Nights Below Station Street (21 page)

One night Vera left the house for a walk. She went for a walk along the beach and looked at the lights across the bay. The road was dark, the fields above her were frozen and the trees made wretched sounds. It was as if she would be able to stick her face in a fire and not feel it. She looked all alone, like a scarecrow standing in the middle of nowhere. She had forgotten her hat, and she stood there for a long time. Out on the highway, at one of the houses they were having a party. There was music from a guitar which reached all the way to where she was, and she could hear screeching, and now and then a door slam, and then loud laughter.

And as she turned back along the road, she stumbled to one side and fell on her stomach, knocking the wind from her. She lifted herself proudly, and brushed the snow off. Far away she could just see the slanted window of her old farmhouse with its yellow light, but tears blurred her eyes.

The doctor had Joe take him by truck and then by Skidoo to Vera’s. Vera and Nevin had been snowed in and she was sick, and Thelma had telephoned the doctor. Dr. Hennessey had delivered them all – that is, Vera, Ralphie, Rita, and Milly and Adele. He had delivered Myhrra and her ex-husband also. Old fashioned and an anachronistic thinker, he had one old-fashioned trait which helped her out – he made house calls.

Vera and Nevin lived about fourteen miles out of town, on the down-river side. The doctor’s house was on the opposite side of the road, and from his upstairs he looked over the bay, a mile and a half away. He could see Vera’s land from his window. He could see the top of her barn and the field, and the lane that led up to her house.

As they came up to the house, the doctor – dressed in a woollen cap and old blue navy sweater with his bow-tie, a pair of bright pea-soup gumboots – took out a chew of plug, walked about the Skidoo, kicking the runners.

Nevin sat by his big woodstove in the kitchen with his hands in the pockets of his corduroy pants. Vera was almost as tall as Ralphie, very thin, with blue eyes and hazel-coloured hair. She wore a pair of black slacks that dragged below her bum, and an old orange-coloured shirt, stuck with woodchips and showing her naked chest bone.

The whole kitchen was dark and spooky because of the styrofoam sheets Nevin used to insulate the walls. Vera began to cough as she stood there, and then looked at them proudly.

It was as if now that they were in the woods they must experience everything, that is, cold and miserable conditions. Joe stood off to the side, smiling – with his eyes swollen because he had had no glasses on while riding his Skidoo, and wearing an old Skidoo suit that was torn at both legs, his boots covered with snow.

There was snow on the doctor’s woollen cap, which hung over the left side of his head, and covered his left ear.

“Hello hello hello,” he said impatiently.

As soon as he came into the kitchen he looked out of place, where he would not look out of place in any other rural kitchen in the Maritimes.

Nevin was reading a manual on pumps and plumbing, and stared up at Joe. Joe smiled, and tried to light a wet cigarette.

The doctor spit into the stove and opened the damper.

“How’s Clare?” Vera asked.

“Clare … Clare … Clare,” the doctor said, as if he were trying to remember her name. “Oh – good good.”

Then he got suspicious for a moment as if someone might tell him something he did not want to hear. It was a cloudy day, and heavy storm-clouds sat above the farm, drifts of snow lay against the kitchen window that looked out over the pond. Some far away woods were seen.

“The main thing,” he said, “is how are you?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “I just got the flu.”

“Well, come in and let me look at you – in here,” the doctor said brashly, as if he knew exactly where everything was already. And, saying this, he turned, stepped over a pail, and made his way into the other room by another door.

Vera, without looking at anyone, followed him.

“What?” they could hear the doctor saying. “Don’t talk about chores – you don’t know what a chore is. Chores – a few years ago now – heh heh – I mean you didn’t call them chores a few years ago. …” Here he cleared his throat as if he was confused. “Having your period?”

And then their voices became muffled.

Meanwhile the whole house was in turmoil. The plumbing
was broken, and Ralphie was there trying to fix it Joe stood in the entranceway, letting snow drip from his boots, and now and then he glanced at Nevin.

“Here,” Joe said, unzipping his coat. “I’ll go down and see if there’s something wrong.”

Joe walked about in the cellar, looking at the beams.

“What do you think, Ralphie?” he whispered.

The air was cold and stale and when they breathed, steam came out of their mouths.

“I tried to put a new pipe on the pump here – I had the motor running – but I still can’t get it to run.”

“Who put this one in?” Joe asked.

“I did,” Ralphie said.

“Ah, well – no, look” And he took the wrench from Ralphie’s hand. “What do you think?” Joe said, undoing the back of the pump one screw at a time with his huge fingers. “Schooners win tonight or Tigers?”

“I don’t know.”

“I was on a team once,” Joe said. “Left wing. But that was the time I was all drunk – no one wanted me about One night, I got a plan. I took a gun and put it in my pants, went skating about. I don’t know why I did it. I knew a lad from across the river was out to dump me, one of the Monk brothers. Well, I waited for him. I could see him, like out of the corner of my eye, coming in, like when I was in the corner, and soon as he was near me, I slipped under him and said, That’s enough a that’ And took out my gun – and shot him.”

“You shot him?” Ralphie said, with an irrepressible grin on his face.

“Only with a blank,” Joe said. “That was sort of the end of my hockey, though.” He smiled quickly, and then coughed gently.

When Joe stopped speaking, and the breath stopped coming out of his mouth, it was very silent. Ralphie sat upon his haunches watching him clean the pump.

“Now,” Joe said, “case back on here – we need more tools – the best way ta do this is for me to take the Skidoo and go back out to the truck and get some and be back, and do this here.”

They left the cellar, and came out of the hatch by the rear pantry door.

“I’m going to get my tools,” Joe said. “I’ll be back.” “You don’t have to,” Vera said.

Joe clomped about in the kitchen. After Vera spoke she went past him into a room at the opposite end of the kitchen. This was done self-consciously as if all eyes were on her – and besides this, there were strangers walking about in her kitchen as if they had come here to watch her.

In the living room a mahogany table, with a white tablecloth folded upon it, sat in the winter light, and a basket filled with ironed clothes lay beneath it. All her china cups in the cabinet shone cold in the winter light. In that room there was a scent of fabric and snow.

Joe looked over at Nevin and smiled, coughed, and looked about. Nevin had asked him to come and see about a horse one afternoon in the fall. The wind had been blowing from the trees and everyone in the yard was drunk. They had all gotten drunk, as if the process of horse-trading must be carried on when you were too blind to know what you were doing. Clay Everette Madgill was there, with his horse, and Nevin was walking about it. Vera was standing by the back door, looking out at them from the wooden porch.

It was no horse to buy. It had had a heart attack hauling the year before, but had survived. Joe smiled when Nevin said he wanted Joe’s opinion on it, because Joe knew instinctively
that no matter what he said, Nevin, walking about the yard with Clay Everette, was already determined to buy it. And he knew also, before it happened, that they would blame him for something – or that they would get angry with him if he tried to talk Nevin out of it. The wind came down on the top of Joe’s hat, and blew up under his coat sleeves. There was a smell of ice in the mud, and the dooryard looked dead. The trees that separated this farm from Allain Garret’s were clear and hard. The horse, left hind hoof turned, breathed somberly.

“I’ll buy it,” Nevin said. He smiled. Clay Everette nodded solemnly, and Nevin proudly walked out to the barn.

For a month afterwards the horse plodded out of the barn across the field and out onto the highway, where it walked along the road to its old home. And every two days Vera would go up, and coax it back. The first storm, it was hit by a truck hauling peat moss, and lay in front of the doctor’s house, breathing in and out, and trying every little while to stand up.

“Well – are we going home?” Hennessey said to Joe after he wrote Vera a prescription and told her to rest in bed.

“I want to get their pump going,” Joe said.

Nevin insisted that he didn’t have to do it, that he would do it himself, but Joe insisted that he did. When Joe was in the cellar he’d seen the work done on it already – and realized that someone from down river had been hired. Joe knew that he had charged them a lot of money probably, and had put all his pipes on wrong.

Nevin looked as if nothing was wrong with his house, and in fact everything was the way he wanted it to be. He
had just applied for a grant from the government to build a windmill – something which was suddenly considered by everyone to be totally innovative and new.

Since there was nothing wrong with their house – and since everything was airtight and shipshape – he didn’t want them to fix the pump. He had spent hundreds of dollars since he had come here and now was almost broke. The money that was supposed to last them two years had dwindled to almost nothing already – and, therefore, everything was fixed.

The doctor sat in the chair beside Ralphie. Vera came out of the other room, closed the door quickly, and walked past them all into the far room, and shut the door again.

But Joe insisted that the pump had to be fixed so they didn’t leave the house until late because of it. Joe took all the pipes off, and then, improvising, made one of his own out of some of the new copper pipe that was there, and out of a section of pipe he had in his truck. So it didn’t look nice at all – it was a rather cold, fashionless sort of pipe. Except it worked.

Vera, with her nose running, and her head aching, and her stomach hurting, was now able to flush the toilet. As she came out of the bathroom, the winter’s twilight made a dull reflection against all her jars of spices, and whole-wheat flour, and packages of granola.