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Authors: Jack Hodgins

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BOOK: Cadillac Cathedral
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He held the dipstick high. Oil was clean and shiny to the “full” line. That woman’s sons had taken pretty good care of the hearse, even while treating it like some sort of tractor. He had good reason to believe that by the time the sun had started to rise above the firs tomorrow he’d have her ready for the journey south.

Until the age of thirteen, when his parents moved up here to Portuguese Creek, he had lived in the city where Martin Glass had died in hospital and where Charlie Birdsong had been the undertaker who’d owned this hearse — also the father of a pretty blonde-haired daughter. Of course it had been a surprise the first time he’d seen a classmate behind the wheel at the head of a funeral procession.

In order not to lose sight of her then, he had walked beside the hearse up the main street, across an intersection and the railroad tracks and the river bridge, and then through the downtown area to the stone-pillared entrance to the grassy cemetery. Perhaps her father had installed a governor, maybe he’d kept his own foot on the gas pedal, since the hearse, so far as Arvo could tell, had maintained precisely the same speed throughout the entire route.

Though he had been aware of her presence every day in the Grade Five classroom, it wasn’t until he’d seen her driving her father’s
hearse — her golden curls and pretty face a contrast to all that sober black — that he’d become fascinated with this girl. Of course he hadn’t suspected then that he would be thinking of her for much of the rest of his life.

Throughout the years that followed, he had tried to forget her — and of course it was ridiculous, an adult man still captivated by a childhood memory. Even during his travels he’d continued to wonder what had become of Myrtle Birdsong. They might very well have come upon one another in Oslo, say, or Baton Rouge. He still subscribed to the city newspaper and had now and then come across her name. Recently, her photo had been alongside an account of the opening of a new theatre named for her father, who had apparently been a generous supporter of local drama clubs.

So she was still alive and living in the city of his birth.

Though he was not sure he had the courage to return her father’s hearse to Myrtle himself — after all, he couldn’t know for sure that she would welcome it — this was no reason to turn down a chance to get this beautiful vehicle back in good running order for Martin’s funeral. Once he’d accomplished that much, he might feel brave enough to deliver it to its original owner’s daughter — though of course he had serious doubts.

He could not be slow about it. Martin Glass’s death was a reminder that your life could go flying by more quickly than you’d ever imagined. Martin had often talked of his plan to look up his son in Saskatchewan one day and — despite the son’s politics, his rejection of his father, his eccentric lifestyle in some remote northern town — try to establish some sort of peaceful relationship. But he had put off making the journey until “another day.” He could not have imagined his life could run out so soon.

Arvo flushed out the radiator and filled it with water from his well. He tested the hoses — brittle but still secure. He checked the
wheel nuts — all tight. This was important, since he could hardly avoid thinking of the jeep he’d rescued from a long-abandoned army training camp in the mountains. Because he hadn’t thought to check the wheel nuts, the back left-side wheel detached itself while he was driving down the highway and travelled independently past him on a long downhill slope. Only when the wheel had gone spinning off ahead and veered across the oncoming traffic to leap into the roadside weeds did the back corner of the jeep drop to the pavement and bring the whole business squealing to a halt. Remembering this, he could break out in a sweat even now.

He tried to keep at bay the doubts that Peterson had raised — the possibility of a breakdown far from home, or interference by police. It was also possible they could get all the way to the city only to find that Myrtle wasn’t at home. Travelling maybe. And of course there was also the possibility that even if she were at home she could turn him away — not wanting a reminder of her father or of the husband who’d worked for her father, or anything at all that reminded her of her childhood.

She had sat directly in front of him in Grades Six and Seven, her long curls occasionally brushing his desk, and often turned to ask him to explain what the teacher was talking about. She had been Snow White in the school play while he was only a woodcutter — but this meant it was sometimes necessary for her to walk home with him to practise their lines in his mother’s kitchen. She had barely noticed his help with her failed science experiments or with anything else, and he had not found the nerve to tell her how he felt, knowing they were both too young for such nonsense.

He’d lived long enough in the city to see her reach adolescence sooner than any other girl her age. Even at thirteen she caused men to turn and watch her walk down the street.

Several years after his family had moved north, he’d learned that
Myrtle had married a middle-aged Hungarian her father had brought to this country to be his assistant. No doubt she’d married him so she would never have to leave her father’s side. Much later still, he’d heard that the husband had been an unsatisfactory assistant and had returned to Hungary, though not until after he’d done a good deal of damage to the business.

Myrtle had not abandoned her father. He had seen her name several times in the arts-and-society pages of the city paper. Apparently she was either a divorced woman or a widow, and might now be running her father’s business herself or, more likely, living in some sort of luxury, having sold the business to someone else.

He knew it was unrealistic to imagine a reunion. Yet trying to forget her had led him into nothing but trouble. He had even, once, considered a mail-order sort of bride. He’d known that Johnnie Banner, who for a while had been his assistant in the Company machine shop, was happily married to the widowed school teacher who’d responded to his ad in the Winnipeg Free Press.

It had taken him three months of writing and throwing away his own advertisement for “meeting a middle-aged woman interested in a visit to the West Coast with other possibilities to follow” but before he had sent his advertisement off, he’d come across a notice in the Vancouver Sun, where a “woman of Finnish background living in the Port Arthur area of Thunder Bay” was looking for a cousin who had disappeared out west. Arvo had recognized the name of a long-ago fellow worker in the logging camps and wrote to tell her of his death. What had been an exchange of brief notes — friendly but not
too
friendly, he’d thought — had apparently seemed, to her, something like a marriage proposal.

One afternoon, without warning, she had stepped down off the bus in front of the Store — a large woman, with three grey suitcases
and a teenaged son who had not been mentioned in the letters. Ritva Pekkanen and Toivo. The mother was determined on a trial period “to see if we’re suited to one another.” The son was determined not to return to Thunder Bay, where “the stupid cops like to pick on me.”

So he now had the unforgettable memory of this woman and her lunk-head son moving into his house and making a nervous wreck of him. By the time he’d got them back on a bus, three months had gone by in which he’d paid Toivo’s bail three times and failed to stave off Ritva Pekkenen’s efforts to move most of his mother’s Helsinki knick-knacks to the basement in exchange for junk she’d found in local yard sales. They would be “house mates for now, nothing more,” she’d said, and he was not about to argue. Yet she’d behaved as though his home were hers. She invited neighbours in for tea in the afternoons — women who had not been inside the house since the death of Arvo’s mother. She’d decided what groceries Arvo must buy. She’d complained when Arvo spent too much time in his workshop, and tried hard to train him to spend his evenings reading the paper and “keeping company with Toivo and myself,” instead of ducking back out to his “greasy engines and such.”

He’d been ashamed of himself even then for putting up with this, but he’d suspected it was his own fault. It was his punishment for not investigating this woman somehow, before writing to her. But how could he have known she would show up without so much as a phone conversation?

For his daily before-dinner sauna he’d locked the door from the inside for fear she would surprise him one day by entering, stripping off, and joining him on the upper bench, then later use this as an excuse for insisting upon a trip to a justice of the peace. While he sat sweating on the upper bench he tried to recall what he’d imagined when he’d written that letter.

Wrenches and screwdrivers disappeared from his workshop and reappeared on the walls of the pawnshop in town. He found himself paying to rescue an electric drill that he’d only recently paid for in a hardware store. The boy did not bother denying that he’d had something to do with this. When the police occasionally kept him overnight after finding him drunk and pestering folks on the main street of town, they apologized to Arvo for not having the legal right to keep him longer. “Maybe if you let him wreck your truck or burn your sauna down we could put him away for a while.”

But Toivo stole only items you didn’t remember you had until you went to use them.

On evenings when he wasn’t out getting himself into trouble, he sprawled across the chesterfield, with his huge feet up on the arm, watching something his mother had chosen for him to watch on television. He had no homework to do since he’d refused to go anywhere near the local school so long as his mother was uncertain how long they’d be staying on.

Then one night the boy had trouble finding the doorknob — or maybe even the door — in order to let himself into the house. He’d tossed stones at his mother’s window to get her up from her bed to let him in, but before she’d got to the door a stone had broken through the glass and fallen against a decorative crystal bowl of his mother’s, causing a visible crack to travel around its waist.

Although the bowl was only one of several, and the fissure did not cause the bowl to fall in pieces, Arvo rushed out of his bedroom wearing only the sagging bottoms of his striped pyjamas and clasped both hands around the boy’s neck. He uttered several words he hadn’t used since he’d been a teen himself. The boy gurgled. The mother screamed. The boy’s eyes grew large. The mother, cursing, slapped at Arvo from every side, but the hands would not let go.

And did not let go until the eyes rolled up and the body went limp.

“You beast!” screamed the woman from Thunder Bay. “You’ve killed him!”

But the boy was still alive enough to pack their belongings into the grey suitcases and carry one of them out to the bus stop, where he waited for Arvo to do whatever he could to get his mother outside and onto the bus for her journey home.

Good-bye!

Arvo washed the dried mud from the hearse’s flank and the dust from the windows — pure pleasure. There wasn’t much he could do about the fine hair-line crack in a corner of one panel of glass, but he could make sure all the windows were spotless.

He paused to admire the hearse while eating a slice of the date loaf Cynthia had left for him yesterday. She seemed to have got into the habit of bringing some of her baking with her now and then, though he was not to let the others know. In return, he sometimes gave her a loaf of his
pulla
, the sweet bread he’d baked from his mother’s recipe.

When he’d got down into the pit and looked up at the hearse’s undercarriage, he could see that all moveable parts could do with a shot of grease. But first he wiped everything down to get rid of the accumulated dirt — to be expected in the circumstances.

On his way through town tomorrow he would stop at Henderson’s Funeral Home to pick up a casket suitable for a friend who happened to be a long-forgotten one-term member of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. Martin was one of those former public officials whose obituary must have been a surprise to people who’d thought he’d died long years ago. The people of Portuguese Creek may have been the only ones aware of the quiet retirement life of Martin Glass, down at the water’s edge.

Once he was satisfied with the sound of the engine, he went inside
the house just long enough to telephone the hospital, identify himself again as Martin Glass’s executor, and let those in charge of bodies know that he would be there to pick up Martin tomorrow on behalf of the Henderson Funeral Home, probably late afternoon, in order to bring him home for burial. When he returned to the shed he carried a wool blanket his mother had brought with her from Finland, draped it over the weather-damaged seat and tucked it in where he could. Now a perfect row of little Suomi birches marched from one end of the bench to the other.

Of course this hearse must not be allowed out on the road again without receiving a good wash and a new coat of wax, a task that kept him occupied for more than an hour. He wiped again over the head lamps and the large panels of glass, polished the chrome handles, and then washed out the interior of the chamber where a casket, and eventually Martin, would rest.

For some time he’d been aware of the muffled sound of lowered voices outside the shed but had thought nothing of it. People sometimes chatted as they walked away from the Store. But now there was an impatient banging on the inset door, an attempt to push it open.

“Arvo? You in there?”

It was Matt Foreman’s voice. Running the Store and post office made him think he had the right to know everyone’s business. It was as though he wanted you to know he could read your mail if he wanted to but had generously chosen not to — so the least you could do in return was to tell him more of your business than you’d tell anyone else.

“Who is it?”

“It’s Matt.”

“Who?”

Why let him think he sprang immediately to mind? There were
other Matts in the world. After owning the store for only four or five years he was still a newcomer here.

“It’s Matthew Foreman.”

“Sorry Matt. I guess I’d never heard you shouting through a locked solid-oak door before. What do you want?”

BOOK: Cadillac Cathedral
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