Year of Lesser (13 page)
“No, the same.” Charlene pours herself another drink. She hopes Johnny can hear the splash though she knows he won’t. She’s being spiteful. She says, “You see, I wanted to have a baby.”
“You did?” Johnny says.
Charlene laughs. He’s so stupid. “Yeah, except my timing was off. I should have aimed for the week before.”
“Listen, Charlene, I’ve got to phone other people. Parents. But, we’ll talk about this. We can have a baby.”
“Really, Johnny?”
Charlene pulls away and pours another glass, but when she tilts her head back to the phone and listens for Johnny it’s too late, he’s gone. She makes it back to her chair, opens the stove door and leaves it ajar. She moves in closer to the heat, throws in two more logs, lights a cigarette and closes her eyes. Perhaps she should have asked Loraine to stay the night. They could have slept together in the big bed upstairs. Would be lovely to have that swollen body close to hers. Loraine’s not a bad woman. Good to see and touch her. Nice to touch people. Very. Loraine must feel the same because she didn’t seem to mind being stroked. Johnny’s a lucky man.
Charlene wonders what it must be like to be a man and make love to a woman. She cuddles her drink and thinks about Loraine’s body, about her knotty shoulders, the fine-balled tightness of her stomach. Full of baby. Charlene remembers playing with this neighbour boy, Ronald, when she was young. Charlene was the man, Ronald was the woman, and he put
a pillow under his T-shirt for a baby and Charlene would put her hands up inside and pull the pillow out and spank it and hand it back and say, “It’s a boy.” One time she undressed Ronald and he undressed her and he tried to stick himself inside her but he was too young for an erection. Charlene liked the secrecy; whispering with Ronald behind the garage in the damp coolness of the fort they had built. A dirt floor, a rickety shelf holding seashells and a chipped ceramic tea set. A reed mat laid out. Ronald on his knees, Charlene on her back. Ronald’s chest pale in the light. His eyes dim. And later Charlene telling him that she was going to have many children. “I want to be a mother,” she said.
It’s cold. Too cold. She stands, catching herself on the arm of the chair. She couldn’t find her slippers. The place is a mess. She’s been meaning to clean it up, not vacuum or anything, just tidy, but time is short and she keeps finding other and better things to do. Loraine must have thought Charlene was a slob: dishes everywhere in the kitchen, Johnny’s boots and shoes scattered, a fried egg abandoned on the stove. Loraine is neat and tidy. Her house must be like that too. Her farm, her barn. And sex. Is that tidy too? Johnny likes it messy, Charlene knows that. She can’t imagine Loraine going down on Johnny. That pretty mouth, the lipstick just so, those hands that Johnny loves, so perfect; do those hands go everywhere? But then, the most unlikely people are wild in bed. Like Nancy Stone from the book club. She used to drop hints about her sex life. Made a reference to anal sex once and everybody was grossed out. Charlene wonders about Johnny. He’d like that. If Charlene did it for him, maybe he’d stay.
She’s surprised to find herself on her knees. She’s facing the shelf which holds knick-knacks and family photos and the few books she and Johnny own. There’s Johnny’s Bible. It’s got a leather front with gold lettering. She pulls at it. Opens it.
This Bible belongs to Johnny Fehr,
she reads. “Belongs?” Charlene says. She shakes her head. Fans the hundreds of pages. When she was a teenager she tried to read the Bible all the way through. She got stuck in Leviticus. Ridiculous. Whoever thought all those men’s names were important? She leaped to the Gospels then. She remembers reading and waiting for a light or a voice, something that
would let her know who she was, or who she should be. Her mother had been so proud of her. “My daughter Charlene is reading the Bible from beginning to end,” she would tell her friends.
Charlene puts her nose inside the pages and smells. She breathes again. There are some things she likes in here. What Jesus says is good. Especially those words about faith and hope and love. Did Jesus say that? Charlene thinks those are probably the most important words in the Bible. She once told Johnny this and he nodded seriously and agreed. There’s more though. Stuff about a
noisy gong
and
tongues ceasing
. She should tell Johnny this too. No sense chasing after
tongues
. All that fades in the end. Everything fades. Even Loraine will eventually fade. When Johnny tires of her and the baby. The baby will interfere with their time and Johnny will be impatient and then he’ll come back to Charlene and Charlene won’t say, “I told you so,” she’ll just take him back and think how predictable he is, like the little boy she never had. She wonders if Loraine and Johnny talk about her, or if Johnny compares the sex and tells Loraine about it. Do they talk about God? About Johnny leaving Charlene? Charlene wants to ask Johnny these questions. She could phone now. No, Johnny said he was busy. Leave him be. Tomorrow.
Charlene reaches out and touches the stove. Burns herself. She sucks on her fingers. Takes the bottle of whisky and drinks. She has a thought. She giggles and takes Johnny’s Bible and carefully rips Leviticus from its centre. She throws it into the stove. Johnny won’t notice. Like Phil Barkman and Melissa Emery and the Bartel brothers and all the others, Johnny gets by on a New Testament diet. That’s what’s important. Except for the Creation story; Johnny likes that one. God snapping his fingers. Magic.
The stove needs wood. Birch. Birch burns the best. “Cadillac of firewood,” Johnny calls it. Charlene fumbles with the wood, it tears at her hands. Stoke. Stoke. One log bangs the edge of the door, flames slide across it and the log drops to the floor. Oh my. Birch bark burns so quickly. So sweetly. Crackles, like bacon frying. Can write letters on it too. Letters to Johnny. Love letters. She remembers writing Johnny little notes, just after they were married, and leaving them lying around for
him. In his boots, his jeans’ pocket. Once she wrote something lusty on the toilet-paper roll. Johnny liked that. He called her from where he was sitting and then he stood and held her, his pants at his knees, and laughed and said, “You’re a horny, silly girl.”
“Am I?” she asked, looking up at his chin, her hands fisted at the small of his back.
Charlene, on her knees, reaches out and pushes at the sparking log. It skitters across Johnny’s mother’s rug and halts at the edge of the couch; can’t quite reach it. The flames die, she thinks. This braided rug. Charlene recalls being here with Johnny, seems so long ago. He laid her out, ass against the braids, fingers kneading her breasts, and she cried out some foolishness. Johnny with his leaping tongue. Stubby Johnny. Light in his eyes, darkness at the edges, like if you didn’t stay close enough to the heat, you’d get lost.
Where’s the bottle? On hands and knees she moves across the floor. Bottle’s tipped over, little bit of rye that’s left soaking the rug. Beautiful colours. “The rug is on fire,” she says. “Too bad.” She stands and stomps with her stockinged feet. She laughs. “Fuck,” she says, “this is not good.” She stands there, looking for a blanket, a jacket. “Should smother it,” she says. She can’t see anything. The phone. She must find the phone but she can’t remember where it is. She wonders if her mother will call. She usually does on a Friday night. Though it’s late, isn’t it? Her mother will be sleeping. That’s better, anyway. Hate to have to fake being sober.
“A bucket,” she says. “There’s a hole …” And then she’s on her stomach and the walls are brightening and there’s a grey creature creeping across the rug. On hands and knees she moves towards the kitchen, manages to stand and grab the phone. She dials the centre but it’s busy. She tries her mother’s number. A man answers. Up from the depths of sleep. Wrong number. She tries again, directory assistance. She tells the woman, “My house is burning,” and then she hangs up.
Outside. She should go there. Out there. But her coat’s missing and she’d freeze and a clarity comes to her through the haze of smoke and alcohol and she sees two choices and they are freezing or burning and
though the machine shed is a haven across the yard she’d never make it in her condition.
She wets a rag and holds it across her mouth. She’s not too drunk to reason, she thinks. Johnny would be proud of her. “Get down,” she tells herself. She does this. Lies on the kitchen floor, curled up against the far cabinets. She faces the beige wall. Finds herself staring at the grease and dirt that has collected over the years. A bit of a crayon drawing. Old. Probably Johnny’s creation from way back. A brief sentence too
.
Charlene’s face is wet. She is crying. Everything’s come loose now. This is a dream, she thinks. That’s good. Yes. A dream. She licks her tears and realizes they taste real. She cries harder. Johnny as a young boy. Right here. Touching the purple letters with her fingers. She’s never seen this before. Wishes she’d known about it. Like finding his childhood gum under the old table; she takes it as a message or something. He must have been learning to print. Excited by it. Wanting to try it out everywhere. Johnny gets so excited about things. It’s easier to breathe now. Maybe the fire’s dying out. Nothing to feed it. She wishes she had Johnny’s enthusiasm. A while back he tried to get her to pray with him. “Fine,” she said, and she even kneeled beside him but the hollowness made her giggle, like they were playing a game and Johnny wasn’t even aware how silly he sounded. Perhaps she should pray now. Beg forgiveness. She calls out, alternately, “God, Mother, God, Mother,” but there is no answer, only a growing heat at her back. She wishes she weren’t so drunk. Then she could save herself. She decides suddenly that she should confront the danger. Easier that way. She turns onto her other side, her back to the wall now, and lies there, knees up at her chest, rag at her mouth, sobbing, “Oh Jesus, save me.” And then, in the background, faintly beyond the roar, she can hear the telephone ring, and she believes, heart fluttering with relief, that she has been saved.
For a month after Charlene’s death, Johnny is stupid with grief. His doctor prescribes something strong but he doesn’t use it, he needs to suffer. So, his nights are spent keening, his days driving the country roads from customer to customer, stopping in small, unlikely towns, where he sits in the coffee shops and dully watches the pattering of the locals. He makes his rounds: Île des Chênes, St. Agathe, Landmark, St. Malo, Grunthal. He finds that he likes to watch the waitresses. They bring to their work a lilt that somehow lifts Johnny from the hell he is living.
He begins to find his regulars; like Holly, in Morris, a single mother of three, who is vicious with her gum and sits with Johnny at her breaks and sometimes touches his hands. He tells Holly about Charlene and Loraine and the baby. He does not want to sleep with Holly, though he finds her toughness attractive. It is his grief that has made him sexually immobile. He, of course, blames himself for Charlene’s death and he is also aware of those in and around Lesser who whisper that he or Loraine were involved in that awful fire.
He dreams of fire. It burns at the edges of his sleep and even awake
he imagines Charlene’s clothes catching fire, her body a log that roasts slowly from the outside in, though he knows, having spoken with the fire inspector, that a house-fire is not hot enough to destroy a body. Charlene’s body was found, charred and unrecognizable, yes, but the shape was there; that is how the inspector put it. Johnny had pushed, wanting to know, and after some hesitation, the man, pink eyelids squeezed over pale eyes, said that a person who dies in a fire, their body remains intact; bones, inner organs, and such. Johnny winced. Swallowed. He recalled Charlene’s tic above her left eye, and again, with compassion this time, the movement of her throat as they made love. These days, at night, he goes to sleep in fear, knowing he will discover Charlene’s eyes following him, narrowing, opening, narrowing again.
It is stunning to remember her, especially the smell of her hair after a day at the bank, the scent of money-dust, similar to twine and bales. He liked Charlene’s smell. Every woman gives off a particular scent and Johnny knows which ones he likes. He shies from the hint of tin, is attracted to women who radiate a faint moisture, that of water sprinkled onto dust. And that is all he has left of Charlene. Perhaps that is where the pain comes from. Her death might not be so final if he had something left of her: pictures, shoes, make-up. Something to touch, to smell and remember, something to sort through and pack up, put away: Charlene in boxes, ready for the thrift shop. Johnny feels the absence of something to heave out the window. His grief, of course, is mostly for himself, for what he is now missing. He recalls wanting her dead sometimes, a sort of adolescent wish for a new life. But now, Johnny rues those old dreams. He finds solace nowhere.
And then, two days before Christmas, he visits Loraine. Loraine was not at the funeral, in fact, Johnny, who hasn’t worked much in the past month, has not seen her for six weeks. When he arrives on a Sunday morning, she is in her housecoat and slippers. She is bigger now, when she walks she seems to lean backwards. Johnny is amazed at her fleshiness. They hold each other just inside the door. They do not speak, just
fold into each other’s bodies, and Johnny thinks that he needn’t ever say another word again; nor move, nor eat, nor drink.
Loraine’s size reminds him, eerily, of Charlene, especially her width. Loraine still has the light touch he remembers, her fingers press his back, skitter across the hairiness of his forearms. She is crying. Her body shakes. Johnny will not cry. He cried one night in his sister’s basement, early in the evening when he heard Carol and Roy talking upstairs. Actually, they were arguing intensely in whispers and this made Johnny cry.
He pats Loraine’s back and stares past her head out the window towards the road and the snow-covered fields and he sees that life out here is desolate, empty. God, floating above this land, must laugh at a house like this, flanked by two barns; three grey spots stubbed into the snow. The world could go on and on and then suddenly end.
