The Stone Angel (20 page)

The house had that rancid smell that comes from unwashed dishes and sour floors and food left sitting on the table. The kitchen was a shambles. You could have scratched your initials in the dark grease that coated the oilcloth on the table. A loaf of bread sat there with the butcher knife stuck into it like a spear. A dish of stewed saskatoons, the berries hard and small, was being attended by a court of flies. On a larded piece of salt pork a mammoth matriarchal fly was laboring obscenely to squeeze out of herself her white and clustered eggs.

“I meant to clean up,” John said. “But I never got around to it.”

The house couldn’t have looked much worse than he did. He wore an old pair of Bram’s overalls, so stiff with dirt they’d have stood alone. He’d lost too much weight.
His face was like a skull’s, and yet he grinned as though it pleased him no end to look that way.

“Welcome to your castle,” he said, and made a bow.

I looked at him shrewdly and wondered why I hadn’t noticed before. He hadn’t needed to drive the car, for one thing. The horse could have found the way blindfold, as Bram’s horses used to steer him home so long ago.

“I wouldn’t have thought you could afford to drink,” I said.

“All you need in this world is a little ingenuity,” he said. “A little get-up-and-go. You’ve often said so. We make it ourselves. At least, I do. There’s not much else to do. It’s my life’s work. The berries weren’t worth a damn this year, but I’ve evolved a vintage champagne from potato peelings. Care to try some?”

“No, I would not. Where’s your father?”

“He stays in the front room, mostly, these days. He never used it all his life here, so he might as well get some good out of it now, while he can.”

I don’t think anyone had so much as flicked a duster over the front room since I’d left. Dust grew like mold over every single thing—the golden oak armchair in which Jason Currie had once sat and drilled me in the multiplication tables, the glassed-in china cabinet, the carved settee from the Currie house. My father’s British India rug was still on the floor, but it had been so spilled upon and the dirt tracked over it that now the blue and russet vines and flowers were barely discernible.

Bram sat in an armchair, his legs splayed out, his frayed heather-gray sweater buttoned right up to his adam’s apple although the day was stifling. How had he grown so small? The broadness of him was gone. His shoulders were stooped, and his wide spade-beard had become
only a tufted fringe along his face. When he looked at me, his eyes were mild and milky, absent of expression. And I, more than anything, was doubly shamed recalling how I’d thought of him at night these past years.

He didn’t know me. He didn’t speak my name. He didn’t say a word. He merely gazed a moment at me, then blinked and looked away.

“Time for your medicine, Dad,” John said.

At first I wondered how he’d managed to pay a doctor or a druggist. But then I saw what it was. He refilled the glass from the gallon jug that stood on the floor, and put it into the old man’s hands, helping him to drink it so he wouldn’t slop too much over himself.

“Is this the usual thing?” I asked.

“Why, yes,” John said. “Don’t frown like that, angel. He’s getting what he needs.”

“John—” I cried. “What’s happened to you?”

“Hush. It’s all right. I know what’s best.”

“You do, eh? You’re sure of that, you think?”

“Were you?” John said, with fearful gentleness. “Were you?”

Only John looked after Bram, washed him, led him to the outhouse, cleaned up the messes that sometimes occurred, performing all these rites with such a zeal and burning laughter they seemed both sinister and absurd.

Bram’s daughters, Jess and Gladys, still lived near Manawaka. They never came to see him. He stayed in his perpetual dusk all through the sifting days. Sometimes he talked, mostly in snatches and broken phrases, but occasionally with a momentary clarity, such as the only time he spoke of me.

“That Hagar—I should of licked the living daylights
out of her, maybe, and she’d have seen I could. What d’you think? Think I should of?”

I could not speak for the salt that filled my throat, and for anger—not at anyone, at God, perhaps, for giving us eyes but almost never sight.

Bram looked at me with recognition one day.

“You’ve come to help out, ain’t you?” he said. “Funny—you put me in mind of someone.”

“Who?” Perversely, I would not tell him, or could not.

He seemed to find it so difficult to ponder anything. His face grayed in strain.

“I dunno. Maybe—Clara. Yeh, her.”

The woman I reminded him of was his fat and cow-like first wife.

    I drove into town with John to take the eggs. The damnable chickens were a godsend now, for they seemed able to live on practically nothing. If people could do half as well, we’d have been all set. On the steps of Currie’s General Store we met a girl. She was about John’s age, a trifle too plump but fair-haired and rather pretty. She seemed a silly thing, though. Such a fuss she made over John, laying her white hands on his brown hairy arm, cooing like a pouter pigeon. Johns eyes narrowed and mocked her, and she throve on it.

“What’re you doing with yourself these days, John?”

“Nothing, on Saturday. Going to the dance?”

“I might—”

“See you there, then,” he said, and she looked disconcerted, having hoped he’d ask her to go with him. How could he? He had no money to spare for that sort of
thing. He and Bram were living mainly on the money I’d sent, and I guess he thought I wouldn’t take kindly to his spending it on girls. He was quite right. I wouldn’t have.

Finally he deigned to introduce us. “Mother—this is Arlene Simmons.”

I scrutinized her with renewed interest.

Telford and Lottie’s daughter?”

The same.”

Arlene. Trust Lottie to pick a name like that, all ruffles, the same way she used to dress the girl so fussily. John put an arm around the girl’s shoulders, smearing her white pique dress.

“See you around, eh?” he said, and we left, he whistling and I bewildered.

“You could have been a little more polite,” I reproached him when we were out of earshot. “Not that I was much impressed with her. But still and all—”

“Polite!” He snorted with laughter. “That’s not what she wants from me.”

“What does she want—to marry you?”

“Marry? By Christ, no. She’d never marry a Shitley. It tickles her to neck with one, that’s all.”

“Don’t talk like that,” I snapped, “Don’t ever let me hear you speak like that again, John. In any case, she’s not the sort of girl for you. She’s bold and—”

“Bold? Her? She’s a rabbit, a little furry rabbit.”

“You like her, then?”

“Are you kidding? I’d lay her if I got the chance, that’s all.”

“You’re talking just like your father,” I said. “The same coarse way. I wish you wouldn’t. You’re not a bit like him.”

That’s where you’re wrong,” John said.

Another day I ran into Lottie on the street. She’d grown fat as butter, and her marcelled hair was gray as mine now. She wore a teal-blue shantung suit which might have looked quite smart if she hadn’t been so portly.

“Well, well, Hagar,” she chirped. “It’s so nice to see you back again, after all this time. We’ve heard such nice things about you—how you’ve done so well out at the coast. And such a lovely job—companion, we heard, to an elderly man who made his money in export-import or something like that.”

“You didn’t hear correctly, then,” I said. “I’m his housekeeper.”

“Oh—” She looked distressed and didn’t know what to say. “Is that it? Well, you hear so many things. We get news of Manawaka people who’ve moved to the coast from Charlotte, who’s lived there for donkey’s years. Goodness knows how she hears, but she has quite an ear, always had. You remember, she was Charlotte Tappen, old Doctor Tappen’s daughter. She married one of the Halpern boys from South Wachakwa. He’s in insurance and was doing awfully well before the depression. Of course, none of us is doing well right now. But still, we’re managing and that’s the main thing, isn’t it? Arlene’s home for the summer. She took Home Economics at the university, you know, and now she’s teaching in the city. She’s a joy to have around, I must say. A woman misses a lot if she doesn’t have a daughter. How long are you here for?”

“I have a month. But I found a temporary housekeeper for Mr. Oatley. I can stay longer if I need to.”

“Something wrong here, then?”

“Bram’s dying,” I said bluntly, not wanting to discuss it.

“Oh dear,” Lottie said feebly. “I hadn’t heard of that.”

    John often used to go out after dinner, and I’d waken and hear the car-buggy returning at daybreak, when the edge of sky was just being prized open by the early light, before even the sparrows had wakened. I never bothered to ask him where he’d been, reckoning he wouldn’t tell me anyway. This jaunting was familiar to me. I’d seen it all before.

“Where’s Charlie Bean?” I asked.

“He’s dead,” John said. “Died a few years back. They found him outside Doherty’s in the snow. Drunk, likely, and he froze. Nobody knew for sure.”

“Good riddance to bad rubbish, if you ask me.”

Yet that was only an automatic reply, made because it was expected of me and because I expected it of myself. Charlie had no family, and he’d died alone, and I don’t suppose a living soul in Manawaka would have turned out for his funeral.

“He wasn’t such a bad old guy,” John said. “He used to give me jellybeans, when I was a kid, and let me have rides in old man Doherty’s two-horse sleigh—it was a nifty black one with an upholstered seat and it had a real buffalo robe to wrap around your legs.”

I could hardly picture Charlie in this role, dispenser of jellybeans and sleigh rides. It seemed we must be remembering two different men.

“I never knew that.”

“If I told you, you wouldn’t have let me go,” John said. “Or you’d have worried, thinking I’d be dumped out
in a snowdrift or break my neck. You always thought something awful was going to happen to me.”

“Did I? Well, a person worries. That’s only natural. What else didn’t I know?”

He grinned. “Oh, lots of things, I guess. After you told me not to walk the trestle bridge, we dreamed up another game there, I and the Tonnerre boys. The trick was to walk to the middle and see who could stay longest. Then, when the train was almost there, we’d drop over the side and climb down the girders to the creek. We always meant to stay there while the train went over. We figured there’d be just enough room, at the very edge, if we lay down. But no one ever had the nerve.”

“I didn’t think you’d ever chummed around with those boys again.”

“Sure,” John said. “It was Lazarus Tonnerre I traded the plaid-pin to, for his knife. Probably he’s got it yet, for all I know.”

“Where’s the knife?”

“Gone up in smoke,” he said. “I sold it once, to buy cigarettes. It wasn’t much of a knife.”

“Gainsay Who Dare,”
I said.

“What?”

“Oh—nothing.”

    One afternoon I asked John to drive me out to the Manawaka cemetery.

“What do you want to go there for?” he asked.

“I want to see if the Currie plot’s been cared for. My father allotted money for that purpose.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” John said. “Okay, let’s go, then.”

The cemetery, being on the hill, caught all the wind but wasn’t cooled by it, for the wind was so hot and dry it seemed to shrivel your nostrils. The spruce trees beside the road stood dark against the sun, and the only sound there that day was the faint clicking and ticking of grasshoppers as they jumped like mechanical toys. The family plot had been tended, all right, even watered. The peonies grew as lushly as ever, although the wildflowers and the grass outside the square were withered and drained of color until they looked like the dried petals in an old china jar of potpourri.

But something was different, and for an instant I could hardly believe that such a thing could have happened, could have been done by someone. The marble angel lay toppled over on her face, among the peonies, and the black ants scurried through the white stone ringlets of her hair. Beside me, John laughed.

“The old lady’s taken quite a header.”

I turned to him in dismay. “Who could have done it?”

“How should I know?”

“We’ll have to set her up,” I said. “We can’t leave it like this.”

“Push up that thing? Not on your life. I bet she weighs a ton.”

“All right—” I was furious at him. “If you won’t do it, I will.”

“You’re off your head,” John said. “You couldn’t possibly.”

“I’m not leaving it this way. I don’t care, John. I’m not, and that’s all there is to it.”

My voice rasped in the thin air.

“Oh, all right,” he said. “I’ll do it, then. Don’t be surprised if she collapses and I break a bone. That would
be great, to break your back because a bloody marble angel fell on you.”

He put his shoulders to the angel’s head, and heaved. The sweat broke on his sharp face, and a hank of his black hair fell over his forehead. Ineffectually I tried to help, but only got in his way and felt the stone straining at me as I pushed. Like two moles we scrabbled in the loose dirt and the parched afternoon. I was afraid for my heart. I always feared for it after I grew stout, thinking if I pulled too hard at it, it would be like a plug jerked from a sink and I’d gurgle and go out of life like wash-water. I stood aside and let John do it.

I wish he could have looked like Jacob then, wrestling with the angel and besting it, wringing a blessing from it with his might. But no. He sweated and grunted angrily. His feet slipped and he hit his forehead on a marble ear, and swore. His arm muscles tightened and swelled, and finally the statue moved, teetered, and was upright once more. John wiped his face with his hands.

“There. Satisfied?”

I looked, and then again in disbelief. Someone had painted the pouting marble mouth and the full cheeks with lipstick. The dirt clung around it but still the vulgar pink was plainly visible.

“Oh, Christ,” John said, as though to himself. “There’s that.”

“Who’d do such a thing?”