Fever (7 page)

I began to convert the other back room opposite the kitchen into my study. I set my desk squarely in front of the big, old-fashioned window where I could lift my head and see the hills across the little river and the opening into the more distant coulee where I would one day find the relics of a dinosaur. I took paint remover and scrubbed away the white paint that marred the Golden Oak chair Nick had left me. Perhaps it had been there since the house had belonged to the writer’s family.

I had been warned about small towns: how they were hotbeds of gossip, innuendo and outright lies, of deep-seated prejudices and antiquated attitudes, also, of the most disgusting hidden vices. But some had told me of their warmth, and of the concern of villagers for each other’s welfare, of their appreciation of the past. What the people of the village thought of me didn’t matter to me; I didn’t expect to fit in, nor want to; I hoped only to find solitude and anonymity, to be better able to hold at bay all the temptations that accompanied fame, for I was sure they would ruin me as an artist.

I want to be a writer. I murmured the incantation to myself over and over again. I want to be a
good
writer. And silently, so
silently that I never formed the words even in my own head, something in me murmured steadily, like the sound of the wind in the trees that lined the streets: I want to be a great writer.

The woman from the neat new bungalow next door came to visit. I was at my typewriter when I heard the front door close and a woman’s voice calling, “Yoohoo,” down the hall. Startled, wondering if somebody had arrived without warning from the city, I hurried out to see who was there.

A short, middle-aged woman in a print housedress, the kind my mother wore when I was a child, was advancing down the hall, peering to the left and right, holding a cake still in its pan in front of her.

“Oh, there you are!” she said when she saw me. “I’ll just put this in the kitchen,” and disappeared into it. I followed. “Have you made a difference in here! That old Nick was so dirty! And when I tried to clean up for him, he got downright grabby, if you get my drift, so I had to leave him to stew in his own juice, if you know what I mean.” She set the cake on the counter, turned, and seeing me standing in the doorway, she said, “I’m Palma McCallum. I live next door. I thought it was high time I came over and introduced myself.”

“George,” I began.

“Barrett, I know,” she said. “You wrote that book. I read it,” she added, and went no further. She began to peel plastic wrap from the cake pan. “I didn’t mind it,” she said. “Heaven knows, there’s lots worse than that.”

“Would you like some coffee?” I asked, deciding to ignore her remarks about my book.

“Just the thing,” she said. “We’ll have some of my cake.”

Palma had a husband, but I rarely saw him. He was always out at the farm seeding or summer fallowing or spraying or hauling wheat. I soon realized that she would be in my house everyday washing my dishes or dusting, if I didn’t make it clear to her that I wanted few interruptions. I was a bachelor, after all, and she assumed that I was like all the others in the district, a man whose socks always needed mending, whose buttons were perpetually popping off and needed sewing on and who would starve if it weren’t for the occasional casserole or pie fresh from her oven.

“That rug needs vacuuming,” she’d say. “I’ll just run over it …” but I would quickly intervene, “Now Palma, I’m not helpless. I can vacuum my own rug. Come and have a cup of coffee with me. I was just going to take a break.” She would meekly follow me into the kitchen, checking behind me for dust on the windowsills, then sit while I made the coffee, chattering about her husband and her relatives and our other neighbours. Her sharp eyes took in everything, and I knew what she saw in the morning was all over town by afternoon. She kept bustling in without knocking until I took to turning the key in the door so that when she decided to drop in, she had to knock.

I had quickly recovered the regime I had maintained before my first novel was released: up at six, write till ten, then out for a long walk across the river, over the prairie and up into the hills behind my house, then back to my desk. The pile of pages by my typewriter grew thicker with each day that passed. It seemed to me, though, that my original idea was changing slightly, and I wasn’t sure whether to wrench the novel back to that, or to follow this subtle new tone to wherever it might lead. I decided finally to let the writing go to where it seemed to want to.

When my writing had temporarily stalled and I had tired of
scraping off old wallpaper or mending wiring or painting, and I found my thirst for human company too strong to resist, I strolled down to the café for a cup of coffee and a hamburger.

“Evenin', how’s the carpenter?” Harry, the owner, always asked as I sat down. Then he’d pour me a cup of coffee without asking if I wanted one.

I soon began to see that the café was the centre of social life for a certain strata of local society: the retarded people who lived in the old peoples’ lodge on the riverbank, the men who had never married, Hutterite men in town on business, strangers passing through, outsiders like myself—in short, everyone who was left after all the circles of friends and relatives had been cast. I found too, that because the town was located in the heart of what had once been dinosaur country, any scruffy-looking stranger might turn out to be a distinguished paleontologist from a distant university.

Occasionally, when I tired of my own company, and the café held no appeal, I went to the bar, which was in the old hotel, where, even if there were only a few old-timers nursing their warm draft beer or a familiar face or two from the café, there was at least loud rock music playing and a pretty barmaid to look at. Later, I knew, the place would fill up with a stray oil crew or two and young farmers and ranchhands and their girlfriends, and the bar would grow raucous with a palpable current of violence that often erupted into fights.

One night I was surprised to find three middle-aged Hutterite men sitting quietly together, each with a glass of beer in front of him. I wondered if this was allowed, or if they were breaking rules. After I had been there for a while a pair of young Hutterite girls came in the outer door and put their heads around the corner of the entry way. They looked to be about sixteen or seventeen and they were grinning broadly and giggling so
loudly that everybody, a dozen or so people, turned to see what was going on. Everybody except the Hutterite men who seemed to know without looking, who it was making the noise.

“What’s that all about?” I asked Denise, the barmaid, who had come to ask me if I wanted another drink. She was only a few years older than the girls giggling in the doorway.

Denise laughed, turning her head toward them. She had a wry, flippant way about her that wasn’t pleasant, but that intrigued me because it contrasted so sharply with her perfect pink complexion and her face with its small nose and sensual mouth and large blue eyes, all framed by her long, pale-blonde hair. She had a way of standing holding her tray that emphasized her full young breasts in the tight shirt she always wore. I had wondered if it was meant especially for me, but I had soon seen that she stood like that in front of all the men, as if she believed that a casual parading of her charms was part of her job description. Once or twice I’d thought of taking her home with me, I thought she could have been persuaded, but something held me back. The welcoming calm of my house, the sense of a presence that was always there, so that I never felt alone—I felt she would disrupt all that, that she might dispel it, and I wouldn’t risk its loss.

“I guess they want to go home,” she said. “Everything in town but the bar is closed.” One of the old men who were waiting at the door each morning for the bar to open, and who sat in his usual place near the door, lifted his unsteady head, his greasy cap stuck on sideways, patted the seat beside him, and called to the girls, “Why doan youse come and sit with me?” The girls dodged back around the corner and their giggles reached such a pitch of hysteria that I thought surely the men would have to get up and tell them to be quiet or shoo them back to the van I had seen parked down the street.

When they didn’t move, I said to Denise, “It doesn’t seem to be
bothering them much,” nodding my head in the direction of the three Hutterites who were talking quietly together. She made a sour face and shrugged one shoulder so hard her breast bounced.

“I bet they’ll catch hell on the way home. The men aren’t supposed to be in here, so the girls know they can get away with it.” She took my empty glass away without looking at it, her eyes meeting mine in a too-frank gaze that she practiced on most of her customers. “Hutterite women don’t have much to say about anything.”

I looked back to the two apple-cheeked girls in the doorway—I had never before seen anyone that description fitted—and studied their costume, the black and white polka-dotted scarves they wore over their hair, their ankle-length bright plaid dresses with the long aprons over them, and I saw that their faces shone with a childish innocence, unabashed as they were by the attention they were provoking from the audience that, except for Denise, was entirely male. I hadn’t known there were still teenagers in Canada like that. I wondered if I could find a place for them in my novel and then dismissed the idea as silly.

Ten more minutes passed, the girls didn’t tire of their game, and the three Hutterite men, one of them very drunk, slowly stood up. As soon as they began to rise, the girls let out a couple of delighted shrieks, pulled open the outside door and pushed each other out into the street. When I went out a half hour later, the van was gone.

Other than Palma, only canvassers for the Heart or Cancer or Lung associations knocked on my door. And, of course, the Hutterites, who came selling freshly killed ducks and geese, frozen chickens, and fresh vegetables from their gardens which must have been vast. It was always the old man with the thin
grizzled beard, Benjamin, who came, too old to work on the colony anymore, I guessed, and a young man who drove the van, carried the heavy sacks of potatoes or carrots and any large orders of birds.

I never bought much, but I always bought something. I even placed an order for some pairs of hand-knitted wool socks, in my case, good for nothing but wearing inside my winter boots since they were so thick and bulky. But I had first seen Benjamin when the house was still Nick’s and I felt leery about disturbing a tradition.

One day they arrived at noon as I was taking a small roast out of the oven. It was too much for me, I had cooked it in order not to have to cook for a few days, and on impulse, I asked him and his driver to have lunch with me. Although he barely knew me, Benjamin accepted without a trace of hesitancy or surprise. I realized that such an invitation was in keeping with the communal tradition he lived by, and I knew too, that if I arrived at the colony at mealtime, it would be taken for granted that I would eat there.

Benjamin said grace before I had even thought of it, and then dug in with a good appetite.

“You should come visit us at colony,” he said. “Our women cook you good meal.”

“I’ll have to do that,” I said, although I had no intention of ever doing any such thing. I hadn’t even any sure idea, beyond the direction, where the colony was.

“What you do for living?” he asked.

“I’m a writer,” I said. “I’m working on a book.” He put his fork down and looked hard at me, his dark eyes sharp. “About this town?” he asked. I had to laugh. “Heavens no,” I said.

“Why not?” he asked, returning to his meal. “Lots here to write.”

“I’m sure there is,” I said, “but …” and couldn’t think how to finish my sentence. “I’m finishing something I started before I came here.”

The young man with him, William, hardly spoke at all, but he ate with ferocity, not lifting his eyes from his plate. Despite Benjamin’s frail old age, it was plain he was the boss.

“Is William your son?” I asked.

“No,” Benjamin said, “grandson. My boys men now, have sons of own.”

“They live on the colony, too?”

“Two in Manitoba,” he said, then gave me that sharp-eyed glance again. “Sure on colony. All on colonies. How else to live?” He gave a little laugh, more to himself, and I glanced at William, wondering why he never spoke. Benjamin must have seen me looking at William, because he said, apropos of nothing that I could tell, “It’s hard to keep young ones on colony. They want to go. Some of them. Gets harder all the time.”

“Oh?” I said.

“They want to see world,” he said. “Television, cars, women.” I kept silent. “They want to see world,” he repeated, giving his old head a shake and reaching with his knife for the butter. “I tell them, the world!” He flapped his free hand as if to make the world vanish. “On colony we keep out bad things.”

William kept chewing, his eyes on his plate, but red was creeping up his neck to disappear under his short, white-blonde hair. “We get him wife,” the old man said, winking at me. “He settle down then.” William swallowed hard, but still refused to look at us.

“You married?” Benjamin asked me.

“No,” I said.

“Man needs woman,” he pointed out. “Oh, I suppose I’ll get married one of these days.” “Have little ones,” he suggested. “Not good for man to live alone.”

When the two of them had gone, I thought about what Benjamin had said about me living alone. I realized then that although I had been living alone for a couple of months, I didn’t have that empty, alienated feeling that being alone had always raised in me in the past. I felt as though someone was with me. It was peculiar, and I found myself wandering through my house thinking about it. It had to be the house, there was something about it, it exuded a warmth, I actually felt it welcomed me, it wanted me in it. But that’s silly, I told myself. It’s only your imagination. But there it was. Perhaps, I thought, it’s the writer glad to have a kindred soul living here.

Still, I reminded myself, if it really were the dead writer, surely my work would be going better. My first novel had poured out of me, but this one seemed to be going in fits and starts. Often a couple of days would pass without my writing a line, and yet I couldn’t quite put my finger on what the trouble was. I knew my characters; I knew where I wanted my characters to go; the setting was as familiar to me as the city I had grown up in. Oh well, I thought, you hit a bad spell every once in a while. You can’t expect it to be always easy and smooth.