How Loveta Got Her Baby (6 page)

“It flew away like the passing of a spirit,” said Aaron Stoodley.

He had another scenario which showed the same room, but this time there was no dog. The blue blanket was there, and so was the radiator, but the pigeon perched up on the windowsill for a long time.
Coo-coo-coo
it went, and that was the only sound you could hear because the apartment was empty. It was the middle of the afternoon, a lot of light came in from the window.

Next thing that happened, in both scenarios, were footsteps on the stairs and the front door opened. Then either the fox terrier jumped up from the blanket and ran to the door, or the fox terrier came in on a leash from the outside. Either way, the scene was set and Aaron liked it better when he pictured it the first way, the dog all alone in the house for such a long time.

Then the six people who lived there came inside, all of them together. They were dressed up in their soccer uniforms, they were a team. Falcons, was what it said on the front of the shirts, and there were numbers, all different, on the back. They all laughed and clumped straight into the kitchen, took off their soccer shoes, pushed them into a pile.

“They spent the rest of their lives in just their socks,” Aaron said.

First through the door was Otto Bond and then in came Johnny Drake. Johnny Drake put a carton of beer on the floor. Then he filled up the refrigerator with the beer bottles, one by one. He had one open already, it looked like he didn't care if it was warm or maybe they'd bought it cold, refrigerated. Aaron wasn't sure. Then in came the others. Terry Snook, Shawn Blagdon, Barry Rose, and Justin Peach. Aaron rhymed off the names like that. He knew them all from the lawyer's papers, from the inheritance, from the stories in the newspapers.

Otto Bond was stocky, he had his hair cut short and he was the quickest soccer player you ever seen. They won the men's championship that night.

“All Halifax,” said Aaron.

That was the truth all right. He'd read it in the
Daily News
, read what the police found when they came in, later on.

It was Otto Bond who owned the dog and you could tell he liked it. First he took the dog out to the park. Then he came back and he went over and got out some kibble from the cupboard, put it into the bowl and shook it, so it made a sound. The dog came over and snuffed at it, but you could tell that he'd had a awful lot of kibble before.

“Oh, eat the food, doggy-oh,” sang Otto Bond.

Then the boys got hungry and the dog was up on the couch curled up in one lap or another. There were no girls there at all. That meant the six of them concentrated on laughing and hooting and joking, just being themselves.

Six, seven o'clock came around and by then they were all in the livingroom. There was a couch, a TV, and a bean-bag chair. Three of them sat on the floor on a rag-rug from home. There was a picture woven into that rug, the
S.S. Caribou
, the ship full of innocent passengers that the Germans sank with a torpedo back in 1942. Down it went, the
Caribou
ship, down to the bottom off Port-aux-Basques. Hundreds drowned. Trouble was, Aaron saw in his scenario, the rag-rug was so old and so twisted out of shape, the ship bent here and there in the fabric, it looked like an old wreck even before the torpedo hit.

That said, it was still afloat on the sea, smoke from the funnels.

“It was an omen too then, the rug, like the pigeon,” Henry Fiander said.

“That's right,” said Aaron Stoodley, “you could say that.”

Now he had that old carpet at home, part of the inheritance.

About once a month, in Halifax, Otto Bond had taken the
S.S.
Caribou
rug outside and shook off all the crumbs. Then it was nice to sit on, and three of the boys sat there on the championship night.

“What'd they look like, physically?” Henry asked.

“They were all different, I bet, but in my mind's eye, at least one of them bore a certain resemblance to my grandmother, Priscilla.”

It was through the connection to Priscilla Yarn that Aaron came by the money. Therefore someone must have looked a bit like Priscilla, or her long-dead husband.

It was that Justin Peach who came up with the idea that caused them all to die.

“Let's order in,” he said, “pizza.”

That's how simple it was. They could have decided to go out, they could have had anything they wanted served up. Instead they ordered in, and it was Otto Bond who said, “I'll do it, let me do it, I'll call.”

“Hold the cod-liver oil,” they heard him say.

“Might come over later,” Bridie whispered over the phone, “but it kind of depends on Mother.”

“Oh?”

“They might need her at the Legion, they might not. I'll let you know, Otto Bond.”

Bridie's mother had to work overtime so Bridie missed the party and after it all happened, and was over with, she consoled herself as best she could, in the middle of her episodes of crying, she said to baby Liam, “Oh my stars!” and she cuddled up with him.

“You were almost an orphan, my little darling. Wouldn't that have been a fine state of affairs?”

Years later, she still thought about Otto Bond on a regular basis, because she knew he was the best of all the boyfriends she ever had. He was the gold standard.

Justin Peach did it again. While Otto was still on the phone with Bridie, he came over and tapped Otto on the shoulder.

“Hey! Order a couple empty blank pizza crusts too, we got that sauce of mine,” he said.

So, when the pizzas were delivered, there were those three empty crusts that Justin Peach fixed up. He went out of sight from the livingroom, into the kitchen, and it took him a long, long time. He banged around, you could hear the pots and pans. When he came back in, he looked so proud, no one knew they were looking at their last supper.

“Jeez, Justin Peach, what you got on there?” they all said.

Aaron Stoodley could see him there plain as day. Justin Peach stood with his own home-made pizza and held it up, slanted, so they could see it. Steam rose up it was so hot.

“You're gonna love this,” he said, “got my own tomato sauce boiled up, sat in the fridge a bit, seasoned it up. Cod tongues and cheeks. Side order, chips and gravy.”

Now that sounded good. After the soccer game, the victory and the beer, they had plenty of room for the Justin Peach Special.

That's what they called it, and they ate it all down but for a piece or two.

“That's what did it, what killed them,”Aaron said. “It was the sauce.”

The little dog wandered around about for five or six hours and sniffed at a couple of slices that were left over. But he was too smart, he turned his nose up and walked away, ate a bit of his dry kibble,
crunch-crunch
, and he looked at the boys, puzzled, every one of them now dead to the world.

Aaron said he was detached, emotionally, but he knew how the dog must have felt.

“Lucky loved them, every single one,” he said.

He'd named the dog Lucky himself, later on.

“I think we might've been buddies with Otto Bond, Henry, but we never had the chance. None of them knew a damn thing about botulism.”

“Botulism?”

All of a sudden, Aaron Stoodley was the leading world expert on all the poisons you could get, cooked into food. He told Henry how he saw it in his scenario, how he saw it clear as day.

Johnny Drake was the first to go because he had most of the beer. He had a head start on the rest of them, he felt weak on his legs. He'd never felt his lips go numb like that, and never before saw double. Now he saw two of the little dogs, so he lay down, tried to orient his eyes, lay back so he was part-way in the bean-bag chair, part-way on the floor, his legs stretched out, and he breathed real shallow for a couple of hours.

“Could have laid a feather on his lips,” said Aaron, “but he never woke up. Last thing he saw was a loon on the water. It opened up its mouth, voiceless.”

Then the botulism that was hidden in the sauce caught up to Terry Snook. He was out on the wharf with his sister when she ran home for lunch and left him there. He heard a low sound, like a make-and-break engine miles away, a choking off and on.

Shawn Blagdon? He went out for a walk, out when the tide was low and when he looked back there was nothing behind him but water. Couldn't swim a bit, gave up easy. Barry Rose walked up Iron Skull, he liked to do that, it took all day to climb the mountain that looked over the sea, and when he got to the top the wind died real mysteriously. He couldn't see half-way to English Harbour.

Aaron Stoodley was too upset at Justin Peach to figure out just what went on, what it was that Justin Peach saw when he died.

“That fool Justin Peach,” said Aaron, “he'd cooked up that sauce way back when, he'd mixed it in a pan like it was just beans for dinner. Never thought of the pressure cooker, didn't know a damn thing about fixing up preserves. Once, maybe twice, he put up jam.”

Aaron Stoodley would have given back the nine thousand dollars just to have those boys alive, have them wake up, but they never did.

Of course the last one to go on that night was the soccer star himself, Otto Bond. He lay back and his blonde hair, what there was of it, cut real short, was bent up against the arm of the couch from the weight of his head. He felt his mouth go dry. He saw Bridie from the pizza place. Then he saw the winning goal go in again, curled off his foot up high, smack up under the crossbar.

He saw the little baby in her arms.

Then he felt the dog jump on his lap and that was the last thing he knew, and the dog was still there when the police came and broke down the door, and by that time Otto Bond was cold. He felt like he was made out of porcelain, when they touched him.

Aaron didn't have to make up any scenarios after that. It was all in the newspapers in Halifax. Public knowledge, how the boys from the soccer team died overnight. The terrier had his picture in the paper, ONLY SURVIVOR it said underneath in capital letters, and off he went to the SPCA. He was still there six months later when in came Aaron Stoodley, re-named him Lucky and brought him home to stay. That's how long it took, six months no less, for the lawyers from Halifax to track down Aaron. They gave him all the money the boys had, what there was of it. It didn't amount to much, especially after the lawyers, but Aaron was the closest living relative they had left on the earth, so he was the one to get it.

Still, Aaron Stoodley couldn't sleep at night. The nine thousand dollars, the dog named Lucky, the rag-rug, he had them all, but when he looked in the mirror, he saw his face was worn, his arms and legs got all sagged out like he was a hundred years old.

“Total insomnia, I've got it bad,” he said to Henry Fiander.

Henry watched him fall apart for a month or two and then, after talking to Eunice Cluett, he gave him some considered advice.

“Snap out of it, Aaron Stoodley, smarten up, you got your whole life to think of.”

It couldn't have been that simple admonition that did it, but the next day Aaron looked a lot better.

“What happened to you?” Henry asked.

“I had another scenario, and I fell asleep.”

Then he told Henry what he saw. First off, he realized—thank God, Henry—that what happened was that Otto Bond didn't die after all. Sure, he was taken to the morgue in the same ambulance as Terry Snook. Aaron saw it, the ambulance had a red cross on its side, no siren, after all what's the rush, so it pulled in slowly, carefully, under a stone arch by the hospital and it stopped and then the back doors opened up. A couple of men in white uniforms appeared and took out the stretchers. You couldn't see the boys at all because they were covered up in sheets, like ghosts. Then the men in the uniforms wheeled the carts down a long hall and turned into a room.

My, but it was cold in there.

They lifted Terry Snook and they lifted Otto Bond and they placed them just as they were on a metal table. One metal table for each. All six of them then, all the friends, were there lined up in a row. Then the men left and turned off the light and it got colder and colder in the pitch-black dark.

If it hadn't been for the night cleaner, whose name was Moses Sealy, Otto Bond would have died again for sure, frozen to death. As it was, it took a couple of hours until Moses came in. He turned on the overhead light so he could see around. He swept up the floor with a broom. He had on a big pair of green rubber gloves, so he didn't have to touch anything, and he didn't seem at all worried by the boys being there. Then Moses Sealy finished up, flicked off the light, started to go out the door and then for some reason he turned back and turned the light on again.

Hey that sheet's moving, Moses thought to himself.

Prickles ran up and down his spine. He looked again and sure enough there was a motion of breathing there. You could scarcely see it. He walked over, slipped off one of his gloves, pulled the white sheet down off Otto Bond's head.

This boy's not so cold. Feel him.

He took off his other glove, went to the wall phone, called 9-1-1, and he sat right down beside Otto Bond till they got there.

After two weeks on the respirator in Intensive Care, after they heated him up with electric blankets, Otto Bond walked out as good as new. Except he had weak legs. First thing though, he went down to the pizza place. Bridie fainted when she saw him, and Jules picked her off the floor and told her to go home with Otto Bond. Then the two of them walked over to Bridie's, got the baby into the stroller, met Bridie's mother for the first time.

“Pleased to meet you, Otto Bond,” is what she said.

Her mother liked him right off, you could see it, the way she acted the whole time when he was there.

Later she said to Bridie, “Oh my, I do likes him, Bridie, he seems like a fine boy.”

Aaron Stoodley told Henry and Eunice it was then that he fell asleep, by a miracle. He figured it was about 2 a.m. that it happened. When he woke up, he felt rested; he had the little dog, Lucky, curled up half-way down his feet.