Fever (10 page)

“He got in the van and drove away,” Martin said. His lined, suntanned face was concerned, and he thrust his hands into the pockets of his pants. “It was the damndest thing! Ernie came barrelling out of the café and Joe was standing right there on the sidewalk by the van, waiting for Ben, I guess. And Ernie shoved him up against the van and swung on him.”

Cheryl gasped, and Benjamin took a step toward Martin as if to ask more.

“Then, before we could do anything, Ernie jumped in his truck and peeled rubber outta here. We helped Joe up,” he nodded toward the other man still standing back in the shadows, “and Joe got in the van and pulled out. I thought he was going after Ernie, but …”

“No, no, he never do that,” Ben interrupted, shaking his head.

“He went that way,” Martin said, pointing down the street. He laughed, turning to Benjamin, a strained sound. “Went off and left you, eh?”

“What’s the matter with him, anyway?” Cheryl asked. “Doesn’t he understand that these men are pacifists? That they won’t defend themselves?”

“I guess he understands that pretty well,” Martin said.

“This is incomprehensible!” Cheryl said. “This is terrible.” At that moment Will arrived in their old Ford, the brakes squealing. Cheryl got in beside him and Benjamin beside her. I sat in the back, behind Benjamin.

“Are you sure you’re not hurt?” Will asked him.

“No, no, no,” Benjamin said, “but Joseph?” Cheryl told Will
what had happened to Joseph. “I got to find him,” Benjamin said.

Will began driving up and down the few streets, all of us peering out the open windows.

“There!” Cheryl cried. The van was parked by the sidewalk in front of the Mountie’s office. Will parked behind it under the old cottonwoods, their branches trailing over the car. The light from the streetlight was muted and erratic as it shone through the limbs of the big trees. We saw Joseph coming down the steps from the office where he had been pounding on the locked door. The old man was out of the car almost before we came to a full stop, surprising us with his agility, which had returned when he saw the van.

“They aren’t here after five o’clock,” I said to Cheryl and Will.

Joseph was striding down the walk with short, jerky steps and as Benjamin reached him, the top of his head coming just up to Joseph’s shoulder, he touched Joseph’s arm, but Joseph pulled angrily away from him. We couldn’t make out Benjamin’s words, but he seemed to be pleading with Joseph. The van’s motor was still running and Joseph went to it, his long legs scissoring in an awkward, staccato way that expressed his agitation. He began suddenly to shout at Benjamin. The old man followed him, pulling at Joseph’s too-short jacket.

Suddenly Joseph turned hard and began to stride down the sidewalk toward us where we sat in the car, Benjamin still hurrying beside him, his head raised to look up at Joseph, still pulling at the boy’s sleeve. As they came closer we could hear Joseph cursing. He paced wildly, up and down, cursing at the farmer who had assaulted him, raging, using language that must have horrified old Benjamin.

“Joseph, Joseph, nein, nein, remember …” and Joseph would jerk away, pace in the other direction, still cursing. His voice
disturbed the calm of the peaceful little street. The old man began to cry.

He let go of Joseph’s sleeve and came to us, standing on the sidewalk close to the open doors of the car.

“I don’t know,” he said, spreading out his hands helplessly. “I can’t … He is …” We could see his tears glistening on his beard.

“I’m sorry this happened,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

Joseph had stopped cursing and was standing half-way between the truck and our car in a patch of shadow. We could see his chest and hands, but not his face. He said something in German to Benjamin that sounded harsh and angry, a command. Benjamin went to him at once, remonstrating softly with him in German. Joseph turned away again, went back to the van and climbed in, slamming the door. Benjamin stood watching him for a minute, then came back to us.

“We go home now,” he said.

Cheryl spoke then, we couldn’t see her face in the shadows either, but her voice was softer now, and her question sounded like a child’s.

“But … what happened?” she asked. “Why did Ernie
do
that?” “He was just drunk,” Will said to her.

Benjamin wiped his face with his sleeve, then touched his beard with fingers that still trembled.

“He’s neighbour to us,” he said. “We help him with his cattle, we help him cut hay …”

“Well, you certainly shouldn’t help him anymore,” Cheryl said, angry again.

Ben ignored the interruption.

“At Christmas,” Benjamin went on, “we sell him pair of socks. He said they don’t match. We tell him, bring them back, we give another pair, but he …” Ben shrugged. “He still mad.”

Will sucked in his breath. Cheryl and I were silent.

“We go to colony,” Benjamin said, his voice soft, and he made a gesture toward us with his hands as if to hush us. “Many thanks.” He started back to the van, hurrying now, as Joseph roared the motor. We watched him struggle up into it and shut the door. It squealed away from the curb and roared down the silent street. We watched until its tail lights disappeared around the curve that would take it out of town and up into the hills where the colony was.

In the morning Cheryl and Will were up early, packed, and ready to leave for Saskatoon. We were subdued, as though what had happened the night before had affected us out of all proportion to its importance.

“It’s a lousy day,” I said. A cold wind was blowing and the sky was heavy with deep rain clouds that I knew from experience would hang there all day and yet not shed a drop. Such a hard, dry country, I thought.

“More coffee?” Cheryl asked. Will and I shook our heads, no. “I suppose we should get moving,” she said. Will stared moodily out the small kitchen window.

“But the writer wrote about how beautiful it is here in the winter—the hills shining with snow, the sky above them a clear, endless blue …”

I could hardly speak, such a heaviness had descended on my spirit. I half-wished Palma would burst in with her cheerful scolding. Cheryl had begun to gather the breakfast plates. Now she set them down and spoke directly to me, her blue eyes meeting mine.

“Come with us,” she said. “Come with us now. You can come
back for your furniture later.” We stared at each other. Behind us Will moved.

“No,” he said softly.

“Why not?” Cheryl asked him, surprised. But still he didn’t speak, gathering his thoughts, or waiting for us to understand something he had already seen.

“You know why,” he said to me at last. There was an intensity in his eyes I hadn’t seen in years. “He’ll stay here,” he said to Cheryl.

For no reason that I could name, I had the impression that there was someone else in the room with us. The sensation was so strong that I couldn’t stop myself from looking nervously around. Cheryl, seeing this, did too, then looked at me in a puzzled, questioning way.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Someone just walked on my grave,” I said. We stood in the kitchen, the three of us, the normally bright room gloomy. “I’m afraid,” I said.

“And so you should be,” Will said, after a minute, but he was smiling.

I rode with them to the service station a block away and waited while they gassed up.

“I hate to see you go,” I said, when the tank was full and Will had paid. Cheryl put both her arms around me and hugged me hard, pulling me tight against her.

“You come and see us whenever you can,” she said. When she stepped back to get in the car there were tears in her eyes. Will and I hugged, then stood back.

“Write to me more often,” he said, putting one arm around my shoulders.

“Come more often,” I said.

Cheryl called through the open window.

“Next time we’ll bring Louise with us. You can show her that dinosaur bone.” Will went around the car and got in the driver’s seat.

“I mean it,” Cheryl said.

I watched them drive away as we had watched the Hutterite’s van disappear the night before. Then I walked slowly back to the house where my manuscript waited on the table beneath the window that had the view of the hills and the mouth of the coulee where the dinosaurs had walked.

When Steven told Joan he was leaving her, he had been very reasonable about it and had spoken to her in a kind way, as if he knew she would be badly hurt and would need all the support he could give her. She felt that after months of coldness or blatant hostility, this new attitude of his wronged her in a way she couldn’t put her finger on and that she didn’t know how to counteract. She began to react to it with rage, saying every cruel thing she could think of to him, whether true or not, but no matter what she said or how loudly she said it, he maintained his gentle, loving manner and wouldn’t respond to her attacks. Then, whenever he tried to talk to her, she would break down in fits of uncontrollable, body-wracking sobbing, and if Steven tried to comfort her, she would pull away, wouldn’t let him touch her.

He had moved out by then and after she began to have the attacks of sobbing, he stopped coming around except to pick up their son, Simon. Joan had been at the same time very glad and very hurt by this, but knew she had only herself to blame, because she couldn’t seem to be reasonable, as he could, about the separation and the divorce.

Even though she had been dreading the moment when Steven would finally say he was going—she had been expecting it for
some time and hoping against all reason that it wouldn’t happen—the finality of his decision and his quick departure had lifted a heavy burden from her shoulders that she hadn’t been willing to allow she was carrying. She was left off-balance, unaccountably light-feeling and giddy, gay even, since gaiety seemed the only possible translation of this new sensation of weightlessness.

“Free at last,” she said to her friends, and hired sitters to look after Simon so she could go out to bars and nightclubs with girlfriends from work who were, one way or another, single too. She met a lot of men this way, some were clearly unsuitable as potential husbands and fathers, having a dark, dangerous side she could readily see hints of in the way they held their mouths, or grasped her wrist too tightly when they asked her to dance so that it hurt, just a little. Some were too young, fun to dance with, but she didn’t feel herself connect to them at all, and some, like herself, had been deserted by their spouses and were bitter, careless about details, and given to moments when they stared off into space and lost all interest in the goings-on around them.

As long as all of them, men and women, stayed clustered together around crowded tables in the clubs and drank and danced with each other and laughed together, things worked out fine. But whenever, rarely, Joan went home with one of them, usually a deserted husband, for a couple of hours, their engagement was without tenderness, or had only a peremptory, false and short-lived tenderness. During the act they would be demanding of each other, silent, sometimes cruel, locked stubbornly each in his own struggle in which the other was only an incidental combatant, a stand-in for something or someone who was never present. Yet each of them knew these forays after the clubs had closed, unpleasant as they tended to be, were necessary. It was not just that their bodies required a sex life, as Joan
and her girlfriends liked to tell each other during the long Sunday afternoons they spent drinking wine and lazing together while their kids were at their fathers’ and new stepmothers'. It wasn’t just the physical drive, they said, and then paused and fell silent, looking away from each other with pained, uncertain expressions. But it seemed that each of them, men and women, craved that moment of facing the other sex undisguised, as if there were still something to be learned, the heart of the secret between the sexes not having been plumbed yet.

One day at work as Joan was walking from the lunch room back to her desk in the office she shared with three other secretary-typists, she felt faint. It was as though the air in the large room, ten stories above the sidewalks, had suddenly thickened, as if all the oxygen had been exhausted and she was suffocating.

Dizzy, she put her hand on the wall to steady herself, but the sensation of weakness and an invading blackness like a flood of dark water that she couldn’t beat back no matter how hard she tried, began to engulf her. Candy, Charlene and Shirley, coming behind her, caught her as she tottered and began to fall. They encouraged her with murmurs, and bird-like coos, glancing worriedly at her as they helped her back to her desk.

“You’re white as a sheet,” Charlene said, peering anxiously into Joan’s face. Candy had run to the water cooler as soon as Joan was safely deposited in her chair and now she handed Joan a plastic cup filled with water.

“Here, drink this,” she said, first dipping the tips of her fingers into the water and sprinkling it onto Joan’s forehead. Joan was still breathing shallowly, trying to get some air, but she managed to sip a little of the water. Its coolness on her tongue and the roof of her mouth shocked and then calmed her, but as soon as the water reached her stomach, a wave of nausea swept through her, making sweat burst out on her forehead. Candy, seeing this,
hurriedly kicked the metal wastepaper basket around the corner of Joan’s desk, stopping it at Joan’s ankles.

“I’m okay now,” Joan said, trying not to look in the basket which was full of crumpled paper, pencil shavings and a mushy brown apple core, but her voice was so weak that they could tell she was not okay. Shirley, who was in charge of them, said authoritatively, “You’d better take the rest of the day off.”

“I was just like that when I was pregnant,” Charlene said, studying Joan’s face, then blushed because all of them knew Joan’s situation and that a pregnancy would be a disaster too horrible to contemplate.

“No,” Joan said, her voice still weak. “I’m having my period,” although what was happening was not exactly a period, but only something like one and had come at the wrong time.

“It’s probably just the flu,” Shirley told her briskly. “I really think you’d better go home and lie down.”

“She’s still white as a ghost,” Candy said. “Maybe one of us should drive you home.”

“No, no,” Joan said hastily. “I’ll just rest a minute and then I’ll be able to drive myself.”

Slowly the others drifted back to their own desks and in a minute the muted clatter of typewriters rose and Shirley’s phone began to ring. Joan rose slowly, covered her typewriter and put her papers away in her desk while the weakness lapped gently at her, threatening to overtake her again. She held it back while she got her coat and left the building.

Steven had moved from their small suburban house straight into a new house in a more prosperous suburb than the one he had lived in with Joan. His new house was nicer too. It belonged to the woman he had left Joan for, Jill Abbott, a childless divorcée who had received it in her divorce settlement. Joan had never met Jill, had only caught glimpses of her red-gold hair and the
blur of her white face as she waited in the car while Steven picked up Simon from what was now Joan’s house.

When Steven had suggested, in his new gentle manner, that the three of them meet to talk things over, “Since there is Simon to consider,” Joan had been filled with such disgust and shame at the very idea that she had turned away from him and had refused to reply. When Steven saw finally that Joan wouldn’t speak at all, would not even look at him, he had gone quietly away. Joan had stood in the living room, back from the window so she couldn’t be seen from outside, and had watched Steven walk down the front steps, cross the sidewalk and get into his car where Jill waited in the passenger seat, the place that for eight years had been Joan’s, with Simon next to her, between her and Steven.

The long drive into the city from the suburb had grown increasingly irksome. The house no longer felt like home and the disapproving or curious glances of her neighbours upset Joan, she felt her right to be there in that neighbourhood made up of families had vanished with Steven’s departure and she had begun to think of moving, although she had no idea where she would go. Then Charlene decided to move in with her boyfriend and suggested Joan should take her place in the house she was moving from.

Charlene lived in a big, old house in the centre of the city with a half-dozen other unmarried people. The four women and two men lived together, to some degree communally, sharing the rent, the housekeeping chores, and the grocery bills. The house was old and nothing worked very well in it, but unless there was a major breakdown such as a blown fuse or a stopped-up toilet, nobody bothered much about its shortcomings. And the household itself was lackadaisical and haphazard, the singleness of the inhabitants and their offhand attitude toward life the only things
that held it together. Everybody who lived there was younger than Joan, but Joan found this didn’t matter.

Since she had moved to the big house downtown, Steven had kept Simon with him most of the time, disapproving of her living arrangement as suitable for Simon. Joan hadn’t argued with Steven about this, had accepted it as something else she deserved because she couldn’t get her life together. Secretly she was grateful not to have to cope with Simon when she knew herself to be in transit, although she had no idea to where, if anywhere. And she was deeply ashamed of being glad not to have Simon with her.

Although she felt weak and ill, Joan managed to drive the short distance home by herself. She went inside and downstairs to her room where she lay down on her bed. Mercifully, the house was empty. It would be several hours before anybody else would be home from work.

After a while she stood up carefully and began to undress. At once the dizziness returned, the weakness invaded her body so that lifting her arms was almost more than she could manage and she knew she would pass out if she didn’t sit down at once. She finished taking off her sweater and skirt and her pantyhose seated on the side of her bed, standing only long enough to get her jeans and T-shirt from the chair near her bed. When she had put them on, she lay down and closed her eyes.

She could see the weakness behind her eyelids. It was a pale lemon with faint streaks of white in it like cirrus clouds and a hint of rosy pink behind the yellow. She had given up fighting it and now her joints felt as if they had been melted by it, her abdomen was light and empty, she felt unable to find the strength even to lift her hands and the pad between her legs felt rough and hard against the unbearable, new tenderness of her flesh. She lay and thought about the seeping of her blood
between her legs and was comforted a little by its presence, even though it was thin and pale with a mauve tinge, and bore no resemblance to the rich, burning blood of menstruation. She had been flowing lightly for several days now and showed no sign of stopping.

When the other residents of the house came home one by one, they drifted down to the kitchen, which was in the basement down the hall from Joan’s room.

“I’ve got the flu,” Joan said to Sukie, then Angie, then Sylvie, as each of them passed on by to the kitchen. Rudy stopped a little longer. By dint of his strong personality and his level head, he was the acknowledged leader of the household and whenever there were disputes to be settled or decisions to be made, Rudy’s opinion carried the day.

“I never get the flu,” he said, and came in to sit down in the chair opposite her bed, stretching out his long legs and crossing them comfortably. Joan pushed her pillows up and moved to a half-reclining position. She experienced a second’s dizziness, and saw clearly the edges of a sea of black water licking at her. She held herself very still and it passed. “You’re sweating,” Rudy remarked, concern in his voice. “Are you nauseous?”

“Oh, no,” Joan said, “but I think I’ll skip supper.” She laughed, a little embarrassed.

“It sure is too bad to get sick right now,” he said. “It’s spring out there.” He twisted his head and looked up at the small window above him where a bluish, late afternoon light entered the room.

“Yeah,” she said, although she hadn’t even noticed that the long winter was over and that spring had finally come. Now she saw in her mind’s eye that the sidewalks were bare of snow and that even the snowbanks on the boulevards had melted down to the last residue of gritty, dirt-encrusted ice. It gave her a shock to
think this. Where has my mind been? she wondered. Out loud, she said, “I’ll be okay tomorrow.”

“Good,” Rudy said, as cheerful as if he were a doctor finishing a house call. He stood up and stretched lazily, then went out of the room toward the laughter and good smells that were drifting down the hall from the kitchen.

After supper Yvan stopped in.

“I hear you’ve got the flu,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Don’t come in or you’ll catch it too.”

“I was going to ask you to go to a movie with me tonight,” he said. “I don’t feel like going alone, and nobody else wants to see it.”

“Maybe tomorrow night,” she said, wishing he would go away so she could sink back into that cloud of weakness that was at once so frightening and so comfortable. He stood watching her for a long moment.

“You don’t look too good,” he said, his voice soft, an unexpected hint of tenderness in it.

“I bet I’m a mess,” she said cheerfully.

The days began to pass and Joan did not get well. Every morning at her usual time for rising she would get up and go to the bathroom, testing herself every step of the way to see if this was the day the weakness wouldn’t come and she would be able to go back to her job. Yet every morning she barely made it back to her bed, the weakness sweeping through her, feeling herself being pulled backward or downward toward that black and liquid pool, so that she fell onto the bed on her side, her face half-buried in the sheet, and didn’t move until the coolness of the bedclothes revived her somewhat and the imminence of the fainting retreated.

The bleeding continued too, never increasing, never diminishing, its character remaining the same, pale and watery, the thin
blood seeping out of her steadily, effortlessly, without even a warning cramp.

Rudy stopped by every day.

“Did I wake you?” he would ask.

“No,” Joan always said, and frowned, because time passed and she never knew if she had been awake or asleep, although she suspected that sometimes she slept even if she had no memory of doing so.