The Life of Hope (18 page)

George watched the strange little fat man leave, and saw that “dashing” was something he could not, in fact, accomplish. His right foot was saddled with a pronounced infirmity, meeting the ground almost sideways.

George Quinton shrugged and placed his tankard to his lips. It was, needless to say, empty.

Two weeks later, the now-famous “Boston Letter” appeared in
The Battle-Axe & Weapons of War
. “When the will of God is done on earth,” it began; the column ended with the name Joseph Benton Hope.

Joseph Benton Hope was a pragmatic man, and following the publication of “The Boston Letter” in
The Battle-Axe & Weapons of War
he made a number of decisions. The first was to publish his own magazine, as there was obviously much power there. Theophilius Drinkwater had managed, through that seemingly innocuous medium, to render the name of Hope synonymous in the minds of Bostonians with moral decrepitude and depravity. The city of Boston quickly fabricated legend and rumor concerning the Free Church, all of it nastily lewd. Hope’s services, they whispered, were nothing other than mass orgies, Joseph impassively directing all the couplings, treblings and
quadruplings
, only indulging himself with the cream of the crop, by which Bostonians meant Mary Carter De-la-Noy, she of the wonderfully pitching bosom. They also accused J. B. Hope of sodomy, which surprised Hope a good deal. Still, Joseph made no move to dispel any of these rumors, and walking the city streets he met every passerby’s eyes with his own sharp, hawklike orb. He did decide, however, to leave Boston.

Martha Quinton told him that she and George had a cousin in Lowell, a cousin sympathetic to their philosophy, and moreover, a cousin with a huge house that he would rent to them at a very reasonable cost. There was only one catch …

Joseph Hope decided to marry Martha Quinton. They went to live in Lowell.

George followed behind, carrying all of the luggage.

Mr. Opdycke went with them, for now that his world was free of disease and delirium, or almost so, it held only J. B. Hope. Mr. Opdycke would never abandon Hope until the bitter end.

Cairine McDiarmid likewise saw no reason to remain in Boston, her family all dead in the old country, the globe on the brink of devastation, its only hope Hope himself, so she went to live in Lowell.

As for the Skinners, all they owned was their farm, and it was impossible to justify selling it, so they remained behind. But Abram became even more brooding, more sad-eyed and poetical, and finally Abigal decided it was better to be impoverished but spiritually happy. They moved to Lowell.

Adam De-la-Noy pointed out to his wife, Mary, that they’d first achieved fame in Boston and that the city had ever since supported them splendidly. What’s more, Lowell was a grimy little “industry” town with no major stage. But Mary’s bosom pitched at a furious clip.

They all lived at Number 42 Dutton Street, across from the dark Merrimack.

“ ‘By the time Hope and his followers settled in Lower Canada (at a point situated approximately 100 kilometers west of Kingston, where today exists the eponymously named town of Hope) they had been practicing “complex marriage” for some months. The practice of “wilful countenance” was introduced by Hope thereafter, in an attempt to stem the production of progeny.’ ”

I was propped up in bed, reading
Failed Utopias
aloud to myself. It was six o’clock in the afternoon, and I was all alone in the house. At some point earlier in the day, I presumed, while I slept, Prof. Harvey Benson had loaded Sheila, Sara and Lee into his tiny red Fiat and headed back to the great city. The silence they left behind was jagged and, if you’ll pardon me, disquieting, so I accompanied my reading with a great deal of whistling and finger-drumming, beating out rhythms on the thick leather cover of the volume I was holding.

I was also somewhat excited, buzzing in my bone marrow. My failure to write a second novel (and thereby replicate even the dubious success of my first) was based on several factors, not the least of them being drinking too much and screwing up on the home front. But also, and perhaps most importantly, I had nothing to write about. The novel I was hacking out paragraph by paragraph was of a vaguely autobiographical nature, by which I mean that I had contrived a little story that enabled me to attack Elspeth in a thinly disguised way. And I suppose my heart wasn’t in it, because I knew that the book was paltry and glib, that I was giving novelists the world over a bad name.

I was, in a very real sense, ashamed of myself. All of my heroes, everyone from Charlie Dickens to Graham Greene, were standing around tsking their tongues. But as I leafed through
Failed Utopias
, I began to sense that I was being granted a reprieve, that I might yet avoid the fate of becoming a TV sitcom
writer or, worse yet, a book reviewer. I had found an interesting story, one that contained at least this single revelation: a man named Joseph Benton Hope had made marriage complex. Move over, boys, I thought, the kid has a little yarn to spin.

None of this thinking was concrete in any way; it was still at the level of bone-marrow buzzing, the same feeling one gets when one is about to fall in love. Whatever level the thinking was at, it was interrupted by a horrible sound, a loud wail like banshees hurling their guts out. I leapt out of bed and rushed to the window as the sound repeated. There in my laneway was a beat-up black pick-up truck; the vomiting banshee noise was produced by the truck’s freon-fueled horn; the horn was being sounded, over and over again, by Mona.

Mona looked up and caught sight of me in the window. She grinned crookedly and hollered, “What, are you in bed?” Mona had overestimated her distance from the house; her bellow was overpowering, actually causing me to take a step backward from the window.

“Just napping!” I returned.

“You all alone in there or what?” Mona screamed impishly.

“All alone!” I called down. “I’ll be right out!”

“ ’Kay!”

As I pulled on my jeans and T-shirt I continued to look at Mona. She turned away from the house, toward the pond, and jumped up onto the hood of her pick-up truck, placing her lovely butt on to it. Mona was differently dressed that day, or at least her top was different. Instead of the undershirt, she had on a bright red nylon baseball jersey. On the back was a large white “7” and a name was spelled out above this, a long name that stretched from shoulder-blade to shoulder-blade, DRINKWATER. The material of the jersey was thick, I figured, too thick given the warmth of the late afternoon, because I saw Mona lift the front and flap it idly, fanning air on to her breasts. Then, hiking it up even further, Mona wiped the sweat from her eyes and forehead. Needless to say, Mona wore nothing underneath, and I was enthralled and delighted to see the soft sides of her breasts. I raced down the stairs and out to the truck.

“Hi!” I said.

Mona jumped down from the hood and grinned. “It’s nice
out here,” she commented, seeming a little bewildered. “I ain’t never been here before.” Mona cocked her head toward the pond and asked, “Got any fish in there?”

“Little guys.”

“Uh yeah.”

“You want to come in and see the house?” I offered.

Mona reached into her pockets for a cigarette, lighting it and blowing smoke from the corner of her mouth before answering, “Nope, I don’t, thanks.”

“Okay.”

Mona made a perfectly formed smoke ring and said, “We missed ya yesterday.”

“Huh?”

“We thought maybe you’d come in yesterday, but ya dint.”

“I had unexpected company,” I told her. “People from Toronto.”

“Your wife, the clown?”

“No, just my friend Harvey and some of his students. We conducted a seminar.”

“La-dee-dah,” said Mona. She flicked away her cigarette even though it was far from finished. “Lookee.” Mona pointed to her left breast.

“Nice,” I commented.

“Not the tit, stupit,” giggled Mona. “The frigging ’C’.”

Over Mona’s nice tit, someone had sewn on a big C. The rest of the jersey’s front was occupied by the profile of a large, evil bird’s head. Letters underneath spelled out HOPE HAWKS.

“It’s the women’s Softball team,” Mona explained. “I’m the Cap.”

“Great.”

“The thing of it is, is,” Mona went on, “tonight we’re playing the Falconbridge Falcons. What a bunch of bimbos they are! And I thought that, if you dint have annathin’ else to do, you might wanna come an’ watch.”

“Great.”

“Hey, maybe you can even get a idea for another book or sumpin’.”

“Maybe,” I agreed.

“So, like, let’s hop in ol’ Esmerelda here!”

Esmerelda was, apparently, the name of Mona’s pick-up truck. I ran over to the passenger side and threw open the door.

“Don’t mind Joe,” said Mona as a mastiff of overwhelming size and viciousness lunged at me. I managed to throw the door shut. There was a loud crunch as the dog’s head collided with the metal. “His bark is worst than his bite,” said Mona as she climbed in behind the steering wheel. The hound pressed its face up against the window, all bloodshot eyes and drooling maw. The dog seemed to grin evilly at Mona’s comment, resolving not to bark at all, thereby granting me no clue as to how truly horrific its bite could be.

“Nice Joe!” said I.

Joe laughed, lather forming in great quantities at both sides of his mouth. Joe jerked his huge head backward—Get in, I dare ya.

“You’re not a’scared of dogs, are ya?” asked Mona.

“No,” I answered, “although I have a little thing about the Hounds of Hell.”

Mona giggled and wrapped her arms around Joe, pulling him away from the window. “Come on, Joe-Joe,” she cooed. “It’s just Paulie. He’s my new friend.”

Joe studied me with interest. Oh goodie, thought the dog, a nice fat one.

“Get in,” urged Mona.

My courage was spawned by Mona’s comment that I was her “new friend.” I opened the door to the cab and jumped in, holding my breath all the while. I stared straight ahead and listened to Joe’s maniacal breathing.

Mona fired up her truck and backed down the laneway at about forty kilometers per hour.

Having decided not to bite me, at least for a little while, Joe elected to demonstrate just how bad that bark of his could be. I had rolled down my window a few inches, because it was as hot as a furnace inside the cab, but only a few inches because Mona was driving like a madman along the dirt roads, engulfing the truck in a great cloud of dust and pebbles. Ahead of us, rolling along the side of the road in a quiet, dignified way, was an old man on a bicycle. Joe waited silently until we pulled up behind the geezer, and then he leaned across me and stuck his
muzzle through the window’s opening. At the instant we were alongside the old man, Joe barked. It was a truly awe-inspiring bark, short in duration, but enormous in volume and speaking unspeakable atrocities. Then we passed the old man. I watched through the side rear-view mirror as he suffered a massive coronary and tumbled into the ditch, bicycle and all.

Joe looked at me, grinning and demanding comment.

“Good, Joe,” I mumbled.

Joe laid his head on my lap, covering my jeans with foul-smelling drool.

“You like Hope?” asked Mona, oblivious to her pet’s sadistic antics.

“Yeah,” I nodded. “As a matter of fact, I’m thinking about doing some research on it.”

“What’s that mean?”

“You know, researching about how it was founded and all that.”

“What for?”

“It might be interesting.”

Mona worked the gearshift as we rounded a corner. “Yup,” she nodded. “I s’pose it might be.”

“You know anything about that?”

Mona nodded but remained silent.

Suddenly Mona threw on the brakes. Both Joe and I were shot forward, Joe crumpling against the dashboard and then slipping with a startled yelp to the floor of the cab. Mona jumped out of the truck and took a few quick steps away, her hands dug into her back pockets, her face turned to the sky. I watched her through the windshield (the glass spider-webbed with cracks), and it occurred to me that Mona was very, very pretty.

“There he is, eh?” Mona nodded toward the clouds.

Joe and I joined Mona on the dusty road.

High above us sailed the hawk.

“I love that fuckin’ birdie,” Mona went on. “Sometimes I think I love him more than practically annathin’ else.”

It would be hard, I thought, to love something so distant; but then I remembered about Elspeth.

“What do you call him?” I asked.

“I don’t call him nothin’,” muttered Mona. “He don’t need a
name, on account of he’s all alone. Just him and the sky.”

“Do you know,” I told her, thankful that I’d wasted hundreds of half-hours watching “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom,” “that hawks never drink water?”

“No shit?” Mona placed her enormous hand above her eyes for shade, because the bird was flying into the sun.

“No. They get all the liquid they need from their victims’ blood.”

“Hey-hey!” Mona gave the hawk a fisted salute. “Way to go, Birdy-baby!”

“And did you know,” I went on, “that hawks can’t stand to be looked directly in the eye?”

“Neither can I,” responded Mona.

“I’ll remember.”

“You do that,” said Mona.

The hawk disappeared, floating behind the tops of some trees. The bird made a strange sound, the sky squeaking as if the Pearly Gates had rusty hinges.

“I love him,” repeated Mona, looking sadly earthward. Mona noticed her beast Joe hanging his head in splendid hang-dog fashion, so she dropped to her knees and pressed the hound’s head against her bosom. “Hey, Joe-Joe. I love you too! You’re my wittle Joe!”