get the old man to put in the furnace system. He said the house would never be the same again. Said he wanted it kept the way it was.”

“Nice sentiment,” Mac said. “There’s some people who believe that heritage should remain heritage and to alter it forces it to lose its value, its place in time. That’s important to a lot of people, Gran—that one place in time that anchors them. You sure you want to sell it?”

I moved to pull across the louvred shutters that covered the twin windows on either side of the fireplace, sending the house into a final gloaming. “Let’s smoke,” I said. “By the lake, one last time.”

He followed me out the back door and across the wide stone terrace I’d helped build as a teenager. At its far end a short set of steps led down to the scraggly patch of grass my father had steadfastly referred to as lawn. Beyond that, a pair of rough timbers and carefully placed stones became the stairs that led to the small dock at their bottom. Neither of us spoke. Mac content to gaze about at the snow-covered rocks and trees, and me lost in the dullness I’d carried for some time now.

“It’s a hell of a lake, Gran,” Mac said. “Great house, a dock, two hours out of the city, quiet. You ask me, at your age you couldn’t swing a better deal. Most of us slave for years to get hold of half of what you have here. It’s what everyone wants nearing retirement age.”

“Everyone but me,” I said flatly.

He turned to face me. I’d inherited the height of my father and Mac was a hand span shorter, but in all the years we’d known each other he’d had a razor in his brown eyes that cut down the difference. He honed it now as he smoked and regarded me. “All right,” he said. “I know that burying your father has you feeling all morbid and lost. But death is death. It’s a hard fact, sure, but you move on. You move on. Why? Because you’re not the one in the ground. Talk to me! Let me in for fuck sake, Gran.”

He turned, tossed his cigarette into the lake, and stared across the water. Birds. Water. Wind. Silence.

It had been thirty years. From the very beginning, on our first day of journalism school, he’d recognized me for what I was—the vague face at the edge of the crowd. One of those people who get so used to a life at the edges that they remain stranded on the
limits forever. On our third day he’d sat beside me, winked, and slowly began to bring me off the sidelines. It was the inherent goodness in Mac Maude that brought him to my side, and it was the same virtue that kept him there all this time. We’d graduated together, got our first reporter’s jobs together, and worked our way up on the same newspaper for twenty-six years. When he left the beat for an editor’s post and I moved to writing national columns, he became my editor. Before all the awards and accolades that came my way in those next years, he had prowled my copy relentlessly, many times finding the turn of detail that altered strong phrases into memorable ones. I had trusted him. Not simply in the professional sense but as a friend as well.