Juliet in August (5 page)

He's feeling something now, though, as he tries to go back to sleep. He's feeling the loss of Marian. It's a feeling of dread, an ache in an unknown place. Just to prepare himself, to get used to the idea of her being gone, he tries to picture her walking out the door with her suitcases. He can't remember her having had suitcases when she arrived to be Ed's wife, although she must have. Willard tosses and turns and throws his pillow to the floor, and then retrieves it when the bed feels too hard and flat under his head, and when he finally falls asleep again, he dreams he has the most awful toothache. He is jolted awake by a rhythmic throbbing in his jaw, and then he realizes that the throbbing is an owl—
who, who, whooo
—and the sound has gotten right inside him like the bit of a dentist's drill.

Sleep now is impossible, so Willard rises and pulls on his clothes and walks out into the night air. He stands in the middle of his drive-in lot with its miniature hills of sand, ordered to position the cars with their windshields at the right angle for movie watching. He rolls himself a cigarette and looks up at the blank screen, and then he turns a slow circle, puffing on his smoke and looking at the yard lights in the distance, thinking about all the people in Juliet and in the farmhouses around him, and how people come and go, they grow up or die or go broke and move away, and how the ones who are left carry on; that's just the way it is. He'll carry on without Marian in the same way the two of them continued without Ed after his death. When Willard's circle points him in the direction of the house, he thinks about the way she sits in the picture window—Ed's window—invisible in the dark, and watches the movies. He stares at the window, perplexed by his own feelings, without knowing that Marian is staring back.

Watching this man, wishing she could speak up, wondering if she ever will. And where would she go if she were to speak up and ruin things, frighten Willard half to death and drown the two of them in awkwardness? Her life would be over if she had to leave. She follows Willard's dark shadow as he turns another circle like a man who has lost his way and is trying to remember the tricks of navigation. She watches the firefly light of his cigarette, disappearing and then appearing again as he turns, turns in the darkness.

Crash

The Dolsons' yard light is one of the ones that Willard can see north of town. The Dolson house—which of course Willard can't see in the darkness—has the same vinyl siding as his own house. It had galled old Mrs. Dolson to no end when she realized she'd been taken in by a confidence man with colored brochures and a promise of siding longevity. As the siding began to lift and snap in the wind and her calls to the sales company remained unanswered and finally wouldn't go through at all because the phone had been disconnected, Mrs. Dolson's disappointment at her own gullibility caused her at last to agree to her husband's retirement plan, and the old couple moved to the West Coast a dozen years ago and left the farming operation to their son, Blaine, and his wife, Vicki. And no sooner had the senior Dolsons settled in a condominium complex in Nanaimo than Mr. Dolson died, and now Mrs. Dolson lives near Blaine's sister in Vancouver and shows no interest in returning to her former home, even for a visit, because she
just can't bear
to see what has become of it in Vicki's care. It's convenient to blame Vicki for the siding mistake.

The Dolsons' three-bedroom bungalow was built about the same time as Willard's to replace the original farmhouse that was old and small and did not reflect the prosperity of the times. The new house (not so new anymore) sits three hundred yards off the grid road, surrounded on three sides by trees lovingly planted by Blaine's mother: poplars, Manitoba maples, even a weeping birch that has somehow survived the arid conditions of this part of the country. The house faces the road, and from the living room window you can see the barn that is now pretty much unused, a rail corral, and a half-acre pen that is home to Blaine's horse, the only one he has left. In front of the house is a miraculous plum tree, of which Blaine's mother was exceedingly proud. South of the house is the vegetable garden, enclosed by chicken wire to protect it from the deer. The fact that it is still bountiful is perhaps more miraculous than the plum tree, since the gardens throughout the district are sparse, even nonexistent, thanks to drought and grasshoppers. Vicki's garden is rich with produce. No one can figure it out. She plants in the spring and then forgets to water and never has time to weed. And the grasshoppers seem to have passed Vicki's garden by as they devoured everyone else's. Her own theory is that grasshoppers don't like weeds. They've cruised the country looking for the weed-free gardens, she tells Blaine, which is why it's a good idea not to weed a garden. “Ha ha,” she says. “It's a joke.” Blaine—who remembers the neat garden his mother was famous for—doesn't laugh.

Blaine's parents had three children and the house was the perfect size for their family, but it's a tight fit for Blaine and Vicki, who have six kids. Until today, the boys shared one bedroom and the girls the other. What's different about today (or technically, yesterday) is that Shiloh, the oldest and almost a teenager, has been allowed to “build” his own bedroom downstairs. Blaine didn't see the need for it, but Vicki tried to be more understanding of Shiloh's growing desire for privacy. She and Shiloh decided on the southwest corner as the driest and brightest spot in a mostly dark, unfinished basement. Although she didn't really have time (the garden's bounty was waiting for her attention), Vicki helped Shiloh build a low wooden platform out of scrap lumber to keep the bed up off the cement floor. They carried a worn area rug down the basement steps and laid it on the platform, and they hung two old bedspreads from the ceiling to create walls, or at least the illusion of walls. Then they took Shiloh's bed apart and reassembled it in the new room, and Vicki found a floor lamp and a couple of plastic storage tubs for Shiloh to use for his clothes, and she made him some shelves out of boards and bricks for his CD player and other personal things.

Vicki noticed that Shiloh was sullen the whole time they were creating the room and moving him into it, but she didn't say anything. She assumed it was his age and adolescent hormones, and she promised to get him a desk as soon as they had a bit of extra money, and even his own laptop computer if they could afford it. She ignored him when he said, “I guess that won't happen anytime soon”—he was getting so like his father—and she said cheerfully, “Well, maybe not, but you never know, I might win the lottery.” She left him to his decorating then, and he covered the two cement walls with pictures of hockey players cut from
Sports Illustrated
and a poster from the national rodeo finals in Edmonton that Lynn Trass had let him take from the window of the Oasis Café.

Shiloh Dolson, just shy of his thirteenth birthday, likes his new room even if he doesn't show it. He doesn't care that it's dark and it doesn't have real walls and he's already had to squash a couple of sow bugs. There is one problem, though, which he discovers on this, his first night in the basement. The problem is a heating duct that runs along the floor joists above his head. He wakes up at three in the morning, and through the duct he can hear his parents arguing. The fact that they argue is nothing new. Shiloh's heard them a hundred times before. What's problematic is that he can now hear what they're arguing about. He'd always assumed money, being fully aware of the situation his parents are in. He knows the farm is mostly gone, all but the home quarter, although Vicki keeps trying to reassure him that things will get better and that Blaine will get the land back, or at least be in a position to rent before too long. It's happened to people before, she tells Shiloh, and they bounce back. It's not your father's fault, she says, it's the times, it's like people running out of fish on the East Coast, not their fault, but things will change. Wait until people in Ottawa and Toronto have to pay five dollars for a loaf of bread, she says, then the politicians will come to their senses.

Shiloh doesn't know what to think. He doesn't know what the cost of a loaf of bread in Toronto has to do with anything and, except for Vicki's reassurances, what he hears, he hears on the TV news like everyone else in the country. Maybe there's too much wheat in the world and Blaine hasn't figured that out, although Shiloh does remember him growing canary seed a few years ago and swearing he'd never do it again because of the full-body protection he'd had to wear to harvest the damned stuff, complaining to Vicki about the itching and chafing he'd had to put up with to grow feed for canaries in New York City. But maybe the canary seed experiment failed because Blaine is a bad farmer. Maybe it
is
all Blaine's fault.

There's another possibility. Maybe, and this is what Shiloh would rather believe, it's Vicki's fault. Vicki who, according to Blaine, is “bloody useless” on a farm. Sometimes Blaine calls her this in a teasing way, as though it's endearing, but if he's desperate for another set of hands and sends one of the kids to the house for Vicki and then she sends a wrench clanging through the frame of a piece of machinery, or lays a bolt on the ground to get lost forever, or fails to hold her ground and lets a yearling calf escape through an open gate, he'll say something like, “For Christ's sake, you grew up on a farm; how can you be so bloody useless?” The way he says “bloody useless” in these circumstances leads Shiloh to believe that his mother actually is. Vicki never gets mad in return, or defends herself, and Shiloh takes this to mean she knows Blaine is right. Shiloh is too young to understand Vicki's brand of diplomacy, which involves keeping your mouth shut until things blow over. Of course, the need for Vicki's help on the farm is now a thing of the past because there's no farming left to do, but Blaine still finds the odd occasion when the word
useless
seems appropriate, or at least easy.

On this first night in his new room, Shiloh wakes up, and Blaine and Vicki are not arguing about land or cattle or money. At three in the morning, they're fighting about green beans. Shiloh thinks he must be hearing things, he must have it wrong, but no, Blaine says, quite clearly, “When I get home from work tomorrow I want those beans in the freezer, Vicki.”

“I'm planning to do the beans tomorrow, I told you that. Or do you want me to do them now? Would that make you happy, if I clattered around the kitchen right now and woke everybody up? Come on, Blaine. Be reasonable.”

Shiloh hears Blaine's footsteps on the floor above. Back and forth.

“I don't want the only thing we grow on this place to end up molding in the basement.”

The beans in question, Shiloh knows, are in plastic tubs in the cold room, which is a misnomer at this time of year. He helped pick them two days ago.

“They aren't molding,” he hears his mother say. “There's plenty of time. But tomorrow. I promise.”

“And I know how much that promise is worth,” Blaine says. “You'll wake up with a big plan to get them done, but you'll be off to town before you've got a pot of water boiling. You'll be gone for the day, and I'll get home and you won't have done a damned thing and the beans will look like a compost heap.”

“That's not fair,” Vicki says, “that part about me not doing a damned thing. We have six kids. It takes a lot of time, looking after six kids.”

Shiloh is resentful that he's included in the category of “kids.” He doesn't need looking after. He tosses back the covers and swings his feet over the side of the bed, thinking he might get up and throw his two cents in. He knows Blaine will agree with him. There are only five kids that need looking after. He wants to say this and be on Blaine's side.

“My mother raised three kids and grew a garden and worked like a man on top of that,” Blaine says.

“I know about your mother,” Vicki says. “She was amazing. I'm not. I don't want to fight.” Then she says, as though she's just remembered, “Shiloh is right underneath us. Let's not wake him.”

Shiloh is just about to part the bedspread curtains and head for the stairs when he hears Blaine say, “If it weren't for that bedroom idea—another one of your big plans—you could have had the beans done.”

Vicki says something Shiloh can't hear, and then Blaine says, “To hell with Shiloh.”

Shiloh stops.
To hell with Shiloh?
Did he hear correctly?

“Blaine,” Vicki says.

“Don't
Blaine
me.”

There's a long silence, and then Shiloh hears Vicki's footsteps going down the hall, and a few minutes later Blaine follows.

Once they're in their bedroom, Shiloh can't hear what they're saying. Nothing, he thinks. He doesn't know that when Vicki asks Blaine what he means by “To hell with Shiloh,” Blaine seems exhausted and answers that he didn't mean anything, he just said it. Shiloh doesn't hear Vicki swear to do the beans and not let them go to waste, and Blaine say, “Well, we both know it's not the beans that are stuck in my craw.” Shiloh doesn't know that in spite of the arguing, his parents get into bed together and Blaine says, “How can you wear flannelette in the summer?” and Vicki says, “You never mind my flannelette.”

Shiloh lies there most of the night, worrying. He's twelve years old and he's worrying about things he can't understand, not the least of which is why the words “To hell with Shiloh” slipped so easily from his father's tongue, just as easily as “bloody useless.” He wants to cry, but he won't—he's too old to cry—and he reaches over and turns on the lamp, and the light falls on the cowboy in the rodeo poster, a bull rider wearing purple chaps with gold fringes. His hand is wrapped tight into his bull rope and the fringes on his chaps are suspended as he gets set for the bull's next jarring contact with the earth. Shiloh wonders if he could be a bull rider, and then remembers that the steers he could practice on are gone.