View From a Kite (28 page)

“Whaa…?” he says, crumbs falling out of his mouth and down the front of his new Cape Breton tartan Christmas shirt.

“Bennie's a good carpenter,” says Donna. “He did all that work on his mother's house last winter before we got married.”

“You interested, Bennie?” asks George Jr.

“I'd have to do ‘er on weekends,” says Bennie, “I got to work at the garage, days. Can't give up a steady job like that. Could take an awful long time. You might want someone faster.”

“Well, we aren't in any great rush, are we?” asks Ruthie, Ranald's wife. She shakes her napkin free of crumbs and restocks from the shortbread plate. I wonder who she thinks does the vacuuming? And who is this “we”? I like Bennie, and he's a decent carpenter as far as I know, but…

Donna has a brilliant idea and it bubbles out before I can say anything.

“We could move in, and Bennie could work on the house on weekends in exchange for part of the rent. We could pay a little, and Gwen could buy the materials. It's perfect!”

“What about the trailer?” asks Bennie.

“We'll sell it. To your cousin Derek and his wife, they're looking for a place closer to town. Anything left after we pay off the mortgage at the bank goes into Carly Christianna's college fund.” (Carly Christianna is Spitball's legal handicap.) Donna hates that trailer. Also, she's been trying to get Bennie to agree to move away from next door to his mother since a week after they got married. Bennie's mother is a widow and comes over to the trailer every morning to drink coffee and give Donna advice on how to clean, cook, raise Spitball, and look after Bennie. Also what to do with her hair and what length her skirts should be. I wonder what Donna's got against Derek and his wife.

“We have to do it, Bennie. For Gwen's sake.”

She's got him, and she's got me too. I can't mess up her plans to escape her evil mother-in-law. He can't abandon her sick cousin to unknown slackers who will do a shoddy job on the house and leave the place full of stinking empties.

“What do you think, Gwennie?” asks Elizabeth.

“Where am I going to live while all this is going on?” I ask.

“With us, of course.” George doesn't miss a beat. “You and Edith will live with us, I thought you knew that. You can't live by yourselves, you belong here.”

Suddenly I feel a little weepy, so I bury my face in Spitball's stomach and rumble it around a little bit. She screeches, a delighted sort of screech, so I do it again.

“You can't look after Edith by yourselves, none of you can,” says Marci. “You'll need to hire a nurse to come in.”

“I think we can manage,” says Elizabeth, but Marci ignores her. “I know for a fact Fiona is looking to get out of hospital work. She says the twelve-hour shifts are killing her and the kids are running wild with her not home to make them do their homework in the evenings. She'd jump at the chance for some homecare work with decent hours.”

Fiona is George's sister's girl. She's big, bossy, competent. And family. And Elizabeth is not strong enough to be shifting Edith around all the time.

“Let's do it,” I say, before Elizabeth has a chance to protest that it will cost too much. “I can pay Fiona; it's either that or throw the damn insurance money in the lake.”

The room is full of Scots, so there is a moment of appalled silence at the thought of drowning perfectly good cash.

I heft Spitball over one shoulder and leave the room. I'm done talking. They can hash it out all they want. As far as I'm concerned, the thing is settled. I'm living with my family and my dog, and Spitball will live next door where I can keep an occasional eye on it. It will never have any fun growing up if I'm not around to sabotage Donna's rules once in a while.

At the end of the afternoon, George Jr. and Marci take Edith back to the home, and all the other relatives gather up their stuff and head out the door. I hold open a pink, fibre-filled bag with a hood and Donna stuffs the spitball into it and then snaps and zips and ties the whole thing into a tidy, immobile package. It seems to solve the windmill problem, in addition to keeping Spitball from freezing on the way home.

“See you when I get out,” I tell it. It's drifting off to sleep, but a fatuous smile drifts across its features. It's probably figured out that if it's going to see me again, there is a large probability that there are more date squares to be had.

While Spitball and I were off watching unsuitable and violent cartoons (
Sleeping Beauty
—we cheered for the witch/ dragon) the relatives hashed and chewed and argued. Marci phoned Fiona and offered her the job while Ranald was still enumerating the reasons why it wasn't such a good idea to hire her, or even to take Edith out of the home with its round-the-clock professional care in the first place. Fiona accepted the job almost before the words were out of Marci's mouth. Everybody then had the fun of ganging up on Ranald and forcing him to agree that since Edith has given up physical violence she is no longer a huge problem to look after, and that we've got to get her out of the home before she fades away to nothing. Spitball's daddy is quite a decent carpenter, everybody agrees on that, and as there is no rush to make the deadline for the summer issue of
House Beautiful
, Bennie, Donna and Spitball are to be my new tenants. Donna had a quick little run over to see where her washer and dryer could be hooked up and which room could be a nursery for Spitball. She's almost as keen to get Spitball out of her and Bennie's bedroom as she is to dump the mother-in-law. I keep forgetting she's only five years older than me, with fully intact hormones and a license to use them. The rent money will pay the taxes and keep me in books, beer, and bras. The blood money will be used to buy building supplies and to pay Fiona to come in from seven to noon in the morning and four to six in the afternoon to bathe and feed and medicate and change and do all that stuff for Edith. Elizabeth will mind her in the afternoons and evenings during the week and I will help when I'm not in school. Donna, who trained to be a nursing assistant before Spitball disrupted her life, will come in to run the show on Saturdays and Sundays. The money I pay her will probably just come back to me as rent money, but somehow it doesn't seem quite as bloody once it's been rinsed around the family a bit. Elizabeth and I will babysit Spitball from time to time. How on earth do people without relatives ever get anything done?

Fiona told us we're going to have to know how to do everything for Edith, and that includes giving her a bath and changing her, which stopped me in my tracks, I'll tell you. Elizabeth says she'll take care of all that. Elizabeth's getting old though, she'll need me to give her a hand, at least with lifting and what not. I can't see myself ever putting a diaper on my grandmother, and I have a pretty good imagination. I should practice on Spitball when I get home for good, though, just so I know how to do it if there's ever a real emergency.

The important thing is, Edith's coming home and I don't have to think about money and houses. When I get out, I have a home to go to. Spanner sleeps with me all the time now. I have to help him hoist his coggly back legs up on the bed, they just don't have enough jump in them these days. He's not supposed to sleep on the bed, but I don't tell on him. I never have cold feet when he's around, he's like a hairy space heater. He snores so loud, it's unbelievable, he's worse than adenoidal Evvie. It's like sleeping with a jackhammer. He's the grandest dog.

CHAPTER 58

Elizabeth and I are knitting and stitching and drinking tea. Spitball is visiting while her mama and her aunts clean out and scrub Edith's house. Donna is not wasting any time moving in; it's less than a day since we settled the details. Spitball waves a piece of purple cloth in the air and sucks on a pacifier engineered to resemble Donna's left nipple. We are not to put pins anywhere near her because she will eat them, so her mother says. I think Spitball's got more sense than that, but I could be wrong.

I am learning to make a sweater for Spitball. My ambition knows no bounds. It's purple, and there are buttons with chickens painted on them to go down the front. I had toyed with the idea of incorporating a whole flock of chickens into the sweater design until Elizabeth explained how much work this would be.

“But I want chickens,” I said, and she hauled out the button bag. Elizabeth used to have real chickens, and when I came to visit she would send me out to get eggs. The birds were cranky, bad-tempered, and they pecked at me. One-woman chickens, they loved Elizabeth; they all but laid eggs right into her hand. Here's the thing about chickens: in the early 1940s a New Jersey farmer brought his sick biddies into a microbiology lab at Rutgers University. The chickens had a recurring infection which, it turned out, they were getting from the dirt in their backyard. There was a fungus in the dirt which not only made the chickens sick, it also produced a bacteria-killing substance to protect itself. This was streptomycin, one of the most important drugs used to treat tuberculosis. When I first went into the San, they gave me injections of strep every day for two months. They still give them to me twice a week, and will until I'm finally out of there. My bum is one big mass of bruises and may be permanently ruined; it's covered in stab marks surrounded by various colours. Having aching, technicolour cheeks beats being dead, though.

“Here's to chickens,” I say, lifting my teacup.

“They're the stupidest birds,” sighs Elizabeth.

“I thought you loved chickens.”

“I do. It's not their fault they don't have much in the way of brains. We're all God's creatures.”

Spitball farts her agreement.

Don't expect the chickens to come to your rescue the next time around. I'm serious. The tuberculosis bacillus belongs to a very large family of bacteria (as far as we know only one other member of that family causes disease in humans, and that disease is leprosy). Some strains of tuberculosis are dangerous and some are perfectly harmless—much like your relatives. Tuberculosis is everywhere and most of the time your body laughs it off. Again, think of your relatives.

The death rate for tuberculosis began to drop sharply in the nineteenth century. If you get it today you have to take drugs for a long time, but you aren't going to languish on a settee and expire gracefully, blood-stained lace handkerchief clutched in one transparent hand. You aren't going to hack out your lungs in a poetic, but filthy, slum (unless, of course, you are poor, crowded, hungry, and living in one of the many countries without affordable universal medical care.)

The decline in the death rate began despite weirdly named cures in murky brown bottles, pseudo-asses' milk made out of puréed slugs, hefty lungfuls of Air du Barn, and well before the rise of sanatoriums and drug therapy. Here's the big scary thing: the disease was already on the way out when we discovered and began using modern therapies. The population had built up natural immunity and the bacteria had evolved into a less lethal form.

We have absolutely no guarantee it won't mutate again, into something we haven't evolved to fight and for which we have no drugs. There is no guarantee chickens will come riding to the rescue, again. We leave huge pools of tuberculosis to fester and mutate in other places around the planet. Why? Because we're cheap. Because we're selfish. Because the festering takes place where we don't have to see it. But it's a small planet, and we all breathe the same air whether we live in a slum in Calcutta, a farm in Cape Breton, or Buckingham Palace.

PART SIX

CHAPTER 59

We have all been drafted, appointed, committee'd. The business of the Royal Alexandra and all its occupants—patients and staff and even innocent unknowing visitors who stray within her ambit—is to get Elaine properly married to Bernard.

Who in their right mind would choose to get married in a tuberculosis hospital? Well, if you've lived here (a year and a half for Bernard, fifteen months for Elaine), done your courting here, and made friends among the staff and the patients—why not? If it's been your home and all the people who understand you and know what you've been through are here, why shouldn't you? There's a chapel, there's a visiting minister, there's a kitchen, there's a crowd of guests, there's Rehab and its piles of unclaimed, pastel crêpe paper just waiting to be plundered.

Elaine sweeps around the halls, checking up on her various battalions to make sure we are all beavering away as we should. She was technically discharged as of yesterday, but she's not leaving until tomorrow afternoon, when she can leave as Mrs. Bernard Schwartz. Bernard was discharged mid-January.

“Twenty bucks says we never see him again,” says Denise.

“Denise! What an awful thing to say.” Evvie is appalled that Denise could think such a thing.

“I say he panics, hits the highway, and keeps running.” Denise is just bored, and looking to stir up something.

“You're on,” I say. “Evvie holds the money.”

Bernard has been back to visit Elaine every night since he left and shows no signs of wanting to cut and run. I think my twenty bucks are safe.

We are cutting out a million hearts from pink and rose and lavender crêpe paper and sticking them in frilled bunches on lace paper doilies and gluing streamers to them, then thumbtacking the whole mess up all over the walls of the dining room, where the reception is to be held. The chapel is being decorated by a team of florists with real flowers. We are not allowed to help them, or even to watch. Evvie is dying to see the flowers—the lush, damp smell of them wafts down the hallway towards us—and we have promised to sneak her in tonight while Elaine is seeing Bernard off at the end of visiting hours. Elaine has got the key from the chaplain and plans to keep the chapel locked up until just before the ceremony, but Denise knows how to pick the lock. We had our final rehearsal this morning, before the flowers came, but Evvie says it's not the same and she'll get all distracted by the beautiful flowers tomorrow and likely trip and fall on her high, high heels and she'll be mortified and just die and then Elaine will kill her.