Nights Below Station Street (15 page)

He looked about, nodded to no one in particular, and left.

Rita followed Joe outside. Snow was coming down gently, and Vye carried his gloves in his hand and walked out into the soft dark snow behind them, singing a new song. Joe was angry, and when he put the hood of the truck up to start it with a screwdriver, he tore one side of the hood off.

“What is it?” Rita asked, looking worried.

“Nothing,” he said.

And, angrier still, he wrenched the hood with his arms and tried to lift it completely off. “Won’t the truck start?” Rita said.

“Yes, the truck will start,” he said. He took some snuff and put it into his mouth, and then spit.

“Well, Rita can come home with us,” Vye said, standing behind him.

“Go on – with them,” Joe whispered. “Go on, go with them. I can fix the sonofabitch.”

“I’ll stay here,” she said, holding the handle of her new curling broom. And Joe felt that he wasn’t understood and
had nothing more to say. And besides this, he had upset Rita for no reason.

Rita got into the truck and sat there with a scarf tied under her chin, and looked out the window at him.

It wasn’t her fault if he did not feel comfortable doing the things she wanted to do. He always felt uncomfortable with people she knew because he could never think of anything to say to them. And Rita was afraid he was going to say something or do something that would embarrass her. Yet he knew people didn’t care why someone didn’t drink when they themselves were having a good time. The only thing was, that in everyone who presumed because of drink that they had suddenly become authentic, Joe saw himself.

The next morning when he woke up he decided to go hunting. They had just had a snowfall and there was a week left in the season. It did not really matter if he went alone or brought Milly with him. The only thing that mattered to him at this moment was to get out of the house. He went into the old part of the basement where he kept his fishing rods and reels, his trophies and guns. The window above him was green, and snow had piled up over it. He packed his knapsack with compass and rope, with his skinning knife and a small whetstone. Everything he did at this moment, however, seemed deliberate – as if it wasn’t really him packing up to go.

Rita did not have the kids that morning and decided to go to the new mall. After he started the truck for her and shoved the screwdriver into her back pocket, Joe went back into the house and sat at the table, rolled a cigarette, and
suddenly picked up an ashtray and threw it against the wall.

Sometimes when Joe took Milly with him to the woods, they’d sleep under a lean-to. He’d make it with tarp between two trees, brace it with rope or wire, and light a fire out front, spread the coals at the entrance, place boughs in the back, make him and Milly a bed, and hunker in for the night. He would stare up at the stars, and smell smoke, and listen to Milly’s stories. He’d do this whenever they were too far from camp to make it back. He did this often when he was alone, just to do it.

Tonight Joe was making their lean-to near the brook about a mile and a half from his camp, while Milly sat on a tree that had fallen over and told him about her favourite
TV
shows, “Scoobie Doo,” and “Star Trek.”

“So then what happened?” Joe asked.

“The monssir got him by the throat.”

“By whose throat?”

“Oh – Captain Kirk.”

“And then what?”

“A faser,” Milly said, yawning. “Got him with a faser.”

Joe could never follow what his daughter was saying.

After the lean-to was set up Joe brought her some soup which he had made in a pan over the coals. Because the cup was too hot for her, Joe held it for her while she drank. The evening was just getting dark. Joe looked cautiously about.

“You know we might see a moose tonight, Milly.”

The little girl nodded as if she knew this. She had been with Joe last year when they hauled a bull out of the woods,
on the back of a truck. When they got home, Milly stepped out of the truck, covered in blood, and began spitting. Rita had to take her inside and scrub her for almost an hour while she screeched and roared. But Joe did not hunt moose this year. It was one more thing that since he was sober he decided not to do.

Joe sat down beside her and drank from his own cup of soup. As the evening got darker, everything seemed further away. There was a boulder a ways off that seemed to disappear, and the white-pebbled brook beneath them took on a stranger and more insistent bellow.

They sat together on the log with Milly’s feet hanging down but not touching the ground, and Joe rolling himself a cigarette. There was a wind, and it was cold on his ears. The gloom made the old spruces and stumps take on the shapes of animals and people. It settled down over the earth. The branches quivered in the dark area. A strange flower that had not yet died stuck up out of a torn piece of earth, and there was a shiver in the smell of dusk. Although only twenty miles from town they could have been a thousand miles.

“Are you cold, darlin?” he said after a time, lost in his thoughts.

“No,” Milly said.

“Well, I’m going to make some hot chocolate – so you go over to the lean-to and get down in the sleeping bag, and I’ll go to the brook.”

After the hot chocolate Milly lay down and began to rock back and forth and Joe lit the Coleman lantern and checked his rifle.

A buck had made two scrapes just north of where they had built the lean-to. There was a doe travelling with a fawn, and another doe that was travelling alone in this
heavy wooded area of mixed stands and gravel slopes and furious little brooks.

As Milly slept, Joe oiled and cleaned the barrel of his rifle, outside away from the shelter, and made mental notes to himself on how he would travel the next day. He did not like hunting with Milly, but now that she was here, in her little red coat and hat, walking about as if she alone knew all about the woods, he would take her with him. To do this he began to rig the basket he had with him so she could rest on his back as he walked.

Then as he tightened the last strap on the basket and slipped into it, to see if it was comfortable riding on his shoulders, he thought of the truck and the hood and Vye in his fur hat outside the curling club, and someone saying: “She can come with us.”

And, bothered by this, he flinched his strong shoulders, threw the basket off to the side and, putting his hands in his pockets, made a stabbing motion in the dirt with his foot.

Rita went out that night with Myhrra and didn’t get home until three in the morning. When she got into the house, and Myhrra honked her horn as she drove away, Adele was sitting on the stairs with a bowl of ice cream, listening to the wind and, with her housecoat and knitted slippers on, looking like she was dressed in a tea cozy.

“I suppose Dad and Milly are going to freeze their holes out tonight,” Adele said, licking the back of the spoon. Rita put down her black purse, and rummaged in the drawer for a package of cigarettes.

“Do you have a cigarette, Delly – I’m out.”

“How do you know if I smoke or not?” Adele asked. Then from under her armpit she hauled a package of Cameos.

“They’ll be alright,” Rita said. “Joe could go into the woods with a blanket and a bag of flour and last all winter.”

“Well, it seems to me that some people don’t care if their wonderful little Milly lies tits up in the woods.”

“You’ve been in the woods with Joe and you got out alright.”

“That’s because I do the worrying in this goddamn family,”
Adele said, crying suddenly, and she set her bowl on the step and walked upstairs, with the padded bottom of her slippers pouncing on the floor. Just then a huge gale came up, a tree made a loud crack, and her little slippers padded silently away. When she got to the bathroom she suddenly felt sick and threw up, waving her hands frantically to keep Rita away from her.

“And I want to tell you about some of the people – some of them are sleazy, sleazy people, Mom – and you are going out booten around with that Gloria Basterache.”

Rita came to the top of the stairs, and with her hand on the banister she spoke, and Adele put her hands over her ears.

“I don’t care about her,” Rita said. “She’s Myhrra’s friend.” Rita’s hand on the banister looked white in the light of the hall. Joe’s red sweater lay over a chair in the hallway. “I don’t have a lot in common with Gloria Basterache.”

“You do so!” Adele screeched. “You and Gloria Basterache.”

“I don’t care about her,” Rita said. “Don’t get me angry.”

“Well, I don’t like her – and who I don’t like is no good – so you just remember that,” Adele screeched. “I worry all night and then I get sick to my stomach and it’s the same all over again. As long as you go work for people they will make a hump of fun about you. And they don’t like Joe and make fun of his stuttering attacks, and I heard that Gloria was just the one to make some fun of his stutter. How could you go out with anyone who makes fun of his stutter!” She said suddenly breaking into tears again. “And Myhrra is just led along by the nose as always. She’s been hanging about a little too much with all those useless people!” Then her door slammed. “And that is my final word!”

Everything that had happened bothered Rita as well. Joe
standing at the curling club door, his huge frame against the outside light, the hood of the truck, and Gloria looking up at him, and then over at Rita.

They all said they were glad he wasn’t drinking. They all hoped he would not drink again. But she felt they wanted Joe to drink and she could not deny this. And sometimes she herself hoped he would drink. She also knew that people who didn’t even know her sympathized with her because of him, but she knew also that it was a sympathy that had been manufactured by Myhrra and others – it was forced and had nothing to do with Joe, whom they did not know or care for. And sometimes Vye would give her arm a squeeze, and nod to her in a patronizing way.

The first time Joe quit drinking it surprised her. This was some years before. Rita celebrated by getting drunk and falling backwards off the steps and twisting her ankle. Joe went outside and picked her up by the belt and carried her back into the house while she sang at the top of her lungs.

Unfortunately, a week later, her two brothers arrived from Lethbridge, Alberta, and they wanted Joe to show them everything and take them everywhere, and be the same as they were.

Joe acted as if he was shy of them, because he didn’t know how to act with them when he was sober. They complained about everything here, because everything here, back east, was evidently not as wonderful as where they were now from. And Joe listened to this, and also to the complaining that things they had expected to be the same were now, somehow, different. And, if they could not make Joe drink (which they insisted they didn’t want to do), they would ignore him.

Because her brothers were back, and because everything was exciting, Rita forgot about Joe at that time. And one day she came into the upstairs hallway and saw him sitting
on the old chair in the corner sweating, though it was not hot, with his hands on his knees, and his duffel bag packed as if he was going to go somewhere. He looked up at her and smiled, in a worried way, and said: